The Hounded

by Simon Butters

  ‘Mum, this is Eliza.’

  My mother turned around and was shocked.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, she’s beautiful!’

  I once heard that all mothers believe their children are beautiful, that it was all in the eye of the beholder, or something. Of course that isn’t true. Parents of ugly children know their children are ugly. Facial features are genetic and usually their parents are no great lookers either. At school there were fat kids with glasses, whose parents were fat with glasses. There were skinny kids with sunken eyes, whose parents were skinny with sunken eyes. These ugly parents still loved their ugly children, no doubt telling them they were beautiful on the inside. But it was a con neither would admit to.

  My mother? In one of life’s spiteful quirks, she was actually rather good-looking, behind the wild hair and manic green eyes, that is. If you looked past her present state, she actually had a pleasing shaped nose and elegant, even features. While I resembled something of her, my genes must have had a flash of inspiration and decided to reorder things a bit. That was a terrible mistake. My mother knew I was an ill-formed version of her. She didn’t hide it. She knew I was ugly and left it at that. She must have assumed Eliza would be equally ill formed. I’d never seen her more surprised.

  She stood up and investigated Eliza’s benign-looking face, inspecting it from all angles. She got closer and closer, looking for some mark of ugliness that would render her presence in our house comprehendible. For a while she didn’t find any. Eliza’s face was a work of art. My mother delved deep into Eliza’s eyes. Finally she stood straight and smiled. She’d found what she was looking for. There was ugliness there, an endless pit of it.

  ‘So you’ve come to see me for yourself, have you?’

  ‘I’ve heard the stories, thought I’d see what all the fuss is about.’

  ‘You’re a brave girl,’ my mother warned.

  My mother offered her a cigarette. Eliza took one casually and they lit up together. They sized each other up as if waiting for the first to blink before going on the attack.

  I stood frozen to the spot, wondering who would win out in a fistfight. Eliza had youthful strength, so I had to give her the natural advantage. But my mother was a wily old thing with baleful eyes. You could never discount a look like that. Who knows what superhuman strength she could muster if the need should arise? I was in the middle of this thought, imagining the screaming and the hair pulling, when Eliza’s words shook me.

  ‘Monty, would you mind leaving us alone for a minute?’

  They were both staring at me, and sucked on their cigarettes in perfect unison. Had they been rehearsing that while I was off in thought? No. It was instinctual, like the way people sit together with the same leg crossed, or copied each other’s hand gestures, or patterns of speech. It was all a subconscious act. A signal they were united. They were connected. They were from the same tribe. I was in deep trouble.

  ‘Yeah. Of course,’ I said.

  I headed to my room. I could hear their voices from up the hall, dim and far away. They were obviously talking in hushed tones so I couldn’t hear the conversation. I thought of sneaking back to listen, but I knew my mother had ears like a wolf and would pick up the slightest creak of the floorboards. I had no choice but to wait it out. It was like a young child being asked to sit outside while their parents talked to the doctor.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam. Your son has clearly lost his mind,’ the doctor would say.

  ‘Is there a cure?’ the mother would ask.

  ‘No. The humane thing to do would be to put him down.’

  The sentence would be final. Whatever they were discussing, it would change everything between us. Eliza would discover something about me that I didn’t know, or had blocked out of my mind, or just plain forgotten. This little bit of information would be vital, a one-line explanation for my whole life.

  ‘Ah, that’s why he’s such a moron,’ she’d realise. ‘That explains everything. Thanks!’

  Or worse. Eliza was right at that minute confessing to my mother all my insecurities, all my pathetic attempts at appearing as if I belonged in this world. These little anecdotes would combine, forming a pattern of behaviour that my mother could now rationalise, and finally make sense of her own son.

  ‘Ah, that’s why he’s such a moron,’ she’d realise. ‘That explains everything. Thanks!’

  ‘You don’t have to sit there and take this,’ said the dog.

  The dog sat across from me. I blinked. I didn’t see it come in.

  ‘Where would I go?’ I asked.

