Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Hello, my lady.’ He stroked the lean red dog with big brown hands. Tender hands running firmly over the dog’s ribby sides. The bitch stood on her back legs and rested her front paws on his thighs, her claws digging into the fabric of his jeans near his crotch, her sincere brown eyes gazing into his. Jenny stood watching, hands clenched around old tissues in her pockets.

  Touch me like that. Look at me like that. Your good little wife.

  He unclipped the chain and Nel bounded away to sniff and squat in the long grass, always with an eye on him, and he with his eyes on her.

  ‘You’re not coming on heat, are you, my ol’ hussy?’ He whistled her, and lifted Nel to inspect her swelling vagina beneath her wagging tail. ‘You old tart, Nellie.’ He held her soft tan jowls in both hands and looked at her face. Jenny tried to swallow the foulness she seemed to taste.

  ‘You coming?’ he said.

  Just as Jenny got into the ute, Nel leapt on her lap.

  ‘Get down!’ She pushed at the dog. He laughed and told the dog to get in the back. As he drove, Nel leant over the side and smelt the air as it rushed past. The dusty air in the cab annoyed Jenny and she rubbed the paw marks on her jeans over and over until her thighs became hot. On the gravel road to the yards, a car passed them. A small blonde head and a wave of the hand. Nel barked once and wagged her tail as the car sped by.

  Was that where you had your cock last night?

  She searched for a clue on his face. A muscle flickered beneath the skin of his shaven jaw.

  The ewes were both cast. Tossed out of the yards by the men who had crutched them. The grass beneath them was limp and white and they had worn patches away to mud where their hooves had scraped the ground. Hooves galloping nowhere, over and over in pain. Their bellies were swollen with lambs and their breath was short and quick.

  ‘Think of the poor little lambs dying inside,’ Jenny said.

  ‘They’d have carked it long ago. Give us a lift,’ her husband said.

  Jenny took the bony back legs in her hands. The flies buzzed madly around. Blackening blood and fluid like caramel oozed from the ewe. Jenny turned her head away from the stench. He had hold of the front legs and he swung the sheep high and hard. On the ute’s tray Nel sniffed and licked at the rear ends of the sheep.

  ‘Get out of it, Nel,’ growled Jenny.

  ‘She’s right,’ he said as he opened the door of the ute. They drove over short winter pasture. Rain had brought the freshest green out of the earth. Spring was coming. Jenny wound down the window and felt the sun on her face and the cold wind. It seemed to rush right through her.

  ‘This’ll do.’ He switched off the engine and dragged the ewes off the ute’s tray to a fallen tree. Its trunk was grey with death even though its roots remained in the black living soil. He grabbed the knife, placed a hand on the ewe’s muzzle and pulled her head back. Her throat was tight. Prodding with his fingers, he found the hinge of her jaw. Jenny watched and pulled her coat around her as he put the point of the blade just below the jaw. He drove it through skin and wool, with a grunt. Quickly he ripped the knife out so the ewe’s legs jerked rapidly. He brought the knife back into the red of her gaping neck and drew her head back sharply twisting and severing. Blood pulsed and spilled onto black earth. The muscle in his jaw twitched. Jenny watched the life drain from the ewe’s yellow eyes. She looked for the soul rising to heaven but saw nothing. She leaned close to the body to see if she could feel the soul rising up through her. But she couldn’t feel anything. It had been like that when her little one had died inside her. She hadn’t felt the soul leave. She looked at the flex of the muscles in his arms. At the line that made his mouth.

  Does it excite you when you kill?

  The wind whistled through the ute. He wiped the blade on the wool of the animal, growing colder in the chilly wind. Nel lapped at the blood that spilt on the earth. His bloodied hand stroked her muscular back. The bitch shook in excitement. Jenny slammed the door of the ute and sat hunched in the front seat as he reached for the second ewe to kill.

  Later, back at the house, Jenny watched him from the kitchen window. In the dying light beneath a pepper tree he sat on Nel’s log kennel for a long time watching her eat her dog nuts and bones. He gently stroked Nel’s ears and talked to her. He lifted her and nuzzled his face into Nel’s. Then he walked to the car, started it and drove away. He drove away into town.

