Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life

‘Well, look, please don’t let this spoil your holiday. As I said, just go inside to eat, to be on the safe side, and you’ll be fine.’

‘Thank you.’ Julian went to the door with her. ‘Poor woman’s worried about losing bookings herself, I imagine,’ he commented after she’d gone.

‘She should have told you about it when you booked the cottage!’ Laura retorted.

‘Come on, I’m sure she’s right that it’s all been exaggerated.’

‘Did it look exaggerated when those gulls attacked us on the beach? It was just pure luck Jessica didn’t get bitten!’

‘Well, now we know, we won’t take food to the beach in future. We could go inside the beach café tomorrow and treat ourselves to a nice lunch there. If it stays this hot, we won’t want to stay on the beach all day anyway. We don’t want Jessica getting too much sun, do we?’

Laura nodded. ‘That’s true. OK, we’ll try the café tomorrow. Or we could come back and eat here, I suppose. I do feel a bit sorry for Charlie being shut up in here all day without any company.’

I meowed with surprise. Somebody was actually considering my feelings! Caroline looked round at me and laughed.

‘I think Charlie agrees with that!’ she said. And then she looked at her father and added, ‘Please can I play games on your tablet, Dad, if we’re not going back to the beach?’

‘Yes, OK, for a little while,’ he said, passing her his computer thing.

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed happily, jumping up to take it from him. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about, but she seemed to get an enormous amount of pleasure from pressing that thing and watching pictures moving on it. She sat on the sofa with it and I jumped up onto her lap, purring contentedly. I hoped maybe my little family was starting to settle down now and get along better again. If only it would last!

CHAPTER

FIVE

Are you all keeping up with my story so far? Good. What did you say, Smudge? When are we getting to the scary bit? Well, I’m building up the tension, aren’t I. Setting the scene. When we do get to the most exciting part, you’ll probably be the first one to turn tail and run off in fright!

In any case I was just about to skip forward slightly in the story, because for a while nothing much changed. It was nice sunny weather, and every day they all went off to the beach while I stayed on my own in the kitchen. Sometimes they came back for lunch, sometimes they apparently ate in the café, wherever that was. It was boring. I spent a lot of time asleep. Caroline thought it was boring too, even though she said she liked swimming in the sea. Swimming in the sea? I was quite alarmed for her, as you can probably imagine. We cats have never bothered with all that swimming malarkey, have we – what’s the point in getting wet all over? It’s bad enough if we get caught in the rain, or if we have an unfortunate accident and fall into a pond, which of course is embarrassing as well as being frankly horrible.

The next Sunday – hard to tell what day it was, when nobody had been going to school or work, Julian packed his bag to go off back to Little Broomford. Laura looked sad when they said goodbye, and Caroline pleaded with him to take her back with him.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘I’ll be going to work. You’ll have much more fun here, swimming every day.’

But the following day it poured with rain. There was no going to the beach, and Laura was stressed because she’d run out of clean clothes for Jessica, the washer-drier machine in the cottage wasn’t very efficient and everything had to be finished off drying inside. I didn’t mind, of course, because after all, there’s nothing nicer than winding yourself up in clean warm towels and clothes hanging on an airer, is there? I was having a lovely time of it, unfortunately pulling a few things off the airer onto the floor in the process, but when Laura found me she was livid, moaning at me about having to wash things twice, and I ended up being shut in the kitchen again.

Caroline was miserable too.

‘I wish I had a tablet or a laptop of my own,’ she complained to Laura. ‘Now Daddy’s taken his with him, I’ve got nothing whatsoever to do. If you’d even let me have a phone it would be better than nothing.’

‘You don’t need a phone, at your age,’ Laura said. ‘Why don’t you read a book?’

‘I was reading a book, on Daddy’s tablet. I was halfway through it and now he’s taken it away. Everyone my age has a tablet of their own. And a phone! It’s pathetic – I can’t even text my friends. I feel like a prisoner.’

But Laura was ignoring her, tutting to herself about the washing. Caroline sat down on the kitchen floor next to my bed and whispered in my ear about how fed up she was. I agreed. Holidays weren’t much fun for anybody, as far as I could see.

*

Julian phoned Laura that evening to say he’d got safely home, and then he phoned her every evening after he’d been to work. I heard Laura talking to him, complaining that the weather was awful and Caroline was bored.