Oliver The Cat Who Saved Christmas

CHAPTER FIVE

Sarah seemed to be a long time coming back from the school bus. I went out in the garden and had a look around. There were a couple of big fat woodpigeons out there, always good for a spot of chasing, they’re so slow and stupid. I amused myself with them for a while until it got boring. Then I climbed the fence at the side and looked down into the little paved area outside Nicky and Daniel’s house. From here, their house looked even smaller, a bit like the toy house I’d seen in the children’s bedroom, with only one window at the bottom and one at the top. The roof was slanting and covered with moss and everything about it looked sort of wonky. It reminded me of an old tatty cat, struggling to stay upright, whereas Sarah and Martin’s house, although it wasn’t big like the pub, was younger and smarter, like a sleek, well-fed, well-groomed cat. Much like myself. No need to laugh, little kitten. I may not be a youngster anymore but I’m still in my prime, let me tell you. I could still give a little kitten like you a run for your money.

Haven’t they given you a name yet, by the way? I can’t keep on calling you Little Kitten forever. What’s that you say? They’re calling you Kitty? What sort of a name is that for a boy cat, for heaven’s sake? Oh, I see, it’s just till they decide on a good name. Well, they’d better hurry up about it. I’m not calling you Kitty in front of all the other cats. You’d be a laughing stock.

Anyway, so I jumped down into Nicky and Daniel’s little yard and had a sniff around, but there wasn’t much there, and they had no cat flap so I couldn’t get inside the house. I remembered them saying they both went out to work all day, so I thought I’d go back and see them later. It was cold, so I was glad to get back inside Sarah’s nice warm kitchen and have a little nap in Sooty’s old bed.

A little later, I heard voices coming from the lounge. It was Sarah, and another female, and they were making peculiar noises that made my fur stand up in alarm.

‘A-cootchy-cootchy-coo!’ Sarah was going. ‘A-boo, cootchy-coo!’

Was she trying to imitate a pigeon? I sat up in bed, my head on one side, wondering whether it was safe to go into the lounge and look.

‘Ah, look at his little face!’ she was saying now. ‘Do you want your dum-dum, diddums?’

Dum-dum, diddums? Was this some foreign language I hadn’t come across before? One of the regulars in the pub used to speak something they called Spanish, and someone else spoke normal English but with a very funny accent they called American, but this was different altogether.

‘He probably wants feeding again,’ the other woman said in a more normal voice, sounding kind of weary. ‘Is that what you want, little man? Milky-poos?’

Milky-poos? It sounded disgusting, put like that. I slunk out of the kitchen, keeping to the walls, and peered around the lounge door. There was Sarah, sitting on the sofa with the other woman, and on her lap was this tiny, tiny human. Honestly, he was probably smaller than me! Well, I knew humans had kittens, obviously, like we do, but I never realised they started off so small. Not only that, he’d now started meowing just like a cat-kitten. It was all very confusing. As I watched, the new woman lifted him up, undid her shirt and started feeding him. This made a bit more sense. It reminded me of being fed by my own mother, along with my brothers and sisters, before … everything terrible happened, long ago. I couldn’t help myself from giving a little mew of sorrow at the bittersweet memory, and both women looked up and saw me.

‘Oh, here he is!’ Sarah said. ‘Oliver, our new house guest – but of course, you’ve met him already.’

Had she?

‘Oh yes.’ The other female smiled at me. She looked nice, probably a slightly younger female than Sarah, but her dark hair was tied back off her face as if she’d done it in a hurry, and her eyes looked like she needed a good long cat-nap. ‘What a little hero he is!’

A hero? What could she mean? She must be muddling me up with some other good-looking ginger-and-white cat.

‘I remember him from the pub,’ she went on. ‘We used to go there for a pie and a pint every Friday night, before we…’ Her face went a bit funny, then, like she was trying not to cry. ‘When I was working,’ she went on quickly. ‘Before I had the baby.’

