Captain Cat and the Golden Sardine

PICKLE, ORDINARY CAT During the day, Pickle was an ordinary cat. At least, that was what the Hills family believed. There was plenty of evidence to support this. Pickle slept wherever somebody else had been planning to sit. He appeared in the kitchen within seconds of a packet being opened, even when he had been three rooms away. He spent long periods watching birds through the patio doors and seemed genuinely surprised, every single morning, to discover that the glass was still there. He also enjoyed interfering with Joe's collections. Joe Hills was seven, and he collected things. Not one particular kind of thing. That would have been much too simple. He had Pokemon cards in folders, Rubik's cubes lined along one shelf and a jar of interesting coins that currently included three foreign ones, an old penny, a trolley token and a metal washer Joe insisted was staying because it looked like a coin if you did not stare at it too hard. But at the moment, Joe was interested in dice. He had ordinary dice, tiny dice, a huge red die with rounded corners and several strange ones with far too many sides. His favourite was a green twenty-sided die that looked, in Joe's opinion, like something an alien might use to decide whether to invade Earth. That afternoon he had spread the whole collection across the living-room rug. He was trying to arrange them in order from least sides to most sides when Pickle walked directly into the middle of them.

"Pickle." Pickle stopped. A six-sided die rested beneath one paw. "You can go around." Pickle looked to his left. There was plenty of space. He looked to his right. Even more space. Then he sat down on the dice. Joe stared at him. "You did that on purpose." Pickle began washing his shoulder. Joe reached underneath him and recovered a blue die. Pickle shifted his weight. "There's another one under you." Pickle continued washing. Joe tried the other side. Something clicked. Then another thing clicked. "You're sitting on about six of them." Pickle gave him a calm look. Joe sighed. There was no point arguing with Pickle. Pickle had never lost an argument in his life, mainly because he refused to accept that anybody else was taking part. Joe spotted his green twenty-sided die beside Pickle's tail. "Ah." He reached for it. Pickle's tail moved. The die rolled away. Joe lunged. His hand missed. The green die bounced off the leg of the coffee table, shot across the wooden floor and disappeared underneath the sofa. Joe looked at Pickle. Pickle looked at Joe. "You are not helping." Pickle stood. For one hopeful moment Joe thought he might leave. Instead, the cat stepped onto the arm of the sofa. Joe knew that look. "No." Pickle crouched. "Don't." His back legs wiggled. "Pickle." Pickle jumped. He had apparently been aiming for the windowsill. He did not reach the windowsill. For one long and deeply undignified second, he hung from the curtain with both front paws while the rest of him swung gently beneath. Joe burst out laughing. "Do you need help?" Pickle looked at him. Then at the floor. Then he let go. He landed directly in the middle of the dice.

