After Cleo (19 page)

Watching Mum ride terrible waves of agony in her last hours, I'd tried to summon up appropriate words: ‘You're doing well,' I said stupidly. Even though she'd lost her false teeth and control over almost all her bodily functions, there was still enough of Mum left to shoot a bull's eye. She was right. I knew nothing of what she was going through.

Driving to the airport, I hoped Lydia understood how deeply my love for her was woven into every inappropriate thing I'd ever said to her. It was just a case of Mother's Tourette's Syndrome:

‘That shirt's too short. You'll catch cold.' (
I wish you good
health always.
)

‘You're too thin.' (
No need to compare yourself with magazine
scarecrows.You're beautiful as you are.)

‘Your eyebrows could do with waxing.' (
Enjoy your sensuality.
Make the most of your beauty and youth while it lasts.)

‘There's a hole in your tights.' (
I'm on your side.
)

‘Have fun!' (
Fill your room with flowers. Drink champagne.
Open your heart to others. Dream huge. You can do anything you
choose with your life.)

‘Take care.' (
Love yourself for the wonderful woman you are.
Don't stand in a man's shadow. Protect yourself. You are precious
beyond words.
)

At the check-in counter, Philip reached for a name tag on top of the desk, took a pen from his pocket and filled in Lydia's details. He attached the label protectively to her backpack.

I kissed her cheeks, pink and warm, and thanked her for looking after me so wonderfully after my surgery.

Smiling, she promised to phone and text and write more often.

As we watched her float away like a snowflake toward the departure gate, the mother in me thought,
White's a dreadful
colour for stains. I hope she doesn't spill tomato sauce over herself.

She turned and waved, then vanished through the doors.

Jealousy

Inside every angel cat lurks a demon

The apple tree outside my study window slept through winter. Stripped of leaves, it was a skeleton of gnarled wood, a patchwork of scars where branches had been lopped off. The tree and I were both familiar with the bite of the surgeon's scalpel.

A gardening friend reckoned the tree was close to a hundred years old, probably the same as the house. She pointed out potentially fatal growths and fungi on its limbs and offered to bring her saw around to hack them off. Winter, she said, was the best time for pruning. I sympathised with the tree. It'd been through enough. I thanked her and suggested we wait another year before putting it through more surgery.

Just as I was giving up on the tree and wondering who to call to cut it down, it sucked deep into the earth and sprouted a leaf. Fresh and vulnerable, the leaf clung to its ancient branch. As it unfurled against the pastel sky, I marvelled at the rhythms of nature.

Life manifests in waves – a gathering of energy, followed by letting go. It happens in childbirth as contractions surge and subside. The same goes for the sea with its ceaseless rising and falling of the tide. Human breath follows an identical pattern, filling and emptying. Even the universe expands and contracts.

As superficial creatures, we value the obvious. The surge has more appeal than the withdrawal. We favour summer over cold months, daytime over night. More growth happens in winter than anyone imagines, though. Creativity lurks in darkness.

Not long after the first brave leaf, hundreds of others burst impudently out of the wood. Against all predictions, the apple tree was willing itself back to life.

Likewise, I was creaking my way back into the world. Though my lungs still puffed like bagpipes, a walk to the end of the street no longer felt like a marathon, and I didn't need to lie down for a rest after the Herculean effort of putting my trousers on any more.

I was incredibly grateful to Lydia, who kept her promise and made regular calls from her jungle monastery. In these conversations we both avoided the contentious topic of taking robes.

While Lydia embraced freedom in Sri Lanka, Jonah was under house arrest. We had security screens fitted on some windows so they could be opened without him escaping. The French doors stayed permanently shut. Philip, Katharine and I slowly adjusted to being jailers imprisoned with their inmate.

Jonah took on some of Lydia's nursing responsibilities, following me about the house, making impatient clucking noises, urging me to lie down and rest.

When I finally obeyed his instructions he'd leap onto the bed and snuggle into my abdomen as if to say, ‘See? This is what we should be doing! Let's have a nap now.'

