Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  The inlet was brimming and tufts of rushes stood like islands in the swamp. I stepped out onto the jetty and Phil left the boat for Peacock to winch into the shed. We drove back to the house, past the mares and foals in their post and rail enclosures; and came on Kate with the front of her skirt held up like a sack, bulging with figs. She would not take a ride but walked up when our dust had settled, eating a fig like an apple, skin and all, and her mouth stained with pulp. She was elated. It was as if she’d found treasure. The figs were as fat as peaches, and some almost black, splitting with ripeness, and of course one could not help thinking of a woman’s parts, and Phil could not forgo the comparison; but even that did not put Kate out of her good humour. I peeled a fig and ate it, then had to take out my upper plate and wash the seeds out.

  Our day did not end with figs though. It ended with a curious act of slaughter; ended with Phil. He had not caught a fish but he could do better than figs, he’d kill me a duck. I thought it would be a matter of wringing one’s neck or chopping off its head with a tomahawk. He led me out through the back yard and across a paddock to an enclosure of wire-netting. There a couple of dozen fat Muscovies quacked and waddled about a pond. They seemed to know what Phil’s coming meant for they set off in a bum-wobbling scurry for the far fence. They were like a crowd of fat old ladies running from a disaster. And Phil is that, he’s a disaster. But he’s many other things as well. He’s sheriff of Tombstone.

  He asked me to choose, but I could not condemn one of those undignified white waddlers; and wondered, with my usual feeling of sickness and apprehension, what bottomless receptacle its spark of life was about to be dropped into. But I knew better than to try stopping Phil. His face had gone deep red, plum-red. He drew his gun from his belt and I saw what an unstoppable thing it was, radiating malignancy. An air pistol, black-handled, long, narrow-nosed. There’s no loud bang, no powder smell. The damned thing has a lung and it spits.

  He cornered a duck and stood off twenty feet and rested the barrel on his forearm. I saw how he trembled. It was age not excitement. He sighted with his pale eye along that exaggerated snout. He has sniper’s eyes – but the shot only kicked a feather from the duck’s tail and made it squawk so loudly I thought the sky would fall.

  ‘I got that one we had for lunch with a single shot. Clean through the eye.’

  His second pellet smashed the duck’s leg and it flapped away, lop-sided, towards its fellows down in another corner. They wanted nothing to do with it. Phil ran stiff-legged, heading it off. He trapped the bird against the wire. It waited there, open-beaked, while he took aim. Of course he would go for the eye, the difficult shot. Phil, in his way, is an idealist.

  He carried the duck down the paddock to me. Blood was dripping on his espadrilles. ‘I shouldn’t have had that whisky in the boat.’ Nevertheless, he was pleased with himself. His third shot had knocked the top of the duck’s head off. He was pleased with that finality.

  17

  It’s taken me a week to write all that. My hand gets tired and my brain gets tired and shadows waltz in and out of my skull. I’ve been having dreams. Mostly there’s a tree, with leaves as big as doormats, and figs the colour and shape of female parts, and labyrinths of green leading to a centre where everything’s cold and indistinct. Sometimes I’m a wasp zooming in. It’s a sex dream and a death dream and a dream of being alive. I don’t know what to make of it, but none of it pleases me much, or frightens me.

  Things have changed here in the last week. I’d better fall back on chronology.

  I asked Kate how she’d got on with the people over the hill.

  ‘Ha,’ she said, ‘they’ll pray for me.’

  She’s repelled by their simplicities and by their certainty, which she regards as anti-human, but their happiness attracts her. How can one be happy and a complex being too, that’s her problem? Complexity’s her right (one she denies Kitty, though) and all possibilities must be open. I tell her the way to happiness can often be a straight and simple thing but she won’t agree, and smartly quotes ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’. That’s nicely put, but I’m sorry to hear her relish it so much.

  She’d argued with them; told them there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth and that makes the Christian God a no-no. I mean, she said, why should he be concerned with us? Or perhaps he’s the God of all intelligent species and he’s sent his Son in many forms. She challenged them with a crustacean Christ and a chlorine-breathing Christ. And if it’s not like that, she said, then he’s only one of millions of gods, one for each world – and so on. They just looked at her and laughed. These are not questions.

