Cleo

by Helen Brown

  Watching him plunge into the surf I sometimes imagined his older brother alongside him. What would Sam look like by now? Probably a little shorter than his younger brother, but even-featured and no doubt handsome in his own way. I wondered what byways that unconventional streak might have taken Sam on. Maybe he’d have turned my hair grey dabbling in drugs and embarking on an uncertain career in filmmaking. Alternatively, he may have become a mother’s dream, sailed through law school and be halfway to owning a house in the suburbs. Time-wasting fantasies were no use.

  During the holidays after his first university year Rob, Philip and I were walking to the local shopping center. Rob suddenly turned pale and said he felt unwell. “Sick?” I said. “You’re never sick.” Rob was equally bewildered. Such a stranger to illness, he had no idea about the etiquette of throwing up in public. Instead of bending discreetly over the gutter, he spun about, showering us with his breakfast. I assumed he’d eaten a dodgy hamburger and would recover in no time. I assumed wrong.

  He took to his bed and was unable to eat or drink for several days. His GP assured us it wasn’t serious and wouldn’t last long. But by the end of the week he was severely dehydrated and admitted to hospital, where he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel condition, cause unknown. Rob’s attack was diagnosed as very severe.

  I sat helpless at his bedside, watching him grow weaker by the day. Once again I mustered all my life-giving power as his mother and willed him to get better. Yet again it seemed to fail. Several times I excused myself to find an alcove to weep in. The prospect of losing another son was unbearable.

  A young surgeon in a green gown fresh from theater stood over the bed. If Rob didn’t respond to the drugs and his already swollen colon expanded another centimeter, he said, the entire lower bowel (more than two meters long) would have to be removed. The surgeon described the operation as Big.

  A tower was under construction outside Rob’s hospital window. I willed time to pass, so we could move forward to a happier phase, when the building was finished and Rob (please every deity that ever existed) was well again. The more I bullied the minutes to speed into hours, the more begrudgingly they crawled. Sometimes they seemed to stop altogether, like belligerent donkeys on a mountain pass.

  Rob and I reenacted his babyhood. I stroked his hair and helped him sip an unpalatable canned drink that contained essential nutrients. I tried to find ways to help him feel better. Reducing his fear was difficult when I was almost equally terrified. A rose quartz crystal on his stomach seemed to help soothe violent seizures of pain. His face always lit up when he was told someone was praying for him or sending healing energy. Rob welcomed a visit from Patrick, a psychic healer. When Patrick took his hand Rob said he felt an invisible force holding his other hand.

  I stuck a photo of a mountain glowing pink in a sunset above his hospital bed. Rob looked up at it and said he’d get there someday. He’d always dreamed of taking time out to work on a ski field.

  Fleets of doctors and surgeons visited Rob in the mornings. While they claimed to be using blood tests and X-rays to determine if Rob needed surgery, they seemed to rely more on how he looked and responded to them.

  As they drew close to making the grim decision, I urged Rob to drag himself out of bed and walk down the corridor when the doctors were due. The effort of struggling fifty meters to the showers was enormous. Rob could hardly walk, let alone wheel the drip he was attached to. As we glided painfully past the team of doctors, their faces froze with astonishment. Rob’s triumph at that moment was up there with winning an Olympic marathon.

  The surgery was put on hold. Rob’s condition slowly improved. We knew he was on the mend the night we found him sitting in the ward’s television room.

  “How do I look?” he asked Philip.

  Not great, to tell the truth. Rob had lost more than twenty pounds through his ordeal. His skin glowed white against his red bathrobe, and he was still attached to a drip. Nevertheless, the return of masculine vanity was the best sign yet.

  He was prescribed hefty doses of steroids for the foreseeable future and warned that his colon might eventually have to be removed. By the time he was allowed home Rob was a skeletal version of his former self. Just weeks earlier he’d been waterskiing, rising from the lake like a young Apollo. It was hard to believe all that muscle and tan could evaporate so quickly. He was too weak to walk to the parking lot. He waited on a bench outside the hospital doors while I collected the car.

