The woman who had welcomed me inside was old enough to be my grandmother, or Marjorie’s grandmother. I wondered if that was why the Sea Witch had sent her so many letters. Marjorie’s Gran had died when she was a child, and she had missed the relationship. Perhaps the Sea Witch found an old woman easier to confide in. So, following what I imagined was her lead, I called the old woman Granny. Not to her face. Her real name came with academic affiliation, with professorships and PhDs, but thinking of her as Granny reminded me that those impressive credentials belonged to the woman she had been before Grief struck her. Forgetting that Grief would have changed her — as Marjorie had changed into the Sea Witch — was a dangerous endeavour. Granny hid the madness well. That she still had an emeritus position was testament to her faculties. Looking for insanity as I was, however, I could see it seeping through to the surface from somewhere deep within her. There was the same mix of scatter and focus that I’d once seen in the Sea Witch, and for a brief moment I thought I saw Marjorie’s eyes staring out of Granny’s face.

  “These are yours,” I told her, handing her the packet of letters. I didn’t need or want them. They were unpleasant reminders of what Grief did to my friend’s mind. “How did you know to send them to me?”

  Granny smiled, and it showed all her teeth. “We talked about you. Does that surprise you?”

  “Yes. I’m not that interesting.”

  “You’re unlucky,” said Granny. “That is interesting. But there are so many unlucky people now. Still, you needn’t worry. It’s possible your fortunes could change.”

  “Unlucky?”

  “Grief hasn’t come for you yet. That’s unlucky.”

  As if the avoidance of Grief was a misfortune she hoped would be remedied. “I’m happy the way I am. Don’t mistake loyalty and curiosity for a tendency to melancholy.”

  “You’re so certain you won’t develop it, are you? Goodness. How extraordinary, to have the walking avatar of immunity here in my house.”

  That was a bold claim, and not one I was prepared to make. I wasn’t superstitious and never had been, but to state that I’d never succumb to Grief was arrogant to the point of foolishness. “The universe dislikes hubris, I think.”

  “And yet here you are.” Granny had a point, and George would have agreed with her. It was why the people who came down with Grief were shut away in hospitals, and why no one went to their funerals. Too much attention to the misery of others was a dark path in a dark wood, and such paths were easy to lose. It’s why I approached Granny at her home, rather than her work. There were fewer eyes here, and fewer suspicions. I had a sufficiency of those already.

  She poured me tea. Her forearms were skinny under three-quarter length sleeves, and as she held the pot over our cups, I tried not to look at the scars that marked them. Puncture marks and ragged slashes, they were livid and in various stages of healing. One wound looked as if it had barely stopped seeping, but Granny didn’t mention them so I didn’t either. Part of that was politeness, part of it was disturbance, and part of it was that I felt she was showing them off and I didn’t want to indulge her. Instead, I sipped the tea that was too weak and too lemony.

  She smirked at me over the edge of her teacup, and I suspected that my refusal to look was indulgence enough.

  “You disagree with what she did,” said Granny. “The Sea Witch.”

  “It’s not a matter of disagreement,” I said. “I understand there was no help for it. Marjorie wasn’t well. She wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “You’re calling her Marjorie out of spite,” said Granny. “You never called her that while she was alive. You were too kind for that. I’m glad you don’t feel the need to display that kindness any longer.” She placed her teacup back on the saucer with a brittle clink. “Good. I was hoping you weren’t a milksop.”

  I drank more of the revolting tea, if only to have an excuse not to answer. I didn’t consider myself a pushover, but it didn’t seem wise to admit it. Bragging of that sort encouraged people to experiment with how much pushing a person could withstand. Besides, that limited praise had given me an inkling as to Granny’s reason for speaking to me in the first place.

  “This is a recruiting pitch.” Of all the ridiculous things — I could see George’s face, the disgust and the skepticism. No one needed to be recruited for anything connected with Grief. It came or it didn’t, and working with it too closely, looking at it too closely … there were some who considered that invitation. “I already have a job.”