  ‘Find a place of your own. If you can.’

  It was a challenge. Was I really that insipid that I’d never even found a place of my own? The closest I’d got was Eliza’s train tunnel, but that was all hers. I remembered the roses, how I used to sit under them as a kid.

  ‘I cut down the roses. They’re all gone,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. That was unfortunate,’ said the dog.

  ‘Do you miss them?’

  ‘They had their uses,’ said the dog. It stared at me, unblinking.

  ‘You could leave now. Nobody would miss you.’

  ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ affirmed the dog. ‘I’m always here to help you.’

  We moved down the hallway together. I walked down the line of nails in the floorboards, following the beam that supported the floor. The floor didn’t creak so much this way. I made no sound at all and glided down that hallway, floating inches above the floor. I was invisible. A ghost. The dog floated beside me. Its eyes looked serene.

  The rocks were slippery. Waves crashed up in a looping spray. Cold water slapped my face and I woke from my slumber. The dog stood next to me on the rocks, calmly looking out to sea. A fog was lifted.

  I’d been to this beach before, on a school outing a few years back. Our class had taken the train there for Clean Up Australia day. We searched sand dunes and escarpments for plastic shopping bags and cigarette butts, avoiding dangers like blue-ringed octopuses and used syringes.

  Even though these things were tiny and hid in small crevices, they both had the power to kill you. I desperately wanted to find them both, just to see what they were like. My goldmine would have been a blue-ringed octopus holding a rusty syringe. Now that would have been some prize. Despite my best efforts I found nothing but rubbish.

  Most of the other kids just hid behind the dunes to goof around and smoke cigarettes. But I found the task interesting, like an archaeological dig on human nature. Every discarded scrap told a unique story about its previous owner. I picked up some chewing gum wrapper. It spoke to me about a six-year-old girl with pigtails who despised her older sister for leaving her at the mall when she was three. Ever since, she’d chew gum to conceal a nervous twitch she had developed. She kept chewing, well into adulthood, until one day her psychiatrist would question her relentless need for gum and she’d break down into sobs, recounting that her life’s miseries were all her sister’s fault and that’s why she’d never been able to finish school or hold down a job or fall in love with anyone but her pet budgerigar Robert, who also chewed gum.

  That was how I thought about rubbish.

  ‘There’s a shipwreck out there,’ said the dog.

  The dog looked out to sea. There was a small reef off the point we were standing on. A high sandstone cliff rose behind us. Chattering gulls nested along the cliff face. I suppose they thought a fifty-metre sheer drop was a pretty safe place to bring up a small, flightless chick. Still, those little chicks survived the wind and the rain and the ever-present danger of falling to their death. Most of them, anyway.

  Beyond the point, a hundred-year-old shipwreck rested in peace under the waves. All you could see was a buoy, bobbing up and down with the rise and fall of the waves. But there were meant to be some remnants of the old wooden ship down there. Broken bottles and pieces of green copper could be found washed up after a decent storm.

  Our class had done a workshee
t on the wreck. It was a sorry tale of events. Despite their best efforts, everything on that fateful journey went wrong. Apparently the ship was held up in port an extra day while someone ran about trying to find the right kind of whiskey for the Governor. After finding the last case of it in town they set sail, right into a terrible storm. Usually, the Captain would turn back for port but he couldn’t. The first mate suffered a terrible sneezing fit on his way past a barrel of pepper and accidentally blew all their maps overboard. The Captain, hopelessly lost, took to the Governor’s whisky, not to drink it, but to make homemade flares out of it and light the way in the storm. But the fierce wind blew the flames back onto the ship’s sails, setting the entire ship ablaze. The first mate, still in a pepper-induced sneezing fit, steered the ship for shore. They crashed on the rocks and a hundred little baby gulls dropped from the cliffs above, their downy feathers catching alight as they rained down upon them. Exactly one hundred men died that night, one for every burning chick. There was only one survivor, the cabin boy, who limped to shore to tell the story. If only one of those events had happened differently, if the ship wasn’t held up in port, or the first mate hadn’t sneezed, or the Captain hadn’t decided to burn all the whiskey, then maybe those one hundred men would have survived. Maybe. Or maybe no matter what path they took, they were all destined to end up dead, with the bodies of those little gulls burning next to them on the rocks.

