The Whisper Coming Back

"M turns out of the creek, squeezes through the fringe of riparian scrub onto the springy orange-tinted coral fern, side-stepping potholes and moss pincushions so green they are almost phosphorescent. And where the pad first slinks into the bush he drops his pack, for this is where he will set his snare. He finds his wire, pegs and straight stick as he had left them, thinking: With this patina of rain and dirt they are no longer newcomers and, no longer new, they are not to be feared ... So works the oldest trick in the book ... The thing that will snatch you up into the air has been lying dormant all along. Then he searches around for a sapling, something long and thin and flexible, and in half an hour he has found one. On either side of the pad he hammers in a graphite peg; into each peg a notch has been cut at the height of a tiger's chest" (46).

"Then I saw that there is a neatness about tragedy -- it looks perfect, as false things so often do: fake blood in all the right places, pretty victims, stately burials and then silence. It is all glorious and conceited. But nothing is worse than disgrace. It is lonely and irreversible -- a terrible mess. The loud snorting laughter it produces is worse than anguish. Having to live through a disgrace is worse than dying.

All your secrets in a twisted form belong to everyone else -- and you are in the dark. That was how I felt then, guessing at what was going on; and I didn't know the half of it. Nothing truthful was revealed, but a version of events emerged. It was like a badly wrapped parcel coming apart --slowly at first, just stains producing rips and leaks, and then more quickly collapsing until it was all loose string and flaps and crumpled wrapping, and something dark and slimy showing through, and finally flopping on to the floor in full view, while people said, 'Oh, God, what's that?'" (57).