The Best Australian Stories 2014 (23 page)

There were two things she wanted to tell me. The first she recounted with some amusement, albeit an amusement unusually brittle. One of the villagers, a drunkard, had evidently seen the panther one night when we were there, and had been muttering about it ever since. No one was taking him seriously and she would not have thought it worth mentioning had it not been for a piece she had just come upon in the local newspaper. Some sheep in a nearby village had been killed during the time we were there. Attacked and partly devoured by some other animal or animals. The attacks were being attributed to a pack of dogs seen in the area over recent months. It probably
was
the dogs, she assured me, and I readily agreed, but she was nervous that someone, perhaps Anton himself, might make a different connection. At least one other, according to Anton, had also seen the panther, or been told by another that
they
had seen a panther, and although this was unverified it seemed to suggest that a rumour was spreading.

‘Like an urban myth,' I commented, ‘or a rural version of one.'

‘Yes, she said, ‘and let's hope people treat it as such.'

I smiled to myself as I recounted the story to the panther – who eyed me quizzically the whole time, as if recognising something pertaining to himself, but then closed his eyes, unfazed, and returned to his dreaming – and then, I think, after a period of reflection concerning any lessons there might be for our own night wanderings, I rather forgot about the matter. Certainly there were people who had seen him – and seen him with me – but there seemed so far to have been almost a benign conspiracy to say nothing. No one in my non-panther life had mentioned him, let alone any rumour of a panther at large in the city. It was not, after all, as if the city was without its own mythic bestiary: the alligators that supposedly inhabited the sewerage system, dogs the size of ponies that lived in the bowels of the disused abattoirs, vampire bats that flew out on moonless nights from the old hospital incinerator tower.

Our life together was our own, it seemed to me, all the more private and carefully guarded as our relationship developed. I appeared to draw something human out of him, or answered to it, and he, who knows?, drew something panther-like from me – became, in the longer and longer nights of winter, a kind of witness to my loneliness, my secrets, and, yes, for I
was
a man alone, an angered man, an embarrassed man, my furies, my disappointments, my desires, my confessions. And he seemed to swallow them, even in some way to understand. Although the season was rapidly cooling, we would still go, some nights, to visit the National Gardens, and on others wander the deserted streets and laneways, farther and farther from home. And on other nights, he, I, would go out to prowl alone. I fed him on dreams, I fed him on disgust. I fed him on all the horrors and pornographies of this human world. What in return he was trying to instil in me, with those slow-burning, emerald-yellow eyes, that infinite patience, I will never truly know.

The first of the murders occurred in late autumn. Murders, killings: I didn't know. A homeless man in a small park by the river. I thought little of it. Such killings, always heinous, are sadly never uncommon. And the detail escaped me, if any had been given at all. It was out of our way; we had never been to the river together, let alone the culvert by the roadside there where homeless people would shelter on inclement nights. Nor did I think too much about the second – although I did raise my eyes at it, and read about it to my companion – of a young man, a drug addict, in the very lane from which I had been brought the packaged meat those several months before.

It can't have been much after this, a fortnight perhaps, time just enough for me to make no immediate association, that I read the first, unconfirmed account of the sighting of a large black cat in the vicinity of the National Gardens. A discussion ensued, amongst various editorial correspondents, during which other glimpses were reported, earlier such stories remembered, and even an account recalled, from almost ninety years before, of a panther kept as a pet by a resident of the quarter, a retired general from one of the Central American republics, who had reputedly used the creature in his tortures there. Word was spreading, or rather an idea; it seemed only a matter of time before the stories of the murders – there was a third, which seemed to me quite unrelated, but alarm was catching – and those of the panther collided. My companion was with me every bit as much as he had been, and I had never known any violence in him, but I felt, nonetheless, a bleak apprehension germinate within me, like the seed of a rank and poisonous weed.

It was the next murder, the fourth, that unleashed the storm. A sudden, terrible thought came to me as I read of it. The young woman with the silver hair, in the National Gardens, very near where we had been used to meeting her. Murdered most viciously, as for the first time the police were releasing details, making connections. These killings, for they now called them that, appeared to have been done by some great cat. There were claw patterns, deep lacerations at the necks of the victims that could only have been made by large, powerful jaws. The sightings of the jaguar, they had reluctantly concluded – jaguar, or puma, or panther – had been actual, no illusion, and it was this beast they now searched for. They urged people to exercise the greatest vigilance in the area, to report anything, however minor, that might seem related, and at the same time warned us strongly against taking this matter into our own hands. Already vigilante groups had formed, and the police were working to discourage them. Experts were being consulted. Tissue analyses were under way. The situation would shortly be under control.

