It was a complete brainwave of utter geniusness, although I say it myself. People always had pets that they didn’t have time to look after. It was a fact of modern hectic life – I was always reading things like that in the Daily Ranter. In fact, there were frequently scaremongeri ng stories about people who went on holiday and left their poor dog/cat/rabbit/gerbil home alone with no food and so on. Obviously people like that were monsters and deserved to have the RSPCA take their pets from them and make sure they could never in their lives ever again have the priceless privilege of being pet owners.

(Life was so unfair. Why were there people in the world with pets who could not even be bothered to look after them, and then there were people like me who weren’t ALLOWED pets but who, if they did have them, would look after them so well they would live as royally as if they belonged to the Queen?)

This was where my brainwave came in (admittedly helped by Dad’s apostrophe and full stop and general mega-grammar-fussiness, although I would never have told him that).

I, Bertie Fletcher, Pet-Sitter to the Stars (well, OK, our neighbours), would go to other people’s houses and walk their dogs,or feed their cats or rabbits or whatever else they had – although I might possibly draw the line at stick insects or piranhas – and Dad would never have to know because the animals would stay in their owners’ homes! I could just go round and feed them where they lived, right there on the spot, without a single animal ever having to cross our threshold – Dad would never have to see an actual animal in his house ever.

I was so chuffed with my brainwave idea, that I immediately made some little notices with my best pens in some lovely curly writing. I wanted them to stand out from the usual boring post that people get:

‘Dad!’ I yelled across to his study, where he was once again glued to his computer screen, tapping away and muttering to himself. ‘I’m just going to the shop!’

Dad grunted something at me about buying milk. I grabbed my hoody and the notices and ran.

As I closed the door behind me, I couldn’t help grinning like a cat who’s eaten all the custard. It was so exciting just imagining all the animals I would be asked to look after! I reminded myself to keep my mobile charged all the time, and I decided I should buy a nice diary to keep my appointments in. I was determined to be professional.

Of course I had not remembered that life doesn’t often go the way you think it will. It’s a fact I often forget about when I get excited.

I posted all the leaflets in every house in my street and on the way I spotted so many animals that it made my tummy squirm just thinking about which ones I might be asked to help out with.

There was a house on the corner of the street that had two cute little King Charles spaniels with the hugest eyes I have ever seen on a real live creature that is not a cartoon. Mr Bruce who lived there was always out at work, and I knew that he often moaned to Dad about how expensive the dogwalker was, so I thought maybe he might be interested in my pet-sitting idea. I would not be expensive at all.

I could see the spaniels through the letterbox, jumping up at me when I put my leaflet through. There was quite a kerfuffly noise when the paper went through the door, a bit like something being scrunched or ripped. I chuckled as I thought about those naughty little dogs and wondered what they would be like to play with. They were yapping and yelping as I went back down the path, and I even wondered in a silly daydreamy kind of way if they had been able to read my notice and were looking forward to meeting me!

There were about forty houses in our street, which is a cul-de-sac. That means you can’t get out the other end of it in a car – or a motorbike, or a camper van. You get the idea. The houses go round in a curve and sort of look out on to each other. Dad didn’t like it. He said that everyone knew each other’s business because it was like living in a goldfish bowl. Personally I didn’t think it looked anything like a goldfish bowl, which is round and made of glass and full of water, whereas our street was very definitely dry and made of tarmac the last time I looked. And I thought it was cool as it meant we knew who nearly all of our neighbours were and people actually talked to each other, and of course one of those people was my best friend, Jazz. The other great thing about our road was that Dad let me go out on my own, as long as I stayed in the cul-de-sac and didn’t try and escape into – shock, horror! – another street. (Anyone would think that the road next to ours was enemy territory or part of the Amazon rainforest or something.) But although I knew most people to say ‘hello’ to, one thing I wasn’t one hundred per cent clear about was what kind of pets everyone had. For example, you know if someone has a dog because you see them (or a dogwalker) out walking with it, and you know when someone has a cat, as cats wander around all over the place. But you don’t necessarily know if someone has a hamster or a goldfish or even a guinea pig unless you have been right inside their house or garden.

After all, it has been known for people to keep chinchillas or budgies in their bedrooms.

I suddenly had a moment of panic – as I was walking up the drive to Mr Sauna’s house. He was a very quiet man who only ever said ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good afternoon’ or ‘Good evening’ and never anything else. Dad said it was because he was Swedish and that his English was not that good. I had no idea what was in his house. What if he kept a ten-foot python in the garage and thought it would be a good idea to ask me to feed it for him while he was on holiday? I decided not to put a notice through his door.

Finally I came to number 15, which is over the road from our house. The person who lived in this house hadn’t lived there long – only a couple of months – but Jazz and I had already decided from first sight that we didn’t much like her. I know that is not fair, but ‘Life is not fair’, as Dad is fond of saying, and anyway lots of people judge by first appearances, even though they are probably the sort of people who will advise you not to.

