by Helen Brown
Maybe we didn’t need to go home. We could just keep driving till we hit the motorway that slithered around the harbor and headed north. The house, cat, shaky marriage and friends with their harrowing outbursts of sympathy could all be left behind. We’d go and live with Mum in New Plymouth, the provincial town I grew up in—for about two weeks until Mum and I drove each other nuts. The town and I didn’t seem to fit together anymore, anyway. Whenever I went back for funerals or birthdays, people invariably asked two questions: “How’s the writing?” and “When are you leaving?” The second was always easier to answer than the first. I never classified what I did as “writing.” It was more about sharing stories with people whose lives were equally imperfect, and having a few laughs together. Readers of my column were like friends, with the added bonus of almost never turning up in the flesh. They had been amazingly kind lately. I’d grown so accustomed to sharing intimate aspects of our lives with them through my weekly installments it seemed appropriate to tell them about Sam’s death. The only alternatives were to continue writing diverting tales about domestic life as though nothing had happened (impossible), or retire. As I sat in bed, dripping tears into my portable typewriter, and recounted the events of that dreadful day, I had no idea I was tapping into a great source of healing. Letters and cards arrived in the hundreds, demonstrating the enormous generosity of strangers. Their letters, a few from people who’d also lost children, offered more strength than almost anything else. I carried a carefully typed sheet of paper around in my handbag. It was from an Indian couple whose two-year-old had wandered into a national park and was never seen again. Ten years after the event they said they were still sad, but surviving. They were living proof that parents who lose children in dreadful ways—they’re always dreadful—can survive.
An even bolder option would be to keep heading north till we reached the flashy lights of Auckland, a bigger city, where I’d get a job on a newspaper or magazine. Except only a lunatic would hire a grief-raddled, worn-out solo mum.
I nudged the car against the earthen bank draped with ferns at the top of the zigzag. The city spread below us in cubes of grey, windows glinting in the sun. In one of those office towers would be the woman who’d taken Sam’s life on her way back to work from her lunch break. I wondered what she looked like, and what she was doing. Sliding a file out of a cabinet, on the phone to someone? Wellington was such a small place we were bound to have some acquaintances in common. Nobody had given a hint they knew her. Perhaps they sensed her life would be in danger if I set eyes on her. She’d have to appear at the court inquest soon and confess she was drunk or driving too fast. Her punishment would come in good time.
Beyond the office blocks and over the hills past Lena’s house was the cemetery where Sam’s body lay. Beyond that, on Makara Beach, families would be making the most of what was left of the summer. Mothers would be spreading rugs over the stones, pouring orange cordial and telling their children the waves weren’t as cold as they looked. Boys would be charging into the surf, their skin goose-pimpled and gleaming in the waves. Some of them would be Sam’s friends. I didn’t want to see them or their mothers again.
A southerly breeze spiked my nostrils. Not so long ago I’d relished the thought of living in our house on the fault line, fixing the place up, along with our marriage. Suddenly it seemed too hard.
Rob scrambled out of the car, eager to show Cleo her new bed. Laden with kitty litter and the plastic tray I followed him down towards the house. I tried to prepare mentally for whatever fresh hell the-house-that-now-belonged-to-a-cat had to offer. At least it was still standing, its painted beams peeling in the sun. There was no sign of the kitten.
When I turned the key a tiny panther gamboled down the hall towards us, her tail waving like a banner. She emitted squeaks of welcome, each ending in a higher tone: Where have you been? Why did you take so long? Did you bring me anything? She sprang up on her hind legs, plunged her chin into our hands and flossed her teeth on our fingernails. The throb of her purr told us all was forgiven. We’d turned the sky blue again and glued the sun back in the sky simply by returning. I was entranced once more. How could I have considered sending her away? We needed her almost as much as she needed us.
But when Rob thrust the leopard-skin bed at her, Cleo arched her back and fluffed her tail out like a bottlebrush. She hissed violently. The cat bed was as threatening as the leopard it imitated. She pounced and savaged it, thumping it with her hind legs before swiftly withdrawing under the sofa. The enemy had no time to retaliate.
