Cleo

Indulgence

Stress—a waste of nap time.

A cat’s lips are arranged in a permanent smile. Even when it’s miserable, the edges of its mouth point skywards. This is not the case with humans, whose mouths have a tendency to turn down at the corners, especially as they grow older. A human who wears the effortless smile of cat is in possession of a happy secret.

A smile appeared on Steve’s lips when he heard the news. He carried it with him back to sea and was still wearing it a week later. I had a cat’s smile too. We agreed not to make it official for a few weeks in case the pregnancy came to nothing.

When we decided it was safe to tell Rob, his smile was an explosion of sunlight.

He immediately put in an order for a baby brother. It had to be a boy, he said, because boys were what we had in our family. I agreed and promised to do my best. Then he ran across the zigzag to tell Jason, who of course told Ginny.

Arriving breathless on the doorstep, she enveloped me in the spicy embrace of her Opium perfume and did an excellent job feigning surprise. “Congratulations, darling! It’s going to be wonderful.” She offered to deliver the baby when the time came. I still had trouble believing my zany friend had another life in sterile gloves. Still, I liked the idea of our baby’s first glimpse of humanity including a woman in false eyelashes and a zebra-skin jacket.

I sank into a pregnancy that combined squeamishness with ravenous hunger. It didn’t seem so long ago that New Zealanders had survived on a diet of grey mince and mutton. During my teenage years, Mum introduced me to an exotic new food called pizza. We’d grown more sophisticated since then. We’d learned wine didn’t necessarily come out of card board boxes, bread could be sold in sticks and there were more than two types of cheese in the world. When a smart new deli opened around the corner we knew we’d arrived.

Profiterole. ProfEETerole, if pronounced correctly, according to the deli man who baked them. Roll your tongue around the word and it sounds almost erotic.

The grumpy profiterole man was Michelangelo in a chef’s apron. How he could produce the lightest, puffiest, most delectable pastries on earth was beyond me. But who would guess a beige moth could produce a gorgeous green gum emperor caterpillar?

He laid them out every morning like naked sunbathers in his shop window. Lightly tanned, each oblong encased a glob of cream. Mudslides of chocolate sauce trickled over the cases. The shop window steamed around the edges, inviting—no, insisting—I venture inside.

“One profiterole, please,” I asked.

“ProFEETerole!” he snapped.

“Make that two.”

After all, I was eating for two now (three, in fact, counting Cleo).

Profiterole man grunted. Anyone would think I was trying to buy his children.

Waddling back up the zigzag I could feel the pastry crumbling and the cream oozing through the paper bag.

It was tempting to lower my globular body onto the seat halfway up the zigzag and scoff them there. But there was a danger I’d encounter Mrs. Sommerville. She’d shoot me that Look of hers. Disapproving as ice cliffs, the Sommerville Look was designed to make boys confess to throwing snails at postmen and grown women suddenly feel as if they’d forgotten to put their underwear on.

I decided to slog on. Besides, I wasn’t the only one holding out for profiteroles. Cleo had developed an obsession with profiterole cream. The day she stole a splodge off my finger was like a heroin addict’s first hit. Ever since, she’d taken to licking empty paper bags, the edges of my plate, my sleeve, anywhere trace elements could be found.

Every morning she waited, outlined against a stained-glass panel in the porch and looking like an Art Nouveau poster, for my return. The moment I arrived puffing at our front gate she galloped towards me, tail high, head slightly tilted. Together we’d trudge inside and sink into the recliner rocker, footrest up, headrest down, and rip open the paper bag.

Cleo was changing my attitude to indulgence. Guilt isn’t in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels, and savor it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don’t waste energy counting the number of calories they’ve consumed or the hours they’ve frittered away sunbathing.

Cats don’t beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don’t get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are—a meaningless waste of nap time.

I loved lazing around the half-renovated bungalow taking chill-out lessons from a cat. I slowed down, zoned out and tried listening to my body. It was screaming for rest, not just to cope with the demands of pregnancy, but to harvest energy for deeper levels of recovery. We became shameless sleepers, indulging in afternoon naps and morning ones, too. Eventually, after I’d waddled home from an after-school visit to Ginny’s, Cleo and I discovered the delights of the early evening snooze.

I was her hot-water bottle. Either Cleo sensed the presence of new life inside me and wanted to be part of it, or she simply enjoyed the extra warmth and curves of the expanding mound. Almost horizontal in our recliner rocker, we had an ideal padded nest in which to laze away the weeks.

