“What,” she whispered seductively, “do you want, eh, little Ferkis? Tell Mary what’s on your mind.”
Ferkis’ heart was galumphing along at so cruel a pace that his ears began to ring like telephones.
“Aaaaah!”
As though of its own accord, one of his large-knuckled, black-nailed hands rose and floated out, ostensibly to point at the jar. Apparently he was considering explaining something but, as luck would have it, the hand rose no further than her breast and hung, pointing like a beagle at that summery curve. He could raise it no further. His Adam’s apple walloped up and down frantically and he feared he would black out.
It was nothing, however, compared to what happened to his body a moment later when Mary stepped forward, allowing his finger to contact the very object of its attention. And she didn’t stop. She took a second step. And a third. By which time even Ferkis’ hormone-riddled mind realised that evasive action might be called for. Too late. He was pinned to the door by the great bulk of her, his finger still poking rather foolishly against her breast.
The perfume of her, musky and rich, made him giddy beyond belief but, such was the pressure of her belly and breasts against him, he could not have fallen even if he’d lost consciousness altogether.
“Take it off!” she breathed into his face.
Ferkis raised both feet off the floor. Tears welled behind his eyes and fear flooded his entire being. He stammered in confusion.
“Aaahhh?”
She stepped back and thrust the jar out between them.
“The lid. Take it off.”
Wildly, he fumbled and cranked until the goo-encrusted lid came loose.
In a trice, Mary snatched it back and beetled off to the light, leaving Ferkis to slide, at last, onto his bum. He sat, hands pressed to his chest where her sheer magnificent presence had so recently been. And he watched her, framed in the light of the window, appetite incarnate, tilting the glass back, draining it of its juices. As, indeed, he was only too certain she could just as easily do to him. Barely was he launched on that fantasy when she in fact did return to him, lifting him, virtually hurtling him into the air. The jar, she had placed on the bureau, at arm’s reach, with only a little forlorn pile of peach parts left huddled in the bottom.
* * *
“You did, didn’t you! You devious little man! You put some clever bit of sauce in there! To make me forget myself!”
She clamped her mouth to his with such force that he feared he would be swallowed whole. His brain and his groin exploded with peach flavoured lust. He felt that his entire inside was being scoured by that ravenous tongue and that, in a moment, nothing but a husk would remain of his former self.
He tried to squeeze a hand between them to clutch her breast, but to no avail. Determined, however, not to miss his opportunity, he began wriggling his hand into the arm-hole of her dress, wending his way under and around the new-age fibres that supported the amplitude of her bosom. She whirled away, dragging him across the room, his hand hopelessly entangled between the fabric and the rolls of flesh.
Half-way to the window, she reversed direction, slamming into him once again and wrapping him in her arms. The bones in his wrist cried out.
“Aiieee!” he squealed.
“My God!” she moaned directly into his mouth. “It’s incredible how much you want me, Ferkis! You’re an animal!”
She licked him fiercely and wetly across the lips and flung him off a second time. There was a ghastly tearing sound as the front of Mary’s dress fell away. And there it was: the wonderful mysterious garment that housed the amazing globes of her breasts. Mary’s breathing was loud and fast.
Her one hand snaked out to scoop up the peach jar while the other arm curled about Ferkis’ neck. He cringed, aghast at what he’d done, fearful of what might now be done to him.
“Have we got some more, Ferkis? Eh?”
That evening at the dinner table, Ferkis sat hunkered over his meal, his wrist rudely bandaged with a sock and clutched to his chest. He mixed and pushed and stirred at his food until the peas were little more than a green slurry through the mashed potatoes. Mary laughed loudly, dominating the table and virtually bouncing out of her chair with enormous bangs and booms of flatulence. The other boarders and Mrs Calvey finished quickly and removed themselves to the television room.
Ferkis, when they had all gone, flicked his eyes at the ceiling, gave a cock-eyed wink and slipped away to the cellar.
“Early night for me, fellow boarders,” Mary announced at the door to the television room.
