Cleo

Rosie predicted our cat would be traumatized by the move north. Cleo didn’t do predictable. The more we treated Cleo as an honorary human, the more she behaved like one—though she was always angling for goddess status. (Why sit on someone’s lap at the dinner table when you can climb onto the table and graze free range?)

An eight-hour car journey cooped inside a basket was hardly luxury travel for a feline deity, but she didn’t complain. She dozed contentedly with a sock for company most of the way.

We’d bought an old tram conductor’s cottage in Ponsonby, a scruffy inner suburb. I adored the laid-back atmosphere on Ponsonby Road, where Polynesian women glided alongside street kids and drunks pretending to be artists. Even the graffiti was worth reading. I didn’t realize it then, but it was just a matter of time before the espresso machines and earnest young couples moved in.

I had fallen in love with the cottage the moment I saw it. Sunny, outward-looking and easy to reach, it was everything our Wellington house wasn’t. With big sash windows and woodwork furled like lace around the veranda it smiled out onto the street. Wisteria coiled through the latticework. Flower baskets swung in the breeze. A white picket fence flashed its teeth at a bottlebrush tree.

The inside layout was pleasantly predictable, with three double bedrooms off a central hallway that led to an open-plan living area. Sometime during the seventies a morose hippie had renovated the place. He must have been depressed. Why else would he have laid dark brown carpet in every room and lined the kitchen with treacle-colored wood? While character features such as paneled ceilings and brick fireplaces had been kept, there were occasional lapses of taste. I was willing to forgive the penchant for redwood fence stain, but had to seriously avoid dwelling on the Spanish archway between the living room and kitchen.

The backyard was perfect for kids. From a sunroom off the kitchen, French doors opened onto a redwood deck, with built-in benches around the edges. Under a pergola groaning with grapes was, joy of joys, a hot tub. Beyond the deck, a luscious patch of grass, miraculously flat, had enough room for a jungle gym and trampoline. A banana tree waved its glistening fronds from over the back fence. Everything about the place screamed happily ever after. Steve wasn’t so sure, but was willing to go along with my enthusiasm.

The basket on the backseat emitted a regal meow. Obeying Rosie’s pre-trip instructions, Rob carried Cleo, basket and all, through the gate. He went inside and lowered the basket onto the floor. (I’d known the house was meant to be ours the moment I slapped eyes on the carpet. We were destined to live with offensive floor coverings.) Carefully, slowly, he opened the lid. Rosie had warned us Cleo could be so disoriented from the trip she might cower in her carrying case for hours.

A pair of black ears rose from the wicker rim, followed by two eyes, black whiskers and a nose. The eyes rolled sideways to inspect the shabby hallway, then upwards to check all people slaves were present. Cleo then sprang daintily from her bower and, like a sniper sussing out an enemy village, padded through the house, sniffing the carpet and investigating corners in every room.

In the bathroom her search for spiders under the decrepit claw-foot bath was rewarded with a satisfyingly crunchy snack. The kitchen revealed another treasure—a colony of hyper-active ants under the sink. With this much live-in livestock, the house was custom-made for her.

Cleo particularly approved of the French doors’ ability to intensify solar rays. Yawning, she stretched across the doorway, her fur shimmering blue-black in the heat. Her eyes shrank to translucent slits while the human slaves heaved boxes and suitcases over the threshold, all the time trying not to trip over our Egyptian princess. No doubt her ancestors had dozed through similar scenes while the pyramids were being built.

Rosie had instructed us to keep Cleo inside for two days in case she panicked and attempted to escape back to Wellington. Basking happily in her personal tanning clinic, our cat showed no interest in cutting loose. The genes that had adapted to cope with the heat of ancient Egypt reveled in Auckland’s subtropical climate.

I hoped the rest of us would be able to follow Cleo’s example and adjust to all the changes, but the fresh start had no hope in the marriage department. Steve’s commute to Wellington was going to mean more time apart. We’d given up trying to reach across the valley of our differences and started having separate social lives. The friends I made he found offensively loud, while I found his friends unnervingly introspective. He set up camp on a sofa bed in the sunroom. We tried to kid ourselves that for the sake of the children we could still be friends, but not in that way.