Everything started to change a couple of days later, because of a woman with a chocolate ice cream.
She was quite an elderly human, one of those whose fur have gone white and hobble along holding a stick in one paw. Why they don’t just give up and walk on four paws when they get too old to balance on two, I’ll never understand, but there it is. The boys and I were patrolling the seafront on the other side of the harbour this particular day. We’d already seen off a few seagulls, and had attracted the attention of a group of holiday humans who stood watching us, exclaiming and cheering us on. This old woman came tottering along with her stick, and in the other paw she had a chocolate ice cream, the type they eat out of a pointy biscuity thing, with a stick of chocolate poking out of it. My mouth watered as I watched her licking it, remembering how much Caroline loved those, and how she sometimes gave me the last bit to finish off. I wondered if I’d ever get to enjoy that kind of treat again.
Suddenly there was a shout from the crowd: ‘Watch out, love!’
A huge seagull had swooped down from a lamppost and was aiming straight for the woman, trying to grab her ice cream. Suddenly I had a flashback to the day I’d watched Caroline being attacked on the beach for her sandwiches. I pictured Caroline’s poor bleeding finger again, remembered how she’d fallen, and the noise she’d made when her head hit the rock. How she lay there, lifeless, for a minute, before opening her eyes and looking so ill. I let out a little mew of anguish. Where was my poor Caroline now? Perhaps she was still at the hospital – I had no idea what they did at these places, except what Oliver had told me about Caroline being in one when she was very ill before, and that they’d kept her there a long time, trying to make her better. Perhaps this time they hadn’t even been able to make her better – it was bad enough her seeming to be ill again, without having got so badly hurt that day on the beach. And it was all the fault of a nasty, spiteful seagull – just like this one who was going for the poor old female’s ice cream! Overcome with fury at seagulls in general, I didn’t even stop to consider whether the rest of the gang was behind me, or whether in fact they’d even noticed the poor old human’s desperate situation at all. I just charged forward, hissing and spitting for all I was worth.
Of course, the other boys quickly came after me, Big shouting at me for not staying with them. I like to think I got the gull pretty flustered on my own, jumping up at him and yowling my head off, but once I had the gang’s support he didn’t need telling anymore. He flapped away crossly without having nabbed the chocolate ice cream. The poor human had dropped it on the ground, though, as she stumbled, letting go of her stick, and she was only saved from falling over by a couple of young male humans who rushed to help her.
‘Well done, Charlie,’ Big said gruffly, as between us all we quickly licked up as much of the ice cream off the pavement as we could. No point in it going to waste and, as you know, humans are far too pernickety to eat off the ground. ‘But it was a bit daft, wasn’t it, not waiting for us? For the love of catnip, don’t you realise that gull could have had your eye out?’
I flinched. One eye was already still quite sore and swollen. The thought of the other one being pecked out by a seagull was enough to make me realise how lucky I’d been, and how foolhardy. I’d landed badly on my wounded leg too, with all that jumping up at the gull.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I just felt so cross, I got carried away.’
‘It was bloody brave of you, young Charlie,’ said Black, coming to rub his face against mine. ‘I don’t think I’d have dared go for that gull on my own. Good for you.’
This was praise indeed, coming from Black. He was the most aggressive of the boys and I hadn’t forgotten that he’d been the first one to attack me, that day when I’d been alone and defenceless. Up till now I’d always believed he still looked down on me somewhat as a naive, posh little house kitten.
‘Thank you,’ I purred. ‘Thank you all,’ I added as the other boys joined in with the congratulations. I looked around at them all. My new friends. I finally felt completely accepted by them now. I should be able to confide in them, shouldn’t I – explain why I’d suddenly been able to behave so bravely. ‘It was because of Caroline, you see – my human kitten,’ I said. ‘I told you she got attacked by a seagull, didn’t I?’
‘So what?’ Stinky said.
‘Well, she hurt herself – badly. Her poor head was broken, and bleeding, and she might still be in hospital, and she might be very ill, everyone’s worried about her, and … and I miss her so much, she’s my favourite human in the whole world, and I just want to go home to her again and find out if she’s all right, and …’
I stopped. All the boys were staring at me. I realised I’d been making a terrible mewing noise at the back of my throat all through this long meow – that in fact I was probably sounding more like a pathetic baby kitten than a brave seagull-chaser.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But that was what made me so cross with that seagull.’
‘Well, at least something good came of it, then!’ Black said cheerfully.
They all turned away, and I tried to calm myself down again. It had been pointless, after all, trying to explain to them how I felt about Caroline. They’d never understand.
But just then, Big turned back again, breaking away from the others, and he came over to me and rubbed his face against mine. He didn’t say anything. He probably didn’t have a clue what to say, probably hadn’t even followed a single word of my meow. But he was showing he cared – and that, for now, was something. For now, it had to be enough. But after that day, I was even more determined I’d somehow find Caroline again, even if it took me the rest of my nine lives.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
There was one thing about the Chocolate Ice Cream Incident that I didn’t tell the others. Never having lived with humans, the feral boys had no understanding about the kind of toys they played with. So it would have been hard to explain to them that I knew people in the crowd watching us that day, and probably other days too, had been taking photos of us. I’d glimpsed them holding their phones and cameras up in the air and aiming them at us as we stalked the gulls before a chase, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me to find out eventually that someone had captured a picture of me going to the rescue of the Ice Cream woman. This is how I found out.
