Timba Comes Home

by Sheila Jeffries

  ‘Is it dead?’ Leroy whispered.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Angie.

  Leroy started to take his shoes off. ‘I’m gonna paddle in there and help it get out.’

  ‘NO!’ Angie looked fierce enough to make Leroy freeze with one shoe in his hand.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Because . . . it’s the struggle that makes it strong,’ Angie said, and as she spoke the creature gave a final heave and the rest of its body popped out and straightened into a tail of iridescent turquoise. Two glistening wings slowly spread out to dry in the sun. Leroy gasped. ‘A dragonfly! It’s massive.’

  The dragonfly turned its complex eyes and looked at us with luminous wisdom.

  ‘Hello, dragonfly,’ said Leroy. His smile beamed round the garden and his aura flared with light. ‘Can you fly now?’

  I meowed to encourage the beautiful creature, and Vati’s eyes flashed green in the sun, the tip of his tail twitching. But Angie looked unexpectedly sad. I ran to her and rubbed myself against her. In the deep heart of her mind a pain was rising. I could feel its unstoppable power.

  Something was wrong with Angie.

  ‘You stay and watch it fly away,’ she said quietly to Leroy. ‘But don’t touch it. Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’ Leroy beamed and banged his hand against hers.

  Angie tried to smile but her face was stiff. She stood up and walked slowly back to the house, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. I ran beside her with my tail up, and she was repeating and repeating the words: ‘It’s the struggle that makes it strong.’

  For once she didn’t pick me up for a cuddle. I sat on the windowsill and watched over her, offering the odd fragment of a purr, as she whizzed around the kitchen chopping vegetables and scooping them into a pan. Her aura was unusually dark, and her eyes joyless. She didn’t want to stop and look at me, and I figured it was because she knew that I knew. Talking about it, even to me, would be too painful.

  Moments later a harrowing sound rang through the garden. Leroy was crying, louder than ever before. I peeped out and he was lying face down on the lawn, beating the earth with his fists. And Vati was padding proudly through the kitchen with the dragonfly hanging, broken, from his mouth. Resolutely he headed through the open door of the music room with his precious gift for Graham.

  The singing stopped. Graham’s nose and mouth curled in disgust as he saw Vati’s gift lying by his shoe. At arm’s length he picked up the broken dragonfly by one of its glassy wings. ‘Yuk!’ Snarling, he crossed the room and held it high up above the trash can, which was a shiny tin with music notes painted on it. Graham dropped the dragonfly in there, and we heard the ping as it landed. ‘You horrible cat!’ he growled at Vati. I winced. Vati’s eyes filled with shock and pain. Running low and scared, he streaked out of the music room, his tail down, his eyes dark and frowning.

  I followed Vati to the edge of the horse field and found him crouched inside an old barrel that was on its side in the hedge. He was devastated.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ he said. ‘I took Graham the nicest gift, the best thing I’ve ever caught, and he called me a horrible cat. And Leroy wants to kill me. What is it with humans?’

  There were no words to comfort him, so I kissed his face and licked him, purring and caring. He soaked it up in silence, but he wouldn’t come back to the house with me.

  ‘I want to spend time with the moon and the stars,’ he said, and looked towards the blue hills far away across the fields.

  ‘This isn’t a very nice place to sit,’ I remarked, sniffing at the dirty old barrel he had used as a haven.

  ‘Oh . . . but it is,’ Vati said. ‘Open your eyes, Timba. This barrel is on a sacred node point where two of the golden lines intersect. Surely you can feel it?’

  I couldn’t.

  ‘It energises me to sit here,’ Vati said. ‘If you want to listen to your Spirit Lion, you should come here and it will be easy for you.’

  ‘So what’s wrong with Graham?’ I asked.

  ‘He is trapped, like the dragonfly was, and struggling to get free.’

  Leroy cried for hours over the dragonfly. To him it was a tragedy, to Vati it was a triumph and a perfect gift. To Graham it was something horrible.

  Angie took the crying Leroy back out into the garden. She opened the shed, and he peered in. ‘We’re going to do something AMAZING,’ she said, and put a spade into his hand. ‘You carry that.’

  I followed them with my tail up into the vegetable garden, where I sat watching. I wanted to learn how Angie would stop Leroy crying so much. ‘I know it’s sad,’ she said, ‘but we’ve done enough crying, don’t you think?’

