Cleo

by Helen Brown

  “Andrea?” I shouted.

  “What time is it?” she mumbled in a voice heavy with sleep.

  “Sorry. Have I woken you?”

  “It’s all right.” Damn. I had woken her up. “I was sleeping in. It’s Saturday morning. Where are you?”

  “Still in the UK. I was just wondering how Cleo, I mean, you are getting on. Any problems with the cat, I mean house?”

  “I had a rugged night,” she replied. “Cleo jumped through the skylight onto my bed when I was fast asleep. It was terrifying. I thought she was a burgler.”

  That was the start of a series of phone calls across the globe focusing on the topic of an eccentric black cat. Andrea soon discovered Cleo’s three great passions: expensive items, anything made with love, and stolen goods.

  “I was heading out to work the other morning when my handbag—not the cheap copy I bought in Bangkok, the genuine Gucci one—anyway, it seemed extra heavy,” she said. “Lucky I looked inside. Cleo was curled up in there! She looked all expectant, like she was sure I was taking her to work with me. She loves that bag. But honestly, how can she tell the difference between the copy and the genuine article?”

  She’d always had a nose for quality. If Cleo was looking for something to sharpen her teeth on she’d favor cashmere over wool, Egyptian cotton over polyester, leather over plastic, even high-class expensive plastic.

  The next phone call featured the tablecloth Andrea’s mother had embroidered for her twenty-first birthday present. Andrea had arrived home one evening to find Cleo had dragged it off the table and was curled up asleep on it.

  “She” s got this sixth sense,” I explained apologetically. “She knows when something’s been made with love.”

  A few weeks later Andrea complained the laces of her running shoes, left and right feet, had disappeared.

  “Go into the garden and look in the ferns behind the goldfish pond,” I said.

  Following instructions Andrea discovered not only both shoelaces (soggy and frayed) but several socks she” d assumed had been stolen off the clothesline by a neighborhood foot fetishist.

  “I’m so sorry,” I echoed across the oceans. “I didn’t realize she was going to be such a handful.”

  Andrea was surprisingly forgiving. In fact, she” d found Cleo so interesting she” d enrolled in night classes in animal behavior.

  “Cleo has classic separation anxiety,” she said. “She needs lots of activities to make her more independent. I’ve bought her a few toys to keep her occupied. They seem to be helping, but she still prefers my shoelaces. As for jumping up on the table…”

  “We’ve tried to stop her, Andrea, but she thinks she runs the joint.”

  “Well, I’ve developed the perfect solution. A water pistol.”

  “You squirt her?”

  “Only when she’s up on the table. Right up the backside. She’s a fast learner.”

  I felt like the mother of a delinquent child receiving reports from its correctional institution. Nevertheless, Andrea was obviously fond of Cleo and it sounded like her methods were working. I wasn’t going to complain if she ironed out some of our cat’s quirks in our absence.

  The next time we spoke Andrea told me about the personal trainer she’d hired. Roy visited the house twice a week and, according to Andrea, Cleo always knew when it was Tuesday or Thursday—a Roy Day. She waited in the front window until Apollo in a tracksuit opened the front gate. She then bounced to the front door, eager to find out what he’d brought her to play with this time—stretchy bands, balls? The moment Roy unfurled his exercise mat on the floor Cleo spread herself on it and rolled on her back, stretching her arms and legs, flicking her head side to side, watching for Roy’s admiration.

  “Anyone would think Roy’s been hired for Cleo’s fitness training,” Andrea grumbled with (thank heavens) a smile in her voice, but she did confess to feeling resentful at times. Whenever Roy engaged Andrea in a particularly harrowing set of sit-ups, Cleo would upstage her by burrowing her head under the exercise mat or engaging Roy in her version of wrestling—wrapping her paws around his ankles and kicking him with her hind legs.

