by Helen Brown
“She likes friends,” Rob replied.
A tingle fizzed down my spine. Rob was remembering Cleo’s so-called promise to help him find new friends in the talking cat dream.
“Can I come over here and play with her after school?” Jason asked.
“Course you can!” we answered in unison.
Cleo settled herself in a pool of sunlight on Rob’s bed and we headed out the door. Rata paddled behind us like a steam boat. Halfway up the zigzag, the old dog seemed to run out of puff and plonked herself down. I waited with her a moment. Even though she was panting, she slapped her tail reassuringly on the path as if to say, “Nothing to worry about.”
Once Rata had recovered her breath we climbed the rest of the hill. The boys watched anxiously as she straggled to the car. Suddenly aware she was being observed, the dog rallied, lifted her tail and leapt youthfully into the back of the station wagon.
The school gates hadn’t changed, which seemed strange considering so much else had. Those gates were at least seventy years old. The first children who ran through them were old men and women now. Their bodies were disintegrating around them in retirement homes, while the gates had merely gathered a layer of rust. The deal hardly seemed fair. Yet, given the choice, I’d still rather come back as human, with a limited quota of laughter and pain, than gates that lasted one hundred and fifty unfeeling years.
Kids were pouring through them, still buzzing with stories from the summer holidays. No doubt Sam’s demise had been a hot topic around every kitchen table. Were they going to smother Rob with too much attention or, not knowing what to say, simply ignore him? I fought the urge to scramble out from behind the steering wheel and escort him through every nanosecond of the day.
Rob and Jason climbed out of the car.
“I’ll pick you up here at three-thirty,” I said.
“S’okay,” Jason said. “We’ll walk home together, won’t we, Rob?”
Rob squinted through the sunlight at Jason and smiled. “Yeah, we’ll walk.”
Walk? Meaning cross roads? My insides swirled at the thought of Rob’s feet going anywhere near roadside tarmac without my protective shadow. But Jason and Ginny were right. The sooner Rob adjusted to a new routine, maybe even created new friendships, the easier his life would become. Their advice had arrived in the most powerful package—generosity wrapped in action, not words.
At the risk of Jason thinking I was deranged, I took an old shopping list from my handbag and scribbled on the back the exact route they needed to take walking home. The pedestrian crossing outside the school was monitored by senior students who presumably had some respect for traffic. Following the footpath along the bend of the gulley, they’d have to cross one quiet street before reaching the busy road Sam had died on. They’d cross not at the bus stop farther down the hill but at the zebra crossing several hundred meters higher up, near Dennis’s grocery store and the new deli. Pressing the shopping list into Rob’s hand I made him promise not to cross until he was certain every car was safely distant. “And remember to ask the teacher to call me if you want to come home early,” I called, the unmistakable whine of smother love in my voice.
But Rob was already halfway through the school gates, laughing at something Jason had said. Jason strolled alongside him, turned, waved at me and flung an arm across Rob’s shoulder.
Huntress
Unlike most humans, a cat embraces the Wild Side.
Waiting on the zigzag that afternoon with Cleo in my arms, I listened for children’s voices. Rob and Jason should have taken about twenty minutes to walk home if they’d followed my map. They were now seven minutes late.
My head filled with what-ifs. If Jason had persuaded Rob to take a longer, more dangerous route, if he’d forgotten Rob was going to walk home with him and gone off with a bunch of cool boys…A river rock sat in my chest. Then boyish laughter echoed up the valley. Some of those whoops, the like of which I’d never imagined hearing again, were unmistakably from our son. His first day back at school must have been more successful than I’d dared hope.
I watched as two heads rounded the corner of the leafy path—not two blonds but one fair-headed, one dark.
“How was it?” I called to Rob.
“Fine,” he said. The sincerity in his voice sounded genuine.
Jason’s face lit up when he saw Cleo.
“Let’s teach her to hunt!” he said, sliding his schoolbag off his back.
