"When I play with my cat", Montaine wrote, "who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" That is my official excuse for keeping cats. As if you needed one. Anyway, I have had cats most of my adult life, and they have never let me down. Until suddenly, last Summer when Coco disappeared. Named for Chanel, because of her black coat with a small white tie at her throat. Saved, along with her sister Goldie, from being put down in a boutique vet’s to which we had never been but which had two kittens looking for a home. When they were old enough to be spayed, that was done. Time passed and they grew, one sweet and coy, striped like a tiger, with golden eyes, the other one stand-offish and wary with great green ones.
They settled in. Unmentionable things were presented when we came down in the mornings; entrails, bits of mouse, once a whole rat outside the back door. They were earning their keep a bit more assiduously than expected. My previous cats used to gesticulate eloquently to me when magpies stole their food, and while mice didn’t exactly Winter safely indoors, to steal a phrase from Thomas Lynch’s poem ‘Grimalkin’, they were in no danger of extinction either. This wholesale slaughter was new to me. But such is the nature of the beast.
Around mid-summer we went to Dublin for two days and when we came home, Coco had gone. Worry was followed by guilt, which was followed by a major cathunt. Goldie pined, but not too much and not for too long.
‘ If only we knew for sure’ we said. After a month, I put her furry bed in the shed and put away her bowl. I cried in secret and imagined I heard her cry. A month after that, I saw her ghost in broad daylight. Then I saw it again. This, I thought to myself, has to stop.
‘I think I saw Coco.’
‘Where?’
‘Behind the crocosmia.’
‘Which is the crocosmia?’
Then we both saw her, skinny and ragged, against the red flame of the bush, her coat a faded brown but unmistakably her.
She was starving and had turned into a demon. She wouldn’t come inside, seemed terrified, had gone wild. But she ate the food we left for her.
I rang the vet – can you give her cat valium? It wasn’t, he said, a thing he’d recommend. We persevered and I gave her homeopathic remedies. I don’t go in for them myself, but they do wonders for animals and if they didn’t, they’d do her no harm. So I crushed them up, hid them in previously banned tinned food, and she got quieter. But not that quiet.
One day I tried to pet her. She dug her claws into my hand, giving me an infection so I had to take strong antibiotics and get a tetanus jab while the cat glared and cried at me at me from under the red flowers which look like exotic birds, and I cried by myself for my stupidity, and hurt by her savagery. I was upset at her and for her.
Gradually, she came inside, grew calmer, but was not herself. Her behaviour could best be described as hormonal. Then I noticed her undersides.
‘That cat is pregnant’ I said.
‘She’s been spayed’ he said. Reason prevailed.
A few weeks later, I was giving a reading for a Yeats event and got a message to ring home. I wasn’t to be alarmed, but something odd had happened. I was alarmed and rang back immediately.
‘Coco just came through the cat flap with a kitten.’
And that’s how Minalouche arrived, on the night of the full moon.
‘I knew that cat was pregnant’ I said. ‘She’s been spayed’ he said.
Maybe it didn’t take, I said and, too late, remembered Baudelaire’s line about cats: ‘Their loins are electric with fecundity.’ No kidding.
But it didn’t end there. Coco sat inside like a Madonna for a night and a day, after which I came home to find the little one mewling pitifully on the grass and her mama nowhere to be seen. The Tomcat started to visit again. I rang our own vet, to make the earliest possible appointment.
‘You’re a terrible mother’ I told her sternly. ‘And an awful trollop.’ She began to get rough with the kitten, so now she’s only allowed supervised access. The kitten is fed many times a day through a tiny syringe and rules the house.
And it’s Coco who …‘creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise
And lifts to the changing moon
Her changing eyes.’
MARY O'MALLEY
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