Wright Left

by Peter Marks

  According to Wright’s quaint pharmaceutical system, had there been any more orphans in the box then they’d have been named as follows: a third would have been Whisky, a fourth Nicotine and a fifth kitten Dope (and any more.....Drowned).

  The remarkable result of his perverse humour was just how accurate Wright had been. Both cats had indeed grown to mimic its own chemical title as if Wright had tempted fate. And won! Now both cats were walking doses of either drug for, ultimately, each had grown to substantiate the prophecy.

  Coke was forever on the move. Serepax was forever on the couch. While Cocaine was boisterous, her brother was just ballast, eighty tons of ponderous cat who was bigger than his sister (bigger than Ayres Rock almost....and as prone to movement) but decidedly less violent.

  Serepax was an obsessively leisurely ginger tom, an orange and white portrait in incredibly still life (..unless bribed. Unless offered the inducement of a lorry load of Whiskas then light moved slower than Serepax).

  A strident pacifist, he was a tank of a cat who shared Wright’s basic philosophy of life. If you couldn’t cope; sleep. He was large and friendly and ate buses for breakfast.

  Cocaine, in stark contrast, was all energy.

  She was agile and small, more compact in fact than most of the food she preferred for, while only half their size, she considered possum the ultimate delicacy and hunted them tirelessly. Coke wasn’t dismayed or cowered by the size of her prey (or the praying of her prey as she was about to vivisect them) catching them between scalpel claws and vice jaws before swiftly dissecting the them with all the finesse of an axe murderer (and about as neatly).

  The little buggar was sleek and silent, and sneaky and forever on the move in search of a bigger prize and a better hunt and would’ve have attacked elephants with-out batting an eyelid had there been any straying in the backyard (which there weren’t..... which was lucky for the flower beds).

  Basically black, her body was thin; the shape of an anorexic rat (even though she feasted nightly on whole tribes of marsupials that were too slow to escape her abattoir attentions). She was as ruthless as a tiger and as clinical as a shark, a cat who was more interested in ripping the shit out of the slow rather than actually ingesting them. Coke was more murderer than masticator. She could achieve such carnage because she was quick, very quick. And especially fast when pursued by an irate human.

  The little shit could outrun a MX missile whenever she was chased by an angry Wright after he’d found possum on the menu. Or smeared across the floor. Or hidden behind the toilet door - legs here, a paw there, pieces of possum everywhere.

  A Cocaine catastrophe. The cat was thoroughly cannibal.

  Scattered amongst the jet black fur, in no distinct pattern but mainly about her paws and ears, splashes of white spotted messily appearing as spent paint haphazardly daubed upon the midnight coat in perfect camouflage for such habitual night stalking.

  On her face, across an ever injured nose, a dark patch birthmark adhered to the nasal pink skin in a distinct personal signature across the puny nose which was always injured from her constant altercations with the dog next door.

  From her meetings with Doom.

  The two of them were always disagreeing about something. Last week it was something about the socioeconomic implications of territory which started the dispute and ended in the best fight since Jenny had accused Wright of stealing her sister’s virginity. The dog retired in the ninth round. Cocaine, wounded but unbowed, gloated amongst the pot plants on the front porch for days.

  ________________

  He wrested himself from the kitchen floor screaming. ‘Lassie, I’ll murder you one of these days!’ He yelled at the cat who was still wildly grinning at him from behind the kitchen door (if you don’t kill me first he thought silently) then stumbled toward the window. Meanwhile, outside his stagger it had begun to rain again.

  In the sky beyond the transparent pane, clouds the size of a nuclear detonation had rolled in to extinguish the day and dampen the spirits. He stood there listening to the gentle splash of rain on glass, then moved carefully through the kitchen keeping a vigilant eye on the lino ahead, constantly checking that no stray cat lurked out of sight ready to interrupt his gait or send him horizontal. Yet again.

  Outside the rain turned very wet.

  ________________

  Next door, the Donopolis’s (Wright’s neighbours’ and Doom’s owners) went inside the salad bowls awash, the steaks drowned, the barbecue ruined.

