A Cat Called Kat

Chapter Six - I Have To Go

I was coming to the conclusion that Terri was a much better nurse than me.

In fact, I was starting to suspect that she was really a much nicer person than me.

To be fair to myself, Mr Bossy was a completely impossible patient. He was behaving just as you'd expect a powerful executive brain to behave if it was trapped in the body of an infant.

He was short tempered, easily frustrated and given to occasional temper tantrums when his hands refused to obey him properly or people didn't get what he was trying to say with his slurred speech.

And, of course, his greatest cause of frustration was the whole situation back in England

It was late on a Monday afternoon when Caroline came marching out of his bedroom, almost incandescent with rage. "Right," she said. "That does it! I'm going back to England to sort out the situation over there. If I stay here another minute, I'm going to strangle him."

I more than understood where she was coming from so I gave her a bit of a smile. "Let's all get together for another one of our 'council of war' things to see how we're going to play this," I suggested. "I feel pretty much the same as you."

So we summoned Zi'Anna to look after Master. She was, by far, the best at dealing with him, firstly, because she simply didn't understand his nasty snide comments and, also, I suspected, because he wasn't quite certain that she wouldn't slap him if he tried his silly temper tantrum stuff on with her.

We gathered around a table at the back of the pizzeria and people sat in silence until I realised that this was an Anthony Lloyd Enterprises' meeting and, in the absence of Mr Bossy, I was going to have to take charge.

"OK," I said to Caroline, "I want you to calmly tell us what the problem is." I could sort of hear Mr Bossy's voice in my head as I said it but in this situation that probably wasn't a bad thing.

"I just cannot cope..." she said with her voice rising then she stopped, took a deep breath and tried again, working a bit harder at the staying calm thing. "I don't think I'm doing any good here," she explained, "and I would rather go back and deal with those traitors in England than spend any more time nurse-maiding Anthony when he's in this state. I hate seeing him like this just as much as he hates it himself."

There were a few nods from around the table but then Terri spoke up. "You can't know they are all traitors back in England," she said quietly. "In fact, it's much more likely that most people probably don't know what's really happened."

I looked at Caroline because she was the nearest thing we had to a manager and she was nodding thoughtfully.

"If you'd had to organise that sort of takeover, how would you have gone about it?" I asked her.

She thought for a bit before answering. "Classic palace coup," she said. "You just need a few key people to announce that Anthony's been killed... by those horrible people in Italy, probably... and that, in the interest of continuity, your chosen candidate would be taking over straight away. You give the impression that you already have complete control and then you simply obliterate anyone who suggests they might be thinking about defying you."

"So we need to get our hands on someone in there that we can trust," Elroy said.

"The trouble is that the whole trust thing is a commodity in fairly short supply at the moment," Caroline said with a small laugh.

The table went quiet for a while until I realised that I knew the answer. "Mr Mac!" I exploded.

That won me several rather puzzled looks.