Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘You live in Cockle Creek?’

  ‘Around there. Just out.’ The woman pulled the stool out from the bench and lifted herself up onto it. She was small and thin, fingers brittle as twigs. She looked like a rag doll perched there. ‘Not close enough to be one of the three. You know the sign? Cockle Creek Population: 3.’

  Maude pursed her lips, considering. Jessica watched her come to a decision, cocking her head to one side. ‘I live alone now so I’m not good at the social etiquette or whatever. I’ll just come out and tell you right up front that my husband was taken too. Fifteen years ago.’

  Jessica felt the blood draining from her face. She took a sharp breath, feeling as if she were still in her little boat out in the middle of the bay and the wind had suddenly turned.

  ‘Taken?’

  ‘By the tiger. We heard you got a photo of it, some video on his phone?’

  ‘I—I don’t…How do you know about that?’

  The kettle screamed. It might have been air escaping from her own lungs.

  Maude hopped off the stool and brushed past her to rescue the kettle. Jessica caught a whiff of stale damp fabric mixed with petrol fumes and tobacco as Maude poured the boiling water into the pot.

  ‘Naomi says I can’t just come out with it like that.’

  Maude led Jessica towards the second stool at the kitchen bench, lowered her into it.

  ‘You’ve got some video. The police looked on his phone. One of those policemen was talking about it. Said it was a dog.’ She snorted. ‘Everyone knows, so I don’t know why I can’t just talk to you about it.’

  ‘You know about the phone?’

  Maude shrugged. ‘He was always wild, your man. Playing chicken on that bloody road. Used to do that when he was charged up in his teens. Could’ve killed people. Almost did.’ She shook her head. ‘Everyone knows everything about everyone. Even me, and I live way out of town. We know about your mum in that doomsday cult and we know your man plays a mean game of pool and we know—’

  She paused, rubbed at her eyes with her wizened hand. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Just try keeping a secret around here.’

  Jessica looked over at the discarded plates from last night’s meal. Entertaining a man so soon after her husband goes missing. She supposed everyone would know that too. She let her shoulders slump and when Maude brought a cup of tea over she sipped greedily even though it was too pale and too sweet.

  ‘There’s twelve of us so far, so if you join us that’s an unlucky number. Maybe a lucky one, we’re divided on that score.’

  ‘What do you mean twelve? Who are you talking about?’

  The woman reached across the bench to pat her hand. It was a faint but awful smell, the smell that clings to the homeless and the very old, the smell of loneliness and neglect.

  ‘Twelve widows,’ she said, and squeezed Jessica’s wrist uncomfortably hard. ‘You are the thirteenth widow. We want you to join us. If you’re ready.’

  She was further down the road than she had ever been, past the turnoff to Hastings, past Ida Bay and her glow-worm caves. Wild country. Before the clear-felling the whole south end of the island must have looked like this.

  Jessica tried to keep her eyes on the road but she kept glancing off into the bush. The forest disappeared into thick darkness just beyond the unsealed road, the sunlight unable to penetrate the wall of trees. The roadkill was phenomenal. She drove over a dead bird of some kind, a possum, big as a dog with ugly patchy fur, and the black hunched shape of a flattened devil. A wallaby sat bloating in the middle of the track and she swerved but not enough: she felt it bump under the tyres. A wave of death-scented air swept into the car. She wound up the windows.

  Jessica was looking out for a branch in the road. She almost missed it, skidded to a stop and backed the car up to make the turn into the unsigned forestry track. This must be it, a cutting in the forest and the dirt road climbing up a gentle incline just as Maude had said. She bounced over corrugations, dipped and splashed into deep puddles. The forest closed in around the road: when it swung across to the left it was as if the forest had consumed it entirely.

  Then she was looking at cars parked along a driveway. Old cars, plus a couple of newer four-wheel drives. Mostly speckled with bird shit and dead leaves, like her own car. She parked next to a Falcon. When she touched the side window, her fingers came away muddy.

  The house was an old farmstead. Peeling wooden boards, holes in the veranda you could put a fist through. You couldn’t hear the sea but you could see it in the rust on the curled metal railings. All the downfalls of coastal living without the benefits.

