Cleo

by Helen Brown

  We’d survived two Christmases without Sam, and two of his birthdays. The days when grief was still raw were interspersed with a slowly increasing number of “good” days. Optimism was fragile, though. Like a shoot forcing itself through the earth after a long winter, I was easily crushed.

  Bolstered by Jim’s offer, I was walking through the city center one morning feeling unusually buoyant. Valerie, an acquaintance from Sam’s preschool, approached, arranging her face in that funeral-parlor expression that had become so familiar. “How are you?” she asked in the old terminal-diagnosis voice. “I was thinking of you the other day when my great-aunt Lucy died…”

  After listening to Valerie’s story (great-aunt Lucy dropped dead digging potatoes, aged ninety-seven) I hurried home and picked up the phone. “Jim? I’ll take the job.”

  Resilience

  There are no changes in a cat’s life. Only adventures.

  The saddest thing about leaving Wellington was saying good-bye to Ginny. She stood at the top of the zigzag, wind blowing her earrings horizontal. But with the house sold and the car packed to the roof, it was too late to change my mind. I sensed we’d always be part of each other’s lives.

  “You’ll be fabulous, darling,” she said, blowing a kiss through the passenger window. “Byeee!”

  Rosie predicted our cat would be traumatized by the move north. Cleo didn’t do predictable. The more we treated Cleo as an honorary human, the more she behaved like one—though she was always angling for goddess status. (Why sit on someone’s lap at the dinner table when you can climb onto the table and graze free range?)

  An eight-hour car journey cooped inside a basket was hardly luxury travel for a feline deity, but she didn’t complain. She dozed contentedly with a sock for company most of the way.

  We’d bought an old tram conductor’s cottage in Ponsonby, a scruffy inner suburb. I adored the laid-back atmosphere on Ponsonby Road, where Polynesian women glided alongside street kids and drunks pretending to be artists. Even the graffiti was worth reading. I didn’t realize it then, but it was just a matter of time before the espresso machines and earnest young couples moved in.

  I had fallen in love with the cottage the moment I saw it. Sunny, outward-looking and easy to reach, it was everything our Wellington house wasn’t. With big sash windows and woodwork furled like lace around the veranda it smiled out onto the street. Wisteria coiled through the latticework. Flower baskets swung in the breeze. A white picket fence flashed its teeth at a bottlebrush tree.

  The inside layout was pleasantly predictable, with three double bedrooms off a central hallway that led to an open-plan living area. Sometime during the seventies a morose hippie had renovated the place. He must have been depressed. Why else would he have laid dark brown carpet in every room and lined the kitchen with treacle-colored wood? While character features such as paneled ceilings and brick fireplaces had been kept, there were occasional lapses of taste. I was willing to forgive the penchant for redwood fence stain, but had to seriously avoid dwelling on the Spanish archway between the living room and kitchen.

  The backyard was perfect for kids. From a sunroom off the kitchen, French doors opened onto a redwood deck, with built-in benches around the edges. Under a pergola groaning with grapes was, joy of joys, a hot tub. Beyond the deck, a luscious patch of grass, miraculously flat, had enough room for a jungle gym and trampoline. A banana tree waved its glistening fronds from over the back fence. Everything about the place screamed happily ever after. Steve wasn’t so sure, but was willing to go along with my enthusiasm.

  The basket on the backseat emitted a regal meow. Obeying Rosie’s pre-trip instructions, Rob carried Cleo, basket and all, through the gate. He went inside and lowered the basket onto the floor. (I’d known the house was meant to be ours the moment I slapped eyes on the carpet. We were destined to live with offensive floor coverings.) Carefully, slowly, he opened the lid. Rosie had warned us Cleo could be so disoriented from the trip she might cower in her carrying case for hours.

  A pair of black ears rose from the wicker rim, followed by two eyes, black whiskers and a nose. The eyes rolled sideways to inspect the shabby hallway, then upwards to check all people slaves were present. Cleo then sprang daintily from her bower and, like a sniper sussing out an enemy village, padded through the house, sniffing the carpet and investigating corners in every room.

