“… skins! Have you read Where the Wild Things Are? Sam and Grace used to listen to that book night after night. But as soon as the lights went out, they called for me. They said I would keep the wild things away! As if!
I felt pretty brave sleeping on the end of their beds, ready to chase anything away. But imagine what we would do if we started to hear a terrible scratching noise at the door, and a yowling and a stamping, and some teeth crunching and grinding. And then, to top it all off, imagine if we heard a stomach rumbling.
I am not talking about the noise that might come out of a cat or a dog or even a lion or a tiger, but some terrifying, terrible beast that we wouldn’t even know the word for.
The sound of the rumbling stomach would be like a volcano erupting. The sound of the scratching would be like one-metre-long fingernails scraping down a blackboard. The sound of the yowling would be like someone had invented it on a computer. Not real in other words!
We would turn white. We would shake. We would feel our throats go so dry we wouldn’t be able to make a single sound. We would decide that if we were very, very, very quiet the terrible mysterious thing would go away and bother another door.
But it wouldn’t go away. It would just get LOUDER and LOUDER. In the end, you would decide to treat the thing on the other side of the door as though it were a child having a very big and very bad tantrum.
You would creep up to the door, Miss May, and open it very slowly, and before you could lose courage, you would say to the thing, ‘I want you to go and sit on the big cushion in the corridor and think of ten things in the world that you really like. Then when you can speak to me in a very quiet voice, I want you to tell me what made you get so wild. I will listen to what you tell me and then we will make a plan, so that tomorrow you can have a better day.’
You will know, Miss May, that this will be very tricky and dangerous, because the thing might like being in a wild, scary rage all the time.”
The cat looked at the teacher with a long hard stare and said, “Now that would be TERRIFYING! In fact it would be EXTREMELY TERRIFYING.”
Miss May was getting used to the cat’s stories by now and was keen to find out what would happen next. She waited patiently for the cat to continue.
“What would happen next?” the cat asked. “It could go horribly wrong, but the thing would be so surprised by the way you spoke to it, Miss May, that it would go and sit on the cushion. Eventually it would become very, very quiet.
The thing would come up to the door and tap lightly. You would open it just a little bit. The thing will tell you it is lost and hungry and needs a friend.
When you looked at the thing, you would see that it was so big it wouldn’t even fit through the door. But as it stood there telling you about its very BIG BAD MOOD, the thing would start to shrink. It would shrink and shrink, until it was small enough to invite inside.
Before you could stop yourself, you would invite the thing to come in and sit in the book corner and read a book.”
Miss May smiled at the end of the cat’s story.
The cat smiled at the end of his story.
“I do like happy endings,” he said.
Miss May felt very happy sitting with the cat on her lap listening to all these stories, but just then they heard a creak and a drip. The storm had found a way into the classroom. Water had started to slip down the wall by the window.
“Oh no!” cried Miss May. “What a terrible, stormy, wild, windy, woolly, treacherous, disgusting, ferocious, terrifying, WET night,” she moaned.
“It could be worse,” said the cat. “We could have ended up in that movie where the dad accidentally …”