Helen Brown - After Cleo

‘Do you think Cleo would approve?’ Lydia asked.

With his lanky limbs and masculine swagger, Jonah was the opposite of Cleo in almost every way. He was twice her size at the same age. His fur was pale as the moon, while Cleo had been black all over. While his coat was soft, his fur was coarser than Cleo’s. He was a thoroughbred from a pet shop. Cleo had been an unashamed half-breed from a friend with an excess of kittens. There was no way Cleo could mistake Jonah for a replacement cat.

‘How could she not?’ I smiled. ‘Do you know what Cleo would want just now? A saucer of milk.’

Lydia hurried to the kitchen, emerging seconds later and placing a bowl of milk in front of the kitten. Intrigued, he sniffed it, then dipped a front paw in the liquid, forming a succession of pale circles on the surface. Jonah raised the damp paw to his nose, sniffed again and shook his head in disgust. With a swoop of his long back leg, he toppled the bowl over, sending milk gushing over the rug.

Mary stood up to get a cloth from the kitchen. Lydia moved to rescue Jonah from the flood, but before she could get near him he galloped across the floor and shimmied straight up the curtains.

‘Here, kitty!’ I called.

Jonah hesitated for a moment, as if considering the invitation. But he narrowed his eyes and took flight like a trapeze artist, launching himself through the air to land on top of the kitchen dresser.

Knocked together by an amateur craftsman in the depths of the New Zealand bush in the mid 1800s, the kauri dresser had since become a live-in restaurant for generations of borer. Every time I opened a drawer, piles of sawdust were a reminder the dresser was another day closer to total collapse. I’d tried to get it renovated once by a ‘restorer’ who’d left a flier in the letterbox. He’d returned the dresser reeking of cigarette smoke and booze, and in even wonkier condition than it’d been to begin with. Photo albums went in the lower cupboards to keep it stable. Our best wine glasses went in the upper cabinet because they didn’t weigh much and would therefore be less likely to cause structural failure.

What I hadn’t counted on was a berserk kitten hurling himself on top of the upper cabinet. The glasses trembled ominously as he struggled to find his balance.

Lydia climbed a kitchen chair and pleaded with him to jump into her arms. He glared down at her and refused to budge. Sighing, Lydia headed off to the garden shed to get the ladder. Jonah watched intrigued as she gingerly climbed the ladder and reached out to him.

Just as it seemed she might catch him, he flew off the dresser, sending champagne flutes toppling over red wine glasses, which smashed into white wine glasses, shattering the sherry glasses nobody had used since 1970.

‘It’s a shame I’m leaving tomorrow,’ said Mary as Jonah plummeted toward the kitchen bench, her tone not entirely sincere.

The kitten, combined with the broken glasses and post-operative exhaustion, was suddenly more than I could handle. How stupid I’d been to fall for him, let alone give him a name. I hobbled off to the bedroom, shut the door, crawled into bed and slept.

I woke to the sound of bells jingling and an unfamiliar squeaking sound. Lydia opened the bedroom door and Jonah burst in with the fishing rod between his teeth. He leapt on the covers, narrowly missing the most painful parts of my body, and dropped the fishing rod in my hand.

‘He wants to play,’ said Lydia. ‘And I need to help Mary with dinner. Can I leave him with you?’

Using my stronger left arm, I lifted the fishing rod and flicked it across my thighs. The bell jingled as Jonah lunged at the fake bird and snared it between his teeth. His reactions were incredibly fast. I flicked the fishing rod in the opposition direction. Impressive and beautiful to watch, he leapt and caught the bird mid-air. The more rapidly I flicked the rod, the faster Jonah went. When I made the bird fly a metre into the air he jumped and pirouetted mid-air like a ballerina. A wind-up kitten on fast-forward, he caught the bird every time.

I was worn out in minutes, but not Jonah. He wanted the game to go on. When I put the fishing rod down, he picked it up between his teeth and pressed it into my hand. Fortunately, Katharine arrived home from school and succumbed immediately.

‘Oooooh, Mum! He’s adorable! ’ she cooed. ‘Can I take him for a while?’

Could she ever! Lifting him into her arms and carrying him out of the room, she swore to take on feeding and litter-changing duties for eternity.

To celebrate her last night with us, Mary was preparing a sumptuous meal of casseroled chicken legs and sponge-top pudding from the same Edmonds recipe book our grandmother used. Nostalgic cooking smells lured me out of the bedroom to lie on one of the green sofas and watch my sister and daughter at work. Side by side, they moved in easy rhythm, Lydia peeling vegetables while Mary whipped a sponge-top batter. Dinner would be forty minutes away, precisely timed for Philip’s arrival home from work.

Jonah amused himself by running non-stop up and down the stairs. Presumably he’d decided to take a rest from shredding the freshly laid carpet, after galloping around the hall, scaling the family room blinds and diving into the toilet.

As she folded the pudding batter over a dish of stewed plums, Mary asked if we remembered Cleo being this active. I had hazy memories of Cleo being a handful as a kitten. Maybe it was because I was physically weak this time, but Jonah seemed worse. Much worse. By the time Cleo was Jonah’s age, she’d morphed into a calm and reasonable young cat. I’d have no hope of keeping up, let alone catching him if I was alone in the house with him. Just watching him was exhausting. If we’d worked out a way of attaching him to the national grid he’d have kept an entire suburb alight. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a tragedy if Philip refused to keep him.

Lydia smoothed a white cloth over the table. Once the plates, glasses and cutlery were in place, she rearranged a bowl of flowers and lit a candle in my favourite candlestick – Mexican, lime-green pottery and covered with decorative flowers.

‘Oh Lydia,’ I said. ‘It looks gorg—’

Suddenly, Jonah sprang on to the table top sending forks and plates flying. The candlestick toppled and smashed to pieces. The only thing that stopped the tablecloth bursting into flames was the water from the flower bowl that was now weeping on its side, its floral contents scattered.

My normal, robust self would have laughed it off.

‘Can’t somebody calm him down?!’ I whined.

Registering my distress, Lydia scooped our vandal off the floor and carried him to an armchair. Mary resurrected what she could of the table arrangement while Lydia held Jonah on her knees, gently resisting his twists and kicks until he stopped struggling. Closing her eyes, she began to chant. Jonah pricked his ears forward, listened intensely and accompanied her with a gravelly purr. Tuned into an unseen world, cat and daughter drifted into a state of serenity . . .

Minutes later, the eyes snapped open and he was off bouncing down the hall toward my study. We soon heard the eerie harmonies of paws on a computer keyboard.

‘Stop him!’ I called to Katharine, who’d been lured downstairs by the cacophony.

As Katharine hurried toward my study, Jonah emerged looking thoughtful.

‘It’s okay,’ Katharine called. ‘He’s jammed your keyboard but I can fix that. Oh, and he’s knocked over the jar you keep rubber bands in but that’s nothing.’

Jonah trotted toward me, let out a mournful groan and vomited a coil of rubber bands on the rug.

‘Oh dear . . . !’

But he’d just heard the toilet flush. Nothing was more exciting for him than trying to bat the torrent of water with his paw. Turbocharged, he was off to the bathroom.