Stray E-Book

A.N. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Animal Antics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 289

Beschreibung

Clever, moving, imaginative and funny, this is both a wonderful adventure story, and a sly look at humans through the eyes of a cat. A cat of literary distinction - Naomi Lewis, Observer A.N. Wilson has written a classic... His episodic, quasi-picaresque story is deeply read-on, funny, moving and exciting (Literary Review). Pufftail the tabby cat was a prince among strays. He was charming, adventurous, a gentleman of the road - not for him a life purring around the shins of a Two Footer. Now that he's old and grey-whiskered, he can laze in the sun, telling the story of his life to his admiring young grandkitten. Not all his memories are happy though. He's been thrown out of a moving car, been experimented on in a science lab and joined the violent Cat Brotherhood. Some Two Footers have been kind to him, but he'd rather be free. And he can't understand humans at all. Why do they live in giant cages? Why do they put smoking chimneys in their mouths? And why do they want their own animals?

Leseprobe

Stray

Also by A. N. Wilson

Furball and the Mokes

Hazel the Guinea-Pig

The Tabitha Stories

First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Walker Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Text © 1987 A. N. Wilson

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 074 0 E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 075 7

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

contents

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen

chapter twenty

chapter one

Like all our race I was born blind and it was some days before I opened my eyes. Even when I could see I did not make much of what I saw. I suppose that this is partly because I was so small and the world was so big. I could see my brothers and my sister, snuggling, as I was, next to our mother. And I could see my mother – then. Often since I grew up I have seen a female cat suckling her young and I have tried to remember my own mother. I know that she was tabby with white markings – as I am myself – but I cannot remember her features. I can only remember the feeling of warmth and security I enjoyed for those first few days and weeks of my life, when I was alone somewhere, in a room, with just my mother and my brothers and my sister and no intrusion from the human world.

My mother must have had decent human minders. They had let her give birth to us. They had not drowned us as so many people drown kittens; and, as I say, they left us in peace. Being born and coming to life was for me like waking up after a long, delightfully deep and lazy sleep. There was no hurry about waking up. As I have told you, little grandson, for the first few days I did not even open my eyes. And then for quite a few days more I simply lay there, squeaking and purring with my tiny voice, and with a constant supply of delicious warm milk always laid on by my mother. Although I cannot remember her appearance, how well I remember that feeling of well-being, when I was cuddled up beside her – I think we were in a large open drawer at the bottom of a bed or a wardrobe – the warmth of her fur, the tenderness with which she licked us and groomed us and taught us to be clean.

After I was about a fortnight old I became aware that the world was not entirely populated by cats. My mother had begun to tell us that there were people in the world. But what could that mean to me when I had no idea what they were like? Then gradually, over the next few days or weeks, my brothers and I got to know the human look and that human smell. The drawer where we were lying peacefully would be roughly shaken and one would hear a grown-up human voice say, ‘Just peep at them, mind! Don’t touch them, yet, or it will disturb them!’ or ‘Aren’t they gorgeous.’

Of course I reconstruct what they said but this is the sort of thing I have heard drooling, well-meaning two-footers say when staring at kittens. And who can blame them? There are no creatures in the world more endearing than young kittens with large eyes and large paws and soft, fluffy little coats. Yes, even I was a young kitten once, though you may find it impossible to believe. Young and frisky and as silly as you. The first thing which struck me about the human beings was not what they said but what they looked like. I remember, when we had been visited a number of times by them, trying to focus my eyes on the enormous red faces which peered so closely at our own. At that stage nothing had happened to make me dread or fear the human race; but I think I did fear them. They seemed so large and, by the refined standards of my own mother, so very coarse and ugly. I remember the extraordinary smells they gave off as they peered at us – you know the human stench already and how horrible it is to animal nostrils.

But, as I say, though I was in the house of human kind, they were reasonably good specimens. Gradually, as we grew older, the people fed us with eggs and boiled chicken until we were used to solid foods. And before long they were feeding us on tinned foods and minced offal, and playing with us. We left the room where we were born and were carried down some stairs in a basket; and there, in front of a big fire, we would scamper about, chase balls of wool, and amuse ourselves and the people in whose house we had been born. They were still happy days, I suppose, but for me the days of pure and true happiness will always be the days in that bedroom, when it was just cats and no human interruptions.

