Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  Footsteps. A soft pad-pad-padding. There was a dog in the shack. A dog in their lounge room and, as well as that, the door was open to the beach. She was sure of it. She could feel the ice chill creeping in under the bedroom door, the sound of the ocean too loud. King tide and the water licking the lip of the rock wall.

  She slipped her feet over the edge of the bed. Hissed at the icy shock of the floorboards.

  Why was the bedroom door closed? Jessica never closed it. They left it open to channel the heat from the fireplace down the corridor and into the bedroom. Tonight in particular she had made sure it was open. She was waiting for Matthew; wanted to hear him open the front door. The animal was moving around in the kitchen, searching for scraps, she supposed. Jessica could smell it, a strong wild smell like you get near a tree full of fruit bats.

  What if the animal was sick, rabid? It was her mother in her head again, with the fables and bogeymen. An animal in the house, and immediately it has to be rabid.

  Rabies, though. At university she had read about the symptoms. Insatiable thirst and yet at the same time a terrible fear of water; spasms, raging—the stuff of nightmares. She knew full well that on this continent only bats carried the lyssavirus; nonetheless she took the key from the bedside table and unlocked the drawer where they kept the gun.

  There was dust on the barrel. She wiped it down with the palm of her hand. Thinking, as she always did, what a ridiculous thing it had been to buy. She usually walked alone on the tracks around here and had never thought to bring the weapon. She checked the chamber, fumbled in the box for bullets. Her fingers slipped the heavy metal nuggets into the chamber. It felt comfortable in the palm of her hand, an old memory. Her mother—don’t ever, ever point that thing at anyone ever. Not even when it isn’t loaded. How easily the weight of it nestled in her palm: the feeling of something she was good at. Blue ribbons every year in the church competition, and her brother’s perpetual envy. Jessica was flooded now with that old mix of pride and shame. We don’t need a gun, Matthew. Do you know that statistically most guns are only ever used to harm a member of your own family?

  She was glad of it now, though. The feral smell drifted in under the door, strong and sharp. She heard something shift in the kitchen, a clatter as something metal—a bowl? A knife?—fell to the floor. More scrabbling of claws on floorboards, something leaping out of the way.

  Jessica opened the door. The corridor was dark but for a vague glow from the last coals in the fireplace at the end. She stepped into the narrow space. She felt the wind gusting, heard the ocean too close and again the tick of the claws. She edged forward.

  The phone rang.

  Christ. She dropped the gun, which landed hard on her toe. If not for the safety, she would have shot her own foot off. This was the first lesson her mother had given her: the cardinal sin of dropping the weapon.

  She bent to pick it up. Heard, simultaneously, the gallop of soft feet, a scramble as the creature slipped on the boards and raced out onto the balcony, taking the stairs at a great leap. She ran to the lounge room and flicked the light on, blinking in the sudden glare, but there was no sign of an animal. The light spilled down onto the sparse garden, the coffin-shaped plot of dirt and young acacias planted over the septic system. Beyond this the rocks paced down to the thin line of sand. The water eased in, slapping against the boulders before dragging more of the beach out to sea.

  The phone was still ringing.

  Matthew.

  The phone, the shrill tone and the sound of it buzzing against a hard surface. She pushed her papers aside; a stack of journals cascaded onto the floor and she bent to snatch the phone up just as it went silent. A number she didn’t recognise.

  Jessica called Matthew’s phone again and listened to the desolate beeping. Then there was the sound of another call coming through. The unknown number again.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘I’m a police officer, miss.’ He gave a name she didn’t catch.

  She looked around the cold lounge room. The fire was almost out. The pot was resting clean and unused on the stove, the stew still in its container in the fridge. She looked at the gun in her hand, at the fruit bowl that had tumbled onto the floor, lemons cowering under it, half-hidden by the silver lip.

  Matthew. The silence on the phone caught in her lungs.

  ‘Where is he?’ Her voice sounded thin. There was no breath behind it.

  ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘Jessica. Jessica Weir.’

  ‘I’m sorry, miss, but this was the last number—’

  ‘Matthew’s on his way home. From work. He’s late. He should be home soon.’

  And only the ocean breathing into the silence as if her own chest were rising and falling without fail. As if his heart were still beating. As if nothing in the world had changed. When they were all dead and buried the ocean would still rise and fall and none of it would matter at all.

  ‘We’ve found a car, miss, but there’s no sign of a driver. I’m going to need your address. You might, ah…you might want to file a missing persons report.’

  And the ocean coming in with a whisper, out with a rush. Always and forever.

  Jessica had forgotten the scarf. It was the adrenaline, she supposed, that surge of panic and, oddly, a growing sense of anger. She was angry to have fallen asleep when she should have been out looking for him, angry that the policeman on the phone could not share her overwhelming sense of dread. She took the corners too fast, forced herself to slow down, easing her foot off the throttle.

  She swerved, accelerated into the corner, swung too wide, felt the tyres skid off the edge and slip in the mud of the verge before she could angle the car back on course. Matthew was out there. Matthew was waiting for her. She hit the thick patch of forest and glanced at the passenger seat where her phone sat, reduced to a simple camera. No internet, no network. Not even SOS only. She was holding her breath again. She forced herself to breathe.

