by Helen Brown
“I can’t promise anything, but we could try her on a course of antibiotics, if you like.”
If you like? Did the man imagine we were ready to give up on her?
“Yes, please. She’s part of our family.”
He seemed oblivious to the fact that Cleo had been guardian of our household for so long, she wasn’t going anywhere as far as we were concerned.
“In that case, when you go home I’d prepare them for the worst.”
The girls gulped back tears when I repeated what the vet had said. They both had memories of Cleo peering over the edge of their cradles. Cleo was practically a surrogate mother to them.
“It’s just nature,” I said, sounding more like Mum than I intended. “We were lucky to have her this long.”
To our delight, Cleo’s eyes cleared and her snuffle evaporated a couple of days later. In less than a week she was back to her omnivorous diet. No housefly, rubber band or sock was safe. Her coat regained its sheen. She danced across the kitchen table, climbed the curtains. Cleo was her old perky self. The vet may have considered her the walking dead, but as far as Cleo was concerned, she was still in her prime.
But she’d given us a warning. Even though she was doing a good job hiding it, old age was creaking its way into her joints. She slept more than she used to and seemed to feel the cold more readily.
In fact, she adapted to old age with aplomb worthy of a duchess. The meow that used to be so pretty and accommodating became an authoritative yowl. Cleo had seen every form of human behavior in her long life. She knew when to take a stand and when to disappear. She’d always known exactly where to find the escape routes. In her younger days, she’d barely twitched a whisker when Lydia had carried her around the house upside down. Not so long ago, she’d allowed Katharine to dress her in a hat and specially knitted gloves for Melbourne Cup Day. It had been an act of patience and affection on Cleo’s part.
In acknowledgment of her advanced years we decided to make a few changes. Once past kittenhood, Cleo had always insisted on spending her nights roaming rooftops outside under the moon. Even in cold weather she’d preferred sleeping under the house, curled up around the central heating system. For the sake of her health, the girls and I agreed a change of lifestyle was required. She’d have to be an inside cat from now on. The trick was to find her a bed she approved of enough to sleep in.
Having monopolized and destroyed a dynasty of family beanbags, she was bound to adore the supersized beanbag I bought her from the pet shop. Sure, it was designed for large dogs, but there’s no way Cleo would know.
Cleo had a built-in radar screen that could detect anything to do with dogs from a distance of a thousand kennel runs. The beanbag couldn’t possibly have smelled doggy. It was brand new. Maybe it carried the thought remnants of its maker, who had mused over her sewing machine what kind of dog might end up sleeping on it—a dalmatian, alsatian or a plain old mutt.
So, despite countless demonstrations from us all showing how luxurious and comfortable the dog beanbag was, Cleo refused to go near it. We repositioned it in alluring sites around the house—in front of the fire, in the patch of sun on the kitchen floor. Our efforts were pointless. As far as Cleo was concerned the dog beanbag was disgusting.
Defeated, I flung it under the house for the rats (or whatever it was that chewed things under there). Maybe one bed wasn’t enough. Perhaps Cleo was trying to tell us she needed options—a day bed and a night bed. Back at the pet shop (where the assistant was starting to treat me like an escapee from an asylum) we bought a fluffy pink cushion and a brown padded pouf, both designed specifically for cats.
We arranged the pink cushion between the sofas in the family room. It was treated with the disdain it deserved. During the day Cleo preferred perching on a sofa arm or, better still, on the belly of a reclining human who was trying to read. Not only did this position provide warmth and a sense of superiority, it was also an excellent opportunity to floss her teeth along the edges of the book’s pages. The only bed she showed anything less than hatred for was the brown pouf. We set it up in the laundry where she grudgingly agreed to sleep at night, alongside her bowls and (the ultimate indignity) a kitty litter tray.
Holidays were problematic. We weren’t willing to risk a cattery again. A live-in cat nanny was the only solution. Cleo’s first cat nanny was our friend Magnolia.
Magnolia is one of the world’s great cooks. Having grown up in Samoa, one of the few countries where people appreciate the beauty of bellies the size of hot-air balloons, she understands the meaning of quantity. Not only that, she has a gourmet’s flair for quality. She stole her recipe for coconut cake from the angels. Her beef bourguignon would make Julia Child turn spinach-green with envy. So Cleo licked her chops approvingly when Magnolia arrived carrying extra cooking pots and bags of undisclosed ingredients.
“Don’t you worry,” Magnolia said, slipping an apron over her head. “Go and enjoy yourselves. We’ll be absolutely fine. And you know I love cats. Not in a culinary sense, of course.”
I kissed Cleo on her tiny forehead, but formal farewells were of no interest. Her focus was on Magnolia clattering a large preserving pan onto our stovetop. We worried about Cleo while we were away.
“She’s such a sensitive animal,” I said to Philip. “She’s probably traumatized having a stranger in the house.”
Every time we phoned, Magnolia said our cat was just fine. I didn’t know if we should believe her. “Just fine” can mean anything from “just fine but she was attacked by magpies and had an eye pecked out” to “just fine but she hasn’t eaten a thing.”
