After Cleo

Deception

The velvet dictator

After Jonah’s act of vandalism, I no longer trusted him in my study. But he cried outside the door while I worked, which was unbearable.

On the hypothesis that his need for attention had to be finite, I devised a plan. If I gave him enough pampering in one hit at the start of the day he’d calm down and be a regular, undemanding cat for the remaining hours.

Jonah adored having his back stroked. I was generous. The optimum number of strokes, I decided, was 200. Jonah shuddered with pleasure, crouching deep in my lap while I delivered his portion for the day.

‘There you go, boy,’ I’d say, placing him back on the floor when I’d finished.

Except 200 wasn’t enough. He jumped back on my lap and demanded more.

And he knew exactly what I was up to. When I put him back down again he would sprint down the hall to the study door and try to slide in before I got there.

My life was being ruled by a cat. If only Lydia were here she’d know what to do with such a wilful animal.

Even though my days were busy with writing, wedding planning and preparing meals for Philip and Katharine, I missed incense wafting down the stairs. I half expected Lydia to appear and say ‘Ha! April Fool!’ Except it wasn’t April. It was November.

Over the weeks we’d grown accustomed to the unpredictable nature of the phone calls from Sri Lanka. When the line went dead, it didn’t necessarily mean Lydia had taken offence and hung up. Her calls were intermittent because the monastery phone was often out of action for days, especially if there’d been rain.

I wished there was a way of pumping Sri Lanka’s water surplus into tanks and shipping it to Australia. The drought was getting worse with the terrifying threat of bushfires in summer.

When Lydia was able to get through on the phone, I asked her about what she’d been up to. It was the usual round of teaching monks English, visiting hospital patients and orphans and, of course, meditating. Though I tried to picture her doing all these things, it was impossible to conjure up anything that made it real. What did the land smell like there? Did the people love her, or were they exploiting her? Or, alternatively, was she exploiting them? She assured me she was paying rent.

‘It’s really beautiful here,’ she said. ‘You should come and visit.’

My snort of laughter bounced off the kitchen walls. I’d seen enough of the Third World through rims of various toilet seats to last a lifetime. The names of several exotic destinations summon memories for me not of swaying palm trees but of intense physical misery.

If I was to be doing any travelling in the future, especially after my brush with breast cancer, I’d decided it was going to involve gleaming bathrooms, haute cuisine and beds soft as cupcakes.

‘How many steps did you say there are up to the monastery?’ I asked, playing her along.

‘A few, but we’d carry your luggage.’

‘Kath told me you saw a rat in your room,’ I added. Katharine was an excellent source of subversive information.

‘It mightn’t even be a rat!’ said Lydia defensively. ‘It was just a shadow. It didn’t come anywhere near me.’

By this time I was counting the days till Lydia would be home. By my reckoning, I only had three more weeks of trying to get to sleep at night without imagining her kidnapped, caught up in unspeakable violence, or seriously ill from food poisoning, malaria or some other tropical disease. Not to mention the possibility of her being bitten by one of the ninety-eight snake varieties in Sri Lanka, or attacked by a scorpion, rogue elephant, leopard, water buffalo, mongoose or jackal.

As for monkeys, which are everywhere in Sri Lanka, after listening to a doctor friend giving me a rundown on the deadliness of monkey bites, I no longer regarded them as harmless pseudo-humans.

On top of all the physical dangers, I worried what was happening inside Lydia’s head. I wondered if hours of meditation had tipped her over the edge into religious fervour. My questions were deflected with silence followed by, ‘It’s hard to explain.’ I didn’t dare ask if she was still thinking of turning her back on the West and all its meat-eating, shallow commercialism.

A sparkle would invariably come into her voice when we talked about Rob’s wedding. For a few moments, I would hear traces of the old Lydia – the little girl dressed as a fairy jumping on a trampoline; the toddler waddling through a park in red shoes insisting swans were ducks. She’d had strong opinions even then.

Whenever Lydia talked as though she was still part of our family, I gulped back tears. Maybe spending three months at the monastery would be like Jonah’s 200 strokes and get the whole thing out of her system. Then again, considering Jonah’s 200 strokes had been a failure, I decided to steer clear of amateur behavioural science.

Replacing the receiver after a call one day, I glanced around the kitchen. Compared to the colourful world I imagined Lydia was living in, we inhabited shades of beige. Shirley’s colours looked tired both inside and out. Rob’s wedding was only a month and a half away and we were planning a pre-wedding barbecue for thirty or forty people under the tree in the back desert. The house needed sprucing up.

Looking around, I wondered what Mum would’ve done to give the house a bit of a lift. Like me, she’d hated cleaning. When layers of grime formed on her kitchen shelves, rather than scrubbing them she painted. Her favourite paint was pastel blue enamel, probably imbued with enough lead to account for several family eccentricities. She thought the colour looked ‘hygienic’ and she liked it being high gloss. She said it ‘covered well’. Tears of blue paint dripped from the edges of the kitchen shelves and set hard.

Running my eye over Shirley’s shabbiness, my mind naturally turned to paint. I phoned David the designer, who knew just the people who could help us out in a hurry.

