CLEO. Helen Brown E.

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СКАЧАТЬ a dog, though in reality it was just someone who looked like him. Their son, Jason, was at the same school as our boys. They were perched on the lip of a gully about half a mile farther up the hill, but we kept our distance. The Desilvas had a sports car. Steve said they were too racy. I had no energy to argue.

      Our side of the zigzag specialized in recluses and people who were renting for a while before moving somewhere less exposed, with better access and not so close to the fault line. Mrs. Sommerville, a retired high school teacher, was one of the few longtime residents of the Wrong Side. She inhabited a tidy weatherboard house one down from us. A lifetime with adolescents had done nothing for her looks. She wore a permanent expression of someone who’d just received an insult.

      Mrs. Sommerville had already appeared on our doorstep with complaints about our dog terrorizing her cat, Tomkin, a large tabby cat with a matching sour face. Even though I tried to avoid her, I bumped into her most days, giving her the opportunity to point out skid marks where boys had been zooming down the zigzag illegally on skateboards, or the latest graffiti on her letterbox. Mrs. Sommerville’s pathological dislike of boys included our sons, who were suspects of every crime. Steve said I was imagining things. While she loathed boys, Mrs. Sommerville knew how to turn the charm on for men.

      I worked at home, writing a weekly column for Wellington’s morning newspaper, The Dominion. Steve worked one week home, one week away, as radio officer on one of the ferries that plowed between the North and South Islands. We’d met at a ship’s party when I was fifteen. A grand old man of twenty, he was the most exotic creature I’d ever encountered. Compared to the farmers who steered us around country dance halls near New Plymouth where I grew up, he was from another world.

      His face was peachy white and he had baby-soft hands. I’d been mesmerized by his blue eyes, which glowed under their long lashes. Unlike the farmers, he hadn’t been frightened of conversation. I’d assumed that being English, he was probably related to one of the Beatles, if not the Rolling Stones.

      I’d loved the way his tawny hair draped across his collar, just like Paul McCartney’s. He’d smelled of diesel oil and salt, the perfume of the wider world that was impatient for me to join it.

      We’d written to each other for three years. I’d sprinted through school and a journalism course (straight Cs), then flown to England. Steve was literally the man of my dreams—I’d met him in person for only two weeks during the three years we’d been letter writing—and reality had no hope of matching up. His parents were probably unimpressed with his big-boned girlfriend from the colonies.

      We’d married in the Guildford registry office a month after my eighteenth birthday. Only five people had been brave enough to turn up for the ceremony. The officiant was so bored he forgot to mention the ring. My new husband slipped it on my finger afterwards outside in the porch. It was raining. Distraught back in New Zealand, my parents investigated the possibilities of annulment, but they were powerless.

      About two weeks after the wedding I’d stared at the toilet seat in our rented flat and thought it needed polishing. That was when I knew getting married had been a mistake. Yet we’d upset so many people by insisting on it I couldn’t back out. Short of running away and causing more pain, the only solution I could think of was to create a family. Steve reluctantly obliged. Honest from the start, he’d made it clear that babies weren’t really his thing.

      We returned to New Zealand, where I’d labored through a December night too frightened to ask the nurse to turn the light on in case it was breaking hospital rules. Somewhere through a drug-induced haze I’d heard the doctor singing “Morning Has Broken.” Minutes later she’d lifted baby Sam from my body.

      Before he’d even taken his first breath he turned his head and stared into my face with his huge blue eyes. I thought I’d explode with love. My body ached to hold this brand-new human with his downy hair glowing under the delivery room lights. Sam was wrapped in a blanket—blue in case I forgot what sex he was—and lowered into my arms. Kissing his forehead, I was overcome by the sensation that I’d never be safely inside my own skin again. I uncurled his tiny fist. His lifeline was strong and incredibly long.

      Even though it was supposed to be our first meeting, Sam and I recognized each other immediately. It felt like a reunion of ancient souls who’d never spent long apart.

      Becoming parents hadn’t brought Steve and me closer together. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Two and a half years after Sam’s birth Rob slid into the world.

      Lack of sleep and jangled nerves had made our differences more apparent. Steve sprouted a beard, a look that was becoming fashionable, and retreated behind it. Returning from a week at sea, he was tired and irritable.

      He became annoyed with what he perceived as my extravagance over the boys’ clothes and upkeep. I bought a secondhand sewing machine that emitted electric shocks and I taught myself to cut their hair. I grew louder, larger and more untidy.

      The times we weren’t sure how much longer we could stay together were interspersed with phases of holding on and hoping things might improve for the sake of the boys. Even though we were drifting apart like icebergs on opposing ocean currents, there was absolutely no doubt we both loved them.

      “Now, boys,” I said, pulling up outside Lena’s house and heaving the handbrake high as it would go. “Don’t get your hopes up. We’re just going to look.”

      They scrambled out of the car and were halfway down the path to Lena’s house before I’d closed the driver’s door. Watching their blond hair catch the sunlight, I sighed and wondered if there’d ever be a time I wouldn’t be struggling to catch up with them.

      Lena had opened the door by the time I got there, and the boys were already inside. I apologized for their bad manners. Lena smiled and welcomed me into the enviable tranquillity of her home, which overlooked the playing field where I often took the boys to run off excess energy.

      “We’ve just come to look at the…” I said as she escorted me into her living room. “Oh, kittens! Aren’t they adorable?”

      In a corner, under some bookshelves, a sleek bronze cat lay on her side. She gazed at me through amber eyes that belonged not to a cat but a member of the aristocracy. Nestled into her abdomen were four appendages. Two were coated with a thin layer of bronze hair. Two were darker. Perhaps once their fur had grown they’d turn out to be black. I’d seen recently born kittens before, but never ones as tiny as these. One of the darker kittens was painfully small.

      The boys were on their knees in awe of this nativity scene. They seemed to know to keep a respectful distance.

      “They’ve only just opened their eyes,” Lena said, scooping one of the bronze kittens from the comfort of its twenty-four-hour diner. The creature barely fitted inside her hand. “They’ll be ready to go to new homes in a couple of months.”

      The kitten squirmed and emitted a noise that sounded more like a yip than a meow. Its mother glanced up anxiously. Lena returned the infant to the fur-lined warmth of its family to be assiduously licked. The mother used her tongue like a giant mop, swiping parallel lines across her baby’s body, then over its head for good measure.

      “Can we get one, please, PLEASE?” Sam begged, looking up at me with that expression parents struggle to resist.

      “Please?” his brother echoed. “We won’t throw mud on Mrs. Sommerville’s roof anymore.”

      “You’ve been throwing mud on Mrs. Sommerville’s roof?!”

      “Idiot!” Sam said, СКАЧАТЬ