In the ensuing days and weeks, love lay on Ferkis like the hand of a circus clown, alternately promising and denying, cajoling and admonishing. The entire shelf of peach preserves was spirited away to sit on the furnace. The boarders sweltered by day and by night as Ferkis surreptitiously cranked up the heat, hoping to spur on the fermentation process.
The poor boy’s nerves became raw and exposed as he time and again sneaked along the hall, jar in hand, to tap at Mary’s door. Always she welcomed him. But never could he coax her to any semblance of submission. Something, he thought, must be wrong with the brew. Or his approach.
Finally, in a state of extreme agitation, he took his fate in his hands and tackled her head on. He strode directly into her room, plonked the obligatory jar of peaches on the bureau and wrapped his arms around her.
“Now yer for it, Mary!” he growled, and heaved with all his might toward the bed.
Mary staggered barely a step before gripping him in return about his middle.
“Ooo hoo hoo!” she squealed and, with a giggle of delight, squeezed. The breath shot straight out of him. He threw back his head and she ploughed her face into his neck, making loud gobbling noises.
Ferkis, even with his jugular exposed and his ribs in danger of collapse, clung desperately to his resolve. He managed to wedge one hand down the back of Mary’s shorts, achieving a beetle-like (yet powerfully intimate) grasp on the cold flesh of her bum.
Mary gasped in surprise and, for the briefest of moments, her grip slackened. In that moment, Ferkis wrapped a leg about one of hers, shoved with all his might and over they went, onto the bed. On that single occasion, the wind and the fight were both temporarily knocked directly out of Mary and she seemed, however briefly, to be at his mercy.
His left hand, however, remained unhappily locked beneath her backside. He struggled to wrench it free but she, reaching for breath, began slowly to roll and he had to drop to his elbow to keep his wrist from breaking.
Then, never mind, he told himself fiercely. Let it break! And, “Now yer really for it, Mary!” he growled lustily. With his free hand, he began an assault on the breastworks of that mighty fortress.
It became, in short, a glorious, rumble-tumble, extended sort of preliminary to romance that left both Ferkis and Mary constantly breathless with anticipatory glee. But, like so many of the glorious things in life, its existence was destined to be brief. For inevitably, the day came when the peaches ran out. The last scant few jars were tracked by Mrs Calvey to their resting place by the furnace and their contents (still non-alcoholic but reduced to a gluey ooze) were destroyed. When they went into the rubbish bin, Ferkis’ confidence went with them.
Dragging himself sadly away from a tongue-lashing by his mother, Ferkis, on that fateful day, took his desolate heart to Mary’s door. She gazed on him forlornly, having listened with all the other boarders to Mrs Calvey’s tirade.
“All gone, Ferkis?” she asked.
He stood with his eyes downcast, noticing for the first time how the flesh of Mary’s toes rose up, swollen and pink, around her nails.
“Yaah,” he whispered. “No more peach whiskey.”
Then he turned, shambling back toward his room at the end of the hall and Mary gently closed her door. It was over.
Love, or something very like it, had come and gone from Mrs Calvey’s boarding house. When Mary moved out a week later (at Mrs Calvey’s whispe
red request) Ferkis waited at the bus-stop to say good-bye. They stood quietly, side by side for only a minute before the bus came. And all that Ferkis learned, he learned in those last few seconds. That was when Mary turned her sad round eyes on him.
“Thanks, Ferkis,” she said. “The fruit was real nice.” She sweetly kissed his cheek and added, “But the real peach was you.”
Rat Dance (first published ‘Australian Short Stories’, No. 34, 1991)
The old lady lived alone for uncounted years before the rat came. Her husband had gone off with, I supposed, a happier woman many years before and she had stayed on in their little house, in that small farming community, souring like fruit beyond its ripening. Perhaps she had nowhere to go. More probably, no one would tolerate her ill-temper for long enough to make travelling away worthwhile.
