by Helen Brown
I’d gone along with Ginny’s dizzy act in the beginning. With her whacky earrings and fabulous hairdos, she gave the impression of being a blonde in brunette’s clothing. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. I was amazed when she confessed to not only being a midwife but studying for a science degree as well. More important, she introduced me to fake fur and lent me some of her earrings, including some orange dangling Perspex lightning bolts that were beyond electrifying. Ginny taught me how to put false eyelashes on straight and to not be scared of platform shoes. She was becoming the friend I’d always dreamt of—zany, wise, kind and equipped with an almost psychic ability to turn up when needed.
Rob and Jason were bonded by their devotion to Cleo. They thought it was about time she had kittens. They were disgusted when I explained she’d had an operation.
“That’s so-o mean!” said Jason, shaking his head with bewilderment.
“Yeah,” Rob added. “Why didn’t you let Cleo have babies?”
Standing on the grass against an orange sunset, Ginny and I exchanged smiles. We’d become such close friends it felt as though we were living in an Antipodean version of an African longhouse. With one short zig of the zigzag between our homes, the boys ran freely from one house to the other. Even though Ginny and Jason lived in two-storied splendor, they seemed oblivious to our shabby kitsch.
“Well,” I said, “a cat can have babies three or four times a year. And if she had five kittens in each litter that means Cleo would have twenty babies in one year. Imagine twenty kittens running through the house.”
Rob thought that sounded fantastic. When I asked where they’d all sleep, Jason volunteered that at least one kitten could live at his house.
“They’d still have nineteen kittens left,” said Ginny. “And it wouldn’t be long before they were able to have kittens. They’d end up with hundreds and thousands of kittens.”
“Wow!” said Rob, turning to me. “Why were you so mean?”
I tried to explain the operation’s benefits. Without it Cleo would want to go out on dates. She’d get moody when we kept her inside. The vet had assured me having her spayed protected her from infections and some types of cancer.
“Nobody stopped you having babies,” Rob grumbled.
This surgical reproductive talk was reassurance we’d done the right thing in not revealing to Rob details of Steve’s vasectomy reversal, which had involved considerably more time under the knife and greater discomfort than Cleo had undergone. The patient hadn’t once complained, though his eyes sometimes clouded with pain. The surgeon reported that the operation had gone well, though it would be some time before we knew for certain if it had worked. After a stoic recovery, Steve had packed his suitcase and hobbled off to the ferry for another stint at sea.
Cleo tuned into the boys’ disapproval of me. Squirming in my arms, she demanded to be put on the grass. She stalked around the side of the house looking like Naomi Campbell. Watching her disappear I felt a momentary twinge of guilt. Perhaps a creature as graceful as Cleo deserved to populate the world.
“You should’ve let her have babies!” said Rob, harrumphing off down the path. “C’mon Jason. Let’s dig.”
The boys’ shared love of Cleo had expanded to other interests, including a vast excavation they’d undertaken in a corner of our garden so wild and neglected I’d barely noticed it before. Shaded with ferns and an air of forbidden mystery, it was a perfect spot for male bonding over a major dig.
Day after day they dragged Steve’s pickax and shovels out from under our house. The equipment looked huge and dangerous in their hands. Today’s parent would probably be sued for letting them loose with such man-sized weaponry. But the hole-digging enterprise really mattered to the boys.
A fireball sun was sinking over the hills. A shawl of frost nestled in the valleys. The city hummed companionably below us. When I asked Ginny if we should call the boys back to get them inside and fed she shrugged. Digging was obviously an important rite in the passage to manhood.
Even though I was tempted to swathe Rob in Bubble Wrap and protect him from every potential dent, I knew it would be a mistake. I had to ease up and allow him the freedom a boy needs to develop into a confident young male. The hole-digging mission went on week after week, much to Rata’s delight (the only expert digger among them). Perched on a branch, Cleo kept lookout for inadvertent birdlife while the boys swaggered like cowboys and exchanged grown-up cursewords below.
