Pet

by Catherine Chidgey

Genres: Coming of Age; Women's Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

A suspenseful new psychological thriller from the Women’s Prize for Fiction long listed and Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal and psychological suspense: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping among them.

“Refreshing, compelling and surprising.”—Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World

 

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Release date: August 8, 2023

Publisher: Europa Editions

Print pages: 332

Sample

2014


CHAPTER 1

Iknow it’s Mrs Price, and I know it can’t be Mrs Price: that’s what I keep thinking. My eyes are playing tricks on me, or the light is, or my memory is. For one thing, this woman looks to be in her thirties, which makes her far too young . . . apart from anything else. And yet she has the same wavy blond hair, the same high cheekbones. Even the voice could be hers.

‘Let’s get you settled in your chair, Mr Crieve,’ she says, leading my father to his recliner. She’s just showered him, and his skin is pink and soft, his face freshly shaved. I can smell Old Spice. He leans heavily on her arm as he takes step after slow step across the tiny room. She is stronger than she looks. ‘You’ll feel better now you’ve had a shower,’ she says, positioning him in front of his chair. ‘All nice and clean for your visitors.’

‘I’m his daughter,’ I say. ‘Justine.’ Stupidly I hold out my hand, but of course she can’t shake it; she is still holding on to my father.

‘I know all about you,’ she says, and flashes me a smile, her warm brown eyes crinkling at the corners. The same smile I remember. The same eyes.

My daughter Emma, twelve years old, sits on the bed and picks at her nail polish, peeling away shreds of bubblegum pink. Dad eyes her.

‘Have you hung up your school uniform?’ he says.

‘Always,’ says Emma, which is true: she never needs reminding to keep her things tidy.

He points a wobbly finger at her. ‘This is my daughter Justine,’ he says to the woman. ‘I bet she’s telling fibs. I bet if I checked her room, the uniform would be in a heap. We’re always on at her.’

Emma just smiles. ‘I made you some gingerbread,’ she says, sliding the container onto the bedside table. ‘Your favourite.’ She has such kindness in her – from her father, I suppose.

‘Now feel for the chair with the back of your legs, Mr Crieve,’ says the woman. ‘Reach for the arms . . . that’s right . . . and down we go. Good.’

I sit next to Emma on the bed and watch, feel the familiar guilt rise in my throat – but I can’t look after him myself. I can’t comb his hair and cut his toenails, dress him and undress him. I can’t wash him. Most of all, perhaps, on the bad days I can’t keep explaining that he doesn’t have to get back to the shop, that nobody has robbed him, that Emma isn’t his daughter and I am not his wife returned from the dead. Everyone agrees he is in the best place.

‘So handsome,’ says the woman, tucking the tips of his collar inside his cardigan – although it’s not his cardigan. The laundry is always mixing up his clothes with those of the other residents. ‘You look like you’re ready to hit the town,’ she says. ‘Get up to no good.’

‘You never know,

’ he says. ‘Maybe I’ll sneak out after dark.’

She laughs. ‘Naughty man! Off to the casino, is it? Off to the nightclubs, wowing all the girls? You’d better watch out for this one, Justine.’

‘I will,’ I say. ‘I do.’

She nods, pats my hand. ‘He’s lucky to have you.’

I can’t take my eyes off her. Surely Dad sees it too. Surely some part of him remembers. Sonia, says a badge pinned to her smart floral tunic. One of those uniforms that’s meant to look like normal clothes. The retirement community prides itself on its personal approach, so the residents really feel they’ve come home. Those in the stand-alone townhouses can even bring a cat or a bird when they move in, if they have an existing cat or bird. No replacement cats or birds can be acquired after the old ones die, though – and Dad isn’t in a stand-alone townhouse, he’s in a premium room.

‘I’ll leave you three to it, then,’ says Sonia.

I want to talk to her, ask her if she knew Mrs Price – but what can I say? How can I ever explain that story? Though I’ve had thirty years to think about it, thirty years to go over every detail. The great dark hulk of it always adrift in me.

‘Curious Questions in the main lounge at three, don’t forget,’ she says. ‘You need to defend your title.’

‘Too right,’ says my father.

And then she is gone.

‘She’s new,’ I say.

‘Someone new every few months,’ he says. ‘They don’t pay them enough.’

‘Doesn’t she remind you of anyone?’

‘Who?’

‘You really don’t see it?’

‘Who?’ says Emma.

