Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

It’s getting a bit late. Is anyone too tired to hear the rest of my story now? No? Good, because we’re almost up to date. We’re nearly at the point where I found out all the answers. Not all the answers to everything in the world, of course, as I suppose that even for someone who isn’t a little kitten anymore, there will always be things in the world that I don’t understand. But after the television people came, I understood some things, at least. And later on, I understood a lot more.

I was shut in the lounge while they came into the house, in case I was daft enough to try to run off before I’d even been allowed to star in my own story. I listened from behind the closed door as the voices greeted each other, and finally the door was flung open and someone gasped:

‘And is this our little hero?’

‘If you say so!’ I meowed, trotting up to the strangers to have a good sniff around their legs and see if they smelt friendly. A couple of them bent down to stroke me, and Caroline was being very jumpy with excitement, answering questions like was she pleased to have me back home, and how much did she miss me while I was gone? Then Julian took over, suggesting everyone sat down so they could talk properly, and Laura went to make tea and coffee.

‘Charlie’s story has really caught people’s imaginations,’ said a man called Andy who seemed to be in charge. ‘They loved the fact that a little cat like Charlie was brave enough to chase away a seagull and save an elderly lady from possible harm.’

‘So everyone agrees it was definitely Charlie in that video?’ Julian said.

‘I think we can assume it,’ Andy said. ‘There were lots of witnesses, don’t forget. And the two ladies … um …’ He glanced at a piece of paper in a folder that was open on his lap, ‘Jean Francis and Shirley Benson, who found him, have said they’re quite sure it was him. The cat in the video Shirley’s niece made had the same bad eye and the same sore place on his leg and everything. Well, as you might know, there’s been considerable nuisance in the Mudditon area recently from some particularly aggressive seagulls, and since Charlie’s story broke, there’s been a lot more discussion in the local press there, and on social media, about how to combat the problem to prevent their tourist industry suffering. It seems it’s made local people, and holidaymakers, more aware of the need to dispose of food rubbish properly and not to feed the gulls with food meant for humans.’

‘Let’s hope it works, then,’ Julian said. ‘We were all very sorry to hear about tourism suffering in Mudditon.’

‘Well, that’ll be mentioned in this little follow-up film,’ Andy said. ‘It’s been pointed out, too, that the local feral cats help the situation by keeping down the food waste themselves. And some of the witnesses to Charlie’s little episode say there were feral cats hanging around behind him at the time.’

‘Probably waiting to attack him, poor Charlie!’ said Laura, who’d come back in now with the tray of coffee.

‘No, we were working as a team!’ I meowed, but as usual nobody was listening to me, even though I was supposed to be the hero.

‘I don’t know about that, of course,’ Andy said. ‘But according to our interviews with local people, gangs of feral cats had been seen chasing seagulls on several occasions around that time. It’s quite unusual behaviour! But it seems there’s been a change of attitude towards the cats in the town. They’re being tolerated more, on the whole, and a couple of local fishermen even went on record saying they’d taken to throwing them the occasional fish.’

I was delighted to hear this. I purred happily to myself at the thought of Big and the others getting free fish at the harbour and not being shooed away so often by the humans.

‘So what we’d like to do today,’ Andy went on, ‘is have a little chat with you all about Charlie – the background of how he went missing and how he was found. And of course we’ll film some footage of him being happy back at home here with the family, so that everyone – all his fans! – can see how much better he’s looking and how well he’s settled back down with you. We’ll add our own commentary with a recap of the seagull incident, reminding everyone about how he came to be so famous in the Mudditon area. And we’ll include the interview with the woman and boy from the beach café, of course.’

There was a silence.

‘What woman and boy?’ Julian said.

‘Which beach café?’ Laura asked at the same time.

‘Um …’ Andy rummaged through his papers again. ‘Stella Parkin, who runs the Seashells beach café at Salty Cove, just outside Mudditon – and her nephew Robbie who helps her … did we not tell you about this?’

‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘Was this the new development you mentioned on the phone? You said you’d fill us in today about it.’

‘Sorry, yes, so I did.’ He smiled around at us all, pausing as he looked at Grace, who I’d noticed had gone a bit pink in the face and was nudging Caroline and whispering to her.

