by Ged Gillmore
‘There’s something you should kno—’ he said as Bunk walked over.
‘Sssh, cat, keep it down. I’ll see you later, up near the window.’
And so Tuck, who did like to do what he was told, wandered silently away.
Picking the lock that night was far easier than Tuck had imagined. For a physically-intelligent animal like him, anything which involved using his various body parts to do different things at the same time comes very easily. That is why I will never have it said that Tuck is stupid. Intellectually-challenged, perhaps; academically lacking, definitely; but stupid, no. Because, physically, Tuck was a genius. Do remember, dear reader, everyone’s good at something, and just because it’s not the same thing as you, doesn’t mean that they’re smarter or dumber than you are. Truly stupid beings are as rare as truly ugly ones, and can normally be identified by the fact they use words like ‘stupid,’ or ‘ugly’ to describe anyone.
Bendypoos, Tuck found picking the lock very easy and, once out of his cage, he naturally found it super-duper, easier than a trooper, to climb up the cages opposite his own. He could even have jumped from the floor of the trailer to the top of the uppermost cage if he’d wanted to, but Bunk had made it very clear he shouldn’t do that in case he woke up the cat who lived there.
‘You made it,’ said Bunk when Tuck arrived at the narrow row of windows above the cages. ‘That was fast, cat. Look, I’ve nearly finished threading my collar through the hook on this handle. Good work on lubricating that pin by the way, it turned in the lock smoother than ever. What did you use?’
Agh! Another dilemma, no more than twelve hours after the last one! Tuck, you see, was a very honest cat and had been brought up to believe you should never tell lies. But just now he wasn’t sure he saw the value in sharing the truth about the pin which Bunk had so recently had in his mouth.
‘Gut instinct,’ he said, thinking this had a good ring about it.
But Bunk didn’t seem very interested anyway. He was still fiddling with his collar, pushing it through the O-shaped hole in the handle of the window.
‘Got it!’ he said at last. ‘Now, you bite on one end and I’ll bite on the other. We both pull on three.’
‘Three?’
‘Yes, I’ll count to three, and then we both pull.’
‘The thing is,’ Tuck whispered nervously. ‘I’m not very good at counting. Can’t we pull on two?’
All Tuck could see of Bunk was his wide yellow eyes looking at him strangely.
‘Fine, we pull on two. You ready? One, two!’
Well, poor trim Bunk had underestimated Tuck’s strength. As soon as he said ‘two’, Tuck pulled with all his might, and Bunk was dragged by his teeth towards the O-shaped window-handle until his nose collided with it.
‘No,’ he hissed. ‘Pull away from the window, not away from me!’
‘Ooh, so sorry,’ said Tuck. ‘But why don’t I just put both ends of the collar in my mouth and pull the handle open myself?’
Bunk looked at him strangely. ‘You that strong?’
‘No verb!’ said Tuck, who did like people to talk properly and had once even got two out of ten in a grammar test. This had been the highpoint of his education and he had never again forgotten what a verb was.
‘“You that strong?” has got no doing-word in it,’ he explained. ‘You should say, “Are you that strong?” And, yes, I think I am.’
And with that, Tuck reached down and took one end of the collar, then the other, and with a quick flick of his head pulled on the handle until the window creaked wide open.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘It’s been snowing!’
‘Nice work, cat,’ said Bunk. ‘I’ll see you get mentioned in the debrief. Stay here and keep the others calm.’
‘Stay here?’ said Tuck. ‘But they’ll put me back in the cage!’
‘Ssh! Keep your voice down. That was the plan. You help me escape and I’ll get help. You stay here.’
‘But I want to come with you to the CAI,’ said Tuck, who really couldn’t spell at all. ‘I want to be free too!’
And with that he started crying.
‘Boohoo, weewah. What if you fail, and I’m stuck in jail?’
‘Ssh!’ said Bunk, looking nervously at the cages below him. ‘Keep it down! Do I need to remind you we’re on a covert mission?’
