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“The high priestess spake truths that totally aligned with my mind-set. Amorous as she was of my paradigm, she hath summoned Mitch and thrown him from a great height and the economics scholar is no longer. Long live Erasmus.”
Which May understood to mean that the student counselor had empathized with Mitch’s need to segue into this new and possibly more liberated persona, a notion May thought both ridiculous and dangerous, but given that she herself had visited the student counselor (an aging hippie with a penchant for the esoteric) once or twice, it was plausible.
“You mean, great Erasmus”—fuck, she hated the sound of her own groveling voice—“Mitch, the economics student, is no longer of this world?”
“World, street, lecture hall, and alas, fair maiden, of the matrimonial bed.”
This last item took May by surprise—she’d never considered Mitch a de facto, never mind a husband, despite having lived with him for the past two years. He was more a kind of pleasant passing phase, which she now reflected might have been somewhat of a misjudgment. But what exactly did he mean? That she was to sleep with Erasmus from now on, and if so, how would this affect their lovemaking?
She glanced over at the aspiring warlock. She’d been quite content with their lovemaking before; if a little predictable it was at least regular and enthusiastic. Mitch had been a good lover and if it was difficult to read his emotional responses it wasn’t for lack of interest on his part. Now Mitch alias Erasmus suddenly grinned wolfishly at her, a fiber of raw meat still clinging to one tooth. Nope, there was nothing remotely sexy about this current manifestation of Mitch’s personality. The meat fiber slipped off, dangling for a moment on his unshaven chin before falling to the kitchen floor. May made her mind up. Sharing a bed with Erasmus was not going to work; but could she rescue Mitch? He was, after all, her boyfriend.
“So there’s no way I can summon the human individual Mitch back into this portal that standeth before me?” May asked, wincing at her own pseudo-Shakespeare speak sprinkled with a little postmodern techno-talk that appeared to be warlock dialect to Mitch.
“Not a hope in hell,” Mitch alias Erasmus answered cheerfully, then smashed the hammer into the bench top as if he were finishing off the human Mitch himself. May tried not to jump at the noise. Saddened and more than a little scared, she eyed the bloodied hammer cautiously, then backed a little closer to the door to contemplate her options, knowing that some strategy would have to be applied to remove the warlock from both kitchen and house. One woman’s warlock is another woman’s schizophrenic, she observed, then determined that self-preservation was probably the only course of action.
“Oh great Erasmus, I, a mere female human, am not worthy of being a repository for your great and mighty organ. . . .” she began, remembering that Mitch had always been slightly sensitive about the size of his penis. “You have greater and more powerful horizons to conquer; therefore I release you from the confines of this cottage. . . .” she concluded, trying to remember whether warlocks belonged to the village scenario as opposed to the castle scenario. At which Erasmus alias Mitch dropped suddenly to his knees and began to rub his head against her knee like a dog.
“You are right, prophetess. I am destined for greater things and distant lands. I will leave by the next full moon.” A statement that had May desperately scanning the calendar hanging over the fridge. To her great relief, the full moon appeared to be two days hence.
“But you’ll have to pack first,” she quickly replied, then patted the warlock on the head.
The next afternoon, after May had made several clandestine phone calls to Mitch’s mother, Erasmus stood in the front courtyard surrounded by cardboard boxes packed with his possessions. The economics student was still wearing the kilt and hadn’t shaved or washed. He was standing stock-still, his arms outstretched and his face turned up toward the sun as if he were in a state of worship. May stood at some distance, praying that Mitch’s mother, a feisty criminal lawyer who’d brought Mitch up single-handedly, would, for once, be on time. May tried not to stare at the aspirant sorcerer and she also tried to resist the temptation to throw her arms around him and say, “Stop, Mitch, it’s May here, it’s okay to be normal now.” Just then he made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a bark or a howl, and May reached for her mobile hidden in her skirt pocket, her fingers curling around it for comfort, trying to reassure herself that at least the police were only a phone call away.
