Cleo

Letting Go

A touch of a paw can work better than aspirin.

Autumn was upon us and the hills around the harbor were burnished gold with gorse flowers. The new season had crept in so gradually I’d hardly noticed the change as it was happening. One moment Cleo was making herself so hot sunbathing on the front path she had to retreat to the shadow of the house to cool off. Next she was jostling for prime position in front of the gas fire with the rest of us, and somehow always getting the best spot. Suddenly there was a bite in the wind and poplar trees were shimmering bronze. My powers of observation had been equally remiss with Cleo. I’d grown so accustomed to telling visitors we shared our house with a cat who looked like an alien I no longer regarded her through accurate lenses. I was taking it for granted that we lived with an ugly cat.

I was out in the garden raking leaves one morning when I noticed an extraordinary cat sitting on Mrs. Sommerville’s roof. Sleek and elegant, its beauty sucked the breath out of my lungs for a moment. It was an awe-inspiring sight. My semirural background ensured I wasn’t usually affected by animals like that. Mum had raised me to believe anything with four legs that wasn’t a table was at best an economic unit, at worst a bloody nuisance. But this being was beyond in-built parental prejudice. Its profile was noble as any lion’s. With its head tilted slightly to one side and its tail curved in mathematical perfection around its rump, it was a feline version of a top model posing for a Vanity Fair photo shoot. Except there was no self-consciousness in the cat’s pose. It wasn’t even interested in me. Ears forwards, nose slightly aloft, its attention was focused on a potential meal in a nearby tree.

I felt a stab of envy for the human who belonged to such a beast. I could see him sitting smug by his log fire, one hand encircling a decent red wine, the other massaging the handsome cat’s fur. Although black from tip to tail like Cleo, it was obviously a pedigreed cat of impressive lineage. It probably had enough papers to set a house on fire. Going by the sheen on its coat, it dined on fresh sardines every night. Next to a cat like that, poor Cleo would resemble something that had just crawled out of the drains of Calcutta. Fortunately, Cleo was nowhere in sight. She was probably inside investigating the fruit bowl, which had recently proved an interesting source of insect life. I put my head down and continued raking. I have yet to discover the Zen approach to raking leaves. Autumn leaves are disobedient at the best of times. Trying to do anything with them on a windy day is physical and emotional torture. The moment I herded them into a satisfactory mound a playful breeze scattered them like kittens and shook another shoal down from the poplars. It was a frustrating job that would’ve been considerably more pleasant if Rata had been able to understand the intricacies of human plumbing services and why they’d been invented.

Muttering one of Sam’s forbidden rude words, I scraped Rata’s contribution to global soil fertility off the sole of my sneaker on a stone. The pleasures of autumn gardening, if there were any, were lost on me. I was about to give up and go inside in search of tea when I heard a familiar meow.

“Cleo!” I called, checking her favorite sunbathing place in the weeds under what once had been a rose bed. Th e only evidence of her there was a flattened oval of long grass. Scanning the window ledge outside Rob’s bedroom, I called again. Th e black cat on Mrs. Somerville’s roof stared down at me with steady curiosity.

“It’s fine for you, you spoiled snooty thing!” I growled up at it. “We can’t all be best in show.”

The cat yawned and rose effortlessly to its feet. I watched it float along the roof guttering and sail into the branches of a tree. It then slid gracefully down the trunk and skipped toward me, meowing delightedly.

“Cleo?” I said bending to stroke the bridge of her back as she nudged her chin against my calf muscles. I lifted the manifestation of feline perfection into my arms and sank my nose into her fur to make sure it really was her. “Goodness, when did you become so gorgeous?”

I’d been so absorbed by grief over the summer I hadn’t noticed Cleo had undergone a makeover beyond extreme. Over just a few weeks our skinny runt with unnerving eyes and hardly any fur had evolved into a drop-dead gorgeous cat. Her fur, jet black, grew thick and glossy in preparation for her first winter. She no longer looked like E.T.’s cousin. Her face had been sculpted into the aristocratic angles of her mother’s.