‘I already kept it down and it came out my bum,’ said Tuck. ‘I did everything you said. Oh, boohoo …’
‘OK, OK, OK,’ whispered Bunk hurriedly. ‘You can come with me. But you have to keep quiet and do exactly as I say, you clear?’
‘No verb!’ said Tuck. ‘But, yes, hoorah! Oh me, oh my, I’m going to be a spy!’
And with that he climbed through the window, jumped down to the ground and waited for Bunk to join him in the snow.
WHAT A SPLASH!
Oh, the seesaw of life. Just when things start looking up for one of our furry feline friends, they get significantly worse for another. At the very moment that Tuck started breathing the sweet air of freedom, poor Ginger was battling for any breath at all. It was dark and cold, and she was wet and frightened and didn’t know how much longer she had to live.
For just as the punk-skunk stream had widened into a fast-flowing river, so the fast-flowing river had accelerated and widened further into a … what’s faster and wider than a river? A great big river, that’s what. A river so big that both banks looked a long way away, even when it stopped snowing, and Ginger could see them speeding past. A river so big it had waves: freezing little whitecaps which splashed over the skateboard and made its wooden surface very slippery, not to mention very cold. Ginger had tried steering the board by leaning more of her six bellies to one side than the other. But the eddies and currents and slips and slews of the grey water had other ideas, and she soon had to accept that she had no control whatsoever over which way she drifted.
Worse than that, Ginger had once again lost sight of the rats and the last bags of her winter store. A little after setting herself afloat on the stolen skateboard, she’d spotted them cruising downstream in the slower water near the opposite bank. She had soon caught up with them, and was even worried one of them might turn around and notice her.
Speed was one thing, though, and direction was another. Whenever the rats wanted to steer, one or two of them would jump into the water beside their little boat and push it left or right. But Ginger, being a cat, would do anything rather than get into the water. When the river first widened, and the rats steered hard right away from current, there was little she could do but float on in a straight line. Then, when the cold grey water forked around wooded land, and the rats steered right again, all Ginger could do was follow the main current down to the left.
That had been in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun, though pale behind the snow clouds, was still up in the sky. Ginger had hoped she could drift towards the shore before it got too dark, and then, perhaps, run across the land which had forked the river and follow the rats from there. But now that hope was gone. On and on she floated with no way of doing anything about it.
The river had long before left the Great Dark Forest, tracing its way at first through frosted fields and meadows, then winding through increasingly built-up suburbs. Soon Ginger saw great factories and huge high-rise blocks, and she realised she was passing through the city. This made her very nervous indeed, because if she carried on floating at this rate soon the river would reach the ocean, and there she was certainly done for. By staying awake and balancing carefully, she could just about stay afloat on the river. But in the shifting ocean, with its treacherous waves, she wouldn’t last a minute.
As if all of that wasn’t scary enough, now night had fallen and Ginger couldn’t even see where she was going. Her only consolation was that the river had grown slightly narrower as it entered the city. She could see this by the lights which shone through the black air from the shore on either side of her. Shopfronts and apartment windows, office blocks and streetlamps,
all twinkled in the dark, their lights reflected on the wobbly surface of the black river. It was a strangely comforting sight, and Ginger was able for seconds at a time to forget the damp and the cold, her hunger and the perilous slippiness of the skateboard, and remember her old city days as a street fighter, running through alleyways and hiding under cars. She remembered how she’d first met her true love Major on a winter’s night such as this. How he’d turned to her and said—SPLASH!!!
‘Miaowwwww!!! Yeweeeee!!!!’
What? Major had said what? Why did he say ‘splash?’ Oh! Major didn’t say ‘splash’ at all! Poor Ginger had fallen asleep on her skateboard, exhausted by the day’s events and the nerves of staying afloat. The splash had been the noise of her falling into the freezing black river water. And it was she that now screamed as she sunk her front claws into the wooden skateboard. She kicked and pummelled and splashed with her back legs and pulled with all her might on her front legs, but there was no way she could get back up on the board. She tried again and again, the water dragging down on her fur and the cold of it seeming to enter her very bones. Again she pulled on her front claws, just managing to keep her face out of the bitter water. Never in her life had she been so frightened, and she screeched in a most pitiful way. Mmyeeeanggggowwww!!! Who knew what lived in the river that would like a nice big cat for dinner?
