The Kitten Hunt Read online

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.

  I think that shiver was what made me put a notice through the door. Whatever it was, there was definitely a voice inside me saying that I should get to know that kitten better – even if it did mean having to put up with Pinkella patting my hair and calling me Roberta.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could be quite a good business woman. In fact, I could have gone on that programme on the telly called In the Line of Fire, where you have to present a new idea for a business and if you are good the man with the grey hair and the face like an angry potato says, ‘You’re hired!’ and if you are rubbish, he says, ‘You’re fired!’

  Maybe if I entered my pet-sitting idea on the programme I could get on it, I thought. It would be fun even if I was fired, as then I could say, ‘Well, who cares? Your face looks like an angry potato.’ It would give me a lot of satisfaction, actually.

  One of the things that made me excited about the Pet-Sitting Service was that it would mean I would get some calls on my mobile, which I was now keeping glued to my side at all times. I had not received any calls for a long time as I had not been allowed to make any calls myself for over a year. This was all because of the incident with the first phone bill. Apparently I had spent enough money chatting to Jazz to feed a family of five for a month – Dad’s words, not mine, in case you hadn’t guessed. So I was only allowed to use it for emergencies from then on, such as if I was going to be coming out of school late or if Dad needed to tell me that he would be late back from work. But after the incident with the phone bill I was not allowed to use it to call my friends (especially Jazz) or text anyone. And seeing as Dad had never once called me on it and I had never once called him, I hadn’t really seen the point in having it up until now.

  As soon as Jazz had been released from her many weekend commitments (ballet followed by tap followed by piano followed by singing – you’d never have guessed she wants to be a celebrity pop-star-singer-songwriter when she grows up, would you?) I went round to hers to tell her everything.r />
  ‘It’s such a cool idea, Bert!’ she said, hugging me and jumping up and down, which made my face squish uncomfortably into the zip on her hoody.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, prising her off. ‘You want to help?’

  ‘You bet!’ Jazz cried, punching the air and swivelling round on the spot in one of her so-called funky dance move s. ‘Sooo, who d’you reckon will call first? I hope it’s that lady with the guinea pigs. I loooove guinea pigs!’ she squealed, sounding a bit like one herself.

  ‘Which lady with the guinea pigs?’ I asked, feeling a bit miffed that I had not known about a lady with guinea pigs in our street. But Jazz wasn’t listening – she was whirling round her room, jabbering away about all the animals we’d soon be looking after and how much money we’d be making.

  I kept glancing at my phone, which I’d put on Jazz’s bed so that I would hear it clearly when it rang. It was bound to ring soon, wasn’t it? Of course it was, I told myself. In fact, now that I was on course for being Pet-Sitter and Business Wo man of the Year, my phone was going to be ringing so much I might actually have to buy another one to keep up with the demand.

  3

  Call Number One

  Three whole days went by and no one called. I was jittery with nerves So was Jazz, which made me even more jittery as she kept asking, ‘You will tell me the moment someone calls, won’t you?’ Every time the house phone rang I jumped, thinking it was my mobile This shows just how agonizingly jittery I really was, as the two phones do not sound remotely the same: my phone has a weird ringtone on it that Jazz recorded, which is her voice shouting, Yay, Bertie! Yay, Bertie! like some kind of manic American cheerleader (She did it for a laugh one break time. I don’t know how to get rid of it, and Jazz won’t get rid of it for me.)

  ‘It was such a lame plan in the first place,’ I said to Jazz on Day Three, slumping into her purple beanbag with the stars on. ‘I don’t know why I thought I could change my life overnight with some stupid babyish pet-sitting idea.’

  ‘Hey, don’t get stressy!’ Jazz said, sounding, if I may be so bold, quite stressy herself. ‘Maybe the neighbours haven’t gone through their post yet. We get so many pizza leaflets and stuff. Mum just chucks them all on the side and goes through everything at the weekend.’

  ‘Oh, huge amounts of thanks for your undying support, dear friend,’ I said sarcastically. ‘So my leaflet is like junk mail, you mean?’

  Jazz ignored me and carried on pacing up and down her room, ticking off possible reasons for our neighbours’ non-communicativeness. ‘Or maybe no one needs a pet-sitter right now. It’s not the holidays yet. Maybe they’ve pinned your notice up and they’ll call you when they need you.’

  I huffed and puffed and took out all my grumpiness on Jazz, which was unfair, but luckily for our friendship Jazz is pretty good at putting up with my moods (i. e. ignoring them), and double-luckily I didn’t have to keep up the grumpiness for long as someone finally called the next afternoon.

  Unfortunately it was at a very inconvenient time and completely took me by surprise. This was mainly because it was the one day when Dad had actually offered to pick me up from school rather than making me take the bus.

  ‘What the—?’ Dad leaped about a mile and a half out of his seat and the car lurched dangerously to the right, causing the traffic coming in the other direction to swerve and honk noisily at us. A man leaned out of his car window and shouted and made a sign with his hand that was definitely not a friendly kind of sign.

  ‘It’s just my phone,’ I said, rummaging in my bag and trying to push down the excited and flut-tery feelings in my tummy and smother them with a layer of calmness instead.

  ‘Your what?’ Dad snapped, glaring at me in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘My phone – you know, that extremely modern invention which allows humankind to converse with other members of the species from a distance while— I’d better answer it,’ I said hastily and not at all calmly. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, sweetie!’

  I froze.

  ‘Hello?’ the voice continued. ‘That is Roberta Fletcher, isn’t it?

  No,it’s BERTIE Fletcher, I screamed inside my head, all tangled up with panic and annoyance and confusion.

  ‘It’s Fenella Pinkington, your neighbour from over the road?’

