The Kitten Hunt

by Anna Wilson

Jazz stuck her chin in the air and squared her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I would – if the money was good enough,’ she said.

  ‘Now you are seriously freaking me out,’ I said, horrified. ‘Can we change the subject, please? We ’ve got work to do.’

  Jazz rolled her eyes and grinned. ‘OK, OK. Whatever you say, boss. Let’s get started on the Appointments Book.’

  We were back at her house now and I had brought my new red ring-bound notebook with me. I was going to use it to write down everything I needed to remember about which animals I was pet-sitting.

  ‘As your assistant I’ll take care of writing down all the appointments for you!’ Jazz said, bouncing on to one of her beanbags.

  Secretly I thought I could probably manage to write them down myself, but I just said, ‘Cool. And I’ll make some notes about what Kaboodle needs.’

  ‘Hey, let’s check out cats on the We b,’ said Jazz, bouncing up from her beanbag and going over to her desk where her silver laptop was lying.

  Jazz has a lot of stuff I don’t, like a laptop and a TV in her room, and bunk beds. And a mum.

  We searched for websites that might have top tips on how to look after cats, but we got a bit distracted by some pretty scary stories about the mad things that cats can get up to. And there were certainly more than a few tales about the kind of ‘presents’ that cats had brought their owners – like live frogs, for example.

  ‘Urgh – gross!’ Jazz cried. ‘Lucky you don’t have to live with Kaboodle. I magine a live frog in your actual house!’

  ‘Yeah, but Kaboodle doesn’t catch anything yet, remember?’ I told her.

  ‘Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Fairyland,’ said Jazz. ‘All cats catch stuff, Bertie. It’s in their blood. Kaboodle might be a baby to Pinkella, but he’s not a newborn kitten, is he? He’s probably just really good at finishing off what he catches instead of leaving it for Pinkella to find.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ I protested. ‘I’d rather not talk about it. It’s disgusting. You’re in a weird mood today, Jazz.’ I thought about those round yellow eyes and shook my head. There was no way that little cat would cause me any trouble at all, I was convinced of it.

  Pinkella left for Scotland early that Saturday. I was going to say ‘bright and early’, except it wasn’t bright because I was up before the sun had peeped over the top of the houses in our street, and that’s when I saw her leave. I was so excited about the idea of finally being a pet-owner – OK, a pet-sitter – that I hadn’t been able to sleep properly. I saw Pinkella glance up at my window and give me a cheery wave as she got into her taxi. She was wearing a coat that went right down to the ground and was made entirely of pink fake fur (at least I hope it was fake – surely no real animal has bad enough taste to be that colour in real life?). She also had high-heeled dark pink shoes on. She certainly was a loony, but something told me she might actually be quite a nice loony .

  I couldn’t wait to go round and feed Kaboodle. I’d been agonizing about how I was going to be able to do it without arousing Dad’s suspicion, as it was unlike me to be dressed on a Saturday before ten o’clock, let alone out of the house. I was usually watching telly, and there had to be a world eve nt of universe-shattering proportions for me to agree to change out of my Snoopy PJs before lunchtime.

  So the night before I had been about to ask him if I could go and help Jazz get Ty son dressed in the morning (bad excuse and totally unbelievable, I know, especially seeing as Ty is seven and perfectly capable of getting dressed on his own – but I was desperate!). But then Dad saved me the trouble.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Bertie, but I’m going to have to ask Jazz’s mum if you can go round there early tomorrow. I know it’s the weekend, but I’ve got to go out and do some research for this article I’m writing about a new multi-storey car park in the town. Apparently everyone’s very upset because the plan is to knock down the old theatre and build the car park in its place.’

  How thrilling – I didn’t think. If ever Dad were to tell me he had high hopes of me following in his footsteps as a journalist, I would have to tell him that he was the ‘Weakest Link. Goodbye.’ I would rather eat a tonne of Brussels sprouts. Raw. With mustard.

  ‘Sounds riveting,’ I said, grinning cheekily. ‘I’m sooooo disappointed you don’t want me to come with you.’

  ‘No need to be sarky, young lady,’ said Dad. ‘So you don’t mind going to Jazz’s then?’ he asked, peering at me in a very concerned manner as if he’d just discovered my homework was to recite all my tables backwards, instead of telling me to go to my best friend’s house on a Saturday morning.

