After Cleo (20 page)

As for monkeys, which are everywhere in Sri Lanka, after listening to a doctor friend giving me a rundown on the deadliness of monkey bites, I no longer regarded them as harmless pseudo-humans.

On top of all the physical dangers, I worried what was happening inside Lydia's head. I wondered if hours of meditation had tipped her over the edge into religious fervour. My questions were deflected with silence followed by, ‘It's hard to explain.' I didn't dare ask if she was still thinking of turning her back on the West and all its meat-eating, shallow commercialism.

A sparkle would invariably come into her voice when we talked about Rob's wedding. For a few moments, I would hear traces of the old Lydia – the little girl dressed as a fairy jumping on a trampoline; the toddler waddling through a park in red shoes insisting swans were ducks. She'd had strong opinions even then.

Whenever Lydia talked as though she was still part of our family, I gulped back tears. Maybe spending three months at the monastery would be like Jonah's 200 strokes and get the whole thing out of her system. Then again, considering Jonah's 200 strokes had been a failure, I decided to steer clear of amateur behavioural science.

Replacing the receiver after a call one day, I glanced around the kitchen. Compared to the colourful world I imagined Lydia was living in, we inhabited shades of beige. Shirley's colours looked tired both inside and out. Rob's wedding was only a month and a half away and we were planning a pre-wedding barbecue for thirty or forty people under the tree in the back desert. The house needed sprucing up.

Looking around, I wondered what Mum would've done to give the house a bit of a lift. Like me, she'd hated cleaning. When layers of grime formed on her kitchen shelves, rather than scrubbing them she painted. Her favourite paint was pastel blue enamel, probably imbued with enough lead to account for several family eccentricities. She thought the colour looked ‘hygienic' and she liked it being high gloss. She said it ‘covered well'. Tears of blue paint dripped from the edges of the kitchen shelves and set hard.

Running my eye over Shirley's shabbiness, my mind naturally turned to paint. I phoned David the designer, who knew just the people who could help us out in a hurry.

I wasn't looking forward to the arrival of the painters. The smell would disrupt my writing, not to mention the inevitable prattle of talk radio on their ghetto-blasters.

Their clattering ladders and stomping boots were bound to terrify Jonah. They'd leave doors and windows open for him to escape through so that precious hours I needed to work on the book would be spent scouring the neighbourhood.

On their first day, the painters rattled on the door just after 7 a.m. I had a contract with the Universe not to get up before 7.30, but Philip had gone for a run so there was no choice but to climb out of bed. Still in my nightie, hair uncombed, I scooped Jonah into my arms before opening the front door a crack.

‘I'm sorry but our cat is Siamese and very highly strung,' I said. ‘We have to keep him inside. I'll just shut him in whichever rooms you're not working in, if that's okay.'

The boss painter nodded, no doubt used to people making unreasonable requests. He seemed oblivious to the fact I wasn't dressed yet and my hair appeared to have been through an electrical storm.

‘Beautiful cat,' he said, casting an appraising eye over Jonah through the crack. ‘But he's not Siamese. He's Tonkinese.'

‘Really?' I said, backing down the hallway to make way for him and his two assistants, all dressed in white overalls, to come in. ‘The pet shop man told us he's Siamese.'

I could feel Jonah coiling every muscle as the painters arranged their pots and brushes and dust sheets on the floor. Any moment now he was going to explode out of my arms and go berserk.

‘No way!' said the painter, stroking Jonah's forehead. ‘He's Tonkinese. Swear my life on it. I've got two cats just like him at home and they're both Tonks. Your cat's too dark for a Siamese. He's definitely a Tonk.'

To my relief, Jonah purred at the painter's touch. Maybe they were going to get along all right. If the painter was correct, Jonah was not only a nutcase, he was an imposter. Smiling down at our cat, I didn't care a thing about his pedigree. His personality was enormous enough to warrant an entire new breed of his own. But it was intriguing to imagine his background might be even murkier than we'd thought.

