The Night Guest

by Fiona McFarlane

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “There’s a smell, too. That’s why I asked you about the smell.”

  Frida sniffed luxuriously and long. She leaned into the sniff, and her nostrils flared; her eyes narrowed; she leaned farther, as if into a fragrant wind. “A kind’ve hairy smell, is that it? Like a rug that needs washing?”

  “Like a jungle,” said Ruth. Then another possibility occurred to her. “Or maybe a zoo.”

  “So, what you’re telling me is, even though I bust my gut daily to get this place spotless—and beach places are the hardest of all to keep clean, believe me, what with the salt and the sand—even though I work myself to the bone to keep this place spotless, you’re telling me it smells like a zoo?”

  “Oh, Frida, no!” cried Ruth. “I noticed the smell last night, but you already have everything perfect again.”

  “Then it’s the cats, you mark my words,” said Frida. Problem solved, she swiveled away on one crisp foot.

  “Of course it is,” said Ruth, relieved. “Or it’s nothing at all. I’m imagining it. Thank you.”

  But Frida turned to face her again. The light that leapt up around her, off the floors and the sea, hid her face.

  “And what would a tiger want with you?” she asked; she was baffled, clearly, by the possibility that a tiger might take any interest in Ruth. She propped her mop in a corner, crossed to the recliner, and sat in it. Her face was full of jovial scorn. She settled into the possibility of the tiger; she made herself comfortable.

  “You think this tiger’s got it in for you? Maybe you killed its mum in that jungle you grew up in, and it’s here to hunt you down.”

  “I didn’t grow up in the jungle,” said Ruth. “I grew up in a town. And there are no tigers in Fiji.”

  “If there’s jungle, there’s tigers.”

  “That’s not true. Tigers like cold weather. They live in India and China. Maybe Russia.”

  “There’s Indians in Fiji.”

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about Fiji.”

  “Everyone knows that, from the news.”

  “Just because there are Indians in Fiji doesn’t mean there are Indian tigers. I thought everyone knew that.”

  “What I do know is, there’s no tigers in Australia,” said Frida. “There’s no seaside bloody tigers in the local area. Unless they’re on holiday.”

  “I know that. It was just funny noises in the night.”

  Frida sat on the recliner. Her face was immobile with thought. “It’s the cats, then,” she said.

  “Yes, the cats,” said Ruth. The cats were frightened of something; that was undeniable.

  “I mean, it’s not so surprising, when you think about it. You leave the back door open every night for the cats to come and go. That’ll be how this tiger of yours got in. What if Jeff knew that, huh? What if I told Mr. Fantastic you left your back door open and a tiger walked in? I wonder what he’d say to that.”

  Ruth had always pictured the tiger just appearing in the lounge room, the way a ghost might; he was a haunting and required nothing so practical as a door. Now she saw him coming by road and through the high grasses of the drive; she saw him moving with intemperate speed over the beach and ascending the dune; she saw him in the dark garden, making for the open door. One of the most fanciful things Harry had ever said to her had to do with the quality of moonlight by the sea. It was brighter and bluer, he said, with the sea to reflect it. Now Ruth saw the tiger under the bright blue seaside moon, and she saw her own house high on the dune’s horizon; she ran towards it alongside the tiger, and the back door lay open for both of them. But the foolishness of having left her door open at night struck Ruth as too childish to have such terrible consequences.

  “Nothing to say to that, have you?” said Frida. She tilted the recliner back and her magisterial stomach arced into the air; all her neat chins folded into place, like a napkin. “Why don’t you just bring the phone over here and I’ll call that son of yours? Let him meddle in that.”

  “He already knows about the tiger.” That was satisfying to say. Ruth felt as if she’d thought ahead to this moment and called Jeffrey in order to have an answer ready for Frida now. Frida regarded her from the recliner. Her legs in the air were undeniably slim, and she flexed her nimble feet in their unlaced sandshoes.

  “He does, does he?” She made a small grunt. “You told him before you told me?”

  “I told him before I even knew you.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought you said this tiger just showed up last night.”

  Ruth reddened; she felt caught out in an unintentional lie. “I thought I heard it once before.”

