A comical sight, even ludicrous, but I sensed the terrible seriousness of purpose.
She hadn’t noticed me. She leant to one side; now I saw, horrified, that she had already shaved, or scissored, most of the hair from her legs. I also saw the blood; the black skin of her thigh was a mess of cuts and lacerations.
I stepped forward into the bathroom; she turned to me, startled, then quickly turned her back again, crouched forward, hiding her injuries. I remembered our first meeting, months before—how she had slunk sideways, crab-wise, into the room, embarrassed, it seemed to me at the time, by her nakedness.
My hands moved: ‘Why?’
She stared at me in the mirror, reflected. There was something new in that look—a hardness, or directness, which I hadn’t noted before. The room was suddenly drenched in her characteristic musk, but more rank than usual. Then she backed into me, suddenly, reached one elongated arm behind her to grip my thighs, and leaning forward, her weight resting on her other elbow, pressed my groin against her backside. Startled, I pulled free as quickly as I could. A sticky wetness stained the front of my jeans; I realised, shocked, that she was in oestrus.
She was presenting to me, a word that doesn’t exist in any dictionary of Sign.
‘Wrong,’ I signed, frantically. ‘Bad.’
She half-turned to me, puzzled. ‘Why?’
No immediate answer came to hand; she reached for me again, and tugged me towards her. Her grip was gentle, but inexorable; her wet hind-parts pressed hard against me—and now I panicked, flailing at her with both fists, striking her thick-furred back several times, as hard as I could. Her astonishment gave me time to break free.
I fled downstairs to the laundry, ran the hot tap over a damp cloth, and wiped, scrubbed, at those stains on the front of my jeans. The heat of the cloth seemed to release, or heighten, a new, volatile odour: rank, fish-like, identical to the smell of a woman. I rubbed frantically at the denim, aware of the growing stiffness of my cramped cock beneath. Horrified, I peeled off the jeans, dropped them into the sink and ran the hot tap, at maximum gush, over them. My own stiffness remained, straining inside my flimsy jocks. A reflex, surely—the effect of that universal female-smell. Or was it a residual waking erection? Even as I pleaded with myself—please let it be that—another, more disturbing thought refused to let me off the hook so leniently. If it were a reflex, where had that reflex been last night? Stella had also been on heat. ‘I’m the sort who needs it every day,’ she had murmured, drunkenly, during the night. My hard cock still refused to sag; I felt harder than I had felt for many years. Given back to me also was the urgency of old; an urgency that demanded to be addressed, immediately. I pressed my thighs hard against the edge of the laundry sink, gripped my cock, a rigid faucet jutting over the lip of the sink, and squeezed. Already balanced on the edge of coming, I was pushed instantly over the last threshold. A groan-shout escaped my lips, helplessly, I ejaculated. And the image that filled my mind as I came—as much, still panicking, as I tried to suppress it—was of Wish presenting, her swollen hindparts pressed hard against me, her long arm gripping my buttocks, my face buried into the warm, thick fur of her shoulders.
I slumped over the sink, wobble-kneed, paralysed. Horror at my actions filled me, the hands of sign-shame rose to hide my face. The noise of my coming would surely bring Wish down the stairs. I couldn’t face her; I could barely face myself. I managed to tug on my jeans, soaked through, still steaming, and escape from the house through the laundry door.
I hurried through the trees and across the outer field. Stella’s flock watched me, incuriously; my hands rose again to hide my face, automatically. I needed to drive, and think, safe in my Fiat tortoise-shell. I needed to drive to the nearest beach, and immerse myself in the salt water, and float, cleansed, far out to sea.
BOOK
THREE
1
The polite sign for sex, a throat-cutting mime, but made with the Good Hand; a weird mix of the sweet and the sour. The little death of orgasm: the surrender of the self? Or something deeper and weirder: sex equals danger, sex is a kind of suicide.
A see-through sign, certainly; a bifocal lens that first shows this, then that, a different focus, a further meaning.
The sign was a favourite of Jill’s. The same contradiction is buried in English, she once told me—always keen to find patterns and make connections between languages. To fight and to fuck have the same ancient root: ficken, to strike.