  The lights flashing blue red blue. Yellow tape, the kind you saw on crime shows. Had Matthew committed a crime? She didn’t understand. Was he sitting, cuffed, in one of the police cars? She counted five of them and an ambulance as she eased the car to a stop at the edge of the taped-off area.

  An officer moved towards her window. He was saying something, she saw his mouth move but couldn’t hear him. He turned his finger in a clockwise motion. The symbol for crazy. She was going mad. She was insane. Parts of the forest lit up with the reflection of torchlight. The Pajero was right there. His car. Their car.

  She turned towards the policeman. No, not the crazy sign—he wanted her to wind the window down. She pressed the button and a blast of icy air rushed into the cabin.

  ‘Won’t be long, miss. We’ll let you go by in a minute.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you…Is there anything I can help you with?’

  ‘That’s our car.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘That’s our car.’

  She pointed. Her breath came out of her mouth, puffs of smoke. She wasn’t cold. She was burning up. Here was the evidence, steaming up her windscreen and erasing the image of their four-wheel drive.

  ‘That’s my car.’ She said again. ‘That’s my partner. Matthew. My partner. Matthew!’ she was shouting now, leaning her head out the window and screaming. The cold air scraped her lungs on her in-breath. ‘Matthew!’

  The officer was holding his hand out as if to stop the sound but it was loud and sure and echoing. Other officers were walking towards her car, and she was still shouting his name. Over and over, the repetition leaching the meaning from the word. Matthewmatthewmatthew just a jumble of syllables, piercing the night like the light from the torches. Policemen surrounded her car.

  ‘Miss. Miss. All right, miss.’

  And when she stopped giving voice to the meaningless word she could still hear the note of panic, high
and shrill at the edge of the silent forest.

  They shook their heads as she pulled in to the carpark. She could see they had already called in an extra person to cover her shift.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ It was Lidia.

  Jessica genuinely considered the question. Her eyes were red, she knew, and the skin under them was bruised from staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Go home,’ said Lidia. ‘We’ve got you covered. You can’t be at work with…with all this going on.’

  They had all heard, of course. Someone told someone told someone and the whole south was ringing with the news. Bloke missing, distraught girlfriend. They had replaced her now and they were already counting the shifts till she would give her notice. She might not even stay around for her own graduation. What was the point? She didn’t really have any friends at uni. Or in Tasmania at all.

  Jessica still stubbornly sprayed herself with perfume bought from fancy city shops. She put soy milk in her coffee and the look they gave her cup spoke volumes. She made herself a soy macchiato on her lunch break, for godsake. People who drank any kind of macchiato did not belong around here. They were counting the days all right, and when the counting was done she would go home to wherever it was. Brisbane? Maybe Townsville, wasn’t that where her mother lived? Somewhere that didn’t have a winter.

  Jessica turned the car around in the muddy carpark. She drove back to the shack and her stomach groaned with sickness and with hunger all at once. She had made a breakfast and watched the eggs go cold on the plate. The flowers were dead now but she refused to throw the shrivelled stems away, the smell of the water in the vase turned her stomach, the eggs were rank with death. She had felt ravenous after a night without sleep and yet, when she picked up her fork, there was nothing she wanted less than food.

  She wanted something, though. The wanting was eating out her chest, and she drove home too fast, chasing the idea of whatever it was. The sun was coming up and there would be a search on. Or maybe not. She glanced at the impenetrable wall of tree trunks. He couldn’t have walked out into the forest. There was no path for anything bigger than a wallaby. She tried to keep her eyes on the road but her gaze kept straying into the darkness. The forest pushing in against the sides of the car till she felt the breath pressed right out of her and even if she wanted to she wouldn’t be able to draw in enough air to scream.

  At home the ocean breathed for her. As long as it inhaled, sucking the bulk out of the ocean, then exhaled, pushing itself up higher onto the beach, as long as the sound of it mimicked the rise and fall of her chest, she would know she was alive.

  She let her coat fall to the floor. She hadn’t swept. Her coat lay in the sand and dust and mud. She kicked her shoes off by the dead fire and let them sit where they fell.

  She shivered, staring at her laptop. She hadn’t opened the laptop since…

  Why had they fought? She could barely remember it now. She remembered what came after. Bacon and bread fresh from his hands and a picnic basket shushing against long grass. Spreading a blanket out under the wakeful glimmer of the glow-worms. The taste of smoked salmon on her tongue, champagne washing it down, a kiss, and the chill of the cave floor against her naked back as she rolled under him. So cold, and when she bit into his shoulder she tasted it, the damp cave. His chest hot against her bare breasts.

  She picked up her laptop. The blue case she had clipped onto it was askew and when she eased it back onto the metal, sand fell off onto the coffee table. She brushed it away.

  There. Gone.

  As if none of it had happened. She hugged the laptop to her chest.

  There was something she needed to do, some deadline. She barely knew what day it was. It was as if the world had restarted in the middle of the night and this was the first day. She was still learning how to live in this brand-new and desolate world.

