by Ann Bryant
Sasha turned to Emily. “I wish I could hold one, but I suppose they’re too young, aren’t they?”
But Emily was watching Silver intently. “She’s about to have another one,” she said, ignoring Sasha’s question.
“How can you tell?” asked Nicole.
“See how she’s kind of shuddering? She’s having contractions.”
“She must be exhausted,” murmured Mrs. Pridham.
Emily was frowning.
“Is she okay, Ems?” I asked, starting to feel prickles of concern.
Emily didn’t reply, and we all stayed silent for a good five minutes until a sixth kitten slid out of Silver and lay quite still. It was absolutely minute, and didn’t resemble a kitten at all, but for its little tufts of grey fur sprouting out from wrinkled red skin. So ugly. Definitely my favourite kitten.
From behind me I heard a gasp. I think it was Sasha.
“Oh dear…” murmured Mrs. Pridham, and I swallowed, turning sharply to look at Emily to see why she thought this kitten was so still.
Silver got up suddenly, her kittens tumbling and rolling off her. They stumbled on their weak little legs and fell over again while their mother only seemed to care about the still little kitten that lay on the very edge of the dust sheet. She began to lick it, giving it all her attention, until slowly, slowly it started to move. Then it let out a high-pitched mew and Silver flopped down again. A moment later the kitten latched on to one of her teats, and before long it was sucking away just like the others. Its mother looked exhausted, and though the kittens all latched on happily, Silver was shuffling around. She seemed uncomfortable.
“Are there any more to come, Ems?” asked Izzy.
Emily shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Thank goodness for that!” said Mrs. Pridham.
There was a short, awkward silence. It was as though the show was over and now I had to face the music. Mrs. Pridham stood up, which seemed to make the awkwardness spread to the others.
“Well—” she began. But she got no further.
“I think Silver needs a vet,” came Emily’s voice, serious and strained.
Mrs. Pridham crouched down again. “A vet?”
“Why? What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling an urgency to know it was nothing serious, but fearing Emily’s answer.
“Something’s not right. She’s in pain. She’s trying to get the kittens off her,” said Emily. “I mean, I can only say what I’ve seen on the farm, but if a cow was looking like that, Dad would call the vet for sure.”
I felt a tightness in my throat as I looked at Mrs. Pridham.
“I’ll go down and phone a vet now,” she said after frowning at the floor for a moment.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, with a rush of gratitude. “Th-thank you.”
About an hour later the vet still hadn’t arrived. Emily and I were the only two people with Silver. The others were all at supper but we weren’t hungry and Mrs. Pridham had said we could stay.
“Only till the vet arrives,” she’d warned us. Then she’d given another instruction. “Now, I’m saying to you what I’ve said to the others. Even if everything turns out well, there’s no question that we can keep the cat or the kittens. We don’t have the facility and it’s not appropriate. We break up for the summer holidays in under two weeks and Mr. Pridham and I have got a holiday booked shortly afterwards. We’re away for a month, and as it’s too early to separate the kittens from their mother there’s no choice but to find a home for the whole family.” My eyes had been fixed on Silver as Mrs. Pridham had been talking, and my heart felt heavy seeing the way she kept pushing the kittens away. It could only mean she was in pain. “I’ll ask the vet’s advice when he arrives,” Mrs. Pridham carried on quietly. “And we’ll take it from there.”
My whole body had felt limp and lifeless the more Mrs. Pridham had talked. And I’d started to make a plan to call Anna to see if we could have Silver and her kittens at home. Our house is quite big and so is our garden, but even if Anna said we had to give the kittens away to good homes, it would be all right as long as she agreed to keep Silver. That was all I wanted.
I was desperate to stroke Silver but Emily thought we should leave her alone and just sit with her. I couldn’t bear the way she kept looking at me. She seemed to be saying, “Do something!” And I just kept murmuring to her that the vet was on his way, even though she didn’t have a clue what I was on about. Emily put her arm round my stiff shoulders once or twice. “The vet will sort her out, Bry, don’t worry,” she said. But somehow, the anxious look on her face didn’t match her words, and I was worried sick about what might be the matter with poor Silver.
