Charlie the Kitten Who Saved a Life

Suddenly, there was a loud yowl of warning from where Black and Stinky were positioned. Big, another fish in his mouth, turned tail and dashed back towards us. The two humans had turned away from their boats and one of them was throwing something at him while the other one yelled:

‘Bloody cats! Thieving bloody varmints! Get out of here, you pesky moth-eaten bag of bones!’

‘Phew!’ meowed Big as he skidded to a halt beside us. ‘That was a close shave.’

‘I can’t believe how rude that human was to you,’ I sympathised. ‘There was no need to call you names like that.’

Big and Tail-less both gave me a funny look.

‘Oh, he was just making a lot of angry growling noises,’ he said without much interest.

I thought perhaps he’d been running too fast to hear what was being said. But a little later, while we were finishing off the fish round the back of the pub, a couple of humans strolled past, holding each other’s paws, the way they do sometimes if they like each other.

‘Ah, look at the poor little cats,’ the female said, stopping and bending down towards us. ‘Do you think they’re strays, Kev?’

‘No, I think they’re feral cats, Gemma. Don’t touch them, they might be carrying some kind of disease. And they might attack you.’

‘What a cheek!’ I muttered to Big, but he wasn’t taking any notice.

‘Poor things,’ said the female. ‘It’s not their fault, Kev – they were probably someone’s pets once. They might have got lost, and turned feral to survive.’

I pricked up my ears at this. Was I going to turn feral too, if I didn’t find my way home? Would I end up living my whole life like this, stealing fish, raiding bins for humans’ rubbish, sleeping rough and starting to talk in the strange, guttural Cat accent of my new friends? I started to shiver at the thought of it.

‘No, most of them will have been born in the alleyways around here to feral mothers,’ said the male. ‘They’re vermin, Gemma. There’s a lot to be said for the idea of a cull.’

‘What?’ She let go of his paw, looking at him in horror. ‘I can’t believe you just said that! What have these poor little things done to deserve that?’

As you can imagine, I was liking her a whole lot more than her male! I couldn’t help myself from purring and going to rub myself against her legs in gratitude. It seemed ages since I’d had any human affection.

‘Don’t let it touch you!’ the male said, pulling her away from me. ‘It’s probably riddled with fleas and disease.’

‘I’m not!’ I meowed. ‘I’m a pet! I’m lost! I want some love!’

‘What are you doing?’ Big meowed at me at the same time. ‘Stay away from them, Charlie, for the love of catnip! You don’t know whether they’re tame humans or not.’

‘They were. Well, she was,’ I mewed sadly as I watched them walk away. I noticed they weren’t holding paws anymore and the female was walking apart from the male, looking cross. ‘She was being kind, but the male was horrible, wasn’t he.’

All the other cats were staring at me.

‘So what are you, some kind of expert in human behaviour now?’ Big demanded. ‘I’m telling you, it’s impossible to know what they’re thinking. Not all of them are like the pet humans you used to have, you know.’

The words used to have filled my heart with despair. I was going to go back to my family. I had to find my way back! But in the meantime, something was puzzling me.

‘Didn’t you hear what that male was saying?’ I asked Big quietly. Maybe he was a bit deaf.

‘I didn’t notice any particular body language from him, no,’ he said. ‘But then again, humans don’t use much, do they.’

‘I mean what he was saying. Verbalising.’

‘Oh, you mean all that growling and whining they do. It’s meaningless. Don’t worry about it. It’s only when they bark like dogs we have to make ourselves scarce.’

‘No,’ I protested, ‘it’s not meaningless at all. Do you mean to say you can’t understand Human?’

‘There’s nothing to understand,’ he insisted. But he was giving me another funny look now. ‘You’re not telling me you think you can translate it?’

‘I thought all cats could. We’re born bilingual. I mean, we can’t speak it, of course, and they can’t understand Cat, sadly, but …’

Stinky and Black were sniggering. Big and Tail-less were frozen on the spot, looking at me as if I had two heads.

‘Prove it,’ Tail-less demanded.

‘Yeah, go on,’ Black said. ‘Tell us what those humans were saying.’

‘All right. But you won’t like it. The male said we were all vermin, we carry disease, and we should be culled.’

‘What?’ Stinky squawked. ‘I hope you’re making this up!’

‘No, I’m not. But the female felt sorry for us and told him off.’

There was silence for a while. They were starting to look at me differently – almost like they respected me.

‘And you’re saying you can understand everything humans say?’ Big demanded.

‘Well, they do sometimes come out with new words I haven’t heard before. But I can usually get the gist of it.’

‘I suppose it’s because you were born to domestic cat parents,’ he said wonderingly, ‘and you’ve been raised by humans, lived with them from kittenhood.’