Cleo

The best thing about getting married in a foreign country is it’s so inconvenient that the few guests who do make the effort to turn up sincerely want to be there. We arranged the wedding to take place in the September holidays, so Rob and other family members could share the occasion. I bought a cream suit and matching hat. We took a day trip across the lake to Evian to buy Lydia a French party frock with a lilac sash and stiff petticoat straight out of The Sound of Music.

Around forty guests turned up for the wedding. Most of them wanted to stay in our miniscule apartment. We practically had them sleeping in wardrobes. The living area was set aside for itinerant Romanians. Mum and Rob slept in Lydia’s room.

Without being biased I have to say it was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. It was in an exquisite medieval church on the shores of Lake Geneva. Our weekend honeymoon was friendly, too. Five guests, including the bride’s mother and children, accompanied us to the dreamy shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. The only thing missing was a small black cat.

After the guests dispersed, Philip returned to his executive sweatshop. Golden autumn days leaked into sleety grey. Cobbled streets that had been picture-book quaint in summer faded to charcoal drawings. We never adjusted to the ferocity of European cold. No matter how thick our socks, our toes became ice.

At the end of our year in Switzerland I wasn’t sad to leave. The feeling appeared to be mutual. Officials at Geneva airport decided we were such an unlikely trio we had to be terrorists. They took us aside to interrogate us. How could we possibly be married? Whose child was she, anyway? When I swore we’d packed no guns, they knew they had us. We were escorted into a room, where I was made to unpack my suitcase to reveal a weapon of minimal destruction—my umbrella.

On the way home we had a few days’ stopover in New York with my old friend Lloyd. He knew all the right places to take a girl. What gay man doesn’t? I made excuses to take a break from the sightseeing, sneaked into Kmart and bought a pregnancy testing kit. Back at Lloyd’s I hurried upstairs past his African mask collection and shut myself in his bathroom. Holding the test stick to the light, it was hard to stop my hands trembling long enough to read the result. Hallelujah! A little plus sign appeared.

Patience

To wait is merely to consider the clouds for a while.

“Cleo is how old?” Rosie asked over the phone.

“Ten,” I replied.

“Amazing!” said Rosie. “I never thought she’d live that long.”

“Living with us, you mean?”

“Well, yes, frankly. You must be doing something right.”

One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it’s diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes.

If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We’d notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.

I wasn’t sure what sort of reception we’d get from Cleo. A year is a long time to be away from someone you love. There was a chance she wouldn’t recognize us. No doubt she’d shifted loyalties to Andrea. That would be understandable. We’d fled while Andrea fed.

As the cab pulled up outside our front gate in Auckland I was relieved to see the house spread like a familiar smile behind the fence. Shrubs in the front garden were a little taller. Wisteria had increased its stranglehold around the veranda posts. I scanned the windows and the roof for signs of a small black cat. Nothing. Andrea, who’d moved out the day before, had assured us our cat was still alive. Maybe she’d tactfully forgotten to mention that Cleo had gone feral.

With a boulder in my chest I helped Philip and Rob unload our suitcases from the cab. The front gate opened with its familiar complaint. The wind in the bottlebrush flowers held its breath.

“Cleo!” Rob called in the man’s voice that had croaked its way into his larynx.