by Kathryn Hore
But the disgust stayed with me.
It was a feeling I knew well, however indirectly. In the months before she left, I had seen it creep across Sallie’s face like a shadow, seen it pull down the edges of her mouth, seen it in the way she turned from me, as though unable to bear the sight of me any longer.
‘It’s like living with a black hole,’ she had said.
And then: ‘I hate who I am with you.’
And then: ‘You’re draining the life from me.’
It made no sense to me. I heard the words, but it seemed she was talking about some other person — someone I did not recognise and could not identify with.
In the time we’d been together, I’d done all I could to become the perfect partner. I was dedicated to her constant happiness, moulding myself precisely to each contour of her personality. Every quality she disliked in a man — vanity, aggression, jealousy, protectiveness — I erased from myself as though they had never been. Her likes became mine. Her interests and opinions too. I cooked her favourite foods, met up with her friends in her favourite bars, massaged her feet to her favourite movies. I wanted everything to be perfect for her, for every one of our moments together to be a festival of worship, a religious devotion with her the central deity.
But as I came close to that idea of perfection on which I’d staked everything, Sallie began to change. That shadow fell across her eyes. That twist appeared at the corner of her mouth. Finally, there came the looks of unmistakable contempt.
‘But I love you,’ I had said.
‘You love something,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t me.’
‘And you? Do you…?’ I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
‘Do I love you?’ she said, and looked at me as though at a complete stranger. ‘What’s there to love?’
Sallie and I continued to live together for some weeks after that, but we were just bodies drifting through a vacuum: all coldness and silence and the mounting fear of suffocation. I went through the motions, carrying on as though nothing had changed, perhaps believing that those words could be undone or overpowered by the simple repetition of established habits. But the change was written on her face. The twist grew into a sneer and, soon enough, I had to accept that it was over.
Within days of moving out, Sallie started seeing her ex, the one that I had worked so hard to be nothing like. Shortly after, she set off for Europe on some pseudo-existential jaunt; to ‘find herself’, perhaps, or to put as much distance as she could between her and me.
I thought I had made myself exactly what she needed me to be. But in the end, it just wasn’t enough. Or wasn’t what she had wanted in the first place.
#
The cabin was a basic affair, characterised by its size and lack of amenity; two small bedrooms, a smaller bathroom, and combined kitchen-living room, were compressed together beneath an old tin roof. It stood empty most of the year, so had become a home to every imaginable sort of vermin. I was kept awake each night by the rattle of possums across the roof and the skittering of rats in the walls, then deprived of sleep past dawn by the scratch of claws on tin and the cacophony of shrieks as cockatoos drove smaller parrots from the feeder. The back deck looked out upon the garden: a wild tangle of rainforest from which, at night, the faraway lights of the Gold Coast could be seen, shimmering through giant fronds of cycads and bursts of frangipani like a hallucination.
The cabin and surrounding block had been in Sallie’s family for years. Her parents had bought it before she was born, in the carefree early days of their marriage. It was unique on this road of stately Queenslanders, of expansive and manicured gardens; a little island of wilderness that her parents swore always to keep intact, never to develop. It had been their family retreat throughout Sallie’s childhood, and later, when she and her brother were at uni, it had been their escape, a free space for their group’s riotous weekends or an intimate one for their lovers. Her brother married and moved to Perth and her parents had followed to be closer to their grandchildren. For some time, Sallie and I had been the cabin’s only visitors.
In the first flush of our romance, we had come often, whiling away the days in blissful aimlessness. We would walk the local bush trails, loving the exhaustion and the closeness that came with it. Long, impassioned siestas in the heaviness of afternoon would drift into boozy dinners on the verandah, watching the night descend into the spatter of lights that marked the coastline. In those happier times, the cabin was our haven, a cocoon in which the best parts of ourselves felt safe to emerge, and love, with all its possibilities, could grow without restraint.
