Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was one thing about the Chocolate Ice Cream Incident that I didn’t tell the others. Never having lived with humans, the feral boys had no understanding about the kind of toys they played with. So it would have been hard to explain to them that I knew people in the crowd watching us that day, and probably other days too, had been taking photos of us. I’d glimpsed them holding their phones and cameras up in the air and aiming them at us as we stalked the gulls before a chase, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me to find out eventually that someone had captured a picture of me going to the rescue of the Ice Cream woman. This is how I found out.

Once again it was because of my new human friends Jean and Shirley. When I made my secret visits to them at the café, I often heard them talking about whatever had been written in their newspaper. On this particular occasion, a day or two after the Battle for the Chocolate Ice Cream, they were sitting with their heads close together, laughing, apparently, at a picture in it.

‘That’s so funny, Jean!’ the one called Shirley was saying. ‘Just look at that seagull, terrified of one little cat!’

‘Well, you’re right about one thing, Shirl, I’ll give you that – the wild cats have certainly started being a deterrent around here. I hope that poor old dear wasn’t badly hurt.’

‘No. My niece Holly was down on the seafront that day, as it happens, and saw the whole thing. She said the cat scared the seagull right off, and although the poor woman got a nasty shock and did drop her ice cream when she stumbled, she wasn’t hurt. Someone caught her and stopped her from falling over. Apparently a lot of other cats joined in afterwards but this little one had already saved the day.’ Then she picked the paper up again and held it closer to her face. ‘Hang on a minute!’ she said, sounding excited. ‘Who does this look like to you?’

They both stared at the paper again, then at me – I was sitting by Jean’s feet, where I’d been washing my whiskers after their usual treat of a saucer of milk.

‘Are you saying you think it’s him – our little friend here?’ Jean looked back at the paper again. ‘Well, you could be right, although to be fair there are probably lots of little feral tabbies like this around.’

‘Well, the person who sent this picture into the paper wasn’t the only one to have his camera out,’ said Shirley. ‘My niece told me she’d filmed the whole thing on her phone. She’s going to show me when she comes round tonight. She’s put it on Facebook, and YouTube apparently. She says it might go viral, whatever that means. She seems to think it’ll make her famous. Kids, eh? The ideas they get into their heads!’

‘It’s more likely to make the little cat famous!’ her friend remarked, and they both laughed.

Well, by now, as you can imagine, I was meowing my head off at them.

‘It was me who chased the seagull away from that old lady!’ I said. ‘I am that cat!’

But Jean had folded up the paper now and they were talking about something else. And even though I jumped up on Shirley’s lap and nudged her hands and arms with my head until she almost spilt her tea over me, they just gave me a little stroke and laughed at me, and nothing more was said about the picture.

When I rejoined Big and the others back at the yard, I was still so worked up about the whole thing, I couldn’t resist telling him what I’d overheard.

‘You mean to tell me you’ve been hanging around outside that café on your own while we were asleep?’ he meowed at me. ‘Have you suddenly got a death wish, these last few days?’

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I was just listening.’ I wondered if he could smell humans on me. What would he say if he knew I’d actually been cuddling up with them?

‘Charlie,’ he said in a stern meow, ‘I keep telling you not to take risks around humans. Even if some of them might not mind us so much now, you don’t know which ones might still be dangerous.’

‘They were talking about me, though! They had a picture of me in their newspaper.’

He gave me a pitying look. ‘Charlie, do us all a favour, right? Don’t let all the fuss about your bravery the other day go to your head. You’re a good little cat, at the end of the day, but nobody likes a show off.’

‘I’m not showing off!’ I protested. ‘I could hear what they were saying.’

‘Yes, I know you can understand Human. But please, don’t start telling me they’ve got pictures of you. That’s just too far-fetched for common sense.’

I knew I’d never convince him otherwise. For a start, he didn’t know about cameras and phones making pictures. Even I didn’t understand how it worked, how a picture of me had got from someone’s phone into the newspaper, but I did at least believe it was possible – I knew how clever humans could be with things like that. I didn’t like Big thinking I was just a show off, so I just dropped the subject. But Jean’s and Shirley’s words lingered in my head, and in my dreams, giving me a funny, fluttery, hopeful feeling that wouldn’t quite go away. Could it be true? Could the pictures from the humans’ cameras really make me famous? And if they did, would it actually be such a bad thing, after all – especially if I got famous enough to be sent back home to my family?

