Lynne Barrett-Lee - Able Seacat Simon

‘Well, well, well, well!’ it said. ‘What do we have here, then?’

The still-lucky shrew streaked away out of sight, but I realised I had no such possibility. Not without turning round, and I knew I mustn’t do that. So, instead, I arched my back, and I hissed.

The human – a man – opened his mouth again and laughed at me. ‘Hey, little feller, don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.’

I hissed again, drawing my lips back, partly in rage, partly in terror, all the while trying to work out my own best means of escape. Should I make a leap for the nearest barrel? Scale the sacks just ahead of me? Try to squeeze myself through the tiny space by the wall, as the shrew had? It was clear from the way the man was still looking down at me that he wasn’t going to leave me alone yet.

‘Hey, kitty, kitty,’ he said, looming even closer, squatting down on his haunches and extending his arm.

I knew about this. Sometimes humans liked to offer things to you and then, when you plucked up the courage to inch closer, would grab you and take you away and put you in a cage. My terror intensified as soon as that thought popped into my head, because I knew all about cats being put in cages. It was probably only because I was still a kitten that I hadn’t yet been in one – because putting kittens in cages was considered bad luck.

But perhaps the human in front of me didn’t know about bad luck, so I shrank further back against the wall and hissed at him a third time.

Again he laughed. ‘Don’t be scared, little feller. Don’t be frightened.’ And then he reached all the way to me and just as I tensed, stricken, he smoothed his huge human hand all the way down my back, like the kind lady in the big house used to do.

‘There,’ he said. ‘My, you’re just skin and bone, aren’t you, Blackie? Shall I see if I can find you something to eat?’

Eat . He meant food. And I was starving, so I wavered. But most humans weren’t like the lady in the big house. I knew that too. I saw my chance. Spied the sack. Made a leap and scrabbled up it. Then ran away just as fast as my legs could carry me.

I never knew what happened to the brothers and sisters who’d been born along with me. My mother never said, and I was too scared to ask, for fear of hearing something that would frighten me. Cats were supposed to have nine lives – it was one of the first things I ever remember her telling me – but even so, one by one, all of them had disappeared. ‘Such a shame,’ the lady in the big house used to say, shaking her head as she stroked the tips of my mother’s ears.

And now they had gone too, both the kind lady and my mother. I couldn’t help wonder why I’d worried so much about hearing about my brothers and sisters, because now that I was completely alone in the world I’d have liked to know what had become of them. And, besides, being afraid of almost everything now felt normal.

Fear travelled with me everywhere because there was so much to be frightened of. It had almost become something of a friend. It accompanied me on all my hunting forays, curled up with me wherever I hid myself away to sleep, whispered in my ears as I prowled around the island, trying to keep to the secret places and shadows.

I knew fear was a good thing, that it would help keep me out of danger, but it was beginning to be such a constant and insistent companion that there hardly seemed room for anything else. But I was a kitten, soon to be a cat, and there was something else still burning bright in me – the curiosity that I’d been born with. And that night, as on most nights, as I padded along the jetty, it was still up to the stars that I looked, rather than down to the planks beneath my paws.

It was midnight. And, bar the gentle slip and slosh of the waves, silent. The noise of the harbour always lessened as the moon rose, almost as if it had been instructed to do so. Just now, the huge orb was low-lying and lemony, but I knew it would soon rise up to take its place among the stars, becoming smaller and brighter and whiter.

Bathed in its glow, the city of Hong Kong was transformed. By day full of the sights, sounds and scents of human industry, by night, from my vantage point at the far end of the jetty, it seemed a less scary, more pretty place altogether. One strung with distant lights, where diamonds danced on the water.

This is our time , my mother had often explained to me, as we’d sit and gaze out over the inky expanse together. The time when the humans are all going to sleep. The time when the moon is our friend.

I had liked the moon then. I liked it even more now. Moonlight always seemed to me the friendliest light of all – particularly now that she had left me. The starlight, too, from stars that every living thing had originally come from. Stars to which the soul of every cat always returned.

I took up my usual position and curled my tail around my paws, feeling the breeze tickle my whiskers and the salt prick my nose as I watched the water lapping lazily at the jetty’s wooden pillars. Then I gazed up, imagining my mother up there somewhere, looking down at me. Remembering how, a while before she’d been run down and taken from me, she’d told me that she would always be there, watching over me, whatever happened.

I’ll be enjoying my ninth life , she’d told me, which had initially confused me. So she’d explained that cats were lucky. Perhaps the luckiest of all the creatures. Because our nine lives meant more than perhaps I’d imagined; the eight on earth, which was why cats could afford be so curious and courageous, and then the ninth, up in the stars for all eternity.

I gazed at the moon, wishing eternity didn’t feel quite so far away, then padded back towards the beach, in search of prey.

Prey was always on my mind but, as hard as I tried, prey kept managing to elude me. By the time the dawn broke on another day I was so weak with fatigue and hunger that the dock, with its slim promise of scraps to pick over, seemed once again the only place left to go. At the very least, I knew I could find a sheltered spot in which to rest before trying again.

So I returned, trying to pad my way lightly along the soggy paths and alleyways, always on the lookout and alert to new scents but, bar a brown snake that reared up and hissed at me threateningly, still failing to find anything to pounce on. But it wasn’t just my empty stomach that was drawing me back. Despite my knowing what my mother had said about how dangerous it was to show myself, the memory of the kind man I’d met the day before had stayed with me. And as I slipped once again through the holes in the fences, I kept going back to what he’d said. Did he really mean me no harm? Could I trust him? Might he feed me? Despite the danger, I wanted to find out.

When my mum had still been with me, I’d been curious about everything. So much so that there had been many times when she’d been the fearful one. When my curiosity might well have got me into trouble, had she not been there to remind me of all the hazards in the world. I was curious again now.

And the more I thought about the man’s kindness, the more I wondered. Had I been right to run away from him after all?

Yes, of course you were right to run away , I could hear my mother’s voice telling me. Who knows what might have happened to you? Humans are dangerous.

But a part of me – a guilty part, even as it was a defiant part – kept thinking no . Because it seemed to me that not all humans were dangerous. Snakes were dangerous. Rats were dangerous. (My mother had had a scar on her nose to prove it.) Cars and trucks were extremely dangerous, as was everything else that travelled so fast and so threateningly along the big road. I knew I wouldn’t forget about that, ever.