A Tiger Tale

by Holly Webb

  The tiger ducked his head helpfully, and let out a low, contented rumble. He liked it. Kate was stroking a tiger’s ears, and the tiger was purring…

  He nudged at her again, and bumped her with one fat paw – the dagger claws safely tucked away. He wanted her out of the corner, Kate realized. She scooted forward, and the tiger wrapped himself around her, as if she were a cub.

  He was definitely a most unusual tiger, Kate told herself dreamily. Tigers weren’t usually good fathers at all. They hardly ever saw their cubs, and left the tiger mothers to do all the work. But this tiger was fussing over her, nuzzling her so she lay curled up against his huge shoulder. Then he yawned. His front teeth were so huge they almost looked like knives, Kate thought, lying pillowed against his side. But when he closed his jaws again, and laid his massive head down on his paws and purred, she could almost swear he was a house cat. Only a big one.

  She could feel his purrs rumbling through her, as she fell asleep.

  Kate stirred as the tiger shifted next to her. She blinked, confused. The shed was dark now, except for a thin beam of light dancing on the floor.

  “There you are!” Her dad’s voice was full of relief as the torchlight found her face. “We didn’t know where you’d gone, Kate.”

  Even in the darkness of the shed, Kate could see him gazing down at her worriedly. Of course he was worried. She would be too, if she’d just walked in.

  “It’s all right,” she murmured sleepily, about to explain that the tiger wasn’t fierce. And then she realized that the tiger wasn’t there. He had gone, and she was curled on the floor of the shed, alone except for the toy Amos tucked under her arm.

  “Come on, sweetheart.” Dad crouched down and lifted her up. “You must be freezing. Let’s get you up to bed.”

  “But the tiger…” Kate started to murmur. Then she stopped. Perhaps it had all been a dream. There was a sudden burning behind her eyes as she realized that of course it must have been. How could she have been so stupid? She’d fallen asleep – Dad had just woken her up, so she must have slept. She had only dreamed the tiger, even though it had seemed so real. And she had so wanted him to be real. Only something so amazing, so special, so strange, had made her stop wanting to cry and cry until Granddad came back.

  “What did you say?” Dad asked gently. “I think you’re still half asleep.” He stood up, cradling Kate against his shoulder, and walked her out of the shed and back to the house.

  Kate blinked at the brightness of the kitchen light, and buried her face in her dad’s jumper. She didn’t want to look at anyone, or talk to anyone. Not even her mum.

  It was as Mum was helping her find her pyjamas that Kate noticed the hairs. All over her best cardigan. Soft, gingery-brown hairs, like tiger fur.

  Kate sat in the back of the car, looking at the building, and the bright signs outside. She’d never been to anything like this before. And she didn’t want to start now.

  Mum and Molly were already on the pavement, and Mum opened her door. “We need to go, Kate. Come on.” She didn’t sound cross – more worried. But Kate could tell that she was jittering inside, knowing she needed to get to work. She wanted Kate and Molly nice and tidily out of the way.

  Maybe that wasn’t totally fair, Kate admitted to herself. But it felt true. Like they were being put away in a neat little box until Mum had time to deal with them again.

  They’d explained it all yesterday, the day after Granddad’s funeral. Mum was obviously trying to do her best to cheer them both up – she insisted that they all sat down and watched a film together, and she even made popcorn, properly in a pan. She made a big fuss over it, but the good mood didn’t last long. That was when Mum said that both she and Dad had to go back to work on Monday, even though it was still the Easter holidays. They’d had time off while Granddad was in hospital, and to organize the funeral. But now that was over, and things had to go back to normal.

  Kate had stared at Mum when she said that. Normal? Normal was Granddad being there and looking after them in the holidays, with Mum or Dad taking days off here and there so they could do special things together. Normal wasn’t ever going to happen again.

  Mum had backtracked, trying to explain that this new way of doing things might be difficult at first, but they’d all get used to it. But as far as Kate could see, the new way just meant other people looking after her. People she didn’t like. People she didn’t even know.

