The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
The seafront is busy. People flow around him, into him sometimes, sorry, sorry, then on, huddled against the wind and clinging to one another as if they were falling, tumbling down the street. Then, in the polished glass of a shop front, he sees her. Just for an instant, behind him, looking right at him. Wide brown eyes, dark hair moving in the wind. He turns, looks, but sees behind him only the promenade and the greying sea. He looks back at the window, but is confronted only by his own reflection, standing ghost-like behind the glass. He looks again, but there’s nothing.
He buys fish and chips, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and returns to the car. When he gets there, on the driver’s side window he sees a face. Not a real face; a cartoonish approximation of dots and curves, as traced in breath with a finger. She drew something like it on the bathroom mirror once, so that in the mornings, when he got out of the shower, he’d have a smile to cheer him up. It’s a sweet gesture, and he doesn’t really mind that it’s slightly distracting to have one on a car window. He doesn’t remember it being there before.
He lays out clothes for her every night before he goes to bed now, and sometime the next day they are always gone. He finds them eventually, days later, in the washing basket, so he washes them for her and hangs them in the wardrobe. He replenishes the feminine toiletries as they dwindle in the bathroom. He has taken to cooking two meals in the evening.
He doesn’t like looking at himself in the mirror any more. The reflection that stares back at him with those sagging eyes is a lie. The images in the old photographs are the real him, caught in an intangible past. The images are the real her.
He comes to the workshop after hours now, to rebuild the car. To be away from Terry and Craig, though he’s not sure why.
It’s finished now, the car. The parts all installed. He’s got the engine working. He’s polished the paintwork, and the mirrors and the windows. He’s vacuumed the seats. Dusted the dashboard. He’s filled the tanks with oil, brake fluid, petrol. It gleams, frozen and impenetrable.
Except it isn’t finished. The leather at the side of the passenger seat is cracked and thin. The rear bumper is pitted with coppery blooms of rust. Already the perfection is crumbling.
It isn’t finished. It’ll never be finished.
~~~
It’s a Saturday, and he’s in the High Street, on his way to the supermarket. He sees Craig coming the other way, with his wife. She’s pushing a pushchair with a young child in it. He smiles at them, but they don’t respond. He waves, but still they don’t react. He’s certain they haven’t missed him, certain they aren’t deliberately snubbing him. It’s more that they looked right through him, as though he were transparent. As though there were only blank space where he was standing.
It’s a Wednesday, and he’s at the crematorium. It’s the anniversary of her death. He’s come here alone, but there are other mourners here, and they collect in drifts, like black snow. None of them is here for her. He places the bunch of fresh dahlias in the vase by the plaque and steps back to admire them. He knows they’re what she would have wanted, because her diary told him so. She told him so.
Scattered people fill the streets on the way back from the crematorium, walking in ones and twos and threes. Some of them look at him as he passes in his ash-coloured suit and black tie, a man dressed to meet the dead, and he suspects them of talking about him, quietly plotting condolences and excuses.
He hears someone fall into step with him. High-heeled shoes, clapping along the pavement, a rhythm and timbre that he recognises. Familiar, comforting. The moment feels fragile, so he keeps walking and looks straight ahead, fearful of shattering it.
Just then a silvery car sweeps past, and for a second, just for a second, he wonders if it’s the Facel II. Perhaps Terry’s taken it out for a spin, to get the engine warm, blow out the cobwebs.
He’s aware of these thoughts, but it’s as though he’s outside his body, eavesdropping on himself. He’s dreamed of this moment for years, of releasing the Facel II into the wild, yet this passing confection of metal and glass stirs no emotion in him. It feels as though … he doesn’t know what. Something feels different now.
“Was that the car? The Facel II?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. He keeps looking straight ahead.
“Is it finished now?”
“I thought it was, but it’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
He closes his eyes for a second, shakes his head.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter? I thought you said it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen.”
He walks on for a few steps before replying, just to listen to her footsteps.
“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
~~~
SIMON JOHN COX was born in Tunbridge Wells, and has a degree in chemistry, a job in marketing and a black belt in Taekwon-Do. He has been writing fiction for as long as he can remember. He has had short stories published in various places, and is editing his second novel whilst trying to interest agents in his first. Simon is a founder member of the Tunbridge Wells Writers group and is currently starring as the protagonist in his autobiography.
Website: www.simonjohncox.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonJohnCox
When a single mum returns to her island home of Tasmania with her young son Jack in tow, things don’t turn out quite the way she expects. In fact, her efforts to settle back in take a strange twist…
A DARK FOREST
by Jen White
On the way over, a man, who had been muttering and pacing for a good half hour, climbed onto the rail of the ferry and dived into the black water.
“What’s he doing?” Jack asked.
“Jumping in,” I lied. “But don’t you do it. It’s dangerous.”
All around us people shouted and ran to the place where the man had been standing only a moment before. I didn’t move, just stared at the empty rail, at his after-image.
I led Jack inside to the snack bar. I knew he would not forget what he had just seen. It would emerge days, or even weeks, later, rising up from somewhere deep and dark. “Remember that man, Mum?” he would say. “The one who jumped into the water? Remember? I had a dream about him last night.”
