by Ged Gillmore
‘What is it?’ said Tuck.
‘Nothing...’ Ginger murmured after a while. ‘Nothing at all. Now jump on the accelerator. Gently!’
It was a stop-start journey as you can imagine if you’ve ever tried driving with a cat that’s not had lessons. Tuck wasn’t good with his left and right at the best of times, and he slowed them down at the first few green lights and sped up at the red ones. But after a while, and much to Ginger’s surprise, he got the hang of it. ‘Goodness,’ thought Ginger, ‘I must be instructing him very well.’
As for her, well, her job was easy. Once you learn a city as well as Ginger had learnt this one you never forget. She took them right off Rawley Road and into Railway Square, then north across the square and into Long Lane. Along Long Lane and down around the roundabout and fast past the park. Oh yes, folks, Ginger knew the city pretty well, and soon enough she and Tuck were putting some distance between themselves and the Burringos’ apartment.
THE SECOND BIT
Did you wonder why Arthur the cleaning lady left the apartment door open? I mean, she’d been cleaning that flat for at least four years, and she’d never done it before. So why now? Well, let me tell you. Rodney and Janice were not only lazy at being witches, they were lazy at other things too. Like cleaning up the kitchen after they’d had dinner or writing thank-you notes after birthdays or picking up the wages for their cleaning lady. Arthur, you see, liked to be paid in cash. She had a deep distrust of banks and kept all her money in a big box under her bed. So every Tuesday, when she arrived at the Burringos’ apartment, the first thing she’d do was make sure they’d left her one hundred doodahs on the kitchen counter. And often they hadn’t. This used to drive Arthur nuts.
‘Agh!’ she’d scream. ‘It drives me nuts.’
Well, on the day this story starts, the day she left the door open, Arthur decided she’d had it up to here with the Burringos. No cash on the kitchen counter again. ‘Enough!’ she said. ‘Those blasted bothersome Burringos are too mean. I’m not a machine! They can find someone else to wash and clean.’ And she flounced out, her big bottom wobbling as she stomped out of the apartment and down the corridor toward the lift. She was so angry she even left the door open behind her—this being much classier and dramatic than slamming it. Arthur didn’t care if the cats escaped, for she had decided she was Never Going to Clean for the Burringos again. Serves them right whatever happens. So there. Humph!
Well. Can you imagine the scene that evening when Janice and Rodney woke up in their windowless room? At first it was normal. Janice put on her fluffy slippers and the tracksuit she liked to wear around the house, and Rodney stretched and shaved himself, using the fin of a shark he’d once caught. And then they went downstairs.
‘Eugh,’ said Rodney. ‘The apartment’s still dirty’.
‘Ooch,’ said Janice. ‘There’s a horrible breeze coming through the apartment door.’
And then they both said, ‘Where are the cats?’
You see, they might have never got round to turning their two cats into a Purrari, but they’d never given up on the idea. And besides, witches are extremely possessive. Once they think they own something they get fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurious if it gets taken away from them.
Have you ever smelled a furious witch? It’s not good. It’s a bit like a cocktail of cabbage and vomit with a hint of something you trod in. And when witches are emotional in any way, they don’t look great either. Their eyes turn bright red. Have you ever seen a photo of someone and the flash has put a little red dot in their eye? Well, that’s what witches’ eyes look like when they’re angry. As if that wasn’t enough, their skin gets a greenish tinge, and their noses get little bumps on them before hooking over. Then—PING!—their chins stick out. All those pictures you’ve seen of witches, they’re always angry in them.
‘I’m going to find those cats,’ said Rodney, ‘and I’m going to skin them alive!’
‘I’m going to cook them slowly,’ said Janice. ‘I’ll whisk their whiskers, sear their ears, boil their tails, and pause only before paring their paws.’
Eugh, horrible, horrible witches. I’ll bet you thought Janice and Rodney were a bit harmless, didn’t you? Not a bit of it. Once they’d filled the apartment with such a stench of anger that even they couldn’t bear to stay there, they ran up and put on their witching outfits, and then they opened up the living room window extra wide and flew out into the city night, cackling loudly and leaving a toxic trail of nastiness behind them.
