by Matt Haig
‘Sorry, Oscar,’ Rissa said.
‘’S all right,’ Oscar replied.
Barney said thank you to his best friend the only way he could, by nuzzling his head against her ankles.
Cat On The Run
RISSA GOT BARNEY off the bus, hiding him inside her coat where he could hear the beating of her heart. Then, when all the others had disappeared through the school gates, she took Barney out into the cool air that he could feel tingling his whiskers.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you have a collar?’
Rissa was clearly wondering what to do. Barney realized this. In fact, for a brief moment he could see her thoughts as clearly as if they were fish in a pond. She was wondering if she should borrow someone else’s phone and call the RSPCA. That was no good. That would mean being locked in a cage with no chance of proving to anyone who he really was.
Then Barney had a plan. If he ran ahead of Rissa, he could enter the school and get to his classroom, then he could run to his chair.
Why would a cat run through a school to jump on Barney’s empty chair unless it was Barney?
OK, there were probably other reasons, but this was as good a plan as he had so he pushed his front paws against Rissa and launched himself into the air. He fell, suddenly realizing he wasn’t anywhere near Rissa-height any more and that he had a very long way to drop. He winced, expecting to crash-land painfully, but it didn’t happen. In fact, to Barney’s astonishment, he fell fluidly through the air and landed with ease on all four paws. And he had to admit it felt pretty good, moving like a cat.
But, as Barney started to run, he saw another cat was watching him suspiciously from the other side of the road. A ginger moggy, licking its front paws and carefully studying him. Pumpkin! The shock caused Barney to hesitate.
Rissa’s hand was on his back, ready to scoop him up again, so he ran as fast as he could through the open gates and towards the doors of the vast modern school building.
It had always been big, but now it was infinite. Barney couldn’t see an end to it, whichever way he looked. Just windows and concrete, windows and concrete, windows and concrete …
‘Cat! Come here, cat!’ Rissa was shouting behind him, getting closer.
Good, thought Barney, encouraged his plan was working so far, and actually enjoying the sensation of running in his cat body.
Ahead was a Year Thirteen whom Barney recognized – a scruffy boy with lots of spots who always seemed friendly. He was trying to tuck in his shirt as he pushed his way through the two doors that led onto the main school corridor.
The doors closed slowly, so Barney had time to slip inside.
The Year Thirteen noticed Barney run past his ankles. ‘Oh, a cat,’ he said sleepily as if it was a completely normal thing to see animals running along the school corridor at a quarter to nine in the morning.
Barney could hear Rissa’s footsteps on the polished, sickly scented floor but kept going, as determined as if he were taking part in the Cat Olympics. Past reception, Miss Whipmire’s office, the staff room, weaving through legs of early pupils wandering the corridors.
‘What was that?’ said one.
‘What?’ said another.
‘Looked like a … cat.’
Barney skidded into a left turn, darted past the empty science labs, turned one final corner, and he was nearly where he wanted to be, with Rissa’s footsteps in fast pursuit.
Then he was there. 7R’s classroom. The door was open and Mrs Lavender, the nicest teacher in the whole school, was already inside. She was leaning over her desk, putting big red ticks and writing Very good next to someone’s homework.
A few pupils were already in the room, sitting at their desks, chatting. Barney could see from their feet that Gavin wasn’t there yet. That was good. What wasn’t good was that some of the other kids had noticed him.
‘Look,’ said Lottie Lewis, chewing gum. ‘It’s a cat.’
‘OMG!’ said Lottie’s best friend, Aaliyah. ‘How cute is that?’
Lottie – who was probably the prettiest and most popular girl in school – leaned down and stroked Barney’s back.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ she said, picking Barney off the floor.
Great, he thought. The first time Lottie Lewis has ever noticed me and I’m a cat.
Rissa was in the room now, out of breath. ‘That cat got on the bus,’ she explained. ‘It’s miles from home.’
