Bono

With Philip on one side and Jonah wedged between my legs, I felt like the filling in an alpha male croissant. Much as I loved Jonah, he was the most demanding cat in the world. A Velcro cat, he clung to my lap, my arms, my neck, and never let me out of his sight. He bellowed like a moose when things weren’t going his way, which seemed to be most of the time these days.

Once they’d settled in and were drifting into their parallel dream worlds, I started to retrieve my hand inch by inch. With Jonah anchoring me to the mattress, I reached for the bedside light. My body emitted an involuntary groan, part of a symphony of noises it was making by itself these days.

Staring into the darkness, I wondered what was going on inside my husband’s head. He seemed to have transitioned from the high passion of our early years to midlife contentment with hardly a glitch. Either that or he was an actor of Oscar-winning potential.

I supposed it was inevitable that French kisses should morph into Sunday night pecks. Love has many layers. Sex can be transporting and addictive, but to lust after the same person over and over again is asking a lot of the imagination.

Movies make a big deal of the first kiss and rapturous nights in bed together, followed (ninety minutes later) by the frantic dash to the airport when he thinks she’s leaving him. Hollywood seems to have little interest in portraying the everyday and astonishing achievement of sustaining love through all the reincarnations two people go through in a lifetime together.

His breathing was becoming deep and regular.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Whaaa?!” he said, tugging the sheet over his shoulder, and encasing himself like a caterpillar. “A good night’s sleep wouldn’t go amiss.”

“No, I mean it,” I said, tapping his shoulder. “If you had just a few years left, how would you choose to spend them? Is there something you’ve always dreamed of, a place you’ve wanted to go?”

The room fell silent. He’d either fallen asleep, or was thinking.

“Antarctica,” he said after a long pause.

He knew my theory on Antarctica. Some places on Earth are so sacred people should leave them alone. Besides which, I can’t stand the cold.

“And . . . ?”

“A shack by the sea, and maybe a little boat to knock about in.”

He’d always talked about having a beach house, but I could think of nothing worse. Being in charge of two kitchen sinks, having double the number of beds to make and a house full of sand sounded like slavery. As for boats, I hadn’t earned the title of Vomit Queen for nothing.

Jonah stirred and made licking sounds. A ball of panic settled in the back of my throat. It wasn’t so much that my life was nearly over, but that I might have chosen the wrong life. There was every chance this restlessness was nothing to do with second adolescence but a sign I was wasting my days cooking dinners and sifting through the litter box of an imperious cat. Maybe my soul—if I had one—was telling me I didn’t belong in a ramshackle house on a dead-end street in inner Melbourne, and that my real home was somewhere altogether more glamorous?

At first, the voice in my ear sounded like tinnitus, but the message grew loud and clear:

Time’s running out. Grab all the excitement you can. I’d

I sank into a whirlwind of turbulent dreams. Since I’d opened up to the idea of excitement, it seemed to be rushing in with cyclonic force. Though I’d never experienced a super storm, I’d seen how the one called Sandy had engulfed Manhattan a few months earlier. Watching the televised images of waves swallowing up the city moved me deeply. At the time, I had no idea that hurricane’s force was far from spent. It would soon be driving another form of tumult into my life. I needn’t have worried about lack of adventure. In an animal shelter across the world, a bundle of excitement was sitting inside a cage, licking its fluffy black paws . . . and calling across space and time to me.

Chapter Two

HEAVEN OR HELLHOLE

A feline is seldom what she seems.

The following morning, I woke with a plan so perfectly formed it practically qualified as a vision. If it were true that I’d ended up in the wrong life in the wrong city, I’d change it, at least for a little while. And where better to move to than New York?

After all, New York and I had unfinished business. Though I’d never lived among the city’s skyscraper canyons, I’d spent a tantalizing time there a few years earlier celebrating the launch of my first book, Cleo. The parties were every bit as glittering as I’d dreamed, the people warm and fascinating.

No one had been more surprised than me when Cleo bounced onto the New York Times bestseller list. For one thing, the book was about a cat and how she’d helped our family heal after my nine-year-old son Sam was run over and killed in 1983.