From the back of the crowd came a voice that nobody expected yet all the cats seemed to recognise.

‘I respect myself and I hang out with dogs … a lot.’

Everyone turned to see who was speaking. It was a very cool cat in dark sunglasses.

‘Oh my goodness!’ said Catvinkle. ‘Are you …?’

‘Yes, I am … Ketzington D. Kitten, at your service. These here are some of the Snufflecats.’ Ketzington flicked an ear to indicate the cats standing beside her.

‘You’re the coolest cat in the world,’ said Catvinkle.

‘You’re very kind to say that,’ said Ketzington. ‘But who’s to say, really, who is the coolest? I once met a tubby old tabby cat who lay on the linoleum floor of a convenience store on a very hot summer’s night listening to some of his favourite blues music on an old radio. A cheeky young mouse scurried across the floor, teasing him, saying the tubby old tabby cat would never catch him. That old tubby tabby cat refused to move anything but his tail until his favourite song, “Dust My Tail”, was over. Then he leaned over, caught the mouse with one paw, put it in his mouth, walked over to the front door and spat the mouse out right onto the street. Now that’s one cool cat!’

‘Ketzington, we think you’re the greatest, coolest cat ever!’ gushed Twinkiepaws.

Ketzington frowned. ‘Aren’t you the cat who doesn’t want kittens to hang out with dogs? I heard what you were saying. One of my best friends back in New York is a rapping dog, name of Snout. You ever heard of him?’

‘No, sorry, I don’t listen to that kind of music,’ said Twinkiepaws.

‘What kind of music is that kind of music?’ asked Ketzington.

‘Dog … music,’ said Twinkiepaws nervously.

‘You need to open your ears and your heart. Twinkiepaws, is it?’ said Ketzington.

‘Yes.’

‘We’re all mammals, aren’t we, Twinkiepaws?’ asked Ketzington.

‘Well … yes.’

Twinkiepaws felt something was changing. It wasn’t the wind but it felt a bit like it, as though she was all of a sudden a bit colder than she had been a moment earlier.

Ketzington had let everyone know that back in New York she had friends who were dogs. In fact, she was quite open to friendship with dogs anywhere. Twinkiepaws could see the other cats thinking about this, thinking about dogs in a new way for the very first time. ‘Yes,’ they were thinking, ‘we have to admit, from time to time one did hear about a cat here or there, getting along well with a dog, even if the story was told in whispers through whiskers that fanned the scandalous words away from the kitten who said them as soon as the words were in the air. How long can we pretend not to have heard those stories, at least once or twice? Maybe it happens more often than we care to say?’

Twinkiepaws could see such thoughts on the faces of these cats. Their eyes were slightly narrowed, the fur on their foreheads was slightly scrunched up and crinkly, and their heads were moving slowly from side to side, a sure sign of kitten-thinking.

They were thinking further, ‘Well then, if it does happen from time to time and if Ketzington likes dogs, maybe I could like some of them. Maybe I should try to see dogs differently too?’

This new thinking of a few of the other cats was working in favour of Catvinkle. Twinkiepaws could sense the change – maybe not in every cat, but in quite a few.

Now it felt as though not only was the wind changing direction, but it was blowing directly on Twinkiepaw’s tail, and she felt unexpectedly colder in the area of her rump.

Just then Schrodinger spoke up to invite Ketzington to judge the National Kitten Baby-Shoe Dancing Competition. All the other cats thought it was a good idea.

Ketzington agreed immediately, since she was already very familiar with baby-shoe dancing. Cats and kittens in New York had been doing it in their clubs downtown and on Ketzington Avenue for years.

‘My parents actually met at a baby-shoe dancing competition,’ said Ketzington. ‘It was at a club called Studio Fifty Paws, a place where the coolest cats in town used to go to dance and purr, sip a little cream and wait for the sun to come up,’ she explained. ‘So I grew up with baby-shoe dancing, always had a soft spot for it. I’ve always thought kitten paws look very elegant in baby shoes.’

‘They certainly do, they certainly do,’ said Twinkiepaws, who was in a very big hurry to make Ketzington like her after she had said the wrong thing about dog music.

