That night, Frida joined Ruth in the lounge room after dinner. She brought two of her detective novels with her and dropped one into Ruth’s reclining lap. It was called The Term of Her Natural Life.
“I heard you were a big reader,” Frida said, before positioning herself on the cat-abandoned sofa and opening her own novel.
So Ruth read along with Frida. She liked the book: it was set in Australia, which charmed her, as if it had never occurred to her that ingenious crimes might be committed and solved in her own country. The harsh cries of native birds frequently interrupted the musings of the plucky protagonist, and the seasons were all in the right places. Frida didn’t speak, but the sound of turning pages and the light of the lamps produced a mood so confidential and snug that Ruth found she wanted her to. She cleared her throat and asked, “What will you do for Christmas?”
“I’ll be gone by Christmas,” said Frida, still reading.
“What do you mean, gone?”
Now Frida raised her head. She kept one finger on her place in the book. “I’ll take a holiday, is what I mean. I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I might take a holiday myself,” said Ruth.
“Ah. Richard.”
“Yes.”
“Good for you.” Frida bent her head over her book, then lifted it once more, with a wise expression, as if she couldn’t help herself. “It’s best to take these things slow, though, isn’t it. I always preach caution—look at poor George. You don’t want any nasty surprises.”
Ruth remained quiet. She was unsure of what nasty surprises George might illustrate.
“What’s that machine for, for one thing?” asked Frida.
“What machine?”
“The one he sleeps with. The mask over his face.”
Ruth looked back at her book. She had no idea Richard slept with a mask over his face.
“And it’s not as if he hasn’t surprised you before,” said Frida, with a sympathetic chuckle. “The Japanese girlfriend! Better make sure he doesn’t have another one of those up his sleeve.”
Ruth’s chest fell inward and her ribs felt tight against her lungs. She made a show of reading so that Frida would stop talking. But Ruth couldn’t turn the page. She read the same sentence again and again: “Leaning warily into the burnt car, Jaqui swept the fibres into a small transparent bag.” Stiff tears stood in her eyes, and she blinked them back.
“Did you hear that?” asked Frida.
Ruth’s jumping heart jumped faster. “What?”
Frida didn’t answer for a few long beats. “I thought I heard something outside.”
She stood. Her arms were bare and her face was flushed with red; she was in a marvellous mood. It was a cool spring evening, but the house, Ruth noticed now, was jungle hot. Here he comes, she thought, without meaning to. She was reminded of a poem she’d made her students recite: “Here comes the tiger, riding, riding, up to the old inn door.”
“You go to bed,” said Frida, heading into the dining room. She stood tense at the window, baring her equatorial arms, still wearing her whitish uniform.
“I’m not tired,” said Ruth. But she was gathering her things—her teacup and book—and preparing to stand.
Frida was so still. “Hear that?” she said, cocking her head. “I’m going out there.”
Ruth listened. “There’s nothing,” she said. But Frida was already outside and had closed the back door; Ruth watched her from the dining-room window. Frida stood on the grass in the window’s light, her nose lifted and her head moving from side to side. The beach was empty under the spring moon, with that bare, blanched look of a seashore at night. Frida waved Ruth away from the window, and when Ruth didn’t move, she waved again. The cats sniffed and howled at the closed door.
“Quiet,” Ruth ordered; she shepherded them into the bedroom and turned on her bedside lamp. “She can’t scare me,” she said, still to the cats. She sat on her bed, and among the ordinary stirrings outside she heard Frida stepping through the brush by her window. There were three taps on the glass, and Ruth, unsure of how to respond, turned her lamp off and then on again. Or, because it was a touch lamp—a gift from Jeffrey—she turned it dim, dimmer, off, and back to bright again. Frida moved on. She circled the house for at least the next half hour and, for the first few rounds, tapped at the window as she went; Ruth responded with her lamp, so that she imagined her window as a lighthouse over the bay: off and on, on and off, signaling both safety and danger. It was like being a girl and singing hymns with her parents; on those nights, it was as if her family sang together not towards God but against death, which pressed up at the windows but knew better than to expect an invitation. The brighter the light in the house, the safer they were, and the singing doubled and then tripled the light; the house was so luminous with the song and with the presence of her parents that it must shine out over the garden, the town, the island, all of Fiji, and the entire Pacific. This, she had understood, was how to be a light in the world. Frida stopped tapping, but Ruth continued to operate the light. After this tense half hour Frida came inside and said, “Enough with the lamp. Go to sleep.”