I had not set foot in Tasmania for a decade or more, that deep, dark island, as vivid as a fairytale. Ten years ago I moved to the mainland to seek my fortune. I had blamed the total mess my life had become, the damage that I had inflicted on myself and others, on the place rather than on myself. I know now that nothing is that simple. Oh, I was right to leave. I still believe that. The island and I had been a poisonous mixture, producing something airless and angry and desperate. But, with time, the damage in me had healed as much as it ever would, and distance had enabled me to see that there was something pure about the island, as if all that was extraneous had been filtered out and what remained was heady and overpowering, the distilled essence of Australia. Now here I was, returning with a child, and on my way to a new job as an historian with the museum. I no longer had family on the island, but I had memories of family. And I wanted Jack to see the place. It was as much his heritage as mine.
That man jumping, I told myself, it wasn’t a warning. It was merely the kind of thing that was likely to happen when one undertakes a perilous journey.
Soon after we arrived, Jack and I found a cottage on the edge of a forest and we made efforts to settle into our new lives. Several times a week Jack would ring his dad and tell him about everything.
“I saw snow, but it’s hard,” I heard him complain softly into the phone. “It’s cold and grey. In real life it’s dirty.”
I had never really talked to my wild, untethered son about the island. I hadn’t known how to. “Once upon a time,” I should have begun, the story unreeling from there, ending finally in, “And everyone lived happily ever after.” But I had never been able to find t
he words. I decided to show him instead.
I took Jack to see the house I had grown up in, a sprawling white weatherboard with a stone verandah. We searched and searched for it. Eventually, we found its location, but the house was no longer there. It had burned down, a neighbour told me, one moonless night, and all that remained now was a blackened hole, as if a rotten tooth had recently been removed.
“Maybe this isn’t the place,” Jack kept saying. “Maybe it’s the next street up,” as if I had misremembered the map of my entire childhood. I know memory is malleable, but surely not to that degree.
Jack did not do well at school. His teachers said he always seemed distracted, as if he had dog-hearing and he was listening to sounds no one else could hear. On weekends, we drove through the mountains and camped beside crystal lakes. Jack hated it. He froze. Sun child, he despised shoes and socks and the big, fat, larval jackets we wore against the wind.
It was months before I made any friends. I felt down and dark, like a wrong decision. No one would talk to me, barely even smile. And I, mirror-like, lost the knack of smiling myself. People moved slowly here, as if the air itself weighed upon them. I had forgotten that. Here, nothing was superficial, nothing light.
And then Robin, a scientist who had been employed by the museum for decades, showed me the foetus.
“Come with me,” he whispered.
I had finally past some test I hadn’t known I was sitting.
He ushered me through silent corridors and locked doors. It felt as if I were being admitted to some exclusive private club. After many long minutes of walking, we reached a temperature-controlled room somewhere in the centre of a maze of offices and labs.
Robin brought the object out carefully. He put me in mind of medieval monks handling holy relics. He told me of how they had taken many samples from the creature in an effort to reconstruct the architecture of its existence.
The thylacine itself resembled a baby rabbit more than anything. Its blind eyes, as opaque as peeled grapes, reminded me of my mother’s preserves. This animal was so young when it was taken that it had still been in its mother’s pouch. And now, long dead, it could yet become a mother itself. Imagine that, I thought, a mother who has never lived. It’s the kind of thing you read about in the bible. It has to be a miracle, surely. The equal of the Immaculate Conception, almost.
It wasn’t the only thylacine that had been preserved, Robin told me. There were at least half a dozen others, some of them siblings to this one, raided from the same pouch. But this one, unlike many of the others, was in excellent condition. It had been kept all these decades on the back shelves of a cool, dark room, safely forgotten. Robin let me briefly hold the jar. I tilted it. The animal had fur and the first signs of stripes. The stripes were its camouflage. The animal belonged in the shadowy mosaic of a dry eucalypt forest, a jigsaw of wetlands and grasslands, not a laboratory jar. You could see, even in its infant state, that its jaw was heavy, reptilian, mythical. Its paws were stretched out as if begging, its eyes huge and open, as if it were staring at something unbearably sad, like life.
I had read somewhere that dogs always showed great fear in their presence. On the surface, they were such similar creatures, but underneath there were vast, unseen differences. That dissonance between expectation and reality had thrown everyone.
Robin replaced the jar and led me back through the long hallways. I memorised the way.
One afternoon, as he stared out the kitchen door at the forest, Jack told me he wished we’d never come. “I miss my friends so much,” he said. “Whatever I do here, it ends up bad.”
“Life’s like that sometimes,” I replied. “But it’s not like that forever.”
Since arriving, I was forever feeling as though I were standing at a great height, looking downwards. Too much past flooding into the present, I had discovered, produces vertigo. I’d had to come, but I wished it were easier. Perhaps, leaving it all too late, this place could never be anything more for Jack than someone else’s story.
“We can do something special tomorrow,” I told him. “How about that?”
So I took Jack to see the thylacine. Hell, I thought, it’s something for him to tell the grandkids.
