In the Winter Dark

  The girl looked me straight in the eye. ‘There was barely a feather out of place. Their necks were broken, some with punctures. I didn’t hear a thing.’

  Jaccob looked grey.

  ‘Well,’ I murmured.

  ‘Maurice.’ Ida’s tone was disciplinary. I knew it was my time to speak.

  ‘We had some trouble too. The other night.’ I poured myself some beer. ‘We had a dog torn off its chain. A small dog. There wasn’t anything left except the head in the collar.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said the girl, and Ida flinched.

  ‘There wasn’t a sound. Except for the dog screaming.’

  As I looked around the table, I knew something had begun to roll forward – I didn’t know what – and it was big and quiet and definitely to be worried about.

  ‘I got a print in a cast. I looked all morning for some trace.’ I pulled it out of the sideboard drawer behind me and put it, sweet and honey-smelling, on the table before them. They both held it like it was made of glass. ‘What we’re looking at here is not dogs. Funny we should be talking about cats earlier on, because that’s what we’ve got on our hands.’

  ‘Maurice?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Some kind of cat.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ the girl yelled.

  ‘What would you know?’ I yelled. ‘How long’ve you lived here?’

  She drank off her glass of beer and glowered, mouth puckering as though she tasted something foul.

  Ida got up and came back with more bottles of beer.

  ‘Let’s keep this civil, shall we?’ she said. ‘All neighbours here. What kind of cat, Maurice?’

  ‘Something wild or outsized or maybe foreign. My guess is it’s a feral breed of house cat.’

  ‘Oh, bullshit,’ the girl said. ‘A house cat turned wild is still a house cat. This thing killed a goat, for God’s sake. How could a house cat do that?’

  ‘I’m not talking about a cat that used to belong to Mrs Bloggs that’s decided to go walkabout and decides he likes the wild outdoor life. This is a cat whose ancestors were house cats maybe two hundred years ago. They grow bigger than you think, bigger than we know.’

  Jaccob seemed to stir at this. ‘I had a friend once who had a skin, a pelt from a bush cat that covered the bonnet of his Datsun.’

  I whistled. ‘You ever see it?’

  He shook his head. ‘People exaggerate, I s’pose.’

  ‘Now if that goat was killed by teeth in the skull, and we have to take this young lady’s word for it —’

  ‘Then the teeth’d have to be an inch long or more,’ she said. ‘Ever seen a cat like that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We’re talking about tabby cats!’

  ‘Any schoolkid knows that our house cats come originally from wild stocks from India and Europe. In the beginning, this is.’

  ‘But that’s ancient history.’

  ‘There’s no kind of native animal on this continent that can do anything like what we’re talking about here. It has to be something foreign, something introduced.’

  ‘Oh, but that leaves dogs, pigs, foxes —’

  ‘You know damn-well that this isn’t a dog or a bloody pig. Look at this pawprint. That’s a cat. A big cat. Two hundred years of breeding in the bush from strays. The big ones, the fast ones, the mean ones survive. The quiet ones. They slowly get bigger, faster, meaner, quieter. You know, it’s what they teach at school these days. You know how many litters a cat has a year. Hell, the way we walk through the bush, the big ones’d be well-warned, that’s why we don’t see ’em. God knows how big they get; they’re lords of the bush.’

  I fell back breathless. The whole thing seemed more plausible every word I said.

  ‘Well, whatever it is,’ the girl sighed, ‘we should tell the authorities.’

  ‘It won’t help, and there’s no point. We’ve got it out into the open amongst ourselves. We’ve had our losses and that’s the end of it. Just to satisfy ourselves, Mr Jaccob and I will go out and take a look around tomorrow night. Agreed?’

  Jaccob stared at me a moment, then nodded.

  ‘Right then.’

  ‘Is that all?’ the girl demanded. ‘Is that all you’re going to do?’

  I got up, barking the chair back on the boards.

  ‘I’m going out for a bit.’

  And I left them all there at the table, around the stand of brown bottles, and I went out hoisting my coat on. The fire was out. They all looked grim as mourners.

