Cleo

by Helen Brown

I should never have let Philip near them. He was behaving like a child. Worse than a child. And the last thing I needed was another child. The relationship was doomed. Rob would be devastated for days after losing that game.

  We drove home in silence and exchanged chaste farewells at the gate.

  “It’s good he’s going home,” said Lydia, echoing my thoughts. “His mother will be missing him.”

  “What did you think?” I asked Rob after I’d fed Cleo and put Lydia to bed.

  “He’s cool.”

  “I don’t suppose he comes across as a very warm person.”

  “No, I like him.”

  “You like him? But he beat you at that stupid game.”

  “I’m sick of the way grown-ups always go out of their way to let me win,” said Rob. “They think I don’t notice. He treated me as an adult. He’s cool. You should see more of him.”

  People and Places

  Cats have a reputation for being more attached to places than people. But some remarkable individuals have proved the generalization quite wrong.

  Mum’s voice was jagged over the phone. She told me not to be upset. I prepared for bad news. She’d had to take Rata to the vet again. The old dog hadn’t been coping. She couldn’t walk. The vet was wonderful, such a lovely young woman. She’d been a friend of Rata’s. She went red in the face when she and Mum made the decision. Mum stroked Rata while it was happening. She went out wagging her tail.

  Video footage of Rata rolled through my mind. Sam and Rata charging through the surf, Rata helping the boys dig holes in the sand and scuffing it over disgruntled sunbathers, Sam throwing driftwood for her to rescue. Rata shaking her coat and showering us all in seawater. Rata galloping down the zigzag. Cleo curled between Rata’s giant paws. Tender, loyal Rata.

  Rob didn’t say much when I told him. We put our arms around each other. He was so tall now. With the old dog’s departure another connection with Sam was broken. Mum was going to feel it, too. I invited her to spend a few days with us, though she never stayed long in our “busy household.”

  Frantic was a better word for it. In the weeks the children were home it was a kaleidoscope of school runs and homework; rushing home from work to make spaghetti bolognese; bed time stories on the run. Once they were in bed I often worked on a feature that was due the next day. I was too exhausted to watch television.

  It wouldn’t have been possible to hold together without Anne Marie calmly folding laundry, vacuuming, making sandwiches, tidying toys and countless other things she said nannies never do. She’d sometimes stay on for a coffee after I arrived back from work. We learned to appreciate each other’s strengths and tolerate the differences. Sometimes I’d arrive home so tired I’d collapse on the floor and doze in a patch of sun—something she said none of her employers had done before. She once commented she’d never seen anyone so tired. Yet I always managed to dredge energy up to sew fairy wings for Lydia or teach Rob how to make sushi. Nothing was perfect, but somehow things got done. I began to think there was a goddess of solo mothers who gave strength when it was needed and arranged for the right people to turn up at the right time. If there was such a goddess I reckoned she looked like a cat.

  Steve was carving a new life for himself in a cottage five minutes’ drive away. I was pleased when the kids mentioned he had some women friends. He deserved another roll of the happiness dice.

  Even though Philip had won Rob’s approval on the pizza night, I wasn’t sure the kids and I had met whatever expectations were floating around inside his head. He’d seen us as a set, and was no doubt beginning to absorb the enormity of entering the lives of all three of us (plus cat). The phone stayed quiet for several days. Then, to my surprise, it rang. He obviously hadn’t had enough punishment. He invited all of us, including Cleo, for a weekend at the lake.

  The drive seemed longer by daylight with two extra passengers, one silent, one whining. The road buckled and bent like a cobra in its death throes.

  “I’ve got a sore tummy,” moaned Lydia as the car meandered up a hill.

  “No, you haven’t.” Unlike more conscientious mothers, I treated children’s health complaints as imaginary until proven otherwise.

  “I’m going to frow up.”

  “Take some deep breaths,” I said, turning to examine the backseat patient. Her usually jellybean-pink face had turned the color of a blueberry.

  “I think we’d better stop,” I said to Philip. While I was immune to the potpourri of stale vomit and various other bodily fluids in my own car, I was certain Philip wasn’t psychologically equipped to have the ambience of his Audi permanently altered by Eau de Family.

