The Killer Cat Strikes Back Read online

  Books by Anne Fine

  A Pack of Liars

  Crummy Mummy and Me

  The Diary of a Killer Cat

  Flour Babies

  Goggle-Eyes

  Jennifer’s Diary

  The Killer Cat Strikes Back

  Loudmouth Louis

  Madame Doubtfire

  Notso Hotso

  Only a Show

  The Return of the Killer Cat

  The Same Old Story Every Year

  Step by Wicked Step

  Stranger Danger?

  The Tulip Touch

  The Worst Child I Ever Had

  ANNE FINE

  The Killer Cat

  Strikes Back

  Illustrated by Steve Cox

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2006

  1

  Text copyright © Anne Fine, 2006

  Illustrations copyright © Steve Cox, 2006

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  www.penguin.com

  978-0-14-191764-1

  Contents

  1:

  Not the best photo

  2:

  Whoops!

  3:

  One little biff

  4:

  ‘A riot of beauty’

  5:

  A droplet of advice

  6:

  Little Miss Last Ugly Pot

  7:

  Cat and mouse

  8:

  Before six o’clock tonight

  9:

  ‘Run, Daddy! Run!’

  10:

  A moral victory and a good result

  1: Not the best photo

  OKAY, OKAY. SO stick my head in a holly bush. I gave Ellie’s mother my mean look. It was her own fault. She was hogging my end of the sofa. You know – that sunny spot on the soft cushion where I like to sit because I can see out of the window.

  Down to where the little birdy-pies keep falling out of their nests, learning to fly.

  Yum, yum…

  So I gave her this look. Well, she deserved it. All I was trying to do was get her to move along a bit so I could take my nap. We cats need our naps. If I don’t have my nap, I get quite ratty.

  So I just stood there looking at her. That is ALL I DID.

  Oh, all right. I was glowering.

  But she didn’t even notice. She was busy flicking through the new brochure from the College of Education. ‘What class shall I take?’ she kept asking Ellie. ‘What would suit me best? Art? Music? Great books? Dancing? Yoga?’

  ‘Do they have classes in fixing up old cars?’ said Ellie’s father. ‘If they do, that’s the one to take.’

  He’s right. That car of theirs is an embarrassment. It’s a disgrace. It’s just a heap of bits that rattle along the road sounding like a giant shaking rocks in a tin drum, spewing out smoke. And they will never, ever have the money to buy a new one.

  The best class for Ellie’s mother would be a ‘Build A New Car Out Of Air’ class. But I doubt if the college offers that.

  I upped the glower a little – not out of nastiness, you understand. Simply to let her know I wasn’t standing there admiring her beauty. My legs were aching.

  She looked up and saw me. ‘Oh, Tuffy! What a precious little crosspatch face!’

  I’m like you. I hate being teased. So I just glowered some more.

  Oh, all right. If you insist on knowing all of it, I hissed a bit.

  And then I spat.

  And, guess what? Suddenly she was diving into her bag and had whipped out her camera and taken a photo.

  It didn’t show me at my best, I must admit. I looked a little grumpy.

  And you could see a bit too much of my bared teeth.

  And perhaps my claws looked a shade too large and pointy. And a bit stretched out, as if I were about to lean forward and take a chunk out of someone’s leg unless they shifted along the sofa a bit to let someone else on to the sunny patch.

  No. Not the best photo of me.

  But she seemed to like it. And it gave her an idea.

  ‘I know!’ she said. ‘I’ll take the art class. We do painting and pottery. But the first thing I’m going to do is a portrait of Tuffy just like the one in the photo. Won’t that be lovely?’

  Oh, yes. Very lovely indeed. Lovely as mud.

  2: Whoops!

  SHE DID IT, too. Can you believe this woman? She actually managed to get that heap of scrap metal they park outside our house to burst into life. Then she drove off in it, waving, to her first art class.

  And came back with a portrait of me.

  I watched from the warm spot on the garden wall where I do a lot of my thinking.

  ‘Marvellous!’ said the traffic warden as Ellie’s mother was pulling the painting out of the back of the car. ‘A most realistic tiger.’

  ‘I say,’ Mr Harris from next door called over the hedge as it was being carried up the path. ‘I like that. Is it a poster for the new horror film they’re showing in town?’

  ‘Lovely!’ said Ellie’s father. ‘You’ve captured the look perfectly.’

  Ellie said nothing. I think, if I’m honest, the painting frightened her a little.

  Then Ellie’s mother started wondering where to put it. (Pity she didn’t ask me. I would have told her, ‘How about straight in the dustbin?’)

  But, no. She looked around. ‘What about up on the wall in here?’

  I stared.

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘It will look splendid. And everyone who visits the house can admire it.’

