Beware of Dogs

by Elizabeth Flann

  Why am I dreaming of Jonathan and Kathryn? Is this some kind of preview? My whole life flashing before my eyes?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa)

  The traditional method of cooking Bogong moths is by rolling them lightly in hot ashes and sifting them gently in a string bag to separate the wings and heads from the bodies. However, you’ll need a lot of moths as the result is very small; one writer described it as ‘the size of a grain of wheat after cooking’. They can also be pounded to a mush and made into a form of cake that will keep for a few days. The early literature described the moths as being extremely ‘nice and sweet, with a nutty flavour similar to an almond or a walnut’, but I can’t vouch for this as I’ve never been game to try one.

  Atkinson’s Guide

  FIELD DIARY – Sunday 22 April

  * * *

  I was too exhausted last night to set my alarm, but I woke up anyway to the half-light before the dawn and, without giving myself time to think, gathered my underpants and jeans and stumbled to the entrance space to put them on. With the minimal amount I’ve been drinking again there’s no need for a toilet stop.

  It was a lovely time to be out. There was no problem of glare, and the world seemed somehow squeaky clean and new. I felt invisible as I made my way to the coast banksia thicket and squeezed and squeezed the flowers until there was no more nectar to be found anywhere. I took the time to tie the mouths of the bags tightly to prevent leakage, stripped the last of the boobialla fruits, then made my way back, panic beginning to set in as the sun tipped the horizon and the cloak of invisibility began to lift.

  I’ve been especially careful with clearing my footprints today. I know Dave will be back, because tomorrow the boat comes, and if he believes I am gone, I think he may finally leave. He’ll be checking every inch of the island before that, so I’ll need to be well hidden by sunrise. I stood outside the cave entrance for a moment, taking deep, deep breaths, then disappeared into my shelter, pulling the camouflage tree behind me, and found that I was shaking with tension.

  Today will be a day of tension. If Dave plans to leave tomorrow, I’ll need to be ready for anything. I’ve kept my jeans and boots on, threading one of the straps retrieved from my backpack through the belt loops on my jeans to ensure they don’t fall down and trip me, and changed into a short-sleeved T-shirt. If disaster does not come, this will be a long day, so I’ll keep strictly to my timetable.

  While waiting until it was time for breakfast, I assembled my weapons close to hand, and then looked for ways to reorganise my clothes and food. Since I haven’t been eating the peanuts, I have an extra day’s food, so I put that aside and laid out today’s ration of nuts and the last sultanas, with the water bottle beside them. Then I watched the minutes slowly tick around my watch until the second hand finally showed eight o’clock. Time to eat. I opened the bag of peanuts, shook one out, took a bite and instantly spat it out. Rancid. I took a sip of water and then sampled one from the other bag. Same result. Waves of horror almost overwhelmed me as my careful plans disintegrated. All I now have left are eleven sultanas and a handful of boobialla fruits, and then I’ll have no food at all and, if Dave doesn’t leave, no way of obtaining any. I debated whether I should take a chance and eat the nuts anyway, but my initial instinctive reaction told me they would make me sick. The thought of suffering vomiting or diarrhoea while trapped in a cave the size of a two-man tent was enough to convince me.

  I decided to eat all of the sultanas now, and have the fruit at lunchtime. Even taking them one at a time, the moment arrived when the last sultana was gone, and I was now almost completely cast away. By the end of today, I’ll have no food and no water. I’m already hungry, and I know I can’t risk going out.

  Perhaps a family of bush mice will wander into the cave, and I can bludgeon them to death and have them for dinner. I begin to visualise all manner of creatures crawling in to meet their doom: rabbits, skinks, wombats, even snakes. Somehow in this fantasy I have a cooking pot and no fear of making a fire. I bake the delicious flesh and eat my fill, wrapping the remains in plastic bags and hanging them from the roof, my cave becoming a grisly larder decorated with the bush equivalent of sides of bacon.