  When she opened the computer it started up, the familiar chime and whirr. Relief washed over her. Of course her computer still worked. She realised only now how scared she had been that it might be permanently damaged. She was startled by the flat beep of a reminder window popping up on her screen: file essay. She opened her word document: Glass Sponges Thrive as Antarctic Temperatures Rise.

  She sat hesitantly at her desk. Next week there would be another deadline, then another. She had once considered this her real work, more important than the cave tours, less important than her PhD. Everything arse up. There was no money in the PhD. Hardly any money in the science writing. The rent she paid to Matthew’s mother was serviced by the three days a week at the caves. But the science was always more important to her. He teased her. So much work for your beer money. Matthew wasn’t here to rib her about it but Scienceweekly.com would still trudge ahead, one deadline after another.

  She was about to look over the sponges article, but she hesitated. Some other deadline. She struggled to remember what had been happening in her life.

  Her PhD. She had been finishing the referencing. Had finished, in fact. And here it was, all of it, the PDF files nestled in her documents folder. She had started writing the email that would end it: eight years of her life. All she needed to do was press send.

  Her finger hovered. Are you sure you’ve done the best you can? Matthew’s words.

  No. She wasn’t sure.

  Never would be, but she was done with it now.

  She did it: hit send. Waited for some sign to mark the end of those long years of hard work.

  Just a sinking feeling. And this numbness, unbroken.

  She went back to the Scienceweekly file. All her research about glass sponges was surprisingly still there in the document, a relic from the before time. She pulled on her fingerless gloves, her writing gloves.

  And looked up two hours later, surprised by the passing of time. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t real. She’d walk into the kitchen and Matthew would be there scooping bolognese into freezer containers. She checked. He wasn’t.

  She thought: I’ll have to call his mother and, oh God, his brother. She would have to tell her own mother at some point—and a whole community would be gathering to pray, as if this constituted some kind of valuable addition to the police search. She would have to report him missing to the handful of other people who would care. But for now she had a deadline and a colony of Antarctic glass sponges that suddenly seemed more important than anything in the empty despair of the real world.

  She went back to the story and when it was done and filed she quickly googled ‘hunt for giant octopus’ before the reality of her life could take hold of her once more. If only Scienceweekly could become Sciencedaily she might never have to acknowledge Matthew’s disappearance at all.

  She could go back to the caves. All the people there that Matthew used to sneer at. Do-gooders, tree-huggers, university-educated greenie snobs. Gus and Lidia and Paul. The people at uni, her supervisor, David, the other PhD students, elite narcissists. Of whom she was one: Matthew was right about that.

  Without Matthew, who would cook? Who would tidy? Who would stoke the fire obsessively as if it was the only thing keeping you alive? Jessica looked into the fireplace. The coals were greying, a chill had settled over the room. Matthew was out there in the cold. A fire was the only thing keeping her alive. She shivered and put another log on.

  There were three knocks, a pause and then three more. It was mid-morning or maybe the day had slipped seamlessly into afternoon. Jessica had let the fire go out again. The shack was as cold as it had ever been; she could barely stretch out her fingers. She reassembled herself, placing her feet deliberately on the unwelcoming floor, forcing the disparate parts of her body to follow. She swayed and thought she might collapse, but managed to stretch over to the curtain and lift it. A cruel shaft of sunlight slapped at her face.

  His car was outside.

  The flood of relief was heavy in her limbs. She felt her face grow hot, her lips stretch up into a grin. She laughed but it was a strange choked sound that was more like a sob.

&n
bsp; Three knocks on the door. Why would Matthew knock? The sob turned into a high nervous laugh. Of course it wasn’t Matthew. Just his car. The weight of relief dissipated and she was able to get herself down the corridor to the front door, her hand up to tame the wild tangle of her hair.

  There was a man in uniform at the door. She wondered if he had been there at the crime scene. She wondered if he would see that she hadn’t changed her clothes since then. Matthew’s car was parked neatly. This police officer had brought it to her like a trophy: the blood-stained head of a stag.

  Blood on the fender. He had hit something. She felt a jar as if her own body had thudded into a wallaby. She was losing track of the edges of things. She couldn’t count the number of hours that had passed.

  He had hit something. He had stopped the car. The door opened. He stepped out. She felt it in her body as if all this had happened to her. Then he vanished.

  And here she was, a ghost in the world.

  The story played in her memory as if she had been there. The police at the scene had told her the car door was open. Blood on the fender. He’d hit something on the road, only there was no sign of it now, no roadkill. Maybe it was only slightly injured. It picked itself up, hopped into the forest. That’s what happened. Matthew just hopped off into the forest.

  She stepped past the policeman, touched the side of Matthew’s car as if to comfort it. The door was closed. Why did they tell her the door was left open when here it was, closed now? Who closed his car door?

  There, there, home now. She touched the door.

  ‘Miss?’ The policeman was talking. ‘Do you have anyone who can stay with you?’

  Jessica shook her head.

  ‘Family, friends?’

  No.

  ‘Is there anywhere you can go—’

  ‘No.’ It sounded sharp and angry, she tried to soften her voice. ‘I’m staying here. If he comes home I want to be here.’