I lived next door and often spoke to her as she grumbled about in the yard. Sometimes she would summon me to hammer a nail or adjust her T.V. antenna. Once, she got ‘on the turps’ as she called it, and flew around in her house, crashing and howling like a banshee, until I finally went over, for fear she’d hurt herself. She had discovered that her husband, ‘my Jimmy’, in a far-away city with ‘that thieving whore’, had died. A little old man she had cursed avidly, every day, for years, had been carried off by a cancer and she mourned; she mourned. Perhaps she loved him still. Perhaps she simply had no one else to focus her bitterness on. She was truly alone.
We drank together, that night, that hot tropical night; me in my shorts and bare feet, she bulging and bawling out of her old nightie – her ‘cool’ dress that she often wore all day long in the summer. She cried late into the night about the unfairness, the unexpectedness of life.
“A car could run over you in the street,” she moaned. “You could cut yourself on a rusty wire and get the tetanus. You could catch cold and die of pneumonia. A plane could fall out of the sky and squash you.”
Her bones ached, she said, and it was always too hot except when it was too cold. Prices were too high and pensions were too low and nobody cared about old people. They were morbid old songs that were never far from her lips. She was ill and she was frightened and she was alone in a bleak-seeming world.
She passed out in her chair the night of Jimmy’s death, still cursing him, still missing him. I plumped the great bulk of her down on her bed, turned the fan on her softly and didn’t see her again for four days. There was no fun left in her life and she couldn’t remember a fine thing ever happening. She was dying.
All that was before the rat came. It wasn’t an overly large rat, I don’t suppose, and only unusual in that it had developed a taste for living in houses. Most of the other rats lived out in the cane paddocks on the edge of town, half a kilometre away, where there were bugs and vermin enough to keep an entire plague of rats living high off the hog. But this fellow was on the move somewhere. Perhaps he’d had premonition about the fire that would soon be put through those paddocks. Perhaps it was Jimmy, come back to bedevil her. Whatever the reason, he came alone and uninvited.
I knew the rat was around because he came into my house first. A crash in the pantry woke me up one night, in time to see him disappearing through the little vent window. I screened it the next day and set traps, but he never came back. I thought he might have moved to the chook yard, several houses along the road, where pickings would be easier. But no. He turned up at the old lady’s house.
It was a couple of days after his excursion into my pantry that I heard her bashing and pounding the corrugated iron walls of the laundry shed at the back of her dilapidated house. He was in the rafters, only a foot above my height, scurrying amongst the pipes and bits of wood that Jimmy had stored there for safe keeping all those years ago. I took up a broom handle to help her but I couldn’t get at him, I couldn’t harm him and, before long, I couldn’t even see him.
From then on, it was war. He stayed in and around her house, avoiding all the traps and baits that she scattered for him. From time to time I’d hear her let out a whoop and a holler and there’d be great cursings and poundings as he skipped from hiding place to hiding place, taunting her unmercifully. I think she’d have moved out if she’d had the money or someplace, any place, else to go.
Then, late one night, my phone rang and it was the old lady.
“Come right over!” she demanded. “I’ve got him trapped!”
With a sturdy paling from the garden, I marched through the darkened yards and knocked for admittance. The old lady’s eyes were as wide as paint tins, her mouth fixed in a little trembling ‘O!’ and her complexion as pale as old linen. Beneath her torn old nightie, beneath her ponderous bosoms, her heart rattled audibly, tapping out a cracking rhythm.
“In the bedroom!” she croaked. “I’ve trapped him! The window’s closed, the door’s closed! He can’t get out!”
“You saw him go in?”
“Yes, yes, he’s in there all right! Disgusting big hairy black rat! Big as a cat!”
“Right!” I said, hefting the paling and setting my teeth. “Let’s have a look then, shall we?”
We crept up to the door, me in front, she pressed close behind, both our hearts now skipping wildly. We listened. There was no sound.
“We’ll have to open the door quickly and close it behind us,” I whispered over my shoulder. “Don’t want him slipping out on us.”
“No!”
“Right! You ready then?”
“Uh-huh!”
