The Night Guest
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.
FOR MY PARENTS
CONTENTS
1
Ruth woke at four in the morning and her blurry brain said “Tiger.” That was natural; she was dreaming. But there were noises in the house, and as she woke she heard them. They came across the hallway from the lounge room. Something large was rubbing against Ruth’s couch and television and, she suspected, the wheat-coloured recliner disguised as a wingback chair. Other sounds followed: the panting and breathing of a large animal; a vibrancy of breath that suggested enormity and intent; definite mammalian noises, definitely feline, as if her cats had grown in size and were sniffing for food with enormous noses. But the sleeping cats were weighing down the sheets at the end of Ruth’s bed, and this was something else.
She lay and listened. Sometimes the house was quiet, and then she only heard the silly clamour of her beating blood. At other times she heard a distant low whine followed by exploratory breaths. The cats woke and stretched and stared and finally, when whatever was in the lounge room gave out a sharp huff, flew from the bed and ran, ecstatic with fear, into the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the partially open back door. This sudden activity prompted an odd strangled yowl from the lounge room, and it was this noise, followed by louder sniffing, that confirmed the intruder as a tiger. Ruth had seen one eating at a German zoo, and it sounded just like this: loud and wet, with a low, guttural breathing hum punctuated by little cautionary yelps, as if it might roar at any moment except that it was occupied by food. Yes, it sounded just like that, like a tiger eating some large bloody thing, and yet the noise of it was empty and meatless. A tiger! Ruth, thrilled by this possibility, forgot to be frightened and had to counsel herself back into fear. The tiger sniffed again, a rough sniff, thick with saliva. It turned on its great feet, as if preparing to settle down.
Ruth sent one courageous hand out into the dark to find the phone on her bedside table. She pressed the button that was programmed to summon her son Jeffrey, who would, in his sensible way, be sleeping right now in his house in New Zealand. The telephone rang; Ruth, hearing the creak of Jeffrey’s throat as he answered the phone, was unrepentant.
“I hear noises,” she said, her voice low and urgent—the kind of voice she’d rarely used with him before.
“What? Ma?” He was bumping up out of sleep. His wife would be waking, too; she would be rolling worried in bed and turning on a lamp.
“I can hear a tiger, not roaring, just panting and snorting. It’s like he’s eating, and also concentrating very hard.” So she knew he was a male tiger, and that was a comfort; a female tiger seemed more threatening.
Now Jeffrey’s voice stiffened. “What time is it?”
“Listen,” said Ruth. She held the phone away from her, into the night, but her arm felt vulnerable, so she brought it back. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” said Jeffrey. “Was it the cats?”
“It’s much larger than a cat. Than a
cat
cat.”
“You’re telling me there’s a what, there’s a tiger in your house?”
Ruth said nothing. She wasn’t telling him there was a tiger in her house; she was telling him she could hear one. That distinction seemed important, now that she was awake and Jeffrey was awake, and his wife, too, and probably at this point the children.
“Oh, Ma. There’s no tiger. It’s either a cat or a dream.”
“I know that,” said Ruth. She knew there couldn’t be a tiger; but she wasn’t sure it was a dream. She was awake, after all. And her back hurt, which it never did in dreams. But now she noticed the noises had stopped. There was only the ordinary outside sound of the breaking sea.
“Would you like to go and investigate?” asked Jeffrey. “I’ll stay on the phone with you.” His voice conveyed a serene weariness; Ruth suspected he was reassuring his wife with an eyes-closed shake of the head that everything was all right, that his mother was just having one of her moments. When he’d visited a few weeks ago, at Easter, Ruth had noticed a new watchful patience in him, and a tendency to purse his lips whenever she said something he considered unusual. So she knew, from the funny mirror of Jeffrey’s face, that she had reached the stage where her sons worried about her.
“No, darling, it’s all right,” she said. “So silly! I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“Are you sure?” said Jeffrey, but he sounded foggy; he had already abandoned her.
Jeffrey’s dismissal made her brave. Ruth rose from her bed and crossed the room without turning on any lights. She watched the white step of her feet on the carpeted floor until she reached the bedroom door; then she stopped and called, “Hello?” Nothing answered, but there was, Ruth was sure, a vegetable smell in the long hallway, and an inland feel to the air that didn’t suit this seaside house. The clammy night was far too hot for May. Ruth ventured another “Hello?” and pictured, as she did so, the headlines: “Australian Woman Eaten by Tiger in Own House.” Or, more likely, “Tiger Puts Pensioner on the Menu.” This delighted her; and there was another sensation, a new one, to which she attended with greater care: a sense of extravagant consequence. Something important, Ruth felt, was happening to her, and she couldn’t be sure what it was: the tiger, or the feeling of importance. They seemed to be related, but the sense of consequence was disproportionate to the actual events of the night, which were, after all, a bad dream, a pointless phone call, and a brief walk to the bedroom door. She felt something coming to meet her—something large, and not a real thing, of course, she wasn’t that far gone—but a shape, or anyway a temperature. It produced a funny bubble in her chest. The house was quiet. Ruth pressed at the tenderness of her chest; she closed the bedroom door and followed her own feet back to bed. Her head filled and shifted and blurred again. The tiger must be sleeping now, she thought, so Ruth slept, too, and didn’t wake again until the late morning.