“Isn’t she a bit young?” I asked, nursing the black bundle I’d become so protective of since bringing her back to life. “She’s hardly left her mother.”
“No way!” said Jason, dumping his bag in our hallway as if it was already his second home. “Have you got a piece of old paper and some wool?”
Why hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d been so engrossed in our misery I’d forgotten an essential piece of kitten development. Rob, Cleo and I watched as Jason scrunched a rectangle of newsprint and with a string of red wool tied it into a bow.
“Here, girl,” Jason whispered, laying the newsprint bow like bait on the floor and twitching his end of the wool. “It’s a mouse! Catch it!”
Cleo looked puzzled. Maybe she really was an Egyptian princess trapped in a feline body and unable to lower herself to playing with scraps of paper.
“C’mon!” he said, trailing the lure across the floor towards the rubber plant. “It’s running away!”
Cleo’s ears flicked forwards as she watched the thing skip across the carpet. A paw shot out, almost involuntary in its speed. Paw and paper collided briefly. Jason pulled the string. The kitten tuned into some ancient programming. Crouching on her hind legs, she shimmied her nether regions and tried to hypnotize her target.
Why cats sway like that before they pounce is a mystery. The closest to the cat shimmy I’ve seen in humans is when professional tennis players propel themselves from side to side as they wait to bash back a one-hundred-miles-per-hour serve. Maybe the shimmy, for cats and tennis players, is a subconscious way for them to prepare muscles on either side of the body for sudden action.
The boys laughed as Cleo pounced on the paper bow and juggled it between her front and back paws.
“Here, you try,” said Jason, handing the string to Rob. Generosity was second nature to that child. “Hold it higher so she has to jump.”
Cleo hid behind the rubber plant and waited like an assassin. When the paper bow flew past above her head she grabbed it in midair, between her teeth and front paws. Sailing towards the carpet with her prey locked in a death grip, she looked up at us for the admiration she deserved before crashing in a bundle of legs, fur and paper.
The hapless bow was shredded in minutes.
Jason was even more impressed when Cleo demonstrated her prowess at sock-er. He became a daily visitor to our house after that, while I was gradually introduced to the glittering world of Ginny Desilva. The first time I ventured through the leafy shield up the white gravel path to her place, I felt like a naughty girl escaping from a correctional institution. A hedge of gardenias emitted sensual perfume. A fountain trickled and splashed. With every step I could sense Steve’s disapproval. The racy Desilvas weren’t our kind of people.
“Come in, darling!” cried Ginny, flinging her front door open. “You’re just in time for bubbles.”
Nobody on our side of the zigzag called anyone darling. Certainly not people they hardly knew. Ginny, with her false eyelashes and cheekbones to die for, was the first person I’d ever met who could make drinking champagne at four in the afternoon seem the most natural thing in the world. I was amazed at her capacity to never wear the same outfit twice. I was in awe of her white leather sofa and the stainless-steel sculpture that towered like an electric pylon over a corner of her living room. She couldn’t remember the name of the artist, or at least she said she couldn’t. With Ginny, it was hard to know if she was genuinely vague or just pretending to be in order to put you at ease.
After an hour or two at Ginny�
�s, the world seemed a softer place. When streetlights sparked to life and windows of the office blocks glowed yellow in the city below, I knew it was time to leave. The gravel path undulated under my feet as I wandered home to cook dinner and deal with a hungry cat.
Like everyone else in our family Cleo had a highly developed interest in food. Being half-aristocrat, she made it clear she considered herself a cut above pet shop rubbish.
Once she’d figured out the fridge was the source of high-class menu items, such as salmon, she spent many hours worshipping its great white door. Occasionally she’d run an exploratory front paw along the plastic seal, but her attempts were fruitless.
When I opened the fridge door one morning, she accelerated like a furry cannonball across the kitchen floor and jumped right inside the crisper. When I yelled at her to come out she burrowed farther into the carrots. No way was she relinquishing the right to live inside her own five-star restaurant. When I tried to pry her out she batted me with a claw.
