by Ged Gillmore
‘Then tomorrow night, Janice Burringo, tomorrow night that is what you’ll get. We’ll give those two furbags extra dinner with sedatives, and as soon as they’re sleeping we’ll commingle them. But for tonight, let’s go out witching. Let’s catch some kids, cut them into cubes, and crisp them.’
‘Oh, Rodders, how romantic.’
‘Anything for you, Janice dear.’
And lots more of that cruddy slushy stuff which I’m sure you really don’t want to hear about. I mean, eugh, frankly. Get a broom. Well, you can imagine the impact of hearing that conversation on our two not Tuck-and-Ginger cats. They were horrified. Major, of course, was also slightly smug that the witches had so promptly proven to Minnie what he’d been trying to tell her for a while now, but Major, being a dude, didn’t think only of himself. He thought also of poor Minnie. She was, after all, supposed to be an ally now, so he put his arm around her in comfort.
‘’Ere!’ she squeaked. ‘Get your filfy paws off me, you dirty old tom. I’ve got to get busy. And if you’ve got nothing better to do, you can give me an ’and.’
‘Busy?’ said Major. ‘Busy doing what exactly?’
Minnie looked at him as if he was the stupidest cat she’d ever met. ‘Implementing escape plans,’ she said. ‘Whachoofink?’
A REALLY, REALLY DANGEROUS BIT
Tuck was cold and tired and hungry. It seemed to him all he’d done since leaving the Burringos’ apartment was walk and walk and walk. Admittedly, Ginger had taught him how to play Snap, and Tick, and how to snap at tics. But there had been no mention of any mushroom sauce since the cats in the barn had laughed at him. And now here he was in the cold and the dark, the night definitely colder than any before, and guess what the plan was for the next day? More walking.
Tuck stretched out as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake Ginger. They had made their bed on a little hillside, on a ledge beneath a big sticking-out rock. It had been warm when they’d fallen asleep, but now it was freezing. Tuck felt like someone had pressed a big slab of cold meat next to him and its chill had entered his bones. He closed his eyes, heard Ginger making a little whimpering noise in her sleep, and let his thoughts wander into the beginnings of a dream. But could he sleep? Could he buffalo. He was a night cat after all, genetically designed to hunt in the dark no matter how tired he was.
But also, something was wrong, Tuck thought, and so he opened one yellow eye. Had he heard a mouse rustling around? Should he invite it over for a game of tick? No. But he had heard something strange. Something not quite right. Something like a whimper from a cat who never whimpered. He opened both eyes.
‘Ginger,’ he said quietly.
Again, Tuck heard a tiny whimper from behind him. Not nearly loud enough to be Ginger but with clear ginger accents. Suddenly he was scared. So scared he could hardly bear to turn around. What if, what if—
Tuck made himself turn, and what he saw there was far worse than anything he had what-iffed about. For all he could see of Ginger was half an eye, one ear, and most of her tail. The rest of her was completely wrapped in a huge yellow snake.
‘Aaagh!’ yowled Tuck. And then, in case it helped, ‘Aaagh!’ again.
‘Mmmf,’ said Ginger.
‘What?’
‘Ummfing, well, do smmfing!’
‘What?’
‘G’day,’ said the snake, whose head suddenly appeared from where it had been burrowing under itself. ‘Don’t mind me.’
‘I do mind you,’ said Tuck. ‘You’re squashing my friend.’
‘Tho?’ said the snake, who had a rather unfortunate lisp.
‘I think you’re hurting her.’
‘Tho?’
‘It’s horrible. You wouldn’t like it if someone hurt you.’
‘Tho?’ said the snake again, lingering on the ‘s’ with a languid hiss which would have been more subtly disturbing were it not for the lisp.
‘You’re going to kill her!’ said Tuck.
Can you guess what the snake said? It’s not rocket salad. I’m sure you can work it out. For the snake had discovered the most powerful word in the English language. He said:
‘Tho?’
Well, Tuck had had quite enough of that. This hideous hissing and lisping was most miffing, and he felt himself getting highly hysterical. ‘Leave her alone!’ he yowled. He bared his teeth and the claws of his front two paws. He brushed himself up so he looked like a badly backcombed banshee and spat and screeched at the snake. And the snake just looked at him and licked his lips.
