Right. I need to tell you about the glove.
It's been eleven days. I have made my peace with the fact that it is never coming back, but the postman has NOT, and every morning now there is a sort of low-level diplomatic incident on my doorstep that I want to put on the record before it escalates into something the parish talks about.
Here is what happened, as best I can reconstruct it.
Our postman is a man called Declan. Sound fella. Been doing the route maybe four years, knows everyone's dog by name, the whole bit. He wears these grey fingerless gloves in the cold months — the ones with the little flip-top mitten part, you know the kind, half glove half mitten, and on a damp Clare morning I don't blame him. Last Wednesday it was lashing and he came up the path with a parcel (a banjo strap I'd ordered, if you must know — long story, another post) and he set the parcel down on the step for half a second to find his pen, and in that half a second he took ONE glove off and laid it on the wall.
That was his mistake.
Rattlin' had been sitting in the front window. Watching. She is always watching. I cannot stress enough how much of her life is spent at that window with the calm, level stare of a customs official who suspects you of something. And the moment that glove touched the wall, she came alive.
I didn't see the theft itself. Declan saw it. He says — and his eyes were wide telling me this — that the cat came "out of NOWHERE," off the windowsill, through the cat flap, round the side of the house, up onto the wall, and was gone again with the glove in her mouth before he'd even clicked his pen. He described it as "like she'd planned it." He used the word "ambush." I tried not to laugh because the man was genuinely a bit shaken and also I'd no glove to offer him, only the one he'd left for posterity.
We searched. Of course we searched. I have a fairly good idea of Rattlin's hiding spots after all these years — under the dresser, behind the hot press, the gap behind the telly where she keeps a hair bobble and, for reasons unknown, a single dried pea. The glove was in none of these. The glove is, as far as I can tell, in a dimension Rattlin' alone has access to.
And here's the thing that's tipped it from "funny cat moment" into "ongoing situation." She is not finished.
Now every morning, when Declan's van turns onto the road — and I swear she hears it three houses away — she stations herself in the window and does a thing I can only describe as PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE. She doesn't yowl. She doesn't paw the glass. She just sits, dead still, and tracks him the whole way up the path and the whole way back down it. Slow turn of the head. Like one of those paintings whose eyes follow you round the room. Declan now delivers my post at a sort of nervous half-jog and posts it through the slot from as far back as his arm will reach.
He's started talking about her like she's a colleague he has beef with. "How's the boss," he says, handing me the letters. "She still got my glove?" She still has his glove, Declan. She will always have your glove.
My theory is that the glove smelled of him, and of the van, and of forty other doorsteps' worth of dogs and damp and diesel, and to a cat that is essentially a novel. A whole newspaper of a thing. She didn't steal a glove, in her mind. She stole INFORMATION. (My mate Pádraig says I'm "humanising the cat again" and he's right but he can talk, he reads the racing post to his dog.)
If you've been around the shrine a while you'll know Rattlin' has form for this sort of carry-on — she once held a suitcase hostage for the better part of a weekend and would not let me pack for a session. The woman has priors. And honestly, on the mornings I sit down to write up the lyrics for some new soul who's emailed in a panic about verse order, she's usually somewhere behind me, on the back of the chair, supervising. She is a deeply involved cat. The glove is just the latest file in a thick folder.
Anyway. I've ordered Declan a new pair off the internet. Same grey, same flip-top, set of two so he's a spare. They're coming next week. By post.
I have already worked out the flaw in this plan and I'm choosing not to think about it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I found the dried pea again this morning, moved about two feet from its usual spot behind the telly. Still no glove. I don't know what she's building back there and I've decided I'm happier not knowing.