I closed the fridge the door to a crack and peeked inside. Eyeing the ice cliff of the door, with its built-in cartons of milk and juice, Cleo didn’t look so confident. When I flung the door open again she pounced from her nest of carrots and shook herself on the kitchen floor, as if to say, “I was only doing it to keep the vegetables happy.”
Abandoning the idea of fridge habitation, Cleo worked on other ways of adding gourmet flair to her diet. Emptying her litter box one day I discovered two rubber bands and a length of cotton thread had worked their way through her digestive tract.
With newly discovered power in her back legs, she’d spring onto the kitchen bench for a gastronomic preview of whatever we were having for dinner. Chicken breast and fish were favorites, but she developed a taste for mincemeat, cake, raw eggs and, of course, butter.
If I didn’t stow the butter safely away in the fridge, suspicious-looking tracks would appear on its surface. It’s hard to know if Cleo really liked butter or just pretended to enjoy it to taunt Rata, who was trapped unwillingly down at ground level. Our omnivorous golden retriever was genuinely obsessed with processed animal fats. At Sam’s fifth birthday party she had wolfed down an entire slab of butter that had been left inadvertently on the coffee table. We waited for her to turn green around the whiskers, and prepared for an ambulance run to the vet, but Rata remained cheerful as ever. The dog’s Teflon-lined stomach could handle anything from shoelaces to picnic lunch leftovers, including (if available) the paper napkins.
As the days shortened Cleo discovered the sort of food she liked best. Thanks to Jason’s hunting lessons, she tuned into her wildcat side and learned the thrill of self-service. Prowling through the flowerbeds like a black panther she explored the victim potential of everything that moved, including blades of grass. Even the daisies were in danger. A crack in the path near the front gate revealed an exciting potential prey: ants. Her head would dart from side to side as these corporate workers of the garden went about their business. Cleo would tease them with her paw, only to be disappointed. Instead of playing a game, the ants would simply keep marching ahead, oblivious to fun or danger.
Her first triumph was a praying mantis she discovered on the window ledge in Rob’s bedroom. I’ve always had a soft spot for praying mantises. Their revolving eyes and articulated limbs make them look like visitors from outer space. Geeks of the insect world, they live quietly and are endearingly harmless (except to the occasional fly or grasshopper). Unlike other insects they have no interest in sucking blood, stinging or spreading fatal illness.
Which is why I was upset to find one in Cleo’s clutches one sunny afternoon. She was teasing the poor thing, letting it imagine it had escaped and then pouncing on it again. My first instinct was to rescue the insect. But it had already lost a leg. There was no hope.
For the first time I was mildly repelled by our kitten. Then again, if I tried to stop her hunting and occasionally killing other creatures I’d be denying her essential catness. Somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Mum saying You can’t interfere with Nature. Not that her pioneering upbringing mirrored the sentiment. Our ancestors had no qualms reducing huge tracts of land to ash.
Guilty with praying mantis betrayal, I backed out of Rob’s room and closed the door. Ten minutes later, I discovered Cleo dozing in the sun on Rob’s pillow. She opened a self-satisfied eye at me and closed it. The headless torso of the praying mantis lay on the floor under the window ledge.
Cleo swiftly graduated to mice and birds, much to my horror. Headless corpses were deposited on the front doormat like little gifts. Digging graves for them beside the forget-me-nots was a reminder life has always been a struggle for living creatures. Somewhere along the line, we humans got hung up about death. We invented expressions like “passed away,” and took pains to conceal the process of transforming a cow in a paddock into a hamburger. We hid away the sick, old and disabled, so that suffering was a mystery and death the ultimate abnormality.
People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes.
Cleo’s motto seemed to be: Life’s tough and that’s okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it—but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s not harsh sometimes. Those who’ve survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great.
I wondered if I’d ever feel strong enough to follow her example.
Letting Go
A touch of a paw can work better than aspirin.
