by Helen Brown
To the paradoxical cat, an ending is sometimes a beginning.
It’s easy to fall in love with a kitten. Everything about its furry softness says hold me, cuddle me. In its middle years a cat can be admired for its gleaming coat and sleek athleticism. But an old cat is an acquired taste. She dribbles on cushions and uses vomiting as a form of peaceful protest. People who live with old cats make allowances. Even those who have never suffered a moment of house pride are compelled to cover furniture with old towels and blankets.
Cleo’s fur thinned and carried the odor of an Egyptian tomb. She had to think several times before forcing her arthritic joints to jump onto a sofa. When strangers visited I occasionally imagined distaste flashing across their faces as she teetered to greet them. Our geriatric feline was no longer a great beauty, yet our love for her grew deeper with the knowledge time was running out.
The right side of her face swelled up so spectacularly she couldn’t open one eye. I wrapped her in her blanket and carried her back to Tough Vet. We’d changed our minds about him since our last visit.
“Hmmm,” he said grimly. “A tooth abscess. I could operate and remove her teeth, but she’s so weak I doubt she’d survive the surgery.”
He recommended the obvious, gently this time, while running a hand over her back.
“I know what it’s like when an animal’s been part of a family for a long time,” he said.
He sent us home to mull it over. If Cleo was a person she would have been forced to have a “natural” death like the one Mum had endured. I’d seen how, as disease takes hold, the victim enters a grey realm of pain that makes death a welcome visitor. Maybe it’s nature’s way of making the process ultimately acceptable. Given the choice, I wouldn’t want to suffer what Mum went through. Fortunately, Cleo’s animal status ensured she wouldn’t have to. Death is one of the few areas where animals are granted superior rights.
Katharine, her face a waterfall of tears, readily agreed this was the right thing. Philip helped us wrap Cleo in her blanket for the last time to take her to Tough Vet, whom I’d decided wasn’t tough at all.
“It’s time, old girl,” he said, slipping a tiny needle into the back of her paw. The movement was so gentle she didn’t flinch. As we said our good-byes, Cleo curled in the shape of a crescent moon. Her head drooped. She was suddenly gone.
The vet put her in an opaque plastic bag and we carried her home inside the blanket.
Philip began to dig a hole under the daphne bush in the front garden. The spade hit the ground with soft, regular thuds. He wasn’t in the mood for talking. Reading the back of his head as he swung the spade, I could tell he was upset—not in the tears-on-television way that’s become grindingly fashionable for both sexes. His was a restrained, dignified grief, the sort men were famous for until they were told it was bad for their health.
I wanted to make him put down the spade and just hold him for a while, but it would only drag things out. Men are better off doing things. Besides, there were my own useless tears to deal with.
After what seemed a very long time, he stopped and rested on the spade. We both stared down at the hole. It was deeper than it probably needed to be, but this is a man who always went the extra mile for his family. And Cleo was an integral part of that.
“I don’t suppose we want to bury her in the blanket,” he said.
Unwrapping the blanket he slid Cleo’s lifeless form from the vet’s plastic bag onto the soil. He bent and kissed her head before lowering her into the hole.
“She’s been with this family longer than I have,” he sighed.
Birds sang a requiem as, spade by spade, the earth covered her body.
Some cultures prefer to bury their relatives in their gardens. I was beginning to understand why. Every morning I said hello to Cleo on my way to the letter box. The gardener looked alarmed when I told him not to dig too deep around the daphne bush. Our precious cat didn’t need disturbing.
Cleo presided over our family through nearly twenty-four years. She helped heal wounds I thought we’d never recover from. Maybe her work was complete now, the healing was done, and we could get along without her. Except she left us with a different kind of sorrow. I suddenly understood the logic of ancient Egyptians shaving their eyebrows when a family cat died.
People asked when we were getting a new cat. They spoke as if one cat would lead to another. A friend took me to a pet shop. We watched a bunch of kittens tumbling about in an enclosure. They were mostly tortoiseshell. Adorable. Some were locked in a play fight, rolling around in a bundle of fur. Others dozed. Cute, so cute. A small grey kitten climbed the wire mesh, hitching himself paw by paw above our heads. A group of shoppers gathered around the cage, the expressions on their faces tender as a Leonardo da Vinci portrait. Among them was a disheveled man I’d noticed out on the street earlier. He’d looked angry and so withdrawn people had stepped sideways to avoid him. The layers of aggression he’d been carrying around disintegrated when he saw the kittens. His unshaven jaw softened into a smile. Leaning against the wire he gazed at them with pure benevolence. Now he was watching the grey kitten, who’d suddenly realized he couldn’t get back down as easily as he’d climbed up. He glanced anxiously down at the floor, then back up at the wire. He couldn’t climb any higher. There was no choice. The kitten performed an impressive backwards flip and landed safely back on ground level. The man laughed. Maybe the kitten reminded him of himself, climbing for the heavens only to land with a thump back on earth.