  Jenny put her hands in the hot water so her blood boiled again. Red skin scalded. She sat for a long time staring at their wedding photo. Her toes froze. It was dark. It was late. The wind rattled the old windows and lifted the corner of the tin roof. It sounded like lovers in a cast-iron bed. It got faster and faster. The lovers. Jenny picked up the knife lying on the sink and ran outside into the madness of the winter wind. No moon, just blackness. Her hair flew about her face. She started the ute, switched on the lights and backed it from the shed. Outside, over the grumble of the engine, she could still hear the lovers in the roof. They were going even faster now. Banging in the cast-iron bed. Thin green fingers of the pepper tree branches scraped and bashed on the ute as she parked it near the kennels. In the headlights she found the gleaming chain which lay in the dust and began to pull it towards her, Nel whimpering and resisting. She located the jaw bone and pressed her finger into the soft spot beneath it and pulled Nel’s head back. She placed her knee on the dog’s stomach to stop her squirming and tightened her neck. Nel whined.

  Plunge the knife in and twist it out. Pull the head back and sever and twist until the neck cracks. Good little wife. Good wifey wife.

  Nel’s whines became a gurgle from her windpipe. Her paws jerked in the air. Her blood spilt on the earth. Jenny wiped the knife over the dog’s gold and brown coat. Then she went back to the house. She filled the kitchen sink and washed the knife in hot, hot water. The lovers in the roof had stopped. The baby in her head had stopped crying. She closed her eyes. Now, perhaps, her husband would see her.

  The Way of Things

  Wind in the roof wails woo, woo, woooo while a woman wails on the floor of a pink-tiled bathroom. Her cries echo on in the high-ceiling home. ‘Oh. Oh. Oh!’ She is curled up and wrapped in cold. Cold porcelain, cold skin, cold bones. A black cloud burdened with stinging rain sweeps over a bare hill. It hits the big stone house and the woman cries out again at the cold. Guttering hits on wood. Thut, thut, thut. It reminds her, and her wails rise up again as the wind whooshes in the big empty house. Scudding icy drops smash coldness against the window. The pit, pit, pit of the rain turns to a cold grey roar with the hurtle of the wind. The curled woman feels the rain sting on her brain. It hits the pink and grey fire with a sizzle. She hears it. Phisss, phisss, phisss. Blue-pink fingers clutch into hair and pull and pull. Above, high on a sandstone wall the wind lifts tin and hits it on stone. Thwack, thwack, thwack. An old screen door dances devilishly with the lusty, gusty wind and shrieks and claps. Reeeeek … bang … reeeek … bang … reeek … bang. Leaves skitter and scatter along edges of walls and then peel themselves free. Tossed away into the air. Branches of old trees bend to the storm and creak and snap.

  Someone is whistling somewhere. A high whistle, high in the tree. ‘Perhaps it is him,’ says a voice in the woman’s brain. ‘Perhaps it is him whistling to the dogs.’ The rope on the branch etches its form into green bark. Back and forth with the wind. Urrrrck urrrck urrrck. The dead weight of the man is lifted by the storm so that his body bumps and thuds against the trunk. Thudud, thudud. His clothes swish and flap against his skin and his hair whips around his cold grey face. Farmer’s fingers, curled, drip wet from the rain. The woman hears him whistle and cry out in the storm. The rain has come. But it has come too late. He whooshes and whistles in her ears so she curls up and screams so loudly that she can only hear the storm in her brain. Pink veins pop in the whites of her eyes as she shrivels and swivels on pink tiles. Screaming now in the pink bathroom. She doesn’t know why she is in the bathroom. She only knows she chose the colour he
rself years ago when the sun shone. She only knows the dogs have all been shot on their chains and he is hanging in an old oak in the storm outside the big old house.

  The Handy Man

  It has been ten years since the neat-as-a-pin newsreader with lacquered hair and painted white teeth read the cue cards declaring the operation a success. Now, in a darkened room smelling of tinned spaghetti and burnt toast, Martin Swain uses his old hand to press rewind and play on the remote control.

