He took us outside, and that was the first time I saw the sky and smelled the lawn. A bird was singing high up in one of the trees, and women and children were walking past with pushchairs. No one seemed to care about us, three kittens suddenly wrenched away from their mother. Jessica was at the window, crying and crying, clawing at the glass with her pink paws.
‘You will take them to the Cat Sanctuary, won’t you?’ said Ellen to Joe.
‘Course I will. Stop fussing.’ Joe swung the basket into a car and another door was banged in our faces. Seriously worried now, we were climbing all over the inside of the basket, desperately seeking a crack or a hole through which we could escape.
The inside of the car smelled of beer and socks. It squealed and rattled as Joe drove us away from our home and our mother, away from Solomon, away from Ellen and John. We travelled fast, the basket lurching as the car hurtled round corners. We grew hot with fear and exhausted by our efforts to escape.
‘Nearly there, guys,’ said Joe. He hauled the car around a sharp bend and slowed down. ‘Here we are. Cat Sanctuary.’
He turned the engine off, and there was only the sound of our three baby voices crying and crying for our mother cat. Joe swung the basket out of the car and walked towards a pair of high wire gates. He stopped in front of them, looking at a notice board.
And then he exploded.
‘SHIT,’ he bellowed. ‘They’re shitting CLOSED.’
He kicked at the wire gates. He put the basket down and rattled the gates with both hands.
‘What’s the good of a cat sanctuary that’s CLOSED!’ he roared. ‘Well, you’ll have to go somewhere. I’ve gotta get back. I can’t be doing with a bunch of wailing cats.’
He flung our basket into the hedge. Then he got back into the car, reversed it and roared off, filling the lane with black smoke and a storm of gravel.
And he left us there, three terrified kittens cowering in a corner of the basket.
Minutes later, the car came racing back and skidded to a halt. Joe got out, swigging beer from a can. Still swearing, he seized our basket, opened it and tipped us out like rubbish into the long wet grass.
Chapter Two
A BAD CAT
I learned a lot during those lonely hours in the hedge.
My brothers were both black; they were mates and didn’t care about me, so I followed them as they crawled deep into the hedge. We had to keep each other warm. We found a dry twiggy hollow at the roots of a hawthorn tree and pressed close together. Hungry and tired, we slept, and when we woke, nothing had changed except the sunlight, which was nowa brassy pink. We’d grown up under a bed, and we hadn’t learned about day and night, earth and sky, sun and rain.
Soon we were starving. We spent the night creeping about, not far away from each other, tasting anything we could find; worms, slugs, beetles, all disgusting and too tough for our delicate new teeth. We licked raindrops from the leaves and blades of grass, and we did a lot of meowing, hoping our mother would come and find us.
I tried to see my angel, but I was too little to remember how. Her voice whispered to me, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to hear.
‘Your mother is far away,’ she said. ‘Jessica and Solomon were put in the basket and taken away, hundreds of miles. You won’t see them again in this lifetime.’
But she coaxed me out in the morning to feel the sun on my fur, and this time my brothers followed me. We sat at the edge of the lane on hot stones, and the sun’s warmth was a new and healing experience for us. The sound of a dog barking sent us scurrying back to our twiggy hollow. I’d never seen a real dog and, curious, I crawled out on my own through the narrow grass tunnel we’d made.
I peeped, and immediately regretted it. Towering over me was a very stiff black Labrador with such a tail, wagging up in the sky. Its ears were up and its brown eyes were staring at me. It gave a soft huffy sort of woof and its hot breath gusted over me. Too petrified to move, I stared back and we had a telepathic exchange. She was an old dog, wise and kindly; she wanted to tell me something, and she wanted to ask me a question. Her eyes were puzzled, as if she knew I shouldn’t be there.
‘Come on, Harriet. Whatever it is, leave it. I said LEAVE IT,’ called a voice from further down the lane.
Harriet gave an apologetic shrug, turned and trotted off, looking back at me just once, her paw in the air.
‘LEAVE IT,’ shouted the voice again. I was trembling with shock at my first encounter with a dog. The overwhelming smell of her, the thickness of her legs, the way she went stiff when she saw me. And yet, tiny as I was, I had a sudden sense of power. I was a CAT. Well, almost.