chicken and rice

Posted by e. leonaris
CAT by L.A.U. 2018

The day the vet came to our house, I held my old cat, and hugged her on the floor, while we killed her as kindly as we could. 

I could feel the bones of her spine and her chest under softest black fur. Charcoal black – her name in Japanese. The tiniest scattering of salt, a whisker, a hair here and there. 

21 years of my life, were hers too. 

My husband, played with her in her kittenhood. His big feet and her tiny paws thundering around our two-up-two-down with bits of string, ribbon, feathers. He would poke string through boxes, trail it provocatively around the bannisters, coax her from under the bed with it- cat-fishing until she would collapse and sleep as only kittens can sleep. Deeply and snuggled between us, her stomach puffing in and out with her breath.

My long-legged lover, 6”2 or 3’ whose feet stuck out the end of the duvet. The first time he tangled in bed with me, she bit down hard on his toes. He yelped, then laughed, and I knew he was a good ‘un. 

My boy’s father, who sneezed as his eyes closed-up red but promised me he did like cats as I offered him antihistamine? Not a good sign, thinking back. 

She was constant. Always close. Familiar. 

In her old age she sabotaged my boy’s first efforts at walking. He talked before he walked. When he finally got round to making the effort, my elderly cat stretched herself from zen-like-communion with the sofa, and transformed into NINJA CAT, darting lightening-quick between his legs.

“Ohhhhh CAT!”, he would say with an upward lilt in his voice as he pointed his finger and wobbled off balance. Then “OWWW” his face crumpling as he landed hard on his bottom. Ninja-Cat darting out of reach. 

The day before, when I had phoned the vet and made arrangements, I tried to tempt her with a little boiled chicken and rice. I held out scraps in the flat of my hand and she took a few, scraping my palm with her sandpaper tongue. Our last communion.

We had a long history of chicken and rice. Plain boiled chicken and rice kept her alive when ten years earlier the vet said in all seriousness, your cat cannot tolerate cereal. Cats are not designed to eat wheat.  She was way ahead of the whole Paleo-food-thing. 

There were plenty of other things she could not tolerate as well as cheap wheat-bulked cat food:  My toddler-nephew’s attentions included. His poor podgy arm punctured with her claws when he poked it through the back of the chair where she sat, looking sleepy and furry- Ohhh CAT! Then bang bang bang three times with her claws and HOOOOOWL.

“Nasty Cat” it said on a subsequent, vet’s notes. I had taken her because she was chewing the fur off her stomach. The Vet left the room to get something, leaving his computer on,  so I read his notes. We changed to a different vet. Thinking back, perhaps it wasn’t accidental. Another few weeks of boiled chicken and rice improved her stomach and her temper.

The next vet wore a leather gauntlet. I had warned her apologetically, before cat changed from scared little hissy thing cowering in her basket, to satanic spidery clawed-thing, running up louvred blinds then upside-down across the ceiling. 

So when Cat, needed a vet the last time, I spared us all the whole scene from The Exorcist and the vet came to our house. My boy played in the kitchen and I could hear him chatting, while I held my cat a last time and then put her sleeping her last sleep, the sleep only cats can sleep, back into her basket for a little while.  She was stilll soft and warm, and it gave me time to say goodbye. 

DSH – Black, it said in her vet-book. Domestic Short-Haired black cat. 

Oh CAT! You were so much more to me than that.

 

dsh

e. leonaris 2018

9/11/2001

Posted by e. leonaris

9/11/2001.

The day the sky exploded, and rained fire, and people fell as stones, we  were walking a stretch of the south west coast path.  Oblivious – which was possible before smart phones.

The exact itinerary escapes me. We had left London behind, parked our car in Plymouth, sent our baggage ahead, and started to walk. I thought I was fit from walking up and down escalators on the Piccadilly Line. But this was something else.

The two of us, in barely-worn-in boots, nodding to countryside people out for a brisk half hour with their happy dogs. But for long-stretches of time and place we were alone.

It was beautiful and terrifying. At the top of one climb, a treeless field jutted out into the sea.  Walking through the green waving-grasses was like wading through water.  The ground sloped towards the horizon, and in the  absence of anything between the edge of the world and me,  surrounded on three sides by sky and sea  water, I felt that I was falling. Trembling, I started to sweat, cold.  My clothes sticking to me, though it was windy. I could see and feel my feet on firm ground. The green field surrounded me. I was nowhere near the edge. But the sense that I was falling overwhelmed me. Trying to make light of it, I took P’s  hand, holding it too tightly, “Not good with heights, even a ladder.”

He tried to make me walk faster and closer to the edge, which was the quickest way across. He was grabbing my hand now and swinging my arm. Petrified, that we would trip and roll uncontrolled over the edge, my head suddenly a dead weight, I crouched low so as not to have so far to fall. He saw the look on my face and stopped.