  In the bathroom her search for spiders under the decrepit claw-foot bath was rewarded with a satisfyingly crunchy snack. The kitchen revealed another treasure—a colony of hyper-active ants under the sink. With this much live-in livestock, the house was custom-made for her.

  Cleo particularly approved of the French doors’ ability to intensify solar rays. Yawning, she stretched across the doorway, her fur shimmering blue-black in the heat. Her eyes shrank to translucent slits while the human slaves heaved boxes and suitcases over the threshold, all the time trying not to trip over our Egyptian princess. No doubt her ancestors had dozed through similar scenes while the pyramids were being built.

  Rosie had instructed us to keep Cleo inside for two days in case she panicked and attempted to escape back to Wellington. Basking happily in her personal tanning clinic, our cat showed no interest in cutting loose. The genes that had adapted to cope with the heat of ancient Egypt reveled in Auckland’s subtropical climate.

  I hoped the rest of us would be able to follow Cleo’s example and adjust to all the changes, but the fresh start had no hope in the marriage department. Steve’s commute to Wellington was going to mean more time apart. We’d given up trying to reach across the valley of our differences and started having separate social lives. The friends I made he found offensively loud, while I found his friends unnervingly introspective. He set up camp on a sofa bed in the sunroom. We tried to kid ourselves that for the sake of the children we could still be friends, but not in that way.

  Although Rob had been popular at his old school, its formal approach to learning had proved an uncomfortable match for him. I’d begun to dread perching on dwarf-sized chairs during parent interviews listening to twelve-year-old teachers drone on about Rob being bright but needing to work harder. Having spent most of my school career gazing out classroom windows admiring the quality of sunlight on distant trees (and once a pair of dogs demonstrating something I’d only ever seen in line drawings in a book about teenage health Mum had left on my bed), I sympathized entirely with Rob. The only difference between Rob and me was he was working hard at school. He was frustrated that his Herculean efforts at reading and arithmetic were acknowledged with Cs and Ds. Even though his teachers were barely old enough to chew solids they had power and (like most dictators and children) knew they were right. I was tired of hearing them imply Rob had “problems,” not the least of which was a dead brother and unhappily married parents. They were unable to appreciate his unconventional methods of absorbing information and were too lazy or unimaginative to go out of their way to help him.

  The Auckland move gave him a chance to try a more laid-back school, though I hadn’t expected it to be quite so relaxed. Every surface, inside and out, was smothered with children’s artwork in violent primary colors. The playground equipment (concrete pipes, giant wooden cable spools) resembled leftovers from major roadworks. His new teacher, Mrs. Roberts, had a fuzz of red hair and aquamarine eyes with an otherworldly sparkle. With a tie-dye silk scarf looped over her shoulders she casually mentioned Rob’s lovely aura.

  “She’s Alternative,” I explained to Rob as we scrambled through a giant pipe to get back to the car. “Everything around here is, a bit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t expect you to work too hard. If you don’t like pottery classes, you get an alternative, like dance or theater. Nobody here knew Sam. You don’t have to be the boy whose brother died anymore. Just be you.”

  It had yet to occur to me that dance, theater and pottery might not be a perfect match for a boy who’d built so many model airplanes his bedroom wa
s a miniature version of the Battle of Britain. At the beach while other kids jumped mindlessly in the surf he spent hours constructing cities complete with drainage systems and overhead bridges. I should have realized such a child is unlikely to squeeze himself into tights and beg to play the prince in Swan Lake. Nevertheless, he was willing to give the new school a try.

  The next challenge was finding someone trustworthy, lovable and entirely faultless to look after Lydia. Even though Jim had promised flexible hours I knew I’d have to show up at the office most days. My heart ached at the thought of leaving one-year-old Lydia with a stranger.

