A neighbour of mine had a marmalade cat that spent all last winter in the kitchen, but when the spring came he vanished, as tomcats do. The cat had wandered up the hill and was courting females of splendid allurement around the houses of other neighbours. I knew this because he nearly tore the head of my own delicate little Roxie during one night of wild passion in July. The screams of poor Roxie got me out of bed, and I went around the garden, wearing only the top of my pyjamas, and crying “pussy”, until I scraped my legs on a rose tree.
Last week I noticed the wild marmalade tom under the beech trees. I stuck my head out the window and coaxed it to a plate of dry food under the window sill, and, with the other hand, I texted my neighbour, who arrived within minutes, all excited, and took a cat trap from the boot of his Nissan. He left the trap on the grass. It looked like a big cage with food inside and sure enough after an hour he was off home with his beloved cat in the back of the car. Although I don’t think the cat was entirely happy to be on the way back to a life of quiet domesticity, with no more sex, and reduced to a diet of milk and dry chicken nuggets.
Me, a German soldier?
It’s not just cats that fascinate me. I was on a horse last week, for the first time in my life. My guide gave me boots and a riding hat in the tack room, which made me look like a German soldier in the second World War, and then she brought me out to the yard, where an enormous mare was waiting for me.
“Why is she called Zippy?” I wondered.
“Because she is so quiet,” the guide replied.
And so off we went, me and Zippy, down a laneway through the autumn fog, towards the sea and along the shoreline, and into the shallow waves and then out again. Up we went through the hedgerows dripping with fruit, and back to the stable yard. Zippy was in charge all the way. She knew the route. But when I dismounted, I felt I had achieved something enormous.
There was only one moment that frightened me. A farmer near the beach was spraying weed killer on the ditch, and the haze of moisture floated over the wall towards the mare’s nostrils. She twitched, and, without warning, began to trot away from the poison. For a few seconds I was holding on for dear life. But then she settled and I was happy again.
Relationship with a horse
On the way home I realised I had never had a relationship with a horse before. I have often been around horses. I have spent hours looking at them. I regularly walked around the stable yard with the General at dawn, examining tackle, getting showjumpers on to lorries and into horseboxes.
But none of that constituted a relationship. The horses were no more than objects until finally I sat up on one and was forced to trust her. That was intimate.
When it was over, the mare looked at me with soft eyes and her glance warmed me to the core of my heart.
It was a compassionate glance that brought me back to my school days in Cavan, and the unbearable emptiness of Sunday afternoons and the psychic paralysis that was only ever disturbed by an occasional football match on some distant radio, a cowboy film in the front room, or an ice-cream van in the distance, tinkling like a melancholic farewell to summer.
When my father turned the pages of his newspaper it made a rustling sound, and my mother sighed as she moved in her sleep on the sofa and the knitting needles lay idle in the basket of wool on the floor.
But only the cat and I were really awake. If I went upstairs to lie on the bed, she would follow, her paws whispering on the carpet, her claws scratching the bedroom door, her eyes attending me and drawing me towards her. She was my companion. And when she gazed at me, I felt I belonged in her presence.
And it was the same ferocious glance I got from the horse; the compassion of an uncomplicated animal mind, the savage instinct for affection, that warmed me when I got off the mare’s back and looked into her inky black eye for the first time as a kind of friend.