After Cleo (2 page)

Of all our children, Rob had forged the strongest bond with Cleo. She'd played kitten games with him throughout his boyhood and watched over him when he was struck by serious illness in his early twenties. That little black cat had seen us through grief, migration to Australia and, ultimately, a messy kind of contentment. Then, around the time Rob fell in love with the girl of his dreams, Chantelle, Cleo took a gracious step back and suddenly sprouted white whiskers. It was almost as if she felt her work was done with Rob grown up and happy, and our family on its feet, more or less. She was finally free to leave us and move on to Cat Heaven, if there's such a place.

I swore I'd never get another cat after Cleo. But when life started getting complicated again, a so-called Siamese kitten exploded into our household.

This is the story of how one cat leads to another, that rebellious felines and daughters have more in common than you might think. And how I learned compromise and medication can be okay.

Jonah's the cat I swore we'd never get. But as Mum always said, it never pays to swear.

Leaving

Your old cat chooses your next kitten

‘When are you getting another cat?' asked my neighbour Irene, leaning over the front fence.

What a tactless question
, I thought. You don't go out shopping for another mum the moment her coffin has been lowered into the grave, do you?

I squinted up through sharp sunlight at Irene. She was wearing sunglasses and one of those silly hats from an outdoor shop. Laughing in an offhand way, I asked what she meant.

‘You're always out there in the mornings talking to that shrub you buried Cleo under. It's not healthy.'

Healthy? What would she know?
I thought, staring into my coffee mug. Talking to a deceased cat after breakfast was harmless, and not half as batty as some of the other stuff I'd started doing, like wearing my clothes inside out and buying birthday cards six months in advance. Not to mention my increasing obsession with crosswords and television game shows. Besides, it was my choice if I wanted to converse with a dead cat.

‘A friend of mine has just had three kittens,' she continued. ‘Well, ha ha, I don't mean she
personally
gave birth to them . . .'

There's no end to the craftiness of people trying to offload kittens. ‘Just come for a look,' they'll croon, confident the moment you've set eyes on some three-legged, half-bald creature with no tail your heart will liquefy. The trick is to get in quickly, right at the start. It only takes two little words. ‘No' and ‘thanks'.

The thing is, there wasn't an animal in the biosphere that had a chance of replacing Cleo. It was a year since Philip had shovelled spades full of earth, damp and heavy, over her tiny body. I'd walked away to weep bitterly, Mum's voice scolding inside my head: ‘Don't be silly! It was only a cat, not a
person
.'

In many ways, Cleo had been more than a person. People come and go in any household but felines are a constant presence. Over nearly twenty-four years, Cleo had been part of everything that'd happened to us.

But then cats and people never abandon you completely. I was still finding unmistakable black bristles in the depths of laundry cupboards.

‘Why don't you come along with me and take a look at the kittens?' Irene persisted. ‘Fluffy and stripy. Gorgeous little faces.'

‘I'm not interested in getting another cat,' I replied, the words coming out more vehemently than intended.

‘Not ever?' she asked, adjusting her sunglasses on her nose.

As a hibiscus flower sailed from the tree above my head and landed with a plop beside my foot, I was surprised to feel a tiny bit tempted by Irene's proposition. Most people have hibiscus bushes but ours had sprouted into a seven-metre tree laden with hundreds, possibly thousands, of pink flowers. It was so spectacular in summer we'd had a semicircular seat built to fit around its trunk so I could sit under it swilling coffee, swiping mosquitoes and doing Scarlett O'Hara impersonations. In autumn it wasn't so picturesque. As the days grew colder, every one of those flowers swooned to the ground like a Southern Belle and waited to be raked up. Only one person in our household specialised in raking. If I went on strike and refused to scrape the hibiscus flowers away, they exacted revenge by rotting into slime. The rest of the family managed to tiptoe over the killer goo without doing themselves bodily harm. I skidded and fell painfully on the paving stones.

The same thing would happen if we got a new cat. Like everyone else in our house and garden, it would develop a giant-sized personality and I'd end up doing all the work. Another cat was out of the question.

