Paws and Whiskers (2 page)

My boy Jacob is four now, and the sweetest, most affectionate cat ever. I’ve given him a little sister, Lily, also from Battersea. She came to us as a very bedraggled kitten, who’d been abandoned and had been very ill. She still has a few problems but you’d never know it – she’s the most lively, funny little girl who dashes around everywhere. She totally adores Jacob and cuddles up close to him at night. He’s very protective of her. When she first started going outdoors, he trotted along beside her, watching her every step – and when she suddenly darted up a tree and got stuck, he followed her and demonstrated how to climb down in a tactful and brotherly manner.

In a little while I think it will be time to get a dog at last – a small one who doesn’t mind cats. I’ll go to Battersea and see who I can find, and then my family will be complete.

I had great fun writing
Leonie’s Pet Cat.
I thought it would be a very short story, just a few pages, but it got longer and longer. It’s more like a tiny novel now. I rather like Leonie. I might write some more about her one day.

If you’ve read my book
Clean Break,
you’ll recognize one of the other characters in the story – a certain Jenna Williams. She’s a children’s author like me. She looks rather like me too (apart from her earrings), and now she has a kitten called Lulu who bears more than a passing resemblance to my little Lily.

LEONIE’S PET CAT

It’s so awful being the new girl at school.

‘Don’t worry, Leonie, I’m sure you’ll make heaps of friends,’ said Mum.

I
had
heaps of friends at my old school. I didn’t have to try to
make
friends. They were just there – Maddy and Kas and Janie. We’d been playing together ever since we crayoned cards and finger-painted in Form One. But that was in the old days, when I lived with Dad as well as Mum. We had a proper house, with a bedroom for me (blue, with a rainbow painted on one wall) and a bedroom for my little brother Jumbo (yellow, with lions and tigers and elephants paraded on a frieze).

Now I hardly ever get to see Dad. I see all too much of Jumbo because we have to share this titchy little bedroom (
beige
, because we haven’t got the time or the money to decorate just yet). Jumbo drives me crackers because he messes about with all my things. He tries to draw with my felt tips and nearly always breaks them. He pulls all my Jenna Williams stories off their special shelf and scrumples the pages. He only likes
Thomas the Tank Engine
books. He natters all the time, talking to his irritating imaginary friend Harry. He even keeps me awake at night, wheezing and snuffling because of his asthma.

Mum worried about
Jumbo
making friends. He’s always been an odd little boy, very small and skinny, with big sticky-out ears and a high-pitched voice. I think the boys in the infants at our new school
do
pick on him a bit, but Jumbo doesn’t care. He plays in the Wendy House with all the girls and they make a big fuss of him and invite him to their pretend tea parties. They even lay an extra cup and plate for nonexistent Harry.

I can’t seem to make any kind of friend, girls or boys. My new teacher, Miss Horsefield, told Keira Summers to be my friend and look after me the first day. Keira was all nicey-nicey to me in front of Miss Horsefield, and lent me her spare pen and showed me
the way they do dates and margins in this class – but when I followed her out into the playground at lunch time, she hissed, ‘Push off, new girl,’ and ran away to play with her own friends.

That’s the trouble. Everyone in our class has got friends already. They’re all in little groups and gangs, and none of them seem to want me. There’s one girl I really like – Julie. She’s got lovely long fair hair and she wears five friendship bracelets on one wrist, and every now and then if she sees me looking she smiles at me.

‘Well, smile back and make friends with her,’ said Mum.

Mum doesn’t understand. It’s so difficult. You can’t just march up to someone, grin like a lunatic, and say, ‘Will you be my friend?’ And even if Julie
wanted
to be my friend, she’s already got all these
other
friends – horrid Keira and Rosie and Emily and Harpreet and Anya. They always play together and whisper stuff and write things down in a special book. I’ve tried edging up close to see exactly what they’re doing, but they always go into a huddle, turning their backs on me.

But then one day Julie looked up and saw me, and she smiled again. ‘Hi, Leonie,’ she said.

‘Hi, Julie,’ I said. My mouth was so dry my voice came out in a squeak.

I hesitated, fidgeting from one foot to the other. The other girls all stared at me.

‘Look, buzz off, Leonie, we’re having a private meeting of our club,’ said Keira.

I swallowed. ‘Can’t I be in your club?’

The girls all looked at each other. Keira wrinkled her nose. ‘Our club’s full up,’ she said.

But Julie gave her a little push. ‘Oh, don’t be a meanie, Keira. Let’s have Leonie in the club too,’ she said.

‘No!’ said Keira.

‘
Yes!
’ said Julie. ‘I vote Leonie gets to be a member. Hands up everyone who agrees!’

Rosie put her hand up. Then Anya and Harpreet. Emily’s hand hovered, halfway up. Keira glared at her and she put it down again.

‘There – Emily and I say no,’ said Keira.

‘But us four say yes, so we win,’ said Julie. ‘Welcome to the Pet Girls Club, Leonie!’

‘Thank you!’ I said.

‘We have special badges and we swap photos of our pets and write about them in our book,’ said Julie. ‘I’ve got a Jack Russell terrier called Bobo. He’s terribly naughty but I love him to bits.’

‘I’ve just got a budgie called Joey, but he’s very
clever and can go up and down his ladder for titbits,’ said Rosie.

‘I’ve got a baby rabbit called Woffles. She’s got floppy ears. She’s so cute,’ said Harpreet.

‘I’ve got a hamster called Twitchy,’ said Anya, twitching her own nose.

‘I’ve got two cats called Salt and Pepper,’ said Emily. ‘They’re tortoiseshell.’

‘I’ve got a Labrador called Dustbin because he eats all sorts of rubbish,’ said Keira. She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. ‘You have
got
a pet, haven’t you, Leonie? Otherwise you can’t be in our club, whether you want to or not.’

I hesitated a fraction too long.

‘There, she hasn’t got a pet!’ Keira crowed. ‘So you’ve
got
to buzz off now, Leonie Loser New Girl.’

‘Shut up, Keira!’ said Julie. She looked at me. ‘Haven’t you really got any pets, Leonie? It can be any kind of animal or bird. Maybe even a goldfish . . .’

‘Goldfish don’t count!’ said Keira. She made stupid ‘o’s with her mouth, imitating a goldfish. ‘They don’t have any personality whatsoever and you can’t cuddle them.’

‘You can’t really cuddle budgies, but my Joey’s got heaps of personality,’ said Rosie indignantly.

My heart was going
thump thump thump
underneath my new school sweatshirt. I didn’t have a pet, not even a goldfish – not so much as a titchy tadpole. I wanted a pet desperately. I particularly loved cats, with their soft slinky bodies and delicate ears. But I was never able to have one. First of all my dad said he was allergic to cats. Then he left us and we had to move to the flat, and we might have been able to have a cat then, only of course Jumbo is allergic to practically
everything
and Mum said she wouldn’t risk it.