Grey overcast sky and a sea flecked with pale ash grey.

Was it the day after, or before that I bought two pottery cats: one ginger, one black. Cute. Crafted for tourists.  I think it was a few days later, when seeing the same style of cat from the same pottery in different town shops, I finally gave in to the kitsch because they were cats, and I was on holiday. I told P. the ginger tom looked like him. Particularly around the middle and he poked me and tickled until I said, stop, or I’ll drop them and have to pay anyway.

There was a night later in Fowey, after he bought me an under-priced US first edition Beat writer, and after we sat on the harbour listening to drunken singing from the working men’s club, when we tried to be tender and ended up clumsy and crying. I should have known then that the time for us to marry was in the past. I should have cancelled the wedding before the invitations were printed and sent, and far too much time and money were spent.

I guess I didn’t want to walk alone.

But also we loved each other very much. Loved cooking steaks, and queuing for fresh fish and chips, and reading in bed, and drinking red wine at lock-ins, and going to the football, and watching Bergman films (both short-sighted from reading too much as kids, wearing our thick glasses to read the sub-titles), and sleeping pressed into the curve of the other’s belly and knees.

So on the day the sky exploded in a fury of jet fuel and caused the twin towers to collapse in New York, we were really quite happy.

Oblivious. Until, that evening, we sat in a bar and watched on the news how the world, as we knew it, had ended in horror and falling.

e.antoniou

an actual greek god in the kitchen

Posted by e. leonaris

Some people come into your life like sunshine. When they leave, suddenly you feel your clothes are all wrong, and there’s a cold ache. It’s like the shiver that sets in after the last swim of the summer, only it can’t be fixed by drying-off with a towel or putting on a warm jumper. 

My boy and I have felt the cold this week. At the end of the summer holidays but before we said hello to the new school year, we said goodbye, ‘yiassou’ to Stathis.  

Stathis first came to our door three years ago. A fellow expatriate recommended him as a home-tutor, to teach my boy Greek. Not classical Greek. We were not that precocious, aged 5 and a bit. Ordinary, everyday kitchen Greek, but better, more structured, than my own half-remembered pidgin version. 

Before we met, he sent me his CV – first degree – masters – teaching experience. Earnestly, he hoped I would find him suitable. Suitable! Vastly over-qualifed. One of many exiles washed to this cold mud-brown port. Flotsam and jetsam of the Greek economy. 

As the German chancellor said she would welcome refugees, washed-up on the beaches of Greece and Italy, her own-money men  cynically whipped-up a storm the effects of which drove thousands of Greeks, into economic exile.  As the human traffic flowed, the profits of usury, masquerading as a salvage operation, also flowed, straight back to the Bundesbank.

Greece’s loss, was, at least for a while, our personal gain. Brown-eyed, brown-skinned and fit from cycling and being young, and working-out. 

I was far too pre-occupied with my own misery, to notice how handsome he was, until another mother squealed at me one day when collecting her son after tea:

“My God, who’s He?”. “Why didn’t you tell me you had an actual Greek God in your kitchen?”.

An actual Greek God. Sadly, not being immortal myself, and a good 20-years older, the thought of attempting to be Aphrodite to this Adonis was exhausting, and a bit gross. Once, or twice,I toyed with the idea of leaning-in to kiss him. The thought lasted as long as it took me to take off the slightly grubby, pink apron I was wearing (a birthday present from a practical-minded friend), and open the door. As I looked at his open, warm, smiling face, the absurdity of treating him as anything other than a teacher and friend came as comfort and relief. 

So each week, I bustled a bit, offered him tea, coffee, fruit, biscuits and when he only-ever took a glass of water, I would tease him pretending to be offended at his refusing my hospitality. 

Week by week he came up with new games and strategies to hook my boy’s attention. Week by week he charmed his way into our lives and taught my boy to speak, read and write words and phrases by stealth. 

They would play football, or battle games. I would hear them running around the house and garden, shrieking “strike”, “wind”, and “fire” in Greek, as they zapped each other with magic powers. I aided the stealth-teaching by leaving ever-greater varieties and colours of fruit at the kitchen table: Pomegranate, red-grapes, green apples, sweet strawberries, orange oranges, sunshine bright lemons. 

About every third question, my boy would answer “baskalitsa, baskalitsa, baskalitsa” “Ladybird, ladybird, ladybird”. The colour of the sky today –  “baskalitsa”. Today you are wearing – “baskalitsa,”. Always with a grin, a pause, and then the right answer. 

But now he’s gone, and taken the sunshine and a masters in something techie, with him to go make his own life. 

My boy was bereft, even before he said goodbye. “Don’t go,” he said, quietly, tugging at his sleeve. Then “Baskalista, baskalitsa, baskalitsa” louder, this time. A binding-spell to tie him to us a little longer, or at least forever.

