‘Promise.’ Leroy beamed and banged his hand against hers.
Angie tried to smile but her face was stiff. She stood up and walked slowly back to the house, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. I ran beside her with my tail up, and she was repeating and repeating the words:‘It’s the struggle that makes it strong.’
For once she didn’t pick me up for a cuddle. I sat on the windowsill and watched over her, offering the odd fragment of a purr, as she whizzed around the kitchen chopping vegetables and scooping them into a pan. Her aura was unusually dark, and her eyes joyless. She didn’t want to stop and look at me, and I figured it was because she knew that I knew. Talking about it, even to me, would be too painful.
Moments later a harrowing sound rang through the garden. Leroy was crying, louder than ever before. I peeped out and he was lying face down on the lawn, beating the earth with his fists. And Vati was padding proudly through the kitchen with the dragonfly hanging, broken, from his mouth. Resolutely he headed through the open door of the music room with his precious gift for Graham.
The singing stopped. Graham’s nose and mouth curled in disgust as he saw Vati’s gift lying by his shoe. At arm’s length he picked up the broken dragonfly by one of its glassy wings. ‘Yuk!’ Snarling, he crossed the room and held it high up above the trash can, which was a shiny tin with music notes painted on it. Graham dropped the dragonfly in there, and we heard the ping as it landed. ‘You horrible cat!’ he growled at Vati. I winced. Vati’s eyes filled with shock and pain. Running low and scared, he streaked out of the music room, his tail down, his eyes dark and frowning.
I followed Vati to the edge of the horse field and found him crouched inside an old barrel that was on its side in the hedge. He was devastated.
‘I’m not going back,’ he said. ‘I took Graham the nicest gift, the best thing I’ve ever caught, and he called me a horrible cat. And Leroy wants to kill me. What is it with humans?’
There were no words to comfort him, so I kissed his face and licked him, purring and caring. He soaked it up in silence, but he wouldn’t come back to the house with me.
‘I want to spend time with the moon and the stars,’ he said, and looked towards the blue hills far away across the fields.
‘This isn’t a very nice place to sit,’ I remarked, sniffing at the dirty old barrel he had used as a haven.
‘Oh … but it is,’ Vati said. ‘Open your eyes, Timba. This barrel is on a sacred node point where two of the golden lines intersect. Surely you can feel it?’
I couldn’t.
‘It energises me to sit here,’ Vati said. ‘If you want to listen to your Spirit Lion, you should come here and it will be easy for you.’
‘So what’s wrong with Graham?’ I asked.
‘He is trapped, like the dragonfly was, and struggling to get free.’
Leroy cried for hours over the dragonfly. To him it was a tragedy, to Vati it was a triumph and a perfect gift. To Graham it was something horrible.
Angie took the crying Leroy back out into the garden. She opened the shed, and he peered in.‘We’re going to do something AMAZING,’ she said, and put a spade into his hand. ‘You carry that.’
I followed them with my tail up into the vegetable garden, where I sat watching. I wanted to learn how Angie would stop Leroy crying so much.‘I know it’s sad,’ she said, ‘but we’ve done enough crying, don’t you think?’
Leroy shook his head miserably.
‘Well I’m going to move on,’ said Angie, ‘otherwise I’ll miss out on some of the other miracles happening in the garden. Now … do you remember what we buried in the ground, Leroy? Ages ago, in the spring?’
His eyes brightened.‘A potato,’ he said huskily. I ran to him and rubbed my fur against his bare legs, purring, trying to coax him out of his grief.
‘Well, now we’re going to dig down and see what’s happened to it. Who’s going to dig?’
‘Me. Let me!’
Leroy dug eagerly, flinging earth across the garden like a dog digging. I darted out of the way, flicking my tail, and sat up on a pile of wood to watch. I worried in case Leroy dug up the sleeping badger.
Angie helped him loosen the potato plant, easing it out in a shower of earth. From its roots hung a bunch of creamy white new potatoes. Leroy gasped. His mouth and eyes opened in astonishment. He scooped up the baby potatoes and dropped them into a bucket.‘FIFTEEN!’ he shouted, and his radiance lit up the garden. ‘We got fifteen potatoes.’
‘There’s the old one …’ Angie showed him the dusty old potato in the middle of it all. ‘And there’s more … look!’
Together they scrabbled in the earth like two rabbits.
‘It’s like buried treasure.’ Leroy grinned happily, his hands covered in soil, his eyes shining. ‘I didn’t know you could get potatoes out of the ground.’
‘Shall we cook them?’ said Angie. ‘Quick, help me before Graham goes out. We’ll have new potatoes with butter.’
‘New potatoes with butter,’ repeated Leroy.
‘You’re strong. You carry the bucket.’