"In anxious bursts he brought her a fresh skirt, a fresh sanitary pad, a glass of water, a blanket": a visitation by Emma Neale, from her book of stories longlisted at the Ockham awards
Ruth shouldn’t have left the front door open after going outside to check the mailbox. When she came back empty-handed, a strange, thin cry curled up like smoke near the entranceway ceiling.
Her heart skittered against her ribs. Silence pooled again in the hallway, and she relaxed – maybe it was a trick of acoustics, a puppy’s mewling next door. But then came another short, keening call. A change in pitch strained near language. Oh please, no. Not again. A year ago she had disturbed a drunk university student who had let himself into the wrong house and tried to fix himself a meal, only to set the cooking oil, a cloth and his ragged sleeve on fire. He was so insistent that this was his kitchen, his rental, Ruth had to call the police. They’d come quickly, as though trouble in this part of town was usually the worst kind.
The cry lifted again. Low in her belly came a sharp, feral pulse of dread. She would talk to her husband when he got home. They could start looking for somewhere else to live. Who cared how much money they were saving here ... She fumbled in her pocket for her mobile – not there. She’d have to risk going for the landline. She took a deep breath, then plunged on into the house as if into a cold lake.
She soon found where the cry came from. Fear morphed into surprise. An animal was curled up on the living-room carpet: incongruous as a fish flipping on asphalt. Her mind skipped from stone to stone of good, solid explanation. It must be a neighbour’s exotic pet. Or a lab animal from the nearby medical school ... no, of course, a fugitive from the local zoo.
The animal’s eyes were shut tight. A dark, sparse down feathered its body, growing thickest on its limbs and scalp. It shivered: too young to be fending for itself. As she shifted her weight, Ruth braced herself for some missile of maternal fury to hurtle at her from behind the couch or leap from the tallboy.
The creature lay on its side, an arm and leg paddling at the air, as if its natural element was water and it was trying to swim to whomever it keened for. Weren’t most animal pups more agile than this, even shortly after birth? Was it ill, damaged? Ruth’s heart caught in the hinge of its cry. She swallowed, feeling her hands flex as if they were trying to think ahead of her. How to pick it up? She was so large and cumbersome compared to this little tuft of life ... She must seem threatening, predatory. "Poor wee mite!" she whispered. She took off her cardigan, cautiously went to the cub, then wrapped it up. The creature’s own palms flexed and furled. Its cries ebbed.
It was a bright but bitter day outside, the sky blue ice. Dark birds skated across it on wings like blades. Ruth cradled the stray. Its eyes opened with the stunned stare of something cornered. "You’ll be all right, little one," she said. "I’ll get help."
Ruth still couldn’t find her mobile; and twice when she tried the zoo on the landline she got through only to an answer machine. The quickest thing to do seemed to be to walk there. She’d always thought of the zoo as close, but today the crooks of her arms soon ached. After 15 minutes or so, the little animal’s weight bore down on the small of her back. Twice she rested: once at a bus stop, then on a bench outside a shop selling odds and ends – brooms, birdcages, pom-poms, false noses, aprons. She readjusted the cardigan-swaddling each time, keeping the creature warm. "Boy or girl?" asked a woman Ruth recognised from bus rides and the supermarket. The woman wore her habitual, grubby white fur coat and white fur pillbox hat. She walked a dog dressed in red leather booties and red tartan waistcoat, its collar sporting an engraved metal name-tag: "Findlay". The dog’s nosing around at Ruth’s skirt hem began to feel invasive and crude, so Ruth set her smile at neutral and headed off on her way again.
By the time she got to the zoo, she was worried that she too had everything back to front. The animal-manikin would smell of her; its pack might turn hostile at the scent. Perhaps she should have just waited until a vet had been able to get to her house. She wondered how long this – what, marmoset? Baboon? Lemur? No, no tail – could survive without milk or water. It seemed very still. She wasn’t thinking straight. She heard her own mother’s voice. "Where’s your pluck, woman? Think of what our ancestors had to put up with!" Normally Ruth would have rolled her eyes at her mother’s application of Viking spirit to everything. Today, bizarre tears gathered in a thick, hot band around her forehead. She wasn’t practical enough, stoic enough, tough enough. She couldn’t even look after a little wisp of a thing that couldn’t look after itself.
