“… shrinks his kids. Or the kids shrink the parents. Or the parents shrink the neighbours. You know the one! We would shrink too and end up accidentally slipping down the plughole in the bathroom. We would have slid down the pipes with all the dirty bathwater and that would have mixed with everyone else’s dirty bathwater and everyone’s dirty dishwater and the dirty water from everyone’s washing machines.
We would have almost drowned in dirty water, as we whooshed and spun and sped down the pipes out to sea. At the end of this extremely wet journey, we would have ended up in the biggest pool of water in the world: the Pacific Ocean. One wet cat and one wet teacher in one wet ocean.”
The cat looked at the teacher and the teacher looked at the cat and they both said, “Now that would be WET!”
And then they laughed.
“Well, we can’t stay there,” said Miss May. “What happens next? Perhaps a seagull takes pity on us and picks us up in her beak and flies us back to Station Road School. We would get here just before the bell goes, but we would be very wet and very hungry.”
“Perhaps,” said the cat. “Not every story has a happy ending you know. I know a cat that was searching for a warm home his entire life. He lived through terrible things. Mean people would throw things at him and call him names. Mean dogs would snarl and chase him away from any chance of happiness. And he hardly ever got to eat sardines.
A nice family picked him up from the pound, but then they had to move to Greece. They couldn’t take the cat. And that cat’s life went from bad to worse after that.”
Miss May looked out the window. She had been right. No parents had wanted to come out on such a dreadful night. It must be time to go home.
The cat looked out the window and said, “What a terrible, stormy, wild, windy, woolly, treacherous, disgusting, ferocious, terrifying, wet, LONELY night.”
“It could be worse,” said the teacher politely. She picked the cat up in her arms and said thoughtfully, “I have an idea!”