The Night Guest: A Novel Part 9

"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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gra.s.ses 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentary 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 G.o.d. At that time, when she was aged eleven or so and was reminded everywhere and at every hour of the goodness of G.o.d'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 carca.s.s of a spider, cat-killed and crumpled deep under the sofa; Ruth extracted it with the a.s.sistance 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.

"h.e.l.lo?" 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, "h.e.l.lo?" 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 "h.e.l.lo?" 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 ba.s.s 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 "h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?" 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 antic.i.p.ation. "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, "h.e.l.lo?"

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 gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.katoos ate the berries and rolled around drunk on the gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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.

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 ill.u.s.trate.

"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 j.a.panese 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, c.o.c.king 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 gra.s.s 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 seash.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d 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.