The Night Guest (17 page)

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 glass 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 cockatoos ate the berries and rolled around drunk on the grass, 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 pass 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 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 hair 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.