  On a winter’s night down this way, the cold darkness is like two black sheets of glass pressing you breathless. My throat burned. Stars peppered the sky. I hugged myself, not knowing where to go. I walked up the hill a little way, got to the first wire fence and heard it bulleting down the line in the dark as I pushed down the top strand. For a few moments I stood listening to that eerie sound in the dark and I was overcome by how vulnerable I was, here out in the night alone. And the sound of that wire fence took me a long way back in the past. Did they remember? The cats? Was that what this business was all about?

  I stumbled back down the slope. Or was I just a bit pissed and ratty with nerves?

  In the tractor shed I smelt the good regular smells of diesel and hessian. Rodents tinkered in the dark behind piles of junk. That business about the mob over at Bakers Bridge was a bit of a shock. Witches. I thought we didn’t have that stuff anymore. That girl . . . no, she didn’t look the type. But what is the type? What do they look like? I started to shiver.

  Before long, the voices of Ida and Jaccob could be heard from the front of the house, and a few moments after, the car started. I saw a stray beam of light as they turned around. I could hear the little Jap motor winding across the valley and then come back our way and climb a little to stop at Jaccob’s place.

  Quiet. Cold. I heard the faint clunk of dishes from the house. I went back in, forcing myself not to trot like a child frightened of the dark.

  With the father gone for the doctor in the truck, the two brothers leave the whimpering boy on the kitchen table, go out to the tractor shed and take a can of petrol across the paddock to the fence. They wait in the orchard beside their neighbour’s house. In the light of the windows, they see the cats poised on the sills, gently brushing aside the filmy curtains which used to be so white and grand billowing there on hot afternoons. In time, a black tom comes out to look at them. It pads across fallen leaves and fruit and it rubs itself greedily, arrogantly against their knees, then purrs in their arms. One boy takes off his shirt and pours petrol on it. His brother holds the cat while he strokes its back with the wet shirt. The cat squirms a little, begins to spit and scratch as they tie the petrol-soaked shirt to its tail. The match flares. The cat shrieks and then explodes.

  When they pulled up outside Ronnie’s house, she didn’t get out. She hadn’t left any lights on. The place was lonely-looking. She felt jittery and weak with anger.

  ‘Good grief, what an evening.’

  Jaccob nodded in the green light of the dash. He looked preoccupied. For a moment she wondered what that shithead man of hers was doing tonight – probably playing in some hopeless joint with some hopeless bunch of characters who remembered him from the old days when everybody just had to recognize him. Probably be some hopeless-looking woman sitting beside the sound desk trying to look unmistakeably connected to him and the band – oh, she knew all about that.

  The engine was still running, Jaccob was waiting.

  ‘Listen,’ she murmured, ‘I can’t face this place tonight. I’m, you know, a bit spooked being on my own after all this business.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Well, could I . . . stay at your place?’

  Jaccob shrugged and turned the car around.

  Ronnie woke at three in the morning and went down the cold wooden stairs to find Jaccob rocking in the dimness by the long glass doors through which she could see only the darkness of the valley. He turned a lamp on. He had
a glass in his hand. She didn’t know how to read the look on his face.

  ‘You okay?’

  He just rocked.

  ‘I felt a bit strange then,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. As though I was about to have a nightmare, as though I was about to slip into it. But I stopped myself. I woke up.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s nice to be able to back out of a nightmare.’

  She pulled the blanket tight around herself.

  ‘That stuff about those people over at Bakers Bridge,’ he murmured. ‘Were you serious?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How do you know about them?’

  ‘Oh. I met them once. It’s only fifteen or twenty miles.’

  ‘Did you see it happen? That stuff about the cats.’

  ‘Cats! You don’t think I’m one of them, do you?’

  ‘What, a cat or a witch?’

  ‘A friend saw it. She was kind of interested.’

  ‘You don’t think maybe they’ve got something to do with this, do you? I mean,’ he tried to laugh a little, ‘the goat and everything. All those birds with their bellies open.’

