Loving, Faithful Animal (14 page)

He's standing there, hands wrapped around the taut top wire of his fence, and the boys see him standing so. One of the pillion-sitters raising his rifle in something like salute, and the other levelling his, bluffing. Or is this a kind of greeting, in their parlance? Les doubts it.

He names them, the shooters—
Angus Ferran, Jimmy Knox—cupping his mouth,
shouting up to the ridge. And he too is bluffing, no true threat is he to them. But they're setting to leave in any case, bored now or spent of ammo. They churn the ground up in their leaving, to save face, a violence they might not have seen cause to do, if he'd not called them out. Les watches the riders giving throttle to the bikes, zipping up and down his fence a couple of times, close enough for him to see, through the open faces of the helmets—Aiden MacCallister, and another he does not know, some city cousin perhaps.

He'll go out there in a little while to look for it. Thrash his way through the sea of grass, combing it, methodical, for whatever it is they may have maimed or killed. His cat. No, not
his
, exactly, but somehow. He's beholden to it. In better light, he'll go.

But he feels, then, his blood beating in him like a sea at spring tide, pulled by what force he does not know, overreaching its own line of drift. And he understands to turn, to see; the dark shape of something heaving in the sage bush. And then no longer heaving, simply there, still. Cat-like, he sees when closer, but not his doomed tom with the malignant roses blooming over his snout. And not—or not logically—his brother's panther, the captured mascot, the one Jack had come home emblazoned with at age twenty, grinning like a prize fool at the fresh ink under a blood-tinged slick of vaseline. Not that cat either.

This one is no bigger than a doberman pinscher, full-grown but stunted and runtish, in- or cross-bred to the point of ill-construct, perhaps the last descendant of some rickety line. At once wonderful and pitiful to see there, superimposed into the wrong landscape, patchy hide stretched over a poorly designed frame.

When her side finally falls flat and does not rise—when he's sure it will not rise again—he ventures a hand to brush her flank, feels the rabbit shot, both recent and old, riddling the flesh beneath the fur. Dusky coat bearing her old cat scars, her old cat stories. A congregation of cattle ticks have not yet abandoned the exotic settlement of her ears, though they soon enough will.

Whatever secrets she'd carried with her this far, she's leaving them there, beneath the drought-thinned arms of the sage bush.
Her
, it's occurred to him, though he doesn't check to make certain. Likewise, the eyes, he would like to know—are they a luminous, oily gold? A dull, oxidised green?—but they're lidded over and he doesn't intend to impose his curiosity on the creature.

He leaves her there a moment, returning with a crackling tarpaulin woven of mud-coloured plastic. Lining up the edge with the animal's spine, he tucks the tarp between the grass and the blood-matted fur. Her mouth is rigid in a frozen snarl, mottled pink-black gums bared. The teeth, Les sees, are the greyed yellow of old tableware, those rigged bone handles. Taking hold of the cracked forepaws (no quiver of the partial snarl, and the eyes stay sealed) he turns her onto the tarp, exposing her hurt side, learning the nature of that hurt. Not the smattering of nuisance pellets, but two metal bolts protruding from her shoulder and throat. He'd not seen the crossbow, only the rifles. He's sorry to leave them there, the bolts—it seems to him wrong somehow, that a body should go to the earth still holding what killed it—but they don't twist away from their homes as easily as he'd hoped, and all at once he finds he doesn't have the stomach for it, this early in the day. He covers the panther-thing over with the remainder of the tarp, and pulls her across the yard, out of reach of the day's oncoming heat. Anyone watching him—and people are waking now, must be, staring glassy-eyed and headachey at the detritus of last night, the sticky tables still crowded with plastic cups, relatives and overnighters crimped up onto too-small couches—anyone who happens to see him now would figure it only a cord of wood he's dragging, or engine parts, or a dismantled motorbike, to the sour shade beneath the verandah. He weights the edges of the tarp with old palings and loose paving stones; a barricade to keep out any of his nosy visitors; the crows, his tomcat.

When dark comes he'll bury her, though Jack's girls would hate him to know of it, would feel betrayed—as might Jack himself—what with Belle.

Sorry, he says aloud, though he doesn't know to whom. An old tic,
sorry, sorry
, before he can even determine the source of his guilt.

*

The truck's cab has a brackish smell to it, at once stagnant and salt—or that's his own stench, unslept and unwashed, and he's just trapped himself with it. His hands, at least, are rinsed of panther grime. And he feels awake enough, buoyed on a raft of unlikely materials, a volatile energy thrumming in his chest. He rolls down the driver's window, but whatever breath the earlier morning had is spent now, the day airless and silent as though domed over with glass. He drums the cassette, recalls the last thing the Holden's tape deck chewed up and spat back at him, un-ribboning:
Down in the Groove.
But in a way it had been right of it to do that.

