After Cleo Read online

  HELEN BROWN was born and brought up in New Zealand where she studied journalism and became a reporter. After meeting and marrying a Brit, Helen lived in England briefly before returning to New Zealand where she became a popular columnist and had two sons, Sam and Rob. Helen’s first book had just been published when Sam was run over and killed.

  After the birth of her daughter, Lydia, Helen’s marriage broke up and she moved to Auckland where she worked as a feature writer and columnist. Helen met and married Philip Gentry and had a daughter, Katharine, before the family moved en masse to Melbourne. Helen’s recent memoir, Cleo, was an international bestseller and is currently being made into a film by the producers of Whale Rider.

  After Cleo :

  CAME JONAH

  How a crazy kitten and a rebelling daughter

  turned out to be blessings in disguise

  HELEN BROWN

  First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012 First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Two Roads,

  a division of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

  Copyright © Helen Brown 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Arena Books, an imprint of

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 777 3

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To cats and daughters

  who don’t always come when called

  Contents

  Whisker’s Tip

  Leaving

  Arrival

  Mystery

  Inspiration

  Forbidden

  Visitation

  Inner Terrorist

  Abandoned

  Rage

  Amazons

  Preparation

  Reunion

  Entrapment

  Disenchantment

  Outside Cat

  Inside Cat

  Jealousy

  Deception

  Romance

  Allure

  Dysfunction

  Joy

  Celebration

  Hostage

  Heroes in Wheelchairs

  Embracing the Enemy

  Yearning

  Stardust

  New Life

  Gratitude

  Obsession

  Rejection

  Cleansed

  Sainthood

  Needled

  Blessed

  Serendipity

  Island of Tears

  Monastic

  Disciple

  The Question

  Reverence

  Completion

  Tail’s End

  Acknowledgements

  Whisker’s Tip

  I never thought we’d end up with a cat crazy enough to want to go for walks. But felines change people. I should know that.

  As evening shadows crawl across the kitchen, Jonah’s footsteps drum down the hall. He appears in front of me, his red harness snared between his teeth.

  ‘Not now,’ I say, peeling a carrot. ‘Dinner’s only half an hour away.’

  His eyes widen to become a pair of lakes. He sits neatly in front of me, snakes his tail over his front feet and examines my face. What do cats see when they look at people? They must be appalled by our lack of fur.

  After a moment’s reflection, Jonah, still carrying the harness, stands up and pads toward me. He balances on his back feet and stretches his impossibly long body against mine. Patting my abdomen with his front paw, he flattens his ears and puts his head to one side. Lowering himself to ground level again, he drops the harness at my feet and emits a baleful meow.

  Irresistible.

  Crouching, I clip the harness around his soft, athletic body. The cat arches his back in anticipation. His purrs reverberate off the cupboards.

  ‘Cruel, too cruel!’ I hear Mum’s voice saying. ‘Cats are wild animals. What are you doing to this poor creature?’

  It’s strange how Mum stays inside my head, even years after she’s gone. I wonder if it’ll be the same for my daughters and they’ll hear me wheedling and encouraging them when they’re in rocking chairs.

  In an ideal world, Jonah would be free to roam the neighbourhood. But times have changed. We live in cities. Roads are plagued with cars.

  A normal cat would hate going out in a harness. Three years with Jonah have taught me he’s anything but ordinary. Apart from the fact he’s learnt to love his harness, his obsession with gloves, florist ribbon and women’s evening wear is beyond the realms of feline sanity.

  He’s complicated. While he can seem incredibly intelligent sometimes, he thinks cars are for hiding under. It’s not that I want to keep him prisoner, but we live in perilous times. He needs to be safe.

  Carrying him into the laundry, I attach the harness to a leash, which is connected to an extension lead, allowing him as much freedom as possible. His purrs vibrate up my arms as I open the back door and place him on the grass.

  Standing motionless for a moment, he lifts his nose to savour the warm evening breeze. Its perfume carries stories of mice and pigeons, fluffy white dogs, and cats – both friend and enemy. Tales my human senses are too primitive to detect.

  Jonah charges ahead, straining at the lead, harness jingling, as we scamper down the side of the house. His youthful energy is exhausting. His confidence, terrifying. Not for the first time, he reminds me of our older daughter Lydia. In fact sometimes I think this beautiful, headstrong creature is more like Lydia than our previous cat, Cleo.

  As Jonah pauses at the front gate to sniff the rosemary hedge, I can almost feel Cleo looking down from Cat Heaven and having a good chuckle. Half wild and streetwise, she thought harnesses were for show puppies.

  Cats step into people’s lives with a purpose. Many of these magical creatures are healers. When Cleo arrived nearly three decades ago, our family had been shattered to pieces by the death of our nine-year-old son Sam. His younger brother Rob had seen Sam run over and was traumatised. Yet I was so paralysed with grief and anger toward the woman driver I was incapable of giving Rob the support he needed. Part of my anguish came from the thought of Sam dying alone on the roadside. As it turned out, I’d been misled.Years later, I received a letter from a wonderful man, Arthur Judson, who said he’d been on the roadside and stayed with Sam the whole time.

