EIGHTEEN

Sue is a few paces ahead on the highway when I trip over a collection of fine bones. She turns back to sniff. Chicken, I think, some kind of bird. A few hardened feathers stuck to a frame. The flesh has been picked over already by the sun or other animals. I stay by the carcass a moment, give my hand a stretch. The light over the paddocks shows how much blood is seeping out of my palm. Wriggle out of my yellowed singlet. Weak sun on my cold white skin. Get my teeth into the stinking cotton and rip it to crooked strips. The wound sings. Sue sings along with it. Notes of pain. Of sweat. Phrases of fear. Blood soaks the fabric. I tighten it until it stops. Shrug back into my ranger shirt and we stumble on.

Sue can tell if water is cleanish, and how long things have been dead. She can hear the heartbeats of the mice and rabbits hiding underground. She knows if there are other dogs nearby, where the eggs are, how to root around for things buried in the cold dirt, how to sleep curled around each other. She just needs her warm dog body, shade from the sun and rain, and company. I’d sleep all day if Sue would let me. My bones feel like they don’t have any skin covering them anymore, even the muscle worn away. My sneakers are filled with my swollen feet. Clothes paste to my skin. Sweat rolls between my breasts even though it’s getting colder. I’m off my tucker too. Sue wants us to eat dingo food.

Dinner

is ready.

It’s another putrid mouse. ‘Jesus, Sue.’

Time for

it.

My lips crack when I smile. Sue’s tail sweeps the air.

Good

Cat.

‘I’m not a cat.’

A Bad

Dog.

‘I’m a shit dog.’

It

shits.

I go behind a tree. Have to tell Sue not to follow. She goes and sniffs it anyway.

Old

potato.

Not sick but too

hungry.

‘You’re eating my poo.’

Useless.

‘Yeah?’

Sue finds water and starts bringing me a few different things to eat, so I can choose. Wind-fallen apples, yes. Half a dead bird, no. The end of a loaf of homemade bread.

‘Where’d you get this?’

People.

‘What people? There a town somewhere around? Take me to it. Hey, Sue?’

Shut its face

to

the end

of barking.

‘I need some people food, Sue. You don’t fucking know —’

She sets off down the highway. I follow, quickly, so as not to lose sight of her thick tail and my sanity with it.

Sue wants to be near me, and she wants to be as far away from me as the road will let her be. Biting distance is too close. But she comes back in the night stinking of carrion and wants to rub her chin over my face. It feels almost sexy, her hard bristled chin all over me like that, but when I try to push her away she pins me with her paw and whispers,

Good Cat. It is

ready to want my

shit.

‘I’ve had enough of your shit.’ Choke a laugh. That paw on my windpipe. She eases up only to rake my face with her sharp claws, the pads on her feet rough as road.

Has it pissed after

the

rain.

‘Sue, that …’ Again with the raking. ‘That fucking hurts.’

Has

it —

‘Yes, I did. I pissed, okay?’

She takes a sniff at my pants, and I’m not keen on that paw again, so I let her.

Has

it eaten sky

meat.

‘Ate some of those apples you got.’ I point. She gnaws at one of my knuckles.

Good

Puss.

I laugh properly — her tongue. When she takes it away, it’s cold and wet, and she’s off up the road again, muttering to the nuclear codes charting her womb. Heaven could fall down on me, and I’d still be looking through the debris for Sue. Try to remember, as I trot up the road after her, how long dingoes gestate for. And they’ll talk, those dingo pups. Sue will be their mother.

She won’t let me sleep. She’s got energy for the both of us. Her tail flicks one way, her paws tell stories to the ground. For Sue, the hunger aches like love, and lives in the little gap between free and captive. For her, it’s a gruff sort of being. Time is laid out like some sort of whacko tarot reading, a rule to every moment. Sue’s rules are full on, but they’re real. She throws them down her tail at me while we walk along. I have to watch for them, careful.

Unless others aren’t as

good, succumb to

others.

The other can get

better quickly so

watch, in case it needs to

bow.

Don’t take other’s foods, others

can’t take from it.

If it eats dogs, be

secretive.

Encourage each other.

Let each other feel all the

time.

(Carry)

a message with its

anus.

Pay particular

attention to dirt and wind.

(Enjoy

everything.)

