A Cat Called Penguin Read online

  For Tom,

  who has a fat cat of his own

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  More Books by Holly Webb

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Look After Your Cat

  Copyright

  Purring rumbled through the sleepy sunshine, and Alfie yawned again. It was a warm September Sunday afternoon, and he was full of lunch, and apples, and a squashed bar of chocolate that he’d forgotten was in the back pocket of his jeans. He settled himself more comfortably against the trunk of the apple tree and leaned his arm against the thick branch that jutted out in just the right place. Penguin, who was draped across the same branch like a fat furry rug, leaned forward a little and licked Alfie’s elbow lovingly.

  “Don’t fall off,” Alfie murmured woozily. But it was a silly thing to say. Penguin never fell. He didn’t look as though he was in the best shape for climbing trees – one would think his stomach would get in the way, particularly for jumping. But Penguin had perfect balance, good even for a cat. Alfie smiled to himself as he remembered trying to persuade Penguin to walk along the washing line during the summer holidays. Penguin had refused, even for smoky bacon crisps, his favourite. (Although he had stolen the crisps off the table later.) Alfie had been convinced that Penguin would be a fabulous tightrope artist. They should try again. Perhaps it was the lack of circus music and Big Top atmosphere that had put him off. Maybe a costume… Alfie looked at Penguin thoughtfully. He wondered how easy it would be to get hold of a cat-shaped leotard.

  Penguin opened one yellowish-golden eye a slit and stared sternly at Alfie, as though warning him that attempts to dress him in a sequinned cloak would result in severe scratches. But he didn’t stop purring.

  “OK,” Alfie murmured. “But I bet it would be good for your tummy.”

  Penguin ignored that. He didn't have any problems with the size of his stomach.

  Penguin hadn’t always been enormous. When Alfie had first found him, sitting on the front doorstep on the way home from school two years before, he had been very skinny indeed, and not much more than a kitten. Alfie was pretty sure he’d been a stray for a while, and that was why he loved food so much – he’d never been quite sure where the next meal was coming from.

  Mum and Dad hadn’t been at all sure about keeping the thin little black and white kitten, but Alfie had begged and begged. He had agreed to putting up posters, just in case someone else was looking for their lost cat, and he’d stood anxiously next to Mum as she had phoned all the vets in the local phonebook. But no one had turned up to claim the skinny kitten (who was already less skinny, after a couple of days of Alfie-sized meals). After two weeks, Mum and Dad had given in, and Alfie had announced the secret he’d been saving up.

  The cat was called Penguin.

  Dad had tried to explain that it was ridiculous to call a cat that. He wasn’t a penguin.

  Alfie said he knew that quite well, thank you. The cat just looked like one. And it was true. Penguin had sleek black fur – getting sleeker by the day – and a shining white shirt front. When Alfie had spent his birthday money from Gran on a glow-in-the-dark orange collar, Penguin was a dead ringer for his namesake. When Alfie phoned Gran to tell her what he’d spent the money on, he had got a little parcel back with a silvery tag engraved with his phone number on one side and Penguin on the other. Gran liked cats. And even Dad could not argue now there was a collar with his name on.

  Alfie sometimes wondered what would have happened if Penguin had chosen someone else’s step to sit on that day. Where would he be now? It was impossible to imagine not having him there. Penguin was his best friend. Alfie had lots of friends at school, but he never talked to them as much as he talked to Penguin. Penguin was an excellent listener, and he always purred in all the right places. Once, when Alfie was telling him about being kept in at lunch time by Mrs Haynes, the Year Two teacher he had never got on with, Penguin had coughed up a hairball all over the kitchen floor. Which just proved that he understood exactly what Alfie had been talking about.

  Alfie liked Penguin plump. He thought it made him look even more penguin-like. But at his last check-up, the vet had suggested politely that Penguin ought to go on a diet, and Mum had bought a bag of special diet cat food. It did not look pleasant. Alfie hated the smell of the tins Penguin usually had, and forked it quickly into his bowl with his nose stuffed in the crook of his elbow. But at least the tinned stuff was meaty. Like something a proper cat might want to eat, after a hard day’s prowling around after mice and birds. The diet version looked like rabbit poo.