Would a bigger man listen or not listen?

At first he thinks there's nothing. Clicking play on the A-side, and waiting several minutes, hearing naught. Then, near the five-minute mark, a bird pips. In the recording or in the world, the trees outside his truck? Les rewinds and listens back, and there it is, a bird or something like it. Some minutes later there come voices, too low or too far away to know which words, or even which language they belong to. Other noises, intermittent, unidentifiable. And, a little way out from the end, a man clearing his throat—had he been there the whole time? Had he crept up silent? Someone clearing his throat, as if about to speak. Then nothing. Or almost nothing; the sound of the record button being depressed. The sound of a mind being changed. Sound of there being nothing to say.

He flips it to the B-side, where there is only virgin static, but Les sits with it anyway, to make sure. Looking out at the road for the occasional vehicle straggling past his house. Unfamiliar faces peering back at him from unfamiliar cars, radio antennae angled towards god and other wars.

{How It Sounded}

Oceanic, a great dark swell, sourceless.

Sometimes, yes, like great wings. Some terrible feathered god-like thing beating the air close to our faces.

Like iron wheels grinding along a clay road.

A clock ticking under soft cotton; something an orphaned animal might believe a heartbeat, might be made calm by.

A thick weave of birds lifting into the sky, all at once—as a blanket shaken out—and then settling back just as they had been. Only the leaves shivery and the sunlight stirred to say that anything had happened.

The tearing of fabric. An old silk jacket ripped open along the seams.

Twang of a slack wire. A low electrical murmur.

Big machines cooling, tok-tokking like geckos.

Trees dripping mist, sweat rising to steam.

And sometimes like a voice. A low sweet voice o
f no discern
ible language, calling us from one room to the next.

VI. Fireplan

february of the almost-fire
, alone with only your mother in the house. Deep into the runout groove of summer, with even the Gulf War winding off.
We now return to your regularly scheduled …
But the fireplan was full of holes—Lani, Dad, Belle. All of them so newly gone that it hadn't occurred to draw up a new one yet. You still had the old plan printed neat into an exercise book:

Open the gate for Belle. She will follow because she is a loving, faithful animal …

Then a checklist split into two columns, two colours. Your responsibilities and your sister's. But by the time the fires arrived it was just you and Mum and a box for the rabbits. And when you reached the edge of Norm Hornett's muddy reservoir, even Uncle Tetch wasn't there waiting. He was already away, looking after Grandma Mim as she was starting to go strange.

The fire was close enough to see, though not all that ferocious. Mum had brought along a blanket, rolled up and tucked beneath her wing for if the wind suddenly swung around and you had to wade out into the slimy water, cuddling rabbits, with the red wool drenched and held over your heads for a flameproof cubby. But the fire didn't swing, and never threatened to, so Mum shook the blanket out and spread it on the ground instead. That made it like a kind of picnic, sitting there at the edge of the dam. A bag of fruit and a transistor radio. Sharing bites of apple with the rabbits, who didn't seem especially frightened. Just shuffling about each other, nibbling at the corners of the box now and then to investigate its strength. Maybe they weren't smart enough to be panicked, though the air was smoky to breathe. Or maybe they knew better than you did, because the fires weren't so bad that time around; all people lost were a few sheds and fenceposts, a bit of grandfather-tree shade.

Mum flung herself back on the blanket with a sigh, scuffed off her dusty canvas sandals. She was wearing a pale blue cotton dress, something that would've looked proper on a very old woman, or else a very young girl, and there was a ladder creeping up from the toe of her stocking. She'd been wearing the dress all morning, but when had she thought to put on hose? You worried it might be a sign of insanity, dressing up for a bushfire as though it was a special occasion.

She propped herself up on one elbow to look at you. Kind of peaceful, isn't it, possum? We should do this all the time, you and me. Then she looked back over her shoulder at the rising smoke and went on, Only without the burning trees.

There was a small strangled noise in the back of her throat, a whimper. Then the laughter that cracked out of her was so convulsive, you thought you might have to run and get someone. Her eyes already wet and her shoulders shaking violently, she made shallow, animal grabs for breath when the laughter would let her, while you stood by, helpless. Like watching somebody drown, a long way out from shore. Where had it come from? Perhaps the smoke in the air had starved her mind of oxygen. You put a hand on her knee to remind her you were there, felt the trembling in her leg. The laughing went on for a while, finally puttering down to a few stray coughs, then she cleared her throat.

