Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Every day the children gathered twigs, leaves, and rocks – whatever they could find – and concealed these treasures in pockets, socks, cuffs, behind their ears and sometimes even in their mouths. Then they would hide and wait to ambush each other with their weapons.
On a day like any other the smallest of the children slipped his slender frame between a stand of eucalypts. His pockets full and a stone under his tongue, he told himself he was invisible.
At first the seeker was near, but soon enough she passed him by. Then he was alone, as the game migrated to a distant corner of the paddock.
Yet he daren’t move. He was good at this game and he didn’t get that way by giving himself away when he thought no one was watching. He let his thoughts rest on the smoothness of the pebble beneath his tongue. It was as if he could hide himself from himself, inside the stone.
By doing this he was able to make himself so thin, so silent, that he was barely perceptible. On this occasion he had been standing just so for many hours. He was almost completely invisible – even to himself.
Because of this, he wasn’t paying attention when the cat appeared on a branch above him.
“I heard your heartbeat,” it said. “You woke me.”
The boy was not surprised to hear the cat’s words, for his mind was inside a stone and therefore hidden even from the limitations of reality.
“I’m sorry. Are you upset with me?” His parents were often upset when he woke them. He had learnt to tread quietly and amuse himself in the pre-dawn darkness.
“No, but you’d better make a run for it. If you want to go home that is.”
“Why should I run?”
“Because I’m hungry. I’ve been sleeping sooo long. If you wait much longer you’ll be inside me.”
The boy was young, but he was not unwise and he was not easily intimidated. Even by talking cats.
He looked into the cat’s eyes to gauge if it was serious. But the cat was intent on cleaning its face – three licks on its left paw, two wipes across its eyes, then repeat. He knew that cats liked to clean themselves after, not before, they ate. So he decided it was unlikely that it was hungry.
Besides, cats do not eat small boys.
“Who are you?” asked the boy.
“I don’t have a name.”
“Don’t you have a mother or a father? Didn’t they name you?”
“Yes. But she’s waiting until I’m finished.”
“I’m not finished either. But I have a name.”
“That’s different. You’re a boy. You need a name so that your mother can call you for dinner, your father can scold you and your sister can twist it to make fun of you. I’m a story. I don’t get a name until I’m finished.”
As it said this, the cat stopped licking its paws, shifted position, and started licking its anus. The boy watched in silence for a minute as a question formed in his mind. There was something he had forgotten, something he needed to ask.
“What kind of story are you? I mean, what are you about?”
“I never know until I get to the end … it’s not far now though,” said the cat, momentarily looking up from its grooming to meet the boy’s gaze.
He could feel something cold and hard inside him. The pebble was now joined by a larger, heavier stone, growing in his tummy. A message, some kind of alarm, but its weight pinned him where he stood.
“Are you a scary story?”
At this the cat stopped its grooming altogether. It looked in his face and began to purr.
The boy shifted the pebble in his mouth, placing it in the hollow between his lower jaw and his left cheek. It was warm now. He sucked cool air in through the corner of his mouth, letting it flow over the stone.
“Do you like scary stories?”
He remembered a story that his sister had told him. About a creature who lived in the tiniest of shadows and roamed freely only in the dark, drinking children’s souls. He’d slept with the light on for a week. Even now, he still kept a torch under his pillow for emergencies.
The purring was louder now.
“No.”
“Why not?”
If it was his sister asking he would have said that scary stories were for babies and he was too big to be afraid. But the stone in his stomach told a different tale and in this story he was not able to lie.
“Do you have a name yet?” he countered instead of answering. “I mean, will you be finished soon?”
“Soon. But first, you need to do something for me.” The cat jumped down from the branch, and as it did so it twisted its body into an upright position, so that when it landed it stood not like a cat, but like a person. “Give me your name.”
“But it’s mine.”
“Is it really? Then what is it?”
He knew that he knew his name, but it was hiding in the corner of his mind, buried beneath a pile of stones. Each time he lifted one stone another toppled down to fill the gap. It was like trying to write something down in a dream, the sounds and letters slipped from his mind’s grasp like a child shirking a mother’s kiss.
“Well?” prompted the cat.
“I can’t.”
“Aaaaaah. Now we’re both finished then.”