‘Never.'

‘You will,' the neighbour said, waving a finger mysteriously at me. ‘Haven't you heard the secret of how cats come into your life?'

I feigned interest.

‘Your old cat chooses your next cat for you,' she said.

‘Really?'

‘Yes, and once your new kitten has been found, it makes its way to you whatever happens,' she replied. ‘And it'll be exactly the cat you need.'

‘There's no sign of any cats around here,' I said, yawning in the sun. ‘We obviously don't need one.'

The neighbour reached up and picked a hibiscus blossom from the tree.

‘Your old cat hasn't got around to choosing one for you yet, that's all,' she said, then tapped the side of her nose, stuck the flower in her hat and went off on her morning walk.

Watching her disappear down the street, I drained my coffee mug. The idea of Cleo trotting about in some parallel feline universe sussing out a replacement for herself was intriguing. She'd need to find an intelligent half-breed with heaps of street wisdom and soul.

But anyway, a new cat was off the agenda. After more than three decades of motherhood, I needed a break from nurturing. The kids were nearly off our hands. Once Katharine was through her final exams, I was going to take a gap year, sampling the world's great art galleries and all the other stuff I'd missed out on as a teenage mum. Another dependant – four-legged or otherwise – was the last thing I needed. I beamed a silent message to Cleo, if she
was
in Cat Heaven,
‘Please no!!'

Hard as I tried to forget, Cleo was everywhere. Apart from her remains under the Daphne bush and the black bristles in laundry cupboards, her favourite sunbathing spot under the clothesline was still marked by a circle of flattened grass. Inside the house, memories were embedded like claw marks in every surface. The living room door still bore scars from Cleo trying to break in while we were eating takeaway chicken. When a shadow moved across the kitchen I had to tell myself it wasn't her. For the first time in twenty-four years, I could leave a plate of salmon on the kitchen bench safe in the knowledge it wouldn't be pilfered. Out in the garden and under the house, mice could safely graze.

Maybe the neighbour was right and I was grieving for Cleo on some level. Come to think of it, bewildering ‘symptoms' had set in around the time she died. Without going into detail, recent months had brought new meaning to words like flooding, leaking, flushing, chilling and sweating. I'd become a mini environmental disaster zone. But when I'd raised the subject with women friends a couple of times I'd regretted it almost immediately. Their suffering was infinitely greater. Some made it sound like they'd hurtled straight from adolescence to menopause, interrupted by a brief interval of blood-and-guts childbirth.

Still, I was going to have to stop talking to the Daphne bush. Word would get out. It wouldn't be long before people crossed the road rather than run the risk of bumping into me. Not that it worried me. We'd always been the neighbourhood oddballs. Now every second house was being pulled down and replaced by a concrete monstrosity I felt even less at home. When Irene had shown me plans of her McMansion to be I'd struggled to conceal my horror. Not only was it going to overlook our back yard, its columns and porticos echoed several ancient cultures all at once.

The aspirational tone of the neighbourhood was wearing me down. I'd never be thin, young or fashion conscious enough to belong.

Changes needed to be made. Dramatic ones.

Another hibiscus flower fell, this time right into my coffee mug. That was it! So obvious, it was a wonder I hadn't thought of it before.

I rescued the drowning hibiscus flower from the coffee, flung it into the shrubs and reached for the mobile phone in the pocket of my trackpants.

I'd escape the horror of watching Irene's Grand Design loom over us and years of raking hibiscus flowers in one hit. Never again would I listen for Cleo's paws padding across the floorboards. Or stumble over her discarded beanbags under the house. As for the Daphne bush, it could retire from cemetery plaque status and go back to being an ordinary shrub.

Philip's pre-recorded voice said he was sorry he couldn't get to the phone right now, but if I'd like to leave a message after the tone . . .

‘We're moving house,' I said, then pressed the off button with a satisfying click.

Arrival

A home is a second skin. A new one takes time to grow

‘Who'd live in a house called
Shirley
?' asked Philip, peering at the brass plate beside the front door.

Honestly, he could be so annoying sometimes. Our old house had sold faster than expected. We had to move out in four weeks. And here he was quibbling over a name plaque.