During the middle months of my pregnancy Cleo arranged herself around the top of the bulge, her head perfectly positioned for an idle tickle. Cleo adored small circular massages in the dent behind her ears, interspersed with full-length body strokes from her forehead to the tip of her tail. The experience was equally pleasurable for the masseuse, and at night my hands tingled with the memory of her fur.

As weeks progressed and my mound grew, Cleo reverted to snuggling wherever she could, stretching up my side or sometimes around the lower regions of my expanding abdomen. Claws were politely sheathed, until she could bear it no longer. Overcome with pleasure, she would knead them rhythmically into her protesting human heater.

A cat’s fur has many textures, from the dense velvety covering on her nose to the silky pads of her paws; the sleek fur on her back to the fluffy undergrowth on her belly. Strange that such softness contrasts with claws and teeth sharp as pins. But every feline is a puzzle of contradictions—adoring one moment, aloof the next; a nurturing parent but also a murderer so cold-blooded it toys with wounded prey.

Sprawled in the armchair with Cleo I had an urge to feel wool nudging through my fingers again. To knit the spiderweb delicacy of baby clothes was beyond my capability, so I bought three balls of blue wool (thick) and some chunky needles, and embarked on a plain-stitch scarf for Rob.

The rhythm of needles clicking is soothing, like a heartbeat. How a single thread of wool can be knotted together to create a three-dimensional item of clothing is almost as much a mystery as how a conglomeration of cells multiplies to make a baby.

Every stitch is complete in itself, though attached to stitches past and future. As I wound the wool around the needles to form each stitch, I thought of Sam, and I gently cast off. Cross needles, wind wool, release…cross needles, wind wool, release…If I practiced this ten thousand times, or a million, perhaps my soul could do the same. Release, release…

Cleo was mesmerized; her eyes revolved in unison with the needles. With precision timing, she swatted them as they swept past her face and caught them between her teeth. The enemy of the knitting needles made such a nuisance of herself sometimes I’d scrape her off my lap and put her on the floor. Yet that was no punishment—the snake of blue wool unfurling from its ball was a thrilling foe.

Apart from occasional squabbles over wool and needles, our days drifted away companionably eating, dreaming and following patches of sun around the house. Every moment was a stitch in a larger fabric that was gradually becoming a life connected to the one we had before with Sam, yet entirely different. Household rhythms unfurled effortlessly as a ball of wool. Spoons clattered into kitchen drawers only to be taken out, used, washed, dried and put back again. Each morning Rob and Jason trudged through long shadows down the path to school to return at that time in the afternoon when the day is getting tired. Piles of laundry waited to be sorted, washed and pegged on the clothesline overlooking the shipping terminal below. Then taken down, folded, ironed, put in cupboards, worn and dumped in familiar-smelling piles again. Complete in themselves, each with a beginning, middle and end, these comforting cycles interwove into the semblance of a normal life.

Watching sun ripple against the wallpaper I wondered why we’d been in such a rush to fix up the house. What was so offensive about the wallpaper? If it stayed attached to the walls long enough the frenzy of black floral arrangements against a white background might become fashionable again. Even the shaggy carpet didn’t get on my nerves much anymore. Pregnant euphoria ensured everything could wait.

Steve’s reaction was the opposite. Every room reeked of fresh paint. Ladders leaned at drunken angles all over the house. Plunging into feverish activity, he finished renovating the bathroom. He hauled out the peeling blue bath with its tasteless gold taps and dumped it on the lawn in front of the house. I was so hormoned-out I wasn’t bothered when grass grew tall around its edges.

When I wondered aloud to Ginny if she thought he’d ever take the bath away she suggested we turn it into a lily pond with goldfish. God, I loved that woman.

Cleo and I developed a taste for Mozart, not just because of the theory that babies could hear through the walls of the womb and classical music helped their brain cells grow. Cleo seemed to genuinely appreciate the composer’s soothing music, particularly the second movement of the Clarinet Concerto in A. As the clarinet pulled notes of liquid gold from the air, Cleo’s eyes narrowed to silver slits. Rainbows of sunlight danced across her fur. Nestling snugly around my belly, she purred accompaniment while Mozart resolved life’s heartache in one exquisite movement. Listening to that piece I was assured even the most profound sadness can be transformed into beauty.