In the cold last days, however, the only retreats we made were into our own private worlds, and the cabin remained empty. We still walked, but only to work, and separately, immersed in the gloom that always followed our uneasy breakfasts. Work was a barely tolerable distraction that evaporated into afternoons of restless daydreams and morbid gazing. Sallie, at least, still had the boozy dinners, just no longer with me. She would come home drunk, caustic. Nights descended into bitterness and silence: the unspoken conflict that defined the boundaries of our relationship. And the wilderness that lay beyond it.
When the taxi dropped me off a week ago, the cabin was almost obscured by the encroaching garden, now as dense and unkempt as the beard I’d let grow since Sallie left. I had taken the key from its hiding place beneath the deck, peeling back the wispy vortices of abandoned funnel webs. Inside, the air was stale and damp and had a faint tang that I later came to associate with rat droppings. The draining board was still stacked with plates and glasses from our last meal here, now sticky with dust. A half-drunk bottle of wine had turned to vinegar by the sink.
When I arrived that day, I did not yet know what compelled me or why I had come. The cabin held me in a kind of relentless gravity, drawing me toward some notion of completion that, however vague, was left unsatisfied by Sallie’s parting. Perhaps I felt that something had been left behind here, some ghost of the person I had once been, or, perhaps, some essence of those happier times, that I might reabsorb by simple proximity. It’s possible there were other reasons, but, if so, they were obscure. On some days, it felt as though I was here to say goodbye to Sallie, to finally let go of whatever it was we had shared and move on with my life. On others, I felt I was here to get closer to her, to connect with her once again through spaces she had once occupied and objects she had once handled, to rekindle an intimacy between us that existed now only in inanimate things, and in emptiness and silence.
Although I knew that I would not be disturbed as long as she was in Europe, I often fantasised about surprising Sallie here in some way. Returning home from her travels, seeking solitude in her old retreat. Or perhaps a romantic escape with some new man. These daydreams whiled away the long afternoons and left me with an unusual sense of calm and a feeling one might almost describe as joy.
How would she react to finding me here? I wondered. What strange shape might that encounter take?
#
The wound left by the leech continued to bleed for many hours after I returned. The thin fluid streamed from my calf so profusely that I ran through the cabin’s entire supply of band-aids to staunch it, replacing them each time the blood soaked to the edges of the dressing.
It also began to itch: a maddening tingling sensation that gnawed away at me, no matter how I tried to distract myself from it.
Between the itching and the incessant changes of dressing, that tiny puncture consumed my attention well into the afternoon. My mind came back again and again to the leech, the memory growing in vividness and intensity as I turned it over upon itself. And the more I dwelt on it, the more abstracted my deliberations became. Away from the rainforest, where every frond dripped with the threat of tangible parasites, my thoughts spiralled into a vortex of vague anxieties and phobic imagery. It was as though the heightened clarity of this memory was at the expense of a context that moored it in reality. Underlying everything, feeding and growing fat on my obsession,
disgust was coiled inside me like an unnameable black thing, writhing in my belly, gagging in my throat, and pulling back the corners of my mouth into a grimace. At first, this nameless revulsion was directed at the leech. But as the colour drained from inside the cabin and the blue-grey dusk enveloped me, the feeling began to shift and I grew disgusted with myself.
On the one hand, my feelings toward the leech seemed completely justified, a primal horror that was only natural considering its grotesque otherness. It was repulsive. A hideous creeping parasite. An alien. A thief. Its very nature seemed an offence to warm-blooded creatures of every species. Its foul body: spineless and glistening. Its sickening gait: puppet-like and ludicrous. Its means of survival: stealthy, deceitful, insidious. Just picturing it made me boil with anger all over again.
And it was this anger that troubled me most of all, that kept me picking over the scene again and again, scratching at it and worrying it like the sore spot on my calf. How could I dare feel disgust at a creature simply for feeding on me, when my response had been to take its life? How much blood had the leech taken from me? And how much did I have to spare? Surely I could have shared that little bit of myself for the sake of a life?
