by Ged Gillmore
‘Oooh,’ wailed Janice. ‘I’m soooo tired.’
‘ ,’ said Rodney, who really was beyond words. In fact, he was already asleep and dreaming. He dreamt of the life that could have been, of a big castle on a desolate mountain, with Janice happy and beautiful with a top-of-the-range broomstick and a sleek black Purrari beside her. He dreamt of himself flying alongside her into the city, throwing litter and dog poo in all directions. They were laughing and in love with life, all soft focus and cootchie-cootchie-coo.
But the trouble with nice dreams is that you have to wake up from them. Horrible dreams are much better, and nightmares are best. Then you wake up and think, ‘Phew! Thank goodness I didn’t really steal a shark from the aquarium and put it in my teacher’s bath and get double detention. Life is sweet after all!’ But if you wake up from a wonderful dream like Rodney did, well. The deep, dreary, and downright dull disappointment is doubly depressing. But Rodney was not a man to take things lying down. Oh baloney no. So when he awoke that evening he stood up.
‘No,’ he said. Just that, nothing else. ‘No!’
He was going to find those two cats if it was the last thing he ever did. He left Janice still asleep and drooling onto the floorboards, went downstairs, and found a map of the city. He crossed off all the suburbs he and Janice had visited already and then planned where they would go that night. They’d been south and they’d been west. Tonight, Rodney decided, they would head directly north-east and scour each and every street in search of a big tiger-striped taxi. First, though, he’d have to re-motivate and re-energise his darling wife.
Rodney searched through the kitchen to see what he could find to make her as an afternoon-tea-slash-breakfast treat. In the back of the fridge he found an old pair of fingers, which—once he’d scraped out the rot from under the nails—he threw into the blender with a mango and some ice cubes. Then he poured in the end of a box of pus, which was well past its smell-by date but didn’t look too bad, and whizzed the whole lot together. He poured the blood-and-yellow concoction into Janice’s favourite Knickerbocker glory glass and carried it upstairs to her on a tray, alongside the new issue of Witch! magazine unopened in its cellophane cover.
‘You deserve a lie-in and some pampering for being such an absolute witch,’ he told Janice as she sat up and stretched. ‘You take it easy, honey-bunny. You stay here and take care of yourself while I go and find those cats.’
Janice, of course, was delighted to be woken up by a cold finger smoothie.
‘Oh, Rodney Bodney,’ she said, slurping it down. ‘I can’t let you do that. That’s a nice thought, but I’ll come with you.’
Rodney pulled a face, which was supposed to make him look like he was thinking about it. But of course he wasn’t thinking about it at all. He had no intention whatsoever of flying around, wearing himself out while lazy Janice stayed home. But as you’ll no doubt learn when you grow up and get married, relationship management is largely made up of pretending to do nice things for each other whilst really having ulterior motives. Rodney smiled sweetly at Janice, his yellow teeth gleaming in the light of the bare bedroom light bulb, and went off to do his bathroomy things in the bathroom. Two minutes later he was still there, flossing his teeth with some dog gut, when he heard his darling wife scream his name.
‘Rodneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ screamed Janice, who did tend to overuse vowels when excited. ‘Rodderneeeeeeeeee, come here! Come here now!’
Rodney rolled his eyes. He’d probably left a blister on one of the fingers, and it had worked its way into the smoothie (this was a particular pet hate of Janice’s). Or maybe he’d used the wrong glass or something. Still, he thought he’d better go in or she’d throw a sulk and not go out flying that night.
‘What is it, my precious?’ Rodney said as he walked back into the bedroom.
‘Look! Look at this!’
Janice was lying where he’d left her, naked and wrinkly on the floor. But she was holding up to him the Witch! magazine, opened to page twelve.
‘“Flex your hex for a top Tex-Mex”,’ he read, squinting at a recipe.
‘No, no, below that. Look in the newly developed spells section!’
‘“Monpantso Corp. develops new spell for merging animals.” So what?’
‘So what? So what, he says! So we can merge those cats when we find them. Don’t you see? This new merging spell is on the market. All we need to do is to find those pesky cats and I can get my Purrari.’
Janice jumped up, threw the magazine into the corner, and grabbed her cloak and hat. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go!’
