‘Quick!’ I meowed at them in Cat from the doorway. ‘I need your help! It’s an emergency!’
‘Oh look,’ said the boy. ‘A nice little tabby cat. I haven’t seen him around here before. He doesn’t look like one of the ferals.’
‘No, he’s not. He looks well cared for. Are you lost, puss? He’s only a kitten, Robbie.’
She came over and bent down to stroke me. I wanted to tell her I was getting a bit big to be called a kitten, and that my name wasn’t Puss, but there really wasn’t time for any pleasantries.
‘Outside!’ I meowed. ‘On the beach! Quick!’ I walked back out of the door, turned round and meowed at them again urgently. ‘Come on!’
‘What’s up with him?’ the boy said, without moving.
But the woman, frowning and muttering to herself, wiped her hands on a towel and followed me out of the door.
‘What is it, puss?’ she said. ‘Hungry, I suppose, are you, or …’ She stopped, staring down at the beach. ‘What’s going on down there?’ And then she called back through the door to the boy: ‘Robbie, call an ambulance. There’s been an accident on the beach. A little girl, tell them. Nine-nine-nine, you fool, and hurry up about it!’
Then she ran, as fast as a plump little human female can, down the steps and across the beach, calling out to the girls as I watched her approaching them.
‘Don’t try to get up, dearie. There’s an ambulance on its way.’
‘Oh no,’ Caroline said. ‘Please, we don’t need an ambulance. I’m fine. Honestly, we’ll just get going.’
‘Caro,’ Grace said. ‘I actually think you should get your head looked at. It looks quite bad.’
‘Yes, my lovely, that’s a nasty cut on your head, it probably needs stitches – and look at your poor finger too! How did that happen?’
‘A seagull bit her,’ Grace said.
‘Oh, they’re a dratted nuisance, those damn birds,’ the woman said. ‘Now then, why don’t you go and fetch your mummy and daddy from the car,’ she added to Grace. ‘Tell them the ambulance is coming, and I’ll stay here with your friend until they get here.’
Even from where I was watching, I could see the look Grace exchanged with Caroline.
‘Don’t say anything,’ Caroline warned her.
‘We have to,’ Grace said. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore, Caro. It’s all gone wrong, and we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. We’re going to have to go back. After you’ve been to hospital.’
‘Back where, my lovely?’ the woman asked, looking from one of them to the other.
Grace looked down at the ground. ‘We told you a lie,’ she said, so quietly that I had to prick up my ears to hear her. ‘Our parents aren’t with us. We were trying to run away.’
‘But only to Grace’s great aunt’s house,’ Caroline said, as if that made it all right. ‘We were going to stay with her.’
‘That’s why you wanted to go to Duncombe. I did think it strange. And your parents didn’t know.’
The girls both shook their heads.
‘Are we going to get into really big trouble?’ Caroline mumbled.
‘Not from me, dearie. It’s not for me to say. But your poor parents will be beside themselves, you know. You’ll have worried the life out of them. Let me give them a call, for you, shall I? Let them know you’re all right?’
‘My parents probably don’t even know we’ve gone,’ Grace said, starting to cry now. ‘I’m supposed to be staying with you in Mudditon, aren’t I?’
‘Laura might have told them. And she’ll definitely have told my dad, and he’ll have totally freaked out. He’s probably had to come back down from London. I’ll be grounded for the rest of the holidays!’ Caroline said, joining in with the mewing.
‘Well, look, let’s not all get ourselves in a state about it,’ soothed the plump female. ‘First things first, you need that head injury checked, dearie, and here come the paramedics now, so let’s get you sorted out and we’ll worry about everything else afterwards.’
Two males wearing identical clothing were running down the beach now, carrying bags and looking very serious. They got down on the rocks next to Caroline and started looking at her head and her finger, and talking to her, and to Grace, asking them questions I couldn’t hear properly. They took quite a long time. They put white bandages round both her hurt places and, finally, took one of her arms each to sit her up.