The room had a large, high poster-bed jutting out into its centre. Aside from that, virtually every inch of wall space was hidden behind a welter of vanities, wardrobes and small tables. A maze of gewgaws and gimcrackery. Places to store dusty memories. Where to start looking?
Because it was largest, I looked under the bed. Darkness and strange shapes appeared, but nothing moved. I waved my paling amongst the shadows and the old lady gasped. He was top of the bed, standing on the coverlet, as tense as a dry stick!
“Get him!” she hissed.
“The coverlet . . . ?”
“Never mind it! Just . . . !”
Slowly, so as not to frighten him with his imminent demise, I raised the paling. Here it comes, I thought, steeling myself for the blow. Catch this on your little rat back! But, as suddenly as he’d appeared, he was gone, flitted like a spark, leaving me with an executioner’s grimace sliding off my face and the old lady prodding me in the back.
“Missed him! How could you miss him?” I had never seen her so vehement, so electrified.
“Where’d he go?”
“How should I know?” she wailed. “Over there somewhere! Lord! I can’t sleep another night in this house knowing that creature’s about! Check under there!”
I checked under. And I checked over. And I checked behind. I saw him hunching from cover to cover, just ahead of my paling, his hairless tail like a grey spike out behind him. Once I came eye to eye with him, me on my tip toes and him, sitting up like a squirrel on top of a wardrobe. I swung the paling hard enough to kill a small horse, closing my eyes at the penultimate moment. Behind my eyes, I had a vision of slaughter. The crash resounded and the dust fountained, but he was not there.
The old lady cried, “God in Heaven! You’re bustin’ up me furniture instead o’ the blessed rat! Hit him can’t you?”
“Now take it easy!” I coaxed. “We’ll get him! He’s a crafty little beggar, but he can’t get out!”
I decided then that more drastic action must be taken. The furniture that she’d piled in there when Jimmy left, to help barricade herself against his loss, was too great a hindrance. Together, the old lady and I began dragging the ancient stuff away from the walls, the knickknacks rocking, the spiders scrabbling and vaguely remembered items dropping back into the world after aeons of being lost. Little by little, we reduced the hiding space, until finally we had him. Heaving and perspiring, we stood, facing the last wardrobe.
“We’ve got to get him there!” I whispered. “If he gets out, we’ll be
shifting damn furniture all night! So here’s what we’ll do!”
I reasoned that the rat could only escape at the front or the one clear side. If we barricaded the side, that would leave just the one option – the front – where I and my paling would serve. We picked the top of a large cardboard hatbox for the barricade and manoeuvred the old lady down onto her knees, slowly, quietly, craftily, to hold the item in place. Then I advanced.
On my knees, with perspiration burning my eyes and murder scouring my belly, I hefted the paling. I turned the axe-sharpened end in to the corner where the quarry waited. I calculated how much length would be needed to reach him. I eye-contacted him and stared hypnotically, momentarily as still as he himself. Then, barely perceptibly, I tensed and began to move forward. The rat bolted.
He covered the width of the wardrobe in not more than two strides, hit the cardboard barricade held by the old lady and vaulted it. For the briefest twinkle of time, their eyes must have met, each for the other the closest and most immediately important living thing in all the world. Then, on his little bird-like claws, he scampered up the old lady’s arm, across her shoulder and down her back, lucky only not have been inhaled entirely as he passed her gasping face.
She was on her feet before I could raise an eyebrow. She began to scream: “Aaaaaaahhhhh!”, and to fling herself into the air. The cheeks of her bottom hove into view as she hoiked her nightie up around her waist and her knees pumped up and down in feverish frenzy. A most amazing and trepidatious caper! I froze; the hunt momentarily abandoned, and stared incredulously.
So fantastic a jig, so startling a sight and sound it was that even the rat stopped, in the open, to look back at the old lady, leaping and whooping like a young girl at her first barn dance. More in reflex than in thought, I lunged and cracked him solidly with my paling. He died there, a picture of a large, wildly cavorting, knickerless old lady slipping sadly from the retinas of his eyes.
Connections Page 3