(Getting to know each other, one step at a time.)

“It’s like having an alien life form in the house,” Howard remarks. He has never lived with an animal before, except – he always hastens to correct me – a moggie his parents had when he was a toddler, “who always ran away whenever she saw me.” He also remembers with fondness a neighbour’s Border Collie he used to take out for walks. 

“It’s always been just the two of us,” he adds in a tone of mild regret, “and now it’s like having a third person in the house.”

There’s no like about it. We now do have a third individual sharing our living space. A new member of the household who comes with her own backstory, emotional baggage and – who knows? – perhaps even expectations. Only she can’t utter them to us in human language and we humans, who have been increasingly alienated from nature over the centuries, have lost the ability to sense anything that can’t be channelled through words.  And so when this otherwise silent new member of the family begins to emit distressing-sounding yowls in the middle of the night, every night, I’m at a loss. The first few nights I negotiate the traditional Norwich stairs – so steep they’re practically vertical – to find Luna standing over the toy her fosterers sent with her, saying it’s her favourite, but with which I have never once seen her play. It’s a soft, grey little thing that could be a seahorse or a newly-hatched dinosaur, and may or may not have once contained catnip. The moment she sees me coming, she walks away from the toy.

Later, she repeats the ritual with other toys I buy for her, in particular a soft gingerbread man she picks out of her toy crate and drops on the downstairs landing before breaking into her nightly lament or call or command or – oh, heck, what do I know? I’m only human.

One night, sleep-starved, I hide all her toys, but she finds one of Howard’s sheepskin gloves and carries that to the bottom of the steep stairs.

What do you want, cat? Have you brought me a gift? Then why don’t you bring it up to my bed instead of forcing me to risk life and limb in the dark? Are you bringing me the gingerbread man because you can’t bring me a mouse?

She flashes me a golden-yellow glance and leaves me staring at the toy, feeling stupid and unnatural for failing to understand.

I ask for advice from Facebook groups of cat owners and receive a volley of responses suggesting a list of reasons for this sleep-sabotaging behaviour. Some comment, complete with the now ubiquitous, imbecilic 😂, that there’s no point in my trying to understand the logic of a cat’s behaviour. I find this attitude somewhat upsetting. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. As a literary translator, it’s something I keep repeating to myself, even when a sentence in a text I’m working on reads like the creation of beings from another Solar system.  Everything that happens in this world has a sense, is the effect of a cause, has a backstory – even if we often struggle to pinpoint it.

An acquaintance gives us a laser pointer.  Naturally, Luna chases the red dot all over the flat in a frenzy. Every muscle is taut, pupils so dilated one can barely see her yellow-gold irises.  Only after I switch it off, she can’t find peace, but keeps prowling around the place, searching for the red dot of light, evidently frustrated, angry and bewildered.  She even ignores the treat I shine the beam on.  It occurs to me that this is a cruel game, where the cat never stands a chance of actually catching the pretend prey.  I throw the laser pointer away.  Then, a couple of months later, desperate to have one night’s sleep uninterrupted by yowling and gingerbread men, I buy an LED pointer in the hope that a half hour of zipping around the place may wear Luna out and make her sleep all night.  Again, she whizzes and zooms after the red dot… until she suddenly stops and stares at my hand for a long time, ignoring all else, processes something behind those yellow-gold eyes, and leaps at my hand.  She has worked it out.  Now, every evening, she jumps on the coffee table, where the LED torch is lying among the remote controls, picks it up by the strap and drops it on the wooden surface with a clang.  We play and there’s no more frustration or anger or bewilderment. Only fun.

A few days ago, I noticed Luna jumping on the radiator to chase something on the wall. I realised it was my wrist watch casting reflections.  So did Luna.  So now she paws at my watch until she knocks it off the coffee table, apparently demanding to play.

Anatole France wrote “Tant qu’on n’a pas aimé un animal, une partie de notre âme reste endormie.” (“Until you have loved an animal, a part of your soul remains asleep.”) There’s something very special about loving an animal, as opposed to a human.  You can talk and listen to a fellow human in the same language, and that is an advantage, of course, but can also be limiting.  All too often, we restrict our communication to verbal language, even though there is so, so much more than can’t be conveyed through mere words.  Building a bridge of communication with an animal requires patience, inquisitiveness, respect and hope.  It takes time, and when you start, there’s no knowing how little or how long it will take.  What Luna is teaching me, among so many other things, is patience – not something that comes naturally to me, although I confess I find it much easier to be patient and accepting with animals than humans.  Perhaps the very absence of verbal language makes imagination possible and there’s nothing like imagination to build bridges.  Imagination is rich in possibilities.

Luna can’t tell me her backstory.  She can’t tell me about how her kittens had vanished by the time she came back from hunting.  She can’t tell me that she searched for them everywhere, calling, crying.  But I can imagine it.  She can’t tell me that, in her first few  weeks with us, she left the living room as soon as the television was on because where she was fostered before I adopted her the TV was constantly blaring, she can’t tell me that her every muscle shrank away from my touch because small children used to pat her all the time, unaware of her boundaries.  Or that she easily gets sensory overload.  That’s something I’m only too familiar with myself, so it’s not hard to imagine it in her.  She can’t tell me what she’s been dreaming when she wakes up in the night and rushes to me, miaowing until I open my eyes and look at her, and then she goes back to sleep.  Imagination brings us closer than words ever could.

And so as Luna lets me in a little more every day, it’s a precious gift.  We’re two individuals from different species, but both made of flesh and blood and bone, and a heart beating inside us and that other something that makes us special.  We are each learning about the other’s boundaries, and about what makes the other one tick.  We are learning to trust each other.

Six months ago, when this cat with gold-yellow eyes first came to live with us, she bristled at being caressed and pushed away with her claws whenever I tried to pick her up.  Now, every morning, she expects me to stroke her glossy black coat, scratch her jowls and brush her before she has breakfast.  Very often, I wake up and see her curled up at my feet.

Earlier this afternoon, I scooped her up and held her while kissing her head.  This time, she stayed in my arms for a good few seconds before pushing me away, gently, claws sheathed, and jumping down. Perhaps for those few seconds, much to her surprise, she enjoyed the cuddle.

Another step forward.