The Night Guest A Novel by Fiona McFarlane

Author:Fiona McFarlane
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780865477735
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

11

The tiger came back that night. At least the noise of him did; or whatever it was that produced his noise. Ruth was lying in bed thinking about Richard and what it might be like to live in the city again. Richard lived in a sunny, hilly part of Sydney, northwest of the Harbour, where the trees tended to lose their leaves in the autumn and the wide evening roads were strung with homewards traffic. The gardens up there were all rhododendrons and azaleas, as if the climate were cooler and wetter than in other parts of the city, and Ruth, who didn’t know the area well, associated it with the large, heavy house of one of her elocution students whose parents had invited her to dinner and then argued with each other over the cost of her lessons. Ruth also thought about Jeffrey, how boyish he had sounded on the phone, and the way he’d said, “This is about what you want.” Could that be true? Since Harry died, she’d rarely thought about wanting anything. Frida was the one who wanted. She wanted clean floors, a smaller waist, and differently coloured hair. Frida filled the world with her desires. And Ruth admired it. Why not be like that?

The cats heard the noises first. Ruth was almost asleep, but they sat up, sphinxlike, their paws folded inward and their eyes slit. They were like little emperors on fabric shipped from China to England in the eighteenth century. Their ears moved and their tails were alert. Ruth, sensing their attention, turned her head on her pillow to listen, and there it was: something moving through the lounge room, shifting the furniture; but its tread was so light, so subtle; there was a louder exhalation, the amplification of a house cat sniffing under an unaccountably closed door, and at this the cats lost their composure and fled.

Now Ruth noticed an unusual smell, which seemed to enter the room as the cats left it. This very particular smell, concentrated and rank, was quite unlike the actual jungle, although it was this childhood scent that Ruth recalled now. The smell reminded her of the warning cries of seagulls in the garden when the cats were in the grass: not a specific panic, just a general alarm. Could a smell be a seagull? Perhaps it was more like a parrot. The tiger shook his head—new breathing accompanied the shake—and padded through the lounge room. It annoyed Ruth to hear him; she was impatient with herself because there was no point to him now that she had Frida and Richard; he had prepared the way for them and was no longer needed. She listened for any modulation in the tiger’s sounds, and when she heard it, she drew wild conclusions: the tiger is in the hallway, there are two tigers, the insects are eating the furniture, there may also be a wild pig. Lost in these conjectures, she fell asleep. Ruth was fortunate in this way—she always slept, no matter what her anxiety, but she suffered through the night with fretful dreams.

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