  I find it charming. Kate marching up there to convert them with her silly simple arguments; and they, happy fools, replying with their book. There’s complexity enough, and happiness in contemplating it.

  And what are you? she asked, belligerent. No labels, no labels, I replied. But confessed Tup Ogier made me an evolutionary humanist – by narration, I said, not argument. I was thrilled to my bones by that great drama.

  Kate sniffed. ‘Evolution’s not an issue any more.’ Then she giggled – the first time I’ve heard that girl-sound from her. ‘You want to know my name for you?’ she said. ‘It’s The Chimp.’

  So there we are, Phil Dockery and Noel Papps, those roaring boys: the Old Goat and The Chimp. I wasn’t pleased. I don’t mind seeing myself like that, but I’ve wanted to be something more in Kate’s eyes.

  It was a fat duck. We ate it for three days and had the last of it for lunch, sitting on the sundeck. I drank a glass of cold white wine and toasted Phil across the glittering bay.

  Kate had bought a pot of Cranberry sauce. Soon, to keep the wasps away from our table, she put it on the rail with the lid off. I counted eight wasps on the rim and Kate, looking in, said there was a grand-daddy stuck inside. She lifted it out with a teaspoon and crushed it on the rail.

  ‘There’s too many, there must be a nest.’

  I think she needed it. She needed a physical act, she needed risk, and it’s hardly surprising that in the course of it she found a man. (But you don’t have to keep what you find, do you hear me, Kate?) The wasps were there, just below my sun-deck, in the bank. She called me to see; then off she went, lunch unfinished, and I saw her slide through the dry grass and fennel and stop herself on the hurricane wire fence. She climbed over and went with hooked fingers along the wire – Chimp yourself, Kate – until she was opposite the nest. ‘A big one,’ she called.

  ‘Be careful, Kate.’ If she let go she’d tumble into the river.

  ‘There’s hundreds. There’s a hole as big as my fist.’ She held it up.

  ‘Kate!’

  ‘Keep your shirt on.’ She studied the nest. I could not see it from my position but saw wasps streaking away and streaking home, and saw her eager face turned up and thought how competent she was. I did not need to squawk like a mother hen.

  She came back smelling of fennel, with grass seeds and biddybids in her hair. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘they’ve had it.’ She rubbed her hands and would not sit down and finish her lunch but was on her rattle-trap bicycle and off down the hill to the MAF. I watched her cycle across the bridge and along between the plane trees into town. Just like Kitty, single-minded, simple-minded. A dozen paths but one direction.

  But she had to wait until dusk before she could do anything. Then she armed herself with a table-spoon and a packet of Carbaryl and a pair of hedge clippers. Grass was growing over the hole and she’d have to clip it away before she could spoon the poison in. She was thoughtful now. She’d had all afternoon to picture that black hole in the ground. It was, she said, like a hole going down into nothing and the wasps just went inside and disappeared, except for sentries sitting on blades of grass. She was a little frightened, by the mystery, I think, as much as the danger; but still she clapped her hands and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘It’s not dark enough.’

  ‘They come back t
o the nest when the sun goes down. It says so here.’ She had a pamphlet from the MAF.

  ‘Get a man to do it, Kate. He’ll come with a bottle of petrol and that’ll be that.’ What a foolish thing to say to a modern woman. I have to take some blame for her stings.

  My job was to shine the torch from the sundeck. She slid through the grass again, awkward with her clippers, and crashed into the wire and made it sing.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve lost the spoon.’

  ‘Come back, Kate.’

  ‘Not to worry. I’ll chuck it in with my hands.’

  This time she went along the inside of the wire. I heard her thrashing in the head-high fennel and saw her face rise like a moon. She’d put on slacks and a jersey but had no veil or gloves.

  ‘Shine that torch.’