Bright of eye and light of step, Tabitha came down the slope at the side of the house. She had just been having a quarrel with her neighbour Bundle. Not a serious quarrel but the sort of quarrel which both sides enjoy. Bundle had hissed at her and she had hissed at Bundle and then she had trotted off home, feeling pleased with herself. She was a mackerel-grey tabby cat with alert green eyes and a chin and chest of purest white. And Tabitha was Pufftail’s daughter.

Although she was only a year old, Tabitha had already given birth: to a litter of four kittens, in the previous autumn. Three of her kittens had gone to what the people who looked after her described as ‘good homes’. And one had been retained. The people called him Kitchener because he spent so much of his time in the kitchen. He had a pink nose and bright green inquisitive eyes, a little like hismother Tabby’s own. And he was a black and white cat, though largely black.

Old Father Pufftail lived in the street, but he was not a member of any human household. When it was very cold he crept through the cat-door at Number Twelve and slept in the kitchen there. Sometimes he lodged in a garden shed or a garage. But Old Father Pufftail was a proud and independent cat who called no man or woman or child his owner. He even resented being called by a name, though everyone in the street called him Pufftail; and he was, in fact, a much-loved local ‘character’. Tabitha loved her father. She took him for granted. She did not realize how unusual it is for a cat to know their father. Kitchener’s dad had visited Tabitha the previous summer from far away; and she still cherished the memory of him – a plump black tom with mysterious eyes. The evenings he had stood howling for her on the shed roof were very dear in her memory; and the warm, moonlit nights which had followed. But he was only a figure in her memory and she did not expect to see him again. Whereas Pufftail, who made such a thing of being wild, and a stray and independent, always hovered about.

Though he lived among dustbins and potting-sheds, though all his food was begged or stolen, Pufftail was every inch a gentleman – a gentleman of the road perhaps. Tabitha did not quite know the half of her father’s life. She knew that people had been unkind to him and she knew that he had endured great adventures before he met Tabitha’s mother. But of the details her father had told her little.

And there he sat, in the afternoon sunshine, on top of the garden wall with his grandson Kitchener, looking as sober and domestic as a neutered pedigree in a vicarage.

‘Grandfather is telling me about the good old days,’ said Kitchener as they saw his mother approach.

‘Your ears are dirty,’ said Tabitha, instinctively licking her son. ‘You’ll end up looking like your grandfather if you don’t wash.’

‘Oh, charming,’ said Pufftail. ‘You see what it is to have a loving daughter? You see why I hover about your house, with such irresistible compliments as this falling from your mother’s lips?’

‘What’s a comp thingamy?’ asked Kitchener with a look of innocence.

‘It is a nice thing you say about someone,’ said Tabitha. ‘And Grandfather was making a joke. He thinks I was being rude about him.’

‘And were you?’

‘A little,’ said Tabitha with a smile. ‘Now, Father, would you like me to go into the kitchen and see what I can see?’

‘Dear girl, you are kindness itself!’

Tabitha remembered that the people who shared her house had the extravagant habit of eating only the meat on lamb chops. There had been lamb chops for lunch and lots of nice fat left on the bones at the side of the people’s plates. She trotted indoors to get a couple of chops for her father’s supper, leaving Pufftail talking to little Kitchener. And all summer long that conversation went on. While Tabitha went about her useful tasks of making things neat, of snoozing, of bringing out food or chasing birds, or quarrelling with the neighbours, Pufftail sat at the dustbin end of the garden and told little Kitchener all about the old days. This is the story as he told it to him.

chapter two

When you have lived as many long years in the world as I have, you too will be full of memories which you want to share; and I hope that you have a grandkitten, as I do now, who will sit patiently and listen to you! With the onset of my old age I talk too much. I know that. One of the reasons I want to tell you the story of my life, however, is to try to teach you to be brave and free and independent, for you are a cat and not a slave to any other creature in the universe. But before I begin I have to admit that there is hardly a cat to be met with in our part of the world who is not pathetically dependent when young upon the human race. I do hear tell that in other worlds there are wild cats who live far from the habitations of men and who lead the free and wild and unfettered life which all cats are meant to lead. But it is not like that in our world, the world of streets and houses and dustbins. Nearly all the cats who are born in that world owe their survival to the human race. Coarse, smelly, ugly creatures, they may be. But it was two-footers who had it in their power, at my birth, to drown me or to save my life; it was two-footers who brought me food and who gave my mother warmth and, although it sticks in my throat to say so, it was two-footers who decided my fate.

