Small Wonders — Episode One
There was once a cat who collected lost things.
Not mice, although he was perfectly capable of catching them. Not birds, because he considered birds far too noisy and generally unpleasant company. And certainly not the little plastic balls with bells inside that his human kept buying him, despite his having made his opinion of them abundantly clear.
No. This particular cat collected things that people had lost.
His name was Barnaby, and he lived in a crooked little cottage at the end of a lane where the hedges grew so high that the summer sun could only reach the road in thin golden ribbons.
Barnaby was enormous, ginger, and possessed of a magnificent white chest that required considerable daily attention. He had one torn ear, a tail like a feather duster, and the expression of someone who had been deeply disappointed by the general behaviour of humanity.
His human was an elderly woman called Elsie.
Elsie had lived in the cottage for fifty-three years. She had planted the roses climbing around the front door, painted the kitchen cupboards blue, and worn a shallow groove into the flagstones between her favourite chair and the kettle.
She had also, in recent years, begun to forget things.
At first, it was ordinary stuff.
Her spectacles. The shopping list. Where she had put the biscuit tin.
Barnaby considered these minor inconveniences. Humans were notoriously careless with their possessions, and it was no business of his to organise them.
But then Elsie began to lose other things.
She lost the tune of the song she used to hum while washing the dishes.
She lost the name of the little bird that arrived each spring and sang from the apple tree.
And, one particularly grey November morning, she lost the memory of why she had planted the roses around the door.
She stood looking at them for a long time.
“I know there was a reason,” she whispered.
Barnaby sat beside her feet.
He knew the reason.
A man called Thomas had planted the first rosebush with her, long ago, when the cottage was new to them and they were still young enough to imagine that fifty years was an impossibly long time.
Thomas had been gone for seven winters now.
Barnaby had never met him. But he knew about him because Elsie used to tell him stories.
She had stopped telling those stories recently.
And that worried Barnaby more than he cared to admit.
That evening, while Elsie dozed in her chair, Barnaby went out through the cat flap.
It was raining, which he considered extremely poor planning on the part of the weather.
He crossed the garden, squeezed beneath the hedge, and walked down the lane towards the village.
At the old stone bridge, he stopped.
Something was shining beneath the hawthorn tree.
It was a tiny golden light, no bigger than a firefly, floating just above the wet leaves.
Barnaby approached cautiously.
The light trembled.
And then, quite unexpectedly, it spoke.
“Please,” it said. “I don’t know where I belong.”
Barnaby sat down.
He had encountered many strange things in his life. Hedgehogs who ate cat food. Dogs who believed sticks were worth celebrating. A particularly aggressive goose.
But a talking light was new.
“What are you?” he asked.
“I’m a memory.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been lost for such a long time.”
Barnaby considered this.
Then he stood up and flicked his tail.
“Come along, then.”
The light followed him home.
He led it through the cat flap and into the warm kitchen, where Elsie was still asleep beside the fire.
The little light floated upwards.
It hovered above her silver hair, hesitated, and then slipped gently into her dreams.
Elsie smiled.
And in her sleep, she began to hum.
Barnaby recognised the tune.
It was the song she used to sing while washing the dishes.
Well.
That was interesting.
Over the following weeks, Barnaby began to notice lights everywhere.
A pale blue one trembling beneath a bench in the village square.
A warm orange one caught in the branches of the old oak tree.
A tiny green one hiding inside an abandoned watering can.
Each was a lost memory.
Some were happy.
Some were sad.
Some were so ordinary that Barnaby couldn’t understand why anybody would want them back.
The smell of bread in a childhood kitchen.
The sensation of holding a father’s hand.
The sound of a bicycle bell on a summer afternoon.
The first time somebody had said, “I’m proud of you.”
He discovered that memories became lost for all sorts of reasons.
Some had simply slipped away with age.
Others had been buried beneath grief, worry, exhaustion, or the endless noise of living.
And some had been left behind because remembering them hurt too much.
Barnaby collected them carefully.
He carried them home, one by one, and released them into Elsie’s dreams.
Not all of them belonged to her, of course.
The memory of a little boy falling into a duck pond was clearly somebody else’s, and Elsie woke laughing one morning without understanding why.
The memory of a brass band playing in a seaside pavilion made her ask for fish and chips.
And a particularly mischievous memory involving a stolen wedding cake caused her to spend an entire afternoon giggling at nothing in particular.
