Through the Tiger's Eye (3 page)
Then Mum realised what they were doing and got mad and made them get back to the housework.
‘Come on, you two. That disgusting old rug in your room’s got to go. I hate to think what kind of life forms are hiding in it.’
Lucy and Ricardo started at either end of the rug and rolled as fast as they could until they hit the rickety old bed. Then Lucy said, ‘There
is
an animal sleeping in here already. Look’.
‘I’m not looking at fleas!’
Lucy half-dragged, half-pushed the bed out of the way. The light from the window fell directly on the faded face staring up at them. Lucy went shivery. Deep golden eyes. Cat’s eyes, no, tiger’s eyes. There were the stripes to prove it.
‘Cool!’ said Ricardo.
It was definitely a tiger, not a spotty leopard or a cheetah, but it looked as if it could disintegrate into dust and flea-poo at any moment.
‘Let’s wash him!’ said Ricardo unexpectedly.
‘OK,’ said Lucy. Washing a tiger, even a mangy rug tiger, would be a lot more fun than washing walls.
‘Do you think tigers like minty things?’ asked Ricardo.
Lucy ignored him and began dragging the bed over the roll of rug onto the newly exposed floorboards.
‘We better not roll him up,’ Ricardo said. ‘He might not be able to breathe.’
‘She’s not a he, she’s a she,’ growled Lucy. ‘And anyway, she can’t breathe with your feet so close. Come on!’
They dragged the first iron bed into the corner and then went back for the second. As they lifted it away from the wall, Ricardo dropped his end.
‘Loser!’ said Lucy. ‘What did you do that —’
Then she saw what Ricardo was looking at. Another face, peering intently at them in faded carpet colours. A golden monkey.
‘My monkey!’ screeched Ricardo.
‘What do you mean, your monkey?’
But Ricardo was grinning insanely at the carpet monkey and wouldn’t answer.
The next night Lucy and Ricardo had their first real dinner in the house: baked chicken with lots of spuds and gravy, pancakes, icecream and chocolate sauce. Lucy made the pancakes and Ricardo made the chocolate sauce. It had a slightly minty flavour.
They slept in the tiger room, even though the light switch didn’t work and they had to use candles.
That day they’d washed every surface in sight – windows, walls, floor – and carefully put the sun-dried rug back down. The tiger and monkey were a little brighter. Mum hadn’t said anything else about throwing it out. She’d even helped them drag it up the hall.
They hopped into their sleeping bags and lay looking wearily at the rug until Mum came in to make sure they were zipped up.
‘Now, Lucy, keep that torch where you can grab it if you need it. Ricardo, if you have another nightmare, just call out.’ She kissed them both and blew out the candles.
‘Wimp!’
‘Lucy!’
‘OoooKaaay.’
It was fun, just like camping. The house felt big and empty. That’s because it was. They had only a few of their things in it – clothes, kitchen stuff, enough food to shut Ricardo up, and boxes and boxes of books. Mum had had a big fight with Ricardo because he wanted to take the TV instead of all the books. She won. But he had won the argument about the Lego, stuffed animals and gaming magazines. Lucy had won the one about the soccer balls, all six of them. Mum said the removal truck would come soon with their furniture. In her imagination, Lucy began to pack up her old bedroom but she was asleep even before she’d found her soccer boots at the bottom of the cupboard.
If anyone had looked through the window just then, they would have seen buttery moonlight melting on the three sleeping faces of Lucy, Ricardo and T-Tongue. And on two other faces that never slept, not now, and not through all those long years when the iron beds blocked out the light of sun and moon. And that’s when Lucy started to dream.
She is on a rainforest track, stumbling on heavy stone legs. A light burns ahead. She is almost there. Gunfire! She falls but is dragged relentlessly forward, slithering on her belly, like a stone python, closer to the fire.
A smiling soldier points his gun at the night sky. He’s firing at the moon.
She is crawling on her belly, trying to see. There are kids in front of her, lots of them, lining up for school or something. But it’s night and they’re skinny, really skinny, and they look scared. They’re wearing rags. A little boy limps slowly into line and the smiling soldier yells at him, raising his gun threateningly. In the firelight, Lucy can clearly see a bull with red eyes and yellow horns on his brown shirt. A girl with dark hair twisted on top of her head darts out of line and puts her arm around the little boy, and helps him get in line.
At a shouted command, another soldier empties the contents of a big pot onto the dirt near the fire. It looks like rice. The kids fall on it like hungry animals. In seconds it is gone. The little boy was too slow but the girl with the twisted hair shares hers. Another shout and the kids line up, then march through tall barbed-wire gates into a rickety old house. The limping kid trots to keep up. The girl holds his hand.
Just as they reach the gate she looks up, but not at the soldiers. She looks longingly at the trees where Lucy lies like stone.
She’s looking for help.
Something is going to happen . . . Thunder builds in Lucy’s stone mind, and rumbles into life – a roar from the darkness that makes kids and soldiers freeze.
In the heartbeat between fear and flight, a creature springs from the shadows, knocking the nearest guard to the ground, vicious claws raking flesh. Before the others can raise their weapons, the tiger is gone, and a soldier’s screams fill the night.
No one notices two skinny children at the end of the line melt away into the shadows – no one but Lucy, who is wondering if that terrible roar came from the jungle or from her own stone heart.
Thump! Lucy sat up in bed, gasping, accidentally kicking T-Tongue. He yelped and she cuddled him, which calmed her too.