  “And you told Jeffrey. Well, how about that. No son of mine would hear I had a tiger and leave me all alone to deal with it.”

  “I’m not alone, am I,” said Ruth, but she was alone when the tiger first appeared, and Jeffrey hadn’t come. He’d told her to go back to sleep and made jokes about it the next morning.

  “Your own son left you alone with a man-eating bloody tiger. A woman-eating tiger. You’re lucky you haven’t been gobbled up in your bed.”

  Ruth gave her nervous laugh. She knew how transparent this laugh was, but it flew out of her regardless. She blushed. She saw herself in bed with the tiger’s hot face over hers.

  “It’s not a tiger,” she said.

  “I saw a TV show once.” Frida tilted her head back against the soft seat of the recliner. “Yeah, a documentary about man-eating tigers in India. You know what they say, once a tiger gets a taste of human flesh, that’s all it wants to eat.”

  “That’s only the old tigers with broken teeth,” said Ruth, recalling a documentary of her own; possibly the same one. It had been intensely yellow-lit, as if the heat of India was perceptible in the shade of its sunshine. “And anyway, it’s not a real tiger.”

  “Oh, a ghost tiger, is it?” Frida heaved her body forward to right the recliner. “Here I was thinking a real tiger was dropping in for social calls. A ghost tiger is totally different. Nothing to worry about, in that case.”

  “Well, obviously there’s no tiger,” said Ruth. “You didn’t hear it. You said you didn’t smell anything.”

  “I said I smelled something. Like a rug that needs washing.”

  “That’s just the rug needing washing.” Ruth prodded it with her foot.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’ll wash it today,” said Frida. She dragged herself up from the recliner, which shook in alarm.

  “So you see—just a silly old woman.” Ruth laughed with one coy hand at her throat. “Of course there’s no tiger.”

  “I don’t know, Ruthie.” Frida headed back to the kitchen and her mop. “Stranger things under the sun.” She shook her head, looking out at the sea as she walked, so that Ruth saw she was taking the possibility of the tiger seriously; that the wide spread of her thoughts was growing wider still. Frida rarely looked at the sea.

  Ruth set about scrutinizing every corner of the lounge room. The only thing now was to find a tuft of orange fur, one frond of a parrot’s tail, or any tangible proof that her house had a habit of turning into a jungle at night. And conversely, in the absence of such evidence, that it didn’t. She flipped the rug with her foot, lifted the curtains, and snuck a broom from the kitchen to poke under the sofa. Frida, with a submerged mutter, stayed out of her way. Ruth was reminded of a period during which she had worried over the existence of God. At that time, when she was aged eleven or so and was reminded everywhere and at every hour of the goodness of God’s provision, she developed a horror that she would be visited by an angel and that all of it—all that awful good news—would be proven, absolutely, to be true. How she longed to see that angel, and how terrified she was. She would lie awake at night, afraid to open her eyes and afraid to sleep. It never came.

  Besides the slight disarrangement of the furniture, nothing in the lounge room suggested a jungle except the carcass of a spider, cat-killed and crumpled dee
p under the sofa; Ruth extracted it with the assistance of the broom.

  Frida, her mop rinsed and squeezed and left to dry for the day, marched into the room and, without speaking, rolled up the rug and carried it away, corpselike, over her right shoulder. Without the rug, the room appeared defenseless, and much larger. It was a long way, for example, from the window to the door. Ruth swept the dead spider through the expanse of the lounge and dining rooms, to the kitchen, and out into the garden. Frida had hung the rug over a long frangipani limb and was beating it with a wooden spoon. She pulled her arm back, holding the spoon as if it were a tennis racquet, and unleashed it with such force that dust and hair rose in grubby clouds above her shaking back.

  With Frida out of the house and the living room empty of evidence, Ruth called Richard. She carried the receiver, on the end of its long white cord, down the hallway and into her bedroom, listening with pleasure to the ring of his phone in her ear and in his house. Frida was still beating the rug, and the sound of it was like a flag snapping against its pole in a high wind.

  Richard’s phone rang nine times before somebody answered it.

