Furball and the Mokes

by A. N. Wilson

  They did not run this time towards the backyard. Maybe some instinct kept them from running past the scene of Nobby’s last heroic minutes. They did not run, either, down the old, familiar, short, dusty passage to the nests and dustbowls under the stairs. They ran forwards instead in the direction of the front of the house. They were behind the kitchen wall. Then, as they ran breathlessly through the dark, and not knowing where they were going, they blundered over bricks, rubble and soot. They came through what felt like a sooty cave, which was an old chimney flue. They ran and ran. At one point they came out of a hole and found themselves in an oom-room. There were large white mats or pieces of carpet over the floor. Two of the Rivals ran about on top of these, thinking they were a game, but Mokey Moke squealed at them that the mats were almost certainly a trap and they should come back inside the wall. Back in the darkness, through a small hole in the floorboards, they ran on and on. There were nine of them – Mokey Moke, Buster, four Rivals and some of the older mokes. And there was their friend Furball the hamster.

  As they ran forward now, the dryness and the dustiness changed – first from dampness and then to soaking wet. They had come into the little paved area at the front of the basement, and were running round the outside of some large plastic containers which rose, great black towers, above their backs. It felt even more terrifying, to be exposed like this to the open air.

  ‘Looking for breakfast?’

  A huge grey and white fevva was calling to them in long, sad, gulping cries. Its grey wings were huge. Its big orange-yellow hooked beak was far larger than a moke, and it swooped down into the area and picked up one of the Rivals as if it were a crumb. The little moke was carried up into the air as the fevva – a seagull – flapped away into the trees in the street.

  ‘On! On!’ called Buster.

  ‘Hide – oh hide – oh, take care, my poor little mokes,’ cried Mokey Moke.

  And Furball followed them as they scuttered under the door of an old coal vault, and into the shadows once again.

  ‘You must stay near us,’ said Buster. ‘Look what happened to im.’

  Some of the younger Rivals had not even seen the fevva taking their brother into the sky – it had all happened so quickly. Those who had seen it were reduced to an even wilder state of panic. So it was that when the group of mokes were inside once more, many of them, even the older ones, nuzzled against the soft fur of Furball for comfort, because she was so much larger, and plumper and softer than they were. She herself was quivering with fear. She wanted now, more than anything, to be back in her cage, waiting for the Giant to come and pick her up and stroke her, and feed her seeds and speak to her in her Chum voice. But instead she was in a damp, smelly vault with the mokes.

  And, as if she were reading Furball’s thoughts, or almost reading them, Mokey Moke said, ‘An’ I’ll tell you what that pong is ’n all.’

  ‘No mistakin’ that,’ said one of the older mokes. Furball later picked up the fact that his name was Uncle Sid. He was the least playful moke she had ever met, always willing to look on the dark side of life and always negative, even on those rare occasions (rare for mokes, that is) when things went well. ‘Could only be one fing, vat pong.’

  ‘Maybe they gorn,’ said Mokey Moke.

  Furball, who was quite good at moke language by now, and understood well over half of what they said, replied, ‘Maybe who’s gone? Gone where?’

  ‘Maybe the narks is gorn,’ said Mokey Moke.

  ‘Narks?’

  Nobby had once told her about narks, with their sharp teeth and foul smell, and long worm-like tails, but she had forgotten this.

  ‘I reckon we’ve walked slap bang into the middla of narks’ lair,’ said Uncle Sid.

  ‘Oh, don’t, Sid – don’t say it,’ said another moke. And the five remaining Rivals all squeaked – Don’t, don’t, don’t.

  And then, through the darkness, terrible and loud, there came a raucous laugh.

  ‘Reckon you come inta narks’ lair, didya?’

  Out of the shadows stepped a huge brown nark. It looked – first at the young Rivals, and then at Furball.

  ‘Wot in ve nima charity is yew?’ it spat.

  Furball stammered out, ‘Ham– ham –’

  ‘Vats a goodun – am! Am sandwich more like. Muvva!’ the nark called.

