The Kitten Hunt Read online

  In memory of my lovely grandma Joan Davies,

  who passed away while I was writing this book

  Contents

  1 My Petless State

  2 Business Woman of the Year

  3 Call Number One

  4 Welcome to the House of Pink

  5 Gourmet Delights

  6 Cat-astrophe

  7 A Bad Dream?

  8 Call Number Two

  9 Mr Nibbles and Houdini

  10 The Claws Are Out

  11 Meals on Wheels

  12 Mice Are Not Nice

  13 The Cat Is Out of the Bag

  14 Stranger Things Have Happened

  15 A Purr-fect Spy

  16 Midnight Prowler

  17 Scene You Shoudn’t See

  18 Out in the Cold

  19 The Play’s the Thing

  Epilogue

  1

  My Petless State

  My name is Bertie. And no, I’m not a boy. The name I was given when I was born was Roberta, but that stinks, so as soon as I had a say in the matter, I changed it to Bertie. So now you know.

  Dad’s name is Nigel Fletcher. He doesn’t like his name much either, so when he does his job as a journalist (which he hates almost as much as his name), he signs his articles Marvin Fletcher instead. I don’t much care what he calls himself, as I call him Dad, so it makes no difference to me.

  For as long as I can remember it’s been just the two of us, and life can get a bit lonely sometimes. This is the main reason why I started asking Dad very nicely from quite a young age if I could have a pet. That and the fact that I am, and always have been – and probably always will be – completely animal-mad. Dad has never shared my enthusiasm though, and also didn’t seem to think I asked him nicely enough about having a pet, as his answer was always, ‘Will you stop pestering me!’

  His main reason for saying this was because he was a very busy man, as he was frequently telling me.

  ‘I am a very busy man, you know, Bertie. I have to work hard and look after you.’

  And he never got any help from anybody.

  ‘And I don’t get any help from anybody, so how the Dickens you think I’ve got room in my life for a pet, I don’t know.’

  Except I wasn’t trying to get HIM to have a pet . . . it would be MY pet.

  So I tried all kinds of different tactics to get him to see my point of view.

  ‘Dad, what about a goldfish? They’re easy pets to keep! And if I had a goldfish, it could sit on my desk and keep me company when I was doing my homework.’

  ‘Bertie, a goldfish is the stupidest creature alive,’ was Dad’s rather random reply.

  Honestly, did Dad really think I was going to ask the goldfish to help me with my maths and English and stuff? Also, it was rather a rude thing to say about goldfish. How did he know they were stupid, after all? Had he ever tried talking to one? They probably knew a whole lot more about swimming underwater than he did, not to mention blowing bubbles and keeping their eyes open without blinking.

  OK. So . . . what about a budgie?

  ‘They’re small and cute and—’

  ‘Bird flu,’ said Dad. He wouldn’t say any more on the subject, clearly thinking that those two words said it all, which they didn’t, as how can all budgies in the world have bird flu? They would all be dead and there would be no more budgies, which plainly isn’t the case, or else the pet shop wouldn’t still be selling them.

  ‘A rabbit?’ I tried again. ‘They live off grass and the odd lettuce leaf or carrot, so they’re not expensive, and they don’t make any noise.’

  ‘And who’s going to clean it out?’ Dad replied, crossing his arms and staring at me triumphantly.

  ‘I will!’ I said, crossing my arms and staring back triumphantly.

  ‘You will not!’ Dad said, snorting and uncrossing his arms. ‘You can’t even make your own bed.’

  Another daft reply. Making my bed is a lot harder than sweeping up a few bits of straw and putting another few bits of straw into a hutch. My bed is on a platform and too high for me to reach to tidy it properly, unless I am in it. But then once it is tidy I have to climb out of it, and that untidies it again. It is a definite no-win situation. So I don’t bother any more. In any case, I don’t poo in my bed like a rabbit does, so my bed doesn’t need cleaning out in the same way.

  ‘A dog?’ I suggested, I admit quite quietly, as I already knew what the answer to that idea would be.

  ‘A WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY AND OUT OF YOUR MIND?’

  So it would seem.

  I tried the reasonable and logical approach. ‘It’s a great pet to have if you want to get fit, because you have to—’

  ‘WALK IT EVERY DAY!!! WHICH IS WHY IT’S THE MOST RIDICULOUS IDEA I HAVE EVER—’

  So the reasonable and logical approach wasn’t going to work either. This was when I gave up. I could have carried on. I could have listed all the things which I knew would be the merits of having pet mice, or guinea pigs, or hamsters, or – a cat. But I already knew all the answers that would get thrown right in my face, and I was a bit fed up with all these conversations that ended in ends that were as dead as a dormouse. Or is that a doornail? (My animal obsession gets worryingly over-obsessive at times.)

  If only Dad would chill out a bit, I thought. But Dad was not a chilling-out sort of person. He got stressed about everything, mainly his job, which he hated. As I said, he was a journalist; he worked for the local paper, the Daily Ranter. ‘A journalist!’ I hear you say. ‘What an exciting job!’