It was time to make up for my shocking lack of observation, haul myself out of distraction and notice Cleo. The changes she had gone through while I wasn’t looking were a reminder that life’s relentless cycles were rolling on no matter what. Whether I was going to miss out on some magnificent episodes of change and rebirth was largely up to me.

Scooping her up, I carried her to the front porch and sat on the step with her on my knee. Cleo writhed ecstatically and rolled onto her back, her legs paddling the air. This un-catlike position was one of her favorites. She often fell asleep that way draped upside down across someone’s knee in front of the television, her head drooping backwards so the underside of her neck and chin were exposed to whomever she was sitting on.

Stroking her was a tactile adventure, a journey of discovery through Cleo’s landscape of fur. Her ears were cool and slick the way I’d imagined a seal’s skin would be. Their design was vaguely aerodynamic, potentially giving her descendents the option of flight. The velour ridge of her nose was tipped with a patch of damp leather. On the slope descending between her ears and eyes, the fur was sparser, the closest thing Cleo had to a bald patch these days. But it was in no way unattractive. In fact it was intriguing and stylish in the way Yves Saint Laurent could make tartan a perfect match for polka dots. Taut skin around her eyes was helpful whenever I needed to roll specks of sleep from their corners, which was surprisingly often. Strange there were no eyelashes in this plethora of fur. Two pairs of antennae, a memory of eyebrows, sprouted from her forehead. No doubt they had some stealthy purpose such as measuring rat holes. Her whiskers were like dried grass, her chin a fuzzy beard.

The fur on her torso was fluffy, softer than a rabbit’s. Her “underarms” sprouted longer fringes that seemed vaguely out of place, like human underarm hair, filing cabinets for ancestral memory. A raised ridge of fur ran like a mini Mohawk down the center of her chest. The growth on her lower abdomen was coarser and longer, but still soft. On the inner sides of her legs the fur was silky, the outer thighs slippery and smooth.

Her purr intensified as I rubbed her long back legs with their elongated kangaroo feet. The pads, smoother than vinyl, gleamed purple black in the sun. They were lined with closely cropped hair concealing the sheathed scimitars of her claws.

No decent petting was complete without attention to Cleo’s pride and joy, her tail. Smooth and oily, it had sprouted into an elegant accessory. Serpent-like in appearance and flexibility, it had almost as much personality as Cleo herself. It lay in wait beside her when she woke in the mornings, and coiled stealthily around her last thing at night. Every time she looked over her shoulder there it was again, the stalker snake, shadowing her every move.

Most of the time, Cleo regarded her tail as a playmate. They could spend the best part of an afternoon chasing each other in circles around the floor until they collapsed from dizziness. On other occasions, the tail took on a more malevolent mood. When Cleo was dozing on the window ledge the tail would sometimes twitch, disturbing her sleep. She would open one eye to examine the mischievous appendage. Rippling under her gaze, that tail was asking to be taught a lesson. Cleo would attack, tumbling off the window ledge so she could grab the creature with all four sets of claws and sink her teeth into it. Twitching and writhing between her jaws, the snake put up a noble fight, inflicting mysteriously brutal pain on its attacker. Cleo and her tail were like a warring married couple, glued together for reasons they’d long forgotten and fighting several times a day over imagined insults. It took a long time for them to settle their differences and cohabit in peace.

I resisted the temptation to call Rosie and boast how our “ugly” kitten was transforming into a beauty. Cleo’s newfound elegance aroused two hopes in me. One, that she wouldn’t realize how gorgeous she was and become vain (few weaknesses are more tiresome to live with than vanity, especially in someone who has suffered the indignity of plain looks in their past). Two, that the theory about dog owners developing a physical likeness to their pets might also apply to cat owners. Neither of these aspirations seemed likely to happen. Cleo was too playful and fascinated with life to start behaving like a movie star. And I continued to resemble a food-addicted golden retriever.