‘You’ll be able to go out again, Hayley. Jack’s only a couple of months old, and things will get easier. When he’s stopped needing the night feeds, you’ll be able to get a babysitter.’

‘Will I?’ she said, sounding like she didn’t believe it. ‘Tom booked a table for us for Christmas Eve, you know, as a special treat. He said by then the baby should have settled down a bit, and I could ask one of the mums at the mother-and-baby group to recommend a babysitter. But now the pub’s gone.’

‘Couldn’t you go somewhere else? If you can get babysitters for an evening, Tom could drive you into town to the Italian restaurant, or that big chain pub. They do lovely cheap meals there.’

‘But there’s no mother-and-baby group now either! I’m so disappointed! I’d only just joined, and I was looking forward to getting to know some of the other mums with babies around here. It’s not just Little Broomford mums who come to the group, apparently. They come from Great Broomford and all the other villages around here, and how else can we get to know people, stuck out here in the back of beyond?’ Her voice was starting to sound like the wail of a cat crying. I wondered if I should go and rub my head against her legs. ‘I miss my colleagues in the office. I miss seeing lots of people every day. I even miss commuting on the bloody train.’

‘Of course you do,’ Sarah soothed her. ‘It’s a huge change, being at home with a little baby, after being out at work every day. But you’ll soon get used to it, really you will. Meanwhile, if you and Tom want to book somewhere for an evening out around Christmas time, I could babysit for you.’

‘Oh! Sarah, I couldn’t expect you to do that. You’ll be busy – you’ve got your own children. I hope you don’t think I was hinting.’ She went red and put her paw over her mouth.

‘Of course I don’t!’ Sarah smiled at her. ‘I remember what it was like, when my girls were babies. You need something to look forward to.’

‘Well, I was looking forward to Christmas this year. Jack’s first Christmas – it sounded so exciting. But now, I’m just so tired all the time, I can’t even be bothered to think about it. And I wish I didn’t feel so lonely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been really lovely talking to you. It was so kind of you to invite me round like this.’

‘It was nice of you to ask me if everything was all right,’ Sarah said. ‘I didn’t even notice you sitting there on the village green till I was on my way back from the bus-stop. You saw the whole thing?’

‘I did, yes. What a brave cat Oliver was, fronting up to that Michael Potts like a right little tiger! Scared the life out of him, didn’t he?’

A little tiger! I don’t mind saying, I purred out loud with pride. Both the women were laughing and giving me affectionate smiles. I did a happy circuit of the coffee table, and then rubbed myself against Sarah’s legs and gave her a blink of my eyes as a kiss. She was one of my humans now and I wanted her to know that I liked her.

When the children came back from school, I was pleased to see that Rose looked a bit happier.

‘Her friends were nice to her, about Sooty,’ Grace said. ‘And everyone wrote on her plaster – look!’

Sarah smiled as she read some of the messages. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘They’ve all written about how brave you were, Rose.’

‘And Oliver was brave, too, this morning, wasn’t he, Mummy!’ Grace said, running over to me and giving me a cuddle. I purred again with pleasure. I’d never been called brave or a tiger before today. I’d probably never been brave before!

Then Rose came over to me too. She was smiling and stroking me with her good paw, and when she said in a quiet little voice, ‘I love you, Oliver,’ Grace and Sarah both laughed out loud like they were really pleased and excited. I felt pretty good myself, too.

After I’d had my dinner, I decided it was time to pop back next door and see if Daniel and Nicky were home. Because they didn’t have a cat flap, I had to stand at the front door making as much noise as possible, and it wasn’t long before Nicky let me in. She seemed really happy to see me.

‘Look who’s here,’ she called to Daniel. ‘Ah, it’s lovely to see you again, Oliver. Have you had a good day?’

I wanted to tell her all about being a brave tiger, and cheering little Rose up, but I just had to make do with a lot of purring.

‘I’ll give him a saucer of milk. I’m sure that won’t strain the finances too much,’ she said, going to the fridge.

