Bewere the Night

RED ON RED by Jen White

On the side of the track the eucalypts tremble. They are the earth’s antennae, listening for something we cannot hear. The tops of the trees shiver delicately, sprinkling a permanent patina of red dust over everything. She is covered in it. It sticks to her like red Xmas glitter. She pushes brusquely past the trees, stamping along the track with her spade-like feet, her fat toes gripping the rubber thongs she wears, kicking the dirt up and back onto herself. She’s relaxed. She doesn’t care what she looks like. Who can see her here? Her plump middle flops over the waistband of her shorts.

Funny how in such a large, empty land there are crowds everywhere. People following her. Chasing her so that they can watch her big tits wobble. And she laughs, too, breathless and embarrassed. It’s the only attention she ever gets.

But right now she’s alone, and in order to celebrate that fact she sings. It’s a throaty, tuneless sound, or perhaps it’s a tune with different rules, different times. No matter. She sings for herself. To give herself pleasure. She relishes the thrum at the back of her throat. She can’t get enough of it. She rolls the air around in her mouth like a boiled lolly, collecting spit, and pushes out the sound, thin and bubbling into the vast amphitheater she has chosen.

“You’re asking for trouble,” her mother said. “Everyone knows you do it, go bush. And anyway, you’re nearly a grown woman. You should be staying closer to home. You’re getting to that dangerous time when anything might happen.”

Someone did follow her once, a kid from school. “Yah,” he called, his voice high and strangled and thick with snot. He came up fast behind her and stood there with his fists at his waist, legs wide apart. “Yer no good,” he screamed. “Yer a slut. Yer askin for it.” If it hadn’t been so hurtful she would have laughed. She, such a great ugly lump of a girl, asking for it? She could have died laughing.

He stood there, maroon-faced, opening his mouth wide to shout some more, baring his yellow teeth.

But he forgot, because all he saw before him was girl, that she was bigger than him. She turned, it was like some vast stone monument turning slowly, purposefully, and she began to run towards him with those heavy, stiff, log-like legs. He ran, too, but she caught him easily. He stood there, panting, staring at her, waiting to see what she would do. He wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. She pushed him down on the dirt and put a foot on his back. “I can see up yer shorts,” he sneered.

Back at school he yelled whenever he saw her. “Yer loved it. Yer know yer did.” His mates cackled with glee. She stood there mute, with her impassive Easter Island stare, containing the pain.

And now, alone in the bush, when she sang her strange passion she always wondered if someone was following, listening.

That’s what she thought it was that last time, when she crept out of the house, away from her mum’s constant supervision, away from the rowdy good cheer of her six siblings. She was being followed, she knew it. How? Oh, by the density of the air around her, perhaps. Or the staccato flurry of birds’ wings overhead. But, because of it she denied herself the pleasure of singing. Three times she stopped and waited for whomever it was to show themselves. The third time she was determined. She squatted there in the red dust and waited for an hour. Two hours. She panted slightly from nerves and because it was a hot, dry day.

And whoever it was watched her all that time.

After two hours a pale, heavy-jowled dog pushed through the undergrowth to meet her. It sat before her, cocked its head to one side, and smiled revealing powerful fangs. She could smell its breath.

“You stink,” she laughed with relief.

It lifted one paw like a trained dog, a Hollywood Rin Tin Tin of a dog, and this appealed to her, even if it was artificial and manipulative. She thought it was cute. The dog stood and walked ahead a little, then stopped and turned to look at her as if to say ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

It wants me to follow, she thought, and it felt so nice to be wanted for anything that she forgot to ask herself why the dog had been stalking her, why it had watched her from the undergrowth for two hours. She followed, smiling all the while at the dog’s cleverness and at her own willingness to do what it said. What have I got to lose after all, she shrugged. She enjoyed the delicate softness of the animal’s tread, the soft, rhythmic padding of its four paws in the dirt. She followed the sound more than anything.

It was afternoon now, and hotter than ever. The sweat dribbled down her back and into her pink bike shorts and the crack of her arse. By late afternoon she had changed her mind. Now she thought it was silly. They were going nowhere, just further and further into the centre. ‘I’m going back dog,’ she called.

The animal turned and snarled a warning. It was telling her that she had left it too late. She had come this far, she couldn’t turn back. She realized suddenly that she had been following a wild beast.

She laughed a little, pretended still that it was just a game, and animal and girl continued on. She told herself that she could stop anytime. She was, after all, a human girl with certain powers of reason and intellect. He was only a dog. But they had already come such a long way, and she was drying out in the heat. She was a husk. Only the essence of her was left, the essential elements.

The shadows lengthened. The girl stopped. Even if she returned now it would still be the middle of the night by the time she reached home. She backed quietly away from the dog, intending to turn and run. But how could she have ever thought that her clumsy tread would be softer than this animal’s? It knew instantly what she was up to and it sprang upon her.

It caught her by surprise. Otherwise she would have fought, pushed at his fangs, poked at his eyes. She knew how to fight. His teeth burst a major artery before she could even sort out in her tired brain what was happening. The blood pumped out of her in rhythmic spurts all over the T-shirt she wore. Chunks of gore slid down her arm. He had ripped a huge hole in her. She could feel strips of skin flapping open, and the air, cold now, on her torn flesh. She could see the cold yellow eyes of the beast. He sat beside her, watching, waiting.

And then she was in eclipse.

When she woke she felt the ground moving beneath her. The beast was dragging her by her right foot, so delicately that she could hardly feel it. But she could feel her throat. Dust choked the wound, irritating and scraping at it’s rawness. Blood still dripped out of her and onto the earth. Red on red. It was a wonder she had any blood left. And the pain, it was so large that it was completely beyond her. She hadn’t caught up with it yet, but she would.