Anyway, back to the lady at number 15. She was an actor, according to Dad, although I’d never seen her in any films or telly programmes, and her name was Fenella Pinkington. There, you see, even her name makes you want to not like her. In my head (and when I was chatting to Jazz) I called her Pinkella, because she was always dressed from top to toe in pink, which is definitely not one of my favourite colours – all different kinds of shades of it, from very bright bubblegum pink through to soft pastelly, babyish pink. She was also embarrassing to talk to because the few times I’d spoken to her, she had insisted on calling me Roberta or, even worse, ‘sweetie’, and she touched my hair and told me in capital letters that it was ‘DIVINE’, which I did not like at all.

My hair is sort of darkish blonde and very, very curly. Ringlets is what Dad calls them. I don’t mind it; I quite like it. It’s not the sort of hair you can mind really, as it has a life of its own, so there is no point. What I do mind though is people touching it without asking. Especially if they use the words ‘DIVINE’ and ‘sweetie’ at the same time. How would Pinkella like it if I touched her pink floaty dresses? I wondered. But that was not a thought I wanted to hold on to for long, as those dresses looked decidedly nylony and itchy and would probably give me static electric hair, which with my ringlets would be nothing short of disastrous, if you think about it.

So the long and the short of it was that I almost didn’t put a notice through Pinkella’s door,but then I saw a kitten looking at me from the sitting-room window, where it was balancing on the sill. A kitten with a very distinctive dinner-jacket-with-cute-ink-splodge look.

Now, everyone knows that kittens are cute. But this kitten was seriously cute. It wasn’t because he was at the really tiny, fluff-ball stage – he was older than that. He was into the long-legged, skinny, bouncy stage. I had seen him leaping and bounding around the street only the day before, batting his front paws (which were white, like little boots on the end of his long black legs) at a bee in a very determined sort of way. His fur was silky shiny and he had bright yellow eyes that were still too big for his slim little baby-face. Maybe it was the eyes that did it for me. They we re just so big. So golden.

I looked at him quite carefully, and in those yellow eyes there was a definite look that seemed to be trying to tell me something. I felt a shiver run up my spine. It was a sparkly kind of shiver that made me feel as though I was on the brink of something exciting.

I think that shiver was what made me put a notice through the door. Whatever it was, there was definitely a voice inside me saying that I should get to know that kitten better – even if it did mean having to put up with Pinkella patting my hair and calling me Roberta.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could be quite a good business woman. In fact, I could have gone on that programme on the telly called In the Line of Fire, where you have to present a new idea for a business and if you are good the man with the grey hair and the face like an angry potato says, ‘You’re hired!’ and if you are rubbish, he says, ‘You’re fired!’

Maybe if I entered my pet-sitting idea on the programme I could get on it, I thought. It would be fun even if I was fired, as then I could say, ‘Well, who cares? Your face looks like an angry potato.’ It would give me a lot of satisfaction, actually.

One of the things that made me excited about the Pet-Sitting Service was that it would mean I would get some calls on my mobile, which I was now keeping glued to my side at all times. I had not received any calls for a long time as I had not been allowed to make any calls myself for over a year. This was all because of the incident with the first phone bill. Apparently I had spent enough money chatting to Jazz to feed a family of five for a month – Dad’s words, not mine, in case you hadn’t guessed. So I was only allowed to use it for emergencies from then on, such as if I was going to be coming out of school late or if Dad needed to tell me that he would be late back from work. But after the incident with the phone bill I was not allowed to use it to call my friends (especially Jazz) or text anyone. And seeing as Dad had never once called me on it and I had never once called him, I hadn’t really seen the point in having it up until now.

As soon as Jazz had been released from her many weekend commitments (ballet followed by tap followed by piano followed by singing – you’d never have guessed she wants to be a celebrity pop-star-singer-songwriter when she grows up, would you?) I went round to hers to tell her everything.

‘It’s such a cool idea, Bert!’ she said, hugging me and jumping up and down, which made my face squish uncomfortably into the zip on her hoody.

‘Yeah,’ I said, prising her off. ‘You want to help?’

‘You bet!’ Jazz cried, punching the air and swivelling round on the spot in one of her so-called funky dance move s. ‘Sooo, who d’you reckon will call first? I hope it’s that lady with the guinea pigs. I loooove guinea pigs!’ she squealed, sounding a bit like one herself.

‘Which lady with the guinea pigs?’ I asked, feeling a bit miffed that I had not known about a lady with guinea pigs in our street. But Jazz wasn’t listening – she was whirling round her room, jabbering away about all the animals we’d soon be looking after and how much money we’d be making.

I kept glancing at my phone, which I’d put on Jazz’s bed so that I would hear it clearly when it rang. It was bound to ring soon, wasn’t it? Of course it was, I told myself. In fact, now that I was on course for being Pet-Sitter and Business Wo man of the Year, my phone was going to be ringing so much I might actually have to buy another one to keep up with the demand.