Furball and the Mokes Read online

  Furball and the Mokes

  A.N. Wilson has written over twenty stories for grown-ups, many of which have won prizes, such as the Somerset Maugham Award (for The Healing Art) and the 1988 Whitbread Award (for the biography Tolstoy). He has also written a volume of guinea-pig stories called Hazel, and a tale of an old cat looking back over his life, Stray, both of which will be published by Corvus in 2012. He has had many pets in his life, including dogs and cats. His three daughters have, between them, had rabbits, guinea-pigs, hamsters, gold-fish and dogs. This story is based on the real life of his daughter Georgie’s hamster, who kept getting lost.

  A. N. WILSON

  Illustrated by

  Luisa Crosbie

  First published in Great Britain in 2011

  by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © A.N. Wilson, 2011

  Illustrations © Luisa Crosbie, 2011

  The moral right of A.N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 84887 954 6 (Hardback)

  ISBN: 978 0 85789 447 2 (Ebook)

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  For Georgie, with happy memories of little Chum.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Trouble Aloft

  Chum nibbled on a cherry that the Giant had left in the cage. It was a good juicy cherry. Before the Giant had left the room, her large hand, several times larger than Chum herself, had been lowered into the cage. First, it had scattered seeds among the sawdust on the floor. Then it had added a cabbage stalk. Finally, it had put a dandelion leaf just in front of Chum’s nose.

  Being a hamster – which Chum was – she never knew when the next meal would be. Better safe than sorry. If in doubt, pouch it. Chum had hastily gobbled as much of the food as possible into her cheek pouches – seeds, the stalk, the leaf, the cherry. Now she was alone, and safe, she could de-pouch, and eat the food at her leisure. She started with the cherry, sitting upright on her haunches and holding the cherry in her small pink paws.

  Through the bars of the cage, she could see the big room that the Giant called the kitchen.

  Chum’s cage was on a ledge. She could see the door to the larder where they kept most of their dry food. She could see the fridge. She could see the large dresser where they kept her bag of straw, her sawdust and her seeds.

  As she ate the cherry, and stared into the middle-distance, she heard voices.

  They weren’t voices like the Giant’s and her friends’. In fact, they weren’t human voices at all.

  The first voice said, ‘Are they gorn ven?’

  And the other said, ‘The little oom-varmint said as ow she ad to go ter school.’

  ‘School, eh – that’s a larf. Ow abart the grownups?’

  ‘The oom-fella – e went out a long time ago.’

  ‘How about the oom-woman?’

  ‘She took the varmint to school.’

  ‘So what’s it going to be then? Biscuits, anyone?’

  Chum found this conversation very puzzling and very interesting. Clearly there were some creatures on the other side of the room, who had been following the movements of the Giant and her mum and dad. Chum wondered if the creatures had noticed her. She didn’t wonder for long, since she heard a voice from behind her packet of seeds.

  ‘If you’re going past the furball’s seeds nab a handful for Junior.’

  ‘They feed that furball too much in stir.’

  ‘Did you see what the brat just give ’er – a cherry – a leaf – seeds – I don’t know – I really don’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right giving all that to a furball.’

  Chum felt indignant. She realized that by ‘furball’ they meant herself.

  ‘Mind you,’ said one of the voices, ‘I wouldn’t swap er life for ours – not I. Locked in stir. Fussed over by them brats. Only let out when one of them oomans wants to squeeze er. No ooman’s gonna squeeze me. You wouldn’t see me letting myself be turned into a pet.’

  The voice said this last word with real disgust.

  Chum was just taking in what the creatures were saying about her when, out of the very top of her packet of seeds on the dresser – her packet – there appeared, first a sharp pink nose, then a pale grey, grubby little face, then a pair of greyish-pink little ears, and finally the whole skinny body – greyish-black, dusty and sly – of a London house mouse.

  ‘They’re dry, these seeds,’ it was saying, ‘too dry.’

  ‘Chuck us down some all the same,’ said another.

  The first mouse spat a few seeds at another mouse who had come round the side of the dresser.

  ‘This ain’t dry,’ said the second mouse.

  ‘Only cos I spit it.’

  Chum wondered if they had asked permission to eat from her seedbox and decided they had not. She was still rather angry that they had called her ‘furball’, and thought it was pathetic that the mice either could not, or would not pouch the seeds, like a well-brought-up hamster. Instead, they put seeds in their mouths and spat.

  ‘Good old furball,’ laughed the mouse at the top of Chum’s seed packet. This cheeky mouse either lost its balance at this point, or it was dancing on top of Chum’s packet. But – oh no! – the energetic scuttering of the mouse caused the seed packet on the dresser to fall over. Down on to the floor fell a shower of seeds, straw and sawdust.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said one mouse.

