Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

CHAPTER SEVEN

I ran downstairs and into the kitchen where Laura was cooking dinner.

‘They’re talking about running away!’ I shouted at her in Cat. ‘They’re packing their bags!’

‘Charlie, please don’t get under my feet while I’m cooking,’ she said without looking at me.

It’s the most frustrating thing, isn’t it, when you need to say something really important but you know they won’t make any effort to understand you. I meowed my head off at her and tried walking round her legs to get her attention, only to be told off and sent out of the kitchen. I was still hoping there was a chance the girls would realise it was a silly idea and change their minds. But when they sat at the table later, giving each other secret little smiles and eating up all their dinners without making any fuss at all, even remembering to say thank you to Laura for cooking it, I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my tummy that they were purposely being extra good so that she wouldn’t suspect anything. They went up to bed earlier than usual – I know, because Laura looked up in surprise and said: ‘Well, I might as well have an early night myself, too, while Jessica’s settled so nicely.’

The cottage was soon in darkness, and I could hear Laura’s steady breathing as I loitered at the bottom of the stairs. I crept up and sat outside the door of Caroline’s room. They kept the bedroom doors closed now, to keep me out, but I could hear the girls whispering to each other. Perhaps if I stayed there, I could keep guard over them. I settled down, keeping one eye open, but of course, it’s so hard not to fall asleep, isn’t it, when it’s quiet and dark and you’ve had a stressful day. Suddenly, though, their bedroom light went on and I heard them padding about, whispering again, and the next thing I knew, the door was opened and they came tiptoeing out, almost falling over me on the dark landing.

‘Ssh!’ Caroline whispered at me fiercely. Then she picked me up and carried me downstairs with them. What was she doing? Surely she wasn’t taking me with them? But downstairs in the lounge, she sat down for a minute with me on her lap.

‘I’m going to miss Charlie, though!’ she whispered to Grace, and her eyes filled up with tears.

‘Don’t go, then!’ I meowed at her. ‘Please! It’s a crazy idea!’

‘Ssh, Charlie,’ Grace warned me. ‘Caro, put him down, or he’ll wake Laura up. Come on, we ought to get going. Goodbye, Charlie. I’ll miss you too.’

They both gave me a stroke, and Caroline’s tears dripped on my head. I meowed and Caroline put me down quickly, and before I could even try to trip them up again they were picking up their bags and turning towards the door.

I started to run back up the stairs. If I woke Laura up now, she could still catch them. They’d get a terrible telling off, but it was better than getting lost or attacked, wasn’t it?

‘Laura!’ I meowed at the top of my voice. ‘Quick, wake up! It’s an emergency! They’re running away!’

But her bedroom door was still closed. I started to scratch at it desperately, but then I heard the sound of the porch door being opened. It was too late! They were going! Frantic now, I shot back down again, just in time to wriggle through the glass door to the porch before Caroline closed it. It was so dark, neither of the girls noticed me, and when Caroline opened the outside door I slipped out in front of them and hid, shaking, under the hedge. It was dark, really dark, and the girls were holding hands and shining their little torch in front of them as they walked off. I could see OK, obviously, but I knew their night vision would be rubbish. Humans, as Oliver explained to me when I was a little kitten, are a seriously underdeveloped species compared with us cats. They can’t see, smell or even hear half as well as we can, which is probably why they need us to look after them. I only hesitated for a minute, twitching my tail anxiously as I watched their torchlight getting fainter in the distance.

It was no good. I’d never thought of myself as a scaredy-cat, and this was no time to start becoming one. I’d promised myself to do all I could to rescue those two human kittens, hadn’t I? So with my little heart pounding in my chest, I set off to follow them into the unknown.

Oh, I’m really sorry, Tabitha. I forgot to warn you, didn’t I? Yes, we’ve got to one of the scary parts now. But look, don’t keep mewing about it, you can see I survived, or I wouldn’t be here now, talking to you, would I? Is everyone else all right for me to carry on? Any little kittens need taking home? Oliver, can you see if anyone’s hiding behind the dustbins? Honestly, sometimes the responsibility of being a famous hero cat is quite a burden.