  The holiday club wasn’t even that close to home. No one from her school was going to be there. Her best friend Rosie went to one that was at their school, and Kate thought that would probably have been OK. At least she’d know where everything was, and lots of the classroom assistants from school worked in the holiday club too. Rosie said it was fun, getting to go in the other classrooms and nose about a bit. But that holiday club had been booked up weeks before.

  So now she was stuck here, with no one she knew, except for Molly, and right now Kate would have much preferred it if Molly was somewhere else. Her sister was still being horrible, all the time. It was as if she couldn’t see Kate without having to think of something nasty to say to her. And no one was even telling her off about it.

  “It’s only for a week, Katey-kitten,” Mum said gently. But even Granddad’s old pet name didn’t make Kate feel any better. Especially not with Molly rolling her eyes and making sick-faces in the background. And it wasn’t just for a week. It would be all the other holidays too. Mum and Dad hadn’t worked out what was going to happen when they went back to school either. Who would drop them off and pick them up? Kate and Molly might have to go to a childminder, they said.

  Kate thought that sounded terrible. A total stranger’s house, after school, every day?

  But actually, she wouldn’t mind where they went, if only they could go home afterwards, and it would be proper home again, with Granddad there.

  She followed her mum inside, her arms wrapped tightly round her rucksack. Her lunch was in there, and her coat, but most importantly, she had Amos buried at the bottom. She didn’t usually bring a toy out with her for the day – she’d never take Amos to school. But today, she felt like she needed him. He’d been on her bed as she got ready, and she’d snatched him up and stuffed him into the rucksack. She needed somebody.

  “This looks lovely,” Kate’s mum whispered, nudging her, and smiling hopefully. “Look at the programme, Kate. Drama. Dance sessions. Look, pond-dipping, even! You’ll have such a good time.”

  Molly had been looking almost as gloomy as Kate, but then she suddenly brightened as she saw a girl she knew from her year at school. Kate recognized her too, but she didn’t know any of the other people milling around by the coat hooks. She stood there clutching her bag, watching as Molly walked off chatting with Erin, and feeling more alone than ever. A minute ago she’d wanted Molly to be somewhere else, and now she was, and Kate felt lost without her.

  A chirpy, bouncy-looking girl in a staff T-shirt came over to her, smiling, and Kate shrank back against her mum. She didn’t want to be persuaded into joining in with things, as this girl obviously intended. She just wanted to be left alone.

  “Hi Kate!”

  Was it her imagination, or did the girl – Jasmine, her badge said – did Jasmine have that note in her voice? The “I must be extra-sympathetic to this poor little girl because her granddad is dead” voice that some of the people at the funeral had used. It made Kate want to bite.

  “What would you like to do first?” Jasmine asked cheerfully. “Your mum said you were great at art when she signed you up. We’ve got a huge poster wall in one of the classrooms, and we want to fill it all up by the end of the week. How about that?”

  Kate glanced round hopelessly at her mum, but she was looking at her watch, wrinkling her nose worriedly. She was late.

  Kate turned back to Jasmine and bared her teeth in an unconvincing smile. “That would be nice,” she s
aid, in a voice that made it clear that she couldn’t think of anything worse, and she would be ducking out of all the organized fun as soon as she possibly could.

  If Kate hadn’t been so sad, and so angry with Mum and Dad (and even Granddad) for dumping her here, she would have enjoyed the holiday club. The art room was full of huge, clean pieces of paper, and the sorts of things that Kate usually loved. Metallic crayons. Thick acrylic paint in fabulous colours. Bits of fabric cut up for collages. There was even someone there with different crafts to try out. She’d almost given in when she saw them laying out the stuff for making pâpier maché.

  But instead she sneaked away, and hid herself in the loos for a bit, until everyone thought she was somewhere else. Then she hurried back to the coat hooks, and sat down on the floor with her rucksack in her lap. She didn’t even need to get Amos out. She knew he was there.

