by Toni Jordan
I walk down the drive. Everything is deserted, the house locked up, the windows tiny and dirty. The bars on them are so thick; I had never noticed. It was dark inside the house, I realise now. We always had the lights on even in the middle of the day. The paint is peeling. There are spiders’ webs under the eaves and in the back corner the guttering has come away from the house. There is a dull stain where water from the roof has run down the timber.
Down the slope to the backyard I see the sheds half falling down. It looks like a tip and everywhere is the sweet decaying smell of rotten apples.
It is just two o’clock. I take the key from the small box hidden at the base of the third tree. The cellar door at the back of the house creaks as I pull it open. It is dark inside and dusty, but I find my way along the passage past my father’s office. I touch the doorknob but know I could not bear to go inside, so instead I go up through the trapdoor. The curtains are all drawn and flecks of dust float through the air in the chinks of sunlight. These rooms are where I was born and raised and learned my craft. This is where all my memories live. I want to touch every surface, pick up every object and hold it in my hand. Each vase and trinket and cushion.
I think of the smallest things: the Chokitos that Uncle Syd would bring home for me when I was small. The way Ava would make my salad with mayonnaise instead of the vinaigrette everyone else preferred. Even Greta. Now I can only think of the games we played with our dolls, the way we would make cubbies by throwing a sheet over the dining chairs. I would climb the trees in the backyard with Anders and Beau and we would race to see who could reach the highest. The memories of Julius and Sam and Ruby and my father are more intense. I know that if I begin to think of them I will never stop. I will stand forever right here in the hall, covered in dust, unable to move.
And it is not just this house, and it is not just these people. I have suspected for some time and now it is certain: we are like the Tasmanian tiger itself. We are extinct. Those grand days of my father’s are gone. Con artists are no longer glamorous and persuasive, with charming personalities and wits like lightning, travelling the world, courting trust. We were once beautiful, gracious. We made castles in the air, using nothing but our imaginations. Now we have been succeeded by spotty teenagers and organised crime lackeys, hacking or stealing identities or sending emails so unbelievable that it is only by dint of sheer volume that anyone is taken in at all. There is surely no skill in it. It is right that we should fade away. People will always strive to give away their money but the world has no room for us anymore.
All at once I see in a darkened corner my father’s favourite chair. There is a shadow in it. Someone is sitting there. My knees almost fail beneath me: it is like the ghost of my father is here, watching me. I blink and take a step closer. It is not my father. It is Daniel.
My first thought when I see him is to run, like I did before. The front doors are locked from the outside but I could make it back down the trapdoor and perhaps through the trees, over the back fence. I am fitter than the last time. Wirier. These clothes are better suited for flight. But my arms feel heavy and my eyes feel wet and I just cannot run, not anymore. Last time I managed to escape, yet I still dream of him every night so what is the use? I cannot get away. It is pointless to try. I lean back against the wall and shut my eyes.
‘Hello Della,’ he says.
I shake my head. This is just as impossible as if it were my father’s ghost, sitting there talking to me. I was so careful. I was always so careful.
‘How did you find me?’
‘“Hello Daniel”,’ he says. ‘“It’s been too long. What have you been up to, since I locked you in your bedroom and ran out of your house in the middle of the night?”’
His body. Every cell, every hair. If I took half a dozen steps forward and stretched out my arms, I could touch him.
‘I have your shoes in my car around the corner, and your underwear. If you’re in a Cinderella kind of mood.’
He is resting his elbows on the armrests with his fingertips together, relaxed, but then he leans forward. ‘God, you’re so thin. I imagined seeing you a hundred times a day but in my mind you didn’t look like this.’
I look down at my hands, my jeans. Work boots, for heaven’s sake. He is imagining a woman in a green dress with black heels, another person from a long time ago. I sit opposite him, sink into the couch, cover my forehead with my hands.
‘You can’t have this address. No one has ever found us. There’s no way you could have traced anything back here. I don’t understand.’