  ‘Er, no, Dad. Funnily enough, I don’t!’

  So that is why at nine o’clock that Saturday I was not in my Snoopy PJs, but was fully dressed in my best dark denim skinnies with my favourite stripy top on, and a pink band in my hair, which I’d put on specially for the occasion so Kaboodle would feel at home with me. ( Don’t ask me where someone who hates pink gets a pink hairband from. I just found it in a drawer, OK?) I waited on Jazz’s doorstep, pet-sitting appointments book and cat information pack in hand, all fired up and ready to go.

  Jazz opened the door and threw her arms around me.

  ‘Happy Pet-Sitting Day!’ she yelled, squeezing me tight and squashing her bangles into me.

  THWACK! Tyson careered into Jazz’s back and shrieked, ‘Happy Poo-Sitting Day!’ and giggled like a maniac.

  ‘Ty – buzz off!’ Jazz yelled. ‘This is a girls’ only moment. No brat brothers allowed.’

  ‘Ty-son! Leave your sister alone!’ Jazz’s mum shouted down the hall and for once Ty did as he was told. Although not until he’d stuck his tongue out and blown a full-on raspberry for good measure.

  ‘Idiot,’ Jazz hissed.

  ‘He’s cute!’ I said.

  Jazz curled her lip at me. Then she gave me a quick once-over and smirked. ‘Hey, like the pink hairband – Ms P would approve. So. How did you manage to get out so early?’

  I shrugged. ‘Didn’t Dad tell your mum? He’s got some ultra-boring meeting about a car park that used to be a theatre or something. Anyway, don’t talk so loud – remember I don’t want Dad to find out about the pet-sitting.’

  ‘OK, OK, don’t get stressy,’ said Jazz, wo bbling her head at me and putting on what Dad would definitely have called a Tone of Voice. ‘Mum’s dealing with Ty and everyone else is still snoring.’

  We headed off, a rm in arm.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Berts. We really need to look again at the business side of this enterprise,’ Jazz said, her voice all bouncy and glittery.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The money, Bertie – you should be asking for more.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I’m not going to. A pound a day for two weeks is already a lot of money. And we only have to go over there twice a day . ’

  ‘WHAT?’ Jazz shrieked. ‘What kind of a business woman are you? You’ve got to know the market rate in any business transaction,’ she added confidently, as if she actually knew what she was talking about.

  ‘I’m not really interested in the money,’ I said impatiently.

  I regretted it the moment the words were out of my mouth.

  ‘WHA—?’ Jazz began again, her jaw dropping dramatically as if I had finally lost every last marble in my brain and she was watching them roll away at top speed into the nearest gutter.

  ‘Listen,’ I interrupted, stopping suddenly, which caused my whirling dervish friend to whirl dervishly into me. We disentangled ourselves. ‘I’ve already told you – I don’t care about the money because that’s not why I set up the Pet-Sitting Service in the first place!’ I said, putting a hand up to stop her from butting in, which is what she was about to do. ‘You know I’ve always wanted a pet of my own. You know Dad won’t let me. So you should understand that the only thing I want to get out of this idea of mine is a chance to look after some animals and – well, I know it sounds lame – kind of pretend that they are actually my own for a bi
t.’

  Jazz’s face changed when I said this. She smiled a small smile and dropped her head to one side. ‘All right,’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘Come on then, you noodle; let’s go cuddle Kaboodle!’

  6

  Cat-astrophe

  In Pinkella’s kitchen she’d left another note on the work surface in some more of that seriously classy handwriting. It was written on, you’ve guessed it, pink notepaper And it honked of some of the overpoweringly flowery perfume Pinkella was wearing when she had tried to crush me to death.

  Her signature was a great big loopy thing that took up half the page.

  Jazz sucked her teeth. ‘He gets what? And on a silver dish? You are joking! That woman has serious issues.’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t matter what we think,’ I said to Jazz. ‘We are in charge of Kaboodle until Pinkella gets back, so we must do as we’re told.’

  Jazz rolled her eyes dramatically and said, ‘All right, boss. So long as old Second-in-Command here doesn’t have to touch an actual prawn. Bleurgh! I’m sure I’ve got a deadly allergy to those curly fishy things.’

