Cat Step by Alison Irvine

Review by Cath Barton

‘Some people are natural born mothers. Others aren’t.’

It is one of those opportunities which are bound to bring surprises, good or bad. Or both. Liz has been asked by the brother of her child’s father to go to a small town in Scotland to clear out his late grandmother’s house. For Liz it is a break from a strained relationship with her mother. But looking after her four-year-old daughter is a struggle; she did not have an immediate bond with Emily when the child was born, and finds feelings confusing.

Soon after their arrival in Lennoxtown, Liz drives to the local Co-op with Emily. The child is unwell and restless but falls asleep in the car. Her mother leaves her there while she runs to the shop for – probably – only a few minutes to buy milk, bread and fish fingers. Something happens and people confront Liz when she returns to the car. A social worker calls at the house but Liz does not answer the door. On several occasions.

The set-up is strong and the pace of the opening chapters of Cat Step is fast and involving. Emily is enrolled in a local nursery and although she cries when her mother leaves her there, Liz ignores ‘the shooting stars’ in her head, thinking: ‘They would pass, like everything’.

Liz has trained in ballet and worked as a dancer on cruise ships, which is where she met Robbie, Emily’s father. Now she approaches the manager of a sheltered housing complex and offers a taster dance session. Although the elderly tenants are sceptical, the session goes well, and as Liz leaves on that first morning and sees the sunlight on the Campsie Fells which overlook the town she feels good: ‘Joy returned like a downpour of fresh rain, clearing the shooting stars from my head’.

But the incident at the Co-op dogs her. At a sing-a-long for toddlers at the local library she meets another mother, Caroline, who tells her a story about a woman who’d ‘left her daughter in the car crying her eyes out while she was in the Co-op buying wine and fish fingers.’ This is the way in which stories become distorted and misleading gossip spreads, especially in a small community.

Alison Irvine tells the story in Liz’s voice. She is a complex character, the polar opposite of the unreliable narrator, frank about her weaknesses, her capacity for denial, selfishness and ambivalence. She doesn’t think before she speaks, and has a hard and brittle side. She is also thoughtful and, while she acknowledges that she can be emotionally absent, is determined to be the best mother she can. One of the issues she has to deal with is Emily wetting her bed. One day walking up on the Campsies this happens:

‘She let go of my hand and squatted to pick a dandelion. Robbie called dandelions pee-the-beds. I held back from telling Emily that. See, I did try to be a good parent.’

When violence erupts between mother and daughter it is never abusive on Liz’s part and concludes in shared remorse and closeness. Irvine paints a vivid picture of the developing relationship between the two of them, and her story throws a bright spotlight on how easy it is for those in authority to make false judgements about parenting which stem from one small and innocent mistake.

Liz forms a friendship with an older woman, June, who is one of those who come to her dance class. This friendship is pivotal to the revelation of what happened to Robbie both before and after he and Liz met, although the participation of a group of elderly and variously infirm people in a ballet class stretched my credulity somewhat. However, if there are sections of the novel where I felt the energy of the story flag, Irvine handles well the build-up of the suspicions falling on Liz and her reactions to the challenges thrown up for her.

Irvine has also clearly taken pleasure in using the French words for ballet steps, not just in the scenes in Liz’s class but also to highlight elements of the wider story – ‘petits battements’ for the sound of the heart, ‘un grand jeté’, the biggest of leaps, referring to the trip to Lennoxtown, ‘fondu’, a controlled movement in ballet meaning to melt, in connection with the irreparable alteration of circumstances. This device is also where the title of the novel comes from – ‘pas de chat’ means, literally, cat step; Liz says that it was one of the first steps she’d learnt where she felt she was properly dancing. And it is a suitably positive title, I felt, when I reached the end of the book.

Cat Step is published by dead ink, November 5th 2020