by Ged Gillmore
‘I don’t understand,’ he said as she danced him around the room, closer to the open front of the house than he was comfortable with. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, it’s so exciting!’ said Minnie, twirling him around and around, closer and closer to the drop to the farmyard. Then she stopped suddenly, and a strange glow appeared in her eyes.
‘Oh, let’s go and tell Ginger!’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see the look on her face.’
Without another word she turned on her heels and ran to the top of the staircase.
‘Come on,’ she said mischievously. ‘I want an audience for this.’
WHAT A NASTY NIGHT!
Outside the open-fronted farmhouse, the wind was bolder and colder than ever. Tuck realised the heat from the old black-and-white television set had been keeping him warm while he held the aerial for Minnie. He also realised the brightness of the television screen had disguised what an inky-black night it was outside. There was only a slither of moon high above.
‘Ooh, what a nasty night,’ he miaowed after Minnie. ‘Let’s go back inside and be snuggly.’
Minnie turned and narrowed her eyes at him. With the violent wind blowing her fur in all directions, she looked like a tangle of tights in a tumble dryer.
‘Don’t be silly, Tuck,’ she said. ‘It’s only a bit of wind. Let’s go and see if Ginge is in the stables.’
But it wasn’t only a bit of wind; at least, Tuck didn’t think so. For one thing, it was full of all the smells of the Great Dark Forest. It smelled of foxes and wild dogs and snakes and badgers and ferrets and weasels and all sorts of cat-eating monsters. And it was full of leaves and twigs too, not to mention grit, which got into Tuck’s eyes and made them sting. Things weren’t much better when he and Minnie reached the stables, for although there was less wind between the broken stable walls, there were far more leaves and—worst of all—thousands of shadows that danced and leapt as the huge oak tree overhead bent back and forth in the wind.
‘Ginge!’ called Minnie. ‘Ere, Ginge, want to ‘ear somefink exciting?’
But Ginger wasn’t in the stables. Not downstairs in the stalls—which still smelled of horses after all these years—nor upstairs in the creaking attic where she normally liked to sleep at night.
‘Maybe she’s gone to a nightclub,’ said Tuck. ‘Let’s go back to the farmhouse and tell her in the morning.’
‘Nah,’ said Minnie. ‘She’ll be in the barn.’
The barn was the largest building still standing on Dingleberry Bottom Farm. It stood across the farmyard from the stables, but was so riddled with woodworm and damp and damage that it leant backwards at a steep angle, like it was waiting for one good push to topple it over. The cats generally avoided going inside in case it fell over and squashed them.
‘Oh, do we have to go to the barn?’ said Tuck. ‘Isn’t she more likely to be at the smokehouse?’
‘Of course!’ said Minnie. ‘The smokehouse! I’ll bet she’s guarding the blooming stores, marching back and forth with a gun on her shoulder like it’s the crown jewels or somefink. Come on!’
Poor Tuck! He was totally terrified by the storm blowing around them, but had no choice other than to follow Minnie even further away from the farmhouse and into the grassy shadows south of the stables. He’d forgotten about the visit by the humans, and when he saw the huge wooden structure they had left behind, he screamed out loud.
‘It’s a giant monster!’ he yelled. ‘It’s a—
‘Billboard,’ said Minnie. ‘Remember? Try and keep up, darl, you’ll miss the show.’
But when they arrived at the smokehouse, there was no show to be had. For although they both walked all the way around the little brick building, Ginger was nowhere in sight.
‘That’s strange,’ said Tuck, forgetting his fear for a second. ‘Normally I’m out hunting by now, and Ginger always waits for me to bring the food here first. Oh, I’m not supposed to tell you that.’
But Minnie wasn’t listening. She was staring at the smokehouse door with a huge grin on her face.
‘I know where Ginger is,’ she said. ‘Look!’
As we all know, the door to the smokehouse was normally kept tightly locked, but not on this windswept and inky-black night. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.
‘Ginger!’
It was Tuck who called this time. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but he knew something was wrong. It was as if he could smell it, or—he suddenly realised—not smell it.
‘Ginger?’