Barnaby began to suspect that memories were less interested in finding their original owners than in finding somewhere they could be loved.
But there was one light that refused to come inside.
It appeared every evening at the garden gate.
A small, silver light.
Quiet.
Patient.
Waiting.
Barnaby tried everything.
He sat beside it.
He spoke to it.
He even brought it a piece of chicken, which was a considerable sacrifice.
But the silver light never moved.
Until one night, when the first snow began to fall.
Elsie had been having a difficult day.
She had forgotten the kettle was boiling. She had misplaced her slippers. And she had looked at a photograph of Thomas for a very long time before quietly turning it face down.
“I don’t remember his voice,” she told Barnaby.
Her hands trembled.
“I can see his face. I know I loved him. But I can’t remember what he sounded like.”
She began to cry.
Barnaby climbed onto her lap and pressed his enormous ginger head beneath her chin.
He couldn’t fix everything.
He was, after all, only a cat.
Although he privately considered that a considerable achievement.
But perhaps there was one thing he could do.
That night, he went out into the snow.
The silver light was waiting.
Barnaby approached it slowly.
“You’re hers, aren’t you?”
The light flickered.
“Then why won’t you come inside?”
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the light spoke, so softly that Barnaby almost missed it.
“Because she is afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of remembering how much she loved him. And losing him all over again.”
Barnaby looked back towards the cottage.
Through the kitchen window, he could see Elsie sitting beside the fire, very small in her chair.
The cat thought about this for a long time.
Then he said something quite remarkable.
“Love isn’t something you lose just because somebody goes away.”
The silver light brightened.
“Are you sure?”
Barnaby thought of Elsie’s gentle hands. Of the warm place beside the hearth. Of the way she always saved him the last little piece of chicken.
He thought of all the things he had known and loved.
“Quite sure,” he said.
The silver light floated down and settled between his ears.
And for the first time in his life, Barnaby heard a voice that belonged to a man he had never met.
A warm voice.
A little rough around the edges.
Laughing.
“Elsie, my darling, if you plant those roses any closer to the door, we’ll have to climb through the window to get in.”
Barnaby understood.
He turned and hurried home.
Elsie was still awake when he returned.
“Oh, Barnaby,” she said. “You’re absolutely freezing.”
She gathered him into her arms and wrapped him in the old knitted blanket that lived beside her chair.
The silver light rose from his fur.
It hovered between them.
For one extraordinary moment, the room smelled of fresh roses and warm summer earth.
Then the light slipped into Elsie’s heart.
She gasped.
Her eyes widened.
And slowly, so slowly, she began to smile.
“Oh, Thomas.”
She laughed through her tears.
“Oh, you ridiculous man.”
She looked towards the roses outside the window.
“He said we’d have to climb through the window if I planted any more.”
She laughed again.
And then she cried.
But this time, her tears were different.
They weren’t the tears of somebody who had lost everything.
They were the tears of somebody who had found something precious.
Barnaby curled into a comfortable circle on her lap.
He had done his work.
For tonight, at least.
By spring, the roses were beginning to wake.
Elsie still forgot things.
Sometimes she forgot why she had walked into a room. Sometimes she called Barnaby by the name of a cat she’d owned thirty years earlier.
And there were days when the world felt confusing.
But something had changed.
She began telling stories again.
She told Barnaby about the summer she and Thomas had travelled to Cornwall in a little green car that broke down three times.
She told him about dancing in the kitchen when the radio played their favourite song.
She told him about the first rosebush and the argument about the garden gate.
And Barnaby listened.
Sometimes, he understood every word.
Sometimes, he didn’t.
But he listened anyway.
Because he had discovered something about memories.
They were not always lost forever.
Sometimes they were simply waiting for the right moment to find their way home.
And sometimes, when a person couldn’t find their memories, the memories found another way of reaching them.
Through a song.
A smell.
A familiar place.
A gentle touch.
Or an enormous ginger cat with a white chest and a very high opinion of himself.
And if you ever happen to see a cat sitting very still beneath a hedge, staring at something you cannot see, don’t be too quick to disturb him.
He may be watching a mouse.
He may be contemplating the mysteries of the universe.
Or he may be waiting for a little golden light to tell him where it belongs.
Because the world is full of things we cannot see.
And not all lost things are gone.
Some are simply waiting to be found.
The End.
Small Wonders — Dark Moon Audio Presentations