I do not know how long it took before we were all weaned and independent of our mother. But I think that I was about eight weeks old when the happy security of my world was for ever broken. There were to be no more long hours snuggled with some old clothes in the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, clinging for comfort to that most wonderful of all mothers; no more innocent little journeys downstairs in a basket, no more happy gambols in front of a burning log fire, as the kind but foolish people played with us.

It is my belief that these people were trying to find us what human beings call ‘good homes’, for a number of two-footers came galumphing into that sitting-room to gawp at us as we played with balls of wool by the fire. I can remember with a very distinct horror the first time one of them picked me up. It was a powdery woman in spectacles with a very long nose.

‘Hello, darling!’ she said, holding me within an inch of her benign face. ‘Aren’t they sweet – but no, I think my heart has really gone out to the black and white one.’

So she took my sister instead. I have amused myself, many a time, by wondering what sort of a life my sister had with this kind spinster lady with the spectacles and the powdery nose. I should think that by now my sister is very comfortable and very genteel. Probably if she met me she would turn up her nose with the utmost disdain and rush indoors to her spinster-mistress with squeaks of indignation. ‘Squeak-squeak,’ she might say. ‘I very nearly came face to face with an alley-cat.’ So you did, my darling, so you did. For an ‘alley-cat’ is what I am and proud of it – as you shall hear. Not for me the comfortable parlour where my sister probably, at this very moment, snoozes while her mistress watches a boring programme on the electrical picture box. Not for me the ‘Naughty! Mind the potted plants’, whenever you feel like jumping on their ridiculous furniture. Not for me the whole horrible business of ‘Have you put the cat out, dear?’ And then the servile little trot to the back door, the saucer of milk, before being shut up for hours in the kitchen with a litter tray. If this is civilization, you can have it. Why your mother submits to it I do not know.

One of my brothers also went to a ‘good home’. We hardly noticed he was gone. Some children came round to have tea with the family where we lodged and at the end of the meal, after a session of quite gratifying cat worship, they walked out with a basket.

‘I think they will look after him,’ one of the human beings said when the children were gone.

‘Oh, I’m sure they will. And didn’t you see the look of excitement on Giles’s face?’

No, I had not seen it. But I saw the look of sadness on my mother’s face late that afternoon as she paced about the sitting-room looking for my brother and my sister. After a while she gave up the search. Being a cat – as you will soon discover if you do not know it already – is a story of unending and unexplained loss. We seldom know where our lost ones are and whether they have died, or been taken, or just moved on. This was my first glimpse of the fact; the sight of my poor mother, her tail swishing (yes, I can remember the swishing of that tail, even though all her other features – her face, and her colouring – elude my memory), hunting for her children and refusing to be comforted because they were not there.

The people in whose house I was born were a man and a woman and some children. In the few days after my brother was taken away there were endless conversations about what would become of the ‘other two’ – that is of me and my remaining brother. I really believe that they were on the verge of keeping us but the father of the household opposed the plan. It appeared that they were about to go on holiday and their house was to be occupied by some friends of theirs.

‘We can’t expect the Robinsons to look after three cats for a fortnight,’ he said one evening when my brother and I were sitting with our mother by the fire.

‘But,’ said a child, ‘they are such dear little kittens. Please, Daddy, please let us keep them.’

‘That was never the idea,’ said the man.

‘They’re very sweet now,’ said his wife, ‘but think what a handful they will be when they grow into tom cats.’

‘I’d help feed them,’ said another child.

‘It’s such a pity that the Harts let us down,’ said the woman. ‘Very unreliable, the Harts. They seemed so interested in the idea when we told them Georgina was expecting.’

‘They decided in the end on Siamese,’ said the man from behind his newspaper.

I never know why human beings have this habit of holding newspapers in front of their faces but presumably it is because even human beings find each other as ugly as we find them and they wish to hide themselves.

‘I think the obvious answer is to give them to a pet shop,’ he said from behind his newspaper-hide.

‘Oh, no!’ said one child.

And another said, ‘But Daddy.’

But Daddy said, ‘No buts.’ And then he put one of those small paper chimneys between his lips and lit it and began to fill the room with an unpleasant smoky smell.

