The Memory Tree Read online

  Matt frowned as he realised the significance of Sarah’s words.

  ‘But our insurance devils are from this region,’ said Penny.

  ‘There’s the problem. Your gene pool is weak. Even if your ark animals do beat DFTD, the next thing will probably carry them off.’

  Penny looked as though she was going to apologise again, as if inbred devils were somehow her fault. Matt came to the rescue. ‘How can we help, Sarah?’

  ‘I need hair samples from as many devils as possible. My goal is to test each captive animal in the state, and a lot of the wild ones. I’ll run the samples through a genome sequencer and map them genetically. Then you guys can matchmake based on scientific principles, not guesswork. How does that sound?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Penny. ‘What does a genome sequencer look like?’

  ‘Like a fancy washing machine with a computer screen on top,’ said Sarah. ‘Back home, my lab looks like a high tech laundromat. Before the sequencers it was agonising work. Manual readings, a single genome divided between thousands of international project teams. Some scientists joked that they’d rather be executed than endure a stint on the sequencing chain gang. But today it’s almost routine.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘You take some DNA, the tiniest scrap will do: saliva, skin cells, even hair follicles from ancient hides. The machine chops it up in multiple ways, sequences the fragments, and jigsaws them back together.’

  Penny leaned further across the table. It was a wonder she wasn’t taking notes.

  ‘Think about tearing up fifty copies of a book,’ said Sarah. ‘Then mixing them up and trying to put them back together. You can’t imagine the sort of RAM it takes. But even so, the cost of sequencing keeps dropping and computers triple in speed each year. Before long, sequencers will sit in doctors’ offices and give you a personal genetic read-out while you wait.’

  The oven timer beeped a rude interruption. Penny headed to the kitchen with a disappointed expression on her face. ‘Show Sarah our babies while I serve up,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Let her feed Paddy if she likes.’

  Sarah looked doubtfully at Matt’s injured arm. ‘I’m not entirely useless,’ he assured her, and escorted Sarah to the dimly lit lounge room. A wood heater glowed in one corner. An owl hooted from atop a crowded bookshelf and a little wombat poked its nose out from under a frayed couch. A dozen pillowslips hung from low hooks along the wall, like Christmas stockings in an orphanage. Matt lifted a tiny wallaby from the nearest pouch and gave it to Sarah. The joey lay warm and wide-eyed, barely furred, cradled in the crook of her arm. Penny brought in a bottle of milk with an odd extended teat, handed it to Sarah and returned to the kitchen. Despite Sarah’s best efforts, the little pademelon refused to suckle. It twisted its head from side to side, spattering milk all about.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Matt eased Paddy from Sarah’s arms, sponged the joey clean, then expertly guided teat to mouth. Paddy fed in a greedy ecstasy of gangly legs and jutting tail. ‘Take this, will you? And give me that.’ Sarah took the empty bottle from his hand and substituted a tube of sorbolene. Matt massaged dollops of the cream into Paddy’s soft skin, all the while whispering sweet nothings. His fingers worked with delicate care.

  ‘Mum’s pouch was humid,’ he explained. ‘It kept Paddy’s skin supple. These artificial pouches are dry, so we need to use a lubricant.’ He took a damp cotton ball, massaged Paddy’s bottom, caught a smudge of faeces on a tissue and binned it. Then he washed the soiled fur, patted it dry, bundled Paddy up neatly in a clean bunny rug and replaced the sleepy youngster in its pouch.

  ‘You certainly are not useless,’ said Sarah as Penny came into the room and took the empty bottle. ‘Your husband’s amazing,’ Sarah said to her. ‘Such gentle hands.’

  Penny’s face softened and she favoured Matt with a smile. ‘He’s wonderful with the babies.’

  Sarah and Matt followed Penny to the kitchen. ‘You have such a lot of mouths to feed,’ said Sarah. ‘It must be hard work.’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Penny. ‘Hard and complicated work, but I don’t mind. I’m an orphan myself, so I know how they feel.’ Penny lifted the lid from a pot of steaming rice. ‘We need lots of different formulas. For possums, for wallabies, for wombats. Dasyurids like devils and quolls are different again.’ Penny pointed to a bench cluttered with tins and teats and bottles. ‘You’ve got four kinds of milk replacer for macropods, four for possums and gliders, more for echidnas and wombats. And another for the bats.’

