After Cleo

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.