The Kitten Hunt (2 page)

‘Nothing,’ I said, looking up at him through my eyebrows in a way that I hope said, ‘None of your business!’ without me actually having to be rude out loud.

‘Oh. I just thought I heard you shout,’ he said, looking puzzled.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ I said, looking away from him and out of the window, which I vaguely noticed was a bit smeary from where I had squashed my nose up against it, trying to look
around the corner to my best friend Jazz’s house.

OK, so maybe I’m not as entirely lonely as I’ve been making out, but the thing is, Jazz has a big family and a busy life, so although she really is my best mate, she’s not
always on hand just when I need her. Her real name is Jasmeena, incidentally, which stinks almost as much as Roberta according to her, a lthough I actually would prefer to be called Jasmeena than
Roberta, but isn’t that always the way ? She lives in the same street as me, but it’s a bendy sort of street, so I can’t really see her place from my window. I have always thought
this was a shame, as I would love to be able to use those semaphore flags or the Morse code to communicate with her from my window. I know I can just pick up the phone or even go round there to see
if she’s free, but it’s not as exciting. And I can’t do those things in the dead of night anyway, as Dad would hear me and have a fit. (He has ears like an elephant and would
definitely even hear something as quiet as semaphore flags waving. Come to think of it, I guess semaphore doesn’t work in the dark—)

‘Bertie?’ Dad cut into my snake-like ramblings, jerking me back to reality.

‘Still here then?’ I muttered.

Dad inhaled deeply and said, ‘So – what
are
you up to?’

I crossed my arms and held them tight around me. Could he not tell from my body language that I was not in the mood to be interrogated as if I were a criminal mastermind who had committed the
most horrendous murder of all time? But then I realized that what Jazz always says was probably true: boys (and that presumably includes dads) don’t understand body language.

Too late to do anything about it, I realized that Dad was stooping to pick up the piece of paper that I had thrown across the room.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, un-scrunching it and smoothing it flat so that he could read it.

I panicked. ‘Oh, er – I was just doing a bit of that creative brainstorming stuff that you do,’ I blustered. I wished I could fade, chameleon-like, into the wallpaper and not
have to face what was going to come next . . .

But Dad’s mouth opened out into a huge grin and his eyes went sparkly.

‘Hey, that’s great, Bertie!’ he said, crouching down to give me a half-hug. ‘So what’s your story going to be about then? Let’s see what you’ve written
“Care home for owners pets at”? Erm, doesn’t make a lot of sense – unless that “at” isn’t supposed to be there? “Care home for owners pets”
– is that what you meant? There’s an apostrophe missing there, you know And a full stop.’ He reached for the stubby pencil which seemed to live permanently behind his ear and made
a mark on the scrunchy paper.

‘Dad!’ I was about to snatch the pencil out of his hand and snap back, ‘I don’t give a monkey’s about apostrophes,’ or possibly something ruder, when I
realized what Dad had just done.

The previously nonsensical sentence,

Care home for owners pets at

had just become:

Care home for owners’ pets.

OK, so that still sounded a bit weird – as if a load of old granny dogs were sitting in armchairs with blankets over their knees watching telly together, but nevertheless
something had clicked inside my head and my brain suddenly felt well and truly stormed!

‘Care for pets at owners’ home!’ I cried, then immediately realized what I’d said and clamped my hand over my mouth.

‘Ye-es,’ Dad said, frowning and nodding vaguely. He rubbed his hands though his hair and turned to walk out of the room. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Got my own
story to get on with. Yours sounds like it might be interesting . . .’

If only he’d known how right he was. With two tiny dots of his pencil and a bit of ultra-speedy brainstorming from yours truly, a great idea had been born.

I smiled secretively and hugged myself, whispering, ‘Look out, world. Bertie Fletcher’s Pet-Sitting Service is open for business.’

I
t was a complete brainwave of utter geniusness, although I say it myself. People always had pets that they didn’t have time to look after.
It was a fact of modern hectic life – I was always reading things like that in the
Daily Ranter.
In fact, there were frequently scaremongeri ng stories about people who went on holiday
and left their poor dog/cat/rabbit/gerbil home alone with no food and so on. Obviously people like that were monsters and deserved to have the RSPCA take their pets from them and make sure they
could never in their lives ever again have the priceless privilege of being pet owners.

(Life was so unfair. Why were there people in the world with pets who could not even be bothered to look after them, and then there were people like me who weren’t ALLOWED pets but who, if
they
did
have them, would look after them
so
well they would live as royally as if they belonged to the Queen?)

This was where my brainwave came in (admittedly helped by Dad’s apostrophe and full stop and general mega-grammar-fussiness, although I would never have told him that).

I, Bertie Fletcher, Pet-Sitter to the Stars (well, OK, our neighbours), would go to other people’s houses and walk their dogs,or feed their cats or rabbits or whatever else they had
– although I might possibly draw the line at stick insects or piranhas – and Dad would never have to know because the animals would stay in their owners’ homes! I could just go
round and feed them where they lived, right there on the spot, without a single animal ever having to cross our threshold – Dad would never have to see an actual animal in his house ever.

I was so chuffed with my brainwave idea, that I immediately made some little notices with my best pens in some lovely curly writing. I wanted them to stand out from the usual boring post that
people get:

‘Dad!’ I yelled across to his study, where he was once again glued to his computer screen, tapping away and muttering to himself. ‘I’m just going to the
shop!’

Dad grunted something at me about buying milk. I grabbed my hoody and the notices and ran.