No, she said, brushing invisible grit from her dress, composing herself. We should and we will. Bugger those other two. Reckon we've earned ourselves a bit of fun.

Of course you never would—there would never be any cause to—but you sat there together for another hour or two, tracking the fire and waiting for the all clear. Watching the sun turn the red of molten glass as it sank towards land, in and out of the haze.

Nothing more beautiful than a bushfire sunset, she said; isn't that mean, in a way? Then she rolled up the blanket, grass seeds and all, and you carried the rabbits back across the paddocks to the strange stillness of the house, where Lani's bathers still lay scrunched up in a corner of the laundry trough, stinking of pool chlorine, and lately of mildew.

For weeks, your mother had gone out of her way to work around the bathers, putting them to one side when she needed to handwash something, then putting them right back as they were. She insisted that you leave them be as well, that your sister could clean up her own mess whenever she came slinking back. Finally you couldn't stand it anymore. They'd dried out, mummified in a stiff tangle. You bundled them into a plastic shopping bag and hid them in the kitchen bin, camouflaged them with food scraps. Mum never said anything.

You went through a full year of high school wearing your sister's clothes, left-behind things filched from her dresser drawers. Ripped op-shop silks over tencel denim. Men
'
s shirts. Heavy silver jewellery, tarnished black. Your mother eyeing you warily whenever you slouched into view, all jangle and glitter and soot.

You look like nobody loves you, Ru.

For a while the clothes still smelled of Lani's sweat and her cigarettes, and of the men's aftershave she'd nicked from somebody's brother.
Cool Water
. You held the material to your nose and huffed, were careful to never spray anything over it, but the scent wore off eventually anyway. Then an American rapper went and put it in a song, and soon everyone was wearing it. For years afterwards, boys leaning in shop doorways or mooching in sharky packs at the train station would make you think of your runaway sister, your heart shivering whenever you caught the familiar combination of cigarette smoke shot through with the bright mineral cologne.

Once your mother busted you taking the cellophane off a new box of the stuff.

Where'd you get the money for that?

They were selling it at the chemist. Your voice held convincingly steady.

That doesn't answer my question, she said slowly, and when you refused to say any more, her open hand was there, trembling in your periphery, hovering like a kestrel about to dive.

You stood firm, already taller than her, staring her down. Go on, you goaded.

She spoke through her teeth, but she lowered her hand.

Ruby. Love. You're a good kid. You're loyal. You're my last good thing. Don't let me down, hey?

And by then you understood that
loyal
was a kind of snare, felt it cutting in like a wire looped around your ankle. You surrendered the cologne so that she could return it.

In later stoushes, her hands flew instead to her own hair, and tore at it with such a violence it was as though they did not belong to her.

See what you're doing to me, girl? See now?

You saw.

Well? Happy?

You thought maybe you would've preferred to cop the slap.

*

Go on, just hit me then.

Go on, just leave me then.

Are all family scripts so interchangeable?

*

The first woman you fall in love with says, I want to know everything about you. She says, Show me how, then wets her fingers in your mouth. The first woman you fall in love with reads you poetry as though she is inviting you into a box she has built and lined soft with her voice, a bed she has made warm with her body. She coaxes your childhood out of you in scraps and flashes, with deft cat paws. Never whole stories, but true enough. Fragments you try to lathe the sharp edges from as you tell them, so that she can listen without flinching, without having to say, Oh sweetheart. The sounds through the wall but not the blood in the sink. Sketches almost small enough to unsay. Small enough to tuck behind your tongue, to swallow.

Tell me how you were when you were younger, she says. Tell me something fun.

You tell her what passed for fun in the town you grew up in. It always seemed to involve destroying something. Your sister driving wreckers into dry creekbeds just for a bit of a jolt, just to make something happen. Limping home at fifteen with a piece gouged out of her knee from where the ignition key had crunched in.

She's quiet for a while, this girl in the warm dark, like maybe you've talked her to sleep. But she's only waiting for the rest of it.

Your sister? But I was asking about you.

Oh. Well, I don't know. I feel like I was about the same.

More silence, then her small sharp,
Huh
, before she comes out with it—First boredom, then fear. As though she's finally figured you out, reached a diagnosis, and is prescribing something that might help. Larkin. She likes to quote that other one too, about parents and how they can't help but mess a person up. But you've met her mum and dad, she's taken you home to them; wry, generous people with a lot of cashmere and stoneware under high-vaulted ceilings. An oncologist who keeps bees and knows everything about their intimate customs, and a retired cartographer with vivid stories about trekking the Tigris in the '70s (
When I was by that great river the Tigris …
). You know their house smells of books and woodsmoke and the persimmons left to ripen along the kitchen windowsill.