  Leroy shook his head miserably.

  ‘Well I’m going to move on,’ said Angie, ‘otherwise I’ll miss out on some of the other miracles happening in the garden. Now . . . do you remember what we buried in the ground, Leroy? Ages ago, in the spring?’

  His eyes brightened. ‘A potato,’ he said huskily. I ran to him and rubbed my fur against his bare legs, purring, trying to coax him out of his grief.

  ‘Well, now we’re going to dig down and see what’s happened to it. Who’s going to dig?’

  ‘Me. Let me!’

  Leroy dug eagerly, flinging earth across the garden like a dog digging. I darted out of the way, flicking my tail, and sat up on a pile of wood to watch. I worried in case Leroy dug up the sleeping badger.

  Angie helped him loosen the potato plant, easing it out in a shower of earth. From its roots hung a bunch of creamy white new potatoes. Leroy gasped. His mouth and eyes opened in astonishment. He scooped up the baby potatoes and dropped them into a bucket. ‘FIFTEEN!’ he shouted, and his radiance lit up the garden. ‘We got fifteen potatoes.’

  ‘There’s the old one . . .’ Angie showed him the dusty old potato in the middle of it all. ‘And there’s more . . . look!’

  Together they scrabbled in the earth like two rabbits.

  ‘It’s like buried treasure.’ Leroy grinned happily, his hands covered in soil, his eyes shining. ‘I didn’t know you could get potatoes out of the ground.’

  ‘Shall we cook them?’ said Angie. ‘Quick, help me before Graham goes out. We’ll have new potatoes with butter.’

  ‘New potatoes with butter,’ repeated Leroy.

  ‘You’re strong. You carry the bucket.’

  Leroy set off, proudly, the bucket clanking in his hand. ‘New potatoes with butter,’ he sang, and the three of us headed for the kitchen, me with my tail up.

  Angie was definitely an earth-angel, I thought, and almost believed I saw the shimmer of her wings. But what had Poppy meant when she said, ‘Earth-angels always take on more than they can manage’?

  Chapter Ten

  PURE CELESTIAL ENERGY

  It seemed a long time to me before Angie finally got what she wanted. Vati and I were cats now and we had lived through our first autumn and winter. Our coats were glossy, and we were beautiful and strong. The only bad time was when Angie took us to the vet to have us ‘done’! ‘Sorry, guys,’ she explained. ‘But it’s better for you long-term, and better for the Planet. We don’t want you making hordes of unwanted kittens.’ Rick was gentle with us, and we went to sleep together and woke up together, and got safely home in the luxurious travelling basket Angie had bought us.

  When the blossom was on the apple tree and the bees humming in the spring sunshine, the social workers finally allowed Leroy to come and live with us. I supervised while Angie set up a bedroom for him with a cosy bed. She put posters on the walls, and bought him a blanket with lions on it. He had a brightly coloured beanbag, which I loved, and a bookshelf, and boxes of stuff which I remembered from his home. Even the old teddies were there, freshly washed and pleased with themselves.

  The only thing Leroy wanted when he arrived was me. He seemed awed by the majestic cat I had grown into.

  The other thing Leroy wanted to do was climb the apple tree, and we did that together, Vati and I showin
g off as we led him up through the branches. When he’d done it once, Leroy called out to Angie, ‘I climbed the flower tree.’

  ‘The flower tree?’ Angie came out into the garden, looking puzzled.

  ‘That one,’ said Leroy, pointing to the apple tree.

  ‘Oh . . . that’s an apple tree!’ Angie said, her voice kind.

  ‘No it’s not,’ Leroy grinned. ‘It hasn’t got apples on it . . . it’s a flower tree.’

  Angie smiled at him. ‘You come and look at this, and I’ll tell you a secret.’ She held one of the blossoms still for him. ‘See that little blob in the middle of the flower?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Leroy frowned.

  ‘THAT,’ said Angie, ‘will turn into an apple.’

  ‘No it won’t.’ Leroy rolled his eyes incredulously.