‘Let’s find those horrible little cats!’ they screamed. ‘Let’s make them pay!’
So where were our feline friends while this was happening? Well, they were still in the taxi, but were they chugging full speed away from the city to safety? They were not. And why not? Come on, guess. Work it out. No? Well, I’d better tell you then. They’d run out of petrol. Not surprising really. I mean the taxi had been waiting on the kerb for four years. Only an hour after Tuck and Ginger had driven off, the car started making strange noises. Chuggedy-chuggedy-phut-phut, that kind of thing. Never good in a car. Well, Ginger directed Tuck on the pedals, and she steered to where she could coast downhill, but shortly before dark the car went phutty-phutty-churg-churg and died. Just like that. It was partly by luck and partly by Ginger’s skill that they were in a quiet, little side street when it happened. Ginger leaned on the steering wheel so that the big old taxi curved towards the pavement and came to a rest in a perfect parallel-park position.
‘What do we do now?’ said Tuck.
‘We stop asking questions,’ said Ginger.
‘Why do we do that?’
‘I tell you what,’ said Ginger, ‘why don’t you get out and walk down the road a bit and sing a song?’
Now, if Ginger told you and me to do that, we’d probably tell her to get lost, but Tuck thought it was actually a very good idea. Without a second thought he jumped out of the window and trotted down the tarmac a couple of metres. Then a couple of metres more, until he was sure he was out of earshot. He looked up at the fading sky and started to sing:
‘Oh moon, oh moon,
Forgive my tune-
lessness. I didn’t expect to be here so soon.
I can’t complain, it is a boon.
‘It’s great of course.
I like it of course.
I just wish we could find
All your mushroom sauce.’
Songs had never been Tuck’s strong suit.
Meanwhile, Ginger sat down on the taxi’s driver’s seat and wondered what they were going to do for their supper. Outside it was getting darker by the minute, and it was the time of day when Ginger’s bellies always started rumbling and demanding some food. Can you remember how many bellies Ginger has? Six. And let me tell you, it takes more than the whiff of mint air freshener to fill six bellies. But a whiff of mint air freshener was all there was in the car, and even that was four years old. Ho-hum.
But Ginger didn’t mind being hungry—it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to her—and besides, she was free. Free for the first time in years. So very sensibly (and you’ll discover that Ginger was a very sensible cat) she decided to enjoy her freedom first of all and worry about food in the morning. She made herself comfortable by curling up extra tight in the driver’s seat, the end of her tail over her nose, and watched the sky grow black outside the taxi windows. Soon she was fast asleep and snoring and snuffling like a little pot-bellied pig.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but some people are morning people and some people are evening people. Morning people just love the mornings. They jump out of bed, singing, and they race out to enjoy the sunshine and pick the flowers. Evening people generally hate mornings. They hate them almost as much as they hate morning people in the mornings. Evening people spend the mornings saying things like ‘Not before my coffee’ and ‘Go away’. They think morning people are annoying, but in return morning people think evening people are grumpy. And it’s not eq
ual on both sides. Oh no. Morning people mourn evening people’s morning behaviour far more than evening people mourn morning people’s evening behaviour. Obviously.
Now, do you know which you are? Are you annoying or grumpy? Well, Ginger was definitely a morning cat. She liked to rise early, do her yoga, and clean her claws whilst listening to the birds sing and imagining what they tasted like. Tuck, of course, was the polar opposite. He was very much an evening cat. If you tried talking to Tuck before about 10:00 a.m., he’d look like he was listening to you, but in fact, all he would be thinking would be ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up’. So at this point in the story, where Ginger was settling down for the night, Tuck was really waking up. Once he’d sung his first song to the moon, he sang another two, which were frankly even sillier than the first, so I won’t bother repeating them. Let’s just say he got to rhyming ‘sauce’ with ‘horse’, and as you know, cats don’t like horses.
