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
