by Anna Tambour
The two inspectors drained their coffee cups, made polite thank-yous and left, relieved to escape the sad apartment where that lonely couple were "living" out their years. He, torn from the excitement of a working life, now stuck at home fiddling with mechanical junk strewn all over the dining table, while his ugly wife knitted, some weird bird perched on her shoulder, trilling and cackling, and clothed—the inspectors laughed at this diversion, as they yearned for a real case—in a cloak, like a monk with only its beak sticking out. A cloak of fine wool, patterned with stars.
The Eel
The eel appeared on the third year of the drought, when the creek was so low that the swimming hole grew a green velvet lining of algae.
It was winter, and even though the water was cold, there were no flies to swat, so it was a pleasant time to pick over the mica-flecked stones in the exposed creek bed.
I was bent over glinting a flat rock in the sun when I saw the flash in the water. Just a foot away swam the eel. Its head was still and its body swayed like a ribbon of cold honey stirred in a glass of tea as it examined me through the root-tannined water. The eel was about a metre long, and green with black speckles, not unlike a trout. Its eyes gazed roundly, unblinking, and not at all fishily. They were the eyes of a chicken, with golden irises.
~
After a flood, we'd find the paddocks strewn with dead yabbies, claws big as vice grips, and so brilliantly chalk blue that we wondered why we'd never seen one in the creek. Like many of our neighbours in the wild, we find clues to their existence, or a dead body, but their lives are mostly a mystery.
Maybe this eel lived on yabbies and frogs. Especially after rain, and then especially at night, the frogs bong, conk, and reverberate, metallically to woodenly, loud enough that we hear them through the windows in our house 100 metres up from the creek.
But the frog chorus had dried up with the weather. Maybe the eel was hungry.
Without undue haste, I backed away from the eel, climbed up the creek bank, and ran home; returning with Griffith and a couple of eggs.
Griff squatted on the rocks by the now featureless pool.
"You can try," he said, but without any expectation.
I walked into the pool and broke open one egg with a stone, pouring the contents into the water in front of my feet. The egg, laid that morning, had a solidity of albumen to golden yolk that made it hang like a galaxy with one fantastic sun. There was almost no current.
The water opaqued as a cloud passed overhead. The pool was flat and green-black, almost totally still. We waited in our respective crouches, growing stiff. Then with silent abruptness, the cloud tore away from the sun, and light pierced the depths of the water. And there was the eel, its head looking out from under an ancient fallen tree half caught in the bank, a hazard to us swimmers, but a shelter to this eel and how many other creatures, I'd never put my hand underneath to know.
Out from under the log it swam, straight towards me. It opened its mouth and the yolk and most of the albumen seemed to swim straight in. Then, with a flick and a snap, the eel snatched the last shreds of milky egg white from the water.
While the eel hovered in place, I moved back and Griff took my place. He broke his egg just above the water with the eel poised and grabbing the whole slippery galaxy just as it hit the surface.
~
That winter we read all we could about eels, which wasn't much. It was a short-finned eel, and one day would want to migrate to the sea to spawn, and then die. We couldn't tell the sex, but decided on female. And we called her Angie, short for anguilla, the rather nice name for what is a common freshwater fish with an uncommon lifestyle.
Eels are voracious eaters at the best of times, and this drought was a lean time for all. As blue skies followed upon themselves unabated, the brown grasses were clipped ever shorter by the kangaroos and wallabies that now lived in the valley, driven here by the sparseness in the hills where they usually browsed, and still slept during the day.
After a couple of hungry wedge-tailed eagles picked up a surprisingly easy meal of two chickens one day, our chickens had to be confined to their night pen. For a while, the eagles visited the site of their chicken pick-ups every day. They'd hang over the valley like two massive kites, then swoop down to sit on the roof of the pen, finally giving up to crouch round-shouldered in the branches of the trees by the creek, just watching the chicken pen 50 metres away. I didn't worry about the chickens any more though. They were safe, if bored.