And of course I doubted him, more than doubted. How could I not? And began to fear. The evidence was overwhelming. The sheep in the village near my sister's. His night prowlings. The claw-pattern. And the girl – that, of all things; that it should be
her
– seemed to my abyssal confusion as damning as it was unthinkable. But how could I betray him? It would have been easy, but I could not bring myself to do it. And yet by the same token it was impossible to keep him with me. People
had
seen us together. It was only a matter of time, days, perhaps hours, before one of these reported us. And if he had turned upon
her
, how could I be sure that he would not turn upon me? Neither of us was safe while he was there. Nor could I escape with him. I could only expel him somehow, evict him, and hope that no others, himself included, would lose their lives as a consequence.

The night immediately following the report of the girl's murder I took advantage of his absence to lock the French doors and – something I'd not done since he arrived, but I thought it might convey a message – draw the thick curtains across them. I felt soon his heavy drop to the courtyard, felt his presence on the other side of the glass, felt, like a physical ache, his eyes as they attempted to pierce the fabric, but did nothing. And on the third day, for it took that long, felt – knew, clearly – that he had gone.

For the next two weeks I scoured the papers and listened regularly to the news for further sightings but none were reported. And no further murder. There were now several vigilante groups roaming the night streets armed with sticks, knives, guns, drinking as they went, primed with their drugs of choice, urgent for an encounter, and the city itself was fixated upon the issue, but there was nothing, no sign. I went out only during daylight, and by routes as far from the Gardens as I could. Whenever I arrived home I expected police at my door. But in fact all was suddenly, eerily silent. Until the fifteenth night, when, shortly after twelve, a pounding on my street door flooded me with a sense of imminent disaster.

It was the one-legged man from the Gardens entrance. ‘Come!' he said, nothing more, but from the look in his eyes I knew I had no choice. Immediately I followed, without so much as locking the door, scarcely believing how swiftly he travelled, his crutches pounding onto the pavement, his body swinging through the arc of them, crutches thrust forward and pounding again. In almost no time we were past the entrance and into the dark paths, heading – how was I so sure of it? – toward the clearing by the rotunda.

The howl that came from me as I saw him there even now wakes me, on the worst of nights, as if in a vain attempt to spare me the agony of that last stare, or the loathsome, heart-rending image they had made of him, strung up between the posts at the top of the rotunda stairs, arrows from a crossbow in his side and neck, a piece of wood strapped into his mouth, exposed to their hideous version of the death of the thousand cuts, his sleek fur matted and glistening with blood. I flung myself toward him, but some powerful brute grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground, landing at the same time – or was this someone else? – a heavy blow on the back of my skull, as if to bring me instant, almost merciful darkness.

I woke at dawn on the cripple's bench, stinking of alcohol, my head pounding, the ragged ends of a horrid dream clinging to my mind like the remains of someone's excrement. At first I had no sense of where I was or how I had come to be there, but all too quickly it came back. I vomited, between my legs, then staggered to my feet and made my way to the clearing. Nothing. No corpse. No stain between the posts of the rotunda. Nothing. Until, prompted by some stain in the air, I fell to my knees, pulled away some rotten boards and crawled under, to see the spooled blood still only partly congealed, felt my hands, my knees in the pool of it.

I sobbed alone there, a long while, but then, coming to myself, realising that I could not risk being seen like that, washed myself as best I could in the duck-pond nearby, and made my way home, or rather found myself there, the memory of how I reached it submerged in the questions overwhelming me. How could he have allowed himself to be caught like that? How could it have been that he could not fight them off? How could he have done what he had done? How
could
it have been
he
?

For weeks I was in a stupor. Slept heavily. Drank heavily. Could not work. Correspondence piled up in the hallway. Newspapers were dumped unread by the door. Until eventually there was a headline I could not ignore. Another murder, with the same profile, the same horrid wounds. A nurse, on her way home from a late shift at the Women's Hospital. The panther, again, but not
that
panther, not
my
panther, surely. And I experienced a gruesome reawakening. Was he still here? Alive and dead at the same time? Had that been him? Had I – it was only now that the chilling possibility occurred to me – been living in the same house in which that colonel had once lived?

I had all but resolved, in my extremis, to take my bizarre, scarcely credible story to the police – to sacrifice
myself,
if that is what it meant – when a further headline arrived, blaring and triumphant. ‘The Panther', for so they now dubbed him, had been caught, a young fitter-and-turner who worked in a prestige machine-shop on the edge of the city, making custom parts for classic cars. A lone sociopath, obsessed with big cats, who had fashioned for himself an artificial claw – a gruesome photograph was provided – with which to disfigure his victims after he had at first beaten and then throttled them, paying particular attention to their throats, to cover signs of their strangulation.

