Хелен Браун - Cleo

Once we started trusting life again magical things seemed to unfold. Wonderful people like Ginny, Jason, Anne Marie and Philip turned up at exactly the right times. Cleo supervised every encounter, sometimes giving the impression she’d actually arranged them. I’ll always be grateful to these people and many more who helped us recover from the loss of Sam. Not that I’ll ever confidently say we’ve recovered. We’ve changed, grown. Sam, his life and death, will always be part of us.

Anger ultimately gave way to forgiveness and, years later, the enormous relief of learning Sam hadn’t died alone and frightened. I discovered Superman is real, after all. He’s the hero who stops at accident scenes and does what he can for victims. For us his name was Arthur Judson.

For years I’d avoided returning to the zigzag in Wellington. With typical sensitivity, Ginny understood and never pressed me to visit her. We’d arranged reunions in Australia or other parts of New Zealand, anywhere that served good sauvignon, really. But curiosity eventually got the better of me. As the rental car ground up the hill towards Wadestown I prepared for gut-wrenching replays. Rounding the first hook bend, then the second, I noticed there was still a stretch of public land, a mini park, overlooking the harbor. I’d once dreamt of erecting a sculpture there in Sam’s memory, but concrete and stainless steel lack warmth. There are better ways to honor a lost child.

The road straightened, narrowed and became steeper as it rose towards the footbridge, still hanging across the cutting like a gallows. As the car sped underneath, I absorbed a rush of impressions. The steps down from the bridge, the edge of the footpath where Sam had turned to his brother all those years ago and said, “Be quiet.” The harsh surface of the asphalt where his blood had spilt. My chest jarred. What was the point of putting myself through all this?

The houses on our old street seemed more brightly painted, the gardens better maintained since we’d left. At the end of the road I was astonished to find the zigzag had disappeared. Ginny had mentioned the neighbors had clubbed together to pay for a bulldozer to create drive-on access for all the houses, but I hadn’t imagined anything this dramatic. The old zigzag with its twists and turns had been replaced by a full-on driveway plunging straight down the hill. I stood at the top of the zigzag that was now a road and looked down on the city. It sprawled farther up the hills these days. There were several new high-rise office blocks. Wind jagged up from the south.

“Bubbles, darling?” asked a familiar voice. Ginny and I wrapped arms around each other. Laughter lines and streaks of grey through her hair had only intensified her beauty. Leopard-skin tights and wild earrings had succumbed to a flowing skirt and silk shirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of Milan.

Together we walked down the driveway over what once would have been one zig and a zag to Ginny’s place. I deliberately avoided turning towards our old bungalow. A single glimpse had potential to unleash an army of demons. The jungle that used to surround the Desilva’s had gone, but their house sat serene as ever. A champagne cork popped as Ginny explained how she and Rick had looked at apartments in town, but nothing could surpass the convenience and outlook of this house.

Nodding, I took in the surroundings. Ginny’s taste in interior design had moved on from eighties chic to European understatement. Having lived there nearly thirty years, Ginny confessed she and Rick were the neighborhood establishment now. The Butlers had moved ten years ago. Mrs. Sommerville had gone to the great staff room in the sky.

“And our old house?” I asked tentatively.

“A footballer and his girlfriend lived there for a while,” said Ginny. “Someone wanted to renovate it, but they gave up. It’s been tenanted ever since. There’s a good view from upstairs, remember?”

I followed her tentatively up the staircase, safe in the knowledge that if I broke down Ginny of all people would know what to do. She pulled a curtain aside and beckoned me towards the window. Our old bungalow was barely recognizable. The front garden with its path lined with forget-me-nots had been obliterated, along with the boys’ digging patch, to make way for a concrete slab wide enough to park two cars alongside each other. Sensible, yes. No more rain-soaked treks carrying groceries to the front door. Not that it resembled our front door anymore. The dark paneling had been painted white, along with the mock-Tudor beams that had once given the place “character.” Someone had decided to rid the place of its ghosts by throwing buckets of white paint over it. The house seemed narrower, chastened. Rob’s bedroom window where Cleo used to sit was the same shape, the roof pitched at the same angle, but it wasn’t our house anymore. Like the zigzag and everything else in the neighborhood, it had moved on.

I’d been steeling myself for flashbacks on this visit. Instead, looking down on the old house with Ginny, I experienced an unexpected sensation of lightness and peace. A circle had completed itself. Our life on the zigzag was faded as an old photograph. Nothing but a memory. The only thing that mattered was the lives we had now.

Even after Cleo died she continued to leave physical reminders of her presence. Unmistakable black hairs were scattered through our sheets and clothes. There was frozen cat food in the back of the freezer. Hauling Cleo’s rejected dog bed out from under the house, I had an urge to call Rob. His line was busy, of course.

“Were you trying to call me?” I asked when I finally got through.

“No, I was talking to someone.”

“Who?”

“Chantelle. She’s back in Australia.”

“Oh, that’s lovely! With her boyfriend?”

“She’s broken up with him.”

The bond of friendship between Rob and Chantelle had deepened with the death of her brother. Sam’s loss was so much a part of him that Rob was able to understand a lot of Chantelle’s pain. They both now belonged to the nameless club of people who have lost brothers. Within a year they were living together, engaged to be married and discussing what type of kitten they’d like to add to their household. Intense research was carried out over the Internet. A British Blue, perhaps, or maybe even a Siamese.

When they stayed a night at the house of Chantelle’s Aunt Trudy, who’d introduced them nearly ten years earlier, the resident Burmese insisted on sleeping on their bed.

“No way am I living with a pedigreed kitten,” Rob said next day. “That cat spent the whole night talking to me, telling me to get out of his bed.”

“What is it with you and cats?” I said.

“Dunno. Guess it’s a Cleo thing.”

I smiled, remembering six-year-old Rob cradling his brand-new kitten, how she’d helped him sleep alone in his bedroom for the first time without Sam, “spoken” to him through his dreams and helped him develop friendships. Watching over him for nearly a quarter of a century, Cleo our cat goddess had presided over countless birthday parties and nursed Rob through illness. From her resting place under the daphne bush, she was still exerting her influence.

If and when Rob and Chantelle do acquire a cat, Rob says, it’ll have to be an ordinary mog. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be a crossbreed with just a whisker of Abyssinian.

THE BEGINNING

Acknowledgments

Every kitten belongs to a litter. Likewise, Cleo’s story would never have been born without help from many wonderful people. I’d like to thank Catherine Drayton at InkWell and Amy Pyle, Laurie Parkin, Michaela Hamilton, and the magnificent team at Citadel for embracing Cleo with such enthusiasm. Thanks, too, to Louise Thurtell and Jude McGee in Sydney, who believed in our cat story from the beginning. They provided me with unwavering support through various forms of self-doubt and an unexpected health hiccup while I was writing the book.