  (Oh, yes. At their peril.)

  But that’s what she did. She found a hook and nail, and hung her ‘Portrait of Tuffy’ just above the back of the sofa where everyone could admire it.

  And where I could just reach it.

  If I really stretched…

  Whoops!

  3: One little biff

  OKAY, OKAY. SO clip my claws. I scratched the cat to pieces. For pity’s sake! If anyone had the right to scratch that painted cat’s eyes out, it was me.

  And it was an accident. All I did was put out one of my sweet little paws to give the painting one little biff. Just to make myself feel better about it, you could say. How could you argue it was my fault that one of my claws caught in the th
read of the canvas?

  And got stuck.

  No one could blame me for trying to pull my own paw free.

  Over and over…

  The picture did end up looking a bit of a mess, I have to admit. But I felt a whole lot better.

  I sat on the wall outside and waited. The explosion came soon enough.

  ‘Look at this mess! My “Portrait of Tuffy” has been torn to bits!’

  ‘It’s in shreds! There are bits of painting all over the carpet!’

  ‘Not just on the carpet! Isn’t that a painted ear up on the dresser?’

  ‘And a bit of tail hanging off that lamp?’

  ‘I’ve found a paw on the window sill!’ wailed Ellie.

  Oh, I certainly spread that ‘Portrait of Tuffy’ about. If anyone was ever going to hang what was left of it on the wall again, they’d have to give it a new name.

  They’d have to call it ‘Battle’s End’. And guess who won?

  Ellie picked up the frame with all the stringy bits hanging down. ‘Tuffy!’ she scolded as sternly as she could. ‘Look what you’ve done to Mummy’s very first painting! You’ve destroyed it.’

  What a tragedy – I don’t think. And if you want my opinion, they won’t be howling with grief down at the Art Gallery, either, when they hear the news. Ellie’s mother might be clever enough to bring a dead car back to life for long enough to drive to her art class and back, but she can’t paint for toffee.

  I can paint better than she can with my paws. And next time she leaves one of her nice new expensive blank white canvases about, I might just prove it to her.

  Oh, yes. Indeed I might.

  4: ‘A riot of beauty’

  SO WHITEWASH MY whiskers! I took a short cut over her precious new canvas. I was in a hurry. How was I to know she’d left it for only a minute while she went back in the house to look for her paintbrush?

  There it was, lying on the patio, all nice and flat and neat and white and clean and – well, yes – blank.

  Ready to go, you could say.

  I expect I just wasn’t thinking when I stepped in the tub of blue paint – by mistake – before running over the canvas to the gate.

  And anyone could have been clumsy enough to knock over that tub of red paint when they ran back to check out that smell of fish round the dustbins.

  How could it be my fault that one of my paws slid in the tub of yellow before I took a swipe at that butterfly? How was I to know I was going to get paint droplets all over?

  And you certainly can’t blame me because my tail just happened to flick in the tub of green before I prowled round the ruined canvas a few times, dragging my tail behind me as I worried about the splatters.

  Colourful, though. Cheerful. Rather fresh and ‘modern’.

  Mrs Famous-Artist-To-Be wasn’t at all pleased. A brand-new canvas! Totally spoiled! Look at this mess! And I was planning to paint a lovely sunset on a lake under a hill of buttercups!’

  Ellie stuck up for me. ‘Tuffy wasn’t being bad. He just got to the canvas first.’

  I took a look at my handiwork. Ellie was right. Fancy a sunset? I had that giant streak of red. You want a lake? I had a splodge of blue. Buttercups? Plenty of droplets of yellow in that painting. On a hill? No worries. Tons of green.

  I gave Our Lady of the Paintbrush a lofty stare. ‘That’s not a mess,’ the look said. ‘That is proper art.’

  And Ellie clearly thought so too. She didn’t dare say a word until Mrs Picasso had driven off to her class. (Bang! Rattle! X@%∗%$! Phut! Cough!) But then Ellie said to her father, ‘I really like it. Can we hang it on the wall?’

  Usually, he’d have more tact. But he’s still mad at her ladyship for not taking useful ‘Fix Your Rubbish Heap Car’ lessons instead of art. And he hates wasting anything, even a hook in a wall. So he picked up the painting and hung it up over the sofa.

  Ellie stared at it with her hands clasped in wonder. (You have to hand it to that girl, she may be wet, wet, wet – but she is loyal.)

  ‘I’m going to call it “A Riot of Beauty”,’ she said.

  I turned a critical eye on my first-ever work of art.

  Not sure about the ‘Beauty’ bit. But liked the ‘Riot’.

  Yes. Liked the ‘Riot’.

