After that I did manage to doze, but Jessica’s incessant yowling gave me a headache. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them everything had changed. We were on a quieter road, wandering between hills and rocks covered in heather and gorse. I could smell bracken and sheep. We’d been in the car for hours and hours, and it was raining hard. The rain swept sideways and mist rolled past the windows, thick and white, hiding everything.
‘I can’t see a thing,’ Joe kept grumbling. Sometimes he said, ‘I’ll throttle that cat.’
Jessica didn’t care. She had shredded the rug into a ball of string and peed on it, making her pink paws sore and red. She went on crying and crying and there was nothing I could do to comfort her.
Jessica and I were town cats. We’d both grown up on housing estates with walls and squares of garden, always with the noise of radios and children and lawn mowers. So when Joe finally stopped the car and turned off the engine, the silence, the wild smells and the furious rain of the countryside was electrifying. Quite exciting actually.
‘Here we are,’ said Ellen. ‘This is it. Home sweet home.’
‘I wish,’ growled Joe.
I sat up and tried to stretch, my head bumping the top of the cage. Close to the car was a weird-looking house with a pale cream door. It was on wheels like a car.
‘I don’t want to live in this poxy caravan,’ Joe complained, but Ellen was being cheerful, waking John up and chatting brightly.
‘Come on, it’s going to be lovely. We can make it nice. Now let’s get these poor cats out first. We’ll shut them in the end bedroom and butter their paws.’
‘Butter their paws?’ said John. ‘Don’t be silly Mummy!’
‘It’s what you have to do to help a cat when you move house,’ explained Ellen. ‘They get scared and want to run away, so you put butter on their paws and while they are licking it off they take in their new surroundings and settle down. Maybe it’s an old wives’ tale, but it works.’
The car door was opened, and rain came pelting in. Ellen whisked the cat basket into the caravan. It smelled of plastic, and it was freezing cold in there. She took us into a tiny bedroom, shut the door and let us out. Jessica crawled under the bed, but I was glad to cuddle up in Ellen’s arms. She sat on the bed with me and we looked out of the window at the swirling mist.
‘We’re in Cornwall, Solomon,’ she told me. ‘And it’s going to be lovely, you’ll see. You’re a Cornish cat now.’
She stroked me all over, smoothing my ruffled fur, and then she spread butter on my paws, put down a dish of water, and a plate of our favourite cat food.
‘You stay here, the pair of you, and when we’ve unloaded the car and it’s stopped raining, you can go and explore.’
Jessica stayed under the bed, but I sat up on top of a cupboard by the window and enjoyed licking the butter off my paws while I watched them unloading stuff from the car. I didn’t like the feel of the caravan. It was damp, and it shook all the time, especially when Joe was walking about and John was running from room to room squealing in excitement. I didn’t feel safe in there. It didn’t feel like home at all. As soon as it stopped raining, I vowed to go outside andfind a better place than this.
Later that evening we were allowed out of the bedroom, but the door to the outside remained firmly shut. I inspected everything, walking about nicely with my tail up. There were no stairs, and nowhere to play, no puss flap and no sofa. But I found a wide sunny windowsill and spread myself out on it. Jessica refused to take an interest in our new home. She slunk around suspiciously, her neck getting longer and longer as she peered into the tiny rooms and cupboards. Then she scrabbled at the outside door and yowled.
‘Don’t let her out,’ Ellen called from the bedroom where she was putting John to bed. He was crying.
‘I don’t like it here, Mummy. I want to go back to our old home.’
‘You can’t, darling. It’s not our house now.’
‘But why, Mummy?’
Ellen kept telling him, but he wouldn’t calm down and so I jumped onto his bed and lay close to him, purring.
‘There – Solomon’s here, and he’s all right,’ said Ellen.
I wasn’t all right. I wanted to go back to our old house too. The wanting started as a little ache inside my heart, but I didn’t let John know that. I curled up on his pillow and pretended to go to sleep until he stopped crying and snuggled down in his new bed.
‘One down, two to go,’ said Ellen wearily. ‘Now it’s Jessica’s turn.’
I watched in amazement as Ellen’s aura filled with stars, and the bright mist of an angel shimmered beside her. In that moment I felt proud to be her cat. Ellen had a special loving way of healing and calming any distressed creature. I remembered the times she had done it as a child, when she’d been surrounded with angels. Now I sat close, basking in the energy as if it was sunshine.
Ellen coaxed Jessica away from scrabbling at the door, picked her up and sat her on the amber velvet cushion, all the time stroking and talking in a low hypnotic voice.