by Helen Brown
Our vision was no longer spectacular. An optometrist recommended reading glasses. (Who, me?) I chose the funkiest frames in the shop, green and blue metallic.
“What do you think?” I asked, showing them off to Philip and Katharine.
Their response made it clear. They were the type of reading glasses an old lady would choose in order to look funky.
Cleo developed strange blotches in her eyes, enhancing the impression she was in direct contact with other realities. I found a vet who wasn’t tough and understood how precious she was. He said Cleo didn’t have cataracts. The blotches were just a natural part of the aging process. Soft Vet wasn’t so happy about her kidneys, though. He suggested we could fly her to Queensland for a kidney transplant, though the success rate wasn’t high. (A cat flown thousands of miles for a kidney transplant that will probably fail! I could practically hear my mother wail from the depths of her plastic urn in the New Plymouth graveyard. The world must be off its rocker.)
Unwilling to embrace the less attractive aspects of growing older, I focused on body parts that, with some attention, could still look good. I discovered a nail salon run by a Vietnamese family who, I was thrilled to find out, could hardly speak a word of English. This meant they were mercifully free of small talk and unable to instruct me on methods of maintaining youthful hands and feet. As we got to know each other better, they greeted me with nods and smiles.
Around the same time Cleo’s toenails started clicking like tap shoes over the floorboards. They weren’t getting as much use as in her assassin days. Her claws had worn thin and were as flaky as miniature croissants. I was flattered when Cleo allowed herself to lie on her back in my lap while I attempted to trim her talons with Philip’s nail clippers. Reading glasses perched on the end of my nose, I was terrified of hurting her. I hardly trusted myself with hedge clippers, let alone nail trimmers and her tiny paws. Any clumsy mistakes were corrected with swift gentle bites. After the first few attempts, Cleo trusted me enough to actually purr during the procedure. I was honored to take on the title of official manicurist and (combing dry cat shampoo through her coat) beauty therapist. In short, personal servant.
We’d spent long enough in each other’s company for her to know I had her interests at heart. We’d been through so much together and found a kind of peace, not only with each other, but within ourselves. Together we discovered the well-kept secret that, give or take a few inconveniences, old cats have more fun.
Cleo and I decided to become quirky about our eating habits. I was afflicted with an obsession for chocolate, dark chocolate to be precise, preferably seventy percent cocoa, made in Switzerland and wrapped in something shiny involving photos of mountains. Try as I might to divert my addiction to Italian writing paper or thousand-thread-count sheets, I could find nothing more mesmerizing than chocolate. Cleo underwent an even more powerful food fixation. The word “no” had never been of particular interest to our cat. She now obliterated it from her understanding of human vocabulary. In her mature years, however, she learnt exactly what the words “Chicken Man” meant.
Whenever anyone announced they were off to Chicken Man (to buy a rotisserie takeaway bird from the cheerful Asian man’s shop round the corner), Cleo trotted behind them and waited eagerly at the door until they returned with the mouth-watering parcel.
Cleo was circumspect about most food, though on the whole she preferred it murdered or stolen. Chicken Man was in a different league. One whiff of the freshly roasted flesh drove her to salivating insanity. Anyone in charge of an unguarded plate of chicken was at risk. Loyalties and past affections were forgotten as she embarked on chicken jihad.
We developed a routine of shutting her out of the room so we could have first choice of the meat.
“Poor Cleo!” Katharine would say, as an elegant black paw appeared under the door.
There was no “poor” about it. If the door wasn’t closed properly, the paw slid down the side and pushed it open. Bones and paper napkins would fly through the air, plates clattered to the floor. It was chicken season for young and old.
Our food fixations were equally unattractive to outsiders. The only difference was, Cleo’s didn’t make her any fatter. In fact, she appeared to be shrinking. Her chest bones jutted out, the angles of her skull became even sharper and more prominent. With fur draped over her skeletal form, she resembled an amateur attempt at taxidermy.
