CLEO. Helen Brown E.

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СКАЧАТЬ bent like a willow over her shoulder bag, a huge patchwork sack, flamboyant and colorful enough to have been made by the artist herself. Reaching into the bag, she excavated a small creature with large triangular ears. It was black and not so much furry as sprinkled with occasional hairs. Perhaps she’d stitched together some kind of toy to comfort a boy grieving for his lost brother.

      I was alarmed when the tiny thing’s head moved. Its eyes bulged like a pair of glass beads. A set of impossibly dainty feet draped themselves through Lena’s fingers. I was reminded of those photos of premature babies whose miniature scale is demonstrated alongside an adult human hand. An organism so helpless it would surely have difficulty supporting its own life.

      “We’ve brought the kitten,” said Lena, smiling steadily.

      The kitten? What kitten?

      “Sam’s kitten!” said Rob, running down the hall and squeezing around me.

      Rata barked loudly and sprang free of my grip. Jumping on her haunches, she almost knocked Lena over. The kitten recoiled into Lena’s breast. Our dog must have seemed a monster to the little thing. The two animals obviously loathed each other.

      “Down, girl!” I growled. “She’s not used to cats.” Grabbing the dog firmly by the collar again, I led her inside and back down the hallway.

      “Don’t worry, old thing,” I said, rubbing a hand through her coat. “We’ll sort this out.”

      Rata seemed to understand that being jailed in the kitchen was a temporary inconvenience. The kitten, Sam’s kitten, didn’t belong in our house. It had arrived like E.T. in a spaceship (disguised as Lena’s patchwork bag). The kitten was from another time. We were different people when Sam was with us and our lives were whole. Now that we were broken, frayed remnants of our former selves there was no place for a kitten. Not with us.

      I couldn’t possibly cope with a baby animal and all its needs. Not when I’d already proved myself a failure as a parent of one human child, aged nine. How could I nurture such a tiny, vulnerable creature? Besides, poor Rata had suffered enough. She certainly didn’t need her life messed up any more than it was already by a natural-born enemy.

      Lena would have to take the intruder back. She’d understand. Finding a family better equipped than ours to look after the kitten would be no problem for her. It was a presentable enough animal, and she was a brilliant saleswoman. Heading back to the front door, I prepared my speech. Lena would feel let down, but her disappointment would be nothing compared to what we’d been through.

      As I reached the front doorstep I saw Lena haloed in sunlight, lowering the kitten into Rob’s hands.

      “She’s yours now,” Lena said softly.

      “I’m sorry, Lena…” I was about to launch into my speech.

      But then I saw Rob’s face. As he gazed tenderly down at the kitten, and ran a chubby finger over her back I saw something I thought had vanished from the earth forever. Rob’s smile.

      “Welcome home, Cleo,” he said.

      Trust

      A cat is always in the right place at exactly the right time.

      As Rob disappeared inside with his new kitten, Lena turned to go. Seized with panic, I grabbed her elbow.

      “There’s something you should know,” I blabbed. “I’m not really a cat person. I mean our family had cats when we were growing up, but they were more like wildcats. They just lived under the house and we fed them occasionally. Mum grew up on a farm, you see, and she never really got cats. She let a couple of them come inside and we semi-tamed them, but they weren’t friendly…”

      Lena’s face clouded. She needed to hear this. Not telling her would’ve been worse than filling out a customs form and ticking “Haven’t been on a farm in the past thirty days” when in fact you’ve been helping cousin Jeff milk his dairy herd for the last two weeks.

      “One of them, Sylvester, used to poop in Mum’s shoes, which was horrible for her, because she sometimes forgot to look before she put her shoes on. She’d scream the house down. She said Sylvester was temperamental because he was part Persian, with the long hair, you know. Black and white, he was. The thing is, Lena, I’m pretty sure we’re more dog people.”

      Lena turned her head like an exotic lily and surveyed the scrub that was our garden. Casting her eye over the mountainous piles of dung Rata had bombarded the front lawn with, she sighed.

      “This is a very special kitten,” Lena said. “And if you don’t like cats…”

      “It’s not that I don’t like cats,” I continued. “It’s just I don’t really know how to look after them. I haven’t read any books about kitten rearing or anything.”

      “They’re very easy to care for,” she said in kindergarten teacher tones. “Much easier than dogs. She’ll be no trouble. Just keep her inside for a day or two to settle. Give me a call if you have any problems. And if you change your mind you can give her back to me.”

      “But…” Lena didn’t seem to realize I’d made my mind up already. I didn’t want the kitten.

      “All she needs is a little love.”

      Love. Such a simple, four-letter word to roll off the tongue. So much easier for the facial muscles to arrange themselves around than “lasagna,” “leisure suit” or “leave me alone forever, please.” My heart had been ripped out and pulverized. How could it possibly squeeze out a drip of anything resembling the L word for a creature I’d forgotten we’d ever agreed to own and wasn’t in the slightest way equipped to look after?

      Besides, a cat, assuming by some miracle it survived long enough in our company to grow into one, is an arduous, practically never-ending responsibility.

      I’d gone down enough in Lena’s estimation without tactfully asking how long a cat of this breed might live. From what I could remember, the ones I’d grown up with, even the semi-tame ones, were lucky to spend more than six years in our company. Most of them met sudden fates usually described in solemn, no-nonsense terms by our parents: “poisoned,” “run over” or “run away.” Further questioning was not encouraged. “Who did it?” or “Where?” were invariably answered with “Who knows?”

      Even if this kitten by some miracle managed to reach the grand old age of nine, that would take Rob through to the age of fifteen, a million years into the future. Considering the battering our endocrine systems were taking, I doubted any of us could realistically expect to survive that long.

      Lena smiled thinly and disappeared with Jake down the path. Poor Lena. I should have been more diplomatic. Abandoning her kitten to self-confessed dog people, she must have felt wretched. Nevertheless, she had offered to take the kitten back. Maybe I could let Rob play with it for a day or two, then we could return it to the embrace of a cat-loving household.

      Rata moaned loudly from behind the kitchen door.

      “Don’t worry!” I called to the old dog. “We’ll sort this out.”

      Rob was curled up in a corner of the living room, cradling the tiny creature in his arms. To have called it beautiful or even pretty would have made Elton John’s spectacle frames СКАЧАТЬ