The eagles' usual easy meals of rabbits and small native game were scarce now, and the marsupials would not breed until the drought broke.
~
Up at the house, the grass was pulled threadbare by the teeth of roos, and the spinifex roots dug up by a wombat whose clodhoppery stumbles banged against the walls at night.
The parrots were still happy, crunching blackbutt and stringybark gumnuts in the forest at our back.
Angie seemed happy, too. She was now a very tame lithe eel, decidedly fatter than when we had first discovered each other. We fed her once a day, and after the first week, she was always waiting for us at noon.
At first, dinner was an egg that we broke into the water. Then, one day I dropped the egg before breaking it, and the whole thing slid to the bottom of the creek with only the smallest bump. Angie opened her jaws around the egg and encompassed it, shell and all.
We read about the way eels often travel overland on their migrations, and how they need wet conditions for this, so as not to damage their thick slime covering.
And we heard farmers only half laugh over their "escape artists", the eels raised in dams only to gallop off in their snake-slither way to running water at the first wet-spell opportunity.
That winter, with the daily visits, I felt ever closer to Angie, with that special love one feels from the thrill of earning the trust of a wild animal. By now, she ate out of my hand. She played around my ankles, sluicing around them so that it was hard to feel which was her, which water. She tickled my ankle in a gentle nibble game, and tunnelled her body through the "O" of my hands. The only thing she hadn't done was travel on land, and I wanted to see her do this. To capture this special ability in action became my pet project.
First, I'd put the egg closer and closer to the edge of the water. She seemed shy to go too shallow, and sometimes she was inextricably anxious altogether. I soon discovered she was frightened by flitting shadows. And also, that she didn't like travelling on dry stones. I built a ramp of sod and grass, and sluiced it with a bucket, and when she felt comfortable, that worked. But try as I would, she still wouldn't come up onto the bank.
"It's too dry," Griff said. "Wait till it rains."
~
On September first, it finally did—most of the night, in a steady drizzle. We woke late to a darkened room. The sky, an unbroken blue for so many days that cerulean had become ugly and the otherwise beautiful early and late shadows only accentuated the sharpness of hunger—that sky was gone—replaced by a soft and lovely cover of woolly grey.
The whole morning it drizzled. Birds sat dripping in the trees. Currawongs and finches sang.
"Today's your day," Griff said.
"Let's record it," I twittered.
We set up the tripod and telephoto on the balcony, and zoomed it in to the perfect spot, the top of a rise just 20 metres from the creek.
I ran down with two eggs and a strip of meat for good measure. She loved meat. The smell of her meal would be irresistible, especially since we'd figured for a while now that all her meals these days were on us. It was 11:45 but she was waiting.
She was unusually lively with this rain, and there were no shadows to frighten her.
I showed her the eggs and waived the strip of meat in the water. Up the hill I backed.
She watched, keeping her head still but making all kinds of fancy turns of the rest of her body.
The first egg I put on the top of the ramp.
She came into the shallows, and then started up
the ramp.
Moving backwards, I placed the second egg and the meat on the designated high spot, then turned and ran back to the house, bursting onto the balcony in time to see her lift her head, smell and sight the second part of her meal.
Griff moved away from the camera so I could look through the lens myself.
And I could see everything in detail. She made it all the way to the second egg and was perfectly in the centre of the shot when the eagle swooped.
The photo shows Angie in the claws of the eagle—a long, limp, streaming ribbon.
That day, the drought broke, to be replaced the next day and the week after, by the flood.
The Curse of Hyperica
"when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless"
—Saki
Hyperica Dunphy wasn't the fairest in the land, but she certainly was the vainest. Vain regarding everything and everyone. Of course, she was vain about herself, and took everyone else in vain, the distinction grammatically being lost in linguistics, but the action in her well-honed practice, being lost on no one.