Nobody, including the boys, knew exactly why they were digging the hole. Its purpose changed all the time. They were tunneling through to the other side of the earth for a while, until they started feeling sweaty and wondered if they were getting too close to the core. Changing strategy a few days later, they decided to search for the chest of gold that Captain Cook had almost certainly buried there on his last voyage. A few days later they discovered an old wire mattress base under the house. They carried it outside and stretched it across the hole and made a lethal-looking trampoline.
I wondered if handling the moist weight of the soil was therapy for Rob. The sight of him spattered with dirt and flushed with satisfaction after a digging session reminded me of my grandmother. Mother of nine children, she’d spent most of her life on the same patch of farmland, and must have faced countless anxieties and disappointments. Whenever worry scratched at her innards she headed down her back steps, past the henhouse to her garden. The cure for every sorrow, she said, could be found on her knees on a patch of earth with a trowel in one hand. The ritualistic comfort of turning the earth was her psychotherapy. Deep engagement with her garden’s volcanic loam kept her earthed and connected to the planet’s ancient rhythms.
Though she’d long since moved on, I was beginning to understand her better now, especially since I’d spent more time outside while the boys were digging.
In a frivolous act of optimism I planted tulip bulbs for spring. To cover a seed with soil is to demonstrate faith in the future. Tearing out weeds, watering and nurturing the sleeping seed are acts of trust in Nature. When a green shoot appears the gardener experiences a similar rush to someone who has just created a work of art or given birth. Gardening is the closest some people get to feeling like a god. To watch a seedling sprout and unfurl into a flower or vegetable is to take part in a miracle. The gardener also learns acceptance of decay and death, to almost welcome a season of withdrawal as part of the cycle.
Cleo, on the other hand, had another way of dealing with life’s hiccups. She headed for high places. As we wandered down the path to inspect the boys’ earthworks, Ginny suddenly stopped and pointed a crimson fingernail at our roof. Perched on top of a chimney pot was a familiar silhouette.
“What’s Cleo doing up there?” she asked.
“Probably sulking about the operation,” I said. “She must be feeling pretty fit to get up there. Cleo!”
But our cat sat still as a statue against the orange sky, her back to us, her tail in a graceful loop over the chimney.
“Are you sure she’s okay?” said Ginny doubtfully.
“It’s her way of dealing with things.”
“Do you think she’s stuck?” asked Ginny.
“Maybe she’s enjoying the view.”
Cleo must’ve had fun climbing up there, but getting down looked impossible, even for an agile cat.
“Why do these things always happen when Steve’s away at sea?” I complained. Trudging around the side of the house to find a ladder, I suddenly thought of a new motto: “Keep one eye on the stars and the other on the ground to watch out for dog shit.”
Ginny, whose generosity knew no bounds, offered to climb up and get Cleo. But even a circus performer would think twice before scaling a ladder in fishnet stockings, platform shoes and earrings the size of post office clocks.
Thanking her, I leaned the ladder against the house and looked skywards.
Two tiny black ears stood out against the sunset. The ladder seemed suddenly frail and rickety—and far talle
r than I’d remembered.
As I climbed, a wave of nausea washed up from my knees to the top of my neck, threatening to burst out from the back of my throat. Vertigo had never had such a physical effect on me before.
“Shall I call the fire brigade?” Ginny called helpfully. I regretted glancing down. Ginny, her face turned up in concern, had shrunk to the size of a brightly colored beetle.
I reached the top of the ladder and edged onto the roof. Ex cept it wasn’t so much a roof as a collection of rusty holes holding hands, hardly ideal support for a not very petite woman.
“Here, kitty!” I called. The shape on top of the chimney remained motionless. The poor feline was frozen with terror. “Oh, Cleo! Don’t worry. I’ll get you down.”
The roof squeaked and groaned in protest as I crawled toward the chimney, my stomach churning. The thought was just occurring to me that if Cleo, an agile animal equipped with four legs, was having trouble getting off the roof it might be close to impossible for a lumbering vertigo victim.
“Hold on! I’m nearly there,” I called.