‘I don’t know what you're

getting at,’ he says, and picks up his newspaper, hands me the real-estate section. I’m always looking for a new place.

‘Brick,’ he says, tapping a property he’s circled. ‘Nice and solid. Won’t rot.’

He’s having a good day, then, and we’re supposed to make the most of the good days. I should stay and chat in his premium room, or take him for a walk in the grounds, which really are lovely, with their benches in the shade of oaks and maples and their heady beds of roses. Polite gardeners who nod hello while they clip away at something, train something, keep it all in check.

But I am twelve years old again. 

 

1984


CHAPTER 2

Iwas lying on my stomach in the late afternoon, running my fingers through the straw-dry grass and unknotting the tousled weeds that grew along our fence line. Down deep, where the sun didn’t reach, the stalks were as white as exposed bone. Slaters hurried about in their segmented armour, while a centipede, dislodged from under its dead leaf, looked for a new place to hide. Gently I covered it over again. There at the bottom of our hilly garden you couldn’t see the harbour but you could smell it. Arum lilies and hydrangeas grew in great clusters, and the apple tree dropped its sour little windfalls, and nobody could ask me how I was coping. I poked at an empty snail shell, blew on it so it skittered away. Up in the spotless house, curtains drawn, my father listened to his sad records and drank his sad drinks. The sun, still searing just past the end of summer, scraped at my shoulders and neck, and I knew I should go back inside and make my father’s dinner while he sat in the darkened living room mumbling Beth, Beth, Beth. I should bring him corned beef with a dob of mustard, just the way he liked it, and potatoes boiled in their skins, and ice cream with tinned peaches, the syrup pooling at the bottom of the plate. I should let him tell me I was his best girl, and how lucky was he? And then I should scour the kitchen sink until it gleamed, and polish the taps that showed me my own face all misshapen and wrong, and iron the tea towels with their pictures of birds and maps and castles, folding them into squares to fit on the tea-towel shelf – but not yet. Just a bit longer with the weeds and the dirt, the empty shells and the dead leaves and the frantic hiss of cicadas. The sunburnt grass as light as nothing.

A twinge in my temple. I sat up, sat back on my heels, steadied myself. I was fine. Fine. But was it the sun? My head felt high and hollow, and I could taste burnt sugar, and no, it wasn’t the sun but my own body about to turn on me again. Hadn’t I grown out of it? Hadn’t the pills worked? I looked at my hands, and they were strange hands, and the garden was a strange garden, the arum lilies looming at me like birds with skinny yellow beaks, the sky hazy, covered with plastic, and I could hear my mother’s voice though I knew it was not real: I’m home. And here it came, the seizure, thundering through the hot air, knocking me to the ground.

When I opened my eyes I was lying on the couch, facing the deep-buttoned back. I blinked. Slowly the threads of pale blue and dark blue and white joined into their upholstered pattern: an old-fashioned lady sitting on a swing in a flouncy dress, her waist pulled in tight, her feet the tiniest slippered nubs. Ribbons trailing in the breeze. Cherubs. Butterflies.

I touched my fingers to the bump on my temple.

‘Oh, love,’ said my father.

‘I was in the garden,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t I?’

‘You’re fine, everything’s fine,’ he said.

‘How did I get inside?’

‘I helped you. Here, drink this.’

‘I don’t remember.’

The water swishing the taste of blood across my tongue.

Once, when I was little, I’d held a stolen coin in my mouth so no one would take it from me: that was the taste.

‘I thought the pills had worked,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d grown out of it.’

‘We’ll go back to Dr Kothari. I imagine it’s trial and error.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, we might have to try the pills again.’

‘No. They make my mouth dry and give me the shakes. Can’t we just see how it goes?’

‘Maybe he can give us something different to try, until we get it right.’

‘It was right, though. I thought I didn’t need the pills any more.’

‘I’m sorry, love.’ He poured himself another drink.

In a small voice I said, ‘What if it happens at school?’

‘Mrs Price will look after you.’

‘They’ll think I’m a freak.’

‘Mrs Price won’t let them.’

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, ‘Can we see how it goes?’

He sighed, nodded. ‘One more seizure, though, and it’s back to Dr Kothari. You could hurt yourself, love, and we can’t have that. We just can’t.’