  Alfie had tried to explain to Mum that it wasn’t going to work, but she hadn’t been in a very good mood, as his baby sister Jess had just thrown a bowlful of lovingly mashed carrots into the toaster.

  “If he doesn’t like it, he won’t eat it,” she’d snapped, trying to fish the orange goo out with a spoon. “And that’ll have the same effect in the long run. Stop fussing, Alfie!”

  Alfie had sighed, and measured the correct, tiny amount of diet food into Penguin’s bowl. It didn’t even cover the fish pattern on the bottom. Alfie had crossed his fingers behind his back and set it down in front of Penguin, who was coiling himself adoringly around Alfie’s ankles.

  Penguin had stopped dead, and stared up at Alfie accusingly.

  “Sorry! The vet said!” Alfie protested. “Your legs are going to start hurting if you don’t go on a diet.”

  Penguin sniffed suspiciously at the little brown pellets, then turned round and went straight out of the cat flap.

  Later that evening, two sausages mysteriously disappeared while Alfie’s mum wasn’t looking.

  The diet cat food lasted about a week before Mum binned it. She told Alfie that it was expensive anyway, but since she’d now had to replace most of what was in the fridge as well, it was like feeding three cats instead of one.

  Penguin sat on one of the kitchen chairs looking happily plump and watched as she put the rest of the bag into the bin.

  “That cat is smirking at me!” Mum said crossly, as she clanged the bin shut. “This really can’t go on, Alfie. It’s for his own good!”

  “I don’t think he thinks he’s fat,” Alfie explained.

  “You’ll just have to make sure he gets more exercise.” Mum sniffed. “Maybe you should put a sausage on a string and make him chase it up and down the garden.”

  Now, looking at Penguin’s stomach gently folding over the edges of the branch, Alfie had to admit he was larger than he should be. But it was hard to make a cat exercise when he didn’t want to. Alfie had tried racing up and down the garden, and even throwing a bouncy ball for Penguin to chase. Penguin had sat on the garden bench, eyeing him with fascinated interest, as though he wondered why Alfie was bothering. After all, it wasn’t as if he was a dog.

  “It’ll be tea time soon,” Alfie murmured. From his position in the tree, he could just about see into their kitchen window next door, and it looked like Mum was pottering about making sandwiches with leftover chicken. He yawned. “We’ll go back home in a minute.” He had to be careful to get back before Mum or Dad came looking for him – nobody knew that he was in next door’s garden.

  Alfie and Penguin had found the loose board in the fence a little while after Penguin had arrived on Alfie’s doorstep. Alfie had been so excited about having a cat that for a few weeks he had followed Penguin everywhere, and Penguin hadn’t
seemed to mind. Alfie had rolled underneath every bed in the house (although he didn’t fit under the sofa like Penguin did), wedged himself into the airing cupboard, and gone crawling through the flower beds down at the bottom of the garden.

  Penguin particularly liked the flower beds. It had been late summer when he arrived and the weather had been horribly hot. Penguin had spent a lot of time collapsed under bushes, and Alfie had collapsed under them with him. They had watched, fascinated, as ants crawled past their noses and dry leaves tickled their ears.

  When they weren’t slumped in the heat, they’d investigated every scrap of the garden, and it was behind the shed that they had made the discovery – the loose board, swinging from a nail where it had been badly mended once before. It was like a perfect little cat-and-boy-sized doorway. It had taken a couple of days for Alfie to pluck up the courage to go through it. He didn’t know much about the old lady next door, only her name, Mrs Barratt, and a few other odd little snippets. Mum had said she was ill, and couldn’t walk very far, not even up the stairs in her house. Dad moaned about the brambles snaking under the fence from her garden, and Mum told him off for being unkind, when the poor lady couldn’t really get out there with her garden tools, could she?

  So Alfie knew that Mrs Barratt hardly ever went into her garden. And that it was overgrown enough to hide in. It was the perfect place for exploring.

