Cat Red-Handed

by Katherine Hayton

  Just as my mind threw up that thought, the bus brakes squealed, and it pulled over to the side of the road. The driver issued a few grunts as he struggled out of his seat, then walked down the center aisle, belly jiggling with each step.

  “What’s going on back here?” His beady eyes stared at the chatting passengers who all immediately sat up, backs ramrod straight. “Who’s eating chips? Food’s not allowed on the bus. Says so on the sign.”

  He pointed at a picture board mounted at the front of the vehicle. Chips and burgers were crossed out in the top square. A can and a bottle of fizz were crossed out in the second. The cute ears of a cat and a mangy looking dog were crossed out in the third.

  Hey. At least I hadn’t had anything to drink.

  “Madam, is that your cat?” The driver leaned over, peering close. His breath blew out onto my face, redolent with early morning coffee. “No pets on the bus.”

  “He’s not.” When the driver raised his eyebrows, the woman held her hands up to either side. “Honest. I just found him in my bag after I boarded. He’s a stowaway.”

  “Right. Well, the animal needs to get off the bus. If he’s not yours—” again the suspiciously raised eyebrows “—then I presume you won’t mind if I escort him off now.”

  “You can’t do that.” The man opposite got to his feet, indignation shining across his face and puffing his chest out. “That cat got on the bus at Hanmer Springs. If you take him off here, then the poor thing will never find his way home.”

  “It’s a stray,” the bus driver said, pointing at my bare neck. “The last thing that Hanmer Springs needs is another stray cat wandering about.”

  “He doesn’t look like a stray.” The woman picked me up and dangled me while peeking into my eyes. “Look at him! He’s far too comfortable with humans to be a street cat. His collar probably got caught on something and pulled off. Here—” she handed me over to the bus driver who nearly dropped me in surprise “—you can see where the fur around his neck is slightly matted. This is someone’s beloved pet. You can’t discard him by the side of the road.”

  The driver was holding me so cautiously that I came close to falling. Just as it seemed I would slip out of his hands onto the floor, I gripped hold of his shirt sleeve and climbed up and out of his hands, curling my body more safely around his neck.

  The passengers squealed with delight. I accepted it as my due, though I hadn’t been trying to entertain them. Being adorable to all and sundry was just a knack.

  “Well, what do you suggest?” The driver put his hands on his hips. Perhaps he was trying to be fierce, but the only expressions I saw in response were of happiness. “Do you want me to turn the bus around right now and drive back to Hanmer Springs, so his lordship can be deposited back at the bus stop?”

  I tensed. No. That was most definitely not what I wanted.

  As silence greeted his question, the bus driver nodded with satisfaction. “I thought not.”

  “Don’t you do another trip back to Christchurch today?” the woman asked. “There are two timings, aren’t there?”

  “So?”

  “Well, can’t we just continue on to Christchurch as planned and then this wee fellow—” she chucked me under the chin “—can return with you on the late afternoon bus?”

  “What do you think? That I’m this cat’s chauffeur?”

  “Well, I could probably pay for his ticket, if that’s concerning you.” The woman stared at him, her gaze hardening into steel. “Is that your problem?”

  “No cats on the bus,” the driver said, pointing to the signs at the front again.

  “Yes, but he’s here, isn’t he? And you did nothing to stop him stowing aboard.”

  The driver took a step back, his shoulders tensing so much that I had to shift my position. “He came on board in your bag. You already said.”

  “No, I didn’t. That’s just where I found him. It’s just as likely that he crawled into it on board as he did outside.” The woman paused for a few seconds. “Far more likely, in fact.”

  “Yeah.” The male passenger who’d remained silent up to that point, decided to join in, ganging up on the driver. “Shouldn’t you have done a check before we took off from the bus stop? I don’t remember you doing that.”

  “I looked.”

  “In your mirror,” the passenger said, pointing at the convex bubble mounted high over the front door. “That’s not the same. Imagine if this had been a wild cat, one of those strays with their claws always out. We could’ve been injured.”

  The bus driver retreated another step. “Okay. There’s no need to make accusations.”

  “And there’s no need for your company to find out about it if you do as the lady suggested. It’s no skin off your nose to give the wee cat a hitch there and back.”

  The driver reached up and pulled me from his shoulders by the scruff of the neck. Thank goodness that this time his grip was firm.

  “Fine. I’ll give the kitty a free ride.” He turned and walked back to the front seat, depositing me into a plastic pocket alongside a water bottle. “There you go, sir. All comfortable?”

  Although his words were harsh, he gave me a small pet between the ears, softening them. I wriggled my butt a few times and padded at the confines of my new temporary home. When I sat down, I could look up into the mirror above the door to survey the entire bus. Lovely.

  “Perfectly acceptable,” I agreed back to the driver, but he’d already turned away.

  “About time we got back on the road,” he said. “And, madam, don’t even think about taking out that bag of chips again.”

  In the mirror, her reflection held up her hands again, taking her seat. When everyone was back where they had been, the driver pulled back onto the road.

