TWO

I keep myself busy. Fridays, I take one of the only things my ex left me with for a spin up the highway for my weekly shop. Classic Holden HR sedan in royal blue, white top, only a bit of rust. Tammy Wynette in the tape player, howling about divorce. I pick up food and a couple of bottles too — some beers for my fridge, a cask of wine, whatever spirit is on sale, and a bottle of vodka, regardless the price. That’s my big purchase. That and smokes. The newsagents sell cheap chop-chop under the counter, so if the vodka is expensive, I get a plastic bag of weedy-looking tobacco and spend the week coughing up a lung. Every now and then a special comes my way and so does a packet of menthol fresh. I’d smoke the whole pack in the parking lot, given the chance.

Any booze left by Thursday night when I have Kimberly gets put in the locking cupboard, and the air freshener comes out. I light a bit of incense that reminds me of Lee and, woof, the place cleans up nicely. I do too. It might be me going out instead of Angela. My hair is washed and blow-dried. Beaded top, bright slacks. The bite on my hand looking red so I rub in some antiseptic and put a cloth Band-Aid over the top — better late than never. I pop fish sticks in the oven, carrots and potatoes on the boil, tomato sauce on the table, and lay three plates out on the plastic cloth. The sun paints the park orange. Sue and the other dingoes call in the night. I want to howl along with them.

It’s dark by the time Angela’s car pulls up at my flat. I’m number three in a row of ranger units, neat as ribs on the edge of the Park. Ange carries Kimberly up the little path. The girl is already in her pyjamas, half asleep on her mum’s shoulder and clutching Hello Bear. Me and my ex, Graham, gave her that teddy when she was born, not knowing the damned bear would have glow-in-the-dark peepers — it was creepy enough when there were two eyes, let alone just one like now. Angela lowers Kim to the couch then goes for a kiss on my cheek. I can hear her sniffing, checking for booze and smokes but it’s Kimberly’s night: I’m clean.

‘Stay for some grub?’ I’ve got the fish fingers and vegetables over on the table. The three plates. Ange would probably prefer a salad.

She glances out the door to her car. ‘I’m late for class.’

‘Boxing? No, swing dancing.’

I sit down, wave to a seat. Angela stays in the doorway.

‘We’re trying a new one. Pole dancing.’

My laugh comes out a cough. ‘Pole dancing?’

‘It’s a form of exercise.’

‘You’re not going to meet a nice fella at pole dancing, Ange.’

She folds her arms. ‘Which isn’t your concern, is it?’

I shake my head. Pole dancing. ‘I’d love for you to meet someone. Be happy.’

‘You meet someone. I’m going to class.’

I follow her out the door. ‘I’ve had my time. I’m happy as I am.’

Angela snorts and mutters, yeah, right, under her breath like she used to. She was a sassy bitch before she was with Lee.

As she’s backing out, I jog after the car. ‘Sorry about today, Ange.’ She shrugs. ‘But I want you to know I put in good work on my application for ranger. I typed it up and got Andy to check it. If I could be a ranger —’

‘I’ll look at it next week.’

‘It’s just that the others are saying you keep me on because of Kimberly. But that can’t be right, can it? I’ve got skills.’

She gives me a look you might offer a kicked dog. Gets the car into gear. Her bumper sticker reads, ‘Ethical investments = global improvements’. Poor girl.

Back in the flat, Kimberly is awake and sitting up at the table with my ancient orange Dolphin torch, tucking into the whole serving dish of food. There’s tomato sauce down her pyjama top. I pull it off her and sit down opposite to watch her eat.

‘Walam in orner,’ she tells me through a ball of mashed fish and saucy carrots.

‘Beg yours?’

She swallows and pats the torch with a slimy hand. ‘Wallamina was in the corner again. I turned her around.’

‘You’re a good little ranger.’ I steal a fish finger.

‘What happened to your hand, Granny?’

