Chapter 10
Fiona
Marie and Silas are on their way to Forbes and I am dying to keep reading, but I’ve hardly slept in two full nights, and by
I close my bedroom door when I go up to bed. I tell myself it will shield me from the mysterious thumps and bumps in the night,
but all it does is force me to strain to hear them. That doesn’t help one bit, so I get up again. I turn on every light as I walk to the kitchen for a glass of
water, then turn them all off again as I climb back to my room. This time, I leave my bedroom door open.
A few minutes after I turn my lamp off, I hear a thump down the hall. Somewhere up near Tad’s bedroom this time, I think.
The sleepiness that plagued me downstairs vanishes in an instant.
I can feel my racing pulse in my ears, and I try to calm myself by taking my mind back to happy times in this house and in
this room. I remember dragging the phone along the hallway from Tad’s office, the long extension cord trailing behind. I remember
talking to Stef or Patience or Jon or even Jack in my younger years for hours and hours on end.
I remember shouting at Mum when she lifted the other handset in the kitchen and accidentally, or intentionally, eavesdropped on my conversations.
I think about birthdays and quickly realize I can’t remember a single one—not because I didn’t have them, but rather because they’ve all blended into one glorious, happy blur in my memory.
What year was it when Uncle Tad bought me a TV for my room, against Mum’s wishes, and even though she muttered and grumbled, she didn’t have the heart to take it back?
Maybe it was the year I turned nine. Jon was definitely close to thirteen.
I remember that because he’d just had a growth spurt and was suddenly taller than Mum.
I was jealous of that for some reason but he was jealous of my TV so it all seemed even.
Was it my fifteenth or sixteenth birthday when Mum took me on that holiday to Far North Queensland?
I just remember we were on a train for the whole day of my birthday, but it was worth it for two glorious weeks with an ease between the two of us, just snorkeling and hiking and eating seafood right by the beach.
All of these memories begin to soothe me, and I finally drift into a light and fragile sleep, only to awaken with the knowledge
that not much time has passed at all, and something is terribly wrong in my room.
At first I’m so paralyzed by fear, even my thoughts feel frozen. My God. Is this like the wind blowing in a closed room, the door slamming against all logic? Or is this like my nightmare last night?
Is it the faceless man with the knife? Is it—
No. It’s worse even than that.
There’s something on my bed. Right next to my knee.
I want to scream but no one would hear me anyway. For a few terrifying moments I lie there with the thing against my leg making
that sound my ears can’t quite make sense of and then I wake up just a little bit more and it hits me—
I lift my head off the pillow, just a little so I can peer down the bed. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see it.
Against the white of my new duvet cover is a small black lump. An exceedingly fluffy black lump that happens to be purring up a storm.
And the movement I had sensed, the thing that probably woke me up? It’s another cat, and it jumps up onto a chest of drawers
in the corner. It’s also fluffy and black, but it has white feet and a white belly and even a white patch up along its neck
and over its nose.
I drop my head back onto the pillow and feel like an absolute fool.
Of course there are stray cats in the house. Possums and rats do leave droppings in their wake and they don’t push things off countertops just for fun. Cats though . . . cats are stealthy,
except when they want to be seen. And cats, in the absence of kitty litter, would probably just do their business in the garden.
This doesn’t explain everything—but it does explain a lot.
“Hello,” I whisper. “Who are you?”
The cat on the nightstand moves so fast I lose sight of it before it’s even out the door. The cat on the bed sits up, looks
at me once, then bolts after its companion. I climb out of bed and walk carefully after them, just in time to see them dart
into the first door leading into Uncle Tad’s office. I hasten to pull the door closed to trap them there, but the other door
is still open and they dart back into the hallway and down the stairs—a blurred flash of black-and-white fur whizzing past
my legs.
I follow them down, calling softly “kitty, kitty, kitty,” but they’ve disappeared. When I turn the light on in the kitchen,
I’m not surprised to see that the glass I carelessly left on the bench when I came down earlier is shattered all over the
floorboards.
But the back door is closed so how are they getting in? Surely they can’t have been hiding in the house, totally unseen for all of these weeks?
A memory sparks and I groan and stomp my way through to the laundry, properly furious with myself now. I’d have remembered
this earlier if my brain didn’t default to buying in to all of the ghost stories around this house.
Uncle Tad adored animals but always said it would be unfair for him to adopt a pet given the hours he kept when he was writing.
He said a dog would be even less forgiving of this than say, an adoring niece, who always understood he’d make the neglect
up to her once the book was sent off.
But then, in ’68 or ’69, Uncle Tad heard about an aged Jack Russel at the Forbes pound. Little Rosey was a black, brown and
white dog once upon a time, but by the time she came to live with us, she was a silver, grey and white dog. Her previous owner
was an elderly woman who died suddenly but no one wanted to adopt such an old dog and by the time Tad heard about Rosey, she
was hours from being put to sleep.
Mum was frustrated when Tad walked through the door with Rosey. She liked dogs well enough, but she was convinced it would
dig up the garden. This amused me to no end, because Mum had no interest in gardening—she rarely even went into the backyard.
Uncle Tad promised her the dog would be inside all the time except when he was there to supervise her outside, but that lasted
about three days before the dog’s constant whining in the night drove us all mad. It turned out that Rosey was used to having
access to the outside whenever it pleased her.
Uncle Tad had a handyman come to install a dog flap on the rarely used laundry door. I had totally forgotten about it because
Rosey only lived a year or two before she passed away peacefully, and the dog flap was locked and never used again.
I turn the laundry light on and bend down to push at the flap, then I open the door and peer at it from the outside.
It’s immediately clear that the inside lock was simply not engaged.
The real trouble is that at some point over the past ten years, the fitting on the outside of the door has rusted all the way through. It can’t be locked.
The cats surely must be at least partially tame because why else would they have approached me, even in my sleep? Perhaps
the mischief was more a ploy for my attention than anything. Perhaps they were abandoned at some point. Maybe they’re lost
from a family who loves them. I picture big-eyed children crying for their beloved pets, or an elderly man who looks a lot
like Uncle Tad, standing forlorn at his back door, calling their names. Perhaps a past rodent infestation had drawn them into
Wurimbirra at some point, but now that the mice are gone, the poor things are going hungry and can’t find their way home.
Yes, the cats simply must be caught. How else will I get them home to their anxious family?
I laugh with a delirious kind of relief as I walk back up the stairs, even though I’m so tired my whole body is aching. I
blame Jon and Mum for the way I talked myself into such a spiral.
As I turn into the hallway, it occurs to me that Jack is a vet—he’ll know exactly how to catch the rotten things! I pick up my phone from my nightstand and check the time. It’s just past
11:00 p.m.—late to call, but if I text, he’ll probably see it in the morning.
Theoretically, how would a person catch a pair of stray cats that were wreaking havoc in her new home?
Straight away I see he’s replying, so I hastily add, Sorry, Jack. It’s so late! You don’t have to answer now.
A little time passes then his reply appears.
Believe it or not I’m at the clinic delivering a litter of puppies.
Delighted to announce that Limo the Dachshund (because stretch, get it?) is now mother to four adorable pups and their owner is taking them home shortly.
But as for this cat scenario, I have to admit, it does not sound entirely hypothetical . . . ?
Jack promises to drop some humane traps off on his way home, so I pull a hoody over my pajamas, pick up my book and walk downstairs
to the parlour. The fire is almost out, so I throw a few more logs on it, then make myself up a cup of tea.