The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution Read online

  Another yowl filled the cabin, and again I wanted to pull over and ditch the box at the side of the road, but I was flanked by cars and couldn’t stop. Where had all this traffic come from? Stopping was not an option.

  I fumbled with the buttons on the steering wheel and managed to close the windows. I punched the air con up to the max, full blast. The cat was still squealing and hissing, and I pounded the steering wheel with my fist.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up, cat,” I shouted into the back of the car. I gave a low growling moan, trying to quell the beast into submission. I couldn’t count the years since I’d raised my voice. I’d never raised my voice to my children, or my wife, and certainly not to my staff. But now I did. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  I increased the volume of my chant, and my growl turned into a scream that sounded rusty at first, a bit squeaky, but I was certainly no match for the cat who was still putting me to shame. “Shut up! Stop it, eyyyyyyy yayyyyy!” I put some force behind it, and soon I was reaching down into my lungs and my gut, and it felt fantastic. I was screaming like a toddler having a tantrum and grinning like maniacal Jack. It took me a while to notice that the cat had gone quiet and the only sound in the car was coming from me. Feeling remarkably stupid, I stopped shouting and all I could hear was the frigid air blasting into the confines of the vehicle. I was covered in goosebumps, teeth nearly chattering, but the cat was silent. My detecting skills had proven sound. The cat loved the air con.

  I cleared my throat and readjusted my body in the seat and tried to reorganize my thoughts and myself after my unexpectedly exhilarating screamfest. I wondered if I should carry on screaming just for the fun of it but I had lost momentum.

  The car was as cold as a mortuary’s freezer. That was why the woman had left the car running when she went to get her coffee. To keep the cat happy. That must be some cat.

  I knew I would need to address the cat situation at some point, but I decided not to think about it right at that moment. That was how I’d managed to navigate most of my life, by not thinking about things for the moment, and generally things had worked out fine. Well, up to a certain point, I supposed.

  But I was so fricking cold. I poked around with the controls, trying to see if I could get the air con to blow into the back of the car and not the front, but it didn’t seem to work. I finally settled for turning on my seat warmer. The back of my thighs and my back got blissfully warm, but my hands were like icicle claws in rigor mortis on the steering wheel.

  I wondered what kind of search was taking place for me. Margaux would have been freaked out by my sudden absence—to put it mildly— and I wondered what she would make of my disappearance. But I couldn’t think about that either right then. I did wonder if there was an alert out for the car and I turned on the radio, trying to find a news channel. But I couldn’t find anything about me or the car and every station seemed to be playing that scourge of the earth, Taylor Swift, singing her vapid songs, and I flicked the radio off.

  I had turned my cellphone off the moment I stepped off the ferry, so there was no way Margaux could find me via that. I patted my jacket pocket. Yes, the phone was still there.

  Thoughts of Margaux refused to leave my mind, so I turned my attention to the cat. Anything rather than think about Margaux. The cat needed water. I needed water. I would think about these things, not about my wife of thirty-five years who I unceremoniously ditched in the middle of the night on the edge of the Sydney Harbour. She would be hysterical with fear and worry. The cat needed water. I needed water.

  I had been driving for just over an hour and the signs for Wollongong were becoming insistent so I decided to stop there. The scenery was spectacular, with the aqua Pacific Ocean on my left and rugged bluffs to my right, but it was hard to think about how pretty it all was when I was waiting for sirens and policemen to jump out at me and arrest me.

  I wondered if I could change the license plates of the Jeep with a set from another car, but I figured that was something people only did in movies. It would hardly look inconspicuous to be kneeling down in broad daylight, unscrewing someone’s license. No, when it came to license plates, I would have to hope for the best.

  And what about the cat? Would it start howling as soon as the car was turned off and normal air temperatures resumed? I would have to be speedy if I left the car. Perhaps I shouldn’t stop at all and let the thing die of thirst. But what about me? I didn’t want to die of thirst. I knew that a few hours without water was hardly life-threatening, and I had polished off half that skinny flat white. I was being overly dramatic. But I was hungry too. I hadn’t had breakfast, and my stomach was a growling echoing cavern.