‘I get paid this week,’ Daniel said. ‘Maybe then we can help Martin and Sarah out a bit with feeding him.’

Just then, the phone started ringing and he answered it while I drank my lovely milk.

‘Yes, this is Daniel,’ he was saying. ‘Oh yes, hello, George. I know, I was here when Martin called you. Oh, well, of course not! You’ve had such a terrible shock, and such a lot to think about, I can understand that you wouldn’t have been able to think straight. Yes, it must have been a relief to know Oliver’s all right. He’s here in the kitchen with me right now, actually, drinking some milk! Yes, he’s absolutely fine, don’t worry.’ There was a long pause, and then: ‘Oh, no, George – no, it’s actually … no, look, it’s not us you need to give it to. No, listen, we’re not actually feeding him – Martin and Sarah are. We’re kind-of sharing looking after Oliver, you see, because Nicky and I are out at work all day, and Sarah and the kids are more company for him. Yes, and I know they’re happy to do it. Well, you’d need to ask them, really, but honestly, you mustn’t send us any money – he’s not costing us anything, you see. No, that’s just a drop of milk! Honestly, Sarah’s feeding him! OK, well you discuss it with them, then. Nice to speak to you. Hope you’re settling down all right with your sister. Bye.’

‘Was George offering to pay for Oliver’s keep?’ Nicky asked as I washed myself thoroughly after finishing the milk. She’d come to listen at the kitchen doorway.

I meowed at the sound of George’s name. He must have been thinking about me, missing me, to phone them like that.

‘Yes, he said he felt terrible for not suggesting it the other day. He’d been so overwhelmed with relief about Oliver being OK. And now he wanted to send us a cheque! Even when I explained that we weren’t the ones feeding him, he tried to argue that it must be costing us something to give him a drop of milk now and then.’

‘Ah, it was nice of him to offer. And that’s good if he’s going to send next door a bit of money to help with the food.’

‘Yes. I don’t feel quite so guilty about it now. It was pretty embarrassing having to admit to Martin that we’re so hard up we couldn’t even buy a few cans of cat food.’

‘Perhaps my parents were right, Dan.’ Nicky sounded sad. ‘We should have waited. Moving in together before we had enough money was stupid, wasn’t it. We can barely even pay the rent.’

‘But it was awful living with your parents. I’m sorry, Nick, it was good of them to let us, but we both know it wasn’t working out. They don’t really approve of me, and it’s affected your relationship with them.’ He sighed. ‘Maybe they were right. Maybe you should have found someone better, someone with more money who could support you properly.’

‘Don’t say that! You know I didn’t want anyone else.’ She put her arms round him and hugged him, and I felt so sorry for them both I joined in, walking round both their legs and stroking them with my head until they started to laugh.

‘At least Oliver doesn’t care whether we’re rich or poor,’ Daniel said.

‘I don’t care either. We’ll manage somehow, Dan. And when my parents see how we’ve made a go of it, they’ll change their minds, I know they will. They’re not unreasonable, and it’s not that they don’t like you. They just worry.’

Daniel nodded and gave her another hug, and went back into the living room to read the paper. Nicky stayed in the kitchen with me for a minute, watching me finishing my wash.

‘The trouble is, Ollie,’ she said to me in a soft little voice that wouldn’t carry into the other room, ‘he doesn’t know that they planned to come and see us at Christmas. They were going to stay overnight at the pub. It would’ve been the first time they’d made the effort to visit since we moved in. My two brothers were coming too. We can’t possibly put them up here – we’ve only got one bedroom and it’s tiny. They’re not going to be impressed when I tell them they can’t come.’

Oh dear. I didn’t really understand why her parents seemed to have made Nicky and Daniel unhappy. But it was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to be able to stay at the pub now. I was beginning to see that the fire was making a lot of difficulties for my new human friends, as well as for me and George. If only I could think of a way to help.