  Soaked, they left Doom by the steaming barbecue to face the thunder for this demented dog wasn’t afraid of the celestial cymbals and stood his ground barking at the sodden heavens trying to chase the clouds away (Doom was as stupid as he was vicious).

  Only one thing scared Doom. Wright’s cat frightened the shit out him.

  ________________

  As if crossing a mine field, Wright walked carefully across the kitchen. Lassie, meanwhile, wandered into the lounge room to sit enveloped in the voluminous crimson drapes, gazing out at the torrent falling from the sky and was enjoying the peaceful solitude busily reciting poetry when Wright entered the lounge.

  He interrupted her mid verse so she turned to watch his entrance, almost applauding when the dozy fucker located the light switch with-out the aid of his braille head. Dopey prick she thought sitting transfixed on the wide wooden ledge that ran beneath the vast bay windows.

  With the loony finally seated on the couch, Lassie went back to Wordsworth comfortable as a babe on a nipple meowing rhyme and verse beside the high glass walls that overlooked the expansive back-yard which, in the afternoon drizzle, was a soft green pasture filled with trees and shrubs and flowers.

  But was mostly weeds.

  In the far corner of the garden, used as bunker whenever Wright was involved in hostilities with Doom, an old shed listed to port.

  Precariously attached to the garage, it was constructed of ancient, pitted sheets of corrugated iron and rust decorated its every aging angle.

  The door, once red, was now missing, revealing a shed full of garbage the garbage men deemed unsuitable for collection. (These days even garbo’s were fussy. They called Wright’s collection ‘Wrongful Refuse’ and refused to collect it. Wright said this was Garbage. ‘Rubbish’ said the garbo’s who wouldn’t set foot inside the collapsing hutch so forced it to swallow more and more junk until Wright could organise an end to the Garbo’s black ban - before the garbage organized Wright the black plague).

  Erected by the previous owner’s of the house, the shed was a lasting memorial to architectural incompetence.

  Today, it appeared as a crippled Noah-ones Ark in the flooded yard.

  Chapter Eighteen

  BLIND ALLEY

  NATHAN HEARD A LOUD CRASH. It was chairs and crockery colliding with the laminate floor.

  ‘Christ Ali, when are you going to buy some eyes? If this goes on much longer we won’t have any furniture left,’ Wright advised, hovering over the stove, stirring the stew he was ill-advisedly considering for dinner. Alison just laughed and continued to assist various perishables to the magnet floor.

  Alison was pissed.

  She was nineteen, on holidays and on heat. Sans stilettos, Ali stood five foot four; with stilettos she stood about as upright as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Sorta askew. She was thin; brittle almost, with an elfin face and small dimples that appeared as deep valleys whenever she smiled.

  Ali kept wrecking the kitchen deaf to Nathan’s admonishment, temporarily immune to his humour.

  Deaf, not dumb, she was blind as a bat.

  ________________

  Blind as a cricket bat actually. She had been since birth when it was discovered that her frail mother had passed on some genetic defect to the small bundle cradled in her arms and thus bequeathing a lifetime of darkness to the small pink person wailing, suckling. A small pink baby her mother called perfect, her father called almost perfect, and Nathan, not being fam
ily, called defective.

  But mostly, being the sensitive soul he wasn’t, he called her Blind Alley.

  ________________

  ‘....you’re blind,’ Nathan said, the observation a flash of genius which Ali seemed not to notice for she was too busy demolishing, too busy feeling her way into the kitchen feeling fabulous. Ali was under the influence. And under the weather and almost under a tram on her way home such was the grip of the grog. She’d been at the pub since eleven that morning making advances to a boy she’d met two weeks ago at a party Nathan had led her to.

  She’d drunk gin and tonics until she was drunk and could drink them no-more. (Basically because she could no longer pronounce the mix so had been forced to change her order to something monosyllabic; and vaguely comprehensible. Had, in consequence, ordered beer for the rest of the afternoon as this was the only drink she could manage, slurring soundly and with tongue misbehaving, to make the bartender understand).

