Penny bustled about the table for the umpteenth time, straightening the cloth and rearranging the centrepiece. In a vase, spikes of golden lily and frail snowy pompoms of bushman’s bootlace framed the dramatic heart of crimson waratahs.
‘What’s the big deal with this Yank anyway?’ asked Matt, half-amused, half-annoyed by all the fuss. He did not need an impromptu social engagement tonight. He needed time to himself – time to think.
A cascade of unruly red curls swirled about Penny’s freckled face, and he felt the familiar pull of attraction. How lovely his wife was. She hardly ever wore her hair loose like that anymore.
‘Take the dips from the fridge and get three wine glasses. She’ll be here any minute.’
‘Jawohl, mein Kommandant. Don’t worry that my arm’s all torn up.’
‘It’s your left one, isn’t it? Can you manage with the right?’
Matt saluted and did as she asked. Penny glanced at the clock, cast an appraising eye over the table and another out the window. Her eyes widened. ‘Sarah’s here. Quick, take this.’ She thrust a heavy glass platter laden with olives, cheese and crackers at him.
Matt took it awkwardly and, as Penny whipped off her apron, he fumbled and dropped the platter. ‘Sorry, Pen.’ He held out his injured arm by way of explanation.
Sarah knocked on the door. Penny knelt to retrieve the cracked dish. Grapes rolled across the worn carpet. Chunks of soft cheese clung to bits of fluff. The knock came again. Matt reached for the door. ‘No,’ mouthed Penny.
Too late. Dr Sarah Deville stepped over the threshold, smiled and shook Matt’s hand. After a full day’s field work she still looked fresh, glamorous even. Penny got to her feet with the salvaged tray, feeling her face flush to match the colour of her hair. She kicked an olive under the couch.
‘Just a little accident.’ She forced a smile. ‘Nothing to worry about. Would you like some wine?’
Sarah nodded. ‘Red, if you have it.’
Penny escaped into the kitchen with the broken platter, and reappeared with a bottle of wine in one hand and a tea towel in the other. Not one of their regular tea towels, not faded with a stain or two. This one was brand new and more like a mini beach towel. It featured a devil print and boasted a terry towelling thickness worthy of the finest shag pile. She must have raided the souvenir stand.
Penny used it to give the sparkling glasses on the sideboard a final polish. Matt handed each woman a shiraz and poured one for himself. Sarah was staring at Matt’s bandaged arm, or maybe she wasn’t staring. Maybe she always watched the world with such singular intensity. Matt stopped himself from staring back. Dr Deville was quite a looker.
‘This?’ He raised his injured arm. ‘I’m accident-prone, aren’t I, Pen? This is from an eagle.’
As Sarah went to sit at the table, Penny’s hand dived under her descending rear and wiped the chair with the glorious tea towel. Sarah jumped up like she’d been shot, spilling her drink. Beads of red wine rolled down her cream shirt.
‘There was spilt milk on the seat,’ said Penny in a tone of horrified apology. ‘It must have been from when Matt fed Paddy. I didn’t want you to sit on it.’
Sarah dabbed at her stained front with a paper serviette, and waved away Penny’s offer of help. After a close examination of her chair, she cautiously sat down. An awkward silence ensued. Penny’s embarrassment had rendered her speechless.
‘What’s a Yank doing out here, studying our devils?’ asked Matt, trying to help.
Sarah fixed him with tawny eyes. ‘I visited the Field Museum of Chicago a few years ago and came across this.’ She scrolled through her phone, leaned close and showed him a photo. ‘So peculiar. Like a little mutant wolverine.’
Penny came around from the other side of the table to see. In the jaundiced glow of a display case sat a stuffed devil. Its heavy head swung a fraction to the right. Tired jaws gaped, weary tongue protruded. Unseeing eyes bore an expression of eternal defeat. Fading forever on its fake rock, surrounded by strands of long-dead grass, the devil was sadness incarnate.
‘I was curious about my namesake. Such an interesting study. Do you realise how rare contagious cancers are? There are only three ever recorded.’ Sarah paused for a sip of wine. ‘Canine transmissible tumour, a comparable cancer, was first described a century ago. It’s intriguing to reinterpret that data in light of your devils’ disease.’
Matt couldn’t help grinning. ‘You’re as weird as my wife.’