‘Hungry kid bit me.’ Take another fish finger. She squeals and hoards her grub. Shuffling starts up in the backyard at the ruckus. All the flats in the row back onto a section of the Park that’s not used for show. That bush block has more rock-rats, wallabies, snakes, and birds in it than you’ll ever see behind glass. Don’t try to grow a garden. Those seeds’ll be eaten before you can put them in the ground. I keep a few cages out the back for the animals I’ve rescued from around the place. Angela turns a blind eye long as they’re quiet. Wallamina Wallaby’s mum got hit by a car, and she must have been clunked on the head, too, because she’s got funny ways: keeps getting caught in the corner of the backyard and not being able to turn around. I’m impatient — Kimberly is better with her, charming that crazy wallaby around the right way. There’s a crow too — arrived one day in the backyard with a fucked-up beak that’s coming good. Kimberly named her Princess Pie, and she acts the part, bouncing up and down when I come out with seed, making baby noises. She’ll never grow up. She’ll always be my silly baby crow. Then there’s a little Arnhem rock-rat called Rocky. Hides in the corner of his cage most of the time, eyes shining.

Kimberly picks up the plate and licks the last of the sauce off, and I let her.

‘Want to watch the news after your dinner?’

She laughs with red teeth. ‘No.’

‘You want to read a serious book, then. Wash the dishes. Talk about maths and sewing.’

‘No!’

‘I know, you can tell me everything about grade one.’

‘Granny.’

‘I’ve told you all my ideas.’

She wriggles on her chair.

‘Alright, alright, you finish up there and wash your hands and teeth, and I might find us something else to do.’

The animal sanctuary is our big project. Sometimes we sit up too late on a school night, and I don’t know how Kimberly doesn’t fall asleep in class the next day. We mock up our ideas in a giant scrapbook — I collect magazines from the op shop and doctor’s room, for the trees and buildings. We cut out animals from the Park brochures and from print-outs of the hundreds of pictures we take of Sue, or we draw them ourselves. Kimberly is especially good at that. Ever since she started school, she knows things, and quick. One Thursday, she could suddenly draw a wallaby — and that’s hard. Next week, she knew all about the sorts of trees that should grow here. One day, she comes along saying we shouldn’t have any cats because they eat the native animals. We had to talk about that for a while, decide on a separate mini sanctuary for cats.

‘Granny, how are you going to pay?’

‘What’s that, my lovey?’ I’m cutting out a difficult lizard with spikes and humps, my whole body focused on my hands not shaking.

‘How are you going to pay for it?’

I look up. ‘Are you doing budgets or something at school?’

She frowns. ‘How to pay for things.’

‘I think you might be ready, then.’

When she gets enthusiastic about something her eyes twinkle. I pull out the striped exercise book, where I keep my figures.

‘You see this, Kim? This is where I write down everything I buy.’ Not true. ‘You can see here what I spend and what I save. Not enough, right? But I have a plan.’

‘What is it?’

‘Your mum’s going to give me a better job as a ranger so I can work with animals all the time. Then I’ll save more money and one day, when you’re old enough to run it with me, I’ll quit and we’ll open the sanctuary.’

‘We’ll call it “Come to Kim and Granny’s Animal Place”.’

‘We will. No animal turned away.’

A barking owl flaps over the row, yapping through the night sky. After a moment, the captive one they keep out the back of the nocturnal enclosure calls back. Woof, woof. Kim climbs onto my lap and sticks her thumb in her mouth.

‘What’s he saying?’ she asks around it.

‘Well, he’s saying, “Have you seen some mice around here?”’

‘What’s the other one saying?’

‘The other one’s saying: “Yep, I ate them.” “Drats,” says the first one. “No, not rats, mice!”’

