Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  Jessica put the last of her papers in a box and looked around at the other desks. Someone else would be at her desk soon. She had never really got to know any of the people at the university. She knew their projects by the books piled up at the edges of their desks. The person in the cube beside her had posters of ice shelves, penguins, the red hull of an ice-breaker. On the rare occasions when they were at their desks together she had sometimes stared at the back of his head: young; sharp haircut. She wondered if he had been to Antarctica, and felt vaguely envious. She would like the isolation. The cave-like solitude of a ship’s berth, the barren sweep of ice fields. Perhaps she should have chosen a different specialisation.

  She pulled her graph off her own carpeted pin board. It represented the variants in light emissions. Seven years of sitting quietly, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, documented here in one slowly declining line. When you looked directly at one of the little larval lights it disappeared, small enough to fall into a blind spot in the centre of the human eye. It seemed like a metaphor for her years of work. She thought of Matthew and wondered. Maybe she had been looking at him head on and had never seen him in a true light.

  She folded the graph and placed it in the box, and just like that it was gone. All the work vanishing into nothing. She felt her heart race in her chest, her ribs tightening, crushing her lungs, her head dizzy. She wanted to run. She wanted the dark calm of Winter Cave: to perch on her familiar rock and peer up at the contained universe of embryonic lights.

  Great. So now she was going to be plagued by regular panic attacks. Fantastic.

  The dizziness ebbed and she checked her watch. Two hours till her shift. She wouldn’t even have time to detour via the shack. She hefted the box up into her arms.

  ‘Jessica?’ Dr Ball, hovering in the corridor outside the post-grad door. ‘I just finished your thesis.’

  He was short, with damp patches of sweat at the armpits of his shirt. It was chilly in the building, but Dr Ball had a tendency to nervous perspiration.

  ‘Oh?’ Jessica lowered the box, resting it on the back of a chair.

  ‘You make those little grubs seem pretty interesting.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s lovely work—poetry. I’ll be surprised if you’re sent back for any changes at all.’

  She tried to smile. She lifted her box back into her arms, struggling under the weight.

  He turned, took a heavy step away and she remembered his interest in the thylacine. She had seen the life-sized model of a tiger crouching in the corner of his office. ‘Doctor Ball.’ She heard her voice, too sharp, urgent.

  ‘Yes, Jessica?’

  ‘I haven’t read your book.’

  He laughed. ‘Different field, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I was wondering if you think the people who say they’ve seen the tiger are all crackpots? You probably say in your book but…’

  ‘Oh. No, far from it. Some of us still hold out hope. There’s plenty of wilderness out there, although I imagine the gene pool would be quite narrow. I wouldn’t rule out a population of tigers riddled with some kind of disease, like the facial tumours the devils have. Actually a fellow down near Geeveston saw one recently. Murphy. Old logger from the good old days, so not easily spooked. There was a thing in the local paper about it.’

  He paused, frowned. Then a gorgeous smile lit up his face and she remembered how engaging he had been in undergrad lectures. She found herself smiling with him.

  ‘You thinking of jumping ship?’ he said. ‘Ditching those boring old entomologists for some stimulating marsupialia?’

  ‘Might be fun,’ said Jessica.

  ‘We can always do with some fresh blood up in marsupials. Give me a call if you want to stow away on our ship of fools.’

  ‘Well, I’ve finished one PhD now, might as well turn around and start another.’

  ‘You will always be welcome.’ He winked. ‘And well done with that dissertation. Incremental light change. Who would have thought?’

  And he trudged away down the corridor, his change jingling in his pocket.

  Cockle Creek. Population: 3. Jessica peered through the streaks of water on the windscreen. Matthew loved that sign; he had made her take a photograph of it when they first came down this way. A perfect day. She had picked a shell out of the sand, thin as skin stretched tight, brittle, a warm cup of sunlight. Matthew had said you would come here if you needed to disappear. Murderers, wife-beaters, thieves. There had been a handful of tents clustered around the sign that said No campers—because who would move them on?—and Matthew made up brutal scenarios for each of the tent-dwellers.