  “Hello?” said a young woman. Her voice sounded harried, and out of it came the absurdity of a house in Sydney that Ruth had never seen, daughters and grandchildren related by blood to Richard and Kyoko, a whole life that had never been dismantled and moved to the sea, with no imaginary tigers, no Frida beating a rug over a frangipani branch, and Richard over eighty, herself old; and the voice, more weary this time, as if it would wait forever, firm, polite, and inconvenienced, repeated, “Hello?” Ruth, sitting on the bed where she had recently lain down and—awkwardly, optimistically, and not without pleasure—slept with a man she hadn’t seen for fifty years, listened for another “Hello?” and then, holding one palm against the receiver so as not to hear anything more, hurried into the kitchen and hung up the phone.

  Frida was also in the kitchen, filling a bucket with water. “Everything all right?” she asked.

  Ruth nodded. They went into the garden together, Frida holding the soapy bucket against her leg, and together they washed the rug. Ruth liked the short, rough feel of the bristles under her fingernails. She liked the thin dust that coated the ground under the frangipani tree, and the soapy grey water that ran out of the rug and over the garden. Frida laid the clean rug over the hydrangea bush to dry, and for the rest of the day it fidgeted in the wind as if something trapped underneath were making halfhearted attempts to escape. Then she swept and polished the lounge-room floor, every now and then taking an exploratory sniff. There was no discernible smell in the lounge room; nothing left of the long, hairy bass note Ruth had suspected of issuing from a tiger. The animal odour had only been the rug, after all. Ruth—dirty, tired, and still hearing that “Hello? Hello?” in her inmost ear—took a long bath during which she repeatedly bit the inside of her mouth to stave off self-pity. But as she dressed afterwards—not in pyjamas, not before bedtime, that would be sloppy—she remembered that strange feline stain on the lounge right before Richard’s visit and wondered about it.

  Frida cooked steak for dinner—an extravagance—and when Ruth asked the occasion, she answered, mysteriously, “Red meat for strength.” After the meal, she brewed a pot of strong tea, made Ruth drink two cups, and suggested they sit together in the lounge room. Frida never sat in the lounge room at night. If she didn’t go out—there were nights when George’s taxi drew up, pumpkin-coloured, and carried her away—she usually stayed at the dining table, reading the newspaper or detective novels; or she went into her bedroom to soak her feet and try new hairstyles; or she occupied the bathroom for hours, dyeing and washing and drying her hair. But tonight, she said, her arms were sore from beating the rug and she wanted to sit in the lounge room, watch a little TV, and talk. She made more tea and carried it in to Ruth, who was sitting in the recliner, and who protested, “Three cups! I’ll be up all night.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Frida.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see this tiger of yours.”

  Ruth sipped her too-hot tea and gave her girlish laugh, the one she hated the sound of.

  “Don’t be scared, Ruthie. Between you and me”—Frida flexed a savvy biceps—“your Frida is a match for any old tiger.”

  “Stop it,” said Ruth. “Turn on the television.”

  Frida didn’t move. Her face was agile with anticipation. “We’ll be bait. Lure him out, then kapow! Though maybe that’s not the best idea. Wouldn’t want to hand you to him like a meat tray in a raffle.” Ruth eased herself out of the recliner. “Where are you off to?”

  “If you’re going to be ridiculous, I’m going to bed.”

  “Tiger on the loose, chances are it’s a man-eater,” said Frida. “We should check the news for zoo escapes.”

  “I don’t intend to be laughed at in my own home.”

  “I wish you’d told me about this before, Ruthie. For one thing, I might have run into it on the way to the loo one night. Couldn’t have it see me without my hair all done.” Frida laughed, and her belly shook.

  “Good night, Frida,” said Ruth, and the cats, only just settled on the sofa, followed her to her bedroom, where she took her pills before lying on the bed and remembering the voice at the end of Richard’s phone number saying, again and again, “Hello?”

  Frida turned on the television and the sound of it comforted Ruth, like a light under a door. She lay on her bed, still dressed and without even her lamp lit: she wanted the dark to cool her burning face. The television continued to buzz until late, and every now and then Frida laughed from the lounge room.