Well, you can probably imagine how I was feeling at this point in the story. Yes, Tabitha, that’s right – scared out of my fur. I was in a strange place a long way from home, with no familiar smells, and to make matters worse, there was a crashing and booming noise going on nearby that I couldn’t identify. I scurried along, following the light of Grace’s torch and keeping close to the hedges. If circumstances had been different I might have had a sniff around to see what creatures were lurking there, but I knew I mustn’t lose sight of the girls.

Then we turned a corner and crossed a road and for a minute I stood rooted to the spot, my back arched, my fur standing on end. I thought we must surely have reached the end of the world. Ahead of us was … nothing. Well, there was something, something huge and black that, when the moon kindly poked itself out from behind a cloud for a minute, I could see was moving, sliding backwards and forwards and making the crashing sound I’d heard. It took me a while to realise this was it – the sea, that monstrous moving thing I’d glimpsed from the lounge window of the cottage. In the dark and close up, it looked even more threatening. I’d had no idea it was so noisy! Whoosh, crash. Whoosh, crash. Whoosh, crash. I wanted to hiss at it to shut up, but I was afraid it would come up onto the road and attack me.

‘Let’s walk along the beach,’ I heard Caroline saying to Grace.

‘No! What if we got caught out by the tide?’ Their voices carried back to me on the breeze, almost drowned out by the sea’s constant shouting.

‘OK. But we’d better follow the road along the coast anyway, or we might get lost.’

So we trotted on, with me always at a little distance behind them. For a while the road went along right by the sea, then we turned a corner up a hill and away from it. We went round more bends, down the hill, back up again, and came to a place where the torch showed three different roads.

‘I think it must be this way,’ Grace said, not actually sounding too sure about it at all, and off we went again.

There didn’t seem to be any houses around now. Just darkness and the occasional owl hooting at us from the trees. I was beginning to think I should just run up to the girls and let them see I’d followed them. They’d have to pick me up and take me back to the cottage then, wouldn’t they? But supposing they didn’t? Supposing they took me with them to run away instead – then I’d be stuck, unable to do anything to help. You might well be wondering what on earth I thought I was going to do to help anyway and, believe me, so was I. I suppose I was hoping I could see where the Great Aunt person’s house was, and then find my way back with my amazing sense of smell and memory. I was obviously marking as many spots along the road as I could with my scent, but the occasional whiff of another cat’s scent was stressing me out. And I hadn’t got as far as working out how, if I did manage to get back, I was going to persuade Laura that I knew where the girls were. There’s only room in our heads for one plan at a time, after all.

It all started to go wrong when Grace suddenly stopped walking, saying her shoes were hurting her feet. We’d been walking for ages. If I’d worn shoes on my paws I bet they’d have been hurting too. I don’t know why humans seem to need to wear so much stuff on their bodies, but I suppose if we had no fur, like them, we might do the same, especially as we don’t like being cold. Once again it seems to be a design fault in their species. I suppose we should feel sorry for them. They look so ridiculous when they take their clothes off, don’t they – all bald and bare.

Sorry, I’m getting side-tracked from the story now.

‘Well, is it much further?’ Caroline was asking Grace as she took off her shoes, rubbed her back paws and put the shoes back on again. ‘I thought we might have been there by now.’

‘Me too,’ Grace admitted. She sounded a bit frightened. ‘I didn’t think it would be this far, Caro.’ There was a long pause. Then she added in a little voice that I could only just hear: ‘You don’t think we’ve come the wrong way, do you?’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Caroline said. ‘It’s your aunt’s house we’re going to. I thought you knew the way.’

‘I thought I did, too. But I’m wondering now if we should have gone the other way along the coast.’

‘What? You’re joking, aren’t you?’

‘No. I’m not sure. I told you I’ve never been there, I just knew it was the next village along, but I can’t remember which way. I wish I’d had another look at a map before we started out.’

‘So, what are we going to do?’ Caroline said, her voice all shaky. ‘It’s the middle of the night, we don’t know where we are, the bags are getting heavy …’

‘And my feet hurt. Let’s go back, Caro. I’m sorry, it’s my fault, maybe this was a bad idea.’ Grace sounded like she was going to start mewing.

‘I don’t know if we’ll find our way back, though,’ Caroline said. ‘We went round so many corners.’

