CLEO. Helen Brown E.
the delectable smell of his skin. Strange how every child is born with a distinctive aroma, complex, intoxicating and immediately recognizable to the mother. I wondered if he had any inkling how much my life depended on his at that moment. Without the example of his courage and his need for me the lure of brandy and several bottles of sleeping pills would have been too strong.
“Did you look in the wardrobe?”
“Nothing but soccer balls and raincoats in there.”
“Can I have Cleo now?”
The kitten. Rob’s kitten officially. As I lowered the furry bundle into the crook of his left arm Rob sighed and raised his thumb to his lips. He and Cleo had a lot in common. When a wife loses a husband she becomes a widow. Children are called orphans when their parents die. As far as I knew there was no word for someone grieving for a sister or brother. If there was such a word it would have described both boy and kitten. Since birth their lives had overflowed with clumsy hugs, play fights, the noise and physical warmth of their siblings. Now brutally brotherless, they were both lost and frightened. Yet they were so brave and full of life. The only option for them was to snuggle into the night together and trust that tomorrow would sort itself out.
I switched the light out and ran the day’s events across a screen of darkness in my mind. The relentless ache of living without Sam permeated everything. Nevertheless, I realized with a sense of guilt, almost, that the past twenty-four hours hadn’t been entirely bleak.
Steve would still need to be convinced, of course, but Cleo, as kittens went, was proving remarkably civilized.
Awakening
A kitten knows joy is more important than self-pity.
“Oooow! Help!”
I woke with my hair pinned painfully to the pillow. A wild beast was attacking my scalp, clawing my hair and making dangerous chomping noises. It had to be a tiger or a lion escaped from a television wildlife show. Whatever it was had mistaken me for an antelope that needed eating. Emitting a stifling odor of fish breath, it obviously had a taste for marine mammals as well.
“It’s only Cleo,” Rob giggled.
Cleo? How could a kitten morph into a woman-eating panther in a matter of hours?
“Get it off!” I yelled.
“She’s not an ‘it,’” he said, disentangling the kitten from my hair and placing her gently on the floor. Her legs barely touched the carpet before she sprang back on the bed for a fresh lunge at my hair. I wailed in agony. The kitten’s purr of satisfaction reverberated through my eardrum. Is this the last sound a cat’s prey hears?
The moment I disengaged the animal from my head and set her on the floor, she bounced up on the bed again. How anything that small could leap several times her height was beyond me. She was like an Olympic pole-vaulter minus the pole. Maybe she’d had springs surgically implanted in her hind legs. I sighed and plonked her back on the floor. Eyes gleaming like neon signs, ears huge as moth wings, she bounced up again. She seemed to think it was a game. The animal had no respect for the fact we were engulfed in a grieving process so overwhelming we had little chance of recovering.
“Noooo!” I whimpered, using the pillow as a shield. Cleo was jubilant and hugely pleased with herself. Anyone would think she was the first creature on earth to invent the hair-attack-jumping-back-on-the-bed game. Come to think of it, she probably was. The pillow offered no protection: Cleo simply burrowed under it. I put her on the floor again. She jumped up. Down. Up. Down. Up. This dance routine was going to last all morning if I didn’t do something.
If Steve had been home I might’ve been able to employ him as a human shield. But he hadn’t officially agreed to having a kitten in the house, let alone one that ate humans. Cleo was just an idea of a kitten to him. Over the phone I’d described to him her every curve. “You’re going to love her!” I’d said. Even with my best marketing job, he sounded less than keen. I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction when he arrived home from sea. He was as likely to warm to Cleo as the Pope was to Buddhism.
Rolling reluctantly out of bed I slid into my dressing gown. As I stomped semiconscious towards the kitchen, I experienced a tugging sensation. Looking down I saw Cleo hanging from the belt of my gown like Tarzan from a vine.
“Naughty kitty!” I said, peeling her off my belt and putting her on the floor. The moment I tried to reclaim the belt and loop it around my waist she sprang at my thighs, dug her claws into my flesh and, with her tail swinging wildly, snared the belt between her teeth. I wailed painfully for the second time that morning.
Removing the kitten from my thigh inflicted more pain than the world’s worst Brazilian wax. Obviously there was only one way to deal with this young cat: firmness. I wrapped the belt around my waist, tied a knot and proceeded forwards with all the dignity it was possible to muster. Cleo raced ahead and flicked swiftly between my ankles, before suddenly skidding to a halt. In a single slow-motion movement I tripped over the hump of her spine and sailed through the air, only just managing to grab hold of a wall hanging to stop myself landing on top of her.
Clinging to the macramé tassels, I froze in a position worthy of an advanced yogi and apologized. The kitten rolled on her back, raised a bent paw and fixed me with a wounded expression. I felt terrible for hurting her.
Just as I bent to pick her up, the furry ball exploded to life, sprang to its feet and lunged away from me. Relieved, I followed—until she bounced to a halt and tripped me up again. And again!
Cleo seemed to have decided I was a ridiculous animal, with my bird’s-nest hair and insistence on prancing about on two legs. Her mission was to trim my coat and get me down on all fours so I could savor the exuberance of being a cat.
But I didn’t need a crazy kitten. The animal had no right to dance through our grieving chambers as if life was some kind of joke. If Sam were here, I thought, he’d know how to calm her down. I could almost see him bending over her, hand outstretched, lips damp and tender…
I hurried to the bathroom, the only place I could weep in private, and closed the door. Rob didn’t need to witness any more adult distress than he’d already seen. If only events had unfolded differently that day. If Sam hadn’t found the pigeon, if Steve hadn’t been making lemon meringue pie, if I hadn’t been out for lunch, if that woman hadn’t been driving back to work…That woman. It was all her fault. I wondered if she had children of her own and any idea the anguish we were going through. My mind had turned her into a monster.
A series of jagged sobs erupted. Trying to repress the noise, I leaned my forehead against the cool blue tiles and clutched my stomach. My chest muscles ached. The capacity of human tear ducts continued to amaze me. How many buckets could one pair of eyes fill? Just when I thought I’d exceeded the lifetime quota, another tanker load would discharge down my cheeks. Crying had become just another bodily function, like breathing, something that happened without conscious effort.
As I bent over the toilet bowl, part of my consciousness peeled away to float on the bathroom ceiling. It looked down with benevolence at the howling woman doubled over with hurt and hatred. This other me who examined things from a distance didn’t take things so personally. It was spooky and detached. Maybe it had been there since birth and I’d spent the rest of my life crowding it out with emotions, obligations and conforming to what was expected.
At the same time it frightened me. What if I was tempted to float away with it for eternity, smiling down on human drama like an amused zookeeper? The idea of shedding my body and escaping pain was suddenly attractive. I slid the cabinet drawer open and held the bottle of sleeping pills to the light. Each pill glowed like a promise through the brown glass. There were plenty left. They didn’t smell too bad. Washed down with enough brandy they’d be tolerable. I unscrewed the lid.
The bathroom door opened a crack. Dammit. I hadn’t closed it properly. The shower curtain rippled. Assuming Rob had opened the front door and set a draft going through the house, I leaned forwards to shut the door. It continued to nudge itself open. Glancing down I saw a black paw run down