Lost a Shoe, Went All Funny and The Cat Set Fire to the Carpet

Lost a Shoe, Went All Funny and The Cat Set Fire to the Carpet

Meg Forshaw
(Hereford)

 

Linda woke up in a terrible sweat. The phone was ringing like gusto. She looked at the clock and a naughty word exploded in her head. Three thirty!! Oh dear! I’ve missed the meeting altogether! thought Linda, very miserably. That horrid dreamy nightmare thing! She got out of bed and stretched. Bring! Bring! Ah yes, the phone, she thought. Linda picked it up and yawned, then she gathered up her wits and said “Hello?”

“Hello,” Said a strange voice very slowly.

“Who is it?” Asked Linda.

“It’s Nick.”

“Oh, er, hello?” Answered Linda uncomfortably.

“Why did you not come to the meeting we planned?”

Linda had been dreading this question so she thought of lying. Being an author of fiction this was very easy to do.

“Er, I lost a shoe, and it ages to find it because I went all funny and then my cat accidently set fire to the carpet by jumping onto a log in the fire, and then the log rolls out and set fire to the carpet. I chucked a bucket of water at the fire on carpet. The cat had singed her paws. I had to get a vet to come and look at her because on the way to the vets, I wasn’t looking where I was going, so I crashed into a telegraph pole and it fell on top of the bonnet of my car,” Linda paused for breath.

“Oh, interesting,” said Nick, not very convincingly. “ Poor you.”

“Hang on a tick, I’m not finished yet. The car right this minute is at my house, here, and my cat is at the vets, as they came to pick her up. She’ll be back tomorrow though I couldn’t phone you because there wasn’t any signal, my mobile was charging so I couldn’t phone or email or text you, so I was stuck!”

“Mmmm,” said Nick, clearly not entirely convinced about all this. “I would let you come over to mine for a cuppa, but I’ve just moved into my new house, and, yeah.”

Linda saw what he was hinting so she said, “Come over to mine and we’ll talk everything over together.”

“Ok.”

“Mmmm, well, bye!”

“See you tomorrow.”

Later, if you were walking in the street, you would hear Linda bashing a big groove across the bonnet of her car. Even later, you might hear her talking to her neighbours, asking them if she could borrow their cat who had singed her paws. Snowy was in a lot of pain, and at first there were doubtful, but then, when Linda told the whole story of her oversleeping and telling a lie to Nick, they agreed to lend Snowy, on one condition, that Linda had to give her medicine every four hours.

 

 

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