  We’d tidied and freshened up his bedroom at home, but more than anything he wanted to be outside. I set up a chair and blanket for him in the garden, where Cleo quickly joined him.

  “I never realized the sky was such an intense blue,” he said as the cat nestled into the folds of his trousers that were now several sizes too big for him.

  He examined the grass, trees and flowers with the peeled-back clarity of one who has been close to death.

  “The colors are so bright,” he said. “The birds, the insects. I used to take them all for granted. It’s a miracle. I hope I always see the world this clearly.”

  As soon as he was strong enough, Rob packed his ancient car to the roof and drove south. Miraculously, the car held together long enough to get him to the far end of South Island. He spent the winter skiing and making coffees in a ski field cafe near Queenstown. After that, he was ready to get back to university and finish his degree.

  But his health was far from perfect. Although he suffered regular “flare-ups” the steroids ensured none were as bad as the first attack. With a stony sense of dread I noticed the steroid doses had to be increased every few months to keep his condition under control.

  In case we were lapsing into an assumption that life was dull, Philip arrived home from work one evening to announce he’d had a promotion. The only complication was the job was in Melbourne, Australia.

  Missing

  A cat reserves the right to disappear without explanation.

  My habitual terror of flying was replaced by a different neurosis—cat-in-the-hold anxiety. What if Cleo was freezing back there? Or if her carrier had been placed alongside a pit bull terrier with anger management issues? My ear was cocked for the sound of muffled meowing from the plane’s rear. A pair of stewards performed the flight instructions with the flourish of chorus members from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—“Should an oxygen mask appear, bat your eyelashes, swoosh that plastic tube and gyrate those hips!” Clattering trolleys, yelling babies and pilot’s announcements drowned all hopes I had of hearing distress calls from Cleo.

  I tried not to worry. There was a chance she wasn’t even on our plane. We’d been told she might arrive up to twenty-four hours later than us.

  The parched continent spread like a giant poppadom beneath us. Engines whined as we descended into Melbourne. Fear flipped into excitement and back again. As we climbed into a cab I savored the dry air and the giant blue sky. Everything about Australia was magnified, more confident and outgoing. I hoped we could burrow out a life for ourselves on its sun-burnt expanse.

  The girls regarded the move with almost as little enthusiasm as the convicts who’d been shipped to the country one hundred and fifty years earlier. Unlike the British penal system, we’d gone out of our way to make their transportation to Australia seem attractive. In short, we’d bribed them. Shamelessly. Katharine, who’d initially insisted on a kangaroo farm, settled for a Barbie house with a motorized elevator. Lydia was still working a deal to be driven to her new school in one of the horse-drawn carriages she’d seen trotting around the central city (“the one with red feathers on the horses’ heads”).

  As the cab pulled up outside our rented villa in the leafy suburb of Malvern, I was still worrying about our cat. Poor old Cleo. She was probably languishing in some horrible transit prison for animals. Maybe I should have accepted Rosie’s offer to adopt her. Rosie had pointed out that, at the age of fifteen, Cleo was the human equivalent of seventy-five years old. It was, she
hinted, nothing short of a miracle our cat had survived this long, considering her rugged lifestyle with us. She’d implied that Cleo’s vital organs might not be up to the rigors of jet travel. A short retirement in Rosie’s cat menagerie was possibly a more humane option. Nevertheless, Cleo was woven into our family history as firmly as cat fur into a favorite blanket. We weren’t perfect cat parents. But leaving her behind was unthinkable.

  A lot had changed since our return from Switzerland five years earlier. After leaving school with a scholarship Rob completed his degree and decided to embark on an engineering career in Melbourne. Lydia was on the brink of becoming a teenager. Katharine was about to start school. My ex-husband Steve had married Amanda, and they’d produced a daughter. On a much sadder note, Mum had succumbed to bowel cancer and died after a few weeks of illness. Her suffering in the final days had been terrible to watch, yet she embraced death with great courage. As she’d withered to a shell of her former self, her spirit seemed to distill into dazzling purity, which blazed from every part of her. Harrowing as it was, I’d felt privileged to be alone with her as she heaved her last painful breath. I missed our phone conversations, her ceaseless encouragement, her refusal to regard life in its dimmest light.