  He pulled into a siding near the top of the hill. I concentrated on the spectacular spine of ranges spread out below us while Lydia vomited copiously into a ditch.

  Misty haze enveloped the cottage as the car pulled up under a silver birch. Rain was something I hadn’t counted on. Philip said it wouldn’t matter—there was always something to do at the lake. The leafy smell was intensified in the damp. Cleo recognized the place straightaway and sprang gleefully from the car into a thicket of ferns that was suspect mouse guerrilla territory.

  The children were slower to be impressed. Rob gathered his sleeping bag and trudged inside, the screen door slamming behind him. Philip didn’t seem the least fazed. No doubt he’d seen the full spectrum of male behavior in the army. Alternatively, having endured his own adolescence only a few years earlier, he probably remembered what it was like. Either way, Philip seemed immune to the ogreish male teenage stuff I was at a loss to deal with.

  I helped Lydia slide from the backseat onto the moist earth.

  “It’s a forest,” she said, gazing up at a tree.

  We carried our bags inside, where the familiar combination of sea grass and burnt driftwood tweaked my nostrils. I paused at a noticeboard covered with family photos. Wholesome, smiling faces celebrating Christmas at the lake. Every one of Philip’s family was handsome and tanned, with teeth so white they surely glowed in the dark. Apparently, there were no fat, scruffy, gay, dark-skinned or emotionally challenged people in their circle. Going by the photos, they were also all Olympic champions. Waterskiing, tennis, snow skiing, fishing were activities I’d never had the time or money, let alone the muscular coordination, to learn as a teenage mum.

  Young women featured in the photos, too. Sleek, pretty bikini-clad girls, who were probably studying law or dentistry. So these must be the ticks-in-the-right-boxes girls, I thought. The type Philip and his two brothers were expected to marry. And why not? Every one of the smiling young women was prime breeding stock. But when I asked about them, Philip dismissed them as boring.

  “Please use only a small piece of toilet paper,” instructed a notice in the loo. I wasn’t sure the kids and I could qualify as small toilet paper people.

  “How about a swim?” Philip called to Rob.

  “It’s raining.”

  “I could help you get out the kayak if you like.” The man was nothing if not persistent.

  “Too cold.”

  “Bunks! It’s got bunks!” Lydia called. I went into the bunk room, where Rob was roosting inside his sleeping bag on an upper bunk. Lydia bounced up and down on the lower bunk’s mattress, circling her chubby arms in the air.

  The lake stretched out like a wrinkled sheet of tinfoil. Drops of condensation raced down the inside of windows. Philip crouched over the fireplace and crunched newspapers into balls. After a few false starts the kindling flared and the room crackled to life. Cleo pounced on a spider in the woodpile and munched on its legs with the thoughtful appreciation of a connoisseur, before taking up her usual position in front of the flames. Gazing up at me through half-closed eyes she yawned and seemed to say, This is how it’s meant to be. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.

  “Back in a minute,” Philip said.

  Gathering Lydia onto my lap to read her favorite story about the elephant and the bad baby, I surreptitiously wiped her fing
ers. Even though the cottage exuded rustic simplicity it obviously hadn’t been tainted by preschool fingers for decades. I’d hate us to be accused of leaving sticky fingerprints on the furniture.

  Philip tapped on the window and beckoned us outside. The rain had eased. I slid Lydia into her gumboots. She scooped Cleo up and carried her upside down (a position Cleo had become nonchalant about since Lydia learned to walk). We opened the flyscreen to a gift more magnificent than a room full of diamonds: Philip had latched a rope around one of the higher branches of the silver birch and threaded an old tire through it.

  “Wow! A tree swing!” cried Lydia.

  She spent the rest of the day begging to be pushed on the swing—lying on her tummy with her legs flying out the back; sitting with her legs forward through the center of the tire; standing inside the rim and clinging to the rope. I’d never seen a man demonstrate so much patience with a child who wasn’t his own. Still, something held me back. Even if this wonderful man was everything he seemed, with a soul deeper than the lake itself, the prospect of encompassing all three of us and a cat was surely too much for him.

