The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

The pink bicycle lies in the middle of the living-room floor, training wheels imperceptibly turning. Lauren. She is Ted’s small ted. Or maybe she belongs to another ted and he just looks after her? I forget. Her scent lingers on the rug, the arm of the chair, but it’s quiet. She must have gone already. Good. But she never puts that god damn bike away. Oh dear. I really do try to say ‘gd’, not – ahem ahem. I don’t like to take His name in vain.

I go to my crate when Lauren visits. There is room for my thoughts in there. It’s always dark and good. I am sure the lord would not approve of what I’m about to say, but – small teds are awful. You never know what they’re going to do. And Lauren has some kind of psychological issue; I’m not clear on the details but it seems to involve being very rude and loud. Cats are sensitive to noise. We see with our ears and our noses. I mean, with our eyes too, obviously.

In the kitchen my crate stands against the wall. I put my ear to the cool side to listen, but the whining noise isn’t coming from in there, I don’t think. Ted has piled his weights on top of it again, so I can’t get in. Annoying. Lauren has left scrawling, messy doodles all over the whiteboard by the refrigerator. Blah blah blah, she has written. Ted is Ted. Olivia is a cat. What GREAT observations. She’ll go far. The refrigerator makes its rumble, there’s a drip from the tap. But the little chime in my ears goes on, not matching either of these sounds.

In the room with all the humming, everything is as it should be. The cupboards are all secure. I can hear the machines purring quietly behind locked doors. Cellphone, laptop, printer. They sound alive and I always feel that they are about to speak to me, but they never do.

It goes on, the tiny sound like a chime or a high voice. The machines are not making the noise.

I go upstairs. I like going up stairs. It always feels like an improvement of some kind. I also like to sleep on the step that is exactly mid-flight. It makes me feel like I’m floating. The runner is black and I blend in well against it. Ted trips on me sometimes. He drinks too much.

The sound doesn’t seem to get any louder or quieter as I move through the rooms, which is weird. I skirt the attic door, giving it a wide berth. Bad place. I stand on my hind legs to pull down the handle of the bedroom door. It gives with that robust click and swings wide. (Love doors. Just adore them.) There are five or six rolls of duct tape on Ted’s bed. He buys the stuff by the yard. I don’t know what on earth he uses it all for. I lick the tape. It tastes sticky and strong. The eeeooooeee is still chiming softly in my ear. I row with impatience. Do I imagine this, or is the sound slightly metallic, hollow, like it’s coming from a pipe?

In the bathroom I leap up to test the taps. No sound comes from them except the internal echo of air. I give the metal a lick and sniff the scum that covers the edges of the basin. Ted is not a very clean ted. His bathroom does not look like the bathrooms on TV.

The bathroom cabinet door is open. The tubes sit in long brown rows on the shelves. I stroke them with the tip of my tail, and then give a little nudge. The tubes fall in a clatter, pills raining from their mouths. Pink, white, blue. He never closes them properly, because they’re safety caps and he can’t get them off when he’s drunk. The pills are all mixed up on the dirty tiles. A couple have landed in a puddle, left over from his morning shower. They are already bleeding pink into the water. I bat a green-and-white capsule across the floor.

EEEEeoooeeee. The high song. It’s a message, I know it, and it feels like it’s just for me. But there’s no more time to figure it out because it’s time for her.

I am bound to Ted by the cord, and he is in my care as the lord has decreed. But I do have a life outside him, you know? I have interests. Well, one. It’s time for her now and that is very exciting.

I race down the stairs and to the window, avoiding the pink bike, taking another route behind the couch, leaving paw prints in the dust. I can’t help being afraid that I’m late even though I know I’m not. But the circles of light are at exactly the right angle on the walls. I hop up on the small green macramé table. If I stand on my hind legs and stretch a little, I can just look out of the peephole that catches the street, through the little oak tree. The cord trails behind me in the air, a luminous silver.

The other peepholes are ted height and I can’t reach them. This is my only glimpse of the outside. It’s a small hole, the size of a quarter, maybe. I can’t see much; a twisted stretch of oak trunk, some bare winter branches, through them a couple of feet of sidewalk. As I watch, the grey sky gives and snow starts to fall gently in the silence. Gradually the sidewalk vanishes under white, each tree branch bears a narrow line of snow.

This is all I know, this little coin of world. Do I mind? Do I miss going outside? Not at all. It’s dangerous out there. This is enough for me, as long as I can see her.

I hope Ted doesn’t move the macramé table. It