This wasn’t good. She still thought he was a cat, and now Mrs Lavender had seen what was going on. ‘Oh goodness me. Oh my goodness. Goodness! Whose is that? Is that yours, Lottie?’
‘No. I just found it.’
Rissa explained again about the cat being found near the bus stop, and Barney was watching Lottie’s face and her giant eyelashes like the petals of an exotic plant. She wasn’t concentrating, so he wriggled free, over her arm, and jumped onto her desk across Aaliyah’s.
Then he leaped down onto the floor and ran to his chair. He prepared himself for the pounce but didn’t have time.
Mrs Lavender picked him up, resting him against her purple cardigan, which smelled of flowers. It smelled, in fact, like Bluebell Wood, and cruelly reminded Barney of being nine years old and with his parents on a long Sunday walk.
‘Right, class, please settle down. I’d better just tell Miss Whipmire about this.’
And she carried Barney out of the room, stroking the back of his head tenderly, without the faintest clue that she was, in fact, taking him to the office of a murderer.
The Unknowable Miss Whipmire
AS WE HAVE already discussed, Miss Whipmire was the scariest head teacher in the whole of Blandfordshire. You only had to say her name out loud to change the temperature to a few degrees below freezing. But, actually, the strangest thing was how little people knew about her.
True, they knew what she looked like.
They knew she was a very skinny, very tall woman. Basically a skin-wrapped skeleton with glasses that sat at the end of her nose so she could always look down at whoever was speaking to her.
They also knew she looked quite old. In fact, she looked about two hundred. But obviously she wasn’t. She was just living on Misery Time. (If you don’t already know, Misery Time means that miserable people get old very much quicker than happy people. Sour thoughts inside your head apparently make it look like a pickled walnut quite quickly.)
Of course, she did smile from time to time. At parents. And school governors. But she didn’t like smiling. It actually seemed to hurt her, but it was just something she had to do now and then to stay in her job.
People knew she drove to school in the slick silver car she had bought several months ago, but no one had been to her house since around the time she had been promoted to head teacher. No one had been invited, and they would have probably made an excuse even if they had.
Apparently, before Barney had arrived at the school, Miss Whipmire had been quite a nice and caring teacher. Back when she was just a deputy head. Someone who only raised her voice when absolutely necessary and never stared at anyone as if they were a dirty mark that needed rubbing out, which was how she now looked at the children in her school.
But a few days after she became head teacher, she changed. And everybody could see she looked crosser.
No one knew where that anger had come from. They just assumed it had something to do with her becoming the head.
But then, as I said, no one knew very much about Miss Whipmire. And certainly not Mrs Lavender, who had now arrived with the cat at Miss Whipmire’s office door.
She knocked. Waited nervously. Like everyone else, she was scared of her boss. Indeed, only last night she had woken up in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which Miss Whipmire had called her to her office for placing too many ticks on pupils’ homework.
‘You want ticks, I’ll give you ticks,’ she’d said in the dream, unleashing a whole army of fleas and leaving poor Mrs Lavender on the floor, itching like mad.
And she
wasn’t the only one who was nervous now. Barney too was deeply scared. Admittedly, he’d never felt happy standing outside Miss Whipmire’s office, but this time he felt even worse than usual. His fur was standing on end and his whiskers were twitching with nervous anticipation.
He was sensing something. But he didn’t know exactly what it was he sensed.
You see, when you first become a cat you have a lot of cat senses, but the trouble is, you don’t know how to use them or understand what they mean. It’s like hearing a foreign language. You hear the words but can’t translate them. All Barney knew was that his claws were out and he was clinging to Mrs Lavender for dear life.
The door handle turned.
A moment later there she was, staring at the cat, intrigued. Maybe even a little hopeful.
‘What is this?’
‘It’s a cat,’ said Mrs Lavender. ‘I’m ever so sorry for disturbing you. It’s just I don’t know what to do with it. It came into my classroom.’
‘Your classroom? Well, I’ve always told you, Mrs Lavender, that you have a habit of making children act like animals, but this really is a step further, isn’t it?’
