Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories Read online

  His own rifle empty, John swung with his machete. The thing felt dense and heavy against his blade, like a lump of clay. His arthritic joints burned. Then the things retreated. John leaned on his knees, shaking, trying to catch his breath. The air was so cold, it felt as if he were breathing needles.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Pup said.

  “Having second thoughts. How many do you reckon are left?”

  “About a dozen.”

  We can win this, John thought. A wave of strength surged into his limbs. Hurriedly, he reloaded his .22. “Let’s finish off the bastards,” he said.

  “Look,” Pup said and pointed.

  About five kilometres away was a dark line in the snow. John squinted. Even as he watched, the dark line came perceptibly closer. With a sickening lurch in his stomach, he realised what it was: reinforcements. No wonder these things had withdrawn. They were waiting for back-up.

  “Get on the sled,” John said.

  “What for? Your dogs are knackered, and this place is bigger than the whole of fucken Australia.”

  “We’ll find the French station.”

  Pup laughed. “No we won’t.”

  “Then what’s your plan? Stay here and die? Get on the sled.”

  “Aw, fuck this for a joke.”

  Pup started off at a shambling trot toward the nearby things, shooting on automatic. He killed most of them. One was all it took. The boy’s tiered armour made no difference. The thing ploughed into him and came out the other side. Pup dropped and began staining the snow red.

  Barking, the free dogs charged.

  John found his feet and leapt onto the sled, yelling, “Hike! Hike!”

  Nikita and her team sprinted. John gave out a sob. Oh God, Pup, that poor boy…John glanced behind. Samson, Willow and Voodoo were fighting the remaining things. Meanwhile, the dark line of reinforcements edged closer.

  Pup was right, John thought, I can’t outrun them. Holding onto the sled with one hand, he opened Pup’s kit and dug through it. Surely, there must be more firearms, a semi-automatic pistol, anything. He found a holster with a gun, thank Christ. But no, it was a flare gun, goddamn it, useless as a weapon.

  You idiot, he thought a split-second later.

  I have a flare gun.

  It was a single-shooter, the holster with thirteen flares. He loaded, aimed overhead, and squeezed the trigger. The loud report hurt his ears. If he lived, he would need bloody hearing aids. A glowing orb streaked into the sky. As it reached the top of its arc, it smoked, leaving a long red trail.

  The extraction team would see that, unless they were blind or turning a blind eye. They’d see it, by God.

  Behind him, the dark line was close enough to show detail: scores and scores of things. Why wouldn’t they quit? One old man and five dogs, so what, why the hell wouldn’t those things ever quit? Awkwardly, scared of falling off the sled as it jounced and jostled over the ice, John put another magazine into the .22 and hung the machete from his belt.

  The dogs were slowing down.

  “Hike,” he shouted.

  Nikita tried. She and her team did not have the strength.

  He shot another flare.

  The things were closing in. Turning to face them, he lashed himself to the sled with the reins. He cocked his rifle and peered down the scope. For a time, all he could hear was his heart. Then he heard another sound, like a droning bee. He scanned the blue dome of the sky. And there, far away, small as an insect, was a helicopter.

  He put his eye back to the scope: the things, a kilometre away, were closing.

  Here it is, the moment of truth, John thought with a surreal kind of surprise. What’ll come first: the chopper or those things? A strange calm descended like it often had back in Vietnam, the world dwindling down to a pinpoint, as if viewed through the wrong-end of binoculars.

  “Hike!” he shouted, again and again.

  The chopper sounded louder, but he could not look up from his scope.

  He pulled the trigger, cocked the rifle, and fired again. Three more shots remained.

  Sarah Jane Runs Away

  With the Circus

  At ten years of age, Sarah Jane leaves the orphanage to come and live with these people. This is your family now, a nun says at the gate. When Sarah Jane turns eleven, her new parents give her a colouring book. She hates colouring. She does not want to stay within the lines. Her teacher makes her stay within the lines.

  Mum raises both eyebrows. “Well, what do you say?”

  “Thank you,” Sarah Jane replies. “Thank you very much for my present.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dad says.