What happened next, though, was so surprising, I still have trouble understanding it myself, even though I’ve learnt more about it since. There are lots of things in the human world, of course, that I still don’t understand. So if any of the older cats among you can enlighten me, I’m always willing to be educated, even now I’m not a little kitten anymore.

A few days after I heard about my picture being in the newspaper, Big and I were walking along the street where all the shops were. We were once again heading to a different part of town to see if I recognised anywhere that could have been my holiday home. I remember I was feeling particularly sad, as we trotted along together, because Big had just asked me whether I should be thinking about giving up now. I’d already suspected that a couple of the boys were getting tired of helping me with the search, but Big was very loyal to me, and had said he’d keep on coming out with me for as long as I wanted to. I guessed he just thought that by giving up I could spare myself more disappointment. But how could I ever give up looking for Caroline and the rest of my family? It would feel like I’d forgotten them and stopped caring about them, and that was never going to happen.

I was getting to know the shops. There were the ones selling food, of course, where the windows were full of bread and cakes, or those boring things humans eat that grow on trees or bushes, and of course there was our favourite, the shop that displayed delicious looking body parts of dead prey, and whole chickens hanging up on hooks. Other shops were less interesting. They had humans’ clothes in the windows, or shoes, or books, or toys for human kittens. Then right at the end of the row of shops was one with lots of televisions in the window. If there weren’t any humans hanging around outside, we sometimes loitered here for a few minutes because the televisions were usually turned on, showing various different pictures, and Big and the other cats found them fascinating. They had no idea what televisions were, of course, never having been inside a human house. I’d tried to explain, but of course like all of us I’ve never really understood the need for them myself.

‘You mean they just sit there and watch these things all the time?’ Stinky had retorted when I first told him my family had two of them in our proper home at Little Broomford.

‘Well, mostly in the evenings, but yes, they can watch them whenever they want to. Sometimes there are special pictures for human kittens to watch. And sometimes there are pictures of lots of male humans chasing each other and kicking a ball. I’ve noticed that if I walk in front of the television waving my tail, they sometimes tell me off. But if the picture is of something like birds or fish, and I sit on the shelf on top of it and dangle a paw over it, they find it quite funny.’

‘Suffering catnip!’ Black had said. ‘Humans are the weirdest creatures in the world.’

‘And the pictures keep moving!’ Big had said.

‘Yes. I suppose it gives them some sort of a thrill, like us watching a bird hopping, or a mouse creeping along.’

‘But at least we eventually pounce on the prey and eat it,’ one of the boys had said, and I’d had to agree, the whole thing about watching television really did seem like a pointless exercise to us.

This particular day, it was raining, with a stiff breeze blowing up the shopping street from the sea, and most of the humans must have stayed inside their houses, so Big and I spent a while staring at the moving pictures in the shop window. One of the television screens was showing pictures of almost naked humans swimming in a big bath of water. When the first one reached the edge of the bath, he threw both his front paws into the air and the humans who were watching stood up and clapped their paws together. Very strange. On another screen, there were pictures of pairs of humans holding on to each other and swaying together in very strange, unnatural looking positions. The females were wearing fancy flamboyant dresses so I could only surmise that the smartly dressed males were trying to stop them from tripping over.

‘It’s true,’ I commented to Big now. ‘The longer I’m away from my humans, the more I agree that they’re all a bit odd.’

And then I looked at the next television screen. And I nearly jumped with all four paws off the ground.

‘Oh my claws and whiskers!’ I meowed. I was beginning to pick up some of the boys’ vernacular. ‘It’s me! Big, look, it’s me on there, for the love of catnip!’

‘It can’t be!’ Big was staring at the same screen now. ‘It must be some other tabby with the same eyes …’ He glanced at my still slightly swollen right eye. ‘And the same scars on his head … and … oh. The same limp when he runs. That’s a coincidence. And …’ He broke off. ‘Bloody catnip, Charlie! It’s you!’

We both stared at the picture on the screen as it continued to show me running forwards across the pavement and then leaping into the air, and then the seagull flying off with an angry squawk and the old lady stumbling, dropping her chocolate ice cream, and being helped by the two young humans.

‘It’s me,’ I repeated.

‘It is,’ he agreed, turning to stare at me now. ‘How in the name of all the dogs and foxes did you do that?’