  She reached a hand in under her lunch box, and the anxious, out-of-breath nervous feeling lifted a little bit as she felt Amos’s soft fur. It was silky, and cool – not like the warm roughness of the real tiger’s fur. She remembered it, from that night after the funeral. Tiger fur looked soft in pictures, but it was coarse and thick, even a little scratchy. A tiger had been there, on Saturday night. He was real. He had left hairs on her cardigan. It was only that he’d had to go before Dad came and saw him. But she was almost sure he would come back. Granddad had given her Amos because he knew how much Kate loved tigers. It couldn’t just be an accident that now Granddad was gone, a real tiger had appeared. Granddad had sent him. The tiger was there to look after her instead.

  She unzipped her rucksack and peered at Amos’s face, squashed down at the bottom of the bag. His glassy golden eyes gleamed. The tiger in the shed had golden eyes too, pale orangey-gold. Just like Amos. “Was it you?” Kate whispered, and Amos stared back at her calmly. Had he come alive? It sounded silly. But where else could the tiger have come from? She could almost hear his heavy, rumbling purr. It would be all right. She would be all right, as long as she had him with her. Her tiger would look after her.

  A door opened somewhere down the passageway, and Kate hung her bag back up hurriedly and darted in through the nearest door. The library. It was empty, but no one had said they couldn’t be in here.

  There were footsteps following her down the passage, so she curled up under a table, and sat silent. She could wait, and watch, like a quiet tiger, and when the door opened, she simply curled herself away even tighter, and closed her eyes.

  It was easier than she’d expected it to be. She sat there daydreaming about tigers – her special tiger and the adventures they could have together. It was as if she went away somewhere else, and no one knew. Her and Granddad and Amos, the real Amos, padding through the jungle. Granddad had a flask of tea, and the old sun hat he wore in the garden sometimes. They had gone hunting and she was lying next to her tiger on a broad tree branch, watching a deer padding by beneath them, when someone poked her.

  Kate jumped, hitting her head on the table, and glared back at the girls staring in at her.

  “What do you want?” she said, her eyes watering. Her head really hurt.

  “Are you Kate? You aren’t supposed to be under there. People are looking for you,” one of the girls said.

  “And it’s lunchtime,” the other one added. “What are you doing under there? Are you crying?”

  “No,” Kate muttered, wriggling out, and hurrying past them to the door. She could hear them giggling behind her, and whispering about her. But she didn’t care. Or at least, she tried not to.

  “She was really embarrassing!” Molly hissed, glaring at Kate from the front seat. “People were talking about her. She wouldn’t talk to anybody, and then she got lost, or something. Everyone was asking me if that was my sister.”

  “You could have said no,” Kate muttered. She was sitting behind Molly, with her arms wrapped round Amos.

  “What happened, Kate?” her mum asked worriedly. “They didn’t say you got lost. Just that you were a bit shy.”

  “I wasn’t lost, I was in the library. Reading. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be there. Nobody said.”

  “Nobody else was weird enough to go off on their own!” Molly snapped.

  Kate stared out of the window, biting at her lip to stop herself crying again. She was tired of crying. She didn’t want to be miserable like this, but how was she supposed to make it stop? She couldn’t cheer up all by herself. And everyone thought she was weird, so they were avoiding her. It was as if nobody liked her any more. Not even her own sister.

  “Kate.”

  Kate jumped. She was lying on her bed, with Amos tucked underneath her, hoping to feel him purring again. She didn’t know how to turn him real, how to make the tiger appear, but after her miserable day, she needed him to be huge again. She knew if she curled up in his paws, like she had in the shed, she would feel better.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Her mum came in and sat down next to her on the bed. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I said I’m sorry! I didn’t mean for them to lose me!” Kate had her fingers crossed down the side of the bed, but Mum didn’t notice.

  “It’s not about that, Kate. Well… It is in a way. I’m not cross, I’m worried about you. I know you’re sad about Granddad – we all are. But is there anything that would help? Anything that Dad or I could do to make you feel a bit less sad?”

  Kate turned her face away. How could she feel better about Granddad not being there any more? It was a stupid question. The only thing that would make her feel better was if Granddad came back. Didn’t they understand that?

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she muttered into her pillow.

  Her mum sat there for a few moments, then she sighed, stroked her hand over Kate’s hair and got up.

  “Just say if you do. Please, love.”