  As night enveloped the cottage, the rain eased enough for Philip to grill sausages on a brick barbecue nestled into a hedge. It was too wet for us to eat outside, so I set the Formica table. We shared the meal under the inquisitive glare of a lightbulb.

  “How would you like to go for a bike ride tomorrow?” Philip asked Rob. “There are some great tracks up in the hills.”

  “No.”

  “We could hit a tennis ball around…”

  Rob studied the tomato sauce on his plate. An experienced parent, worn by countless battles of will, would stop at this inter-section, turn back and opt for a change of subject. I was hoping for all our sakes that Philip would do so now.

  “How about taking the kayak out in the morning? I’ll put the life jacket out for you.”

  “It’s all very well for you!” Rob exploded at Philip. “You didn’t see your brother killed on the road!”

  The teenager scraped back his chair and stomped off to the bunk room, leaving us in a bubble of stunned silence at the table.

  “He does this sometimes,” I said quietly. Yet it was more than a teenage eruption this time. The lake cottage, with its garage choked with skis, boats and canoes, made the contrast between our two families all too evident. Philip appeared to have coasted through endless summers of pretty girls and sailboats. Our life, by comparison, was an endless struggle, over shadowed by death and divorce. How could anyone from Philip’s background have the slightest understanding of the grief Rob and I shared—and, more to the point, why should he?

  “I’ll talk to him,” Philip said, standing up to follow him.

  “No, don’t,” I said. “He’ll get over it.”

  In truth I was frightened by Rob’s adolescent outbursts and had no way of handling them, apart from letting them blow over—which sometimes could take days.

  Deaf to my instructions, Philip departed swiftly into the bunk room. Through the walls, I could hear him speaking gently to Rob. While it was impossible to hear exact words, the tone was unmistakable. Philip was meeting Rob’s pain head-on, accepting their differences and talking him down.

  “He’s okay,” Philip said when he emerged some time afterwards. “He says he wants to sleep now.”

  We woke next morning with rain thrumming on the roof. Lydia, plodding around in her pajamas, was delighted when she found a box of old building blocks in one of the cupboards.

  “There’s been kids here!” she called.

  Cleo was chomping on the remains of a moth while Lydia set about building an elephant castle with a swing for the baby elephants.

  “Where’s Rob?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” said Lydia.

  Philip had no idea, either. A lump of fear settled in my stomach. If Rob had taken off during the night he could be anywhere by now. He could have hitched a ride back to Auckland on one of the logging trucks that roared along the main highway. Or maybe just wandered into the bush. Either way, it could be dangerous, especially in this rainstorm. His father would have to be called, possibly the police as well. It was a disaster. Why did I always land in the box labeled “disaster”?

  “Look,” said Philip, putting a hand on my shoulder and turning me slowly towards the French doors. Through the rain-spattered glass I could see waves, big as ocean surf, smashing on the beach. Purple clouds smothered the island. In the distance I could just make out a figure in a kayak.

  The waves pushed the figure sideways and seemed to engulf him completely. He reemerged, plowing the oar into the water and turning the kayak around to surf another wave. The canoeist was fearless, intense in his determination to stay afloat.

  “You’re all crazy around here,” I said. “Who’d go out in this weather?”

  “Rob,” said Philip, smiling enigmatically. “And I have to say he’s making an impressive job of it.”

  Freedom

  Human beings strive to claim ownership of everything they love. Yet a cat belongs to nobody, except perhaps the moon.

  Around the time I became a single mother Cleo stepped up her hunting skills. Maybe she sensed we were down to one provider and thought I was doing a lousy job bringing home the bacon. Not only was I a pathetic, two-legged creature with (from her point of view, anyway) a hideously bald body, I couldn’t hunt a mouse if world peace depended on it. Cleo more than compensated for my inadequacies with a stream of furry or feathered corpses scattered from the front doormat, through the bedrooms and down the hall to the kitchen. Our house resembled the workroom of an amateur taxidermist. To stem the tide of destruction I bought Cleo a hot-pink collar with fake diamond studs and a bell to warn potential victims to scurry back to their nests.

  “Cats don’t wear collars,” Mum said in a tone implying she’d just delivered the Eleventh Commandment.

  While the kids and I always looked forward to Mum’s visits, she invariably found something not quite right with our setup. This time it was the cat collar.

