Milkman

At first glance, the cat’s head middle sister finds in the ten-minute place seems to be a symbol of both the violence that is rife in the community and, relatedly, of the community’s casual acceptance of that violence. In a place where people routinely die in bombings and gunfights, the death of an animal—much less an unpopular animal like a cat—isn’t likely to inspire much sympathy.

Notably, however, the bomb that killed the cat wasn’t laid by either separatists or loyalists; rather, it was a German bomb left over from World War II that exploded by accident. In other words, the cat isn’t a casualty of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, but rather of an entirely different kind of violence that fails to register as important given the region’s more immediate problems. This is where cats’ association with women and womanhood becomes relevant. According to middle sister, the tendency to abuse or kill the neighborhood cats is directly (if tacitly) linked to the cats’ perceived femininity:

[C]ats were vermin, subversive, witch-like, the left hand, bad luck, feminine—though no one ever came out and levelled the feminine except during drunkenness with the drunkenness—should violence then ensue towards some hapless female—later being blamed for the cause (93).