  She pressed the buzzer beside the flyscreen. No sound. She knocked, an insipid rattle no one would hear. There was a peal of laughter, and she felt resentment roll through her. These people had lost loved ones too. Widows, Maude had called them. How could they laugh? She pushed the door open and heard it shudder closed behind her.

  A coven of faces. All women, all weathered. Old, middle-aged, younger; one teenager among them, bent over and playing with a shoelace. When the girl sat up Jessica was shocked to see she was roundly pregnant. Maybe seventeen—eighteen at a stretch.

  They were rough faces, the kind of people she and Matthew would sometimes stand next to at the liquor store. Joking about rednecks in the car on the way home, duelling banjos, Deliverance. These were the faces that used to stare at her suspiciously. City girl making a sea change. Before, in the better days, she would smile and pretend to be polite. All she had to do when she was out in public was hold on to Matthew’s arm and let him talk. Now she felt lost.

  ‘Jessica.’ It was Maude. A familiar face, someone to cling to. ‘Have a piece of apple cake.’

  She moved towards the circle. There were so many of them. She counted ten. Maybe the other two couldn’t make it this month. One of them made room on the couch and Jessica sat, the soggy couch rolling her closer to a thick damp thigh as a urinous fug of sweat and unwashed clothing swept over her. Someone pushed a plate of sliced cake at her face and she fended it off, taking a piece in her confusion, realising that now she would have to eat it.

  ‘Welcome, darling.’ An old, old woman, thin and wrinkled as a fallen apple.

  Jessica blinked. Took a bite of the cake and felt it dry and thick in her mouth.

  ‘Sorry about your husband, love.’ This from a woman whose face seemed kinder.

  ‘We weren’t married,’ she corrected.

  The woman shrugged. There were long dark hairs growing out of her upper lip and her neck. She was wearing a brown shapeless dress, sweat-stained at the armpits. ‘Married in the eyes of God. Law has nothing to do with it. Am I right?’

  Jessica nodded tentatively.

  ‘It’s fucked that the tiger took him. No consolation. But it’s totally fucked.’

  Jessica tried to swallow the cake. It seemed to be swelling into her throat. She was choking on it. She was going to cough—she tensed and leaned forward—she couldn’t breathe, she must be having a heart attack. She held her hand over her mouth and it stretched wide as a carnival clown behind the veil of her fingers. Cake sputtered out and there was the most awful sound she had ever heard, a guttural moaning, a primal scream. It was only when the woman beside her wrapped a heavy arm around her shoulders and stayed her back-and-forth rocking with a strong maternal hug that Jessica realised the sound was coming from her own mouth. The hug tightened. Jessica finally wept.

  She had calmed a little. Her head throbbed. Her nose felt rubbed raw. In the darkness they sat in the rank stench of their own bodies, their anxiety seeping out through their skin. These women who barely washed, it seemed clear—bathed constantly, as they were, in their own grief.

  Maude opened a scrapbook on the table in front of Jessica and pointed to a photograph pasted inside. A furred body crumpled to the dirt of the road. White stripes across its scrawny side like moonlight through fence posts, its dead jaw a wide-toothed grin. She flicked through the pages. Newspaper articles, photogra
phs letters. These scraps of evidence. These small fragments of lost men.

  Melaleuca, Ida Bay, Lune River, Dover, Low Rocky Point, Glendevie, Cockle Creek, Southport. All the little towns and roads and the forests pressing against them. There was a map on a corkboard mounted on one of the walls. Maude swept her hand across the little bristle of coloured flags. She was speaking but Jessica couldn’t make sense of the words. Was she having a stroke? She could hear the pounding of the blood in her head. Something in the tea. Some flavourless drug. She was reminded of her first time with LSD, that odd disconnection. The ability to focus on the movements of a person’s lips but not hear the words. The police had asked about drugs. Did Matthew take drugs. She was having another panic attack. She knew it. She felt incapable of doing anything about it at all.

