On Cats. Doris Lessing

my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches of her paw. I open my eyes, say I don’t want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs – to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed, if it is summer.

      Black cat descends from the top of the house, when she thinks it is time to get up, and sits on the floor looking at me. Sometimes I become conscious of the insistent stare of her yellow eyes. She gets up on to the bed. Grey cat softly growls. But black cat, supported by her nest of kittens, knows her rights and is not afraid. She goes across the foot of the bed, and up the other side, near the wall, ignoring the grey cat. She sits, waiting. Grey cat and black cat exchange long green and yellow stares. Then, if I don’t get up, black cat jumps neatly, right over me, and on to the floor. There she looks to see if the gesture has wakened me. If it hasn’t, she does it again. And again. Grey cat, then contemptuous of black cat’s lack of subtlety, shows her how things should be done: she crouches to pat my face. Black cat, however, cannot learn the finesse of grey cat: she is impatient of it. She does not know how to pat a face into laughter, or how to bite, gently, mockingly. She knows that if she jumps over me often enough, I will wake up and feed her, and then she can get back to her kittens.

      I have watched her trying to copy grey cat. When grey cat lies stretched out for admiration and we say Pretty cat, pppprrreeetty cat, black cat flops down beside her, in the same position. Grey cat yawns; black cat yawns. Grey cat then pulls herself along under the sofa on her back; and now black cat is defeated, she can’t do this trick. So she goes off to her kittens, where, she knows quite well, we come and admire her too.

      Grey cat was turning into a hunter. This was not in pursuit of food. Her hunting is at no time connected with food – that is food considered as a substance to nourish, rather than as a remark, or statement, about her emotions.

      One weekend I had forgotten to buy the fresh rabbit which by then was the only thing she would eat. There was tinned cat food. Grey cat, when she is hungry, sits, not in the food corner, black cat’s lowly place, but across the kitchen in her place. She never miaows for food. She sits near an imaginary saucer, looking at me. If I take no notice, she comes across, weaves about my legs. If I still take no notice, she jumps up, paws on my skirt. Then, she gently nips my calf. As a final comment, she goes to black cat’s saucer, turns her back on it, and scratches imaginary dirt over it, saying that as far as she is concerned, it is excrement.

      But there was no rabbit in the refrigerator. I opened the refrigerator, while she sat close, waiting, then shut it again, in order to say there was nothing in it to interest her, and if she was really hungry, she would have to eat tinned food. She did not understand, and sat herself by the non-existent saucer. I again opened the refrigerator, shut it, indicated the tinned food, and went back to work.

      Grey cat then walked out of the kitchen, and in a few minutes came back with two cooked sausages, which she put at my feet.

      Wicked cat! Thief of a cat! Amoral cat! Sausage-stealing cat!

      At each epithet she closed her eyes in acknowledgement, turned around, scratched imaginary dirt over the sausages, went out of the kitchen, furious.

      I ascended to the bedroom, from where I can see the back yards and gardens and walls. Grey cat had come out of the house, and was crossing the garden to the back wall in a lean long hunter’s run. She jumped on the back wall, ran along it, disappeared. I could not see where she had gone.

      I went back to the kitchen. She appeared with another cooked sausage, which she laid beside the first two. Then, having scratched dirt over that, she left the kitchen and went to sleep on my bed.

      Next day, on the kitchen floor, a string of uncooked sausages, and beside them, grey cat, sitting and waiting for me to decipher the implications of this statement.

      I thought that perhaps the poor actors from the little theatre were losing their lunches. But no. I watched, from my bedroom window, grey cat trot along the wall, and then jump up and disappear into a house wall at right angles to it. I had noticed that a couple of bricks had been taken out – presumably as ventilation into a kitchen. Not easy for a cat to fit into that small hole, particularly after a three-foot jump from a narrow wall, but that was what she was doing, and still does, when she wishes to convey she is not being suitably fed.

      The poor woman in the kitchen, having cooked a couple of sausages for her husband’s breakfast, turns and finds them gone. Ghosts! Or she smacks an innocent dog or child. Or she puts out, on a plate, a pound of raw sausages ready for the frying pan. She turns her back for a moment – no sausages. Grey cat is running across our garden, a string of sausages trailing behind her, to deposit them on our kitchen floor. Perhaps this gesture originated in hunting ancestors who were trained to catch and bring food to humans; and the memory of it remains in her brain to be converted into this near-human language.

      In the big sycamore at the bottom of the garden, a thrush builds a nest every year. Every year, the little birds hatch out and take their first flights down into the jaws of waiting cats. Mother bird, father bird, comes down after them, is caught.

      The frightened chattering and squealing of a caught bird disturbs the house. Grey cat has brought the bird in, but only to be admired for her skill, for she plays with it, tortures it – and with what grace. Black cat crouches on the stairs and watches. She has never killed a bird. But when, three, four, five hours after grey cat has caught the thing, and it is dead, or nearly so, black cat takes it and tosses it up and about, in emulation of the games grey cat plays. Every summer I rescue birds from grey cat, throw them well away from her, into the air, or into another garden – that is, if not badly damaged, so they may have a chance to recover. When this happens, grey cat is furious, puts her ears back, glares, she does not understand, no, not at all. When she brings a bird in, she is proud. It is, in fact, a present; a fact I did not understand until the summer in Devon. But I scold her and take them away, I am not pleased.

      Horrible cat! Bird-torturing cat! Murderous cat! Sadistic cat! Degenerate descendant of honest hunters!

      She sparks off anger, in answer to my angry voice; and rushes out of the house with the squealing bird. I lock the back door, shut the windows, while the torture goes on. Later, when everything is quiet, grey cat comes back. She does not wreathe my legs, or greet me. She snubs me, stalks upstairs, and sleeps it off. The corpse of the bird, dead from exhaustion more than from cat’s teeth and claws, is stiffening in the garden.

      When I had the big tree trimmed, at the request of the neighbours, some of whom dislike it because it shades their gardens, some because ‘It makes such a mess everywhere with its leaves’, the tree man stood in the garden and complained. Not directly against me, the customer who after all was going to pay him; but against modern life, which, he says, is anti-tree.

      ‘Every day,’ he said, bitter, bitter: ‘they ring. I go. There’s a fine tree. It’s taken a hundred years to grow – what are we, compared to a tree? They say, cut it, it’s spoiling my roses. Roses! What are roses, compared to a tree? I have to cut a tree for the sake of the roses. Only yesterday I had to cut an ash down to three feet off the ground. To make a table, she said, a table, and the tree took a hundred years to grow. She wanted to sit at a table and drink tea and look at her roses. No trees these days, the trees are going. And if you do a good job, they don’t like it, no, they want it hacked out of its real shape. And what about the birds? Did you know you had a nest up on that branch?’

      ‘Cats,’ I said, ‘I’d be pleased if the birds would nest somewhere else.’

      ‘Ah, yes,’ said he, ‘that’s what I hear – the cats. Everybody wants their trees cut, and cats all over the place. What chance for the birds? I tell you, I’m going to give up this job, no one wants an honest craftsman these days – look at those cats, just look at them!’

      For the tree man, trees and birds, a unit, a sacred unit to be given preference, I should imagine, over human beings, if he had the decision. As for cats, he’d get rid of them all.

      He trimmed, not hacked,