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The baby was the size of my palm. It suddenly cried out to her, in those small ferocious hissing noises that possums will make in a tree hollow or inside the roof. The sound was tiny but powerful. I wished that the vet had not covered her up before she had died, but she was well on the road to death. I stared down at her spent body and thought about what a fierce mother she had been out there on the street. I saw her breath slowly fill and empty from her lungs when the baby squeaked for her. And worst of all, the mother responded, from deep within her dying, her bloody flesh reeling with lost nerves. They were the only animals in the surgery who shared the language. Her face was so destroyed that it first appeared as if the sound was coming from her whole body. She lay there with her exploded face and squeaked faintly. I turned away crushed by sadness.
The baby wriggled around like a pink rat, becoming cool inside the towel. I do not know what she said. Sharlena said that she might have told her baby that I was taking care of her now. If only it were true! And that directly following this monstrous incident the world were perfect for us all! But the world is not that neat and perfect and I knew that this was not true. This was not a movie of simple hope where good prevails. This was real life and by the grace of God. The baby had simply called out for its mother. It was lost, becoming cooler. So the mother had called out. I felt the maternal love in her quiet call that was muffled by pain and all the things that can go wrong for a body on this earth. She was a flower crushed by a building. I heard the maternity in her gentle squeak that faded inside her, as if a universe were now carrying it away.
Sharlena switched off her mobile phone as yet another client rang through. There would be time enough for cocks later, but now was not the time. We left the veterinary surgery carrying the baby. I put it between my breasts, beneath the red lace of my lingerie. For the first couple of hours the baby ringtail hissed and squeaked for its dead mother. If we had left her on the road, the baby would have gradually sucked out all the cold milk from the nipple of the dead body, eventually dying alone in the pouch from hypothermia and starvation. If we had left it in the surgery, the baby would have drunk the poisoned milk from the dead teat.
After a while the baby ringtail only called out when it wanted to be fed with a syringe or when I removed it from my breast, where it liked to curl up with its claws above its little pink ears, its tiny skin tail wrapped around my thumb. Sometimes it scratched its transparent side, but mainly it slept. Its face was whiskered, with soft pink skin, its black eyes like a quoll. I was exhausted. I quit work early, in order to nurse it into living and in an attempt to feed its small hunger. I said 'sorry' to the dead mother ringtail and her baby through my bitten lip. I said 'sorry' on God's behalf when there was little God left to say it. I would have done anything to take away her pain, but I was tired. All my earnings couldn't buy back her life. My hands were weak, my knowledge clumsy and limited.
A few men rang up on my mobile to talk about their dicks that were dilated with blood and in need of relief. A married couple asked did I do anal and how big my breasts were, because she'd like to suck on them while he looked on. I'm normally polite and patient over the phone, but I hung up on both of them. I was really past the whole thing. I'm trying to save the fucking world, I thought, and the vet wants the credit card number before he helps us out, and these men want to ejaculate before they can help anything. That's if they ever would help anything. Perhaps they just keep on ejaculating, doing little else for the planet. It feels like the whole of fucking Darwin wants to fuck me, but excuse me, I'm busy. I switched off the mobile when we got back to the motel. Sharlena's booking was waiting outside her room. He was young, drunk and fairly easy to do, leaving twenty minutes early.
She told him about the possum and he said, 'Your friend did a good thing.' It only sounded like a good thing, but I am not good. I am weak and powerless. There was nothing good about the dead mother ringtailed possum that we had to leave back at the surgery beneath the tarpaulin. I heaved as I cried into a dark and lonely world without goodness. The next day the Territory Wildlife Park staff congratulated me on keeping the baby alive for so long. They checked its sex. 'She's a little girl,' they said. So congratulations to the Darwin whore on a job well done, the tart with the heart who no one would remember for anything much, aside from how many men had been inside her cunt. I remember her small cry to her baby as she was dying. 'I am not good. So stop telling me about God or that I am good.' Sometimes the universe is bigger than God. It was by the grace of God that we found her. But the universe took her away. |