That spool of looks repeated in her head. As Ruth crossed the road to the zoo’s main entrance, she felt a shift, as clearly as if the odd little pup had hooked its tendril-fingers around her thumb. It sent her a thought.
Disbelief prickled along the nape of Ruth’s neck. She went into the foyer, which was echoing with the noise of a school group being counted through by two teachers and a preoccupied cashier. The children might grab at the cardigan to get a better look, jostle the creature, alarm it, even send it into shock. Pup or cub, what would a zoologist call it? She slipped into the women’s toilets and locked herself in a stall, listening for the hubbub to become more distant, waiting to approach reception when everything was quiet.
The animal stirred in her arms. As clearly as light slipping beneath a door, its thoughts in her head told Ruth to leave. She stared down at its face, but its eyes were closed again, lids smooth and impervious. With a strange, raw ache of rejection, she walked back out to the lobby. There was no one at reception. Now, thought the animal again. Ruth saw a wide, tall-sided plastic container near the cashier’s desk; it looked like others that displayed toys and gadgets in the souvenir shop. If she popped the animal in there, still wrapped warmly in her cardigan, it would be snug as a possum in a pouch. Ruth could rest her arms and rub at the crick in her shoulder while she waited for the cashier.
She nestled the stray into its makeshift manger, then saw the small silver hand-bell on the counter. "Please ring if unattended" advised a note. Ruth picked up the bell and rang it. Beside it was a small green box with a wide slot in its lid; printed on it was a photo of a Little Spotted Kiwi. "Donations", the label read. "Help us with our conservation efforts." As she shifted her weight, she felt the splintering crunch of something fine and sharp as glitter under her shoes. It was sand tracked in by the schoolchildren, probably, yet it made her think of the earth itself, as fragile as a bauble of spun glass. Help us. Guilt and sadness made her sway where she stood. She took her wallet from her shoulder bag, fanned out four twenty-dollar bills, fed them into the slot. She tipped out all her coins – ten dollars or so. She took out her money cards. She seized some Post-Its from the counter, wrote her PIN numbers down, stuck the Post-Its to the cards, and fed these into the donation bucket too. Still no zoo staff appeared. "Exit this way", said another sign, as assured and insistent as the velveteen voice that had placed its thoughts inside Ruth. So she walked out. There she passed a Samoan family. The father, in a white business shirt, red tie, and blue hibiscus-printed lava-lava, propped an enormous armload of flowers on one hip. The bouquet shifted and Ruth saw that it was a child in a lavender froth of sparkling fairy dress and birthday balloons, her feet Minnie Mouse heavy in thick black patent-leather shoes. Ruth said, "Beautiful." And then, "The earth is like a landlord who hasn’t chosen us as her tenants."
"Sorry?"
She ducked her chin and walked on, flustered. She didn’t usually talk to strangers. By the time she was home again, she knew she was running a temperature. It was almost a relief: the ping and whine of fever had convinced her that the little monkey-pup was fully, complexly sentient. She ran a palm over her forehead. Her fringe was wet with sweat.
"Ruthie?" said the hallway. She startled, and now a shivering that began far below her skin – a deep, core cold – made the voice step out of the darkness and put its hands on her shoulders. "Ruth, what is it? You’re shaking." Her husband, Grant, led her into the living room. His hands on her shoulders were heavy, solid and warm. She wanted to fold herself up as small as a love note, ignite and burn away.
"What’s that on your skirt? Are you okay? Has it started? Have you called Aamani yet?"
"Aamani?" Her own voice sounded as if it was travelling to her down a long wooden cylinder.
‘"Amani, Ruth. The midwife." There was a pause. "What’s happened? Is the baby still moving?"
She put her hands on her belly. She stood very still. Grant had gone. His footfall talked instead, in and out of rooms. She heard him say, "Oh shit, Ruth," coming back, using the phone, calling the Aamani-wife.
Grant lay Ruth down on a couch of green. No, pastures green, she thought. In anxious bursts he brought her a fresh skirt, a fresh sanitary pad, a glass of water, a blanket.
"Ruth—" His voice was tight with panic. "What happened?"
Time belled in and out. There was a knock at the door. Voices came shouldering in. There was pressing and palpating and a cuff wrapped around her arm and listening and looking at dials, then Ruth realised she was a bomb: someone had wired her so that soon, very soon, her world would end.
"The fylgja" is taken from the short story collection The Pink Jumpsuit by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson, $35), available in bookstores nationwide, and longlisted for the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
