Cleo

Missing

A cat reserves the right to disappear without explanation.

My habitual terror of flying was replaced by a different neurosis—cat-in-the-hold anxiety. What if Cleo was freezing back there? Or if her carrier had been placed alongside a pit bull terrier with anger management issues? My ear was cocked for the sound of muffled meowing from the plane’s rear. A pair of stewards performed the flight instructions with the flourish of chorus members from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—“Should an oxygen mask appear, bat your eyelashes, swoosh that plastic tube and gyrate those hips!” Clattering trolleys, yelling babies and pilot’s announcements drowned all hopes I had of hearing distress calls from Cleo.

I tried not to worry. There was a chance she wasn’t even on our plane. We’d been told she might arrive up to twenty-four hours later than us.

The parched continent spread like a giant poppadom beneath us. Engines whined as we descended into Melbourne. Fear flipped into excitement and back again. As we climbed into a cab I savored the dry air and the giant blue sky. Everything about Australia was magnified, more confident and outgoing. I hoped we could burrow out a life for ourselves on its sun-burnt expanse.

The girls regarded the move with almost as little enthusiasm as the convicts who’d been shipped to the country one hundred and fifty years earlier. Unlike the British penal system, we’d gone out of our way to make their transportation to Australia seem attractive. In short, we’d bribed them. Shamelessly. Katharine, who’d initially insisted on a kangaroo farm, settled for a Barbie house with a motorized elevator. Lydia was still working a deal to be driven to her new school in one of the horse-drawn carriages she’d seen trotting around the central city (“the one with red feathers on the horses’ heads”).

As the cab pulled up outside our rented villa in the leafy suburb of Malvern, I was still worrying about our cat. Poor old Cleo. She was probably languishing in some horrible transit prison for animals. Maybe I should have accepted Rosie’s offer to adopt her. Rosie had pointed out that, at the age of fifteen, Cleo was the human equivalent of seventy-five years old. It was, she hinted, nothing short of a miracle our cat had survived this long, considering her rugged lifestyle with us. She’d implied that Cleo’s vital organs might not be up to the rigors of jet travel. A short retirement in Rosie’s cat menagerie was possibly a more humane option. Nevertheless, Cleo was woven into our family history as firmly as cat fur into a favorite blanket. We weren’t perfect cat parents. But leaving her behind was unthinkable.

A lot had changed since our return from Switzerland five years earlier. After leaving school with a scholarship Rob completed his degree and decided to embark on an engineering career in Melbourne. Lydia was on the brink of becoming a teenager. Katharine was about to start school. My ex-husband Steve had married Amanda, and they’d produced a daughter. On a much sadder note, Mum had succumbed to bowel cancer and died after a few weeks of illness. Her suffering in the final days had been terrible to watch, yet she embraced death with great courage. As she’d withered to a shell of her former self, her spirit seemed to distill into dazzling purity, which blazed from every part of her. Harrowing as it was, I’d felt privileged to be alone with her as she heaved her last painful breath. I missed our phone conversations, her ceaseless encouragement, her refusal to regard life in its dimmest light.

Some things had stayed the same, however. Cleo was still undisputed queen of our household.

“There’s something on the doorstep,” said Rob.

There was a large box in the shadows of the front porch. I assumed it was a piece of junk the previous tenants had left behind. It had a mesh side. We approached tentatively. A pair of familiar green eyes glowered out from behind the wire.

“Look who’s here!” said Philip.

The eyes glared back as if to say, Well you certainly took your time!

“Cleo! You’re here already!” the girls cried in unison.

Typical of Cleo’s style, she’d arrived in our new country hours ahead of the rest of us. Somewhere along the line she’d flashed a look at a quarantine officer. He’d recognized an Egyptian goddess when he saw one and given her first-class treatment.

Cleo devoured her first Australian meal in a matter of minutes. She was adapting faster than the rest of us. My first reaction was to reach for the phone to tell countless people back in New Zealand we’d arrived. They sounded warm and happy to hear from me, but I sensed we were rapidly becoming part of their history.

