The Kitten Hunt (6 page)

Jazz’s face changed when I said this. She smiled a small smile and dropped her head to one side. ‘All right,’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘Come on then, you
noodle; let’s go cuddle Kaboodle!’

I
n Pinkella’s kitchen she’d left another note on the work surface in some more of that seriously classy handwriting. It was written on,
you’ve guessed it, pink notepaper And it honked of some of the overpoweringly flowery perfume Pinkella was wearing when she had tried to crush me to death.

Her signature was a great big loopy thing that took up half the page.

Jazz sucked her teeth. ‘He gets
what?
And on a
silver dish? You
are joking! That woman has serious issues.’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter what we think,’ I said to Jazz. ‘We are in charge of Kaboodle until Pinkella gets back, so we must do as we’re told.’

Jazz rolled her eyes dramatically and said, ‘All right, boss. So long as old Second-in-Command here doesn’t have to touch an actual prawn. Bleurgh! I’m sure I’ve got a
deadly allergy to those curly fishy things.’

Jazz always conveniently developed allergies when she didn’t want to do something. Like the time we were supposed to be racing in an inter-schools swimming gala and Jazz suddenly developed
an allergy to chlorine.

I smiled. ‘You won’t – I promise.’

‘Leaving a bit of food out twice a day is so easy: it’s cash for nothing,’ Jazz said, brightening as she rubbed her hands together – and repeating almost word for word
what I had said to her only minutes before. ‘Y a y! Just think – if we do a good job for Pinkella, she might recommend our services, and then we’ll be raking the cash in!
I’ll finally be able to get those new trainers – you know,the ones with the wheels in the bottom and the flashing lights on the side and the multicoloured laces and—’

‘I know the ones,’ I cut in. I’d heard the Plan to Buy Multicoloured Trainers at least a million times before.

Jazz stopped walking. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking at me guiltily from behind a curtain of hair and beads. ‘I kind of haven’t even asked you yet if you’ll split the
money with me.’ She took her arm out of mine and fished in the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Here.’ She held out what had become a distinctly crumpled five-pound note.

I pushed her hand away and smiled. ‘I keep telling you – I really don’t care about the money, Jazz. You keep the down payment, and we’ll sort it out when Pinkella pays us
the rest.’

Jazz stuffed the fiver back into her pocket and jabbed me in the ribs, grinning. ‘Hey, if you earn enough money from pet-sitting, you’ll be able to actually buy yourself whatever pet
you want – your dad won’t be able to stop you. It’s your own money.’

I looked at Jazz and twisted my mouth to one side. ‘You obviously don’t know my dad as well as you think you do,’ I said. ‘Dad can stop me doing whatever he wants.
He’s Dad.’

Jazz threw her hands in the air. ‘You’ve just got to try harder, Bertie. Try using some initiative. Sure, you’ve begged him and begged him for a pet and he’s said no a
thousand times, but you haven’t thought about other ways of getting round him, have you? What about washing the car every Saturday or doing the shopping once a month or something?’

I frowned. ‘You obviously don’t know ME as well as you think you do either,’ I said. ‘I already do all those things anyway . It’s called “doing
chores”,’ I added sarcastically.

Jazz didn’t have to help out around the house as much as I did. As well as her little brother, Ty, she had a mega-cool older sister, A leisha, who sometimes took Jazz out shopping or to
the cinema. She also had an older brother, Sam, who admittedly wasn’t around much these days, but he was just as cool as Aleisha. But better than all that she had a dad
and
a mum. A
Full Monty of a family.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I don’t have a mum. She died when I was really small. I can’t even remember what she looks like and Dad’s not one for keeping the
photos out. So.

Jazz’s face melted and she chewed her bottom lip. ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed.

‘Whatever.’ I shrugged. Then I blushed. None of this was Jazz’s fault. I forced a smile and quickly changed the subject. ‘Hey, let’s go and find that gorgeous
kitty. You coming or what?’

We looked all through the house and the garden, but we couldn’t find Kaboodle anywhere. Jazz gave up before I did, saying her voice and legs were aching – hilarious, coming from a
girl who never stops singing and dancing, not to mention talking. I carried on calling and calling for him until I began to feel stupid.

‘I guess he’ll smell the prawns and come looking for them later,’ I said, coming in from the garden.

I was disappointed though. The whole point of the pet-sitting thing was so I could spend some time with an actual real animal, and it was slowly dawning on me that I could go the whole two weeks
coming round to feed Kaboodle without ever seeing him. Cats were like that. Elusive.

We agreed to come back at lunchtime and convinced ourselves that he would be home by then.

But he wasn’t.

I began to get worried. Pinkella had made it quite clear that Kaboodle liked his meals regularly, and I couldn’t help thinking it was very odd that he was nowhere to be found. But I
didn’t want to say anything to Jazz, as she was winding herself up into a mini-frenzy and saying things like ‘What’ll we do if he never comes back? What’ll we say to Ms P?
Do you think she’ll still pay us?’ which wasn’t helping the state of my own nerves.

We spent the afternoon at Jazz’s surfing the internet, looking at missing cat websites and Googling:

I began to feel a bit better when I saw tales of cats that had gone wandering off for a week or two and then come home just as their owners were giving up hope. But there were
also reports of cats who had ‘adopted’ other families and started going round to their houses for meals while their owners were away on holiday.

We decided to set off round the street, calling and looking in everyone’s driveways and up all the trees in the front gardens. Luckily no one stopped to ask us what we were doing, but
unluckily we did not find Kaboodle.