For Sue, smell is like the internet — shooting stars of info that explode from letterboxes, trees, paddocks. She adds to them with her leg half cocked. She responds, she deletes, she reads for news. She knows how long and how far and how sick and what sex and in heat and in hunger and half dead.

End

words.

She goes on about it all in her bloody sleep. When she wakes up, I’ll ask her what dingoes dream about.

I try to walk in a straight line, but I can feel the angle of the world. Sue was in front, now behind, herding me. I stop to unpeel the bandage. Lick my flesh and taste the rot. Swollen twice its size, but it smells less now that Sue has been taking care of it. Nearby, up a graded dirt drive, a grey metal shed with mud sprayed up its side. The driveway scattered with white leaves like snow, so light they spin around on winds that stir the dirt and gravel into whirligigs. Feathers. Thicker by the gate then spread out again, littered up the highway ahead. The whole place neat but for the down, silent as a graveyard. A sign says, Sunny Girl Local Barn-Laid Eggs. A dancing chicken-woman on the front. Boxes of eggs stacked up by the door. Further in, a grimy filing cabinet. I find the key in exactly the same place Graham kept his — under the inner sole of an old leather shoe. Fucking farmers. Inside the cabinet is a plastic bag filled with all the coins this fella ever had rattling around in his pocket, and a few notes too. Take the bag, and on the way out I scoop an egg and tap it on the edge of the shed. It explodes. The gassy, putrid rot of it. A heavy blowfly comes hunting, bombing the shells, my festy hand, and Sue’s nose and eyes.

SUCK.

SUCK AND FUCK.

Sue rubs a pissed-off paw down her face. For her, this fly will be here forever and it’s worse than hunger or death. The blowfly weaves off, droning its thirsty song. Wipe my hands on a stiff rag by the door and trot after Sue, who’s already halfway down the drive. Seemed like it would never stop raining, and now it seems like it will never start. A little church with a padlock on its door. I check for God. Nothing. Check for Sue — everything. Sleep at intervals about a hundred times a day. Seems like every time I drop off, Sue is pushing at me with her cold nose, calling,

Now

Cat Dog

beat it,

and we have to run around. I nearly trip over myself, trying to keep up with her.

The fields turn to stock feed and tractor lots, and then houses start bursting up like mushrooms in the nearby. That rat-infested farmhouse back there was the start of another little town, only ten or so kilometres inland from where I buried Lee. People crammed here too. Cars. Army snoozing, playing cards on the flat hoods of their jeeps and utes, holding their phones up for signal. A bank of charcoal clouds are piled up on the horizon, but here it’s bright. I can’t see an animal, but there’s normal, red-eyed people inside a shop. No zombies here. Sliding automatic door jammed shut. I bash on the glass, leave bloody prints. People crane their necks, look past me at Sue standing there like the statue of a dingo. Her neck ruffed up and ears cocked, muttering,

That one is all

fleshy. (Don’t

eat it.)

A man edges out the sliding door. I smooth my mangled hair with my good hand, try to smile. Go to move past, but he bars my way. He is fleshy.

‘I need bandages and antiseptic and things such as that.’ Lady of the manor. Throat filled with muck. Clear it.

‘You know you can’t come in here,’ he says.

Good under

the tough

bits.

Take a look at myself. Fucked-up hand draining blood, clothes covered in filth, legs all cut up.

‘You can’t be here in this town. With that.’ The guy points at Sue. She’s not covered in muck. Healthy as ever. Caramel gleaming in the sun’s glow. White blaze spotless. Only a few flecks of blood around her lips and on her matching white socks. ‘This is a people town.’

‘What’s a people town?’

A

bony

place.

I touch Sue. The whole town like the inside of a skeleton. The guy strains his face with trying to ignore her. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t come here when the Land Patrol was here and shooting,’ he tells me. ‘They’ve gone now. Kid got in the crossfire. Bit of a tragedy. Army had to intervene. But there’s other ways. You won’t see a bird around here.’ We look at the bald streets. No birds. Insects, though. A fly barrels through the air between us.

SOME LOVE.

Man stares at it like he’s insulted.

‘I’ll just get my supplies.’ I shake my bag of coins. ‘Come on, mate, I’m not in a good way here. My hand —’

‘You’ll get out of here before there’s a problem.’ He glances at the army. Calls out to them. Points at Sue, at me. Waiting for new instructions, they tell him. Sit tight. It’ll all be over. Nothing’s over for the people in that minimart. They’ve stopped their shopping and they’re gathered around the glass doors and windows like we’re the worst show on earth.