Cleo refused to emerge until her foe had retired to the laundry. We didn’t realize at the time, but it was the beginning of lifelong “issues” with bedding. Once it was gone she shot out from under the sofa to skid on a supermarket bag before climbing inside it. After catching her breath inside its plastic belly she ambushed the phone cord and scuttled to the safety of the kitchen pot cupboard.
Our cat was wired tighter than a violin. Every shadow, ball of dust, shopping list, discarded ribbon and household implement was a potential attacker. Noises alarmed her. She jumped at the squeak of a door. A distant bird’s song spiked every hair on her body.
No sock in the house was safe. She abducted them from bedrooms, empty shoes and the laundry basket, carefully separating each one from its twin so it was vulnerable to assault. The sock was then dragged through the house by its toe, tossed in the air, caught between two sets of claws and tortured mercilessly until it feigned death.
I was developing a headache. Cleaning up the day’s mess was pointless. It only gave the kitten scope to invent some new form of household devastation.
“Don’t you dare!” I said when Cleo sprang on the hall table and patted a tall vase of foxgloves with a tentative paw. Looking up at me she shook her whiskers and shrunk into her coat. I was serious. She lowered her paw and jumped obediently back on to the floor. I’m not proud to say I felt a glow of satisfaction. Having a close to wild animal respond to my commands was exhilarating. Megalomaniac teachers must experience similar power surges. Pleased with my venture into authoritarianism I glided into the kitchen to put the kettle on. But like every dictator I was delusional.
The house shook with a resounding thud. I charged back into the hall. Foxglove stems were sailing through the air, closely followed by the vase, from which billowed a spout of water. Surfing the waterfall was a four-legged figure, spread-eagled in an attempt to stay upright.
The vase crashed to the ground. Foxgloves scattered in elegant angles down the hallway. I watched as the kitten was engulfed. Caught in a flower-vase pipeline, she had no choice but to ride it out.
Like most natural disasters, it was over almost as quickly as it started. A house that seconds earlier had resembled a normal, if scruffy, family home was now worthy of relief funds from the UN. Sploshing through the tide, Cleo shook each paw after each step as if the water caused personal offense. Ears flattened, tail drooped, she wouldn’t have won first prize in any beauty contest. Or even best and fairest.
I yelled at Rob to get some towels. Together we tried to bring the house back to dry land. I soaked up the carpet damage while Rob toweled the animal dry. It was the first time I’d seen her anything close to humble.
Healer
A cat loves with all its heart, but not so fervently that there’s nothing left over for itself.
Steve was back from his week at sea just in time to experience the mayhem our new kitten had caused. While he cleaned and tidied the house, I stood at the kitchen bench watching a seagull glide on the updraft from the cliff. The bird and I were at the same eye level. It swiveled the slash of its beak towards me. We exchanged glares.
Not so long ago I’d liked birds, empathized with their struggle. Around the age of eight or nine I’d found a baby thrush on the front lawn. It couldn’t fly. Our cat Sylvester was bound to get it if I didn’t do something. I scooped the ball of feathers up in my hands. It didn’t seem to mind resting its reptilian feet on my fingers. Its bea
k and claws were too big for its body. It was not yet a functioning bird. I had no choice but to take it inside. A shoebox was lined with cotton wool. Holes were punched in the lid with a knitting needle. The thrush took eager gulps of sugared water from an eyedropper. Certain the bird would die overnight, I closed the lid. The box chirruped. Not a call of alarm. Just a chirrup. The box sat on my dressing table all night. I dreaded what I’d find next morning. But when I scrambled out of bed and opened the lid, the bird was sitting upright. Its eyes shone black and expectant. I closed the lid and took the box outside to the front lawn. When I opened the lid the thrush hopped onto the grass. It wobbled uncertainly, then with a thrilling whirr of wings flew up onto a branch. It perched there for a while, pretending I didn’t exist. I called, but it hurtled across the valley to the pines. I thought it might fly back to thank me. Of course it never did.