  I pulled into a parking lot with a gas station and turned around to talk to the cat I had yet to see.

  “Listen to me, you little beast,” I said, although the box opening was facing the car doors and not me, and I had no idea who or what I was really talking to. “Shut up, do you hear me? Do not whine or yowl or scream, do you hear me?”

  There was silence. “I am not telling you again,” I said firmly although there was a quaver to my voice. “One squeak out of you and you’re toast on the side of the road.”

  I turned off the engine with a flourish of bravado I did not feel and slipped out of the car, eying it uneasily. I wished I had a baseball cap to hide my head just in case there was some kind of alert out for me. I hailed from Canada where we watched shows like The First 48 and CSI and Forensic Files, and there were cameras spying at you from every angle, able to identify everybody. I had no idea how realistic those things were in Australia, but I was sure that Big Brother was at the ready a lot more than we cared to know.

  I checked the time and was startled to find that it was only a quarter to nine in the morning. I felt as if I’d been up for days, escaping, a fugitive from justice, cat in tow.

  I did some calculations and I figured I must have taken the cat and the car around seven-thirty a.m.

  Many of the stores in the strip mall weren’t open and the parking lot was empty for the most part. I glanced back at the Jeep, which I had parked in the furthermost corner. There were acres separating it from the next car, a rusty old sedan that looked as if it had been abandoned some years back.

  There was a dollar store, the Hot Dollar, and I ducked inside, telling myself that walking like a criminal was not what I should be doing. I needed to be casual and cavalier. I straightened up and grabbed a basket. I loaded it up with chips and pop and chocolates and a few bottles of water. I stood in the pet aisle and I was about to buy a cat bowl when I realized this might look suspicious. A cat had gone missing in Sydney and some guy was seen buying a bowl in Wollongong? I told myself I was overthinking but I took a dog’s bowl instead, along with a few dog toys and a tiny dog’s leash. I was fairly certain, without ever having met this cat, that it would need restraining when I let it out of the box.

  The baseball cap selection was pitiful. They all had “Wollongong” on them or the Australian flag, which would hardly be worn by a native, so I settled on an ivy-green floppy fishing hat. I was going to buy a pair of sunglasses, but I tallied my purchases and told myself to be circumspect. I returned the dog toys to their shelf.

  The cashier was on the phone when she rang up my lot. She was arguing with her mother about her lout of a boyfriend who was camping out, uninvited, at the mother’s homestead. I thought the conversation was great—she wasn’t concentrating on me at all. I took my bag and left the store bracing myself for a Bonnie and Clyde showdown, fully expecting the police to be outside en masse, guns held high, lights flashing, and bravado shouts of, “Hands up! On the ground, NOW!’

  But the parking lot was empty, and the Jeep was stationed in silence. I approached it cautiously and unlocked the car. I opened the back door, pushed the cat box to the left, slid in, and shut the door.

  I took a deep breath. It was time to face the demon feline. I leaned down and peere
d into the cat box, and the next thing I knew, I fell in love.

  “Oh my God,” I said, breathless. “You beauty you.”

  The cat stared at me impassively. It was a Maine Coon and one of the finest specimens I had ever seen. I am a cat fan, but my daughter and Margaux are both allergic, so my cat dreams had gone unrealized for all of my married life.

  “Oh baby,” I said, in awe. The cat blinked at me like, Open my door, fool.

  So I did. The cat walked out and settled down on my lap. I stroked it, or him, or her, and it made happy little chirping noises, like a bird or a cricket. Such beautiful melodic sounds. And, then, like the screaming episode, I did something I hadn’t done in a century. I cried.

  3. MARGAUX

  “HE’S OVERBOARD,” I REPEATED. “We have to send a rescue party. He can swim but a boat might hit him on the head, and he’s out of shape. He hasn’t exercised in years. There are waves and yachts and boats and ferries. He’ll get hit on the head and he’ll drown.”