“How could I possibly sleep?” protested Ruth. She propped up her pillows and sat unbending in the dark listening for Frida’s footsteps outside her window. The cats curled at the hinges of her arms and legs. She slept and woke and slept again, still listening for Frida. An hour might have passed, or six, when she heard a cry—Frida screaming, was that possible?—and the back door rocking shut. She tapped the lamp and checked to see if the light had disturbed Harry. Of course not. There was no Harry.
“Ruth! Ruthie!” Frida called, and when she swung on the door into Ruth’s room, her face was pale and her torso shook. “Thank God you’re all right!”
“What is it? What happened?”
Frida collapsed onto the bed and over Ruth’s legs. “Look at this!” She presented her left forearm, where three long scratches already brimmed with blood.
“What is it?” Ruth felt at that moment more curious than concerned, but she made herself lift her hands, in horror, to her mouth.
“He may have hurt me, but I scared the bejesus out of him.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” snapped Frida.
Ruth couldn’t think. George? Richard? She gathered blankets into her hands.
“I don’t know how he got in,” said Frida, “but I sure as hell know how he got out. I opened the door and he bolted right through. Knocked me arse up on the sand, as a matter of fact, and I’m lucky I’ve still got all my parts. But he gave me a good swipe. A parting gift.”
Ruth sat up as best she could and looked at the curtained window. She half expected to hear three taps against it. Frida was crushing Ruth’s legs, and Ruth’s heart pumped a strong, slow beat. “There’s no tiger,” she said.
“You think I clawed my own arm?”
“He’s not real.”
“He’s real, all right, but he’s also gone, and he won’t be back in a hurry. Scared him right off.”
“The cats?” Ruth asked in a small voice.
“Don’t you want to know how I scared him off?” Frida propped herself up with her uninjured arm and made a terrible face at Ruth: she bared her teeth and gave out a noise somewhere between a growl and a hiss, and her face was so human that Ruth was frightened. “He ran off with his tail between his legs. Ha! Some tiger.” Frida lay back on the bed and laughed, as if it were typical of Ruth to have been harbouring such a timid tiger. “But”—Frida raised her wounded arm so that it waved above her like a cautionary stalk—“that doesn’t mean the danger has passed.”
“Let me see your arm,” said Ruth. She tried to shift her legs. Frida was a set stone.
“Don’t you worry about my arm. It’s seen worse than a few fingernails, believe me. Stop wriggling!”
Ruth stopped. Frida, completely horizontal, shrank in on herself; her belly flattened, and her breasts. Her delicate ankles jutted out over the floor. Her h
air looked black, as if she’d chosen this colour specifically for the advantage of nocturnal camouflage, and was pulled back into a jaunty ponytail. She shook her sandshoes off and fanned her toes like a peacock’s tail.
“You actually saw it?” asked Ruth, whose legs were beginning to fall asleep. She could feel her buzzing blood. Frida didn’t answer. “Frida?”
Frida smiled. She closed her eyes. “Oh, Ruthie,” she sighed. “What on earth would you do without me?”
Ruth had no idea.
12
Frida spent the next morning building tiger traps around the house.
“I thought you scared him off,” said Ruth.
“Scared him off for now,” said Frida. “Tigers can be patient. They know all about lying in wait.”
She invested most of the morning on the largest trap: a hole halfway down the dune, in the middle of the rough grassy path to the beach. When the hole was deep enough to satisfy her, she walked along the shore gathering fallen pine boughs and brought them back to fill it with. Her left forearm was bandaged to cover last night’s tiger scratches, and she stretched it out to look at it from time to time, as if inspecting an engagement ring; otherwise, her arms seemed normal, capable, as she carried the branches with the sprightly bustle of a nesting bird.