Autumn was upon us and the hills around the harbor were burnished gold with gorse flowers. The new season had crept in so gradually I’d hardly noticed the change as it was happening. One moment Cleo was making herself so hot sunbathing on the front path she had to retreat to the shadow of the house to cool off. Next she was jostling for prime position in front of the gas fire with the rest of us, and somehow always getting the best spot. Suddenly there was a bite in the wind and poplar trees were shimmering bronze. My powers of observation had been equally remiss with Cleo. I’d grown so accustomed to telling visitors we shared our house with a cat who looked like an alien I no longer regarded her through accurate lenses. I was taking it for granted that we lived with an ugly cat.
I was out in the garden raking leaves one morning when I noticed an extraordinary cat sitting on Mrs. Sommerville’s roof. Sleek and elegant, its beauty sucked the breath out of my lungs for a moment. It was an awe-inspiring sight. My semirural background ensured I wasn’t usually affected by animals like that. Mum had raised me to believe anything with four legs that wasn’t a table was at best an economic unit, at worst a bloody nuisance. But this being was beyond in-built parental prejudice. Its profile was noble as any lion’s. With its head tilted slightly to one side and its tail curved in mathematical perfection around its rump, it was a feline version of a top model posing for a Vanity Fair photo shoot. Except there was no self-consciousness in the cat’s pose. It wasn’t even interested in me. Ears forwards, nose slightly aloft, its attention was focused on a potential meal in a nearby tree.
I felt a stab of envy for the human who belonged to such a beast. I could see him sitting smug by his log fire, one hand encircling a decent red wine, the other massaging the handsome cat’s fur. Although black from tip to tail like Cleo, it was obviously a pedigreed cat of impressive lineage. It probably had enough papers to set a house on fire. Going by the sheen on its coat, it dined on fresh sardines every night. Next to a cat like that, poor Cleo would resemble something that had just crawled out of the drains of Calcutta. Fortunately, Cleo was nowhere in sight. She was probably inside investigating the fruit bowl, which had recently proved an interesting source of insect life. I put my head down and continued raking. I have yet to discover the Zen approach to raking leaves. Autumn leaves are disob
edient at the best of times. Trying to do anything with them on a windy day is physical and emotional torture. The moment I herded them into a satisfactory mound a playful breeze scattered them like kittens and shook another shoal down from the poplars. It was a frustrating job that would’ve been considerably more pleasant if Rata had been able to understand the intricacies of human plumbing services and why they’d been invented.
Muttering one of Sam’s forbidden rude words, I scraped Rata’s contribution to global soil fertility off the sole of my sneaker on a stone. The pleasures of autumn gardening, if there were any, were lost on me. I was about to give up and go inside in search of tea when I heard a familiar meow.
“Cleo!” I called, checking her favorite sunbathing place in the weeds under what once had been a rose bed. Th e only evidence of her there was a flattened oval of long grass. Scanning the window ledge outside Rob’s bedroom, I called again. Th e black cat on Mrs. Somerville’s roof stared down at me with steady curiosity.
“It’s fine for you, you spoiled snooty thing!” I growled up at it. “We can’t all be best in show.”
The cat yawned and rose effortlessly to its feet. I watched it float along the roof guttering and sail into the branches of a tree. It then slid gracefully down the trunk and skipped toward me, meowing delightedly.
“Cleo?” I said bending to stroke the bridge of her back as she nudged her chin against my calf muscles. I lifted the manifestation of feline perfection into my arms and sank my nose into her fur to make sure it really was her. “Goodness, when did you become so gorgeous?”
I’d been so absorbed by grief over the summer I hadn’t noticed Cleo had undergone a makeover beyond extreme. Over just a few weeks our skinny runt with unnerving eyes and hardly any fur had evolved into a drop-dead gorgeous cat. Her fur, jet black, grew thick and glossy in preparation for her first winter. She no longer looked like E.T.’s cousin. Her face had been sculpted into the aristocratic angles of her mother’s.