Cleo

Tough Vet, Soft Vet

Chicken Man each day keeps the vet away.

By the time we arrived back home Cleo was her normal self again.

“It was so scary!” said Katharine, still flushed with shock. “She made a horrible growl, then she fell over and twitched. Her whole body seized up. She must’ve been in so much pain.”

Listening calmly to the report, Cleo licked her paw. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about, she seemed to say. It was just a little hiccup.

After breakfast next morning, Cleo succumbed to another dreadful fit. I ran to the phone and called Soft Vet. His honey-voiced receptionist said he wouldn’t be available until later in the day.

“But we need to see someone now!” I said.

“In that case you’ll have to try another vet,” she replied sharply.

For a Soft Vet he had a pretty hard-hearted receptionist. The only other vet who knew anything of Cleo’s history was dreaded Tough Vet.

“If you bundle her in a blanket and bring her over he’ll see her now,” said Tough Vet’s nurse.

As I carried Cleo to the vet’s clinic, she revived enough to take an interest in the traffic and the sky. She purred lightly as I clutched her to my chest. Maybe a simple pill would do the trick. On the other hand, I wasn’t a fool. She was twenty-three and a half years old.

We loathed everything about Tough Vet’s surgery. We didn’t like the anesthetic smell of the waiting room or the bags of pet food piled in the corner like headstones. Cleo particularly disapproved of the big black labrador, its pink tongue dripping obscenely from its mouth. It was impossible to ignore the blue plastic bucket over his head. I knew exactly what Cleo was thinking: How typical of a dog to allow itself to be shoved into such a demeaning fashion accessory.

Tough Vet appeared from an operating room and beckoned us in. Cleo stood defiantly on the stainless-steel table while he poked and prodded parts no lady likes to share with a stranger. Kidney failure and thyroid malfunction was his diagnosis.

“How long do you want to drag this out for?” he asked, his voice drained of expression.

I heard his words and understood what they meant, but couldn’t summon up any kind of answer.

“I can put her down now if you like.”

Now? Immediately? The shock must’ve shown on my face.

“All right, I’ll keep her here a few hours for observation so your family can get used to the idea,” he said. “Phone me at five o’clock.”

I was about to snatch Cleo back and run home with her. But the prospect of helplessly witnessing her fits all day was unbearable. Heading out his door, I hated Tough Vet with every muscle in my heart—until he called out to me.

“You can leave her blanket with me.”

He’d understood that our ancient animal would be more comfortable with a piece of home to snuggle into. Maybe Tough Vet wasn’t such a monster after all.

Back home, I pulled the old towels and rugs off our furniture as a reminder of how much prettier and cleaner life was going to be without a dribbling, fur-shedding old cat. Glancing at Cleo’s bed in the laundry, I considered dumping the stinky thing in the outside bin—but couldn’t quite do it.

No way was she going to vanish up Tough Vet’s chimney. A daphne bush by the front gate would be her gravestone, if she had to have one at all.

Philip arrived home early from work to make the five o’clock call. Tough Vet invited us to pay a visit. Not a good sign. Katharine stayed home resolutely watching TV as we headed out on our morbid mission.

Tough Vet was friendlier this time. I thought it must be his “putting animals down” mode.

“She hasn’t had a fit all day,” he said. “She hasn’t eaten anything, but her vital signs are good and her heart’s strong. She’s in remarkably good condition for her age.”

The light in his eye said it all. Even in her decrepit state, Cleo had charmed him with her determination to defy the feline life expectancy chart on his wall.

Wrapping her in the blue blanket, he handed her back with some pills to stimulate her appetite. “Oh, and if you really want to get her eating again, there’s an excellent takeaway chicken shop across the road,” he added. “I don’t know what he puts in them, but one whiff of that stuff and it drives all the cats crazy.”

I guess a visit to Chicken Man each day keeps the vet away. Cleo purred all the way home.

I draped the old towels and rugs back over the furniture and shook her smelly bed. We were on borrowed time, but one thing Sam’s death taught me is time is only ever on loan. Life can change irrevocably for any one of us at any moment. Awareness of that is what made me scan my dressing table every time I went out in case for some reason I never returned. Even though I wasn’t a tidy person I didn’t want to go down in history as a shockingly messy one.

I phoned Rob in Britain to update him on Cleo’s latest drama.

“I’ve just been trying to call you, but the line was busy,” he said.

“That’s because I was calling you,” I said, delaying the Cleo news as long as possible. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“I can’t face another English winter. People live like moles here, in the dark and underground most of the time. I’ve been offered an engineering job in Melbourne. It sounds great. I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Not long after Rob’s return a surprise visitor turned up on the doorstep. He was a tall dark-haired young man, with looks that were a blend of Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. I scanned the movie-star jawline, the well-defined brow. But it wasn’t until I looked into his eyes that I recognized him.

Baby-faced Jason from Rob’s boyhood zigzag days had morphed into a fine adult. To receive a visit from Ginny’s son was an unexpected compliment. He planted kisses on each of my cheeks, leaving me momentarily dazed. This man Jason was a far cry from the brown-haired boy with almond eyes and an impish smile. Last time I’d seen him he hadn’t been much taller than my waist. I was touched his memories had been warm enough for him to turn up in person so many years later.

“Don’t tell me Cleo’s still alive!” he said.

“Only just,” I replied. I called Rob and arranged to meet him at a cafe near his work with our surprise guest. Rob took less than a second to recognize his old friend. I basked in the glory of dining with two young men with rock-star looks. So this was how it felt to go out with two adult sons. If Sam had lived I wondered how many times we would’ve got together like this. Would it have felt so warm and tinged with almost unbearable sadness? Maybe there’d be no sorrow at all, just a vague pattern of irritations and assumptions families can grind themselves into.

“Do you know what my strongest memory is?” Jason asked, perusing the wine list.

“Digging that hole!” the boys said in unison.

I must’ve looked blank.

“Remember that wild bit of land below your front gate? Rob and I decided to dig a hole there. We dug for years, and it never seemed to get any deeper.”

A vision of two small boys hacking into clay under the tree ferns suddenly sharpened.

“That’s right,” I said. “You had spades and a pickax. You probably shouldn’t have been allowed that pickax. I’d be sued these days.”

“That’s the whole point,” Jason said. “It felt manly and dangerous. Do you remember the day we found a rusty old wire mattress? We spread it over the hole and turned it into a trampoline for a while. Then we got bored with that. We took it away and went back to digging.”

Even now sometimes, Rob said he wondered why the hole never seemed to get any deeper. If his adult self could return to the scene he’d finish the job in an afternoon.

“Maybe you were digging it too wide?” I said. “How deep did you want it anyway?”

“Decent-sized hole deep,” Jason replied.

I felt vaguely guilty the boys’ memories weren’t of me teaching them Mandarin or Gregorian chants. If Jason had inherited half of Ginny’s brains—she’d just finished a doctorate in midwifery—he’d have been more than capable. On the other hand, maybe letting them dig had a hand in making them into the philosophers they’d grown into.

It was hard to believe that somewhere underneath their easy manners and red-wine-drinking maturity were the same little boys who’d lived on the zigzag. Watching them I was reminded of the miraculous renewal of the Australian bush after a fire. Against the blackened outline of taller trees, banksias and wattles create fresh new undergrowth. Similarly, the boys had sprung into strong, handsome young men. During the devastation of those zigzag days I’d underestimated the resilience of nature.