  She came into the light with the silver cross of the clippers on her breast to ward off demons. I saw no wasps, but saw her stretch her arms and poke at the bank, and heard snip-snip. Then I saw them. They swam like tiny goldfish in the light. She did not scream but made a glassy squeak and bitten cries. She beat her arms about her face and fell back down the slope. The fence stopped her. She went on all fours and burrowed into the fennel. The wasps continued their dance and I held the torch on them, thinking I might draw them away from Kate. The clippers and the packet of poison lay by the fence. Then a wasp stung my wrist and I dropped the torch and saw it bounce off the bank and leap the fence and bound away like some creature fleeing, down the hillside into the river. I heard a splash, and for a moment saw a light shining under water before it went out.

  I ran outside to rescue Kate. She almost banged me over in the yard and ran into the kitchen with head down and fingers hooked above her scalp.

  ‘There’s one in my hair.’

  I saw it thrusting with its abdomen and I crushed it between my finger and thumb and pulled it out and threw it in the sink. Then I made Kate sit on a kitchen chair and brought her a cloth to wipe her face. Her hands shook. I hoped she was not going to faint.

  ‘Where did they get you?’

  ‘On my face. On my neck. I need some blue-bag.’

  ‘No, that’s alkaline, we need acid.’ I fetched vinegar and cotton wool, and because her hands were shaking so much I sponged her stings. She had some in her hair and some on the left side of her face, by the corner of her eye and corner of her mouth and on the hinge of her jaw. I could not help thinking that she’d look determined now.

  ‘On my throat,’ she said. There were five there. She dragged in her breath, sniffing vinegar. Then she stood up and peeled off her trousers. They’d stung her through the cloth. There were little blood-red marks on the inside of her thigh. Rage made a thump in my skull. I did not think she’d let me sponge her there, but she sat down and closed her eyes and made no protest as I wiped her skin.

  ‘You’d better go to bed, Kate. I’ll make a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘You are not. I hope you’re not allergic. Are you going to pass out?’

  ‘I’m all right.’ She opened her eyes. ‘That vinegar’s no good.’ She doesn’t believe in antidotes but in like with like, and she ran away and fetched her rattle-box and swallowed ledum; and when she saw me sponging my wrist made me take some too.

  Perhaps it worked. I don’t know. I’ve had no swelling and very little itch but that might be because I’ve got no juices left in me. It certainly didn’t work for Kate, as we found next day. But on that night doctoring me put her in a state of reason. She agreed not to go back down the slope. She agreed to get someone who knew about wasps to destroy the nest. We had a cup of tea and went early to bed. I felt that sponging her was a fatherly act. I felt I could safely love her now.

  When I woke in the night I walked along the passage to her room and opened the door an inch or two. It was black inside, I saw nothing, but heard her scratching in her sleep, and complaining. I wondered if a bag of ice cubes would help; and knew that if I woke her she’d take my visit for what it was. But in the end I went back to bed. Kitty had told me once, never wake a sleeping child.

  18

  But she’s no child. Oh no. She said to me, ‘I’m not a girl. I’m thirty-one.’ That was just this morning. But let me keep things in their proper place.

  The MAF couldn’t recommend anyone so I rang the Lomax and asked for a name, and gave it unsuspecting to Kate. And now we’ve got a fellow called Shane Worth in the house. Shane! That was a movie. How can you name someone after a movie?

  He came on the first of the month, he’s our April Fool’s Day joke. And when he’d dressed himself in yellow gumboots, two thick jerseys, industrial gloves, and draped a yard of cheese cloth over his cowboy hat and had Kate tuck the ends inside his jersey, he looked as if he should have been blundering on a stage as Caliban. He was armed with a plastic rubbish sack and a spade and a bottle of diesel. Carbaryl, he said, was worse than useless. ‘They eat it for pudding.’

  He was no better at keeping his feet than Kate. He went down the slope like a wool bale and I heard wires twang and posts creak. ‘I think I’ve bust your fence, mate.’

  Kate answered for me, ‘Never mind.’ It’s not her fence! I watched from the sundeck, with the room darkened behind, and she, with brand-new torch, directed him from down ‘near the action’, holding one of the poles in her arm. Shane – I suppose I’ll have to get used to the name – found the hole and rammed the bottle in and left it draining. He collected the clippers from the fence and heaved the packet of Carbaryl into the river.

