The Night Guest (18 page)

“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, only 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.

She hadn’t finished with the broom; she used it to fish under the bed, and with it she caught two boxes. The first looked official: it contained bank statements in orderly manila files. The names on these files were unfamiliar, except for one: Shelley, the name of Frida’s dead sister. Shelley’s surname wasn’t Young, so she must have been married, and the thought of Frida at a wedding—as a bridesmaid—made Ruth feel a little guilty. So she pushed the box under the bed with one foot.

The second box was old, shoe-sized, and made of a dull, thick cardboard. Ruth, bending to pick it up, felt her back seize and burn, as if a wheel under her ribs were turning a long, hot cord up her spine. Nausea welled in her throat, her mouth filled with spit, and she threw up onto Frida’s bed: a dryish welt which looked like something the cats might produce and made her laugh, but sheepishly. Before leaving the room with the box under her arm, Ruth made one last valiant plunge to the floor for a handful of pills. Most of them were the blue ones she took for her back, and she swallowed a couple down, waterless. The rest she pushed deep into the pockets of her dress.

Ruth opened the box out at the dining table. It was full of rocks and bottles of sand; small sections of glass and rock gleamed from the greasy dust. Each object was tied with twine and identified by a small shipping label. One rock was marked
Coral, various
. Another:
Brimstone fr. Volcano, 4000 ft
. Another:
Shell of the Cowrie type
. She looked more closely at this rock, wiping at it with her fingers, and a patterned shell did emerge. Ruth recognized its glossy freckles. She knew these things, and this box—she looked again at the lid and remembered the image on it, an advertisement for boot polish; she cried out and her hands trembled in the air. This box had belonged to her father.

Now Ruth went under the sink for cloths and cleaners. Her back throbbed and stung, but she ignored it; she pictured the tiny blue pills dropping down her long, dry throat into her waiting stomach. She removed every object from the box, one by one, and knew all of them. Small explosions flared in her brain; she felt them in specific places, and she could visualize them, too, as if watching a map on the evening news that identified the locations of burgeoning bushfires. Her kindling mind; the good pleasure of cleaning; every moment of discovery: all this was thrilling, was so deeply satisfying that Ruth found herself tapping her foot the way she would to music. She set to cleaning every item with a singleness of purpose she recognized as belonging to an earlier part of her life; she felt her attention as something laserlike and constant, which she could turn with great pleasure onto any item in the box and watch it emerge, minutes later, from its own ruin. Each item required specific care. The coral clung to its dust; when Ruth tried to scrub it, it disintegrated in her hands. She breathed on it gently instead, and pinched the fibrous dirt between her fingernails—how long they were, she noticed, and still sturdy, just as they’d been when she was a girl. She fetched a toothbrush to clean with, and a jar of water. Shells shone out of their grime, and Ruth listened at each one to hear the irretrievable sea. There it was—and gone—and there. She recognized the distant roar of her own blood.

In the bottom of the box, dust and bits of rock and broken shell all mingled in a filthy glitter. Ruth nudged the wastepaper basket down the hall from Harry’s study to the dining room. She loaded it up with dirty cloths and papers and shook the box out over it. Then she replaced the lid, from which a dark, happy shoeshining boy smiled up with oversized teeth. She lay the box down next to her chair.

“Now look,” said Ruth, to nobody; to herself. She had forgotten Frida, and even the cats.

Everything was clean. Everything was laid out on the table, orderly and labelled; nothing touched anything else. Small bottles of brown and blue glass looked as if they’d been fished, moments before, from the sea. Inside each one, mysterious substances settled and slept. The shells were now pink and purple again, flesh-coloured, immodest. They nestled into themselves like ears.

Ruth wanted to share all this with someone. It should, she thought, have been Harry; she called Richard’s number. It rang four times and then clicked and popped; there was Richard’s voice, but with a mechanical buzz to it, as if he were still a smoker. I can’t come to the phone right now, he said, and his was an old man’s voice, an ending.

“Richard?” she said. “It’s Ruth.”

The line exploded with sound—there was that same young woman’s voice saying “Hello? Ruth?” and Ruth was sure she heard laughter in the background, and one laugh in particular: she rarely heard it, but when she did, it was a golden, bouncing swell, a brass ring, and unmistakable. It was—Ruth was quite sure—Frida. What could Frida be doing at Richard’s house? And in fright she hung up the telephone. It rang again, naturally; Ruth lost track of the number of times. She sat in her chair and watched a strange yellow haze pass over her eyes, as if a cloud, in crossing the sun, had been half burnt away by its light. Bright circles formed in this fog, and they pulsed in time with the ringing of the telephone. Ruth watched them even with her eyes closed; they seemed to stick to her eyelids, so she took another pill to make them go away. The phone stopped, finally, and she might have been asleep; her sleep was dusty and angular, punctuated by swimming light. Somewhere in it, she saw the sea running up and over the dune, muddying the carpets and rising and rising, until strange shelled animals clung to the lower walls and fronds that were either worms or the homes of worms beckoned from the skirting boards. Then there was nothing but wreckage and ruin. She saw herself and Frida floating on a raft fashioned from the back door. Frida used the broom as a pole and punted them, like a Venetian gondolier, towards the triumphant pennants of the surf club.

This vague sleep broke when Frida returned; Ruth heard her coming through the front door, and she noticed the end of the day’s light hanging reflected in the east.

“Ruthie?” Frida called, and she bustled into the dining room in a tremendous mood, unwrapping the green scarf from her hair. She looked browner than she had when she left, and her hair seemed a different shade of flattering bronze.

“What a day!” she sang.

She gave a girlish laugh and claimed to have gained two pounds, and she patted Ruth’s arm as she passed by on her way to the kitchen. It was as if she’d been away for three weeks. In her arms, she carried a load of pink lilies wrapped in Christmas paper. She dumped them on the countertop before fishing in the fridge for her yoghurt, which she ate straight from the container while leaning against the wall and explaining that George had taken her to a beach far away, “so I could sun myself like a frog on a log.” On some days Frida was furious with George; on other days he was inviolate. This was one of those saintly days. “It’s so necessary to be with family,” said Frida, her spoon dripping with yoghurt. “You know I’m crazy about you, Ruthie, but it’s not the same thing. And time away gives you a chance to think about what you want from life. Believe me, you’ll see some changes.”