 

I don’t recall much about the rest of that day – I usually suffered memory loss from a seizure and sometimes couldn’t account for hours of time – but one detail has stayed with me through the years: watching The Love Boat while I lay with my head on my father’s lap. As the opening song played, Captain Stubing looked through his binoculars, and Isaac the bartender put fruit on the rim of a glass, and Julie the cruise director beamed in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge because she was supposed to be marrying an Australian, though he sounded nothing like an Australian and would in fact leave her at the altar because he was dying and loved her too much. And

Vicki, the captain’s daughter, who had the same haircut as I did, stood on the deck in her sailor suit with all the blue ocean behind her. Vicki, who lived on the ship and got to visit Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco and Mazatlán, and what would that be like, to live in so many different places but also no place at all?

‘Where are they?’ I said.

‘What?’ said my father.

‘When they’re sailing, which country are they in?’

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘And what if someone dies on board? What happens then?’

‘No one dies on The Love Boat.’

‘But in real life.’

‘A captain can bury people at sea,’ he said. ‘He can marry people, and he can bury people.’

‘You can’t dig a hole in water,’ I said. I felt too heavy to move.

‘It’s an expression.’

I knew that Vicki was actually much older; if you watched the credits at the end of the programme, and squinted to read the year in tiny Roman numerals, you could tell that New Zealand was years behind and we were watching the past.

And my father stroked my ear as the passengers filed on board, the sound of his hand the sound of the ocean.

 

CHAPTER 3

In the morning I could still feel the remains of the seizure: mud in my head, mud in my legs. My father said I could stay home if I liked, but I wanted to go to school because Mrs Price had promised us a surprise – a surprise and a test, though not one we could study for. I made sure I had my special pen. My mother had bought it for me when she took the ferry to the South Island, just before she was diagnosed. I could keep it as a souvenir, she’d said, and she showed me the tiny white ship inside that slid back and forth when you tilted it, gliding into the green of the Sounds, gliding into the open ocean. I tried not to use it too much, because I didn’t want the ink to run out, but I always wrote my tests with it. I thought it brought me luck. The talismans we cling to.

‘What do you think the surprise is?’ I whispered to my best friend Amy as we took our places at our desks.

‘Maybe something to eat?’ said Amy. ‘Some more of her Russian fudge?’

Mrs Price had brought a batch to class in the first week of term. If we were good, she’d said, there’d be more treats, because good things happened to good people. And every boy and girl had sat up straight then, and nodded, and listened, and spoken when it was their turn to speak, not just because of the good things in their future, the treats, but because they wanted to please her. She was new to town and new to St Michael’s that year, and younger than our parents, and prettier than our mothers, who wore fawn slacks and plastic rain bonnets. She made us feel special just by the way she looked at us, as if we had something important to say and she couldn’t wait to hear it. Often she’d rest a hand on our shoulders like an old friend, then lean in and listen. Laugh when we wanted her to laugh. Offer kind words before we knew we needed them. Tell us how bright we were, what original thinkers. If we came to school with a new haircut we really weren’t sure about, she’d put her hands on her hips and say, ‘Look out, David Bowie!’ or ‘Christie Brinkley, eat your heart out!’ When she sent home a note asking if one or two fathers could come on Saturday to fix up the wobbly desks and chairs, a dozen men showed up, hammers and drills at the ready. The story was that her husband and daughter had died in a car accident, though nobody quite knew when or how, or whether she had been in the car at the time, and nobody liked to ask. Each morning she arrived at school in a white Corvette with the steering wheel on the wrong side, the American side, and it had no back seat and no boot, so where on earth did she put her groceries? But perhaps she ordered takeaways like people on TV; perhaps she ate in French restaurants where candlelight caught in gigantic mirrors. Glass bangles clicked at her wrists, and she wore her wavy blond hair with a deep fringe like Rebecca De Mornay in Risky Business – not that we’d been allowed to see the film, because it wasn’t suitable. Around her neck a gold crucifix with a tiny gold figure of Jesus, all ribs and thorns.

I lifted the lid of my desk and put away my exercise books. At the start of term I’d covered

 them with leftover wallpaper from home: the stripes from my bedroom for Religion, Maths, Social Studies and Science, the bunches of fuchsias from the dining room for Language and Reading. My mother had chosen the patterns when she first got sick, pinning the samples to the wall and scrutinising them at different times of day, in different lights. She wanted the house to be perfect, she’d said. I hadn’t understood.

I double-checked that I had my special pen in my Care Bears pencil case.

‘What’s that?’ said Melissa Knight, who sat on the other side of me.

