Just then Ula’s ears stood up. She thought she heard a sound outside the kitchen. ‘What’s that? It sounds like a child crying. Do you hear it?’

But Catvinkle had her mind on something else. ‘Ulee, there’s a little piece of salmon hanging from the end of your snout. Do you mind if I just lean in and …’

Before Catvinkle finished her own sentence, she found herself straining her neck to reach the tip of Ula’s snout. She stuck out her tongue, scooped the tiny piece of hanging salmon onto it and gobbled it up.

After she had done this, both Catvinkle and Ula heard a very different sound. First Ula had heard crying. Now it sounded like two children laughing.

‘Did you hear that?’ Catvinkle asked Ula.

‘Should we go and find out if they’re okay?’ asked Ula. ‘I love human children,’ she said excitedly.

‘I love human children too. But before we go, there’s one thing we need to agree on first.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Ula.

‘Sometimes the only way to find things out from humans is to talk to them. You can’t sniff and be sniffed because their noses don’t smell very well. They can’t sniff tails. They don’t even have tails, poor things. So you just have to talk to them. Are you willing to let them know we can talk?’

‘How about this for an idea,’ suggested Ula. ‘We’ll go and look and sniff the children and then we’ll be able to tell if they’re nice. If they are nice, we can let them know we can talk. What do you think, Catvinkle?’

‘Good idea, Ulee.’

So they went out to investigate and sniff and they found it was Anja and Ferdi, the two children who had come with their aunt to have their hair cut. The children were very happy to see them and took it in turns to pat Catvinkle and Ula. In fact, they patted Catvinkle and Ula so nicely that Catvinkle decided to speak to them.

‘Were you crying?’ asked Catvinkle.

‘Ferdi was,’ said Anja, and then she shook her head as though to wake herself up. Wait a minute! It sounded to her as though the cat with the thick white whiskers and the big red bow tied around her tail had just asked her a question.

‘Ferdi, did you hear what I heard?’ Anja asked.

‘It sounded as if Catvinkle talked,’ said Ferdi in amazement.

‘I did! I did! You can ask Ula,’ said Catvinkle.

‘She really did,’ said Ula.

The children couldn’t believe their eyes or their ears. ‘Surely cats and dogs don’t talk?’ the children asked the two animals in front of them.

‘We do talk,’ explained Catvinkle. ‘We talk all the time, but humans almost never pay us any attention.’

‘It’s true,’ added Ula. ‘No offence, but most humans are so busy worrying about themselves that they hardly ever give a thought to other animals who might be talking to them, often with very interesting things to say.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Catvinkle, ‘but to be fair to the humans, we only ever try to talk to special humans who seem friendly, kind and calm, and who smell nice.’

‘You two seem very nice and you smell a bit like Mr Sabatini,’ said Ula.

‘Hey, that’s true!’ said Catvinkle, pleasantly surprised at her dog friend’s powers of observation. ‘What a powerful snout you have, Ulee.’ Then, turning to the children, she added, ‘It might be because he’s just given you each a haircut. His paws would have been all over you.’

The children looked at each other, still completely stunned to find that the lovely cat and dog they had wanted to pat in Mr Sabatini’s hair salon earlier were now talking to them and to each other.

‘So, at first I thought I heard crying and then very soon after I thought I heard laughing. Am I right?’ asked Ula.

‘Yes,’ said Anja. ‘Ferdi was crying because we’ve been trying to be so brave while our parents are away for work. We’ve been staying with our aunt, who is nice, but we’ve been missing our parents terribly and we hadn’t cried at all, neither of us.’

‘But then,’ continued Ferdi, ‘we lost our favourite toy and it was too much for me to bear. It was a toy Mum and Dad gave us and we loved playing with it. They had given it special powers. It was like magic.’

‘What was it?’ asked Ula.

‘It won’t sound very special when I tell you about it but it is,’ said Ferdi. ‘It’s just a rubber ball. It’s made of clear rubber but it’s colourful in the middle where it sort of sparks in flashes that look like bolts of lightning when it bounces or hits anything.’

‘It always seemed that it was shooting sparks of our parents’ love as we played with it, and it helped us to feel they were with us while they are away for work, but now it’s gone,’ said Anja.

‘Hmmm … this is very sad, too sad to bear, even if we’re not any of us actually bears,’ said Catvinkle. ‘We will help you to find your ball, won’t we, Ulee?’

‘Yes,’ said Ula, ‘we will help you.’

‘We like helping,’ said Catvinkle. ‘Especially Ulee. I’m not saying I don’t like helping because I do, but Ulee likes helping even more than I do.’

‘Do you think so?’ asked Ula.

‘Oh yes, definitely more than me.’

‘Gee, Catvinkle, I had no idea I liked helping more than you do.’

‘No point hiding it, Ulee, you’re quite the helping kind. I could learn a lot from you when it comes to helping.’

Catvinkle suggested to the children that they not mention any of this to their aunt. ‘No offence to your aunt but her hair reminded me of a beehive even before she asked to have it styled like one.’

‘Oh yes, I see what you mean,’ agreed Ula.

‘If she were to give any shelter to bees in her hair it could be very bad for us,’ said Catvinkle.

‘Oh, I don’t think she would ever do that,’ said Anja.

‘No, not our aunt. She really means well,’ added Ferdi.

‘Maybe,’ said Catvinkle, ‘but with hair like that – all tall and honeycomb-like – well, we don’t really feel we should trust her with our secrets.’

‘Did you say “secrets”?’ asked Ula.

‘Shh! Never mind our secrets, Ulee. Now, Anja and Ferdi, you’ve told us what your ball looked like but do you know where you lost it?’

‘Can it be lost if they know where it is?’ asked Ula.

‘Not sure. Good question, Ulee, let’s ask them and see,’ said Catvinkle.