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  Many people played their part in Sally Monteith’s death. Mine was, in the end, thought to be small, excusable. People could see I had written the poem not so much to kill her as to escape her. To get myself sacked as her cat-poet. Even, I think, they were a bit ashamed. I was a lad, after all, and what the hell was everyone thinking letting me play cat-poet to some mad old witch?

  The postmaster read the poem publicly, so he had his share of blame. The housewives were guffawing at my couplets when she was struck, so they were in no position to judge poets and were inclined to tell people they suspected it might have been a fit or a hallucination that made her bolt. Were inclined to tell people her death probably wasn’t even related to the poem at all. She may have heard the call of her long-lost husband, they speculated, and rushed out to greet him. She hadn’t been right since the Japanese did what they did. The remorseless, pitiless Japanese.

  Her cats were hoodwinked and repossessed by Roger Hoffman, superintendent and only employee of the Shepparton Animal Pound. The very man Sally Monteith had purchased them from. Roger was a sort of stooped hippy hidden in a grove of greasy hair who spent his days talking about peace while strapping lost pets down to be killed with a needle. He was proud to have saved the town money by catching Sally’s whole posse using a single can of sardines, and hinted that certain other animal welfare officers in nearby towns like Seymour and Nagambie might have spent many days and the entire liver of a heifer to bag a posse of fifty cats. That empty can sat with its lid gaping on Roger Hoffman’s desk as a reminder and a conversation piece. Inside it a scrap of paper boasted, ‘Feline (Latin) Fifty-Two. (Monteith. Dec.).’

  Roger Hoffman had a soft heart but was a prisoner himself of the council regulation that said only a fortnight’s grace was extended to stray animals. No more. No less. If you were on holidays in Queensland and got back a day late, sorry, a fortnight’s a fortnight, whether you’re a doctor farting by a pool in a five-star resort or a superintendent of animal welfare doing his duty. You paid a fine to retrieve your pet within fourteen days of its incarceration or Roger slid a needle of sodium barbital into it and its soul ‘whooshed away to a cool afterlife in the pet cemetery where it would be, even now, cocking its leg on some exotic heavenly flora’, he said, as he fluttered the hand that held the syringe upward. Roger had a simple and wrong vision of most things and I believed his take on afterlife was another misinterpretation. And one time I told him I thought the thing about an afterlife was you got to leave the cemetery. I told him the only way to get out of a cemetery was in an afterlife, and that most people lazing around in an afterlife were ensconced in cloudy white palaces living it up smoking cigars and driving Mercedes-Benz cars. And I reckoned the dead pets, if they got into an afterlife, were snoozing about in a green grove or hunting in some bushland or prowling a neighbourhood with garbage strewn about for their smorgasbord. But Roger was emphatic. Clapped his hands to his ears so he didn’t have to hear my theory of afterlife, and told me, ‘No, man. No. You can’t have ’em just … wandering stray. That’s why I iced ’em in the first place.’

  He had a kindly way about him and if you turned up a day after he killed your pet he’d stare at you from behind greasy fronds of hair and assure you Scruffy closed his eyes peacefully without too much of a struggle and no more than a couple of unmanly crescendos of howling. Talking this sort of crap Roger regularly had his nose broken by fathers of kids whose pets he killed. He rarely walked the streets of Shepparton without a black eye or a fat lip, and barely a family in town didn’t have a grudge against him. He was forced to take comfort in knowing he was adhering faithfully to a regulation. Which couldn’t have been much comfort at all to a man trying to live the hippy vibe.