  ‘The bats?’ asked Sarah.

  Penny pulled a casserole dish and foil-wrapped loaf from the oven. ‘Tasmania has eight species of bats. Only the little ones though, the microbats. We’ve six in the laundry right now. Matt, can you show Sarah the bats?’

  In the large laundry, a fridge and two industrial-sized chest freezers stood against one wall. Rows of cotton-lined wooden boxes sat on a table, secured at the top with taut flyscreens. Matt slipped on gloves and extracted a small grey bat from a box. It had an odd squashed nose, prominent ears and sharp thumb-claws on each satin wing. ‘Exhibit A … the large forest bat.’

  ‘But it’s so tiny,’ said Sarah in wonder.

  ‘As opposed to Exhibit B … the little forest bat.’ He extracted an even smaller bat, barely five centimetres long, with the tiniest hands and feet imaginable. ‘Montgomery’s not weaned yet.’ Matt held up a tiny syringe.

  Sarah stifled a giggle. ‘You’re kidding me. You feed that flying mini-mouse milk? And he’s called Montgomery?’

  * * *

  All through their dinner of vegetable curry, Sarah was full of batty questions.

  ‘They fly around the lounge room at night to exercise their wings,’ said Penny. ‘Of course, we put Hedwig away first.’ The bookshelf owl hooted on cue from the lounge room.

  ‘They’re rodents, right? Like mice?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Ever heard of a mouse with echo-location radar?’ said Matt.

  ‘Speaking of flying mice …’ said Penny.

  ‘Here we go.’ Matt settled back in his chair.

  Penny was a taxidermist. She held a licence to mount native animals, and wanted to set up a museum at the Sanctuary. State law meant she couldn’t sell natives, but she was already earning extra money stuffing dead pets for grieving owners. She made jewellery from bits and pieces of non-natives, using rabbit tails and feathers and fins. Penny’s bestselling brooch was a mouse, with rhinestones for eyes and a tail cast in bronze. At Christmas time she made tree decorations, picking the prettiest white mice from the reptile feeder packs, stuffing them with cotton balls and attaching tiny angel wings sourced from craft shops.

  Penny jumped up from the table and returned with a container of tiny stuffed mice angels, not much bigger than Montgomery. Sarah examined one, stroked its snowy fur and traced the wire in its wings with her finger. ‘These are cute,’ said Sarah. ‘Bizarre … but cute.’ Penny looked pleased and fetched some trays of mouse jewellery to the table. Sarah oohed and aahed politely.

  ‘Wherever did you get the idea?’

  ‘My great-great-something-grandmother came here from England in 1856 to mount specimens for the Royal Society. She ended up a taxidermist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Ten pounds a month, same pay as the men. She ran a business with her daughter. They won medals at all sorts of international shows. They might have even mounted that devil you saw in the Chicago museum.’ From the sideboard drawer, Penny extracted a yellowed newspaper clipping in a plastic sleeve. The 1893 article about the World Taxidermy Exposition in Chicago announced Mrs Jane Tost and Mrs Ada Rohu as winner and runner-up of the Supreme Champion Exhibit. It went on to claim that ‘… a good deal of bird and animal stuffing in Australia is performed, oddly enough, by females.’

  ‘Okay, but that was centuries ago,’ said Sarah. ‘What made you want to do it?’

  Matt watched Penny check herself. Her strange passion wasn’t something she usually talked about, for she rarely got a good resp
onse.

  ‘Go on,’ said Sarah. ‘You have to tell me.’

  ‘Well … death and life go hand in hand, don’t they? I want to create my own museum here at Binburra.’

  Sarah considered this. ‘What was it like the first time?’

  ‘I thought I mightn’t be able to do it, but it’s not like there’s blood and guts everywhere. When you strip the skin, the body’s quite neat, contained in muscle. It’s beautiful really …’

  Sarah had that look on her face, the one Matt had seen too often when Penny explained her odd hobby. A combination of distaste and incomprehension.

  ‘I’ll get dessert,’ said Penny, and hurried to the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s hear about you then, Dr Deville,’ said Matt. ‘Why are you so interested in our little bats?’