The nights can go on forever, but there’s always something to listen to at the row — one of the young rangers next door fighting with their boyfriend, shooting on the TV, the creatures sliding around outside. Guides and support staff don’t usually live on the Park estate. That sweet subsidised housing is for rangers, logistics, and the maintenance guys. It’s also the honour I get for being Granny. All the units in the row look the same, except some have a second bedroom squashed next to the first. Mine is single as me. Walk up the short path to the front door and, hey diddly, you’re in the lounge room. The dining bit beyond looks through a glass sliding door to the yard, the kitchen a nook around the corner. Then there’s the bedroom with the en suite bathroom — a light that extracts as well. I’ve got a portable evaporative air cooler in the living area I can drag into my bedroom on a bad night when I’m lying there, sweating with heat and worrying that Rocky the rock-rat will get eaten. Make a noise outside the row, drag something along in the wind, and I’m out there with my ex’s old unlicensed Colt. I keep it in the fridge. If it still works, it probably wouldn’t do much more than scare the shit out of me and the animals.

I always want to wake Kimberly up to hear the creatures that only come out after she goes to bed. The wild rock-rats gnaw something outside the kitchen window. The wallabies edge forward with their short front legs. The owls, and sometimes, but not often, a magpie goose with its sobbing laugh. Sugar gliders crab at their enemies, the sound in their throats like gravel being shaken in a plastic container. Insects scream past. Can I hear pythons slithering over my roof, hunting the rock-rats that either didn’t get caught or have such big families they’re always replaced? Can I tell where the grubs and centipedes burrow into the ground? Can I hear the naughty cats on their velvet paws, sliding through the undergrowth, stalking the pythons that stalk the rats? It’s like the old woman who swallowed the fly out there. Through it all tonight, the dingoes keep howling. They don’t normally do that. Dingoes are dawn and dusk callers. I go to the window for a cheeky fag and listen to those ancient voices. Something’s up. Maybe it’s a good thing, like love or money. Maybe it’s death. Fire. You don’t have to ask them to know it’s serious. Just imagine Sue’s pursed lips and her courage, standing out there on the exposed rocks, calling it in. Makes me want to keep the ones I love close. Call Lee. Call my shithead ex. Lock the doors and hold on to Angela and Kim. Make them all safe with Granny Jean.

I don’t like walking Kimberly up to the school in the mornings at the best of times. She’s like a toothpick in checks, with a mop stuck on her head. The school is made of Besser blocks that could fall and crush her. She could get eaten up by one of the pythons that slide into the cool concrete play yard. If Kimberly stayed at home with me, I could teach her from books, and she’d get learning from life. Angela gets a particular colour up at the mention of homeschool. Red and green at the same time — a nasty look.

‘Do you want to go to school today?’ I ask Kim.

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’

‘We got an excursion to the crocodile park.’

‘That’d be alright, I guess.’

‘Crocodiles are reptiles. They’re dinosaurs.’ Kimberly’s mouth is full of mashed Coco Pops. When we get outside the row, the two curlew birds that have been screaming bloody murder all morning fall quiet and watch us with their otherworldly eyes, edging away on backward legs. Kimberly isn’t scared of crocodiles, but a murder bird is sent up from hell to creep the bejesus out of her of a morning.

‘What are they saying?’ she whispers, clutching at my hand with her hot little paw.

‘They’re saying …’ I clear my throat. Hell, fire, guts and blood. Fuck the police. A bird looking like that can’t be saying anything nice. ‘You really want to go to school today?’ I ask again.

‘The crocs.’

‘It’s my day off. What’ll I do?’

This stumps her. She’s never considered it. She’s only six years old.

After I drop Kim off, I go back to the row to sit at the table with my mobile phone. Wait. Don’t even have a smoke. I stare at the screen and realise it’s not working. Give it a quick test with the home phone — it rings. The curlews start screaming, and it feels like they’re killing me. My breath hurts. I need to pee, take the phone to the loo, pissing against the side of the bowl in case she calls and I can’t hear it. I stand with the phone in the middle of the living room until it’s slippery with my sweat. Turn on the evaporative, get the TV going on mute, perch on the couch. Whichever way I sit, my body hurts. I just know that Angela is dead and I’ll have to look after Kimberly until she’s grown up. The curlews give another bloody scream. I fling open the door. Back in the kitchen, the phone rings.

‘All good?’

‘Yep. She’s at school.’

‘Okay, have a good day.’

