David said, “I was joking! Seriously. Let’s call them Tipp-Ex and Shaving Foam.”
Paloma hit him. Not hard.
“Well, you go.”
Paloma still liked flower names. She said, “There are tulips that are nearly black. So Tulip. And as they’re black, like witches’ cats, I’ll call the other one Black Magic. Madge for short.”
“And what if they’re toms?”
“Tango and Blackie. Now you. And no jokes!”
David said, “I don’t want to have to change names when we find out if they’re toms or queens. So I’ll call mine Cloud and Snowy. That’ll do, whatever they are.”
That left the fifth kitten.
While they sat there thinking of something black and white, David reached into the cradle and lifted the black and white kitten. Paloma nearly screamed.
“You mustn’t!”
“It says in the cat book you should habituate kittens by handling them when they’re tiny.”
“What’s habituate mean?”
“Get them used to you, I think. Only don’t take them out of the nest.”
So then Paloma very gently curled her hand around one of the black kittens. Incredible softness, warmth, sweetness.
Peony narrowed her eyes and made a quiet, warning noise.
“OK, Peony, darling,” said Paloma, and laid the kitten back with the others. “I was just habituating.” It was good to have a fellow cat-fancier around who read serious books.
“Magpie!” David shouted suddenly.
Paloma looked at him. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the perfect name.” A few weeks after that, Paloma’s family had three cats, and so did David’s. I’m not going to tell you what the parents felt about this, but sometimes guilty feelings are useful.
Just a minute… Mother cat. Father cat. Plus two of the kittens in each house. (One black and one white, if you’re interested.) Which adds up to six altogether.
But there were seven.
So what happened to the fifth kitten –black and white Magpie?
That’s another story. But I’ll tell you the beginning of it. Magpie was the first of the kittens to crawl away from its mother and fall head-first out of the cradle. The first, a week later, to get lost and have the whole household hunting for it. The first, a few weeks after that, to find the catflap and venture out into the big world.
They never found it after that. But don’t worry. There’s an old story that David read to Paloma, about The Cat that Walks by Himself. The cat in the story is independent, proud, and very clever. And I think that story could have been written about Magpie.
Copyright
First published in 2011 by HarperCollins Children’s Books
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BAD CAT GOOD CAT. Text copyright © Lynne Reid Banks 2011. Illustrations copyright © Tony Ross 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN: 978-0-00-741904-3
EPub Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-743655-2
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