‘This isn’t a great advert for my Pet-Sitting Service,’ I pointed out. ‘If people hear us, they’ll know we’ve lost him.’

‘Let’s go back to Ms P’s,’ Jazz suggested.

I nodded reluctantly. My feet were sore and my voice was sounding a bit hoarse and it was half past four already. Dad would be back soon, I thought miserably. ‘By now I bet
Kaboodle’s sitting on one of those huge fluffy cushions in her sitting room, snoozing,’ I said, sounding a million times more confident than I actually felt.

But of course, he wasn’t.

‘This is a nightmare!’ Jazz wailed. ‘And it’s definitely the hardest way to earn a fiver
I’ve
ever heard of. My feet are going to be so covered in blisters,
forget the funky trainers, I’ll be buying a pair of huge fluffy granny-slippers.’

‘Yeah, right – the day I see you in huge fluffy granny-slippers the cow really will have jumped over the moon!’ I hooted.

Jazz giggled but her face clouded over almost immediately and she groaned, burying her head in her hands.

‘Oh Bertie, I’ve just thought of something! What if he’s totally freaked at being left all on his owny-own?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked suspiciously, thinking that Jazz was going to do her whole squeaky-Pinkella routine again.

‘No, I’m serious,’ Jazz persisted, letting her hands fall. She fixed me with her velvety eyes, her forehead crumpling. ‘What if he saw her leave this morning and now
he’s decided to follow her?’

‘Why would he do that?’

Jazz crossed her arms. ‘Well, you saw those websites! They said if you move house, you have to put butter on your cat’s paws to stop it running away – or was it margarine? No,
it must be butter. Margarine is gross—’

‘What are you on about?’ I cut in irritably. ‘He’s not going to have gone all the way to Scotland, is he? Not unless he was quick enough to stow away in her taxi this
morning, which I think is not that likely. He’ll be back.’

‘Oh no!’ Jazz gasped. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets. ‘What if he
did
try to stow away in the taxi, and he tried to jump into the boot, and he missed and
fell under the car wheels, and the taxi man didn’t see him and reversed on to him and – and – and
squashed him . . .
!’ Her voice trailed off in a horrified
whisper.

An invisible finger traced a line up my back to my neck and I shivered.

Jazz continued, the wide-eyed look still etched on to her face. ‘Remember what it said in all those articles we read? Cats have a sixth sense, right? They know when something’s up.
Kaboodle will have definitely been freaked cos his mummsie is away. And now I think
I’ve
got a sixth sense about what’s happened. I’m sorry to say this, Bertie, but . .
.’

She paused dramatically as if she were a detective on a whodunnit who was about to announce, er, whodunnit.

‘. . . considering all the evidence, and taking into account all the facts at our disposal . . . I can hardly bear to even
think
this, but I – I – I have to say . .
.’ She gulped and put a hand dramatically up to her throat. ‘I reckon he’s – oh my goodness, I reckon he . . . he’s got to be
dead
, Bertie! I’m sorry, but
there’s no other explanation.’

Tears spurted out of the corners of her eyes and she slumped down on to one of the pink kitchen chairs and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

I stared out of the window at the cherry tree in Pinkella’s garden and peered at the branches. Blimey, even the trees in her garden were pink! Was Kaboodle up there somewhere, hidden among
the leaves?

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ Jazz rasped, blinking up at me through her tears. ‘We owe it to the poor little thing. After all, we are responsible for him while Ms P is
away.’

‘What are you on about now?’

‘We’re going to have to give Kaboodle a good send-off,’ Jazz sniffed.

‘What?’ I repeated.

‘A good send-off – you know, a memorial service type thing.’ Jazz stood up and tore a piece of pink kitchen roll from where it was fixed on the wall. She blew her nose noisily
and went on with her latest bonkers idea. ‘When someone dies you have a funeral, right?’ She broke off and glanced at me, blushing.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, waving a hand at her. ‘Go on.’

‘And sometimes you have a memorial service – you know, you say beautiful poems and things about the person who’s died. We did it for Nan. She had always loved the sea, so when
she died we had a day trip to her favourite beach in Kent and we said poems and sang songs. It – it was a n-nice way to remember her,’ Jazz hiccuped.

‘Yes, lovely,’ I said. ‘But you’re forgetting one small yet important fact: Kaboodle isn’t dead. At least, we don’t
know
he is. He’s only been
missing a few hours. You can’t give up on him that easily.’

Jazz sniffed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘It can’t do any harm having a little service for him,’ she said. ‘And if he comes back, it’s not like
he’ll know or be offended or anything.’

I shook my head. ‘What is wrong with you?’ I snapped, suddenly fed up with the whole conversation. Jazz jumped like a startled deer. ‘The cat’s gone away for a day and
you immediately leap to the conclusion that he’s dead? If he’d been run over we’d have seen a body –’

But Jazz was in full flow with the memorial idea, and once she’s in full flow, there is no stopping her.

‘Can’t you just think of it as a lovely symbolic thing to do?’ she wheedled. ‘We could write our own poem or song, and then we’ll go out into the garden and say
some words in memory of Kaboodle.’

I huffed. This sounded like just another excuse for Miss Jasmeena Brown to take centre stage in an Oscar-winning performance. But more big fat tears had started rolling down her cheeks. She was
getting really emotional so I thought I’d better agree quickly to her loony-brain plan so that we could get it over and done with.

Jazz perked up when I told her I liked her idea (even though it would’ve been pretty clear to even the doziest dormouse on the block that I really didn’t) and she suggested we have
the service right there and then.