  Maude lifted her by the elbow and she allowed herself to be led. She imagined this was some kind of initiation and thought instantly of her mother. A sudden clear memory of being held down on a table by her mother—this was after they’d found her by the river, throwing rocks into it with a boy—the hands of the other women pulling her legs wide, the shame as they checked her, the little finger inserted to be sure she was intact, her face flushing with blood even now.

  Maude closed Jessica’s fingers around—what? She looked down to see she was holding a little green flag at the end of a pin. She had been led towards the map. The flag had a word written on it: Matthew.

  Don’t consort with boys. Not till you are married. Married in the eyes of God.

  The other flags on the board all had names on them: Peter, Charles, Albert, Don. Twelve flags. She didn’t need to count them. Jessica forced her eyes to focus on the map, the scattered roads, the solid area of green without any tracks or towns. She put her finger on Southport, traced the road back to Dover. Placed her pin at the halfway point and pushed hard.

  Matthew.

  She turned to see the ring of their faces staring at her. Even the teenager, her eyes wet with unshed tears, and Jessica realised that the girl’s baby must be fatherless.

  A thick silence vibrating with unspoken loss. They sat and breathed in each other’s stale exhalations. Breath like the grave. Jessica couldn’t help thinking that they were rotting inside. And now she was one of them. She had started to decompose.

  Then a voice, strident as a horn cutting through fog: ‘They didn’t believe in the Devil’s Triangle and look what happened there.’

  Jessica blinked.

  ‘Ellen,’ Maude warned.

  ‘Well, look at the map. It’s all just around here. Nothing up at St Helens or Devonport. It’s here. Those things. They live in that forest here. It’s the Devil’s Triangle all over again. Perhaps it is tigers, but it could be anything. I told you about all the lights them people keep seeing, just around the south, Geeveston down to here, lights in the sky that no one can explain. I saw a thing on TV.’

  ‘Tigers.’ Maude picked up the teapot and tilted it towards her cup, World’s best lover written on the side. A few dark drips fell into the cup and the air expelled from her lungs as she plumped back heavily into the overstuffed settee. ‘We call a spade a spade here. Those are tigers, Ellen. We are not idiots or nutjobs or UFO chasers.’

  ‘Although…’ A large woman with small, dull-looking eyes. She brushed crumbs from her voluminous chest. ‘Ellen might be right. We shouldn’t be ruling out anything.’

  ‘Just the scientific facts, Grace. Tasmanian tigers rise up and take people. Just the goddamned scientific facts.’

  Jessica made her way back to her seat. There was no tea left in her cup and her mouth was dry. Just the scientific facts. Words stolen from her own mouth, the way she would chastise her own mother.

  ‘We should watch your video, Jessica.’ The old apple woman rested her cup back in her saucer, her hand a bundle of bones with skin pulled over like a thin glove. Her eyes were filmed. Cataracts.

  Maude nodded. ‘Marijam’s right. I’ll get you to send me a copy. We’ll keep it with the scrapbook. Your man next to ours. Our evidence. But if you don’t mind I’ll show the others what was on your phone.’

  ‘His phone.’ It came out too loud, too strident. Jessica frowned. ‘Matthew’s phone.’

  Maude was holding out her hand.

  ‘I don’t have the phone anymore.’ She reached into her bag. ‘The police took it.’

  Maude glanced at the old woman, Marijam, something unspoken passing between them.

  ‘I copied the footage onto my computer.’

  Jessica slid the laptop out of her bag. She opened it, clicked the icon. Heard the hollow sound of wind through the speaker, watched as the women leaned forward, jostling for a better view of the tiny screen, a press of sallow flesh. She leaned away from the table where she had balanced her laptop on a copy of the Sunday Tasmanian and a pile of magazines. She wanted air, but the room was full of the stale breath of the women. She stared at the screen. It was impossible to look away.

  Darkness, light, darkness.

  Jessica felt suddenly guilty, as if it had been her in the car, risking the lives of wallabies and devils. She pursed her lips. The headlights blaring back on high beam. The animal rearing, the bones glowing pale in the light or the stripes standing out against its dark side, the too-wide mouth. Jessica knew that if you looked at the footage frame by frame it might be a mouth or a shadow or nothing at all, all of it hidden in the blur of movement. The women watched, nodded. Maude held her finger over the keyboard; moved it along the track pad, pressed start, setting the footage into motion again.

