To Be A Cat

Sardines

BARNEY FELT HIS new thick black hair rise all over his body.

Miss Whipmire was a cat!

‘Oh yes, true as a tail, as we cats say,’ she said, popping behind the desk and opening up a drawer. She pulled out a tin of sardines.

‘Do you know how many sardines you can buy on a headteacher’s salary?’ she asked, peeling off the lid and placing one of the oily fish into her mouth.

‘No, I don’t,’ Barney told her, remembering the smell of fish he’d noticed yesterday as a human sitting right here in her office. The smell that was stronger still now that he had cat nostrils.

‘A lot,’ she said, making no attempt to close her mouth as she chewed the fish. ‘Mmmmmmm, delicious. Better than cat food, I can tell you. Eugh. Cat food. That’s what I used to live on. And not just any cat food. The most disgusting cat food in the whole of Costslicers Supermarket – rabbit kidney.’

Miss Whipmire looked like she was about to be sick at the memory. But she became angry instead and beat her human fist down on her desk causing the pens in her weird pen pot to bounce about.

‘You see, everyone thought that Miss Whipmire – the real Miss Whipmire – was so lovely,’ she said bitterly. ‘Lovely Polly Whipmire! Even after two days in the job it was clear she was going to be a terrible head teacher, but no one minded, because she was such a wonderful person. Riding her little bicycle, being gentle and kind with all the children, loving her little Siamese cat …’ She shook her head. ‘Well, that’s not how I saw it. Not with her rabbit liver, and the tiny kitchen she used to shut me in.’

She ate another sardine, and another, and one more, the last while she closed her eyes, comforting herself with the taste.

‘But she doesn’t bother me now,’ she said in a most peculiar voice. A voice which sounded as cold as a grave in the night. ‘Oh, no, you don’t bother me now, do you, Polly?’

Barney realized she was no longer looking at him. She was gazing down at the table. At first he thought she was staring at the empty tin of sardines she had just placed there.

But no.

She was staring at the pen pot next to it. The funny-shaped black one with the holes. She leaned forward, took one of the school pens; the ones that said: BLANDFORD HIGH SCHOOL – YOUR CHILD IS OUR WORLD. And then she studied Barney’s face as she tapped the pen against the pot. The pot shaped like a skull.

A cat’s skull, he thought as he began to realize exactly what Miss Whipmire – or rather this cat who had become Miss Whipmire – was truly capable of.