To Be A Cat

Waking Up

BEFORE HE EVEN opened his eyes for the day to begin, Barney knew something was wrong.

His mouth felt like a desert. His heart was racing fast but gently, like a drum roll at low volume. But that wasn’t all. His whole body felt different. Warmer, for one thing, but also more hunched in, like a closed fist that couldn’t open.

He could feel a softness on top of him. A big, heavy softness. When he opened his eyes it made no difference, because it was still totally dark. Quickly, though, he could see patterns in front and around him, as if he had suddenly developed night vision.

Long, black, teardrop-shaped shadows stood out against grey.

I’m in a cave.

A very soft, low – and particularly warm – cave.

As he became more alert he realized this was ridiculous. He decided he must be under his own duvet. But how could it have grown so big?

Barney tried to get to his feet but couldn’t, or at least not in the way he normally got to his feet. He was standing up, and yet his back was still pressed against the soft, warm gigantic cave of a duvet.

He moved forward, but his arms and legs weren’t working like they normally did. Something was wrong with his coordination. And where were his knees? What had happened to them? It was as though his skeleton was a jigsaw puzzle that had been mixed up overnight. Things that should have bent didn’t. Things that shouldn’t have did. And some pieces of his bone-jigsaw were entirely new. Most notably, he could feel something trailing behind his back. Something that he could move in various ways as if it was made of ten elbows joined together.

Mum, he said, or tried to. And then, pointlessly: Dad. But he couldn’t make words, just noises.

Trapped as he was in this strange new body, he started to panic. Barney urgently wanted to get out of the darkness, and the only way he could think of doing that was to crawl from under it. So he did. Shuffling forward on his new limbs, with his head low and his legs close to the spongy floor, he pushed his way through.

And then he was there, out in the cold light of morning.

He looked down to see a great vastness that at first seemed like an ocean. The length of the drop was at least three times his height so it took a moment to realize that the great blue vastness he was looking down at was his own carpet.

This was his bed.

This was his room.

But everything had grown beyond all possibility. The wardrobe was the size of a house. The bedside lamp peered down at him like some strange armless robot. The door was miles away. And the school uniform which hung over his chair belonged to a giant.

Next he saw something which made even less sense.

His hands, or his feet – he couldn’t tell which – were entirely covered with hair. And they were fingerless. Toeless. He turned his head to see what he had only felt so far. A tail. Curled into a quivering kind of question mark, as though the rest of his body was a query wanting an answer.

It was impossible.

He was still Barney. His ‘Barney-ness’ was still there in his head, his mind still the same bulging suitcase of memories and emotions. But at the same time he already knew he wasn’t him at all. He was something else. Something so impossible that he thought this had to be a dream, like the one he’d had about his father.

He blinked, and then blinked some more.

No. There was no doubt about it.

He was awake.

Indeed, he was as awake as he had ever been. So, to his horror, he had to believe what his eyes were telling him, and what the black hair and the tail and the paws were telling him. And what they were telling him was this: he may have gone to bed human, but he had woken up unquestionably, unmistakably, unimaginably cat.