Kitten Kaboodle (7 page)

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.

‘I’ve just had a poptastic idea!’ she said, bouncing around the house with all her previous tragic misery miraculously forgotten. ‘Let me just get some paper and a pen .
. . right.’ She started scribbling on a pink notepad she’d filched from a drawer. ‘We could sing that mega song from
Cats
– you know, the musical? And we could write
out an order of service.’

Hmm. She was getting really carried away now.

‘Look – what about this?’ She showed me what she’d sketched out:

‘What does “RIP” mean?’ I asked.

‘“Really Important Person”; you always find it on gravestones and so on to show how important that person was to their family,’ Jazz said, her eyes shining with
enthusiasm.

‘Shouldn’t we put RIC, then?’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘You know, Really Important Cat?’ I insisted. A voice in my head was saying, ‘I cannot believe you are even having this conversation.’

Jazz shook her head. ‘No, no. It’s always RIP . We can pretend in this case that it stands for Really Important Pet, if that helps?’

Jazz always has an answer for everything.

‘Do we have to sing “Memory” from
Cats
?’ I asked, feeling very squirmy at the thought. I seemed to remember that the music went very high and screechy and I
didn’t think I’d be able to reach the top notes. And what if Pinkella’s next-door neighbours heard and wanted to know what we were doing?Then the cat really would be out of the
bag. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

But then I noticed that Jazz had put on one of her huffy faces so I said quickly, ‘Actually, I think it’s going to be fab – don’t listen to me.’

At last Jazz agreed that we had done enough preparation and that we could go ahead with the service. I think the fact that I kept glancing at my watch and pacing up and down had something to do
with it.

‘Dearly beloved . . .’ she began in a droning, deep voice. She sounded like she was a grey and wrinkly ninety-year-old priest instead of my best friend. We ird bubbles of
inappropriate laughter started to fizz up inside my nose.

‘We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of our much-loved brother Kaboodle—’

‘
Brother?
’ I squeaked. ‘But he’s a kitten!’

Jazz shot me a dirty look and carried on: ‘. . . much-loved brother, Kaboodle
the kitten
. Kaboodle was a kitten above all others. He will be sorely missed. In his memory, we will
now sing the song printed on the order of service.’

And then, solemn as anything, she started to sing, ‘
Mem-ry, not a sound from the pave-ment
. . .’

I couldn’t help it, the laughter just burst out. You couldn’t blame me. She sounded how I imagined Kaboodle would if he’d got his tail trapped in a door, or if Pinkella had
stepped on him by accident in her high-heeled spiky pink shoes.

Very soon I was howling. I just couldn’t stop. I had to sit down on the bench, otherwise I would have fallen over.

Jazz was furious. ‘Thanks for nothing!’ she ye lled at me. ‘I was only trying to make you feel better. Isn’t that what mates are for?’ And when in response I shook
my head with silent laughter, trying in vain to get my breath back, she spun on the heel of her trainers and marched out of the garden, leaving me there, gasping for breath.

Deep down inside I felt one hundred per cent horrendous for laughing at Jazz like that. But it was no good. I had got to that stage of laughing when you are panting hard, trying to get your
breath back while vaguely hoping you are not going to be sick. I had lost control of every one of my senses. The sight of Jazz flouncing off in a huff just made it worse. I wiped the tears from my
eyes and struggled to get up from the bench, and was just about to call out to her when a smooth, suave voice beside me said, ‘I’m glad you find the situation so amusing.’