“I can’t talk now,” Magnolia added. “We’ve got some bouillabaisse on the stove, haven’t we, Cleo? Then I’m off to the market to get fresh prawns.”
“Do you think Cleo’s all right?” asked the girls.
We told them she probably was, but what would we know?
The girls talked us into going home a day early because Cleo was almost certainly pining for us. When Magnolia answered the door the fragrance of a Michelin-star galaxy wafted through our nostrils—warm and meaty with a hint of wine and truffles. A small plump animal was tucked in the crook of Magnolia’s elbow. The creature had the expression of a movie star encountering fans on the way to the Academy Awards—“I see you, but you’re not really there. Collect a signed photograph from my publicity team if you’re desperate.”
“Cleo!” we cried, all reaching out to hold her.
She hesitated for longer than was decent before allowing Magnolia to lower her into Katharine’s arms.
“She likes her food,” laughed Magnolia.
Cleo wriggled to be put on the floor and waddled away towards the kitchen. Not only had she grown chubby over the past two weeks, she’d become incredibly smug.
“I’m going to miss sleeping with her,” Magnolia added. “She’s so cute the way she snuggles between the sheets and puts her head on the pillow beside me.”
There was still enough country girl left in me not to want to share a pillow with our cat, even our treasured cat goddess. And I couldn’t cook like Magnolia.
I don’t know if those were good enough reasons to punish us. Maybe Cleo was simply annoyed with us for going away. More likely it was a combination of crimes on our part. But she made her feelings clear enough by depositing a carefully placed turd in the middle of our bedcover.
Live-in cat nannies became the norm every time we went away after that. During one of these sojourns a kitchen chair fell on Cleo’s tail, leaving a permanent dent near the tip. The nanny apologized profusely. She said there’d been blood. Katharine shed tears over the damage. While the tip of Cleo’s tail remained tender for the rest of her days, she didn’t ask for sympathy. She wore her dented tail with the suave pride of a battle-scarred cavalry officer. Forgiveness for permanent injury was a straightforward process for her, simple as breathing.
I wished I shared her expertise in the art of forgiveness. We humans hold on to our hurt and n
urse it, often to our own detriment. We’re quick to assume the role of victim. Yet cats are and always have been at the receiving end of human maltreatment. During medieval times many thousands of them were hunted out and killed because it was believed they were inhabited by witches. In Paris during the sixteenth century thousands of people looked forward to fun outings witnessing the mass burning of bags full of cats. Even today, kittens are routinely dumped into sacks and drowned. Cats of all ages are tortured in experiments for the so-called advancement of science. In parts of Asia, a serving of cat meat is considered beneficial for women of a certain age.
Humanity has brought such suffering upon the domestic cat it’s amazing they still tolerate any contact with us. Felines may not forget our atrocities against them. Yet, generation after generation, they continue to forgive us. Every new litter of kittens born helpless and mewing is an invitation to start again, for humans to lift their game. While our past behavior reveals the depths of the cruelty we’re capable of, cats continue to expect better of us. We won’t be worthy of considering ourselves fully evolved until we live up to the shine of trust and expectation in a kitten’s eye.
I still thought about the woman driver who’d run over Sam all those years earlier. She used to haunt my mind. My anger towards her had been like fire run rampant. In those early days, whenever I read newspaper stories about parents forgiving the murderers of their children, I could only imagine they were avoiding honesty.
Time may not heal everything, but it gives perspective. Ford Escorts went out of style years before. I hardly saw them anymore, let alone blue ones. The car that killed Sam was probably an ashtray. The streets had given way to four-wheel-drives. I was finally able to accept fully that Sam’s tragedy was hers as well. That January day in 1983 would be carved into her heart as deeply as it was on mine. Every time she slid behind a driver’s wheel, or saw a blond boy crossing a street, she must have seen his ghost.
I was finally emotionally equipped to meet this woman, if it were ever possible. I’d tried throwing out a few lines. In a magazine interview I’d suggested I was ready. I wanted to put my arms around her, acknowledge the pain she must have endured all these years, and tell her I forgave her. Utterly.
A response arrived in the mail, but not the one I was expecting.
Dear Helen,
My wife showed me the recent article on you and she urged me to write to you as we both felt very sad after reading about the dreadfully difficult time you had following Sam’s death.
I’m not sure if it will be of any comfort to you, but I came on the scene of the accident very soon after it had happened. The driver of the car was not there and I assumed she had gone for help. My companion went down the road to stop the traffic and I stayed with Sam—he was deeply unconscious and I am quite sure he did not suffer at all. I also think that he did in fact die while I was with him—before the police and ambulance people, who were, without exception very kind and thoughtful, arrived.
Eventually the police said it would be OK for me and my workmate to leave so we did. I was very distressed at what had happened, so much so that when I got home from work that night I had real difficulty in telling my wife about Sam. It seemed such a dreadful waste of a dear little boy’s life—but it was no one’s fault.
I thought about calling on you at that time but decided against it as I was a stranger and felt it would be an invasion of your privacy. I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I feel now that you would like to know Sam was not alone—hence this letter, and if it is even a small amount of comfort to you then I will be very pleased to have written it to you.