“Don’t walk there,” Frida said, pointing out the pit.
No tiger will fall for that, thought Ruth. Already the dune was subsiding into the hole. Ruth went inside and wrote her letter to Richard. It was only supposed to be a short note, designed to seem casual and pretty, in which she would suggest they start out by having her visit for a weekend, to see the lilies, at least. “At least the lilies,” she wrote, noticing, as she did so, that her handwriting was not what it once was. It was quite inexpertly square now; Mrs. Mason would be disappointed.
George’s taxi rolled up to the front of the house. Ruth watched from the lounge room as Frida chattered through his open window before hauling a bundle of barbed wire from the boot. George reversed the car expertly down the drive; only then did Ruth go outside.
“Did you say anything about the tiger?”
“What do you take me for, an idiot?” said Frida, but she wasn’t angry. She was genially indignant, which was one of her best moods.
“Then what does he think all this is for?” Ruth asked, indicating the wire.
“I told him it was to stop erosion.” Frida smiled, as if the gulling of George was one of life’s simple pleasures. She took the wire out onto the dune and wrestled with it in the grasses. Ruth worried about cats caught on hidden barbs, but Frida dismissed her fears.
“Look at them watching every move I make,” she said. “They know what’s going on.”
The cats did sit in watchful poses, very still, which they occasionally animated with the urgent bathing of a paw.
“So the tiger is biding its time, is that it?” Ruth asked.
Frida nodded. She wore thick gardening gloves—Harry’s—and they seemed to require a strict rigidity in her arms and shoulders. Only her head could move freely.
“How will we know when the time is up?”
“We won’t,” said Frida. “He’ll just show up.”
“Like a thief in the night.”
“Exactly,” said Frida. “Therefore: traps. I’d love to rig up a whole video system, like I bet they have in zoos.” She explained to Ruth that surveillance was a hobby of George’s; she looked philosophically out to sea. “A cabbie can’t be too careful, you realize. Poor Georgie.” Ruth felt a shiver of jealousy at this affectionate name. “He’s no green thumb when it comes to growing money.”
Frida was finished with her traps by early afternoon. The sky had clouded over.
“That’s good,” said Ruth, looking out at the garden from the dining room. “Clouds mean a warmer night.”
Frida shook her head. “Tigers need shelter from the rain, just like the rest of us.”
The tiger was Frida’s now; and not just this tiger, but the entire species. She was proud of him, and of her arm; the heroics of the night before seemed to give her precedence in all household matters. She took milk in her tea, which she drank in front of the mirror in Ruth’s bedroom—she preferred the light in there, she said, for arranging her hair—and closed the door so that Ruth knew not to follow her. When Frida reemerged, she wore her grey coat and a green scarf over her hair; under the influence of the green, her hair verged on a dark, distinguished red.
“Chilly this arvo,” she said, tilting her head towards the back door, which was open and admitting a stiff wind. “Let’s close this, shall we?”
“The cats are still out,” said Ruth, who was a little cold herself; she was wearing a thin summer dress. She sat with her chair pulled up to the dining table, reading The Term of Her Natural Life. The letter to Richard lay at her elbow, snug in an envelope, addressed, and awaiting a stamp.
Frida smothered a cough. “I have a weak chest.” Frida had a chest like the hull of a ship. She stood at the back door and called, without conviction, “Here, kitty kitty.” Then something approximating a miaow.
“You’ll scare them,” said Ruth.
“All this fuss over cats, for God’s sake.” Frida began to gather things into her handbag. “They’re not sheep, are they—now sheep are dumb.” She swayed through the kitchen, gathering, gathering. She plucked the spare keys from the top of the fridge. “And I have plans this afternoon. I am going O.U.T.” And on that final, plosive T, she pulled the door shut, flung its bolts home, and deadlocked it.
“I want it open,” said Ruth.
“I know you do, but I can’t leave you here all alone with the door open and a tiger on the loose, can I?” said Frida. “What’s this? A letter for Prince Charming? Shall I post it, Your Highness? Yes, no? Shall I?”
