Cleo

Conversion

Beware the passionate convert. She may bore you with cat stories.

“Oh, look at the dear little kitten!” a stranger exclaimed when she saw Cleo posed sphinxlike on our front path.

“She’s not a kitten,” I explained. “She’s actually very old.”

“Really? She looks so…young.”

If we could have bottled whatever gene Cleo had that made her look younger the older she grew, we’d have several beach houses, a yacht and a season pass to the space shuttle by now. I put a lot of it down to attitude. Hers, of course. Growing old wasn’t a tragedy, as far as Cleo was concerned. She simply despised the whole process.

Menopausal women would have nothing to fear if they could see how willingly Cleo shed slinky youth to become an increasingly authoritative, essential ruler of our household. High priestess of the family, she expressed her views on everything from whether her fish had been properly mashed to how early human slaves should be forced out of bed. Anyone who hadn’t risen by dawn could expect a screeching wake-up call from Cleo outside their bedroom door.

I too entered a phase where I was more inclined to air my opinions. Having long given up hope of changing the world, I felt it was still entitled to hear my views on everything from presidential politics to how blondes should never be let loose in four-wheel-drives. The only thing missing was a loudspeaker on top of my car through which I could inform other drivers and pedestrians exactly how they were endangering others, themselves and the planet in general.

Following nature’s cycle, our nest was emptying out. Lydia took a year off from her university studies to teach English in Costa Rica. For a while, Rob moved to London, where he was working in a wineshop. If ever Rob and I needed proof of our powerful psychic connection all we have to do is try to call each other. Though we were on opposite sides of the earth, we’d often phone each other at exactly the same time. Even today when I call him his line’s often engaged because he’s trying to ring me.

“You’ll never guess who I caught up with,” he said one day, his voice tinged with excitement over the phone. “Chantelle. She’s over here, teaching in one of those tough inner-city schools.”

I felt a little sad when he mentioned she had a boyfriend. A good guy, Rob assured me, an Australian surfie, though it was hard to imagine what a wave-rider did with himself through the depths of an English winter. Not that Rob was lonely—he was living with a nurse from Queensland. Love’s often a matter of timing and coincidence: while I knew Rob would always have special feelings for Chantelle, prospects of them getting together seemed increasingly thin.

Several months later I was devastated to hear that Chantelle’s younger brother Daniel had died suddenly, of no apparent cause. While tragedy visits every household sooner or later, this was a terrible one for Chantelle and her family to endure. I hoped Rob might be able to help Chantelle with the overwhelming range of shock and sadness she’d be going through.

As the only one left at home, thirteen-year-old Katharine became Cleo’s assistant caregiver. “Look what my friends did last night!” she wailed one morning after having a group of girls over for a sleepover. “They’re so mean! They painted Cleo’s chest white!”

Closer inspection of the snowy fur revealed it wasn’t painted but was white from natural causes.

Cleo developed a geriatric gait, moving stiffly from the hip joints, a sensation I too was becoming begrudgingly familiar with. Cleo gave up playing sock-er, though she kept an old sports sock of Rob’s in her bed. She no longer sprang onto the kitchen bench. Likewise, my joints suffered a shortage of elastin. Creaking ligaments pleaded with me to give stairs a swerve if an elevator opened its tantalizing doors.

Our coats were changing, too. Teenage hairdressers felt duty-bound to instruct me how to make my thinning hair thick and glossy. (“Just massage a peanut-sized glob of this mousse into your scalp. I know it may seem expensive at one hundred and twenty-five dollars, but it’ll last you a whole year.”) Their older sisters lectured me about skin care. (“A cup of blueberries a day will have your skin looking like mine forever. And you’ll never guess how old I am. I’m really old. I’m twenty-five.”)

Free from the attentions of child hairdressers and beauticians, Cleo sprinkled black exclamation marks of fur over our sheets, our underwear, sometimes even our food.

Her black whiskers turned grey. I discovered an unsightly bristle sprouting from my chin.

Cleo and I had always enjoyed roasting ourselves in front of an open fire. Sitting too close nowadays made my legs resemble the surface of Mars. Cleo was even less fireproof. After ten minutes or so she had to stagger away from the inferno and lean against a cool wall to recover.

