To Be A Cat

Barney’s Dream

YOU KNOW THAT expression I just used – ‘fell asleep’? Well, Barney did, but he’d never really understood exactly what it meant. Not until now, as he lay on his plate, falling through layers of treacly blackness. Down and down he fell, watching a shape float above him. A white shape, which at first he thought was a kind of cloud. But he recognized the shape of it, like a blurry number 6, and he realized this was the exact same shape as the patch of white fur around that cat’s eye.

And this shape grew and grew until eventually light had taken over the dark, and he was walking through this empty white landscape, to nowhere in particular. It was like walking through the Arctic, except without the cold. Not that it was warm, either. It was absolutely neutral. A place beyond temperature.

But then he heard a voice.

‘Barney!’

It was a voice he knew as well as any in the world.

‘Barney! I’m over here! This way!’

Barney looked around him but he couldn’t see anyone. He strained his eyes, as if to find a word on a blank sheet of paper. It was useless, but he kept trying. He was getting desperate now, because he wanted to see the person the voice belonged to.

He wanted, in short, to see his father.

‘Dad! Dad? Where are you?’

‘I’m still here, Barney. I’m alive!’

‘But where? I can’t see you.’

‘You’ll find me. Don’t worry!’

‘Dad? I can’t see you!’

And suddenly Barney felt darkness start to leak onto the white, descending in little moving lashes, like a thousand cat’s tails. Still he heard his dad’s voice, getting fainter and fainter. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon …’

‘What?’ asked Barney.

Then he felt something shaking his shoulders, and he looked up to see his mum.

‘Barney? Are you OK?’ his mum asked, examining his pale, jalfrezi-streaked face. ‘I think you might need the day off school tomorrow.’

And Barney nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. Or tried to. When he opened his mouth the only sound that came out was a strange release of air.

Like a gasp.

Or a hiss.

So he tried again. ‘Yes.’ And this time his voice was there.

Then, when he got home, he was strangely wide awake and shot upstairs, feeling the need to write something down, as if he almost knew that writing things down was something he might not be able to do in the future.