On a day filled with sunshine and promise I left the house with my daughter’s two dogs attached to their respective leads and we went walking through the streets of Hawthorn, as is my habit while they’re in our care, twice each day.
On this day earlier in the afternoon than usual, the dogs are sniffing the nature strip of a posh house complete with central bird bath when we meet a woman on the street.
A woman a decade or so younger than me, which does not make her young. Her hair dyed black, and too harsh for her pale skin which gives her an other-worldly appeal, she is also dressed in black. Black blouse, trousers and jacket. The only colour a slash of bright red across her lips.
She stops as I approach, as if wanting to ask a question. I’m wary when I travel with the dogs these days, when it comes to the advance of other dogs but this woman is alone, dogless and seemingly harmless. Nor does she look homeless.
I’m wearing earphones into my latest audiobook Flashlight, which fills me with fear and suspicion given I’m learning about the kidnapping of Korean and Japanese citizens from Japan during the 1970s, a time in my life when I was beginning my career in therapy and getting married here in Australia.
I had no idea such terrible things happened in the shadow of communist fears and that North Korea was capturing select Korean and Japanese citizens in order to get them back to North Korea to retrain them through cruelty and propaganda to become spies who could infiltrate other places and seek to empower the North Korean regime before it fell apart. After its leader died decades later.
The book fills me with awe and trembling to read about the cruelty imposed on one of our central characters whose name changes from Soek to Hiroshi to Serk as he moves from place to place and is kidnapped and presumed drowned by the Japanese and Americans, his family as well as the world at large.
My mind filled with the mysteries of his disappearance, this woman proffered her hand towards the dogs and looked about to speak. I pulled out my ear phones.
Do you live in this street? She asked. I told her no.
‘Just walking your dogs then? She asked as if it was not obvious. ‘I’m a cat person,’ she went on and moved her hand towards the labradoodle.
The dog shrunk back.
‘Do they bite?’ the woman asked undeterred
‘No. She’s just shy.’ Then the Jack Russell jumped up to lick her hand. I pulled the dog back and made to continue our journey.
This woman herself seemed timid but keen on some sort of conversation so though her style had a question mark to it such I could not figure out what she was hoping for, she seemed harmless enough.
We said goodbye and the woman pulled into a house one door down from where we stood. I watched her enter her gate and she was gone.
Then I crossed the road to reach the lane I cut through on my way home.
As we walked through yet another open gate way, the dogs began to bark. Ensconced in my book once more I could not see what the commotion was about.
No dogs on the horizon, then the Jack Russell dragged at her lead to get onto the pathway beyond the open gate and I saw the fluff ball of a black cat puffed up like a porcupine and hissing like Scarface claw.
The Jack Russell was snarling and pulling at her lead to get to this monster and I yanked both dogs away beyond the open gate. As I did so,the Jack Russel mid snarl at the cat clamped her teeth down on my trouser leg, enough to draw blood.
Not a deep wound mind – no hole in my trousers – but it gave me a shock. This dog the sweetest of dogs and I have never before been bitten by a dog.
So I raced the dogs home and on my husband’s recommendation applied his favourite antidote to all minor ailments, a generous splash of ti-tree oil.
It stung like a knife had passed through but healed quickly and in time I forgave the dog.
That night thinking about the events of the day, I put together the strange woman in black, lover of cats and her question as to whether the dogs bite with my encounter with the black cat and subsequent dog bite. As if in some uncanny way she had predicted my future.
og bites, Scarface Claw, I am not prone to superstition, but I can enter a paranoid world as fast as the next person. Now every time I walk along this street I avoid the side of the open gate and walk swiftly past the house the woman entered to avoid any further encounters
Such a strange process, how we encounter the unexpected and it morphs in memory to something bigger and more meaningful than it might otherwise. The book, the bite and a cat.