Once again it was because of my new human friends Jean and Shirley. When I made my secret visits to them at the café, I often heard them talking about whatever had been written in their newspaper. On this particular occasion, a day or two after the Battle for the Chocolate Ice Cream, they were sitting with their heads close together, laughing, apparently, at a picture in it.
‘That’s so funny, Jean!’ the one called Shirley was saying. ‘Just look at that seagull, terrified of one little cat!’
‘Well, you’re right about one thing, Shirl, I’ll give you that – the wild cats have certainly started being a deterrent around here. I hope that poor old dear wasn’t badly hurt.’
‘No. My niece Holly was down on the seafront that day, as it happens, and saw the whole thing. She said the cat scared the seagull right off, and although the poor woman got a nasty shock and did drop her ice cream when she stumbled, she wasn’t hurt. Someone caught her and stopped her from falling over. Apparently a lot of other cats joined in afterwards but this little one had already saved the day.’ Then she picked the paper up again and held it closer to her face. ‘Hang on a minute!’ she said, sounding excited. ‘Who does this look like to you?’
They both stared at the paper again, then at me – I was sitting by Jean’s feet, where I’d been washing my whiskers after their usual treat of a saucer of milk.
‘Are you saying you think it’s him – our little friend here?’ Jean looked back at the paper again. ‘Well, you could be right, although to be fair there are probably lots of little feral tabbies like this around.’
‘Well, the person who sent this picture into the paper wasn’t the only one
to have his camera out,’ said Shirley. ‘My niece told me she’d filmed the whole thing on her phone. She’s going to show me when she comes round tonight. She’s put it on Facebook, and YouTube apparently. She says it might go viral, whatever that means. She seems to think it’ll make her famous. Kids, eh? The ideas they get into their heads!’
‘It’s more likely to make the little cat famous!’ her friend remarked, and they both laughed.
Well, by now, as you can imagine, I was meowing my head off at them.
‘It was me who chased the seagull away from that old lady!’ I said. ‘I am that cat!’
But Jean had folded up the paper now and they were talking about something else. And even though I jumped up on Shirley’s lap and nudged her hands and arms with my head until she almost spilt her tea over me, they just gave me a little stroke and laughed at me, and nothing more was said about the picture.
When I rejoined Big and the others back at the yard, I was still so worked up about the whole thing, I couldn’t resist telling him what I’d overheard.
‘You mean to tell me you’ve been hanging around outside that café on your own while we were asleep?’ he meowed at me. ‘Have you suddenly got a death wish, these last few days?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I was just listening.’ I wondered if he could smell humans on me. What would he say if he knew I’d actually been cuddling up with them?
‘Charlie,’ he said in a stern meow, ‘I keep telling you not to take risks around humans. Even if some of them might not mind us so much now, you don’t know which ones might still be dangerous.’
‘They were talking about me, though! They had a picture of me in their newspaper.’
He gave me a pitying look. ‘Charlie, do us all a favour, right? Don’t let all the fuss about your bravery the other day go to your head. You’re a good little cat, at the end of the day, but nobody likes a show off.’
‘I’m not showing off!’ I protested. ‘I could hear what they were saying.’
‘Yes, I know you can understand Human. But please, don’t start telling me they’ve got pictures of you. That’s just too far-fetched for common sense.’
I knew I’d never convince him otherwise. For a start, he didn’t know about cameras and phones making pictures. Even I didn’t understand how it worked, how a picture of me had got from someone’s phone into the newspaper, but I did at least believe it was possible – I knew how clever humans could be with things like that. I didn’t like Big thinking I was just a show off, so I just dropped the subject. But Jean’s and Shirley’s words lingered in my head, and in my dreams, giving me a funny, fluttery, hopeful feeling that wouldn’t quite go away. Could it be true? Could the pictures from the humans’ cameras really make me famous? And if they did, would it actually be such a bad thing, after all – especially if I got famous enough to be sent back home to my family?
What happened next, though, was so surprising, I still have trouble understanding it myself, even though I’ve learnt more about it since. There are lots of things in the human world, of course, that I still don’t understand. So if any of the older cats among you can enlighten me, I’m always willing to be educated, even now I’m not a little kitten anymore.
A few days after I heard about my picture being in the newspaper, Big and I were walking along the street where all the shops were. We were once again heading to a different part of town to see if I recognised anywhere that could have been my holiday home. I remember I was feeling particularly sad, as we trotted along together, because Big had just asked me whether I should be thinking about giving up now. I’d already suspected that a couple of the boys were getting tired of helping me with the search, but Big was very loyal to me, and had said he’d keep on coming out with me for as long as I wanted to. I guessed he just thought that by giving up I could spare myself more disappointment. But how could I ever give up looking for Caroline and the rest of my family? It would feel like I’d forgotten them and stopped caring about them, and that was never going to happen.