‘I didn’t do anything! It’s … I don’t know! Somehow my life has got repeated in pictures on that television.’

‘That’s impossible! You haven’t been inside that shop, have you?’

‘No, of course I haven’t. I don’t understand it any more than you do. I told you I think someone has put a picture of me in a newspaper, but …’

‘Yes, and that was unbelievable enough – I thought you were making it up. But this …’ He stared back at the shop window again, where the television screen was now just showing a male human with his mouth opening and closing as if he was talking to us, with a lot of Human writing running along the bottom of the screen. ‘This is just impossible. It defies all common sense.’

‘I know. But it was definitely me, wasn’t it. It was me jumping up at that seagull.’

‘Yes, it was, although if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I’d say you’d finally taken leave of your senses.’

We stayed there in the rain, with the wind whistling around our whiskers, for quite a long time after that, in case we saw the pictures of me again, but it didn’t happen. In the end we waited so long, we got drenching wet and cold, and didn’t bother with searching for my holiday home that day after all.

‘Let’s not tell the other boys what we saw in that shop,’ Big said quietly as we headed back to the yard. ‘They’ll think we’ve both been at the catnip.’

‘OK,’ I agreed. I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamt it, anyway. It all seemed so unreal and unlikely. ‘But we did see it, though, didn’t we?’

‘Yes.’ He turned to stare at me again. ‘And I’m still trying to make sense of it. The only thing I can think of is that you’ve got some kind of magic power – what with this, and understanding Human, and the way you were brave enough to come back and attack me, all on your own, that first day we met. It never did seem quite natural. Are you sure you’re really a normal cat?’

‘Yes, I am!’ I meowed, feeling a bit scared now.

I had no idea what had happened there. But if I’d really had magic powers, there was one thing I was sure of: I’d have magicked myself back to my human family by now and would be sitting on Caroline’s lap, purring into her ear, and not caring if she spent all day every day looking at strange moving pictures on the television, just as long as I never lost her again.

The following day, we were walking past the pub at the harbour when we saw another strange thing. Inside the pub window was a big piece of paper with a picture of a cat on it and some large Human writing underneath. This time it was Tail-less who noticed.

‘Blinking codfish, Charlie!’ he meowed. ‘That cat in the picture looks just like you!’

Big, still feeling spooked by what we’d seen on the television screen, immediately crept up for a closer look.

‘It does look like you,’ he told me, almost accusingly, when he came back, ‘but I don’t think it is. That cat looks fatter, and more groomed, and it hasn’t got scars on its head or a nasty eye, like you.’

‘Right,’ I said. Even from a little distance, I could see it was true that the cat in the picture didn’t have my wounds.

Of course, I wasn’t sure exactly what I looked like, apart from what my humans, and other cats, had told me. Caroline had sometimes picked me up and held me in front of that shiny thing they call a mirror, and said things like ‘Ah, Charlie, look at you!’ – but all I could see was the little tabby kitten who always seemed to appear in the mirrors around the house, copying whatever I was doing. When I was very young, I thought he was another kitten who lived in the house, but Ollie soon put me right on that, explaining that he wasn’t real – he had no scent and if I tried to rub faces with him, all I’d get was the hard shiny surface of the mirror. I presume you all think the same as Ollie and I do – that the mirror cats are something like the pictures on television.

So the mirror cat in our house may, perhaps, have been a picture of me. If it was, then I had a good idea what I used to look like before I got lost and started living rough. Before I got badly beaten up by a gang of alley cats, almost lost the sight in one eye and apparently gained some scars that I supposed would last my whole nine lives. But I didn’t want to freak Big out any more than I’d done already.

‘OK. Obviously not me, then,’ I said.

We saw another picture, exactly the same, in the café window. Another one in the window of the fish and chip shop when we went scavenging that evening. Next day, there was one in the bookshop, one in the bread shop, and one in the window of the Chinese takeaway shop. When we walked back past the café, Shirley and Jean were sitting in their usual spot outside. I lingered behind the fence for a while to listen to their conversation, and Big waited for me. He didn’t mind me using my two friends as sources of inside information, as long as he was there to keep an eye on me and I didn’t venture too close.

‘It’s such a shame, isn’t it,’ Shirley was saying. ‘They must be so desperate to get him back. The pictures are going up everywhere.’