‘Details, I see. You want to talk about details,’ he says. ‘Fair enough. It was the forms. At the national park. The camping permit. I drove back down there. The rangers were very helpful when I explained who I was and what I wanted. They let me look at their records.’
‘No.’ I swallow, blink my eyes, try to stop shaking. ‘I remember signing those forms. I used fake details. That’s not a mistake I would make.’
‘You didn’t make a mistake. You used fake details all right,’ he says. ‘But Timmy didn’t.’
‘Timothy.’
‘He used his real name, his real address. I went to his house. We had a long talk. Narrowly escaped buying a watch. Greta says hi, by the way, and if she ever sees you again she’s going to make you sorry you were ever born. That’s her name, isn’t it? Your cousin. Greta, not Glenda.’
My neck feels weak. I’m not sure it will continue to support my head. Timothy. I can almost see him now, in the cramped ranger’s office, scribbling his real details on that form in regulation block letters, tongue between his teeth. All my effort, all my hard work. All unravelled by Timothy.
‘No sign of Julius, but I expect he had his laptop set up somewhere else. Flat out, probably.’ Daniel crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. He has won. I have lost. ‘If he’s ever interested in becoming a scientist, the Zoology Department would be happy to have him. You tell him that.’
‘You’ll have to tell him yourself.’ I pull the envelope out of my back pocket, smooth it between my fingers. ‘Here. This is what you want. Take it.’
I reach out one arm and hand it to him. He shakes it, holds it to his ear like it might explode then he rips one end off the envelope and tips it upside down. Out tumbles a wave of confetti: the cheque is shredded into tiny pieces of paper as small as my fingers could tear. They drift onto his lap and the chair and the floor and make a white mosaic against the rug.
‘That’s not what I want.’ He looks up. ‘That’s not why I tracked you down.’
‘I didn’t cash it.’
‘And I didn’t cancel it,’ he says. ‘So why all the little pieces?’
I pull at the flannel of my sleeve, try to smile. ‘I’ve been on a farm. Wearing these. I thought I might weaken and make an emergency visit to a day spa or a dress shop. Call it insurance against future bad judgment.’
He scoops some of the little cheque pieces up in one hand and sprinkles them to the other. ‘The whole point of this operation was to get this cheque, wasn’t it? And now you don’t want it?’
My legs won’t be still now so I stand and walk over to the fireplace. The mantel is dusty. I trace my fingers along it.
‘I thought you were fair game,’ I say. ‘I didn’t realise you were pretending as well.’
He laughs, then. ‘I’m glad I gave you that impression. That room was no end of trouble to set up.’
His words seem to drift on the still air of the room, floating like the dust motes. It takes a while for them to reach my consciousness. ‘Set up? What do you mean “set up”?’
‘You think you’re the only one who can pretend? It’s some bylaw? Della Gilmore is allowed to make things up, but the rest of us have to tell the truth?’ He is sitting there in my father’s chair like he has been busting to tell me all this. Like it’s the greatest joke ever and he can barely keep from laughing. He’s grinning now, like a kid, like a child who’s jumped out from behind a door and yelled bo
o.
‘You should have seen your face when I got back to the diningroom.’
Set up. ‘How did you know I’d go up there?’
‘I didn’t. But I thought if I gave you the opportunity, you wouldn’t be able to resist having a look around. You got me out of the way just before I disappeared on a long phone call.’
I shut my eyes, summon my memories, everything he said early that morning, everything I did. ‘But what about the tooth? You said I made a mistake. That I should have picked up the tooth, the one I found in the park, wearing gloves. To preserve the DNA. How did you know about that?’
‘I saw it on CSI.’ He’s still smiling. Dimples I had never noticed before appear in his cheeks. He stands, walks over to me near the fireplace and leans on it with one elbow. Mirror behaviour, like I was the mark and he was the artist. ‘Don’t think it was easy. I had to work fast. Those books were hell to round up in one day. Five or six separate shipments, by taxi from every store I could get on the phone. There was dust everywhere. The cleaners only left ten minutes before you arrived.’
I shake my head. ‘No. You went to Harvard. I saw your degrees.’