‘You too. Ange —’

She hangs up.

It’s ten in the morning and my hands are shaking. I can’t get the damned cupboard door unlocked. I need to pee again, and I do, a tiny bit, just as the lock gives. The first bottle is cooking sherry, only a finger full. The burn washes my teeth and flames down my throat. It takes everything to stop before I drink too much. Too much, and I can’t drive to the shops for more. Too much, and I’ll get done by the cops and lose my licence again, and I can’t exactly ask Angela to drive me to the bottle-o in her campervan. I’ve done some hard things. Watching Graham take off down the road and never come back is hard. Seeing my baby boy make all my mistakes and worse is hard. Dingo Sue up there in her enclosure with nowhere to run is hard. Sitting all alone on the floor of the kitchen, no one to talk to until tomorrow and not drinking that finger of sherry in the bottle is hardest. But I roll a smoke and suck it back and when I breathe out, it’s better.

The big sexy engine of my Holden swallows the other sounds. My blood buzzes just enough to get me up the highway. ‘Stand by Your Man’ so fast on my wonky tape player it sounds like Tammy is on the good stuff. The man at the bottle shop is the old guy who hasn’t worked there in months. When I put my beers and voddy on the counter, he sneaks a mini bottle of ‘mudslide’ for my nightcap and gives me a discount on a pack of menthol fresh.

‘I could kiss your cheeks,’ I say and, bless him, he blushes. On the way back I’m high, like I’m living the high life. Got my bottles and smokes, and someone left a magazine on a bench outside the supermarket that looks to have some good pictures for the scrapbook. I roll down the window and light a menthol fresh. Wind comes through in hot blasts. The tape squeaks to its end and the radio cuts in. They’re talking blah blah, then they start talking about animals.

‘While releases of pets, farm, and laboratory animals across the south are being investigated for possible eco-terror connection,’ says the announcer — a bit fuzzy, I tune her in — ‘in many cases it is the owners and managers themselves who have let these animals go.’ My ex is down south. Last I heard, my boy Lee was down there too, chasing dolphin migration and girls. Going around convincing people to let their cats and dogs go is exactly the sort of stunt he would pull. ‘Some of the animals have been captured, but others have been hurt or killed and many are still missing.’

‘Woof.’ I turn it off, suck back. Another hot dry-season day with a wind.

Back home I knock down the rest of the sherry, slug the mudslide, then turn on the TV again. It’s all over the news too — those people down south letting poor old Fluffy go. Cows wandering pie-eyed all over the roads. Some messed-up macaque monkeys, half shaven, refusing to be caught. Those newsreaders go over it a billion times, then BREAKING comes over the screen.

‘Superflu has reached epidemic stage in only five days.’

I crank the volume. ‘So, who died?’ Feel my way to the fridge for a beer. ‘Those soft-cock southerners.’ I can say that, I’m from the south myself. People in cold-weather clothes milling like idiots in front of the camera. I see my ex, that big swarthy shape. It isn’t him, of course. The news report is about the cities, and he tucked his tail back down to the country to take up with some teacher or nurse or something. I ring him anyway.

‘Hello —’

‘You don’t sound too sick there, Graham Bennett. I was hoping —’

‘You’ve called Graham Bennett and Amy Olivia. We’re not home at the minute so just leave a message.’

I leave a message alright. I lay down the whole beer in the course of it and tell him I hope he dies of sick. What sort of name is Amy Olivia? Crack open the vodka and make a few other calls too. No one is ever home anymore. I leave long messages, explain about myself and the world. Try to get some internet knowledge but I’ve used up my data again. The TV news flashes between the flu and the animals. Fever-y people lined up outside the hospitals. CCTV footage of others breaking into the zoos and farms. Elephants and zebras. Pigs and chickens. That gets me going. I drag my guide shirt on and pour some vodka into my hip flask. It slops all over my fingers. You could set fire to my life. I’m pumped. Ange told me to get across it, and I’m all over it. The news keeps saying the same thing again and again — the animals, the flu, everywhere.