  “We’ll find him,” the ferry captain told me. “We’ll find him.”

  It was midnight and we were heading back to our hotel after dinner with Anita, an old friend of mine, a dinner that I knew Lyndon had found tedious and I had felt bad for having made him go. I hadn’t seen Anita in years, and yes, admittedly, she was tiring to be with even for the shortest periods of time. But still, when we bumped into her at Circular Quay, she had squealed with delight. How could I have come to Sydney without having gotten in touch? I did know about Facebook, surely? Cowed, I had said yes, dinner would be lovely, and I made Lyndon come with me, and then of course, he had hated the whole evening. My already frazzled nerves were splayed like the frayed edges of an electrical cord as I waited for the flying sparks to erupt into a raging fire. But they didn’t, which was only a partial relief. The tension crackled in the air and I felt as if I was trying to spark a flame off an old Bic lighter, while all I was doing was shaving off the top layer of my thumb.

  In fact, my whole body had felt as if it had been trying to spark a fire off an old lighter. I was raw and scraped, such was the evening. And I was angry with Lyndon. It was only one night of our whole trip. Just one objectionable night. Why couldn’t he have been nicer? At least, nicer to me. Why couldn’t he have been a conspiratorial ally about Anita’s loud, challenging hospitality? He could have exchanged looks with me, made me feel like we were on the same side, but instead, he ignored me and made snippy comments at her, which wasn’t like him either. Although really, he hadn’t been himself in ages. Perhaps I’d hoped the dinner would be a catalyst to help him snap out of his malaise, but, like all my other solutions and ideas and remedies, it hadn’t done a darn thing except make him act like a sullen schoolboy while I felt like his aging mother, which was hardly sexy or fun.

  I had finally slipped a Xanax under my tongue when neither of them was looking, and I kept the wine flowing, and by the time Lyndon and I were waiting on the ferry at Neutral Bay, I was numb to the whole night. All I wanted to do was have a lovely hot bath, add a sleeping pill to the chemistry in my blood, climb between the freshly-laundered crisp hotel sheets, and forget about the dinner, my husband, my life, and this awful trip which had been my ill-advised idea in the first place.

  But my hot bath hadn’t happened because Lyndon had vanished.

  “When last did you see him, Mrs. Blaine?”

  “Hmm?” I tried to rally my thoughts. The captain was asking me a question. It was true that fear and adrenalin had stripped me of my cosy Xanax and wine comforter, but it was still hard to think straight.

  When had I last seen Lyndon? Good question. I had ignored him on the ferry, taking a seat inside when I knew he liked to be outside, enjoying the waves and fresh air. Although “enjoying” would be a strong term since I hadn’t actually seen Lyndon “enjoy” anything in decades. So, I had stared pointedly away from him, pretending to look at the sparkling lights that lined the harbour. But I was really watching the reflection of my face on the window and all I could see was a tired old woman with deep, harsh lines cutting into the sides of her mouth. Her skin had become saggy and dimpled, soft, like cheesecake past its best-before date. While a part of me didn’t want to admit it, I knew that woman was me. She was disappointed and hurt and tired, and I wanted to comfort her, but I was angry with her for being disappointed and hurt and tired, and worse, for looking inescapably old, so I turned away. I studied my feet, or the other people on the ferry, and then when I finally looked around for Lyndon, he wasn’t there.

  Just like him, my first thought shouted. It’s always all about Lyndon. It’s only ever about Lyndon.

  A part of me wanted to scream, So be theatrical then! Vanish and do whatever you want to, you challenging, tiring man. You overgrown child. Just leave me alone. Leave me to have some kind of peace. I’m tired of cosseting and cocooning you from the disappointments and hurts of your life. I have my own problems to deal with. Don’t you ever think of that?

  But then a worm of worry crawled through my belly. Seriously, where was he? I stood up, telling myself that he’d be around the corner, leaning against the side of the ferry, waiting for me to come and find him and apologize for making him suffer through such a tedious evening.