The seagull peeled away, swooped down over the ferry terminal and across the harbor. Five weeks had passed since our older son, inside his white coffin, had been lowered into the hills behind Lena’s house. We’d visited the grave a couple of times. I found no comfort on the windswept summit of Makara Cemetery, with its soldier lines of plaques. The first few times we went it took a while to work out where Sam’s grave was in that mosaic of misery. Steve pointed out it was in line with the toilet block. I could almost hear Sam laughing about that. He’d always had a lavatory sense of humor. In typical incongruity he’d been buried between two people who’d lived well into their eighties. Kneeling above him, my tears irrigating the grass, I searched for something of his essence. There was nothing of him in the gnarled bushes bent permanently against the wind. Clouds wrapped themselves in improbable shapes. Sheep bleated. Sam didn’t belong in that empty place.
I felt like an actor wearing someone else’s clothes. On the outside we resembled the same people we’d been a month or so earlier. I drove the same car, went to the same supermarket, but my internal organs felt like they’d been rearranged and scrubbed with steel wool. Shock, probably. I no longer trusted the goodness of being alive. Hatred and fury flared easily. I was angry at the people who lay alongside Sam. They had no right to live so long.
Even though the new school year had started we’d decided to keep Rob home for a couple of weeks. He hardly ever mentioned Sam but he still wore the Superman watch every day. Maybe he thought the action figure on his wrist was a hotline to his big brother. Rob needed a superhero more than any boy I could think of. If only Superman could jump through his bedroom window with Sam laughing in his arms.
I began to wonder if the point of superheroes isn’t so much the extraordinary feats they perform as the fact they have other lives as uncool males struggling for acceptance. Most boys relate to Clark Kent, geeky and rejected by the woman he loves. Like Clark Kent, every boy has an inner hero. His only hope of knowing a real live Superman is to become one, a goal that sets most young men up for disappointment. As they grow older the search for Superman continues. Sports heroes, rock stars, billionaires. Yet the real hero isn’t so far away. He lies within.
Reluctant as I was to admit it, I was getting help from Cleo. She seemed to know when I was bottoming out, whatever time of day or night it was. A paw would slide down the crack of a door, she’d leap on our bed or sit nearby, not demanding anything. Purring patiently, she’d simply wait until I surfaced.
Even her destructive behavior seemed to have purpose. It dragged us into dealing with the here and now. During the few moments I was yelling at her about curtain cords or toppled photo frames, I wasn’t eating my insides out over Sam. Infuriating, impish and bursting with affection, Cleo pulsed with exuberance. From the point of her tail to the tips of her whiskers she was one hundred percent alive. There was more Sam in her than there was under the whistling skies of Makara.
But Steve didn’t seem to see it that way. Even though I’d explained how Sam had picked her out, I had the feeling Steve associated the kitten with the life we’d had before Sam died, not this surreal existence we were trying to eke out now. Adopting a pet without his consent was hardly a functional family thing to do. Besides, he came from a long line of dog people.
Steve unpacked his seabag under Cleo’s watchful gaze. She appeared to be making an inventory of his clothes, and which might be portable. His eyes slid sideways at her. I could tell he was thinking only one word. Mess.
One of the many differences in our personalities was attitude to mess. I was, and still am, comfortable with quite a lot of disorder. Amazingly creative ideas can spring from piles of old paper and clothes you forgot you ever had. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I can’t be bothered sifting through them, which is almost always.
Steve, on the other hand, could have been mistaken for a graduate from the Zen school of the obsessively tidy. As a teenage bride, I’d strived to satisfy his craving for immaculate surroundings. Whenever he was due home from a week at sea, I’d rush around the house dusting skirting boards, straightening curtains and arranging rug tassels in parallel lines. I was a slow learner. It took years to realize that no matter how perfect I thought the house looked it made no difference to Steve’s perception. Oblivious to my efforts, he moved like a robot through the same routine every time he arrived home from sea: unleash vacuum cleaner, wipe countertops, even if I’d cleaned them half an hour earlier, and unpack seabag. Vacuuming had been out of the question today, due to the saturated shag pile. He had to content himself with picking up socks and supermarket bags.