He walked over and pulled the door open, the noise of its rusty hinges competing with the creaking of the oak tree over the stables. As he did so, there was a gap in the clouds crossing the moon, and both he and Minnie gasped at the moonlit sight which met their eyes.
WHAT A DISCOVERY!
Brace yourselves!
Because if you want to know what had happened to Ginger, we need a flashback so we can go back in time. Not very far, don’t worry. No fancy costumes and horse-drawn carriages, we just have to go back a couple of hours to when Minnie ran into the farmhouse to turn on the television, and Tuck stayed back to look up at the sign, and the light faded from the sky. Whilst all of that was going on, Ginger walked slowly back to the smokehouse. The fight she’d had with Minnie had bothered her, and she wanted to have a good think about it. Not that she was upset at a bit of fisticuffs. Oh flying furballs, no—she was an ex-street fighter, after all! Nor was she upset that Minnie had fooled her. No, in fact the opposite was the problem. For Minnie’s reactions to her accusations had convinced Ginger that Minnie was, for once, telling the truth.
Now you might wonder how on earth Ginger could be so sure, but let’s not forget what a clever and experienced cat she was. After all, you don’t get to be the first ginger cat in history to win the National Poker Championships without knowing when someone’s bluffing. So, as soon as their fight was over, Ginger knew Minnie had been neither stealing, nor planning to steal, from the smokehouse. This bothered her for two reasons. Firstly, if Minnie had not removed a brick from the back of the smokehouse wall, then who had? And secondly, if Minnie was not on a fitness regime so she could squeeze through the smallest possible hole, then why was she on a fitness regime?
It was as Ginger was pondering these two questions that Minnie let out her pitiful howl because a windblown twig had knocked down the TV aerial and stopped her watching Kitten’s Got Talent. From her vantage point outside the smokehouse, Ginger could clearly see what had happened. She rolled her eyes, sighed a big gingery sigh, and turned to walk along the long and crumbling stable wall which ran away from the farmyard. Ginger didn’t mind Minnie laughing at her and teasing her about how strict she was—without the food store they would all starve to death—but she hated seeing how Minnie took advantage of Tuck. After all, if anyone should take advantage of Tuck, it should be Ginger herself and—
But whatever Ginger was about to think next was blown away by the full force of the wind as she rounded the back of the stables. Winter, she realised, was even closer than she’d thought. There was snow on the way, and she thanked her lucky stars—not to mention her forward planning—that there was enough meat in the smokehouse to get them through it alive. But then Ginger smelled something strange on the wind: something eerie and unsettling. It was the smell of change. She shivered and ran to shelter behind the ruins of the old milking shed. Ginger closed her eyes and curled up tight. In the distance she could hear Minnie’s television with that manky Manx and his too-tight pants. Then the wind came through the forest again. She heard dry leaves crackling in the air, twigs clattering as they fell onto the stables and the loud whisper of something saying ‘Push it!’
The voice shook Ginger out of her thoughts. She pricked up her ears even more than normal (which is a lot for a cat, considering how upright their ears always are) and listened carefully. Crackle, crisp, crunch went the leaves. Rattle, tumble, tattle went the twigs.
‘I am blooming well pushing i
t, aren’t I, so?’ said a second whispery voice.
Ginger cautiously opened one eye; then she cautiously opened the other one; and, moving only her head, looked all around her. There was nothing in sight to account for the voices, but even so she heard the first one again as it grunted, ‘Well, push harder then.’
The whispers were coming from beyond the ruined wall Ginger was leaning against, inside the tumbled remains of the old milking shed. Even more cautiously Ginger stood up, turned and jumped onto the top of the wall. As she did so, she dislodged a bit of crumbled brick.
‘What was that?’ whispered the second voice. ‘Did ye hear something there?’
‘I did not, so. Will you please push this thing?!’
‘I’ll push if you— There it was again! I heard something!’