That’s not saying we didn’t enjoy moments of friskiness. If the curtains were pulled tight enough and there was no evidence of human life within a five-hundred-meter radius, a determined anthropologist might still have caught a glimpse of me boogieing alone to the strains of Marvin Gaye.
Likewise, after a shower of rain, Cleo shimmied like a kitten up a tree trunk—until halfway up old age got the better of her and she slid unceremoniously back down.
Cleo’s legs, once so tapered and streamlined, became slightly stumpy with lumps where (if she was human) knees and ankles would be. She never grumbled, though. I trudged off to the gym and lifted weights to combat back and neck pain that would never have developed if, like Cleo, I’d spent my life on all fours. The old person’s fear of falling over would never have to be considered if we’d stayed firmly planted to the ground on four feet. Once again, our cat was proving herself a higher-level species.
While our bodies may have given the appearance of growing old, inside Cleo and I were growing up and getting stroppy. In the supermarket checkout line, people always used to recognize me as a pushover. Anyone from toddlers to old men knew they could sneak in front of me without consequences. But the new, stroppy me stood my ground when queue jumpers tried to nudge in front of me. I was even capable of an indignant “Excuse me!” I filled out complaint forms without hesitation and stopped thinking twice about hanging up on telephone marketers calling from Mumbai.
Cleo surpassed me by taking uppity to an art form. When our sight-impaired friend Penny visited with her guide dog Mishka, I placed two bowls of water on the floor—a small one for Cleo and a large one for Mishka. Cleo eyeballed the yellow labrador and claimed the large bowl for herself. Mishka shrunk to half her giant size and retreated to the small bowl.
Penny laughed and accepted my apologies for our pet’s ungracious behavior. I explained that, as a kitten, Cleo had done the same thing to Rata. Nodding amiably, Penny sat on the floor. Mishka parked her rear end affectionately on her owner’s lap. They made a charming vignette, a picture of owner and devoted dog. The image was too much for Cleo. She fixed Mishka with a glower that was so withering the poor animal skulked away into a corner and allowed Cleo to take over prime position on Penny’s lap.
“And what happened to poor little Cleo?” Rosie asked when she phoned out of the blue one day.
“Oh, she’s fine.”
“In a better place,” she sighed. “I always say there are sardines every day in Pussy Heaven.”
“No, Rosie. I mean fine fine.”
“She’s still alive! You’re joking! How old is she now?”
I was getting sick and tired of people asking us impertinent questions about age. “Twenty-three.”
“But that’s, let me see…something like one hundred and sixty-one in human years. Are you sure it’s the same cat?”
“Absolutely.”
“How did you do it? What have you been feeding her? What medication is she on?”
“Nothing special. How are Scruffy, Ruffy, Beethoven and Sibelius?”
An awkward silence. “Well, Scruffy disappeared, Beethoven had kidney failure. Sibelius and Ruffy went to cat heaven ten years ago. I always made sure they had the best of everything, not like your poor little Cleo. I’m surprised you remember their names. You never were a cat person, were you?”
“But I must be!” I replied. “I couldn’t not be. Cleo wouldn’t have stayed with us this long if I wasn’t. Besides, we’re both getting so old Cleo and I are practically the same person. No, dammit, Rosie. You’re wrong. I AM a cat person!”
Not long
after, Philip and I were at a restaurant celebrating our fourteenth wedding anniversary.
“I’ll never forget that night you took us to the pizza restaurant and you beat Rob at that game filling in the squares.”
“It was snakes and ladders, wasn’t it?” he said, sipping his champagne.
“It was filling in squares. You nearly blew it that night. Not letting a boy win. I was going to send you packing.”
“Were you?” he replied with a twinkle. “I’ll always remember Cleo bouncing around the house like she owned the place.”
“She did own it. Not many people would have taken us on the way you did, you know”, I said, changing the subject. “A solo mum eight years older with two kids.”