‘You’re nektht,’ he thed. ‘But do thut up until then, you thtoopid thilly thing.’
Well, we all know Tuck didn’t like being called stupid. Or thtoopid, come to that. He jumped onto the snake and sank his claws in. He bit at its leathery yellow skin. He scrabbed and scratched and scored its scales, he screeched and scolded and called it a scallywag, but all to no avail. The snake merely squeezed Ginger a little harder than before. She gave the tiniest of whimpers, as if there was no air in her lungs for anything more than that. ‘F,’ she said. And that was it—she couldn’t even manage a full ‘Mmf’.
Tuck yelled, ‘Hang on, Ginger!’ and with a massive yowl and a quicker-than-the-human-eye double-twist-turn he jumped onto the snake’s head. Thinking nothing of the danger to himself (and unaware that snakes that squeeze generally aren’t poisonous anyway) he ignored its scary teeth and sank his own scarier teeth into one of its eyes. Blurgh! Blood and eye bits shot everywhere, including into Tuck’s mouth, which unfortunately gave him a taste for snake’s eye-bits, which he never lost and of course rarely had the opportunity to indulge very often after that.
‘Hitthing hell!’ screamed the snake, and moved every muscle in its horrible long body. It thrashed and lashed and bashed and crashed and smashed around, biting wildly into the air and beating its tail. But Tuck had dashed around to its blind side and was now pulling Ginger away and off the ledge where they’d made their bed, until the two of them tumbled down through the leaves and twigs of the steep slope.
‘I’ll get you, you hideouth puthy catth!’ thcreamed the thnake. ‘I’ll thearch for you for the retht of my dayth.’
On and on the cats tumbled, bump bumpedy bump, head over rump, over dead bark and through leaf litter, through old spider’s webs and fragile ferns until at last they found themselves at the bottom of a dark and damp hollow. Tuck lay panting until he felt well enough to sit up and pull wild webs from his whiskers. Ginger just lay there. She was breathing, that much was clear, but when Tuck asked her how she was, she merely held up her front feet to him. The message was clear: pause. So he sat there in silence and listened as his own breath slowed, and Ginger’s breaths grew full and normal again, and the distant threats of the snake continued to rain down on them.
‘You thcoundrelth! If I ever thee you again, you’re cuthtard! You’re muthtard! You’re totally buthted!’
At last Ginger sat up and sniffed the air around her.
‘We should go,’ she said.
‘We could rest a while longer if you need to,’ said Tuck.
Ginger shook her head. ‘It’s never a good idea to rest when there’s a one-eyed snake after you,’ she said wisely. ‘Come on, let’s get going.’
And so on they walked, picking their way around the mossy rocks and muddy puddles of the creek bed that ran through this part of the forest. Steep and heavily wooded slopes ran up on either side of them, damp shadows in every direction, and the two cats wondered what strange part of the forest they now found themselves in.
‘Push,’ said Minnie.
‘I am pushing,’ said Major. ‘Turn!’
‘I’m trying,’ said Minnie. ‘But it won’t turn unless you push.’
Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen two pussycats trying to open a bottle of bleach, but it isn’t easy. And with many other cats it would have led to a catfight. Next time you see a pair of cats chasing each other along a corridor or flailing in a fury of flying fur, have a good sniff in
the air to see if you can smell bleach. If you can’t, well, there you go. They obviously got into a fight because they couldn’t open the bottle.
But Minnie and Major didn’t fight. You see, Major had come to the realisation that he’d got off on the wrong paw with Minnie. His tactics had been Tic Tacs, his strategy a strudel. He’d tried to be boss cat when, as you will no doubt learn in life, people generally respond better when pulled rather than pushed. And cats are no different.
So, as Minnie sat on the stairs and told him her canny plans of escape, Major decided to put his ego to one side. Being something of a dude, this was easy for him. He didn’t need to behave like the boss to feel like the boss because beyond all doubt he was the boss. And if Minnie didn’t see it that way, it was her dross loss. So Major sat and listened and appraised and at the end of her extensive, exhaustive, and expert explanation of explosions and escape, he simply said, ‘Yeah, sure, man. Just tell me what I need to do.’