  ‘Ta, Furball – great seeds,’ laughed another.

  A rain of Chum’s seeds cascaded from the dresser to the kitchen floor.

  ‘I am not,’ said Chum, ‘called Furball.’

  She had not intended to say the words out loud. She often said things out loud to herself – it was her way of thinking. So it was a bit of a shock when she heard a high, rather menacing little voice imitating wha
t she had just said.

  ‘Oh! Listen to er – Ai am not called Furball.’

  There was high excited laughter among the mice.

  ‘You oughta get outta that cage, mate – help yourself to food – and not wait till the oomans feel like dishing up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take no food from oomans,’ said another mouse. ‘Ooms kill us. They’ll kill you one day, Furball.’

  Chum listened with indignant astonishment. Then she said, through the bars of her cage, ‘But they look after me.’

  ‘They look ah-fta me…’ Another imitation of her voice by the mice. It was not a very good imitation.

  ‘They done the other furball in,’ said one of the mice.

  ‘What other furball – I mean, hamster?’ asked Chum.

  She was looking across the kitchen at the mouse who had just spoken, the one who was looking up at her. She was an agile little mouse. She scuttered across the kitchen and managed to climb up the cupboard door and on to the ledge so that her pointed little grey face was looking closely at Chum’s.

  The mouse peered at Chum. Always hungry, the keen, clever, little grey mouse saw how plump the hamster was. Chum was clever as hamsters go but she had never had to use her cleverness for survival. If the mouse stopped being clever for an instant she would be in danger. Yet though the mouse was grey and thin and darting, while Chum was a light sandy-brown with clean pampered fur and a snowy-white chest and well-fed body, they were both little rodents who had more in common with one another than they did with the human race – the oomans or ooms as the mice called humans.

  ‘There was another hamster?’ asked Chum.

  ‘Before you,’ said the mouse. ‘Murphy, they called im. Nice old bleeder. E’d call out cheerio to us now and then – known what I mean. Sometimes warn us if there were trouble aloft.’

  ‘Trouble aloft?’ asked Chum.

  ‘If there was ooms coming. E’d keep us informed like. Tell us if they’d had pie ’n that.’

  ‘Pie?’

  The mice on the other side of the kitchen could hear the word pie and seven or eight of them now came from behind the dresser in hungry anticipation.

  ‘Pie? Where’s the pie?’

  ‘Furball says there’s pie.’

  ‘Where – where –’

  ‘Chicken pies they were. Very tasty,’ said the main mouse, the one who was talking to Chum through the bars of her cage.

  ‘Pies! Pies!’ called the mice.

  ‘We’re just talking about a pie, stoopid,’ said the main mouse. ‘There ain’t no pie.’

  ‘But,’ said Chum, ‘Murphy, the other hamster…?’

  It was true. She had heard the Giant talking about Murphy, and the Giant’s dad sometimes called her – Chum! – Murphy by mistake.

  ‘Oh,’ said the mouse, ‘they done Murphy in.’

  ‘What’s done him in?’

  ‘Fixed him.’

  ‘Fixed?’ Chum knew that the mouse was talking of something unpleasant, but she didn’t understand the words. Done him in? What had they done to Murphy, the human beings? And in what had they done him?

  ‘Killed him,’ said the mouse simply.

  ‘Dug an ole in the garden – dropped him in it, like. Threw earth over im.’

  ‘And filled it up with earth?’ Chum could not easily believe her ears. What she heard was beyond her experience. She had no knowledge of death. She had never seen a dead animal. She didn’t know that she herself would die.

  ‘Filled it up. Buried old Murph. Cleaned out iz cage. Few days later, you come. It’ll be your turn next, my friend. They’ve probably dug the ole fer yer already.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  But as Chum asked the question, the mouse froze. They could hear the noise of a front door opening. The chief mouse called to the others, ‘Scarper.’

  Chum watched with admiration as the little group of mice disappeared under the dresser. Some of them squeezed through the quite tiny crevices between the top of the skirting board and the wall.

  ‘I’m Moke – Mokey Moke,’ said the chief mouse as she left Chum.

  ‘I’m Chum,’ was what she wanted to say but she found herself silent. Chum was what they called her – the ooms, the ones who had buried the last hamster in the garden. How could he breathe, with all that earth on top of him? She liked to burrow herself. She liked making her way through the plastic tubes that the Giant had put in her cage to amuse her and exercise her. And she liked playing with the straw and newspaper and making tunnels for herself beneath them. But to be buried – in heavy, damp, garden mud – was horrible, really horrible. Could it be true?

  She watched Mokey scutter head first down the cupboard door and disappear.

