Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Map

  1. My Early Life

  2. The New Baby

  3. No More Peace and Quiet

  4. Running Away

  5. Adventures in the Dark

  6. Going Home

  7. Buggins

  Other books in the series

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Oh, no, Callie, you must never, ever go on the baby’s bed. That’s not allowed.’

  When a new baby arrives in the Anderson household, Callie does her best to make it welcome. But everything goes horribly wrong and even David who has always been her friend, has no time for her. Then she is banished from David’s warm and cosy bed to the kitchen, and Callie has had enough. If the Andersons don’t want her any more, she will just have to do something desperate . . .

  ADÈLE GERAS

  Illustrated by Tony Ross

  1. My Early Life

  “CALLIE! CALLIE! WAKE up! You’re dreaming.”

  I opened my eyes and there was Blossom, pushing her nose against mine.

  “You were dreaming again,” said Perkins.

  “And growling in your sleep,” said Geejay. “We thought we should wake you up at once.”

  Blossom, Perkins and Geejay are my greatest friends among the cats who live in Cuckoo Square.

  “Oh, my padded paws!” I said. “I was having a dreadful nightmare. I was locked in a very dark room, and I didn’t know where you all were, or what had happened to our Square, or our people, and I had no idea if I was going to find any food ever again. Thank you for waking me up.”

  “Come and sit down over here,” said Blossom, and she led me to one of our favourite spots, the sheltered place under the rhododendron bushes. Snow had fallen on Cuckoo Square. Nobody at all was sitting on the benches and all the trees were bare and dusted with white, so the garden belonged to us cats. A little sunshine had crept through the branches and we were all quite comfortable.

  Blossom began to lick herself all over. It is difficult for a cat to talk and wash at the same time, so I was left alone with my thoughts, and I’m sorry to say that they weren’t very happy ones.

  Of all the cats who live in Cuckoo Square, I am the only one who has been rescued. The Andersons found me in a Cat Shelter. I am four years old, and my early life was not happy. This is the reason, I think, for my nightmares. I seem to dream far more than any of my friends. I was much too young to be separated from my mother when I was taken away from her. I remember her kind black-and-white face only very dimly. Sometimes I imagine that she looked very like dear Blossom: fluffy and plump and beautiful, and perhaps my father was a ginger tom like Geejay, because I am a calico cat, and my fur is a patchwork of white and ginger and black.

  “You look,” said Blossom one day, “like one of those cat statues that live on people’s mantelpieces. Your eyes are such a pretty colour and I do love that black patch.”

  I cannot bring to mind anything at all of the first home I went to as a tiny kitten, but I do remember how I left it. Someone put me into a box. It was a small, dark space with cardboard walls, and though I miaowed as hard as I knew how, and scratched at the side of my prison with my little claws, the box stayed shut. Then I was bumped up and down, and kept sliding from one side of the darkness to the other. After that, everything was silent. I slept for a short while, but then I noticed the cardboard I was lying on was soaking wet and, what was even worse, I couldn’t find anything to eat or drink. If a kind person had not chanced to see the box I was imprisoned in lying in a puddle on the pavement, I would certainly have died.

  The lady who found me took me to the Cat Shelter, where I was dried and brushed and fed and stroked and put to live in a warm cage, next door to a rather grumpy grey cat, who hardly ever felt like talking to me. But I was so relieved to be out of the dark and the cold, and so happy not to be hungry any more that I thought the Shelter was all a cat could wish for. Then, one day as I was lying with my eyes closed, I felt a small finger stroking my nose through the bars of the cage. I opened my eyes and there was a little boy staring at me.

  “This kitten,” he said. “I want this kitten.”

  “She’s very young,” said his mother. “She’s probably not even house-trained.”

  “Don’t care!” said the boy. “I want this one.”

  “She is sweet,” said his mother. “Calico cats are so pretty.”

  “Callie Cat,” said the boy. “She’s my Callie Cat.”

  “Calico.” His mother smiled at him.

  “That’s what I said,” he told her. “Callie. That’s her name.”

  And so I came to Cuckoo Square. The little boy who found me and gave me my name is seven years old now. He is called David. His parents’ names are Liz and Nick Anderson, and my home, at number 18, is Cat Paradise – or it was until a very short time ago, when David told me that there would soon be a new baby coming to live in our house. The moment I heard this, I went straight into the Square to share the news with my friends.

  “Oh, my waving whiskers!” I said. “You’ll never guess what’s coming to live in our house.”

  “A goldfish?” said Blossom.

  “A pet bird, perhaps?” Perkins suggested.

  “Is it a puppy?” Geejay asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a baby.”

  2. The New Baby

  “THEY ARE BRINGING the baby home from the hospital today,” I told my friends. “I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t really understand why my people should want one.”

  “They like to cuddle babies,” said Blossom, “and feed them all the time and carry them around.”

  “They do all those things,” I said “to me.”

  “Perhaps,” said Perkins, “David wants a brother or a sister he can talk to. As the Furry Ancestors say, ‘Words are for humans, purring is for cats.’”

  “David thinks words are for cats too,” I said. “He often talks to me. I understand everything he says.”