“Can we take one home?” a teenager asked his mother. He, too, was enthralled. If he persuaded her to take a kitten that day it had a noble task ahead. The young man was mentally disabled.
A sad woman pointed at a pretty tortoiseshell. Maybe her house was empty, just waiting for the pad of velvet paws.
Every kitten in the enclosure had a purpose to fulfill, human hearts to heal, lessons to teach about the true nature of love. There wasn’t one I didn’t want to scoop up and hold warm and soft against my chest. But I wasn’t going to take one home that day.
Cats aren’t something to be “got.” They turn up in people’s lives when they’re needed, and with a purpose that probably won’t be understood to begin with. I certainly hadn’t wanted a kitten so soon after Sam’s death. Not consciously, anyway. Life is a contrary business. Sometimes what you think you don’t want and what you need are the same thing. Cleo’s cuddles, her fun, her uppity behavior, were exactly what we needed to take our minds off monumental sadness and remind us what joy there is in living and breathing. She taught us to loosen up, laugh and toughen up when necessary.
Guardian of our household, Cleo watched over every step of our journey. She stayed with us for as long as we needed her—which turned out a decade or two longer than expected. Whether she’d been sent to us by Sam or the Egyptian cat goddess, she bestowed her healing powers on us with more generosity than could be asked of any creature.
Once we started trusting life again magical things seemed to unfold. Wonderful people like Ginny, Jason, Anne Marie and Philip turned up at exactly the right times. Cleo supervised every encounter, sometimes giving the impression she’d actually arranged them. I’ll always be grateful to these people and many more who helped us recover from the loss of Sam. Not that I’ll ever confidently say we’ve recovered. We’ve changed, grown. Sam, his life and death, will always be part of us.
Anger ultimately gave way to forgiveness and, years later, the enormous relief of learning Sam hadn’t died alone and frightened. I discovered Superman is real, after all. He’s the hero who stops at accident scenes and does what he can for victims. For us his name was Arthur Judson.
For years I’d avoided returning to the zigzag in Wellington. With typical sensitivity, Ginny understood and never pressed me to visit her. We’d arranged reunions in Australia or other parts of New Zealand, anywhere that served good sauvignon, really. But curiosity eventually got the better of me. As the rental car ground up the hill towards Wadestown I pr
epared for gut-wrenching replays. Rounding the first hook bend, then the second, I noticed there was still a stretch of public land, a mini park, overlooking the harbor. I’d once dreamt of erecting a sculpture there in Sam’s memory, but concrete and stainless steel lack warmth. There are better ways to honor a lost child.
The road straightened, narrowed and became steeper as it rose towards the footbridge, still hanging across the cutting like a gallows. As the car sped underneath, I absorbed a rush of impressions. The steps down from the bridge, the edge of the footpath where Sam had turned to his brother all those years ago and said, “Be quiet.” The harsh surface of the asphalt where his blood had spilt. My chest jarred. What was the point of putting myself through all this?
The houses on our old street seemed more brightly painted, the gardens better maintained since we’d left. At the end of the road I was astonished to find the zigzag had disappeared. Ginny had mentioned the neighbors had clubbed together to pay for a bulldozer to create drive-on access for all the houses, but I hadn’t imagined anything this dramatic. The old zigzag with its twists and turns had been replaced by a full-on driveway plunging straight down the hill. I stood at the top of the zigzag that was now a road and looked down on the city. It sprawled farther up the hills these days. There were several new high-rise office blocks. Wind jagged up from the south.
“Bubbles, darling?” asked a familiar voice. Ginny and I wrapped arms around each other. Laughter lines and streaks of grey through her hair had only intensified her beauty. Leopard-skin tights and wild earrings had succumbed to a flowing skirt and silk shirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of Milan.
Together we walked down the driveway over what once would have been one zig and a zag to Ginny’s place. I deliberately avoided turning towards our old bungalow. A single glimpse had potential to unleash an army of demons. The jungle that used to surround the Desilva’s had gone, but their house sat serene as ever. A champagne cork popped as Ginny explained how she and Rick had looked at apartments in town, but nothing could surpass the convenience and outlook of this house.
Nodding, I took in the surroundings. Ginny’s taste in interior design had moved on from eighties chic to European understatement. Having lived there nearly thirty years, Ginny confessed she and Rick were the neighborhood establishment now. The Butlers had moved ten years ago. Mrs. Sommerville had gone to the great staff room in the sky.
“And our old house?” I asked tentatively.
“A footballer and his girlfriend lived there for a while,” said Ginny. “Someone wanted to renovate it, but they gave up. It’s been tenanted ever since. There’s a good view from upstairs, remember?”