‘She needs the stretcher,’ I heard one of them say as Caroline swayed slightly and put her paws up to her head again. ‘All right, sweetheart, we’re going to lift you now. One, two, three …’ She was laid onto a thing like a sheet that they’d put on the beach. ‘Still feeling dizzy?’
‘No, I’m all right while I’m lying down,’ Caroline said. ‘I really don’t think I need to go to hospital. I don’t like hospitals.’
‘It’ll be fine, love, they’ll take good care of you, you’ll see. Anyway we’ve already told them we’re on our way, so it’s out of our hands. And now we’ve got your names and your holiday address, we’ll be calling your details over to the hospital so they can get your parents there.’
‘But we don’t want—’ she started.
‘Has to be done, sweetheart,’ he said firmly. ‘No choice in the matter. You’ll be glad to see them when they get there, you know. Everyone has arguments, pet, but at the end of the day, they’re still your parents, see?’
‘I know,’ Grace said in a little voice as she followed them up the beach. ‘We shouldn’t have done it, Caro. We’ll just have to take the telling-off.’
I shrunk myself back into the shadows again as they all came back up the steps. I was glad they were going to the hospital. Glad they were going to be taken home, too. But as for me, I had no idea what I was going to do. I followed behind them, at a distance again, up the slope to the road where this big yellow car they called an ambulance was waiting. The female from the café called out goodbye to them.
‘You’ll be all right now, dearie!’ she said.
And then, as Caroline was carried inside the ambulance, with Grace climbing in next to her, the woman said:
‘Oh, there’s that little tabby cat again! I could swear he was trying to let me know there was an accident on the beach.’
I ran back quickly to the nearest bushes, trying to hide. I’d have liked to get into the ambulance and go with Caroline and Grace, to be honest, but I knew I wouldn’t be allowed.
‘It looked a bit like Charlie,’ I heard Caroline say.
I couldn’t help a pitiful little mew escaping from my lips. I felt so lost and lonely now the girls were being taken away. I don’t suppose they heard me, from inside the ambulance. But as the men started to close the doors of the ambulance, I saw Caroline’s face staring back out at me. I couldn’t have been as well hidden as I thought I was. And at the very last moment, just as the doors closed, I thought I saw her eyes growing wide with surprise and her mouth making the word ‘Charlie!’
And then they were gone. And I was all alone.
CHAPTER
NINE
Despite all my worries, I knew my priority now was, of course, to get hold of some food. I’m not a bad hunter, even though I do say so myself. Oliver here gave me lessons from my early kittenhood. But the scrubby little bush things near the café didn’t look very promising in terms of mice or shrews, and the only birds around were seagulls. I certainly wasn’t intending to mess with them after what I’d just witnessed. I sat down and washed myself again – always a good bet in times of uncertainty – and suddenly a voice behind me said:
‘Well, little puss, shall we see if we’ve got anything nice to reward you with?’
It was the female from the café, and before I knew it she’d picked me up and carried me inside with her.
‘What are you rewarding him for?’ the boy asked her as, to my delight, she proceeded to pour me out a big dish full of milk and started looking in the fridge for some scraps.
‘He came to let me know
about that little girl, I’m sure of it. Told me there was an accident down on the beach, he did.’
‘Yeah, right, Auntie Stella!’ the boy laughed. ‘The amazing talking cat, is he?’
‘You can laugh,’ she said, giving me a stroke as she put down a second bowl, full of bits of lovely leftover fish. ‘But I’m telling you, if he could speak he would have been saying: Quick, it’s an emergency!’
Fancy that. At last, a human with a pretty good grasp of Cat! I’d have to converse with her a little more, just as soon as I’d finished this delicious meal. I was enjoying it so much, I was purring out loud while I ate, but I still couldn’t help hearing the conversation going on between the female, who seemed to be called Auntie Stella, and the boy.
‘Hope the little girl will be all right,’ she was saying. ‘That was a nasty cut on her head.’
