The Cat And The Mirror

There she goes again. Up on her hind legs, scrambling at the
full-length mirror I've left propped against a wall while we're
decorating. Every part of her tiny attention span is focussed on her
reflection as she paddles away, claws clicking against the glass.
Yes, this is a cat story. Yes, I happen to think that she's different
to every other cat. Yes, she talks to me. She wails, chirrups, honks,
makes weird industrial whirring noises. Great, you're thinking. Next
he'll be telling us he understands every word. Actually, no. Apart from
dinnertime, when she sits by her food bowl glaring and trilling at me,
I've never been able to figure out a blind thing she says.
Let me tell you about my cat. Trust me, this isn't a "You've Bin
Framed/Kats do The Kraziest Things" kind of a deal. Something's
happened with my mad little feline. I need to run it past someone else.
Just to hear how crazy it really sounds.
She appeared, a vet refugee, about seven years ago. Hasn't grown much
since she was a kitten. Low-slung, distinctly ungraceful. An early bout
of cat flu left her with a weepy eye that occasionally glues itself
shut. An early argument with a door left her with a foreshortened tail
that ends in an acute-angled kink.
And she absolutely hates the idea of a door closed against her. If she
feels she's being excluded from something, she'll scrabble and push and
wail and make drill noises until she finally wears away your patience
and you let her in. It'll take hours sometimes, but she'll win. Two
minutes later, once she's figured out there wasn't anything interesting
to sniff at, she be up on her hind legs clamouring to be let out again.
It's all part of her charm, I suppose, unless she's doing it at three
in the morning, in which case the temptation to nail her to an exterior
wall by her stumpy tail becomes very strong indeed.
So she scrabbles at closed doors. And mirrors. That's the weird thing,
and I only really started thinking about it recently. If she's
confronted by a mirror, or any kind of reflective surface, she'll
hammer away at it like there's a party going on and she's not invited.
I know cats don't recognise their own reflection. But I don't think
she's seeing another cat there. She treats any other cat, including her
own sister, the aloof, normal side of the family with supreme contempt.
So I have to wonder what it is that she's seeing with those crazed,
gummy eyes. What can possibly make her paw at an ungiving pane of glass
for hours at a time, hopefully, unrelentingly? Is it even a mirror that
she sees at all? Or is she thinking that if she tries long enough and
hard enough, she'll finally wear down the resolve of whatever lives on
the other side of the glass.
And it'll get up with a sigh.
And let her in.
Yeah, I know. Maybe it's my imagination running away with me. Maybe
it's just the lack of sleep because she's been scrabbling away at the
mirror all night. She wouldn't shut up, despite the threat of violins
and mittens. Thing is, when I finally got up, around half four, watery
light, maybe I was seeing things, and you'll tell me, won't you? You'll
tell me it couldn't have happened. I took one look and went back to
bed, and I've lain there ever since, and I'm late for work now. Just
listening. I can still hear her, claws ticking against the glass, and I
know I'm going to have to go downstairs soon and figure out what the
hell I'm supposed to do. Because I know what I saw, early morning light
and all. I saw her. There she was, up on her hind legs, clicking away,
her squawks kind of tinny and far away.
On the other side of the glass. Scrabbling to be let back in.