Penny almost choked on her drink. But before long even Matt conceded that cancer was a fascinating malady, at least the way Sarah described it. Malignant cells, cloning themselves in an anarchy of spurned rules, theoretically immortal. But these rogues faced a dilemma. When their host died, so did they. Contagious cancers had learned to cheat death.
‘It’s quite a trick,’ said Sarah. ‘Take canine transmissible tumours. Diseased samples from fifty dogs across five continents share identical genetic markers. That means each tumour evolved from one single ancestor, from one diseased cell, in one ancient dog. The oldest lineage of mammalian cells on earth, unchanged for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, achieving eternal life by outliving their original host.’
‘Real-life body-snatchers,’ said Penny, going back to her seat opposite Sarah.
‘Exactly.’ Sarah finished her wine. ‘By then I was hooked, and spent a year collaborating remotely with a team of Aussie scientists. We finally have a complete map of the devil’s DNA.’
‘The holy grail for marsupial biologists,’ said Penny in an awed tone.
‘Hardly,’ said Sarah. ‘That gong would go to a complete thylacine genome, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, of course, you’re right.’ Penny may as well have said silly me. Matt had never seen her so starstruck.
Sarah offered her glass and Matt refilled it. ‘The more I learned about devils, the more I wondered about Tasmania. Somewhere unimaginable, somewhere far beyond the city lights that keep Los Angeles stars permanently at bay.’ Penny sighed. Sarah did have a way with words. ‘Anyway, having a year’s leave up my sleeve, I agreed to head up this devil genotyping project. And that,’ she said, ‘is where you guys come in.’ Sarah flashed an ivory smile. ‘You’re doing some amazing work here at Binburra. But my concern is your insurance devils. I’m not sure your animals have enough genetic variety.’
‘We thought Winston did,’ said Penny. ‘Researchers inoculated three of our devils with dead cancer cells, then injected them with live ones.’
Matt heard the effort in Penny’s voice, the effort to sound professional. She’d cried long and hard the night before that research team came. It didn’t matter that it was for the good of the species in the long run. Those were her babies.
‘Two died,’ said Penny. ‘But Winston produced antibodies. He was free of cancer for a whole year. Then they injected him with a different strain. He was fine for six months. The saviour of the species we thought – we hoped. But in July we found two tumours.’ Her voice cracked. ‘It broke my heart.’
‘I know about Winston,’ said Sarah.
Penny’s face fell. ‘Of course you do. Sorry, I—’
‘Any resistance is encouraging.’ Sarah’s smile seemed a touch condescending. She took a folder from her bag and produced a chart. ‘I’ve mapped the DNA of one hundred devils statewide. Each colour represents a genetically identical cohort. We don’t have many samples from this region, but those we do have are all in the green group – meaning no genetic diversity at all.’
Matt frowned as he realised the significance of Sarah’s words.
‘But our insurance devils are from this region,’ said Penny.
‘There’s the problem. Your gene pool is weak. Even if your ark animals do beat DFTD, the next thing will probably carry them off.’
Penny looked as though she was going to apologise again, as if inbred devils were somehow her fault. Matt came to the rescue. ‘How can we help, Sarah?’
‘I need hair samples from as many devils as possible. My goal is to test each captive animal in the state, and a lot of the wild ones. I’ll run the samples through a genome sequencer and map them genetically. Then you guys can matchmake based on scientific principles, not guesswork. How does that sound?’
‘Brilliant,’ said Penny. ‘What does a genome sequencer look like?’
‘Like a fancy washing machine with a computer screen on top,’ said Sarah. ‘Back home, my lab looks like a high tech laundromat. Before the sequencers it was agonising work. Manual readings, a single genome divided between thousands of international project teams. Some scientists joked that they’d rather be executed than endure a stint on the sequencing chain gang. But today it’s almost routine.’
‘How does it work?’
‘You take some DNA, the tiniest scrap will do: saliva, skin cells, even hair follicles from ancient hides. The machine chops it up in multiple ways, sequences the fragments, and jigsaws them back together.’
Penny leaned further across the table. It was a wonder she wasn’t taking notes.
‘Think about tearing up fifty copies of a book,’ said Sarah. ‘Then mixing them up and trying to put them back together. You can’t imagine the sort of RAM it takes. But even so, the cost of sequencing keeps dropping and computers triple in speed each year. Before long, sequencers will sit in doctors’ offices and give you a personal genetic read-out while you wait.’