  I’d kind of guessed that, SWEETIE. Why on earth was she calling?

  ‘I’m ringing in response to your imaginative business idea . . . ’ She paused. ‘The Pet-Sitting Service?’

  Of course – the kitten! My tummy clenched itself into a ball as tight and spiky as a baby hedgehog.

  ‘Ye-es?’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘Well, darling, I was wondering if you might like to come and meet my little kitty-cat.’ Pinkella wittered on in my ear while I was quietly freaking in my seat. How was I going to talk about my Pet-Sitting Service right that instant with Dad listening in?

  ‘I was wondering if you’d be free—’ Pinkella continued.

  ‘Oh, right, sorry . Wrong number,’ I said quickly, and cut her off.

  Darnation and hell-busters! I was in a right state. Why did she have to call while I was in the car with Dad? This was my one and only call from a true and genuine client wanting my Pet-Sitting Services, and I’d just gone and put the phone down on her! Even if it was Pinkella Deville, I still wanted her custom – especially since she was the only person to bother replying to my advert and double-especially since she was the owner of that seriously cute, ink-splodge-to-die-for kitten.

  ‘Bit odd, you getting a call,’ said Dad, glancing at me in the mirror again, his eyebrows raised in a suspicious expression.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, in a non-committal way, looking out of the window.

  ‘Why have you even got your phone on anyway? I’m the only person with the number and I’m right here. You should turn it off to save the batteries. Unless . . . You and Jazz haven’t been calling each other again, have you? What on earth have you two got to talk about that’s so important you need to call each other every moment of every day? You’re in school together the whole time, for heaven’s sake. I bet you’ve been texting too. I t’ll cost a fortune! You know that phone is only for emergencies.’

  I slouched in my seat and rolled my eyes. ( No wonder he worked on the Daily Ranter, I thought. He was the daily ranter. No, make that the hourly ranter.)

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said wearily. ‘I mean, no, Dad. I mean . . . ’

  I was not really listening to him as I was surreptitiously saving Pinkella’s number so that I could call her back later. Meanwhile my brain continued whirring into a head-spin. What would I say? I had been quite rude, cutting her off like that.

  I know! I had a flash of inspiration. I’d tell Pinkella it was Jazz who had answered the call because she had taken my phone home instead of hers by mistake.

  Dad parked the car, and I scuttled inside and up to my bedroom for some privacy.

  ‘Don’t you want a snack?’ Dad called after me.

  ‘In a minute – need the loo!’ I called back, and veered into the bathroom to put Dad off my scent. I needn’t have worried though – Dad was already disappearing into his study to get on with yet more work.

  But for once, I didn’t care.

  I shut the bathroom door and locked it just in case and then sat down on the edge of the bath. I took a deep breath and then turned my phone back on. I called up Pinkella’s number on my screen and pressed the green dial button. She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Er, yes, hello – erm, it’s Bertie Fletcher.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Roberta,’ said Pinkella, sounding puzzled. ‘That’s funny. I tried ringing you a few minutes ago and the person who answered told me I’d got the wrong number.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ I faltered. ‘That was my, er, my assistant, er, Jasmeena.’ I used her full name as it sounded more serious than ‘Jazz’. ‘Well, she’s more of a friend than an assistant, but she assists me, you see,’ I warbled, wincing and thi
nking what an utter nut-brain I sounded.

  ‘Oh dear, sweetie! If you take my advice, you’ll get yourself a new assistant – one who knows a thing or two about assisting! Heeeheeeheee!’ she twittered in that tinkling titter of hers. Even her voice sounds pink, I thought.

  ‘Yes, I – I’m thinking of doing just that,’ I said, feeling a bit of confidence return, and putting on the most professional voice I could under the circumstances. ‘So, how can I help you, Pin— Ms Pinkington? I hear that you received one of my leaflets?’ I hoped my more businesslike tone would stop her from thinking I was actually a bonkers person who could not be trusted with looking after a used tea bag, let alone her beloved cat.

  ‘Please, call me Fenella, sweetie,’ she tinkled. ‘Yes,I was simply thrilled to get your leaflet – it came absolutely in the nick of time. You see, I’m due to go away for a couple of weeks and I was starting to get into a teensy bit of a panic about poor little Kaboodle here. Isn’t that right, Kaboodle?’

  At that point I heard a very loud purring noise right in my ear. I nearly dropped the phone.

  ‘There! Did you hear that, sweetie? Kaboodle agrees with me!’ said the worryingly insane woman on the other end of the phone. ‘You see,’ she continued, as I shook my head sadly, ‘my previous cat, Pusskins, God rest his soul, used to have a room at the gorgeous cat hotel in town – do you know it?’ She broke off to blow her nose.

  Oh no. She’s going to start blubbing down the phone about her old dead cat, I panicked. ‘Er, no, no I don’t,’ I said, hastily adding, ‘but I’m sure it’s lovely.’

  ‘Yes,’ sniffed Pinkella. ‘“Purrfect Heaven” it’s called. It’s just off the high street, behind that hairdresser’s with the lovely fuchsia curtains. Of course, poor Pusskins has gone to the real purrfect heaven in the sky now . . . Anyway, I’m getting off the point,’ she sighed and blew her nose again.

  We re you ever on it? I wondered.

  ‘I was so desperate for darling little Kaboodle here to go to the same cat hotel, where I know they would treat him most royally, but to my utter despair, when I phoned them this morning, they told me they were fully booked! Well, I simply cannot cancel this trip. I’m auditioning for the leading role in a new romantic comedy by that gorgeous man Richard Elton – Love, Don’t You Know?, I think they’re calling it – and the auditions are in Scotland of all places.’ She made a noise that sounded rather like a shudder. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘how much do you charge?’