The Night Guest (24 page)

“By all means,” said Frida, magnanimous. “Call Phil, call everyone. Call the Queen, my love. Why the hell not.”

“I saw the Queen,” said Ruth, and they both said together, “In Fiji.”

“Jesus, Ruthie,” said Frida in the window.

15

That was the night Frida fought the tiger. He came earlier than he had the other nights: Frida was in the bathroom and Ruth sat up in bed with the lamp still lit. She was thinking about calling Richard, but couldn’t be sure of what she wanted to say: something about an invitation to Christmas, and also about hating Sydney because of bad junipers and good pirate plays. She was aware of being very tired and thought she would probably make a fool of herself. So she sank down into the bed and, as she did so, heard the first suggestions of the tiger: the footfalls in the lounge room, the moving lamps and chairs. He had come without the jungle, although Ruth could feel that it was nearby, outside the windows, in a way that reminded her of Fiji. It was like night in their wide, hot house beside the hospital, where the moths knocked up against the windows and the gardens dripped in the dark. The light around her bed stirred like the mosquito netting she had slept under as a girl. Then the tiger: softly at first, his usual nosing and breathing, which was all so quiet that Ruth was inclined to ignore this evidence and assume he was still banished to the beach. The cats, however, stiffened and stared—a bad sign, a tiger sign—and shortly after this, the tiger began to make a sharp whine, as if he was hungry. Then he was unmistakably the tiger.

Frida was still in the bathroom. Ruth’s door was ajar, and she could see light falling across the hall in a way that meant the lounge-room door was open. The tiger was there, in that light! What would it mean to actually see him? Would it hurt? The jungle pressed against the windows, not insistent; only present.

Ruth got out of bed. She felt lately as if she were always heroically rising from bed, mainly because of her back. Tonight it hadn’t had the chance to freeze in sleep; it still had the day’s limited elasticity. The cats watched her. They were in no hurry to leave the bed. Ruth shook her head at them to say “Quiet!” She crossed the floor and leaned into the hallway. It was empty. Then Frida was at the end of it, and running towards her.

“Did you hear it?” called Frida.

“Quick!” cried Ruth, and she pulled Frida into her room. Frida wore a white towelling dressing gown. She was soft and without shape. “Close the door!”

Frida closed the door. “Did you hear it?”

“Yes,” said Ruth. “I think—yes, I did.”

They both stilled and listened. He had come into the hallway, Ruth was sure of it. He must have heard Frida, or seen or smelled her, and now he knew with certainty they were there. Now he nosed at the door.

Frida flew against it. “All right, all right,” she said. “Think.”

They both thought. There was nothing to think. Ruth’s mind was blank of everything but the tiger. Frida pressed against the door. Finally she said, “I’m going out there.”

“You can’t!” cried Ruth. But she was certain Frida would; there was no alternative.

“I can and I will.” Frida’s face was resolved above the white fluff of her dressing gown. She pressed one ear against the door, listening, but there was silence in the hallway. Ruth waited for a hungry howl.

“Promise me you won’t come out, no matter what you hear,” Frida said. “And if something happens, promise me you’ll call George and tell him about it yourself.”

“Frida!”

“Promise me.”

“How do I call him?”

“Look him up in the phone book. Look up his taxi. Young Livery. Can you do that?”

Ruth nodded.

Then Frida turned to face the door. She adjusted her robe, took a deep scuba breath, opened the door, and disappeared into the hallway. The door closed behind her. Then it was definite: Frida was going to fight the tiger.

“Can you see him?” Ruth asked through the door.

“Not yet. I’m going to find a weapon.”

“Get a broom.”

“All right, a broom,” said Frida. “And maybe a knife.”

Ruth heard Frida run into the kitchen in search of a broom and a knife; then came the sound of the tiger’s paws on the floor of the hallway. This sound reminded Ruth of the soft rhythm of a particular trolley on the floor of the clinic in Fiji; she heard it passing up and down while she waited in her father’s consulting room. The tiger was following Frida, but without hurrying; he was a cat in long grasses; he was hunting. Pressed against the door, Ruth could hear her busy heart, the hunting tiger, and the hospital trolley; then the sound of Frida’s finding a broom.

“Frida!” Ruth called. “He’s behind you!”

The broom cupboard was stiff with equipment, mops and brooms and buckets all piled in together, and they fell out on the floor as Frida selected her weapon—Ruth heard all this from her room.