So, that evening, my brother’s fate and mine was decided. We were both so young that we did not understand what the human beings were talking about. And I think our poor mother cannot have had the heart to explain to us what the discussion had meant. Recalling it now, that last night with my mother, it seems that she snuggled against us and licked us with particular tenderness. She cried a lot next morning when we were put into a basket. Till the day I die I will remember the sweet noise of my mother crying. At first my brother and I thought that we were merely being put into a basket in order to be taken downstairs to play. But this was a different kind of basket, with a sort of cage at the front. And I remember peering through the grille of that cage and looking for my mother and being unable to see her. I could only hear her plaintive voice calling to us her last sad goodbye. We never saw her again.

chapter three

We were taken to the pet shop by the woman of the house. Evidently, she had made some previous arrangement with the pet shop man because he expressed no surprise when she entered his shop and placed the basket, with us inside, on the counter.

‘Good morning, Mrs Wentworth. These are the little fellows, are they?’

‘It’s very sad to part with them,’ said Mrs Wentworth, ‘but I’m sure they will go to good homes.’

‘Oh, deary me, yes,’ said the pet shop man. ‘I never sell to anyone unless I’m quite sure they will be responsible owners. Now we have all the details, don’t we? You have had them injected?’

Apparently all these so-called necessities had been gone through and we had been taken to a vet and injected against all the various diseases which human beings fear we would catch. Funnily enough, I remember nothing about it. Presumably it was in that very basket where we now sat in the pet shop. All the other memories of what has happened to me since have overlaid the trivial one of visiting a vet.

The pet shop man had a very red shiny face and in him the human smell was even stronger than in the Wentworths. It was unpleasant when he pressed this shiny red face against the bars of the basket and said, ‘Oh yes, they look very nice young chaps. I shall have no difficulty in selling those. And the money we agreed was satisfactory?’

Mrs Wentworth was evidently happy with the financial arrangements.

‘It really will be hard to say goodbye,’ she said.

‘You needn’t worry, Madam. They will be quite safe and happy.’

What foolish and untrue words these were!

With his rather lumpy fingers the pet shop man picked us out of the basket one by one by the scruff of the neck.

‘This is the kindest way of handling a young cat,’ he said, doubtless in response to a pained expression on Mrs Wentworth’s face. ‘I’ll put them in the window, and, believe me, Madam, they’ll be sold in no time.’

After these words had been spoken I suppose that Mrs Wentworth slipped away taking that basket-cage with her. And at eight or nine weeks old my new life had begun.

I am a wary and suspicious character now but it was not so then. I was young and innocent. I looked at the world with large innocent green eyes and expected it all to be as comfortable and as kind as the household of the Wentworths. At first, the experience of being in the pet shop was so new and interesting that I quite forgot to be sad. The window in which my brother and I had been placed was like a sort of cage. Through the glass at one end of it we could look out at the street, and through the cage at the other we could look back into the shop. The shop smelt of seeds and hay but blending with this there was a delicious and appetizing aroma which my brother and I soon learnt to identify as mice. The mice were in a different window, at right angles to our own, but by looking across the shop we could see them. There were about ten of them being fattened up in a cage with little bowls of dried food. They were white mice with red eyes. I now consider white mice to taste insipid and much prefer the flavour of a house mouse. (Though, for true flavour, you cannot beat a brown field mouse, eaten very rapidly, soon after it has been killed.) At that stage neither my brother nor I had even thought of eating a mouse. We merely luxuriated in the smell and felt our mouths watering, as we watched the foolish little creatures in their cage scuttling about on a treadmill. There were also some gerbils and some hamsters which in my opinion are hardly worth the bother of catching. The proportion of fur to meat is decidedly unappetizing and you have to choose between taking ridiculously dainty mouthfuls and spitting out the fur in between or gulping them whole and then vomiting up the fur.

In a tank near the mouse cage there were some coloured fish, scudding about among the rocks and artificial plants with which these over-estimated delicacies are usually served in a human household. (Again, for taste, give me the great outdoors. The nicest fish I have ever eaten have been goldfish the size of kittens, scooped out of an ornamental pond in a garden.)

In spite of this range of tasty delicacies within our view, my brother and I were merely given some rather nasty little biscuits by the shop man. Once Mrs Wentworth had gone his tone became distinctly more surly.

