I went and made a cup of tea while I reconsidered the message. By the time I returned I’d resolved not to email Marla anymore, but then I pressed send anyway. What the hell.
Marla used to be my girlfriend. I could hardly believe that my life of mundane deskwork and silent public-transport travelling had been touched by something as uncanny as the presence of Marla. She was funny and kind and interesting. Marla knew stories about explorers who died in horrible and tragic ways on very long treks. Usually they were just half a day from their destination when they were eaten by a dingo in their sleep, or their camel fell down dead and they died of thirst rather than slice open the flesh of their only companion. Marla loved explorers because they dedicated themselves to one thing above all else. I loved Marla just because.
When I told her about the cats she was very understanding. I knew she would be. That’s why after about six weeks of knowing Marla I decided the time was right. We sat on my bed one night, and I started talking. It was probably the best night we spent together. Marla’s hair is dark brown, which matches her eyes, and I remember how much they were shining, her hair and eyes, as the sun went down outside, and we climbed under my blankets with our clothes on.
The next morning Marla woke early.
‘Let’s walk together,’ she said. I didn’t want to walk to the train with her because the presence of the cats put me in a difficult position. It took a lot of focus to ignore them, and I wasn’t sure I could maintain a normal conversation with Marla at the same time. But I said okay. Now that I’d told her the truth it didn’t seem right not to.
‘Just ignore them,’ she whispered, gripping my hand. ‘Focus on me now.’
The sight of the two of us together had whipped the cats into a frenzy. They’d seen Marla before. It hadn’t taken long for them to put things together.
‘Got yourself a girlfriend, I see,’ the black cat had announced. ‘Quite a girlfriend! Enough for two girlfriends!’
Cancerface had loved it. ‘I bet you had a good time with her last night. I heard you … Yeah, outside your window. Oh, oh, Matty, Matty, Matty! Yeah, I’d like to show that bitch! I could really show that bitch!’
I’d never acknowledged them — but the morning I stepped out with Marla it went off the scale.
‘Matty and Fatty!’ the white Persian chanted. ‘Look! Matty and Fatty!’
A variety of cats followed us; some I’d never even met before, regaling me with long stories about what they’d like to do to my girlfriend. I gritted my teeth and picked up our pace.
‘It’s okay,’ Marla said quietly. ‘I’m here and none of it matters.’
She was trying really hard, but I just wanted it to be over. I walked even faster.
Cancerface spotted us about fifty metres from the station.
‘Well, well!’ he shouted. ‘If it isn’t the screamer. In the flesh! And look at that flesh. She’s got a big arse, Matty. Have you got her on a diet? I’d get her on a diet.’
Marla and I kept on. Cancerface trotted by Marla’s feet.
‘I can see up her skirt, Matty. Whoa. That’s quite a bikini line. Christ!’
I could see he was making Marla nervous. She quickened her pace and almost tripped, but caught herself as we reached the station’s steps.
‘Lucky!’ Cancerface called out. ‘If she’d fallen on me I’d be a goner! Big one like that! Whoa, lucky escape, nearly got fell on by a whale! Boom! A big hairy whale!’
I was seething with anger, both at Marla and the cats. She shouldn’t have insisted. Things were just fine before that, just perfect.
On the station platform I stayed quiet. I tried to calm myself down. Just let me stay quiet.
Marla interrupted. ‘Matthew?’
I ignored her. Just let me stay quiet. I needed a few minutes. It would pass.
‘What is it?’ she insisted. ‘What were they saying?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, through gritted teeth.
‘It’s okay, you can tell me. I think we should be open about it. Let’s not let these silly cats come between us.’
That’s when I snapped. The idea that Marla could ever understand!
‘Just stop it! They’re not saying it to you; it’s not about you. This is my thing, okay? They’re my cats.’
‘If they’re saying things about me I have a right to know.’
‘Do you? Do you really?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course! I mean it, if you don’t tell me …’
‘Then what? You’ll leave me?’
She paused and lowered her voice. ‘I’ll have no choice. I just want us to get through this together.’
‘The cats said you’re fat,’ I blurted. ‘They said you’re fat and hairy and they made a whole lot of sexual jokes about what it must be like for us to have sex. That ugly cat, the tabby with cancer that nearly tripped you up? He looked up your skirt too.’
The train arrived then, so I wasn’t sure if she’d heard all of what I’d said. The roar of the train tumbled over my words and her response. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I saw her face contort, horrified and ashamed.
The train stopped at the platform, but we didn’t get on.
‘Is that what you think about me?’
‘No. No, it’s not. It’s just what the cats think.’
She didn’t believe me.
That was the last time we spoke in person. The email I sent today was just one of many I’ve sent Marla over the last few weeks. I’ve explained everything. I told her the truth about the cats, how I don’t really know what they are and I can’t guarantee I’m not crazy or that the things they say aren’t my thoughts after all. Of course I reassured her that I find her unbearably attractive and that I have never thought that she was at all overweight. She really isn’t, or if she is then I haven’t noticed because Marla is truly ideal in every way — with the exception of her sensitivity to the attitudes of the cats. I explained how, given my uncertainty about the cats, I’d tried medication, counselling and owning a dog, but ultimately my only choice was to get used to the cats and to hope that, one day, someone else would get used to them too. I tried to make it sound like a singular adventure. The type explorers committed themselves to and risked their lives for.