That is thirty years ago. And now, hotly discussed, there is talk of his release. The whole matter stirs again. And I am still alone, still in the same house, still writing, almost seventy. Lingering, for reasons I can't explain. I have my admirers, as I have always had, but am in most common respects quite unsuccessful. Those critics who pay my books any attention say almost to a person that they are beautifully written, even haunting, but that there is always some indefinable thing missing, an unspoken absence around which everything turns. Every year, in late summer, I visit my sister, who also remains alone. And every year, in autumn, I go to the Art Gallery, to stand before
Bestiary.

I can see him, there in the shadows.

He never looks at me.

The Green Lamp

Leah Swann

After Jimmy was sacked, he spent several days sleeping. At two he'd get up to surf the net or watch telly and drink Coke, creeping back to bed before his flatmate Paula got home. On Friday he didn't rise till almost three, and spent a fruitless ten minutes searching for the Xbox before remembering Marko had borrowed it. He shuffled into the living room with his thin doona still draped around him, nursing a packet of lime and black pepper crisps.

Daylight shone on the iPad screen, blurring the images. He logged into his bank account. Ten dollars. It would hardly buy him a coffee and BLT. Back in the kitchen he raked around in the fridge like a madman and found the half-eaten pie from last Sunday night. The night of bongs and beer with his boss that had cost him his job. He peeled open the brown paper and sniffed the onions and meat. Was it off? Dare he bite it? He drew it closer to his nose and held it there, sniffing.

Through the window he saw Paula marching along the footpath. Home from work already! He hurled the pie into the bin and raced to the bathroom to wash away his five-day reek. His reflection told a sorry tale: unkempt whiskers, gungy teeth.

‘Hell,' he muttered. ‘That's what you look like, mate.'

A yellow pimple extruded through the whiskers. He popped it and hopped under the shower and lathered. It was good to wash. He was coming out of some kind of fog. He decided to shave, scolding himself for squandering water but loving the heat driving out gloom from his body. Whiskers filled the razor and he knocked it against the tiles to empty it. Next to the wet patch of whiskers he noticed a tiny rainbow made by the bevelled glass window.

Jimmy towelled himself dry and contemplated his stiffly soiled pyjamas on the bathroom floor. He couldn't wear them again. He wrapped the towel over his hips and dashed into his bedroom. Paula was making real coffee. He could hear the machine percolating and smell coffee beans roasting. What a smell! He licked his lips and flicked open the blind. Callous light exposed dirty clothes and a bowl full of half-smoked roaches.

‘God,' he said, under his breath.

His drawers were almost empty. He dressed in a pilly tracksuit and running shoes. There was rent and reckoning to get through. He needed shoes to face Paula.

‘Cuppa, Jimmy?' she said as he came down the hallway. She was bustling around in a red skirt a tad snug over her pillowy hips. So far so good. He sat cautiously on a kitchen chair. A book of Chinese poetry was lying open on the table. Paula's last boyfriend gave it to her when he dumped her. Jimmy hadn't heard the end of it.

‘That'd be great, Paula.'

She steamed the milk and sprinkled chocolate over the froth. She set it down in front of him along with a plate of fruit toast. Jimmy's stomach growled audibly. Paula smiled.

‘Have some.'

Was that … a tear in his eye? Nah, couldn't be. It was days since he'd eaten properly, that was all. Not since that pie. Unless you included cola and crisps and bowls of Weet-Bix.

‘So why did you lose your job?' she asked, sitting across from him. He could smell her perfume. Something very flowery and sweet.

‘Fight with the boss.'

‘What about?'

Jimmy took a bite and chewed, relishing the butter, dates and crunchy macadamias, and wondering how to change the subject.

‘Did he crack on to a girl you like?'

There was no way out when Paula wanted to know something.

‘He was drunk. Came on to a girl who didn't want him. Wouldn't stop.'

‘Ah,' Paula leaned forward, her eyes glittering.
‘You
stopped him! Good boy!'

Jimmy squirmed.

‘Yeah, well, look where it's got me.'

Paula got up to take an empty Coke bottle to the sink, and gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze. The bottle clinked on the stainless steel.

‘You shouldn't drink that stuff. It's got aspartame in it.'

Jimmy shrugged.

‘It turns into formaldehyde. A deadly neurotoxin. It's what they pickle rats in. Maybe they don't dissect rats in school anymore?'