Anyweeway, once Tuck had finished singing, he decided to see if anyone wanted to play. He knew Ginger long enough to know she’d be asleep by now, so he didn’t bother asking her. Instead, as the stars plinked on high above him and the streetlights plinked on a little lower down, he looked behind rubbish bins and under cars, on top of a pile of bricks and even under a bush to see if there was anyone, anyone at all on the moon who wanted to play. But there was nobody.
Poor Tuck. He was feeling a bit despondent and lonely, trying ever so hard to like the moon but finding it very dull, when suddenly he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. At first he thought it might be just his own shadow. He’d been caught out that way before. So he stood as still as a still thing and waited. And there was the movement again. Tuck stared with the superb night-vision goggles which all cats wear inside their heads and saw a little twitchy nose and a pair of little twitchy ears appear from a hole in the gutter which he hadn’t noticed before. Soon the ears and nose were followed by a furry, grey body.
‘A mouse!’ said Tuck. ‘Hello, mouse! Do you want to play? Do you want to play catch?’
Well, whether the little rodent thought this was a good idea or not we’ll never know, because he just turned and ran full speed in the opposite direction. He went squeak, squeak, squeak as he scampered along the gutter. Then he went squawk! as Tuck caught up with him in two easy bounds and sank his shiny, white teeth into the back of the rodent’s neck. Tuck wasn’t quite sure why he’d done that, but it sure was fun.
‘Ooh, ooh, ooh,’ he thought. ‘Let’s see if there’s another one and I can do it again.’
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Janice and Rodney were circling slowly above a deserted playground. This was partly because Janice had run out of breath and partly because Rodney was savouring the scent of small innocents that still hung in the air above the concrete.
‘Ooffee,’ said Janice. ‘I’m more extremely exhausted than an exhumed executive. Maybe we should go home and order a takeaway instead of looking for these silly cats.’
‘What?’ said Rodney. ‘Are you crazy? And let those miserable little creatures make fools of us? No way. It’s only just got dark. I’ll bet that’s when they’ll take their chances, and it’ll be easier for us to find them.’
But even Rodney had to admit that finding two medium-size cats in a very large-size city needed a bit of planning. And of course he wasn’t wrong. If you ever want to do anything difficult—and the difficult things are the only ones worth doing—then you always need a plan. Or at the very least a list, which is really just a simple plan if you think about it. So Rodney told Janice they could sit down on the next flat roof they found.
‘Let’s think,’ he said when they’d parked on the red roof of Rufus’s Rare Roofing Supplies. ‘They’ll be trying to get as far from us as possible as quickly as they can. How would they do that?’
‘On a plane,’ said Janice, who was very possibly being sarcastic. They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but I’m not sure that’s true. Either way, Janice’s comment gave Rodney an idea.
‘Or a car,’ he said. ‘A car! Hang on, when we left tonight, was that big tiger-striped taxi outside like normal? I don’t remember seeing it.’
‘No!’ said Janice. ‘It was definitely gone. And that’s the taxi Ginger was driving when we got her. That’s it—they must be in the taxi!’
And so the Burringos decided that instead of looking for two cats (which are rather small), they should look for one big tiger-striped taxi (which is rather big and tiger-striped). ‘Ha ha,’ they cackled. ‘Mwah ha ha ha ha! Those cats haven’t got a chance!’ And they flew into the air, trailing orange and green smoke out of their bottoms, which is an embarrassing phenomenon that happens to overexcited witches. They flew over all the suburbs in the south and west of the city. Which is fortunate, really, because of course, our furry, fleeing, feline friends had headed exactly north-east.
GOSH, ANOTHER BIT ALREADY
Ginger awoke with the daylight. At first she couldn’t quite remember where she was. She’d had troubled dreams of distant thunder and booming seas, no doubt caused by the rumbly grumbling of her six bellies. ‘Mmm,’ she thought at first. ‘Maybe another five minutes sleep before I have to wake up and really be hungry.’ Which just goes to show how hungry she was because morning cats normally jump out of bed as soon as they can.