It was less than twenty minutes later that Rodney and Janice Burringo, evil man-and-wife team extraordinaire, hit the skies. The sun was barely down, and there was still light in the western sky, but out they flew, cackling shadows darker than the night, their eyes so red that if you’d looked up at that moment you would have thought they were the wing lights of a distant plane. Unless of course you’d noticed the broomsticks, the pointy hats, and the cloaks that enveloped them and had run screaming in the opposite direction.
Anyhoo, the Burringos were on form that night. They whooshed and swooshed through the air on their broomsticks, bobbing and weaving, scooting and zooming, ducking and diving, dropping and rising from high-rise to horizon as they scoured the city for the cats. At last, shortly before midnight, Rodney yelled, ‘There it is!’
Janice looked up from her position a few hundred metres to the right to see Rodney pointing to the ground below them.
‘I don’t believe it!’ he shouted across to her. ‘I thought we’d have to search all night! Look, it’s definitely the same taxi.’
‘Shush,’ said Janice, zooming over to him. ‘You’re getting overexcited.’
A thin trail of orange gas had started streaming from Rodney’s bottom.
‘You’re right,’ he said, pulling himself together and clutching his broomstick more tightly. ‘Let’s creep down on them.’
Which is what they did. They circled a few times until they were at the right altitude, and then, without a word, they swooped down in a formation known at the Reverse Tornado.
Have I told you what superb flyers Rodney and Janice were? I haven’t? Well, Rodney and Janice were superb flyers. They had, in the early days of their romance, been to several flying galas where they had won silver medals in regional championships (Janice’s laziness stopping them ever being good enough for gold). Now they put those flying skills to the test. Their Reverse Tornado was so fast, so perfectly executed that within the blink of an eye they were on the taxi, one on each side, arms outspread so that there was absolutely no way anything or anyone inside the vehicle might escape.
‘Mwah ha ha ha,’ cackled Rodney once he realised the car was now hermetically (look it up) sealed.
‘Mwah haa haa haaaa,’ echoed Janice. ‘We’ve got you, you furry little pussies. You’re toast. You’re dead. You’re mine. Ha ha haaaaaa!’ and a huge trumpet of green gas billowed out the back of her cloak.
A BIT OF A DOG 1
Well, can you imagine how terrifying it would be to be inside that taxi when two horrible foul-smelling but well-trained witches came and hermetically (did you look it up? did you? If you had done, you’d know what it meant now, and wouldn’t that feel good, huh?) sealed you in. Imagine their greenish hook-nosed faces squashed against the glass. Imagine the smell from their armpits as they stretched out their arms over the car. Imagine …
Actually, don’t imagine any of that because it ain’t what happened to the cats. Why’s that? Because the cats were a good few miles north of the taxi when the Burringos found it. Oh, come on, you thought they were dumb enough to laze around anymore than necessary in a somewhat conspicuous taxi when two angry witches were after them? Well, OK, I’ll let you off with half of that. Because truth be told, Tuck was dumb enough.
‘I like it here,’ he’d said to Ginger over breakfast that morning. They were sitting on the roof of the tiger-striped taxi and enjoying
the warmth of the morning sun on their fur. ‘The food isn’t mushroom sauce, but those mice do taste good.’
‘Rats,’ said Ginger.
‘And just because we haven’t found the mushroom sauce yet doesn’t mean we won’t find it. The only thing I can’t work out is, if we are on the moon, how come when I looked up in the sky last night I could still see the moon up there?’
Now Ginger was faced with a problem. A moral dilemma, you could say. On the one hand, she didn’t want to disappoint Tuck too much and tell him they weren’t actually on the moon. On the other hand, she was worried that when Tuck did eventually find out he wasn’t on the moon he would be so upset he might want to go back to the apartment. Hmm. Tough one. See what I mean?
‘It’s a reflection,’ said Ginger. ‘From earth you can see the moon because there’s no water in the sky. Here the sky is all water so when you look up you just see a reflection of where you are. Here, have another kidney.’
‘Oh. And the mushroom sauce?’
‘Well, we’ll just have to keep looking for that. It means a bit of a walk though, so you probably won’t want to do it.’
‘I will!’ said Tuck. ‘I will if it means mushroom sauce!’
‘I don’t mean just a short walk. I mean several days’ walk. We have to leave the city, cross into the countryside. It’ll be at least a week.’