The cats jumped from the bed and clamoured at Ruth’s feet. They wanted to get out. Frida was swearing in the kitchen now, among the mops and buckets, but she stopped when she saw the tiger and cried “Aha!” The tiger answered with a crisp, proud puff from his nostrils. Then he sprang onto the table—Ruth heard the table scrape over the floor. Frida was in the knife drawer now. Its metals rang. Frida would carve the tiger! But he was ready to pounce.

The house was hotter than ever before. Ruth pressed her sticky hand against the door, as if checking for fire. The kitchen had burned today! Frida was facing the tiger! Did she really stand in the Sausage King’s with an empty purse only this morning? Was there such a thing as a bus, a town, a mortgage? The cats clawed at Ruth’s legs. Whose side were they on? They were wild with panic and fear, and Ruth could barely recognize them.

Frida wielded her broom—she was trying to herd the tiger out the back door. But he wouldn’t run tonight. Frida commanded, “Out! Out!” The broom battered the shutters and walls, but he stayed put. Ruth had seen the cats hunting birds in the garden; she knew the tiger’s whole rusty front would be still and low, and his back paws would be lifting, lifting, beneath his undulant tail. Then—the table moved again, sharp against the floor—he flew at Frida. She lifted her broom, which cracked against something hard. They were both so quiet; Ruth marvelled at it. Every now and then, Frida produced an “Oof,” but there were no shouts of pain or whimpers from the tiger; only the noise of furniture shifting, and periodically a shatter of glass. Ruth closed her eyes. The tiger was stronger than Frida and determined to fight.

But Frida was fearless. She didn’t give up any ground or lose hold of her weapons. She struck! And now the tiger gave out a high squawk. The cats went mad at the door, and Ruth—her eyes still closed—opened it for them, quickly, and closed it again. They ran through the kitchen, through Frida and the tiger, and outside. Their flight was enough to distract him; Frida struck again. Now he ran. All through the hospital the tiger fled, into the house and the hallway and through the clinic, and as he ran, the patients sat up in their beds, even those that couldn’t sit, as if the trumpets of the resurrection had sounded and their souls were rising from perpetual sleep. Someone began to ring a bell, which might summon the fire brigade; it might wake the doctor with his canny, flimsy hands and bring him running in expectation of surgery. It might wake the whole town, the whole island; it might bring the sea to a halt, waiting, waiting to see the tiger run by. He ran into Phillip’s room and out of it again, and everywhere he ran, Frida followed him with her broom and her knife and her battle cry. Ruth heard, along with the bell, a new sound—the beating together of the compost-bin lids, sailing across the sand. Children fled from the beach. Children in the wards began to cry out, but not in alarm; they called “Frida! Frida!” Lights came on in every room. The bell rang. Lights disappeared and came on again in every room. The tiger ran blindly into furniture. His claws skidded over the floors.

“Oh, no you don’t!” called Frida, and Ruth called—everyone called—“No you don’t!” along with her.

The tiger was trapped in the hallway. Ruth pressed against her door; her heart struck again and again. There he was in the hallway, there was his snarl and the fury of his breath. The cats cried out in the garden. Now Frida began to roar; she was magnificent. The tiger answered—he roared, and his roar was a stone flying over water. Then Frida struck. The speed of her striking arm lifted a wind in the house. The tiger yelped in surprise—a startled domestic little yelp—and then he was in the jungle again, or of the jungle, and enraged. Ruth felt for a moment on the verge of understanding exactly what the tiger was saying when he roared. He wasn’t concerned for his safety, but for his dignity. There was a sense of enormous injustice, not quite conceivable to him. But you must take Frida seriously, thought Ruth. She found herself pitying the tiger. He was fighting to save his territory, but Frida meant to finish him off. Then he roared again, a war cry, and she stopped trembling for him. She was never afraid for Frida.

Something heavy fell against the door; it was unclear which of them it was. But the tiger must have struck because Frida cried out in rage and pain. She fought back. There had been no beginning to Frida and the tiger, and now there would be no end. They both snarled and bared their teeth. Frida called out the strange syllables of a warlike alphabet. Her voice grew louder, but the tiger’s slowed. He still roared, but his roar seemed full of static, like the roar of a tiger on television. It came and went. Frida’s broom rattled. The bell stopped and all the lights went out. There was no hospital and no house; only Frida and the tiger. Ruth leaned, terrified, against the door.