  Jazz always conveniently developed allergies when she didn’t want to do something. Like the time we were supposed to be racing in an inter-schools swimming gala and Jazz suddenly developed an allergy to chlorine.

  I smiled. ‘You won’t – I promise.’

  ‘Leaving a bit of food out twice a day is so easy: it’s cash for nothing,’ Jazz said, brightening as she rubbed her hands together – and repeating almost word for word what I had said to her only minutes before. ‘Y a y! Just think – if we do a good job for Pinkella, she might recommend our services, and then we’ll be raking the cash in! I’ll finally be able to get those new trainers – you know,the ones with the wheels in the bottom and the flashing lights on the side and the multicoloured laces and—’

  ‘I know the ones,’ I cut in. I’d heard the Plan to Buy Multicoloured Trainers at least a million times before.

  Jazz stopped walking. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at me guiltily from behind a curtain of hair and beads. ‘I kind of haven’t even asked you yet if you’ll split the money with me.’ She took her arm out of mine and fished in the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Here.’ She held out what had become a distinctly crumpled five-pound note.

  I pushed her hand away and smiled. ‘I keep telling you – I really don’t care about the money, Jazz. You keep the down payment, and we’ll sort it out when Pinkella pays us the rest.’

  Jazz stuffed the fiver back into her pocket and jabbed me in the ribs, grinning. ‘Hey, if you earn enough money from pet-sitting, you’ll be able to actually buy yourself whatever pet you want – your dad won’t be able to stop you. It’s your own money.’

  I looked at Jazz and twisted my mouth to one side. ‘You obviously don’t know my dad as well as you think you do,’ I said. ‘Dad can stop me doing whatever he wants. He’s Dad.’

  Jazz threw her hands in the air. ‘You’ve just got to try harder, Bertie. Try using some initiative. Sure, you’ve begged him and begged him for a pet and he’s said no a thousand times, but you haven’t thought about other ways of getting round him, have you? What about washing the car every Saturday or doing the shopping once a month or something?’

  I frowned. ‘You obviously don’t know ME as well as you think you do either,’ I said. ‘I already do all those things anyway . It’s called “doing chores”,’ I added sarcastically.

  Jazz didn’t have to help out around the house as much as I did. As well as her little brother, Ty, she had a mega-cool older sister, A leisha, who sometimes took Jazz out shopping or to the cinema. She also had an older brother, Sam, who admittedly wasn’t around much these days, but he was just as cool as Aleisha. But better than all that she had a dad and a mum. A Full Monty of a family.

  You’ve probably guessed by now that I don’t have a mum. She died when I was really small. I can’t even remember what she looks like and Dad’s not one for keeping the photos out. So.

  Jazz’s face melted and she chewed her bottom lip. ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Whatever.’ I shrugged. Then I blushed. None of this was Jazz’s fault. I forced a smile and quickly changed the subject. ‘Hey, let’s go and find that gorgeous kitty. You coming or what?’

  We looked all through the house and the garden, but we couldn’t find Kaboodle anywhere. Jazz gave up before I did, saying her voice and legs were aching – hilarious, coming from a girl who never stops singing and dancing, not to mention talking. I carried on calling and calling for him until I began to feel stupid.

  ‘I guess he’ll smell the prawns and come looking for them later,’ I said, coming in from the garden.

  I was disappointed though. The whole point of the pet-sitting thing was so I could spend some time with an actual real animal, and it was slowly dawning on me that I could go the whole two weeks coming round to feed Kaboodle without ever seeing him. Cats were like that. Elusive.

  We agreed to come back at lunchtime and convinced ourselves that he would be home by then.

  But he wasn’t.

  I began to get worried. Pinkella had made it quite clear that Kaboodle liked his meals regularly, and I couldn’t help thinking it was very odd that he was nowhere to be found. But I didn’t want to say anything to Jazz, as she was winding herself up into a mini-frenzy and saying things like ‘What’ll we do if he never comes back? What’ll we say to Ms P? Do you think she’ll still pay us?’ which wasn’t helping the state of my own nerves.