  ‘Hey,’ I cried, ‘you’ll poison the fish.’

  ‘Sorry, mate. Never thought of that.’

  He’s sub-normal. He can’t think. He simply does the thing under his nose and checks up later that it’s all OK. I’m surprised to hear him speaking sentences. And surprised – I’m disbelieving – to hear him say he had three years at secondary school. He says ‘yous fellers’; he says ‘anythink’; he says ‘I rung him up’; but Kate declares he’s only putting me on, whatever that means.

  They waited under the sundeck for the wasps to die. He told her about himself: how he’d had a PEP job clearing old man’s beard from the hills around town and along the river. He dealt with any wasp nests they found, and got the idea of doing it for a living. There was no living in it, he charged thirty dollars a nest and was lucky to get one a week. In his spare time – plenty of that – he helped collect old clothes and furniture for the Unemployed Workers Union.

  Kate was stirred by it. A hard luck story, true hard luck, with no self pity. I felt her emotion rolling up, and knew how it would be. Clumsiness, simplicity, with social responsibility thrown in. He’s made for her. I turned on the lamp by the door and looked over the rail and saw them striped with light, she still hugging one pole and he sitting with thighs wrapped round the other. It rose like a monstrous phallus between his legs. Yes, I knew. But I simplify, and over-state. I’m off balance a little, I’m over-heated. Volatile, that’s my state, and crude fancies rise from me like vapour. I’ll delete that phallus, it’s for show; and declare nothing carnal was in their meeting.

  All the same, I knew how it would be.

  He dug out the nest and brought the sack into the kitchen for me to see. There was the city, geometrical, amazing, with dead warriors lying in the dirt. Just for a moment I was with them, I was murdered; then looked at Kate and saw what they’d done to her. Her face was huge on one side: mouth swollen as a plum and with a clenched fist in her jaw. One eye peered from a porker-slit and even her nose was lopsided.

  ‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.

  ‘Take them home and burn them. I hate the buggers.’ He said there’d be strays around the hole for a day or two but the smell of diesel would drive them away. He stripped off his two jerseys, and took his gloves off to pocket my cheque. ‘Cash mate, or I’ll lose my benefit.’ Kate gave a painful laugh. She offered him a cup of tea, but he shook his head and sa
id he wouldn’t say no to a beer, he got so bloody hot in those jerseys. So they sat at the table drinking my beer, which Kate found hard with her swollen mouth. She dribbled down her chin and had to wipe her chest with a tea-towel. Laughing hurt her. Her throat was swollen too. Shane Worth was looking hard, trying to see a pretty girl in there.

  ‘That’s not all,’ she said, and pulled up her skirt and showed her thigh. Not an ounce of modesty in her, but no shame either. It evens out.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. It shocked me too: a great flushed dumpling. When I touched it with my finger – by invitation – I expected to find it hot, but no, it was cold. There’s a lardy cumulus under the skin. Shane Worth touched it too. ‘Jeez lady, you should see a doctor.’

  Kate laughed. She’d had a triumph. She told him she was treating it herself, and dropped the front of her skirt and swallowed more beer. She asked him if he knew about homoeopathic medicine.

  ‘Come again.’ (I understand putting on now. He was putting her on.) He took a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, with black lenses the size of a penny and wire rims. They made him look round-eyed, comical, empty-headed, which he intended; and would have made a different sort of person sinister. He’s a big lumping boy – yes, twenty-two – a heavy-built, hairy, gap-toothed fellow, with elf-locks round his head, but thin on top. There’s a fuzz of black fur on his scalp. He grins a lot. Yeah, he says, and Jeez, all the time, and Gunna crash, eh mate? That to me, when I went to bed. I took myself out of their way. Kate’s eye leaked tears constantly. They ran down the smooth depression between her cheek and nose and she wiped them away with the heel of her palm. She was definitely not at her best. But all the same carnality got in. I saw it in a kind of calculation in their look. I went to bed. I knew how it would be.