‘I’ll show you!’ I meowed at once. Now was the time to show myself. I’d be their Rescue Cat, leading them home safely … as long as I could find the right way myself, of course. But before I could run up to them, there was the sound of a car coming along the road behind us. We hadn’t seen any cars since leaving the cottage. Probably they were all fast asleep at their homes, and I wasn’t sorry, because the road was narrow, with no pavements. You know how aggressive cars can be, wanting the whole road to themselves. This one was purring quite loudly and its eyes were shining very brightly. I jumped back into the bushes, and I saw the girls hiding themselves too. The car roared past us, but as we all stood and watched it continue down the next hill, the light from its big eyes danced off something vast and shiny down in front of us.

‘The sea!’ Grace shouted. ‘We’re heading back towards the coast!’

‘Yeah, but which coast?’ Caroline said. ‘It could be the other side of England for all we know, the distance we’ve walked!’

‘Or it could be the right coast, and we might be just coming into Duncombe. Come on, Caro, let’s get going again. It doesn’t look far.’

So off we trudged. Before long we could hear the crashing of the sea again, and one or two little cottages loomed up out of the darkness.

‘How are we supposed to know whether it’s Duncombe or not?’ Caroline demanded. She sounded fed up, and I didn’t blame her. ‘We didn’t think this through properly, Grace. It’s too dark to see anything, and there’s nobody around to ask.’

‘And I can’t walk any further. I’ve got blisters on both feet now. We’re going to have to stay here till the morning.’

‘What?’ Caroline shrieked. ‘Well, I’m not sleeping on the beach.’

‘There might be a nice dry bit of sand, up against the sea wall,’ Grace said. ‘At least it’s not cold. What else can we do?’

Shining the torch in front of them, they started to walk down a slope towards the sea.

‘No!’ I meowed after them in terror. ‘The sea will get you!’

But they couldn’t hear me because it was crashing so loudly. I have to be honest here. For a minute – just a minute, you understand – I was too scared to follow them. I stood at the top of that slope, looking down at the sea, my tail swishing back and forth for all it was worth. The sea was so big, and I was just one little cat, not much older than little Timmy Kitten over there behind the dustbin. What chance would I have, if it came after me? Then I thought about those two children, all alone in the dark, talking about going to sleep down there. They were braver than me! What a scaredy-cat I was being. But just as I was plucking up my courage to run after them, I heard Caroline calling out:

‘Look! The door of this one’s not locked.’

I crept a little way down the slope to see what they were looking at. There was a row of funny little houses, each of them looking only big enough for a couple of cats to live in. Caroline had pushed the door of one of them open and they were staring inside.

‘There’s nothing in here. I don’t think anyone can be using it. The others have all got padlocks on.’

‘It’s not ours, though, Caro. I think beach huts belong to the council, and people just rent them for their holidays.’

‘I know, but we need somewhere to sleep, don’t we? It’s an emergency. Surely it won’t hurt. There’s nobody around.’

‘But what if someone comes and finds us? We’ll get into trouble. I’m scared. I wish we hadn’t left home now.’

‘So do I, Grace, but it’s no good us just standing here crying about it. Come on, I think we should stay in the hut, nobody’s going to know. If you like, we can take it in turns to stay awake and keep watch.’

‘OK,’ Grace said, sounding doubtful. ‘I do need to take my shoes off for a while. And we could eat some of our biscuits.’

‘Yes, good idea, I’m starving.’

And they disappeared inside the little hut together, closing the door after them and leaving me standing there in the moonlight, wondering where I was going to sleep. I was starving too, I might add! And tired. It had been a long walk, much longer than my normal evening constitutional round the grounds of my house back in Little Broomford. Thinking about home made me mew to myself sadly for a while. But as Caroline had said, there was no use crying, was there? I didn’t want to go too far away from the girls, so I had to ignore the rumbling of my tummy, forget about hunting for food and concentrate on the priority of getting some sleep. I crept cautiously down the rest of the slope and trotted along the path next to the little huts. At the end of the path was a bench, like the ones on our village green where people sit to chat to each other. I crept under the bench and put my head on my paws. I knew I should really keep a watch on the door of the hut where the girls were. I had no idea whether they were in danger or not. But it was no good. Exhaustion overcame me and, before I knew it, I was fast asleep.