Хелен Браун: Cleo

“Can you turn that noise down, please?” I shouted down the hall.

“I can’t turn it down!” Steve yelled back. “There’s only one volume. It’s an electric sander.”

“Sam has to wait eight more weeks for the kitten,” I explained to Rob, running my hand under the cold tap and wondering why it wasn’t doing any good. “Besides, if you ask nicely I’m sure you can have a digital Superman watch when it’s your birthday.”

“Sam doesn’t even play Superman anymore,” Rob said. “He just reads books about history and stuff.”

He was right. Sam’s new phase didn’t include comic book heroes. A Superman watch wasn’t Sam anymore. Nevertheless, when he’d opened the parcel that morning he’d smiled and been gracious.

“I hate my watch,” Rob said. “It should go in a museum. Nobody has a watch that ticks anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with your watch.”

The sander’s shrieking mercifully stopped. Steve appeared coated in paint dust and wearing a mask and a bath cap.

“You look funny, Daddy,” Rob said. “Like a big white Smurf.”

“It’s no good,” Steve sighed. “That paint’s glued to the wood. I’ll have to take the doors off. There’s a place in town that’ll soak them in acid baths. It’s the only way we’ll get rid of that paint.”

“You’re removing all our doors?” I asked. “Even the bathroom’s?”

“Only for a week or two.”

Lured by the smell of banana cake, Sam wandered into the kitchen. Rata trailed behind, clicking her toenails over the vinyl. If boy and dog were ever twin souls those two were it. She’d arrived, a milk-colored puppy, when Sam was just two years old. They’d grown up together, comrades in arms whenever the fridge needed raiding or Christmas presents unearthing two weeks early from under our bed.

I couldn’t remember exactly when Rata decided she was the senior partner and assumed the mantle of guardianship. Perhaps Rob’s birth, two and a half years after Sam’s, had something to do with it. With Rob’s arrival, Rata took on nanny duties. The retriever would stretch in front of the fireplace, her tongue lolling nonchalantly on the carpet; Rob used her as a pillow while he sucked on his bottle of milk. The drawbacks of living with such an animal—layers of silvery hairs over our carpet and furniture, a pervasive doggy smell that I imagined made visitors balk—were a miniscule price. Rata had a heart bigger than the Pacific Ocean. I hoped that heart could encompass a small furry stranger.

“Have you thought of a name for the kitten yet, Sam?” I asked.

“She could be Sooty or Blackie,” Rob volunteered.

Sam fixed his younger brother with the look of a tiger about to lunge at a chicken.

“I think E.T. would be a good name,” Sam said.

“Noooo!” Rob wailed. “That’s a horrible name!”

Rob hadn’t fully recovered from the movie E.T. His terror of Steven Spielberg’s alien had provided Sam with a wealth of fresh material to freak Rob out. Ever since Sam told him the gas meter on the zigzag was E.T.’s cousin, Rob refused to walk past it without clutching my hand.

“Why not?” Sam said. “The kitten looks a bit like an E.T. with hardly any hair and those bulging eyes. But not as scary as the E.T. I saw in our bathroom last night. He’s still there, but don’t look at him, Rob. If he sees you looking he’ll eat you up and it’s worse than being eaten by an alligator because he’s got no teeth…”

“Sam, stop it,” I warned. But it was too late. Rob was already running out of the kitchen with fingers planted in his ears.

“He makes green slime run out of his nose so he can dissolve your bones and suck you up!” Sam yelled after him.

“Not funny,” I growled.

Sam slid onto a kitchen chair and examined his cake. Apart from the times he was teasing his brother, Sam had transmuted into an introspective soul, so unlike the wild warrior he used to be. I occasionally worried what went on inside his head. Mixing icing in a saucepan, I asked if he’d like to help decorate the cake. He said yes—just a few jellybeans would do.

Sam had kept his word about a modest birthday and invited only one friend, Daniel, from around the corner. He claimed to be sick of “those big parties where everyone goes crazy.” I had to agree. Those tribes of boys who trashed the house and tied sheets together to leap out of windows surely needed medication, or more of it.

At the last minute I’d felt guilty and tried to persuade him to ask more boys. But he said he was happy with just his best friend, Rob, and Rata. The only thing he insisted on was to be allowed to light his own candles. It seemed a small enough request.

I spread newspaper on the kitchen table and spooned the pale icing onto the cake. The texture was about right for once, smooth and easy to shape. To prove I was a half-creative mother, I added cocoa powder to the dregs of the icing in the pot, stirred in some boiling water and trickled a large, wonky “9” on top of the cake. Sam pressed the jellybeans into the sticky surface.

As he glanced up at me his sapphire eyes darkened. He suddenly appeared ancient and wise. I’d seen that look several times recently. It unnerved me, especially when he said things that seemed to emanate from a soul who’d been on earth countless times before and was aware he was merely passing through.

“It’s a good time to be alive,” he said, sneaking a black jellybean under the table to Rata.

“It’s a great time to be alive,” I corrected.

“I’m jealous of Granddad. He was alive when the first cars were made and they started flying planes. He saw towns get electricity and movie theaters. That must’ve been exciting.”

“Yes, but when you get to be an old man you’ll have seen even bigger changes. Things we can’t imagine now. You’ll be able to say to your grandchildren, ‘I had one of the first digital Superman watches ever.’”

He glanced down at his wrist and arranged his lips in a diplomatic smile. I wanted to take him by the shoulders, hold him close so I could savor the delectable smell of his skin.

“I was just joking about calling the kitten E.T.,” he confided, scraping a teaspoon around the pot to collect what was left of the chocolate icing and shoveling it into his mouth. “Her mother looks like an Egyptian queen. I think we should call her Cleopatra. Cleo for short.”

“Cleo,” I said, running a hand through his hair and wondering if children ever understand the painful depth of their parents’ love. “That’s a great name.”

“I’m giving Rata a lot of attention, so she doesn’t get jealous of the kitten. I brushed her coat twice yesterday. We’ve talked a lot about it. She’s going to like Cleo.”

Rata put her head in his lap and gazed up at him with liquid eyes.

“She seems to understand every word you’re saying,” I said.

“Animals know a lot more than people do. Dogs can tell when there’s going to be an earthquake. Birds can fly halfway around the world to find their nest. If people listened to animals more often they wouldn’t make so many mistakes.”

Sam’s connection with animals had become apparent when he was a baby. Our outings were devoted to animal spotting more than anything else. Enthroned in his pushchair, he’d wave chubby arms at dogs and cats wherever we went. One day, he pointed at a seagull circling above our heads and said his first word—“Dird!”

Animals were a tactile experience for Sam, too. He adored the feel of fur and feathers. Mum gave him an old goatskin rug that was black and white and shiny with age. Sam had dragged it into his bed to sleep on its comforting smoothness every night.