Rob had once said having Philip in our lives was like winning Lotto. I’d been in awe of Philip’s love and commitment to all three of our children, never once making a distinction between Katharine, his biological daughter, and the other two. Their love for him in return was equally deep and seamless. I was fortunate to have spent so many years with such a rare, open-hearted man.
“Not work again, is it?” I said as he took his bleeping mobile phone from his pocket.
“It’s Kath,” he replied, his face grave as he listened to her distraught staccato.
“We’d better go. Cleo’s having some sort of fit.”
Tough Vet, Soft Vet
Chicken Man each day keeps the vet away.
By the time we arrived back home Cleo was her normal self again.
“It was so scary!” said Katharine, still flushed with shock. “She made a horrible growl, then she fell over and twitched. Her whole body seized up. She must’ve been in so much pain.”
Listening calmly to the report, Cleo licked her paw. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about, she seemed to say. It was just a little hiccup.
After breakfast next morning, Cleo succumbed to another dreadful fit. I ran to the phone and called Soft Vet. His honey-voiced receptionist said he wouldn’t be available until later in the day.
“But we need to see someone now!” I said.
“In that case you’ll have to try another vet,” she replied sharply.
For a Soft Vet he had a pretty hard-hearted receptionist. The only other vet who knew anything of Cleo’s history was dreaded Tough Vet.
“If you bundle her in a blanket and bring her over he’ll see her now,” said Tough Vet’s nurse.
As I carried Cleo to the vet’s clinic, she revived enough to take an interest in the traffic and the sky. She purred lightly as I clutched her to my chest. Maybe a simple pill would do the trick. On the other hand, I wasn’t a fool. She was twenty-three and a half years old.
We loathed everything about Tough Vet’s surgery. We didn’t like the anesthetic smell of the waiting room or the bags of pet food piled in the corner like headstones. Cleo particularly disapproved of the big black labrador, its pink tongue dripping obscenely from its mouth. It was impossible to ignore the blue plastic bucket over his head. I knew exactly what Cleo was thinking: How typical of a dog to allow itself to be shoved into such a demeaning fashion accessory.
Tough Vet appeared from an operating room and beckoned us in. Cleo stood defiantly on the stainless-steel table while he poked and prodded parts no lady likes to share with a stranger. Kidney failure and thyroid malfunction was his diagnosis.
“How long do you want to drag this out for?” he asked, his voice drained of expression.
I heard his words and understood what they meant, but couldn’t summon up any kind of answer.
“I can put her down now if you like.”
Now? Immediately? The shock must’ve shown on my face.
“All right, I’ll keep her here a few hours for observation so your family can get used to the idea,” he said. “Phone me at five o’clock.”
I was about to snatch Cleo back and run home with her. But the prospect of helplessly witnessing her fits all day was unbearable. Heading out his door, I hated Tough Vet with every muscle in my heart—until he called out to me.
“You can leave her blanket with me.”
He’d understood that our ancient animal would be more comfortable with a piece of home to snuggle into. Maybe Tough Vet wasn’t such a monster after all.
Back home, I pulled the old towels and rugs off our furniture as a reminder of how much prettier and cleaner life was going to be without a dribbling, fur-shedding old cat. Glancing at Cleo’s bed in the laundry, I considered dumping the stinky thing in the outside bin—but couldn’t quite do it.
No way was she going to vanish up Tough Vet’s chimney. A daphne bush by the front gate would be her gravestone, if she had to have one at all.
Philip arrived home early from work to make the five o’clock call. Tough Vet invited us to pay a visit. Not a good sign. Katharine stayed home resolutely watching TV as we headed out on our morbid mission.
Tough Vet was friendlier this time. I thought it must be his “putting animals down” mode.
“She hasn’t had a fit all day,” he said. “She hasn’t eaten anything, but her vital signs are good and her heart’s strong. She’s in remarkably good condition for her age.”
The light in his eye said it all. Even in her decrepit state, Cleo had charmed him with her determination to defy the feline life expectancy chart on his wall.