  Kate waited until she’d heard Mum go back downstairs, and then she sat up, wrapping her arms round her knees.

  It felt like she wasn’t allowed to be sad any more. As though Mum and Dad and Molly wanted her to get over Granddad, and get on with things again, like they had. But Kate just didn’t see how.

  She slid off her bed, and went to peer round her door. Mum was in the kitchen, making dinner, so it would be tricky to go out to the shed again without explaining why. Which she really didn’t want to do. But she could go and sit in Granddad’s room instead. If her tiger wouldn’t come, being in there would help her remember them both.

  Granddad’s bedroom had been the garage before, so it was downstairs. The door to it opened from the hallway, opposite the living room. Kate hung over the end of the stairs, watching out. Dad wasn’t home yet, and Molly was watching TV in the living room. Mum was leaning over the hob, stirring something. Kate wasn’t sure why she felt like she had to hide what she was doing. She hadn’t gone into Granddad’s room much before, but that was only because he wasn’t usually in it. He was in the garden, or watching TV with her and Molly, or drinking tea in the kitchen. It wasn’t that she wasn’t allowed in there.

  Kate pushed the door open, and stood just inside, looking round. Something invisible squeezed her stomach into a ball, and she felt suddenly sick.

  It was all wrong. Someone – probably her mum – had tidied the whole room up. She’d taken the great pile of detective stories from next to Granddad’s bed back to the library. She would have had to, Kate supposed, or they’d get late book fines, but it looked so strange seeing Granddad’s bedside table with no books. His reading glasses were gone, and the glass where he put his teeth. The room smelled of washing powder. Mum had put new sheets on the bed, then. All of Granddad had been swept away.

  Kate stumbled out, and into the kitchen, tucking Amos under her arm as she fumbled with the back door keys. She had to get to the shed, where everything was still the same.

  “Are you going outside?” her
mum asked, looking surprised as she turned round from the pans.

  Kate didn’t answer. Of course she was!

  “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “I won’t be long,” Kate muttered, turning the key at last.

  “Only ten minutes or so till dinner, Kate! Dad’ll be home in a minute.”

  “All right.” Kate banged the door behind her and raced down the path, gasping with relief when she saw that the shed looked exactly the same. Granddad was still almost there. He could have just put down his trowel and gone back to the house to put the kettle on.

  His grubby old green fleece jacket was hanging up just inside the door. Kate pressed it against her cheek. The smell reminded her of Granddad – earth and rain and mint imperials. Granddad always laughed at her for running inside when it rained. He said she was a fragile little flower, and a bit of wet never hurt anybody.

  Kate pulled the jacket off the hook and slipped it round her shoulders – it was chilly out in the shed, but the jacket made her feel warm all through, not just on the outside. But what if Mum came in and tidied up the shed? What if she washed Granddad’s jacket, or gave it to a charity shop? Kate smiled to herself, just a little. A charity shop probably wouldn’t want this jacket, she thought. It had holes in the cuffs, and it was all droopy and sagging. Mum had bought Granddad a new fleece for his last birthday, but Granddad had kissed her and said it was lovely, and then put it in the bottom of his wardrobe, and left it there. He’d told Kate it was too nice to wear. Besides, he was fond of the old one. It was worn in, he said. He’d just got it the way he liked it.

  Kate picked up the pile of catalogues on Granddad’s chair and opened the one on top. They were full of tiny bright pictures of flowers, and here and there a photo had been ringed in purple felt tip. One of her felt tips. She’d sat with Granddad at the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating biscuits (Kate had just had the biscuits) while they chose the bulbs for the garden this year. Kate had begged for red-and-white stripy tulips, because they were beautiful in the photo, and because she liked the name, Estella Rynveld. She was planning to add a mermaid called Estella to her book. Granddad hadn’t been convinced about the stripes (he liked something a bit less flashy, he said), but he’d given in. He’d chosen some apricot-coloured ones, so Kate had circled both, and then she’d helped him dig the holes, back in November. It had been raining, but Kate had stayed out anyway even though she could hardly feel her fingers. She felt responsible for those stripy Estellas.