6 Cat's cradle

It is late spring and already quite warm, so, in accordance with the current ideas on childcare, I am put outside, rain or shine, for my afternoon nap. Mama likes me to sleep as much as possible. Not, as she maintains, to ensure healthy growth, but because I am less trouble asleep in the garden than awake in the parlour, waiting to be entertained and not taking ‘no’ for an answer.

I am pushed onto the back lawn and left to my own devices, which involve staring into the blue skies and listening to the birds calling to each other in the trees. Sometimes the wind rocks my pram and I drift into sleep to the squeaky rhythm of its springs. At other times I imagine melodies and make-believe that my unborn sister is sharing spiritual moments with me.

On this particular afternoon, a black cat of uncertain age and origin slinks up to my pram and joins me with an elegant leap into its confines. This cat has the long spiky fur of a scruffy, unkempt alley cat. She is heavy with sleep and the four kittens she is about to deliver. She covers my face with her warm furry body and we drift into an in-between world where cats and humans have the same status. I am happy. I can hear music – rhythmical, spherical pulsations - through the contented purring of my feline guardian. This world has been a strangely perturbing experience that I am not anxious to prolong. Perhaps this is the day my unborn sister and I are to be reunited.

There is an angry screech and I am snatched from the warmth and security of my cat’s cradle. The tabby leaps to safety and disappears into the safety of the bushes, never to be seen again. How can I forgive Mama for plucking me back from the threshold of eternity?

From now on, I am closely guarded. I no longer sleep in my pram in the fresh air, but in a barred cot in a room closed to all but those who can reach the high doorknob. Apparently I have had a narrow escape. My encounter with the cat has been interpreted as a bad omen and Mama is ashamed that she has been leaving me outside for hours on end instead of tending me lovingly.

So in future she will make more serious efforts to love me. Is it my fault that I never sense actually being loved, but only her well-meant efforts in this direction?

I can forgive her, though. Left to my own devices in the confines of my cat-free cushioned prison, I watch the shadows of other friendly spirits playing upon the walls and listen to the music my inner spirit plays and sings, and a kind of love reaches out from me to that lonely spirit out there fighting against her paucity of motherly love. I don’t really need people to amuse me. I am at my most creative when uninterrupted by the niceties of behaving suitably in company, even though I am only an infant.

By the time Dada comes home from the office, I am usually bathed, powdered, fed and back in my padded cell for the night. But I always listen for his footsteps in the hallway. He comes into my room and lifts me out of my reveries, despite Mama’s protests to ‘leave her alone’. He throws me into the air and catches me and never lets me fall. I gurgle a short sequence to let him know that I am happy that he is back and we laugh into each other’s eyes and I forget that I am only me alone, and that my sister rejected this life together.