I’m no fighter. I’ll run a mile to avoid conflict. And no one, least of all Jill, would describe me as oversexed, the kind of man who thinks with his cock. A crude expression? On the contrary. English at its best, at its closest to the simple poetry of Sign.
I drove up out of the bowl of the valley, crossed the western rim, and rolled at speed down Greenhill Road and through the city to the waiting surf.
The sea was grey and choppy, white-flecked by a strong westerly. My wetsuit was still hanging in the guest-room wardrobe in the Hills; I had nothing but my own thick seal blubber for insulation. Sand and frigid salt-spray whipped my face and skin as I stripped to my jocks and waded in. The first heart-stopping shock of cold quickly faded, and I felt only a warm glow as I floated beyond the surf line, sole swimmer as far as the eye could see. Less buoyant without my rubber suit, I was still unsinkable, more walrus than man.
The shock of Wish presenting to me was also fading. I felt again a tremble of excitement as I remembered that bathroom scene, a pilot-flame had been lit somewhere inside me, and was growing, surely and steadily. Gratitude for that excitement nourished the flame even further. Guilt, shame, gratitude, relief—a sweet-and-sour mix, definitely. I floated with my eyes closed, limbs flaccid, a buoyant cork at the whim of the sea. I wanted to feel my way to some sort of resolution, rather than merely think—but self-justifications were also easy to find, or invent. A small, logical voice nagged at me: if Wish deserved human rights, she deserved human pleasures.
Excuses, excuses? Her face came to me clearly as the swell lifted and lowered me. Her wide nose, her dark, mischievous eyes. Her thick ‘mink’ coat. The warmth of her big body. Above all I remembered her hands, her bare black fingers emerging from thick fur as if from fingerless mittens.
Clive would have condemned these comparisons: I was committing the sin of anthropomorphism. But such scruples had come to seem petty, and irrelevant. As I floated, glowing, one single, overriding need shouldered through the jostle of contradictory feelings: I missed her.
Should I feel guilty if I preferred her company to others, if I loved being with her?
Loved. The word had sneaked into the open indirectly, under subterfuge of that innocent sentence. It now insisted on being spoken more clearly: I realised that I loved more than merely ‘being with’ her.
I loved her.
The classification of that love, its type, its specifications, refused to wait. A tutor’s love for a gifted pupil? A foster-parent’s love? These, certainly. These at the least. Sign is less ambiguous than English on the subject of love, less able to hide its feelings and hedge its bets behind the euphemisms of infatuation, bewitchment, temporary insanity. The shape is clear, powerful, undeniable:
I knew also, equally clearly, that those feelings were returned. Wish loved me, I loved her. Armed with this knowledge, armoured by it against guilt and doubt, I kicked back towards the shore, and the neat pile of clothes waiting in the dry sand above the tidemark.
2
Stella opened the door, agitated, dishevelled, restlessly shifting her weight. Her hair was a matted nocturnal tangle, but she had pulled on some clothes. A stethoscope dangled about her neck.
‘Where have you been, J.J.? I found Wish in the bathroom. Shaving herself with your razor. Where were you?’
‘I’m sorry—I had things to do.’
‘She’s in a terrible state. She might have bled to death.’
She stood blocking my path; I wanted to push past her and up the stairs. What was the signifi
cance of the stethoscope?
‘Is she alright?’
‘No thanks to you. I’ve patched her up as best I could.’
She ran the fingers of both hands through her tangled hair, distraught.
‘You shouldn’t have left her alone, J.J.’
She seemed to think I had left the house before the shaving disaster. I wasn’t about to tell her otherwise.
‘I didn’t leave her alone. You were in the house.’
‘I slept in because I thought you were here. You should have woken me. You shouldn’t have left your razor lying about.’
Her voice trailed off as if she had realised the absurdity of the accusation, an attempt to find anyone, or anything, to blame.
‘I want to see her.’
She stood aside and followed me up the stairs, her tone more conciliatory. ‘I’m sorry, J.J. I went off half-cocked. I don’t want to point the finger. Wish is the one we have to worry about. It’s very disturbing.’