“Listen, someone’s coming. I can hear a man’s voice,” Emily said suddenly.
I got up and went over to the stairs. The man had a brown case. He smiled up at me and said hello in a kindly voice. “I’m Duncan.”
“I’m…Bryony, and this is Emily.”
Emily scarcely turned round, but she started talking immediately and I wondered whether this was how her dad talked when they called the vet out on their farm. “The cat’s name is Silver and she’s had six kittens over the last few hours. The last one looked as though it might not survive but it seems fine now. Silver struggled to give birth to that one, though, and she doesn’t seem to want her kittens suckling her.”
“Dear me,” murmured Duncan, laying his case down behind him so as not to frighten Silver, and reaching out his hand to her to let her sniff it. “There we are,” he said in a sing-song voice. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
The kittens had been making their high squeaky mewing sounds off and on for the last hour but now they were making a constant noise.
“I think we should leave Duncan to examine…Silver, girls,” came Mrs. Pridham’s voice from behind us. “And you two need to get some supper before prep.”
Supper? Prep? How could normal life go on when Silver had just had six kittens but she wasn’t well enough to feed them? “I’d rather stay here,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.
“No, come on, Bry,” said Emily. “Silver’s not going anywhere. Duncan will look after her.”
“I’ll take some blood and get it analysed,” he said. “It’s probably a uterus infection… Then we’ll see what we can do.”
“There you are,” said Emily. “She’ll be fine. Come on, Bry.”
I knew it made sense. I’d be starving hungry later if I didn’t eat now.
“She’ll need food and water to keep her strength up,” Duncan was saying to Mrs. Pridham as Emily and I left.
My body felt stiff and strange from being still for so long, and my legs trembled a bit as I followed Emily down the stairs.
“A cat and six kittens! That’s amazing!”
The whole school seemed to be buzzing with the news of what had happened in the Forest Ash attic. There was hardly anyone left in the dining hall because Emily and I were so late getting to supper, but on the way over we’d passed loads of people who’d asked about Silver and that’s how we knew that word had spread. Before we’d even left Forest Ash we’d met the Year Nines from the dorm near the cleaning room and they’d pretended to be cross with us.
“Yeah, cheers for telling us, you two!” said Nadia.
“Don’t worry about us! We’ve only been having nightmares for the last week!” That was Annie.
“Sorry. But we thought Mrs. P would go mad…” I said, trying to explain.
“But she seems okay about it, doesn’t she?” said Gemma. “At least she sounded okay with us…I mean, not cross or anything.”
“She was cross earlier on,” Emily told them.
“And she’s not letting us keep Silver or her kittens,” I added, sounding angrier than I’d intended.
The three Year Nines had gone quiet after that, and looked at me as though I was completely mad.
And now Emily and I were sitting in the dining hall, talking about them as we ate our salads.
> “It was just the way they looked at us,” I said.
“Yes, like we were out of our trees, or something.”
“They obviously assumed Mrs. P would never agree to keep Silver and the kittens in a million years.”
“The thing is, Bry,” said Emily carefully, as though she didn’t want to upset me, “it’s probably no wonder she isn’t letting us keep them, is it?”
I didn’t answer but I felt sad, because in my heart of hearts I knew that Emily was right. I’d thought it through myself. We couldn’t keep them in the attic. Kittens soon became cats. In the winter it would be freezing with the window open, and they’d all start going downstairs into the cleaning room looking for a way out. Then they’d nip into the corridor whenever anyone opened the door. And in no time at all they’d be roaming all over Forest Ash. No, I knew the only answer was to let a nice animal-loving family take them all. But then my mind came straight back to Anna and Dad and I decided to call them then and there. Maybe…just maybe…
“And don’t forget to text Hannah too,” Emily reminded me when I told her what I was going to do. So I quickly did that first.