‘That was the easiest bit. I hired a freelance designer, but in retrospect I could have managed myself. Next time, maybe.’
I close my mouth, shake my head. I feel like my father loading shovels onto a truck.
‘I had to rent that copy of Origin of Species. It was exorbitant, let me tell you. From friends of the family, but that didn’t help. I had to wear white gloves the whole time and sign away my first born if it was damaged. For a while I didn’t think they’d take the risk.’
I took a deep breath. ‘But you convinced them.’
‘Ah. Yes. You see, I had an argument no one can resist. I told them it was an affair of the heart.’
The single bed in my attic room is small for two people. Often Daniel’s feet hang over the end and once I hit my head on the wall. We make love slowly, languid but relentless, without the desperate urgency of the first time. Like we have time for all things now. After a while, we sneak down to the kitchen and find the preserves in the pantry, big jars of peaches and apricots laid down by Ruby and Ava. I open one; the lid gives way with squelch. We sit on the kitchen bench, me in my dressing gown, him in his shirt and undies. We eat peach halves with our fingers and drip the juices in the sink. I tell him stories about the house, show him this and that. If I tell him, there will be someone else who remembers it. Even when the house is gone. Mostly I talk and he listens, but there is still one thing I need to know.
‘Did you really see a Tasmanian tiger when you were a boy?’
He kisses the palm of my hand. ‘I thought you must have known about that.’
‘Well did you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Tell me what happened,’ I say. ‘Tell me the truth.’
He talks for a long time, as if to show me he has nothing left to hide. After a while the sun goes down and I light a dozen candles in holders and we move to the sittingroom floor so the light can’t be seen from outside. I don’t interrupt.
He holds my hand and tells me a story about a little boy whose classmates called him Dunny, who was the last picked in every team. A boy who wheezed if he walked too quickly and carried his grey inhaler in the top pocket of his shirt always, sucking on it when he was anxious or shy like a prescription thumb-replacement.
By day he was quiet, evasive at school or tucked in a corner of his room alone, reading or playing with his Action Man toys. After dark he couldn’t step on the floor of his room. He moved to the bed by a complicated process of leaps from the hallway to a chair, then to a pile of cushions positioned carefully on the floor so the monsters underneath couldn’t grab his ankles. He dreamed of falling, drowning, being eaten by crocodiles, devoured by monsters. He woke with hair sweat-damp, heart hot and racing.
Then one day his father looked up from his desk and saw his son before him—wan, craven, pudgy—and knew action was required. Camping, Daniel told me, was like a secret tonic for manhood brewed by generations of Metcalfs. Confronting the dark built courage; erecting a tent, dexterity with mallet and peg; walking through the bush, muscles that would eventually replace the baby fat that clung so stubbornly.
The weekend Arnold Metcalf chose was cold; winter had come early to Wilsons Promontory. When they reached the campsite, scarcely fifty metres from the car, they found a few patches of tired earth separated by struggling grass and a prison-grey toilet block.
Arnold paused. No, he said. Trimmed grass? Bloody toilet block? He slipped his thumbs under the straps of his pack and kept walking. On to the far track, deeper into the forest, past the signs that said No camping beyond this sign and Camp only in designated bays.
Eventually Arnold chose to camp in a small damp clearing barely large enough for a tent, a few metres off a rough track. The ground was thick with dead leaves and shrubs, overhung with shadows. Danny watched his father put up the tent and imagined a carpet of black spiders waiting to jump on his defenceless ankles.
It was very late. Danny should still have been snuggled up asleep in his Tom and Jerry pyjamas, exhausted from the long walk and intense sulking. It was freezing outside. Dark. Put it out of your mind, he thought. Go back to sleep. If only he hadn’t drunk that can of warm lemonade with the cold baked beans they had had for dinner.
The pressure from Danny’s bladder was becoming extreme. Arnold was deep asleep. A long, low whistle came from one nostril, and a small slurp. Danny was frightened to wake his father now. There was no option. He would have to go outside under a tree. In the dark.