‘And you promise we’ll find the mushroom sauce?’
‘Er … sure,’ said Ginger, picking her teeth and flicking the bits down to the tarmac. ‘As much as you want. You just keep catching rats every night and we’ll be fine.’
Now Tuck looked doubtful. He swallowed the last few crumbs of rat’s tongue which he’d been saving until last and gave Ginger a long and suspicious look.
They set off straight after breakfast. Ginger knew the Burringos wouldn’t fly by day, but she also knew it wouldn’t take them long to find the tiger-striped taxi. Even if it hadn’t run out of petrol, she would probably have dumped the car and carried on by paw anyway. Being an intelligent and sensible cat, she knew that taxis are easier to spot than cats, no matter how good your eyesight. So all day she and Tuck had walked. It was a bright hot day, the sky the colour of Tuck’s sort-of-favourite blue, a day better spent panting in a shadow than traipsing along hot tarmac. But Ginger insisted they push on through the midday heat, the early afternoon heat, the late afternoon … Well, you get the idea.
By the time the sky started to fade, and at last a little evening breeze could be felt, the two cats were utterly exhausted. And once more, they were hungry. And you know what happens when you’re tired and hungry? Yes, you get grumpy. But more dangerous than that, you start to make mistakes. That’s why you should always eat a meal when your parents tell you to, whether you’re hungry or not. Skip lunch and next thing you know you might find yourself washed out to sea on a rather large flip-flop which you mistook for a li-lo. Skip dinner and you might wake up in Russia because you got into a train instead of into bed. See the potential peril lurking behind every refusal to consume calories? Well, it was just such a danger that the two cats now walked into.
‘Oh,’ said Tuck. ‘Please can we stop? My paws are killing me.’
Now, Ginger could have pushed him on with a reminder that she’d told him it was going to be a long walk. But she was even more tired than him. After all, Tuck was a streamlined ebony athlete, and she was a flabby middle-aged mog. It was little wonder she replied, ‘Yes, I suppose we’d better stop. Next car we come to we’ll sit underneath it and maybe settle for the night.’
But they were now in an outer suburb where no cars were parked on the street. They were all locked away in prim little garages or behind painted fences. So the cats walked for another few blocks until eventually, at just about the time Rodney and Janice were swooping down on the taxi, Ginger said, ‘This will have to do.’ She was wobbly with exhaustion, leaning against a solid wooden fence over the top of which they’d noticed the roof of a large jeep. Tuck helped her squeeze underneath the fence, and then he crept under it himself.
See the mistake? Well, Ginger and Tuck, Tuck and Ginger, our feeble and fatigued feline friends, they looked over the fence, and oh yes, they squeezed under the fence. But oh no, they didn’t look at the fence. They were so tired, so hungry, so hungry and tired that neither of them took a moment to notice the sign that was hanging there.
Ginger lay under the jeep, exhausted and wondering why she couldn’t fall asleep. Something, she knew, was wrong. You see, cats have a sixth sense, which most humans have lost. Not all, but most. This sixth sense is as important to a cat’s survival as its ability to feel, smell, taste, see, or hear. It’s as intricately woven into the nervous system of a cat—or any animal, come to that—as those five senses, but because we humans have lost it, it is rarely spoken of as anything other than mythical.
The sixth sense is the ability to detect danger. Maybe you have this sense too? Have you ever been in a situation where you knew, without knowing how you knew or why you knew, you just knew something was wrong? And you quickly got out of that situation and only later found out how dangerous it was? You haven’t? Don’t worry about it.
As I said, most of us don’t have this sense anymore. I know I don’t. But cats most certainly do, and for all her language skills, cooking ability, and sporting prowess, Ginger was first and foremost a cat. Well, first and foremost a redhead, but second and fivemost she was a cat. And so she opened her eyes and wondered what might be wrong. She turned to look at Tuck, who lay in a heap beside her. He too had his eyes open. He opened his mouth to say something, but Ginger lay her paw on his lips (of course cats have lips!) and frowned deeply. She realised she could hear Tuck snoring. Except there was Tuck awake, which meant maybe it wasn’t him snoring after all.