I went to the computer and Googled Tonkinese. Half Siamese, half Burmese, Tonkinese cats are said to encompass the best of both breeds. Interestingly, the name stems back to Mum's favourite musical,
South Pacific
. The character she played, Bloody Mary, was supposed to be Tonkinese, from an island free from prejudice against half-breeds.

If the painter wanted Jonah to be Tonkinese that was fine by me, especially as Tonkinese were supposed to be ‘less demanding and highly strung' than Siamese. Maybe while he was working on his Tonkinese-ness, Jonah could learn to have a ‘softer voice', and be ‘playful rather than hyperactive'.

Jonah adored the painters to the point of worshipping them. He waited for them beside the front door every morning. If they were working at ground level, he sat alongside them, peering into their pots and teasing their brushes. When they climbed ladders, he sat anxiously below, or leapt up on to a window ledge to keep them company.

With their white overalls, stealthy movements and penchant for climbing, the painters must've seemed like human cats to Jonah. When they had morning coffee in the kitchen, our cat sprang up on to the table and batted his eyes at them, mewing seductively and stretching an elongated paw to pat their faces. Fortunately, they loved him back.

Painters have gone upmarket. Instant coffee isn't good enough for them anymore. They prefer plunger coffee or, better still, takeaway lattes from Spoonful. They like china mugs on a pretty tray. If the biscuits don't look homemade they leave them on the plate to go soft in the sun. Those who don't like coffee favour freshly squeezed orange juice in a glass (not plastic) with ice.

Painters see and hear everything in a house. They peered curiously through the study window as I struggled to complete the final chapters of the Cleo book. I steeled myself against the certainty that at least one of them would also be writing a book, or have a friend or relation who was. Everyone in the world was writing a book, or (more patronisingly) planning to do it when they retired.

‘Is it a children's book?' one of them asked.

By this stage my confidence was seeping through the floorboards. Maybe it
was
a children's book, which wasn't a bad thing because I have enormous respect for people who write for children. Then again the aftermath of a child's death was surely too dark a theme for a children's book. Maybe the agents and publishers who'd turned it down had been right. When I finally wrote the last sentence and then typed those longed-for words ‘The End' they didn't seem right. Life goes in cycles. Cleo's departure was the start of a new phase. I deleted ‘The End', replaced it with ‘The Beginning' – and, with huge trepidation, pressed ‘Send'.

As the painters worked through the house, I helped reorganise rooms they'd finished painting and tidied the ones they planned to work on next. I wasn't physically capable of lifting and moving much, so Philip did most of the donkey work after he got home at night.

Just as one mound of books, paintings and furniture was put back in place, another roomful was dismantled and shuffled into corners under dust sheets. It was like shifting the sea.

In the laundry near Jonah's food bowls, I noticed faint streaks dribbling in roughly parallel lines down the wall. I asked the painters to put an extra coat over them.

A few days later, the marks mysteriously reappeared. Bending, I examined them more closely. Free-form in shape, they resembled something Jackson Pollock might've painted. They spoke of the jungle too, as if some wild creature had thrown his art against the wall as an insult. There was something sinister about them. Symbolic, almost. I wondered what they could mean.

Romance

Cats and daughters come home when they please

Two weeks before the wedding, Chantelle appeared glowing with excitement at the front door. Her gown was finally ready. It was in her car. She didn't want to store it at their place. Even if she tried to hide it in their spare room, she was sure Rob would find it. I was thrilled when she asked me to guard the precious garment at our place.

Under the watchful eyes of the painters, we carried the gown, sheathed in protective covering, up the front path. From his viewpoint in the living room window, Jonah's ears pricked with interest. He ran to meet us at the door, glued himself to our heels and trotted after us into my study. I was too engrossed to shut him out. Chantelle unzipped the cover to reveal a wedding gown fit for a princess. Pearls on the bodice shimmered against the soft pink silk. It was simply the most . . .

‘
Jonah!
' Chantelle cried.

We'd been too engrossed in the gown to notice the effect it was having on our cat. With his ears pointed forward and blue ray eyes, he lunged forward and buried himself under the hem of the garment. We were too nervous to grab him in case he dug his claws into the silk.