I followed her tentatively up the staircase, safe in the knowledge that if I broke down Ginny of all people would know what to do. She pulled a curtain aside and beckoned me towards the window. Our old bungalow was barely recognizable. The front garden with its path lined with forget-me-nots had been obliterated, along with the boys’ digging patch, to make way for a concrete slab wide enough to park two cars alongside each other. Sensible, yes. No more rain-soaked treks carrying groceries to the front door. Not that it resembled our front door anymore. The dark paneling had been painted white, along with the mock-Tudor beams that had once given the place “character.” Someone had decided to rid the place of its ghosts by throwing buckets of white paint over it. The house seemed narrower, chastened. Rob’s bedroom window where Cleo used to sit was the same shape, the roof pitched at the same angle, but it wasn’t our house anymore. Like the zigzag and everything else in the neighborhood, it had moved on.
I’d been steeling myself for flashbacks on this visit. Instead, looking down on the old house with Ginny, I experienced an unexpected sensation of lightness and peace. A circle had completed itself. Our life on the zigzag was faded as an old photograph. Nothing but a memory. The only thing that mattered was the lives we had now.
Even after Cleo died she continued to leave physical reminders of her presence. Unmistakable black hairs were scattered through our sheets and clothes. There was frozen cat food in the back of the freezer. Hauling Cleo’s rejected dog bed out from under the house, I had an urge to call Rob. His line was busy, of course.
“Were you trying to call me?” I asked when I finally got through.
“No, I was talking to someone.”
“Who?”
“Chantelle. She’s back in Australia.”
“Oh, that’s lovely! With her boyfriend?”
“She’s broken up with him.”
The bond of friendship between Rob and Chantelle had deepened with the death of her brother. Sam’s loss was so much a part of him that Rob was able to understand a lot of Chantelle’s pain. They both now belonged to the nameless club of people who have lost brothers. Within a year they were living together, engaged to be married and discussing what type of kitten they’d like to add to their household. Intense research was carried out over the Internet. A British Blue, perhaps, or maybe even a Siamese.
When they stayed a night at the house of Chantelle’s Aunt Trudy, who’d introduced them nearly ten years earlier, the resident Burmese insisted on sleeping on their bed.
“No way am I living with a pedigreed kitten,” Rob said next day. “That cat spent the whole night talking to me, telling me to get out of his bed.”
“What is it with you and cats?” I said.
“Dunno. Guess it’s a Cleo thing.”
I smiled, remembering six-year-old Rob cradling his brand-new kitten, how she’d helped him sleep alone in his bedroom for the first time without Sam, “spoken” to him through his dreams and helped him develop friendships. Watching over him for nearly a quarter of a century, Cleo our cat goddess had presided over countless birthday parties and nursed Rob through illness. From her resting place under the daphne bush, she was still exerting her influence.
If and when Rob and Chantelle do acquire a cat, Rob says, it’ll have to be an ordinary mog. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be a crossbreed with just a whisker of Abyssinian.
THE BEGINNING
Acknowledgments
Every kitten belongs to a litter. Likewise, Cleo’s story would never have been born without help from many wonderful people. I’d like to thank Catherine Drayton at InkWell and Amy Pyle, Laurie Parkin, Michaela Hamilton, and the magnificent team at Citadel for embracing Cleo with such enthusiasm. Thanks, too, to Louise Thurtell and Jude McGee in Sydney, who believed in our cat story from the beginning. They provided me with unwavering support through various forms of self-doubt and an unexpected health hiccup while I was writing the book.
A purr to U.S. friends Helen Trammell, Faith Kaiser and Sarah Heineken, who discovered my stories on the Internet and sent generous reassurance that people laugh and cry about the same things whatever part of the world they live in.
Huge thanks to Roderick and Gillian Deane, who encouraged me to write about Cleo in the first place. And to Douglas Drury for providing soothing lunches during what seemed, to a superficial 500-word-story journalist, long months of writing. Julie Wentworth, the world’s best yoga teacher, deserves a salute for her flowers and phone calls, which arrived just when they were needed. As does Sarah Wood for regular laughs over cups of coffee, along with Heather and Mano Thevathasan for countless acts of kindness. Big hugs to my sister Mary for her loving care during my recovery.
Thanks from the depths of my heart to Philip, Rob, Lydia, Katharine, Chantelle and Steve for allowing me to share my version of our story with the world. Given the chance to write from their personal perspectives, there’s no doubt each tale would unfold differently. Their trust and generosity is boundless. An extra high five goes to Philip and Katharine for taking over cooking, shopping and laundry duties, and to Lydia for her heavenly massages.
The deepest bow is for Cleo, who loved us with all her heart for so long.
www.helenbrown.com
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Copyright © 2009 Helen Brown
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924998
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3441-1