  ‘It takes all summer,’ said Angie. ‘The petals fall off and that little green blob swells up like a balloon and becomes an apple.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘No, it’s true. You’ll see it happen. In a few weeks the flowers will have gone and you’ll see tiny green apples, too small to eat. BUT . . . ’ Angie widened her eyes even more, and Leroy looked mesmerised. ‘It won’t happen unless a bee goes into the flower. There’s one . . . look. Let’s watch it and see what it’s doing.’

  ‘It might come out and sting you.’

  ‘No it won’t, it’s too busy pollinating.’

  ‘Pollinating,’ repeated Leroy. ‘Are you joking, Angie?’

  ‘No.’

  Leroy didn’t look convinced. ‘Well, Mum got her apples from Tesco,’ he said. ‘She didn’t get them off a tree.’

  At night Leroy’s bedroom door was left open so that I could go in and lie close to him, purring, as he slept.

  One night he didn’t go to sleep, but lay there talking to me. ‘My mum didn’t want me, Timba. She left me alone in the house and the social workers took me into care. They wouldn’t listen when I said I wanted to live with Angie. That’s why I missed playing with you when you were a kitten, but I still love you now you’re big.’

  He got up and put the light on. Then he roamed around the room in his bare feet, a box of pens in his hand. I watched anxiously. I knew what he was going to do!

  The walls in Leroy’s bedroom were covered in posters, and he couldn’t find a space. He drifted out onto the landing and listened with his ear to the closed door of Angie and Graham’s room. He turned and gave me a thumbs-up and a beaming smile. ‘They’re asleep,’ he said in a stage whisper. He switched the lights on and surveyed the pale green bare wall along the landing, took the lid off a pen, and began to draw. First he did a pair of hypnotic yellow eyes. I watched anxiously, my tail twitching, as he drew with swift, skilful strokes, and the rest of the lion appeared on the wall.

  A fox was barking out in the night, and the wind blew scatters of rain against the window. Leroy worked on, in a silent frenzy. I felt as if that lion was in the house, drawing its own picture through the wildly moving arm of a pyjama-clad boy.

  I knew that in the morning Leroy would be in terrible trouble. I wanted him to stop. An ordinary meow had no effect, except that Leroy put his finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Shh, Timba. We gotta be quiet. I’ll draw the curly mane now . . . in colours!’ And he worked furiously, doing crinkling lines around the lion’s face. His pens fell to the floor, the white tops rolling everywhere, and I couldn’t resist playing with them, batting them through the banisters to the hall floor below.

  Vati sensed the excitement and came trotting upstairs. He slunk up to Leroy’s lion, and peered at its eyes, and dismissed it as unimportant. We played with the pen tops, filling the silent house with whirrs and clicks and the muffled thud of paws belting up and down the stairs.

  The dawn chorus was starting when Leroy decided the lion was finished. He stood back to look at it with a satisfied smile. Leaving the pens scattered on the floor, he went back to bed, and the house fell silent.

  I followed Vati downstairs and out through the cat flap into the light of the rising sun. We caught a mouse each and took them back into the house to play with. I ate mine, but Vati chucked his on top of the piano and left it there for Graham. He went straight to sleep in our favourite armchair, while I stayed awake, washing and listening. I was nervous about what Leroy had done. I wanted to warn Angie before Graham woke up. I felt it justified an amplified extended-meow, so I sat outside her bedroom door and did one, a real beauty. Then I stuck my claws out and tapped on the door, politely, like a human.

  I heard a groan and a yawn. Graham opened the door. ‘What’s up, Timba?’ I looked around at the scattered pens and the lion on the wall and felt it was my fault.

  Leroy appeared, and he didn’t look nervous at all. His eyes danced with excitement. ‘You like my lion?’ he said to Graham. ‘It’s a surprise.’

  In one of Leroy’s story books was a picture of a very hairy, very angry giant towering over a downtrodden little farmer. Graham looked exactly like that giant as he stood there in his boxers, staring open-mouthed at Leroy’s lion. I saw a red flash burn upwards through his aura until it reached his head and Graham pushed his fingers through his hair and made it wild and scraggy.

  The smile was disappearing from Leroy’s face, and the silence hung in the air. I felt it reaching into my memory, and I recalled the time in my early kittenhood when a man had shouted, and instantly extinguished any spiritual light. I didn’t want Graham to shout at Leroy and destroy the bright joy in the boy’s heart.

  So I did another amplified extended-meow and gave Graham a stare that he couldn’t ignore. It helped him with the rage he was struggling to control.