Feeling his purr vibrate through my body, I knew I'd finally found the friend I'd been missing. Listener, healer, the companion who never judged. All I'd ever needed was a feline. Maybe our old neighbour had been right, and Cleo had sent an angel cat.

Jonah improved the look of the house by simply gliding through it. There wasn't a carpet or cushion his colouring didn't enhance. He'd grown into such a magnificent-looking cat he seemed too glamorous to belong to us. His fur had darkened from cappuccino to shades of
café latte
over winter. Whiskers stood out like pale nylon thread against an espresso-coloured face. His eyes, which were blue as Sri Lankan sapphires, gazed out from the depths of their darkened mask. Improbably large ears hovered like bat wings over his narrow face. A long nose gave him the profile of an Egyptian Pharaoh.

He had only one flaw – two upper teeth protruding fang-like over his lower lip.

Jonah was so lanky I wouldn't have been surprised if his ancestors had been squeezed out of a pipe. Tiptoeing about on his long legs, he seemed several centimetres taller than a cat should be.

Our feline spent hours preening his tail, a twitchy serpent with a separate identity. He carried it like a pennant so it doubled as a location device for us. We followed its tip as he glided behind a chair.When he crouched on all fours to doze in the sun, he snaked it around his front feet and back in between his legs.

Even though he was a devoted companion, he was constantly on the lookout for escape routes – a window left open, or a crack in a door. Every afternoon Katharine and I clicked him into his harness so he could prowl the backyard for bugs. He strained against the harness, always pushing to go further than it allowed.

Philip assured us that Jonah would get used to being an inside cat. Of the 200 million pet cats in the world, heaps lived happily in apartments, he pointed out.

Jonah's squeak morphed to a deep throated yowl that said, ‘
This isn't good enough! Do what I want!! Now!!! Neeeowww!!!!'

Our young cat seemed to feel, see and hear everything a hundred times more acutely than the rest of us. Even when curled up on a lap with his eyes closed, he was only one quarter asleep. Muscles twitched under his silky fur. A creak in the eaves or the distant sigh of a tram gliding down High Street was enough to jolt him awake.

With Lydia away, the house was quiet during the day. Jonah scratched at my study door one morning, so I lifted him on to my shoulder and carried him in. He purred a liquid song as I eased into the chair and switched on the computer.

‘This is where we should be now,'
he seemed to say.
‘Let's take a
look at that old Cleo manuscript.'

Reading over what I'd written before my cancer surgery, I was crestfallen. Even though my prognosis was good, there was a possibility this could be the last book I'd have the chance to write. The manuscript was too self-pitying and depressing. I wanted to celebrate the wonder of being alive more than ever. With Jonah nestled on my knee, I drew a breath and reached for the delete button. Thousands of words, half a book, evaporated into cyberspace.

That done, I stared into the cavern of the computer screen. And started again.

I was beginning to wonder if Jonah was a born writer's cat. Every morning, he tapped on the study door until I opened it and sat at the desk. Heavy on my lap, he'd purr himself to sleep and lie there motionless for hours. Whenever I stood up to stretch my legs, he'd shake himself awake and deliver me a good snitching off.

By mid afternoon, my brain would be too tired to do anything but watch crap television, which Jonah also enjoyed. He preferred wildlife programmes, and for some inexplicable reason, modern dance. But his favourite show was
Inspector Rex
. One glimpse of the German Shepherd detective and Jonah would jump on to the ledge in front of the television and follow the dog across the screen. When I watched quiz shows or
Antiques Road Show
, he'd yawn as if to say ‘Purrrrlease change the channel!'

Male to the core, Jonah adored mechanics. The only thing that interested him more than a flushing toilet was the printer. Whenever the machine clattered to life, he jumped on top of it and patted the pages as they shuffled out.

In between shredding the stair carpet and abseiling down the curtains, he enjoyed his role as chief editorial advisor. We were getting along well.

I should've known it was too good to last.