  “But,” said Geejay, “does he understand everything you say to him?”

  “Not everything,” I had to admit. “No.”

  Perkins smoothed his whiskers with one paw. “The Furry Ancestors say: ‘Silence flees the house when a baby enters it.’ Babies are extremely noisy. There’ll be no more peace and quiet for you, Callie.”

  “Then I’d better go and have my lunch before they get back.”

  I made my way into the house through the cat-flap. There was a lady in the kitchen whom I had seen before. I recognized her smell and her voice, but I’d forgotten exactly who she was.

  “Hello, Callie, dear,” she said. “Do you remember me? I’m Rita, David’s Nan – Liz’s mother. Follow me. They left me in charge of your lunch.”

  Oh, my fluffy forepaws! Of course I remembered Nan. The minute she began to cut up a piece of coley for me, I remembered how fond of her I was. She chatted away to me all the time, and the food always improved greatly whenever she came to stay. Every time she passed the fishmonger’s, she would go in and buy a little treat for me: a piece of salmon skin, say, or a few prawns.

  “So, Callie,” she said as I was eating. “A new baby, eh? What do you think of that? No more peace and quiet for poor old Puss!”

  It was a little worrying. Perkins had said exactly the same thing, but I had been hearing quite different stories from David.

  “Callie,” he said to me before the baby was born, “I’m going to have a sister. Or a brother. I’m so excited. It’ll be someone I can play with. Someone I can talk to.”

  I must have looked a little hurt, because he added quickly: “I know I can play with you, Callie. Of course I can. But I’ll be able to teach my baby things, won’t I?”

  I turned my back on him and began to lick my front paws very energetically. I knew exactly what he meant. He’d tried to teach me to read once, propping pieces of paper with black marks on them against the skirting-board and saying: “‘A’, Callie – that’s the letter A. It says ‘A’, like Apple. A is for Apple . . . and that’s B – B is for Book.”

  I think he was offended when I sniffed these pieces of paper and wandered off to look for something more interesting to do. If I had a kitten, I thought, I’d teach it how to hunt mice and other small creatures, and all the very best ways to lick the hard-to-reach parts of the body: useful, practical things which would make its life easier. I wished that a kitten were coming to the house, instead of a baby.

  “Come and see where our baby will live, Callie,” he said to me just before everyone left for the hospital. He picked me up and carried me upstairs. “I’ll put you down just while I open the door,” he said.

  I already knew that something interesting had been happening in that room. Nick had been spending a lot of time hammering on pieces of wood, and when he went on to paint the walls, all sorts of strange smells had come to my nostrils. Now, as David and I looked in from the corridor, I could see that everything was coloured pale yellow. The new curtains at the window were scattered with flowers. I looked for a long time at some fishes hanging from the ceiling on long black threads, and David laughed at me.

  “They’re not real fishes,” he told me. “It’s called a mobile, and it’s for the baby to look at, while it lies in its cot.”

  The minute I saw the cot, I longed to jump up and settle myself on the fluffy white blankets I could see there, which looked as soft and warm as cotton wool, or clouds. But why were there wooden railings ar ound the cot? I was sure that the baby would be delighted to have me curled up at the end of its bed. There was nothing for it. I would have to try and squeeze between the bars. David must have seen me crouching down, ready to leap, and he picked me up and hugged me to him.

  “Oh, no, Callie, you must never, ever go on the baby’s bed. That’s not allowed. Mum says so. Come on, let’s go back down now.” He carried me out of the room and shut the door. “I’m closing it, Callie,” he said, “so that you won’t sneak in while I’m not looking.”

  I walked downstairs feeling a little put out. Never in all my time in the Anderson house had I ever been forbidden to do anything.

  Now, here I was, waiting for the baby to come home, and Nan was watching me eat my lunch.

  “Any minute now,” she told me. “They’ll soon be here with the baby. It’s a lovely little girl.”

  3. No More Peace and Quiet

  THE NEW BABY is not what I expected at all. Her name is Celia.

  “I’m going to call her ‘Sis’,” David told me, “because she’s my sister.”

  She is bald, and very wrinkled and pink, and she looks nothing like any little girl I’ve ever seen. Human babies are even more helpless than kittens. They have to be fed and washed and carried round in people’s arms, because (and I find this amazing) they cannot walk or crawl, nor can they speak properly. This baby lies wherever Liz or Nick or Nan put her, and the noises that come out of her tiny mouth are ear-splitting: the moment she begins to wail, I run away. She cries a great deal, it’s true, but there are times when she is lying quietly sleeping, and I look at her and think:

  “Oh, my twitching tail! How delightful it would be to lick her and groom her. Then she could be my baby and not just David’s.”

  From the day she arrived, there have been visitors knocking at our door. Each time I find a comfortable chair to lie on, a human appears, lifts me off it, and puts me down on the floor. I usually run to David’s room, and jump on his bed, but there’s no peace there either these days. David keeps coming in to disturb me.

  “Look,” he said today. “All the visitors are bringing presents for Sis, and lots of them have given me one, too. Look at this!”