  ‘There’s treasure down there,’ said the dog.

  ‘The bottles?’

  The dog nodded. Apparently it knew as much on the local history as I did. Those whisky bottles were extremely rare and an unopened one would fetch a small fortune. But they were all destroyed, surely. Plenty of divers had been out to that wreck over the years and found nothing. I told the dog as much.

  ‘If one bottle was protected all this time, it could have survived,’ said the dog.

  I wasn’t convinced. It was all too long ago, surely.

  ‘Perhaps the bottle was in a wooden case,’ continued the dog. ‘And that wooden case was in a metal chest. And now, after all these years, the wooden case had rotted away and the metal chest had rusted through and that one surviving bottle, worth a small fortune, was right there for the taking, lying on the seabed under that buoy. Perhaps.’

  ‘What kind of dog are you?’ I muttered.

  The dog looked back out to sea. Most dogs on a beach run around like complete lunatics. They roll about in seaweed and poo as much as they can. Not this dog. It just stood on the reef and talked to me about shipwrecks. It was disconcerting, but the idea of finding a priceless piece of history was tempting.

  I was an okay swimmer but that stretch of coast was known for its rips and the occasional white pointer. The buoy wasn’t far off shore. The waves rolled in and broke on the reef, but they were only small. I decided to brave it.

  I took off my clothes and placed them on the rocks. I was naked, on a public beach, looking for sunken treasure with a talking dog. Great.

  The water was cold, even though it was a warm day. The Southern Ocean loomed for thousands of miles beyond that beach. The water that finally hit those shores had once melted off some iceberg in Antarctica. It brought a crisp chill that hacked at your ankles.

  I picked my way through the rocks, keeping to the small patches of soft sand that dotted the way. Eventually I was up to my waist and I dove under an oncoming wave. The cold rush washed over me. I broke the surface behind the waves. The buoy was closer now. I pushed on and swam out to meet it. It took a lot longer than I thought and, by the time I got there, I was panting from the exertion. The water was deeper than I had imagined too.

  The wreck was a dark shape below. Who knew what lurked down there. I turned back to shore. The dog watched me. I was comforted I wasn’t alone.

  ‘Go on,’ I heard it say. ‘You’re almost there.’

  Its voice sounded full and close. I understood it better. No matter how far away I was from the dog, or how deep I’d go, it would always be by my side. Comforting me. Guiding me. I took a long, deep breath and filled my lungs with as much air as I could.

  Underwater was a blur. Dark shapes materialised underneath. It was very deep and I struggled to push myself down. My lungs grew hot. I wanted to turn back. Just as I was about to retreat, a soft, green glint caught my eye.

  I found the surface again, gasping for air. The dog still watched from shore, calmly waiting. I eagerly gulped more air and went back down. This time I went further.

  Sunlight pierced the gloom. Reflections glimmered below. Something was down there. I pushed on, deeper and deeper. The air in my lungs began to fade. A green flash shone ahead. It was on my right, then my left. I was dis­oriented. I found something to hold onto, some blackened part of the ship, burnt from the fire and since encrusted with barnacles. I wanted to suck in some air but there was none to be had. The green glint was just ahead now. Tantalisingly close. I made one final lunge.

  My air ran out. Water invaded my mouth. It attacked my nose. Spray tickled my lungs, provoking me to swallow it in. I was drowning.

  I broke the surface, coughing like mad. Salt water surged out of me like a whale spout. Air was all around but I struggled to get it. My body gave out. I was going down again. Over the top of a rolling wave, I saw the dog was gone. It had left me to my fate. I was abandoned, about to disappear under the waves and join the lost souls on that wreck. I curled my lip and swore. I damned that dog and went under.

