Helen Brown: After Cleo

‘You are a wonderful man,’ I sighed as we drove away, my hands still trembling from signing papers with so many zeros on them. ‘Are you sure we can afford it?’

‘We’ll work something out,’ he replied in the reassuring tone he’d used with customers when he’d been working at the bank. ‘We have some savings and I should get a pay rise at the end of the year with any luck. And who knows? Maybe you’ll write a bestseller.’

I squirmed in the passenger seat. His faith in my writing ability verged on pitiful. Supermodels would be size 18 before I produced anything like a bestseller.

After weeks of packing and planning, moving day finally arrived. I walked out the door of the mercifully never-named house we’d spent the last six years living in and said goodbye to Cleo and the Daphne bush, promising I’d drive past every now and then to pay my respects. Removal men heaved the semicircular seat into their truck and rattled off down the road. Melbourne’s trees were dressed in autumn reds and golds as we drove to our new home, where the apple tree spread its branches in woody welcome.

Shirley’s insides were cold and echoey. The oak table was dwarfed in its new family room, where the phone still bleated even with the receiver down. Some of our furniture fitted in better than others. The green couches looked good at the other end of the family room and the stone Buddha statue that’d sat on a window ledge in our old house settled comfortably in the alcove beside the couches. As I dusted it off, I remembered the day I’d bought it in a garden centre – not for religious reasons but because I was struck by the tranquillity of the statue’s expression and hoped some of it might rub off on me.

As it turned out, I needed all the serenity I could get. Every house has a secret or two. Shirley had been hiding the fact she was a maternity ward for moths. Clouds of them flew out of every room, patting our faces with their soft brown wings. Alfred Hitchcock had missed a horror movie opportunity.

Watching the removal men plonk the semicircular seat in plumes of dust under the tree in the back desert, I hoped we hadn’t made a mistake.

Philip and I wondered aloud if we shouldn’t have claimed the upstairs ‘apartment’ for ourselves. The two bedrooms in it (one of which would’ve made a very nice study) were surprisingly spacious, each with a charming outlook over treetops and gardens, and the living area had views toward the city’s skyscrapers, often outlined in tangerine sunsets. Instead, we moved our king-sized bed and snore-proof pillows into a room across the hall from the Marquis de Sade. With a disused fireplace, plain white walls and no wardrobes, our new bedroom was stark but sunny. I placed our wedding photo on the mantelpiece and hoped we’d get around to giving the room a personality boost. We decided to use the wardrobes in the Marquis’ gloomy chamber, which would also accommodate our chests of drawers, my stepper and Philip’s bike machine.

I cleaned out what had been the baby’s room, painted the walls red and claimed it as a writing space. My first ‘study’ had been the oak table in the kitchen. I’d then graduated to a desk in the corner of a bedroom. This was by far the best work environment I’d had in thirty years of writing. It lured me away from The Weakest Link and helped me keep up with deadlines for the magazine and newspaper columns I’d been churning out for decades. I’d also recently embarked on a book about Cleo.

One of the reasons I didn’t feel we needed a new cat was that as I wrote about her, Cleo seemed more alive than ever. Nestled in front of the computer in my new study, I could almost feel her coiling around my ankles. Nevertheless, my professional confidence as a writer was at an all-time low. Though I’d sent drafts of the Cleo manuscript to various agents and publishers, none had shown interest in the book. I decided I’d sign up for a weekend writers’ workshop, hoping that might help.

During that weekend I was so impressed by the talent of the other students, all of them amateur, I was reduced to silence most of the time. At the end of the programme we were invited to read our book ideas aloud. I scribbled a few paragraphs about Cleo and gave the last presentation. The room fell silent when I’d finished. Then people started asking questions. They wanted to know what had happened to the cat, and to our family. Several said they’d buy it if it was a book. That was when I began to realise Cleo and Sam’s story had legs.

The course co-ordinator told me about Friday Pitch, run by Sydney publishers Allen & Unwin. Writers could email their book proposals in on any Friday with the promise of a response the following week. It was for fiction writers but I thought I could be cheeky and send them a memoir.

Nestled in my new room I knocked the manuscript into shape while the girls settled in upstairs. Now I felt more confident our story might interest others, I fell into a routine. Armed with takeaway coffee from Spoonful, I’d write most mornings until my brain felt tired. Piecing our lives together in readable form helped me come to terms with some of the more painful experiences. If I wrote honestly enough, perhaps there’d be some healing in it.

Katharine and Lydia adored Shirley and loved their new living arrangements. Both easy-going girls, they’d always got along well, despite the seven-year age difference. Now Katharine was a teenager they’d grown even closer, swapping clothes and makeup. Currently in the throes of a charity shop obsession, they delighted in bringing home stinky old clothes glorified with the name ‘retro’. There was no tension over who’d have which bedroom. They quickly agreed Katharine would have the blue room on the left while Lydia took the one with apricot-coloured walls on the right.

Moving into Shirley made me regret that we hadn’t been able to afford a house of its size a few years earlier when Rob was still at home. With such a spread of age groups in the family, it was good to have more space.

If nothing else, having representatives from five different decades kept our regular family Sunday lunches lively. At a recent lunch, for example, Philip (b. 1962) had been wearing a T-shirt I’d talked him into buying because it had ‘Free Leonard Bernstein’ emblazoned on the front. To Philip, Leonard Bernstein was some old musician he didn’t listen to, like Leonard Cohen. He probably only wore the T-shirt because the design was retro-ish and therefore acceptable to his daughters. I (b. 1954), on the other hand, loved the T-shirt because I remembered seeing black and white reruns of the free concerts Bernstein gave to young people in New York. Katharine (b. 1992) knew who Leonard Bernstein was because she loved WestSide Story . The first time Lydia (b. 1985) saw the T-shirt she studied it respectfully and asked in an Amnesty International voice, ‘Who’s Leonard Bernstein and why is he in jail?’

Rob (Generation X) took a grumpy old man’s perspective of Lydia’s GenerationY. He thought she and her ilk had no idea what tough times were like and they expected everything laid on a plate, from jobs to technology. Lydia gave the impression she regarded Generation X as a pompous lot. And as token baby boomers, Philip and I were easy targets for all the offspring. Not only had we stuffed up the world environmentally and politically, housing had been affordable for us, education free and employers had practically begged us to work for them. Borderline Generation Z, Katharine was the only one safe in these discussions because nobody had profiled Generation Z fully yet. Chantelle (b. 1979) tended to listen in silence at family lunches, no doubt wondering what sort of family she was letting herself in for.

Each of our daughters was beautiful and precious in her own right. Katharine at fifteen was a tall pale blonde blessed with her father Philip’s blue eyes and cursed with her mother’s large feet. A born extrovert, she laughed easily and was never short of friends. Books, her violin and musicals were among her many enthusiasms. She’d been thrilled to star in school musicals a couple of times, though always in male roles due to her height and alto voice: Wild Bill Hickok in Calamity Jane , Bert Healey in Annie . Short sopranos always scored the glamour parts. Katharine eventually agreed with my conclusion that most female roles were shallow compared to those written for men. Sunny yet sensitive, she was a conscientious scholar. In fact, I sometimes wondered if she took schoolwork too seriously. Katharine was desperate for a kitten. If we got one, she promised she’d clean its litter tray every day. Just as likely, the Dalai Lama was about to convert to Catholicism.