Authors: Anna Wilson
The Kitten Hunt
In memory of my lovely grandma Joan Davies,
who passed away while I was writing this book
Contents
4 Welcome to the House of Pink
14 Stranger Things Have Happened
My Petless State
M
y 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.