  “She’s killing too many animals,” I said, tightening the buckle around Cleo’s reluctant neck. “Besides, it looks quite Audrey Hepburn, don’t you think?”

  “It’s hideous,” Mum replied. “And it’s a cat’s job to kill things.”

  For once Cleo agreed with Mum. The cat shook her head vigorously, making herself jingle like a Christmas accessory.

  “See? It doesn’t like that thing!”

  “She’s not an ‘it.’ She’s a she,” I said. “And she’ll get used to it.”

  Cleo and I embarked on a serious battle of wills. She detested that collar with more focus than she’d ever hated anything, including non–cat people. Every waking hour was devoted to scratching and gnawing at it. Three fake diamonds fell out. The sumptuous pink strap faded and was reduced to a stringy neck brace. Cleo fixed me with a hooded look that said it all: How dare you try and brand me with this degrading object! What makes you assume you have the right? Do you think you own me?

  “Is that your new boyfriend?” Mum stage-whispered in the kitchen. “I thought he was a policeman when I opened the door. His hair’s so short and he’s so clean-cut. Hardly your type, is he?”

  I never enjoyed her reviewing my personal affairs. Her observation skills were astringent enough to qualify as an ingredient for aftershave. Philip’s appearance in our lives provided her with a wealth of new material.

  “Just out of the army, is he? Oh well, you were married to a sailor. I suppose it’ll be the air force next.”

  Life at work was no easier. When the cat got out of the bag that I was still seeing Philip with one l there were enough arched eyebrows to form a Gothic cathedral. Toy-boy jokes echoed from one end of the newsroom to the other. Journalists pride themselves on being broad-minded, but I was learning they’re broad-minded only in certain ways. If I’d taken to booze and boogied till dawn with an elderly drug addict they’d hardly have noticed. Movies were (and still are) full of old men a
s ugly as bulldogs slurping over models twenty-five years their junior. It hardly seemed fair that a woman going out with a short-haired, younger bloke in a suit was regarded as an act of indecency. I tried to retaliate with quips to assure them it was merely a fling. Except the fling was lasting a month or two longer than expected.

  Things weren’t straightforward for Philip, either. His circle of bright young things couldn’t believe he was in such a whacky relationship. He continued to be inundated with invitations to lunches and parties by ticks-in-the-right-boxes girls. The town was packed with highly qualified wrinkle-free beauties all desperate for a man, and Philip in particular.

  Falling in love with my one-night stand was the most pleasant surprise that ever happened to me. Getting to know him was like exploring an underground cave, dark and deceptively shallow at first. Yet dig a little deeper, turn a few corners, and there was a cavern full of rare and magnificent crystals. Not only was he handsome, great company and wonderful to the kids, he had a strong spiritual curiosity. He was the first man I’d ever met who seemed genuinely interested in my weird dreams and occasional off-the-planet psychic experiences. We were destined to be together, I thought, encircling him with an invisible version of Cleo’s pink collar (camouflage pattern, perhaps; definitely no bell).

  “It doesn’t matter what wrapping people are in,” I said to anyone who questioned our unlikely union. “It’s what’s inside that counts.”

  I even loved the aspects of him that had stopped me taking him seriously at the beginning. The age difference between us was fun and interesting (apart from the time he asked, “Who’s Shirley Bassey?”). His conservative manner wasn’t so deep-set that I couldn’t joke him out of it sometimes. And I had a lot to learn about military life and banks. Our relationship was astoundingly close to perfect.

  One of the many aspects of Philip I adored was the way he kept a perfectly ironed handkerchief in his pocket. The hand kerchief was flourished whenever required to wipe a woman’s tears or, occasionally by very special request, less glamorous outpourings from her nostrils. Even more impressive, he insisted on being on the outside whenever we were walking along a footpath. The only other man I knew who performed this ancient act of chivalry designed to protect a woman from oncoming horses as well as mud flying from carriage wheels was my father. The first time Philip gently took my arm, moved slowly behind me and slid my hand into the crook of his other elbow so I was closest to the shop windows and he was nearest the gutter I knew this was a man I’d willingly spend the rest of my life with.