  Her parents attend to breakfast. Her four brothers are slouched at the kitchen table. They are much older, in high school. All the members of Sarah Jane’s new family have red hair, blue eyes, and freckles. She has dark hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. She is the colour of shit, so her brothers tell her. Why did these people take her from the orphanage? She asked one time, and made her new parents furious. Sarah Jane wishes to find her real family. Once, the nuns took the children on a trip to the circus. As Sarah Jane watched the trapeze artists, a beautiful woman and a handsome man, she knew they were her real parents. That’s not true, the nuns said.

  Sarah Jane slips into a chair at the kitchen table and waits. Mum puts toast in front of her. Dad pours her a cup of milk. Late last night in bed, she heard them arguing in the next room, a familiar argument.

  “What can we do?” Dad said. “She’s not a dog we can take to the pound.”

  Sarah Jane eats her toast, drinks her milk, and recalls the shivering dachshund in a pink tutu skirt, trundling on a miniature tricycle, doing laps of the circus ring under hot lights while the audience pointed and laughed. The dog could do nothing but pedal, pedal, look this way and that with its wet, brown eyes, and keep pedalling.

  Today is Sarah Jane’s birthday, but it is also Sunday. Aunty, Uncle and the cousins will visit after lunch, as they do every weekend, so the men can play cards, the women can gossip, and the children can tease Sarah Jane. They tease her in the rumpus room if the weather is foul, in the backyard if the weather is fine. You’re not one of us. Clenched, Sarah Jane does not reply. Her silence inflames them. They shove or hit her. She falls down and gets up again. Eventually, her stoicism makes the younger children cry in fright. The older children get angry. What’s wrong with you?

  After lunch, Aunty, Uncle and the cousins arrive. Everyone takes a seat in the open-plan kitchen and lounge room. Sarah Jane has nowhere to sit. As usual, she is stranded on the rug by the radiator. The visitors find out it is her birthday.

  “Oh?” Aunty says, and winks. “You know, I think I’ve got a present for you.”

  Aunty glances about. Sarah Jane knows it must be a trick, but hope flutters in her chest anyway. Finally, Aunty takes a heavy-gauge wire coathanger from the clotheshorse set up next to the radiator. A titter of laughter rolls around the room.

  “Here you go,” Aunty says. “Happy birthday.”

  Sarah Jane takes the coathanger. The brothers and cousins nudge at each other. Everyone is looking at her, their eyes gleaming. They lean forward, waiting. The coathanger is old and buckled. She touches the hook with her thumb. The hook is sharp. She turns the coathanger over and over in her hands. What would be the correct response to a gift like this? The blood is pounding in her head. She feels faint.

  “Well?” Mum says, prompting her.

  The brothers and cousins smother their giggles.

  “Thank you,” she replies. “Thank you very much for my present.”

  Laughter breaks out. Mum sniggers and snorts.

  “Hey, that’s not nice,” Dad says, yet he is smiling too.

  Sarah Jane can do nothing but pedal, pedal, keep pedalling. The room is suddenly hot, as if under spotlights. She looks
at the jeering crowd. What is expected of her? Should she laugh too? She tries to join in, but no, the crowd laughs harder. Tears rise. She blinks them back.

  A lion wakes up inside its cage, inside her ribcage, and roars.

  The roar is so loud that it beats at her eardrums.

  Sarah Jane listens, and stops pedalling.

  The nearest child, one of her cousins, has a fat, round face. The hook of the coathanger splits his cheek from ear to lip. The exposed molars shine white. Everyone recoils, gasps, and freezes. The butchered flesh shivers, glossy and moist, before the blood gushes and the child shrieks. His ruined mouth gapes oh so very wide. Sarah Jane laughs at the spectacle. People scream, jump, dash from one side of the room to the other, a pack of frightened monkeys hooting and whooping inside an enclosure.

  They are too slow. Nobody can catch her. Nobody can flee.

  Sarah Jane gashes a scalp, ruptures a nose, and tears out teeth, punctures an eyeball. Swooping and diving on the end of the hook, she is a trapeze artist like her real parents, agile and strong, unerring, her grip sure.

  The lion roars. The monkeys holler. The blood flows.