They scattered in every direction. One rolled beneath the television. Two disappeared under the sofa. The enormous red one travelled halfway across the room before bumping into Toast, who had been asleep by the radiator. Toast opened his eyes. He looked at the die. He looked at Joe. Then he tried to eat it. "No, Toast!" Joe rescued it just in time. Toast was the Hills family's dog: large, golden-brown, friendly and permanently hopeful. His main interests were food, people who might have food, and investigating things that definitely did not contain food in case everybody else had somehow missed something. Pickle stepped carefully out of the destruction he had created, sat down and began washing one paw. Joe surveyed the room. Five minutes of careful sorting had vanished. His dice were everywhere. Toast was now searching the floor in case any of them turned out to be food. Pickle was behaving as though nothing unusual had happened. Joe smiled. "You definitely meant to do that, didn't you?" Pickle washed the other paw. Joe nodded. "Thought so." He understood Pickle better than anybody else in the house. Izzy, who was twelve, claimed this was because Joe and Pickle had roughly the same attitude towards rules. Evelyn, who was fourteen, said it was because neither of them listened properly when spoken to. Joe thought both explanations were unfair. Pickle thought nothing of the sort, because Pickle had never accepted that rules applied to cats in the first place. "Joe!" Mum called from upstairs. "Bath!" Joe looked at the dice scattered around the room. "Two minutes!" "You said that five minutes ago." "That was a different two minutes!" From somewhere in the kitchen, Dad laughed. Joe began gathering his collection. Pickle watched him. Toast attempted to help by sniffing every single die. It took slightly longer than two minutes. By the time Joe reached the bathroom, Izzy was standing outside with her arms folded. "Mum said ten minutes ago." "I was clearing up." "Pickle knocked your dice over." "That is still clearing up." Evelyn appeared from her room, glanced at them and kept walking. "This argument is going to last longer than the bath." Joe ignored her and pushed open the bathroom door. Pickle had followed him as far as the landing and stopped. Joe looked back. "Coming in?" Pickle sat down several feet from the doorway. Joe nodded. "Thought not." Pickle disliked water. He disliked rain, puddles, dripping taps and damp grass. If the patio was wet in the morning, he would stand at the back door and look at Mike or Jen as though they had arranged the weather specifically to annoy him. Toast had no such concerns. The dog squeezed past Joe and marched straight into the bathroom. "No, Toast." Toast looked at the bath. "Don't." Toast looked at Joe. "You drank the bathwater yesterday." Toast wagged his tail. "That doesn't make it better." Mike appeared on the landing. "What's he doing?" "Trying to drink my bath again." "Toast. Out." Toast came out, looking as though he had been treated very unfairly. He passed Pickle on the landing. The two animals looked at each other. Pickle's expression suggested dogs were a failed experiment. Toast's expression suggested he was pleased to have seen a cat. The rest of the evening was ordinary. Joe had his bath. Izzy complained that he had splashed water onto the floor. Evelyn came in looking for a hairband she had apparently left by the sink, then blamed everybody else when it was not there. Jen discovered three towels in three different places and asked why nobody in the house appeared to know what the towel rail was for. While the bathwater drained, Joe lined several old toys along the edge. There were three rubber ducks. One was slightly larger than the others and had a faded blue mark around its neck that looked rather like a collar. Another had a worried-looking face painted on it. The third was simply Dave. Joe had named him years ago and no longer remembered why. Near the bottom of the toy basket was a folded piece of waterproof paper covered in pictures. Joe opened it.

"Oh, I remember this." It was a treasure map he had made when he was younger. There was a toothbrush forest, a whirlpool where the plughole should be and a huge white castle that looked suspiciously like the toilet. Joe had drawn a golden fish at the far end and surrounded it with little pawprints because, at the time, he had been going through what Evelyn called his Pirate Cat Phase. "Joe! Bed!" Jen called. "Coming!" He put the map on the shelf beside the bath. As he did, something yellow caught his eye behind the toilet. He leaned sideways. "What's that?" A dusty fish-shaped bath toy was wedged in the narrow gap by the wall. Joe reached for it, but his fingers were nowhere near long enough. "Tomorrow," he told it. He had forgotten the toy existed, but now that he had seen it, he wanted it back. That was the trouble with collections. Sometimes you only remembered something belonged in one after you found it again. He switched off the light and ran downstairs to say goodnight. One by one, the Hills family settled. Evelyn disappeared into her room. Izzy went to bed after coming downstairs twice, once for water and once because she had forgotten why she had come downstairs the first time. Mike and Jen turned off the lights. Toast circled his bed three times and collapsed with a sigh so enormous it seemed to empty the whole dog. Joe called goodnight to Toast, goodnight to Pickle and, because he was seven and saw no reason not to, goodnight to the three rubber ducks in the bathroom. At last the landing became still. Pickle waited. He listened. No doors opening. No footsteps. No humans. He rose from his place outside Joe's room and padded along the landing. Toast opened one eye from the foot of the stairs. Pickle stopped. Toast thumped his tail once. Pickle continued. The bathroom door stood slightly open. He slipped inside. For a moment, nothing happened. It was an ordinary bathroom. A bath. A sink. A toilet. Three rubber ducks. A few bottles on the shelf. Then a thin line of silver appeared beneath the bath. Pickle's ears lifted. Water spread across the tiles. The room began to stretch. And Captain Cat smiled.