We lugged our mattress along the floor and squeezed it through the opening into the kitchen and let it fall to the ground, a pale faux wood vinyl atop a concrete slab we would come to discover was painted the same blood red as the walls of our maroon galley kitchen. This would be our bed for the night, refusing to sleep anywhere near the decades old shagpile carpet that covered every inch of the rest of the house, not cleaned in as many years as it seemed entirely covered in the full scope of all that is sticky and left a film on one’s feet. It would be first to go.
We could’ve slept on rocks that night, our first night at Little Oak and we would’ve slumbered like babes, falling asleep the most contented we had ever been, standing on the very cusp of our big adventure, the masters of our own destiny, at last. We talked into the dark, marvelling at every detail of our day; the birds, the light, the air, the space, the view, the plans, the dreams, the visions. It would all be waiting when we woke but we woke long before morning.
We had barely drifted off to sleep when we were shot upright by the most harrowing screams that filled the pitch black abyss that was night time in the country, with the most horrifying sound, that pushed us straight back down and under the covers.
“What. The. Hell. Was that?”, we whispered into the shadows, seeing the whites of eachother’s eyes through the dark an inch from eachother’s faces. We did not answer, we just sat completely still in silence and listened to the spine-chilling squalls and growls and screeches so loud it seemed as though they were beside us in the bed.
My brain scrambled to identify it and then suddenly, down somewhere in the depths of my childhood memories amongst Gem and Cabbage Patch Dolls, divorce and Athletic Carnivals, lay the answer. Buried in the farthest recesses of a brain that seemed to forget nothing of a childhood equally as magical as it was harrowing, lay the once seemingly inconsequential information acquired from every animal documentary I’d ever watched with my late father and there had been many.
Tassie Devils, it was the bloodcurdling screams of the Tassie Devil and I remember thinking, no wonder the early settlers called it what they did after hearing them. It was an extraordinary sound to come from such a small creature, disturbingly demonic, especially from out of the pitch black in a place that felt so wild then. It would appear they seemed to have set up camp under the cottage and we laughed into the dark and our eyes, adjusted to the dark, met and smiled. What could have been a more Tasmanian welcome than that, on our first night?
Kermit sat in the driveway, repaired just enough to function by a mechanic friendly enough to open on a Sunday and rescue the two stranded city slickers from the side of the Southern Outlet. Our rusted out green steed would live to fight another precarious day with us at the wheel, now tempting fate beneath an old gum that had a lean on it like the Tower of Pisa toward the little cream cottage and her peeling paint. It was perfectly in position to take out the crude extension to the original 1800’s weatherboard footprint of a perfect cube that, as decayed as it was, was undeniably essential to keep, as it was home to the kitchen, and our makeshift bedroom while we dealt with the floors. We put a rush on getting one of the bedrooms carpet free so we didn’t have to sleep beneath impending death.
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