AniMalcolm

“The one I stuck up on the kitchen wall!”

“Oh …” said Malcolm’s sister, Libby, in her bored voice, which was the one she used most of the time, when not cooing over cute animals. “I think Ticky may have ripped that down a few days ago. When she was play-fighting with Tacky …”

“The cats ripped down my birthday list? So where is it now?”

“I think … Chewie may have eaten it …?” said his dad.

“The dog ate my birthday list?”

“Either the dog or the hamster.”

“Marvin wouldn’t eat that,” said Grandpa. “Would play havoc with his digestion.”

“Actually, I think I may have put it on the floor of the iguana’s cage. Sorry, Malc … olm,” said his mum. “Only I didn’t realise that’s what it was. I just thought it was some bits of paper. And you know how ’Nana likes to scratch around in bits of paper.”

“But …” said Malcolm, getting more and more frustrated, “… we’ve already got loads of animals! We’ve got two cats, a dog, a hamster and an iguana. Which most people would say is enough pets.”

“M!” said Jackie. “You can’t have enough pets.”

“Exactly! I agree!” said Stewart.

“Yeah. YOLO,” said Libby, who used a lot of these acronyms.

“Yes, siree!” said Grandpa Theo.

“I want to eat him!” said Bert.

Even the chinchilla seemed to nod, its enormous ears flapping up and down as it stared quizzically at Malcolm from inside its sparkling new cage, which had a water bottle attached to the outside, and a running wheel and a mirror inside.

“Right,” said Malcolm. “Let’s just look at that statement for a moment. You can’t have enough pets. So … if we had 700 cats, and 800 dogs, and five – I don’t know if you can keep them as pets, but I imagine if you could, you, Mum, would soon be off to the pet shop to get them – giraffes … would that be enough pets?”

“Well,” said Stewart. “As long as they were all house-trained.”

“I don’t think we could get a litter tray big enough for that many cats and dogs, Stewart,” said Jackie. “To say nothing of the giraffes.”

Grandpa frowned. “I wouldn’t like to see a giraffe use a litter tray, even if it was big enough.” He shook his head. “Bottoms too far off the ground.”

“TD,”

said Libby.

“Hello?” said Malcolm. “Are we seriously discussing the pros and cons of getting 700 cats, 800 dogs and five giraffes now?”

But this question was never answered. Because the chinchilla – who later that day would be christened Chinny Reckon, by Stewart, after a funny phrase he used to say at school, in the 1970s – started running on the running wheel.

“OMGTT!”

said Libby, crouching down next to the cage. “That’s soooooooooooo cute!!”

“Look at his little nose!” said Stewart.

“And his adorable enormous ears!” said Jackie.

“Actually, he doesn’t look much like Lord Kitchener …” said Grandpa Theo.

“I want to eat him!” said Bert.

Eleven-year-old Malcolm watched the chinchilla running in its wheel for a moment. The chinchilla looked back at him, but kept running, almost as if it wanted Malcolm to be impressed.

“Look!” said Jackie. “He loves you!”

Malcolm looked at his family, clucking and cooing over the new pet. A part of him wanted to join them, to be in that group hug round the cage. But another part of him couldn’t.

“Yes,” said Malcolm quietly. “Thing is, I don’t love him …” And, for extra emphasis (a bit like The Terminator, in one of Malcolm’s favourite films, does when he says Hasta la vista), he said it again, but in Spanish, a language he had just started to learn at school: “Yo no lo amo.”

As ever, when he tried to tell his family how he felt about animals, no one seemed to hear him. So he sighed and turned away, and walked down the hallway towards his bedroom, passing on his way the family’s two cats, Ticky and Tacky, their dog Chewie, their hamster Marvin and their iguana, Banana.

As it happened, someone in the living room had heard him. Someone with enormous ears; someone who could hear words even when they were said quietly. Someone who, when Malcolm said, “Yo no lo amo,” stopped running on his wheel, got off, and went and sat in the corner of the cage, facing the wall.

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Malcolm lay back on his bed, looking out on to the street.

He could still, faintly, hear the sound of his family making cute noises round the cage – now added to by the click-click-click of his sister’s phone, which meant that she was taking selfies, pouting, with the chinchilla in the background. He could also hear other, very tinny, animal noises, so he assumed that Bert must have got hold of his dad’s phone. Malcolm’s family did not have much money:

his mum worked as a receptionist at the local vet’s, and his dad designed apps, none of which had been very successful.

The only one that had got on to the Apple Store was called AnimalSFX, which was one where you pressed on some cartoon animals and it would make the sounds of those animals. No one really played with it any more, except Bert – which meant that along with all the other animal noises in the house, Malcolm could also hear an artificially created donkey, cow and elephant. This just made him more depressed.

He wondered why his family never got the message about him and animals. After all, he thought, looking round the room, his walls were the only ones in the house that didn’t have animal pictures on them. Libby’s and Bert’s bedrooms were covered in cute images of kittens and puppies and seals and bears and penguins and – y’know: all the animals. His parents’ bedroom didn’t have animal posters on the wall, but they did have lots of family photographs, and every family photograph included the pets. Even Grandpa’s room had a painting in it of some dogs playing poker.

Malcolm felt quite bad about it. He knew kids were supposed to like animals. He knew people were supposed to like animals. He knew that not liking animals generally made other people think that you were a bad person.

And, anyway, he didn’t not like animals, really. He just didn’t really get animals. Most of them seemed to lie around eating and sleeping and not doing anything useful.

He had watched Ticky and Tacky (or possibly Tacky and Ticky – even though one was mainly brown and one was mainly white, Malcolm was always unsure which was which) for long periods of time and had never seen them, for example, read a book, or make a cake, or design a fantastic computer, or do any of the things he was interested in. Even now as he looked out of the window, he could see some pigeons in the street doing that stupid pigeon thing of hanging around in the middle of the road waiting until the last moment of a car approaching before flying away. Why did they do that?

But because his family so liked animals, and had so many animals, and went on so much about animals, sometimes – like now – he felt like he really did not like animals. He sometimes wondered, in fact, if his mum and dad preferred animals to children; or at least to him, their one child who wasn’t obsessed with animals.

At those moments, he sometimes felt like he hated animals. He didn’t like to admit that, but he knew that at those moments it was true.

There was a knock on the door.

Malcolm didn’t answer.

“Malc,” came his mum’s voice, from behind the door.

“Mum!” he said.