Calling home was the easy part. The hard bit was finding new everythings—from doctors and hairdressers to shopping centers and playgrounds. The most daunting “new” was discovering new friends. The importance of an amiable network of people struck home when I had to fill out school forms. For “Emergency Contact: i.e., friend, neighbor etc.” I had no choice but to leave a blank space. We were stranded on a rock of anonymity. If we couldn’t find new friends soon we’d have to invent some. I’d decided to work from home, sending columns back to newspapers and Next magazine in New Zealand. While I loved staying in touch with loyal readers it was a solitary occupation. Mulling over a computer screen in the suburbs was hardly going to raise my chances of meeting friends.

After keeping Cleo inside for the statutory two days I opened the back door for her. She nudged a tentative nose outside. Her whiskers twitched. She lifted an uncertain paw. Australia, with its concoction of garden smells mingled with possum fur, eucalyptus and parrot feathers, smelled different. Before I could stop her she slithered like a trout between my ankles and disappeared into a clump of bird of paradise.

“It’s okay,” I said to Katharine. “She’s just exploring. She’ll be back for dinner.”

Dinnertime came and went. Not a whisker of Cleo. In all her fifteen years she’d never disappeared on us. Dusk faded. The sky turned the color of a bruise and it started to drizzle. Cleo hated rain. We called for her. No answer.

“She’s probably sheltering under the house,” I said, hoping it was true. “She’ll turn up in the morning.”

Rain hammered on the roof all night. It wasn’t right. Australia was famous for drought and desert, not downpours. Soon after dawn I hurried out of bed to check doors and windows for a cat asking to be let in. Nothing. Losing our beloved Cleo would be a ghastly omen for our move to Australia. Philip left for his first day at work, a cloud of anxiety in his eyes. After breakfast, the girls and I slid into raincoats and trawled the neighborhood, calling for her. A grumpy white cat stared at us from a window. Across the road I heard a dog bark. While Cleo wasn’t as resilient as she used to be, she was still tough. But what if Australian animals were tougher? If she encountered a rottweiler she might not be able to stare him down. Even though she could still run, she wasn’t an elite athlete anymore.

Tucking the girls under their blankets that night, I tried to prepare them for heartache. “Cleo’s had a long, exciting life,” I said.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Lydia asked.

“No,” I said. “She doesn’t feel dead, does she? I think she knows we still need her.”

I couldn’t help thinking the odds were against us. An old cat runaway in a new country had a survival chance of a thousand to one. With every hour that passed her chances were surely getting slimmer.

Next day the rain had eased. We searched the neighborhood again. My throat was sore from calling her name. We trailed through laneways and a builder’s yard. We scoured a playground at the end of the street. There seemed no point investigating the busy main road just a couple of houses from our new place. If Cleo had ventured in that direction we wouldn’t be seeing her again.

Heavyhearted, we turned into the gate. Now I really wished I’d been sensible enough to accept Rosie’s offer to let Cleo spend her sunset years with a certified cat lover. We’d been crazy to move countries. Mentally deranged to think we had sufficient charm and energy to make new friends. Gulping back tears, I draped my arms around the girls’ shoulders and croaked out one last hopeless “Cleeeeeeo!” The houses and trees of our new neighborhood responded with silence.

A shadow flickered in the basement of the house across the road, the one where we’d heard the dog barking. The shape pushed forwards and squeezed between some gardenia bushes. At first I thought it was some strange Australian animal, an urban wombat, perhaps. But it had ears and whiskers…and…to our great relief, Cleo trotted across the street into our arms. We never found out where she’d been and whether some other family had tried to lure her to their fridge. Whatever she’d been up to, she’d made a decision in our favor.

Everything in Australia was bolder and more luridly colored—including the birdlife. I assumed Cleo would reassert her reign of terror over the feathered species once she knew her way around. But Australian birds aren’t to be messed with. Assertive as Dame Edna on HRT, they have no intention of becoming a cat’s breakfast.

Cleo was dazzled by the colors of the rainbow lorikeets, who set themselves up in our backyard pear tree. She ran her tongue over her lips, imagining the pretty toothpicks their green and red feathers would make. But they cackled derisively at the elderly black cat. They knew that if she got anywhere near them they’d claw her to pieces and fillet what was left of her with their beaks.

A couple of magpies decided to claim vengeance on behalf of the entire bird species. One afternoon I glanced out the kitchen window to see Cleo, head down, tail tucked under, running as fast as she could up the side of the house. Like a pair of spitfires the magpies were chasing her, swooping and diving and squawking with delight. I ran to the door and opened it just in time for Cleo to sprint inside to safety.