  But I hadn’t found him, so I ran back and forth calling for help, and my Xanax and wine fog only made it harder to look, and I felt my mascara running down my face in salty black trails.

  We finally docked at Circular Quay, and it took a lifetime of bumping and nudging the ferry and throwing ropes this way and that—all of which had seemed so romantic to me when we first arrived in Sydney. But at that moment, it was torturous, and took forever.

  The captain ushered me through the small crowd waiting to board. They looked at me curiously but without any real compassion or interest. My face was streaked with makeup, my hair was wild, and none of my clothes were sitting as they should. Everything was twisted.

  I was led into the main terminal where we waited for an elevator. I wanted us to run to wherever it was we are going. Why weren’t we running? Why was everything taking so long? I stared at the captain and the deckhand, but they were pointedly ignoring me and conferring in quiet tones. I wanted to ask why helicopters weren’t searching the black waters of the Sydney Harbour—Lyndon would surely have died from hypothermia by now or been hit by a yacht or another ferry.

  “Why aren’t you out looking for him?” I asked, and the two men exchanged a look.

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” the deckhand said. “We’ll find him. Please don’t worry. We have protocols in place for these kinds of things.”

  The captain didn’t say anything.

  Protocols in place. I wiped my face with a shaking hand. The elevator arrived and we rode up several floors. I was then led by the captain into a room filled with computer monitors, and he sat me down in front of one of them.

  “Now,” he said, and I hated him, his gingery hair, his weak chin, and his self-righteous manner. “Where exactly did you get on?”

  “At Neutral Bay,” I told him. “At eleven-thirty. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Lyndon. When we got on, he stayed outside, and I went inside. I don’t like the wind, not even in summer. But he wanted to be outside, and I thought he must have walked out of my line of sight, so I didn’t worry. Why would I? But then, all of a sudden, I did worry. I knew something was wrong. I searched everywhere and Jerry helped me.” Jerry was the deckhand.

  “We’re going to go through the camera footage that shows people getting off the ferries,” the captain said. He told me his name was Brian.

  Jerry brought me a cup of hot tea while Brian fiddled with the computer.

  “Here’s the first stop after Neutral Bay,” he said. “Kurraba Point.” I peered at the people getting off. The footage was clear, not like British CCTV cameras in films, where you couldn’t recognize anyone.

  “No, he’s not there,” I said,
but they made me watch it three times to make sure.

  “I am sure,” I told them. “Let’s try the next one.”

  The next stop was Kirribilli. That was when I saw Lyndon stroll off the ferry. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Wait, stop,” I said. “Make it go back.”

  They took it back to the beginning again, and there, unmistakably, was my husband, getting off the ferry.

  “That’s him,” I said. “But why would he get off there? It’s on the north shore. He knew we had to come back to Circular Quay. Why would he get off there?”

  Brian shrugged. “That I can’t tell you, but at least I can tell you that he isn’t dead, which is very good news.”

  I was speechless. Yes, it was very good news, but what on earth was going on? There was nothing for Lyndon to see in North Sydney, no tourist attractions or nightlife. So, if he wanted to go for a walk by himself, why not tell me? Why didn’t he tell me? He just left me.

  “Can I see it again?” I asked. They showed me how to rewind the recording and I repeatedly watched Lyndon getting off the ferry, while my brain scrambled to find a solution, which was not forthcoming.

  At one point, Lyndon turned and glanced back at the boat. I tried desperately to decipher that quick look. Had he been looking for me? Was he trying to tell me something? What was going on at that moment? And why had he turned off his phone? Where was he going? Had he planned this all along?

  “Can we file a missing person’s report?” I asked.

  Brian shook his head. “He’s not missing. We can all see him, large as life. Probably wanted to find a pub, have a rum and Coke, some time alone. Blokes need time to themselves. It’s not unusual. Look, we’ll take you back to your hotel, all right? I am sure he just wandered off for a bit, and he’ll be home in a couple of hours. It will be all sorted out.”