Hi Han, Silver has 6 fab kittens! My thumbs hovered over my phone as I racked my brain for what else to say. Should I mention that the vet was with Silver right now? Should I say that it looked pretty unlikely that we’d be able to keep Silver, let alone the kittens? In the end I just put Luv Bry. I’d leave it another day before telling Hannah any bad news, and let her enjoy the good news first. Maybe Silver would make a swift recovery and she and the kittens would go to a lovely family who lived really nearby and Silver would still come here to visit. That would be a nice thing to be able to report to Hannah.
I called home but it went to voicemail so I left a message for Anna or Dad to get back to me. I didn’t want to start talking to the answerphone about how I thought it would be a good idea if we adopted a cat and six kittens. It might not go down too well. No, I had to explain it carefully, and make them realize how desperate I was.
Emily and I got back from supper to be told that everything was under control and that the vet had taken a blood sample from Silver, which was being analysed. Mrs. Pridham also said she’d managed to get hold of a double feeding bowl from our Head of school, Ms. Carmichael, whose cat had died of old age about a year earlier.
After that it was impossible to concentrate during prep, mainly because of worrying about Silver. But there was another huge worry lurking in the back of my mind too. I was doing my best to ignore it, thrusting it back every time it tried to creep forwards. But I couldn’t forget that Mrs. Pridham hadn’t even given me a proper telling-off, let alone a punishment after all the wrong things I’d done. I ran through the list, my heart hammering against my ribs. Had I really ignored her when she’d told me to go to the dorm, then shushed her when she’d appeared behind me in the loft? I wondered if anyone else at Silver Spires had ever behaved so appallingly. I swallowed as I imagined her telling me I’d been expelled.
I’d worked out that the reason she hadn’t said anything yet was because she was waiting to get the kittens sorted out before she started sorting me out, and I could feel an embarrassed awkwardness hanging between us after prep when I went to ask her if I could go up and see Silver.
I was relieved when she gave me permission to see Silver before I got ready for bed, but I knew she was just hanging on, biding her time, waiting for the moment when she was going to sit me down and tell me what punishment she’d decided on. I felt a tight knot in my stomach at the thought.
One or two people asked why I was allowed to see Silver, when no one else was.
“Because it’s all down to Bryony that Silver had her kittens at Forest Ash, that’s why!” Emily replied, flinging her sharpest stare at anyone who dared to come back at her.
But nobody did. In fact I felt quite touched at the way people seemed to be rooting for me. Already there were murmurs that we ought to be allowed to keep the kittens. It made me sad that no one seemed too bothered about Silver, though. They just thought it would be sweet to have kittens running around.
In the end Emily came up with me too. She looked as shocked as I felt at the sight of Silver. The poor cat seemed so miserable and weak and every so often a dreadful noise came out of her. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. The kittens were still mewing and scrambling to get to her teats but they didn’t stay still for long and I was so worried that they might not be getting enough milk.
“Has Duncan phoned with the blood sample results?” I asked Mrs. Pridham, when I’d left Silver, with a lump in my throat.
“Yes, just this minute. It’s…exactly as he thought – an infection of the uterus. He’s going to drop off the antibiotics and a few sachets of soft food for her. I’ll crush the first tablet into the food for her to take tonight. Then…as soon as she’s better in…a day or two, we’ll start to take steps to have them all moved. Duncan thinks he knows someone who’ll take the whole family, so I might not need to advertise.”
“What about a litter tray?” I asked, desperately trying to get away from talk of Silver leaving Forest Ash, and get back to the arrangements for right now.
“Ms. Carmichael has given us hers and Duncan brought a bag of cat litter. I asked him whether she ought to be taken into his surgery but he said it was safer not to disturb her.”
I nodded, feeling exhausted.
Then Emily spoke and I suddenly realized she hadn’t said a single word until now. “Mrs. Pridham…?”
“Yes?”