  I think what saved me was rage; I was angry at the dog for leaving me. I grabbed hold of the buoy and my finger­nails scraped into the crumbling polystyrene. It was enough to keep me from going back under.

  I had the bottle. I would be rich. I could buy my parents one of those fancy new houses and we could eat roast dinners on white crockery and Eliza and me could just get the hell out of Middleford forever. The hell out.

  But it was all for nothing. I was holding a lemonade bottle.

  ‘Where were you, Monty?’

  Eliza and me faced off in the street. She’d just spent the last two hours with my mother, no doubt talking about all my foibles and insecurities. My eyes fell to my shoes. I didn’t realise it right then, but I now distrusted her.

  ‘What’s with the bottle?’

  I still had the lemonade bottle gripped in my hand. I’d walked all the way back home with it. Even though it was worthless, some part of me had refused to let it go. I’d been on autopilot again. At least some dark recess of my brain had remembered I should get dressed. My shirt was on back-to-front and my shoes were on the wrong feet but at least I had my pants on.

  ‘Found it,’ I muttered.

  Eliza looked at me curiously. She could tell there was more to this, but let it go. If I wanted to keep secrets from her that was perfectly fine, she wasn’t going to ask me to tell her anything I didn’t want to. That was the true mark of a stranger, I guess.

  ‘We didn’t talk about you if that’s what you’re worried about,’ she said.

  She left me there on the street holding the lemonade bottle, my shoes on the wrong feet.

  My mother tried to coax one more cigarette into her ashtray. It had filled up hours ago. Still, she preferred to keep pushing more in than bother emptying it.

  ‘That wasn’t very good of you, Monty.’

  What was this? Condemnation? Some futile, last gasp attempt at parenting? For as long as I could remember, we’d had a pact: she would never instruct me, never provide me guidance and, in return, all her shortcomings would be ignored. She would be allowed to fester inside that blue haze of tobacco. This arrangement wasn’t my choosing. It just was. It was simply part of life, as involuntary as breathing. Her eyes focused on me, searching for something resembling shame I guess. I had none, only rising anger.

  I suddenly flung the ashtray back at her and the dusty, grey butts spilled all down her front. She recoiled, covered in her own ashes. I don’t know why I did it but I wanted to provoke some reaction from her. Anything. If I couldn’t have appro
val, I’d gladly take disappointment. Show me your regrets, I thought. But don’t just sit there.

  She said nothing, and turned away to smoulder.

  Chapter Nine

  Alias: @The Full Monty

  Date: Monday May 5, 2.45AM

  I’m such an idiot. I pushed her away. I think I’ve lost her.

  @Gutentag

  So you are of losing. She will gain.

  @The Full Monty

  What do you mean? That neither of us can be happy?

  @Gutentag

  What is happy?

  @The Full Monty

  Having fun, I guess.

  @Gutentag

  What is happy?

  @The Full Monty

  A smile. Sunshine. Being together.

  @Gutentag

  What is happy?

  @The Full Monty

  I don’t really know.

  @Gutentag

  Now we regard the truth.

  *

  Eliza sat outside Ms Finch’s office on a long wooden bench reserved for detainees. That bench was probably the oldest relic in the school, hewn from the guts of a gum tree over a thousand years old. That bench was harder than any other material known to humanity. Many a sorry bum had sat on it over the years and every single one formed deep welts under the strain. By the time the Principal called the poor kid in, they would be pummelled into submissiveness, ready to confess to any crime. They’d happily agree to any punishment, anything but sit back on that bench. Eliza sat there with absolute ease.

  ‘Where were you, Monty?’

  ‘I went to the beach, that’s all.’

  ‘That wasn’t all and you know it,’ she said.

  I didn’t like the accusation. My blood quickened. My heart tightened. Defiance threatened. Normally, I would have stuck my tail between my legs if confronted by Eliza. But something had changed after she talked with my mother. I was angry, but I didn’t want to let it show.

  She caught my reluctance and smiled cagily. She still thought of me as some pathetic creature, I could see. She had played rescue with me. She knew I couldn’t resist. I wanted to sit beside her so much.