  ‘You don’t know much about it, do you?’

  Jaccob smiled. ‘I don’t even know if it exists.’

  ‘Black magic? Of course.’

  ‘Black cats and everything, eh?’

  She sank back against the sofa. ‘Oh, cats again. Listen, what do you think is killing the animals?’

  ‘Stubbs may be right, it could be a feral cat, or more than one. Jesus, for all I know it might be the Tasmanian Tiger.’

  She didn’t laugh. ‘Yeah, people talk about that still, don’t they?’

  ‘I s’pose it doesn’t sound so stupid really, a marsupial cat, or is it a dog?’

  Ronnie looked at him. He wasn’t a happy man.

  ‘I don’t know you at all,’ she said.

  ‘Neither you should. We’re strangers.’

  He got up and went to bed and Ronnie sat there in that dim room with its mismatched furniture and bare walls.

  I sat up in the dark, shivering with cold and memory.

  Running, one boy sees over his shoulder the ball of light cometing around the yard, the cat afire and screaming like an evil spirit, cutting back across its own path.

  THE MORNING was cool and overcast and Ronnie spent the day with Jaccob. They helped each other in a stiff, self-conscious way with the chores, first at his place and then at hers, where the cow had to be disentangled from the fence it had demolished in mad pain from an engorged udder.

  In the shed where she milked there was a big bench stacked with picture frames she’d half-stripped of their ugly red varnish. Jaccob, who was watching her with a look that she took to be amusement, picked up a frame and ran his hand over it.

  ‘Oak.’

  Ronnie peered along the length of the cow.

  ‘Found them in an old shop in Balingup. Promised myself I’d do them up one day.’

  Hiss of milk. Far away, the petulant song of a crow. Ronnie put her cheek against the warm side of the animal and she began to hum as a strange sadness came upon her. She kind of liked this bloke. He was awkward but not stupid. She was the one who felt stupid.

  The headache got so bad Ida put herself back to bed. It was the kind of headache she used to have at school, the night before a spelling test. The pain would be like a hand clamping down on her skull and she could almost feel fingers creeping in under her scalp going hot and cold in waves that made her too frightened to move her eyes. She was no squib when it came to pain. Oh, the kinds of pain she’d lived with. Years of periods (now mercifully gone), and childbirth (let no one tell you it didn’t hurt), secret pains she kept until the last minute like the cartilage in her knee she hobbled around on, keeping the house running and the children and Maurice in their routine until the day she couldn’t even walk to the toilet. Ah, those were just everyday pains; but the headaches, she hated the headaches. She pulled the blankets up to her chin and wedged her head between the pillows to keep it still. She lay with her eyes closed and the hot colours burst before her.

  Now and then during the day the pain would slacken and she would have some respite for a while. She didn’t get up for fear of bringing back the pain before schedule, so she had time to think, and what she thought about was Ronnie. She liked the girl in a way. Of course she was rude and disrespectful, but she was so alive and energetic, at least for a girl who looked so pale and badly fed. Reminded her of her younger days. She’d been cocky herself once, but girls in her day could barely even think the things that Ronnie was saying last night. Was she deserted? Did she have money? She was small; she’d take a hiding getting a baby out. She wondered what the dickens a girl with all the advantages was doing here. It seemed so wasteful that it made Ida angry and she felt the fingers tighten on her skull and then the colours cracking like fireworks.

  Through the fizzing and spurting, a memory came to her. It just arrived, blurring and ghosting but now and then coming clear despite the pressure.

  Rain hits the windscreen of the truck. A woman – that familiar young woman – drives with her eyes slitted in concentration. Two small girls sleep on the seat beside her, mouths black with liquorice. Windscreen wipers labour against the torrent. The road is pelted with leaves and twigs, furred with the impact of water. As she rounds a bend near a rail crossing, she sees an overturned semi and its garishly painted trailer jacknifed at the side of the road. Behind a spear of light, the vision fades a moment and she sees only the heat of pain, but quickly it’s back again and she sees the zoo-like bars on the trailer, some twisted wide apart. Great sods have been turned up in the accident. Someone is backing a tractor up to the overturned truck, and another man is hauling up a chain. The woman pulls in beside him and winds the window down. Rain spatters in on the children.