  The suit-clad newsreader springs onto the screen again. ‘Australian businessman Martin Swain, the world’s first hand transplant patient, was released from a Los Angeles hospital today with surgeons declaring the forty-hour operation a success …’

  The present-day Martin, slumped in his stained chair, winces as he watches the footage showing his younger self smiling from his hospital bed with his new hand bandaged tightly in a sling. He looks at the hand that now lies limp on the tatty arm of his chair. The hand plucks at the chair, which oozes foam stuffing onto the threadbare carpet. He examines the hand’s hairy knuckles and stubby fingernails, and curses it for the millionth time. He holds up his slim businessman’s hand next to the stubby stitched-on hand and in his mind for the umpteenth time replays the scenario …

  Neither his wife nor his girlfriend objected to the hand to begin with, but the first signs of trouble appeared just days after the operation. Driving home from the doctor’s surgery after the bandages were removed, Martin was amazed to find his newly stitched hand flinging itself onto his wife’s knee.

  ‘Are you all right, Martin?’ she said, trying to concentrate on driving through the afternoon traffic. The fingers, still stained with iodine, travelled under her neatly pleated skirt. Martin’s eyes darted from the hand to his wife’s face as the out-of-control fingers crawled and kept crawling. With his original hand, Martin quickly reached over and caught his new hand in the nick of time, just before it reached the cotton gusset of her control-brief pantyhose.

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ he said, and nervously cleared his throat.

  For a few days after that, relations with his wife improved dramatically, breathing fresh life into what had become a stale and routine marriage. Despite some post-operative grogginess and a good deal of soreness in the stitched area, the hand fumbled in Martin’s wife’s dressing-gown most evenings before bed. And in the dead of night, the hand crawled towards her under the shadowy floral sheets, even as Martin slept.

  ‘Oh! Martin,’ yelped his wife in nervous delight.

  The hand even made the girlfriend giggle and squirm, and for the first time distracted her from asking when he was going to leave his wife. Martin followed his new hand’s every move with virile glee. But at night he was sure he dreamt of its previous owner. In his dreams, a leering, gold-toothed sailor with the tattoo of a buxom mermaid on his upper arm slurred to Martin, ‘Come on, sonny, go another one. Take another lass. So warm and fleshy.’ The sailor laughed a gravelly laugh as he took Martin by the hand, and in his dreams they sailed from port to port taking whichever whore they pleased with a toss of a bank bill, peeled from a fat wad of notes by the hairy stubby hand. The dreams left Martin in a sweat and the hand again reaching for the soft female flesh of his wife or girlfriend.

  After just a few days, the perverted persistence of the hand began to drain Martin. Drain his girlfriend. Drain the wife.

  ‘Stop this instant,’ his wife said, pushing the hand away.

  ‘Martin, that’s enough!’ screeched the girlfriend.

  But the hand would not listen.

  ‘That’s it, Martin Swain! You’re sleeping in the spare room,’ the wife said, throwing him a travel rug and turning her back.

  ‘Oh, come on, love, I’ll take you out for a nice dinner. No handies under the table … I promise!’

  So he picked a restaurant where he and his girlfriend never ate and told the hand in no uncertain terms to behave itself. Things were going well. He’d ushered his wife into the restaurant with the hand nestled in the small of her back. No slipping downwards for a quick grab of her rear. At dinner he used his original hand to elegantly refill his wife’s wine glass while he made the hairy hand grip the leg of the table.

  ‘That’s fine, darling,’ he said smiling, ‘order crayfish if you like. It’s not too expensive at all.’

  But as the waitress came back to take their orders, the hand flew out from under the table and up the waitress’s short black skirt, grabbing a handful of young dimpled flesh. Martin, teeth gritted, pulled the hand away after the third scream. He found himself looking across the table at his seething wife through a film of stinging red wine, which the waitress had thrown in his face.

  At home his wife locked herself in the ensuite and sobbed for hours. The next morning she emerged puffy-eyed to see Martin outside greeting their neighbour, Mrs Pottinghouse, as he picked up the paper from the drive. With horror, the wife saw Martin’s newly stitched hand fling itself inside Mrs Pottinghouse’s flannelette dressing-gown.

