Cleo

Cleo swiftly graduated to mice and birds, much to my horror. Headless corpses were deposited on the front doormat like little gifts. Digging graves for them beside the forget-me-nots was a reminder life has always been a struggle for living creatures. Somewhere along the line, we humans got hung up about death. We invented expressions like “passed away,” and took pains to conceal the process of transforming a cow in a paddock into a hamburger. We hid away the sick, old and disabled, so that suffering was a mystery and death the ultimate abnormality.

People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes.

Cleo’s motto seemed to be: Life’s tough and that’s okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it—but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s not harsh sometimes. Those who’ve survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great.

I wondered if I’d ever feel strong enough to follow her example.

Letting Go

A touch of a paw can work better than aspirin.

Autumn was upon us and the hills around the harbor were burnished gold with gorse flowers. The new season had crept in so gradually I’d hardly noticed the change as it was happening. One moment Cleo was making herself so hot sunbathing on the front path she had to retreat to the shadow of the house to cool off. Next she was jostling for prime position in front of the gas fire with the rest of us, and somehow always getting the best spot. Suddenly there was a bite in the wind and poplar trees were shimmering bronze. My powers of observation had been equally remiss with Cleo. I’d grown so accustomed to telling visitors we shared our house with a cat who looked like an alien I no longer regarded her through accurate lenses. I was taking it for granted that we lived with an ugly cat.

I was out in the garden raking leaves one morning when I  noticed an extraordinary cat sitting on Mrs. Sommerville’s roof. Sleek and elegant, its beauty sucked the breath out of my lungs for a moment. It was an awe-inspiring sight. My semirural background ensured I wasn’t usually affected by animals like that. Mum had raised me to believe anything with four legs that wasn’t a table was at best an economic unit, at worst a bloody nuisance. But this being was beyond in-built parental prejudice. Its profile was noble as any lion’s. With its head tilted slightly to one side and its tail curved in mathematical perfection around its rump, it was a feline version of a top model posing for a Vanity Fair photo shoot. Except there was no self-consciousness in the cat’s pose. It wasn’t even interested in me. Ears forwards, nose slightly aloft, its attention was focused on a potential meal in a nearby tree.

I felt a stab of envy for the human who belonged to such a beast. I could see him sitting smug by his log fire, one hand encircling a decent red wine, the other massaging the handsome cat’s fur. Although black from tip to tail like Cleo, it was obviously a pedigreed cat of impressive lineage. It probably had enough papers to set a house on fire. Going by the sheen on its coat, it dined on fresh sardines every night. Next to a cat like that, poor Cleo would resemble something that had just crawled out of the drains of Calcutta. Fortunately, Cleo was nowhere in sight. She was probably inside investigating the fruit bowl, which had recently proved an interesting source of insect life. I put my head down and continued raking. I have yet to discover the Zen approach to raking leaves. Autumn leaves are disobedient at the best of times. Trying to do anything with them on a windy day is physical and emotional torture. The moment I herded them into a satisfactory mound a playful breeze scattered them like kittens and shook another shoal down from the poplars. It was a frustrating job that would’ve been considerably more pleasant if Rata had been able to understand the intricacies of human plumbing services and why they’d been invented.

Muttering one of Sam’s forbidden rude words, I scraped Rata’s contribution to global soil fertility off the sole of my sneaker on a stone. The pleasures of autumn gardening, if there were any, were lost on me. I was about to give up and go inside in search of tea when I heard a familiar meow.

“Cleo!” I called, checking her favorite sunbathing place in the weeds under what once had been a rose bed. Th e only evidence of her there was a flattened oval of long grass. Scanning the window ledge outside Rob’s bedroom, I called again. Th e black cat on Mrs. Somerville’s roof stared down at me with steady curiosity.

“It’s fine for you, you spoiled snooty thing!” I growled up at it. “We can’t all be best in show.”