Her fondest hours were spent admiring herself in her myriad of mirrors. But when her mother got dressed to go out, the gentle, pretty woman could always depend on a parting acid-drop present from her only daughter of "You're not wearing that, are you?" Hyperica's father was Cloudmere Dunphy—the physicist so famous that people who buy The Sun for their daily news (tits: page 3)—even these people instantly recognize his broad ivory brow. This noble forehead was simply the inspiration for "Oy, Baldy" to his only child. Even God wasn't safe, always being called on with great irony whenever anyone wanted Hyperica to lift her mind or finger away from her own being to learn something, or do something for another being on the planet. "Oh, Gawd," she would say. God knew he wasn't being called but sneered at also.
The three lived in their cosy house in Cambridge, surrounded by a garden that the parents fanatically tended, and the daughter studiously avoided, choosing instead to prance, primp, and preen in her room in front of her mirrors. She combed her diction as much as her hair, stealing the essence of the accents of her cultured parents, but curdling the tones with her own brand of irony. To her, it was wit of the highest order.
God had only blessed the Professor and Mrs. Dunphy with this one product of their love for each other, but their mutual regard had only grown stronger over the years, as they shared their bewilderment over the gargoyle whose second-greatest joy in life seemed to be—to embarrass them.
The garden was their refuge. They tended their canes of raspberries, currants and gooseberries; pruned the espaliered pears against the garden wall; carefully bletted the idiosyncratic medlars from the ancient arthritic tree till they were properly rotted; and grew muscatels and peaches in the hothouse along with a collection of orchids to enhance the posies of rare flowers which Cloudmere thrilled in picking for his wife.
She, in turn, delighted in making a blizzard of puddings: ruby and snow summer pudding, seagreen gooseberry fools, syllabubs, Sussex ponds that oozed butter and lemon. Cloudmere adored his puddings.
They ate them with the same childish joy, usually in the hothouse, out of one big bowl—an escape from the product of their womb and loin, lurking in her room except at mealtimes or when she knew her mother had made something sweet. Grace Dunphy had resorted to making and leaving decoy desserts for Hyperica to steal so the girl didn't pinch her father's favourite foods before all had a chance to eat them. Thus the practice evolved of Mrs. Dunphy making and the distinguished Professor and Mrs eating their puddings like guilty children, hidden by a conspiracy of friendly leaves and foggy windows.
~
Lately though, even these delights had been harder to come by, the bile of Hyperica spreading to become a vast river delta encompassing the house, their love for each other, even their friends.
Grace and Cloudmere had just come home from the airport after a tearful parting, seeing off Cloudmere's old physics soulmate, Grusha Gorosuv (the Gorosuv, if you keep up with the field), who had spent the past two weeks at their home.
Hyperica's protests had taken on the form of a campaign. "Do I have to watch him sieve his tea through his teeth" at the breakfast table. "I know he's here. I can smell his socks,"—her first words back from a trip to the shop to buy makeup or magazines. And to his face, "Thy stinking breath doth make me long for death," followed by a giggle at how well that one came off, before she tripped up the stairs to gaze at herself in admiration.
Grusha's visit had been urged by the Dunphys because Gorosuv had been offered a post at the College, and Tom Platkin, their next door neighbour, was selling to move to MIT. The reason for Gorosuv's appointment to the College was also the reason that he could suddenly afford to buy Tom's house. Grace and Cloudmere considered the childless Gorosuvs as family—a feeling shared by Grusha and Irena. The idea had seemed perfect. But Hyperica's bile mortified Grusha and he hid in Cloudmere's study. In his still somewhat tattered state (no money had come through yet), he looked as if his socks might smell, but he was, in actuality, just poor and more interested in numbers, theories, hothouse tomatoes, and his beloved wife of twenty years.
Grusha's visit ended at the airport with tears and indecision. Grace and Cloudmere hurt for him and for themselves at the thought that their wish to have their beloved friends next door was probably lost forever by their fiend of a daughter. They, as usual, had no control whatsoever over her actions, and were slaves at home to her demands. "To keep the peace", they cowardly maintained.
On coming home, they crunched through the red and gold leaves to the hothouse and gorged themselves on a huge bowl of apple crumble made with Eldon pippins from their own garden. The steamy heat and loamy smell comforted, but not enough.
