CLEO. Helen Brown E.
ones, were lucky to spend more than six years in our company. Most of them met sudden fates usually described in solemn, no-nonsense terms by our parents: “poisoned,” “run over” or “run away.” Further questioning was not encouraged. “Who did it?” or “Where?” were invariably answered with “Who knows?”
Even if this kitten by some miracle managed to reach the grand old age of nine, that would take Rob through to the age of fifteen, a million years into the future. Considering the battering our endocrine systems were taking, I doubted any of us could realistically expect to survive that long.
Lena smiled thinly and disappeared with Jake down the path. Poor Lena. I should have been more diplomatic. Abandoning her kitten to self-confessed dog people, she must have felt wretched. Nevertheless, she had offered to take the kitten back. Maybe I could let Rob play with it for a day or two, then we could return it to the embrace of a cat-loving household.
Rata moaned loudly from behind the kitchen door.
“Don’t worry!” I called to the old dog. “We’ll sort this out.”
Rob was curled up in a corner of the living room, cradling the tiny creature in his arms. To have called it beautiful or even pretty would have made Elton John’s spectacle frames the understatement of the eighties. It was a scrap of life wrapped in a dishcloth. A toy you’d take back to the department store to exchange for one with more stuffing. I refused to think of it as something with a name, but if it did have one, “Cleopatra” would be far too long and elaborate. Something that miniscule wasn’t hefty enough to handle a name with more than one syllable. It wasn’t going to be staying with us long, so for now “it” would suffice.
Sam’s observation had been spot-on. With the prominent head and neck narrower than a vacuum cleaner hose, the animal was more like E.T. than a kitten. To the non–cat person the lack of fur offered too much information about feline anatomy. I tried not to notice the folds of semitranslucent skin draped over its rib cage. The skin was a deep charcoal shade, which mercifully concealed some of the detailed rippling of movement under the surface. If I looked any closer it might’ve been possible to see the throb of a tiny heart. It was safer to avert the eyes.
How anything could be born with so much spare skin was a mystery. The flaps under its arms (front legs?) were generous enough to double as wings. A saggy pouch hung under its abdomen. There was enough spare skin to make at least two other animals the same size. The struggle to survive as the runt had obviously been touch-and-go. No doubt older brothers and sisters had pushed their puny sibling off their mother in order to fill their own bellies.
The kitten would need to do an awful lot of eating and growing to fill those empty pouches. Even then it stood no chance of looking presentable. A larger, filled-out version of the kitten had freak potential. I took a step backwards. It was definitely one of those things that looked better from a distance. At least the color was consistent. The kitten couldn’t have been blacker. From the claws and pads of its feet to its whiskers it was black. Even the pins of its claws were black. Its eyes were the only things that broke the rule. They were shimmering green mirrors that hardly belonged to a cat. Surely they’d been stolen from a creature from another world. As Rob stroked her forehead with his finger, the kitten gazed adoringly up at him. My heart lurched. All of a sudden the kitten wasn’t ugly anymore. Sun caught her fur. Affection beamed from her eyes. She radiated a kind of silvery light. The room filled with beauty, the pure essence of all new beings. They looked so perfect together, like a scene from a 1950s advertisement.
“Sam was right,” he said, beckoning me forward and lowering her into my reluctant hands. “Animals can talk. Listen to her. She’s growling.”
Maybe it was the warmth of her miniscule weight, the fragility of her limbs or the softness of her fur, but my chest suddenly filled with a fluttery sensation as I lifted her into my hands. “That’s not growling,” I said, running my finger along the delicate beads of her spine. “It’s purring.”
Gazing into the innocent furry face overshadowed by gigantic ears I felt momentarily overwhelmed. Even though we’d lost Sam, and I sometimes felt my existence was finished, this scrap of feline life had summoned up the cheek to burst in on our world with no apologies. Not only that, curled in my hands, she was apparently expecting things to turn out perfectly. She was tiny, helpless. And had no choice but to trust us.
Cleo stretched a lazy paw and yawned, revealing a lollipop-pink mouth palisaded with dangerous-looking teeth. The astounding eyes gazed into mine with an expression that hardly matched the vulnerability of her size. Her unwavering stare said it all. As far as she was concerned this was a meeting of equals.
“Touch her ears,” Rob said. “They’re soft.”
Cleo didn’t object to having her ears rubbed. In fact she dipped her head and nudged firmly into my hand to intensify the contact. Delicate as antique silk, her ears slipped between my fingers.
A reward was the last thing I expected. It was delivered in the form of a sandpapery swipe from her tongue. Cleo’s lick on the back of my hand was startling, like a lover’s first kiss. Part of me wanted to envelop her and never let go. The other part, so wounded, was wary of the tsunami of affection washing over me. To love is ultimately to lose. The unwritten contract that arrives with every pet is they’re probably going to die before you do. The more devoted you are to them the more sorrow their departure will inflict. Opening my heart to Cleo would’ve been the equivalent of placing an already bruised organ on an airport tarmac and inviting planes to land on it.
“Let’s see how she walks,” I said, lowering the kitten to the floor. We watched her paddle like a clockwork toy through the carpet. The shag pile was the equivalent of tall grass for her. Using the worm of her tail as a rudder she paced jerkily towards the rubber plant.
I’d never been a fan of the rubber plant. We’d inherited it from the owners of our previous house. I gradually understood why they’d left it behind. With its big waxy leaves it had an indestructible, vaguely humorless presence. Like an unwelcome guest at a dinner party, it eavesdropped on every conversation and contributed little in return except, perhaps, when it was in the mood, oxygen. We’d been hoping to leave the thing behind when we moved to the zigzag, but the removal men had mistakenly packed it into their truck with our furniture.
When I transplanted the rubber plant into an ugly orange plastic tub its confidence surged. It sprouted dark-green branches the size of Frisbees and sent feelers trailing creepily around picture frames and across curtain rails. Technically more a tree these days, the darned thing had ambitions to engulf the entire suburb. I’d tried cutting it back with a pair of hedge clippers, but that only encouraged it to swamp the sideboard.
About a meter away from the plant’s orange tub Cleo paused. Her ears and whiskers pointed forwards. Her nose twitched as if she was sampling some dangerous perfume. She crouched and, with the stealthy determination of a lion stalking an antelope, eyed her prey—a pendulous leaf dangling from one of the lower branches. Quivering on her haunches, she waited for the moment the leaf would be least suspecting. Satisfied her prey was foolishly absorbed in leafy thoughts, she attacked furiously, claws exposed, teeth perforating the startled victim’s skin.
Then something strange happened. It began with a noise, unfamiliar at first, a soft gurgle followed by vague hiccuping. Our mouths widened, the soft tissue at the back of our throats went into spasm, but not for crying this time. Laughter. Rob and I were laughing. For the first time in weeks we reveled in the simplest, most complex healing technique known to humanity. Grief had pulled me so deeply into its dungeon I’d forgotten about laughing. It took a boy, his kitten and a rubber plant to engage me in a function essential to human sanity. The horror of past weeks dissolved, padlocks of pain were unlocked momentarily. We laughed.
In the Cleo versus rubber-plant leaf war, there was no doubt who was winning. The leaf was twice Cleo’s size and firmly attached to the plant’s trunk. Every time she tried to grip the vegetation between her claws it slipped away and bounced insolently skyward again.
“She’s a gutsy little thing,” I said.
The kitten suddenly stopped and collapsed