‘You take your eyes off my fish or I’ll skin yer,’ he said to us rudely.

‘Skin you!’ echoed a loud screeching voice. ‘Skin you.’ It was a green parrot, which was kept in a cage, unhygienically near the bins of bran and rabbit food.

‘Shut your face,’ said the man. ‘The same goes for you.’

‘Skin you,’ shouted back the intrepid parrot.

‘Hello, sonny,’ said the shop man in quite a different voice, an oily ingratiating voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

A boy had come into the shop.

‘Got any lizards?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said the man. ‘We’re right out of lizards at the moment. Hoping to get some more in next week, but just at the moment there’s a shortage.’

‘Only, I wanted a green one,’ said the boy.

‘Like I say,’ said the man, ‘we’re hoping to get some in next week. Now, mice. We’ve got some lovely mice.’

‘I don’t want a mouse,’ said the boy. ‘I want a green lizard.’

‘Ever had a lizard before, have you?’ asked the man.

‘Not exactly,’ said the boy cautiously.

‘Only they’re not that easy to handle,’ said the man. ‘A lizard’s not like a mouse. Easy, mice is. And friendly. You wouldn’t call a lizard friendly.’

‘Can I look at the mice?’ asked the boy.

‘You go ahead, sonny, and look at the mice.’

The boy went and stared at the cage where the mice, so tantalizingly, were scampering about, and running around on their treadmill.

‘My sister’s scared of mice,’ he said contemptuously.

‘Is she now?’

‘I think it’s silly to be scared of mice.’

‘Very silly,’ said the man. ‘They make ever such friendly little pets, and looking after them’s no trouble. The cages are cheap too. Got a lot of new cages in, as a matter of fact.’

‘Do you really think it would be easy to look after a mouse?’

‘Cinch,’ said the man. ‘Easy as pie, mice is. Not like lizards, which are really more of a handful than you’d think. They gets diseases, and that.’

‘Don’t mice get diseases?’

‘Mice? Nar! Still, if you want an expensive, difficult lizard, rather than a nice, cheap, easy little mouse, I wouldn’t stand in your way. But, you know what I’d do?’

‘Skin you!’ shouted the parrot.

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘What would you do?’

‘I’d buy a mouse,’ said the man.

‘She really squeals at the mention of mice,’ said the boy excitedly, reverting to his sister. ‘How much are they?’

‘Normally they’re a pound,’ said the man, ‘but for a first time buyer like yourself, I’d go down to fifty pence.’

‘I’ve saved up ten pounds,’ said the boy. ‘I thought I’d buy a lizard and a tank and rocks and everything.’

‘Well, I’m glad you mentioned the money, in that case,’ said the man. ‘’Cause a lizard tank and all the equipment would set you back a tenner for a start, before you even bought yer lizard. Whereas, I can let you have this nice little cage here for a fiver.’

‘Could you really?’ said the boy.

‘Five pounds for a nice cage,’ said the man.

‘Then I’d have five pounds left,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve been saving up for a year. I’d saved seven pounds, and then my granny gave me three pounds for my birthday. We thought lizards were cheaper than that.’

‘Not with the equipment,’ said the man.

‘I think I’d better buy a mouse cage,’ said the boy, who was staring at the white mice in fascination.

‘I think you’re very wise,’ said the man. ‘You just wait a minute and I’ll —’

‘Skin you!’ said the parrot again.

— ‘get one down from the shelf.’

In the end he sold the boy the cage, two mice (‘They’ll get edgy on their own.’), a treadmill, a little mirror, a feeding bowl and a bag of food. He gave the boy one pound change out of his ten pounds.

‘There we are, Polly,’ laughed the man when the boy had left the shop. ‘Another satisfied customer. I’ve had those mice on my hands for months. They’ve been looking peaky. Wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t pop off in a month or two.’

My brother and I sat in the window all morning looking sometimes out at the street and sometimes back into the shop. Customers came in and out. On the whole they were less gullible than the little boy and came in to buy specific objects: five pound bags of rabbit food, dog leashes, worming powder, flea collars, bird seed or fish food.

Passers-by on the pavement outside the shop peered in at us. If we jumped up and pressed our paws against the glass, begging them not to stare, they stared at us all the more. Our presence there constituted quite a little side-show. In the afternoon some children came in and asked how much we were. The shop man said we were five pounds each. They asked if they could stroke us and were told only if they were serious. Evidently they weren’t serious at all for they soon let us be.