  ‘As a kid, at twilight, I’d watch little bats dip in and out of pools of lamplight in the park. I called them my shadow angels. Now they’re gone. I still look for them, but haven’t seen one in years.’ She sounded suddenly sad. ‘I think pesticides killed them off. City Hall uses a lot of pesticides these days. Climate change has people scared of mosquito-borne tropical diseases, like West Nile virus and malaria.’

  Sarah picked up her wine glass, then put it back down as Matt began to speak. ‘Bats are top insect predators. They’ll eat their weight in mozzies each night. Without your shadow angels, mozzies will swarm back in ten times the numbers, and immune to pesticides to boot. The bats won’t bounce back like that.’

  ‘Don’t they have big litters, like mice?’

  Matt shook his head. ‘I told you. They’re not like mice. They’re like us. Just one, maybe two babies at a time.’

  Penny came in with cheesecake and coffee. She caught the end of the conversation. ‘One out of every five mammals alive on earth at this very moment is a bat,’ she said. ‘People don’t realise.’ The conversation ground to a halt. Penny began to serve dessert.

  Sarah waved her hand. ‘None for me. It’s late. I should let you guys get to bed.’

  Penny looked bereft. ‘Not even coffee?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Sarah. ‘Well, I’ll see you in a few weeks when you come to Hobart. By the way, do you have a name for your little jewellery line?’

  ‘Memento Mori,’ said Penny

  ‘And it means?’

  ‘Aah … it means ‘Remember you shall die.’

  Sarah smiled a tight smile and turned to leave.

  ‘I’ll walk you to the car,’ said Penny, finding a torch and turning on the outside light.

  Sarah held up her hand. ‘No need.’ She let herself out.

  Matt and Penny moved as one to the window and stood side by side, watching her leave. Sarah paused for a moment in the glow of a single cobwebbed verandah globe, then stepped into the darkness. A minute later her headlights blinked on.

  ‘That went well,’ said Matt, when she was finally gone.

  Penny groaned and lay her head on his shoulder. ‘You wash, I’ll dry.’

  Chapter 5

  Penny had waited weeks for Sarah to ask her to Hobart, and the invitation had finally come. On the way into town they stopped at the old zoo site.

  ‘I never did like it here,’ said Penny.

  Sarah gazed about and nodded. ‘It’s certainly not what I imagined.’

  They stood beside a busy road, in front of a tall pair of padlocked gates on the edge of Hobart’s Queens Domain parklands. Not the original gates – they were long gone. White letters, set in a high steel frame, spelt out Beaumaris Zoo across a blue-tiled background bordered in red.

  Once upon a time this quiet place shook to the roar of lions, the screech of monkeys and the coughing barks of Tasmanian tigers. Once there were turnstiles and ticket collectors and Sunday families. Now, forlorn animal sculptures of beaten tin guarded the gates. One of them was a sad-looking thylacine.

  Sarah peered through the iron bars, past a few derelict wooden buildings set in a bare, rocky hillside. A two-metre chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire, secured the grim site. ‘So this is where the last one died?’

  ‘In 1936. There’s not much to see now,’ said Penny. ‘The site’s contaminated. The Navy used it for fuel storage after the zoo closed.’

  ‘What a wasted opportunity,’ said Sarah, shaking her head. ‘Back home this place would be a tourist attraction. There’d at least be some sort of memorial.’ Sarah read a sign on the gate. ‘It says here that a woman started the zoo?’

  ‘Mary Grant Roberts – a real hero of mine. The first person to breed devils and publish the findings. That was back in 1915, and I still use her notes today. She really liked devils, tried to give them an image makeover.’

  Sarah rattled the gates.

  ‘It’s private property,’ said Penny. ‘You can’t go in.’

  Sarah slipped through a break in the wire and headed up the hill. Penny looked around to see if anybody was watching, then climbed through the gap and set off after her. She caught up with Sarah high on the hill, at the ruins of a circular stone enclosure.

  ‘The old polar bear pit,’ said Penny. ‘The thylacines were over there.’ She pointed behind the wrecked walls. ‘There’s nothing left of their pen now.’

