by Sarak Kanake
‘I like the Grey Brother,’ said Samson, because he could feel the anger boiling beneath his feet, the same as when his parents argued.
‘Do you?’ Clancy asked Jonah, and his eyes were narrowed like in the picture of Bagheera the panther.
Jonah shrugged. ‘Not especially,’ he said, but Samson could tell his brother was lying.
Clancy turned around and started serving up the eggs. ‘Either of you want to visit your grandma with me?’
‘Not me,’ said Samson. ‘I have … well, I have some stuff to do.’ He watched the eggs slip one after another onto the plates. His stomach growled.
‘What about you?’ said Clancy, without turning around.
‘Can’t,’ said Jonah, as he turned a page of his book. ‘Reading.’
Clancy glanced down at the bunch of flowers in his hand. The tiger stirred inside the sleeve of his cardigan as if trying to smell them. The flowers looked as though they’d been through the wood chipper. He’d never been good with flowers, and they were always a dog’s breakfast by the time he got them to her grave.
Essie had asked to be buried in the highest gully on the mountain where, twice a year, the earth above their house was a veil of white daisies. Maybe she wouldn’t have made such a romantic request if she knew how difficult it had been for him and George to carry her up and dig the hole. But, maybe she still would have. Clancy had wished there was some way he could bury her with her hair, but her red curls were long gone. Taken by the cancer and the chemo.
She gave a single auburn lock to Clancy and one to George before it was all gone. George wove his into a long flat band and wore it around his neck.
The path came to an end at a furrow behind the waterfall. Warm midday sunlight trickled over the surface of the churning water. Everything looked as if it had been dipped in gold. Essie had loved the waterfall. On school holidays she would take the kids swimming almost every day. Some days, Clancy found time to join them, watching them swim from the bank. There was never much play between them. It was more deliberate, meditative, as though the water could bring all three of them back to a time when David and River were still swimming inside Essie’s belly.
Clancy had never completely fit with the three of them. He looked over to the edge of the waterfall where they all used to lie down their towels.
Clancy and Essie were lying on a blanket, with River on her back between them. David was on the other side of the creek, stretched out on his towel, reading. River kicked her legs and blew bubbles from her mouth as if she was already swimming.
‘She has your eyes,’ said Essie, and she tickled her daughter’s feet. River kicked her mother’s fingers.
‘My eyes are blue,’ said Clancy.
‘That’s not important,’ she said.
‘It is to me.’
‘She has your inside.’
‘What does that mean?’ he asked.
Essie looked up from her daughter and caught his eyes. She was still so beautiful. Her eyes were green. ‘Don’t push so hard,’ she said, ‘or Rivy and I might roll all the way down the mountain, and you’ll never get us back.’
River laughed.
Clancy stood up and walked to the edge of the creek. Sunlight danced through the surface of the water like thousands of tiny firebugs caught in a spider web. He took a deep breath. Mud folded into the falls and fell with the clean water from the spring. The creek slowly turned brown.
‘I’m still your wife,’ Essie said. Her voice still echoed across the water.
Clancy shook his head and stepped into the clearing, good leg first. The tiger shuddered inside his sleeve.
He stopped. There was a man in the clearing beneath the rocky overhang, crouched over Essie’s grave. The man stood and turned around.
Samson tried not to feel afraid, but he’d never seen the inside of a cave before. Everything seemed small and sharp and trapped, but somehow enormous as well.
I come here all the time, Mattie signed.
Samson took a step forward. His clothes felt thin and his skin felt thin. Even his long, Other Samson hair felt thin. Behind him was the opening to the cave, and in front of him was another kind of opening, darker and more of a tunnel leading into something he couldn’t see. Mattie said this cave was special. It was daylight, but the sun was getting further and further away. Inside, the cave smelt damp and musty like socks, and dirty like freshly overturned garden soil.
Mattie beckoned him in, but it was dark.
‘I can’t see you,’ said Samson, even though she couldn’t hear or see him.
His voice echoed across the walls. Every sound he made was swallowed up by the rock and spat back in ghoulish echoes. His footsteps were louder than thunder. His hands, reaching to steady himself on the wall, sounded like thousands of scratching rats, and his breathing was the surf after a storm.