I showed it to her, tilting it to make the ship move.

‘Can I have a go?’

I hesitated, then handed it over. ‘Careful,’ I said. ‘It’s very valuable.’

Melissa had long caramel-coloured hair and pierced ears and a spa pool, and I could never be her, though Amy and I practised her walk and her laugh. One lunchtime, too, we folded down the tops of our tunics and knotted our blouses above our belly buttons like Melissa did. When Paula de Vries saw us she whispered something in Melissa’s ear, but Melissa didn’t even care, because she wasn’t mean the way some pretty girls with pierced ears could be mean.

Mrs Price was standing at the front of the classroom, watching us, waiting for us all to settle down. Melissa gave me back the pen.

‘Today, people,’ said Mrs Price – she called us people instead of children, which made us feel responsible – ‘we’re learning about the eye.’

She asked Melissa to hand out a cyclostyled diagram, because Melissa was one of her pets. It wasn’t fair, but what could anyone do? The tingly smell of the purple ink rose from the newsprint sheets, and we followed with our fingers as Mrs Price pointed out the cornea, the sclera, the retina, the optic nerve, and then we wrote the names in our neatest handwriting and added arrows to show the right spots on the drawings that didn’t look much like eyes. I forced myself to

concentrate; I was still groggy from the seizure.

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Price, as if she knew what we were thinking, ‘the best way to learn is to see the thing for ourselves, isn’t it?’

She smiled her special smile and walked to the back of the classroom, and there on the activity tables, hidden under a cloth so as not to ruin the surprise, were rows of scissors and scalpels and sharp little tools like the dental nurse used in our mouths. She took the lid off an ice-cream container, and Karl Parai said, ‘Strawberry ripple!’ in his deep new voice that had arrived over summer, but Mrs Price laughed and said no, definitely not strawberry ripple, and inside the container sat a pile of eyes. Cows’ eyes. Enough for one between two.

‘Mr Parry was kind enough to supply these,’ she said, ‘so make sure you thank him next time you’re in his shop.’

Leanne Parry beamed; she had kept the surprise to herself, the secret, and now Mrs Price was singling her out for it. Mr Parry was the local butcher who gave every child a slice of luncheon sausage whenever they went with their parents to buy their meat. ‘You look like you could do with some fattening up,’ he’d say, winking as he weighed chops or sharpened his big silver knife. He gave out pencils sometimes, too: metallic green, with Parry’s Meats High Street running down the side, but I’d never used my one – never even sharpened it – because it was too nice. Then I’d lost it.

‘All right, people, find a partner,’ said Mrs Price, and Amy grabbed my hand and held on tight, too tight.

‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ she whispered, but already Mrs Price was handing out the eyes with a soup spoon and the pairs of children were taking their places at the dissecting trays. I had the feeling I had seen this moment before: the trays, the rows of glittering tools. The dead eyes looking in all directions. My own hand reaching for something sharp. Strange thoughts often followed a seizure; I tried to blink them away.

‘First of all,’ said Mrs Price, ‘let’s trim off what we don’t need – all the scraggy bits from around the edges, yes? Use your scissors to snip them free, or your scalpel. These are the remains of the eyelid, and the muscles that move the eye.’

I offered the scissors to Amy, but she shook her head.

‘Don’t be afraid to handle

it firmly,’ said Mrs Price, walking around the tables. ‘You’d be surprised how tough it is. Good, Melissa. Good, Leanne.’ She rested a hand on Leanne’s shoulder and watched as she neatly removed the trailing pieces of flesh.

Picking up our specimen, I began to cut. I still felt so heavy in my limbs.

‘Careful to leave the optic nerve,’ said Mrs Price. ‘The little stump at the back. Your cow can’t see without it.’

The eye was slippery under my fingers, like the grapes Amy and I peeled when we played Slaves. I thought I could make out some eyelashes. I pushed the scraps to the edge of the tray.

‘Now, look at the cornea. Can everyone find the cornea? You’ll see that it’s cloudy blue – this is what happens in death. In life it’s clear, like a plastic bag filled with water, to let the light through.’

‘Death?’ said Amy. ‘Death?’ She pushed her thick black plait over her shoulder as if it might touch something dreadful.

‘Duh,’ said Karl, and he waggled his cow’s eye at her and made a mooing sound.