Wrapping her in the blue blanket, he handed her back with some pills to stimulate her appetite. “Oh, and if you really want to get her eating again, there’s an excellent takeaway chicken shop across the road,” he added. “I don’t know what he puts in them, but one whiff of that stuff and it drives all the cats crazy.”
I guess a visit to Chicken Man each day keeps the vet away. Cleo purred all the way home.
I draped the old towels and rugs back over the furniture and shook her smelly bed. We were on borrowed time, but one thing Sam’s death taught me is time is only ever on loan. Life can change irrevocably for any one of us at any moment. Awareness of that is what made me scan my dressing table every time I went out in case for some reason I never returned. Even though I wasn’t a tidy person I didn’t want to go down in history as a shockingly messy one.
I phoned Rob in Britain to update him on Cleo’s latest drama.
“I’ve just been trying to call you, but the line was busy,” he said.
“That’s because I was calling you,” I said, delaying the Cleo news as long as possible. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I can’t face another English winter. People live like moles here, in the dark and underground most of the time. I’ve been offered an engineering job in Melbourne. It sounds great. I’ll be home for Christmas.”
Not long after Rob’s return a surprise visitor turned up on the doorstep. He was a tall dark-haired young man, with looks that were a blend of Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. I scanned the movie-star jawline, the well-defined brow. But it wasn’t until I looked into his eyes that I recognized him.
Baby-faced Jason from Rob’s boyhood zigzag days had morphed into a fine adult. To receive a visit from Ginny’s son was an unexpected compliment. He planted kisses on each of my cheeks, leaving me momentarily dazed. This man Jason was a far cry from the brown-haired boy with almond eyes and an impish smile. Last time I’d seen him he hadn’t been much taller than my waist. I was touched his memories had been warm enough for him to turn up in person so many years later.
“Don’t tell me Cleo’s still alive!” he said.
“Only just,” I replied. I called Rob and arranged to meet him at a cafe near his work with our surprise guest. Rob took less than a second to recognize his old friend. I basked in the glory of dining with two young men with rock-star looks. So this was how it felt to go out with two adult sons. If Sam had lived I wondered how many times we would’ve got together like this. Would it have felt so warm and tinged with almost unbearable sadness? Maybe there’d be no sorrow at all, just a vague pattern of irritations and assumptions families can grind themselves into.
“Do you know what my strongest memory is?” Jason asked, perusing the wine list.
“Digging that hole!” the boys said in unison.
I must’ve looked blank.
“Remember that wild bit of land below your front gate? Rob and I decided to dig a hole there. We dug for years, and it never seemed to get any deeper.”
A vision of two small boys hacking into clay under the tree ferns suddenly sharpened.
“That’s right,” I said. “You had spades and a pickax. You probably shouldn’t have been allowed that pickax. I’d be sued these days.”
“That’s the whole point,” Jason said. “It felt manly and dangerous. Do you remember the day we found a rusty old wire mattress? We spread it over the hole and turned it into a trampoline for a while. Then we got bored with that. We took it away and went back to digging.”
Even now sometimes, Rob said he wondered why the hole never seemed to get any deeper. If his adult self could return to the scene he’d finish the job in an afternoon.
“Maybe you were digging it too wide?” I said. “How deep did you want it anyway?”
“Decent-sized hole deep,” Jason replied.
I felt vaguely guilty the boys’ memories weren’t of me teaching them Mandarin or Gregorian chants. If Jason had inherited half of Ginny’s brains—she’d just finished a doctorate in midwifery—he’d have been more than capable. On the other hand, maybe letting them dig had a hand in making them into the philosophers they’d grown into.
It was hard to believe that somewhere underneath their easy manners and red-wine-drinking maturity were the same little boys who’d lived on the zigzag. Watching them I was reminded of the miraculous renewal of the Australian bush after a fire. Against the blackened outline of taller trees, banksias and wattles create fresh new undergrowth. Similarly, the boys had sprung into strong, handsome young men. During the devastation of those zigzag days I’d underestimated the resilience of nature.
Renewal