Quality was more important than we’d realized. I developed an irrational interest in the thread counts of bed linen and Italian stationery.

Our vision was no longer spectacular. An optometrist recommended reading glasses. (Who, me?) I chose the funkiest frames in the shop, green and blue metallic.

“What do you think?” I asked, showing them off to Philip and Katharine.

Their response made it clear. They were the type of reading glasses an old lady would choose in order to look funky.

Cleo developed strange blotches in her eyes, enhancing the impression she was in direct contact with other realities. I found a vet who wasn’t tough and understood how precious she was. He said Cleo didn’t have cataracts. The blotches were just a natural part of the aging process. Soft Vet wasn’t so happy about her kidneys, though. He suggested we could fly her to Queensland for a kidney transplant, though the success rate wasn’t high. (A cat flown thousands of miles for a kidney transplant that will probably fail! I could practically hear my mother wail from the depths of her plastic urn in the New Plymouth graveyard. The world must be off its rocker.)

Unwilling to embrace the less attractive aspects of growing older, I focused on body parts that, with some attention, could still look good. I discovered a nail salon run by a Vietnamese family who, I was thrilled to find out, could hardly speak a word of English. This meant they were mercifully free of small talk and unable to instruct me on methods of maintaining youthful hands and feet. As we got to know each other better, they greeted me with nods and smiles.

Around the same time Cleo’s toenails started clicking like tap shoes over the floorboards. They weren’t getting as much use as in her assassin days. Her claws had worn thin and were as flaky as miniature croissants. I was flattered when Cleo allowed herself to lie on her back in my lap while I attempted to trim her talons with Philip’s nail clippers. Reading glasses perched on the end of my nose, I was terrified of hurting her. I hardly trusted myself with hedge clippers, let alone nail trimmers and her tiny paws. Any clumsy mistakes were corrected with swift gentle bites. After the first few attempts, Cleo trusted me enough to actually purr during the procedure. I was honored to take on the title of official manicurist and (combing dry cat shampoo through her coat) beauty therapist. In short, personal servant.

We’d spent long enough in each other’s company for her to know I had her interests at heart. We’d been through so much together and found a kind of peace, not only with each other, but within ourselves. Together we discovered the well-kept secret that, give or take a few inconveniences, old cats have more fun.

Cleo and I decided to become quirky about our eating habits. I was afflicted with an obsession for chocolate, dark chocolate to be precise, preferably seventy percent cocoa, made in Switzerland and wrapped in something shiny involving photos of mountains. Try as I might to divert my addiction to Italian writing paper or thousand-thread-count sheets, I could find nothing more mesmerizing than chocolate. Cleo underwent an even more powerful food fixation. The word “no” had never been of particular interest to our cat. She now obliterated it from her understanding of human vocabulary. In her mature years, however, she learnt exactly what the words “Chicken Man” meant.

Whenever anyone announced they were off to Chicken Man (to buy a rotisserie takeaway bird from the cheerful Asian man’s shop round the corner), Cleo trotted behind them and waited eagerly at the door until they returned with the mouth-watering parcel.

Cleo was circumspect about most food, though on the whole she preferred it murdered or stolen. Chicken Man was in a different league. One whiff of the freshly roasted flesh drove her to salivating insanity. Anyone in charge of an unguarded plate of chicken was at risk. Loyalties and past affections were forgotten as she embarked on chicken jihad.

We developed a routine of shutting her out of the room so we could have first choice of the meat.

“Poor Cleo!” Katharine would say, as an elegant black paw appeared under the door.

There was no “poor” about it. If the door wasn’t closed properly, the paw slid down the side and pushed it open. Bones and paper napkins would fly through the air, plates clattered to the floor. It was chicken season for young and old.

Our food fixations were equally unattractive to outsiders. The only difference was, Cleo’s didn’t make her any fatter. In fact, she appeared to be shrinking. Her chest bones jutted out, the angles of her skull became even sharper and more prominent. With fur draped over her skeletal form, she resembled an amateur attempt at taxidermy.

That’s not saying we didn’t enjoy moments of friskiness. If the curtains were pulled tight enough and there was no evidence of human life within a five-hundred-meter radius, a determined anthropologist might still have caught a glimpse of me boogieing alone to the strains of Marvin Gaye.