Frida swept the letter up into her quick brown fingers and tucked it inside her coat, somewhere in the busty vicinity of her heart.
“Give that back and open the door.”
A car horn sounded from the drive.
“That’ll be George,” said Frida. She adjusted her green scarf. “Don’t wait up! See you soon, Bonnydoon!” She waltzed to the front door while Ruth called, “Frida! Frida!” and there was her merry voice greeting George, the door closing, and the sound of the taxi driving away.
Then Ruth was alone in the house. “Shit,” she said.
The front and back doors were bolted tight, and all the keys were gone: the set in Ruth’s purse, the fridge set, and even the last-chance spare key, gummed to the bottom of one of Harry’s desk drawers. Ruth went to some trouble to look for that one; bent and stiff-backed in Harry’s study she swore again, with greater pleasure this time, as if the word fuck could increase in beauty the more care she took to say it. The cats battered the back door in frantic longing.
“Shoosh, chickens,” she crooned, pressed against the door, which only sent them into wilder spasms; they howled like hungry babies. Ruth retreated. She was furious with Frida for locking her in and the cats out, for making fun of her with this tiger nonsense, for taking the letter, for waltzing and teasing and acting as if she owned the place. In her anger, Ruth kicked a pile of detective novels in the lounge room; the skidding of the books lifted one corner of the rug, much, she imagined, as the tiger’s tail might. If he were really a tiger. If he were really a tiger, she thought, he would be as long as the rug. He would turn the corner behind the recliner and in doing so bump the lamp; Ruth bumped the lamp, and it fell to the floor. His tail might sweep over the coffee table and send all the television remotes flying; they went flying, and one set of batteries rolled out. Ruth considered the mess she had made. She liked it. If I were a tiger, she thought, I wouldn’t be frightened of Phil’s room. Of Frida’s room. This realization sent her down the hallway on soft feet.
Ruth pushed open Frida’s door. She stood in the hallway and listened for the return of George’s taxi, but heard only a little tick, which seemed to be coming from the room itself but was, after all, o
nly the tiny sound of her heart behind her ears. Ruth inhaled the room’s new beauty-parlour smell. Frida had turned the top of the chest-high bookshelf into a vanity: it was covered in creams, mousses, hair spray, combs of different widths, and all the other hardware of her glorious hair. Above this cache, on the wall that used to display a poster of Halley’s Comet, hung an oval mirror. Ruth had trouble looking into the mirror; she suspected Frida might look back at her out of it, like a fairy-tale queen. Instead Ruth saw her own pale face and the reversed room behind it. The bed was made. Phillip’s children’s books were still lined up on the shelf.
Ruth opened the wardrobe and slid Frida’s clothes off their hangers. They pooled at her feet. Most of them were white or off-white, the assorted parts of her daily uniform, but there were other intriguing items: a pink blouse, dark purple pants of impressive circumference, and a black dress with gold sequins stitched into the sleeves. Frida in sequins! Ruth smiled and swam among the clothes, pulling at sleeves and skirts and shuffling in the faint eucalypt odour. Touching the fabrics lifted the hair on her forearms, but she persisted until every item either lay in the bottom of the wardrobe or spilled into the room. She sifted through drawers, too. Frida’s underwear seemed to fly from Ruth’s fingers. The bras were particularly aerodynamic and made a lovely soft clatter as they floated to the floor. So this, thought Ruth, is what a tiger feels like, bumping and brawling; but I am not a tiger, she reminded herself. I can use tools.
Ruth fetched a broom from the kitchen and used its handle to poke at the underside of Frida’s suitcase, which sat on top of the wardrobe like a long-neglected household pet. She shook and battered the case, and it made a maraca sound as it fell; bursting open, it spread a rainbow of pills and capsules over the bedroom. They crunched underfoot, except where they were caught up in Frida’s clothes. Ruth recognized most of them as her own pills; she was delighted to see their picturesque array, the prescription ones all blue and sweet pale yellow, and the thick turmeric ones, and then of course the golden vials of fish oil. Those glowing capsules were the most satisfying to step on because when Ruth pressed them they resisted and bounced and then they popped.
The Night Guest Page 14