Moonlight shone on the tiger rug and Lucy’s eyes followed its path. Suddenly her heart was thumping again: there was something human and very dead on the floor. She wanted to scream but couldn’t, which was lucky really, because it gave her time to notice that the corpse had blond hair, was wearing her brother’s pyjamas and was in a sleeping bag. Ricardo. She had never been so pleased to see him.
The feeling didn’t last long.
‘Retardo,’ Lucy whispered. ‘Wake up!’
She grabbed the torch and beamed it at him, but he just lay there, right on the golden monkey’s head. The thump that woke her must have been him falling out of bed.
Lucy struggled out of her sleeping bag and shook him. He muttered something. It sounded like ‘ids’. She shook him again. Just then T-Tongue got involved. One sloppy lick and Ricardo opened his eyes wide in the moonlight, looked deep into the puppy’s eyes and said very clearly, ‘They’re mean to the kids’.
‘What kids?’
His eyes closed again.
Lucy shone the torch in his face.
‘What kids!’
He opened his eyes and, dazzled, promptly shut them again.
‘Ricardo, what kids?’
But all he said, eyes shut tight, was ‘They’re mean to the kids’.
She couldn’t get any more out of him, no matter how hard she shook him, so she went back to bed.
Next morning, when Lucy woke up, she was still clutching the torch and the smell of mint was right in her face. T-Tongue was licking her. The bedroom was still quite dark but Lucy could just make out Ricardo standing in the middle of the floor, staring down at the tiger. Lucy shone the torch at him. He kept staring at the tiger with a funny expression.
‘Hey, Retardo! Do you think it’s going to talk to you?’
Instead of glaring at her as usual, he said seriously, ‘It does talk. I heard it’.
Lucy did her best fake laugh. Ricardo didn’t respond. She did it again. Still no response. He just turned and ran out of the room, through the back door into the garden. T-Tongue chased him, with Lucy right behind.
When Lucy burst out onto the concrete, she was glad she still had the torch. It was
really
early. She turned east towards the ocean and saw the first golden arc of the rising sun just breaching the horizon. The sky was streaked a sleepy purple-pink but the back yard was deep grey and mysterious. Suddenly scared, she turned on the torch and stood in the wet grass examining the shadowy garden.
The rainforest rolled back up the hill to the cliffs. If the mermaid house had had a back fence once, it was long gone. The trees and creepers had eaten it. There was only dense forest between the garden and the wild, steep slopes higher up, where the last trees clung for their lives. The cliffs above were just catching the light of the rising sun, sheer rock glowing pink, splintered by black shadows and secret places. It was so quiet Lucy could hear the faint roar of the waterfalls that spilled over the cliffs on their way to the sea. The smell of the bush was overwhelming: gum trees and something lemony.
Ahead, the shadow that was Ricardo plunged into the trees, with T-Tongue’s smaller shadow in pursuit. Lucy gave chase. She reached the trees and heard Ricardo calling cajolingly, ‘Here, puss, puss, puss,’ but she couldn’t see him. She kept walking and the trees seemed to open in front of her. Then she found Ricardo on a path she had never been on in her life,
yet she remembered it clearly
.
‘Look,’ Ricardo said triumphantly, pointing up the path. In the dim light, Lucy could just make out a set of stone stairs. She shone the torch. Maybe they used to go somewhere, but the somewhere – an old house? – had vanished. There was just a curtain of vines and creepers and the dark trunks of trees. Lucy couldn’t even tell if the track continued into the dense shadow above the stairs.
Sitting on the top stair, as though waiting for them, was a cat: a distinctive ginger cat. And it was looking at them with the golden eyes and serious expression of the tiger in their bedroom.
For once Lucy had nothing to say. She felt the hairs on her arms stand up.
T-Tongue was standing at the bottom of the stairs, growling low in his throat, all the hackles along the ridge of his back bristling like a doggy mohawk. The cat turned its golden gaze towards him and T-Tongue’s growl became a disappointed whimper. He flopped down on the ground with his nose between his paws, but didn’t take his eyes off the cat.
Meanwhile, Ricardo was acting weirder than ever, grinning insanely at the cat.
‘I know who you are,’ he babbled, ‘you’re the tiger from our bedroom. But you didn’t eat your vegies and you shrank. Or maybe you jumped out of the rug like T-Tongue’s fleas because we were going to wash you, and you ran away and hid in the bush and a tiger would have looked too con-con . . . con-see-you-us . . . you know that word? So you had to be a ginger cat. How come you can talk? Have you seen my monkey?’
Lucy stared at the cat, perched on the muddy old stairs as though on an ancient Egyptian throne. She thought the cat
was
going to talk for a minute because it sat looking at them so intently. Then it yawned, licked a stripy paw, washed behind a stripy ear, jumped lightly off the steps and began rubbing and twisting around her legs. Its fur brushed thick and luxurious on Lucy’s bare skin and she felt shivery again. She reached down to stroke it, but it stalked a few steps away before turning to fix her with a compelling look.
‘Why don’t you talk?’ pleaded Ricardo, but the cat leapt off into the bush.
Lucy finally broke her silence.
‘Because it can’t, you idiot! It’s a cat. You know, miaow and all that!’
Lucy’s brain was working harder and faster than ever before. In the growing light her eyes felt super-sensitive, as if she was seeing for the first time . . . and she had certainly never seen
anything
like that cat.
It
did
look like a tiger. It was stripy all over. Its fur was deep, burnt orange and its stripes were proper stripes: charcoal along the length of its back and face, with chalky white marks on its face and chest. Tigerish. A Tiger-cat!