Most days my only human contact was with Bronte, Stevan or whoever was making takeaway coffees across the road. They'd ask how the book was coming along and hand me a polystyrene cup of writer's jet fuel.

I returned to the house one morning, coffee in hand, to find my study had been trashed. The wastepaper basket was upended. Photos on top of the bookshelf were sprawled on their faces. Mum's framed 1949 reference from a newspaper editor claiming she was nearly as good as a man had toppled on to the floor.

But the worst damage was to my computer keyboard. Four letters had been torn off and strewn over the floor. One by one I picked up the letters and examined them – Z, F, P. The fourth, and most damaged, tile was E – the most commonly used letter in the English language.

‘
Jonah!
' I roared.

A small furry face appeared around the edge of the study door. It looked up at me with a cobalt glare – and roared right back.

The message was clear. I'd been spending too much time at the computer. He needed attention more than that stupid machine.

Our angel cat had morphed into a little devil.

Deception

The velvet dictator

After Jonah's act of vandalism, I no longer trusted him in my study. But he cried outside the door while I worked, which was unbearable.

On the hypothesis that his need for attention had to be finite, I devised a plan. If I gave him enough pampering in one hit at the start of the day he'd calm down and be a regular, undemanding cat for the remaining hours.

Jonah adored having his back stroked. I was generous. The optimum number of strokes, I decided, was 200. Jonah shuddered with pleasure, crouching deep in my lap while I delivered his portion for the day.

‘There you go, boy,' I'd say, placing him back on the floor when I'd finished.

Except 200 wasn't enough. He jumped back on my lap and demanded more.

And he knew exactly what I was up to. When I put him back down again he would sprint down the hall to the study door and try to slide in before I got there.

My life was being ruled by a cat. If only Lydia were here she'd know what to do with such a wilful animal.

Even though my days were busy with writing, wedding planning and preparing meals for Philip and Katharine, I missed incense wafting down the stairs. I half expected Lydia to appear and say ‘Ha! April Fool!' Except it wasn't April. It was November.

Over the weeks we'd grown accustomed to the unpredictable nature of the phone calls from Sri Lanka. When the line went dead, it didn't necessarily mean Lydia had taken offence and hung up. Her calls were intermittent because the monastery phone was often out of action for days, especially if there'd been rain.

I wished there was a way of pumping Sri Lanka's water surplus into tanks and shipping it to Australia. The drought was getting worse with the terrifying threat of bushfires in summer.

When Lydia was able to get through on the phone, I asked her about what she'd been up to. It was the usual round of teaching monks English, visiting hospital patients and orphans and, of course, meditating. Though I tried to picture her doing all these things, it was impossible to conjure up anything that made it real. What did the land smell like there? Did the people love her, or were they exploiting her? Or, alternatively, was she exploiting them? She assured me she was paying rent.

‘It's really beautiful here,' she said. ‘You should come and visit.'

My snort of laughter bounced off the kitchen walls. I'd seen enough of the Third World through rims of various toilet seats to last a lifetime. The names of several exotic destinations summon memories for me not of swaying palm trees but of intense physical misery.

If I was to be doing any travelling in the future, especially after my brush with breast cancer, I'd decided it was going to involve gleaming bathrooms, haute cuisine and beds soft as cupcakes.

‘How many steps did you say there are up to the monastery?' I asked, playing her along.

‘A few, but we'd carry your luggage.'

‘Kath told me you saw a rat in your room,' I added. Katharine was an excellent source of subversive information.

‘It mightn't even be a rat!' said Lydia defensively. ‘It was just a shadow. It didn't come anywhere near me.'

By this time I was counting the days till Lydia would be home. By my reckoning, I only had three more weeks of trying to get to sleep at night without imagining her kidnapped, caught up in unspeakable violence, or seriously ill from food poisoning, malaria or some other tropical disease. Not to mention the possibility of her being bitten by one of the ninety-eight snake varieties in Sri Lanka, or attacked by a scorpion, rogue elephant, leopard, water buffalo, mongoose or jackal.