The Garage 1 One day my mother told me about an accident I nearly had in my early childhood. We had
been shopping when I was only three years old, and when we came back she drove the
car into the garage, telling me to stay in my seat in the back of the car while she took the
shopping from the front seat. She did that and was just about to slam the door shut when
she saw that I had got out of the car. I was standing beside her with my hand holding on to
the inside edge of the door frame. ‘I very nearly squashed your fingers,’ she said. She held
up the thumb and first finger of her right hand, narrowly parted. There was a short silence. I
was thinking that perhaps I should apologise for being the kind of child who never did as she
was told, persistently putting herself in the way of danger.
2 Although I have no memory of that event, I do remember the garage. I thought it a fascinating
but slightly frightening place, with oil stains, thick and pungent, on the concrete floor which,
if looked at one way, could transform into rainbows, shiny and fleeting. It had dark red
doors and a window behind which a confused bird once became trapped, its wings flapping
incessantly. My father wrestled with the catch, which had been painted shut, while the bird
dived again and again into the glass, unable to comprehend that it would not yield. Finally,
the catch gave way and the bird flew out, swooping once over the flowerbed, then away
over the hedge. In my memory the garage was a cobwebby, dim place, filled with spades
and other gardening tools, an axe hanging on a high nail. One summer we set up a childish
museum in the garage, arranging our exhibits on the workbench. They included, among
other mismatched and valueless things, some old postage stamps, several dead insects
and some pieces of rock.
3 Our cat chose the garage as the place to give birth to her kittens. Awed and delighted, our
family visited her and her new family to worship at the side of the cardboard box which was
their temporary home. We watched the four squirming bodies as they burrowed into their
mother’s grey-striped fur. My mother instructed my sister and me not to touch the kittens,
not yet, and we nodded gravely. As soon as she had left the shrine and gone back to the
kitchen, however, I told my sister to keep watch at the garage door. I reasoned with her that
obviously there was no way I was going to leave those kittens untouched. No way at all.
The sheer joy of plunging my hands into the box and lifting up all four kittens in a mewing,
writhing mass and burying my face in their softness, their never-walked-on paws: how could
I pass up this opportunity?
4 The cat looked at me with eyes that were alert but which also seemed to me to be full of
forgiveness. She knew it wasn’t possible for me to follow my mother’s edict – there was no
way I could. She purred when I gently touched the kittens, stretching out an ecstatic paw to
touch me on the wrist.
5 That cat lived an astonishing twenty-one years. There are photographs in my parents’
house of me holding her when I was a self-conscious ten-year-old, with teeth too large and
numerous crowding my mouth, and photographs of me as an adult with the cat on my lap.
When I was living at the other side of the world, years after the birth of those kittens, my
sister, who was by then a veterinary surgeon, phoned me to say that the cat who, a lifetime
ago, gave birth to kittens in a cardboard box in our garage, had died of old age. She had
been sick and could not survive another operation. My sister and I clutched the ends of
our respective phones close to our ears, separated by mountains and countries and seas,
reluctant to end the call because we both knew what would happen next. We would be
transported back to that moment in childhood when we were separated by only the length of
the garage, as she stood, an anxious sentinel, keeping watch, her head turning between me
and the house, as I bent over the cardboard box and lifted the kittens out.