‘Let’s walk along the beach,’ I heard Caroline saying to Grace.
‘No! What if we got caught out by the tide?’ Their voices carried back to me on the breeze, almost drowned out by the sea’s constant shouting.
‘OK. But we’d better follow the road along the coast anyway, or we might get lost.’
So we trotted on, with me always at a little distance behind them. For a while the road went along right by the sea, then we turned a corner up a hill and away from it. We went round more bends, down the hill, back up again, and came to a place where the torch showed three different roads.
‘I think it must be this way,’ Grace said, not actually sounding too sure about it at all, and off we went again.
There didn’t seem to be any houses around now. Just darkness and the occasional owl hooting at us from the trees. I was beginning to think I should just run up to the girls and let them see I’d followed them. They’d have to pick me up and take me back to the cottage then, wouldn’t they? But supposing they didn’t? Supposing they took me with them to run away instead – then I’d be stuck, unable to do anything to help. You might well be wondering what on earth I thought I was going to do to help anyway and, believe me, so was I. I suppose I was hoping I could see where the Great Aunt person’s house was, and then find my way back with my amazing sense of smell and memory. I was obviously marking as many spots along the road as I could with my scent, but the occasional whiff of another cat’s scent was stressing me out. And I hadn’t got as far as working out how, if I did manage to get back, I was going to persuade Laura that I knew where the girls were. There’s only room in our heads for one plan at a time, after all.
It all started to go wrong when Grace suddenly stopped walking, saying her shoes were hurting her feet. We’d been walking for ages. If I’d worn shoes on my paws I bet they’d have been hurting too. I don’t know why humans seem to need to wear so much stuff on their bodies, but I suppose if we had no fur, like them, we might do the same, especially as we don’t like being cold. Once again it seems to be a design fault in their species. I suppose we should feel sorry for them. They look so ridiculous when they take their clothes off, don’t they – all bald and bare.
Sorry, I’m getting side-tracked from the story now.
‘Well, is it much further?’ Caroline was asking Grace as she took off her shoes, rubbed her back paws and put the shoes back on again. ‘I thought we might have been there by now.’
‘Me too,’ Grace admitted. She sounded a bit frightened. ‘I didn’t think it would be this far, Caro.’ There was a long pause. Then she added in a little voice that I could only just hear: ‘You don’t think we’ve come the wrong way, do you?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Caroline said. ‘It’s your aunt’s house we’re going to. I thought you knew the way.’
‘I thought I did, too. But I’m wondering now if we should have gone the other way along the coast.’
‘What? You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘No. I’m not sure. I told you I’ve never been there, I just knew it was the next village along, but I can’t remember which way. I wish I’d had another look at a map before we started out.’
‘So, what are we going to do?’ Caroline said, her voice all shaky. ‘It’s the middle of the night, we don’t know where we are, the bags are getting heavy …’
‘And my feet hurt. Let’s go back, Caro. I’m sorry, it’s my fault, maybe this was a bad idea.’ Grace sounded like she was going to start mewing.
‘I don’t know if we’ll find our way back, though,’ Caroline said. ‘We went round so many corners.’
‘I’ll show you!’ I meowed at once. Now was the time to show myself. I’d be their Rescue Cat, leading them home safely … as long as I could find the right way myself, of course. But before I could run up to them, there was the sound of a car coming along the road behind us. We hadn’t seen any cars since leaving the cottage. Probably they were all fast asleep at their homes, and I wasn’t sorry, because the road was narrow, with no pavements. You know how aggressive cars can be, wanting the whole road to themselves. This one was purring quite loudly and its eyes were shining very brightly. I jumped back into the bushes, and I saw the girls hiding themselves too. The car roared past us, but as we all stood and watched it continue down the next hill, the light from its big eyes danced off something vast and shiny down in front of us.
‘The sea!’ Grace shouted. ‘We’re heading back towards the coast!’
‘Yeah, but which coast?’ Caroline said. ‘It could be the other side of England for all we know, the distance we’ve walked!’
