Шейла Нортон - Charlie The Kitten Who Saved A Life

‘Well, that’ll be mentioned in this little follow-up film,’ Andy said. ‘It’s been pointed out, too, that the local feral cats help the situation by keeping down the food waste themselves. And some of the witnesses to Charlie’s little episode say there were feral cats hanging around behind him at the time.’

‘Probably waiting to attack him, poor Charlie!’ said Laura, who’d come back in now with the tray of coffee.

‘No, we were working as a team!’ I meowed, but as usual nobody was listening to me, even though I was supposed to be the hero.

‘I don’t know about that, of course,’ Andy said. ‘But according to our interviews with local people, gangs of feral cats had been seen chasing seagulls on several occasions around that time. It’s quite unusual behaviour! But it seems there’s been a change of attitude towards the cats in the town. They’re being tolerated more, on the whole, and a couple of local fishermen even went on record saying they’d taken to throwing them the occasional fish.’

I was delighted to hear this. I purred happily to myself at the thought of Big and the others getting free fish at the harbour and not being shooed away so often by the humans.

‘So what we’d like to do today,’ Andy went on, ‘is have a little chat with you all about Charlie – the background of how he went missing and how he was found. And of course we’ll film some footage of him being happy back at home here with the family, so that everyone – all his fans! – can see how much better he’s looking and how well he’s settled back down with you. We’ll add our own commentary with a recap of the seagull incident, reminding everyone about how he came to be so famous in the Mudditon area. And we’ll include the interview with the woman and boy from the beach café, of course.’

There was a silence.

‘What woman and boy?’ Julian said.

‘Which beach café?’ Laura asked at the same time.

‘Um …’ Andy rummaged through his papers again. ‘Stella Parkin, who runs the Seashells beach café at Salty Cove, just outside Mudditon – and her nephew Robbie who helps her … did we not tell you about this?’

‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘Was this the new development you mentioned on the phone? You said you’d fill us in today about it.’

‘Sorry, yes, so I did.’ He smiled around at us all, pausing as he looked at Grace, who I’d noticed had gone a bit pink in the face and was nudging Caroline and whispering to her.

‘Is she the lady who helped us when Caroline got hurt?’ Grace asked quietly. And when Andy nodded, she said, turning back to Caroline, ‘You remember, Caro. She got the boy to call an ambulance, and persuaded us that you needed to go to hospital. She was really kind.’

‘I don’t really remember that,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s all a bit of a blur.’

‘Of course it is,’ Laura soothed her. ‘So what have these people got to do with Charlie’s story, Andy?’

‘She’s convinced it was Charlie who alerted her to the accident,’ he said.

‘ What? ’ Julian said, looking surprised. ‘I can’t see how. Charlie was found in the harbour area at Mudditon, not at Salty Cove. Sorry, but it could’ve been any little tabby cat, couldn’t it?’

‘But, Daddy, I told you I thought I saw him, didn’t I?’ Caroline yelled, so loudly that baby Jessica, sitting in her little bouncy seat next to the sofa, jumped and started to cry. ‘I knew it was him. It’s the only clear memory I’ve got, of that day, until I got to the hospital.’

‘Yes, darling, but honestly, it isn’t very likely, is it?’

As you can imagine, by now I was meowing for all I was worth, trying to tell them it was true, it was me, I’d been there, I’d tried to help!

‘Actually, Mr Smythe, there are photos,’ Andy said. ‘Would you like to see them?’

‘Well, yes, of course, but how …?’ Julian was saying, looking confused, as Andy rummaged through his folder again.

‘Robbie from the café took some pictures of the cat on his phone. His aunt apparently took the cat in to give him some food and milk, after the girls were taken to hospital,’ Andy explained. He chuckled. ‘Stella said in our interview that he’s never off the phone, using Twitter and WhatsApp and so on while he’s supposed to be working. Well, he shared these photos on his social media accounts as usual. Apparently he told Stella he was doing it to try to find the cat’s owner. But instead he made a joke of it, saying his aunt thought this cat had told her about an accident on the beach. He thought it was funny, said he thought she was barmy. But a couple of weeks later, when the networks started buzzing with pictures of the incident in Mudditon with the seagull, he looked at them and thought it could actually be the same cat. He showed his aunt, and she was convinced it was. After we ran our first news story, she contacted us to tell us about her experience.’ He held out a couple of pictures to Julian. ‘Printouts of the nephew’s shots,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

Well, everyone in the room now nearly fell over each other to get to the pictures. I tried to get a look myself, but they were all in my way.

‘I remember the boy holding his phone up at me,’ I meowed. I knew this made pictures appear. Were these the pictures? Were they pictures of me?

‘Let me see!’ Caroline was squealing.

‘Is it him?’ Laura said, looking excited.

‘Oh my God, Caro,’ Grace said. ‘Maybe it really was Charlie!’

Julian was the only one staying quiet. He held the pictures, staring at them, one after the other, with Caroline leaning on the back of the sofa, looking over his shoulder.

‘It’s him, Daddy, I know it is,’ she said. She sounded like she was about to start mewing. ‘Charlie came to my rescue! He saw me getting hurt, and went to get the lady from the café.’

‘It could be him,’ Julian said, sounding a bit less doubtful now. ‘What do you think, Laura?’ He passed her the pictures, and she looked at them with Nicky.

‘I think it is him,’ Laura said. ‘It’s how he looked before, Julian – before he got into the fight, or got attacked, or whatever, and got the injuries. Before he lost weight and everything.’

‘But why would he have been at Salty Cove?’ Nicky said.

‘He must have followed us,’ Grace said.

‘Yes, he must have done,’ Caroline agreed. ‘If he ran out of the house when we opened the door, then he must have trailed us all the way we walked that night, Grace, without us seeing him.’

‘Yes, and … oh my God, he must’ve seen us go in the beach hut, and … waited around outside all night,’ Grace said. ‘And then he saw what happened on the beach in the morning.’

‘Yes!’ I meowed. I jumped off Caroline’s lap and scampered around the room, doing a few little jumps of excitement so that they all laughed at me. ‘That’s what happened. But what I don’t know is what happened after you went off in the ambulance. Nobody’s told me.’

And it looked like nobody was going to, either. They were much too busy discussing the mystery (to them) of how I ended up back at Mudditon. Hello? I walked! It wasn’t very far, along the coast. Shouldn’t they have known that, if they were so clever? And then they were listening to Andy telling them how the film was going to be put together, with the café lady’s story, and Jean and Shirley’s story, as well as my family talking about me and their relief about having me back home.

When they were all ready, Andy held up a thing called a microphone and started talking to Caroline and Grace, while his friend Sandeep was filming them on his huge camera. By then, I’d finally begun to understand how I got inside the television that first time, because Sandeep had spent a while showing the girls the camera, playing back a bit of film to them. Because I was sitting on Caroline’s lap at the time, I could see that it did the same thing as their phones did when they filmed each other. And Sandeep explained that these moving pictures would eventually appear on people’s television screens. I can’t say it makes sense to me, any more than lots of the weird things humans do. But now I see there is some kind of connection between cameras or phones, and televisions, so maybe it isn’t actually magic.