  The guy with the old-fashioned A-frame drowned his baby in the bath before fleeing. The high-tech dome belonged to an embezzler, and there was a million dollars in cash buried in the sand beneath the fly.

  Now she pulled the car up in front of one of the three permanent dwellings, a neat wooden shack with paper daisies spreading out from the flowerbeds down the slope of the hill towards the sand. Jessica stepped over the gate, which was only knee high, and crunched up the gravel path. There was a blue rowboat dragged up on the sand. It would be a fair haul to get it down onto the water, flip it over, push it out over the gentle swell.

  She knocked on the door. Waited. She could hear a clattering of crockery. Marijam, the wrinkly apple-faced woman from Maude’s house, had pulled Jessica aside before she left. Marijam seemed smarter than the others. Saner. Come any time she had said. She would always be home unless she was out for the nets. An evening away from the house every so often to meet with the other widows. Housebound or oceanbound the rest of the time. Pop around. She’d put the kettle on.

  Marijam was home. Jessica heard the hacking rattle of an old hot water system wheezing out a tepid trickle. She knocked again, harder, and the rattle stopped, replaced by expectant silence. Footsteps—a shuffling, slippered sound.

  When Marijam opened the door it was not slippers she was wearing but fat running shoes, fluorescent yellow and huge on such a tiny frame, making her look a little like a waterbird.

  She smiled when she saw Jessica, a genuine pleasure lighting up her face.

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ she said, voice thin and tremulous. ‘I hope you haven’t been knocking for long. I’m almost deaf, you know.’

  Marijam held out her hand and the tiny fingers disappeared inside Jessica’s grip, thin as sticks. But there was power in her handshake, the strength to launch a boat and pull a net. Almost impossible to believe this woman was ninety. But then, Jessica’s mother could easily end up as fit and wily as Marijam. This could be Jessica herself in sixty years if she kept launching her boat every morning.

  Sixty years without Matthew. As the possibility began to spread out around her she leaned against the doorframe to get her balance, and Marijam offered her tiny shoulder in support. A sharp sweet smell of soap. Jessica allowed herself to be led inside.

  ‘When Charles went missing I went about fainting all over the place for ages. Dropped like fruit in winter. You know when they wore corsets, my grandmother’s time? Went down like skittles. Same thing. Short of breath when you lose someone.’

  The house was dark, sparse, but neat and free of dust, the paint washed thin. The curtains were faded, with only a faint trace of the flowers that had once crowded the fabric. The wooden kitchen benchtop was scarred as if it had been hacked into.

  ‘It gets better,’ said Marijam, settling Jessica into a chair at the heavy wooden table.

  She shuffled to the sink and there was that noisy rattle of pipes as she filled the kettle.

  Everything about the place seemed oddly familiar: the anodised aluminium teapot, the angular modernist canister, the cracked floral plate—even the biscuits the old woman placed on it, salty sweet. All these things were the kind of details Jessica would have chosen for herself. The photographs fading in their frames depicted a line of fishermen in long rubber boots, a rowboat heading for a cloudy horizon, the tangle of ropes and colour
ed glass floats rubbing against the flyscreen above the sink. Jessica couldn’t help feeling as if she had suddenly been transported into her own future, a spartan world of fishing and grief. Marijam was Jessica, refined by the years down to a bundle of bones held together by will.

  When the tea was made Marijam sat opposite Jessica and reached over to pat her arm. The hug of those arms would be formidable.

  ‘They’re crazy, right?’ Jessica said finally.

  ‘Those women?’

  Jessica nodded.

  ‘Grief makes us crazy, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘But your own husband? What do you think happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t think. I know. He was taken by a tiger.’

  ‘How do you know that? What makes you so sure?’

  Marijam shifted on her chair. It creaked slightly under her bird-like frame. ‘I saw it ten years ago. I was throwing a line in off Lune River. To be honest, I was taking some mussels free of charge off that farm down there. I was going to make spiced mussels with buttered polenta, I remember cutting the recipe from a magazine. Still have it somewhere.’