  When Alison was drunk, which wasn’t often, but was certainly a sight, she’d bump and laugh and collide her way about the house wreaking havoc as she went.

  For this reason the household did it’s best to keep her sober. But today she’d escaped.

  Early that morning, well before any-one else was awake or even dreaming of arising, she’d slipped quietly away on two cute legs varnished in sheer pink. She’d looked alluring yet sweetly innocent in a pale blue shirt and tight denim skirt that neatly packaged her to sneak silently out the back door.

  ________________

  Alison was Fionna’s sister and Fionna should have known something was up when Ali had asked her to lay out a suitably reasonable combination of clothing the night before. Ali, blind, was also blind to colour or what colour was good for she had no use for the concept. But she did know that others around her reacted to the theory in quite astounding ways. Sometimes they whispered, sometimes they begged her to go and change, the more compassionate took her shopping.

  Nathan on the other hand usually laughed hysterically and recommended nudity as the only solution.

  ________________

  With a crimson silk scarf flapping gently in the quiet breeze, she’d crept away. She wore no make up but her hair was carefully combed and glistened in the early light. Lurking in the bushes of the front yard her boyfriend waited. The two of them met, exchanged embarrassed hello’s then disappeared into the still morning.

  He was quite taken with how pretty she looked.

  Personally, Ali didn’t give a shit what he looked like.

  ________________

  When it was up to Ali to dress unassisted, she didn’t exactly end up looking like a fashion plate (looked more of like a dog’s dinner actually). This was not her fault, obviously it’s rather difficult to co-ordinate clothing of every colour and hue when one’s pupil palate is so critically limited.

  As far as Ali was concerned everything she dressed in always matched perfectly. Everything was sorta’ black.

  Unfortunately this wasn’t how the sighted saw it. They saw combinations of colour they only recognised from the chunky chucked after effects of a bad curry.

  Fionna had tried to remedy Ali’s fashion impediment one day several years ago when she’d scrambled through every drawer and wardrobe to toss out every piece of Ali’s clothing and replaced the entire technicolour melange with a less risky wardrobe. All black so Ali could see exactly what she was wearing.

  It didn’t work. People kept asking Ali who died so the ploy was exposed and it was back to basics. Basically costumes of colliding colours.

  Vanity was not a vice Ali embraced.

  In this she was unique for she was the only female Wright knew not afflicted by the mirror grip.

  ________________

  Ali arrived home late that afternoon smelling like a still; moving. And crashing and colliding. She was visiting from Queensland for a few weeks and Wright was having the time of his life inventing ways to insult and harass this sightless sister.

  Surprisingly, she didn’t seem to mind his ill begotten humour. She thought he was great. Actually thought Wright was good value, refreshing in fact, fun because normally every-one treated her like porcelain, as an object too fragile for laughter.

  Or alcohol.

  ________________

  ‘You’re blind..’ he reiterated, just in case deafness had joined darkness in her repertoire. Alison gazed at him from deceased sockets. ‘I know,’ she giggled, slurring mildly, adjusting the hem of a dress that had decided to commune with her crutch.

  ‘... drunk,’ Nathan finished, ‘you really take it literally don’t you? You should be ashamed of yourself ...wait until I tell big sister about your escapades,’ Wright joked, sniffing the hot wafts of curry vapour rising from the steel pot bubbling energetically on the stove. Wright’s nose, dallying above the curry lava, turned red. While his stomach just turned.

  Alison kept giggling.

  She asked Nathan if he’d seen her cane.

  ‘No,’ he lied, removing the collapsed white rod from the yellow jelly mire of curry, then, wiping it, handed her eyes back to her.

  ‘Nathan..’ she drawled, pissed and proud of it, ‘what have you been doing to Radar?’ she asked, a slim nose attached to the white rod. (Alison called her cane Radar because Nathan called her cane a stick. Which it wasn’t being her eyes).

  ‘I varnished it,’ he sniffed.