  Jessica knew it by heart, of course, the terrible sequence of events. She felt it on the back of her neck. The cold of that stretch of road, the cold of her bed now he was gone, the cold of the ocean every morning when she launched the boat and dropped her net. The icy chill of the caves. She remembered sitting on the rock in the cave, watching the little lights above her like a universe of fixed planets. Each one a temptation. The insects flitting up towards the benevolent glow and their own death. She felt the chill spreading down her back as the creature reared up in the headlights, again and again and again.

  When the women were finally done with the laptop they passed it back to her. Jessica cradled it in her lap like a child. It was hot, as if it had been snatched from a fireplace. She held it in her lap, and lay the flat of her hands gently on the top of it.

  ‘Well,’ the old apple lady said, her smile, unbelievably, wrinkling her face even more. ‘We are glad you are with us, love.’

  Jessica slowed the car to a complete stop and watched the trees loom bright in the car’s headlights. She turned the headlights off and the trees disappeared. The tick of the engine cooling, a memory of movement. Full darkness.

  There were others out there. Bodies dropped like litter on the side of the road, cold bloating bags of fur, alive now only with insect life. The flesh eaten back to bones. She could hear them now: foot scuffles, throat clicks, grunts and growlings.

  She turned the lights back on. Perhaps it was this exact place—the police tape was gone but the trees looked similar. She opened the door and slipped out onto the verge. She had loaded the footage onto her own phone and she held it up now, trying to line up the trees to the frame of the photograph.

  No. Impossible to tell one stretch of forest from another. What she needed was a crack in the surface, a fallen tree, an x to mark the spot. Instead, just the white bones of trees and not even a pool of blood to mark where Matthew was…taken. She was not a UFO chaser, did not believe in alien abduction, and yet the result was the same. A life taken from her.

  She held the phone up again, pressed play. The lump of roadkill. The white stripes on its flanks. The rising-up into a blur of pixilation and yet there were the hips, the slight hang of a penis between withered thighs. White light from his headlights burning the detail from the scene. A human rising up, or an animal mimicking a human stance the way a bear might, or a dog rearing onto its hind legs, a whippet or a greyhound. Or a tiger, burning bright in
the forest of the night.

  She felt the skin of her neck tingle. Turned the phone off and slipped it into her pocket, and the cold pressed itself into her skin.

  She found her way to the front of the car, touching the warm bonnet. It was so dark that if she stepped away from the vehicle and turned in any direction she might be lost.

  Something in the trees. Something large and close. Not a wallaby, no thumping of a tail. She steadied her breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. When she concentrated, she could smell something, a foetid smell of damp fur and earth. The rustle of leaves. Louder, and louder again. So loud that it must surely be right here at the edge of the road. A shaking of branches, a creaking of tree trunks bending, a breathing—she was certain that was a puff of breath—a snort. The thing, whatever it was, catching her scent. The creature rising up all white-ribbed fur and jaw and dark eyes, the odd transformation from animal to something almost human…Jessica peered out into the thick black for some glint of it, but there was none.

  Silence now, beyond the edge of the tree line. On the road, too, only silence.

  She listened for the sound of paws. Quiet as a cat. Of course. Now that it was close enough to smell she let herself know that this was true. This was a tiger. The tiger that took Matthew.

  ‘Here,’ she said, knowing that her tight throat had barely let out enough breath to make a sound. ‘Here, kitty.’

  She had come out scarfless, her neck exposed to the chill of the dark. Perhaps the tiger would leap at her throat, so soft and vulnerable. Or her groin. Animals aim for a person’s groin—Jessica was certain she had read this somewhere. They catch and drag from the hipbone, the legs snapped back, the body disembowelled, the head dragging slack-jawed into the forest.

  ‘Kitty,’ she said, louder now. Needing to know what he knew, to leave this place of loneliness as he’d left it. Needing to find him, finally. ‘Kitty, kitty, kitty.’