  It took the arrival of a small black kitten called Cleo to make six-year-old Rob smile again. Cleo seemed to understand we were in crisis. Through cuddles, play and constant companionship, she’d helped Rob embark on a new life without his older brother. For the first time I understood how profound the healing powers of animals can be.

  Our lives changed after Sam’s death and our hearts never healed completely. But through the years, Cleo stood guardian over us as we slowl
y pieced ourselves together. She’d curled around my expanding girth through a subsequent pregnancy, then kept me company during endless nights of feeding baby Lydia. A few years later she’d been my divorce buddy and, when I was ready, cast a feline eye over my pathetically few suitors to make sure I chose wisely. As it was, Philip – the first man Cleo approved of – turned out to be the right choice, even if he spends most of his life on a plane these days. Before our daughter Katharine was born, Cleo resumed her tummy-curling duties and was with me during the breastfeeding again.

  Of all our children, Rob had forged the strongest bond with Cleo. She’d played kitten games with him throughout his boyhood and watched over him when he was struck by serious illness in his early twenties. That little black cat had seen us through grief, migration to Australia and, ultimately, a messy kind of contentment. Then, around the time Rob fell in love with the girl of his dreams, Chantelle, Cleo took a gracious step back and suddenly sprouted white whiskers. It was almost as if she felt her work was done with Rob grown up and happy, and our family on its feet, more or less. She was finally free to leave us and move on to Cat Heaven, if there’s such a place.

  I swore I’d never get another cat after Cleo. But when life started getting complicated again, a so-called Siamese kitten exploded into our household.

  This is the story of how one cat leads to another, that rebellious felines and daughters have more in common than you might think. And how I learned compromise and medication can be okay.

  Jonah’s the cat I swore we’d never get. But as Mum always said, it never pays to swear.

  Leaving

  Your old cat chooses your next kitten

  ‘When are you getting another cat?’ asked my neighbour Irene, leaning over the front fence.

  What a tactless question, I thought. You don’t go out shopping for another mum the moment her coffin has been lowered into the grave, do you?

  I squinted up through sharp sunlight at Irene. She was wearing sunglasses and one of those silly hats from an outdoor shop. Laughing in an offhand way, I asked what she meant.

  ‘You’re always out there in the mornings talking to that shrub you buried Cleo under. It’s not healthy.’

  Healthy? What would she know? I thought, staring into my coffee mug. Talking to a deceased cat after breakfast was harmless, and not half as batty as some of the other stuff I’d started doing, like wearing my clothes inside out and buying birthday cards six months in advance. Not to mention my increasing obsession with crosswords and television game shows. Besides, it was my choice if I wanted to converse with a dead cat.

  ‘A friend of mine has just had three kittens,’ she continued. ‘Well, ha ha, I don’t mean she personally gave birth to them . . .’

  There’s no end to the craftiness of people trying to offload kittens. ‘Just come for a look,’ they’ll croon, confident the moment you’ve set eyes on some three-legged, half-bald creature with no tail your heart will liquefy. The trick is to get in quickly, right at the start. It only takes two little words. ‘No’ and ‘thanks’.

  The thing is, there wasn’t an animal in the biosphere that had a chance of replacing Cleo. It was a year since Philip had shovelled spades full of earth, damp and heavy, over her tiny body. I’d walked away to weep bitterly, Mum’s voice scolding inside my head: ‘Don’t be silly! It was only a cat, not a person.’

  In many ways, Cleo had been more than a person. People come and go in any household but felines are a constant presence. Over nearly twenty-four years, Cleo had been part of everything that’d happened to us.

  But then cats and people never abandon you completely. I was still finding unmistakable black bristles in the depths of laundry cupboards.

  ‘Why don’t you come along with me and take a look at the kittens?’ Irene persisted. ‘Fluffy and stripy. Gorgeous little faces.’

  ‘I’m not interested in getting another cat,’ I replied, the words coming out more vehemently than intended.

  ‘Not ever?’ she asked, adjusting her sunglasses on her nose.

  As a hibiscus flower sailed from the tree above my head and landed with a plop beside my foot, I was surprised to feel a tiny bit tempted by Irene’s proposition. Most people have hibiscus bushes but ours had sprouted into a seven-metre tree laden with hundreds, possibly thousands, of pink flowers. It was so spectacular in summer we’d had a semicircular seat built to fit around its trunk so I could sit under it swilling coffee, swiping mosquitoes and doing Scarlett O’Hara impersonations. In autumn it wasn’t so picturesque. As the days grew colder, every one of those flowers swooned to the ground like a Southern Belle and waited to be raked up. Only one person in our household specialised in raking. If I went on strike and refused to scrape the hibiscus flowers away, they exacted revenge by rotting into slime. The rest of the family managed to tiptoe over the killer goo without doing themselves bodily harm. I skidded and fell painfully on the paving stones.