  Granny shrugged and poured herself more tea. The scars stretched like thick red webbing over her arm as she placed the teapot once more between us.

  “You’ve kept your joy in the world,” said Granny, stirring the sugar into her cup. “Those revolting jellyfish. I suppose someone has to love them.”

  There was no response I could give to that either. Climate has done for some species, and done better for others. I wished there was a correspondence to Grief but there wasn’t. The man who gave the keynote address at a conference I attended two years ago was as involved in jellyfish as I am — his papers were required reading — but that didn’t stop his Grief, and he’d hung himself five months after the symptoms first appeared, tears streaming from his eyes and as far from ocean as he could get, or so his mourning husband had claimed in the obituary. Whatever the dead man had Grieved for, it hadn’t been jellyfish. The loss was something that no saltwater could soften.

  Granny leaned forward. “How much could you love if the world were different?” she said. “Can you take that level of joy in something other than jellyfish?”

  “I don’t see why not.” It was a flippant response, though, so I stopped to consider. “It’s difficult to say. The world isn’t different. If the jellyfish were all destroyed, the oceans would be an emptier place. They’d be a shadow of a marvel for me, I think. It would feel as if something had gone out of my heart. I’d hope I could find something to replace it, but who knows. It doesn’t seem to work that way for others.”

  “The Sea Witch thought it might work that way for you,” said Granny. “She said you had a facility for replacement.”

  “Doesn’t sound very complimentary, that.”

  “I didn’t say it meant to be. Truthful, though. Her perceptions were very much unclouded. She had a gift, you see. The sanest of them all. She could see what was needed. She could see she didn’t have it. I think she was sorriest for that in the end … That her Grief was so purely internal. Rubbish and plastic, the ghosts of organisms that hadn’t died. She’d have been better focusing on the really dead.”

  As far as I was concerned, the Sea Witch focused on nothing but the dead, on an ecosystem that could never recover. The last thing it made her was better off. The loss of the Reef was sickening, and I’d vomited up that anger and depression, and perhaps that purging had kept me from a greater sense of loss, and one more ultimately futile. Acknowledgement of the dead was never the problem.

  Granny stirred more sugar into her tea, and the spoon squealed along the side of her china cup. “What if she could have brought it back?” she said.

  The kittens, the pups … I didn’t know what to call them.

  “Joeys,” said Granny, but the word didn’t make a difference. There were still ghosts in my lap. Small, nuzzling ghosts. I could see the faint pattern of stripes that started behind their shoulders and followed the spine over their rumps, the tail that seemed too long for their bodies, the round-eared, triangular face that reminded me of weasels. Miniature versions of the creatures that adorned Granny’s walls in photograph and video.

  “I didn’t realize you’d been successful.” This should have been all over the news — the resurrection of an extinct species. I’d been focused elsewhere, but how had I missed this?

  “No one does,” said Granny. “Let’s just say this is a private project. And it’s going to stay that way. We’ve spent many years trying to bring back the thylacines,” said Granny. “Piecing together the DNA, failing again and again.”

  I didn’t know why she felt my silence was guaranteed, but it was clear that she did, and that sent stillness down my spine like a harbinger. Stupid, stupid. I should never have forgotten that Grief is an insanity of spirit, brought on by loss and ending always in death. As far as I knew — as far as anyone knew — that death had always been suicide. Suicide in the wake of irredeemable loss, when there was nothing left to protect.

  In my lap, little teeth were closing on my fingers, with nips as sharp as a puppy’s.

  “They didn’t love thylacines like I do,” said Granny, of her former colleagues. “I couldn’t trust them. How could I trust anyone who hadn’t known Grief to keep my darlings alive again?” There was an accident in the lab, she told me. One that she carefully orchestrated, and the project was so compromised by the loss that the laboratory closed down, the project in abeyance, and Granny was able to steal enough of their resources to carry on in secret. It was the focus and obsession of Grief, and by it these creatures were brought back from the brink, hidden away in an old house in an isolated area. Coddled by a woman who conversed with suicides, and who saw sanity in the actions of self-murder.