  From the darkness came an even more raucous, even coarser voice. ‘Wot izzit, Ray-mond?’ it asked.

  ‘Only gotta ruddy torkin am sandwich, enn-eye?’

  ‘Yew wot?’

  Out of the gloaming the other animals saw another nark stepping, even larger, and even coarser, even browner, even smellier than the one who called her Mother. To her thick brown fur there clung moisture. It looked as if she had been paddling or rolling in something really nasty, and the smell was terrible.

  ‘Sez it’s am.’

  ‘Wot does?’

  ‘Vat.’

  The son nark, by the name of Ray-mond, nodded his head. The mother nark, dragging her thick moist worm of a tail approached Furball and against the hamster’s pink, delicate quivering nose she shoved her pointy, smelly nark-nose and opened her nark-mouth and bared her brown nark-teeth.

  ‘Wot in the name of bleedin ek is vat?’ asked the mother nark.

  ‘Sez its am.’ Ray-mond really liked this joke. He gave a hoarse chuckle every time he repeated it.

  ‘Well,’ said the mother nark with a truly evil leer, ‘If it sez its am, we all know what we does with am. Eh? Eh?’

  As she said this, Furball could smell her putrid breath and nark-spit drenched her face. The nark turned and spoke to her son. ‘What would you say, son, that we should do ter noice juicy sloicer am, eh?’

  ‘Sez its am,’ laughed Ray-mond in return.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Little Sooty Footprints

  ‘Have some tea,’ said Kitty’s dad.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Five to seven.’

  Kitty’s mum yawned and answered, ‘Oh, what a night.’

  When he placed a mug of tea on her bedside table, she sat up and said, ‘Peter? What’s the matter?’

  He sighed, a very long drawn-out sigh.

  ‘You’re trembling. You’re pale. It’s Chum, isn’t it? Chum got caught in the trap!’

  ‘It’s not Chum,’ said Kitty’s dad. ‘Well then?’

  ‘But there was one trap still left down.’

  He was very careful not to say, ‘there was still one trap which you had left down,’ but she still felt bad about it and snapped at him. ‘Peter, I asked you to go downstairs and check.’

  He was silent for a while and sipped at his mug of tea. ‘It was awful. There was a mouse caught in that thing.’

  ‘That’s why I put it there.’

  ‘Allie, it was stuck there.’

  ‘That’s the idea of the traps.’

  ‘It was squeaking and squawking in terror.’

  ‘You haven’t just left it there?’

  ‘Its eyes looked up into mine. They were no different from Chum’s eyes. I just couldn’t help thinking – supposing it had been Chum caught in the trap.’

  ‘I’m so glad it wasn’t. What did you do to the little brute? Drown it?’

  ‘Allie, it was screaming and struggling. I just didn’t know what to do. At first I tried to get it off the trap.’

  ‘You mean, let the smelly thing go?’

  ‘But he was stuck fast. So I just wanted to end its suffering as soon as possible. I took it in the garden – it was terrible.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  Kitty’s dad groaned. ‘I hit him with a rake a few times. Then I poured water over the body from the watering can – just to make sure. He’d have drowned then. Then I wrapped him in a plastic bag and put him in the dustbin.’

  ‘At least you’re not asking us to have a funeral.’

  ‘You’d have felt the same if you’d found him. I just had this sense when he looked up into my face that he was a fe
llow creature; that I had no right to take his life.’

  Mum smiled at him. ‘Are you a man,’ she asked, ‘or a mouse?’

  They decided not to tell Kitty about the mouse. It was upsetting enough that Chum had, yet again, gone missing. They really didn’t need to tell Kitty about the sticky-traps, and – as they saw it – the hamster’s lucky escape.

  ‘Suppose it had been Chum caught in that thing? I couldn’t have killed her –’

  ‘You’d have had to.’

  ‘Alex, we must find a different solution to the mouse problem.’