Ginger was about to screech again, but then—phew! —she remembered she was a sensible cat. She also remembered this: in a dangerous situation, fear is the thing mostly likely to kill you. She took a deep breath and told herself to CALM DOWN!!!! Try again. She took another deep breath and told herself again to calm down, because shouting wasn’t going to help.
‘I’ve still got the skateboard,’ she told herself. ‘I just need to hang on. Maybe by kicking I can move myself towards the shore.’
So she tried kicking her back legs again. Not to get back onto the skateboard, but to try and steer towards the shore, the way she’d seen the rats do. But the more she kicked, the more tired she grew. Soon she was struggling to hold her mouth above the level of the dark and dirty water. Three times she swallowed a huge mouthful of the river and choked, spluttered and coughed. Each time, she calmed herself down until she was ready to kick some more, on and on until at last she just couldn’t continue. She had stared death in the face before and decided it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Now it was time to look at it that way once more. Major, her late husband, the love of her life, was waiting for her in Purrvana. As Ginger thought of him she closed her eyes, and a single tear rolled down her face into the freezing black river.
WHAT A SECRET!
The farm smelled different. When Tuck had left it the previous morning, it had still had a lingering odour of smoke from the smokehouse, of the food stores which had disappeared, of Ginger, of Minnie, and of Tuck himself. Now it smelled of strange vehicles and their horrible exhaust fumes, not to mention the damp milky smell of humans.
‘Come on,’ Tuck said to Bunk as soon as he’d landed beside him in the snow. ‘The quickest way out is up the driveway.’
But Bunk shook his head slowly.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I need to gather some intel for the mission.’
‘Ooh,’ said Tuck. ‘What is the mission? Is it impossible?’
Bunk didn’t answer. He simply looked around him. Tuck looked around too and spotted a little caravan that had been parked by the farmhouse.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’
Again, Bunk didn’t answer. Instead, he walked slowly towards the caravan. Tuck followed him and watched with amazement as Bunk managed to open its door with his nose. Immediately, the fusty smell of sleeping humans drifted out into the night air.
‘Be careful!’ said Tuck loudly. ‘That must be where the Pong people are!’
Bunk turned to him, his yellow eyes narrowed. ‘Which is why we must be so silent. Not a word, you understand?’
Tuck did understand. He sat mutely and watched as Bunk climbed up the steps into the caravan and disappeared inside. Eek! What to do? He didn’t want to get any closer to the humans, but he was too scared to be out here alone with everything that had happened. What if there were more humans hiding nearby? He forced himself forwards, as close as he could bear, to the caravan door.
‘Zzzzzzz.’
Through the doorway, he could see the corner of a bed, with one of Mr Pong’s smelly feet sticking out of it.
‘Zz zz zzzzz.’
Tuck was too scared to go any further, but from where he sat, he could see a huge picture on the wall of the caravan opposite the open door. It was a picture of a black fur coat, made up of lots of strange, but similar, shapes sewn together. Then he gasped as he realised those shapes were animal skins, each one the size and shape of a flattened black cat. Next to the diagram of the coat was a poster with garish writing, colourful pictures of cat food and lots of crossings-out on it.
‘Zzzz! Snuffle, snuffle … Move over, Willy.’
Mrs Pong’s deep and throaty voice mumbled inside the caravan, and Mr Pong’s foot disappeared from view. Well, that was too much for Tuck. He wasn’t going to hang around to see if the humans were waking up. He turned on his tail and fled to the other side of the farmyard. From there, he watched as Bunk came slowly out of the caravan, then used his nose to push the door closed again.