  She shifted again as if she were about to get up and hunt around in her recipe books, but thought better of it. She took a sip from her cup.

  ‘I looked over to the bank and I saw it. A dog, I thought. But remember I had just turned eighty and my eyes weren’t to be trusted even then. Now? Pffff. If I saw the tiger now I might think it was a wallaby. But I let the boat drift closer. It was running laps on a small stretch of sand. Long tail, sluggish hindquarters, and when I got close enough I could see the stripes on it. It paused, like it knew me. I knew him too: my Charles, only those gentle eyes were filled with something else now, more like cunning. He took a step towards me and I got a look at the teeth on it. Froze my blood in my veins. I missed him so much. I should have stayed in the boat but I got out onto the sand. Held out my hand, almost like he should eat out of it. Stupid. He took another step towards me and his mouth opened, big mouthful of tiny teeth. The hair all at the back of my neck shot up and I pulled my hand away quick smart. Got the feeling he would bite it off if he could. Not Charles, the way he used to be, but this was something wild. I just stared, so focused on the beast I forgot to keep hold of the rope and the boat got dragged out on the next wave. I turned and waded out thigh-deep to get it back and when I hauled it to shore the tiger was gone. There were tracks, though. I looked at them long and hard.’

  The old woman paused and tapped a spoon on the rim of her cup.

  ‘That’s how I know the tracks I found here not so long ago were his. Or one of them at least. This was a month back. You normally see them at night and I had seen it, something, skin in the moonlight. My eyes, I told you about them, but still I am sure it was a man, standing naked between my shack and the beach. He was just at the edge of the spill of light from the kitchen and his thingy hanging down for all to see.’

  A sly, humorous glance at Jessica.

  ‘My eyes are good enough to recognise a thingy when I see one, don’t you worry about that. It was him, my Charles. But he was young still, like when he was taken. Then he dropped down to all fours and he ran off like a cat dragging his tail, that awkward gait like the first one on the beach, like his hips were heavy. It was Charles, I guarantee it.’ She laughed. ‘Unless it was a kangaroo. My eyes, you know. But in the morning, there was tracks just where he’d been, footprints coming in, paw prints leaving.’

  She poured more tea into her cup and sucked it loudly. Jessica noticed the steam. Her own tea was still too hot to drink.

  ‘Those women? They’re mad all right, and most of them are stupid. But they’re not wrong about this. A tiger took them all, one by one, picking them off. And they’re still out there, somewhere. I’d swear blind—but I am almost blind, so I’d swear deaf, except I’m a bit hard of hearing too.’ She cackled. ‘I’ll swear on my dinghy, because that’s about all I’ve got that’s still reliable. Your husband is alive.’

  Jessica flinched, but didn’t contradict the old woman. All the years between them added up to a kind of marriage anyway.

  ‘And’—the old woman tapped the table to make sure she had Jessica’s attention—‘he’s dangerous. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be a fool. He’s changed into something wild and that’s why he can’t come back to you, not ever. It’s why you mustn’t let him.’

  Jessica glanced away, out of the window. There in the garden, half-sand, half-grass. The sounds outside her shack. The scrambling in the darkness.

  ‘The scientists I work with would say that’s just paranoia.’

  ‘But you know it’s true.’

  Jessica bit into a biscuit. Soft. Stale. If there was a tiger, if she found a tiger alive…She knew her little experiments with glowworms, the tiny changes in light emissions, would not make a proper career. She was still working in Hastings caves, picking up rubbish, tutting at kids who tried to touch the stalagmites.

  ‘You get any crays at the moment?’ asked Marijam.

  ‘What?’ Jessica blinked. ‘I—yes. A couple.’

  ‘Commercial fishermen. I reckon they see my pot out and come out with seven or eight pots of their own. Put them in beside mine. It is like Amazon. You know Amazon?’

  ‘Sorry? The river?’

  ‘The bookshop. No, hang on. Not Amazon, that other one, the big one. Is it Amazon? Pick on a little bookstore, put a big mega-store across the road. Discounts on all the prices till the little fella dies, then corner the market. I read about that on the internet.’

