… puss,’ she says. ‘Here, Boots.’ She keeps her voice low and calm. She is almost within reach, but the cat lashes out at her extended hand and backs away, hissing, ears flat, and Sybil has no choice but to edge further, her legs straddling the branch with its rough bark and awkward twigs. ‘Silly Boots. Come on, now. Don’t be frightened.’
Around her, long tendrils of new willow leaf whip in the wind and, though the worst of the storm has passed and the sun has come out, the river surges, mucky brown in full flood, bearing its seething cargo of broken timber. Swirls of creamy froth billow by the bank. Boots sometimes forgets that she has only three legs and can no longer leap and climb as she once could. She has already fallen once, but managed to catch hold of some twigs and clamber back. Her fur is slicked close and she looks so very small and frightened out here on the willow. She can climb out, but not back, driven from the safety of the kitchen through the cat flap by the invasion of the Souchotts’ miniature poodle, who looks like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth but is a killer with a long tally of cats, kittens, rabbits and small furry creatures to his name. Sybil has found the torn remains often enough, laid in a misplaced display of canine affection at her back door: broken-necked, spread-eagled. The poodle doesn’t bother to eat them. It’s the chase he enjoys, the dragging down, the snap of the small neck.
The branch bounces lightly in the wind and Boots is unsettled, scrambling for purchase on her three legs. Poor creature. Her fear catches at Sybil’s heart. Sometimes she cannot bear the fear of animals. Those desperate sheep she has seen sometimes on the road, the truck spraying piss and terror, the frantic eye looking down from among the press of bodies, on the way to the works. The cows in paddocks whose sons are torn from them when they are no more than a few weeks old, still suckling with their soft pink mouths. And the way people eat their dead terrorised flesh, suck at the bones, cut and carve and swallow. How can they? And then there have always been the horses forced to take the metal rod between their big lips.
The farthest memory is of Rajah, glossy flanks gleaming, harnessed to the gig. His mouth frothing green about the bit. Tossing his enormous head against the restraint of leather and metal. ‘Doesn’t the bit hurt him?’ she’d said, and her father had gathered up the reins saying he’d never hold him without the bit and didn’t she want them all to go for a nice drive to the beach? She had tried the bit herself, surreptitiously slipping into the tack room one afternoon and putting it in her own mouth. It lay heavy, icy cold, tasting sourly of metal against her teeth. And Rajah had rolled his eye, white rimmed, as he stood waiting, harnessed and restrained in the yard. He’d looked down at her and cried, quite distinctly, ‘Help me! Help me!’
Then there were the lions and elephants and sad chimpanzees captured for her entertainment as a child in some big draughty reeking circus tent. And only a few months ago, the dog that had passed overhead, strapped into that tiny glittering capsule, poor Luka. Probably already dead from sheer panic by the time she looked up from the garden to see the pinprick of light peep peep peeping as it flew among the stars. Help me! Help me! She could not bear it: that the beauty of stars and moon had been infected by that terrible fear.
So here she is trying to make up for all that. Here she is, reaching out to a little cat whose leg was caught in a possum trap and half torn away in her effort to escape before she’d been rescued, brought to the house near death by an earnest child, who had wrapped the little creature in a dirty cardigan. Boots, whom she had kept safe with her other animals, all of them living the way they were intended to live their lives, fed and cared for and free to roam about. Boots, who snuggled down each night, warm against her body in the bed.
‘Boots,’ she calls. ‘Boots.’
And at that moment, the willow cracks in two and one part, the branch, begins to fall. It falls and Boots yowls and makes one final desperate leap for safety, clawing her way up Sybil’s extended arm, across her shoulders and down her back to the bank, where she sets off as fast as she can on her tottering legs up Barchester Street, ears flat, around the corner onto Savage Street, through the garden, avoiding the poodle who yaps from behind the fence and clickety click through the cat flap to the sofa.
While Sybil falls, her trousers snagged on a twig. She falls with the branch into the churning river and there is nothing to hang onto, nowhere to get a foothold. Tangled in willow leaf, she tumbles in and is carried downstream, water closing over her head, as it has closed over other heads in river or lake or safe harbour: the waka capsizes on the reef and its crew are turned to stone. The ship drifts, sails full-bellied, onto some rocky promontory and all are lost. The ferry overturns within view of a suburban living room. And only a few hundred yards away the lifeboats dangle useless on the high exposed flank of the ferry, or they are launched and flip in the wind and all the people are flung into the water. It closes over their heads.
This is the way Sybil falls. The river takes her in its grasp, sweeping her downstream the way it did long ago. She looks up and, there are the same golden brown bubbles rising from her mouth. They rise about her like stars, while the raft sails onward above her head, leaving her to be swept along alone, caught up in the flood of water and time. She looks up and can see the rough wooden boards sailing away from her, and she waits, because any second now, his hand will smash through the dazzle. His big kind hand will reach down into the water and he will grab her by the hair and pull her up, up into …