  At first Alfie and Penguin had followed tunnels through the brambles, Alfie tearing his shorts and staining his fingers and lips scarlet with squishy-ripe blackberries. They’d prowled through next door’s garden like a pair of panthers, Alfie loving the feel of being somewhere he shouldn’t really be, and Penguin pouncing on shadows like the overgrown kitten he was.

  Alfie’s own garden didn’t have anything to explore. It was neat and divided up into what Mum called garden rooms. Lots of little hedges, and screens, and statues that popped up and surprised you. But it was so neat, it was useless for having adventures in.

  The only good thing about it was that Mum could never quite tell which part of the garden Alfie was in. If he heard her calling him, it was easy to suggest he’d just been lurking behind the sweet peas, when actually he’d slipped back through the loose board, and emerged from behind the shed looking innocent.

  Then one afternoon, a few weeks after they’d first ventured into the wilderness, Alfie and Penguin had discovered the tree. It was a huge old apple tree down at the far end of the garden, where it backed on to a little wood. The apple tree’s furthest branches joined the elderberries on the other side of the fence. It was first time they’d explored that far and the ground around the tree had been buzzing with drunken wasps, feeding on the fallen apples. Penguin had sniffed one, and jumped back in shock when it buzzed angrily at him, and flew wobbling away.

  Alfie had stood staring up at the trunk, wondering if he could climb it. He could reach the first branch with his hands, but he’d never get a foot up there. He’d always wanted a treehouse. He supposed Mrs Barratt might notice if he built a house in her tree, but then Mum had said her eyesight wasn’t very good. Surely she wouldn’t notice him hidden in the branches? The next time he came through the fence, Alfie brought an old wooden box that had been round the back of the shed by the compost heap for ages. With that he could just scramble far enough up to get his elbows over the first branch.

  He needed to grow. His mum was always complaining that he grew out of things – now for the first time Alfie was actually trying to grow on purpose. He started drinking more milk, but gave up after a week as it didn’t seem to work. He went back to the tree every day and stood underneath it, eyeing the huge branches. He would be able to see everything from up there. As far as his friend Oliver’s house down the road, he thought. Maybe even further. But he still couldn’t reach that vital first branch.

  It was soon after then that Alfie found the rope. It was quite close to the house, which was probably why he hadn’t seen it before. He didn’t normally like to go too close, in case Mrs Barratt spotted him. He occasionally saw her, just a smudge behind the kitchen window blind, but no more. He wasn’t quite sure if that made her more scary or less. Alfie sometimes pretended she was a witch hidden behind the windows and if she caught him in her garden she would put him under an evil spell. It made the challenge of climbing the tree – a witch’s tree – even more exciting.

  Alfie had heard her scolding Penguin through her window as well, telling him off for sitting on the fence and staring hungrily at the birds on her feeders.

  It was one afternoon when he’d been trying to distract Penguin from the birds that Alfie spotted the rope. And it was the rope that got Alfie into the tree.

  “Alfie! Alfie!” Mum was calling from the kitchen door. Alfie stopped daydreaming and peered down between the branches to check that she wasn’t looking over into Mrs Barratt’s garden. Then he slid quickly down the tree trunk, hardly using the rope at all. He was a lot taller than he had been two years ago, and the tree was easy to climb into now.

  Penguin followed him, loping from branch to branch and springing down into the long grass. In the two years since they’d discovered the wilderness next door, it had only grown thicker and wilder. Every so often, Alfie borrowed Mum’s kitchen scissors to cut himself a way through the brambles, but they grew back like something out of a fairy tale. He was used to getting scratched; it was worth it, to have a whole land of adventure and mystery all to himself.

  They shot back through the fence and emerged, wandering carelessly up their own garden.

  “Hey, Mum.”

  “Oh, there you are! Tea’s ready, Alfie. Just some sandwiches. And please don’t feed them to the cat – you know it’s not good for him.” She frowned down the garden. “Where were you?”