  The same thing would happen if we got a new cat. Like everyone else in our house and garden, it would develop a giant-sized personality and I’d end up doing all the work. Another cat was out of the question.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You will,’ the neighbour said, waving a finger mysteriously at me. ‘Haven’t you heard the secret of how cats come into your life?’

  I feigned interest.

  ‘Your old cat chooses your next cat for you,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and once your new kitten has been found, it makes its way to you whatever happens,’ she replied. ‘And it’ll be exactly the cat you need.’

  ‘There’s no sign of any cats around here,’ I said, yawning in the sun. ‘We obviously don’t need one.’

  The neighbour reached up and picked a hibiscus blossom from the tree.

  ‘Your old cat hasn’t got around to choosing one for you yet, that’s all,’ she said, then tapped the side of her nose, stuck the flower in her hat and went off on her morning walk.

  Watching her disappear down the street, I drained my coffee mug. The idea of Cleo trotting about in some parallel feline universe sussing out a replacement for herself was intriguing. She’d need to find an intelligent half-breed with heaps of street wisdom and soul.

  But anyway, a new cat was off the agenda. After more than three decades of motherhood, I needed a break from nurturing. The kids were nearly off our hands. Once Katharine was through her final exams, I was going to take a gap year, sampling the world’s great art galleries and all the other stuff I’d missed out on as a teenage mum. Another dependant – four-legged or otherwise – was the last thing I needed. I beamed a silent message to Cleo, if she was in Cat Heaven, ‘Please no!!’

  Hard as I tried to forget, Cleo was everywhere. Apart from her remains under the Daphne bush and the black bristles in laundry cupboards, her favourite sunbathing spot under the clothesline was still marked by a circle of flattened grass. Inside the house, memories were embedded like claw marks in every surface. The living room door still bore scars from Cleo trying to break in while we were eating takeaway chicken. When a shadow moved across the kitchen I had to tell myself it wasn’t her. For the first time in twenty-four years, I could leave a plate of salmon on the kitchen bench safe in the knowledge it wouldn’t be pilfered. Out in the garden and under the house, mice could safely graze.

  Maybe the neighbour was right and I was grieving for Cleo on some level. Come to think of it, bewildering ‘symptoms’ had set in around the time she died. Without going into detail, recent months had brought new meaning to words like flooding, leaking, flushing, chilling and sweating. I’d become a mini environmental disaster zone. But when I’d raised the subject with women friends a couple of times I’d regretted it almost immediately. Their suffering was infinitely greater. Some made it sound like they’d hurtled straight from adolescence to menopause, interrupted by a brief interval of blood-and-guts childbirth.

  Still, I was going to have to stop talking to the Daphne bush. Word would get out. It
wouldn’t be long before people crossed the road rather than run the risk of bumping into me. Not that it worried me. We’d always been the neighbourhood oddballs. Now every second house was being pulled down and replaced by a concrete monstrosity I felt even less at home. When Irene had shown me plans of her McMansion to be I’d struggled to conceal my horror. Not only was it going to overlook our back yard, its columns and porticos echoed several ancient cultures all at once.

  The aspirational tone of the neighbourhood was wearing me down. I’d never be thin, young or fashion conscious enough to belong.

  Changes needed to be made. Dramatic ones.

  Another hibiscus flower fell, this time right into my coffee mug. That was it! So obvious, it was a wonder I hadn’t thought of it before.

  I rescued the drowning hibiscus flower from the coffee, flung it into the shrubs and reached for the mobile phone in the pocket of my trackpants.

  I’d escape the horror of watching Irene’s Grand Design loom over us and years of raking hibiscus flowers in one hit. Never again would I listen for Cleo’s paws padding across the floorboards. Or stumble over her discarded beanbags under the house. As for the Daphne bush, it could retire from cemetery plaque status and go back to being an ordinary shrub.

  Philip’s pre-recorded voice said he was sorry he couldn’t get to the phone right now, but if I’d like to leave a message after the tone . . .

  ‘We’re moving house,’ I said, then pressed the off button with a satisfying click.

  Arrival

  A home is a second skin. A new one takes time to grow

  ‘Who’d live in a house called Shirley?’ asked Philip, peering at the brass plate beside the front door.

  Honestly, he could be so annoying sometimes. Our old house had sold faster than expected. We had to move out in four weeks. And here he was quibbling over a name plaque.

  ‘Lots of houses had names in the old days,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to call a house anything it might as well be Shirley.’

  It was clear he was unimpressed. Deep down, I knew he wanted to move into something white and modern, like a refrigerator. Instead, Shirley reared up over us in a children’s-home-meets-Colditz style. Built early in the twentieth century, its red bricks and tiled roof whispered of an era when mothers packed their sons off to war, and sex before marriage was unthinkable. Any glamour Shirley might’ve possessed had long since evaporated behind cracked bricks and unadorned windows.