To Be A Cat

The Unknowable Miss Whipmire

AS WE HAVE already discussed, Miss Whipmire was the scariest head teacher in the whole of Blandfordshire. You only had to say her name out loud to change the temperature to a few degrees below freezing. But, actually, the strangest thing was how little people knew about her.

True, they knew what she looked like.

They knew she was a very skinny, very tall woman. Basically a skin-wrapped skeleton with glasses that sat at the end of her nose so she could always look down at whoever was speaking to her.

They also knew she looked quite old. In fact, she looked about two hundred. But obviously she wasn’t. She was just living on Misery Time. (If you don’t already know, Misery Time means that miserable people get old very much quicker than happy people. Sour thoughts inside your head apparently make it look like a pickled walnut quite quickly.)

Of course, she did smile from time to time. At parents. And school governors. But she didn’t like smiling. It actually seemed to hurt her, but it was just something she had to do now and then to stay in her job.

People knew she drove to school in the slick silver car she had bought several months ago, but no one had been to her house since around the time she had been promoted to head teacher. No one had been invited, and they would have probably made an excuse even if they had.

Apparently, before Barney had arrived at the school, Miss Whipmire had been quite a nice and caring teacher. Back when she was just a deputy head. Someone who only raised her voice when absolutely necessary and never stared at anyone as if they were a dirty mark that needed rubbing out, which was how she now looked at the children in her school.

But a few days after she became head teacher, she changed. And everybody could see she looked crosser.

No one knew where that anger had come from. They just assumed it had something to do with her becoming the head.

But then, as I said, no one knew very much about Miss Whipmire. And certainly not Mrs Lavender, who had now arrived with the cat at Miss Whipmire’s office door.

She knocked. Waited nervously. Like everyone else, she was scared of her boss. Indeed, only last night she had woken up in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which Miss Whipmire had called her to her office for placing too many ticks on pupils’ homework.

‘You want ticks, I’ll give you ticks,’ she’d said in the dream, unleashing a whole army of fleas and leaving poor Mrs Lavender on the floor, itching like mad.

And she wasn’t the only one who was nervous now. Barney too was deeply scared. Admittedly, he’d never felt happy standing outside Miss Whipmire’s office, but this time he felt even worse than usual. His fur was standing on end and his whiskers were twitching with nervous anticipation.

He was sensing something. But he didn’t know exactly what it was he sensed.

You see, when you first become a cat you have a lot of cat senses, but the trouble is, you don’t know how to use them or understand what they mean. It’s like hearing a foreign language. You hear the words but can’t translate them. All Barney knew was that his claws were out and he was clinging to Mrs Lavender for dear life.

The door handle turned.

A moment later there she was, staring at the cat, intrigued. Maybe even a little hopeful.

‘What is this?’

‘It’s a cat,’ said Mrs Lavender. ‘I’m ever so sorry for disturbing you. It’s just I don’t know what to do with it. It came into my classroom.’

‘Your classroom? Well, I’ve always told you, Mrs Lavender, that you have a habit of making children act like animals, but this really is a step further, isn’t it?’

Mrs Lavender didn’t know if Miss Whipmire was joking. So she gave a very quiet laugh, hidden at the back of her throat like a dead mouse under a rug.

‘I thought it best to bring it to you,’ she said, ‘so you could maybe, possibly, perhaps call someone like animal welfare or a cat-rescue centre, or something.’

Miss Whipmire sucked in air through her nostrils, the way she always did when she was about to get furious. But she didn’t. She was too clever. ‘Absolutely. You are quite right, Mrs Lavender. You couldn’t be any more right if I sawed you in half and stole the whole left side of your body. I will indeed call the necessary authorities.’

‘Right.’

And then there was a very long silence. Long enough for Barney to say his prayers and for Miss Whipmire to bark at a late Year Eight shuffling to class and having a nose at what was going on. ‘If you want your eyes to take a holiday from their sockets, keep staring, you dopey slug,’ she said as the boy turned away in fear.

‘That was a little bit unfair, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Lavender in the poor boy’s defence.

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘But—’

‘Mrs Lavender, these children – all human children – are despicable brutes. They are poisonous weeds. If you water them with kindness, well, there goes the nice garden. Trim them, snip them, cut them down, that’s the best way.’

After which, Barney was grabbed roughly by the scruff of his furry neck and yanked from Mrs Lavender’s cardigan and its smell of warm summer meadows into Miss Whipmire’s thin, unloving arms.

As Barney was stroked too hard he imagined Miss Whipmire giving one of her painful smiles as she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it. You can go now.’

And he watched Mrs Lavender turn and walk away, the sound of her footsteps echoing and fading along the corridor until they were gone completely.