Cleo awakened a depth of tenderness in Rob I hadn’t seen before. He’d always been the baby of the household, the one everybody else looked out for. Now, for the first time, he was responsible for something smaller than himself, and a gentle, caring side of him began to emerge. Feeding, combing, cuddling his lovable kitten (often with enthusiastic advice from Jason) was helping him grow stronger and more self-assured. I watched in awe as he carved a fresh identity for himself at school, and a trickle of new friends made their way down the zigzag to our place.

Our affection for Cleo was fiercely returned. As her adopted slaves, we were duty-bound to include her in everything. If she heard a conversation going on in another room she scratched and called at the door until she was part of it. Occasionally she was content to witness goings-on from a vantage point in the sun on the back of the sofa. Mostly, though, she preferred to be wedged into a warm lap, her paws tucked neatly under her body, purring approval.

If someone was reading a book, particularly if the reader was lying comfortably on his back, Cleo knew she was being invited to position herself between him and the pages. Supremely confident that a cat was far more fascinating than any printed word, she’d be astonished when the reader lifted her, evicting her gently to the other side of the book. How could an inferior human be so rude? Once she’d regained her composure, she would examine the outside cover. She could only presume it had been placed there for grooming purposes. Cleo discovered cats don’t need toothbrushes when they can run their teeth along the cardboard edge of a paperback cover.

She waited on Rob’s window ledge with more than a hint of accusation in her eye whenever we went out. Was time going to limp by while we were away? As if. The moment she’d seen the back of the last raincoat disappear up the zigzag she’d get up to secret cat’s business. A potted plant would tumble mysteriously on its side. Telltale paw prints appeared on the kitchen bench. Half-eaten blowflies sprinkled themselves over the carpet. The joint certainly jumped while we were out. When we arrived home Cleo would be waiting in the window again. She seemed to have an inbuilt radar that told her exactly when we’d be back. She would dance down the hall to greet us, her tail raised in an elegant curve of greeting. Anyone who picked her up in their arms would be rewarded with a kiss from her damp, licorice nose.

If dogs could talk, Rata would have been a reliable informant. Gazing mournfully at a tangle of pulled threads on the sofa she’d sigh as if to say, “What can you expect from a cat?” But when Cleo snuggled into the dog’s belly to be slobbered with giant retriever kisses, all was forgiven. For all her uppity, occasionally murderous, habits, we adored her.

The more we let ourselves love our young cat, the more readily we seemed able to open our hearts and forgive the unfamiliar people we’d become since the loss of Sam. As we turned towards each other and started to rebuild a sense of family, a hopeful warmth resurfaced in our marriage. Steve dismantled the barricade of his newspaper one night, looked me straight in the eye and said: “You look so terribly sad and beautiful.” His words stretched across the icy distance and enveloped us.

I’d forgotten how amusing his quirky sense of humor could be. That’s what had drawn us together in the first place. Both outsiders, we’d been hopelessly uncoordinated at school sports and shared a talent for feeling awkward in groups. Together we’d created a separate universe and tried to persuade ourselves that life as a pair of misfits on the edge of the mainstream was a comfortable place to be.

Vulnerable as a pair of oysters without their shells, we put on our winter coats and went on our first movie “date” since our lives had changed so drastically. A divinely youthful and sexy Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman diverted my attention long enough for me to feel surprised, then guilty, I’d gone for a few minutes not thinking about Sam. When the credits rolled, the lights went up and Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes launched into the theme song, “Up Where We Belong,” reality crashed in again.

Soon after, Steve visited a specialist to investigate the prospect of a vasectomy reversal. Complicated microsurgery would be involved, and he was warned the chances of success were minimal, as low as ten percent. Nevertheless, taking our circumstances into account, the surgeon was willing to give it his best shot. Even though we knew our marriage was on a fault line and on the verge of crumbling, we both desperately wanted another child. A date for the surgery was set.