  Sarah Jane decides to fly through this crowd until she is good and done, for as long as it takes; until the nuns, repentant, show up at the door and hold out their arms.

  What the Sea Wants

  The gale passes with the dawn. The Mary Jane barely lifts on the swell; her mainsail fortified with the bonnet and drabbler to better catch the breeze, her square-sail full on the mast. The North Sea lies as green and calm as an English meadow. Joseph puts on his cap but the cold still bites at his ears. The wintry air, like a ghost, moves through anything it pleases, stinging his fingers and toes, slicing without resistance into his belly, his marrow. It’s a familiar discomfort.

  Joseph leans on the gunwale to better enjoy this rare moment of rest.

  The sky shines pale and clear, a sign of good fishing. Once thrown, the nets will be full of cod and herring within a few hours. Joseph longs for something to eat other than fish. Mostly, he craves bacon and potato pie. His wife, Amelia, is a good cook. He sighs. The Mary Jane has been at sea for weeks. It’s best not to think about one’s wife and the various pleasures that she can offer.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Young Thomas approach. The boy tugs the elbow of Joseph’s woollen gansey to get his attention. He turns. Young Thomas looks haggard and ill; his first full storm at sea left him puking all night. Joseph, a grown man of nineteen years who has worked on doggers since he was ten, claps a reassuring hand on the shoulder of poor Young Thomas.

  “Rough storm,” he says. “Don’t worry, lad. You’ll find your sea legs.”

  “Does the weather get much worse?”

  Joseph considers. Yesterday, after a red sky, the shifting wind began to whip the North Sea into chop and foam. The heavens disappeared behind a veil of mist. Each breath drew salt into the lungs. Without waiting for orders from Skipper, the experienced hands abandoned the gutting of the catch and started to batten down, telling the deckie-learners—including Young Thomas—to do the same.

  Soon after, the wind swung around, and blew from ahead.

  Skipper ordered the crew to shorten sail. The men scrambled to obey. Water flung aboard the vessel in sheets. Skipper tacked as close to the wind as he could. The ever-increasing swell drove the boat leeward, back towards England and away from the Dogger Bank, despite the dropping of every anchor.

  How many storms at sea had Joseph endured? Five hundred? One thousand? He felt keyed up, but not afraid. The dogger is a sturdy craft, fifteen feet at the beam with a draught of five feet; rugged and high-sided, substantial enough to resist the vagaries of the North Sea. Heart pounding, his frozen and wet hands wrestling to knot the weather-cloth over the hatches, he risked a glance behind him.

  The sea heaved and pulsed, the foam a series of broken and jagged streaks lacing the rollers. Then a surge loomed. Climbing, it rose more than twenty-five feet, a wall of dirty green water. Its white cap tipped in a long unbroken line over the crest, and barrelled at the dogger as solid as a felled log. Joseph knew that when it hit the side of the boat, this giant wave might capsize the Mary Jane.

  “Brace yourselves,” he yelled, his voice thrown away by the wind.

  Whether they heard him or not, it didn’t matter; the old hands instinctively knew what was coming by the pitch of the dogger, and immediately clutched at grab rails, ropes, and anything else pinned down. The deckie-learners, terrified, were already holding on fast. The wave crashed into the ship with the power of God’s fist, sending a flood of water over the gunwale. The soapy foam snatched Richard, a deckie-learner. Joseph saw the lad wash over the side as the Mary Jane almost flipped to starboard. One moment, the lad was there; the next moment, no more. Joseph’s heart squeezed down into a tight clutch. Almost immediately, he determined to forget about it. Plenty of men had perished during the years of Joseph’s tenure. What the sea wants, the sea will have. Nevertheless, he hoped that Young Thomas was all right.

  The waves dumped on the Mary Jane one after another, slopping and frothing across the deck, freezing Joseph and smothering his breath. As fast as the sea gushed out through the scuppers, a fresh deluge would come on board. When the Mary Jane ascended each crest, Joseph became weightless and lifted from the deck, his feet scarcely touching the planks. When the dogger ploughed her bow into a trough, his body transformed into a ton of bone-cracking weight, crushing down through his spine.