Marla has never replied.
I caught the train home today. I braved the walk from the station with typical resolve. I kept my eyes down as if nothing was different.
‘Looking good with that new hair!’
‘Still hasn’t grown back then?’
‘Did you think that fat chick of yours would come back for your new hair? Ha! Not likely! She’s never coming back.’
‘Never coming back, Matty!’
I waited until I was a third of the way down the street, then I broke into a run. They followed me.
‘Never coming back!’
A black cat darted in front of me. My neighbour’s Persian trotted out to meet us. I bolted into a stranger’s yard and did the first thing I could think of. I grabbed the garden hose and I twisted it on as far as I could. The cats were still coming towards me so I turned the hose on them. I sprayed them all then I focused on Cancerface. Got him right in the nose and I saw his eyes roll back in pain as the jet of water crashed through his broken skin straight into his cancer. He coughed water, his head tipped back, choking. Then he fled. All the others ran too. In a rage, I turned on the only cat still nearby. The fluffy white Persian yelped as I whipped the hose in her direction. She twisted and rolled, unable to make sense of the threat. I backed her into a bush, saturating her fur as her body spasmed and her stupid eyes widened in fear. She didn’t even run. Just rolled over and over and over.
I threw down the hose. It convulsed in the grass and the Persian fell still and cowered. As I hurried home the front window of my house reflected my clumsy frame — uneven shoulders and sticking-out ears. Stumbling up to the front door I went for my keys. They weren’t there. I figured I must have dropped them in all the commotion. I had a coating of wet grass al
most up to my knees and I just wanted to get inside and into the shower.
I doubled back and headed across to the neighbour’s yard. No sign of the white Persian, but my keys were there so I ran over, relieved. I bent to collect them. When I straightened up I saw him. Cancerface. He was at the edge of the lawn, his paws unhappily wet, his mouth drawn in a dour expression. I stood my ground.
Cancerface was quiet. Completely silent.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Cancerface just turned and walked away. I went after him.
‘Hey,’ I called. ‘Hey!’
He went on walking.
The cats weren’t talking to me. I guessed they were so angry they didn’t want to know me anymore. I could have been happy about it, but I wasn’t. I ran and caught up to Cancerface and, although he kept on ignoring me, I saw something in his expression.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Cancerface! I’m really sorry.’
He paused. When he spoke his voice was small. ‘We just wanted to protect you, Matty.’
Cancerface must have sensed my doubt. He sighed and walked on. I called out again, but he had nothing to say. None of them did. The silence around me felt so huge then, so foreign, and in the space left by their voices I suddenly understood: they never thought Marla was fat. They thought she was as beautiful as I did and that’s why they drove her away. The cats knew someone like Marla wouldn’t love someone like me for long.
The wet grass squelched under my feet as I went home. I imagined the voices of the cats:
You get what you deserve, Matty!
We’re never coming back, Matty!
I unlocked my door, took off my wet shoes and went in. I stuck my head outside and looked around one last time.
‘See you in the morning, Cancerface!’ I shouted into my darkening front yard. There was no reply, but I knew it was true. He’d be back. They were my cats. I knew they’d be back.
After Rachel
TONY BIRCH
I wasn’t surprised when Rachel left me. I’d seen it coming in her mood swings and long unexplained absences from the house. But when she finally broke the news to me, in a note she stuck on the fridge door before leaving for work one morning, I felt betrayed. I thought the least she could have done was to let me know in person. I don’t recall much of what was in the note, as I tore it into pieces and flushed it down the toilet after reading it. But I do remember she commented several times about needing her ‘space’.
I thought I’d be okay on my own, but my life quickly fell apart. I stopped eating and found it hard to sleep. One of the other attendants at the city car park where I was working at the time, Alan, noticed I’d lost weight and was chain-smoking. He invited me for a beer after work. I wasn’t keen, but he insisted. We went into a crowded bar across the street. We shared some small talk before he put a hand earnestly on my shoulder and asked if there was something wrong.
Without a couple of beers to loosen my lips I would never have confided in Alan. I hardly knew him. I skolled half a pot of beer, wiped my mouth and told him about Rachel’s decision to leave the note on the fridge door.
He knowingly nodded his head, as if something similar had happened in his own past.
‘Space? You know that’s a code word?’
‘For what?’
‘Rooting. I’d bet my last pipe of weed she’s fucking another bloke.’
The thought of Rachel sleeping with another man shocked me.
‘No. It’s not like that. She just needs some time to herself.’
‘Whatever,’ he said with a smirk. ‘A few months down the track, you’ll run into her on the street, a café or somewhere, and she’ll be with some fella, probably a bloke you already know, one of her mates from work, most likely. She’ll blush and pretend that this thing between them has only just started.’
He looked into the bottom of his glass with one eye as he kept the other on a tall blonde woman who had just walked into the bar.
‘Don’t you fall for that bullshit. I bet it’s already on. Like I said, with someone you know.’
