New Australian Stories 2 by Aviva Tuffield Read Free Book Online Page B

stretch his grey back. He walked figure eights in his cage the way a tiger would.)
    â€˜He’d better be good,’ said David.
    â€˜That bloody cat,’ said Sarah, happily.
    (The Queen of Sheba sat in his cage and looked out at the ferrets and iguanas. He looked out at the tanks of scorpions and turtles. He settled, sphinx-like, and crossed his paws. The nurse poked her fingers through the grille as she passed Sheba’s cage and Sheba, blinking, ignored them.)
    The crowd at the pub seemed to part before the bridal party, and they found an outdoor table, newly abandoned. Their happiness was good luck. Sarah said, ‘Just one more drink. I might have to work.’
    â€˜You might,’ said Peter. ‘And you might not.’
    â€˜Remember, this is your wedding reception,’ said Clare, and she placed her arm around Sarah, coaxing.
    Sarah looked up at David. ‘Just one more then,’ she said.
    â€˜We’ll make it vodkas,’ said Peter.
    â€˜My first vodka as a married woman,’ said Sarah. She sat against David and felt the day carry them towards each other. The hours passed at the pub, and they didn’t think of going home, although this was what they looked forward to: the privacy of their bed against smudged windows, its view of small gardens and the beat of trapped bees against glass that shook as the buses moved by. Their bed was a long way from the colleges and the river, but the bells would still come over the roads and houses, and they would be alone, and married. The day moved them both towards the moment in which they would face each other in bed, utterly familiar, and see that despite their marriage there was no change, and that this was just what they wanted.
    Sarah’s phone rang. She knew it would be work, and so did David. He creased his face at her, disbelieving, but found that he wasn’t disappointed. This way he would have her to himself. They would drive in the car, and she would tell him her impressions of the day: the mannerism she had disliked in the registrar — a tendency to blink too often and too hard. He would rest his hand on her warm leg and lean his head back on the seat and watch the way her driving forced her to keep her usually animated hands still. This animation would pass instead into her face, where her eyebrows would knit and rise across her forehead. She would crane forward to look left and right at intersections, as if she needed to see vast distances. Sarah drove as if she were landing an enormous plane full of porcelain children on a mountaintop.
    â€˜What a surprise,’ said Sarah. She placed her phone on the table. ‘The Queen of Sheba needs a catheter.’
    Clare said, ‘There must be someone else.’
    â€˜No one else,’ said Sarah, standing now, slightly unsteady on her feet, but graceful. ‘Sheba’s all mine. He’s a friend’s cat.’
    â€˜And does this friend know you got married today?’ asked Clare.
    Sarah laughed. No one knew they had been married today.
    â€˜Your wedding night and you have to go stick something up a cat’s dick,’ said Peter.
    (Sheba rolled in his cage, snapping at the nurse’s fingers. The pain felt familiar to him, but newly terrible, a hot pressure. He flicked his paws to shake it off, shake it off. He couldn’t.)
    Sarah led David from the pub. He leaned against her the way he did when he was on the way to being very drunk. In fact, he was just perfectly, amiably, generously drunk, inclined to pause in order to kiss his new wife. He looked at her and felt grateful. He felt an expansion in his brain that he enjoyed — a feeling that finally he had found his life, or was finding it, was on the verge of finding it, although he was still a graduate student and suspected he always would be. He said to himself, ‘This is my youth, at this moment, right now,’ and because he was drunk, he also said it to Sarah.
    The walk home