Mrs Price showed us how to snip right around the eyeball to cut it in half, though we mustn’t push the scissors in too deep because that would damage the lens. I had worried I might feel disgusted, might even have another seizure, but it was no different from chopping up chicken for a casserole or touching the muscular foot of a snail, and the jelly inside the eye no worse than egg white. And how easily it all came apart, one hemisphere detaching from the other, a severed world. Mrs Price pointed out the blind spot, where the optic nerve attached to the back of the eye and there were no light receptors. We couldn’t see anything at that point, she said, but our brains filled in the gaps for us without our even noticing, and wasn’t that amazing? Wasn’t God amazing?

Amy was leaning in now, poking the lens with the probe.

‘Make sure you’re taking note of all this, people,’ said Mrs Price. ‘Make sure you’re remembering. It’s important.’

Next we cut out the cornea and studied the pupil, which she told us meant orphan – a child looked after by an adult, taught by an adult – but it also meant little doll, because of the tiny reflections of ourselves we saw in another

person’s eyes. I checked: and yes, there I was in Amy’s pupils, a shadow girl caught in the curve of black.

‘Do you see that the pupil is just a hole?’ said Mrs Price. ‘We think it’s something solid, that black dot, don’t we, but in reality there’s nothing there.’

Next to me Melissa had turned pale, all the blood gone from her lips and cheeks. When she started to gag I leapt away, and the vomit just missed my foot. The puddle glistened on the floorboards between us, full of bad and bitter things.

‘Oh sweetheart,’ said Mrs Price. ‘Come away. Come and sit down.’ She led Melissa to the front of the classroom and settled her in the story chair, brought her a glass of water.

‘I’m really sorry,’ said Melissa.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Price, stroking her hair. ‘God made some of us more sensitive than others, and that’s a beautiful thing – yes? Never apologise for it.’

Melissa nodded, her face as white and lovely as a saint’s, while the rest of us watched and wished we were sitting in the story chair, and that Mrs Price was stroking our hair and talking to us in her kind and quiet voice, and if only we’d thought to vomit.

‘Hey Justine,’ whispered Karl, and when I turned to him he lunged for my chest, shoved his hand inside my blouse. Something slithered down my skin, a cool wet mass that came to rest at the waistband of my tunic. I knew he wanted me to scream.

‘Is that a cow’s eye?’ I said.

He was laughing too hard to answer.

I untucked my blouse and the thing plopped to the floor like some kind of clot, some awful part of me expelled from my body.

‘You’re such a moron, Karl,’ said Amy, but I didn’t think she meant it, because we had both agreed he looked like a Māori John Travolta, and we’d written his name in biro on our shoulders and thighs where nobody could see. I tucked myself in again and returned to my work, picking up my probe and starting to ease the retina away from the blind

 spot behind it.

‘All right, people, I need a volunteer,’ said Mrs Price. ‘Who’s going to clean this up for us?’ She waved at the vomit.

No one raised their hand.

‘You know we’re a team,’ she said. ‘A family. We help one another.’

Silence.

‘Do I need to choose someone myself?’

‘I’ll do it,’ said a voice next to me.

And there was the smile we all lived for, spilling across Mrs Price’s beautiful face.

‘Amy! Thank you, my darling. Go and see Mr Armstrong for a cloth and bucket.’

 

At lunchtime we went to the adventure playground where everything was immense, like the contents of a giant’s garden: huge tractor tyres set in concrete, and a row of stormwater pipes we could crawl right inside, and great wooden spools that had once held steel cable, and a climbing rope that stretched higher than was safe, surely, and that burned our hands and legs when we shinnied back down to the ground. Some of the younger girls were playing elastics, jumping in and out of the long stretchy band they hooked around their ankles, then knees, then thighs. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, they chanted. Inside, outside, puppy-dogs’ tails. Tangling and untangling themselves. Over on the field, other children gathered up handfuls of dry grass clippings and built them into hand-high walls. This is the living room. This is the bedroom. Here’s the kitchen. That’s the front door. The bossier ones assigned roles: I’m the mum and you’re the baby. I’m the big sister and you’re the grandma. You’re the dad and I’m a robber. You have to do what I say. Amy and I climbed into the stormwater pipes and leaned back against the cool interior. We opened our lunchboxes, and I gave Amy one of my cheese and Vegemite sandwiches, and she gave me one of her pork dumplings. Mostly she brought sandwiches or a filled roll, like the rest of us – she’d told her mother not to give her foreign things – but now and then Mrs Fong insisted on using up the leftovers. ...