  When I move to the entrance space for exercise, I bring my weapons and my diary, so that I can continue to dream and write. For some reason I seem incapable of conjuring the meals I would normally regard as special: Tasmanian crayfish, Sydney rock oysters, venison steaks, soft, melting aged Brie, chocolates, wine. My visions are of what this island might offer if I was free to explore it fully: fish barbecued with crushed berries, stews of crabs and tea-tree leaves, roasted mutton bird.

  Fired up by these fantasies, I have had to restrain myself from exercising too vigorously. My muscles are still sore and tender, and I have tried to think yoga rather than workout. But the lack of food yesterday and today and even this mild exercise are making me aware of a gnawing hunger I know is not going to go away. I now understand how dieters become obsessed with food.

  To distract myself, I ponder what to do about the two bags of peanuts. I’m afraid to keep them, in case hunger drives me to eat them. The risk of sickness is far more serious than that of starvation. As long as I can get water I know I can stay alive for four or five days, even a week, without food, though in what state doesn’t bear thinking about. I need to dispose of the nuts. But how? I haven’t actually had a rubbish problem until now. Dropping the stripped boobialla stones has worked quite easily. Bad food is quite another matter. I think incongruously of the four recycling bins behind my current flat, always filled to overflowing with boxes, cans, peelings and plastic bags of junk. This certainly is the simple life, but knowing that doesn’t solve my problem.

  I need to dispose of the peanuts outside the cave, but not in a location where they could be seen, or dug up by fossicking animals. Probably the best way would be to drop them into the sea and hope they’ll sink, but I can’t see any practical way of doing that. I could leave them on the rocks for birds to feed on, but that wouldn’t be very environmentally friendly either, and what if they didn’t take them, and Dave came along and found them? He may not know much about the bush, but he’d recognise a peanut. And he’d know where it came from.

  This problem kept me occupied until noon, when I moved back and ate the little handful of boobialla fruits for lunch. The end of the crop, they were quite small and sour, but I ate them with enjoyment mixed with a terrible sinking feeling that they were the last food I would ever eat.

  As I began to write up my diary, I heard what I had both expected and dreaded.

  Footsteps going past the cave and out towards the headland. Then a voice.

  ‘Alix! Can you hear me? The boat will be coming tomorrow and we’d better be on it. There’ll be no-one here, Alix. You’ll starve. Alix!’

  He must have gone down to the beach because I heard his voice off in the distance. Then the footsteps passed me again and went on towards the centre of the island, the cries slowly fading away. I don’t know why, but his tone of voice told me that this time he really did believe I was gone, that he was almost trying to convince himself that he was genuinely searching for me, that he was worried about my fate. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of weapon he was carrying this time and what would happen if he did find me, but the very thought filled me with such abject horror that I didn’t pursue it any further.

  I just sat there pondering the conundrum of Dave, and as dusk fell I decided to act on my intuition and make a quick visit to the toilet rock. On a sudden impulse, I took with me the two bags of nuts, and when I’d finished I emptied them down the hole and heard them tumbling and splashing to the sea. Then back to the cave to discover that at least one of my fantasies had come true. A flock of giant moths were flying around the entrance, slow and ponderous and beautifully fat. I managed to catch six of them and, holding them tightly as they tried desperately to fly away, stuff them into one of the plastic bags left over from the
nuts.

  Professor A says these moths are edible, and from a bizarre lab visit by an insect fanatic from the zoo I happen to know exactly how to eat a moth. I had closed the bags tightly, and found when I carefully opened them that the moths were all well and truly dead. Then, holding the tail end, I quickly pulled the wings off. ‘The body’s full of nutriment,’ Moth Man had said brightly, holding one up to demonstrate, ‘but the wings have barbs that could snag in your throat, so it’s best to pull them off.’ And he proceeded to do so. ‘You need to twist them quickly,’ he had said, ‘so they come off cleanly and don’t bring any flesh away.’

