‘Any fluttering or flapping?’ Bridie asked. ‘Peeping or chirping? Squealing?’
‘No, just the scratching.’
Bridie nodded, took a hair tie from around her wrist and put her hair up. With her hair in a high ponytail she looked fifteen, not eighteen, picking her way to the side of the fireplace over the posh rugs and travertine tiles like she was worried about devaluing the property just by being there. She went to the fireplace and peered in through the glass panel at the front, which was clouded with brown smoke-stains. I watched her cup her bare hands around the stainless-steel flue running from the top of the fireplace directly into the ceiling twenty feet above us. Bridie bent and put her nose to the seam where the tubular flue met the black top of the fireplace and sniffed loudly, drawing a deep chestful of air through her nose. She straightened, put her hands on her hips and announced, ‘It’s an adult male brush-tailed possum.’
The couple looked from Bridie to me and back to Bridie.
‘What?’ The woman frowned. ‘How can you tell that?’
‘If it was a bird or a rat it would have been crying out after it fell in, calling for its mate or its pack to come get it,’ Bridie said. ‘A possum would be silent. It wouldn’t want to draw attention to itself. And it’s the animal that makes the most sense. Possums climb down people’s chimneys all the time. If it rains, sometimes they come in search of shelter, find they can’t get back up the flue because it’s too smooth inside. Or sometimes a male will chase another male down there in a fight over territory.’
‘But how do you know the species? And the gender?’ Damien asked. ‘You can’t smell that, surely.’
‘I can. It’s definitely male, just from the strength of the odour. But as far as species goes: whatever it is, it’s so large it’s filling the entire base of the chimney flue.’ Bridie cupped the flue again with her hands, which was about the circumference of a bread plate. ‘I can feel the warmth of its body through the metal. That says brushie to me, not ringtail.’ She turned to Myra. ‘Do you want to feel?’
‘Not one bit.’ Myra clutched at the neck of her linen thing, actually took a step back. ‘No, thank you. I won’t be coming anywhere near it. I know they can be quite vicious.’
‘I wouldn’t use that word exactly.’ Bridie crouched and eased the lever of the fireplace door down carefully, pried the door open a crack. ‘They get pretty scared and put on a performance, but they’re not gonna kill you.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Damien’s arms were folded. He nodded at me. ‘Isn’t now the time for you to get involved, mate? Before it comes flying out?’
‘I have nothing to do with this.’ I put my hands up again. ‘I’m just here for my good looks and sparkling personality.’
‘Butyou’renot going to remove it.’ Myra stepped towards Bridie, her face taut with apprehension, as though she meant to pull the girl back from the fireplace. ‘It’s—You should—It shouldn’t beherthat does it. It should be you.’
‘Why?’ I frowned.
‘Well, because it’s—it’s—it’s—’
‘It’s a wild animal!’ Damien blurted.
‘Yes, so I’ll be leaving it to the experts.’ I waved at Bridie. I saw a hint of a smile creep onto my child’s face, even though she was crouched at the fireplace and turned away from me. Myra and Damien made unconvinced noises as Bridie bent, peering into the area where the flue met the top of the fireplace.
‘But, darling,’ Myra persisted, ‘shouldn’t you put some gloves on or something?’
‘Look, usually I would.’ Bridie shifted something aside at the back of the fireplace. ‘But I’m working blind here. I like to feel exactly what part of the animal I’m grabbing hold of.’
‘Oh my god.’ Myra held her brow.
‘What I’m going to do,’ Bridie said, ‘is shift the plate that separates the flue and the fireplace forward just enough so that I can get a hand in. Then I’m gonna grab his ankles and his tail and pull him out backwards.’
Myra turned away, her hand to her mouth. ‘I can’t watch, Damien. I just can’t. She’s going to get savaged.’
‘She knows what she’s doing,’ I said. Bridie looked over her shoulder at me. Even though I could only see her eyes, I saw that they were bright. I jutted my chin, my mind filled with guilt about the lack of confidence I’d shown in my kid in the houseboat for her serial killer theory. ‘She’s trained, and she’s experienced. Just give her some space and let her do her thing.’
Myra, Damien and I watched as Bridie gently manipulated the steel plate from its housing, dealing with the weight of the animal on the plate and rust and ash and grit lodged between the plate and the roof of the fireplace. I had memories of driving Georgia to these kinds of rescues when Bridie was so small she would just sit nearby on the carpet, her eyes locked on her mother and her thumb in her mouth. I’d always encouraged my wife’s love of animal rescue volunteering and my daughter’s similar fascination with it, because in my own childhood I’d had to accompany my father on hunts, and I felt bad about the psychopathic joy he’d taken in killing and hurting things, and my inability to intervene. Or, early on, my plain childlike ignorance of the pain and suffering of those animals. I felt I owed a debt to animal kind in general.
Bridie lunged suddenly forward and upwards and grabbed something. An almighty moaning, hoarse and wild, echoed up the hollow flue, followed by the frantic scrabbling of claws on steel. Myra had both her hands to her mouth and Damien was by her side, transfixed. Bridie was gently consoling the creature that was doing its best to escape her clutches in the chimney flue. In time she had both hands in the fireplace, twisting and manipulating its limbs, unhooking its claws from holds, as she wrestled it backwards out of the tube.
‘Don’t be silly, now,’ she was cooing. ‘Come on. Come on. Comeon, you big baby.’
The possum Bridie birthed from the chimney and dropped into her rescue cage was twice the size of a house cat, tawny-brown all over with black ears and the iconic bushy black tail. Its huge orange eyes yawned in terror as it did a lap of the cage, throwing itself at the bars, standing on its hind legs and trying to find a way out the top. Bridie clipped the cage closed with all the quiet elegance of a woman who had just plucked a piece of lint from her cashmere cardigan. Her hands were free of scratches and bites. She draped a towel over the cage and stood again, hands on her hips, the mortified rich couple and her unspeakably proud father watching her.
At the bottom of the driveway leading to Grevillea Lodge, Bridie took the enormous possum out of the cage, swathed its head in a towel and sat it on her lap like a teddy bear facing outwards, doing a series of checks while it groaned and hissed. I supposed she was looking to see if it had been injured while doing its Santa Claus impression. I sat nearby on the sandstone wall, now and then fielding texts about Chloe Lutz and watching as she plucked out the possum’s fleshy paws and inspected its sharply clawed toes.
‘I think he’s fine,’ she said, returning the squabbling, hissing creature to the cage and replacing the towel on top. ‘But I’ve got to get approval from the area coordinator before I let him loose.’
She started typing out a text, the gold glow of the ’Stang’s cabin lights making the tip of her ponytail look white and aflame. ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said as she worked.