Next thing, she was in a place between two rocks, a dark place, a cool place. It was like being in the shallows of the ocean, like a rock pool, only instead of water rippling around her, it was light reflecting and shimmering off shiny rocks. She was panting for water, or for air, she was not sure which. She sensed that she had been there already for a long time, days perhaps. She felt the pain now. She was turning inside out with it. Her skin was raw, new, it felt like it had been rubbed all over in sand. It went on for hours. The beast—she’d thought he was a dog but now she saw that she had been wrong—brought her small animals every so often, ripped in half. He offered their bodies up to her like bowls of chicken soup. He shoved them at her. She was thirsty. She lapped at the congealing blood.

“Oooh, oooh.” He laughed as he watched her. “There, that’s better,” he said.

Surprisingly soon she was ready to stand, though the first time she tried her legs felt like matchsticks from lying down for so long. Her clothes were gone. It took her a while to get used to being naked. At first she dug under the sand to cover herself. She shivered, even though it was hot, at the thought of such complete exposure, and she spent a whole morning looking for her T-shirt. But a new power threaded through her and made her forget about stupid things like clothes. She had the strength now of something that had become other than what it was born. Her golden fur, flat at first and covered with a type of clear, gelid substance, glistened in the sun. She ran to see what running was like with four legs instead of two. The beast himself allowed her to wrestle with him, so that she could test herself. The muscles moved under her skin like small, lively animals. It was the first time she had ever enjoyed having a body.

She was grateful. She had wanted things to be different.

The beast taught her how to hunt and what the smells meant. He was wise, she could see it in the cast of his eyes. And if there was a certain smugness in the way he conducted himself, well, it was something she could forgive.

“That spicy stink,” she said.

“Like rotten meat dressed with exotic herbs. What is it?”

“They’re the ghosts,” he told her. The flat-faced ones, the pearl-skins. They are what you used to be.” She didn’t ask what she was now.

Did her family know she was gone? she wondered. Did her mother realize that she had not returned? Did her brothers and sisters notice that there was one less of them? She suspected that any small space in the house due to her absence would have closed up almost immediately, like flesh cut cleanly, and left no sign of anything amiss. Her mother had warned her that something would happen to her if she kept going bush. Is this what she had meant?

They got along well enough, the two of them, the beast and she, until she attacked him one day. She made up reasons for it, like resentment, like she hadn’t chosen this life. You can always find an excuse to fight. But, really, it was because she knew she could do it and get away with it. She had always been powerful and had always held herself back. Now she didn’t have to any more, not even against him.

And that was all.

She had to prove it, test it. She brought him down and wounded him, and in her terror she fled. Weeks later she returned, but his smell was gone.

Without the beast she was utterly alone. But she was, by nature, and by inclination, a solitary being so she enjoyed it well enough, or at least it didn’t send her half mad as it would have some. And if she needed company the dingoes let her sing with them of a night, though not too close, mind. She might have looked like them, but they could easily smell her difference. When she came near they backed away slowly and carefully. Their hair stood erect at the thought of her and of her kind. They thought she might jump them and eat their flesh, and she might have, too, if she were hungry or in the mood.

And that other, first life, that soft white larval stage of a life, moved further and further away. Sometimes, though, she dreamed of it and woke afterwards with a deep unease, for there was still something of that other, social creature in her. But it passed soon enough. She always felt better after she killed.

At times like these she haunted the edges of the human camps. She remembered their scents and their songs. They left a trail of smells wherever they went. The earth was crisscrossed with them like old scars never quite fading. She was drawn to them but she was appropriately cautious for she knew that, very often, you are drawn to that which can hurt you the most.

The smells were sweet and dark to her. Irresistible. She didn’t hunt them, though, the humans. She knew that if you hurt one of them, you hurt the whole pack. They were too much trouble. She remembered that much. But she ate their companions, the dogs. The dogs smelled better anyway.

And every day she remembered less. Eventually there would only be the now, the continuous now. She would forget what a day was. She would forget that the sun would set until it did. Even now it surprised her and pleased her to see a fine sunset. And then to see the glittering stones far above her in the velvet dark.

That’s what she was doing at the campsite that night. Bathing in its warmth, craving its painful comfort for reasons she had almost forgotten. Her nose twitched at the smells. She could hear high hooting sounds that had to be laughter, and the tinkling of bottles and cans, and she could hear car doors open and shut, and engines rev. And then she was on her belly, crawling nearer, dangerously near, for if they saw her, if they sensed what she really was, and how could they not with just one look into her beastly eyes, they would destroy her.

She was a mystery, and mystery must be contained.

She crawled closer, flattening grass, rustling past trees, her powerful muscled limbs pulling her closer and closer until someone came her way, almost treading on her. He wanted a piss. She ducked quickly into a shelter that was a little removed from the others, meaning only to hide herself until they passed. She stood there waiting and listening. It was dark, and in the gloom she could see a pattern of ordinary, everyday objects made sinister by the darkness and by her own faulty memory of their purpose. There were suitcases and a lamp, a folding chair and a low cot, and in the cot a young one. The young one was not crying, just playing with the ribbon on its woollen jacket. It was a very little one, so easy for her to carry, and she hadn’t known what she was going to do until she was already slipping through the opening of the shelter and running from the camp with the baby in her mouth. The baby did not cry.

She tried to be gentle, but the act had to be savage. There had to be risk. There was blood, of course, mingled with saliva, and the baby’s eyes turned blank like windblown fruit that’s been pecked at by birds, but she brought the little one a fresh kill, just as one had been brought for her, and pushed it up to the little one’s face. And the child sucked up the blood, her tiny pink tongue lapping, and her lids fluttering, and smiling up at her.