  Martin’s eyes locked with Mrs Pottinghouse’s as they both screamed, Martin tugging frantically on his arm with his original hand to make the hairy hand release her voluminous, squelchy breast. After failing to satisfactorily explain the situation to Mr Pottinghouse, Martin went back into his house with a fresh black eye, fat lip and a ripped Ralph Lauren shirt. He found his wife in the bedroom amidst a flurry of clothes, which she was shoving into a suitcase. She slammed the door behind her as she left and made certain she grated the gears of the Mercedes as she sped off down the road.

  Two months after the operation, Martin Swain, who had been slated for the top executive position with his company, was told in no uncertain terms to leave. It had started out well enough in the office. The congratulations over his operation, the condolences over his wife, the fascination and sympathy of the office girls, the fun and games over a simple handshake. But soon the women in the office ran for cover when Martin and his new hand came near. Now he was accused of sexual harassment on seventeen different counts. Eleven of the charges came from the girls in the office – even one from dotty old Dot, the receptionist. Other complaints flooded in from women taxi drivers, shop assistants, bottle-shop staff and even from a stripper in one of the more upmarket bars.

  ‘Surely that one wouldn’t count?’ raved Martin to his lawyer.

  Pleas to his surgeons, who were still basking in the glory of such a successful operation, fell on deaf ears.

  ‘But why can’t you remove it and replace it with the hand of an artist or a great engineer? Anything! Just get rid of this one!’ he yelled at his doctor.

  Martin was sent to counselling. That was until the stern-jawed, elegant counsellor was made to shriek and run from her office with the hand and a horrified Martin following.

  The final straw for Martin was when his girlfriend left him. Or rather kicked him out of her duplex home. He had thought his girlfriend would always stand by him.

  ‘Martin,’ she said waving her hairbrush at him, ‘in the early days I chose to ignore your troubles. I ignored the charges, put up with your sacking, and held you in my arms when your car and house were repossessed. But I cannot, simply cannot, ignore you grabbing the pizza girl. And what’s more,’ she screamed, ‘I cannot put up with this!’

  She flicked the remote control and to the TV screen sprang the neat newsreader telling viewers about Martin Swain’s sexual harassment charges. The final straw for the girlfriend had been when the nightly news crew trampled her gladioli flower bed as they scrambled to get the best shot of Martin leaving her house for court. She took her protests to the TV station’s head office. It was there she met the suit-clad newsreader with the dazzling smile and stunning hairdo.

  No, she said with a gleeful smile, she didn’t mind at all if they went for coffee to discuss the finer points of the story.

  When Martin had called his surgeon at home in desperation he nearly gagged when he heard his wife’s voice answer the phone. His new hand dropped the phone. As he s
at sobbing outside the phone box with his head in his original hand, he hardly noticed the warm, wet sensation of a dog lifting its leg on him.

  Now in the flat in the dark, with only the fuzzy light from the TV, Martin Swain, with a kitchen knife in his original hand, tries in vain, yet again, to sever the hand which was never his.

  Evie’s Garden Dreaming

  Evie knew Barnaby was depressed by the way the old dog sighed. The rust-tinged kelpie spent his days at the window, gazing out beyond the potted herbs on Evie’s small patio and up to the smog-filled sky. Today, misty rain clouds hung above the units and washed out the morning with their drabness. Barnaby sank his head between his greying front paws and gave another sad sigh. Evie glanced at him and sighed herself. It was ridiculous keeping a farm dog cooped up in the city.

  With a cup of homegrown ginger tea, Evie settled into a snug armchair that had tufts of horsehair sprouting like whiskers from its sides. She recalled with a smile the way the farm cats used to scratch at the chair. It was one of a pair, taken from the rambling old farmhouse where she had lived on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  ‘You won’t fit both the chairs in your new unit, Mum,’ her daughter Trish had said firmly, after the farm was sold. ‘You can keep one and I’ll have it reupholstered for you in a lovely chintz.’

  Evie ran her cracked old fingertips over the chair’s leather, which was as dry as dust. She smiled gently, and her husband smiled back at her from behind the glass of a photo frame. In the photo, Henry was perched on an old apple bin in the dapple of a summer orchard, his eyes crinkled in a joyful smile and his strong arms wrapped around a young, waggy-tailed Barnaby. Evie often talked to Henry.

  ‘I wonder if someone’s pruned the orchard trees yet, dear?’ she said to Henry’s image. Barnaby cocked an ear at the sound of her voice.