Lara The Runaway Cat: One cat’s journey to discover home is where the heart is

When Gobi had arrived home with Dad, I’d had to teach her everything about our home, our lives, our family. Here, things seemed to be the other way around.

It wasn’t natural.

Once we were on the ferry itself, I started to feel more at home. Mum and Dad had booked us something called a ‘pet-friendly cabin’. (I didn’t want to know what made the other cabins unfriendly towards pets.) It had two narrow beds, a window, and a door that opened onto a small bathroom. As soon as Dad let me out of my carrier, I hopped up onto the little table under the window to look out.

I’d hoped it would feel familiar, like all the other windows I’d stared out of over the years. Instead, I looked out over an expanse of endless water, and shuddered.

It looked hundreds of times worse than bathtime.

Behind me, Mum laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Lara. You’re safe in here, the water can’t reach you.’

But I wasn’t about to take her word for it, so I jumped back down onto the bed and made myself at home.

Dad was standing in the open doorway, moving a bag from the hall into our cabin, when another lady appeared outside, with another pet carrier. She smiled at Dad as she passed, then she stopped, stared inside our cabin, and her grin grew even larger.

‘Look, Cleo! Another Ragdoll, just like you! And staying right next door to us. How lovely to meet fellow discerning pet lovers! It can be so lonely travelling alone.’ She lifted her carrier so her cat – Cleo, I presumed – could see me. We surveyed each other with steady gazes. I couldn’t get a really good look at her, behind the bars of her carrier door, but if she was a Ragdoll like me, I was sure she must be gorgeous.

When I tuned back into the human conversation again, Mum was saying, ‘Would you like a drink? Dion was just going to pop to the cafe for a hot chocolate for me,’ to Cleo’s human and, before I knew it, Cleo was out of her carrier and onto the bed with me.

‘Ooh, that sounds be lovely! I’m Jennifer, by the way.’ Cleo’s human bustled into the already cramped cabin, and took a seat on the end of my bed.

I meowed a welcome to Cleo. ‘I’m Lara. And the dog is Gobi,’ I added, jerking my head towards my sister pet.

‘Cleo,’ the other Ragdoll said, not even acknowledging Gobi.

I liked her already.

‘I’ll just go find the cafe then,’ Dad said, looking bemused. It was just as well he left – he’s a tall guy, and the cabin really wasn’t all that big for all six of us.

‘So, are you off to France on holiday?’ Mum asked, settling onto the other bed. Gobi was already asleep beside her. It was very late, I supposed, but I’d slept so much in the car down, I wasn’t tired at all. (I don’t know what it is about car journeys, but they always send me to sleep. I was hoping the ferry might do the same, but already there were so many strange noises and smells, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to settle.)

‘No, just passing through,’ Jennifer said. ‘We’re flying out of Paris tomorrow.’

‘Us too!’ said Mum. ‘We wanted to have the animals with us on the plane.’ And we wanted to be there with them. I still remembered Gobi’s tales of travelling in the hold of a plane in China. I shuddered just thinking about them.

Jennifer nodded. ‘Exactly! I really don’t like to fly without Cleo. And until Britain lets animals travel with passengers instead of in the hold, I will only fly out of Paris.’

At the other end of the bed, Cleo rolled her eyes, and settled her head down on her paws. I padded closer – other cats were usually far more interesting to talk to than humans.

‘You don’t look very excited to be going on this trip.’ I took a spot close enough to Cleo to talk, but not so close as to crowd her, and began nonchalantly licking my leg.

‘You wouldn’t be either, if you were travelling with her.’ Cleo jerked her head in the direction of Jennifer, sitting behind her.

‘Oh, look!’ Jennifer clapped her hands together and beamed. ‘They’re talking to each other!’

Mum smiled, too. ‘Oh, Lara’s quite the chatterbox. Especially when Dion is trying to watch the sports. He says she always seems to know exactly when something important is about to happen, and then she interrupts.’

Cleo ignored them, so I did too.

‘She seems … enthusiastic,’ I said, eyeing Jennifer carefully.

‘That’s one word for it.’ With a sigh, Cleo heaved herself closer, as if she needed to whisper so Jennifer wouldn’t hear what she was saying. Like humans would ever concentrate long enough to understand us the way we understand them. ‘She gets so excited about things, she forgets what really matters: me.’

‘I know how that feels.’ I glanced across at Gobi on the other bed. She was Mum and Dad’s latest excitement. And maybe they hadn’t forgotten about me completely, but they’d definitely stopped remembering that I was the most important animal in their lives.

‘She always has to be doing something too,’ Cleo went on, obviously pleased to have someone to moan to about her human. ‘She got really into crystals last year. Kept trying to use these pieces of rock to cure me.’

‘What was wrong with you?’

‘Nothing,’ Cleo said, mournfully. ‘Well, except for when she dropped a huge piece of quartz on my tail.’