A pair of luminous eyes loomed above my head and narrowed to a bad-tempered glower. Cleo shook her head in a bored, dismissive manner. She rose gracefully to her feet on top of the chimney, arched her back and yawned. Without hesitation she sprang nimbly down to the roof, leapt across the rusty tin, jumped onto a nearby tree and slid groundwards, landing inches away from Ginny’s platform shoes.
“I think I’m going to throw up!” I wailed down at Ginny.
“You’ll be fine. Just take it slowly. Crawl back to the ladder, that’s right. Turn around. Watch out for the gutter…there you go!”
When I finally reached terra firma I took three steps and threw up in a hydrangea bush.
“Why didn’t you say you were scared of heights?” asked Ginny.
“It’s not usually this bad. I haven’t felt this sick since I was…pregnant.”
Indulgence
Stress—a waste of nap time.
A cat’s lips are arranged in a permanent smile. Even when it’s miserable, the edges of its mouth point skywards. This is not the case with humans, whose mouths have a tendency to turn down at the corners, especially as they grow older. A human who wears the effortless smile of cat is in possession of a happy secret.
A smile appeared on Steve’s lips when he heard the news. He carried it with him back to sea and was still wearing it a week later. I had a cat’s smile too. We agreed not to make it official for a few weeks in case the pregnancy came to nothing.
When we decided it was safe to tell Rob, his smile was an explosion of sunlight.
He immediately put in an order for a baby brother. It had to be a boy, he said, because boys were what we had in our family. I agreed and promised to do my best. Then he ran across the zigzag to tell Jason, who of course told Ginny.
Arriving breathless on the doorstep, she enveloped me in the spicy embrace of her Opium perfume and did an excellent job feigning surprise. “Congratulations, darling! It’s going to be wonderful.” She offered to deliver the baby when the time came. I still had trouble believing my zany friend had another life in sterile gloves. Still, I liked the idea of our baby’s first glimpse of humanity including a woman in false eyelashes and a zebra-skin jacket.
I sank into a pregnancy that combined squeamishness with ravenous hunger. It didn’t seem so long ago that New Zealanders had survived on a diet of grey mince and mutton. During my teenage years, Mum introduced me to an exotic new food called pizza. We’d grown more sophisticated since then. We’d learned wine didn’t necessarily come out of card board boxes, bread could be sold in sticks and there were more than two types of cheese in the world. When a smart new deli opened around the corner we knew we’d arrived.
Profiterole. ProfEETerole, if pronounced correctly, according to the deli man who baked them. Roll your tongue around the word and it sounds almost erotic.
The grumpy profiterole man was Michelangelo in a chef’s apron. How he could produce the lightest, puffiest, most delectable pastries on earth was beyond me. But who would guess a beige moth could produce a gorgeous green gum emperor caterpillar?
He laid them out every morning like naked sunbathers in his shop window. Lightly tanned, each oblong encased a glob of cream. Mudslides of chocolate sauce trickled over the cases. The shop window steamed around the edges, inviting—no, insisting—I venture inside.
“One profiterole, please,” I asked.
“ProFEETerole!” he snapped.
“Make that two.”
After all, I was eating for two now (three, in fact, counting Cleo).
Profiterole man grunted. Anyone would think I was trying to buy his children.
Waddling back up the zigzag I could feel the pastry crumbling and the cream oozing through the paper bag.
It was tempting to lower my globular body onto the seat halfway up the zigzag and scoff them there. But there was a danger I’d encounter Mrs. Sommerville. She’d shoot me that Look of hers. Disapproving as ice cliffs, the Sommerville Look was designed to make boys confess to throwing snails at postmen and grown women suddenly feel as if they’d forgotten to put their underwear on.
I decided to slog on. Besides, I wasn’t the only one holding out for profiteroles. Cleo had developed an obsession with profiterole cream. The day she stole a splodge off my finger was like a heroin addict’s first hit. Ever since, she’d taken to licking empty paper bags, the edges of my plate, my sleeve, anywhere trace elements could be found.