The oven timer beeped a rude interruption. Penny headed to the kitchen with a disappointed expression on her face. ‘Show Sarah our babies while I serve up,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Let her feed Paddy if she likes.’
Sarah looked doubtfully at Matt’s injured arm. ‘I’m not entirely useless,’ he assured her, and escorted Sarah to the dimly lit lounge room. A wood heater glowed in one corner. An owl hooted from atop a crowded bookshelf and a little wombat poked its nose out from under a frayed couch. A dozen pillowslips hung from low hooks along the wall, like Christmas stockings in an orphanage. Matt lifted a tiny wallaby from the nearest pouch and gave it to Sarah. The joey lay warm and wide-eyed, barely furred, cradled in the crook of her arm. Penny brought in a bottle of milk with an odd extended teat, handed it to Sarah and returned to the kitchen. Despite Sarah’s best efforts, the little pademelon refused to suckle. It twisted its head from side to side, spattering milk all about.
‘Here, let me.’ Matt eased Paddy from Sarah’s arms, sponged the joey clean, then expertly guided teat to mouth. Paddy fed in a greedy ecstasy of gangly legs and jutting tail. ‘Take this, will you? And give me that.’ Sarah took the empty bottle from his hand and substituted a tube of sorbolene. Matt massaged dollops of the cream into Paddy’s soft skin, all the while whispering sweet nothings. His fingers worked with delicate care.
‘Mum’s pouch was humid,’ he explained. ‘It kept Paddy’s skin supple. These artificial pouches are dry, so we need to use a lubricant.’ He took a damp cotton ball, massaged Paddy’s bottom, caught a smudge of faeces on a tissue and binned it. Then he washed the soiled fur, patted it dry, bundled Paddy up neatly in a clean bunny rug and replaced the sleepy youngster in its pouch.
‘You certainly are not useless,’ said Sarah as Penny came into the room and took the empty bottle. ‘Your husband’s amazing,’ Sarah said to her. ‘Such gentle hands.’
Penny’s face softened and she favoured Matt with a smile. ‘He’s wonderful with the babies.’
Sarah and Matt followed Penny to the kitchen. ‘You have such a lot of mouths to feed,’ said Sarah. ‘It must be hard work.’
‘It is,’ agreed Penny. ‘Hard and complicated work, but I don’t mind. I’m an orphan myself, so I know how they feel.’ Penny lifted the lid from a pot of steaming rice. ‘We need lots of different formulas. For possums, for wallabies, for wombats. Dasyurids like devils and quolls are different again.’ Penny pointed to a bench cluttered with tins and teats and bottles. ‘You’ve got four kinds of milk replacer for macropods, four for possums and gliders, more for echidnas and wombats. And another for the bats.’
‘The bats?’ asked Sarah.
Penny pulled a casserole dish and foil-wrapped loaf from the oven. ‘Tasmania has eight species of bats. Only the little ones though, the microbats. We’ve six in the laundry right now. Matt, can you show Sarah the bats?’
In the large laundry, a fridge and two industrial-sized chest freezers stood against one wall. Rows of cotton-lined wooden boxes sat on a table, secured at the top with taut flyscreens. Matt slipped on gloves and extracted a small grey bat from a box. It had an odd squashed nose, prominent ears and sharp thumb-claws on each satin wing. ‘Exhibit A … the large forest bat.’
‘But it’s so tiny,’ said Sarah in wonder.
‘As opposed to Exhibit B … the little forest bat.’ He extracted an even smaller bat, barely five centimetres long, with the tiniest hands and feet imaginable. ‘Montgomery’s not weaned yet.’ Matt held up a tiny syringe.
Sarah stifled a giggle. ‘You’re kidding me. You feed that flying mini-mouse milk? And he’s called Montgomery?’
All through their dinner of vegetable curry, Sarah was full of batty questions.
‘They fly around the lounge room at night to exercise their wings,’ said Penny. ‘Of course, we put Hedwig away first.’ The bookshelf owl hooted on cue from the lounge room.
‘They’re rodents, right? Like mice?’ said Sarah.
‘Ever heard of a mouse with echo-location radar?’ said Matt.
‘Speaking of flying mice …’ said Penny.
‘Here we go.’ Matt settled back in his chair.