  Alfie shrugged. “Just playing down at the bottom. There’s a massive spider hanging on a web outside the shed, did you know?”

  Mum shuddered. She hated spiders, and the shed terrified her – she had to go in there to get her spades and things, but she did it at a run, not really looking, in case she saw one of the family of huge spiders that lived in the corners. They liked to lurk around the tools and pop out at her. If Alfie was around, she sent him to get the tools for her. Alfie quite liked spiders, but he tried not to get too close, because Penguin always wanted to hunt them. Alfie had seen him several times sitting by the shed looking rather embarrassed, with legs trailing out of the corners of his mouth like a set of extra whiskers. Alfie thought spiders must be tickly to swallow – they seemed to take a lot of gulping.

  Still, the spider distracted Mum from wondering where he’d been.

  “Couldn’t you feed it to Penguin?” she asked.

  “Mum! I don’t think they’re good for him. Besides, you wanted him on a diet – no snacks, you said!”

  “I shouldn’t think spiders are very fattening, Alfie. And he’d probably have to run around to catch it.”

  Penguin twirled himself around her legs, purring, and Mum laughed. “Yes, you’d like to eat me up a horrible spider, wouldn’t you? Come on, Alfie, I left Jess with a sandwich, she’s probably wrecked the kitchen by now.”

  But Jess was still sitting angelically in her high chair, clapping her hands as Dad sang her “London’s Burning”. It was her favourite song, but only he was allowed to sing it for her. It was as if she knew he was a firefighter.

  “I saw Mrs Barratt from next door earlier on,” Mum mentioned as she passed Alfie a sandwich.

  Alfie nearly dropped it. Had Mrs Barratt seen him? Had she complained that he’d been messing around in her garden?

  “I haven’t seen her for weeks…” Dad murmured through a mouthful of chicken sandwich, not noticing Alfie’s rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes, she’s fine. She waved to me as I was walking past with Jess in the pushchair. She was just saying goodbye to the meals on wheels people. But she won’t be needing
them soon, she said. She was very excited about it.”

  “She’s not going into sheltered housing, is she?” Dad asked. “She always said she couldn’t bear the thought of it. She loves that house, even if she hasn’t seen most of it for years.”

  Mum smiled. “No, nothing like that. Her daughter’s coming to live with her!”

  Dad frowned. “Really? The one she never sees? That’s a surprise.”

  Dad did look quite surprised, but it was nothing compared to how Alfie felt. A daughter! That would be someone around Mum’s age, probably. Someone who’d be bound to go upstairs, and look out of the windows, and maybe even try and sort out the jungle of a garden.

  “I think Mrs Barratt didn’t get on with Lucy’s husband,” Mum explained. “But now they’ve split up, and Lucy’s coming to stay with her mother for a while. And the best bit is, Lucy’s got a daughter your age, Alfie. She’s missed the first week of school, of course, but you’ll have someone next door to play with, isn’t that great?”

  Alfie blinked, and Penguin took the opportunity to snatch a bit of chicken that was dangling from his sandwich.

  A girl? Next door? Why was this supposed to be good news?

  “She’s coming this week sometime. She’ll probably go to our school!” Alfie hissed, panicked, to Oliver the next morning, as they spilled out of the classroom at break.

  Oliver nodded. “Mm, probably. But it’s not that bad – Alice and Emily in Year Two live next door to me. I don’t have to hang around with them or anything. Their mum brings me home sometimes, that’s all.”

  Alfie snorted. He didn’t want some strange girl and her mum bringing him home. And he didn’t want anyone in his garden.

  That was the real problem. It wasn’t his garden. It never had been. And now he was going to have to give it up.

  Oliver frowned suddenly, his dark eyebrows meeting in the middle like furry caterpillars. “What about your tree?” Oliver came over to Alfie’s house every couple of weeks or so, and Alfie had shown him the loose board and the garden next door – after making him swear an elaborate oath of secrecy that had a lot to do with a book about pirates that he’d just read. Oliver was suitably envious of the tree – he only had a baby playhouse in his garden. With curtains.