The Catnappers. Ann Pilling

Chapter Three

      Kitty decided that there had got to be children. Hadn’t she seen two bicycles? So instead of doing her jobs, she spent a lot of time in her sitting room, lurking behind the curtains and peeping down into Golden Square. But nobody ever came out of Number 26.

      Miss McGee got quite cross with her. It was now two whole days since they’d seen the removal van and all that time the pudding mixture had been soaking in a big, brown bowl, covered with a clean piece of cloth to keep out any flies or spiders. It was now time to boil it.

      Kitty had funny feelings about this bowl because it was the very bowl that Miss McGee’s grandfather, who had been a farmer, used to soak his poor tired feet in at the end of the day. The pudding was always delicious but each year, when she took her first mouthful at Christmas lunch, Kitty always thought of a pair of big, sweaty feet swishing about in the bowl it had been mixed in. But she never dared tell Miss McGee.

      “Come along!” her friend called to her from the kitchen. “I’ve got the pudding ready, and it’s time to start boiling. Stop mooning about by that window, Kitty, I need help.”

      “I’m not mooning,” Kitty replied. “I’ve been waiting for those children to emerge from Number 26.”

      “I’ve told you, there are no children. Now put your finger on this knot for me, please. I want a really nice, tight top to the pudding.”

      Miss McGee had spooned her mixture out of the feet bowl into a white pudding basin. She had cut out a neat circle of greaseproof paper for the top then wrapped it all up in a big, special pudding cloth, the size of a tea towel. She had tied a string round this cloth, to keep it in place, and now, with the help of Kitty, it was secured with a very complicated knot.

      The Christmas pudding, cocooned in its cloth, was quite heavy. Between them, Kitty and Miss McGee lowered it into a large saucepan which was ready waiting on the cooker. They filled the pan halfway up with water, then lit the gas. Five minutes later the water around the pudding was boiling fast and Miss McGee turned the heat down until it was bubbling gently.

      “Now then,” she said, “we must keep the water topped up till it’s thoroughly cooked, and we must NOT let it boil dry.” She said this bit very loudly, as if poor Kitty was as deaf as a post. She wasn’t deaf, but it was true that she sometimes forgot things.

      “When we leave this kitchen, we must both take our pingers with us,” continued Miss McGee. “Here’s yours, Kitty.” The “pingers” were things that made a noise when the food you were cooking was ready, or needed looking at. Kitty’s was a smart white one with digital numbers that shone in the dark. It was called Big Time and it bleeped rather than pinged. She had bought it one day in Mr Moat’s corner shop. He sold all kinds of useful items.

      Sometimes they saw Debbie in the shop. Mr Moat was her mum’s brother and he was Debbie’s “Uncle Ted”. When it was the holidays, Debbie sometimes helped him, putting things in bags and weighing things, but it was so long since the old ladies had seen her, or her mum, they were beginning to wonder if they had left the town altogether and gone to live somewhere else.

      Big Time was the latest thing in pingers. In her quiet wag, Kitty could be quite trendy. Miss McGee’s pinger was a wind-up red one and it was an old and trusted friend, like the feet bowl. It had timed many puddings.

      The old ladies never stayed in the kitchen at boiling time because the process took ages and the room got much too hot and steamy. With their pingers in their pockets, they went off into their own parts of the house. Miss McGee’s was set to ping in half an hour when she would go and top up the water in the pan. Kitty’s was set to bleep half an hour later, when she would do the same. Turn and turn about, every half hour, they would make sure the precious pudding never boiled dry. Only Nicholas remained in the kitchen, curled up in his basket next to the cooker. He kept looking up at the boiling saucepan; he was better than any dog.

      “He’s guarding our pudding,” said Miss McGee. “Good old Nicholas.”

      “Good, dear cat,” whispered Kitty. “What would we do without you?”

      Kitty had plenty of time to spare before Big Time bleeped so she went back to sit in her chair by the window and stared down into Golden Square. She was a patient sort of lady. She believed that if she stayed there long enough, something was bound to happen. It was just a question of waiting.

      She had learned about waiting from Nicholas. He would sit for hours, patiently waiting for a mouse to creep out from under a table or chair, where it had gone to hide (19 Golden Square had quite a few mice). He knew that, if he waited long enough, the mouse would reappear in the end. He was a brilliant mouser. Miss McGee said that Nicholas’s paw control was the best she had ever come across, and she knew about cats because she’d been brought up on a farm. Kitty, who was a town person, had only ever known one cat, Nicholas, but she loved him with all her heart.

      So did Miss McGee, but she never said it aloud, neither of them did, though each knew what the other was feeling. In this way, although very different from each other, the two old ladies were exactly the same.

      Now perhaps Kitty had nodded off in her chair, or perhaps she had been looking away at the moment the person appeared on the scene. She couldn’t remember afterwards. But what was for certain was this: on the afternoon of the pudding boiling a real child appeared down in the garden, in the middle of Golden Square.

      It was a boy and he was very small, about three years old perhaps. He had a red something on his top half, and a blue something on his bottom half, and a floppy yellow something on his head. From her upstairs window Kitty couldn’t see what any of these things were.

      The minute she saw him, she stood up and made her way downstairs to the front door. From the hook where it had hung for years and years she took the large, heavy key which unlocked the gate into the gardens. She only had one pocket in her skirt and it was quite little so, to make room for the key, which she absolutely must NOT lose, she removed Big Time and put it on the hall table. After all, she would only be out of the house for a very few minutes.

       Chapter Four

      The spiky, black gate which let people into the garden was not only shut, it was locked. This meant that the little boy must have climbed over the spikes or that he had been lifted inside, and left there. Kitty did not approve of either of these things: the iron spikes were dangerous and the garden was lonely and the boy was very small indeed. She could see him clearly now; he was wearing a bright red jersey and ting, bright blue jeans and a floppy woollen hat the colour of a daffodil. Underneath, his hair was a great mass of golden curls; it looked as if he’d not yet had his first grown-up haircut.

      Kitty unlocked the gate and went into the garden. She shut it behind her carefully, locked it again and walked up the path towards the child. “My name’s Kitty,” she told him. “I live at Number 19 with my friend Miss McGee and we have a cat called Nicholas. Do you have a pet?”

      The small boy looked at her uncertainly. He had enormous, glossy brown eyes and a small, sweet mouth, all folded like the petals of a flower, but his lips were quivering. Kitty turned away, pretending she had lost all interest because she knew all about that particular look; it meant that he was about to cry.

      Ignoring him, she started to poke about under the leafless shrubs on the edge of the little pond. “You find lovely things here,” she said, as if to herself (but just loud enough for the little boy to hear, which of course was the whole idea). “Look … here’s a lovely leaf that’s slowly turning into a skeleton … and here’s a perfectly round pebble … and here’s … here’s a frog! My goodness me …” The little boy was following her now and every time she bent down to look at something he bent down too. Round and round the garden they went, peacefully collecting things.

      This game