‘Or it could be the right coast, and we might be just coming into Duncombe. Come on, Caro, let’s get going again. It doesn’t look far.’
So off we trudged. Before long we could hear the crashing of the sea again, and one or two little cottages loomed up out of the darkness.
‘How are we supposed to know whether it’s Duncombe or not?’ Caroline demanded. She sounded fed up, and I didn’t blame her. ‘We didn’t think this through properly, Grace. It’s too dark to see anything, and there’s nobody around to ask.’
‘And I can’t walk any further. I’ve got blisters on both feet now. We’re going to have to stay here till the morning.’
‘What?’ Caroline shrieked. ‘Well, I’m not sleeping on the beach.’
‘There might be a nice dry bit of sand, up against the sea wall,’ Grace said. ‘At least it’s not cold. What else can we do?’
Shining the torch in front of them, they started to walk down a slope towards the sea.
‘No!’ I meowed after them in terror. ‘The sea will get you!’
But they couldn’t hear me because it was crashing so loudly. I have to be honest here. For a minute – just a minute, you understand – I was too scared to follow them. I stood at the top of that slope, looking down at the sea, my tail swishing back and forth for all it was worth. The sea was so big, and I was just one little cat, not much older than little Timmy Kitten over there behind the dustbin. What chance would I have, if it came after me? Then I thought about those two children, all alone in the dark, talking about going to sleep down there. They were braver than me! What a scaredy-cat I was being. But just as I was plucking up my courage to run after them, I heard Caroline calling out:
‘Look! The door of this one’s not locked.’
I crept a little way down the slope to see what they were looking at. There was a row of funny little houses, each of them looking only big enough for a couple of cats to live in. Caroline had pushed the door of one of them open and they were staring inside.
‘There’s nothing in here. I don’t think anyone can be using it. The others have all got padlocks on.’
‘It’s not ours, though, Caro. I think beach huts belong to the council, and people just rent them for their holidays.’
‘I know, but we need somewhere to sleep, don’t we? It’s an emergency. Surely it won’t hurt. There’s nobody around.’
‘But what if someone comes and finds us? We’ll get into trouble. I’m scared. I wish we hadn’t left home now.’
‘So do I, Grace, but it’s no good us just standing here crying about it. Come on, I think we should stay in the hut, nobody’s going to know. If you like, we can take it in turns to stay awake and keep watch.’
‘OK,’ Grace said, sounding doubtful. ‘I do need to take my shoes off for a while. And we could eat some of our biscuits.’
‘Yes, good idea, I’m starving.’
And they disappeared inside the little hut together, closing the door after them and leaving me standing there in the moonlight, wondering where I was going to sleep. I was starving too, I might add! And tired. It had been a long walk, much longer than my normal evening constitutional round the grounds of my house back in Little Broomford. Thinking about home made me mew to myself sadly for a while. But as Caroline had said, there was no use crying, was there? I didn’t want to go too far away from the girls
, so I had to ignore the rumbling of my tummy, forget about hunting for food and concentrate on the priority of getting some sleep. I crept cautiously down the rest of the slope and trotted along the path next to the little huts. At the end of the path was a bench, like the ones on our village green where people sit to chat to each other. I crept under the bench and put my head on my paws. I knew I should really keep a watch on the door of the hut where the girls were. I had no idea whether they were in danger or not. But it was no good. Exhaustion overcame me and, before I knew it, I was fast asleep.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Hello everyone, I’m glad to see you’ve all come back again today to hear some more of my story. It was a good idea of yours, Oliver, to have a break so that we could all go home for our dinners and get some sleep. I hope none of you had nightmares about my experiences with the sea. It actually doesn’t hurt you, you know, as long as you don’t walk right up to it. As an experienced traveller now, I can reassure you all of that, but of course, at the time I’m telling you about, I didn’t know any more than you do. No, Tabitha, there’s no sea around here, I promise you. We’d have heard it by now if there was.