  David has always shared his toys with me, and he’s often tried to get me to join in his games, but I’ve never found them very interesting. Now he showed me his gifts, and then left them lying on top of the bed next to me, taking up space I would have liked to stretch out in. I sniffed at toy trains, and tiny creatures that looked like humans but were hard all over, and smelled very strange. I examined wooden boats and big cardboard boxes that seemed interesting, but which unfortunately were firmly closed. I decided to go out to the Square and avoid the visitors for a while.

  I found Perkins sitting in the sheltered porch of his house.

  “Callie,” he said. “I am surprised to see you. You are a brave cat to venture out in this cold weather.”

  “You are brave, too, Perkins,” I said.

  “Ah, but I am used to it,” he said. “I’ve seen many snowy winters. I find them bracing.”

  “Our house is full of visitors,” I told him, “and they have all brought gifts for the baby. I can’t imagine why, because she cannot possibly play with them.”

  “It is a tradition,” said Perkins. “It’s good manners to greet a new baby with a present.”

  “Oh, my bushy backpaws!” I said. “I’d better look around for something, even though there isn’t much to be found in the middle of winter.”

  “How true!” Perkins said. “As the Furry Ancestors say: ‘Hunter and hunted both like to keep warm.’”

  “I shall go and look for something under those trees. Goodbye, Perkins.”

  “Goodbye, Callie,” he said, and made his way solemnly down the steps and along the path that led to his cat-flap.

  I had only been looking for a few minutes when I found a little bird lying at the foot of one of the trees in the Square. I didn’t have to hunt it, because it was lying very still. I patted it and pushed it with my front paws, and it wouldn’t stir. It was definitely a dead bird.

  “What luck!” I said to myself. “I shall pick it up and give it to Sis.”

  As I made my wag home with the bird in my mouth, I imagined everyone exclaiming and telling me that I was the best and kindest cat in the world. They would stroke me and praise me, and probably give me a delicious treat to eat. I made my way to the cat-flap as quickly as I could, and pushed my way in. Everyone was in the lounge, admiring the baby, who was being cuddled in Liz’s arms. They were drinking tea, and eating slices of cake. I trotted over to the fireplace, and dropped my gift on the hearthrug. Two of the ladies shrieked and jumped up, dropping their plates and sending cake-crumbs flying all over the carpet. Nick came over to me at once, and he was frowning and looked crosser than I’d ever seen him.

  “Naughty Callie!” he said. “You know we don’t allow dead birds in the house.” He picked it up on the coal shovel and walked quickly out of the room.

  I followed him, feeling very hurt. He didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him: “It’s not an ordinary bird,” I miaowed. “It’s a present for the baby.”

  He took no notice, but wrapped the bird up in a plastic bag and opened the back door to throw it into the wheelie bin. As he left the kitchen, he said to me: “Stay in here, Callie. I’m going to close the door behind me. I don’t want to see you again till all the guests have gone.”

  I thought that David would come and visit me in the kitchen and tell me he understood. We had always been such friends. He spoke to me more than he ever did to anyone else. I was sure he would be kind to me, but he never came, and in the end I fell asleep with my head resting on the knitted snake that was lying pushed up against the back door to keep the draughts out.

  4. Running Away

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I went out to the Square because I longed to talk to someone. Geejay was there, and I told him all my troubles.

  “I’m feeling very neglected,” I said. “No-one takes any notice of me any longer. I might just as well be invisible. Do you know, this morning, I had to miaow loudly for a good few minutes before Nan suddenly noticed that my bowl was quite empty, and I was waiting for my breakfast?”

  “You should teach them a lesson,” Geejay said. “If you ran away, they’d all miss you. You can be sure of that.”

  “I’m not sure at all,” I said. “And in any case, I’d be frightened. Where would I go? Where would I find food? Wouldn’t it be dangerous? And it’s so cold . . .”

  “You could find somewhere to hide, and go back later. Or you could find someone else to live with. Another family.”

  “Oh, my tuna titbits!” I cried, shocked at the idea. “Number 18 is my home. David is my person, and the whole family is my family.”

  “Of course,” said Geejay, “we would all miss you if you really ran away, but disappearing for a little while is often a good idea. I’ve done it myself, usually on hunting expeditions.”

  “But you’re brave,” I said, “and I’m a scaredy-cat.”

  Geejay smiled. I said goodbye to him and went back to the house. It was getting colder and colder.

  Once I was indoors, I went upstairs to look for David. The door of the baby’s room was open. I looked in and saw Liz, busy dressing her for the night. David was helping his mother, handing her things. The cot was empty. I knew that I wasn’t allowed in the cot, but I thought no-one would mind if I curled up in there for a moment, just till Sis was ready to sleep. I knew I would have to leave the cot then, but I remembered how lonely I sometimes was when I was a tiny kitten, and I thought to myself: It’s a pity I can’t stay here. I’m sure Sis would be happy to have a furry creature keeping her company, whatever they say.

  No-one was looking so I jumped up and settled myself on the blankets. When Liz turned round and saw me sleeping, she began to shriek as though I were some kind of monster. “Callie!” she shrieked. “Out! Get her out, David! Quick! Oh, you wicked cat! You know you’re not allowed in this room. Out! Out!”

 

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