“Ohhh,” Jack exhaled when he saw it.
He went to caress the jar. I pulled it back.
“It is very precious,” I told him.
“Its paw is cut,” he said.
The right paw was almost gone.
“That’s to make more of them,” I explained.
His eyes filled. “Can’t we bury it? It looks so sad.”
“It’s not ours. Besides, it can’t feel anything anymore. It doesn’t know what is happening to its body. The real beast, its essence, is exactly in the place where it belongs. Some cool, green plain where it can run and laugh and be its true self.”
Since the afternoon Robin had first shown me the beast, I had been reading everything I could find about it. Dog-faced dasyurus, it was called once, dog-headed opossum, striped wolf, Van Diemen’s Land tiger. I knew all the names. Thylacinus cynocephalus, meaning pouched dog with wolf’s head, named for the backward pouch in which it carried its young. But also, I liked to think, for the way it carried its testes, folded softly inside a partial pouch, protected by the lateral folds of the belly skin. And slut, too, it was called. Used, of course, only when speaking of the female of the species. Ironic really, for one who bred so rarely, and never in captivity.
Meanwhile, Jack had fights. He turned vicious. Telling me over dinner what he would do to his enemies. I couldn’t believe it. Where was my gentle boy? The child who cried in sympathy when other children did? Had I brought him too far? Made him leave his own natural and true habitat? I was so worried, I talked to his father about his going back. I felt sick when I did that, actually physically sick. And even worse afterwards. I had to lean over, my hands touching my knees, my hair dangling over my head, draping the floor.
In the end I couldn’t do it. I kept an eye on him, though; kept that radical plan behind glass in case of emergencies.
I had forgotten about the island, about it being a place of outrageous extremes, of fairy tale animals, of terrible, dark cautions. I wanted the middle ground again, just for a day. I did not want the dark forests, the imaginary creatures, the yowling beasts. But I was drawn to it too, of course. It was my own childhood, my territory, my nature. And sometimes our nature makes us sick to our stomachs.
I began to collect books on the beast. Many island people did, just as if they were collecting biographies of family members. I read the books over and over. Jack did too. We read that its tail was heavy and stiff, as inflexible as a kangaroo’s. It was a dog that could not wag its tail. How disturbing it must have been to own a dog whose tail you could not encourage to wag. It could make a person resentful, a tail like that. The creature had had a surprisingly large brain capacity, much larger than expected. I wondered what that large brain had been used for? Dreaming?
Caged in zoos, thylacines were seen by most people as boring. The creature did not seem to know that what was required of it was a performance of some kind. Even a rebellious, zoo-crazed frenzy would have been something. But having no understanding of people, they showed no fear. We simply did not exist for them, and to be ignored is, for human beings, the worst thing in the world. Mostly, the beast sat in its cage looking pitiful, meekly accepting the situation it found itself in, without protest. Alive, it had been completely without entertainment value. Now that it is dead, it is a vacant space, able to be filled with anyone’s fantasies. It is replete with potential. People can’t get enough of it.
There were protests over the research, of course. Some mornings I had to cross a picket line. I know how you feel, I wanted to tell the protesters. I know all the issues. I think about them too. You’re right. This is a publicity stunt, a way to attract funding. But it is also so much more than that. Think of it as a resurrection, the raising of the dead. Such a thing has only been done once or twice be
fore, and then by gods. How marvelous it would be!
Or is that what worries them?
But I was being unfair. Miracles, by their nature, provoke fierce, uncontrollable response. That is their purpose, surely.
And lately the creature was being spotted everywhere. People saw it in paddocks and scrubland, on mountains, even in small, suburban backyards. Dream tigers leaping suddenly out of the island’s subconscious and, just as suddenly, being sucked back in again, disappearing immediately, covering all tracks. Most sightings, I noted, occurred at night. That made sense, I thought. The beast, after all, had been a nocturnal hunter. But, also, night is the time of shadows and dreams, the time of yearning. It has been seen on the mainland too, though it has been extinct there for thirty centuries. Resurrection is an effort of the imagination as much as anything.
I hoped the effort and expense of the work would be worth it. Humans rarely change their habits, however. We might bring the beast back only to see it quickly become extinct once more.
~~~
It happened slowly, at continent-forming pace, but Jack began to ease into the island. He found a group of friends, sometimes even staying over with one or the other of them. He smiled a bit every now and then. He relaxed enough to give me a hard time. That was a good sign, believe it or not. It meant he was getting his confidence back. I took him to a small zoo one day with six or seven Tasmanian devils. He couldn’t believe them. “They’re just like cartoons,” he said. One of them opened its obscene mouth wide and growled, setting all the others off. Jack howled with laughter.
I loosened up enough to plan a veggie garden. We stopped being tourists. This crazy idea of mine was actually working. Sometimes we just stood there grinning at each other. It was probably the relief more than anything. After such a grim time, one or two good things made us giddy, hysterical, as if we were particularly lucky and fortunate people. I don’t know how it happened, except maybe that we just persevered. After all, we couldn’t go back, not really. It happened because we’d had no alternative.
Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever Page 5