Paula was thirty-five and Jimmy was twenty-four and she often found ways to remind him of this. She was no beauty while he was considered quite good-looking, and Jimmy wondered if this was her way of evening out the social stakes. Her maturity. And her education, of course.

‘This is the best fruit toast I've ever had.'

‘It's a Phillippa's loaf. Seven dollars,' sighed Paula. ‘Rent's due.'

‘I'm going to Centrelink on Monday to sign up …'

‘Centrelink?'

Jimmy's eyes fell to the open poetry book on the table, next to Paula's new iPhone. He dragged the book closer. It might distract her. He read a few words by an old Chinese poet, Gekkutsu-Sei, about an emerald lamp.

‘Why don't you just work for yourself?' asked Paula. ‘Tradies make heaps.'

‘I don't have any clients.'

‘Put an ad in the local rag. Run off flyers.'

He gulped, forcing toast down his throat. He sipped coffee to loosen it.

‘I don't have the money.'

He couldn't say that he hated wiring electric currents through dark and dusty places. His squeamishness had once, famously, led him to reroute all the electrics because he'd seen a rat's tail. His mates whooped when they worked out why. Paula's face was intent, round, expectant. Just looking at her made him shivery and tired.

‘I'll give you till Wednesday,' Paula said. ‘Just get
any
job. They need pizza makers at Fahd's.'

‘I don't know how to make pizza.'

Paula swept away the empty plates. Feeling vaguely ashamed, Jimmy lowered his eyes and read the poem again. It was nothing special. It didn't even rhyme.

*

Fortified by fruit toast, Jimmy made his way to Fahd's that night. He walked down to the Windsor end of Chapel Street with the wind cutting through his tracksuit top. Cars belted past, some throbbing with rap. If he'd saved some of his last pay cheque he could have put petrol in his own car. He'd never saved a cent. Money was slippery. You couldn't
own
money: it came and went like breath.

The smell of roasting mushrooms and cheese and salami wafted out of the pizzeria. Nightclubbers, students and locals were packed in front of the counter where a black-haired man was frenziedly making pizzas. Jimmy shouldered his way to the front. Dockets bristled around the till and someone was complaining.

‘I ordered a capricciosa half an hour ago!'

‘Here it is, my friend,' said the man, whipping a cheesy ham confection into a box. The damp smell of hot dough rose through the cardboard. He presented it to the customer with a one-handed flourish while his other scattered chunks of pineapple over a raw pizza. Seeing Jimmy, he said:

‘There's a thirty-minute wait.'

‘I'm here for the job. I can come back—'

‘No joke!' said the man, staring at Jimmy with sudden, blazing intensity, eyes as green as olives in his tanned face. ‘Grab an apron.'

‘I've never made pizzas—'

‘You'll learn. Ten dollars an hour orright?'

Jimmy blinked.

‘Okay, fifteen. Just get back here. Fahd's my name.'

Behind the counter was a row of glass bowls filled with chopped tomatoes, mushroom crescents, grated mozzarella, pink ham shreds, salami, creamy white goat's cheese, spinach, rolls of fleshy coral salmon, capsicum, black olive discs, and a bottle of golden garlic sauce.

‘Get the pizzas into boxes. When the bowls get low refill them from the big tubs on the shelf under here. If you've got a minute, spread cheese for me, like this.'

Fahd fanned grated cheese over the dough with an expert flick.

‘The cheese makes a bed for the other ingredients. Soaks up the juice.'

For the next few hours, Jimmy and Fahd worked like dogs. Fahd could assemble a pizza in about thirty seconds. Jimmy learned the docket codes, took orders, figured out the till and slotted hot pizzas into boxes.

‘You're good,' Fahd grunted at him and Jimmy felt absurdly pleased. It was almost eleven when Jimmy handed a box to the last customer. The restaurant was still busy, but the shop was empty.

‘Ahhhh!' said Fahd, with a long sigh. ‘I don't believe it.'

He collapsed on a chair to eat a pizza someone had forgotten.

‘Want some?'

Jimmy took a slice. It still had a hint of warmth, and was flavoured with salty salami and garlic. He crammed it down and took a swig from the orange juice Fahd offered him. The door jingled and in came a girl wearing an old-fashioned dress and pink Converse shoes.

‘Hello, darling,' said Fahd, getting to his feet. ‘I would've said we're closed but for
you
of course we're open.'

‘I'm not here for a pizza,' said the girl. Tiny blonde locks curled over her brow. ‘I'm here for the job.'

‘A female pizza-maker?' said Fahd. ‘Don't think it's done.'