Penny was a taxidermist. She held a licence to mount native animals, and wanted to set up a museum at the Sanctuary. State law meant she couldn’t sell natives, but she was already earning extra money stuffing dead pets for grieving owners. She made jewellery from bits and pieces of non-natives, using rabbit tails and feathers and fins. Penny’s bestselling brooch was a mouse, with rhinestones for eyes and a tail cast in bronze. At Christmas time she made tree decorations, picking the prettiest white mice from the reptile feeder packs, stuffing them with cotton balls and attaching tiny angel wings sourced from craft shops.
Penny jumped up from the table and returned with a container of tiny stuffed mice angels, not much bigger than Montgomery. Sarah examined one, stroked its snowy fur and traced the wire in its wings with her finger. ‘These are cute,’ said Sarah. ‘Bizarre … but cute.’ Penny looked pleased and fetched some trays of mouse jewellery to the table. Sarah oohed and aahed politely.
‘Wherever did you get the idea?’
‘My great-great-something-grandmother came here from England in 1856 to mount specimens for the Royal Society. She ended up a taxidermist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Ten pounds a month, same pay as the men. She ran a business with her daughter. They won medals at all sorts of international shows. They might have even mounted that devil you saw in the Chicago museum.’ From the sideboard drawer, Penny extracted a yellowed newspaper clipping in a plastic sleeve. The 1893 article about the World Taxidermy Exposition in Chicago announced Mrs Jane Tost and Mrs Ada Rohu as winner and runner-up of the Supreme Champion Exhibit. It went on to claim that ‘… a good deal of bird and animal stuffing in Australia is performed, oddly enough, by females.’
‘Okay, but that was centuries ago,’ said Sarah. ‘What made you want to do it?’
Matt watched Penny check herself. Her strange passion wasn’t something she usually talked about, for she rarely got a good response.
‘Go on,’ said Sarah. ‘You have to tell me.’
‘Well … death and life go hand in hand, don’t they? I want to create my own museum here at Binburra.’
Sarah considered this. ‘What was it like the first time?’
‘I thought I mightn’t be able to do it, but it’s not like there’s blood and guts everywhere. When you strip the skin, the body’s quite neat, contained in muscle. It’s beautiful really …’
Sarah had that look on her face, the one Matt had seen too often when Penny explained her odd hobby. A combination of distaste and incomprehension.
‘I’ll get dessert,’ said Penny, and hurried to the kitchen.
‘Let’s hear about you then, Dr Deville,’ said Matt. ‘Why are you so interested in our little bats?’
‘As a kid, at twilight, I’d watch little bats dip in and out of pools of lamplight in the park. I called them my shadow angels. Now they’re gone. I still look for them, but haven’t seen one in years.’ She sounded suddenly sad. ‘I think pesticides killed them off. City Hall uses a lot of pesticides these days. Climate change has people scared of mosquito-borne tropical diseases, like West Nile virus and malaria.’
Sarah picked up her wine glass, then put it back down as Matt began to speak. ‘Bats are top insect predators. They’ll eat their weight in mozzies each night. Without your shadow angels, mozzies will swarm back in ten times the numbers, and immune to pesticides to boot. The bats won’t bounce back like that.’
‘Don’t they have big litters, like mice?’
Matt shook his head. ‘I told you. They’re not like mice. They’re like us. Just one, maybe two babies at a time.’
Penny came in with cheesecake and coffee. She caught the end of the conversation. ‘One out of every five mammals alive on earth at this very moment is a bat,’ she said. ‘People don’t realise.’ The conversation ground to a halt. Penny began to serve dessert.
Sarah waved her hand. ‘None for me. It’s late. I should let you guys get to bed.’
Penny looked bereft. ‘Not even coffee?’
‘No thanks,’ said Sarah. ‘Well, I’ll see you in a few weeks when you come to Hobart. By the way, do you have a name for your little jewellery line?’
‘Memento Mori,’ said Penny
‘And it means?’
‘Aah … it means ‘Remember you shall die.’
Sarah smiled a tight smile and turned to leave.
‘I’ll walk you to the car,’ said Penny, finding a torch and turning on the outside light.
Sarah held up her hand. ‘No need.’ She let herself out.
Matt and Penny moved as one to the window and stood side by side, watching her leave. Sarah paused for a moment in the glow of a single cobwebbed verandah globe, then stepped into the darkness. A minute later her headlights blinked on.
‘That went well,’ said Matt, when she was finally gone.
Penny groaned and lay her head on his shoulder. ‘You wash, I’ll dry.’