‘I thought you said it was her finger?’ the boy said.
‘I knew you weren’t listening. I told you, she hit her head when she fell over. She was running away from the dratted seagulls because one of them bit her finger when it pinched a bit of her sandwich. Damn things are getting to be a real nuisance around here, if you ask me. There’ve been a few people lately who’ve been attacked like that on the beach.’
‘Poor kid, she must have been frightened. I don’t like their big beaks myself.’
‘No, well, you’re a big wuss, aren’t you,’ she said, laughing. ‘And yes, I do feel sorry for the girl of course, but you know, they were asking for trouble, running away from home like that – silly children. God only knows what might have happened to them, far worse things than a sore finger or even a bumped head.’
I stopped eating for a minute at this, and gave a little meow of agreement. Wasn’t this exactly why I’d been so worried about the girls myself? I agreed with Stella – it had been a relief, in a way, that they had to go to hospital rather than carry on with their mad running away idea. But it wasn’t until I’d finished my food, licked the bowl clean and started to wash myself that the reality of my situation came flooding back to me in a rush. I was lost and alone in a strange place, and although my poor Caroline was safe now, I had no idea how badly injured she might be or whether the hospital would be able to make her better. Or whether I’d even be able to get back to her again, to find out. Now that my urgent need for food and milk had been satisfied, these worries were suddenly so overwhelming to me that I didn’t know what to do, apart from pacing up and down and crying.
‘Poor little thing’s still hungry,’ said the boy, watching me.
‘I don’t think so, Robbie.’ The female bent down and picked me up, giving me a little stroke and looking at me carefully. ‘I’m sure he’s somebody’s missing pet, you know. But he’s not wearing a collar.’
No, I wasn’t. I never do. I know some of you are happy about wearing them, but personally I can’t stand the things. After I chewed my way out of the first two Julian bought me, my family gave up trying.
‘Tell you what,’ the boy said. ‘Shall I put a picture of him on Twitter?’
‘Bloody Twitter, leave off about it for God’s sake. You’re never off your bloomin’ phone doing your cheeps and whatnot when you’re supposed to be washing up.’
‘Tweets, Auntie Stella!’ he said, laughing. ‘Tweets, not cheeps.’ He held his phone up in front of me and pressed something on it. ‘Look this way, little cat,’ he called. ‘That’s it.’ He pressed again. ‘Good one. Right, I’ll just share this on Twitter – and on Instagram and WhatsApp, while I’m about it. I’ll say he’s a lost kitten—’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re on about, bloomin’ What’s Up,’ Stella grumbled. ‘How’s a picture of him on your phone supposed to help?’
‘Oh, Auntie, you’re, like, so old school,’ he said, laughing again. ‘The picture goes all over the world! Everyone who sees it can share it with other people and thousands of people will end up looking at him. Someone’s bound to recognise him. That’s how these things work, see?’
Needless to say, I didn’t understand what he meant, any more than Stella seemed to. Caroline had sometimes done that thing before, holding up her dad’s or Laura’s phone and saying she was taking a picture of me, but when she showed me the picture of a little cat on the phone later, I couldn’t understand why she thought it was me. It could have been any little tabby, surely.
‘Well, for someone so old school, as you put it,’ Stella was saying now, ‘at least I know the right thing to do with our little furry friend here. I’m going to take him to the vet up the road, and they can scan him with their scanner thing to find out whether he’s got an identity chip.’
If the boy responded to this, I wasn’t there to hear it. As you can probably imagine, as soon as I heard the word vet, I’d yowled in fright and jumped out of Stella’s arms. And by the time she’d finished her sentence I was on my way out of the door. Pity. I’d been enjoying her company up till then.