LOVE STARTS

HERE HERE HERE.

Realise I’m crying. Crying and bloody, and they won’t let me in, even when I bash on the doors and scream blue murder. Sue butts me away down the street.

Shift

it Cat Dog. Good

Cat. Salty.

Those army guys with their phones up, filming the damned parade of two. Watch us the whole way down the long paved road out of town. The houses aren’t empty, either. I struggle past their quivering curtains and blinds, still bawling, holding on to a bit of Sue’s fur like I can’t see. I do see, though. See a dead Persian cat that hangs by its tail from a basketball hoop in a driveway — bell collar sparkling in the sun.

The clouds start rumbling, and when it’s raining again I put my hand to use and drag a bit of tin up against a fence post for us to rest under. Winter sun half-mast in the sky, and me and Sue looking at each other with hunger — a cave that you might shout into and never have your voice return. Deep, anyway. When it’s dark, she leaves. Comes back with a rabbit. She hasn’t killed it — I can hear it singing out of her mouth.

The day, the

old day.

‘Sue.’

The day was new, why

is it

old.

I put my arm over my eyes. ‘Sue, for Christ —’

She bites down. The rabbit doesn’t have any more day or anything. I don’t think about that when I’m skinning it, pulling on the warm meat, like licking iron and an old goat at the same time. Only after, with a full stomach, does that rabbit’s song get stuck in my brain, The day, the old day, the end of all my days. I hum along with it, my belly full and warm again. My old mum and her shitty stews thickened with flour and game, but on a cold night: guts warm and faithful. I’d eat those stews again. I’d eat them every night and for breakfast too.

‘The carrot, the potatoes, the onion, the bunny, no garlic at all or spices, but salt. So much salt.’

Shut

it.

‘She had these home-made bowls that fitted in your hand. She had —’

Shut

it

Bitch.

‘What’s that about, Sue?’

She bolts straight at the entrance. A growing tension that bounces off the tin. Her growls shake my blood.

Get up. Get

out.

‘What is it?’

Run, Dog.

Run.

I grab up everything I can find. My damp sneakers, the empty plastic bag. Sue sniffed out Lee and Kimberly for thousands of kilometres. Sue found me in the rat house. She says go, I follow. We run across the black field, my bare feet stabbed, ankles rolling on the pockmarked ground. Sue’s white-tipped tail flashes like a rabbit’s arse in the dark: warning, warning. Nothing. Stumble in the direction I think she’s gone, but it’s pitch. The blackness sucks the light from my eyes. Makes dancing alien shapes. There’s Sue. Where? There. Tail flashing,

Run.

Run.

I jog toward her. Fingers outstretched. We run up the empty highway toward the morning. When the whole place has become dingo-coloured, she pauses. Her body crackling. Whispering about gold or something.

Fill us forever

with warm, beating

wealth.

I’ll say

it with a bad smell.

‘See something?’

I’ll say warnings

or love.

To starvation.

‘Sue, what is it?’

She flicks an ear.

Quieter.

‘I can’t see anything —’ I’m too slow. Sue lunges, teeth bared, then ducks her head and nips my heels and my calf. Small smiling bruises all over the back of my legs and feet.

We stumble and walk all day. Don’t make it anywhere. My body in clicks and creaks.

‘Got an idea of heading north, Sue.’ Sun so weak in the sky, but it’s morning and that’s east. North is the other way from where we’re headed. ‘My old mum up there, remember, Sue —’

Play.

‘No, Sue, I’m saying —’

Play.

‘It hurts.’

Stop

yapping.

Sue wants me to not talk, just move. I squat on the road edge, put my hands up over my face to protect it from the onslaught of little nips. She dances around me. I have to turn to wherever she is or she bites harder. My forearms get bitten up. She scrapes at me with her paws. It’s just her playing. I’m crouched, trying to remember it’s just her playing. I feel like a kid too. Slumping along after a dingo. Trying to focus on the messages from her rear, but a whole flock of birds have come up overhead to throw down their stories. The big ones training the little ones. Makes me smile.

Follow, follow, follow.

Wait.

Wait for position.

Now lead.

Lead. Lead.

When I look back at the road again, it is a ball of dust and at its middle, a fast-moving square. Another army jeep. We edge to one side. A hairy hand chucks a small white package from the window. Lands on the gravel. I stoop to pick it up. Sue sniffs it, turns her head away in disgust.