The tension between these conflicting extremes bound me in an unresolvable, and quite intolerable, state of agitation that lasted well into the night. As I lay awake in the small bed that Sallie and I had once shared, I was overcome with pity for the leech and with remorse for what I had done to it. Like words of spite that erupted unbidden into one of my few arguments with Sallie, or the many times I let slip something about myself that did not hold with the image I had cultivated, I couldn’t take this back, no matter how much I may have yearned to. I could not undo what I had done or return the leech to life. Knowing this, and finding no possible way to right it, was an agony that oppressed me like a storm that wouldn’t break.
The rats that night were particularly bold. I had left a cupboard door open in the kitchen and I could hear their tiny feet skittering amongst the boxes of cereal and open packets of crackers. When I first arrived at the cabin, I had found a rat by the garden tap, the body of one at least, flat and completely desiccated. I knew the cabin was peppered with unsprung traps and boxes of poison, their lids peeled back to reveal the deadly green lollies inside. My heart had gone out to this poor creature, which, believing it to be food, had filled her belly with the poison. It must have taken days to parch her from within, sucking all the moisture from her body. She had died beside the dripping tap, no doubt in a desperate, doomed attempt to slake her undying thirst. Before unpacking the meagre supplies I’d brought with me, I had gone round to every corner of the cabin, every cupboard and cabinet, springing the traps and emptying the poison into the bin. As long as I was there, I wasn’t going to be responsible for the death of an innocent creature. The rats had no less right to be in the cabin than I had.
The noise, along with my deliberations, kept me awake for many hours. Listening to the rats in the cupboard — gnawing on crackers, upending the open bags of rice — made me question still further my reaction to the leech. Why had my response been so extreme? What was the real root of my disgust? Where had the anger come from? And the violence? Why was I able to accept the rats, feeding themselves on the food that should have fed me, yet recoiled from the leech, following its instincts to precisely the same end?
These thoughts came from the shadowed border between sleep and wakefulness, folding over upon each other, collapsing together into a dreamlike soup of impressions and ideas that merged at last into a united vision. A vision that was at once transcendent and monstrous. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, revealing the inescapable perversity of nature: to be born hungry, a belly that lives only to feed itself, alive only at the expense of other lives. Purposeless and interminable, compelled to live, to feed, only to make meat to feed some other starving belly. The pointlessness and horror of it was overwhelming. The hunger never satisfied. The hunger unto death.
At the peak of the vision, I saw all life as nothing more than a grotesque sculpture of mouths devouring mouths devouring mouths. A multitude, an infinity, expressed as a single mouth devouring a single meal.
And that meal was itself.
#
I must have slept, for I dreamed; long vivid dreams that I had no memory of on waking. Still, I felt them weighing on me like an old overcoat, heavy with melancholy and a nebulous longing. It had been raining while I slept and the cabin was ripe with the perfume of the rainforest. This fragrance intermingled with the funk of my forgotten dreams, as though, for want of sleep, I had become porous and was both absorbing the moisture of the rainforest and, at the same time, spilling out into it.
There was little breakfast to speak of. I rummaged in the kitchen for whatever scraps the rats might have overlooked, but all they had left was a scene of devastation and abandon. Rice was everywhere. Spilled from the upended bag, it was pooled in dry rivers on the Laminex work surface and sprayed across the kitchen floor like the dead husks of fallen stars. The cupboards themselves were bare of everything but crumbs, shredded boxes, and the ubiquitous peppering of dry turds. In the fridge, I found a small piece of cheese and the last apple. I tossed the cheese onto the deck for the possums and set out for my morning walk, eating the apple as I went.
The morning was oppressively humid, thick with moisture from the night’s rain and already pregnant with the heat of the coming day. Even at this early hour, it was too hot for clothes, so I walked in nothing but my hiking boots and a pair of cut-off shorts. Unlike previous mornings, I had no plan, yet my feet seemed to know exactly where they were going.