  ‘Vandal!’ She snorted and made a wild lunge at Wright with her collapsible sabre. Wright calmly parried her thrust, fending her off with a long wooden soup spoon. Then, deftly, like a child avoiding a hypodermic, stepped aside and started laughing loudly when, in missing him, she’d plunged her white rapier into the triple layer chocolate cake that was sitting fat and delicious on the bench by the stove.

  ‘Now you’ve done it Ali. That was Jenny’s cake. She’s huffed and puffed and complained all afternoon to bake that..’ Nathan bent to the oven, ‘I think you should suicide, here, shove your head in the here and I won’t dob on you,’ he said opening it,’ I don’t dob on the dead,’ he explained.

  Or the blind he thought.

  Ali removed her weapon. ‘Why?’ she queried, ‘the oven’s electric and I’m not Jewish,’ she laughed, wiping the end of her weapon on Wright’s favourite jumper that was draped on the chair in front of her. Wright was too busy stirring to notice the vandalism. She asked him to hand her a wine. Chef Wright grunted, left the boiling mire, went to the fridge and did as he was asked, then, one guiding hand on her shoulder, he pointed her in the direction of the lounge. Sent her contentedly tapping her way out of the kitchen.

  Citizen Cane (Wright’s alternate nick name for her) greedily deep throated Radar as she went wondering what Jenny’s cake tasted like.

  Her taste buds screamed. It wasn’t the cake but the combination that was the cause. Wright’s cooking was horrid. Her mouth assaulted with chocolate curry cake she recoiled, tried to choke back the nausea. Lucky I’m pissed she thought, deciding to apologise first to Jenny then to her taste buds when she finally sobered up. Next week sometime she smiled, fully enjoying the current grip of the grape.

  Nathan, still in the kitchen and ignoring Ali’s desperate agonised screams, sang along with the radio while leisurely clearing up after Cyclone Cane. He sang a line, picked up a chair, grunted a line when the words escaped him, picked up the salt, whistled the next few bars, grabbed the pepper.

  At last, he’d managed to clear the kitchen floor of her passing pissed parade and rearranging the table setting, he swept the broken scatterings of crockery that were the only tiny reminders of Ali’s visit into a corner of the pantry. Out of sight, out of mind (and Nathan’s idea of clean).

  He looked at the cake. Oh God, it was damaged beyond repair. Not even superglue would fix this one and Nathan felt a little sorry for it. Then felt really sorry for himself knowing with experienced certainty that he’d be blamed for the damage done.

  So he fled the sc
ene immediately scarpering to his room where he locked the door and made sure the wardrobe door was open and ready for his probable urgent entrance.

  ________________

  Hidden behind the fridge, safe from Cyclone Ali and housemaid Wright, twenty stone of furry fat sat purring and preening. Serepax licked its whiskered lips and also thought that Nathan would get the blame so decided the cake was fair game and that he was hungry. So he ate half of it.

  But he wasn’t done yet. Serepax wasn’t even minimally full yet so he clambered onto the now cold stove and started on the curry. Had a feast.

  And then food poisoning.

  Two hours later, poor old Serepax was spitting sticky hunks of detoured dinner onto the kitchen floor; a greedy cat who paid dearly for having supplemented the cake with the curry discovering, via vomit, that Wright made a ferocious curry and a dangerous chef.

  ________________

  Alison was draped leisurely across the couch entertaining her guest in the lounge. Her guest was her boyfriend and he was very ugly. Every-one told her so.

  ‘So he’s the perfect boyfriend for the blind,’ she’d tell them, telling them to keep their sight to themselves for she liked Paul. Loved him even maybe. She had felt his face once, touched the craters and wrinkles and scars and enjoyed the rich texture so ended up dating the dark side of the moon.

  Paul was slumped in the chair under one of the large bay windows eating his way through his fifth bowl of Twisties. The sun tumbled through the room, sweeping brightly over the man eater as he chewed slowly, munching contentedly, savouring each mouthful, watching the television.