Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life

Julian was the only one staying quiet. He held the pictures, staring at them, one after the other, with Caroline leaning on the back of the sofa, looking over his shoulder.

‘It’s him, Daddy, I know it is,’ she said. She sounded like she was about to start mewing. ‘Charlie came to my rescue! He saw me getting hurt, and went to get the lady from the café.’

‘It could be him,’ Julian said, sounding a bit less doubtful now. ‘What do you think, Laura?’ He passed her the pictures, and she looked at them with Nicky.

‘I think it is him,’ Laura said. ‘It’s how he looked before, Julian – before he got into the fight, or got attacked, or whatever, and got the injuries. Before he lost weight and everything.’

‘But why would he have been at Salty Cove?’ Nicky said.

‘He must have followed us,’ Grace said.

‘Yes, he must have done,’ Caroline agreed. ‘If he ran out of the house when we opened the door, then he must have trailed us all the way we walked that night, Grace, without us seeing him.’

‘Yes, and … oh my God, he must’ve seen us go in the beach hut, and … waited around outside all night,’ Grace said. ‘And then he saw what happened on the beach in the morning.’

‘Yes!’ I meowed. I jumped off Caroline’s lap and scampered around the room, doing a few little jumps of excitement so that they all laughed at me. ‘That’s what happened. But what I don’t know is what happened after you went off in the ambulance. Nobody’s told me.’

And it looked like nobody was going to, either. They were much too busy discussing the mystery (to them) of how I ended up back at Mudditon. Hello? I walked! It wasn’t very far, along the coast. Shouldn’t they have known that, if they were so clever? And then they were listening to Andy telling them how the film was going to be put together, with the café lady’s story, and Jean and Shirley’s story, as well as my family talking about me and their relief about having me back home.

When they were all ready, Andy held up a thing called a microphone and started talking to Caroline and Grace, while his friend Sandeep was filming them on his huge camera. By then, I’d finally begun to understand how I got inside the television that first time, because Sandeep had spent a while showing the girls the camera, playing back a bit of film to them. Because I was sitting on Caroline’s lap at the time, I could see that it did the same thing as their phones did when they filmed each other. And Sandeep explained that these moving pictures would eventually appear on people’s television screens. I can’t say it makes sense to me, any more than lots of the weird things humans do. But now I see there is some kind of connection between cameras or phones, and televisions, so maybe it isn’t actually magic.

It was nice being cuddled on Caroline’s lap while Andy talked to her about what happened in Mudditon. Because Julian had already warned him that the girls had been punished enough for running away, and he didn’t want it brought up again, Andy just referred to it as their little adventure that went wrong.

‘Charlie must have come with us, and followed us,’ Caroline said into the microphone. ‘We didn’t realise.’

‘But it seems it was a good thing he did,’ Andy said. ‘And when you and Grace got lost, he seems to have stood guard over you all night.’

‘Well, to be quite honest I fell asleep under a bench,’ I meowed. But Caroline stroked me and said yes, I must have been protecting them, which made me feel a bit guilty.

‘So can you tell us what happened the next morning?’ Andy asked, and Grace explained how the seagull swooped on their sandwiches and bit Caroline’s finger.

‘I tried to run off, and I must have tripped on the rocks,’ Caroline said. ‘I don’t really remember it very well.’

‘She hit her head, cut it open, and knocked herself out,’ Grace said.

‘That must have been very frightening,’ Andy said. ‘And it seems that’s when Charlie managed to get the attention of Stella at the café.’

‘Yes, that lady was very kind, and she said the boy had called an ambulance,’ Grace said.

‘And what a good job you were taken to hospital, Caroline,’ Julian said, sounding very serious.

I looked around the room. Everyone was much more serious now. Caroline was looking down at the floor and Laura reached out to put a paw on her arm.

‘Perhaps your dad would like to explain what happened, Caroline,’ Andy said, and the camera turned towards Julian.

‘Well, we’d been frantic with worry, of course,’ he said, ‘so when we got a call to say the girls were at the hospital, we – and Grace’s parents – rushed straight there. And Caroline—’

He broke off, swallowing hard. I looked up at him. Caroline what?

‘She looked dreadful,’ he said very quietly, ‘and there were doctors all round her. We … well, as you can probably imagine, we didn’t know what to think.’