Шейла Нортон - Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

By now we were approaching the area where all the shops were. I stayed close to the ferals, unsure what the procedure was.

‘Stay in that doorway, and watch me,’ Big said.

He stalked towards a rubbish bin outside the shop next to the one where I was waiting, and with a quick glance around him, leapt up onto the top of the bin, grabbed something in his mouth and ran back to me. It was all done in the flash of a cat’s eye.

‘Here you go,’ he said, dropping his trophy at my paws. ‘Help yourself. I’m going back for more.’

I sniffed the lump of food. Fish! Yes – just what I needed. I took a hungry bite and my appetite diminished straight away. What kind of fish was this? The outside was hard and crunchy! I spat it out, and tore at what was left of it with my teeth to investigate further. The inside looked nice enough – good white fish meat, a bit bland, but I had to be grateful for small mercies.

‘What on earth is it?’ I asked Big when he returned with another lump from the bin. ‘It’s all crunchy and horrible on the outside!’

‘Bit ungrateful, aren’t you?’ he remarked. ‘Is it true what they say about domestic cats – you’re so pampered, you can afford to be fussy eaters?’

‘Sorry,’ I said, immediately feeling ashamed. ‘You’re right. I’ve been used to the lovely food my humans hunt for me in the supermarkets. I suppose I am spoilt.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said easily. ‘You’ll have to eat whatever you can get now, like us, or you’ll starve. This is the type of fish humans buy from fish and chip shops. For some reason they like it covered in this stuff. Batter, they call it. Ruins the taste, doesn’t it, but the fish meat inside is OK, until it starts to go off, anyway. That’s why we only take what’s at the top of the bin.’ He took a bite of the second lump of food he’d brought back. ‘Want to try some of this?’

‘What is it?’ I asked doubtfully. It looked like mouse meat wrapped in bread.

‘They call it a burger. Don’t your humans eat them? I thought they all did. Round here, they even walk along the street eating them. Crazy! Then they wonder why the seagulls attack them!’

‘I think they do have them at home sometimes,’ I said. Just thinking about Laura cooking the dinners for my family made me feel sad all over again. ‘But I’ve never tried one.’

‘Help yourself. I’ll see what else I can find. Then we’ll move on to catch the others up at the Chinese takeaway. That’ll be an experience for you!’

I nibbled at the burger, discarding the bread, and then felt bad for being fussy. The meat part wasn’t bad, but it was smothered in something yellow and spicy that made me want to throw up. Then Big came back again, this time with a mouthful of chips. I knew all about them – I’d occasionally stolen one or two from my humans’ dinner plates when they hadn’t eaten them all. But these were different: greasy and slimy. I forced one down and hoped I wasn’t going to have an upset stomach.

‘If this is the sort of food humans eat around here,’ I commented, ‘they must have very strange tastes.’

‘Well, let’s face it,’ he said. ‘Humans are just plain weird. I’ve given up trying to work them out. I can’t understand what you see in them.’

And so the night went on. Exhausted, aching and starting to feel sick, I was forced to sample things I thought no self-respecting cat would ever let pass their whiskers. Now that my hunger had been eased, I really didn’t want to try balls of pig meat smeared with a bright red spicy sauce, or prawns that had been ruined by being covered in that awful batter stuff. But I didn’t want to offend Big and his friends, who were teaching me how to scavenge and might just as happily have left me to starve.

‘You’ll get a taste for these things in due course,’ Tail-less tried to comfort me as I retched on a piece of funny-tasting red sausage wrapped in stale bread.

But I wasn’t sure I ever could. When they finally led me back to their yard, Big showed me his sleeping place in a mossy crevice of a brick wall – and taking pity on me, offered to share it with me. Then I lay awake for ages, watching the dawn break, thinking about Julian and Laura, and whether they’d gone to the hospital to find Caroline and Grace. And whether Caroline’s wounds hurt as much as mine did. And … whether they all missed me. But eventually I mewed myself quietly to sleep, curled up against Big’s bony back, and dreamt I was back here in Little Broomford, chasing stupid pigeons in the Big House grounds. Oh, if only that dream would come true!

When I woke up the sun was shining brightly, but I could see from the length of the shadows that the day was already half over. I guessed I’d have to get used to this more nocturnal lifestyle while I was living with the feral gang. I just hoped it wasn’t going to go on for too long.

‘I need to start exploring the town again, to try to find my human family,’ I told Big when I found him washing himself under the lamppost. ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate your generosity in letting me stay with you and the boys. It’s very good of you to give me your protection.’

As you can tell, despite him calling me a hero the previous day, and seeming to like me well enough now, I was still a little wary of Big and I didn’t want to offend him.

‘All right, all right, no need for all that,’ he said. ‘I get it, you’re not one of us, and I suppose you’re missing your nice easy life with your tame humans.’ He paused. ‘But I’m not sure you should be off exploring on your own. You’re only a kid, and not very streetwise. You’ll probably get yourself lost again. Your eye is so swollen you can’t see properly.’

Yes, and whose fault was that?

‘What am I going to do, then? If I don’t find them soon, they might finish their holiday and go back to our normal home. And I’d never be able to get back there on my own. It’s on the other side of the universe – our car had to carry us here and it took nearly a whole day.’

‘Oh, they’re holiday humans, are they? Huh! They’re the worst sort,’ he said.

‘Mine aren’t!’ I retorted. ‘They’re very kind humans, actually, and they love cats.’

‘I bet they wouldn’t love us. Humans never do. They treat us like we’re rats,’ he said. ‘But still, I think a couple of us should come with you if you’re going to start touring the streets looking for them. I warn you, though, there could be a few fights if we trespass into other cats’ territories.’

‘I expect you’ll win, though.’

‘Of course we will. That goes without saying!’

Black, Stinky and Tail-less had joined us by now, and Tail-less was meowing about going to the harbour to try to steal a fish or two.

‘Good idea,’ Big agreed. ‘Let’s show our new little friend how it’s done. We have to be careful, as well as crafty,’ he said, as we began to move off.

‘Yes, you explained about the angry humans and the vicious seagulls,’ I said. It didn’t sound like my idea of fun. ‘Shouldn’t we just stay away?’ I think I’d proved myself not to be a Cowardy Cat now, but to be fair, my bites and scratches from the previous day were still sore, and I was walking with a limp.

‘What, and miss the chance of a nice bit of fish, fresh from the sea?’ squawked Stinky.

‘You can stay in the shadow of the humans’ pub place, and watch us from there,’ Big said. ‘Tail-less will stay with you and watch out for seagulls swooping down. Black and Stinky – you stand guard by the harbourmaster’s hut as usual. I’ll be the runner today. If anyone sees one of those humans by the boats, coming after me, you give me the cat-call, OK?’