We had a few more beers before I left alone. I walked to the train station in the rain. When I got off at my stop it was still pouring. I was wet to the bone and felt miserable with the thought that all I had to look forward to was an empty house.
The day Rachel left, she insisted I stay away from the house while the removalists came. When I returned home that night I heard her absence as soon as I put the key in the door. And as I walked down the hallway my footsteps echoed throughout the house, reinforcing my sense of abandonment.
There was little furniture or ornament remaining in the house, which was not unexpected. I’d arrived two years earlier with a backpack stuffed with clothes and a cardboard box full of paperback novels. Previous to moving in with Rachel I’d lived in a share house in Richmond. None of the furniture there was mine, either. I was a literature student at university but dropped out during third year. The other tenants had dropped out also, from one venture or another. We did not have a serious dollar between us, the house was falling down, and we drank from jam jars and sat on stolen milk crates.
Rachel rescued me from this mess. We met at a seminar organised by a job centre. While I didn’t get anything of value out of the seminar itself, Rachel and I hit it off straightaway. We talked all afternoon. She said I had ‘potential’, and I believed her.
Even though the double bed belonged to her, she’d left it in the house for me, along with a clean fitted sheet, two blankets and a pillow. That first night, I sat on the bed and hugged the pillow to my chest as I considered how generous she had been. But now, following the conversation with Alan, I woke in the middle of the night, troubled by the thought that since she’d left her bed with me then logically she’d moved to someplace where a bed was waiting for her.
A bed she was probably sharing with another man and, as Alan warned me, ‘rooting’ in.
She had also left her kitchen table, two wooden chairs, the fridge she’d stuck the note to, and enough cooking implements to get by on. Not that I’d done any cooking once she’d gone: I was living on black coffee, cigarettes and toast.
There were some pre-made meals in the freezer, casseroles and soups that had been lovingly prepared by Rachel before being labelled and stacked away. She once told me they’d come in handy on wintry evenings, after we got in late from a romantic walk through the park or along the river. We would warm a meal on the stove and sit on the couch in front of the TV.
Well, winter had arrived, and the couch and the telly and my girlfriend were gone.
I did pull a frozen block of pea-and-ham soup out of the freezer one night, but couldn’t bring myself to thaw it, let alone eat it. I forgot to put it away and found the container on the bench the next morning sitting in a pool of water. I threw the meal in the bin, made myself a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette.
I’d been off the smokes since meeting Rachel. Deceiving myself that I hadn’t taken up the habit again, I bought my cigarettes loose, in twos and threes, from Ali at the local milk bar. I’d smoke the first of three as we chatted out the front of the shop and the second on the walk home. I shared the precious third cigarette with a cup of coffee on the back porch as I looked over the garden.
It had become unkempt since Rachel’s exit. With the exception of an olive tree that continued to thrive, most of the plants looked sadly neglected. I couldn’t summon the energy to care for it. The best I could manage was to look at the garden as I took a drag on what I truly believed was my final cigarette. I’d then sit at the kitchen table for an hour or so before giving in and making another trip to the milk bar.
I was on my way to Ali’s one Sunday morning when I noticed a rickety wooden ladder leaning against the trunk of an olive tree that grew outside a block of flats at the end of the street. A yellow plastic bucket was sitting on the nature strip, next to the ladder. Closer to the tree I noticed a pair of legs wearing thick woollen socks and a scuffed pair of slippers on the t
op rung of the ladder. I looked up and saw an old woman picking olives from the tree and throwing them into the bucket. She looked down at me and nodded. I nodded back and walked on.
At the milk bar Ali suggested I increase my supply to four or even five cigarettes.
‘I’m no pusher, man. But you buy more and you will come back not so quick. It is better for you.’
As I paced the footpath outside the shop he stood in the doorway complaining about his son’s recent trip back to Egypt.
‘The bastard, he rings me reverse. Reverse charges. I say “no”, but his mother, she is too soft. Always, she takes the call.’
A teenage boy brushed by him and went into the shop. Although it was a cold morning he was wearing only a singlet, a pair of track pants and no shoes or socks. As we chatted Ali looked over his shoulder, keeping a watchful eye on the boy. He came out a couple of minutes later, empty-handed. He was about to walk away when Ali grabbed him by the neck.
‘The pockets, little thief. Empty your pockets.’
The boy tried to free himself. They scuffled. A bottle of tomato sauce fell from his side pocket onto the footpath. Ali let go of him, reached down and picked up the bottle. The boy ran off and stopped at a laneway. He turned and called Ali a ‘wog prick’ before disappearing down the lane.
Ali laughed as he studied the bottle of sauce.
‘No offence, my friend, but this country has no culture.’
I lit another cigarette, said goodbye and began walking home. When I got to the olive tree the old woman was down from the ladder. She was picking up the few loose olives that had missed the bucket. It was almost full. I reached my front gate before I stopped and walked back up the street.
‘I have a tree. In my yard.’
She stared at me, blankly. I wondered if she understood English.
‘I have a tree,’ I repeated. ‘In my backyard there is an olive tree, just like this one. I live at number thirteen. You can come and have a look if you like?’
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