‘Yes. Well, of course, since it was on the News, everyone knows about that cat who chased the seagull away from the old lady. The family who put up the notices seem to be convinced it’s their cat, don’t they? They were staying here all through August, I heard – down at the Oversands end of the bay, in one of those rental cottages, apparently. The little girl’s inconsolable. There’s some story about her being very ill, and she seems to think it’s her fault the cat went missing.’

‘Ah, bless her, poor little love. And that’s her little cat in the picture, is it, Jean?’

‘Yes. Look, have you read it? LOST: CHARLIE. Young neutered male tabby. Last seen on 28 August in the Oversands area of Mudditon-on-Sea. Believed to be still in Mudditon. Microchipped. Reward for safe return. And it’s got a mobile number and email address. Apparently the girl’s father has been staying in Mudditon again since they saw the cat on the News – walking the streets, calling out for Charlie.’

‘Well, I do hope he finds him, for that little girl’s sake. If it is that same cat, of course. Tabby cats are two a penny, though, aren’t they? For a start, there’s our little friend who visits us here. He’s a tabby, and he looks about the right age, doesn’t he. And we did think he looked like the cat who was in the paper.’

‘Yes, but come on, Shirl – he’s much skinnier than this one in the poster, and so scruffy looking, poor little thing. He really doesn’t look like this cute kitten in the pictures, at all. To be honest, I wonder if the family are just clutching at straws. I’d be very surprised if the cat in these posters is the same one who chased the seagull.’

‘But then again, we’ve both been saying our little one doesn’t really behave like a feral, haven’t we. He seems too trusting.’

I’m sure you can imagine how I felt as I listened to all this! I was mewing to myself like crazy and twitching all over with distress.

‘What the dog’s bum is up with you?’ Big kept asking me, but I was too intent on listening, to reply. Julian was looking for me! It seemed that so much time had passed, my family must have actually gone home to Little Broomford, but they hadn’t forgotten me. Caroline was pining for me! Julian had come back specially to put up pictures of me, he was walking the streets calling me! If only he would walk past here right now, I’d run to him, and I’d be rescued. I’d be taken home, I’d see Caroline, I’d be back to my old life, to you, Oliver, and you, all my other old friends in Little Broomford.

But then I mewed again with a new bout of anguish. What if he never happened to walk along the same street or path or alleyway at the same time as me? What if he gave up, like Big had suggested I ought to give up looking for the holiday cottage? Then he’d go back home without me, telling Caroline I was nowhere to be found. The pictures would be taken down again, and all the humans around here would stop talking about me the way Jean and Shirley were doing now, and nobody would look for me, and I’d have lost my only opportunity of going back to my real life. How could I afford to take that chance?

I glanced at Big. He was looking at me with such concern, meowing quietly to me about calming down and not getting myself upset, and why didn’t I tell him what the humans were saying? And I felt yet another wave of distress as I realised how fond I’d become of him and the other boys, how they’d taken me into their gang and looked after me, despite the fact that I was so different from them, and despite them thinking I was weird and posh and possibly magic on top of everything else. They’d be upset with me for leaving them now. Or perhaps they wouldn’t – perhaps they’d just think that was part of my weirdness, and forget about me as quickly as they’d accepted me.

‘Well,’ Jean was saying, ‘even if it really is our little cat, Shirl, there’s not a lot we can do until we see him again – then we could have another good look at him. Now, shall we get the bill? I need to get back and start a bit of housework.’

So this was it. I had to trust those two females; trust them, and trust my own grasp of Human language, or my chance was gone. I poised myself, preparing to make a dash for it.

‘Where are you going, Charlie?’ Big said, but there was something in his voice that made me think he’d guessed this was goodbye.

‘I’m sorry, Big,’ I meowed. ‘Thanks for everything. Say goodbye to the boys for me. I’ll miss you all.’

‘Charlie!’ he yowled as I ran straight round the end of the fence and threw myself at the legs of the nearest of the two females. ‘For the love of bloody rats’ intestines, don’t do it! They’ll skin you alive! They’ll roast you and eat you with their stinky red ketchup!’

‘Goodbye, Big,’ I mewed back to him loudly, as Shirley, gasping with surprise and squawking to Jean about what a coincidence it was that I’d turned up at that very moment, bent down to pick me up. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I called back as he continued to yowl after me ‘But I’m going home.’