  Indeed, the day I visited the cats of Sally Monteith, Roger had recently been attacked. Both his eyes were black from having his nose broken with a bullock shank by Carmel Johnson. Carmel had been away in Melbourne serving on a jury she helped bog in a confusion so deep it lasted fifteen days and turned into a mistrial. She bought the bullock shank in Melbourne for her schnauzer Blitzkrieg to be presented at a joyous homecoming. But Blitzkrieg had run away from Carmel’s sister’s house on day one of Carmel’s legal entanglements to go swimming. Had, anyway, ended up at the Raymond West Pool and had been snared there by Roger, who was taking his leisure in his board shorts ogling teenage girls. Blitzkrieg was unfairly taken, some thought, because Roger had used an Eskimo Pie as bait. Regardless, Blitzkrieg was green-dreamed fourteen days after licking that choc-coated morsel as the judge was raising his eyebrows and scratching his wig and shaking his head and thanking Carmel’s jury for their efforts. When she found out Blitzkrieg was dreamed by Roger who had captured him on his day off using an iced confection, it was too much. She smacked him between the eyes with the bullock shank and called him a ghoul.

  So on the day marked for their execution Roger was in no mood to reprieve cats owned by a dead woman who couldn’t turn up with a bullock’s shank and avenge them. And the cats that day seemed to know the clock had only a handful of ticks and tocks left to tell, for they were edgy, pacing the wire with their tails swishing. When they saw me they crowded up against the chain-link fence writhing and meowing with memories of old times when I was their bard. And they began to beg, it seemed to me, for one last poem. An ode to bolster their spirits and help them face up to what they had to face up to and help them cross over with dignity and march into the afterlife like condemned heroes, and not just cats sold onto death-row by their greed for sardines.

  How could I refuse? How could I? I would write them a poem. Roger had put on a leather apron and pulled on a pair of leather gloves that reached up to his armpits, and was touching his toes and twisting his spine, limbering up to begin his day of executions when I told him, ‘Wait. Wait a minute. I’m going to say a few words.’

  ‘Good, man,’ Roger said. ‘Nice.’

  I pulled up a plastic chair and sat down and placed my head in my hands. The place smelt of faecal matter and chlorine and in this fug I harried my Inner Poet for an elegy, which is a sort of poem to die by. But it is hard to compose amid the entreaties of two-score-and-ten of God’s creatures while black-eyed Death, smelling fishily of baits, lures and temptations, and singing that he has been through the desert on a horse with no name and stretching his hamstrings, hovers with the needle. Shelley’s Adonais was not penned in such an unlikely climate, I think.

  In the end I chose a light touch. Remembering this was only to be one of nine deaths they would die and therefore not nearly so special as the death of, say, a tortoise, a platypus, or a stoat, I thought I might give it a twist of humour and send them on their way smiling and whistling. And after I decided the occasion didn’t require dignity and would be better served by a good chortle, a weight seemed to lift from my Inner Poet and my well of creativity uncorked and the words began to gush. They were these:

  SPONTANEOUS ELEGY FOR CATS #1.

  Dear cats of Sally

  Though we aren’t pally

  And neither kiths nor kins,

  I’m wondering now

  With furrowed brow

  If you might need your skins.

  See I thought I might

  With binder twine

  Sew them all together,

  And make myself

  A show of wealth …

  A robe of feline leather.

  What I’m, then, saying

  Is with your flaying

  I’ll strut while townies whisper

  Wearing looks of disbelief,

  ‘Lad’s strangely reminiscent of

  The cats of S. Monteith.’

  So could I have them,

  Your manes and stoles,

  My dear old bath-day mates?

  Yes, do meow affirmation, yes

  Keep howling, hissing, waving paws,

  Yes spit your full agreement.

  You will donate your hides? That’s great.

  And thus go nude in the next eight,

&nbs
p; While I, myself, your poet once,

  In fashion most explosive,

  Will have a coat made of you runts

  As colourful as Joseph.

  The cats were moved by my elegy. They were angry as hell. As I said in the poem itself, they twitched and hissed and spat and weaved in and out of each other like a school of highly disgusted fish. This was a major surprise to me. Up to now I wasn’t convinced the cats knew one poem from another. I had half-believed my poems were just noise to these cats, with maybe the rhyming giving off a little spark of fun in their brains but the full integrity of the things probably escaping them. And when Sally Monteith assured me her cats loved my work I smiled inwardly, thinking: Sally Monteith loves my work, the cats are oblivious to my work and are a base mob more excited by fried liver and random fornications than fine verse. But I was wrong and Sally Monteith was right. For they certainly got a grasp of this elegy. They took full insult at it and began throwing themselves at the wire yowling hell at me.