Just as I launched into a spiel about how much Rob adored the kitten, Cleo dived into Steve’s bag and emerged with the toe of a black sock between her teeth. Scurrying away, she tossed it above her head and jumped in the air. She caught it between her front paws with panache, before rocketing away full tilt, the sock trailing between her legs. One of her back legs stepped on it, bringing her to such a sudden halt she somersaulted through the air and landed on her back. I sucked a breath. The poor creature had surely damaged her spine. We’d have to take her to the vet’s. She’d writhe in agony. There’d be no cure. Unperturbed, Cleo wriggled to her feet, picked up the sock again and sprinted away.
Unimpressed, Steve trudged out of the room in search of his sock. It generally took us two days to adjust to Steve’s routine after he’d been away. With the additional tension of an unwelcome kitten, domestic harmony was more problematic.
I’d read somewhere that seventy-five percent of marriages fail after the death of a child. I wasn’t prepared to buy into that. Defying statistics was one of my specialities. But I was beginning to understand why so many relationships crumble.
Steve’s pain was no less than mine, but it was different, more internal. I grieved in wild expressionist brushstrokes, sobbing, wailing, accusing, wanting to be held. His sorrow was more orderly and restrained. Words, when he said them, were as carefully considered as dewdrops on an orange in a Dutch master’s still life.
While Steve had been able to undertake the tasks expected of a man—identifying the body, the police interview and, tomorrow, an appearance at the court inquest—his ability to convey what was going on behind the fortress of his face had shut down. I was to blame for some of that. I should never have asked him to stop crying that morning after the accident. His gaze slithered everywhere these days, from curtains to carpet to rubber plant. Never into my eyes. When he’d asked if I’d go along to the inquest with him I’d refused. The thought of reliving it all in front of strangers was too much. If I’d had the courage to agree I’d have been a better wife. We were both at our most needy, yet neither had reserves to soothe the other.
Rob called us to the living room, where he was crouching over Cleo, dangling Steve’s sock. He tossed the sock across the room. Cleo chased it, caught it neatly between her teeth, trotted back to Rob and dropped it at his feet. She then sat neatly beside Rob and waited, staring up at him expectantly.
“See? She can fetch!”
“Only dogs can fetch,” said Steve, swooping his sock off the floor.
“No, you try it,” said Rob.
Hesitantly, Steve flung the sock into the air. Cleo barrelled away and retrieved it, depositing it at my feet this time.
The kitten ensured we were all awarded equal time throwing the sock. She wanted it to be a family game.
“Cleo can play sock-er!” said Rob.
Her enthusiasm was limitless. The three of us were soon mesmerized by the wiry figure dancing to and fro after her sock victim. When it rolled under the sofa’s underskirts I was almost relieved. No way would she be able to slide into the two-inch gap between the sofa and the floor.
But I’d underestimated Cleo’s yogi-like flexibility. Without hesitation she flattened her haunches and wriggled under the sofa. It was like watching birth in reverse.
The silence that followed was unnerving. She was stuck under there. Seconds later, a single black paw appeared from behind the high back of the sofa. It was swiftly accompanied by another paw. With leverage from two sets of claws a face appeared, much narrower than the last time we’d seen it, the eyes half-closed, the ears reduced to mere flaps flattened against its skull. Clamped victoriously between its thin lips was the sock.
The sun glinted like a giant tiger eye as it sank behind the hills. The sky was turning pink with exhaustion. Slipping on a cashmere cardigan, I chopped chicken breasts. Risotto was bland enough not to offend anyone’s tastebuds.
Cleo lifted her nose and, like a connoisseur analyzing the aromas of a rare Bordeaux, half-closed her eyes. Following my ankles as I moved about the kitchen, she emitted a series of squeaks. Not the mews of a cat begging for food, but the demands of a priestess impatient to have offerings laid at her feet.
Gathering her up, I snuggled her against my chest and sat down with her on a kitchen chair. She strained wistfully towards the chicken but soon became intrigued by my precious cashmere cardigan. Simple sheep’s wool was of no interest to Cleo. Fiber removed from domestic goats and then painstakingly dehaired was another matter. She chomped the wool around the middle button.