So let’s get back to my incredible story, shall we? I was just telling you how I fell asleep under the bench. Well, when I woke up, it was already bright sunshine so I must have slept soundly all night despite the scary situation. I felt bad that I hadn’t even managed to keep one eye open in case I was needed to protect the girls. I had a stretch and a quick wash, and padded cautiously along the walkway to the hut where the children had gone to sleep. To my horror, the door was open and neither of them were in there! I looked all around and in the distance I could see another small building, where a female human was carrying chairs and little tables and arranging them outside. And then, to my relief, I saw Caroline and Grace standing in front of the building, taking sandwiches and bottles of water from a young male serving them from the window. It must have been a shop of some kind. I was so hungry I would have liked to run up and grab myself a bite of one of those sandwiches, but I was pretty sure I should stay out of sight. So I slunk carefully along, keeping to the shadows, until I was close enough to hear them.
‘Thank you,’ Caroline was saying to the boy, giving him some money. ‘And we wondered if you could tell us how far it is to Duncombe?’
‘We’re on our way there, to stay with my aunt,’ Grace added.
‘Duncombe?’ the woman putting out the chairs said, turning round to look at them in surprise. ‘You’re a bit off the beaten track here, then, my lovely. You need to get back on the main road into Mudditon and it’s about five miles further on from there. Your parents waiting for you in the car, are they?’
‘No, we’re—’
‘Yes! Yes, they’re … um … waiting for us, up the road,’ Caroline interrupted Grace quickly.
‘Right. Well, that’s just as well, because if you were trying to get there without a car, you’d have a job. The morning bus has gone, and the next one isn’t till one o’clock. And that only takes you as far as Mudditon.’
‘Is it too far to walk to Duncombe?’ Grace asked, glancing at Caroline.
‘Oh, bless you, you’d take all day and night to walk there, and that’s a fact!’ the woman said, laughing. ‘Get yourselves off back to Mum and Dad now, if they’re waiting for you up the top.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, they’re just … um … having their breakfast,’ Caroline said.
‘Yes,’ Grace joined in. ‘They said we could come down here and eat ours on the beach.’
The woman stared after them, shaking her head, as they walked away.
‘I don’t think she suspected anything,’ Grace whispered as they passed by without noticing me shrinking back into a gap in the wall.
‘Let’s sit on the beach to have these, then, while we decide what to do,’ Caroline suggested. ‘It looks like we’ll have to wait for the next bus, Grace.’
‘Yes, and then it’ll just take us back where we started. I’m sorry, Caro. I have brought us in the wrong direction, haven’t I?’
‘Well, it’s not your fault. We’ll just have to start again from Mudditon.’
And they proceeded to climb down some steps, taking them even closer to the sea. I must say, the sea didn’t look so scary now. It had turned from black to a nice blue colour, with shiny white bits in it, and was swishing backwards and forwards a lot more gently. Instead of roaring and thumping it was just making gentle whooshing noises. I still didn’t fancy getting any closer, but it wasn’t making my heart race with fear now. I sat down in the shadow of the huts and watched my two bad little human kittens sitting themselves down on the part they called the beach. Caroline got a jumper out of her rucksack and laid it on the ground, and they spread their sandwiches out on it and started eating. My mouth was watering and my tummy rumbled so loudly I thought they’d hear it. I’d have to hunt soon, or find someone to feed me, or I’d never have the strength to get back home!
At this thought, I mewed sadly to myself with the sudden realisation that I didn’t even know when I was ever going to get home, if the holiday cottage was even my home now. The girls were talking about getting on a bus! What about me? Could I get on it with them? I knew what a bus was, of course – one comes to Little Broomford a few times every day, as you know. (It’s a very large green car, Timmy Kitten, if you’ve never seen it. It snorts and grunts when it stops outside the village shop, and lots of humans climb onto it with shopping bags.) And of course, the human kittens all get on another bus every day to go to school, don’t they. But I’d never heard of a cat getting on a bus, and anyway I didn’t want the girls to see me following them. What was I going to do? I doubted I could run fast enough to keep up with the bus. I’d just have to try to find my way back to Mudditon on my own. The girls would carry on trying to get to the place where the Great Aunt lived, risking their lives again with predators and all sorts of unknown dangers, and my mission to save them would have failed miserably. I was despondent now, as you can imagine, as well as feeling hungry and lost.