‘Is she the lady who helped us when Caroline got hurt?’ Grace asked quietly. And when Andy nodded, she said, turning back to Caroline, ‘You remember, Caro. She got the boy to call an ambulance, and persuaded us that you needed to go to hospital. She was really kind.’

‘I don’t really remember that,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s all a bit of a blur.’

‘Of course it is,’ Laura soothed her. ‘So what have these people got to do with Charlie’s story, Andy?’

‘She’s convinced it was Charlie who alerted her to the accident,’ he said.

‘What?’ Julian said, looking surprised. ‘I can’t see how. Charlie was found in the harbour area at Mudditon, not at Salty Cove. Sorry, but it could’ve been any little tabby cat, couldn’t it?’

‘But, Daddy, I told you I thought I saw him, didn’t I?’ Caroline yelled, so loudly that baby Jessica, sitting in her little bouncy seat next to the sofa, jumped and started to cry. ‘I knew it was him. It’s the only clear memory I’ve got, of that day, until I got to the hospital.’

‘Yes, darling, but honestly, it isn’t very likely, is it?’

As you can imagine, by now I was meowing for all I was worth, trying to tell them it was true, it was me, I’d been there, I’d tried to help!

‘Actually, Mr Smythe, there are photos,’ Andy said. ‘Would you like to see them?’

‘Well, yes, of course, but how …?’ Julian was saying, looking confused, as Andy rummaged through his folder again.

‘Robbie from the café took some pictures of the cat on his phone. His aunt apparently took the cat in to give him some food and milk, after the girls were taken to hospital,’ Andy explained. He chuckled. ‘Stella said in our interview that he’s never off the phone, using Twitter and WhatsApp and so on while he’s supposed to be working. Well, he shared these photos on his social media accounts as usual. Apparently he told Stella he was doing it to try to find the cat’s owner. But instead he made a joke of it, saying his aunt thought this cat had told her about an accident on the beach. He thought it was funny, said he thought she was barmy. But a couple of weeks later, when the networks started buzzing with pictures of the incident in Mudditon with the seagull, he looked at them and thought it could actually be the same cat. He showed his aunt, and she was convinced it was. After we ran our first news story, she contacted us to tell us about her experience.’ He held out a couple of pictures to Julian. ‘Printouts of the nephew’s shots,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

Well, everyone in the room now nearly fell over each other to get to the pictures. I tried to get a look myself, but they were all in my way.

‘I remember the boy holding his phone up at me,’ I meowed. I knew this made pictures appear. Were these the pictures? Were they pictures of me?

‘Let me see!’ Caroline was squealing.

‘Is it him?’ Laura said, looking excited.

‘Oh my God, Caro,’ Grace said. ‘Maybe it really was Charlie!’

Julian was the only one staying quiet. He held the pictures, staring at them, one after the other, with Caroline leaning on the back of the sofa, looking over his shoulder.

‘It’s him, Daddy, I know it is,’ she said. She sounded like she was about to start mewing. ‘Charlie came to my rescue! He saw me getting hurt, and went to get the lady from the café.’

‘It could be him,’ Julian said, sounding a bit less doubtful now. ‘What do you think, Laura?’ He passed her the pictures, and she looked at them with Nicky.

‘I think it is him,’ Laura said. ‘It’s how he looked before, Julian – before he got into the fight, or got attacked, or whatever, and got the injuries. Before he lost weight and everything.’

‘But why would he have been at Salty Cove?’ Nicky said.

‘He must have followed us,’ Grace said.

‘Yes, he must have done,’ Caroline agreed. ‘If he ran out of the house when we opened the door, then he must have trailed us all the way we walked that night, Grace, without us seeing him.’

‘Yes, and … oh my God, he must’ve seen us go in the beach hut, and … waited around outside all night,’ Grace said. ‘And then he saw what happened on the beach in the morning.’

‘Yes!’ I meowed. I jumped off Caroline’s lap and scampered around the room, doing a few little jumps of excitement so that they all laughed at me. ‘That’s what happened. But what I don’t know is what happened after you went off in the ambulance. Nobody’s told me.’

