Cleo

“Shall I call the fire brigade?” Ginny called helpfully. I regretted glancing down. Ginny, her face turned up in concern, had shrunk to the size of a brightly colored beetle.

I reached the top of the ladder and edged onto the roof. Ex cept it wasn’t so much a roof as a collection of rusty holes holding hands, hardly ideal support for a not very petite woman.

“Here, kitty!” I called. The shape on top of the chimney remained motionless. The poor feline was frozen with terror. “Oh, Cleo! Don’t worry. I’ll get you down.”

The roof squeaked and groaned in protest as I crawled toward the chimney, my stomach churning. The thought was just occurring to me that if Cleo, an agile animal equipped with four legs, was having trouble getting off the roof it might be close to impossible for a lumbering vertigo victim.

“Hold on! I’m nearly there,” I called.

A pair of luminous eyes loomed above my head and narrowed to a bad-tempered glower. Cleo shook her head in a bored, dismissive manner. She rose gracefully to her feet on top of the chimney, arched her back and yawned. Without hesitation she sprang nimbly down to the roof, leapt across the rusty tin, jumped onto a nearby tree and slid groundwards, landing inches away from Ginny’s platform shoes.

“I think I’m going to throw up!” I wailed down at Ginny.

“You’ll be fine. Just take it slowly. Crawl back to the ladder, that’s right. Turn around. Watch out for the gutter…there you go!”

When I finally reached terra firma I took three steps and threw up in a hydrangea bush.

“Why didn’t you say you were scared of heights?” asked Ginny.

“It’s not usually this bad. I haven’t felt this sick since I was…pregnant.”

Indulgence

Stress—a waste of nap time.

A cat’s lips are arranged in a permanent smile. Even when it’s miserable, the edges of its mouth point skywards. This is not the case with humans, whose mouths have a tendency to turn down at the corners, especially as they grow older. A human who wears the effortless smile of cat is in possession of a happy secret.

A smile appeared on Steve’s lips when he heard the news. He carried it with him back to sea and was still wearing it a week later. I had a cat’s smile too. We agreed not to make it official for a few weeks in case the pregnancy came to nothing.

When we decided it was safe to tell Rob, his smile was an explosion of sunlight.

He immediately put in an order for a baby brother. It had to be a boy, he said, because boys were what we had in our family. I agreed and promised to do my best. Then he ran across the zigzag to tell Jason, who of course told Ginny.

Arriving breathless on the doorstep, she enveloped me in the spicy embrace of her Opium perfume and did an excellent job feigning surprise. “Congratulations, darling! It’s going to be wonderful.” She offered to deliver the baby when the time came. I still had trouble believing my zany friend had another life in sterile gloves. Still, I liked the idea of our baby’s first glimpse of humanity including a woman in false eyelashes and a zebra-skin jacket.

I sank into a pregnancy that combined squeamishness with ravenous hunger. It didn’t seem so long ago that New Zealanders had survived on a diet of grey mince and mutton. During my teenage years, Mum introduced me to an exotic new food called pizza. We’d grown more sophisticated since then. We’d learned wine didn’t necessarily come out of card board boxes, bread could be sold in sticks and there were more than two types of cheese in the world. When a smart new deli opened around the corner we knew we’d arrived.

Profiterole. ProfEETerole, if pronounced correctly, according to the deli man who baked them. Roll your tongue around the word and it sounds almost erotic.

The grumpy profiterole man was Michelangelo in a chef’s apron. How he could produce the lightest, puffiest, most delectable pastries on earth was beyond me. But who would guess a beige moth could produce a gorgeous green gum emperor caterpillar?

He laid them out every morning like naked sunbathers in his shop window. Lightly tanned, each oblong encased a glob of cream. Mudslides of chocolate sauce trickled over the cases. The shop window steamed around the edges, inviting—no, insisting—I venture inside.

“One profiterole, please,” I asked.

“ProFEETerole!” he snapped.

“Make that two.”

After all, I was eating for two now (three, in fact, counting Cleo).

Profiterole man grunted. Anyone would think I was trying to buy his children.

Waddling back up the zigzag I could feel the pastry crumbling and the cream oozing through the paper bag.

It was tempting to lower my globular body onto the seat halfway up the zigzag and scoff them there. But there was a danger I’d encounter Mrs. Sommerville. She’d shoot me that Look of hers. Disapproving as ice cliffs, the Sommerville Look was designed to make boys confess to throwing snails at postmen and grown women suddenly feel as if they’d forgotten to put their underwear on.