  Roger Hoffman lay a gloved hand on my shoulder and said in a stern voice, ‘No, man. No can do. Not on my watch. Myself, I own a pair of croc-skin boots. But a coat made of council cats is too far.’

  ‘It was a poem, Roger. It was a joke. A joke-poem. Everyone took it wrong.’

  He was holding the syringe up beside his head and looked at me through his greasy fronds with his blackened eyes and squeezed so a little lime-coloured fountain of sodium barbital shot glistening in the air as he spoke. ‘A joke? Well sorry. I didn’t get it.’ He said this huffily, as if I’d accused him of a lack of subtlety or insight. ‘Apparently neither did the cats, man.’ The cats were fully fired up now, leaping and slashing at the air. Looking at them seemed to suck all the air out of Roger. Individuals emerged from the ruck and were submerged again before he could focus on any one as a client. He pointed his syringe here and there with no conviction. You might just as well try to find a vein in any stone of a passing avalanche as in one of these cats. He shook his head and sighed. ‘If I knew you was going to impose a poem on proceedings that was so disrespectful and got them so jumping hot I wouldn’t have allowed it, man. Shit. Look at these cats. My day just got way tougher.’ He pointed me toward the door.

  From the reception I could hear him explaining to the cats, ‘Think we’d make a coat of mangy bastards like you? Mangy, flea-bitten, pack-animals? We’re not Eskimos here in Shepparton. Settle down. That boy’s poems was all bullshit. All of ’em. He wasn’t a poet. He was a liar. A liar bullshit-artist who never told the truth. A coat of cats …’

  From what I could see, looking through the crack in the door from the reception area back in to the holding pens, this denunciation of my poetry seemed to have a calming effect on the cats. They began to settle and slow. They began to relax. Their furore was becalmed, and they began to mince about, not realising peaceable scenes and slow heart-rates was what Roger Hoffman required to kill them all.

  Song of the lyrebird.

  The aged-care nurse in the white uniform is a punk-rocker with blue hair and a great many piercings. He snaps earrings onto Maureen’s ears and each snap makes her blink and suck breath. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Maureen. Honestly, I got doubts, babe. See – for instance – who dressed you this morning? Was it you or me? Let me refresh you … it was me. Are you even in there?’ He raps his knuckles gently on the top of her grey head, then leans down and whispers to her, ‘Don’t you have a daughter or someone who can help you with this, Maureen? You shouldn’t be signing contracts. God, man, you’re a shell. Elvis has left the building, babe. And that music company guy out there looks like he was born to fleece deep-fried oldsters. I fear for you, babe.’

  He wheels her into the Visitors Day Room up to the table until her fallen bosom rests on its plastic wood, and says to the man there, ‘Here she is. Here’s our famous resident. In a hot lilac top. Don’t she look cool? I don’t let her wear it too often, because the buttons on it are hard to unbutton and I’ve snapped a nail on them twice now and I’m a lead guitar, so nails are, like, mega-important tools of my trade.’ He locks her wheels. ‘But seeing as a big-wig of music is here …’ He smiles at the music guy, who doesn’t smile back. ‘’Kay then, dude.’ He leans down into Maureen’s face. ‘I’ll be in the nurses’ station, Ms Cotswold. Press your buzzer if you need me. Your buzzer … here …’ he taps the arm of her wheelchair. ‘Your buzzer … And wipe your chin.’ He dabs at his own chin with his fingertips by way of example. ‘You’re dribbling.’ Her last stroke has left her speech slurred and her mouth droops to the left and leaks saliva.

  ‘Aarhoe,’ she says as the punk nurse walks out. It doesn’t sound like ‘arsehole’, and Maureen knows getting around this town without that word on the tip of your tongue leaves you unable to communicate truthfully and effectively with your fellow Melburnians. Maybe she is better off in here; interned, locked up, hidden from the world, rather than at large without command of a clear arsehole. She dabs at her mouth with a handkerchief, momentarily shutting her eyes, imagining what she looks like to Lionel Pavelich, sitting across the table from her.

