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Abi crouched down by the kitten but Flower hadn’t even noticed that the front door was open. Abi heard the door close and went to get her cereal. Flower finished her drink and padded out into the hallway.

“I nearly missed them!” Mum said, coming back with a relieved look on her face. Then her eyes met Abi’s and they both whirled round at the sound of the front door clicking open.

“It’s the bin lorry!” Ruby cried excitedly, waving to the man pulling the dustbin away from the front gate. “Hello! Hello!”

The bin man waved back and Ruby jumped up and down happily. Behind her, a curious white kitten hurried towards the door and Abi raced up the hallway.

“Ruby, don’t let her out!”

Ruby turned round, surprised and then horrified, as Flower slipped past her feet. Abi lunged forward, grabbing the white kitten just before she shot out of the door.

[Êàðòèíêà: img_22]

“Oh Abi, well done!” Mum gasped, hurrying down the hall after her. “That was close!”

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“I’d have been so cross with her,” Sky said when Abi told her about it later on.

“I was a bit – but Ruby’s only little and she was really upset when Mum explained what she’d done wrong.” Abi shook her head. “It’s so tricky! I never thought we opened the front door that much. But we do, loads. And in the summer we leave the back door to the garden open all the time. Or we did.”

Sky made a face.“Are you thinking an indoor cat’s going to be too much trouble?”

“No way! We’ll just have to be careful. Flower’s so gorgeous. She’s still a bit shy sometimes, but we’ve only had her for a few days. Ithink she likes us.”

“Of course she likes you,” Sky said encouragingly. “Or she should do. It sounds like you’re being perfect indoor cat owners.”

They were trying, anyway– but it was a lot more work than anyone had expected, even after all they’d done to get ready. After Flower had climbed the curtains for the third time, Mum and Chris decided she needed something of her own to climb. So on Saturday they went to the pet shop to choose her a cat tree – a sort of special climbing frame for a cat with scratching posts, a box to hide in and a little hammock to sleep in.

[Êàðòèíêà: img_24]

Flower loved it and the hammock was her new favourite sleeping place, much better than her basket. She lolled about in it with her paws in the air and her chin hanging over the edge so she could see what was going on.

Abi wasn’t sure if Flower was so nosy because of her deafness or if all cats were like that, but the little kitten hated to miss anything. She had to climb and sniff and probably scratch everything that came in the house. She loved Abi and Ruby’s room because it was full of toys and blankets and thingsto explore and snuggle under. Sometimes she slept on Abi’s bed, but Mum always came and got her before she and Chris went to bed. Mum wasn’t sure that Flower would be able to make it down the stairs when she needed the litter tray.

Halfway through Flower’s second week with the family, Ruby brought home a junk model from school. Junk modelling was her favourite thing about Reception but Mum had made a rule – one model in, one model out. Otherwise Abi and Ruby’s room would be completely full of cereal packets stuck to toilet-roll tubes.

The new model was a cat– actually it was Flower, or so Ruby said. Abi couldn’t quite see it, only that there were some soggy bits of white tissue paper stuck on.

“Flower knows it’s her,” Ruby said proudly, setting it down on the floor in front of the kitten and watching as she sniffed it and then tried to climb inside the tissue box that was her body.

“You know what,” Abi said thoughtfully, “there was something like that on one of the websites I was looking at about indoor cats.”

Chris looked at her in surprise.“What, making junk models for them to shred? Ruby, if you don’t want her to eat it, I’d go and put it somewhere high up in your bedroom.”

“Not to claw at. To get food out of.” Abi frowned, trying to remember. “It said that outdoor cats spend ages tracking and hunting, and even if they never actually catch anything it’s good for indoor cats to have something like that too. That you should make their food into a puzzle. There was a picture that looked just like one of Ruby’s models. It was all loo rolls stuck together, and there were cat biscuits hidden inside it. Like the biscuits Flower sometimes has for her tea now.”

“That’s a great idea.” Chris reached out to the back of the kitchen door, where there was a cloth bag hung on a hook. “There you go. We were saving these for Ruby to take into school.Loads of loo rolls.”

“Can I help?” Ruby asked, cuddling her junk cat protectively while Flower pranced around her ankles, purring with excitement.

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