She felt like crying. It was like Mitch had died; she might never see him again and she hadn’t been able to say a proper good-bye. Meanwhile Mitch alias Erasmus started running from one end of the short street to the other, backward and forward past their gate. Christ, he looked completely demented, May thought to herself. Neither of them had slept all night. Instead he’d spent the night prowling naked around the tiny concreted backyard, occasionally stopping to genuflect toward the moon. It required all of May’s charm and diplomatic skills, as well as the reassurance that he would be gone by the next night, to dissuade the neighbors from calling the police. Curiously, Mitch alias Erasmus did not seem emotionally affected by their approaching separation. If anything he appeared cheerful, relieved even, which made May suspect that perhaps Mitch had unconsciously wanted to leave her anyhow. Exhausted and near tears, she leaned against the front gate, determined not to get upset in case this triggered some unexpected reaction in her ex-lover.
Mitch’s mother was due any minute and there was still no sign of Mitch reemerging from under the hairy mantle of Erasmus. If anything, the warlock persona appeared to have gained in strength: the five o’clock shadow on his chin had become a stubbly beard, his thick black unbrushed hair looked as if it was about to divide itself into dreadlocks, and he’d taken to muttering incantations, which had terrified the Vietnamese postman earlier that morning.
As May watched him, a great sadness anchored her to the pavement. Would he ever recover or would he end up like her older brother, medicated and only half-functional? She couldn’t bear thinking about it. She glanced back at their apartment, where another, more pressing issue awaited her attention—the rent, which was due in four days. May knew she didn’t have enough money in the bank to cover it, and she couldn’t afford to be late with the payment. Accommodation was really scarce for students; she couldn’t afford to lose the flat and yet she couldn’t afford to keep it on alone.
Just then Mitch’s mother’s car swung into the quiet suburban street. Mitch alias Erasmus, recognizing the car, ran back to the gate and suddenly reached down behind some bushes. He pulled out a large cardboard box, from which came loud scratching noises. Smiling at her, he thrust the mysterious box into May’s hands.
“His name is Shadow, he is a familiar, he will protect you. This is my last gift to you, oh faithful female of the human species.” May was too frightened to ask what was inside, just in case it was something odd like a rat or a possum.
She watched the Lexus drive off. Already she could see Mitch’s mother arguing with her son inside the car. Surprisingly, now that he was gone she felt nothing but relief. Had she really loved Mitch, she wondered, or had he just been a financial convenience? As if to answer, a loud scratching suddenly sounded from the cardboard box. May rested it against the garden wall and opened the lid. Inside, a black cat peered out with uncannily intelligent eyes—there even appeared to be a glint of amusement in them. “Shadow,” she said to the creature. The cat did not reply.
Sitting at her desk later that evening, May booted up her computer and posted a “Flatmate wanted” ad on the university website. Shadow, who was endowed with great feline beauty, sat curled by her feet. To her relief he seemed to be remarkably self-contained, which was just as well, as May was neither a cat person nor even a dog person. Pets worried her: they merely embodied more responsibility and expense, and cat food was one cost she knew she couldn’t afford.
She picked the animal up, placing h
im on her lap. He was large for a cat, almost the size of a dog, with huge thin-skinned ears rising up from a noble, narrow skull. His only flaw was that part of his left ear was missing, as if it had been bitten off in a fight. Apart from that he was perfect. His eyes were large and green and unfathomable. His whiskers, feathery and long, seemed to quiver in the slightest breeze, and his fur, although dense and short, had a texture and touch that reminded May of very expensive silk. It was a dense black with hints of what almost looked like purple under the light. And the animal didn’t seem to purr so much as growl—a low, almost mechanical sound, like an engine running. She stared down thoughtfully, caressing him under the chin and behind the ears, his eyes half-closed in ecstasy. Shadow butted his head against her breasts as if to say, “More, more . . .”
The animal seemed a strange legacy for Mitch to leave. They’d never talked about having a cat, and, like her, he’d always seemed indifferent to pets. Now that he’d left, the reality of his departure had begun to dawn on May—a growing melancholy infused with a sense of both guilt and futility. Should she have fought harder? Should she have been more active in finding him help?