I took the main track through the gates of the national park and down into the rainforest. Instead of turning up toward the lookouts, I continued to descend, leaving the path to follow the creek into the lushest nooks of the forest. I found a small pool beneath a terrace of lazy waterfalls, where the canopy above was so thick that no sunlight could penetrate. I settled down in the cool gloom and pulled off my boots, sat on the moist edge with my feet in the water.
It wasn’t long before they found me there.
Before I even reached the pool, several leeches had already attached themselves. I wasn’t sure exactly how many. I could see one on my calf and another further up my thigh, both of them quivering as they drew blood into their expanding bodies. At least one had settled on my back, but there may have been others. Knowing they were on me, seeing them feed, the feelings of disgust arose again. But, unlike the day before, I did not react. The emotions where still there, just detached somehow; only another tangled shape within that body, with its mouth and its belly, with its hunger and fear and other drives of a distinctly animal nature.
And more were converging. Other leeches inching through the foliage toward the bare white flesh, heads twitching on the end of undulant black stalks. They swivelled this way and that as if sniffing the air, sensing the promise of warmth and of nourishment. I felt the feather-light touches of tail suckers and mouths, the delicate end-over-end as the leeches made their ponderous climb, seeking out a space on which to attach. On which to feed.
I must have cut a strange sight as I returned from the park that lunchtime. The track was busier than usual and I encountered many other walkers before I reached the cabin. There were families, couples, and lone hikers like myself. Every one of them recoiled when they saw me approach, flattening themselves against the edge of the path to clear the way for me. One man was so disturbed he tripped over the snaking roots of a Watkin’s Fig and almost fell backwards into the foliage. On his, and on every face, that same look. The flaring nose, the downward pull at the edge of the lips; the unmistakable grimace of disgust. They talked too, talked about me as I passed, as if I couldn’t hear, as if I was in some way contrary to them. I heard one woman retch behind me.
I had to laugh. Hadn’t my face been contorted by these same emotions only the day before? I felt for them. All they could see was the wild young man storming alon
g the path, his eyes perhaps a little too wide, revealing a little too much white. They saw the expression, at once intense and serene, that encompassed a grin, uncomfortably twisted. They would have seen the body, bristling with the glistening black hairs that swelled and rippled and writhed as though with life of their own, pulsing shapes that dropped to the ground like rotten fruit, leaving thin ribbons of red to darken his shorts, streak his legs, and pool in the fluffy bands of his socks. I couldn’t blame them for their feelings of horror and revulsion. They couldn’t see beyond the mechanics. They lacked the vision.
Although it was all downhill, the final stretch to the cabin seemed endless. I must have given away a fair bit of blood by then, for I felt giddy and weak. Each step took considerable effort. When I finally reached the cabin, having left a breadcrumb trail of engorged leeches that led all the way back to the forest, I was so drained that I flopped straight into bed. I didn’t even have the strength to pull my boots off.
#
I awoke later to the sound of rain drumming on tin. I had no idea what time it was. The light seemed to have leaked out of everything, creating an effect both shadowless and grey. It must have been evening, for I could hear the rats in the kitchen and could feel the pinch of cold on my skin. The bed was soaked.
I made to sit up, to put my legs out over the side of the bed, to stand, change out of my bloody shorts and into something warmer, perhaps scratch around in the kitchen for a bite. But I could barely sit up. Even that small movement made my head swim and I lay there, feeling the world flip-flop around me.
Then the itching began.
Not the uncomfortable irritation that I had felt the day before, but a seething anger in my arms and legs and chest. Had I been suspended from a thousand burning hooks and slowly pulled apart, it could not have been worse than this. I longed to scratch, but even that movement was too much to contemplate. My arms lay lifeless beside me on the blood-soaked sheets, as flaccid and impotent as the swollen bodies that still squirmed there.