  ‘Everything alright?’

  The tractor driver looks over. He seems sick. A man in overalls comes across, steps up to the window.

  ‘No problem, lady.’ He has a beard and an American accent. DENVER BROS CIRCUS is embroidered over the pocket of his overalls. She can almost feel his gaze, as though he sees she’s only a farm-wife from some lost valley. She brushes the skirt across her knees. ‘Nothin’s happened. Drive on.’

  ‘But is anyone hurt?’

  ‘No one’s hurt. Look, this never even happened.’

  She gives him her coldest look. The girls begin to stir. She winds the window up in his face and drives on . . . Lord, she’d forgotten all about . . . the reds and flamebreaks shot in from every corner. Ida lay dead-still.

  Jaccob stood by while Ronnie skimmed the cream from the turning milk. Bulbs of sweat hung on her brow. The afternoon sun rested on the windowsill and dust motes twisted about. It had been a long day with their curiosity and their caution; nevertheless it had been a good day’s work for a retired man and a girl who looked as though a day’s work’d kill her. It stopped him thinking about things. She seemed like maybe she was a decent sort after all, this girl, just frightened, that was all. He started to wonder how she was going to get on alone.

  ‘What does your . . . boyfriend do?’ The sun was warm on his back.

  ‘Oh, he plays guitar. Used to be in the Clever Young Boys in Black.’ She said the name with an upward intonation as though she expected him to be familiar with it.

  ‘When’s he coming back, you reckon?’

  She shrugged. It was an obvious effort to be nonchalant. You had to admire her guts.

  ‘It’s tough luck about your birds. I like muscovies.’

  She smiled.

  The sun began to die on its soft bed of trees. At the bottom of the valley the river went coppery and the swamp glittered. Smoke rose perpendicular from the Stubbses’ chimney over on the west side. Sun caught their windows as in a mirror. The wind was already dead.

  ‘If you need a lift to the hospital any time, just let me know. I mean if your boyfriend isn’
t around.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll hear me screaming. Thanks. Anyway, he’ll be around.’

  He looked at her through the veil of steam.

  ‘So. Tomorrow night you have to go a-hunting?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Men!’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Do you know anything about shooting?’

  ‘No. Not really. I shot rabbits when I was a kid.’

  ‘Why the hell are you going then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stubbs seems to think it’s important. And,’ he laughed, ‘I didn’t want him to despise me.’

  ‘Boy. I don’t understand men.’

  You said it, love, he thought.

  Jaccob and the girl came after dinner when it was dark and the paddocks were moony and still. He brought his .22 but he had no ammunition for it, so I went to the bedroom for a couple of boxes and left him with the women who chatted quietly. In the bedroom I found some bullets, pocketed them and looked out the window, but all I could see was my own face, eyes narrowed like shutters. When I returned to the kitchen Ida was laughing with the girl over some joke I’d come in too late for and Jaccob was standing by the stove with a blank cast on his face. I put the box of longs in his hand and he looked at the women.

  ‘No prizes for guessing who’ll be enjoying tonight’s proceedings.’ He tried to smile. He was worried.

  ‘Come on.’

  He followed me out to the ute. The women didn’t even say goodbye, and I felt like a fool for feeling miffed about it.

  The air was hard and metallic.

  ‘You should have worn some warmer clothes,’ I said. I gave him the .243. ‘I’ll drive. You hold this.’

  Jaccob juggled the two rifles a moment and settled them across his lap.

  I drove slowly down towards the girl’s place with the window open. The moon lit some patches of pasture well, but it also made the sort of shadows that cause you to wonder. A rabbit stared up into the headlights. I smelt the swamp and the night-wet stands of grass as I took us down by the river and slowly up the gravel drive to Ronnie’s place.