Холли Вебб - A Cat Called Penguin

“It’ll be tea time soon,” Alfie murmured. From his position in the tree, he could just about see into their kitchen window next door, and it looked like Mum was pottering about making sandwiches with leftover chicken. He yawned. “We’ll go back home in a minute.” He had to be careful to get back before Mum or Dad came looking for him – nobody knew that he was in next door’s garden.

Alfie and Penguin had found the loose board in the fence a little while after Penguin had arrived on Alfie’s doorstep. Alfie had been so excited about having a cat that for a few weeks he had followed Penguin everywhere, and Penguin hadn’t seemed to mind. Alfie had rolled underneath every bed in the house (although he didn’t fit under the sofa like Penguin did), wedged himself into the airing cupboard, and gone crawling through the flower beds down at the bottom of the garden.

Penguin particularly liked the flower beds. It had been late summer when he arrived and the weather had been horribly hot. Penguin had spent a lot of time collapsed under bushes, and Alfie had collapsed under them with him. They had watched, fascinated, as ants crawled past their noses and dry leaves tickled their ears.

When they weren’t slumped in the heat, they’d investigated every scrap of the garden, and it was behind the shed that they had made the discovery – the loose board, swinging from a nail where it had been badly mended once before. It was like a perfect little cat-and-boy-sized doorway. It had taken a couple of days for Alfie to pluck up the courage to go through it. He didn’t know much about the old lady next door, only her name, Mrs Barratt, and a few other odd little snippets. Mum had said she was ill, and couldn’t walk very far, not even up the stairs in her house. Dad moaned about the brambles snaking under the fence from her garden, and Mum told him off for being unkind, when the poor lady couldn’t really get out there with her garden tools, could she?

So Alfie knew that Mrs Barratt hardly ever went into her garden. And that it was overgrown enough to hide in. It was the perfect place for exploring.

At first Alfie and Penguin had followed tunnels through the brambles, Alfie tearing his shorts and staining his fingers and lips scarlet with squishy-ripe blackberries. They’d prowled through next door’s garden like a pair of panthers, Alfie loving the feel of being somewhere he shouldn’t really be, and Penguin pouncing on shadows like the overgrown kitten he was.

Alfie’s own garden didn’t have anything to explore. It was neat and divided up into what Mum called garden rooms. Lots of little hedges, and screens, and statues that popped up and surprised you. But it was so neat, it was useless for having adventures in.

The only good thing about it was that Mum could never quite tell which part of the garden Alfie was in. If he heard her calling him, it was easy to suggest he’d just been lurking behind the sweet peas, when actually he’d slipped back through the loose board, and emerged from behind the shed looking innocent.

Then one afternoon, a few weeks after they’d first ventured into the wilderness, Alfie and Penguin had discovered the tree. It was a huge old apple tree down at the far end of the garden, where it backed on to a little wood. The apple tree’s furthest branches joined the elderberries on the other side of the fence. It was first time they’d explored that far and the ground around the tree had been buzzing with drunken wasps, feeding on the fallen apples. Penguin had sniffed one, and jumped back in shock when it buzzed angrily at him, and flew wobbling away.

Alfie had stood staring up at the trunk, wondering if he could climb it. He could reach the first branch with his hands, but he’d never get a foot up there. He’d always wanted a treehouse. He supposed Mrs Barratt might notice if he built a house in her tree, but then Mum had said her eyesight wasn’t very good. Surely she wouldn’t notice him hidden in the branches? The next time he came through the fence, Alfie brought an old wooden box that had been round the back of the shed by the compost heap for ages. With that he could just scramble far enough up to get his elbows over the first branch.

He needed to grow. His mum was always complaining that he grew out of things – now for the first time Alfie was actually trying to grow on purpose. He started drinking more milk, but gave up after a week as it didn’t seem to work. He went back to the tree every day and stood underneath it, eyeing the huge branches. He would be able to see everything from up there. As far as his friend Oliver’s house down the road, he thought. Maybe even further. But he still couldn’t reach that vital first branch.

It was soon after then that Alfie found the rope. It was quite close to the house, which was probably why he hadn’t seen it before. He didn’t normally like to go too close, in case Mrs Barratt spotted him. He occasionally saw her, just a smudge behind the kitchen window blind, but no more. He wasn’t quite sure if that made her more scary or less. Alfie sometimes pretended she was a witch hidden behind the windows and if she caught him in her garden she would put him under an evil spell. It made the challenge of climbing the tree – a witch’s tree – even more exciting.

Alfie had heard her scolding Penguin through her window as well, telling him off for sitting on the fence and staring hungrily at the birds on her feeders.

It was one afternoon when he’d been trying to distract Penguin from the birds that Alfie spotted the rope. And it was the rope that got Alfie into the tree.

“Alfie! Alfie!” Mum was calling from the kitchen door. Alfie stopped daydreaming and peered down between the branches to check that she wasn’t looking over into Mrs Barratt’s garden. Then he slid quickly down the tree trunk, hardly using the rope at all. He was a lot taller than he had been two years ago, and the tree was easy to climb into now.

Penguin followed him, loping from branch to branch and springing down into the long grass. In the two years since they’d discovered the wilderness next door, it had only grown thicker and wilder. Every so often, Alfie borrowed Mum’s kitchen scissors to cut himself a way through the brambles, but they grew back like something out of a fairy tale. He was used to getting scratched; it was worth it, to have a whole land of adventure and mystery all to himself.

They shot back through the fence and emerged, wandering carelessly up their own garden.

“Hey, Mum.”

“Oh, there you are! Tea’s ready, Alfie. Just some sandwiches. And please don’t feed them to the cat – you know it’s not good for him.” She frowned down the garden. “Where were you?”

Alfie shrugged. “Just playing down at the bottom. There’s a massive spider hanging on a web outside the shed, did you know?”

Mum shuddered. She hated spiders, and the shed terrified her – she had to go in there to get her spades and things, but she did it at a run, not really looking, in case she saw one of the family of huge spiders that lived in the corners. They liked to lurk around the tools and pop out at her. If Alfie was around, she sent him to get the tools for her. Alfie quite liked spiders, but he tried not to get too close, because Penguin always wanted to hunt them. Alfie had seen him several times sitting by the shed looking rather embarrassed, with legs trailing out of the corners of his mouth like a set of extra whiskers. Alfie thought spiders must be tickly to swallow – they seemed to take a lot of gulping.