Well, if there was one thing Minnie was very good at (apart from being annoying, getting people into trouble, picking locks, disturbing the peace, waking people up, and looking cute), it was telling cats what to do. All night long she had Major bending coat hangers and shredding paper, catching flies and sawing wood, pulling threads from the nylon bathmat, and even weeing into a small saucer. And now she had him trying to open a bottle of bleach.
‘Push!’ she said again. ‘Come on, fatboy, use that weight of yours!’
Major sat back from the huge bleach bottle and gave her a flat-eyed look.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Dude?’
‘Sorry,’ said Minnie. Then she sat in silence for a minute, clearly as deep in thought as she ever got. ‘I know!’ she said suddenly. ‘Let’s try another approach. Let’s bite froo the plastic!’
‘OK, man,’ said Major, who was not a little exhausted after all the night’s efforts. ‘Go for it.’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t,’ said Minnie, fluttering her huge false eyelashes. ‘I’m just a poor little female cat with weak jaws and blunt little toothypegs, innit? I need a big masculine man cat with muscly mandibles to do it for me. Know what I mean?’
Well, I’m not sure I can quite convey the gingeriness of the sigh that greeted that little performance. No man likes a princess and no Major does either. But he stood up and put his mouth around what looked like the weakest part of the bottle. He squeezed his jaws and grunted and grinded and bit harder and harder until ‘Eugh!’ he said. ‘Eugh, eugh, eugh!’
He spat onto the kitchen counter. ‘I’ve got bleach on my teeth!’ he said.
‘Oh, but they do so look sparkly white, ah ah ah ah ah,’ laughed Minnie. ‘Come on. It’s baking soda next. Maybe you can brush them too. Ah ah ah ah.’
A couple of hours later, when the Burringos arrived home from their sandal-lit dinner, what did they find in the apartment? A mess of half-spilled bomb ingredients strewn across the kitchen? A cleverly constructed contraption combining combustibles and complicated crosswires? Bony-baloney, no! They found nothing but two innocent-looking cats hungry for their breakfast and looking like they’d just woken up.
‘Aw, look at them, I think they’re beginning to get along,’ said Janice, through a full, foul, and filling-filled yawn.
‘Whatevs,’ said Rodney. ‘There’ll be getting along a lot better tomorrow night when they’re sharing the same body.’
‘Mwah ha ha ha,’ cackled Janice, giddy already at the idea of her own evil furball companion.
The two cats looked at them, dumbly wondering why the witches had forgotten they could understand every word they said.
‘They’re probably drunk,’ thought Major.
‘Too right,’ thought Minnie.
And too right they were indeed. For after the restaurant Janice and Rodney had gone to a belated Hallowe’en party. Hallowe’en had fallen on a Tuesday that year, and so Janice and Rodney had had to wait for the weekend before any parties came along. Now, witches, like everyone else apart from dudes, are not very patient at the best of times, so by the time the party came along, it was a rambunctious and raucous affair where the best night of the year was feted and celebrated until all were belatedly sated.
The hosts, Beleasha and Barry Beacon from Birmingham, were old friends of Rodney’s from his college days, and, boy, did they know how to throw a party. They served little boys’ bits on cocktail sticks with pieces of pineapple, watermelon wrapped in still-warm tongue, and prawn salad with all the poo-tubes left in. To drink there was a choice of beers: liquid-gout stout, dirt-from-under-the-Aga lager and stale ale. There were a few white wines (wee-sling, soap-onion blanc, and chardonnay) and of course a Hungarian bull’s blood.
But it was the cocktails that were the undoing of Janice and Rodney. After a few too many shots of ToKillHer, they knocked back the Caipirranhas like there was no price to be paid. Trust me, folks—there is always a price to be paid. My suggestion is to avoid alcohol completely until you’re about twenty-five and you’ve let everyone else learn the lessons for you. Then you can proceed straight to smug without passing go or collecting two hundred dollars. Oh, how wise. Oh, how sensible. Oh, how Rod ’n’ Jan should have paid heed to such words.
