After six months without regular employment, it had been confirmed that I'd finally got a job - the same one I left in October of the previous year.
It took a brave, almost-whispered phonecall to my manager, who said he'd be happy to set me back on in my old position. This meant a move 50 miles or so down the motorway, and the prospect of leaving behind Danny (the many times mentioned cat), who would remain in South Yorkshire with my mother.
This left a window of some two or three weeks to not only find a place, but to get the bulk of my possessions shifted down there. I've been thinking about Danny's unusual behaviour over the course f those few weeks, and it raises some questions which are interesting, even if I am uncertain about the conclusions I draw.
I took a big grey bag into my room, intending to fill it with books and clothes. It was the early days of my relationship with Bluefish, though, and she always managed to distract me, so the bag remained on the floor, empty.
I'd always operated an 'open-door' policy with Danny: come into my room whenever you like. I'll never be angry with you for doing so, even if you're jumping on the bed at six o'clock in the morning. The invitation, though, was almost always ignored.
Then, when I'd arranged to move out, I suddenly found that he became my lodger, spending most of his time on top of the luggage bag, which I'd placed next to the radiator (inadvertently). It might be coincidence, and I have no way of ever discovering whether it is the case, but I'd like to think that Danny knew I'd soon be leaving him and wished to spend as much time with me as he could.
I write from the point of view that it is true, and proceed from there. It raises questions about the nature of animal intuition and even into their consciousness or lack of it. If Danny knew that I was to leave him (and I refuse to put the word 'knew' in quote marks in the first instance; a suggestion that a cat's certainties are less than my own) then, a previously latent grasp of spoken English aside, from where did he get his knowledge.
When the Indonesian tsunami struck, legend has it, many animals escaped an almost certain death by moving to higher ground in the hours before the catastrophe. It is said that dogs were frenzied, with their owners unable to silence them. Even if there truly is a sensitivity, in animals, to forces which most humans cannot detect, how could it ever be demonstrated empirically?
These questions interest me, and I'd like to derive the answers, somehow, even if I have to be satisfied with a very tentative framework at the end. I need to sit with Danny when my moods fluctuate between unbearably sad to ecstatically happy, pensive to worried, and see how he responds to them, if indeed he responds at all. Or perhaps him being my lodger was just one of those things, the unpredictable movements of a cat who sleeps one week here, two weeks somewhere else....