‘Jonah, come out!' I called. But he only wriggled deeper into the folds of the tulle under-layer.

Enraptured by the softness and glitz of the wedding gown, Jonah refused to budge. One careless scratch would cause untold emotional and financial damage. Chantelle had proved herself an incredibly level-headed bride-to-be so far, but if Jonah ruined her dress she'd have every reason to become Bridezilla.

I fetched one of his fishing rod toys and managed to divert his attention long enough for Chantelle to lift the gown off him and zip it safely back in its bag. I scribbled ‘NO PEEKING!!!' on a scrap of paper and Sellotaped it to the cover.

Not every writer gets to store a bridal dress in her study cupboard. I was honoured Chantelle had trusted me with its keeping, especially with our live-in feline formal-wear fetishist.

Every day, once I'd made sure Jonah was safely shut out of the study, I'd open the cupboard door to ogle the gown. A couple of times I disobeyed my own instructions and unzipped the cover to admire the garment folded like a butterfly inside its chrysalis.

A symbol of love and hope for the future, the wedding dress shimmered with expectation. It felt like a lucky charm. Especially when an email arrived from Louise at Allen & Unwin saying she loved
Cleo
. I naturally assumed Louise was being polite and protecting my fragile writer's ego. Jude, who was to edit
Cleo
, sent an email echoing Louise's enthusiasm – and the anxiety lifted. Maybe the book wasn't so bad after all.

When fifteen pages of editorial suggestions arrived from Jude soon after, my heart muscles contracted. But once I understood what a sensitive and thorough editing job she had done, I was more than willing to follow her guidelines. She was asking me to delve into the dark emotional corners I'd obliterated from the first version of
Cleo
.

As I revised, reliving the painful days after Sam's death wasn't easy, though I was surprised how much detail I remembered. But remembered pain isn't as bad as it is first time round.

I hoped maybe now the book would have a better chance of reaching out to other parents who'd suffered loss – and that
Cleo
might find a few readers not just in New Zealand, but Australia as well.

As the wedding day drew closer, the house hummed with excitement. Every phone call and early wedding present delivered to our doorstep brought more happiness. The fact that six months earlier I'd worried I mightn't be around to be part of this, made it all the more wonderful. Nevertheless, I still had to be careful. While my body was stronger, I still wasn't entirely back to normal. Whenever I pushed myself too hard, I'd crash in a heap of exhaustion. Occasionally I'd collapse in tearful frustration, wondering if I'd ever feel strong again. During these low moments, malevolent thoughts crept into my mind. What if this extraordinary tiredness was abnormal, and cancer was still swirling inside me?

It was hard to believe Rob was getting married. I still thought of him as a six-year-old playing hide and seek with Cleo, or as the young Sea Scout who loved sailing. Then there was the fourteen-year-old hurrumphing home in his blue school uniform through a cloud of teenage hormones. We were all thrilled when the boy who'd had ‘learning difficulties' won a scholarship to engineering school. Then devastated when at the age of nineteen he was struck by serious illness.

Rob and I had been through so much together. The day I'd had to phone him to say Cleo had died, he'd sighed and said, ‘There goes the last link with Sam.' Our grief would always be an invisible bond between us. Even these days, when we had a moment alone, we'd thumb through old photos and talk fondly about Sam.

Rob always says bad times help you appreciate the good. Casting my mind back over the uncertainty and pain of recent months made these joyous days leading up to the wedding so precious.

In quieter, sombre moments I'd Google the latest events in Sri Lanka. The month before Rob's wedding a suicide bombing in the town of Anuradhapura claimed the lives of twenty-seven people, including a former general. While Lydia insisted the monastery was a million miles from these atrocities, my maternal heart still fretted.

With the wedding only two weeks away, we were just about ready for visitors. Ahead of them all was one very important arrival. When I phoned the airport an automated voice said the flight would be arriving ten minutes early. That couldn't be right. Planes are never early.

Philip and I bustled into the car and hurtled down the motorway.

‘She'll have lost weight,' I said. ‘Two vegetarian curries a day must be incredibly purging. I'm not going to say a word.'