Mrs Lavender didn’t know if Miss Whipmire was joking. So she gave a very quiet laugh, hidden at the back of her throat like a dead mouse under a rug.
‘I thought it best to bring it to you,’ she said, ‘so you could maybe, possibly, perhaps call someone like animal welfare or a cat-rescue centre, or something.’
Miss Whipmire sucked in air through her nostrils, the way she always did when she was about to get furious. But she didn’t. She was too clever. ‘Absolutely. You are quite right, Mrs Lavender. You couldn’t be any more right if I sawed you in half and stole the whole left side of your body. I will indeed call the necessary authorities.’
‘Right.’
And then there was a very long silence. Long enough for Barney to say his prayers and for Miss Whipmire to bark at a late Year Eight shuffling to class and having a nose at what was going on. ‘If you want your eyes to take a holiday from their sockets, keep staring, you dopey slug,’ she said as the boy turned away in fear.
‘That was a little bit unfair, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Lavender in the poor boy’s defence.
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘But—’
‘Mrs Lavender, these children – all human children – are despicable brutes. They are poisonous weeds. If you water them with kindness, well, there goes the nice garden. Trim them, snip them, cut them down, that’s the best way.’
After which, Barney was grabbed roughly by the scruff of his furry neck and yanked from Mrs Lavender’s cardigan and its smell of warm summer meadows into Miss Whipmire’s thin, unloving arms.
As Barney was stroked too hard he imagined Miss Whipmire giving one of her painful smiles as she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it. You can go now.’
And he watched Mrs Lavender turn and walk away, the sound of her footsteps echoing and fading along the corridor until they were gone completely.
A Strange Discovery
BARNEY WAS STANDING on a chair, where Miss Whipmire had placed him. It was the same chair he’d sat in yesterday when he’d imagined life couldn’t get any worse. How wrong he’d been. He watched as his skeletal head teacher went over and locked the door, wondering why she needed to do that.
She turned and gave him a strange look. Not friendly, obviously, but not cross, either.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered.
Of course, people ask animals things all the time. Like if a dog decides to go to the toilet on a carpet you might ask, ‘What is the matter with you?’ Or if a goldfish is lying upside down on the top of the water its owner might enquire, ‘Are you dead?’ But when a human asks a member of another species a question, they don’t normally expect an answer, just as Rissa hadn’t this morning.
But Barney really thought an answer was exactly what Miss Whipmire expected.
She walked over, leaned right into Barney’s face. ‘Don’t just sit there. Tell me. I need to be sure.’
She’s mad, Barney thought as he smelled her fishy breath.
‘Well,’ he said, assuming she wouldn’t understand. ‘I’m not a cat really. I’m Barney Willow. And, by the way, you are the most horrible head teacher in the universe.’
He expected her to look blank.
He was talking cat, not human.
But she wasn’t blank. She was smiling – without any sign of pain. And soon the smile was a laugh, and the laugh grew until the sound of it filled the room. It was a horrible laugh. The kind of laugh reserved for witches to use over cauldrons after casting an evil spell. But Miss Whipmire wasn’t a witch. Not a real one, anyway. She was something else, something just as strange. And twice as evil.
She was now putting her hand over her mouth and trying desperately to keep the laugh locked inside, but she couldn’t. She was soon on the floor, curled right up, laughing uncontrollably.
‘He did it!’ she was saying to Barney’s confusion. ‘He actually did it.’
About a minute later she stood up. ‘Oh, that’s funny. That’s so satisfying … Barney Willow! You’re Barney Willow!’
Barney waited, wondering whether to speak again, but before he knew it, words were leaking from him: ‘Yes, I am. How can you understand me?’
Miss Whipmire had understood his miaow – hence the speech marks (and, yes, all those words equalled only one miaow) – but she chose not to answer it. Not right then, anyway.
‘When?’ she said, on the brink of more laughter.
‘What?’