The girl waited. She couldn't be more than twenty, Jimmy thought.

‘What's your name?'

‘Bethany.'

‘Would you take me to the Equal Opportunity Commission, Bethany?'

‘I – don't know,' said the girl. She looked confused. Then she smiled crookedly, white teeth protruding through round lips.

Fahd tossed her a menu.

‘Learn those by tomorrow.'

He was leaning forward to disguise that he was rubbing his crotch against the bench.

‘Okay,' Bethany said. ‘See you tomorrow.'

The little bell tinkled again when she left.

‘How hot was she! Whew!' said Fahd, adjusting his fly. ‘Don't look at me like that, mate, she hasn't taken your job. We need two pizza-makers.'

*

Sixty dollars and a free pizza made the cold walk home more bearable. On foot, he noticed things he didn't notice when he was driving, like the intense green of the traffic light. It was
unnaturally
green, he thought – his current aversion to all things electric was influencing how he saw things. Where would you find that green in nature? Not in plants. Certainly not in flowers. Maybe in water, he thought, remembering TV ads for Hayman Island, where women in white bikinis cleaved through impossibly aqua seas. Or in gemstones like emerald and jade. He remembered the emerald lamp in that Chinese poem.
Take it up
–
exhaustless.
A light that never got tired.

When he got home he sat down in front of the telly to watch footy highlights and eat his pizza with joy. Paula appeared, curvy and cosy in a red dressing-gown.

‘Well,' she said. ‘How was it?'

‘Pizza?' he said, happy to offer her something.

‘Mmm. Oh, I shouldn't,' she said, patting her hips.

‘You gotta try it,' he said. ‘Salami and green peppers and garlic sauce.'

She sat beside him and picked up a piece and bit into it.

‘Oh, delicious! It's like savoury cake.'

‘Yeah,' he said, guzzling his Diet Coke. ‘They taste pretty good.'

She ate some more. He rolled a joint and got up to smoke it outside.

‘Just smoke it in here,' said Paula, indulgent from her pizza.

Jimmy lit up and smoked. He offered it to Paula but she declined. The soft fog surged over him in prickly waves.

‘Thanks for the pizza,' said Paula, getting up.

‘There'll be more,' he said, grinning stupidly.

‘You know,
that's
a lot of your trouble.'

‘What?'

‘That stuff. Dope. Keep smoking it and you'll never get ahead. It retards your growth.'

‘Foof!' Jimmy sputtered out smoke, laughing. ‘What – like smoking cigarettes stunts your growth?'

‘Your
maturity,
you great oaf,' said Paula. Evidently the goodwill from the pizza had worn off.

*

Socks. Two pairs. His dad's old thermal. A fleece grandpa shirt. A Saints beanie. Thus arrayed, Jimmy got into bed and wriggled around, trying to get warm. He was sure he could feel toxins mushrooming in his body, heavy under his muscles.
Inside
his muscles. He was a bit too foggy to worry about his retarded maturity. Somewhere in his brain the thought formed that he wouldn't be impressing Bethany right now. He recalled the skin glowing above the scooped neckline of her dress.
Out. Of. My. League.
Girl who dressed like that. Arty type. He thought of Fahd rubbing his crotch in that obscene way. A man like him couldn't appreciate her details, like the lace-up shoes on the end of her soft, stockinged legs. Little laces crisscrossing.

*

Jimmy arrived early at Fahd's the next afternoon. Despite the sunlight the place was garishly lit. The only person there was an older woman with an immense bosom under her knitted jumper of sparkly brown wool.

‘Hello,' said Jimmy. ‘I'm the new pizza-maker.'

‘My son not here,' the woman said, accusingly. ‘You clean.'

Jimmy looked about somewhat helplessly. The place was already clean. The woman handed him a Chux Superwipe.

‘Clean, you clean,' she said, forcing his hand down onto the bench.

‘Yes, alright,' said Jimmy, shaking her away.

Fahd still wasn't there by six. Fahd's mother didn't explain. When Bethany arrived there was a crowd waiting, and Jimmy had five pizzas in the oven. He was hot and sweaty already.

‘Watch me,' he said, taking an order from two high-school students. ‘You write the dockets like this – c for capricciosa, a for Aussie, g for gourmet, then l or s for size. You take the money. Know the prices?'

Bethany nodded. ‘But where's the other guy?'

‘Fahd? God knows.'

*

Later that night, wriggling under his thin doona, Jimmy remembered Bethany's tears. She'd given two customers the wrong pizzas, another the wrong change, and at one point she had both Fahd's mother and a customer yelling at her.

‘I should go, I'm no help,' she'd said.