So everyone, including Ula, Lobbus, Grayston and his puppies, along with Roy Llama, made their way to the Vondelpark bandstand down on the lake. None of the kittens wanted to miss it. Cats were huddled together all the way along the bridge that led to the bandstand. Some of them stood on top of other cats and kittens and some of them stood on top of still other cats and kittens, forming a small mountain of cats.

Those who couldn’t get a spot on the bridge sat on the grass on the bank of the lake as close as they could get to the bandstand where the competition was going to take place.

Ketzington was surprised to learn that this year there were only two contestants. All the cats pretended they too were surprised by this.

Catvinkle explained the reason for the lack of contestants to Ula. ‘After Twinkiepaws won the competition last year,’ Catvinkle whispered, ‘the other cats were too frightened to compete against her. You’ve seen how mean she can be.’

‘But you’re not too scared, are you, Catvinkle? You’re brave. You’re standing up to her,’ Ula whispered back.

‘Thanks, Ulee, but now I have to win – and with everyone looking on and with Ketzington as the judge, the pressure is on me like never before.’

Twinkiepaws was jumping up and down, stretching from side to side and furling and unfurling her tail as though it was a flag. She looked very confident as she took the stage.

‘Okay, well, I guess you only need two contestants, even in a national competition?’ said Ketzington.

Twinkiepaws put on her baby shoes. They were pink with big yellow bows. She looked over at Catvinkle and Ula with a very mean face, stuck out her tongue very quickly, and then turned back to Ketzington with the smile of an angel who had just come down from the sky in the form of a cat.

Twinkiepaws was indeed a very good baby-shoe dancer and she had carefully worked out a complicated dance that was ready to go. She had spent a lot of time practising.

But because she was so desperate to win – more than ever given that Ketzington was the judge and that her only opponent was that dog-loving Catvinkle – she decided not to do the dance she had been rehearsing for weeks.

Instead she decided to take a very big chance with something new. In an attempt to make Ketzington choose her as the winner, she sang one of Ketzington’s songs as she danced. She moved her tail slowly to the left and then to the right, picking up speed as she went.

But because she had never practised her dance routine to this song, because she didn’t know all the words and because she kept looking at Ketzington every few seconds, she wasn’t very good at all. She realised things were not going well and just thinking this made them go even worse.

Instead of concentrating on her dance moves and her singing, she imagined how Ketzington must be seeing her – as the mean cat who was ruining one of Ketzington’s own songs. Twinkiepaws was forgetting the words and then making them up. It really was not going at all well for Twinkiepaws. Her dance moves were all out of time with the beat of the song.

She thought she needed urgently to do something that would really stand out, something quite spectacular. So she tried a backflip. Her bottom paws went over her head with her tail following, but the problem was that her right bottom paw got stuck in her ear. She quickly pulled it out and tried not to let anyone see how much it hurt. But because this backflip hadn’t gone very well she thought she’d better try to do another one. This one was even worse. On her second backflip she fell completely off the stage. In fact, she fell right off the bandstand and into the lake. She dog paddled her way sheepishly back to the island with the bandstand and clambered back up to the stage. She was soaking wet and the drips made a puddle where she stood.

‘Gasp!’ went everyone.

Except Roy Llama, who whispered to Lobbus, ‘I thought we were going to play backgammon.’

‘I meant that second backflip, you know, the one that might have seemed as though I were falling and then tumbling into the lake,’ Twinkiepaws said. But no one seemed to believe her and anyway, whether she meant it or not, it looked horrible.

Twinkiepaws could tell that no one was very impressed with her dance or her song, and she scurried down the ramp from the bandstand to the grassy bank with her tail between her legs. This had been one of the worst days she could remember, and she had a good memory.

Then it was Catvinkle’s turn. On her way to the stage she went to Ula and, in front of all the other cats, she sniffed the back of Ula’s coat for its musky goodness.

‘Thanks, Ulee,’ she whispered to her best friend.

On the stage, Catvinkle stood on her hind legs with her tail in the air, her front paws raised and bent at the elbow. She put one bottom paw in the right baby shoe and one bottom paw in the left.

With her eyes closed, Catvinkle counted softly to herself, ‘One, two, three,’ and began to dance.

She swung her rump to the left and then to the right and back again with her tail going in the opposite direction. Then she called out in a strange voice that Ula had heard before.

Ketzington loved both Catvinkle’s song and her special baby-shoe dance. No one was at all surprised when Ketzington announced that Catvinkle was the winner.