  What I was looking for, I explained to the nanny agency, was a cross between Mary Poppins and the Virgin Mary. The nanny agent laughed, but it wasn’t the cynical snort of someone who was about to offer a child molester in nanny’s clothing. It was a crystalline laugh of recognition. “I have that exact person on my books,” she said. “Her name is Anne Marie, and I can hardly believe this, but she’s actually available. She has people lining up asking her to work for them, though. You’ll have to find out if she likes you first.”

  The nanny interviews us?

  Anne Marie’s credentials couldn’t have been better. Not only had she trained at the prestigious Norland nanny school in London, she’d raised four children of her own.

  I was awestruck when she appeared on our doorstep wearing a combination of pastel pink and white devoid of a single stain. Her shoes glowed like a pair of snowballs. Her brown eyes were warm, though, especially when she saw Lydia (who adored Anne Marie on the spot). When the baby beamed a welcome, raised her chubby arms and wrapped them around Anne Marie’s neck I experienced the primitive stab of jealousy every working mother feels when she hands her child over to a caregiver.

  After a day of anxious waiting the phone rang. Anne Marie said she was willing to take us on.

  I could hardly believe my luck to be working on a newspaper again. I’d forgotten how much I’d missed the sad/funny/clever misfits who inhabit newsrooms. Like a lost wanderer returned to her tribe, I finally belonged again—alongside all the other outsiders who’d chosen journalism because no other employer would tolerate their quirky antisocial ways.

  I loved Mary, the glamorous, self-doubting Irish fashion writer, and Colin, the rock reporter whose sexy melancholy had women sticking to him like plasters. Tina, the features editor, was highly strung, and could erupt into platinum rages. Yet every now and then her ice-queen mask melted to reveal a heart that was passionately pure.

  Nicole, the television writer, was beautiful and blond, with legs she’d stolen from Marlene Dietrich. I assumed Nicole wouldn’t waste her time with mere humans. But she’d been a teenage bride like me, and was wading through a divorce and custody swamp. Nicole was offbeat and wounded like the rest of us, and tough as a terrier when she sunk her teeth into a story. I adored them all.

  I also reveled in wearing proper clothes again. For the past decade my wardrobe had consisted of track pants, maternity clothes and dressing gowns (in tones of mostly grey, black and brown). It was exhilarating to slip into a fuchsia-colored suit with a cobalt blue bow tie (in retrospect a crime against fashion). Applying makeup every morning and learning to walk in shoes with heels again was thrilling. I felt like Cinderella, who’d just found out the ball wasn’t over after all. The music was louder, the guests were zanier and I was invited back to collect my size 10C glass slipper and get back on the floor.

  As a general features writer, I didn’t care what stories they were going to assign me. I’d have been grateful if they’d asked me to write about bedbugs. To my astonishment, Jim and Tina trusted my abilities beyond logic. They assigned me interviews with international performers like James Taylor and Michael Crawford and writers such as Margaret Atwood and Terry Pratchett. Crazier still, they sent me to meet our nation’s porcine prime minister and even (for heaven’s sake) the president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. I soon learned that the more elevated on the global stage people are the more humble and approachable they tend to be, despite the bewildering jet lag involved in getting to our agricultural outpost. Mary Robinson was more animated when she talked about helping her kids do homework around their kitchen table than anything else we discussed. (Which was just as well. International politics was hardly my beat.)

  Jim also had me writing editorials, where I’d switch into pipe-and-slippers mode and hammer out the paper’s views on everything from atomic energy to zoos. Producing one of those within the required forty minutes was the equivalent of being spun inside a microwave oven on high.

  Distraught with panic one morning, I wrote an entire leader raging against the perils of “alcahol.” Either my fingers fumbled on the typewriter keys or all those years gazing out of classroom windows had finally come home to roost. My bizarre spelling slipped through the subeditors (spellcheck was yet to be invented), no doubt lowering the newspaper’s status to litter-box liner for several weeks. To my disbelief and eternal gratitude Jim and Tina refrained from throwing me back on the streets. They kept on nodding, smiling and tossing plum stories my way. Maybe all the real journalists had caught some form of plague through drinking too much and sleeping with each other and died off.