  “They sleep in my bed,” she said. “Wrapped up in my jumpers. They know my scent, see.” One arm reached out to stroke the small heads, bone-hard beneath fur. Her scars shone white in sunlight. They were astonishingly varied — thick, thin, puncture marks and dragging, the long razor cut on the once-tender skin on the underside of her forearm, following the vein. Granny marked where my eyes were and smiled. “I didn’t cut deep enough,” she said, and the tone was all wrong, a parody of confidence.

  “You’re affording me a great deal of trust,” I said, and two cups of that terrible tea had done nothing for the sudden dryness in my throat.

  “I’m showing you very little,” snapped Granny, and her hand hardened in my lap, closed tight about a small, protesting body. The squeak it made recalled her to herself, and she snatched the beast into the folds of her own body, cuddling it and crooning apology. She glared at me over the small head, eyed the remaining creature in my lap distrustfully. “You made me hurt it,” she said. “You hurt it.”

  “It was an accident,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” The Sea Witch had always told me, mournful, that my strength was in adaptation. It was foolish to find yourself swimming in dangerous waters and fighting currents. It was best to go with them, to cut across when you can’t go against. I took the small, warm creature in my hands and held it out. “Perhaps you had better take him. I wouldn’t want to harm him by accident. He is too precious.”

  “He is precious,” said Granny, suspicious. Then the suspicion slipped from her face, and the change was so immediate and absolute that it could have come from nothing but Grief. “They sleep in my bed,” she said. “Did I tell you?”

  The thylacines had once been known as Tasmanian tigers. “They’re not tigers,” Granny said. “Don’t look at the stripes. Look at how they behave.”

  They joeys squirmed on Granny’s lap, trying to get free. One tumbled to the floor and shook itself, before hopping on its two back legs to her ankles. The joey buried its teeth in the already ragged hem of Granny’s trousers, easily shredding the material. The other crawled to the edge of her lap and stared down at its littermate, intent on the shredding and entirely indifferent to the pats that Granny bestowed upon it.

  “Marsupial wolves,” said Granny. “That was their other name: the Tasmanian wolf. Of course they’re not really wolves either.” Her face was as watchful as a hunter, the face of a woman who reveled in the bite. Her upper lip twitched, exposing glimpses of yellowed teeth. I couldn’t tell if she were doing it deliberately, trying to unsettle me, or if it was an unconscious gesture, born out of intimidation and threat. I might have been invited, albeit implicitly, but my presence was still an intrusion, and the Grief that so unbalanced her was not trusting of outsiders.

  “It was us that killed them,” she said. “Changing climate made them vulnerable, and we did the rest. Hunting and hunting and hunting … Their extinction was deliberate. We weren’t so damn indifferent to them that we let the world take them. I suppose that’s something to be grateful for, that we at least cared enough to do it ourselves. We liked doing it.”

  She blinked at me, slowly. “Do you like it? Hunting?”

  “I’ve never tried.”

  “I think you’d be good at it. You can care for something and watch it die and let it die. I know all about you,” she said, and what the Sea Witch hadn’t told her she must have inferred somehow.

  The truth was I did let the Sea Witch die. Or at the very least I didn’t try hard enough to save her, and it wasn’t a good death. Truth is even if I could have saved her, I don’t know if I would have. She would only have tried again. And again, and again. The next time might even have been worse, more painful. That’s what Grief is, I think: an unshrinking look at the inevitable.

  Granny invited me to stay the night. I would have rather declined her offer, but I had yet to understand what she wanted of me, and I wasn’t sure she would have let me go when that understanding was absent. She was old, of course, and most likely frailer than she appeared. I could have pushed past her if I wanted to. I could go to all the newspapers in the land if I wanted to. It would be the story of the century. But Granny was here, and those delicate creatures were here. They were sleeping in the bed with Grief, and all that talk of letting loved ones die made me worry for their safety.