I was getting to know the shops. There were the ones selling food, of course, where the windows were full of bread and cakes, or those boring things humans eat that grow on trees or bushes, and of course there was our favourite, the shop that displayed delicious looking body parts of dead prey, and whole chickens hanging up on hooks. Other shops were less interesting. They had humans’ clothes in the windows, or shoes, or books, or toys for human kittens. Then right at the end of the row of shops was one with lots of televisions in the window. If there weren’t any humans hanging around outside, we sometimes loitered here for a few minutes because the televisions were usually turned on, showing various different pictures, and Big and the other cats found them fascinating. They had no idea what televisions were, of course, never having been inside a human house. I’d tried to explain, but of course like all of us I’ve never really understood the need for them myself.
‘You mean they just sit there and watch these things all the time?’ Stinky had retorted when I first told him my family had two of them in our proper home at Little Broomford.
‘Well, mostly in the evenings, but yes, they can watch them whenever they want to. Sometimes there are special pictures for human kittens to watch. And sometimes there are pictures of lots of male humans chasing each other and kicking a ball. I’ve noticed that if I walk in front of the television waving my tail, they sometimes tell me off. But if the picture is of something like birds or fish, and I sit on the shelf on top of it and dangle a paw over it, they find it quite funny.’
‘Suffering catnip!’ Black had said. ‘Humans are the weirdest creatures in the world.’
‘And the pictures keep moving!’ Big had said.
‘Yes. I suppose it gives them some sort of a thrill, like us watching a bird hopping, or a mouse creeping along.’
‘But at least we eventually pounce on the prey and eat it,’ one of the boys had said, and I’d had to agree, the whole thing about watching television really did seem like a pointless exercise to us.
This particular day, it was raining, with a stiff breeze blowing up the shopping street from the sea, and most of the humans must have stayed inside their houses, so Big and I spent a while staring at the moving pictures in the shop window. One of the television screens was showing pictures of almost naked humans swimming in a big bath of water. When the first one reached the edge of the bath, he threw both his front paws into the air and the humans who were watching stood up and clapped their paws together. Very strange. On another screen, there were pictures of pairs of humans holding on to each other and swaying together in very strange, unnatural looking positions. The females were wearing fancy flamboyant dresses so I could only surmise that the smartly dressed males were trying to stop them from tripping over.
‘It’s true,’ I commented to Big now. ‘The longer I’m away from my humans, the more I agree that they’re all a bit odd.’
And then I looked at the next television screen. And I nearly jumped with all four paws off the ground.
‘Oh my claws and whiskers!’ I meowed. I was beginning to pick up some of the boys’ vernacular. ‘It’s me! Big, look, it’s me on there, for the love of catnip!’
‘It can’t be!’ Big was staring at the same screen now. ‘It must be some other tabby with the same eyes …’ He glanced at my still slightly swollen right eye. ‘And the same scars on his head … and … oh. The same limp when he runs. That’s a coincidence. And …’ He broke off. ‘Bloody catnip, Charlie! It’s you!’
We both stared at the picture on the screen as it continued to show me running forwards across the pavement and then leaping into the air, and then the seagull flying off with an angry squawk and the old lady stumbling, dropping her chocolate ice cream, and being helped by the two young humans.
‘It’s me,’ I repeated.
‘It is,’ he agreed, turning to stare at me now. ‘How in the name of all the dogs and foxes did you do that?’
‘I didn’t do a
nything! It’s … I don’t know! Somehow my life has got repeated in pictures on that television.’
‘That’s impossible! You haven’t been inside that shop, have you?’
‘No, of course I haven’t. I don’t understand it any more than you do. I told you I think someone has put a picture of me in a newspaper, but …’
‘Yes, and that was unbelievable enough – I thought you were making it up. But this …’ He stared back at the shop window again, where the television screen was now just showing a male human with his mouth opening and closing as if he was talking to us, with a lot of Human writing running along the bottom of the screen. ‘This is just impossible. It defies all common sense.’
‘I know. But it was definitely me, wasn’t it. It was me jumping up at that seagull.’
‘Yes, it was, although if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I’d say you’d finally taken leave of your senses.’
We stayed there in the rain, with the wind whistling around our whiskers, for quite a long time after that, in case we saw the pictures of me again, but it didn’t happen. In the end we waited so long, we got drenching wet and cold, and didn’t bother with searching for my holiday home that day after all.
‘Let’s not tell the other boys what we saw in that shop,’ Big said quietly as we headed back to the yard. ‘They’ll think we’ve both been at the catnip.’
‘OK,’ I agreed. I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamt it, anyway. It all seemed so unreal and unlikely. ‘But we did see it, though, didn’t we?’
‘Yes.’ He turned to stare at me again. ‘And I’m still trying to make sense of it. The only thing I can think of is that you’ve got some kind of magic power – what with this, and understanding Human, and the way you were brave enough to come back and attack me, all on your own, that first day we met. It never did seem quite natural. Are you sure you’re really a normal cat?’
Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life Page 12