  ‘You angry?’ whispered Leroy.

  Graham raised his eyebrows and made his voice quiet. He sat down on the wide window seat. ‘Come here, Leroy. I need to explain something to you.’

  Leroy shuffled over to him.

  ‘Look at me, please,’ Graham said, and his own eyes were so full of light that Leroy looked at him attentively, seeming fascinated by this giant of a man who could speak quietly when he was angry. Graham used that same hushed tone to create suspense when he was reading stories to Leroy.

  ‘This is my house,’ Graham said. ‘And I like it, in fact, I love it. I lived here when I was a little boy, like you. I like it to look clean and bright, and if I want a picture, I put it in a nice frame, with glass over it, like that one there.’ He pointed to a nearby painting of the sea. ‘It looks good, doesn’t it?’

  Leroy grunted. ‘Yeah.’ He fidgeted and I could see he was still expecting Graham to shout at him the way Janine had done.

  ‘So . . . I’ll tell you what we are going to do about that lion that’s appeared on the wall . . . look at me, Leroy,’ Graham continued. ‘I must say . . . it’s a quality drawing . . . very good. BUT.’ His voice rose slightly. ‘I don’t want it on our nice clean wall. So, what I’m going to do is take a photo of it with my digital camera, and you can help me make a posh frame for it . . . then we can hang it on the wall. We can even put it on Facebook.’ Leroy’s smile was reappearing, only to vanish as Graham spoke, low and sinister. ‘However . . . I am going out after breakfast, until lunchtime, and when I come back I want to see that wall painted a nice apple green like it was before. Otherwise the photo will stay inside my camera. Do you understand, Leroy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘AND . . . ’ The red flash burnt through Graham’s aura again. ‘Look at me. I want a promise that you’ll never, never, never EVER draw on my wall in my house again.’

  ‘OK,’ Leroy mumbled.

  ‘Is that a deal?’

  ‘Deal.’ Leroy banged his small hand against Graham’s giant one.

  ‘But . . . we’ll put my lion on FACEBOOK?’

  ‘We’ll put the lion on Facebook,’ Graham promised, and Vati came running upstairs with his tail up, and made a fuss of Graham, purring and gazing adoringly at him. Cats like quiet voices too.

  Later, Angie covered the floor with a sheet
and set Leroy up with a tin of apple green paint and a roller. Painting over his lion made him cry, but he got on with it, and made a mess. His hair and his hands were smeared with paint, and there were drips everywhere.

  ‘Keep those cats away from the wet paint,’ Angie said. ‘We don’t want two apple green cats!’

  Too late. Vati and I had already played around on the slippery sheet. Vati had trodden in one of the drips and left apple green paw marks along the landing and down the stairs. And I had managed to sit in a pool of paint.

  ‘Timba’s got an apple green bum,’ said Angie, laughing. ‘Oh dear . . . I’ll have to bath you, Timba,’ and I had to endure being ‘encouraged’ to sit in a bowl of warm water and let her slosh it over my fur.

  The day ended with supper in the garden, blackbirds singing and petals from the apple blossom drifting around us. We were family, sharing ups and downs and growing closer. But only I knew the secret that haunted Graham’s mind.

  The trouble between Angie and Graham came to a head in the autumn.

  Vati led me into ever more daring escapades. He would scale the wire around the chicken pen and jump down onto the roof of the wooden chicken house. Then he’d sit there coolly observing the hens, while I sat sensibly outside the pen, looking in.

  I was on a polite nose-to-beak relationship with the cockerel, strictly through the wire, and not too often. Just common courtesy and respect. But Vati really pushed his luck, and one day the cockerel flew at him with his colours blazing. I would have retaliated, but Vati simply rolled onto his back and waved his paws in the air. The sight of his sleek tummy and shining black pads seemed to disarm the outraged cockerel who turned and stalked off.

  ‘I’m a peacemaker,’ Vati often told me. He’d actually made friends with Leroy, allowing a tentative stroking session, and the occasional cuddle, strictly on Vati’s terms.

  I wished Vati could make peace between Angie and Graham. There were more and more times when Graham came home late, and one day when Angie was at work and Leroy at school, he brought a woman friend into our home. Her name was Lisa, and she didn’t like cats. Especially me.