Our four walls couldn’t protect us from everything, though. Just when we thought we were adjusting to our new life we struck our first day over a hundred. I’d always claimed to be a warm-weather person. A few extra notches up the thermometer would be nothing short of delightful. Having grown up in a country that welcomes every ray of warmth, I threw the windows and curtains open. Nothing like a good through-draft. Except this “through-draft” was hurtling straight off the sizzling Outback into our living room. Heat lumbered through the house like a monster. Instead of wafting through as heat was supposed to, it plonked itself in every room and expanded like a phantom until it filled every corner and reached the ceiling. My arms and legs swelled to twice their size. My hair hung in damp streamers. My heart thudded in my ears. Paralyzed on the sofa, I could hardly move. I managed to drag a basket of laundry out to the clothesline. Our underwear practically caught fire in the wind.

We were all overwhelmed by the heat. It was worse for Cleo. Her black coat absorbed the warmth and distributed it through her body like a personal central heating system. She who liked nothing more than roasting herself by an open fire lay seemingly lifeless on her side, limbs rigor-mortis rigid, her tongue a rippling flag of surrender.

While hot days came and went, Rob’s illness continued to debilitate him. The flare-ups were increasingly frequent and severe. At twenty-four, he was a qualified engineer, yet a normal working life was impossible. The extent of his debilitation struck me the day we took him for a bushwalk, or tried to: he couldn’t walk much farther than the distance between two lampposts. His gastroenterologist told him the steroid levels he was taking were unsustainable. Rob agreed to see a colorectal surgeon.

I was concerned for him on many levels, including his social life. Having left his friends from school and university behind in New Zealand, he knew hardly anyone his own age in Australia. When I mentioned this to Trudy, one of the mothers at Katharine’s school, she brought her niece, Chantelle, over to meet Rob one day. A beautiful young brunette, Chantelle filled the kitchen with her vibrant personality. Oddly, I felt a similar sense of recognition I’d experienced meeting Philip. I put it down to Chantelle’s outgoing nature. She was just one of those people who’s easy to warm to. Chantelle took Rob to a football game and introduced him to her younger brother Daniel. I could tell Rob had feelings for her, but hopes of anything other than friendship were futile. Not with massive surgery looming ahead of him.

Anxiety clawed at my insides. I hated the prospect of Rob undergoing such a radical procedure. Nobody wants their child mutilated. What if the surgery went wrong? If, on the other hand, he elected not to have the surgery the future would be even grimmer. One glimpse of his pale face, swollen from steroid intake, was enough to convince me. He was dying in front of our eyes.

One morning I opened the kitchen door to find a plump baby thrush lying stunned on its back on the brick path. Cleo was losing her touch. Not so long ago she would have gone in for the kill by now. The baby thrush’s eyes were bright, alarmed. Perched on the fence above, two adult birds, the parents, were creating the mayhem that had drawn me outside.

As Cleo crept forwards for the final lunge, my skin prickled with rage. How could she be so soft and loving one minute and a coldhearted destroyer of families the next? For once I had the opportunity to stop one of her ritual killings. I grabbed her and swept her into the house, slamming the door behind us.

All afternoon Cleo and I watched the adult birds flit between the fence and an overgrown camellia bush. Their shrieks were fractured with desperation. I understood their anguish as they urged their child to fight for life. At least they’d been spared the horror of seeing their child mutilated, I thought. Then again, those two little words “at least” always carried a shadow of dread with them.

Cleo was infuriated by my sentimentality. It’s nature, you fool, she seemed to say. You’re only making things worse. Let me get it over and done with.

Next morning, I imprisoned her indoors. The baby bird lay motionless in the same spot on the brick path. Its eyes were blank, its claws curled up in a gesture of astonishment. I gulped back tears. To my surprise the parents were still standing guard in the camellia bush, staring down at their dead child in disbelief. I’d never realized birds could feel grief for their lost children the way people do. As Sam had often said, the world of animals is more complex and beautiful than humans understand.

Witnessing the scene from a nearby window, Cleo licked her paws with regal nonchalance. I struggled to even like her at that moment.