Хелен Браун: Cleo

He was born with a wild sense of humor, a tool to test boundaries. When he was small I feigned shock at his use of rude words. He retaliated by following me around humming “Bum, bum, bumble bee.” Never afraid of flamboyance, he’d flung himself fully dressed into a bath of water and insisted on wearing a monkey mask with matching feet for the duration of his eighth birthday. Life was too magnificent not to be made fun of. I understood where he was coming from. Teachers were either amused or appalled by him, though none of them complained when, at the age of eight, he scored a reading age of thirteen. While he wasn’t disruptive at school, he enjoyed making bold personal statements, like excusing himself from class if he thought I might be in the school grounds, or asking to have his hair cropped close to the scalp when other boys were diligently growing theirs long.

I knew and loved every part of his body, especially the so-called imperfections: the scar above his left eyebrow where as a toddler he’d collided with the edge of the coffee table; his square hands with their chewed fingernails; the wart in the middle of the palm of his right hand. I adored the chip in his front tooth (tricycle accident), the flecks that made his eyes seem so wise sometimes, his feet (often grubby) and his nuggetty legs toasted by the sun. Without these he’d have been a flawless boy, a cherub too perfect for planet Earth. His scratches, bruises and scars formed a secret code only the two of us knew the history and formation of. Knowing Sam the animal lover and clown, I wasn’t sure what to make of his serious approach to his ninth birthday. Maybe he wanted to prove how much he’d grown up.

The knocker rapped against the front door. Sam and Rata trotted down the hall to answer it.

Daniel seemed to understand it was an understated birthday. The three boys sat around the kitchen table with Rata strategically positioned underneath to collect her share of the feast. I snapped a few photos while the birthday boy lit his nine candles. The atmosphere was rich with feeling, yet strangely somber.

Weeks later, when the photos came back from the processor they were so dark it was hard to make out the images. Even though the kitchen had been flooded with sunlight that afternoon, Sam’s image was cloaked in shadow, with a halo of gold light around the edges. Maybe I was a lousy photographer. Or perhaps it was one of those supernatural tricks some people believe cameras are capable of performing.

Loss

Unlike humans, cats are accustomed to loss.

Most days are so similar they’re forgotten almost before the sun sets on them. Thousands of days dissolve into each other, evolving into months and years. We slide through time expecting each day to be as predictable as the one before. Lulled into routines involving the same breakfast cereals, school runs and familiar faces, we’re anesthetized into believing our lives will go on unchanged forever.

The twenty-first of January 1983 started out that way. There were no hints this date would slam down on us and slice our lives permanently in two.

After breakfast the boys wrestled in their pajamas on the living room floor, with Rata refereeing while Steve unscrewed the bathroom door from its frame. The last door headed for the acid dipper in town, it was also the most political. Nobody wanted to pee in public.

Doors are heavier than they look. It took the four of us, aided by cheerful tripping up from Rata, to carry the thing up the zigzag and stow it in the station wagon. It was January—summer holiday time on this hemisphere—and the boys were bronzed, their hair almost white from the sun. Unlike me, they were keen to meet the mysterious acid dipper. After Steve had tied the bathroom door to the car, the boys slid into what was left of the backseat.

On the way into town, Steve dropped me at my friend Jessie’s place in a suburb wedged between the hills. Climbing out of the car, I turned and invited Sam to take my place in the front passenger seat. Smiling, I told him I’d see him after lunch. His blue eyes beamed into mine as he slid into the front. We had no reason to believe that “after lunch” would never happen.

Jessie was on the mend after a week in bed with the flu. Like a Victorian heroine in her white nightgown, she stretched on the covers and made the most of her semi-invalid status. We drank soup, talked and laughed about our kids. Her boys were older than ours, well into high school and turning into artistic rebels. I imagined Sam and Rob would be getting up to similar antics in the not-too-distant future.

Somewhere a phone rang. Jessie’s husband, Peter, answered. I was vaguely aware of his voice in the background. His tone was clipped, then jagged. He seemed to be receiving some kind of bad news. Wondering if he’d lost an elderly relative, I arranged my face in what I hoped was a sympathetic shape as he entered the bedroom. He looked pale and on edge, like someone being devoured by a drama he wanted no part of. He glanced at Jessie, then at me. His eyes were black as onyx. The phone call, he said, was for me.

There’d obviously been some kind of mistake. Who’d ring me at Jessie’s house? Hardly anyone knew I was there in the first place. Confused, I walked into the hallway and lifted the receiver.

“It’s terrible,” I heard Steve’s voice say. “Sam’s dead.”

His voice reverberated across space into every cell of my body. His tone was measured, almost normal. “Sam” and “dead” were words that didn’t belong together. I assumed he was talking about some other Sam, an old man, a distant cousin he’d previously forgotten to mention.

I heard myself scream into the telephone receiver. Steve’s voice arrived like rounds of artillery fire in my ear. Sam and Rob had found a wounded pigeon under the clothesline. Sam had insisted on taking it to the vet. Having seen the Disney film The Secret of NIMH the day before, he was feeling even more attuned than usual to the suffering of animals.

Steve had been making a lemon meringue pie in preparation for lunch. He’d told the boys if they wanted to take the bird to the vet, they’d have to do it themselves. They’d lowered the bird into a shoebox and carried it down the zigzag. Lennel Road was a main route into town from the outer suburbs. In a less car-obsessed age, a town planner had decided to wedge in a bus stop for people wanting to travel up the hill out of town. The road narrowed so dramatically at the footbridge that there was only room for a footpath on one side of the road. Any pedestrian wanting to go farther down the hill into town had no choice but to cross the road at the bus stop. It was a perilous crossing with no signs to make traffic slow down.

As the boys arrived at the bus stop at the bottom of the steps, a bus pulled in on its way up the hill. Rob told Sam he thought they should wait until the bus had moved on before they tried to cross. But Sam was impatient to save the bird. Determined to reach the vet’s rooms down the hill as quickly as possible, he told Rob to be quiet, and ran out from behind the stationary bus. He’d been hit by a car coming down the hill.

The words were like pieces from different jigsaws that didn’t fit together. A nightmare voice that wasn’t mine yelled down the phone, demanding to know if Rob was okay. Steve said Rob was fine, though he’d seen the accident and was badly shaken. A shudder of relief jolted through me.

When people receive ghastly news, some say a sensation of disbelief sets in. Perhaps it was the simple harshness of Steve’s language, but his words hammered through me straight-away. My mind collapsed into different compartments. From a position high on Jessie’s hall ceiling I watched myself wailing and screaming below. My head felt about to burst. I wanted to smash it against the glass panels of Jessie’s front door to stop the pain.