  Lionel is the managing director of Lurid Music and he is here to buy the copyright on Maureen’s famous song. She wrote ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ sixty-five years ago when she was working as a midwife in the Ulladulla Shelter for Unwed Mothers. It won a competition at the Girl Guides Jamboree of 1946 where it was sung by a choir of one hundred Girl Guides to Queen Elizabeth and all her dominions, who were eavesdropping with their ears pressed to the wireless. The song became internationally known, and had Maureen owned the copyright instead of granting it to the Girl Guides for fifty years as per the rules of the competition, she would have been a wealthy woman with opinions and high-heeled shoes. Instead the Girl Guides roped in the loot and bought fancy sandals for themselves and flipped Maureen a buck every now and then when her plight threatened to break into the newspapers.

  Penury left Maureen free of the happiness and hubris that attend great composers. She delivered babies and never had any. Nor did she ever own a dwelling or a motor vehicle. By the time the copyright came back to her just before the turn of the century the royalties had petered out to nothing. Kindergartens with their end-of-year sing-along, evangelical churches with their choirs of mellifluous simpletons, primary-school children at their Christmas concerts, high schools in their wobbly cardboard eisteddfods, the Salvation Army Choir in its grey ranks smelling of camphor and stale virginity; these tight-arses are happy to warble ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ gratis, but they won’t shell out a bean to a broke composer. Now here comes a man offering to buy the song for thousands of dollars.

  ‘It is a lovely colour, Maureen. Your top,’ Lionel says, pointing at her blouse. ‘But I think not lilac. I think the young man doesn’t know cerise when he sees it.’ He smiles at her, inviting her into complicity against the punk-rocker nurse. Maureen doesn’t respond.

  ‘All right then, Maureen. Business. Only three signatures needed. The same contract in triplicate. Everything we agreed on, all written up by lawyers. Would you like me to read it to you?’

  ‘Eeza hor ar oofie?’ she asks.

  ‘I … I didn’t understand.’

  ‘Heema.’

  ‘Heema?’

  ‘No. Heema.’ She takes the pad from her lap and writes, her new hand that of a child. Cinema!! Is it for a movie?

  ‘Heavens, no. Oh, no, no, no. I told you, Maureen, I just love the song. A unique beauty. A sphinx. And I always thought it would be a great privilege to own it. Such an anthem. And better for you than to see the old girl fall into the wrong hands and be maltreated by punks or rappers. I’ll take care of her and make sure she’s never misused. Never cheapened in beer ads and such.’

  She looks at him, his sincere, blinking eyes. ‘Hoolshee,’ she says.

  He doesn’t ask for clarification of this. He moves the papers across the table to her.

  Despite her physical wreckage, Maureen’s mind is still good. She knows he has an a
ngle. She knows this creeping little hood has some scheme to wring money from the old tune. But for the life of her she can’t think what it is. She can only take what money he offers. It will pay six months in Wyndamere Private Nursing Home, anyway. Get her out of Wintringham Hostel, this hell-hole where she is babied by punk-rockers. And six months might do. Six months might be what she has left.

  She signs the three copies of the contract. From beneath the table Lionel produces two roses. In her song two roses are placed on the unmarked grave of a child born out of wedlock. He hands her the roses with a cheque. ‘It is a beautiful song, Maureen. And I will take great care of it.’

  ‘Hoolshee.’

  In the palm jungle under the atrium of the Palm Jungle Hollywood Hotel in Perth, Australia, butterflies flutter hither and thither. Serial Atlas, singer-songwriter of The Exotic Jujubes, is in a spa starting to suspect he might be on the verge of a threesome. He is not sure, because he has had only one big hit and no threesomes yet. But he has a girl on either side of him now and he is fondling them while they say yes, yes, Serial, yes, way to go, babe. Which, to Serial, remembering scripts of porno-threesomes he has viewed, indicates this might be one starting up.