"She's practicing for the Nobel in December, you know," Grace said to her husband, her tears salting the brimming spoon.
Cloudmere turned the colour of blanched asparagus. " ... at me and Grusha?"
"No. I think she has bigger ideas. The King of Norway when he presents your prize."
Cloudmere's last swallow of heavenly mess churned in his stomach. "We'll have to leave her home," he announced, but with not a speck of firmness in his manner.
"If only we could. The house ... and who—"
"... else could stomach her," Cloudmere finished the sentence. No, Hyperica wouldn't be above burning the house down. And as for having her stay with ... there was not a soul who hadn't been burnt by her tongue within minutes of her company. If she were a dog, she would have been banned by every kennel in the land, except the pound as a candidate for instant incineration.
Cloudmere took his wife's face in his hands and kissed her cinnamon-scented lips. "She'll grow up." It was meant as a reassurance, but once said, resonated with the comfort of the poorhouse bell to an 1800's pauper.
"Dear, she's bloody nineteen now, and doing buggerall," Grace uttered, and the crudeness shocked both of them.
The next day, with Cloudmere at the College and Hyperica out somewhere, Mrs. Dunphy cleaned the house. On emptying the rubbish, she saw one of Hyperica's beauty magazines, a discard from a huge library paid for by Hyperica's allowance (for doing nothing), and generous self-helpings from Mrs. Dunphy's purse. In a depressed curiosity, Grace sat at the kitchen table and flipped through the magazine. The models were the same vapid types Hyperica aped, and were of no interest to the naturally pretty, but totally unartificed Mrs. Dunphy. The ads in the back of the magazine, however, had a sort of low-class appeal.
One didn't read such things.
Lady Lydia's International Network of Psychics: Lady Lydia's knowledge and powers have been passed on for centuries ... Regular guidance is sought by high profile TV and radio personalities, royalty and business leaders from around the world. Lady Lydia, was over-made-up, as Grace expected they all are. In the next column, an even more fancifully painted "Esmerelda" smiled cryptically. Ask me anything! I have assisted police in investigati
ons and correctly predicted events and natural disasters—even picking winning lottery numbers for years. A sixth generation psychic with a lifetime of experience. I have made many fortunes. Sought out by well known politicians and celebrities ... And then, a simple ad, with no picture: Miss Cassandra. I can see the future. When your's is clouded, come to see me. Don't leave your life till its to late. Dial now. The spelling in the whole magazine was subliterate, so Grace didn't hold it against the woman. The main attraction was the area code. An hour's drive away. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and if she hurried and put out Hyperica's lunch in case she came home, Grace could take off for the day, and be back before Cloudmere came home. Her crockpot bubbled patiently, there was a trifle hidden under the medlar tree, and dinner would be on time. She picked up the phone ...
~
One hour and fifteen minutes later, Grace Dunphy, , the picture of a mature and a sensible woman, keeper of an orderly and lovely home, distinguished Classics reader and possessor of an officially designated "first-class mind" (Balliol), pressed her finger to a brass button under a plaque that said in French script, "Miss Cassandra".
Mrs. Dunphy did not wait long before the door was opened by a short, plump woman whose face was clean as Mrs. Dunphy's floor. "Good afternoon," Miss Cassandra greeted Mrs. Dunphy accurately. Her smile was warm but not overly sweet.
Wafting Pears soap, she led the way down an immaculate hallway, all white walls and polished wood floor, to a little room with one round wooden table and two comfortable chintz-covered chairs; in one corner, a coat rack, and the other, a gas heater quietly throwing out its warmth to the room.
"Would you like to hang up your coat, Mrs. Smith, and settle yourself down while I make us a nice cup of tea," Miss Cassandra smiled, and to "Mrs. Smith's" docile "Yes, please," she bustled out. The tea must have been brewing because in less than a minute, she was back, wheeling in a trolley with a tea service for two, two plates, and a large platter of what looked like homemade biscuits.