Cleo

Nicole, the television writer, was beautiful and blond, with legs she’d stolen from Marlene Dietrich. I assumed Nicole wouldn’t waste her time with mere humans. But she’d been a teenage bride like me, and was wading through a divorce and custody swamp. Nicole was offbeat and wounded like the rest of us, and tough as a terrier when she sunk her teeth into a story. I adored them all.

I also reveled in wearing proper clothes again. For the past decade my wardrobe had consisted of track pants, maternity clothes and dressing gowns (in tones of mostly grey, black and brown). It was exhilarating to slip into a fuchsia-colored suit with a cobalt blue bow tie (in retrospect a crime against fashion). Applying makeup every morning and learning to walk in shoes with heels again was thrilling. I felt like Cinderella, who’d just found out the ball wasn’t over after all. The music was louder, the guests were zanier and I was invited back to collect my size 10C glass slipper and get back on the floor.

As a general features writer, I didn’t care what stories they were going to assign me. I’d have been grateful if they’d asked me to write about bedbugs. To my astonishment, Jim and Tina trusted my abilities beyond logic. They assigned me interviews with international performers like James Taylor and Michael Crawford and writers such as Margaret Atwood and Terry Pratchett. Crazier still, they sent me to meet our nation’s porcine prime minister and even (for heaven’s sake) the president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. I soon learned that the more elevated on the global stage people are the more humble and approachable they tend to be, despite the bewildering jet lag involved in getting to our agricultural outpost. Mary Robinson was more animated when she talked about helping her kids do homework around their kitchen table than anything else we discussed. (Which was just as well. International politics was hardly my beat.)

Jim also had me writing editorials, where I’d switch into pipe-and-slippers mode and hammer out the paper’s views on everything from atomic energy to zoos. Producing one of those within the required forty minutes was the equivalent of being spun inside a microwave oven on high.

Distraught with panic one morning, I wrote an entire leader raging against the perils of “alcahol.” Either my fingers fumbled on the typewriter keys or all those years gazing out of classroom windows had finally come home to roost. My bizarre spelling slipped through the subeditors (spellcheck was yet to be invented), no doubt lowering the newspaper’s status to litter-box liner for several weeks. To my disbelief and eternal gratitude Jim and Tina refrained from throwing me back on the streets. They kept on nodding, smiling and tossing plum stories my way. Maybe all the real journalists had caught some form of plague through drinking too much and sleeping with each other and died off.

But much as I loved the office the best part of the day was when I slid the key in the front door of the old cottage to see Cleo prancing down the hall to greet me with a welcome meow.

I’d started to notice Cleo was developing her language skills. Apart from the charming hello meow she gave whenever any of us arrived home, and the polite mew when someone picked her up, there was the assertive let me come in, you heartless morons! wail when she was shut out. She had better manners than the four of us put together. Whenever anyone opened a door to let her in she always responded with a clipped and demure thank you as she sailed past.

Mealtimes, especially if they were delayed, reduced her to a stream of alley cat language. Standing in front of the fridge she’d yowl, If you don’t feed me right now I’m going to jump on your head and tattoo your eyeballs.

Cleo moved houses and cities without so much as a twitch of a whisker. I worried that living on a street for the first time she might get run over—especially with her penchant for after-dark expeditions. Who’d see a black cat against a darkened street? Once again I was underestimating her. She had a traffic-smart gene, no doubt inherited from her father.

After a raucous fight with a larger cat under the house one night she appeared at the front door with a torn ear. I tried to keep her inside after that, but every night she wailed until I let her out. Even though the fight had been serious, she must have established her territory with it. We never heard another scrap.