  5: A droplet of advice

  SO MRS Watch-My-Fingers-Weave-Enchantment comes home that afternoon with three manky lumps of dried mud.

  (I kid you not. Dried lumps of mud. If they’d been green, you would have thought of them as giant bogeys.)

  ‘I didn’t have a canvas,’ she explained. (Frosty look at me – I just ignored it.) ‘So I moved on to pottery.’

  Pottery?

  Potty, more like, if you want the opinion of that talented pussycat who painted ‘A Riot of Beauty’.

  I put my paw out to stroke one of the lumps.

  Accident! It fell to pieces before it even hit the ground.

  ‘Tuffy!’ she said. ‘How could you! First you tread paint all over my lovely clean canvas, and now you’ve broken one of my pretty new pots.’

  Pretty new pots? Puh-lease. They are not pretty. The mud comes from a primeval swamp. And if you dropped so much as a pin into something that lumpy, you’d never find it again.

  She put the other two pots safely up on the shelf. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Not even Tuffy can get up here and knock them off.’

  A tiny droplet of advice: don’t ever challenge a cat. It may have been a bit of an effort. (I don’t keep as trim as I should.) But finally – finally – I managed to rise to the occasion and get up on that shelf.

  Those pots up there were even worse than the one I’d knocked on to the floor. (By accident.) Talk about ugly! They had lumps hanging off here, and extra lumps sagging off there. One of them even had a kind of wart on its bottom, so every time I gave it a tiny little push, it wobbled horribly.

  Uh-oh!

  I’d like to tell you that it shattered into a thousand pieces. (That would sound good.) But it was such a lump of old rubbish it only fell into two halves.

  Never mind. Be fair to me. At least the thing was gone.

  Two down.

  And one to go.

  6: Little Miss Last Ugly Pot

  I WASN’T THE only one in the house to hate those ugly pots enough to want to be rid of all of them. Next morning I strolled into the living room at my usual time to find Ellie’s father sitting on the sofa, right next to my sunny spot.

  There was a look in his eye I’d never seen before. For a moment I couldn’t work out what it was, and then I realized he was pleased to see me.

  Weird, or what?

  He put out a welcoming hand. ‘Come on, pussy. Here, pussy.’

  Well, stretch my stripes! ‘Come on, pussy’? The man’s never pined for my company before. Do I recall many a happy hour spent on his lap being gently stroked and petted?

  No, I do not.

  Clearly he wanted something. I took a quick look round the room and –

  Voila! He’d moved Little Miss Last Ugly Pot down to the coffee table. Aha! So that’s what he was hoping for! An action replay of yesterday’s excellent result: one little soft paw out prodding, one quick cry of ‘Whoops!’, and a freshly smashed pot in the rubbish bin.

  I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. That was one nasty pot. The world would be a prettier place for being rid of it. If I am scrupulously honest, I think that pot would have looked nicer in bits on the floor than it did as one lump on the table.

  And I’m an obliging family pet, always keen to help out when I can.

  I stuck my paw out, ready.

  Then he made his big mistake.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Good boy!’

  Good boy? What does he think I am? A stupid dog?

  I gave him the cool slow blink. If he’d had anything but cloth for brains, he would have known what it meant. That blink meant: Excuse me. Which of us is the one who’s trained like a dog? Do I do what you want? No, I do not. Do I come when you call? No. I go my
own sweet way. I am a cat.

  You, on the other hand, are perfectly well trained. If I am hungry, all I have to do is walk round your legs a few times, half-tripping you, and you open a tin. If I want to go out, I stand by the door and yowl as if I’m about to throw up, and you’re over in a flash to open it.

  Who is the one who should be saying, ‘Good boy!’ round here, Buster?

  Yes. Not you. Me.

  More than one way to make a point, of course. I chose to do it by giving him the runaround. I kept him on tenterhooks, padding up and down the coffee table. (He is such a hypocrite. Usually he’d push me off.) I let my fur graze the pot more closely every time I passed, and every now and again I even stretched out a paw as if to stroke that nasty pottery lump he was so hoping I would break.

  I even gave it a little push so it toppled a little.

  Almost fell off the side.

  Almost.

  Not quite.

  ‘Come on,’ he urged me. ‘You can do it. You’re a clumsy enough cat.’

  Clumsy, eh? So things were getting nasty. I could have told him: not a thing gets smashed by me in this house unless I choose to smash it. Call us cats clever. Call us cunning. Call us caterwauling.

  But never call us clumsy.

  And then he really blew it. He changed tack.

  ‘Come on,’ he wheedled. ‘Smash it for me. Please. Sweet pussy. Sweet, sweet pussy.’

  How dare he! What a nerve! Can you believe this man? Five years we’ve lived together, and he calls me ‘sweet’.