Signalling to Tuck to stay where he was, Ginger dragged her six bellies in a low crawl to the far side of the jeep. Nothing. Just the paved yard and the side fence silent in the light of a streetlamp. Then she belly-dragged to the front of the jeep, the side nearest the house whose garden they had snuck into. There, not one metre from her nose, she saw a large white dog. And not just any white dog. It was a large white pit bull. As I’m sure you’re aware, white pit bulls are notoriously nutty and voraciously vicious dogs. It was the pit bull’s snoring that Ginger had heard, not Tuck’s. A light snuffled snoring from which it would be easy to awake. The dog was nasty-looking, all snout and muscle, no fluffy bits or tail to talk of. Just a lean, mean killing machine. Ginger gulped and started crawling backwards towards Tuck again.
‘What is it?’ he whispered.
‘It’s fine. It’s just a dog.’
‘A DOG!’
Tuck miaowed at the top of his voice and then banged his head on the underside of the jeep as he tried to stand up.
‘A DOG! Oh, oh, oh how … how … a dog!’ he yelled. And without a moment’s hesitation Tuck scrambled from below the jeep and jumped up onto the fence, balancing precariously on top.
Well, as you can imagine, by the time Tuck had made all this commotion and stood wobbling on top of the fence, there was no more sleeping dog in the yard. There was just a loud, snarling, angry dog. Bobbo, bobbo, boh. That was the dog barking, you get it? BOBBO, BOBBO, BOH! Grrrrr … ROH!
Ginger watched from under the jeep as the pit bull jumped up and barked at Tuck. ‘Please let it be chained,’ she prayed. ‘Please let it be chained up.’
But as she watched the dog’s muscular white legs running around the jeep, Ginger could see no chain trailing behind. The dog ran around freely, barking and snarling and sounding more deadly by the minute. Ginger lay perfectly still. Maybe, she thought, maybe the dog wouldn’t notice her. She barely dared to breathe as she watched its powerful legs run around the yard. Then they stopped. The pit bull had stopped barking, and Ginger could hear him sniffing the air. Not just the air above him where Tuck was still wobbling somewhere out of Ginger’s sight. But the air beside him, beneath him, beneath the jeep.
Sudde
nly he crouched down and stuck his angry white face under the vehicle, his pink eyes shining brightly, his black nose glinting in the dark. ‘’Ello there, kitty,’ he said, letting his mouth hang open and all his teeth show. Ginger could smell his breath, feel the stinking warmth of it as he snarled his teeth at her. If only she’d followed Tuck like a sheep, making the steep leap from deep below the jeep to the safe-keep of the fence. It made her want to weep. She shut her eyes tightly and prayed it would all be over quickly.
A SMELLY LITTLE BIT
Meanwhile, back at the taxi, can you imagine the scene? Rodney and Janice went from elated to deflated in a very quick minute. They had so convinced themselves that they’d found the cats, got so excited about the opportunity to boil them and skin them alive, so hyper about getting a Purrari … well, the comedown was more like a slam-down. It totally took the wind out of their bottoms. It’s a strange phenomenon that witches produce gas at both ends of the spectrum of emotions. When they are excited and happy, it’s green and orange. When they are quickly deflated, it’s invisible but extremely toxic.
‘Oh, blast, bother, and blister it!’ said Janice, a large tree wilting slowly beside her.
‘Gnash, gnash, gnash,’ said Rodney, pronouncing the g each time so that you have to go back and read it again to get the proper effect. His nose hooked over, and all the warts stuck out, and his face started to turn green. You see, Rodney was more angry than upset. He might have been a male witch, but he was a macho male witch, and he confronted adversity with aggression rather than anything else. He stood there fuming (literally) and thinking hard about what they should do next.
‘Why?’ wailed Janice. ‘Why, why, why must my life be so hard?’
Poor Janice. She was one of those stupid witches who think their lives are hard just because they can’t sit around picking their toenails all day. She had no idea she was one of the richest beings in the world. Like you. Oh yes, you. Trust me, if you are reading this book with a roof over your head in a peaceful country with hot and cold running water, you are one of the rich ones. If you don’t believe me, try Sudan for the weekend (I’ll see you when you’ve got over the squits). Really, you should try it. Otherwise you might end up like Janice, wailing and crying about her poor miserable life not knowing how good she had it. It’s not everyone who can pop down to the shops and pick up a cockroach curry whenever they want to.