  Upside down, her toes clinging to the Swiss ball while she attempted twenty-five push-ups, Andrea could sense Roy’s attention wandering to the feline flirting with him from behind the curtains. Roy was a self-confessed dog person, but he was beginning to change his mind. He asked Andrea where he could get a cat like that. She recommended house-sitting for unusual families who’d taken off overseas.

  Even though Cambridge opened fascinating new worlds to me, nothing surpassed the joy of reuniting with Lydia and Philip after three months. On the pretext of having important business in Ireland, wonderful Mary, the fashion reporter, accompanied Lydia from New Zealand. Lydia rewarded her by throwing up orange juice on Mary’s jacket as the plane flew out of Auckland.

  We met at Heathrow before flying to Geneva and boarding a train that wove along the lake front. The train stopped briefly at chocolate-box villages on its way to the medieval town of Lausanne.

  I promised five-year-old Lydia she’d adore her new school and would be speaking French in no time. Wrong on both counts. Apart from having a regime as rigid as the Swiss Alps, the Swiss school was a nightmare for Lydia. She couldn’t understand a word anyone said. As we staggered up the vertical path to the local primary school every morning, I tried to divert her attention to rows of tulips standing to attention alongside the path, or the Alps sprinkled with icing-sugar snow across the lake. She always had a “sore tummy” by the time we reached the school gates. I hated leaving her red-faced and in tears as I abandoned her to the care of her teacher. Madame Juillard’s kindness turned out to be a form of inadvertent cruelty. She spoke to the class in French, then repeated everything in English for Lydia. As a result, Lydia remained unable to communicate with her classmates.

  The one subject Lydia excelled in was swimming, due to long summers spent on New Zealand beaches. The Swiss sports teacher was intrigued by the Antipodean tadpole. Despite the humiliation of a preswim shower and the insistence on a bathing cap being worn at all times, Lydia could slap out a length of the indoor pool in her deep-sea overarm. Unable to relate to the wild freedom that creates a young surfer, the teacher amused us by suggesting Lydia had a future as a synchronized swimmer.

  While I was flat-out failing to meet the standards of Swiss hausfrau-hood, Philip slogged through punishing hours at business school. On one of his rare days off when we were sailing up a mountain slope in a gondola not much bigger than a vitamin pill, Philip took my hand and remarked that the skin under my engagement ring was turning a delicate shade of green. I was startled to discover he was right. Our year’s betrothal was past its use-by date. He suggested if we were going to tie the knot, Switzerland was as good a place as any to do it. Besides, we both liked the idea of getting married far away from those who regarded our unusual setup as a source of gossip and amusement.

  There are the Swiss Alps, chocolates, banks, watches, cheese and cuckoo clocks. While Switzerland is famous for many other things besides (including giant mountain horns and nuclear shelters for every household) it is not widely feted as a wedding destination. We were about to find out why.

  If there was a competition for the most difficult place on earth to get married in, Switzerland would win the prize. But then, Philip and I had a talent for doing things the hard way. We decided the land of clocks and chocolate was ideal for us to tie the knot. Someone should have warned us. As usual, we were insane.

  When he wasn’t studying the machinations of international business, Philip was warring with petty officials, who demanded to see and stamp every document that had our names on it (from birth certificates and proof of my divorce to Girl Guide sock-darning awards). After weeks of phoning and faxing lawyers across the globe, the Swiss officials were finally satisfied. Every scrap of paper was signed, countersigned and delivered in triplicate. But that wasn’t enough. They then demanded to know how many fac
ial moles our parents and grandparents had, at what age they had sex for the first time and which side they slept on at night. The truth is, Swiss officials don’t want people getting married in their country, and they’ll do everything in their power to stop it. They don’t approve of holy union. It’s too much paperwork. They’d rather people lived in sin.