It’s a bit of a slog up into the Park on foot. By the time I get to the car park, I’m woozy as shit. The heat is turned up full, the sun a fried egg above. I’m thirsty, nip under a pandanus tree for a shot of the vodka. The leaves stretch upwards, dead fingers for the sky. The heat of the booze doesn’t help. I’m revived but in no hurry to get back out under that sun. A black, orange-footed bush fowl scratches the ground in the little bank of scrub by the car park — dashing low. A deep, dumpy body covered in black feathers with a green sheen. Little crest on its head. The bush fowl calls, eh oh eh eh oh! eh eh eh eh oh!

‘Uh oh, uh oh, I’ve lost my keys. Better scratch around for them, aye?’ This is my best bush turkey voice — a bit high, a bit busy. Some tourists come past, gaze in.

‘She’s lost her keys,’ I tell them. ‘She’s saying, “Uh oh, uh oh. Lost my keys. Fucking luck.” Sorry.’ There’s a little boy with them. Looks like he wants nothing more than to escape and hang out with me and the bush turkey. His mum and dad grab the boy like I might eat him, swing him away. The bush fowl leaves too.

‘Get to work, Jean Bennett,’ I mutter to myself. ‘Bloody hell.’

The Guide Manager’s office is locked and Angela’s office empty. I see them all in the glass meeting room: guides, rangers, office staff, management. Put my hands to the door and lock eyes with Andy. He’s sitting at the table where everyone’s hunched over some document. Goes all rabbit in the headlights, waving me away. Fuck Andy. I go to push the heavy door but my guide shirt is buttoned up crooked. Forgot to put a bra on. The tiger tattoo on my left boob is crouched, ready to leap over to the other one. Stop halfway trying to fix it and stare down at the maze of buttons. There’s no way unless the whole meeting room is ready to cop a flash of boob. Then I spot Ange. She’s tearing at those nails with her teeth — going to rip a hole right through her hand next time someone so much as squeaks. For once that person isn’t going to be me. I duck away before she notices, stumble off back down the road, parched as anything. After a while, Andy pulls up beside me in a Park ute. Pumps the aircon and puts on the country music station. Back at the row, he puts a brick of ice in the evaporative cooler, changes the dressing on my bitten hand and even puts me to bed. Pours us both whiskey and finds some sleeping pills in my bathroom. I take them all.

‘Sometimes I think you want Angela to know what a booze hound you are,’ Andy tells me.

I strike out at him. Miss. ‘I can do whatever I want.’

‘Yeah, but do it at home. What if Kim saw you?’

Stupid me starts crying. Andy shakes his head. ‘Come on, drink up.’

I drink up. I drink up. I drink up.

This time, it’s Andy’s problem. We’re on the floor of the lounge room, underpants around our ankles, doing not much. We’ve had a couple of misses and a couple of hits — both times when we’ve been too sober to appreciate it. Andy is as old as me and he was raised on vagina, but he prefers his men. Has this young guy up in the city now who works on the rigs and fawns over him when he’s in town.

‘You drank too much, you dickhead.’ I’m shitfaced. The pills make the world marshmallow.

‘Not that.’ He struggles from under me.

‘What, then?’

‘You’ve got to stop calling. You’ve got to stop calling me up at nights.’ It’s true. I do call him. ‘I’m not your husband. You can’t leave messages like that. You don’t say nice things. He doesn’t like it.’

‘Jealous.’

‘You think?’

‘Probably not.’ I turn over, present my rump to him. I can see under the kitchen table and out the window into the yard, where Wallamina Wallaby is fixated on a log, trying to get over or around it. ‘Come on.’ I glance back at Andy. His forehead wrinkled and confused as his dick. ‘You’re too upset to fuck?’

He shrugs.

‘You’re a bag of gold. Even Wallamina out there can fuck, and she’s half gone in the head.’

It’s mean, but we laugh at the wallaby a bit, and it feels strange and good. Wallamina doesn’t know. She stares at that log long after we’ve turned back to drinking.