  Some things had stayed the same, however. Cleo was still undisputed queen of our household.

  “There’s something on the doorstep,” said Rob.

  There was a large box in the shadows of the front porch. I assumed it was a piece of junk the previous tenants had left behind. It had a mesh side. We approached tentatively. A pair of familiar green eyes glowered out from behind the wire.

  “Look who’s here!” said Philip.

  The eyes glared back as if to say, Well you certainly took your time!

  “Cleo! You’re here already!” the girls cried in unison.

  Typical of Cleo’s style, she’d arrived in our new country hours ahead of the rest of us. Somewhere along the line she’d flashed a look at a quarantine officer. He’d recognized an Egyptian goddess when he saw one and given her first-class treatment.

  Cleo devoured her first Australian meal in a matter of minutes. She was adapting faster than the rest of us. My first reaction was to reach for the phone to tell countless people back in New Zealand we’d arrived. They sounded warm and happy to hear from me, but I sensed we were rapidly becoming part of their history.

  Calling home was the easy part. The hard bit was finding new everythings—from doctors and hairdressers to shopping centers and playgrounds. The most daunting “new” was discovering new friends. The importance of an amiable network of people struck home when I had to fill out school forms. For “Emergency Contact: i.e., friend, neighbor etc.” I had no choice but to leave a blank space. We were stranded on a rock of anonymity. If we couldn’t find new friends soon we’d have to invent some. I’d decided to work from home, sending columns back to newspapers and Next magazine in New Zealand. While I loved staying in touch with loyal readers it was a solitary occupation. Mulling over a computer screen in the suburbs was hardly going to raise my chances of meeting friends.

  After keeping Cleo inside for the statutory two days I opened the back door for her. She nudged a tentative nose outside. Her whiskers twitched. She lifted an uncertain paw. Australia, with its concoction of garden smells mingled with possum fur, eucalyptus and parrot feathers, smelled different. Before I could stop her she slithered like a trout between my ankles and disappeared into a clump of bird of paradise.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Katharine. “She’s just exploring. She’ll be back for dinner.”

  Dinnertime came and went. Not a whisker of Cleo. In all her fifteen years she’d never disappeared on us. Dusk faded. The sky turned the color of a bruise and it started to drizzle. Cleo hated rain. We called for her. No answer.

  “She’s probably sheltering under the house,” I said, hoping it was true. “She’ll turn up in the morning.”

  Rain hammered on the roof all night. It wasn’t right. Australia was famous for drought and desert, not downpours. Soon after dawn I hurried out of bed to check doors and windows for a cat asking to be let in. Nothing. Losing our beloved Cleo would be a ghastly omen for our move to Australia. Philip left for his first day at work, a cloud of anxiety in his eyes. After breakfast, the girls and I slid into raincoats and trawled the neighborhood, calling for her. A grumpy white cat stared at us from a window. Across the road I heard a dog bark. While Cleo wasn’t as resilient as she used to be, she was still tough. But what if Australian animals were tougher? If she encountered a rottweiler she might not be able to stare him down. Even though she could still run, she wasn’t an elite athlete anymore.

  Tucking the girls under their blankets that night, I tried to prepare them for heartache. “Cleo’s had a long, exciting life,” I said.

  “Do you think she’s dead?” Lydia asked.

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t feel dead, does she? I think she knows we still need her.”

  I couldn’t help thinking the odds were against us. An old cat runaway in a new country had a survival chance of a thousand to one. With every hour that passed her chances were surely getting slimmer.

  Next day the rain had eased. We searched the neighborhood again. My throat was sore from calling her name. We trailed through laneways and a builder’s yard. We scoured a playground at the end of the street. There seemed no point investigating the busy main road just a couple of houses from our new place. If Cleo had ventured in that direction we wouldn’t be seeing her again.