‘Still as slow as ever, aren’t you, Barney Willow? I’ll ask it slowly.’ She closed her eyes and moved her mouth carefully around her words. ‘When. Did. You. Become. A. Cat?’
‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I felt funny for a while, but it was only this morning that I became … like this.’
(Three miaows, long and heartfelt.)
‘This morning … this morning …’ said Miss Whipmire, thinking, and tapping her fingers on her chin as if it were a silent piano.
And then she had another question. ‘And so, where are you?’
Barney was confused. ‘I’m here.’
‘No, you imbecile, the other you. The better you. The cat in your body.’
‘I don’t know. He was walking to the bus stop with Rissa and then he ran away.’
‘Good.’ Miss Whipmire nodded the kind of nod you give when everything is going to plan. ‘Good, good. He’ll be taking some time to adjust, like I told him to. Then he’ll be on his way here. Very good … But not for you, obviously. Bad, bad for you. Because there goes your ticket.’
‘What ticket?’ said Barney, noticing an envelope on the desk with what looked like tickets sticking out.
‘Oh, not these,’ she said, waving the envelope. He could see the address:
Miss Polly Whipmire
63 Sycamore Terrace
Blandford
Blandfordshire
BL1 3NR
‘These are real tickets – my tickets. Mine and my only love’s. Out of here for ever. This time tomorrow I’ll be en route to Old Siam – Thailand. I’m talking about the ticket back to you. Back to you you.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ she said, her thin lips curling into a frosty smile. ‘After all, just because you look like a cat doesn’t mean you have the brain of a cat, does it?’ She leaned close into him again. He felt his claws growing, itching to strike her nose. But he was too scared to do anything.
‘Do you know what the IQ of the average cat is?’ she asked him.
‘No.’
‘One thousand and six. That’s nine hundred and six points higher than the average human.’ Miss Whipmire paused, licked her lips as if savouring the taste of something. ‘Anyway, this happens more than you think. See, I’m a cat. Was a cat. Oh yes, that’s right – Blandford High School has had a Siamese cat acting as its head teacher for quite a while n
ow.’ She smiled again as Barney began to absorb the madness of what she was telling him. ‘And do you know what? This school has never had such good results!’
Sardines
BARNEY FELT HIS new thick black hair rise all over his body.
Miss Whipmire was a cat!
‘Oh yes, true as a tail, as we cats say,’ she said, popping behind the desk and opening up a drawer. She pulled out a tin of sardines.
‘Do you know how many sardines you can buy on a headteacher’s salary?’ she asked, peeling off the lid and placing one of the oily fish into her mouth.
‘No, I don’t,’ Barney told her, remembering the smell of fish he’d noticed yesterday as a human sitting right here in her office. The smell that was stronger still now that he had cat nostrils.
‘A lot,’ she said, making no attempt to close her mouth as she chewed the fish. ‘Mmmmmmm, delicious. Better than cat food, I can tell you. Eugh. Cat food. That’s what I used to live on. And not just any cat food. The most disgusting cat food in the whole of Costslicers Supermarket – rabbit kidney.’
Miss Whipmire looked like she was about to be sick at the memory. But she became angry instead and beat her human fist down on her desk causing the pens in her weird pen pot to bounce about.
‘You see, everyone thought that Miss Whipmire – the real Miss Whipmire – was so lovely,’ she said bitterly. ‘Lovely Polly Whipmire! Even after two days in the job it was clear she was going to be a terrible head teacher, but no one minded, because she was such a wonderful person. Riding her little bicycle, being gentle and kind with all the children, loving her little Siamese cat …’ She shook her head. ‘Well, that’s not how I saw it. Not with her rabbit liver, and the tiny kitchen she used to shut me in.’
She ate another sardine, and another, and one more, the last while she closed her eyes, comforting herself with the taste.
‘But she doesn’t bother me now,’ she said in a most peculiar voice. A voice which sounded as cold as a grave in the night. ‘Oh, no, you don’t bother me now, do you, Polly?’