‘Here we go, here we go.’ Andy flops in the lounge chair with a sarong across his balls and moves his thumb over his phone. I’m decent enough to pull up my undies and put my guide shirt back on. Cover the tiger on my tit. The news on the muted TV shows army guys and empty farms and stockyards. Beasts out where they shouldn’t be, roaming all over the roads, getting into everything. Andy wipes his nose on his hand. ‘Listen,’ he tells me. ‘It says here the people who let the animals out have all had that flu.’ He blinks at me. We’re sobering up. I pull the last two beers from the fridge-cum-safe. I keep a wad of rainy-day cash alongside the empty revolver in a cooler bag on the very top shelf. Andy keeps reading. ‘Says here the normal flu symptoms — your blocked nose, your fever — last a few hours, day at most —’

‘I know all this.’

‘But once they’re gone, you see things. Visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory. What’s that?’

I hand him a cold one. ‘I don’t know. Look it up.’

‘Anyway, it says …’ He shifts to rearrange himself and I look over his body. Hairy and stringy, skin stretched over his big belly. Once, Kimberly made a papier-mâché pig at school by layering gluey newspaper over a balloon. I saw the other kid’s creations — lumpy things. Kimberly had sculpted hers smooth and very round, like Andy’s gut. He clicks his fingers to get my attention. ‘It says it wasn’t terrorism. Everyone who did it is just hallucinating.’

‘Hallucinating what?’ Andy doesn’t answer. ‘What’s it say about the cure?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Has anyone died from it?’

‘No.’

‘How long’s the trip last?’

Andy’s phone starts pinging. He waves it at me. ‘My man.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘Dick pic.’

‘Can your phone take a photo of something that small?’

Now that the booze is gone, I’m sick of him. His big body on my couch. Arsehole wiping over the cushions. I open the glass door to the backyard to get some air. The animals clamour at the screen. Wallamina kicks and the crow bounces, flapping his good wing. The baby rock-rat sleeps on.

‘He doesn’t really want a dick pic,’ Andy calls, apologetic. He thinks I’m jealous. I hide my grin in my shoulder. ‘He’s only coming back this weekend because of the outbreak. They want all the riggers back on land. Something about whales — I don’t get it.’ He goes back to his phone. The weekend, the weekend, the endless bloody weekend. I work weekends, but only the days. Ange and Kim on endless ‘play dates’ in the city. The hot little flat. I’ve almost run out of booze for the week. It’s all swilling around in Andy’s stomach — impossible to get at — and he doesn’t even seem that pissed. I tell him to get out. He doesn’t move fast enough. I throw my keys, a boot, an empty can. The animals startle away from the door. Andy is more pissed than I thought. He can’t drive. He pulls his pants over his bare bum and stumbles off down the road to hitch a lift up the highway. Maybe he’ll get hit, or kidnapped and killed. I don’t give a shit. On the TV, the Prime Minister sits there like a lump of mashed potato, saying, ‘To maintain order, increase security, and provide essential services to families and ordinary citizens who are affected.’

The light claws at the sky, loses its grip. I get out the scrapbook and the budget book. Look at them both. Kimberly is so good at colouring now she can stay between the lines. She got so mad one time when I used the wrong colour for a hooded parrot’s breast.

‘That’s wrong, Granny. Wrong. You’ve done it all wrong.’

I stare at the page. I have done it all wrong. A hooded parrot has a turquoise breast and I made it dark green. I rip it out, then realise there’s a picture of the cattery on the other side that me and Kim spent three nights on. It’s a double-page spread, with a bit for the cats to sleep in, a bit for their feed, plus a play centre, with scratching posts, balls of wool, and paper bags for them to sit in. Cats like that. Now I’ve fucked it up. There must be 700 rolls of clear sticky tape in this flat, but I can only find thick grey gaffer tape. Only when it sits, bubbled and wonky, through the middle of the cattery do I realise I should have taped it on the other side with the parrot, to give the cattery a clean line. I pull it off. A layer of the paper comes away and the play centre is ripped in half.