  On our way to Christchurch, once again.

  I’d fallen into a light doze for the remainder of the journey, only coming back to full wakefulness when the bus stopped with a jolt.

  “End of the line,” the driver called out, as though the passengers might be in some doubt. The bus had pulled up just inside a building with a large dome roof. There was concrete and glass everywhere, funneling people where they needed to go.

  I waited until everyone had gotten off, not wanting to draw attention to myself so soon after the big ruckus. However, it appeared that although the passengers were keen to disembark, the driver had no such inclination. He stayed seated, waving out the windows at people a few times, but otherwise unmoving.

  “Only a ten-minute layover before we on-board the next lot of passengers,” the driver said. It took me a few seconds to realize the words were directed at me. “I’ll just keep you company here, so you don’t scarper, and then I’ll get you back home, quick as I can.”

  I listened to the words in horror. There was no way that I could get out of my plastic pocket and through the door without the driver seeing. After all, I had to either run over his feet or his lap to make it to that side.

  The door wheezed close, and the bus started up again. Every muscle in my body was tense, on high alert. The air smelled electric, metallic, as panic started to grow inside my body. I’d come all this way, yet I couldn’t figure out how to stop retracing my steps straight back home again.

  “Now,” the driver said. “I’m going to have to leave you alone for a bit, so don’t you be naughty. Need to offload a bit of liquid, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. All I wanted was the opportunity to sneak off board.

  But when the driver huffed and puffed his way out of the seat and to the door, he activated it by a button well out of my reach. Before I could think of sneaking out past him, he must have pressed a button on the other side, because it hissed shut again.

  I was trapped.

  Chapter Five

  I tried my best to reach the door release button. With the nimbleness of my youth having departed, though, it ended up in painful defeat.

  No matter how many times I launched mys
elf at the top of the door, I couldn’t get a grip on anything up there to hold me in place. That button whizzed by me half a dozen times but never came close to being pushed.

  On the last attempt, I saw a child outside pointing and laughing. Humiliation drenched me like a bucket of cold water. His mother turned to look, adding to my embarrassment, then her eyes widened in alarm.

  For a second, I froze. Was this a further defeat or an opportunity? Hoping for the later, I forced myself into action. I didn’t need a long bus drive home full of chastisements and dreams of what might have been.

  With a forlorn stare, I pressed myself against the bus door, exposing as much of my beautiful body as I could. With shoulders sagging in defeat, I must have looked like the saddest creature in history. My skin crawled while I rested the side of my face against the smooth glass panes of the door.

  “We have to get him out!” a voice cried. I didn’t turn to look, didn’t want to see anybody who was observing my shameful display. “Quick. Hit the release button. They must be burning up in there!”

  I frowned for a second, unsure of how somebody could be so far from the realities of how a bus worked. Burning up? The cool waft of air conditioning cushioned my exit as the doors were opened from the outside.

  I didn’t stop for thank yous or safety checks. The driver could be back at any moment.

  The glass and concrete were like a maze at first. I ran, but everywhere I turned looked precisely the same. It felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere, and the frustration didn’t aid my escape.

  Glass. Block. Glass.

  Finally, I saw an opening out onto a busy street. Not usually the sort of vision that would entice me, but at that moment it was a mirage in a desert.

  Even with an aim in sight, it still took me a few goes to find the right corridor to arrive at the exit. When I walked outside, the waft of air following the rush of traffic, felt like being set free.

  Of course, now that I’d escaped the bus, I had no idea of where to go.

  I might have stood on the roadside forever if it hadn’t been for the honk of a horn and a near miss on the corner. The horrendous sound—far too loud for its own good—drew my attention and I turned to see a miracle unfold.

  The same van that made deliveries to Hanmer Springs was sitting parked in the middle of an intersection!

  It only took a second to realize my mistake. The van wasn’t exactly the same. The number plate had a completely different assortment of random figures. Still, it was a much-needed lead on a trying day, and I was grateful that it showed up when it did.

  Best of all, because of the weird place it had chosen to park, it was no trouble at all for me to jump in through the side window and snuggle in safely under the passenger seat. From there, I waited.

  The driver had—for some obscure reason—chosen to exit the vehicle to have a loud discussion with another driver. I’d missed too much of the start to have any context, but from the gist of it, the other driver’s mother appeared to have done something very wrong.

  The angry conversation continued on for another minute then the honking started. Not from the van this time, no. It seemed that every other driver on the road had taken this man’s lead and were creating a cacophony of sound.

  It grew so awful that I had to press my paws up to my ears to try to shut the worst of it out. Why on earth would someone make such a din? It appeared that people in the big city were a lot more furious than the ones I’d grown used to in Hanmer Springs.

  Never mind. If I could just keep on track and maintain my courage, then I might soon have a cure for my ailment, and I could go back home. The sounds were probably worse than they appeared, exacerbated by my empty tummy and downcast mood.

  The driver got back in the van. He jumped into his seat with such gusto that mine lowered to brush the top of my head. If I’d thought that would end the noise, I was wrong for he chose to slam the door shut and honk his own horn again.