I winced, and put a paw over my face – that did sound painful.

‘The worst part,’ Cleo went on, ‘is the adventures.’

‘Adventures?’ My ears pricked up at that – even if Cleo did say it like it was one of those words Mum scolded Dad for using sometimes.

‘Yeah. Ever since her husband, Jeremy, died, she’s been running around all over the world.’

‘Why?’ That was the part I still didn’t fully understand about adventures – why people wanted to have them. I mean, I knew why I needed to have one, but presumably everyone else wasn’t also having them to prove superiority over a dog. So, what was so special about them? So far, it just seemed like I was looking out of a different window from normal. Nothing much else had changed, except that I had to eat one of those horrible pouches of food for my dinner instead of my usual fresh prawns.

I was certain I was missing something about adventures. If this was all there was, I really couldn’t understand why people wanted to have them at all.

‘Something about finding the perfect place to scatter his ashes.’

‘Ashes?’

‘That’s what was left of Jeremy, after he died,’ Cleo explained.

‘And now she needs to put them somewhere else? Why?’

‘I have no idea. But I heard them talking before he went into hospital the last time. She said she’d find him his ideal place to spend eternity.’ Cleo shrugged her shoulders, then stretched out her paws in front of her. ‘All I know is that she’s dragging me all over the world, and she’s a terrible flyer. That’s why she needs to take me with her. Apparently, I’m her ESA.’

‘What’s an ESA?’ Could I be one? Well, if it turned out to be a good thing, anyway.

‘Emotional Support Animal,’ Cleo explained. ‘Means she grips tight hold of me whenever a plane is taking off or landing, and talks to me constantly in between when I’m trying to nap.’

I’d never been on a plane, or any further away from home than I was right now. But I would tomorrow. I’d be flying high in the sky over to China, according to Mum. I wondered if they’d hold tight to me.

I looked over at Gobi again. Mum had one hand resting on her fur as she talked to Jennifer. And I knew, right then, that I wasn’t anyone’s ESA: Gobi was. She was the pet who had changed everything. The one who got to go on all the big adventures, because people wanted to see her wherever she went. I was just tagging along. This wasn’t my big trip at all, it was all Gobi’s.

‘And this is going to be her longest journey yet.’ Cleo was still talking, oblivious to my realization of my unimportance. ‘She’s going all the way to Australia. That’s practically a whole day on a plane, she says. And …’ Cleo’s voice dropped, lower and smaller, like she was ashamed of what she was going to say next. ‘… I’m terrified of flying. It was bad enough just jetting around Europe but a whole day on a plane? I can’t take it. All I want is to go back home, with the automatic kitty feeder they used to use when they went away for a weekend. Is that so much to ask?’

I made a vague sympathetic noise, but my brain was stuck on one word.

Australia.

I knew about Australia. Not much, but enough.

You see, that was where Dad was from, before he met Mum and me. He grew up there. He showed me on the map – and it was further away than China, even.

Dad talked about Australia sometimes. Not often, but every now and again. Because he’d not been back there in years – since long before he found Gobi in the desert.

Which meant that Gobi had never been to Australia.

That was an adventure that was too much even for Gobi.

But I was sure I could do it.

I studied Cleo carefully. Same fluffy white and dark brown fur. Same blue eyes. Same fluffy tail. We really did look very alike …

Suddenly, an idea floated into my mind. An adventurous, crazy idea. One that was more extreme than a ferry ride, or a book tour. It might even be more exciting than being lost in China, or running an ultramarathon.

The sort of idea that, if it worked, would mean that no one would be able to say that I was just an indoor, homebody cat ever again.

I’d be Lara, cat adventurer. I’d be the pet everyone wanted to talk about. Maybe they’d even write a book about me, too.

‘We should swap places,’ I said, without thinking it through any further. ‘I’ll go to Australia with Jennifer, and you can …’ Ah … For a cat who hated flying, I was pretty sure the flight to China wouldn’t be a lot of fun, either.

‘Hide out in the airport until Jennifer gives up and comes home again?’ Cleo finished for me. She sat up straighter, looking imperious and calculating. Somehow, I got the feeling that my adventure had just slipped from my paws into hers. ‘That could work.’

‘It could?’ I’ll be honest, I hadn’t thought through the specifics, I’d just acted on impulse. Like Gobi did.

To my surprise, it felt kind of good.

‘We’d need to be cunning about it.’ Cleo was watching Jennifer again, sounding thoughtful. ‘But yes, I think it could work.’

‘Great,’ I said. But inside I was wondering what on earth I’d got myself into now. It had sounded exciting in my head, but now the words were out in the world, it was sort of, kind of, terrifying.

Well, I’d wanted my own adventure. One that wasn’t about Gobi at all.

It looked like I’d got one.

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