Genocide and absence, and for some things, for some people, a corresponding Grief that never came. I’d seen an old woman in an old house, the descendant perhaps of a man who’d gone mustering on the Black Line, driven to insanity by the loss of a marsupial wolf but not the indifferent slaughter of a people. Had the destruction of Tasmania’s first peoples ever induced someone like Granny — someone like me — to Grief, or was it only the absence of those so little like us that was memorialized in this way? I’d never thought to check, though the over-representation of Indigenous populations in suicide statistics was a grim, provoking question.
Of all the places to which George and I had gone on holiday over the years, we’d never come here. I’d suggested it, idly but more than once. George had never wanted to visit. He claimed it was because it made him think too much of home, and I’d always thought he was referring to geography and landscape instead of blood and conflict.
Hunting and hunting and hunting … I suppose that’s something to be grateful for. That their extinction was deliberate. We weren’t so indifferent to them that we let the world take them. We did it ourselves. We liked doing it.
It was nothing to be grateful for.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I said finally, on my third cup of coffee and jittery with it, skimming over a sorrow that had never been recognized enough, at least not by me, the woman who had brought plastic to a friend who mourned more for coral than for culture. George let me do it, too, as if practice had taken away his resentment. I didn’t ask if that were possible. I was more concerned with other possibilities. Such luxuries the lopsidedness of Grief had left us. The eggs I hadn’t been able to finish sat uneasily in my stomach.
“Am I supposed to walk into a police station and say ‘Hey, there’s an old woman who’s brought back marsupial predators from the dead, and I think she wanted me to help them hunt. You know, for food. Or she was planning to feed me to them herself. I’m not sure.’”
“They’d lock you up,” said George. “Just long enough to call a doctor.” He didn’t need to say more. Irrationality, a sustained focus on an old extinction … they’d call it Grief, and anything I said after that would be at first suspicious and then irrelevant. I’d likely get the same reaction from everyone — from Granny’s colleagues, and from the press.
“It’s a miracle you believe me,” I said, hunting for strawberry jam in the little jars they brought with the toast. I wasn’t hungry, but if I didn’t do something with my hands I’d be clutching at my cup with a grip so tightly unsteady it would have spilled the coffee.
“Yes,” said George, definitive. He’d never been much of a liar. I’d always found that inability to prevaricate an irritating trait. Now it was actually comforting, because if George thought — if he even suspected — that I’d fallen to Grief, he would have flat-out said so to my face.
“Well, you’re not exactly fanciful, are you?” he said, shifting the coffeepot out of reach as I stretched to refill my cup. I shook my head, cheeks bulging with toast and strawberry. “Question is, what are we going to do now?”
It was the “we” that did it. Our marriage was ending, an ongoing process neither of us would stop, but when push came to shove it was still “we,” an automatic standing-beside that not even divorce could shift. I burst into tears over the remains of a plate of scrambled eggs, hands over my mouth to prevent jam-coated crumbs from leaking out. George, faintly appalled at all the mess, fished paper napkins out of the dispenser and started mopping me up regardless.
We were on a flight to New Zealand the next day. I should have felt bad about all this flying — it was only making matters worse, with climate the way it was — but since I’d held in my lap a species brought back from the dead, everything else seemed a little … distant was the best word for it. Like the world had been set slightly askew, and gravity had become less than it was.
I called the police while George was organizing tickets, to report vandalism of a rental car. I told them kids must have done it while I was visiting. Where kids would have come from that far out in the country I didn’t know, but it was their problem now, and, if nothing else, having the police check for fingerprints and the like would prevent the rental agency people from wandering out there on their own, defenceless. Not that I thought Granny would do anything, precisely. If she were going to hunt, it wouldn’t be in her interest to draw attention to herself.
I was afraid of what more elaborate schemes Granny might have been planning, and it didn’t help that I lacked information enough to draw any adequate conclusions. There were at least two generations of thylacines in her house, perhaps more. The sheer scale of her operation made me think she couldn’t have done it all herself. Who would be mad enough to help her, and do it in absolute secrecy? It could only be someone else infected with Grief, and that, too, would be unusual. Grief attacked communities sometimes, but the Grief-stricken never worked together, not that I’d ever heard. They lacked the capacity to focus, because they were locked in on themselves and their experience of
