Miss Whipmire had understood his miaow – hence the speech marks (and, yes, all those words equalled only one miaow) – but she chose not to answer it. Not right then, anyway.
‘When?’ she said, on the brink of more laughter.
‘What?’
‘Still as slow as ever, aren’t you, Barney Willow? I’ll ask it slowly.’ She closed her eyes and moved her mouth carefully around her words. ‘When. Did. You. Become. A. Cat?’
‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I felt funny for a while, but it was only this morning that I became … like this.’
(Three miaows, long and heartfelt.)
‘This morning … this morning …’ said Miss Whipmire, thinking, and tapping her fingers on her chin as if it were a silent piano.
And then she had another question. ‘And so, where are you?’
Barney was confused. ‘I’m here.’
‘No, you imbecile, the other you. The better you. The cat in your body.’
‘I don’t know. He was walking to the bus stop with Rissa and then he ran away.’
‘Good.’ Miss Whipmire nodded the kind of nod you give when everything is going to plan. ‘Good, good. He’ll be taking some time to adjust, like I told him to. Then he’ll be on his way here. Very good … But not for you, obviously. Bad, bad for you. Because there goes your ticket.’
‘What ticket?’ said Barney, noticing an envelope on the desk with what looked like tickets sticking out.
‘Oh, not these,’ she said, waving the envelope. He could see the address:
Miss Polly Whipmire
63 Sycamore Terrace
Blandford
Blandfordshire
BL1 3NR
‘These are real tickets – my tickets. Mine and my only love’s. Out of here for ever. This time tomorrow I’ll be en route to Old Siam – Thailand. I’m talking about the ticket back to you. Back to you you.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ she said, her thin lips curling into a frosty smile. ‘After all, just because you look like a cat doesn’t mean you have the brain of a cat, does it?’ She leaned close into him again. He felt his claws growing, itching to strike her nose. But he was too scared to do anything.
‘Do you know what the IQ of the average cat is?’ she asked him.
‘No.’
‘One thousand and six. That’s nine hundred and six points higher than the average human.’ Miss Whipmire paused, licked her lips as if savouring the taste of something. ‘Anyway, this happens more than you think. See, I’m a cat. Was a cat. Oh yes, that’s right – Blandford High School has had a Siamese cat acting as its head teacher for quite a while now.’ She smiled again as Barney began to absorb the madness of what she was telling him. ‘And do you know what? This school has never had such good results!’
Sardines
BARNEY FELT HIS new thick black hair rise all over his body.
Miss Whipmire was a cat!
‘Oh yes, true as a tail, as we cats say,’ she said, popping behind the desk and opening up a drawer. She pulled out a tin of sardines.
‘Do you know how many sardines you can buy on a headteacher’s salary?’ she asked, peeling off the lid and placing one of the oily fish into her mouth.
‘No, I don’t,’ Barney told her, remembering the smell of fish he’d noticed yesterday as a human sitting right here in her office. The smell that was stronger still now that he had cat nostrils.
‘A lot,’ she said, making no attempt to close her mouth as she chewed the fish. ‘Mmmmmmm, delicious. Better than cat food, I can tell you. Eugh. Cat food. That’s what I used to live on. And not just any cat food. The most disgusting cat food in the whole of Costslicers Supermarket – rabbit kidney.’
Miss Whipmire looked like she was about to be sick at the memory. But she became angry instead and beat her human fist down on her desk causing the pens in her weird pen pot to bounce about.
‘You see, everyone thought that Miss Whipmire – the real Miss Whipmire – was so lovely,’ she said bitterly. ‘Lovely Polly Whipmire! Even after two days in the job it was clear she was going to be a terrible head teacher, but no one minded, because she was such a wonderful person. Riding her little bicycle, being gentle and kind with all the children, loving her little Siamese cat …’ She shook her head. ‘Well, that’s not how I saw it. Not with her rabbit liver, and the tiny kitchen she used to shut me in.’
She ate another sardine, and another, and one more, the last while she closed her eyes, comforting herself with the taste.
‘But she doesn’t bother me now,’ she said in a most peculiar voice. A voice which sounded as cold as a grave in the night. ‘Oh, no, you don’t bother me now, do you, Polly?’
Barney realized she was no longer looking at him. She was gazing down at the table. At first he thought she was staring at the empty tin of sardines she had just placed there.
But no.
She was staring at the pen pot next to it. The funny-shaped black one with the holes. She leaned forward, took one of the school pens; the ones that said: BLANDFORD HIGH SCHOOL – YOUR CHILD IS OUR WORLD. And then she studied Barney’s face as she tapped the pen against the pot. The pot shaped like a skull.
A cat’s skull, he thought as he began to realize exactly what Miss Whipmire – or rather this cat who had become Miss Whipmire – was truly capable of.
Poor Polly
‘OF COURSE, I had to cut the top of the skull off,’ Miss Whipmire explained thoughtfully, admiring her handiwork. ‘And I painted it, to disguise it. But it works quite well. What do you think?’
‘I … I … I … think you’re a monster.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Barney, I can assure you the former Miss Whipmire had a very nice time in my ageing cat body. I told her lovely stories of Old Siam, and I kept her warm and safe.’ She sighed thoughtfully. ‘Of course, I didn’t give her anything to eat or drink, but then, compared to the rabbit kidney she used to give me, I was doing her a favour really. Oh, poor Polly, though. Fading away like that. It was hard. I do still have this lovely little memento to keep me company.’
She tapped the pot again.
Her mouth twitched at the corners, like a cat’s tail. ‘The trouble is, I do have rather a lot of pens. I get them free. One of the perks of the job. But this old head isn’t very big.’ Her mouth twitched its way into a smile again. ‘I suppose what I’m really saying is that I could do with a new pen pot. Do you understand?’
And, just in case Barney didn’t understand, she tapped the side of her head, then pointed at him. ‘And I think yours would hold a few more. Yes, I might even get some marker pens in there.’
‘You’re mad,’ Barney said as he leaped down and began to walk backwards towards the door. ‘You’re absolutely mad.’
‘No, I’ll tell you what would have been mad,’ she hissed. ‘Staying a cat. Now that would have been crazy. To be a cat, that’s no fun … What I went through at the hands of humans … When I was just little old Caramel, well … And not just with Polly Whipmire, either. Oh no, she was the least of it. You see, Polly had neighbours, and the neighbours had children. The Freemans. Torturers, they were. Once, on bonfire night, they … they—’
She stopped. Closed her eyes tight shut, as though the memory was a piece of sharp glass in her shoe.
‘Well, put it this way. I left the house that night with a tail and came back without one. And, of course, I was relieved when I heard the Freemans were moving abroad, to Thailand – my ancestral homeland, as it happens. But my sadness remained, every time I turned round and saw the space where my tail should have been.
‘Anyway, I could have coped with all that … I could have coped with anything if I had been with …’