  Kitty’s mum was a practical person, and she knew that there were only three possible ‘solutions to the mouse problem’. The first solution was to do nothing. There are seven million people in London and probably getting on for thirty million mice. These mice are going to live somewhere, and the likeliest place for them to choose is within reach of human houses, so they could eat the food that people hoard, store, drop or throw away. Everywhere you looked in London there were mice. In the underground railway stations mice leaped across the electrified rails and hopped about the platforms, picking up crusts of bread dropped from sandwiches, gnawing on apple cores, chewing pieces of paper. On street corners and in gutters, indoors and out of doors, there were mice.

  She knew that she couldn’t change this. But she didn’t want mice in her house. The mice were dirty and smelly and they made a mess. And that same morning she found mayhem everywhere: half-chewed vegetables on the larder floor, and a whole packet of biscuits, broken and half-chewed, on the kitchen floor.

  Worse than this, when she went into her office at the front of the house, she found little footprints all over a document which she had just printed out from her computer.

  Clearly she had to do something, so option number one, doing nothing, was no use. There were only two alternatives: either to kill the mice, or to stop them getting in. Killing them upset everybody and she worried about the hamster. She would just have to make sure the house itself was mouseproof: to block up all the holes, cracks and cavities which let them in.

  Kitty’s mum went over every inch of the house before she called in Ted, her favourite builder.

  And so, a day or two after Kitty’s dad had found the mouse in the sticky-trap, Mum took Ted on the tour. They started in the small paved garden at the back of the house. She pointed to holes in the brickwork through which it was possible to imagine mice squeezing. They examined drainage holes and ventilation shafts. Once inside, they peered at the holes through which pipework burst into plastering. They looked in the larder, and at the various holes and cracks under the stairs. Then they went to the kitchen, and lay under the sink. They moved back the dresser. There were many intakes of breath here.

  ‘I reckon this is one of the places they’ve been using. Look here,’ said Ted.

  Kitty’s mum fetched a dustpan and brush to sweep up crumbs and – she couldn’t help noting – two sorts of droppings. The tiny pellets left by the mice and the slightly larger little turds usually found in the hamster cage.

  ‘That’s not all,’ she said. And she led the builder to her small basement office at the front of the house. ‘Somehow they got in here. Look at this!’

  She held up her document, covered with little sooty pawprints. And this time she noted there were two sorts of pawprints – some tiny ones, which must be from the mice, and some which were a bit bigger, more the size of a hamster’s. She couldn’t be sure of this, and the thought slipped out of her mind while Ted, lying on the floor beneath the window, looked at the skirting board under the radiator.

  Then Ted went with a torch into the area at the front of the house to look round the coal vaults. These searches were a bit less thorough, but when he turned to Kitty’s mum he had a funny expression on his face.

  ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ he said, ‘but I think I just seen a rat scurrying out of there.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Guzzling Narks

  ‘Lucky escape,’ said Mokey Moke.

  They had run through the house, and beyond the area. In an old coal vault near the dustbins, they had met the two narks, Ray-mond and his mother. None of them wanted to hang around to see if he and his mother were joking when they spoke as if Furball was a ham sandwich. They had scarpered. At one end of the coal vault there were holes in the brickwork, leading through to another vault. The narks could follow them but at present it didn’t look as if they would. Right now the mokes needed to find a part of the vault where they could hide – away from ooms, away from narks, away from the big white fevvas with their huge, sharp, orange beaks.

  Mokey Moke could not count. She knew that one of her babies had been eaten by a seagull, and that earlier that day an oom had killed Nobby. But she didn’t have any means of knowing whether all the mokes were safe, or how many had followed her and Furball in the stampede to the front of the house and the coal vaults.

  Still, Mokey Moke could not look after all the mokes. Even the little Rivals must learn that the rule of life was this: every moke for isself.

  Furball lay in the darkness. They all kept close together because it was comforting after all they had been through. But they also huddled close because none of them, not even Mokey Moke, had the smallest idea where they were.

  Furball, who had lost all sense of direction, said, ‘Maybe if we go on we’ll reach the backyard and the shed I was telling you about.’

  ‘Yeah, and maybe we’ll get eaten by vat snark you was telling me abart an’ all.’