  I wished I could trust her as a caretaker, but I didn’t, not entirely. I wished I could talk to George, but he wasn’t answering his phone and such conversation as I could have made would only have disturbed him.

  I decided to stay, and not to sleep. I sat up in a cold night in a cold bed, reading of tigers and wolves and marsupial beasts, their skeletons and observed behaviour. Granny had left a stack of journal articles by the bed, dissections of what their authors believed was a dead species. I wondered if the articles were a deliberate reminder of shredded paper and plastic bells, the fishing trail of a tentacle dragged through water, but how could she have known so much of what the Sea Witch had done? Perhaps their letters shared more than I knew; I had no way of knowing if I’d read them all.

  Granny didn’t sleep either. I could hear her up and down the hall all night, the quick pattering footsteps of the old when they are trying to be light and cunning creatures.

  In the middle of that cold night, I ventured out into the hallway to search for another blanket, and realized what those footsteps really were. Patter patter patter, and it was only because the floors were hardwood that I could hear them. On another surface, nocturnal hunters would be so very silent … Catching the dark outlines of shapes in the hall, my back slammed against a wall before my brain understood why. Fragments of my earlier reading surfaced between ragged breaths: a paper on thylacine physiology, and what their skeleton implied about their hunting techniques. All I could think of was the morphology of their limbs, the construction of elbow joints that suggested that thylacines were ambush predators, tigers rather than wolves. The two I’d held in my lap were too small for predation, but moonlight shining through windows reflected eyes a lot further from the ground than a tiny joey could account for. I could hear breathing over the footsteps, an almost silent panting, and I couldn’t tell which breaths were mine and which were theirs, but there was a faint stench of feeding, as if meat had been left out for pets and the scent of it had stained their teeth and tongues.

  The whole house was shifting with them, stripes and small sounds and that warm, meat-scented breath: the convergence of the dead and the living, and I didn’t know if they hunted in a pack like wolves, or if together they were enough to bring down an animal so much bigger than they were. They were living in a house, but that didn’t mean domestication — they weren’t dogs, and if resurrection and care had changed their nature, I had no indication of it. They may have started out sleeping in Granny’s bed, but the scars on her arms … They were too big and too deep to have come from the joeys. Those marks had come from creatures that hunted. Creatures raised by a woman who had teased me with the prospect of hunting, and who I suspected enjoyed hunting herself. Both the stalking and the bloody death.

  Can you watch something die and let it die? she’d asked, and whether she was speaking to me or of me I was no longer sure, but I locked myself in the bedroom, door shut against resurrection and marvel. Thylacines were nocturnal, with night vision much better than mine, and to attempt escape in darkness was a foolish endeavor. Better to wait until dawn, when they were asleep, I hoped, and I could make my way out of a window and run for the rental car. Yet when dawn arrived, I found all the tires on the car had been cut, leaving me stranded amid the eucalypts. There I would have stayed — for what, I don’t know — except a car pulled into the driveway and the passenger door opened up, the engine still running.

  “Get in the fucking car, Ruby,” said George.

  3

  Turned out George hadn’t answered his phone because he was in the air at the time. “You’ve still got location tracking on your phone,” he said. “And I didn’t … I just felt there was something very wrong about all this.”

  He’d never been the superstitious type; had never dreamed a death only to be woken by a phone call announcing the same. “The worst that could happen is that I’d look like a bloody fool,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Fool or not — and he wasn’t, and had never been — I was never so glad to see anyone in my life. “You would not believe the time I’ve had,” I told him, and explained everything, in hysterical, overwrought detail, after we’d traveled far enough that panic had calmed enough for complete sentences. I made him stop for breakfast in case disbelief at my story caused him to drive us into a ditch.

  Halfway through my explanation, tucked into a quiet corner booth in a cafe, something stilled in him. A bitter, sardonic smile and then nothing. “What?” I asked when I was done and his face hadn’t changed through my recount of resurrection.

 

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