  “All right,” he screamed out the window. “I’m moving. See? I’m moving.”

  Given the amount of noise that I’d heard so far, I’m surprised that we couldn’t hear Christchurch all the way from Hanmer Springs.

  The van took off with a screech of tires. By this time, even though I’d only been there a few minutes, my head was pounding furiously. Combined with the strange scent of lousy food wafting from the back of the van and the odor of oil and petrol engrained under the seat, and I was soon a miserable cat, indeed.

  In any other set of circumstances, I would have found my place of comfort and taken a nap while the road-beast got to wherever it was going. Between a queasy stomach and my thumping temples, sleep didn’t stand a chance.

  The van stopped after another ten minutes or so. In my misery, it was hard to keep track of time, so that was just my best guess. The driver called out, his voice softer than before, announcing his arrival. Soon after that, he pulled open the back of the van.

  “What on earth is this?” another man called out. His voice was round and comfortable, sounding like a big, fat belly. “This isn’t what my order had on it. That’s the second time this week.”

  “It’s what I was told to bring,” the driver said. His voice was full of sharp edges and stinging nettles. “If you’ve got a problem, take it up with someone who cares. They told me to deliver this, and that’s what I’m doing. If you don’t like it, you sort it out at your end.”

  “Now, wait a minute—”

  “No.” One of those sharp edges slashed straight through the rotund speech. “You listen. I’m delivering this. After that, it’s your problem. If you don’t like it, then maybe you should remember what happened to that lady in Hanmer Springs.”

  I raised my head so quick at that statement that I forgot about the confined space and banged it on the base of the passenger seat. Hoping that it wouldn’t lead to my discovery, I edged out into the footwell to hear the discussion better.

  “You dirty sod. Were you responsible for that?”

  “Not me, mate. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, are you going to give me a hand to take these inside your store, or should I just leave them out on the street and let you deal with the stock yourself?”

  From the noises, I guessed the store owner chose the former course of action.

  I ducked back under the seat, hiding entirely out of sight again before the driver got back in the van. My stomach was tingling, not with queasiness this time but with a sense of achievement as I started to pull some threads together.

  This van was the same as the type that delivered to Old Man Jack’s dairy, and the driver knew about poor Agnes. So did the store owner—at least it seemed that way to me—so he also had some kind of connection. Maybe the shop we’d just been outside carried the same range of deliciousness that Old Man Jack’s did.

  Wait. There was another connection, too. The driver of this van had handed out goods that weren’t the same as usual. Old Man Jack had complained that his driver was off sick and hadn’t provided him with the typical quality goods.

  As I knitted the threads together and unpicked them only to weave them together again in a different pattern, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I might still not know the root causes or the full meaning, but I was definitely heading down the right track!

  The next time the van pulled to a stop, the driver got out and slammed the door shut, but didn’t open up the back. Long after I tracked the sound of his footsteps going inside another door—again one that he couldn’t resist slamming—I ventured out from under the seat and jumped out of the window.

  The van was parked in a row of similar vehicles. As I headed along the lineup, I recognized the license plate from Old Man Jack’s regular delivery van.

  It appeared I was in the place I needed to be. Now I just had to find out what was going on.

  As well as the long line of parked vans, there was a building nearby. After checking that there was nobody outside watching me, I ran across to the wall. Halfway along there wa
s a break in the foundations, and I crawled underneath. I scanned the structure above me but couldn’t see any light coming through to indicate a gap.

  Outside again, flush against the wall, I struck the jackpot when I turned the corner and found a window sitting ajar. I waited for a moment, listening intently to fathom if there was someone in the room. After hearing nothing—not even the low puffs of breathing—I summoned my courage out of its hiding place once more and jumped inside.

  My paws weren’t ready for the greasy surface of the windowsill, and for a second, I held a grim fight with gravity before I overcame it to jump down inside. I skidded on the linoleum-covered floor for the first few steps, until whatever had greased the sill wiped itself off onto the ground.

  When I poked my head out of the door, I saw a large cavern of space, stacked high on all sides with crates of stock. Large steel cages held the stacks in place, and forklifts stood at the ready, waiting for the command to go to work.

  I trotted along the wall, sticking to the shadows. Loud voices drew me up a rickety flight of stairs. Old wood, with the carpet runner long ago worn down to bare threads.

  “I told you when you needed to get the money to me, and I told you how much,” one loud voice stated. Even from outside, I could tell this was a man used to getting his own way.

  “But I paid you the right amount—”

  “Philip, Philip, Philip. It doesn’t matter if you paid me the right amount when you didn’t pay it on time now, does it? What’s the word I’m searching for here?”

  I guessed it was Philip that answered him, judging from the defeat in his tone. “Interest.”

  “Exactly,” the first voice said. If it had belonged to a cat, I bet the speaker would have looked just like Fat Bobby. “Interest keeps accruing whether you like it or not, so if you don’t pay the amount on time, it’s a different amount you owe. See?”