  ‘The snark didn’t come in the shed,’ said Furball. ‘I’m sure that, once we were settled there, the Giant would bring us food.’

  ‘Yeah, oom food – vat’s all we need,’ said Mokey Moke in the darkness. ‘Floor-food more like, or food in the ole snapper – like Aunty Flo.’

  ‘I’m sure the Giant means us no harm,’ persisted Furball. ‘If she knew where we were, she would bring us food, she would.’

  ‘Yeah, an’ you thought vat sticky-trap were a trampoline an all,’ said Mokey Moke, with a sigh.

  They became very hungry in the darkness of the vault. Furball emptied her pouch and shared the remains of biscuit, pearl barley and other delicacies stored there, but these didn’t go far among a gang of hungry mokes. Buster ran under the door of the vault and found that it led to the paved outside area. The dustbins had lately been emptied, and one of the bin bags had burst, dropping a few very tasty-looking potato peelings.

  There was rejoicing among the mokes when Buster came into the vault bearing this very welcome treasure. He put down the first bit of potato peel and Furball immediately volunteered to come with him to the basement area to retrieve some more.

  ‘You can pouch more than I can carry, Furball, ole girl,’ he agreed.

  But when they reached the area, they were not alone. Furball had no sooner picked up some potato peel when she heard a voice – a familiar voice.

  ‘Well, well, well – if it ain’t the am. The am sandwich,’ said the mother nark. ‘Ray-mond – we ave company.’

  ‘Wot did you think you woz doin?’ Ray-mond asked Furball.

  ‘I was coming to fetch some potato peelings,’ said Furball with artless truthfulness.

  ‘Oh, you woz, woz yer?’

  ‘I heard that some peelings had been dropped,’ said Furball.

  ‘And the am sandwich thought to issel – oi’d loik summa vat vere per-tater.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Furball. It pleased her that the narks were friendlier than they had been when she first met them.

  ‘So you thought you’d jus’ come and eat the pertater – did yer, am sandwich?’

  ‘Just some of it,’ said Furball truthfully. ‘The rest, I thought I would share with my friends.’

  ‘Jus’ share it, did yer, sandwich?’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Furball, her voice now trembling a little. Although the narks were surely trying to be friendly, there was something – well, just a little frightening about the way they bared their
teeth at her.

  ‘And so –’ the mother nark laughed in a way which even Furball, with her desire to think the best of others, thought was a little unpleasant, ‘And so, which friends woz yer a-goin ter share vat pertikler pertater wiv, if you don’t mind my askin’?’

  ‘I rather thought,’ said Furball, trembling, ‘of sharing it with the Rivals, who are too young to –’

  But she wasn’t able to finish. Ray-mond jumped towards her and hit her vigorously on the side of the head. She fell, and felt a sharp pain as he bit her in the back and the tail. She lay on her side quivering as he brought his cruel, smelly face close to hers.

  ‘Wotcha meant ter say, am sandwich, woz that you woz goin’ er share yer pertater wiv Ray-mond and wiv iz dear ole mother.’

  ‘I really…’

  Perhaps it wasn’t very safe to explain to Ray-mond what she’d meant. Perhaps with Ray-mond it was safer to say nothing.

  ‘Vat woz wotcha menter say, am.’

  Furball wasn’t strong enough to reply. She wished she could explain the true facts to the nark. Although he seemed stupid (not that she wished to be unkind), surely he’d understand if she explained that the Rivals were very small and very hungry, and so was their mother, and she’d been finding food for them?

  But Ray-mond was still talking.

  ‘You tell it – our Ray-mond,’ said its mother through her sharp orangey-brown teeth. ‘Tell the little bleeder.’

  ‘Taters, or rather as I should say since you’re so lah de bleedin’ da – per-taters – isn’t am’s, isn’t no sandwich’s, isn’t the sandwich’s little friends, the mokes. Taters is narks’. Wot is taters?’

  ‘I – I –’ Furball was now speechless with fear.

  And while Ray-mond repeated his question, ‘Wot iz taters?’ his mother urged him on with, ‘You tell it, Ray-mond.’