Every morning she waited, outlined against a stained-glass panel in the porch and looking like an Art Nouveau poster, for my return. The moment I arrived puffing at our front gate she galloped towards me, tail high, head slightly tilted. Together we’d trudge inside and sink into the recliner rocker, footrest up, headrest down, and rip open the paper bag.
Cleo was changing my attitude to indulgence. Guilt isn’t in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels, and savor it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don’t waste energy counting the number of calories they’ve consumed or the hours they’ve frittered away sunbathing.
Cats don’t beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don’t get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are—a meaningless waste of nap time.
I loved lazing around the half-renovated bungalow taking chill-out lessons from a cat. I slowed down, zoned out and tried listening to my body. It was screaming for rest, not just to cope with the demands of pregnancy, but to harvest energy for deeper levels of recovery. We became shameless sleepers, indulging in afternoon naps and morning ones, too. Eventually, after I’d waddled home from an after-school visit to Ginny’s, Cleo and I discovered the delights of the early evening snooze.
I was her hot-water bottle. Either Cleo sensed the presence of new life inside me and wanted to be part of it, or she simply enjoyed the extra warmth and curves of the expanding mound. Almost horizontal in our recliner rocker, we had an ideal padded nest in which to laze away the weeks.
During the middle months of my pregnancy Cleo arranged herself around the top of the bulge, her head perfectly positioned for an idle tickle. Cleo adored small circular massages in the dent behind her ears, interspersed with full-length body strokes from her forehead to the tip of her tail. The experience was equally pleasurable for the masseuse, and at night my hands tingled with the memory of her fur.
As weeks progressed and my mound grew, Cleo reverted to snuggling wherever she could, stretching up my side or sometimes around the lower regions of my expanding abdomen. Claws were politely sheathed, until she could bear it no longer. Overcome with pleasure, she would knead them rhythmically into her protesting human heater.
A cat’s
fur has many textures, from the dense velvety covering on her nose to the silky pads of her paws; the sleek fur on her back to the fluffy undergrowth on her belly. Strange that such softness contrasts with claws and teeth sharp as pins. But every feline is a puzzle of contradictions—adoring one moment, aloof the next; a nurturing parent but also a murderer so cold-blooded it toys with wounded prey.
Sprawled in the armchair with Cleo I had an urge to feel wool nudging through my fingers again. To knit the spiderweb delicacy of baby clothes was beyond my capability, so I bought three balls of blue wool (thick) and some chunky needles, and embarked on a plain-stitch scarf for Rob.
The rhythm of needles clicking is soothing, like a heartbeat. How a single thread of wool can be knotted together to create a three-dimensional item of clothing is almost as much a mystery as how a conglomeration of cells multiplies to make a baby.
Every stitch is complete in itself, though attached to stitches past and future. As I wound the wool around the needles to form each stitch, I thought of Sam, and I gently cast off. Cross needles, wind wool, release…cross needles, wind wool, release…If I practiced this ten thousand times, or a million, perhaps my soul could do the same. Release, release…
Cleo was mesmerized; her eyes revolved in unison with the needles. With precision timing, she swatted them as they swept past her face and caught them between her teeth. The enemy of the knitting needles made such a nuisance of herself sometimes I’d scrape her off my lap and put her on the floor. Yet that was no punishment—the snake of blue wool unfurling from its ball was a thrilling foe.
Apart from occasional squabbles over wool and needles, our days drifted away companionably eating, dreaming and following patches of sun around the house. Every moment was a stitch in a larger fabric that was gradually becoming a life connected to the one we had before with Sam, yet entirely different. Household rhythms unfurled effortlessly as a ball of wool. Spoons clattered into kitchen drawers only to be taken out, used, washed, dried and put back again. Each morning Rob and Jason trudged through long shadows down the path to school to return at that time in the afternoon when the day is getting tired. Piles of laundry waited to be sorted, washed and pegged on the clothesline overlooking the shipping terminal below. Then taken down, folded, ironed, put in cupboards, worn and dumped in familiar-smelling piles again. Complete in themselves, each with a beginning, middle and end, these comforting cycles interwove into the semblance of a normal life.