  The best thing about getting married in a foreign country is it’s so inconvenient that the few guests who do make the effort to turn up sincerely want to be there. We arranged the wedding to take place in the September holidays, so Rob and other family members could share the occasion. I bought a cream suit and matching hat. We took a day trip across the lake to Evian to buy Lydia a French party frock with a lilac sash and stiff petticoat straight out of The Sound of Music.

  Around forty guests turned up for the wedding. Most of them wanted to stay in our miniscule apartment. We practically had them sleeping in wardrobes. The living area was set aside for itinerant Romanians. Mum and Rob slept in Lydia’s room.

  Without being biased I have to say it was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. It was in an exquisite medieval church on the shores of Lake Geneva. Our weekend honeymoon was friendly, too. Five guests, including the bride’s mother and children, accompanied us to the dreamy shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. The only thing missing was a small black cat.

  After the guests dispersed, Philip returned to his executive sweatshop. Golden autumn days leaked into sleety grey. Cobbled streets that had been picture-book quaint in summer faded to charcoal drawings. We never adjusted to the ferocity of European cold. No matter how thick our socks, our toes became ice.

  At the end of our year in Switzerland I wasn’t sad to leave. The feeling appeared to be mutual. Officials at Geneva airport decided we were such an unlikely trio we had to be terrorists. They took us aside to interrogate us. How could we possibly be married? Whose child was she, anyway? When I swore we’d packed no guns, they knew they had us. We were escorted into a room, where I was made to unpack my suitcase to reveal a weapon of minimal destruction—my umbrella.

  On the way home we had a few days’ stopover in New York with my old friend Lloyd. He knew all the right places to take a girl. What gay man doesn’t? I made excuses to take a break from the sightseeing, sneaked into Kmart and bought a pregnancy testing kit. Back at Lloyd’s I hurried upstairs past his African mask collection and shut myself in his bathroom. Holding the test stick to the light, it was hard to stop my hands trembling long enough to read the result. Hallelujah! A little plus sign appeared.

  Patience

  To wait is merely to consider the clouds for a while.

  “Cleo is how old?” Rosie asked over the phone.

  “Ten,” I replied.

  “Amazing!” said Rosie. “I never thought she’d live that long.”

  “Living with us, you mean?”

  “Well, yes, frankly. You must be doing something right.”

  One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it’s diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes.

  If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We’d notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.

  I wasn’t sure what sort of reception we’d get from Cleo. A year is a long time to be away from someone you love. There was a chance she wouldn’t recognize us. No doubt she’d shifted loyalties to Andrea. That would be understandable. We’d fled while Andrea fed.

  As the cab pulled up outside our front gate in Auckland I was relieved to see the house spread like a familiar smile behind the fence. Shrubs in the front garden were a little taller. Wisteria had increased its stranglehold around the veranda posts. I scanned the windows and the roof for signs of a small black cat. Nothing. Andrea, who’d moved out the day before, had assured us our cat was still alive. Maybe she’d tactfully forgotten to mention that Cleo had gone feral.

  With a boulder in my chest I helped Philip and Rob unload our suitcases from the cab. The front gate opened with its familiar complaint. The wind in the bottlebrush flowers held its breath.

  “Cleo!” Rob called in the man’s voice that had croaked its way into his larynx.

  A black shape trotted down the side of the house in our direction. I’d forgotten she was so tiny. Her pace was businesslike at first, as if she might be heading out to check for spiders in the letter box. She hesitated, pricked her ears and scowled at us. For a moment I thought she might drop her tail and scurry under the house.

  “We’re home, Cleo!” Lydia cried.

  The cat meowed gleefully and sprinted towards us. We dropped our bags and ran to her, each of us fighting for turns to hold the purring bundle and smother her with kisses. Even though Rob and Lydia had sprouted over the past year, she remembered all four of us.

