Two more days and nights passed. We kept each other warm, but we were getting weaker and more depressed. We’d given up meowing; it took too much energy. Worse than that was the emotional pain. That feeling of being dumped in the hedge like rubbish never left me in my whole life, but weaved and wandered through my aura in strands of anger and sorrow. We should have been normal happy little cats, but already, at four weeks old, our confidence was damaged, our sense of self-worth shaken. And we didn’t have our mother to teach us how to live.
I wondered if Jessica ever got over losing us, even me.
On our third day in the hedge, something terrifying happened.
We were sleeping, heaped together in a mound of fur, in a round nest we had made in the grass, when I woke up suddenly. The Labrador, Harriet, was looming over us, puffing and sniffing, a long pink tongue flopping from her mouth. I caught the smell and the gleam of her teeth set in pink and black shiny gums, and the look of thoughtfulness in her eyes as she reached down to me. Before I could move, she had opened her jaws and picked me up by the scruff.
I squealed and screeched. My heart lurched into a stream of beats. I tried to kick and scratch but she had me so tightly, stretching my skin so that my tiny legs splayed out and wouldn’t move. I hung there, hardly able to breathe, and the dog lifted me high in the air and walked off with me.
‘I can’t survive this. I can’t,’ I thought, panicking. But Harriet was plodding down the lane with me. She wasn’t going to put me down. I kept my baby-blue eyes wide open, and floating alongside us were splinters of coloured light, stars of turquoise, emerald and lime. My angel! My angel was there, escorting us in cloaks of light, and in total silence. The Angel of Secrets.
After that, I calmed down and let it happen. Harriet wasn’t eating me. She was taking me somewhere, the only way she knew how, in her mouth. An extraordinary thought dawned in me: this was a dog, a dear old dog who wanted to mother me.
She broke into a trot, and I was swinging, like it was when Jessica had carried me upstairs. I could see the dog’s tail wagging faster and faster. We reached a wicket gate in the hedge, and Harriet shoved it open with her paw, being careful not to bump me. She took me up a garden path and in through an open door.
‘Oh, Harriet! What have you got?’
A woman was sitting there on a cosy sofa. Harriet’s tail dropped and only the tip of it wagged apologetically as she gently put me down in the woman’s lap. I lay there in total shock. The woman’s lap smelled of bread and flowers. She gasped.
‘A KITTEN!’
I sat there, disorientated.
‘Where did you get that from?’ she asked Harriet loudly. And immediately the dog turned around and bounded out, her tail wagging madly. She turned the corner on one leg and galloped up the lane.
‘What a little beauty you are,’ whispered the woman. She cupped me gently in a pair of weathered hands, and I could have cried. The way she looked at me with such tenderness. Someone wanted me. I wasn’t rubbish. The dog hadn’t hurt me.
Minutes later, Harriet came back through the door, her tail bang banging against the wood, and in her mouth was one of my brothers. She did the same again. Put the traumatised kitten down next to me and charged out again to fetch the other one.
‘That dog!’ Tears were running down the woman’s face. ‘That dog is a miracle. A miracle.’
But this time the dog returned with a puzzled expression on her face, and she hadn’t got my brother. He was the all-black one, the biggest and bravest of us three kittens.
I never saw him again.
I’d have liked to stay in the cottage and cuddled up to Harriet for the rest of my life, but it wasn’t to be. A few days later, well fed and rested, we were put in another basket and taken, gently this time, to a Cat Rescue Centre, to await adoption.
I wanted to go with my brother. He was all I had. But the first person to look at us fell in love with me straight away. Her name was Gretel. I gazed up at her wrinkled face which was covered in powder, and her expectant eyes under blue-painted lids. Two tantalising pearls dangled from her ears and there was a halo of silvery hair. She pursed her red-painted lips, then opened her mouth very wide.
‘Oh, what a pretty kitten. Aren’t you a little poppet?’ she crooned, and picked me up as if I was made of gold. She held me against her pale pink sweater, and I managed to keep still, smelling her perfume and watching those earrings. Aware that my silver and white fur was exquisitely soft, my paws had pink pads, I knew I was beautiful, but I wasn’t sure if this was right for me. Was I good enough for Gretel?
I didn’t exactly have a choice.
Gretel looked at me silently for a moment, and then said,‘You are a darling, darling little Fuzzball.’ I hoped that wasn’t going to be my name, but then she turned to the cat lady and said, ‘Can I have her? She’s definitely THE ONE.’