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Alfie had sighed, and measured the correct, tiny amount of diet food into Penguin’s bowl. It didn’t even cover the fish pattern on the bottom. Alfie had crossed his fingers behind his back and set it down in front of Penguin, who was coiling himself adoringly around Alfie’s ankles.

Penguin had stopped dead, and stared up at Alfie accusingly.

“Sorry! The vet said!” Alfie protested. “Your legs are going to start hurting if you don’t go on a diet.”

Penguin sniffed suspiciously at the little brown pellets, then turned round and went straight out of the cat flap.

Later that evening, two sausages mysteriously disappeared while Alfie’s mum wasn’t looking.

The diet cat food lasted about a week before Mum binned it. She told Alfie that it was expensive anyway, but since she’d now had to replace most of what was in the fridge as well, it was like feeding three cats instead of one.

Penguin sat on one of the kitchen chairs looking happily plump and watched as she put the rest of the bag into the bin.

“That cat is smirking at me!” Mum said crossly, as she clanged the bin shut. “This really can’t go on, Alfie. It’s for his own good!”

“I don’t think he thinks he’s fat,” Alfie explained.

“You’ll just have to make sure he gets more exercise.” Mum sniffed. “Maybe you should put a sausage on a string and make him chase it up and down the garden.”

Now, looking at Penguin’s stomach gently folding over the edges of the branch, Alfie had to admit he was larger than he should be. But it was hard to make a cat exercise when he didn’t want to. Alfie had tried racing up and down the garden, and even throwing a bouncy ball for Penguin to chase. Penguin had sat on the garden bench, eyeing him with fascinated interest, as though he wondered why Alfie was bothering. After all, it wasn’t as if he was a dog.

“It’ll be tea time soon,” Alfie murmured. From his position in the tree, he could just about see into their kitchen window next door, and it looked like Mum was pottering about making sandwiches with leftover chicken. He yawned. “We’ll go back home in a minute.” He had to be careful to get back before Mum or Dad came looking for him – nobody knew that he was in next door’s garden.

Alfie and Penguin had found the loose board in the fence a little while after Penguin had arrived on Alfie’s doorstep. Alfie had been so excited about having a cat that for a few weeks he had followed Penguin everywhere, and Penguin hadn’t seemed to mind. Alfie had rolled underneath every bed in the house (although he didn’t fit under the sofa like Penguin did), wedged himself into the airing cupboard, and gone crawling through the flower beds down at the bottom of the garden.

Penguin particularly liked the flower beds. It had been late summer when he arrived and the weather had been horribly hot. Penguin had spent a lot of time collapsed under bushes, and Alfie had collapsed under them with him. They had watched, fascinated, as ants crawled past their noses and dry leaves tickled their ears.

When they weren’t slumped in the heat, they’d investigated every scrap of the garden, and it was behind the shed that they had made the discovery – the loose board, swinging from a nail where it had been badly mended once before. It was like a perfect little cat-and-boy-sized doorway. It had taken a couple of days for Alfie to pluck up the courage to go through it. He didn’t know much about the old lady next door, only her name, Mrs Barratt, and a few other odd little snippets. Mum had said she was ill, and couldn’t walk very far, not even up the stairs in her house. Dad moaned about the brambles snaking under the fence from her garden, and Mum told him off for being unkind, when the poor lady couldn’t really get out there with her garden tools, could she?

So Alfie knew that Mrs Barratt hardly ever went into her garden. And that it was overgrown enough to hide in. It was the perfect place for exploring.

At first Alfie and Penguin had followed tunnels through the brambles, Alfie tearing his shorts and staining his fingers and lips scarlet with squishy-ripe blackberries. They’d prowled through next door’s garden like a pair of panthers, Alfie loving the feel of being somewhere he shouldn’t really be, and Penguin pouncing on shadows like the overgrown kitten he was.

Alfie’s own garden didn’t have anything to explore. It was neat and divided up into what Mum called garden rooms. Lots of little hedges, and screens, and statues that popped up and surprised you. But it was so neat, it was useless for having adventures in.

The only good thing about it was that Mum could never quite tell which part of the garden Alfie was in. If he heard her calling him, it was easy to suggest he’d just been lurking behind the sweet peas, when actually he’d slipped back through the loose board, and emerged from behind the shed looking innocent.