“N-nothing. It’s all right.”
“Right, well let’s leave it there for now. Off you go to bed.”
The moment we were alone again, walking up to our dorm, I asked Emily what she’d been about to say.
“Nothing. Well…nothing much.”
I know my best friend and I could tell she was keeping something from me. And the only reason she might be keeping something from me was because she thought it would alarm me. I didn’t press her right then. Instead I looked at my phone to see if there were any messages, and found a text from Anna. At work. Special dinner. Will call first thing 2moro. Hope all good wi you. Love you. A x
Then I followed Emily into the dorm and climbed up onto my bed. I looked down at her. “Truth talk,” I said in a no-nonsense voice.
She sighed a massive sigh, then slowly came towards my bed, as though a truth talk was the very last thing she wanted to have at that moment. The others came to join us, exchanging darting glances, wondering what was going on. I didn’t waste a second, just asked Emily what she’d been going to say to Mrs. Pridham.
“Truthfully,” I reminded her, firmly.
She sighed. “It’s probably nothing, but I don’t think you’re supposed to give antibiotics to cats that are suckling kittens.”
There was a pause while I tried to work out why on earth Duncan had decided to give them to Silver then.
“We had a cow that had to have its calf taken away from it to be hand reared,” Emily went on, “because the cow would have died without antibiotics.” The moment the words were out of her mouth she looked as though she’d given herself a horrible shock and was scrambling to get out of it. “I don’t mean that Silver’s going to die. I mean, Duncan obviously knows what he’s doing and everything. Mrs. P might have got it wrong, maybe they’re not antibiotics, maybe they’re just some kind of tablets to relieve the pain…” She trailed off, her cheeks turning bright pink. “You shouldn’t have made me have a truth talk, Bry.”
She was right, I shouldn’t.
Because now I was worried sick about Silver.
Chapter Ten
That night I hardly slept at all, and neither did Emily. We kept on whispering in the dark, asking each other if we could hear anything. There were no sounds of kittens mewing, which filled me with a new dread, and every so often we heard an awful strangled cry from Silver. I found it unbearable to think of her in such pain, with nothing and no one to help her.
In
the morning Emily and I went straight to Mrs. Pridham to ask her if we could see Silver and the kittens. We wanted to find out if she’d eaten her tablet the night before and to ask when Duncan was coming back too. She said he should be arriving any time and Emily and I begged to be let off breakfast. Mrs. Pridham hesitated, then agreed to allow it this once, as long as our friends brought us back some fruit. Her face seemed to be set hard when she looked at me and I feared the punishment I was due, but I kept on pushing it to the back of my mind so I could concentrate on Silver.
As soon as Duncan arrived we asked him if we could go up to see Silver with him, and he said that would be all right.
She looked so frail and thin, her chest rising and falling much too quickly as she breathed hard. Three of the kittens were suckling and she didn’t seem to have the energy to stop them, even if she’d wanted to. The other three were rolling about nearby. At least the kittens seemed all right, but Silver… I swallowed.
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked Duncan, dreading the answer.
“Well, the next twelve hours are critical.” He paused, then turned a very grave expression on us. “I ought to warn you that it’s not looking good, I’m afraid. You see, the problem was finding antibiotics that she could take safely while suckling her young.”
Emily and I exchanged a glance. She’d been right then.
“The ones I’ve given her might not prove to be as effective as some others could have been, but at least they won’t affect the kittens.”
I looked at my watch and suddenly needed to know exactly what Duncan was saying. “Twelve hours? So if she’s still…okay at quarter past eight tonight, she’ll definitely be…all right for ever.”
Duncan looked at his own watch and paused before answering. I couldn’t tell if he was calculating the time or wondering whether I could cope with the truth. “Yes, I’d say so… Yes.”
Emily squeezed my hand and I realized Mrs. Pridham was right behind us. I hadn’t even heard her footsteps on the stairs. “You’d better come down now, girls. You can pop over again at lunchtime.”