The lounge room, when Ruth entered it in daylight, was benign. The furniture was all where it should be, civil, neat, and almost anxious for her approval, as if it had crossed her in some way and was now waiting for her forgiveness, dressed in its very best clothes. Ruth was oppressed by this wheedling familiarity. She crossed to the window and opened the lace curtains with a dramatic gesture. The front garden looked exactly as it usually did—the grevillea needed trimming—but Ruth saw a yellow taxi idling at the end of the drive, half hidden by the casuarinas. It looked so solitary, so needlessly bright. The driver must be lost and need directions; that happened from time to time along this apparently empty stretch of coast.
Ruth surveyed the room again. “Ha!” she said, as if daring it to frighten her. When it failed to, she left it in something like disgust. She went to the kitchen, opened the shutters, and looked out at the sea. It lay waiting below the garden, and although she was unable to walk down to it—the dune was too steep, and her back too unpredictable—she felt soothed by its presence in an indefinable way, just as she imagined a plant might be by Mozart. The tide was full and flat across the beach. The cats came out from the dune grasses; they stopped in the doorway, nuzzling the inside air with their suspicious noses until, in a sudden surfeit of calm, they passed into the house. Ruth poured some dry food into their bowls and watched as they ate without ceasing until the food was gone. Something about the way they ate was biblical, she had decided; it had the character of a plague.
Now Ruth made tea. She sat in her chair—the one chair her back could endure for any length of time—and ate pumpkin seeds for breakfast. This chair was an enormous wooden object, inherited from her husband’s family; it looked like the kind a Victorian vicar might teeter on while writing sermons. But it braced Ruth’s back, so she kept it near the dining-room table, by the window that looked over the garden and dune and beach. She sat in her chair and drank tea and examined the new sensation—the extravagance, the consequence—she had experienced in the night, and which remained with her now. Certainly it was dreamlike; it had a dream’s diminishing character. She knew that by lunchtime she might have forgotten it entirely. The feeling reminded her of something vital—not of youth, exactly, but of the urgency of youth—and she was reluctant to give it up. For some time now she had hoped that her end might be as extraordinary as her beginning. She also appreciated how unlikely that was. She was a widow and she lived alone.
The pumpkin seeds Ruth ate for breakfast were one of the few items in the pantry. She spread them out on her left hand and lifted them to her mouth, two at a time, with her right. One must go in the left side, at the back of her teeth; the other must go in the right. She was like this about her daily pills, too; they would be more effective if she was careful about how she took them. Through this symmetry—always begin a flight of stairs on her left foot, always end it on her right—she maintained the order of her days. If she had dinner ready in time for the six o’clock news, both of her sons would come home for Christmas. If that taxi driver didn’t ring the front doorbell, she would be allowed to stay in her chair for two hours. She looked out at the sea and counted the pattern of the waves: if there were fewer than eight small ones before another big curler, she would sweep the garden path of sand. To sweep the sand from the path was a holy punishment, a limitless task, so Ruth set traps for herself in order to decide the matter. She hated to sweep, hated anything so senseless; she hated to make her bed only to unmake it again in the evening. Long ago she had impressed the importance of these chores upon her sons and believed in them as she did so. Now she thought, If one person walks on the beach in the next ten minutes, there’s a tiger in my house at night; if there are two, the tiger won’t hurt me; if there are three, the tiger will finish me off. And the possibility of this produced one of those brief, uncontrollable shivers, which Ruth thought of as beginning in the brain and letting themselves out through the soles of the feet.
“It’s nearly winter,” she said aloud, looking out at the flattening sea; the tide was going out. “It’s nearly bloody winter.”
Ruth would have liked to know another language in order to revert to it at times of disproportionate frustration. She’d forgotten the Hindi she knew when, as a child, she lived in Fiji. Lately, swearing—in which she indulged in a mild, girlish way—was her other language. She counted seven small waves, which meant she had to sweep the path, and so she said “Shit,” but didn’t stir from her chair. She was capable of watching the sea all day. This morning, an oil tanker waited on the rim of the world, as if long-sufferingly lost, and farther around the bay, near the town, Ruth could make out surfers. They rode waves that from here looked bath-sized, just toy swells. And in every way this was ordinary, except that a large woman was approaching, looking as if she had been blown in from the sea. She toiled up the dune directly in front of the house, dragging a suitcase that, after some struggle, she abandoned among the grasses. It slid a little way down the hill. Once she had made her determined way to the top of the dune, the woman moved with steadfast purpose through the garden. She filled up a little more of the sky with every step. Her breadth and the warmth of her skin and the dark sheen of her obviously straightened hair looked Fijian to Ruth, who rose from her chair to meet her guest at the kitchen door. Her back didn’t complain when she stood; that, and the woman’s nationality, made her optimistic about the encounter. Ruth stepped into the garden and surprised the woman, who seemed stranded without her suitcase, exhausted from her uphill climb, encased in a thin grey coat, with the thin grey sea behind her. Perhaps she had been shipwrecked, or marooned.
“Mrs. Field! You’re home!” the woman cried, and she advanced on Ruth with a reckless energy that dispelled the impression of shipwreck.
“Here I am,” said Ruth.
“Large as life,” said the woman, and she held out both hands cupped together as if they had just caught a bothersome fly. Ruth must offer her hands in return; she offered; the woman took them into her sure, steady grip, and together they stood in the garden as if this were what the woman had come for. The top of Ruth’s head didn’t quite reach her visitor’s shoulders.