*
I started off running back past the beach huts and past the bench where I’d slept the previous night. Then the pathway ran out, and I plunged into an area of little soft sandy hills with tufts of horrible stiff grass, and spiteful prickly bushes growing on them. It was difficult to run, and I didn’t like the feel of the sand – I had to keep stopping and shaking my paws. Yes, it was a bit like when you walk on snow, Smudge, but it was hot instead of cold, and had a gritty feel to it. Sometimes I felt like I was going to sink. But I was too scared to turn back now, in case the Stella woman was coming after me to take me to the vet. It was slow going, and seemed to go on forever. Despite feeling a bit stronger thanks to my delicious meal, I was getting tired from the effort of running on such difficult ground. After a while, I obviously had to stop for a cat nap, so I hid myself behind one of the prickly bushes. I didn’t sleep too well – I had a very vivid dream where I was being attacked by a giant dog with big sharp teeth, and I woke up to find I’d inadvertently wriggled closer to the bush and got scratches on my head and my back. Yelping to myself miserably, I trudged on through the sand, without any idea where I was going. It was only by sheer luck that I caught a tiny little bird who’d been feeding from the prickly bushes. I’d never seen one like him before, and he was barely more than a mouthful by the time I’d dispensed with his feathers. But he kept me going for a little longer.
To my relief, soon after I’d finished my makeshift lunch I noticed a rough path leading up the cliff, away from the sea again. Treading gingerly through an overgrowth of the horrible spiky grass, I followed the path and found to my surprise that it came out on a road. Not only that, but I was pretty sure from my superior feline sense of direction that it was the road where the girls and I had started our journey away from Mudditon-on-Sea the previous night. I was heading home, and by following the coast it had taken me far less time than it took us to make the journey on the road! All I had to do was find the little lane that led to the holiday cottage, and I’d be safe, back with Julian and Laura and baby Jessica and … well, eventually Caroline and Grace, too, once they’d been rescued from the hospital place.
Oh, if only that had been true, my friends! I raced along the road and turned hopefully into the next little lane. I didn’t recognise it, but I was sure that at any moment I’d smell something familiar, preferably my own scent markings from the night before. No such luck. I went from one lane to another, and then into streets that were more built up, with big houses, shops, and lots of humans wandering about looking in the shop windows. I turned this corner and that corner, but it was no good. I was hopelessly lost.
Finally I turned down a narrow road that arrived back by the sea, but instead of the sandy beach thing I’d come to expect, this time there was just a pathway and a sheer drop down into the water. I backed away from the edge, terrified of falling in, as you can probably imagine, and stared at the sea. It wasn’t moving so much here. There were lots of little boats floating on the water – I knew what they were from pictures I’d seen on the television. Th
ey seemed to be tied up here to stop them from running away, and they were nudging each other in their sleep, some of them making a jangling noise like the bells on cats’ collars but much louder. There were humans around here too, some of them walking along the edge, others sitting on benches looking out to sea. There was a little café, with a picture of ice creams on a sign outside, and a pub – it looked very similar to the one where you live Oliver, in our village – with a roof made of that thatch stuff, and baskets of flowers hanging by the door.
‘It’s so pretty here, isn’t it,’ I heard a female human say to her male as they walked past. ‘I’m so glad we decided to come to Mudditon again this year.’
So I was right, I thought to myself. I’m back in Mudditon. But it seemed Mudditon was quite a big place, even bigger than Little Broomford, and just my luck, I was in the wrong part, with no idea where the right part was. There was nothing else for it but to find a warm little spot in the sun behind a wall, and have another little sleep. As always, cat logic decreed that I’d feel better afterwards, and even if I didn’t, it’d be easier to cope if I was well rested.
When I woke up, it was dark. I must have had a longer sleep than I intended. For a minute I couldn’t think where I was, or what had woken me up. I lifted my head and pricked up my ears. I could hear something, but more to the point, I could sense something – some kind of threat nearby. You’ll understand what I mean when I say I could feel it in my whiskers. Then the sound came again, and I was up on my paws at once, instantly alert. There was a strange cat somewhere close to me, and whoever it was, he was making the low, rumbling, growly noise in his chest that we all know means only one thing. He wasn’t best pleased to see me.
Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life Page 8