  I sometimes wonder if I’m just as fanatical about rocks as Moth Man is about moths. I’ve had moments when I’ve looked around my home office (and even my work office, come to think of it), and seen rows of books about rocks, walls covered with drawings of rocks in cross-section, and shelf after shelf displaying samples of rocks from all corners of the world. Does this make me a mad Rock Woman? I’ve always thought of myself as an enthusiast rather than a fanatic, but where do you draw the line? At least, unlike Moth Man, I don’t produce photocopies of recipes for Bogong moth scones.

  He would have been proud of the way I handled the de-winging. I’m sure he’d have given me ten out of ten. However, as I was unable to cook my moths, when it came to putting a dead grey object covered in pallid lichenous fur into my mouth, it didn’t seem quite so easy. I was tempted to wait until morning, when I’d be hungry enough to eat them wings and all, but I feared they might begin to deteriorate. Fresh moth was unlovely enough. Decomposition was not likely to improve it.

  After an initial and very unpleasant gagging session, they turned out to be not bad at all. I’ve met people who’ve eaten witchetty grubs and they say the same thing. It’s just a matter of adjusting your mental boundaries. The moth meat, if you could call it that, was not as dry as I expected. Although it tasted like nothing I had ever eaten, it was OK, and I ate every bit, bodies, heads, even the eyes (though I pulled off the tiny feet), keeping my own eyes steadfastly shut throughout. Perhaps it was a bit like grasshopper, which is a delicacy in many countries, but then they do tend to cook, or at least dry, the insects first. This meal had the advantage of being more filling than grasshopper, but I wished I had saved a boobialla fruit to take the taste away.

  Then I turned my mind to matters of health. The good news was that when I peeled the bandages off the cut on my leg it was already partially healed and showed no signs of infection.

  Now for the bad news.

  Since my last toilet visit I have been aware of a nagging pain in my pelvis. With my cast-iron constitution I’ve had very little of this kind of trouble, but from female colleagues I know the symptoms. Cystitis. I’ve drunk as much water as I can in the hope of heading it off, but fear the high sugar content of the nectar will serve to inflame it. Probably what caused it in the first place. I keep the water bottle with me, unable to think of any other plan, and settle myself for sleep. The time is 5.47 p.m. on Sunday the 22nd of April.

  * * *

  The pain increases and I know it’s going to be an uncomfortable night with too much to think and worry about.

  My mother had strong opinions on the inefficiency of the female body, and I now begin to understand why she was always so fanatical about making me drink lots of boiled water. I’d been delighted to find the nectar from the coast banksia flowers, but I realise that, coupled with the sultanas and fruit that have recently been my only food, I have been regularly delivering my body a concentrated sugar hit, just what all those nasty little bugs love most.

  Living in exile, we were dependent on my mother’s treatments and remedies. Her own mother, as well as helping with the cheesemaking, was the local midwife, and my mother had acquired from her a solid grounding in hygiene, basic diagnosis and the use of herbal as well as conventional medicines. Of course the remedies available in Madagascar (mostly of the herbal variety) were unfamiliar, but we did remain remarkably healthy throughout our time there, and I have no doubt this was largely due to the careful regimen she made us follow.

  Both of my mother’s parents died while we were in Madagascar, her father first, then, a few years later, her mother, my unknown grandmother. The news, like everything else in Madagascar, took a long time to reach us. Some visiting missionaries brought the news of her father’s death. Although Moe went very quiet for a while, it didn’t seem to my child’s eyes to affect her very much. An old-fashioned yellow telegram, arriving by packhorse, announced her mother’s death, and a letter from Tante Leni, who had gone Home to look after the funeral, quickly followed. My mother cried for her mother. I’d never seen her cry before. Even weeks later, I would come upon her in one of the back rooms, wiping her eyes as she held some object from Home. She behaved as if nothing was happening, didn’t mention the tears, didn’t apologise, so I behaved in the same way, sitting silently with her while she wept for her lost life.

  I didn’t know then just how much she had lost. It was only through persistent questions to Leni when I occasionally found myself helping her around the house that I began to piece together my family history.

  ‘Did I ever live in Nederland?’