  ‘Polar bears?’ asked Sarah. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘The zoo held all sorts of exotics,’ said Penny. ‘Lions and tigers. Monkeys and zebras and elephants. A leopard that went for a daily walk on a leash around The Domain. Thylacines didn’t attract much interest from the public back then.’

  ‘The fools didn’t realise what they had.’ Sarah turned to face the sweeping panorama across the Derwent River. A cold wind whipped off the water. ‘And now Tasmanian tigers are gone.’

  ‘Is anything ever really gone?’ said Penny. ‘They were here just a blink ago. There are traces of them everywhere – in the rivers, in the trees. We’re breathing the same air they did …’ She kicked at a rock. ‘Walking the same ground. Look back in time and they’re just behind us. Look too far ahead and we’re gone too.’

  ‘You make it sound like a ghost story,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  Penny couldn’t bear it any longer – the air of neglect and squandered chance, the sense of loss. Tasmania could be the loveliest place on earth and the saddest all at once. She ran down the hill, squeezed back through the fence and waited in the car. Penny didn’t like people to deliberately flout the rules, but she’d make an exception for Sarah, the way she had for Matt. He’d done the very same thing last time they were here.

  No matter. Here came Sarah now, and in a few minutes they’d be in Macquarie Street, stepping into Penny’s favourite place – the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It didn’t matter how often she visited the eternal twilight of its corridors, its last-century dioramas and ancient art. She always got that delicious, anticipatory tingle, and today would be more special than usual. Today she was helping Sarah collect hair samples from the museum’s historical devil collection.

  Sarah reached the car. How did she manage to always look so good? Penny caught her own reflection in the mirror. Hair a mess, half out of its band. Frizzy, stray locks dangling down her face. Sarah’s hair merely looked fashionably wind-swept.

  Penny swung sharply into the light traffic stream, heading south into Hobart along the Domain Highway. Her mind wasn’t really on the driving. A few impatient beeps didn’t bother her, not on a day like today. Not when the fun was about to begin.

  * * *

  The basement vault smelled like a funeral home and was filled with treasures. They were onto their thirteenth devil; this one a joey, poorly preserved and thinly furred. Barely enough hair to collect a decent sample. Penny heaved a great contented sigh. What a privilege to have access to the specimen stacks, to dozens of devils she could otherwise have never hoped to see. Such an incredible range of taxidermies. Some good, some bad, some complete aberrations; hack jobs, turning the devils into freakish crosses between bug-eyed weasels and cringing beave
rs. Patrick Duff, curator of vertebrate zoology, was a sallow man, who looked half embalmed himself. He brought out the next specimen, a jewel by comparison to the rest. So real, it might at any moment escape its frame.

  Penny couldn’t resist a delighted squeal. ‘That’s an Alison Reid.’

  Patrick’s lips split in a bloodless smile.

  ‘Alison Reid?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Last person to run the Hobart Zoo, the one who walked that leopard round The Domain,’ said Penny. ‘Her father was the curator. When he died in 1935 she unofficially took over.’

  ‘Miss Reid was also a brilliant taxidermist,’ said Patrick, ‘as evidenced by this mount.’ He beamed at the stuffed devil. ‘Years ahead of her time and an unfortunate victim of the patriarchy – denied the curatorship because nobody believed a woman could run the zoo. Truth was, she was the only person qualified to do so. It folded within months of her being forced out.’

  Sarah placed the latest sample into her insulated bag. ‘Enough morbid talk.’ She smiled her perfect smile. ‘Take me to lunch, Patrick.’ Penny gave a little groan. ‘Penny’s hungry as well,’ said Sarah. ‘I heard her tummy rumble.’

  It couldn’t be lunchtime already. The last thing Penny wanted was to be dragged away from the collection.

  ‘I know just the place.’ Patrick peeled surgical gloves from his elegant white hands. ‘Meet you at the cafe in a jiffy.’ He disappeared up the stairs.

  ‘Salamanca Market is on today,’ said Penny. ‘We could have a quick browse? Get something to eat there instead?’

  Sarah looked unimpressed at the prospect of lunching at a street stall. ‘Let’s wait for Patrick. He already has a place in mind.’

  On their way to the courtyard cafe they passed through the Indigenous gallery. Sarah stopped to stare at a portrait of an Aboriginal man holding a firestick.