I saw in this goodbye, the other one, that my boy didn’t say to his father when he left home. My sweet blue-eyed boy said all his goodbyes in this one first big, 8-year-old’s goodbye.

We gave Stathis a small framed print of a ladybird to take home with him. I made him promise to invite us to holiday on his yacht when he becomes a tech zillionaire. 

And then  Stathis (“not staphili/grape”), wheeled his bike out of the hall and rode away. My boy and I held it together just long enough. We closed the door and turned clutching each other and lurched unsteadily to the sofa where I held my boy tightly, as he howled.

We were grief-stricken, which is not an exaggeration.

e.antoniou 2018

the knot

Posted by e. leonaris

For as long as I can remember, I have woken every morning with a tight knot in my stomach.

I can feel it now.  Sitting in bed with a  light warding off the dark, and tap tap tapping out words. Nervous energy. My body buzzes with constant anxiety – static – fear. 

I once worked with a woman who was sick every morning on the tube on her way to work. The first time it took her unexpected and she vomited in her handbag. Next time she was ready with a carrier bag. It was a question of when and where, not whether. “How far today?”, we would ask, smiling in anticipation of the latest episode of how she got to work. We weren’t lacking in sympathy but we delighted to hear of her puking in tight public spaces as surely as the Alien bursts out in every replay. She was our space-travelling Ripley.

Swapping to buses helped her a bit. Reaching her next trimester helped much more. Our morning talks became less about comical recounting of disgust and horror, and all about old-fashioned-names v celebrity made-up-ones, whether-to-avoid-gender-stereotyping when buying baby-gros, and how-long-does it take one husband to decorate a box-room nursery.

I had got this job through a morning sickness of my own. A dream starter job in publishing was a happy accident.  Driven by my own unhappiness to action, one lunchtime I bought a pad of A5 blue writing paper from the newsagent-come-off licence . In the greasy-spoon, me in my suit surrounded by men on breaks from building sites demolishing big plates of eggs bacon beans and chips, I wrote my first resignation letter. Steaming mugs of tea, conversations, and cigarette smoke condensed on the windows so that the water ran down as much on the inside as it did on the outside. A grey London day, when the only flashes of colour came from red buses that splashed wind-braced pedestrians with oily road puddles.  

Finally it was the knot in my stomach, purging my insides every morning, that pushed me to stop tolerating an intolerable situation. I could not carry on shaking and crying my way to the station and back. Once there, smile in place, brain in overdrive, no-one would ever have guessed the super-woman effort it took me to get there and stay.

The resignation letter led me to a publishing job, and my morning-sick work colleague, who fell away from my life after she had her baby, only remembered years later, when I found myself pregnant and queasy at work. As my baby grew and pressed up into my chest and down onto my bladder, the fear that had never gone away, took on a physical presence.

In the tiny grey loo cubicles at my place of work, I found momentary peace. My very own confessional, stinking of drains with a thin layer of cheap commercial air-freshener I could walk away from the ringing phones and constant noise in my head and I could speak to it, little prayers, match-flickers, quickly muttered in the work loo. 

Now, my fear had a focus and a growing form. I could speak to her. “Hang on in there”, I would say. Grow strong little one”. And he (as it turned out) did grow strong. Strong enough, anyway, the little vulnerable scrap of a baby who made me both superwoman, and shaking at the thought of walking out of my own front door, along such hard pavements (so much harder than I remembered from before) and crossing any of the city roads I had crossed countless times before. So I crossed myself, a stealthy little prayer of superstition, then crossed the road. Cupped his tiny head in my hand, him and me, each so so fragile but strong enough. 

He is eight now. And hearing his laughter, watching his wild somersaults on the trampoline, I begin to understand what heart in my mouth means as I actually want to vomit with fear that he could hurt himself. So I practise and practise at quietly holding in the fear. Watching with a big encouraging smile, Letting him be. 

His laughter in my ears, sometimes drives out the self-defeating internal noises – but more often they are there nagging at me still. 

As a girl, I was always good at untangling fine silver chains of necklaces. I used to do that for my mother. Long slim fingers gently loosening, teasing apart until I proudly handed over small gold crosses, and impressions of the virgin Mary. Somewhere in my life, I forgot this ability to untangle.. 

My mother promised me pretty treasures. Instead I find myself frayed, unravelling. 

Divorced, dissatisfied, disappointed. One day when the cats come to play, they will pounce on a trailing thread and drag what’s left of me along the floor. 

But not interested in eating me yet, the cats are busy, busy examining and washing their paws. Flashes of pink tongue. Home for the night in their favourite places. 

My boy has crawled in to bed with me too. Snuggling as close as he can in the curve of my bosom. 

Him, me and too many cats. This is enough, for now. The knot will still be there in the morning: Maybe one day I’ll figure out whether it’s choking the life out of me, or holding me together.

(c) e.antoniou 2018