  Leni had to stop buffing a silver candlestick to answer. ‘Your mother went to Nederland to have both you and your brother so that you would have Dutch nationality. Then she took you back to Denmark.’

  ‘Denmark?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? Your name is Danish. Alix.’

  Before Madagascar all I can remember is the boat trip going over, when everyone was sick but me and, somewhere in the backblocks of my memory, a place with sheep and hills and pine trees.

  I have one very clear memory of playing in a field of cold whiteness with Abel, who was dressed like a clown in a bright red snowsuit. On my hands were shiny round blue covers that must have been mittens. I can still remember the feel of them and how the shiny fabric slid off the cold white stuff. Because my family has talked about it, I know that what I’m remembering is snow, and I know it’s a true memory because only I remember the mittens. I wonder where they are now. Did Moe keep them tucked into one of her boxes of mementos, now packed up and sent off to Abel in Canada?

  Leni also told me the story of how my parents met. My father, then a journalist, and my mother, a photographer, were sent on an assignment to interview Dutch artists in Scandinavia. They met for the first time the day they set off in my father’s Volkswagen. One of the artists lived in a self-sufficient religious community. My parents, who were at that time still individuals and not yet my parents, filed the story, then severed their connection with the journal that had sent them, and joined the community.

  I wonder what my father must have been like then, to have persuaded my mother to abandon her hard-won career, and her conservative Protestant background, not to mention home, family and friends, and to follow him into a life of poverty and religious fanaticism.

  The father I remember was an angry man. Was he always like that? Is that what drove him to try to improve the world and its people, make them fit into the mould he wanted to prescribe for them? Or was it his failure to change people that made him angry? I wonder if Abel could answer that. It seems the kind of question that wouldn’t engage his attention, but how would I know? We never discussed our parents. Or any personal matters at all.

  I wish I could phone him. I don’t want to die with all my questions unanswered, but even if I went to visit Abel, or Leni, would they be interested after all this time?

  And what could they tell me? Like me, they liked to skim along the surface of life, ignoring the dangerous undercurrents. I wonder what my mother thought about it all.

  Did she ever keep a diary?

  So many questions.

  She kept a plan for each week on a blackboard in the schoolroom where she took the English lessons. The left-hand side of the board was sectioned off with a chalk line and then divided in half. On the top half she neatly listed the lesson plan for the week. T
he bottom half was a kind of weekly personal organiser. The classes took place in the afternoon. The mornings had their own regular pattern: Monday – washing; Tuesday – mah jong; Wednesday – market day; Thursday – choir practice; Friday – house-cleaning; Saturday – games; Sunday – Bible class.

  Saturday was Abel’s favourite day. No English classes, and the local children (usually boys) were invited to come along and play with the balls, bats and hoops we’d found in the lean-to storeroom when we first arrived. My favourite was mah jong day, sitting on the floor listening to the comforting sound of bamboo tiles sliding and clicking, and the gentle murmur of women’s voices, broken periodically by triumphant shouts of ‘Pung!’, ‘Kong!’ or ‘Mah jong!’

  Occasionally there would be a variation of the plan. Someone would invite us to celebrate famadihana with them (the attendance of strangers was believed to bring good luck), or we would need to go into Tana to buy medicines or clothes. Normally we lived on a barter system. We had a steady supply of food, provided in exchange for English lessons, and Moe’s witch-doctor skills were also paid for in kind; she rarely needed to clean the house or launder our clothes.

  But some things had to be paid for – toiletries, postage, journeys by zebu-cart – and for these the Money Box was ceremonially opened. I wonder now where the money came from. Certainly not from the villagers. Did the church in Denmark pay a stipend? My father used to send them regular reports of his activities, so perhaps they did. Or did it come from Moe’s family?

  Superstitiously, I reach for my anorak and search for the secret pocket near the hem. Neatly folded inside it is a one hundred dollar note, which I hid there before I left for the Easter break, even before Dave came to pick me up. My traditional emergency plan. I begin to see that I am very much my mother’s daughter, my life proceeding through a series of such plans.