I wasn’t allowed to dwell on this for long, though, because suddenly there was a loud squawking and screeching in the air above me, and out of nowhere, two huge seagulls came flapping down, skimming the roofs of the huts behind me, circling round each other for a minute over the beach and then suddenly swooping down on the two girls, trying to grab their food.
‘Leave them alone!’ I meowed out loud without stopping to think, but of course, nobody could hear me because of the squawking of the gulls and now, the screams of the girls as they waved their paws around, trying to defend themselves.
‘Go away!’ Grace was yelling, flapping her paw at one of them. Bits of sandwich fell onto the beach and the gull started grabbing at them with his big hooked beak.
‘Ouch! Get off!’ Caroline was shouting at the other bird. She dropped the sandwich she’d been holding and jumped up, crying and clutching one paw in the other. ‘It bit my finger, Grace! Ouch! Go away!’ Still holding her sore paw, she started to run away from the gulls, but she was too busy looking back at them and crying, to see where she was going.
‘Watch out for the rocks, Caro!’ screamed Grace.
Too late. I watched in horror as Caroline’s paw caught on a rock and she went crashing down onto the ground. Her head hit another rock and she made a noise that sounded like ‘Oomph’ before lying very still, with Grace running towards her, screaming her name.
I suppose you all think, if I’m such a brave young cat, why was I still standing up there on the pathway by the beach huts instead of galloping down the beach to help? But look, sometimes things are so bad that even the cleverest cat in the world wouldn’t know what to do, right? I admit it, I just stood up there and stared, my heart pounding, my muscles taut and tense, my tail twitching, quivering with fear and indecision. What could I do? I wasn’t big enough to pick her up, was I? Even dogs wouldn’t be much better in a situation like this, I’ll have you know. They migh
t go and lie down next to the wounded human and lick her face with their slobbery wet tongues, but at the end of the day, what’s the point of that? My instinct, to be honest, was to run for my life, but I think it says something for me, at least, that I didn’t. I was so scared for Caroline, I had to wait to see if she was all right. The seagulls had no such finer feelings, I can tell you. There they were, squabbling over the last few crusts of the girls’ sandwiches, not caring in the least about the trouble they’d caused, and within a few minutes they’d flapped their massive wings and taken off into the sky again.
‘Yes, clear off, you bullies, you!’ I meowed at them from the safety of the ground. I didn’t think they’d ever been known to eat cats.
When I looked back at Caroline again, I saw to my relief that she’d now woken up and lifted her head. She let out a moan, and Grace cried out:
‘Oh, no! Your head! You’re bleeding!’
‘Ow, ow, ow!’ Caroline was crying, holding her paw up to her head. ‘No, it’s my finger that’s bleeding. That horrible seagull bit me, Grace!’
‘And you hit your head, look – you’ve cut it open. Oh, Caro, we need to go to a hospital. I’d better go and get help.’
‘No!’ Caroline mewed. ‘We’ll get into terrible trouble, Grace. And I’m not going to hospital. I hate hospitals!’
‘But you’re hurt!’
‘I’ll be all right. Just give me a minute. I’ll … I’ll wrap something round my finger, and maybe you can help me clean up my head … we can use the sink in that toilet block behind the café.’
She tried to stand up, but she must have been feeling dizzy, like you do if you’ve chased your tail for ages, because she quickly sat back down again and held her head. There was red blood dripping down the back of her neck onto her T-shirt and even though Grace tried to wrap a tissue round her finger, blood was still coming through that too.
This was no good. I knew I had to do something now, or I’d definitely have to consider myself a champion scaredy-cat for the rest of my nine lives. And there was only one option. I belted back along the pathway to the little café where they’d bought the sandwiches. The woman was inside now – I could hear her talking to the boy, and laughing.
Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life Page 7