Yours sincerely
Arthur Judson
Christchurch
P.S. Have been enjoying your newspaper column for years.
I read the letter again and again. Shock coursed through me as I relived the events of that day from someone else’s perspective, a stranger but a man of great heart. The letter I sent in return had no hope of expressing the depth of my gratitude to him. To have stayed alongside a dying boy would have taken courage, and to have written the letter almost as much. His letter had given me a greater sense of completion than anything I could have hoped from meeting the woman driver.
I kept the letter and treasure it to this day. Knowing Sam hadn’t died alone or in great pain has gone a long way to easing my sorrow.
The world must be full of silent heroes like him, people who stay behind at accident scenes when it would be easier to leave. Risking their personal tranquillity, they give the greatest solace one person can provide another—the comfort of not dying alone. Then, like angels, they disappear without a trace.
Conversion
Beware the passionate convert. She may bore you with cat stories.
“Oh, look at the dear little kitten!” a stranger exclaimed when she saw Cleo posed sphinxlike on our front path.
“She’s not a kitten,” I explained. “She’s actually very old.”
“Really? She looks so…young.”
If we could have bottled whatever gene Cleo had that made her look younger the older she grew, we’d have several beach houses, a yacht and a season pass to the space shuttle by now. I put a lot of it down to attitude. Hers, of course. Growing old wasn’t a tragedy, as far as Cleo was concerned. She simply despised the whole process.
Menopausal women would have nothing to fear if they could see how willingly Cleo shed slinky youth to become an increasingly authoritative, essential ruler of our household. High priestess of the family, she expressed her views on everything from whether her fish had been properly mashed to how early human slaves should be forced out of bed. Anyone who hadn’t risen by dawn could expect a screeching wake-up call from Cleo outside their bedroom door.
I too entered a phase where I was more inclined to air my opinions. Having long given up hope of changing the world, I felt it was still entitled to hear my views on everything from presidential politics to how blondes should never be let loose in four-wheel-drives. The only thing missing was a loudspeaker on top of my car through which I could inform other drivers and pedestrians exactly how they were endangering others, themselves and the planet in general.
Following nature’s cycle, our nest was emptying out. Lydia took a year off from her university studies to teach English in Costa Rica. For a while, Rob moved to London, where he was working in a wineshop. If ever Rob and I needed proof of our powerful psychic connection all we have to do is try to call each other. Though we were on opposite sides of the earth, we’d often phone each other at exactly the same time. Even today when I call him his line’s often engaged because he’s trying to ring me.
“You’ll never guess who I caught up with,” he said one day, his voice tinged with excitement over the phone. “Chantelle. She’s over here, teaching in one of those tough inner-city schools.”
I felt a little sad when he mentioned she had a boyfriend. A good guy, Rob assured me, an Australian surfie, though it was hard to imagine what a wave-rider did with himself through the depths of an English winter. Not that Rob was lonely—he was living with a nurse from Queensland. Love’s often a matter of timing and coincidence: while I knew Rob would always have special feelings for Chantelle, prospects of them getting together seemed increasingly thin.
Several months later I was devastated to hear that Chantelle’s younger brother Daniel had died suddenly, of no apparent cause. While tragedy visits every household sooner or later, this was a terrible one for Chantelle and her family to endure. I hoped Rob might be able to help Chantelle with the overwhelming range of shock and sadness she’d be going through.
As the only one left at home, thirteen-year-old Katharine became Cleo’s assistant caregiver. “Look what my friends did last night!” she wailed one morning after having a group of girls over for a sleepover. “They’re so mean! They painted Cleo’s chest white!”
Closer inspection of the snowy fur revealed it wasn’t painted but was white from natural causes.
/> Cleo developed a geriatric gait, moving stiffly from the hip joints, a sensation I too was becoming begrudgingly familiar with. Cleo gave up playing sock-er, though she kept an old sports sock of Rob’s in her bed. She no longer sprang onto the kitchen bench. Likewise, my joints suffered a shortage of elastin. Creaking ligaments pleaded with me to give stairs a swerve if an elevator opened its tantalizing doors.
Our coats were changing, too. Teenage hairdressers felt duty-bound to instruct me how to make my thinning hair thick and glossy. (“Just massage a peanut-sized glob of this mousse into your scalp. I know it may seem expensive at one hundred and twenty-five dollars, but it’ll last you a whole year.”) Their older sisters lectured me about skin care. (“A cup of blueberries a day will have your skin looking like mine forever. And you’ll never guess how old I am. I’m really old. I’m twenty-five.”)
Free from the attentions of child hairdressers and beauticians, Cleo sprinkled black exclamation marks of fur over our sheets, our underwear, sometimes even our food.
Her black whiskers turned grey. I discovered an unsightly bristle sprouting from my chin.
Cleo and I had always enjoyed roasting ourselves in front of an open fire. Sitting too close nowadays made my legs resemble the surface of Mars. Cleo was even less fireproof. After ten minutes or so she had to stagger away from the inferno and lean against a cool wall to recover.
Quality was more important than we’d realized. I developed an irrational interest in the thread counts of bed linen and Italian stationery.