  The storm intensified as night fell. The watery blue mist of the sky became black. Joseph did not pray. As a fisherman for some ten years, he understood the futility of the exercise. On and on went the storm. The ferocity left it during the false dawn. Minutes later, the true dawn heralded a change in weather. The storm died. The waves dropped at once, as if God Himself had lost interest.

  Now, Joseph and Young Thomas are leaning on the gunwale together, surveying the North Sea, which lies as harmless as a drawn bath.

  “Does the weather get much worse?” Young Thomas says again.

  “We’ve had the lowest of it,” Joseph says, which is a lie. Actually, the gale was nothing unusual. The North Sea is a contrary and capricious bitch, yet it would not help to inform the lad of this fact. Joseph adds, “Now hurry up and eat breakfast.”

  The wind is behind. Skipper asks for full sails. The crew complies. The Mary Jane skips over the North Sea towards Dogger Bank where the fishing is best. Half the crew finishes gutting, decapitating and salting yesterday’s catch, and packing the fish with extra salt into the hold. The rest of the men, including Joseph and Young Thomas, check and repair the trawling nets. No one mentions the lad, Richard, washed overboard during the storm; to do so would be bad luck.

  The nets are voluminous, wet and heavy. The salt water stings the various cuts and welts that crisscross Joseph’s leathery hands. He notices that Young Thomas’ palms are bleeding. To his credit, the lad does not complain. They dole out the nets to starboard. The sea takes the clotted mess of twine and effortlessly plumps it out into the narrow-necked shape of a sack, pluming it in the wake of the Mary Jane. Crew members on the port-side do the same. Sweating, Joseph takes off his woollen cap, wrings the sweat and brine from it, and tucks it into the back of his trousers. Solemnly, Young Thomas imitates him.

  It is time to adjust the trim of the boat. Most of the hands either move or jettison the boulders and sand in the hull to counterbalance the salted fish in the hold. The work done, the Mary Jane bobs higher, jaunty; the North Sea once again kisses at her painted waterline. The crew has a brief rest, each man climbing into his individual berth in the cuddy. Joseph falls asleep at once. He dreams of his wife, Amelia, of her plump arms and warm lips, the moist and welcoming softness between her thighs.

  Skipper rings the bell.

  The crew turns out. On deck, however, Joseph notices that the sun is too low in the sky. I
t is not yet noon. The trawling nets will be half-empty. Confused, troubled by the break in routine, he decides to question the Skipper, and turns to find him. The old man, however, is already at Joseph’s side. They have fished many times together over the years, and have grown to trust each other’s judgement.

  “What’s the matter?” Joseph says. “The nets aren’t ready.”

  Skipper is a stoic man, never prone to joking around, yet his rheumy eyes are wide and haunted. Uneasy, Joseph crosses his arms. Young Thomas is suddenly by Joseph’s elbow, clutching the gansey that Amelia had painstakingly knitted, pulling at the sleeve hard enough to finally rip and unravel the wool. Angered, Joseph raises a hand. Young Thomas cowers. Skipper does not react at all, as if blinded, and this—and nothing else—is what stays Joseph, stops him from slapping the lad.

  Joseph says, “Skipper. What is it?”

  “Christ almighty,” Skipper whispers. “Can’t you hear that?”

  No.

  Not at first.

  And then Joseph hears it, lying way out on the edge of his perception.

  But it is not a sound to be discerned by the ears; rather, it is a long, high and tremulous note that sings instead through the soft tissues. He experiences the lusciousness of the tune as it runs up his muscles and warms his blood, surging into his cock, stiffening him. The sound flows through his brain and flushes it out.

  The catch can go to hell.

  Where is the music coming from? He spins around. The crew is doing the same; even Skipper, who is now smiling. The melody forms part of the air itself, coming from nowhere in particular but from everywhere at once. It is the sweetest sound that Joseph has heard in his life, a sound that brings to mind the surfeit of all physical comforts a man could have if he could have them all at once.

  He is overwhelmed, dazzled, glutted.

  When he returns to his senses and looks about, he notices that some of the men are gathered at the sides of the Mary Jane, looking down at the sea. At once, Joseph is compelled to do the same. Running across deck to the gunwale, he gazes into the water, and sees his wife.