Barney desperately tried to free himself. ‘Dad, I’m sorry – you were right. Just run or he’ll kill both of us.’
‘No way …’ And then Mr Willow had an idea. ‘Guster, listen, you can kill us in a second … Just hear me out.’ He tried to think. ‘You … like the snow.’
The spaniel’s jaws froze in midair.
‘In winter you run in it with your head low and your tongue out,’ Barney’s dad blurted. ‘And … and we washed you once, in the bath, but only once, because you went crazy when the water went in your eyes … and … and … You always liked sticking your head out of the window … and …’
Barney could see this might be working, so helped his dad out. ‘And you hate chocolate! Even nice human chocolate. When I gave you some you spat it on the carpet. But you love it when I scratch your tummy.’
Guster’s jaws closed. ‘One can’t abide chocolate, that is true … How do you know all this? Who supplied your information?’
‘Guster. It’s me, Barney. And this is Dad. You have to believe us.’
Guster was looking very confused. But then he was suddenly yanked out of the bush, his lead clipped on. Barney-Who-Wasn’t-Barney, or rather, Maurice, was pulling the spaniel hastily out of the park.
‘We’ve got to follow them,’ Barney said, finally freeing himself from the last twig. This time his dad reluctantly agreed.
They jogged behind in silence for a while, considering what to do next. Eventually Barney decided to speak to his body snatcher.
‘Maurice,’ he said. ‘Maurice!’
And Barney watched his former body stop and turn round. He looked shocked, as if he thought he was seeing a ghost.
‘Go away,’ Maurice said.
‘No. I won’t. I can’t. I don’t want to be a cat any more.’ And Barney wished as hard as he could wish, closing his eyes and urging himself to enter his old body again, but … nothing.
‘Trust me, if you know what is good for you, you will run far, far from here.’ It sounded more like a warning than a threat, as though Maurice actually wanted to help them.
Barney felt his dad nudge up against him when Maurice and Guster walked on. ‘I think we should do as he says.’
Barney waited, watching as Maurice yanked an even more perplexed Guster forward round the next corner. Before he vanished out of view completely, Maurice went stiff with fear.
‘Come on, Dad,’ Barney said, looking at his father’s nervous face. ‘Let’s see what’s happening.’
When Barney reached the corner he quickly saw the reason for Maurice’s fear. It was Gavin, walking to the bus stop with his mates Alfie Croker and Rodney Wirebrush.
‘Oi, Barney,’ Gavin shouted to Maurice. ‘Oi, you weirdo! What happened to you yesterday?’
Maurice said nothing.
Gavin was up close now, so enjoying himself he hadn’t noticed the cats. ‘I’m speaking to you. Speak, you freak! Speak!’
Barney was terrified as Gavin pushed Maurice against the wall.
He thinks it’s me, he thought. That should be me against the wall.
Guster just grumbled nervously. ‘Crikey! Oh good grief! Oh my word!’
‘We should leave,’ Barney’s dad was saying. ‘This isn’t our business.’
‘No, Dad,’ Barney said quickly. ‘This is exactly our business.’
Then he noticed something. When he looked at the situation from cat level, he could see that he was roughly the same height as Gavin. Not as a cat, obviously, but as a human. OK, so Gavin was a little taller than Barney’s true self but the difference wasn’t really that much. Two inches. No more. He suddenly realized Gavin was only as scary as you let him be. Barney had no more reason to fear him than the feline population of Blandford had reason to fear the Terrorcat.
‘The donkey,’ Barney said to Maurice.
‘What?’ gargled Maurice, petrified, as Gavin’s hand kept pressing up against his neck.
‘Mention the donkey. You know, the cuddly one he sleeps with on his bed. It’s called Eeyore.’
And Maurice remembered. The cuddly donkey from the room he’d had a thousand nightmares about.
‘Donkey,’ he said, his voice weak and blank at first.
Gavin snarled. ‘What?’
Maurice steeled himself. ‘I’ll tell your friends about who you’ve had to share a bed with ever since your mum noticed you’d wet the—’
Gavin’s eyes were filled with dread. ‘How do you know?’ he said. ‘You’ve never been to my house.’
‘If only.’
Meanwhile Rodney and Alfie had stopped laughing.
‘What’s he talking about?’ asked Rodney.
‘Yeah. What’s Willow mean?’ added Alfie.
‘I’ll tell them,’ said Maurice. ‘I promise you. Oh, and the damp sheets.’
‘Yes,’ growled Guster, not having a clue about what was going on. ‘He most certainly will.’
Gavin went purple with rage, and experienced the kind of fear that only came to him in his nightmares. A few moments later Alfie was pointing to the pavement. A puddle was emerging around Gavin’s feet.
‘He’s wetting himself! Look! Look!’
Alfie and Rodney were bent double, laughing even more.
‘Shut up!’ shouted Gavin. ‘Shut up, skinny rake!’ he said to Rodney Wirebrush. ‘Shut up, dog breath!’ he said to Alfie Croker. But even Gavin realized, as his friends kept laughing, that he’d suddenly just lost his bully powers. He walked away, fast, beckoning for his friends to follow, but they didn’t – they walked off in the other direction, laughing a laughter that burned into Gavin as he began jogging towards home.
Barney saw his own freckled, but actually not-bad-looking, face stare back down at him. Maurice seemed thankful, but didn’t say so. Instead he ran back to a house that wasn’t rightly his, pulling the half-reluctant King Charles spaniel behind him.
A Small Circle of Believability (or, the Wish He Wished He’d Never Wished)
THE SKY WAS full of thick, grey, puffy clouds, as if the whole of Blandford was tucked under the same duvet.
But Barney wasn’t feeling very snug as he waited with his dad outside the front door, which had been deliberately closed far too quickly for them to get inside.
He could hear his mum’s voice behind it, talking to the boy she thought was her son. Barney couldn’t hear the words, though, just the tone. Worried, maybe a little cross.
Two cats prowled by, made eye contact with Barney’s dad, then ran down the street.
‘See who that was?’ said one in a panic.
‘The Terrorcat!’ confirmed the other with dread.
Barney turned to his dad. They both laughed, cat-style. But then Barney thought of something.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I was there just then, with Maurice, and I was wishing to be in my own body again, but it didn’t happen. I’m still a cat.’
His dad nodded. ‘You have to really want it.’
‘I do.’
‘No, really,’ his dad explained. ‘I mean, I want my old life back too, but it’s not enough. You see, if there’s a part of you that is still unhappy with who you were, then it won’t happen. You have to want to be you more than Maurice does. More than you’ve ever wanted anything. You have to accept everything in your life, all the things you can’t change. You have to truly want to be Barney Willow.’
Barney considered.
His old life:
School. Gavin. Miss Whipmire. Rugby. Nicknames. A mum in fast-forward. Long weeks and weekends of infinite nothingness.
It was hard to find the happiness. The reasons to be grateful.
Mr Willow decided it was time to tell his son something he knew he should have said a long time ago and hadn’t been able to, not even in Barney’s dreams. ‘None of it was your fault, you know. The divorce, I mean. It was about me and your mum, that’s all.’