We weren’t looking for a replacement for Sam. We both knew that would be impossible. But our house and hearts felt empty. I still set the table for four every night, until a cold gong in my heart reminded me I was living in the past. One set of knives and forks had to be put back in the drawer.

I longed for sorrow to shrivel and sail effortlessly into oblivion. If an autumn leaf could release the memory of summer and float into nothingness, fearless and with such grace, why was it impossible for me?

An inner lioness of motherhood refused to relinquish anything connected to Sam. Alone in the house, I’d carry his blue Boy Scouts jumper around with me like a comfort rug, over my shoulder. His name tag had been hand-sewn clumsily inside the collar. After he’d earned the red patches for Reading, Art, Chess and (laughably) Housework, I’d shared his pride by sewing them on the sleeves with small careful stitches. The garment had shrunk to the shape of his torso. It was redolent of him and now also of my tears.

Mothers are the ultimate power junkies. When we lift a newborn human from our bodies we experience an adrenaline high far headier than anything Bill Gates or Pablo Picasso ever knew. Multi-zillion-dollar businesses and the world’s greatest art fade to trinkets alongside the miraculous creation of a human being. The reason so few women become great concert masters, politicians and inventors isn’t so much because of prejudice (not that there’s a shortage) or lack of opportunity (hardly a drought of that, either). Why would anyone bother writing a symphony when she can create a collection of cells that will one day ask to borrow her car?

Our passion for our children springs straight from the jungle. Would Bill Gates lay down his life for Microsoft? Picasso commit murder for one of his paintings?

Mothers have power beyond politics, art and money. We’re the people who give life, nurture babies and make them grow. Without us humanity would wither like seaweed on a rock. Knowledge of our power is so deep we don’t talk about it often, but we use it all the time.

Ancient mother’s power is employed to make our kids eat green vegetables, aim straight at the toilet bowl and grow a few centimeters every year. When we yell “Come back here!” across a supermarket or a playing field, they freeze, turn around and obey—most of the time, anyway. It’s magic. It works. Because we say so.

I’d brought Sam to life when he slid out of my body all those years ago. Surely I was strong enough to muster enough mother’s power to will him to life again? “Come back here!” I yelled across the universe. The silence was darker than midnight. I longed to see even his ghostly form standing at the end of the bed. But Sam had flown farther away than the distance between stars, to the empty nothingness of space.

I dreaded bumping into Sam’s old school friends. Their innocent faces still fired me with irrational resentment, then profound shame at my reaction. Rage flared whenever I saw a blue Ford Escort. It had yet to occur to me that the events of 21 January could have ruined the woman’s life almost as drastically as ours. I often wondered how events had unfolded that day. After Sam had fallen, Rob had run up the zigzag to find Steve. Had she climbed out of her car to comfort the dying child?

But the sight of our young cat scampering down the hallway invariably lifted my mood. Not so long ago Lena’s instruction to simply love our kitten had seemed an impossible ask. Yet Cleo overwhelmed us all with affection so freely, we couldn’t help loving her back. The youngest, most joyous member of our family, she had woven herself into our life after Sam. I couldn’t believe I’d ever contemplated giving her back to Lena.

Leaves of a birch in our garden transformed themselves into a curtain of gold medallions that shimmered against pewter branches. Oblivious to its chances, a late summer rose unfurled on a bush.

A squall direct from Antarctica pummelled the harbor to stainless steel, scattering birds across the sky. No wonder birds greet a translucent dawn with consummate joy. They don’t dwell on the previous night’s storm. Their chorus betrays no concern for the winter ahead, either. They simply embrace the miracle of being alive in this instant on one perfect autumn morning. I had so much to learn from them.

If anything, the beauty of these sights was heightened now I understood how achingly brief the life span was of any living thing. Maybe the key to healing isn’t found in books, tears or religion, but in affection for small things—a flower, the smell of damp grass. Love for a kitten was helping me embrace the world again.