And it looked like nobody was going to, either. They were much too busy discussing the mystery (to them) of how I ended up back at Mudditon. Hello? I walked! It wasn’t very far, along the coast. Shouldn’t they have known that, if they were so clever? And then they were listening to Andy telling them how the film was going to be put together, with the café lady’s story, and Jean and Shirley’s story, as well as my family talking about me and their relief about having me back home.

When they were all ready, Andy held up a thing called a microphone and started talking to Caroline and Grace, while his friend Sandeep was filming them on his huge camera. By then, I’d finally begun to understand how I got inside the television that first time, because Sandeep had spent a while showing the girls the camera, playing back a bit of film to them. Because I was sitting on Caroline’s lap at the time, I could see that it did the same thing as their phones did when they filmed each other. And Sandeep explained that these moving pictures would eventually appear on people’s television screens. I can’t say it makes sense to me, any more than lots of the weird things humans do. But now I see there is some kind of connection between cameras or phones, and televisions, so maybe it isn’t actually magic.

It was nice being cuddled on Caroline’s lap while Andy talked to her about what happened in Mudditon. Because Julian had already warned him that the girls had been punished enough for running away, and he didn’t want it brought up again, Andy just referred to it as their little adventure that went wrong.

‘Charlie must have come with us, and followed us,’ Caroline said into the microphone. ‘We didn’t realise.’

‘But it seems it was a good thing he did,’ Andy said. ‘And when you and Grace got lost, he seems to have stood guard over you all night.’

‘Well, to be quite honest I fell asleep under a bench,’ I meowed. But Caroline stroked me and said yes, I must have been protecting them, which made me feel a bit guilty.

‘So can you tell us what happened the next morning?’ Andy asked, and Grace explained how the seagull swooped on their sandwiches and bit Caroline’s finger.

‘I tried to run off, and I must have tripped on the rocks,’ Caroline said. ‘I don’t really remember it very well.’

‘She hit her head, cut it open, and knocked herself out,’ Grace said.

‘That must have been very frightening,’ Andy said. ‘And it seems that’s when Charlie managed to get the attention of Stella at the café.’

‘Yes, that lady was very kind, and she said the boy had called an ambulance,’ Grace said.

‘And what a good job you were taken to hospital, Caroline,’ Julian said, sounding very serious.

I looked around the room. Everyone was much more serious now. Caroline was looking down at the floor and Laura reached out to put a paw on her arm.

‘Perhaps your dad would like to explain what happened, Caroline,’ Andy said, and the camera turned towards Julian.

‘Well, we’d been frantic with worry, of course,’ he said, ‘so when we got a call to say the girls were at the hospital, we – and Grace’s parents – rushed straight there. And Caroline—’

He broke off, swallowing hard. I looked up at him. Caroline what?

‘She looked dreadful,’ he said very quietly, ‘and there were doctors all round her. We … well, as you can probably imagine, we didn’t know what to think.’

‘We feared the worst,’ Laura said. ‘She’d been very ill, you see, and we were still waiting for results of a biopsy, to see whether there was a recurrence of her illness. So we were very, very worried at that point.’

‘They told us she’d had an accident, and at first all we could see was a wound on her finger,’ Julian said. ‘But she was so pale, and she kept complaining of a headache and feeling sick and dizzy.’

‘And she seemed quite confused,’ Laura added. ‘She wasn’t too sure where she was, or what had happened.’

‘And then, of course, the doctor showed us where she’d hit the back of her head when she fell, and that Grace had told them she’d been unconscious, so they were treating it as concussion,’ Julian said. ‘But when we told them about the leukaemia, and the fact that we’d been worried about her health recently, they obviously took that very seriously. And, well, to cut a long story short, if she hadn’t been taken straight to hospital, the concussion could have been missed, which could have had really serious consequences in itself. We might have thought her symptoms were linked to the … other health worries, you see.’ He shook his head. ‘It really doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘So it seems your little cat actually saved the day!’ Andy said, beaming at me.

‘If it really was Charlie who alerted someone to call an ambulance, then I’d say …’ Julian was looking at me too now, with a strange expression on his face, ‘to be honest, he could have actually saved her life.’