I don't know, you try and bring a little Christmouse cheer to your staff and what do you get? Abuse and more abuse, that's what. As if the whole darned thing was my fault.

"Mr Mush," Miss Penny said to me, "I think the secretary is bored. She's been in her office for hours, looking at her compewterr thing. You ought to go and cheer her up."

It's not as if I didn't have things to do myself. It takes a lot of time and effort to run a Private Investicator agency. But the secretary sneezed an hour ago and Miss Penny's got a phobia about that kind of thing - terrified the passing wind will ruffle her fur and make her untidy. As usual, then, it was up to me.

I tried singing first. "Felines, Wo wo wo felines, wo wo wo felines..." Not a glimmer of a smile. So I jumped onto the compewterr and dangled my tail over the front so the secretary could bat at it with her fingers. It's one of my favourite tricks and, boy, did it work! The secretary asked me to get off the compewterr for a moment - in fact, she lifted me down herself - got a roll of packing tape (very useful for sealing claw holes in bags of cat litter), and proceeded to stick it criss-cross all over the top of the compewterr.

"Now let's see you try it," she said.

A lesser cat wouldn't have been up to the challenge. But I am no lesser cat. It was a dangerous leap. A one in a million chance, but it might just work. With one quick switch of my tail I was airborne. My back feet hit the side of the compewterr and scrabbled for a moment, then I was clear. I landed with my four paws exactly between the strips of tape. Purr! Meow! Supercat or what? The secretary leapt up, screaming with approval as, for an encore, I used my landing platform as a springboard to leap to the high bookcase in the corner of the room.

Well, how was I to know compewterrs were so flimsy? Or that they'd fall over if you kicked them? If they're not supposed to be used as springboards, they shouldn't be flat on top. Or they should be covered in sticky stuff to keep people off.

Oh.

Copyright © Claire Fay
December 15, 2001