  A few minutes later, the giant’s dad entered. He turned on the music box in the corner and clattered for a long time – first lowering plates and pans into some soapy water, then taking the cloth things which giants wear over their bodies, placing them on a narrow table and rubbing them up and down with a hot shiny thing which made a steamy, clothy smell. After a while, a long while, the Giant’s dad found a little brush and swept up the seeds on the floor – but not every single one. For, when he had touched the music box and stopped the sound, and left the room, Chum heard a scuttling, scuttering sound under the cupboard. And out came Mokey Moke – quick as a flash. She ran across the floor, grabbed the few remaining seeds in her mouth and turned.

  ‘Watcha, Furb!’ she squeaked before disappearing behind the dresser.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mouse Droppings Everywhere

  Kitty’s mum shouted from the larder. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘What?’ asked Dad.

  He knew what the answer would be. For several weeks now, he had been sweeping the larder with a small dustpan and brush whenever he found half-chewed bits of paper, crumbs or mouse droppings. He did so because he was lazy and didn’t want all the trouble which would follow when Alex, Kitty’s mum, discovered they had mice in the larder. The last time this had happened, they’d had to remove from the shelves every cardboard cereal carton, every packet of biscuits, every box of pasta – in short, anything through which the mice could nibble with their sharp little teeth.

  ‘There are mouse droppings everywhere,’ called Kitty’s mum. ‘Oh, no! And they’ve eaten through the bottom of –’

  Kitty and her dad heard Mum’s reaction as she lifted a packet of Rice Crispies and found that mice had chewed a hole in the bottom. Rice Crispies were pouring out on to the larder floor.

  Kitty said, ‘I told you it might be mice that had knocked over Chum’s food bag last week.’

  ‘And there we were,’ said Dad, ‘blaming you for spilling food on the floor.’

  Mum, who had by now finished sweeping up Rice Crispies and mouse droppings, came into the kitchen.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said. ‘It took such ages to get rid of them last time.’

  ‘I just don’t know how they could get in,’ said Dad. ‘Do you suppose they live outside the house and come in when it’s raining?’

  ‘Mum, is it all right if I take a bit of carrot from the fridge and give it to Chum?’ interrupted Kitty.

  She was eleven and lived alone with her houseproud mother and father. Except Dad wasn’t quite as tidy as Kitty and her mum. Being neat is a gift – and they had it.

  ‘We must be especially careful,’ said Mum, ‘not to leave out any food which might attract them.’

  ‘They couldn’t get into Chum’s cage, could they?’ asked Kitty.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Dad.

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Mum, ‘and they’ve just come in from the garden to escape last night’s rain. Maybe they won’t come again.’

  Kitty’s dad was silent, concealing the fact that for weeks he had seen the telltale signs of mice.

  ‘It’s funny in a way,’ said Mum. ‘We keep one little rodent as a pet, and then spend so much energy driving away these other little rodents.’
r />   Kitty put on her ‘Chum’ voice and pretended to speak for her hamster.

  ‘Allie – I am not one little rodent.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Mum, whose name was Alex, leaning over Chum’s cage and looking into her curranty little eyes. When Kitty pretended to be Chum, Mum was Allie and Dad was ‘Mister Peter’.

  ‘I am not just a little rodent,’ squeaked Kitty in her Chum voice. ‘I’m not, I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, look, it’s rather sweet,’ said Dad, ‘Chum’s sitting up and doing her impression of a meerkat.’

  Chum was the second hamster they had bought. The first, a much slower and in some ways statelier fellow, had been called Murphy. When, after something over a year, he died, Kitty and Mum had decided to replace him at once. They had returned from the pet shop with the tiny, hyper-energetic, fudge-and-white coloured Chum only days after Murphy’s sad funeral in the garden. All three of them had quickly grown to like, and then actually to love, the tiny Chum.

  As well as being a fast runner, Chum had a bright sunny outlook on life. When not asleep inside the cashmere sock which Dad provided for her bedding, she was eagerly looking out at the world. When out of her cage, she sometimes became what Kitty called ‘hyper’, running round and round the room. Kitty and her mum believed that Chum both needed, and enjoyed, this form of exercise. Dad, more timorous, was everlastingly afraid that she would get lost or run away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Free as the Mokes

  ‘Wotcha, Furba.’

  Chum stirred a little in the comfort of the cashmere sock. Her eyes were still closed. Her fur and her eyelids were flecked with sawdust.

  The voice in her ear persisted. ‘Ope don’t mind, Furba. Elped erself ter seeds. Good.’

  Mokey Moke had not asked if she could eat Chum’s seeds. But it made a change that she had apologised – or sort of apologised – for eating them.

  ‘Ad carrot too – ope don’t mind, Furba, ole mucka.’

  Chum opened her eyes and saw Mokey’s eager little grey face close to hers. Mokey Moke gave off a strong smell. But Chum didn’t mind this.