By evening we were both feeling rather hungry. We had been spoilt, I suppose, by the Wentworths. I had grown used to thinking that minced liver and scrambled egg and fresh milk were foods to be expected automatically. But all we had that day was a bowl of biscuits and a dish of water. When darkness had fallen the man told the parrot that he was going to lock up the shop and we, with the other animals, were left alone in our prison.

‘We’ve been in here long enough,’ said my brother. ‘I wonder where mother is. When do you think they will be taking us back to mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ said I. ‘But I suspect that...’

But when I looked at my brother’s questioning face, I could not voice my suspicions. He had obviously not been thinking as I had been. For him, this tedious business of being locked up in a pet shop window was just some kind of boring game. Sooner or later, we would be released and life would return to normal. We did not realize (I myself could not realize it fully) that there would never again be a ‘normal’ to which life might return; and that for ever afterwards we would be pressing on, with the world our enemy, into new and strange adventures.

Let me describe my brother to you. When I look at you, little black-and-white Grandkitten, I am quite reminded of him. From the beginning he was a handsome cat with a good thick coat of black fur. His face and chest, however, were white and so were his paws, white about halfway up the legs, as though he were wearing boots of human kind. Hence the ‘name’ which they ignominiously imposed upon him. You call me simply by the name of grandfather but you know as well as any cat that we do not have names, any more than the Gods themselves have names. The habit of naming is a human one. Men think that when they have named something, they have subdued it. Even our great Mother-of-Night and all her handmaidens and concubines and sisters, whom we know as nameless guardians and friends as we pace the rooftops by night, these divinities the human race call stars. But with us it is not so. We do not, as they do, wish to possess all that we conquer, nor to subdue all that we admire. We are content to allow things to be themselves, from the highest Gods to the smallest mice, and without imposing upon them our own naming. That is why we are without names. My brother will always be my brother but for me he is the brother without name and until the point in the story where it seems right to use the foolish name which human beings bestowed upon him, I will not sully my lips by using it.

But, as I began, let me finish and let me describe my brother. He was black and white. His markings were as I described and his eyes were of the very brightest green. We were both large kittens for our age; but I think that my brother was even larger than I. We did not much resemble each other. My face, gazing back at me from mirrors and windows and puddles of water and ponds, has always worn a scowl. His face was peaceful and innocent. My tail has always been a thick matted affair – hence the ‘name’ by which ‘they’ call me now. But his tail was straight and sleek and purely black, only curling when he moved or felt excitement or fear.

From now on, after we had left my mother’s care, my brother and I were not just brothers. We were friends. Neither of us knew what the future held and neither of us, quite, understood what a shop was. I know that it had not occurred to us that we might be separated. I merely feared that we had been brought here for some incomprehensible human purpose and that we would never return home. That was why, when he asked me if we would soon be returning to our mother, I did not have the heart to tell him my fears.

‘The food here’s pretty boring,’ said my brother. ‘The bloke forgot to bring our meat.’

‘Do you really think he forgot?’

‘Surely, brother. Did you not hear him promise Mrs Wentworth that he would look after us, and that we would be safe and happy?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said with a sad heart. ‘I had forgotten that. Silly of me.’

‘This cage is small, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I could do with a nice run about.’

‘So could I.’

‘Do you think we could get through that clear stuff if we pushed hard enough with our paws?’

‘The clear stuff which we both see and don’t see and which divides us from outside?’ I asked. ‘No, you can’t get through that. We tried this afternoon. Don’t you remember?’

‘I’m going to have one more try,’ said my brother. And he went to the window and jumped against it with his paws. The action attracted the attention of some people passing by on the pavement outside. A young human male with its mate stood there gawping at us. They had both covered their skin with that tight rough blue cloth which they name denim and the poor scraps of fur which they have at the top of their heads had, in the male’s case, been cut short. In the female’s it had been allowed to grow over her shoulders. I noticed that the female claws in a human being can be much longer and redder than the male’s. She was reaching into their portable food-trough which is made of the same newspaper-substance which they use during the day for hiding their faces and bringing out strips of potato dripping with fat.

‘Inny sweet?’ she said, nuzzling against the male’s shoulder.