  We spent the afternoon at Jazz’s surfing the internet, looking at missing cat websites and Googling:

  I began to feel a bit better when I saw tales of cats that had gone wandering off for a week or two and then come home just as their owners were giving up hope. But there were also reports of cats who had ‘adopted’ other families and started going round to their houses for meals while their owners were away on holiday.

  We decided to set off round the street, calling and looking in everyone’s driveways and up all the trees in the front gardens. Luckily no one stopped to ask us what we were doing, but unluckily we did not find Kaboodle.

  ‘This isn’t a great advert for my Pet-Sitting Service,’ I pointed out. ‘If people hear us, they’ll know we’ve lost him.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Ms P’s,’ Jazz suggested.

  I nodded reluctantly. My feet were sore and my voice was sounding a bit hoarse and it was half past four already. Dad would be back soon, I thought miserably. ‘By now I bet Kaboodle’s sitting on one of those huge fluffy cushions in her sitting room, snoozing,’ I said, sounding a million times more confident than I actually felt.

  But of course, he wasn’t.

  ‘This is a nightmare!’ Jazz wailed. ‘And it’s definitely the hardest way to earn a fiver I’ve ever heard of. My feet are going to be so covered in blisters, forget the funky trainers, I’ll be buying a pair of huge fluffy granny-slippers.’

  ‘Yeah, right – the day I see you in huge fluffy granny-slippers the cow really will have jumped over the moon!’ I hooted.

  Jazz giggled but her face clouded over almost immediately and she groaned, burying her head in her hands.

  ‘Oh Bertie, I’ve just thought of something! What if he’s totally freaked at being left all on his owny-own?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked suspiciously, thinking that Jazz was going to do her whole squeaky-Pinkella routine again.

  ‘No, I’m serious,’ Jazz persisted, letting her hands fall. She fixed me with her velvety eyes, her forehead crumpling. ‘What if he saw her leave this morning and now he’s decided to follow her?’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Jazz crossed her arms. ‘Well, you saw those websites! They said if you move house, you have to put butter on your cat’s paws to stop it running away – or was it margarine? No, it must be butter. Margarine is gross—’

  ‘What are you on about?’ I cut in irritably. ‘He’s not going to have gone all the way to Scotland,
is he? Not unless he was quick enough to stow away in her taxi this morning, which I think is not that likely. He’ll be back.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Jazz gasped. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets. ‘What if he did try to stow away in the taxi, and he tried to jump into the boot, and he missed and fell under the car wheels, and the taxi man didn’t see him and reversed on to him and – and – and squashed him . . . !’ Her voice trailed off in a horrified whisper.

  An invisible finger traced a line up my back to my neck and I shivered.

  Jazz continued, the wide-eyed look still etched on to her face. ‘Remember what it said in all those articles we read? Cats have a sixth sense, right? They know when something’s up. Kaboodle will have definitely been freaked cos his mummsie is away. And now I think I’ve got a sixth sense about what’s happened. I’m sorry to say this, Bertie, but . . .’

  She paused dramatically as if she were a detective on a whodunnit who was about to announce, er, whodunnit.

  ‘. . . considering all the evidence, and taking into account all the facts at our disposal . . . I can hardly bear to even think this, but I – I – I have to say . . .’ She gulped and put a hand dramatically up to her throat. ‘I reckon he’s – oh my goodness, I reckon he . . . he’s got to be dead, Bertie! I’m sorry, but there’s no other explanation.’

  Tears spurted out of the corners of her eyes and she slumped down on to one of the pink kitchen chairs and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

  I stared out of the window at the cherry tree in Pinkella’s garden and peered at the branches. Blimey, even the trees in her garden were pink! Was Kaboodle up there somewhere, hidden among the leaves?

  ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ Jazz rasped, blinking up at me through her tears. ‘We owe it to the poor little thing. After all, we are responsible for him while Ms P is away.’

  ‘What are you on about now?’

  ‘We’re going to have to give Kaboodle a good send-off,’ Jazz sniffed.

  ‘What?’ I repeated.

  ‘A good send-off – you know, a memorial service type thing.’ Jazz stood up and tore a piece of pink kitchen roll from where it was fixed on the wall. She blew her nose noisily and went on with her latest bonkers idea. ‘When someone dies you have a funeral, right?’ She broke off and glanced at me, blushing.