‘She wants to turn us into a coat!’ Tuck said to Bunk when the American arrived beside him. ‘And what was that poster? What did it say?’
Bunk spoke slowly, as if trying to work something out.
‘It said: Free cat food for everyone. Coming soon. It had a date on it that had been changed several times. It’s like they’re waiting … Oh, cat! They must be waiting to develop a poisonous food that cats will eat! I found lots of recipes in there, all of them containing toxins. That’s why the man keeps bringing us toxic food every night. They’re trying to get it right and then … then they’re going to give it away for free.’
‘Ooh, how awful,’ said Tuck. ‘Was that why you were sent to spy on them? Was that your secret mission?’
Bunk didn’t answer. He walked past Tuck towards the smokehouse, gesturing for him to follow. Above them, the thick clouds which had brought the snow were breaking up, the infinite black sky showing through in ragged patches.
‘What’s this?’ said Bunk, pointing with his nose at the smokehouse.
‘What’s the mission?’ said Tuck. ‘I asked first.’
‘It’s top secret,’ said Bunk. ‘I can’t share it. Tell me about this building.’
‘You tell me about the mission,’ said Tuck. ‘The Pongs are so ghastly and gruesome; I want to hear what you’re going to do about them. And I’ve never met anyone from the Feline Bureau of Investigation before.’
‘I’m not from the Feline Bureau of Investigation!’ Bunk’s underbite was even more pronounced than normal. ‘They only look after domesticated affairs. The Cat Intelligence Agency has a much broader mandate. We tackle interspecies issues.’
‘Ooh, so sorry,’ said Tuck, who had no idea what any of these long words meant. ‘Tell me about the Pongs anyway.’
‘No. This building smells strongly of food, but now it’s empty. What happened here?’
‘Not telling!’ said Tuck. ‘Not until you tell the story. You said we were going on a covered mission and now you won’t tell me what it is. It’s not fair. So if you won’t tell me anything, I won’t tell you anything either. So there.’
And, with that, Tuck sat down in the snow and curled his tail over his front paws to show he meant business. Bunk stared at him for a second or two, then closed his eyes and sighed.
‘I was recruited into the Agency last year, straight out of college. It was a huge honour.’
‘A collage!’ whispered Tuck. ‘Like with bits of paper?’
Bunk gave him a wide-eyed look before continuing.
‘They approached me in my final year,’ he said. ‘The vetting process was so well-disguised I didn’t even
know it was happening.’
‘Ooh, that’s good,’ said Tuck. ‘I went to the vet once and I hated it. She was disguised too, in a white coat and a mask, but it didn’t help at all.’
‘Cat, you going to let me tell this story or not? You need to stop interrupting. Where was I? Oh yes. Training was intense. We had to dive through burning cat flaps; sit for days on end under a sofa; resist bits of string pulled along the floor. We had to learn bird languages and how to transmit messages to humans. Sometimes we were placed in homes with them, had to live alongside them without them noticing. At other times,’ Bunk’s voice quavered at the memory, ‘we had to let them pick us up and tickle our tummies. Then there were the other cats. We had to let them attack us without responding. It was tough, but it was meant to be tough. I’d wanted to get into the Human Manipulation Program, but I wasn’t fluffy enough, so I trained for Black Ops, the elite night division. A month ago, I was called in to receive my first brief.’
‘Brief what?’
Bunk turned and looked at Tuck in the dark night. His head seemed even smaller now they were outdoors.
‘Ooh, sorry,’ said Tuck. ‘Do go on.’
‘I was to be dropped into the garden of a suspected super-baddy,’ said Bunk. ‘I was to enter the house … I was to …’
‘Go on,’ said Tuck. ‘This is so exciting!’
Bunk looked away. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe we should get out of here as fast as we can.’
‘Oh, but I want to hear about the story. What were you supposed to do when you got into the super-daddy’s house?’
Bunk ignored the question and walked towards the smokehouse.
‘There was food in here, wasn’t there?’