The bedroom door was deadlocked, a security measure that had been neglected in Clive’s absence. Stella turned the key and pushed. Wish was lying on her bed, facing the wall. Her back, once thickly coated with fur, was now a kind of savannah: bare shorn skin, with just a few central tufts of hair, out of reach of the razor. Adhesive plasters had been stuck here and there, flesh-pink against the underlying blackness. Her neck and arms were more smoothly shaven; a hacked thatch of hair perched on top of her head. I was reminded, absurdly, of Clive’s ill-fitting toupée.
I sat on the edge of the bed and touched my fingertips, gingerly, to her damaged skin. She was trembling slightly, sobbing, perhaps. She refused to turn and face me; she failed even to acknowledge my presence. Her mattress was smeared with stains, the brick-reds and red-browns of dried blood.
‘I couldn’t get through to Clive,’ Stella was babbling somewhere in the background. ‘I left a message—in Chicago. I was desperate.’
I wrapped my left arm across Wish, my hand in the Signing Space between her chest and the wall, hidden from Stella. ‘Mink grow again.’
No response.
‘Me sorry,’ I signed.
She shivered violently, a small convulsion—I realised that her trembling was more physical than emotional. Black goose bumps, human goose bumps, pimpled her damaged skin. I turtled my head towards Stella. ‘She’ll freeze to death. Get some clothes.’
‘I’ve turned up the heating, J.J. It’s hot in here.’
‘She can’t sit in front of a heater till her hair grows back.’
‘We can’t reward this behaviour with clothes.’
‘You sound like some fucking animal trainer! I thought you believed she was human.’
I was shouting, the first time my voice had been raised in that house. The fact that someone else was doing the worrying, expending the emotion, seemed to permit Stella to relax slightly.
‘Not human, J.J. Obviously she’s not human. I just believe she should have human rights.’
‘Humans are usually allowed to wear clothes. And shave themselves, for that matter.’
There was a Clive-logic in this that seemed to flummox her; she glanced sharply to one side as if half-expecting to find him nearby.
‘I’ll get a quilt,’ she said, a reasonable compromise, and left the room.
‘You sick?’ I signed, my hands still reaching across Wish’s broad back, into Signing Space.
‘Cold,’ she shaped, tersely, one-handedly—her first acknowledgement of my presence.
I lifted my legs onto the bed and pressed myself full length against her. Footsteps approached; a thick quilt was shaken out above us, momentarily suspended, it descended slowly and gently, settling across the bed.
Stella was right: the room was hot, the quilt unnecessary. I was soon sweating profusely—but Wish was shivering again, uncontrollably. Her breathing seemed laboured; was she feverish?
‘She’s ill. She might have pneumonia.’
‘She’s fine, J.J. I’ve been over her with a fine-tooth comb.’
‘Are you sure? You’re only a vet.’
Not the most tactful choice of words; and not at all what I meant to say.
‘I’m sorry, Stella. All I meant was—she’s not a dog, or a horse. Her anatomy is human, surely. Perhaps we need a real doctor.’
Another bad choice. I regretted the word ‘real’ as soon as it left my mouth.
‘A specialist,’ I corrected myself, more diplomatically. ‘A chest specialist.’
‘J.J., she is an animal and I am a vet. Believe me, I know more about primate physiology than any doctor in this city. The problem is not in her body—it’s in her head.’
‘What are you saying—she needs a psychiatrist?’
My voice was raised again; Wish shifted her weight on the bed and cupped her hands over her ears, a clear rebuke. She might have done better to cover her eyes; as always at times of stress, my hands signed, involuntarily. The shape for ‘mind’.
Then ‘doctor’, two fingers, taking a pulse.
Mind-doctor. I wrapped my arms around her again; she shrugged them off with a twitch of her powerful shoulders, then rolled onto her back and held her hands high above her, in full view.
‘You go,’ she signed. ‘Me wish alone.’
‘Alone’ was all her own work, but instantly readable: the Point Hand personal pronoun—me, Number One—sheltered inside the curved Flat Hand.