  When she woke early the next morning, Ruth couldn’t remember falling asleep. More than this, she couldn’t remember her own body; it seemed to be missing. Nevertheless, she was able to move. She got out of bed in the slow, deliberate way Frida had taught her: bend your legs, roll onto your side, keep the spine intact, think of it as a steel rod, let gravity do the work, stay relaxed, sit up, don’t twist, move the spine as a unit, rest, stretch as tall as you can, bend forward and lift, straighten your legs, and then you’re standing, Ruth was standing, without ever quite knowing how she came to be on her feet. She felt nothing. This might be the true weight of age, she thought, without feeling her thought; it was weightless, everything was, but not in a light way. That might be pleasant. This weightlessness was all absence. Her back should hurt and her legs should be shaking. And she wanted Richard, but her heart didn’t ache. Then there was a noise in the room, which finally she recognized as her own voice—she wasn’t sure what her voice was saying, but the existence of it, and its definite sound, returned sensation to her back and legs. Her skin was dirtily damp. There she was in the mirror, and the cats had found her and were running in and out of the door pleading for breakfast. It wasn’t long past dawn, the sea was outside; it was audible, and so were her feet on the floor, so she called to the cats just to hear her voice again. “Kit! Kit!” she called. Her tongue was sticky in her mouth.

  Out in the lounge room, Frida was asleep on the sofa. She woke when Ruth came in, starting up with a hand to her hair and rubbing her bleary face. Ruth couldn’t think what to say. Her body had returned to her, but she was still unsure of her control over it.

  “Whatsa time?” enquired Frida, but Ruth didn’t know. They looked at each other, Frida from the sofa and Ruth standing by the window, and after a moment of this, Frida shook her head and stood up. The ease with which she stood was awe-inspiring. She was like a wave. But strands of her hair were stuck to the sweaty sides of her face.

  “It didn’t come,” she said, stretching her arms behind her head and walking towards the kitchen. Her hair had flattened in the back. “The tiger.”

  Ruth made a small sound of disgust. It was childish of Frida to persist in teasing. But she saw, without wanting to, evidence of Frida’s seriousness: her crushed hair, the displaced sofa cushions, and the cups of tea. Now Frida came back into the lounge room with pills and a glass
of water; Ruth accepted them; she put the pills in her mouth, swallowed, and felt safer for knowing she was able to do so.

  Ruth wanted to telephone Richard while Frida was making breakfast, but it was far too early. So she called him later, while Frida was in the shower, and this time he answered.

  “Ruth!” he cried, obviously delighted. “Ruth, Ruth, Ruth!”

  She wanted to hear his dear voice settle down into a slow, happy rhythm, but he was excited to hear from her, and he talked too much and too quickly: about his garden and the local council, who were sending men to remove a tree that afternoon, an old juniper that was threatening the neighbour’s roof but gave him such pleasure because of the way the cockatoos ate the berries and rolled around drunk on the grass, and about his great-granddaughter who had just gotten a part in the school play, she would play a pirate with a wooden parrot, and he was in charge of finding an eye patch and a scarf fringed with gold coins, and also, and this was sad news, but Andrew Carson—did she remember him?—his son had died last week, very unexpected, a stroke, and Richard would be at the funeral tomorrow; of course, Andrew was long gone himself—this phrase long gone dismayed Ruth—but he would pass on Ruth’s sympathies to the rest of the family.

  Ruth listened and asked questions and made appropriate noises; she was reminded of the old Richard with too much to say after a play or a film, except that now his talk was full of people and events and objects, and not the abstract things that used to frighten her. But she found herself missing them, or missing the man who had waited for her to talk about them with him, because she couldn’t contribute to the pirate play, the juniper tree, or even Andrew Carson’s son, who had been born not long after the kiss at the ball, and consequently quite soon before Ruth left Fiji. Was it that Richard remembered her as only being capable of this sort of low-level gossip? Or was it that she was exhausted and saddened by this evidence of the vitality of Richard’s life, which failed to appeal to her? So she ended their chat without saying any of the things she wanted to: that she missed him, for example, and that she thought every day about their morning in her bedroom. It was only as they said goodbye that Richard said, “I’ve rattled on, I’m sorry, I get nervous on the phone,” and she was ashamed for him—Richard, nervous! Ruth promised to call him again soon, but thought she would write him a letter instead.