There was a drip. It might have been somewhere behind him, or in front, but when Samson tried to pinpoint it, the noise jumped and was everywhere. Every rock was dripping into every other rock, and every sound could dissolve into every other sound.
Samson held his arms out, searching for Mattie in the darkness. He found her neck. Her hair was soft. His hands travelled down her long, curly ponytail as though he was searching for a light switch on the wall of a dark room.
Mattie took his hand, and the inside of his palm burst like firecrackers.
He’d held hands with girls before. Probably more times than any of the boys in mainstream school, because everyone held hands at Special School. His mum always held his hand, worried he’d wander away. Even his dad still held his hand when they crossed the road, because his mum said it was important.
With Mattie, it was different.
Then she dropped his hand and turned on the torch. Click. Light burst from the centre of her hand.
It faded into a dim twilight as his eyes adjusted. The cave was small, but the ceiling was so high that he couldn’t see the top. The air felt light and heavy at the same time. Mattie pointed over her shoulder to a smaller archway behind them, leading into another, narrower tunnel filled with darkness.
Samson shook his head.
Mattie didn’t try to convince him. She crouched until her body made an L shape, and she moved along the side of the cave, down through the second arch, feeling her way with her right hand and holding the torch with her left.
Samson didn’t want to go. He probably wouldn’t even fit through the tiny entrance, but he made an L shape and followed the darting torchlight anyway. Almost straight away, he wanted to go back, but his shoulders were too big to turn around. His breathing was wet and deep. In. Out. In, out.
The light from the torch darted sideways. Samson couldn’t see the outline of Mattie anymore. In, out, he thought, but this time it didn’t help.
He felt like a rat passing through the body of a snake.
‘George?’ asked Clancy, and the man standing over Essie’s unmarked grave nodded. ‘What … what are you doing here?’ Clancy reached for a nearby boulder and slid himself into a sitting position.
‘Same as you, I reckon.’
‘I’m looking for my dog.’
‘Up here?’ said George. ‘With those?’
The wildflowers shivered in Clancy’s hand. ‘When did you get back?’
‘I saw David leave,’ said George.
A hard, bone-like lump formed in Clancy’s throat. ‘Seen your boy yet?’
‘I’m here for you, mate. But looks as if you’ve been pretty busy with them boys.’
‘They’re my grandsons.’
‘What you doing, looking for Queenie? She must be getting on now.’
‘Nearly nineteen,’ said Clancy. ‘She just disappeared.’
‘You trust them?’
‘Queenie loves Samson,’ said Clancy, ‘but she attacked the other one. He was under the house. She’s never been territorial before.’
George lifted his Akubra and ran his hand through his immaculate black hair. It was perfectly combed
and glistening as always. ‘Why was she under there?’
Clancy felt a wall inside him move, rumble, shift and start to break apart. He’d had a go at Jonah for scaring the old girl, but he wasn’t angry. Clancy knew why his dog had concealed herself under the house. His da had given him the answer years ago, after they found his 27-year-old kelpie dead inside a log. Clancy’d only been a boy then and wanted to cry. He remembered the bloated face and the way the legs seemed to reach forward, as if trying to drag itself free. He remembered the white tears as the kelpie’s eyes turned to water.
‘No point mourning,’ his da said. ‘She lived a good life, that bitch, and dogs don’t die in the company of others. They find some nice dark, warm place and die alone.’
The kelpie couldn’t be dragged out of the log. It was too fat with death, so Clancy’s da plugged up the holes on either end with circles of wood cut from another dead tree. He told Clancy never to open the sides, and Clancy soon forgot which tree the kelpie was inside.
Years later, one of River’s search party found the log. The papers called it ‘the tree coffin’ and asked Clancy how long he’d being killing things on the mountain.
George took a pack of Craven As from his back pocket, knocked a durry out with the side of his palm, pressed it to his lips and closed the lid. George didn’t offer one, but Clancy didn’t mind. He hadn’t smoked since he was married. Essie hadn’t liked it – although George always smoked, so maybe she just didn’t like it on Clancy.