Casting a cold anthropological eye over the situation, she wondered at her own callousness and reluctance to get involved. The childhood trauma of her brother’s own breakdown flooded back. She had been nine at the time and her brother, older by some years, had suddenly started to hoard silver milk-bottle tops obsessively, convinced that laid out in the right order they would send psychic messages to aliens. Eventually May’s parents had him committed to a psychiatric unit. He returned a few weeks later, sluggish and dim-witted on the drugs they had prescribed. He’d never really recovered and May had withdrawn from him, having little to do with him as a teenager, but she now remembered the faint revulsion and her unutterable fear that she might later develop whatever her brother had. Was this why she’d been so ruthlessly pragmatic with Mitch? Had his mental illness awoken a hidden terror of her own?
Unable to concentrate on her studies, May glanced over into the sparse bedroom. Mitch’s cupboard door had swung open, forlorn and abandoned. The bed was stripped and the side table that had housed Mitch’s collection of knickknacks—a framed photograph of Donald Trump, a school rugby prize (a small battered silver cup), a Rabbitohs footy scarf, a salt shaker he had stolen from a restaurant as a memento of their first date together, and, most telling, his first issue of Warlock, with Marvel comics character Adam Warlock on the cover circa 1975—were all gone, swept away in his disappearance. She glanced back to the bed; the prospect of sleeping alone was daunting.
Resigned, May settled down on the couch to watch TV, determined to exorcise the emptiness that had now begun to slip into the shadowy corners. The cat followed her and after leaping up beside her in territorial fashion, curled up against her as she reached for the remote. Comforted, May turned the television on. Immediately images of another teenage witch series filled the screen. With the sound muted, May watched in fascinated horror as a young man in a suit turned into a warlock in a flash of white smoke. He looked nothing like Mitch, she noted, but the idea that such a prosaic storyline could have triggered Mitch’s breakdown was depressing in itself.
She switched channels and wasted an hour watching a documentary on the seasonal migration of stingrays from Mexico to Florida—thousands of them—cow-nosed rays flying through the sea, their elegant yellow fin wings arcing slowly through the ocean depths in a timeless aquatic flight, a soothing distraction for May’s overwrought emotions. Watching them made her want to be one of them. She imagined there would be great security in being one of many swimming along, seamlessly integrated into both their environment and their species, the cool ocean rippling across one’s fins. No madness there. No unexplained warlocks or material greed rocking the world.
Around eleven p.m. she decided she would have to confront her fears and sleep in the empty bed. As if guessing her reluctance Shadow stretched his back, then leapt down. The cat padded silently on his long, elegant legs toward the bedroom as if he already knew the way and had taken that path a thousand times before. Bemused, May followed him. By the time she arrived at the door he was already on the bed, laid out in an elegant arc across the side Mitch used to sleep on.
She switched on the bedside lamp and began undressing with her back to the cat. Suddenly she stopped. Unease swept across her body like a shiver as she was filled with a strong sense of being watched. She swung around. The animal was sitting upright staring directly at her, his eyes filled with an extraordinary human intelligence. It was uncanny.
“Stop looking at me, you fur-covered pervert.” May spoke out loud in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. But the animal took no notice whatsoever. Instead his gaze panned slowly down her half-naked torso with the kind of appraisal May would normally have associated with a man. It was both disturbing and highly intrusive. May pulled an old dressing gown off the hook on the back of the bedroom door and covered herself, then retreated to the bathroom, making sure the door was closed behind her. She stared into the bathroom cabinet mirror.
“This isn’t rational,” she told her reflection, the stress of the past two days now beginning to show in her eyes and thin-lipped mouth. “It’s only a cat, May, a harmless feline, incapable of anything remotely like human emotion. You’re being paranoid, and even if your nut of an ex-boyfriend who thinks he’s a friggin’ warlock gave you the beast, it doesn’t mean the creature itself is bewitched,” she finished, failing to convince herself. Was she losing her sanity, the way her brother had? Was Mitch’s condition contagious in some strange way? After all, she was also under similar stress, her own finals looming in a month or so, with no prospect of employment. Was it possible his breakdown could trigger one of her own?
