Шейла Нортон - Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

Once again it was because of my new human friends Jean and Shirley. When I made my secret visits to them at the café, I often heard them talking about whatever had been written in their newspaper. On this particular occasion, a day or two after the Battle for the Chocolate Ice Cream, they were sitting with their heads close together, laughing, apparently, at a picture in it.

‘That’s so funny, Jean!’ the one called Shirley was saying. ‘Just look at that seagull, terrified of one little cat!’

‘Well, you’re right about one thing, Shirl, I’ll give you that – the wild cats have certainly started being a deterrent around here. I hope that poor old dear wasn’t badly hurt.’

‘No. My niece Holly was down on the seafront that day, as it happens, and saw the whole thing. She said the cat scared the seagull right off, and although the poor woman got a nasty shock and did drop her ice cream when she stumbled, she wasn’t hurt. Someone caught her and stopped her from falling over. Apparently a lot of other cats joined in afterwards but this little one had already saved the day.’ Then she picked the paper up again and held it closer to her face. ‘Hang on a minute!’ she said, sounding excited. ‘Who does this look like to you?’

They both stared at the paper again, then at me – I was sitting by Jean’s feet, where I’d been washing my whiskers after their usual treat of a saucer of milk.

‘Are you saying you think it’s him – our little friend here?’ Jean looked back at the paper again. ‘Well, you could be right, although to be fair there are probably lots of little feral tabbies like this around.’

‘Well, the person who sent this picture into the paper wasn’t the only one to have his camera out,’ said Shirley. ‘My niece told me she’d filmed the whole thing on her phone. She’s going to show me when she comes round tonight. She’s put it on Facebook, and YouTube apparently. She says it might go viral, whatever that means. She seems to think it’ll make her famous. Kids, eh? The ideas they get into their heads!’

‘It’s more likely to make the little cat famous!’ her friend remarked, and they both laughed.

Well, by now, as you can imagine, I was meowing my head off at them.

‘It was me who chased the seagull away from that old lady!’ I said. ‘I am that cat!’

But Jean had folded up the paper now and they were talking about something else. And even though I jumped up on Shirley’s lap and nudged her hands and arms with my head until she almost spilt her tea over me, they just gave me a little stroke and laughed at me, and nothing more was said about the picture.

When I rejoined Big and the others back at the yard, I was still so worked up about the whole thing, I couldn’t resist telling him what I’d overheard.

‘You mean to tell me you’ve been hanging around outside that café on your own while we were asleep?’ he meowed at me. ‘Have you suddenly got a death wish, these last few days?’

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I was just listening.’ I wondered if he could smell humans on me. What would he say if he knew I’d actually been cuddling up with them?

‘Charlie,’ he said in a stern meow, ‘I keep telling you not to take risks around humans. Even if some of them might not mind us so much now, you don’t know which ones might still be dangerous.’

‘They were talking about me , though! They had a picture of me in their newspaper.’

He gave me a pitying look. ‘Charlie, do us all a favour, right? Don’t let all the fuss about your bravery the other day go to your head. You’re a good little cat, at the end of the day, but nobody likes a show off.’

‘I’m not showing off!’ I protested. ‘I could hear what they were saying.’

‘Yes, I know you can understand Human. But please, don’t start telling me they’ve got pictures of you. That’s just too far-fetched for common sense.’

I knew I’d never convince him otherwise. For a start, he didn’t know about cameras and phones making pictures. Even I didn’t understand how it worked, how a picture of me had got from someone’s phone into the newspaper, but I did at least believe it was possible – I knew how clever humans could be with things like that. I didn’t like Big thinking I was just a show off, so I just dropped the subject. But Jean’s and Shirley’s words lingered in my head, and in my dreams, giving me a funny, fluttery, hopeful feeling that wouldn’t quite go away. Could it be true? Could the pictures from the humans’ cameras really make me famous? And if they did, would it actually be such a bad thing, after all – especially if I got famous enough to be sent back home to my family?

What happened next, though, was so surprising, I still have trouble understanding it myself, even though I’ve learnt more about it since. There are lots of things in the human world, of course, that I still don’t understand. So if any of the older cats among you can enlighten me, I’m always willing to be educated, even now I’m not a little kitten anymore.

A few days after I heard about my picture being in the newspaper, Big and I were walking along the street where all the shops were. We were once again heading to a different part of town to see if I recognised anywhere that could have been my holiday home. I remember I was feeling particularly sad, as we trotted along together, because Big had just asked me whether I should be thinking about giving up now. I’d already suspected that a couple of the boys were getting tired of helping me with the search, but Big was very loyal to me, and had said he’d keep on coming out with me for as long as I wanted to. I guessed he just thought that by giving up I could spare myself more disappointment. But how could I ever give up looking for Caroline and the rest of my family? It would feel like I’d forgotten them and stopped caring about them, and that was never going to happen.

I was getting to know the shops. There were the ones selling food, of course, where the windows were full of bread and cakes, or those boring things humans eat that grow on trees or bushes, and of course there was our favourite, the shop that displayed delicious looking body parts of dead prey, and whole chickens hanging up on hooks. Other shops were less interesting. They had humans’ clothes in the windows, or shoes, or books, or toys for human kittens. Then right at the end of the row of shops was one with lots of televisions in the window. If there weren’t any humans hanging around outside, we sometimes loitered here for a few minutes because the televisions were usually turned on, showing various different pictures, and Big and the other cats found them fascinating. They had no idea what televisions were, of course, never having been inside a human house. I’d tried to explain, but of course like all of us I’ve never really understood the need for them myself.

‘You mean they just sit there and watch these things all the time?’ Stinky had retorted when I first told him my family had two of them in our proper home at Little Broomford.

‘Well, mostly in the evenings, but yes, they can watch them whenever they want to. Sometimes there are special pictures for human kittens to watch. And sometimes there are pictures of lots of male humans chasing each other and kicking a ball. I’ve noticed that if I walk in front of the television waving my tail, they sometimes tell me off. But if the picture is of something like birds or fish, and I sit on the shelf on top of it and dangle a paw over it, they find it quite funny.’

‘Suffering catnip!’ Black had said. ‘Humans are the weirdest creatures in the world.’

‘And the pictures keep moving!’ Big had said.

‘Yes. I suppose it gives them some sort of a thrill, like us watching a bird hopping, or a mouse creeping along.’