He is not out there. I will not find him. It was just another dream. IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DREAM.
The Hairs
BARNEY STILL FELT wide awake from his deep nap at the restaurant, and was allowed to stay up late as it was his birthday.
‘That was very odd, you falling asleep like that,’ his mum commented. ‘I think we might need to take you to hospital to get you checked out.’
‘I’m all right now. I think I’m feeling better.’
But then, while he sat on the sofa watching TV with his mum, his arms started itching and he began to rub them.
‘Barney, don’t do that. You’ll make them sore,’ Mum said, switching from polar bears to a quiz show.
‘I can’t help it.’ He unbuttoned one of his cuffs, rolled up the sleeve and started to scratch the skin directly. ‘They’re so itchy.’
As he scratched he saw one, then two, then three thick black hairs on his right arm. They were pure jet-black, way darker than his normal mousy mid-brown hair colour, and were arranged like points in a neat line just below his wrist.
‘Mum, look – these hairs.’
‘Oh yes, you’re turning into a man. Well, now that you’re nearly a teenager you’ll be starting to get hairy all over the place.’
‘But they’re weird. They’re black. I don’t have black hair. And they weren’t there yesterday. They weren’t even there this afternoon. I don’t want to turn into a man that quickly.’
She wasn’t listening. She was too busy looking at his forehead.
‘What is it?’ Barney asked her.
‘Oh dear, I’ll just get the tweezers,’ she said, before disappearing up to her bedroom.
Meanwhile, Barney went to look in the hallway mirror to see what the matter was.
There, right in the middle of his forehead, was another thick black hair.
‘Right,’ his mum said, running back down the stairs. ‘I’ve got the tweezers. Let’s pluck it out. Stand under the light so I can get a good look at it.’
Barney did as she instructed, staring up at the bulb, which shone little white whiskers of light. A part of him quite enjoyed his mum giving him so much attention. But another part of him was worried.
‘Mum, what’s happening to me?’
‘Nothing’s happening,’ she reassured him. ‘Bodies are strange things. You can get hairs anywhere.’
‘But I feel itchy as well. My arms, and my legs.’
‘Well, don’t scratch right now,’ she said. ‘Stay still and we’ll get this out.’
Barney stayed still even though his skin felt like it was covered with a hundred invisible mosquito bites.
‘Right,’ his mum said. ‘This might hurt just a little bit.’
She pressed the tweezers together, jamming the hair between the ends. Then she started to pull. And pull.
And pull.
She had one hand pressed onto his head and the other was trying to tug out the hair. Barney winced, his eyes watering from the pain as the hair was pulled and tugged and yanked.
‘How weird,’ she mused. ‘It just won’t come out.’
A horrible image flashed into Barney’s mind. He imagined walking into school and Gavin making even more jokes about him than normal. Hey, look at the werewolf! Or something equally hilarious.
Then his mum went and got the cream she used on her upper lip to stop her getting a moustache, but that didn’t do anything except add a red circle around the black hair – just in case it wasn’t noticeable enough already.
Barney wanted to tell her that this needed to be sorted out, but he felt another wave of overwhelming tiredness. This time, though, he managed not to fall asleep right there. He just yawned a ‘Goodnight’ and a ‘Better go up’ to his mum, and had a vague thought that he should confess about the letter, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the courage. Or the energy.
Instead he promised to wash his face and brush his teeth, and climbed upstairs in a sleepy trance. Then he went to bed (without washing his face or brushing his teeth – or even closing his curtains), collapsing on his mattress and pulling the duvet over him before falling into the deepest, darkest sleep of his life.
Waking Up
BEFORE HE EVEN opened his eyes for the day to begin, Barney knew something was wrong.
His mouth felt like a desert. His heart was racing fast but gently, like a drum roll at low volume. But that wasn’t all. His whole body felt different. Warmer, for one thing, but also more hunched in, like a closed fist that couldn’t open.
He could feel a softness on top of him. A big, heavy softness. When he opened his eyes it made no difference, because it was still totally dark. Quickly, though, he could see patterns in front and around him, as if he had suddenly developed night vision.
Long, black, teardrop-shaped shadows stood out against grey.
I’m in a cave.
A very soft, low – and particularly warm – cave.
As he became more alert he realized this was ridiculous. He decided he must be under his own duvet. But how could it have grown so big?
Barney tried to get to his feet but couldn’t, or at least not in the way he normally got to his feet. He was standing up, and yet his back was still pressed against the soft, warm gigantic cave of a duvet.
He moved forward, but his arms and legs weren’t working like they normally did. Something was wrong with his coordination. And where were his knees? What had happened to them? It was as though his skeleton was a jigsaw puzzle that had been mixed up overnight. Things that should have bent didn’t. Things that shouldn’t have did. And some pieces of his bone-jigsaw were entirely new. Most notably, he could feel something trailing behind his back. Something that he could move in various ways as if it was made of ten elbows joined together.
Mum, he said, or tried to. And then, pointlessly: Dad. But he couldn’t make words, just noises.
Trapped as he was in this strange new body, he started to panic. Barney urgently wanted to get out of the darkness, and the only way he could think of doing that was to crawl from under it. So he did. Shuffling forward on his new limbs, with his head low and his legs close to the spongy floor, he pushed his way through.
And then he was there, out in the cold light of morning.
He looked down to see a great vastness that at first seemed like an ocean. The length of the drop was at least three times his height so it took a moment to realize that the great blue vastness he was looking down at was his own carpet.
This was his bed.
This was his room.
But everything had grown beyond all possibility. The wardrobe was the size of a house. The bedside lamp peered down at him like some strange armless robot. The door was miles away. And the school uniform which hung over his chair belonged to a giant.
Next he saw something which made even less sense.
His hands, or his feet – he couldn’t tell which – were entirely covered with hair. And they were fingerless. Toeless. He turned his head to see what he had only felt so far. A tail. Curled into a quivering kind of question mark, as though the rest of his body was a query wanting an answer.
It was impossible.
He was still Barney. His ‘Barney-ness’ was still there in his head, his mind still the same bulging suitcase of memories and emotions. But at the same time he already knew he wasn’t him at all. He was something else. Something so impossible that he thought this had to be a dream, like the one he’d had about his father.
He blinked, and then blinked some more.
No. There was no doubt about it.
He was awake.
Indeed, he was as awake as he had ever been. So, to his horror, he had to believe what his eyes were telling him, and what the black hair and the tail and the paws were telling him. And what they were telling him was this: he may have gone to bed human, but he had woken up unquestionably, unmistakably, unimaginably cat.