Cleo

Freedom

Human beings strive to claim ownership of everything they love. Yet a cat belongs to nobody, except perhaps the moon.

Around the time I became a single mother Cleo stepped up her hunting skills. Maybe she sensed we were down to one provider and thought I was doing a lousy job bringing home the bacon. Not only was I a pathetic, two-legged creature with (from her point of view, anyway) a hideously bald body, I couldn’t hunt a mouse if world peace depended on it. Cleo more than compensated for my inadequacies with a stream of furry or feathered corpses scattered from the front doormat, through the bedrooms and down the hall to the kitchen. Our house resembled the workroom of an amateur taxidermist. To stem the tide of destruction I bought Cleo a hot-pink collar with fake diamond studs and a bell to warn potential victims to scurry back to their nests.

“Cats don’t wear collars,” Mum said in a tone implying she’d just delivered the Eleventh Commandment.

While the kids and I always looked forward to Mum’s visits, she invariably found something not quite right with our setup. This time it was the cat collar.

“She’s killing too many animals,” I said, tightening the buckle around Cleo’s reluctant neck. “Besides, it looks quite Audrey Hepburn, don’t you think?”

“It’s hideous,” Mum replied. “And it’s a cat’s job to kill things.”

For once Cleo agreed with Mum. The cat shook her head vigorously, making herself jingle like a Christmas accessory.

“See? It doesn’t like that thing!”

“She’s not an ‘it.’ She’s a she,” I said. “And she’ll get used to it.”

Cleo and I embarked on a serious battle of wills. She detested that collar with more focus than she’d ever hated anything, including non–cat people. Every waking hour was devoted to scratching and gnawing at it. Three fake diamonds fell out. The sumptuous pink strap faded and was reduced to a stringy neck brace. Cleo fixed me with a hooded look that said it all: How dare you try and brand me with this degrading object! What makes you assume you have the right? Do you think you own me?

“Is that your new boyfriend?” Mum stage-whispered in the kitchen. “I thought he was a policeman when I opened the door. His hair’s so short and he’s so clean-cut. Hardly your type, is he?”

I never enjoyed her reviewing my personal affairs. Her observation skills were astringent enough to qualify as an ingredient for aftershave. Philip’s appearance in our lives provided her with a wealth of new material.

“Just out of the army, is he? Oh well, you were married to a sailor. I suppose it’ll be the air force next.”

Life at work was no easier. When the cat got out of the bag that I was still seeing Philip with one l there were enough arched eyebrows to form a Gothic cathedral. Toy-boy jokes echoed from one end of the newsroom to the other. Journalists pride themselves on being broad-minded, but I was learning they’re broad-minded only in certain ways. If I’d taken to booze and boogied till dawn with an elderly drug addict they’d hardly have noticed. Movies were (and still are) full of old men as ugly as bulldogs slurping over models twenty-five years their junior. It hardly seemed fair that a woman going out with a short-haired, younger bloke in a suit was regarded as an act of indecency. I tried to retaliate with quips to assure them it was merely a fling. Except the fling was lasting a month or two longer than expected.

Things weren’t straightforward for Philip, either. His circle of bright young things couldn’t believe he was in such a whacky relationship. He continued to be inundated with invitations to lunches and parties by ticks-in-the-right-boxes girls. The town was packed with highly qualified wrinkle-free beauties all desperate for a man, and Philip in particular.

Falling in love with my one-night stand was the most pleasant surprise that ever happened to me. Getting to know him was like exploring an underground cave, dark and deceptively shallow at first. Yet dig a little deeper, turn a few corners, and there was a cavern full of rare and magnificent crystals. Not only was he handsome, great company and wonderful to the kids, he had a strong spiritual curiosity. He was the first man I’d ever met who seemed genuinely interested in my weird dreams and occasional off-the-planet psychic experiences. We were destined to be together, I thought, encircling him with an invisible version of Cleo’s pink collar (camouflage pattern, perhaps; definitely no bell).

“It doesn’t matter what wrapping people are in,” I said to anyone who questioned our unlikely union. “It’s what’s inside that counts.”

I even loved the aspects of him that had stopped me taking him seriously at the beginning. The age difference between us was fun and interesting (apart from the time he asked, “Who’s Shirley Bassey?”). His conservative manner wasn’t so deep-set that I couldn’t joke him out of it sometimes. And I had a lot to learn about military life and banks. Our relationship was astoundingly close to perfect.