  Heavyhearted, we turned into the gate. Now I really wished I’d been sensible enough to accept Rosie’s offer to let Cleo spend her sunset years with a certified cat lover. We’d been crazy to move countries. Mentally deranged to think we had sufficient charm and energy to make new friends. Gulping back tears, I draped my arms around the girls’ shoulders and croaked out one last hopeless “Cleeeeeeo!” The houses and trees of our new neighborhood responded with silence.

  A shadow flickered in the basement of the house across the road, the one where we’d heard the dog barking. The shape pushed forwards and squeezed between some gardenia bushes. At first I thought it was some strange Australian animal, an urban wombat, perhaps. But it had ears and whiskers…and…to our great relief, Cleo trotted across the street into our arms. We never found out where she’d been and whether some other family had tried to lure her to their fridge. Whatever she’d been up to, she’d made a decision in our favor.

  Everything in Australia was bolder and more luridly colored—including the birdlife. I assumed Cleo would reassert her reign of terror over the feathered species once she knew her way around. But Australian birds aren’t to be messed with. Assertive as Dame Edna on HRT, they have no intention of becoming a cat’s breakfast.

  Cleo was dazzled by the colors of the rainbow lorikeets, who set themselves up in our backyard pear tree. She ran her tongue over her lips, imagining the pretty toothpicks their green and red feathers would make. But they cackled derisively at the elderly black cat. They knew that if she got anywhere near them they’d claw her to pieces and fillet what was left of her with their beaks.

  A couple of magpies decided to claim vengeance on behalf of the entire bird species. One afternoon I glanced out the kitchen window to see Cleo, head down, tail tucked under, running as fast as she could up the side of the house. Like a pair of spitfires the magpies were chasing her, swooping and diving and squawking with delight. I ran to the door and opened it just in time for Cleo to sprint inside to safety.

  Our four walls couldn’t protect us from everything, though. Just when we thought we were adjusting to our new life we struck our first day over a hundred. I’d always claimed to be a warm-weather person. A few extra notches up the thermometer would be nothing short of delightful. Having grown up in a country that welcomes every ray of warmth, I threw the windows and curtains open. Nothing like a good through-draft. Except this “through-draft” was hurtling straight off the sizzling Outback into our living room. Hea
t lumbered through the house like a monster. Instead of wafting through as heat was supposed to, it plonked itself in every room and expanded like a phantom until it filled every corner and reached the ceiling. My arms and legs swelled to twice their size. My hair hung in damp streamers. My heart thudded in my ears. Paralyzed on the sofa, I could hardly move. I managed to drag a basket of laundry out to the clothesline. Our underwear practically caught fire in the wind.

  We were all overwhelmed by the heat. It was worse for Cleo. Her black coat absorbed the warmth and distributed it through her body like a personal central heating system. She who liked nothing more than roasting herself by an open fire lay seemingly lifeless on her side, limbs rigor-mortis rigid, her tongue a rippling flag of surrender.

  While hot days came and went, Rob’s illness continued to debilitate him. The flare-ups were increasingly frequent and severe. At twenty-four, he was a qualified engineer, yet a normal working life was impossible. The extent of his debilitation struck me the day we took him for a bushwalk, or tried to: he couldn’t walk much farther than the distance between two lampposts. His gastroenterologist told him the steroid levels he was taking were unsustainable. Rob agreed to see a colorectal surgeon.

  I was concerned for him on many levels, including his social life. Having left his friends from school and university behind in New Zealand, he knew hardly anyone his own age in Australia. When I mentioned this to Trudy, one of the mothers at Katharine’s school, she brought her niece, Chantelle, over to meet Rob one day. A beautiful young brunette, Chantelle filled the kitchen with her vibrant personality. Oddly, I felt a similar sense of recognition I’d experienced meeting Philip. I put it down to Chantelle’s outgoing nature. She was just one of those people who’s easy to warm to. Chantelle took Rob to a football game and introduced him to her younger brother Daniel. I could tell Rob had feelings for her, but hopes of anything other than friendship were futile. Not with massive surgery looming ahead of him.