‘Lots of houses had names in the old days,' I said. ‘If you're going to call a house anything it might as well be Shirley.'

It was clear he was unimpressed. Deep down, I knew he wanted to move into something white and modern, like a refrigerator. Instead, Shirley reared up over us in a children's-home-meets-Colditz style. Built early in the twentieth century, its red bricks and tiled roof whispered of an era when mothers packed their sons off to war, and sex before marriage was unthinkable. Any glamour Shirley might've possessed had long since evaporated behind cracked bricks and unadorned windows.

The brickwork ran in wavy lines and the grey stuff holding it together didn't seem entirely committed to the job. The orange roof tiles looked like rows of broken biscuits, some of which appeared to be sliding earthwards. There was no reason to point any of that out to Philip. If we didn't find a house we wanted to buy soon we'd have to rent, causing more uncertainty and disruption.

I'd thought finding a new place to live would be simple, yet we'd spent weeks looking at town houses and inner-city apartments; demolition jobs and building sites. They were either too cramped, stupidly expensive or spread over so many levels that abseiling gear should've been included in the price. We didn't want to downsize, but a Brady Bunch house in the 'burbs wasn't right either.

I'd always liked the raffish inner-city suburb of Prahran (an Aboriginal name pronounced ‘Pran' by locals) so I'd been excited when I'd first spotted Shirley near the corner of an unpretentious cul-de-sac just off High Street. All the houses in Shirley's street had been built between the wars, giving the neighbourhood a pleasing unity which is rare for Melbourne. Most were single-storeyed, semi-detached affairs. I liked their white picket fences and quirky gardens. There was something
Alice in Wonderland
-ish about them. Thanks to a preservation order, apartment blocks and modern buildings were banned.

Unlike our current neighbourhood, nobody living on Shirley's street appeared to be afflicted with a lawn-mowing fetish. In fact, there seemed to be an ongoing competition to see who could let the grass outside their house grow the longest.

Shirley's front garden, a rectangle of sandy soil alongside the double car pad, was technically a desert. Concrete paving stones masqueraded as a path to the front door. The only hint that Shirley might've once been a setting for family life was an ancient apple tree with a twisted trunk leaning against the verandah.

‘C'mon,' I said to Philip, ‘let's go inside.'

But my husband refused to budge. He was still glaring at Shirley's brass rectangle nameplate, freshly polished for the open home inspection.

‘We could get rid of that,' I said, grabbing his arm.

‘I don't see how. It's set in concrete.'

I dragged him over the wooden threshold, uneven from decades of foot traffic, into the hallway. High ceilings. Draughty. A shaft of dusty sunlight settled on a pyramid of cardboard boxes. But something about it felt like home.

‘Not exactly well presented,' he observed.

‘Can't blame the tenants,' I replied. ‘They're being kicked out.'

‘Who sleeps in here?' he asked, inspecting a darkened room crammed with gym equipment and suitcases. ‘The Marquis de Sade?'

A real estate agent appeared like a spectre in the doorway.

‘This is the master bedroom, sir,' the agent glowered, handing Philip a brochure and spinning on his heel.

‘Ah yes, the one with the torture rack and excellent view of the neighbour's brick wall,' Philip muttered.

Floorboards shrieked as we followed an aroma of mothballs across the hall to a smaller room with a boarded up fireplace. Circular stains on the ceiling hinted at roof leaks.

‘Looks like a baby's room,' he said examining peeling teddy bear wallpaper.

‘Or a study,' I added, gazing out through a cracked pink and green leadlight window to the apple tree.

We squeaked down the hall to the kitchen/family room, our voices echoing in the empty space. Philip pointed out the bench top, yellow marble speckled with brown blotches. Unusual, admittedly. A phone off the hook emitted a constant beep, like a heart monitor recording the decline of a patient.

Though Shirley was neglected inside and out, she was speaking to me. Tired, big boned and possibly structurally unsound, we had a lot in common. It was like meeting a woman with sad, soft eyes – someone destined to be a friend for life.