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‘How ridiculous, giving a kitten a surname!’
    ‘She’s part of the family now, Dad,’ I teased, following him through the door.
    The vet was waiting by a high table in the middle of a small ultra-white room which reminded me of the dentist’s, except there wasn’t one of those black leather chairs that look like
something you’d see in an evil master criminal’s torture chamber. There wasn’t much in the room at all, actually. Apart from the table, there was just a very stern-looking skinny
woman in a white coat and a veterinary nurse in a green uniform who was about five times the size of the vet and looked so muscly and tough that I thought at first she was a man until I realized
her uniform was a dress. Behind this terrifying pair were lots and lots of white cupboards that all looked the same. How would you ever remember where you’d put things? I wondered.
    ‘So this is – Jaffa ?’ the skinny woman asked, as if the name left a nasty taste in her mouth. She gestured towards the box and curled her lip.
    I nodded. I was struck absolutely dumb. I was now in a real vet’s surgery with Jaffa, my own real kitten!
    ‘Let’s take a look then, shall we?’ the vet said, carefully lifting the lid.
    Not carefully enough, as it happened.
    ‘Aiiiiiee!’ Dad yelled, as a streak of ginger and white shot out of the box like a firefly and went scooting round the tiny room, bouncing off the walls in an attempt to escape.
    I squealed in fright as I thought someone would end up stepping on her, and backed myself into a corner while Dad hopped nervously from foot to foot telling me to ‘do something’.
    Luckily, neither the vet nor the nurse seemed at all fazed, and in a swift pincer movement they swooped down on poor confused Jaffa and caught her.
    The vet lifted her up by the scruff of the neck in much the same way I had seen Kaboodle hold her just a few days ago.
    ‘Not so fast, you little scamp,’ she said sharply.
    ‘Ca-can I ask a question?’ I stammered. The woman was so scary, and all the white and the shining metal things everywhere made me distinctly nervous.
    ‘Hmm?’ the vet said impatiently, Jaffa still dangling in mid-air from her long rubber-glove-encased fingers like a specimen in a laboratory experiment.
    ‘It’s just – well, it might sound weird, and it might be totally normal but because I haven’t had a kitten before I don’t know, but—’
    ‘And your point is?’ the vet cut in. She was tapping her foot now, and the nurse was smirking at me.
    ‘I – well, is it normal for a kitten not to mew?’
    The vet snorted. ‘Of course it’s normal. This one’s only a few weeks old. Probably ten or eleven.You should have brought her in before this, of course, so that she could have
her first jabs. She’s probably riddled with worms.’ Dad shuddered. ‘As for mewing, some kittens are very quiet at first, some are not. Her voice will develop sooner or later, and
then you’ll probably wish she’d never started, she’ll make such a racket. Especially around dinner time.’
    I had a feeling this vet was not what you might call a ‘cat person’.
    Still, it was a relief to hear that Jaffa probably just hadn’t quite found her voice yet. It made me hopeful that she might one day communicate with me after all.
    The vet set Jaffa down on the black surface of the table while Dad chatted about how we’d been given her as a leaving gift by a friend and how we knew nothing about kittens. I tuned out
and let him do all the talking as I was feeling too intimidated by the spiky white vet with her laser-sharp tongue to offer any information myself.
    I don’t think the vet would have taken any notice of me anyway. She certainly didn’t look as if she was listening to Dad. She had bent down so that she was at eye level with Jaffa
and the pair were staring each other out. The vet kept her hand firmly on the back of Jaffa’s neck the whole time, but I didn’t think she needed to: Jaffa’s