But they didn’t. At about three o’clock in the morning, Beleasha Beacon had to ask them to leave the party for vomiting on everyone’s cloaks, which were piled in a corner. Janice of course refused. She shed she wash having sush a good time woy should she do anything that fatsho told her to do. Then a rather embarrassing fight broke out, which ended up with Janice and Rodney being thrown out on their bus passes. Fat lot of good a bus pass is when it’s too late to get a bus! Of course, they couldn’t get a taxi to stop for them, what with the state they were in, and they were far too drunk to ride home on their broomsticks. So they had to walk all the way. Then, halfway home, it started raining, and the first of winter’s cold winds started to blow. So now they arrived home sodden, cold, and not in the most rational of dispositions. Hence them talking to the cats as if they couldn’t understand. And hence Major smiling quietly to himself, thinking how deeply they would sleep all day.
‘Noight noight, puddycatsh,’ said Janice as Rodney pushed her up the stairs.
‘Lawks and lemmings,’ said Minnie, once the secret-upstairs-locked room door had closed on Janice’s off-key warbling. ‘’Ow common!’
Major looked at her and said nothing.
Meanwhile, back in the forest, that same cold wintry wind had also brought a rainstorm. Tuck and Ginger had walked in the dark down the creek bed to a strange flood plain of willowy trees with well, plane trees and willows, flat flat-bits and grassy grass. The canopy above was sparse now, but above it the sky had grown so thick with clouds that the night was darker than in even the deepest part of the forest. There were no stars or moon tonight, just ominous black clouds. Neither cat needed to say that rain was on the way—they could smell it in the breeze. And not piddly-tiddly spitty little pitter-patter rain either. This was going to be a big-drop drama.
Ginger was still weak from her cuddle with the python, and Tuck was bored, bored, bored of walking, and both of them were exhausted. But they knew they had to get under thicker cover ASAP, so on they pressed in the vague hope they would find something up ahead. All too soon they heard a rumble in the distance, and soon after that they saw a flash in the not-very-far-off sky. Then, sooner than either of them had expected, huge great drops of rain began to hit the ground around them. Drops so huge that they threw up tiny explosions of dirt as they landed. Still the cats pressed on, for what else could they do? It wasn’t two minutes before they were both soaked to the skin. Tuck felt as miserable as he ever had done, but he decided to tough it out just to show how big and brave he was.
‘I want to go home!’ he said after five minutes. ‘I don’t like it here. It’s scary, and there’s strange animals, and it’s cold, and I miss cat food and the sofa and the television, and I’m hungry and tired, and … and … what’s that?’
Ginger ha
d stopped when Tuck had started yowling. She sat looking at him, wondering how best to motivate him out of this prissy sissy hissy fit. But halfway through she’d seen something behind him, which had taken her concentration away from everything he was saying.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ said Tuck again. ‘What’s that thing?’
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘What’s that? It’s like a light behind you.’
‘Yes!’ said Tuck. ‘Behind you too. It’s like a little window.’
And Tuck stood, his tears washed away by the torrential rain, and crept cautiously over to what he had seen. It was half-buried in the ground beneath a thick tuft of grass. Ginger was still a little nervy after the evening she’d had, so she followed Tuck closely rather than investigate the little light she’d first seen. But as she did so, she saw there were other faint lights here and there in the grass, near and farther away.
‘It’s a tunnel!’ said Tuck. ‘A tunnel with a little light at the end! Let’s shelter in here.’
‘No!’ said Ginger. ‘It might be a foxhole.’
At this Tuck froze. He’d not forgotten what foxes like to eat. Ginger came and stood beside him and sniffed at the mouth of the tunnel. It didn’t smell like a fox. It smelled more like …
‘Oh, hello!’ said a rather posh voice suddenly. ‘Lord, what weather we’re having!’
Both cats jumped off all four paws, and their hair stood up as if they’d been electrocuted. They spun around and saw, right behind them where they hadn’t noticed it before, another opening to a tunnel. In it stood a dapper little rabbit in a tweed waistcoat and smoking a pipe.
‘How do you do?’ said the rabbit.
‘Are you, are you, are you a fox?’ said Tuck.
‘How very, very rude,’ said the rabbit. ‘No, I am most certainly not. Really!’
‘Sorry,’ said Ginger. ‘My friend is a housecat—he doesn’t know much about animals. He hates foxes, that’s why he asked.’
‘Oh,’ said the rabbit, visibly relaxing. ‘Well, any chap that hates a fox can’t be all bad, I suppose. How d’you do. My name is Bartholomew P. Wilkins.’