Likewise, after a shower of rain, Cleo shimmied like a kitten up a tree trunk—until halfway up old age got the better of her and she slid unceremoniously back down.

Cleo’s legs, once so tapered and streamlined, became slightly stumpy with lumps where (if she was human) knees and ankles would be. She never grumbled, though. I trudged off to the gym and lifted weights to combat back and neck pain that would never have developed if, like Cleo, I’d spent my life on all fours. The old person’s fear of falling over would never have to be considered if we’d stayed firmly planted to the ground on four feet. Once again, our cat was proving herself a higher-level species.

While our bodies may have given the appearance of growing old, inside Cleo and I were growing up and getting stroppy. In the supermarket checkout line, people always used to recognize me as a pushover. Anyone from toddlers to old men knew they could sneak in front of me without consequences. But the new, stroppy me stood my ground when queue jumpers tried to nudge in front of me. I was even capable of an indignant “Excuse me!” I filled out complaint forms without hesitation and stopped thinking twice about hanging up on telephone marketers calling from Mumbai.

Cleo surpassed me by taking uppity to an art form. When our sight-impaired friend Penny visited with her guide dog Mishka, I placed two bowls of water on the floor—a small one for Cleo and a large one for Mishka. Cleo eyeballed the yellow labrador and claimed the large bowl for herself. Mishka shrunk to half her giant size and retreated to the small bowl.

Penny laughed and accepted my apologies for our pet’s ungracious behavior. I explained that, as a kitten, Cleo had done the same thing to Rata. Nodding amiably, Penny sat on the floor. Mishka parked her rear end affectionately on her owner’s lap. They made a charming vignette, a picture of owner and devoted dog. The image was too much for Cleo. She fixed Mishka with a glower that was so withering the poor animal skulked away into a corner and allowed Cleo to take over prime position on Penny’s lap.

“And what happened to poor little Cleo?” Rosie asked when she phoned out of the blue one day.

“Oh, she’s fine.”

“In a better place,” she sighed. “I always say there are sardines every day in Pussy Heaven.”

“No, Rosie. I mean fine fine.”

“She’s still alive! You’re joking! How old is she now?”

I was getting sick and tired of people asking us impertinent questions about age. “Twenty-three.”

“But that’s, let me see…something like one hundred and sixty-one in human years. Are you sure it’s the same cat?”

“Absolutely.”

“How did you do it? What have you been feeding her? What medication is she on?”

“Nothing special. How are Scruffy, Ruffy, Beethoven and Sibelius?”

An awkward silence. “Well, Scruffy disappeared, Beethoven had kidney failure. Sibelius and Ruffy went to cat heaven ten years ago. I always made sure they had the best of everything, not like your poor little Cleo. I’m surprised you remember their names. You never were a cat person, were you?”

“But I must be!” I replied. “I couldn’t not be. Cleo wouldn’t have stayed with us this long if I wasn’t. Besides, we’re both getting so old Cleo and I are practically the same person. No, dammit, Rosie. You’re wrong. I AM a cat person!”

Not long after, Philip and I were at a restaurant celebrating our fourteenth wedding anniversary.

“I’ll never forget that night you took us to the pizza restaurant and you beat Rob at that game filling in the squares.”

“It was snakes and ladders, wasn’t it?” he said, sipping his champagne.

“It was filling in squares. You nearly blew it that night. Not letting a boy win. I was going to send you packing.”

“Were you?” he replied with a twinkle. “I’ll always remember Cleo bouncing around the house like she owned the place.”

“She did own it. Not many people would have taken us on the way you did, you know”, I said, changing the subject. “A solo mum eight years older with two kids.”

Rob had once said having Philip in our lives was like winning Lotto. I’d been in awe of Philip’s love and commitment to all three of our children, never once making a distinction between Katharine, his biological daughter, and the other two. Their love for him in return was equally deep and seamless. I was fortunate to have spent so many years with such a rare, open-hearted man.

“Not work again, is it?” I said as he took his bleeping mobile phone from his pocket.

“It’s Kath,” he replied, his face grave as he listened to her distraught staccato.

“We’d better go. Cleo’s having some sort of fit.”