And the second voice was right: its owner had heard something. For Ginger, who had never been particularly light on her paws, was creeping slowly along the wall. Still she couldn’t see the source of the voices, but her ears—not to mention her feline sixth sense—told her she was moving in the right direction. On and on she crept, guided along by squeaky grunts and what sounded like something heavy being pushed along the ground. Then, at last, as she climbed over a particularly high-jutting brick, she saw them. Three rats! Three big, fat, squeaky rats. Except, as Ginger looked again, she realised the middle one wasn’t a rat at all. Oh round rodents, no! It was a lumpy bag, which the two rats—who actually were rats—were pushing (from behind) and pulling (from the front) along the ground.
‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day,’ thought Ginger.
And she decided to sit and watch and see what she could learn before she had the rats for an extra helping of dinner (minus a portion for the smokehouse).
‘Listen to me, Fleabomb,’ said the first rat. ‘If you don’t push this thing, we’re never going to get it back to the boat, and the others will go without us and, more importantly, they’ll go without paying us, so they will. They managed all the other bags, I can’t see why you can’t push this one. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Please keep yer voice down, Bumfluff,’ said the rat called Fleabomb. ‘Ye know full well there are cats living here. What if they hear us? This being the last one, that’s when it happens, ye know. No one ever stole anything after they were killed.’
Ginger heard the rat called Bumfluff sigh a ratty raspy sigh.
‘The quicker yer push, yer eejit, the quicker we’ll be out of here with the loot. So just push.’
Ginger let the two rats and their heavy load get another metre through the ruins of the milking shed. They were working their way towards an old oil sump which sat beneath a pile of twisted machinery. Then, just as the rats were about to disappear into the field beyond, she leapt.
Now, as you no doubt know by now, if Tuck had been in this scene, he’d have caught those two rats in a jiffy, killing them so quickly it would make you feel squiffy. But Ginger was not nearly as fit, nor as athletic, as Tuck. In fact, she was as dumpy and lumpy as a flump with the mumps, and as she jumped, her rump bumped an old milk pump with a harrumphing thump which sent the two grumpy humpers running past the sump before Ginger could catch even a clump of them.
‘Aw, rats!’ she said to herself, blushing in the dark at having let them get away. She licked her tail, just to remind herself who was in charge, and then she wrinkled her nose. Mmmmmm, something smelled gooooooood. She wrinkled her nose again and, following its lead, stepped towards the bag the rats had been heaving away. It smelled like dried lark shanks. Ginger put out a paw and opened the mouth of the bag. It was dried lark shanks! And she’d thought she was the only cat in these parts who knew how to prepare those. She had a few in the smokehouse and— Hang on a secondominium! Something here smelled fishy, and it certainly wasn’t the contents of the bag.
Ginger closed the bag again and sniffed the ground along which it had been dragged. The trail was easy enough to smell, and as Ginger sniffed her way along it, she moved deeper and deeper into the overgrown ruins of the milking shed until soon she found herself inside a bit of a tunnel. On and on Ginger sniffed until suddenly the sky opened above her, and she found she was no longer under the ruins at all: she was in the overgrown patch of field behind the smokehouse. And yet, still the trail didn’t fail. In fact, if anything it got stronger. Now it wasn’t just lark shanks she could smell. There was a whiff of wilted worms, an odour of offal hors d’oeuvres, even a pong of pickled parrot. Ginger followed the trail on and on, right up to the backmost wall of the smokehouse, right up to the hole she’d discovered that afternoon.
‘No!’ she miaowed aloud. ‘No, no, no, no!’
And without a second thought (or a sixth ‘no’), she ran at full speed around to the smokehouse’s front door. Struggling to remain calm she found the right key, dropped it twice, then jammed it into the lock and turned. But when she did so, you know what she saw? The smokehouse was empty! All the dried stores—all of the cats’ canapés for the coming winter—were gone!
‘Rats!’ said Ginger, in a very different tone from the one she’d used ten minutes before. ‘Rats!!!’
And with that she ran back the way she’d come. Back outside, back around to the hole in the wall, back into the tunnel under the ruined milking shed, back along the winding path towards the sump. And did she stop at the dark bag of lark shanks? Blistering bags of booty, no. Because the bag of lark shanks had now disappeared too.
‘Rats!’ said Ginger for a fourth time.
Then she put her nose to the ground again and followed the trail on past the sump, across the overgrown fields, and towards the Great Dark Forest.
