The sound of cats climbing stairs
Our staircase is old and rickety. Well, not that old. The place was built in the late 1950s as a single storey bungalow, only a previous owner added stairs to make it a dormer, and didn’t like to spend a lot of money on quality craftsmanship. Over the years Debbie and have learned which steps – which treads - are best approached with a tender foot to avoid waking the sleeper above. And there are those boards, the uppermost boards, that creak the loudest when you are trying to be your quietest. Such is their general state of poor repair even a cat’s feline touch can produce the telltale squeal of pine on pine, the glue having dried to powder years ago.
I know each of our cats by the way they climb the stairs. Mort, the larger of the two, the male, approaches the stairs like he does everything else in life – at a gallop. He wastes no time on the petty consideration of others, planting each paw with the aloof assertiveness of a croquet mallet. He doesn’t pace or lollop or sashay, he WALKS, with that serious yet indifferent intent common amongst their kind. If I’m only lightly napping, the foggy part of my semi-conscious mind can still sense his imminent upstairs arrival by the way he tackles the first few steps in a thunerous run. The final creak of the last tread is followed by a couple of hollow beats as he closes the distance between us, culminating in a soft thump at the foot of the bed. This he does with a loud ree-OW! that has the same brassy, rising intonation of an Australian “G-Day!” This last stage of his routine is a profusion of purring and excessive kneading as gradually works himself into a knot in the most awkward, leg-deadening position possible, his aim apparently being to pin you below the knees for the rest of the night.
By contrast Margot, or "Mags" as we like to call her, is altogether more skittishly cautious. Even so, I can still sense her hushed presence trying to tiptoe its way up the stairs. Unlike Mort, she likes to take things at her own pace, resulting in an altogether more measured ascent, hiding her gathering presence from all but the last step, the loudest step. Upon arriving in the bedroom, she makes two or three administrative circuits of the bed, checking for surprises one assumes, or boobytraps, lost mice. Then, circuits complete, she carefully alights on Debbie’s side and instantly commences the loudest, deepest, most rumbling of diesel-powered purrs. It’s really something, and I adore it. We both do. At times it’s as though she’s just barely in control of it, such is the violence with which it threatens to overtake her. If you’re on the phone with Mags anywhere within a three-to-four metre radius, people will say “is that your cat I can hear purring!?” and you say, “Why yes, yes it is!” and you both laugh. If she deigns to lie beside you on the bed, a rare treat indeed, your breathing and hers will eventually fall into step. A single rhythmic inter-species breath, rising and falling. In such moments I like to imagine that they are our nighttime guardians, and that as our sleeping minds detatch and wander through the woods our cats keep pace behind, lest we stray from the path. In reality they would probably eat the eyeballs right out of our heads should the plague take us in the night and they had to go more than a few hours without food.
In interview, the director Ridley Scott spoke of how he learned from Akira Kurosawa that even in the most still and silent of scenes there should be some subtle movement to keep it alive. A lick of wind trundling through fallen leaves, the twitch of a samurai’s long-tailed banner. As the camera pans across the frozen interior of the USCSS Nostromo the scene glitters like the morning following a hard frost, the frozen stillness broken by the mechanical dipping of a top-hatted drinking bird. It is the same with cats in the night, their unseen movements stirring the near-silence (so little in life is actually silent) with their peregrinations, their enigmatic comings-and-goings. I wonder if that is why Ripley brought her cat with her, the comforting chaos of a little non-human energy to set against the vast horrific stillness of space.
Perhaps this is why a cat’s presence, especially a sleeping cat, seems to redistribute the uneven balance of a world in motion.
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