Nothing to

eat.

The packet is so clean and square in my filthy, blood-caked fingers. One foil blister with a pill inside. The jeep slows to a stop. The hairy hand drums against the side of the car. Another young soldier in fatigues and a tightly wrapped face gets out and jogs toward us, pauses a few metres away.

‘Can you speak?’ she calls.

What is

it.

I grunt. My mouth so dry.

‘Do you still have language?’

I move my tongue to work some thick saliva through my mouth. ‘Yeah.’

Watch

it (Cat Dog).

The woman’s shoulders relax. ‘Great. You know what to do?’

I look down at the packet. ‘NoZo one dose.’

‘The instructions are on it but we’re supposed to …’ She turns to glare through her sunglasses at the idling jeep. ‘We’re supposed to tell people how to use them. So it’s just one dose. Take it now. You got some water?’

Careful.

I hold the packet up. ‘This is some sort of … painkiller …?’

The soldier laughs. Her uniform is new. She’s so clean. ‘It’s the cure.’

My lips move around the words. The cure.

‘You didn’t know?’ she asks. ‘It’s amazing how many people don’t know. Heaps have gone animal, I guess. Whole town back there. Army and everyone. Completely clueless.’ I squint against the glare of her voice. ‘That’s why we’re supposed to go around and hand them out, not just chuck them at people. It doesn’t take long — fifteen minutes you’ll notice a difference, a few hours and you’ll be fixed. It’s compulsory to take it. We’re allowed to use force. If we have to.’ She touches a black box at her hip.

I shake the packet to hear it rattle.

What is

it.

‘It’s medicine, Sue.’ I peer at the soldier. Black glasses covering her eyes. Doesn’t even seem to notice the dingo. ‘Have you taken it?’

The soldier looks uncertain. ‘We’re not supposed to until the last. So we can communicate with the animals if we have to. Some people couldn’t wait, though.’ She glares again toward the jeep. ‘It totally works.’ She pulls a square bottle of water from the pocket in the leg of her pants and unclicks the lid. ‘We’ve had one hundred per cent success rate in a case study involving sixty people aged between eighteen and eighty-three.’ I recognise the water from aeroplane meals. Sue’s interest blooms again.

I

can drink to

water.

‘Think I’ll wait until —’

The soldier puts her hand to her hip again. I’ve forgotten the word for that black box. ‘You need to take it now, madam. I have the authority to use force.’

(Take

its face.)

The soldier tightens her grip on the box, and the word comes back to me: taser. I reach down to touch Sue’s spiky ruff with my bad hand, mauve and rosy against the tan. Sue looks up at me, swallows.

Is this its

friend.

‘She’s helping us, Sue. I think. I mean,’ I turn back to the woman, ‘what will happen to me and —’

‘You’ll be well,’ the woman tells me firmly. ‘You’ll go back to your normal life. You can get that hand seen to before it falls off. Tie up your pet. It’ll be over. You got a family somewhere?’

My old mum with her crow talk. Room full of dears with their stockpiles of wishes and an in-house cook. They’ll be dead. They’ll be having a sherry party. They’ll have flown off with the crows. Another blowfly screams past, gagging at my face.

SUCK IT AND FUCK IT.

It lands near my eye and there’s a release:

SUCH JOY.

I swat at it. From the sky, the birds note,

Piss.

Piss lights the ground.

I can see it.

SUCK IT.

Is this its

friend.

Its friend can

fuck off.

The soldier gives a brisk wave at the jeep. The door opens and a massive leg and a stun gun appear. The woman reaches into her pocket and pulls out another white box. This one has a needle inside.

Poison

anus.

The soldier flicks the needle with a practised nail. ‘Easier if you just take the pill, but anyway.’

Sue’s got her wolf teeth ready:

Prick its friend

in the eye

hole.

The man at the jeep readies his stun gun.

‘Hold up. Wait a second. Here.’ I kneel and pour some of the water over Sue’s mouth. She tilts her muzzle, licks it from the air. Haunches calling,

Forever.

Sue first, then me. The white pill the size of a flattened pea. I put it on my tongue, then fill my mouth with the water and let it wash like first rains down my throat. The soldier waves the man in the jeep away. Moves closer.