I wasn’t looking forward to the arrival of the painters. The smell would disrupt my writing, not to mention the inevitable prattle of talk radio on their ghetto-blasters.

Their clattering ladders and stomping boots were bound to terrify Jonah. They’d leave doors and windows open for him to escape through so that precious hours I needed to work on the book would be spent scouring the neighbourhood.

On their first day, the painters rattled on the door just after 7 a.m. I had a contract with the Universe not to get up before 7.30, but Philip had gone for a run so there was no choice but to climb out of bed. Still in my nightie, hair uncombed, I scooped Jonah into my arms before opening the front door a crack.

‘I’m sorry but our cat is Siamese and very highly strung,’ I said. ‘We have to keep him inside. I’ll just shut him in whichever rooms you’re not working in, if that’s okay.’

The boss painter nodded, no doubt used to people making unreasonable requests. He seemed oblivious to the fact I wasn’t dressed yet and my hair appeared to have been through an electrical storm.

‘Beautiful cat,’ he said, casting an appraising eye over Jonah through the crack. ‘But he’s not Siamese. He’s Tonkinese.’

‘Really?’ I said, backing down the hallway to make way for him and his two assistants, all dressed in white overalls, to come in. ‘The pet shop man told us he’s Siamese.’

I could feel Jonah coiling every muscle as the painters arranged their pots and brushes and dust sheets on the floor. Any moment now he was going to explode out of my arms and go berserk.

‘No way!’ said the painter, stroking Jonah’s forehead. ‘He’s Tonkinese. Swear my life on it. I’ve got two cats just like him at home and they’re both Tonks. Your cat’s too dark for a Siamese. He’s definitely a Tonk.’

To my relief, Jonah purred at the painter’s touch. Maybe they were going to get along all right. If the painter was correct, Jonah was not only a nutcase, he was an imposter. Smiling down at our cat, I didn’t care a thing about his pedigree. His personality was enormous enough to warrant an entire new breed of his own. But it was intriguing to imagine his background might be even murkier than we’d thought.

I went to the computer and Googled Tonkinese. Half Siamese, half Burmese, Tonkinese cats are said to encompass the best of both breeds. Interestingly, the name stems back to Mum’s favourite musical, South Pacific. The character she played, Bloody Mary, was supposed to be Tonkinese, from an island free from prejudice against half-breeds.

If the painter wanted Jonah to be Tonkinese that was fine by me, especially as Tonkinese were supposed to be ‘less demanding and highly strung’ than Siamese. Maybe while he was working on his Tonkinese-ness, Jonah could learn to have a ‘softer voice’, and be ‘playful rather than hyperactive’.

Jonah adored the painters to the point of worshipping them. He waited for them beside the front door every morning. If they were working at ground level, he sat alongside them, peering into their pots and teasing their brushes. When they climbed ladders, he sat anxiously below, or leapt up on to a window ledge to keep them company.

With their white overalls, stealthy movements and penchant for climbing, the painters must’ve seemed like human cats to Jonah. When they had morning coffee in the kitchen, our cat sprang up on to the table and batted his eyes at them, mewing seductively and stretching an elongated paw to pat their faces. Fortunately, they loved him back.

Painters have gone upmarket. Instant coffee isn’t good enough for them anymore. They prefer plunger coffee or, better still, takeaway lattes from Spoonful. They like china mugs on a pretty tray. If the biscuits don’t look homemade they leave them on the plate to go soft in the sun. Those who don’t like coffee favour freshly squeezed orange juice in a glass (not plastic) with ice.

Painters see and hear everything in a house. They peered curiously through the study window as I struggled to complete the final chapters of the Cleo book. I steeled myself against the certainty that at least one of them would also be writing a book, or have a friend or relation who was. Everyone in the world was writing a book, or (more patronisingly) planning to do it when they retired.

‘Is it a children’s book?’ one of them asked.

By this stage my confidence was seeping through the floorboards. Maybe it was a children’s book, which wasn’t a bad thing because I have enormous respect for people who write for children. Then again the aftermath of a child’s death was surely too dark a theme for a children’s book. Maybe the agents and publishers who’d turned it down had been right. When I finally wrote the last sentence and then typed those longed-for words ‘The End’ they didn’t seem right. Life goes in cycles. Cleo’s departure was the start of a new phase. I deleted ‘The End’, replaced it with ‘The Beginning’ – and, with huge trepidation, pressed ‘Send’.

As the painters worked through the house, I helped reorganise rooms they’d finished painting and tidied the ones they planned to work on next. I wasn’t physically capable of lifting and moving much, so Philip did most of the donkey work after he got home at night.

Just as one mound of books, paintings and furniture was put back in place, another roomful was dismantled and shuffled into corners under dust sheets. It was like shifting the sea.

In the laundry near Jonah’s food bowls, I noticed faint streaks dribbling in roughly parallel lines down the wall. I asked the painters to put an extra coat over them.

A few days later, the marks mysteriously reappeared. Bending, I examined them more closely. Free-form in shape, they resembled something Jackson Pollock might’ve painted. They spoke of the jungle too, as if some wild creature had thrown his art against the wall as an insult. There was something sinister about them. Symbolic, almost. I wondered what they could mean.