Danny edged out of his sleeping bag, slipped on his sandshoes and crawled to the door of the tent. Lifted the flap and peered outside. Nothing. The moon was deep beneath the clouds and the trees he had seen all afternoon had lost their shape in the inky black—a spreading dark that could conceal anything. An escaped criminal, perhaps. Or a dingo. If he were a dingo, under a tree is exactly the spot he’d wait for a small unsuspecting boy to take out his penis at dingo-jaw height. He crawled back and sat on the sleeping bag again. He lay down, shut his eyes. Then in a blind surge, he bolted for the tent flap and lurched into the blackness on hands and knees. The dark was complete and threatening. The night pressed in on him, hiding things.
He was uncertain of his direction; he inched forward with sounds around him on all sides. A dank smell from the trees, a rustling of leaves. Eventually he sensed space around him, enough to stand, and there he stopped, pulled down his pyjama pants a little and aimed into the blackness. The relief he felt almost weakened his knees. As if in reward for his courage, the clouds parted the instant he finished, sending a shaft of light down on the track just as Danny straightened his pants and turned to go.
Then he heard a noise almost directly behind him in the bush. A snuffling sound, something disturbing the fallen leaves and scrub. Not a little noise, like a snake or a spider or a mouse. A big noise.
Danny froze. It was a dragon, the last one in existence, breathing fire, waiting to eat him alive. It was a wild pig, tusks dripping blood. An axe murderer, hockey-masked and chuckling, coming to separate his body from his head.
Danny’s heart beat faster and his brain seemed to function a long way above his body and screamed to him to run, shrieking, as quickly as he could back to the tent. But he didn’t. Against all his better judgment, all his character, all his experience, Danny slowly turned his head and looked.
In the dark, through the bush, he could see a pair of luminous eyes glowing. Satanic eyes, staring straight at him. He sank to his knees and as he cowered there, frozen, out of the bush walked a monster. It might have been a wild dog, but it wasn’t. It might have been a giant wolf but it wasn’t that either. It was like no animal Danny had ever seen or ever imagined. Longer nose-to-tail than Danny was tall. Heavy, with a head disproportionally huge; a sense of bulk looming much, much too close. Strong crouching limbs that seemed tensed to spring. The stripes on its
hindquarters warning, like a hornet or a venomous snake. It hissed, a kind of low growling menace. Its eyes, pale and malevolent, bored straight into Danny’s.
They stood and stared at each other, Danny and the monster. Neither so much as blinking. For a minimum of two minutes and a maximum of a lifetime, Danny was rooted to the spot. Eyes bugged, perspiration dribbling down his back. Two minutes. All the nights he’d been frightened, all the times he’d begged please, Daddy, let me sleep with the light on. And now, he was standing, body paralysed, mind utterly vacant, in front of a monster.
They might have stood there all night, staring at each other, but at a sound—a branch falling, a possum scrabbling up a tree—the monster turned its head. It opened its mouth impossibly wide as if its jaws were unhinged, as if it was about to pounce and tear out Danny’s throat. Then it yawned and stretched its stiff tail. A dirty musk smell hit Danny like a fist to the bridge of the nose, and he vomited on the path. When Daniel looked up, the monster was gone.
‘You don’t seem much like a whiney brat now,’ I say. The candles have burned low. I have pulled a throw rug from the couch and wrapped it around us. ‘A bit, but not a lot.’
‘Somehow my walnut-sized brain figured that seeing a monster was the worst thing that could ever happen to me,’ he says. ‘Somehow from that moment I knew I could get through anything.’
I had thought the whole idea of Tasmanian tigers was too impossible to believe. And yet he did believe it. It was me he didn’t believe. ‘Ruby was right,’ I say.
‘Ruby was right about what?’
‘Why didn’t you ask, “Who’s Ruby?”’
‘Ruby and I are old friends. I should phone her, actually. I promised I’d let her know how things went,’ he says. ‘Don’t look so surprised Della. Once I had this address it was easy to track the owner of the house, find your dad in prison, find Ruby. How else did I know you’d be here today?’