Шейла Нортон: Oliver The Cat Who Saved Christmas

Haven’t they given you a name yet, by the way? I can’t keep on calling you Little Kitten forever. What’s that you say? They’re calling you Kitty? What sort of a name is that for a boy cat, for heaven’s sake? Oh, I see, it’s just till they decide on a good name. Well, they’d better hurry up about it. I’m not calling you Kitty in front of all the other cats. You’d be a laughing stock.

Anyway, so I jumped down into Nicky and Daniel’s little yard and had a sniff around, but there wasn’t much there, and they had no cat flap so I couldn’t get inside the house. I remembered them saying they both went out to work all day, so I thought I’d go back and see them later. It was cold, so I was glad to get back inside Sarah’s nice warm kitchen and have a little nap in Sooty’s old bed.

A little later, I heard voices coming from the lounge. It was Sarah, and another female, and they were making peculiar noises that made my fur stand up in alarm.

‘A-cootchy-cootchy-coo!’ Sarah was going. ‘A-boo, cootchy-coo!’

Was she trying to imitate a pigeon? I sat up in bed, my head on one side, wondering whether it was safe to go into the lounge and look.

‘Ah, look at his little face!’ she was saying now. ‘Do you want your dum-dum, diddums?’

Dum-dum, diddums? Was this some foreign language I hadn’t come across before? One of the regulars in the pub used to speak something they called Spanish, and someone else spoke normal English but with a very funny accent they called American, but this was different altogether.

‘He probably wants feeding again,’ the other woman said in a more normal voice, sounding kind of weary. ‘Is that what you want, little man? Milky-poos?’

Milky-poos? It sounded disgusting, put like that. I slunk out of the kitchen, keeping to the walls, and peered around the lounge door. There was Sarah, sitting on the sofa with the other woman, and on her lap was this tiny, tiny human. Honestly, he was probably smaller than me! Well, I knew humans had kittens, obviously, like we do, but I never realised they started off so small. Not only that, he’d now started meowing just like a cat-kitten. It was all very confusing. As I watched, the new woman lifted him up, undid her shirt and started feeding him. This made a bit more sense. It reminded me of being fed by my own mother, along with my brothers and sisters, before … everything terrible happened, long ago. I couldn’t help myself from giving a little mew of sorrow at the bittersweet memory, and both women looked up and saw me.

‘Oh, here he is!’ Sarah said. ‘Oliver, our new house guest – but of course, you’ve met him already.’

Had she?

‘Oh yes.’ The other female smiled at me. She looked nice, probably a slightly younger female than Sarah, but her dark hair was tied back off her face as if she’d done it in a hurry, and her eyes looked like she needed a good long cat-nap. ‘What a little hero he is!’

A hero? What could she mean? She must be muddling me up with some other good-looking ginger-and-white cat.

‘I remember him from the pub,’ she went on. ‘We used to go there for a pie and a pint every Friday night, before we…’ Her face went a bit funny, then, like she was trying not to cry. ‘When I was working,’ she went on quickly. ‘Before I had the baby.’

‘You’ll be able to go out again, Hayley. Jack’s only a couple of months old, and things will get easier. When he’s stopped needing the night feeds, you’ll be able to get a babysitter.’

‘Will I?’ she said, sounding like she didn’t believe it. ‘Tom booked a table for us for Christmas Eve, you know, as a special treat. He said by then the baby should have settled down a bit, and I could ask one of the mums at the mother-and-baby group to recommend a babysitter. But now the pub’s gone.’

‘Couldn’t you go somewhere else? If you can get babysitters for an evening, Tom could drive you into town to the Italian restaurant, or that big chain pub. They do lovely cheap meals there.’

‘But there’s no mother-and-baby group now either! I’m so disappointed! I’d only just joined, and I was looking forward to getting to know some of the other mums with babies around here. It’s not just Little Broomford mums who come to the group, apparently. They come from Great Broomford and all the other villages around here, and how else can we get to know people, stuck out here in the back of beyond?’ Her voice was starting to sound like the wail of a cat crying. I wondered if I should go and rub my head against her legs. ‘I miss my colleagues in the office. I miss seeing lots of people every day. I even miss commuting on the bloody train.’

‘Of course you do,’ Sarah soothed her. ‘It’s a huge change, being at home with a little baby, after being out at work every day. But you’ll soon get used to it, really you will. Meanwhile, if you and Tom want to book somewhere for an evening out around Christmas time, I could babysit for you.’

‘Oh! Sarah, I couldn’t expect you to do that. You’ll be busy – you’ve got your own children. I hope you don’t think I was hinting.’ She went red and put her paw over her mouth.

‘Of course I don’t!’ Sarah smiled at her. ‘I remember what it was like, when my girls were babies. You need something to look forward to.’

‘Well, I was looking forward to Christmas this year. Jack’s first Christmas – it sounded so exciting. But now, I’m just so tired all the time, I can’t even be bothered to think about it. And I wish I didn’t feel so lonely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been really lovely talking to you. It was so kind of you to invite me round like this.’

‘It was nice of you to ask me if everything was all right,’ Sarah said. ‘I didn’t even notice you sitting there on the village green till I was on my way back from the bus-stop. You saw the whole thing?’

‘I did, yes. What a brave cat Oliver was, fronting up to that Michael Potts like a right little tiger! Scared the life out of him, didn’t he?’

A little tiger! I don’t mind saying, I purred out loud with pride. Both the women were laughing and giving me affectionate smiles. I did a happy circuit of the coffee table, and then rubbed myself against Sarah’s legs and gave her a blink of my eyes as a kiss. She was one of my humans now and I wanted her to know that I liked her.

When the children came back from school, I was pleased to see that Rose looked a bit happier.

‘Her friends were nice to her, about Sooty,’ Grace said. ‘And everyone wrote on her plaster – look!’

Sarah smiled as she read some of the messages. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘They’ve all written about how brave you were, Rose.’

‘And Oliver was brave, too, this morning, wasn’t he, Mummy!’ Grace said, running over to me and giving me a cuddle. I purred again with pleasure. I’d never been called brave or a tiger before today. I’d probably never been brave before!

Then Rose came over to me too. She was smiling and stroking me with her good paw, and when she said in a quiet little voice, ‘I love you, Oliver,’ Grace and Sarah both laughed out loud like they were really pleased and excited. I felt pretty good myself, too.

After I’d had my dinner, I decided it was time to pop back next door and see if Daniel and Nicky were home. Because they didn’t have a cat flap, I had to stand at the front door making as much noise as possible, and it wasn’t long before Nicky let me in. She seemed really happy to see me.

‘Look who’s here,’ she called to Daniel. ‘Ah, it’s lovely to see you again, Oliver. Have you had a good day?’