One of the many aspects of Philip I adored was the way he kept a perfectly ironed handkerchief in his pocket. The hand kerchief was flourished whenever required to wipe a woman’s tears or, occasionally by very special request, less glamorous outpourings from her nostrils. Even more impressive, he insisted on being on the outside whenever we were walking along a footpath. The only other man I knew who performed this ancient act of chivalry designed to protect a woman from oncoming horses as well as mud flying from carriage wheels was my father. The first time Philip gently took my arm, moved slowly behind me and slid my hand into the crook of his other elbow so I was closest to the shop windows and he was nearest the gutter I knew this was a man I’d willingly spend the rest of my life with.

But then…why does there always have to be a “but then”? Why can’t the sad solo mother queen just meet her prince, fall in love, stroll down the aisle in a tactfully off-white suit and live happily ever after? Because life isn’t written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Real people have histories, hang-ups, phobias, anxieties, egos, ambitions, not to mention opinionated friends and family just waiting to pass judgment.

We no longer went to huge lengths not to be seen in public with the children. At least, I didn’t think so. So when the four of us drove to town one Saturday morning on a T-shirt shopping mission, we parked on the main street and bundled out of the car. Walking down the footpath, Philip completed one of his elegant mud-protecting moves. The kids galloped ahead into the store. I felt like someone in a movie whose life has turned out wonderfully, when people have finished their popcorn and the credits are about to roll.

“I like this one,” Lydia said, holding up a T-shirt featuring teddy bears dressed as fairies. The color was predictable.

“She’s going through a three-year-old pink phase,” I said to Philip. “I’m not fighting it. If I do she’ll probably end up on a shrink’s couch someday, blaming me for denying her an essential part of her development.”

He didn’t laugh. In fact, he’d frozen like a cat that has spotted a rottweiler.

“Sarah!” he said, smiling broadly over my shoulder.

I turned. Standing outside a changing room in a bikini so miniscule it could have doubled as dental floss was a blonde with legs longer than Barbie’s. I recognized her from the photo board at the lake, one of the famous “boring” girls. Ticks in every single box.

“Philip!” she beamed. “Where have you been? We haven’t seen you at tennis for ages. I’ve been missing you.”

I waited for Philip to introduce me, but he snapped himself inside a Perspex bubble that denied any connection with me. I was just another shopper he happened to be standing next to, and the kids were invisible.

“Work’s been full-on,” he said, moving towards her. “You know what it’s like this time of year.”

“Same at the surgery,” she said, rolling her eyes and flicking her golden mane. “There’s heaps of cosmetic work these days. Everyone wants perfect teeth. You’re looking so well!”

“So are you!” His voice ricocheted off the walls into my ears, collided inside my brain, spun down my spinal column and ruptured something in my chest.

“And your parents? How are they?”

As their conversation grew warmer and more intimate I stood like a Charles Dickens character shivering out in the snow and peering through a window at a flickering hearth surrounded by happy faces.

“Let’s go!” I said quietly to Rob.

“But I want this pink one,” said Lydia.

“Not now!” I said, thrusting it back on a neatly folded pile.

Grabbing her hand, I swept out of the shop with Rob jogging to catch up with me.

“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” Rob asked, as we charged through a sea of faces.

“I don’t think he even knows we’ve gone.”

What a fool I’d been. A consummate moron. Why on earth hadn’t I listened to Nicole and Mum and everyone else who’d warned me? They’d been right all along. The boy-man and I had no place in each other’s worlds. He was no more capable of fitting in with my journalist crowd than I was of suddenly becoming a twenty-four-year-old Barbie dentist. Let alone the kids. It would take an incredibly special man to encompass my kids in his future.

How wrong of me to expose them to someone so shallow and immature. And yes, conservative. So damned conservative and dull he might as well take up smoking a pipe and marry a dentist.

“Wait!” Philip, panting from running to catch up with us, touched me on the shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

I sent Rob into a McDonald’s to buy himself chips and Lydia an ineptly named Happy Meal.

“Ashamed of us, are you?” I yowled.

“What do you mean?” he asked, feigning innocence.

“Why didn’t you introduce us?”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

“You mean you didn’t think she’d be interested!”

“Look, I…” An inquisitive shopper paused to absorb as much of our argument as was politely possible.

“I thought you said Sarah was boring.” I hated the vindictive quaver in my voice. It was hideously unattractive and about as un-ticks-in-boxes as anyone could get. “You did a pretty good impression of not being bored.”

“She’s…just a friend.”

“If that’s the case why did you act as if we weren’t there?”

Philip stared up at a neon sign above our head. In a merciless act of cruelty it flashed the words “Engagement Rings.”

“Do you think this is easy for me?” he erupted. “It’s not that I don’t like the kids. I think they’re wonderful. It’s just…”

I waited as a thousand shoppers changed color under the flashing sign.

“I’m not sure I want to be an instant father.”

When he dropped us home and drove off I discovered Cleo’s collar was missing. She’d finally chewed it off and claimed her freedom.