‘Will you come back to the house with me?’
George shook his head. ‘It would take too much explaining to my boy.’
‘She’s gone, isn’t she,’ said Clancy. He knew the answer already.
‘There’s more important things to worry about, mate.’
Clancy knew what his friend meant, but he wasn’t sure how George knew about the girl running in the bush. ‘Could have been anyone,’ Clancy said. ‘A kid from town. Tilda Kelly’s girl, Mattie –’
‘This isn’t what I wanted, you know,’ snapped George. ‘I never wanted to come back here. I’m only here because of you.’
‘I know, I know.’ And Clancy did. George had left for good and he wasn’t the kind to go back, not even for Essie. Not even for River.
‘I don’t have any answers for you,’ said George. ‘I’ve been out woop woop.’
‘Couldn’t it have been someone else?’
George took a long drag on his durry to finish it off. He stabbed the butt out on the rocky overhang and pocketed it. ‘Who?’
Clancy thought again of the running legs and the long hair. Had the hair been brown, or red like River’s? He thought of the arms at right angles, running like she’d been taught to run. Had he ever done that? Had the girl’s skin been pale like stars, or the colour of melaleuca honey?
‘River,’ he said.
George didn’t nod or shake his head. He just stared, as though the answer was inevitable. He pointed to Clancy’s bulging sleeve. ‘What’s inside there?’
Clancy glanced down at the woollen cocoon.
George shook his head. He didn’t like Clancy using the pelt and had told Clancy as much almost a year after River went missing. Clancy had been fresh back from a hunt. Naked but for the tiger on his back and wallaby shit crumbled into his skin to hide his smell. It gathered in his chest hair like bark on a tree. He unfurled the tiger from around his body and hung the pelt back on the wall.
George was at the kitchen table. He smelt of smoke. ‘You going up there is just keeping it in all our minds.’
‘I need a shower.’
‘I loved her too,’ said George, ‘but you’re keeping her spirit restless.’
Clancy didn’t remember pushing George into the wall, but he did remember holding him there.
‘You’ll go missing too,’ gasped George.
Clancy let go, but maybe he hadn’t really let go because George was back on the mountain, staring at him as if wearing the pelt was a sin he needed to atone for. Clancy moved towards his friend, arms outstretched in an apology.
The tiger moved again, only this time as though it was about to pounce.
George took a step back. ‘I can’t stop you,’ he said.
The sky blackened, and Clancy looked up. Dozens of silent kookaburras flew overhead, mouths agape, having left their laughter repeating somewhere deep in the bush. Clancy sensed the tiger curl sleepily into his side through his sleeve, and he felt like tearing the pelt to pieces.
Jonah’s stomach was empty. He looked into the sky, but he still couldn’t read time in Tasmania. Even if it was almost dinnertime, he wasn’t ready to go back to the house. Not yet. He wanted to play his hunting game, like Mowgli in The Jungle Book. He just didn’t know how – not without his brother. He always made Samson play the part of the prey, but he didn’t know where his brother was. There had to be something better to hunt on the mountain. Something wild and sleek, and hard to catch.
Jonah listened to the trees. He squeezed his toes. Damp earth oozed around his feet. The rain made everything softer. Wind sighed past. Jonah closed his eyes and tried to pull the threads of sound from beneath the canopy. Scuttling. He could hear that. A ruffle, followed by a squawk. Wings beating. Falling leaves. Maybe even the faraway call of the waterfall.
A branch snapped. Jonah opened his eyes. Footsteps, heavy and slow. He moved behind a tree and waited, the tree trunk steady in his hands. He closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath. Everything around him was a wave of familiar and unfamiliar smells. He took another breath. His nostrils felt cold, but he could still smell his granddad.
Pretty soon, Clancy shuffled through the trees using low-hanging branches and rocks for balance. He was wearing the skin. Its front legs came to his elbows, and its legs hung loose from his lower back. The long reedy tail wilted across Clancy’s tailbone, coming to rest between his buttocks. Jonah wondered if it smelt. His granddad was naked underneath, his penis shrivelled and grey.
