After Cleo

Whisker’s Tip

I never thought we’d end up with a cat crazy enough to want to go for walks. But felines change people. I should know that.

As evening shadows crawl across the kitchen, Jonah’s footsteps drum down the hall. He appears in front of me, his red harness snared between his teeth.

‘Not now,’ I say, peeling a carrot. ‘Dinner’s only half an hour away.’

His eyes widen to become a pair of lakes. He sits neatly in front of me, snakes his tail over his front feet and examines my face. What do cats see when they look at people? They must be appalled by our lack of fur.

After a moment’s reflection, Jonah, still carrying the harness, stands up and pads toward me. He balances on his back feet and stretches his impossibly long body against mine. Patting my abdomen with his front paw, he flattens his ears and puts his head to one side. Lowering himself to ground level again, he drops the harness at my feet and emits a baleful meow.

Irresistible.

Crouching, I clip the harness around his soft, athletic body. The cat arches his back in anticipation. His purrs reverberate off the cupboards.

‘Cruel, too cruel!’ I hear Mum’s voice saying. ‘Cats are wild animals. What are you doing to this poor creature?’

It’s strange how Mum stays inside my head, even years after she’s gone. I wonder if it’ll be the same for my daughters and they’ll hear me wheedling and encouraging them when they’re in rocking chairs.

In an ideal world, Jonah would be free to roam the neighbourhood. But times have changed. We live in cities. Roads are plagued with cars.

A normal cat would hate going out in a harness. Three years with Jonah have taught me he’s anything but ordinary. Apart from the fact he’s learnt to love his harness, his obsession with gloves, florist ribbon and women’s evening wear is beyond the realms of feline sanity.

He’s complicated. While he can seem incredibly intelligent sometimes, he thinks cars are for hiding under. It’s not that I want to keep him prisoner, but we live in perilous times. He needs to be safe.

Carrying him into the laundry, I attach the harness to a leash, which is connected to an extension lead, allowing him as much freedom as possible. His purrs vibrate up my arms as I open the back door and place him on the grass.

Standing motionless for a moment, he lifts his nose to savour the warm evening breeze. Its perfume carries stories of mice and pigeons, fluffy white dogs, and cats – both friend and enemy. Tales my human senses are too primitive to detect.

Jonah charges ahead, straining at the lead, harness jingling, as we scamper down the side of the house. His youthful energy is exhausting. His confidence, terrifying. Not for the first time, he reminds me of our older daughter Lydia. In fact sometimes I think this beautiful, headstrong creature is more like Lydia than our previous cat, Cleo.

As Jonah pauses at the front gate to sniff the rosemary hedge, I can almost feel Cleo looking down from Cat Heaven and having a good chuckle. Half wild and streetwise, she thought harnesses were for show puppies.

Cats step into people’s lives with a purpose. Many of these magical creatures are healers. When Cleo arrived nearly three decades ago, our family had been shattered to pieces by the death of our nine-year-old son Sam. His younger brother Rob had seen Sam run over and was traumatised. Yet I was so paralysed with grief and anger toward the woman driver I was incapable of giving Rob the support he needed. Part of my anguish came from the thought of Sam dying alone on the roadside. As it turned out, I’d been misled.Years later, I received a letter from a wonderful man, Arthur Judson, who said he’d been on the roadside and stayed with Sam the whole time.

It took the arrival of a small black kitten called Cleo to make six-year-old Rob smile again. Cleo seemed to understand we were in crisis. Through cuddles, play and constant companionship, she’d helped Rob embark on a new life without his older brother. For the first time I understood how profound the healing powers of animals can be.

Our lives changed after Sam’s death and our hearts never healed completely. But through the years, Cleo stood guardian over us as we slowly pieced ourselves together. She’d curled around my expanding girth through a subsequent pregnancy, then kept me company during endless nights of feeding baby Lydia. A few years later she’d been my divorce buddy and, when I was ready, cast a feline eye over my pathetically few suitors to make sure I chose wisely. As it was, Philip – the first man Cleo approved of – turned out to be the right choice, even if he spends most of his life on a plane these days. Before our daughter Katharine was born, Cleo resumed her tummy-curling duties and was with me during the breastfeeding again.

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.