As I closed the door behind me, I couldn’t help grinning like a cat who’s eaten all the custard. It was so exciting just imagining all the animals I would be asked to look after! I
reminded myself to keep my mobile charged all the time, and I decided I should buy a nice diary to keep my appointments in. I was determined to be professional.

Of course I had not remembered that life doesn’t often go the way you think it will. It’s a fact I often forget about when I get excited.

I posted all the leaflets in every house in my street and on the way I spotted so many animals that it made my tummy squirm just thinking about which ones I might be asked to help out with.

There was a house on the corner of the street that had two cute little King Charles spaniels with the hugest eyes I have ever seen on a real live creature that is not a cartoon. Mr Bruce who
lived there was always out at work, and I knew that he often moaned to Dad about how expensive the dogwalker was, so I thought maybe he might be interested in my pet-sitting idea. I would not be
expensive at all.

I could see the spaniels through the letterbox, jumping up at me when I put my leaflet through. There was quite a kerfuffly noise when the paper went through the door, a bit like something being
scrunched or ripped. I chuckled as I thought about those naughty little dogs and wondered what they would be like to play with. They were yapping and yelping as I went back down the path, and I
even wondered in a silly daydreamy kind of way if they had been able to read my notice and were looking forward to meeting me!

There were about forty houses in our street, which is a cul-de-sac. That means you can’t get out the other end of it in a car – or a motorbike, or a camper van. You get the idea. The
houses go round in a curve and sort of look out on to each other. Dad didn’t like it. He said that everyone knew each other’s business because it was like living in a goldfish bowl.
Personally I didn’t think it looked anything like a goldfish bowl, which is round and made of glass and full of water, whereas our street was very definitely dry and made of tarmac the last
time I looked. And I thought it was cool as it meant we knew who nearly all of our neighbours were and people actually talked to each other, and of course one of those people was my best friend,
Jazz. The other great thing about our road was that Dad let me go out on my own, as long as I stayed in the cul-de-sac and didn’t try and escape into – shock, horror! – another
street. (Anyone would think that the road next to ours was enemy territory or part of the Amazon rainforest or something.) But although I knew most people to say ‘hello’ to, one thing I
wasn’t one hundred per cent clear about was what kind of pets everyone had. For example, you know if someone has a dog because you see them (or a dogwalker) out walking with it, and you know
when someone has a cat, as cats wander around all over the place. But you don’t necessarily know if someone has a hamster or a goldfish or even a guinea pig unless you have been right inside
their house or garden.

After all, it has been known for people to keep chinchillas or budgies in their bedrooms.

I suddenly had a moment of panic – as I was walking up the drive to Mr Sauna’s house. He was a very quiet man who only ever said ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good
afternoon’ or ‘Good evening’ and never anything else. Dad said it was because he was Swedish and that his English was not that good. I had no idea what was in his house. What if
he kept a ten-foot python in the garage and thought it would be a good idea to ask me to feed it for him while he was on holiday? I decided not to put a notice through his door.

Finally I came to number 15, which is over the road from our house. The person who lived in this house hadn’t lived there long – only a couple of months – but Jazz and I had
already decided from first sight that we didn’t much like her. I know that is not fair, but ‘Life is not fair’, as Dad is fond of saying, and anyway lots of people judge by first
appearances, even though they are probably the sort of people who will advise you not to.

Anyway, back to the lady at number 15. She was an actor, according to Dad, although I’d never seen her in any films or telly programmes, and her name was Fenella Pinkington. There, you
see, even her name makes you want to not like her. In my head (and when I was chatting to Jazz) I called her Pinkella, because she was always dressed from top to toe in pink, which is definitely
not
one of my favourite colours – all different kinds of shades of it, from very bright bubblegum pink through to soft pastelly, babyish pink. She was also embarrassing to talk to
because the few times I’d spoken to her, she had insisted on calling me Roberta or, even worse, ‘sweetie’,
and
she touched my hair and told me in capital letters that it
was ‘DIVINE’, which I did not like at all.

My hair is sort of darkish blonde and very, very curly. Ringlets is what Dad calls them. I don’t mind it; I quite like it. It’s not the sort of hair you
can
mind really, as it
has a life of its own, so there is no point. What I
do
mind though is people touching it without asking. Especially if they use the words ‘DIVINE’ and ‘sweetie’ at
the same time. How would Pinkella like it if I touched her pink floaty dresses? I wondered. But that was not a thought I wanted to hold on to for long, as those dresses looked decidedly nylony and
itchy and would probably give me static electric hair, which with my ringlets would be nothing short of disastrous, if you think about it.

So the long and the short of it was that I almost didn’t put a notice through Pinkella’s door,but then I saw a kitten looking at me from the sitting-room window, where it was
balancing on the sill. A kitten with a very distinctive dinner-jacket-with-cute-ink-splodge look.

Now, everyone knows that kittens are cute. But this kitten was
seriously
cute. It wasn’t because he was at the really tiny, fluff-ball stage – he was older than that. He was
into the long-legged, skinny, bouncy stage. I had seen him leaping and bounding around the street only the day before, batting his front paws (which were white, like little boots on the end of his
long black legs) at a bee in a very determined sort of way. His fur was silky shiny and he had bright yellow eyes that were still too big for his slim little baby-face. Maybe it was the eyes that
did it for me. They we re just so big. So golden.

I looked at him quite carefully, and in those yellow eyes there was a definite look that seemed to be trying to tell me something. I felt a shiver run up my spine. It was a sparkly kind of
shiver that made me feel as though I was on the brink of something exciting.