Clancy stopped and coughed. Smoker’s cough, his dad called it. The old man spat something into the scrub and kept walking. He started talking to himself. Jonah followed. ‘I fuckin’ well knew … no one bloody listens. And where’s George anyway? Why didn’t she stop, three feet and she didn’t stop …’
Light trickled from the canopy and shimmered through the ginger fur. It slid between the dark, wavering stripes. Clancy’s own skin looked thin and pale. Almost as if the pelt was holding the pieces of him together.
Jonah watched as Clancy shifted the weight of his body onto his injured leg. Both legs buckled beneath him. The pelt slipped from his back and tumbled onto the dirt. It curled into the leaves and looked immediately at home, like a wild tiger sleeping.
Clancy braced himself. Jonah watched him press his forehead into the tree. He stayed that way for a long time. Jonah kept his eyes on the pelt. Then, his granddad came out of the slump with a roar. He punched the tree. One, two, three, four. Jonah stopped counting. Clancy’s voice was like fire. He sobbed and called to the river, and burnt the silence out of everything.
Jonah wondered if he could reach the skin without his granddad noticing.
Then Clancy stopped. His breathing was heavy, and his knuckles were spotted with bloody lumps. The tree looked untouched. Clancy said something to the pelt that Jonah couldn’t hear, then nudged it with his foot. It didn’t move.
Clancy lifted his good leg up and brought his heel down on the tiger’s head.
Everything stopped. The trees stopped. The wind stopped. Even the birds stopped calling. Everything waited. Everything wanted to see if the tiger would fight back.
Clancy lifted his foot up again and brought it down over, and over, and over.
Scared, Jonah pushed himself into the base of his tree. The ground weakened beneath him. He brushed the leaves and dirt away. A burrow. He crawled inside, and it closed around him like a hand. For anyone else it would have been impossible to fit inside, but for Jonah the burrow was almost perfect. It smelt like cats
and mice and birds, and something else he couldn’t place. Jonah put his hands over his ears and thought about the tiger pelt until he could no longer hear his granddad shouting.
Jonah knew a little bit about the thylacine from school, but long before they started school his dad had told them about tigers as well. ‘The place where I’m from,’ David had said, ‘is the real wilderness. There are still places in Tassie where no person has ever been. A forest that grows sideways and lots of wild animals.’
‘What sort?’ asked Samson.
Their dad smiled. ‘The devil, and the tiger.’
Jonah knew from school that the thylacines were probably extinct, but he didn’t say anything.
‘What are they like?’ asked Samson. His school was different. They didn’t have Science.
‘They’re like long, lean tiger-dogs.’
Jonah smirked. ‘Whatever, Dad.’
‘Do they bite?’ asked Samson.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said David. ‘They’re extinct.’
‘What does “extinct” mean?’
‘It means we killed them all.’
Their mum didn’t like any talk of tigers, and that night she and their dad fought across the kitchen shouting words like, ‘tiger’ and ‘lost’ and ‘lies’.
But, none of that mattered now because Jonah was already replacing King. As his granddad’s screams got lower and shorter, Jonah started to imagine how his life with the tiger might be. It wouldn’t leave him. The tiger was already older than him and stronger than King. Maybe, thought Jonah as he watched Clancy reach down, grab the skin and fling it over his back again, the tiger was why he had come to the mountain.
Jonah watched as the tiger’s head settled back into Clancy’s collarbone. The nose turned, just slightly, towards where Jonah was hiding. His granddad grunted and moved away. Jonah followed silently, a plan already forming in his mind. He would trail Clancy back to the house and watch from outside. His granddad would hide the key to the locked room somewhere. When he was asleep, Jonah would take the key and unlock the room.
He was going to make a great tiger.
Samson came to the end of the tunnel and straightened up. Mattie was waiting in another cavernous room. She pointed the torch over her head and made an umbrella of light. ‘Wow,’ he said quietly. Mattie laughed, and her laugh echoed across the walls and swirled towards the ceiling, which was so high that not even the torchlight could reach. Samson looked up, off-balance. It was the first time he had heard her voice.