  But much as I loved the office the best part of the day was when I slid the key in the front door of the old cottage to see Cleo prancing down the hall to greet me with a welcome meow.

  I’d started to notice Cleo was developing her language skills. Apart from the charming hello meow she gave whenever any of us arrived home, and the polite mew when someone picked her up, there was the assertive let me come in, you heartless morons! wail when she was shut out. She had better manners than the four of us put together. Whenever anyone opened a door to let her in she always responded with a clipped and demure thank you as she sailed past.

  Mealtimes, especially if they were delayed, reduced her to a stream of alley cat language. Standing in front of the fridge she’d yowl, If you don’t feed me right now I’m going to jump on your head and tattoo your eyeballs.

  Cleo moved houses and cities without so much as a twitch of a whisker. I worried that living on a street for the first time she might get run over—especially with her penchant for after-dark expeditions. Who’d see a black cat against a darkened street? Once again I was underestimating her. She had a traffic-smart gene, no doubt inherited from her father.

  After a raucous fight with a larger cat under the house one night she appeared at the front door with a torn ear. I tried to keep her inside after that, but every night she wailed until I let her out. Even though the fight had been serious, she must have established her territory with it. We never heard another scrap.

  Her bird-hunting skills shifted to new levels. The shoes in my wardrobe were stuffed with tiny corpses and clusters of feathers. After persistent begging from the kids, I dug a hole in the corner of the back garden and fitted it with a fishpond and water plants. The resident goldfish became a voyeuristic fixation for Cleo. I doubted they’d survive past Christmas. Fortunately, they were wily enough to spend most of their waking hours up to no good under the lily pads. They made so many babies I wondered if there was such a thing as goldfish contraception.

  Cleo demonstrated how good manners and charm can coexist under one skin, along with backstreet resilience. Following her example, I tried to shrug off embarrassing moments at work (for example, when I took too long to realize the man panting on the other end of the phone line hadn’t been for a run but was indulging in a less wholesome activity. Or the time I had to field dozens of calls after getting the names of two fashion models confused and captioning a classy one with a slutty one’s name.) Like Cleo on the rare occasions she slipped off a fence to tumble into the hydrangeas, I endured the humiliation, shook it off, hoped I wouldn’t be stupid enough to repeat the mistake—and prayed lawyers wouldn’t be involved.

  Over the following year, Steve and I settled into a pattern of avoiding each other when he was at home. According to statistics, women are far more l
ikely to end a relationship than men. I’ve never been a fan of statistics. Another theory is that men who want to end relationships make themselves impossible to live with, so the woman is forced into ending it.

  Our marriage was like a bowl of egg whites. We’d both sweated over it, whipping air through, occasionally working it into peaks. At times it looked like we might make a decent meringue out of it, but as any cook knows, if you whip egg whites too long, if you try too hard, they simply go flat.

  Things came to a head one afternoon when I arrived home from work. He was standing in the driveway. I can’t remember exactly what the conversation was about, probably something trivial, like who’d left the butter on the bench so Cleo could get it. It escalated into an argument—and we never argued. Suddenly we were talking about divorce.

  We both knew he couldn’t go on sleeping in the sunroom the rest of his days. Nevertheless, it was shocking to finally have the D word out in the open.

  Steve looked sideways at a red bottlebrush flower and said he wanted to keep lawyers out of it as much as possible. The flower nodded agreement. A car backfired farther down the street. The front garden seemed an unlikely place to be having such a conversation. But where do people talk about divorce? Certainly not candlelit restaurants or incense-scented bedrooms, as far as I knew.

  He said he’d move out next week. He wanted to take the painting of yachts that was in the hallway if I didn’t mind, and some other things as well. I was shocked at how carefully he’d thought it through, though realistically he’d had years to mull it over. He wanted the kids fifty-fifty and suggested we’d sort the money out later.

  Oh, and I could keep the cat.