I had never seen that hand-shape before, but it seemed far more heartfelt than the official sign for aloneness, or loneliness, an opaque borrowing from British Sign.
‘Go!’ her hands repeated, more forcefully. ‘Me—alone!’
I looked over my shoulder at Stella; she stared back, guilty, silenced. Finally she shrugged and nodded towards the door; I reluctantly eased myself from beneath the quilt and followed her out.
3
We faced each other across the cluttered living room, bewildered. I lay slumped on the couch; Stella sat on the floor, leaning against a bookcase, surrounded by her dogs. I remembered an Aboriginal term Jill had brought back from a field trip to the desert, the description of a very cold night: a three-dog night. Stella seemed in need of similar protection, or comfort.
‘Should we leave her alone, J.J.?’
‘She wants to be alone.’
‘All the same…’
She pressed the side of her face into Binky, sitting astride her lap, but the presence she most needed was Clive’s, I saw. She might mock his calm rationality, she might even spend odd nights with other men, but without that bedrock, she was lost.
‘Perhaps I should sit with her all the same, J.J.’
‘She’ll order you to leave.’
‘Then I’ll sit outside the door where I can keep an eye on things. Until Terry gets here.’
This was news; she tossed me another scrap as she detached herself from her quilt of dogs. ‘I’m sorry, in all the fuss I forgot to tell you. I rang Terry in Melbourne when I couldn’t reach Clive. He’s flying over on the first plane. Sometime late this afternoon.’
I called up after her: ‘What did you tell him?’
‘That Wish had mutilated herself.’
‘You told him the reason?’
Her tone was impatient. ‘We don’t know the reason—that’s the point.’
I was speechless for a moment, surprised. The connection seemed obvious: Stella had spent the night in my bed, naked; Wish had shaved off her fur.
I said, carefully: ‘It might be best not to tell Wish that Terry is coming.’
She paused on the stairs, puzzled. ‘I think we should play the whole thing down,’ I added. ‘It’s a bit out of control. It’s possible that your own reactions have just added fuel to the fire—just reinforced it. I’m beginning to think we should treat it as a…bit of a joke.’
‘It’s hardly a joke, J.J.’
‘I said treat it as a joke.’
She moved a step back down the stairs, watching me. ‘If you have any theories, please share them w
ith me.’
A small turning-point had been reached, a moment of truth. To tell, or not to tell? The question could no longer be evaded, or postponed.
I said, limiting myself: ‘Perhaps she wants to be more human.’
More impatience from Stella. ‘Obviously. But it’s such a neurotic gesture.’
I decided I wasn’t ready to share my theory with her. She waited; when nothing more was forthcoming, she turned again and climbed the narrow stairs, followed, laboriously, by her dogs.
I lay on the couch, thinking. Rain was falling again outside, drumming against the roof, spilling from the gutters—soothing water-noise. I had no proof that Wish had seen us in bed together. Was the connection entirely mine, the product of a guilty imagination? The possibility was seductive, a three-dog fantasy it would have been easy to clutch at for comfort. But I knew that Wish had shaved herself out of sexual jealousy.
Mid-afternoon, I made some salad sandwiches and carried them upstairs. Stella was sitting on the floor outside the locked door, surrounded by her dogs.
‘Any sign?’
‘I’ve looked in once or twice. She hasn’t moved.’
She passed a sandwich-half to each dog, I returned downstairs to the couch, and my thoughts. The gate intercom buzzed as the afternoon light began to fade. Stella’s voice carried down the stairs. ‘Could you get that, J.J.? I don’t want to leave her alone.’
I pressed the intercom but received no response. I forced my big feet into a pair of Stella’s gumboots, opened an umbrella, and picked my way through the rain and slippery mud to the outer gate. A taxi waited on the far side of the road, exhaust smoking; as I approached, a tall bearded figure, carrying a rucksack, emerged into the rain. Terry, surely—recognisable, in essence, from the crayon sketch taped to Wish’s bedroom wall. He signed a one-handed hello, then dropped his rucksack to the ground, freeing his other arm, and finger-spelt his name: T-E-R-R-Y.
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