  Once we were inside, the warmth of her welcome cooled. Cleo decided we needed punishment for our absence. She asked to be let outside and perched on the roof for several hours. After we’d unpacked I lured her down to ground level with a bowl of her old favorite—barbecued chicken. Halfway through her meal she looked up at me and winked as if to say So, pregnant again? Can’t you humans control yourselves? Oh well. Guess I can put up with a few more years being dressed up in baby clothes and wheeled around in a doll’s pram.

  Early in the pregnancy I went to a specialist and begged him to anesthetize me from the neck down for the birth of my fourth child. He agreed. At the age of thirty-eight I even had a medical title—Elderly Multigravida (which, by the way, any aspiring rock band in search of a name is welcome to). To reinforce the notion I had everything to fear he showed me a chart of the increased rate of birth defects as mothers approach forty. I left his offices feeling old. Sick and old. Following his advice I underwent invasive tests, one of which brought on worrying contractions. The tests showed the baby was healthy. And a girl.

  With Cleo curled on my lap one afternoon, I phoned Ginny in Wellington. Instead of laughing at my vision of a high-tech birth, all bright lights and scalpels, she put me onto a magnificent midwife, Jilleen.

  The moment I opened our door to Jilleen the baby somersaulted inside me. Jilleen had the kindest brown eyes. Her small hands were crossed neatly in front of her body. I knew this was the woman who would deliver our child despite the fact that we’d never thought of ourselves as home birth people.

  A smudge of cloud crossed the moon. Schubert’s music wrapped itself tenderly around the room. An open fire flickered shadows of Philip, Cleo and Jilleen against the wall. Time dissolved. We welcomed each muscular surge the way a surfer greets a wave, with concentration and respect. As the contraction reached its peak Jilleen taught Philip how to massage the pain away with gentle circular movements around my belly. Katharine tumbled pink and disgruntled into the world around two in the morning in her big brother’s bedroom. Our support team (including Anne Marie and a local doctor) glowed with that sense of achievement seen on the faces of people who have plunged off a bridge with elastic bands attached to their ankles. Lucky for Rob, he was staying at his dad’s house that night. We weren’t even going to tell our sixteen-year-old son exactly where the baby had been born in case he refused to ever sleep there again. Our plans were quashed when he discovered an acupuncture needle on his bedcovers and demanded to know the truth. To my surprise he wasn’t the slightest bit squeamish th
at his room had doubled as a delivery suite. In fact, he seemed almost proud of the fact.

  Time is said to heal everything. Certainly on the surface our lives were looking good. I no longer dreaded parent-teacher interviews at Rob’s school. He’d worked hard. The tone in the teachers’ voices had changed. Instead of learning difficulties, they spoke of career options like medicine or engineering. His final-year marks were dazzling enough to earn him a scholarship to embark on an engineering degree at university.

  I was happy, too, and grateful for the loving stability Philip brought us. Nevertheless, there was part of our lives that Rob and I tucked away and seldom talked about, certainly not in the company of others.

  “Sometimes I feel as if our lives have been split in two,” he said one day when the house was silent except for the mews of Cleo pacing in front of the fridge. “There was the existence we had with Sam, and the one after he died. It’s almost as if we’ve had two separate lives.”

  I had to agree. Few things bridged those two worlds, apart from a handful of friends and relatives, and the small black cat Sam had chosen for us all those years ago. Even though we laughed, worked and played, our grief was still real, unresolved in many ways and buried deep inside. Concerned neither of us had undergone professional grief counseling, I sometimes embarked on “Remember when Sam…” stories to encourage Rob to acknowledge our previous life. We thumbed through photo albums, talked and smiled. But to say time had healed us was a lie. Although we’d encompassed the enormity of losing Sam, we were still emotional amputees. We’d lost a limb when he died. After so many years the stump was invisible to almost everyone, apart from Rob and me.

  Rob sprouted into a tall, handsome young man. He was a strong swimmer and, with Philip’s encouragement, a triathlete and yachtsman. While I sometimes worried about his emotional well-being his physical health was never a concern. He had an enviable ability to shrug off any virus within a day.