There was a pond-sized puddle on the path. Still water lit by the faint morning sun.
Barney looked into the remnants of yesterday’s rain and saw a face he recognized. A cat’s face, with a white patch of fur around its left eye.
It was the cat he’d seen on his birthday. The one who’d made him feel dizzy. The one Barney had wished he could be in order not to have to face his mum.
To be a cat …
And so it was that, right there, Barney’s terrible mistake was confirmed.
A Whisper
HE WENT LEFT. He didn’t know why. Left just felt better than right. Instinct. And left was better, because he recognized the next street he came to, with its bigger detached houses and sky-high trees. It was where the Primm twins lived, but that’s not how Barney knew it. He knew it
because it was a street he had been on many times in his life. Because it was on the way to Blandford Library. Where his mum worked.
Where his mum was working right now.
He would go there.
Yes.
He would go there and make his mum understand. Somehow he would tell her the truth.
Her son was now a cat.
A cat, whom Miss Whipmire, along with half the swipers in Blandford, wanted dead.
Oh, and his dad was alive.
Yes, that really would take quite a bit of explaining.
A giant human appeared miles in front of Barney. It was one of his mum’s friends taking out heavy shopping bags from the boot of her car.
Claire! he shouted. Claire! Claire! Claire!
He stood at her ankles. Miaowing. Worth a shot, he thought. After all, Miss Whipmire won’t be the only former cat around here …
But it was no good.
Claire didn’t even look down as she crossed his path, nearly knocking him out with one of her bags as it swung boiler-sized tins of beans at his head.
Barney kept going, feeling very small indeed.
Walking down the road towards the library was like being in the depths of a valley, with enormous parked cars on one side of him and houses on the other. These houses, like all the houses in Blandford, were suddenly bigger than skyscrapers. It was weird. These were the streets he knew better than any other in the world, yet it might as well have been another planet.
Again he had the feeling that someone was watching him. He turned and saw nothing but a dark brown tail sticking out from behind the wheel of a parked car. The tail quickly whipped away.
Time to speed up, Barney said to himself.
He galloped, cat-style (of course), to the library, turning round every time he heard the tinkling of a collar.
Then, a whisper.
‘They’re after you,’ came a voice.
Barney looked. Couldn’t see anything except the wheel of a car.
‘What? The swipers?’
‘They follow Caramel,’ said the same dark brown cat he’d seen behind the car as he walked to the library, who – incidentally – was Mocha’s sister, born in the same litter (even if she hadn’t seen her sister for seven years). ‘She rewards their loyalty with sardines and catnip. In return she gets protection from some of the most deadly swipers in Blandford.’
‘Oh,’ said Barney, remembering what he had seen outside the school gates. ‘You mean Miss Whipmire.’
‘They’re getting closer. Hide.’ And then she darted away. A fast blur of chocolate-brown fur.
Barney only had a short distance to go, across the road and then the bowling green, but he felt exposed, and he panicked, the way he had seen insects panic when he’d turned over stones or lifted up plant pots in his garden.
I’m never going to scare an insect again, he told himself, if this is how it feels.
Then it was there.
One of the largest buildings in Blandford, made of glass like a giant greenhouse. Not the best hiding place in the world, now he thought about it.
There was his mother’s Mini in the car park.
He trod through a puddle of old rain and looked up at the steps which led to automatic doors. He doubted he’d be able to get them to open on his own. But then he saw a woman and her little boy arrive, so he waited and snuck in behind them, looking in every direction for his mother.
A City of Books
IT WAS A city of books.
Every aisle between the towering bookshelves was street-sized. The shelves themselves seemed impossibly high, but at least he was unseen here. Barney had deliberately chosen an aisle with no people. He looked up and saw the same label on all the shelves: Classic Literature. Authors S–Z.
He saw books with spines as tall and wide as doors, large names on them: William Shakespeare. Leo Tolstoy. Mark Twain. Voltaire. Barney had no idea that all four of these very famous dead writers had, at one time or another, been cats. Or that one of them had even admitted to having been a cat. (That one was Mark Twain, who had written very brilliant books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who were both boys but acted more like wild and adventurous cats, and were based on Mark Twain’s own early years as a tomcat. Hence the clue, Tom Sawyer.) Indeed, as I think I’ve told you, most of the really brilliant people who have ever lived have been cats at one time or another. And that is because many of the great cat geniuses, in cat form, get very fed up of not having the kind of wiggly thumbs and fingers that let you write a book.
And you know when people say, ‘I just don’t know where she (or he) gets it from’ – the ‘it’ meaning imagination or talent or nastiness? You can be pretty sure he (or she) gets it from having been a cat somewhere along the line. Or knowing or loving someone who used to be a cat.
Anyway, I digress. Let’s get back to—
Barney.
He was trying to lift his neck as high as possible to look over the lowest row of books. He saw the desk, but there was only a man at it. A man with orange hair and an orange moustache, eating an orange. Barney had seen him before, when he’d been here with his mum. The man was called Jeremy, Barney remembered, and he had been a bit grumpy.
He still looked grumpy now, actually, as he chewed his orange and stared crossly towards a noisy little girl and her mum who were in the far corner looking at picture books.
‘BORING!’ the girl was yelling as her mum showed her a book about crocodiles. ‘Want DVD!’
And she really liked saying ‘DVD’ so she kept on saying it, as a kind of chant. ‘DVD! DVD! DVD!’
Barney turned back round. If he didn’t find his mother soon, then someone else was bound to find him, and he’d be thrown outside to fend for himself against those evil and obviously super-powered cats.
And there she was!
Three bookshelves along. He could see her jeans. She must have been stacking more books back in place. The trouble was, there was no way of reaching her without stepping out into the view of the orange man. And, anyway, he couldn’t just reach his mum with no plan. How could he prove who he was? Then inspiration struck.
He had it!
It was perfect!
And a stroke of luck aided his plan. Barney heard an incredibly loud wail coming from the picture-book section. The little girl was now crying and screaming, throwing books all over the place.
‘No like croccy-dile! No like teddy bear! DVD! DVD! DVD!’
Her mother – a blonde lady wearing a lot of make-up – was crouching over her, hands hovering nervously, as though her daughter was a very dangerous and complicated bomb.
‘Calm down, Florence. It’s all right. Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go home and watch a DVD. You can watch Princess Piglet. That’s your favourite. And you can have some jelly stars too!’