Now the jungle began, sudden and synchronized: insects tucked in trees, and a high peal of hidden birds. The wind died out among the foliage and became instead a hot, damp gag, barely moving, and carrying something wet whenever it did. Frida had the tiger down near the coatrack now, and she was holding her ground. Probably his ears were flat against his head. His tail moved to and fro. There was the scrape of his claws on the wood of the floor.

“Frida!” cried Ruth, and when she did, there was the sound of falling bodies, more cries, more knocks of the broom on the wall, but it was as if nothing more serious than a scuffle were taking place, a closing-time fracas, until there came at last a screech—the sound of a cat whose tail has been trampled. Frida grunted; she was pushing something hard. She called out, and then her body—or his body—a heavy body—fell. The hallway was quiet. Then light came in under the bedroom door.

“Frida?” said Ruth. Frida groaned. “Are you hurt?” Frida rapped on the door with the end of the broom. “Can I come out? Are you all right?”

“Stay where you are,” said Frida. The words heaved out of her. The light disappeared. “Open the door,” she said. “Don’t look out here.”

Ruth opened the door. The wet smell of the tiger was everywhere. Frida came in carrying the broom, but not the knife.

“It’s finished,” she said, and accepted Ruth into her arms. There was blood on her white robe and on her face; tiger blood.

16

Ruth rose early the next morning. She crept by Frida’s bedroom door as high on the tips of her toes as her back would allow. The house was in disarray. Sand lay in banks and eddies all over the floor. Ruth decided to sweep it, but it seemed to be sticky at the bottom, as if soaked in liquid—each clump had the long, damp foot of a mollusc—and sweeping only thickened the bristles of the broom with mud. Her back hurt. Her chair lay shipwrecked on the sandy floor. Ruth kept walking over hard objects that she worried were teeth and tiger claws but turned out to be miscellaneous grit. Frida’s broom, or the tiger’s tail, had knocked glass to the floor, and the lamp tilted drunkenly in the lounge room. But the tiger’s body was gone.

Frida had covered the area by the front door with a tarpaulin, and she had weighed this tarpaulin down with buckets of water. The water smelled rusty, and it was a rust colour when Ruth dipped her finger in it. She couldn’t lift the buckets to see under the tarpaulin, and when she opened the front door, she could see only that something large had been dragged to the grass at the edge of the drive. The ground was muddy. Frida had spent hours in the night filling buckets with water and throwing them out over the path she had made with the body of the tiger. She wouldn’t allow Ruth to leave her room.

When Frida emerged, fully dressed—in her white uniform, with her hair pulled so tight into a bun she looked more like a beautician than ever—Ruth was dozing in the lounge-room recliner, still wearing her nightgown.

“Come on, lazybones,” said Frida. “The bus is due at quarter past ten.”

“What bus?” Ruth blinked and squinted.

“To take us to town? To the bank?”

“Isn’t George going to drive us?”

“I told you, darling heart, George’s run off. Now get a move on, or we’ll miss it.”

“We’re going to the bank?”

Frida flourished a book in front of Ruth’s face. The book had writing in it—it said “TRUST FRIDA.”

“I know, I know,” said Ruth, a little crankily.

“Chop chop!” cried Frida, clapping her hands. She hauled Ruth out of the recliner, marched her into the bedroom, and took charge of dressing her. Ruth sat mute on the end of her bed. Frida’s hair was so severe, and her uniform so white, that it would have been impossible to conjure the bloody Frida of the night before except that bruises were beginning to bloom on her forearms.

Frida muttered at Ruth’s open wardrobe. “Something sensible, something sensible. Try this.” She pulled out a neat grey skirt suit.

“It’s very formal,” said Ruth.

“Just try it. Can you manage?” Frida advanced on Ruth and began tugging at her nightgown.

“I can manage!” The thought of being naked in front of Frida was terrible: proud, firm Frida of the lacquered hair, who had killed the tiger.

Frida threw up her hands. “Then hurry,” she said. She turned her back to Ruth, but stayed in the room.

Ruth struggled with the skirt. When had she last worn this suit? Years ago, surely, and it was a little big for her. When she managed to button the skirt, she was so pleased with herself that she mustered the courage to ask, “Frida, where’s the tiger?”