WHAT A THING TO SAY!
That night Tuck and Minnie had such a fierce and frightening fight that it drowned out the noise of the storm outside. Even the bunnies, sheltering wearily from the wind in their warm dry warrens, heard Tuck and Minnie’s screams and shouts and—not for the first time—wondered what had happened to the neighbourhood.
Tuck and Minnie’s fight erupted outside the smokehouse, snarled across the blowy farmyard, growled into the farmhouse, hissed up the stairs through each open-fronted storey and ended up screaming and shouting in the house’s attic. Unlike the roof of the stables, the roof of the farmhouse was completely intact, and it was up here that Tuck and Minnie generally spent the night. The attic was normally warm and always dry and, best of all, contained an old chest of drawers full of Old MacDonald’s winter clothes. Tuck and Minnie shared the middle drawer, and it was as Minnie jumped up into this drawer that the fight reached its peak. Until now, it had just been two cats bickering about what they had seen in the smokehouse. But here, with Minnie exhausted, unfed and desperate for bed, and Tuck feeling guilty for being inside, the fight turned nasty. Now, to you or me—or your average rabbit—Tuck and Minnie’s fight would have sounded like screeching and yowling and meowling and hissing. But cat language is far more subtle than that. There’s a huge difference between a hiss and a hiss, after all.
‘She’ll be fine’ said Minnie for the hundredth time. ‘Don’t you worry about Ginge. If ever there was a moggy what could look after herself, it’s that big bossy boots.’
‘How can you say that?’ said Tuck, aghast. ‘Something terrible must have happened. Someone must have—’
‘Tuck, please. She’s fine. Don’t be silly.’
‘I’m not being silly.’
‘You are being silly; you’re being silly and stupid. Please let me go to bed.’
Uh-oh. Can anyone see Minnie’s strategic error here? Don’t ever tell Tuck he’s stupid.
‘Well,’ he hissed (as opposed to hissed), ‘at least I’m not lazy and lumpy and losing my looks! You’re bigger than Ginger’s ever been!’
Minnie, who had lain down to go to sleep, now jumped up on all fours again, her fur standing up on end. Or, at least as ‘on end,’ as it ever got, what with it being very long and rather heavy.
‘You take that back!’ she screamed at Tuck. ‘You
take that back this second.’
‘No. Shan’t. Can’t make me, won’t do it, na-ah, no!’
‘No?’ Minnie looked like she was going to choke. ‘No?! ‘ow … ‘ow dare you. I didn’t crawl my way from under a house, I didn’t escape from a cattery, I didn’t risk life and limb to come to this dump of a farm to have someone say ‘no’ to me. I could have been … I could have been …’
‘Thinner?’
‘A star!’ said Minnie. ‘I ‘ad the looks, I ‘ad the voice; Cod nose, I ‘ad the ambition. And now look at my life. Aoeioooh, it’s too depressing.’
‘But why does that mean you can’t help me look for Ginger?’ said Tuck. ‘Something’s obviously happened to her. We have to help.’
‘A star,’ said Minnie dreamily. Her expression softened and she held out a paw. ‘Oh, Tucky, let’s run away in the morning. Just you and me. Let’s go to the city and make our fortune there.’
‘But what about Ginger?’
Minnie caught the expression on Tuck’s face, and her own features hardened again.
‘Ah, don’t bovver,’ she miaowed at him. ‘I’m gonna sleep.’
‘But you can’t!’ said Tuck.
But he was wrong: she could. For, even though Tuck stood miaowing at Minnie at the top of his voice, within five minutes she was snoring softly and dreaming her dream of being a star. Tuck could tell by the little ballet kicks her front paws were doing in her sleep.
Tuck got to bed very late that night. He spent hours scouring the farm to see if he could find even a clue of what had happened to Ginger. Then he spent hours sitting in the television room, looking out at the windy night. Eventually, long after midnight, he climbed the stairs to the attic and crept in beside Minnie, who was snoring ‘When Will I Be Famous?’ gently in C minor. ‘Oh well,’ he thought, ‘maybe everything will be better in the morning. Maybe Ginger will be back and maybe Minnie will be in a better mood.’