  Not. Dad was the kind of journalist who got sent to cover stories that would make you want to chew your arm off with boredom.

  ‘Who in their right mind wants to read about how appalling it is that the Christmas decorations have gone up too early, or what Mrs Miggles in the Post Office thinks about the new rubbish bins?’ he would grumble. And he had a point.

  But there was nothing I could do about Dad’s job. And for as long as Dad was stressed out all the time, I could see that I was not going to be able to persuade him to let me have a pet. So I started looking out for opportunities to make friends with any animals I might come across in my day-to-day existence, without actually having to own one and have it live in the house.

  Not much of a challenge, then.

  First of all I tried looking around the garden to see if there were any friendly sparrows or blackbirds that I could get to know. I bought some bird-feeders with the last of my birthday money and hung them up in the trees to see if I could tempt any birds.

  The feeders did tempt something, but it wasn’t a bird. It was a squirrel, and a rather vicious, fat one at that. The first time I saw it, I thought it looked quite cute and cuddly, so I moved a bit nearer.

  ‘Hello!’ I said quietly. ‘You’re a lovely little thing— OW !’

  The nasty nut-nibbler chucked a peanut at me and hit me on the head! It was becoming clear that the garden was not going to be the place to offer me a pet, unless I was desperate enough to collect bugs and creepy-crawlies, which I was not. There is not much in the way of a relationship that you can develop with a beetle.

  So I turned my attention to my general neigh-bourhood. There was a particularly lovely looking kitten that had recently appeared around the place. I spotted him trotting up and down the pavement opposite our house and wondered who he belonged to. He was mostly black, but he had this stripe of white all along his tummy and right up his neck so it looked as if he was wearing one of those posh dinner jackets with a white shirt on underneath. The posh look was rather spoilt, though, by the black splodge on his white nose and mouth that made him look as though he’d fallen face-first into a pot of ink. I liked that splodge best of all.

  Once or twice I tried to get near enough to
stroke him. I was desperate to touch that fluffy coat. But he froze for a split second when he saw me approach and I could have sworn he looked me up and down as if he were trying to decide whether or not he wanted to get to know me, and then he scarpered as if he’d decided he definitely didn’t. I must have looked like a giant to him. It made me sad though, him running off like that. All I wanted to do was stroke him and hear him purr.

  I was seriously beginning to despair of ever getting near an animal, forget the idea of actually owning one.

  Then, one weekend when Dad was in his study writing all the time, I descended into an all-time record low of Boredom and Loneliness. I’d already done all my homework and tidied my room and packed my bag ready for school on Monday morning. I’d phoned round to find someone to hang out with, but everyone was busy.

  ‘This is rubbish,’ I told myself after I’d chewed off my last nail in sheer despair. ‘You can’t sit here all weekend and feel sorry for yourself.’ So that was when I decided that I had to come up with a plan.

  I got out a pad of paper and started brainstorming. It’s what Dad does when he’s got to write yet another article about a granny getting locked in the loos in the park and he can’t think of how to spice it up. He gets a piece of paper and writes down all the words to do with the story and then draws arrows between the words to try and join them up in a fun way. He says, ‘It helps to get the creative juices flowing.’

  So I wrote down:

  Those were some of the words that had come up in conversations with Dad about having a pet. They were also the first words that came into my head, which is why random things like ‘sausages’ and ‘liquorice’ got in there. But it doesn’t matter that they were random. That’s what brainstorming is all about, Dad says, as you never quite know what is going to lead where.

  I started drawing lines between the words in a lazy, dreamy way hoping that I would come up with a sentence which would jump off the page and give me a brilliant idea about how to solve my petlessness and general boredom with life.

  Nothing happened to start with. All I got was:

  Cats care for liquorice at home.

  (Not true on any level, surely?)

  And:

  Dogs love hamster cuddles.

  (More like ‘Dogs love hamster-burgers.’)

  And:

  Guinea pig walks cleaning out sausages.

  (Weirderer and weirderer!)

  The only thing these sentences made me do was giggle, which did cheer me up a bit, but didn’t solve my problems of petlessness. ‘One more try’ I told myself, and half-heartedly picked up my pen again and joined up these words:

  Care home for owners pets at.

  I stared at it for a bit. But then I puffed out my cheeks and slumped back in my chair.

  ‘Aaargh! None of this is making sense or helping me in any way, I said, and my frustration made me screw up my face and screw up the paper at the same time and throw it across the room (the paper, not my face).

  ‘What are you up to?’

  Dad had come into the room. I do wish he would knock instead of just barging in on me like that. It’s not that my life is so riveting that I am ever up to anything particularly private, but I have to knock on his study door when he’s working, so you would think he could do the same for me But as is often the case with grown-ups, it is one rule for him and one for me.

  ‘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.’

  2

  Business Woman of the Year

  It 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 scaremonger
i 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.