‘Show me. And under your tongue. Good. Keep an ear out for more instructions. From the government. You’ll be able to hear them properly now without all —’

A horn blast from the jeep makes the woman and Sue jump.

Dick

dancer.

‘Dickhead.’ The soldier backs away. Flashes a smile that shows how recently she was in high school. I watch her spin, jog. The jeep skids, and the dust rushes up again. The pale red of the side of the road and the bitumen.

Sue and me. My hand in her fur. We keep walking. What else is there to do?

Stay

quiet. Stay

still.

I could throw up that pill. I could vomit it up like the fly and talk with Sue, until.

SUCK.

Piss.

Is that its

friend.

‘Sue.’

Follow

me.

‘Sue.’

I’m the

Shiny One.

Come

on Cat

Dog.

‘I just —’

Bad. Do

it.

I do, I follow.

There,

says Sue.

‘Where?’

I look behind me but don’t know what I’m supposed to see. My stomach hurts. Sue’s nose is pointed at me, her tail sweeps the air, whispering. I can’t quite make out the words.

‘What’s that, Sue?’

There.

I look down at myself. Same ripped, stinking ranger shirt. ‘Something on me?’ I can’t see or hear anything.

Where has it

gone.

‘Well, whatever it was, can’t have been important.’ My mum used to say that when I couldn’t remember what I was talking about. The birds are still flapping around above us, but it’s hard to see whether their wings are saying,

Follow

or

Lead.

Then, they fall quiet.

‘Hey, Sue. Sue. We should find something to eat. Where should we sleep? What do you think, Sue?’

Her ear moves. She glances up but doesn’t say, shut up or stop barking. I squint at her. Body quiet but not in her wolf way. I can see her tail move, her ears twitch, her eyes on me, but I can’t quite make out the words.

There

or

Here.

My guts churn. The quiet drills into my ear canals until quiet is all I can hear. Nothing from the birds. The bugs gone to ground. The rabbits stunned in their burrows. The sheep hushed in their field. Roos struck mid-bounce. I move my face around, trying to catch something. A whisper here. A squawk and a buzz.

‘You hear that, Sue? You hear that nothingness?’

She shivers, and her paw presses the ground.

I’m the

kin,

she whispers. Stares at me with amber eyes. Flecks of gold on gold leaf on solid rounds of gold. Not wolf. Half-breed dingo show dog trying to say something. Telling me to go somewhere with her, about the food, or the flies. The highway. I grab her. She doesn’t say whether that’s okay or not so I grab her. The need to hold on to her gets me in the heart. Seems that one of those rats got inside and is trying to gnaw his way out. I pick through Sue’s fur, searching for whispers. Hairs yellow at the end, fading to white, and then pocked black skin. A flea — so quiet now, contained — clings to that flesh. I cling too. A whine in Sue’s throat.

‘What is it, Sue? What do you want to say?’

She starts panting. I wait for the meanings to dribble off her tongue. Sit there on the road edge holding her like that for I don’t know how long. Then I put my face to her side and try to hear if there are babies in there, curled like the bean she once was. Dingo dog babies. Some Sue. Some other. Does she want them? Does she know?

‘I always told Kimberly that I’d ask you something,’ I mumble into her fur. ‘Now is as good a time as any, right, Sue?’ The silence roars. ‘I said I’d ask what you want. What do you want the most out of anything? You’d want a pack, wouldn’t you? A pack of your own to run with. Or all the food you could eat so you wouldn’t have to hunt for it. All the food I could eat too. If we had that, you wouldn’t have to look after me. Would that be better, Sue? If you didn’t have to, you know, mind your Jean? I’m your good Cat Dog, aren’t I.’ A bug scoots past, buzzing, mysterious. I let go Sue’s face and jam my fingers down my throat. Retch and retch but nothing comes out. Not even a rat. Sue watches, head cocked. When I was pregnant with Lee, I felt full, like the universe was coming together right in my belly. Then he was out, and real, and I loved his separate little body like I’d go mad with it. But Graham had to tell me to stop clawing at the empty space he left. I rip, now, at my face. The universe gone. My empty ears, my empty nose, and my eyes. Can’t taste what Sue’s talking about, or feel it in my pores. Imagine her saying,

Where is

it.

Where.

But I can’t be sure. ‘I’m here,’ I tell her, in case she did say it. Case she’s listening. ‘I’m right here —’

The dingo licks her lips, looks away.