think what to say, and every second he didn’t turn it all off with some careless remark made it more obvious to Gillon that he’d stumbled on a really important secret. He was staring at Omri now with an ever more beady look of interest and excitement.
“I know there’s more to that cupboard than you’re telling,” he said at last. “I’m sorry I laughed about the bank. Maybe it really is valuable. I wish you’d tell me.”
There was a long silence. Then Omri suddenly shouted, “Well, I’m not going to!”
Turning, he ran fast towards the hedge at the far side of the playground. It was about a hundred yards away. When he got there, panting, he sat down on the grass in a hidden place. Gillon hadn’t followed him.
Omri put his head on his knees. He was shaking. Something terrible had almost happened. He’d had a strong urge to tell Gillon. He had wanted to tell him. Gillon of all people, who made fun of him, who could never in a million years keep such a secret to himself. What had come over him? Why had he had to run away fast to stop himself from blurting it out?
He didn’t understand this feeling. It felt more like loneliness than anything else. People did really crazy things when they were lonely. But how could he be? He had his family, he was making new friends at school… Of course he missed Patrick… and Emma… and what he thought about as ‘the old world’. But that wasn’t it.
It couldn’t be old Kits, could it? You couldn’t miss a cat so badly that it made you weak and apt to do stupid things, blurt out a vital secret just to share it with someone?
He’d have to watch himself.
He heard the bell in the distance. He got up slowly and walked back to the school, saying over and over again, “Never. Never. Never. Never must I tell.”
Omri’s father lost little time in getting the re-thatching of the roof underway.
He had been making enquiries among neighbours and people in their local village and pretty soon some men arrived in a beaten-up old car to inspect and measure the roof and talk money. A very great deal of it. That evening Omri saw his mother carrying a large tumbler of brown liquid across the lane to the big workshop his father had adopted as a painting studio.
“Is that whisky, Mum?” asked Omri with interest. (The cowboy, Boone, had been a great whisky drinker, but his father wasn’t.)
“Yes,” said his mother somewhat grimly. “Your father has had a shock. Alcohol was invented for times like this.”
“How much of a shock?”
“Fifteen thousand pounds’ worth,” she replied.
“Blimey! Just for a bit of straw?”
“Just for a bit of straw.”
But it wasn’t only for that, of course. Thatching was a skilled craft, and not many people still knew how to do it properly. And it wasn’t straw. It was reeds, and the right sort only came from a particular place in France, because in Britain the reed beds were protected and couldn’t be used. The work would take about four weeks. And they had to do it at once because it couldn’t be done in winter - the whole of the old roof had to come off.
“Like when the storm blew our other roof off!” said Omri the next day at tea when all this was being gone into.
“Dad, it’s going to be so cold!” said Gillon.
But their father said tersely, “We’ll all have to be terribly brave about that, won’t we, Gillon?”
“Lucky old Ad, safe and snug at school,” muttered Gillon, who certainly hadn’t shown any envy for his older brother so far.
“Look out of the window, boys,” said their mother suddenly. “We’ve got visitors.”
They went to the window. On the lawn were three large magpies, gleaming black and white in the sun, strutting about and pecking at something that lay in the long grass.
Omri had a moment of absolute horror. He knew magpies were scavenger birds — he’d seen them pecking at the remains of one of the fox-killed hens. What could be lying there, dead?
He rushed out of the house, his heart in his throat. The birds flapped unconcernedly away just as he reached them. Hardly able to bear his apprehension, Omri parted the grass and looked at the corpse.
It was a half-grown rabbit without a head.
The others, belatedly realizing what Omri had feared, trailed out after him.
“It’s not her, is it?” called his mother.
“It’s a dead rabbit,” said Omri.
“Yuck,” said Gillon. “Those magpies have eaten half of it.”
Their father bent down to look at it more closely.
“I don’t think the magpies killed it,” he said. “Too big for them. It would take a fox to kill that, and why would he have left it half eaten? Looks more like a cat’s work to me.”
Omri gazed at the dead half-rabbit with entirely new eyes.
“You mean - a cat could kill a thing that size? You mean maybe Kitsa could have hunted it?”
“It’s possible,” he said.
Omri’s heart did an upward lurch. The hope he had abandoned rushed back, painfully, like the blood coming back into a numbed limb.
“But if she’s around, why doesn’t she come home?”
“Maybe she’s gone feral,” said his father.
“Gone feral? What’s that?”
“Wild. Cats do. Mainly tomcats, but queens do as well sometimes, when they’re moved. I bet she’s around, Omri. Keep your eyes open for her, and keep putting out her milk.”
Omri put not milk but clotted cream out for her that night. In the morning it was gone.
“Probably a hedgehog,” said Gillon.
Omri wanted to hit him, but he felt too relieved. There was hope, after all.
The thatchers arrived to begin work, and chaos came again to the just-organized-after-moving household.
The garden, the hedge, the border of the lane, and all the paths vanished under masses of mouldy old thatch as the thatching team tore it off the roof beams. There was no point in clearing most of it till the job was