But then Ginger remembered why she was hungry. She was free! She had escaped! Whoopee doobie dingbats! She sat bolt upright, suddenly ready for the day. She scratched a little behind her right ear with her hind leg, looked up through the windscreen at the blue sky above and listened to the birds chirruping from the overhead power lines. But birds, of course, made her think of food. Oh, what she wouldn’t give now for a tiny tin of tuna chunks. Freedom was good—the air smelled fresh with old fish bones and distant dustbins wafting on the breeze—but, oh Budapest, was she the capital of hungry.
Tuck was fast asleep on the passenger seat, snoring his flat snores. He was incapable of being in tune even when asleep. Ginger looked down at him and tutted. She didn’t notice the bits of grey fur around his mouth or the dirty hairs which bent inwards as he inhaled, then outwards as he let out his snore. She was too hungry to think about anything but food. She jumped onto the dashboard and walked past the steering wheel to the open driver-side window and was about to jump down onto the tarmac when she saw the most amazing sight. ‘I’m dreaming,’ she said to herself out loud. She pinched herself—not easy when you don’t have opposable digits—and it hurt, but there she was still, wide-awake, looking down at not one, not two, but six full-size rats laid out on the tarmac next to the car.
‘Miaow!’ she said. ‘Tuck, Tuck, wake up. Do you know anything about this?’
Tuck, not being a morning cat, didn’t respond at first, so Ginger jumped onto the seat next to him so that it bounced him up and down until he had to open his eyes.
‘What do you know about the rats outside?’ Ginger said.
‘Sleeping,’ said Tuck.
‘You can sleep when you tell me about the rats. What happened?’
‘I was playing dicey micey, but none of them were any good, and then they were dead, so I thought you’d know what to do with them. Can I sleep now?’
Could he sleep now?! He could sleep like Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years if he wanted to! Ginger felt like kissing him, but of course she never would. Instead she jumped back up onto, through, and down from the window in a flow as graceful as any cat with six bellies could ever manage. Then she ran along the still-cold road to the back of the taxi and opened the boot. It was chocka-blocka full of her old possessions. Crammed to the edges with things she hadn’t seen for four years: beach balls, boxing gloves, a dirty biscuit tin with suspicious contents, a Hula Hoop, and a decent selection of red wines. But she ignored all of these. Instead she reached in and pulled out from its trusty bottom-left position a camping stove and then—top right—a frying pan.
‘Oh yeah, baby,’ she said. ‘Ratatouille for breakfast.’
Gin
ger had learnt to cook on a container ship in the South China Sea, where—as you may or may not know—rat dishes are a serious speciality. Unfortunately, Ginger had to leave the vessel after a disagreement with the head cook (an absolute dragon) in Shanghai harbour. But she’d left with an amazing knowledge of rodent cuisine. Pest-o sauce, sliced mice, vole-au-vents, flying-foxtail soup, diced-mice rice, and of course, ratatouille.
No more than ten minutes after Ginger had awoken, even Tuck was happy to open his eyes and face the day, for the aroma of fried rat guts filled the air around the taxi. Can you imagine anything more mouth-watering than freshly cooked rat guts? With a salsa of diced tails on a bed of wilted ears?
Yummy yummy YUM-YUMS!
Tuck sat on the bonnet of the taxi, rubbing his eyes as Ginger—who had also found herself an old apron and floppy chef’s hat—tossed the entrails in the frying pan. She had a long piece of grass hanging out of one corner of her mouth and was very possibly smiling.
‘Are the mice ready to eat yet?’ said Tuck.
‘Rats,’ said Ginger. ‘They’re rats, you … you … silly thing.’
She couldn’t bring herself to call him a moron just yet. He had, after all, provided their breakfast. And it suddenly occurred to her that, if she took him along, he might continue to provide food for the long journey which lay ahead.
Back on the other side of town were two very deflated witches. I mean literally deflated—all that colourful bum gas really does take it out of you. Again, literally. Rodney and Janice, never fond of the daylight at the best of times, had barely made it home before the evil energy they required to fly their broomsticks ran out completely. They were miserable, saggy, and very, very tired. They dragged themselves up to their windowless room, dropped their black robes to the floor, threw their pointy hats into the corner, and collapsed naked onto the floorboards.