  It was odd to hear someone so old talking about the internet. Jessica had assumed this woman would be cut off from a world of technology, living off the land, isolated.

  ‘My pot goes in and then the damn commercial fishermen are all over it. You just watch out. Change your spot. Lead them astray. Bloody Amazons, the lot of them.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Wily buggers.’ She dunked her biscuit in the tea and ate it quickly as it began to crumble. ‘And don’t let that tiger anywhere near your house. Shoot the bastard. You have a gun?’

  Jessica nodded.

  ‘Good. Shoot it. It’s a monster. I miss my husband every day but that thing he’s become is a wild beast. A rabid one. Dangerous. Shoot him.’

  Jessica stood. She didn’t want to be here anymore. She saw the woman for what she was now, the shell of a person, kept alive by crazy rage. She looked into her sharp, clouded eyes and saw herself, turned sour.

  ‘Thanks for the tea.’

  The woman nodded, lips tight. Jessica had disappointed her. They had disappointed each other.

  ‘I’ll see you next week at the meeting.’

  Jessica nodded, smiled as warmly as she could manage and walked quickly to the front door. When she stepped out into the chill of the air she felt as if she was escaping. She wasn’t sure exactly what from.

  There was a view. The house was tucked neatly up a steep concrete driveway with an aviary flanking the carport. A cockatoo arched its crest and screeched, stepping from foot to scaly foot. Jessica locked the car door out of habit and stood staring the cocky down. She had no desire to get closer to the bird but the front door was there beside it and she would have to eventually. She stood leaning against the car. She could see the sailing ships all moored along the Huon, the whole flotilla bobbing up and down on a gentle tide. The sun was out and it touched the water; made it seem viscous, like mercury poured out over the bay.

  Murphy opened the door. ‘That’s Butch. He’s harmless but don’t put your finger in between the bars. Bites like a bastard.’

  Murphy had a long balding head: a shining strip of skin flanked by thin grey hair on each side. He was dressed neatly in a pink shirt tucked into high-waisted trousers, and brown lace-up shoes. Everything about him clean and pressed and shining. Jessica walked over to shake his hand. His palm strong and dry.

  ‘I hope I’m not intruding.’

  ‘No, no. We’re virtually neighbours. Come in.’

  The
cockatoo shrieked again and she flinched.

  ‘Shush up, Butch.’ The bird spread his wings and upped the volume.

  Murphy bent to his laces and slipped his shoes off at the door. She realised he must have put his shoes on to make the few steps out to the porch. Fastidious: not what she would have expected from a tiger hunter. She supposed she’d been expecting a cross between the rough types Matthew worked with at the fish farms and Indiana Jones. She stooped and pulled off her own boots.

  The house was immaculate. Crocheted doilies on every wooden surface and neat watercolour landscapes. The couches were light brown leather. She perched on the edge of one, unable to shake the feeling that she was making the place untidy. She was wearing her clothes straight from the boat. Fish blood on her sleeve.

  ‘So you’re writing a story?’ he asked, smiling. Sitting straight-backed with his hands folded neatly in his lap. He was well over seventy but he was fit. She could see all the wiry energy in his wrists. She could imagine him hacking his way through virgin bush. No Indiana Jones, but a thorough and hard worker.

  ‘Researching. I’ll write it up if there’s anything in it.’

  ‘Oh, there’s something in it, all right. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

  ‘The tiger.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I read the interview in the paper.’

  ‘I have that here.’ He reached towards a manila envelope on the side table and opened it, and there were photographs and old letters and news clippings inside it.

  ‘This is my father.’ He tapped the fading photograph. A man, just as neatly dressed as Murphy, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, standing on a divot of wood that had been hammered into the gigantic trunk of a tree. It was the largest tree she had ever seen, the man dwarfed by it.

  ‘That’s how they climb up them. They put those sleepers into the trunk and climb that way.’ She could feel her eyes glazing over. The room was hot, the fireplace blazing. She wanted to open a window but didn’t dare ask. ‘That would have been 1914 and that tree was up in the back of Geeveston. They used to take two teams in there, you know…’