You do not tell her that you feel like a tourist in this house. But what you feel is just that. Hands in your pockets as though fumbling for the cost of admission.

When she says to you, First boredom, then fear, you do not correct her. You do not tell her, No, first fear then boredom—I think something in us just calcified. (That closed fist still throbbing behind your ribs; so much for growing pains.) You pull her closer, stroke the inseam of her arm until she and her questions and answers fall back to sleep.

*

In the end it takes a twenty-foot skip to hold it all. Boxes of crockery and rolled-up posters, suitcases she doesn't bother to look inside. Your old beat-up bike. Armfuls of bedlinen, as though somebody had died of plague. Again, you wonder if she's lost her mind.

Are you just going to stand there, Ru?

Yes, you just stand there. Cradling a mug of tea by the front steps, watching it all go in. Uncle Tetch handling
the bigger things, the shabby furniture and boxes of
unlabelled video tapes.

Salvaged: a cigar box of cicada shells, packed carefully into cotton wool. One balding flock mama deer. A box of cologne, still packaged in yellowed cellophane. Talismans. Unuseable things. You tuck them into a shoebox and tape it up and mark it
trousseau
. A strange little joke you'll tote unopened from one house to the next.

*

Occasionally there are notes. Postcards showing foreign cities. Your sister, killing time in the airports belonging to these cities, choosing pictures that show monuments and natural attractions she may or may not have visited herself. Occasionally you are moved to trace a plane across the sky, glinting up there like whitebait. She can go all that way, travel all that distance. Slipping back and forth across meridians, across the dateline as if it isn't so much as a crack in old linoleum. Hours flooding in or tumbling away like scree. But you haven't seen her face since she was sixteen, chlorine stiffening her hair, the cut still healing on her lip.

*

Then Easter Saturday, years later, half waking to her weight at the end of the bed. Your sister has become so light, at first you think: Cat. That one of them must have snuck in, sprung up.

You are twenty-two years old, and she has driven all night, through bad weather, to reach the bayside address she sometimes scrawls in childish loops. The house she finds you in holds seven people, ghost odours, faulty wiring, suspected asbestos. Cupboards full of stolen glassware and instant ramen. When trains rattle past, this house shakes its window casings like rickety fists, coughs plaster dust from a network of fissures. Families of stray cats take refuge in the overgrown backyard, and while the more tenacious ones occasionally move inside, mice continue to run their skittery cartels behind the walls. It's the first place you're able to call
home
without your stomach clenching, and it will be knocked down for apartments within the same year. Your room in it is large and bright, with most of the floorspace given over to rolls of canvas and silk mesh, milk crates of paint and ink, a narrow daybed pushed into the bay window. At certain times of the year the light spills in underwater-green through the new soft leaves of vines, but when your sister shows up the vines are bare, the light untinted.

The impression of her there, through your eyelashes. Backlit by too-early morning. She's propped the window sash with a tin of linseed oil, is breathing smoke out into the thin winter light. Bottle-black hair banked over her face. Still wearing her uniform. Or no, you'll see later; just a shirt dress all wrong for the season, but half-asleep you mistake it for cabin garb.

Even with the window open, the room has filled with her smoke, and it carries into your fitful half-sleep, becoming that of the fires: that first year, boiled-wool blanket spread by the dam. Your twelve-year-old self clutching fistfuls of summer grass to stay anchored in that summer, to the scrape and thump of rabbits shuffling in their box, Mum cracking up over nothing. These sounds as loud as if in the next room.

For a flicker of time Lani exists in both places, like those double-sided trick cards whose images merge when the card is twirled around fast enough. The horse and the rider becoming horse-and-rider; the cage slamming over the bird. Your sister is there by the window and she is there by Hornett's dam, her long legs stretched forever, stretched towards the water. But looking as she does now; nursing the hot drink that somebody from downstairs has given her, fiddling with the knot of the silk scarf that is meant to go with her hostess dress. The still-sleeping part of you wants to grab and hold her, keep her there, whatever fight she might kick up. If you could just get the two of them into the same place, Lani and your mother, then perhaps—

But it's ten years since you've seen her. And there's the grit of a hangover waiting behind your eyelids, stymieing generosity. Why should she be let off easy, allowed to waltz right back like nothing's happened? The part of you that is awake demands to know, Who let you in? Who gave you that? then shifts the pillow to block out whatever the response might be. Remembering her bathers growing mould in the laundry sink.