Matilda’s eyes are so big and damp I can see my reflection.

They quiver as she speaks. “Go out and talk to them, David. If you want to.”

“Who?” I ask. “How do you know what I want?”

“What? David, I’m just saying…”

“You’re not listening to me,” I hiss.

Matilda inhales, exhales. “Alright, okay. What do you want to say?”

I shrug.

“Look… if you want to, if you think you can, talk to them.”

“Who?” I say, my hands flying upwards. I know who.

“I don’t know, David,” she says, dabbing her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan. She looks back at me, assuming a calm expression, but her voice is small. “The animals?”

I snort. Easy for her to say.

Nature builds eyes like those as vessels to fill with either fear or wonder. In Matilda’s, there have always been both. I thought it the first moment we met, if you want to know the truth: Matilda has the eyes of an animal. That’s why I fell for her. A doe. Or a gazelle. The kind of animal that runs away a lot. The kind of animal that is only seen in a documentary moments before the real star of the show — a big cat, maybe, or a wolf — makes a splashy entrance through the tall dry grass. The audience gasps in awe.

We watch the shows about the dangerous ones, the hungry, violent, desperate ones. Nevertheless, they all open with the same shot: the elk grazing in the plains. An ear twitches, a head lifts slightly. Danger?

We’re sitting on our blood-red sofa we bought from the Salvation Army. It’s tired and threadbare. It suits her. Hands clasped on her knees, her legs crossed unevenly at the shins, she’s leaning forward, hunching her long body, a body that seems designed to be graceful but she somehow wears as awkward. Her lips are screwed up to one side, like an unsent love letter.

“David,” she says. “Please.”

This forces me to my feet. Matilda flinches slightly. It’s all the Davids that did it, if you want to know the truth. David is new, as of today. For two years, since we met, I was Davey. Up until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally told her what had been going on in my head. Our problem-solving conversations quickly became more arguing, as was our way at the best of times, and I became Dave. Davey, Dave, David. My name at its third and final iteration. What options had she left herself, I wondered, should things get any worse?

I turn from Matilda and towards the sliding door. I push it open, hoping that it will make an impressive swoosh sound, but the runners are bent and full of rust, and it jams. I grunt as I lift the door and try to jiggle it. It gives slightly, and I force my way through, scraping my chest and belly, a button pinging off my shirt. Life seldom allows a man like me the full-intended impact of their dramatic flourishes.

Outside, it’s muggy. The sky sits above in monotonous grey, like a lazy child’s solution to filling in all the white on the canvas. I stall. Our apartment is two stories up, the same height as the line of sidewalk magnolias, and there are birds everywhere. I watch them as they luxuriate in their freedom of the air. I have always loved birds, envied them for all the obvious poetic reasons. When I realised that I would have to, at some point, confront what was going on in my head, I wanted the birds to be my first.

“I’m not sure, David, maybe we should wait,” Matilda says, stepping in behind me, touching my waist. “Until after we speak to an expert.”

Expert. “I’m not… go away,” I say, elbowing her hand from my waist. She’s silent.

The next words I say aren’t to her. They’re also not in English, though I do remember them now as such, the way you recall a subtitled foreign film as if the actors had been speaking in your language.

What I do remember clearly is pocketing my hands to stop them trembling. I look towards the birds spiralling around the balcony, and I say, somehow: Hello.

It had exploded in my brain unannounced and unexplained, some kind of bored wager between God and Darwin. In the end, everyone would have a theory about it: Matilda, The Therapist, even the public at large, while they cared. I had theories too, if you want to know the truth, back then, back when I still considered such thinking useful.

It started earlier in the year, six months before the balcony scene. Walking alone at night down empty streets, I’d hear gibberish that, over time, became speech: conversations, monologues, ramblings. Seeking the sources, I’d knock over some trashcan or peer over some gate, and there’d be an animal: rat, dog, cockroach. I never lingered for long enough to hear them out, and I never spoke back. After all, I whispered to myself madly after each encounter, I’m not crazy.

Five and a half months later, futile time spent trying to ignore the racket that surrounded me, I told Matilda. She was scared, I was frustrated, so we did what we always did: we argued. Two weeks passed, and she said in a shaky voice: Go out and talk to them, David. If you want to.

Hello, I said to the dozen sparrows and the one lonely crow that lived outside our apartment.

I hadn’t actually prepared anything else. I paused, and then said: What’s flying like?

Matilda later told me that, watching from behind, it was like I was having a fit. Noises that sounded to her like a scratched record on fast play, my head whipping around violently, my shoulders twitching. Three minutes later, I stopped.

After a few moments of stillness, Matilda said, “What did they say?”

I couldn’t answer straight away. My brain felt like someone had stuck a bicycle pump into my ear.

“Um, they said…” I stuttered. All I could do, for some reason, was tell her the truth. I inhaled, held it, and then screamed, inhumanly loud and high: “HEY! YOU! HEY!”

Matilda got me to bed. I collapsed, requesting complete silence. I needed something to block out the noises I could hear from outside. Matilda tried to find music I could tolerate, eventually settling on radio static turned up loud.

Opening myself up to the birds was like dropping into a warzone where the soldiers were armed with talons and beaks. Threats and warnings, calls for blood. Hysterical declarations of dominance, screeching replies of challenge. The chicks screamed for food and the parents would fight each other for whatever scraps they could see. But there was something else, too. Something I wasn’t used to. Something good.

Matilda stroked my brow until I told her not to. She eventually said she’d go for a walk, and I was relieved.

I stared at the ceiling and thought as best I could. It had been horrible: brutal, frightening. However, the conversation with the birds somehow made more sense to me than a lifetime of talking to people, avian death-threats and all. There was a ferocious straighforwardedness, and that was exhilarating.

Halfway out the door, Matilda said, “Let’s not do that again, Davey.”

Looking back over the months that followed, it’s more about what I unlearned than what I learned, if you want to know the truth. Memory, for example, isn’t all we crack it up to be. Animals don’t play the games that we more evolved beings spend our lives distracting ourselves with, picking memories like popcorn, stringing them through with thread, creating a single, simple line, choosing the pretty white kernels and throwing over our shoulders the dirty, charred ones.

Later, when Matilda got her way, The Therapist would want to know a lot about memories.

“Have animals always been significant to you?” The Therapist asked breathlessly, fingering the top button of her blouse.

“I had a dog,” I said. “When I was a kid.”

“Did you talk to it?”

“Him. All boys talk to their dogs. It’s the most significant relationship a kid has.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him, not really, not like this.”

“Like what then?”

“I don’t know… I’d say stuff, then I’d imagine what he’d say back.”

“What would you say?”

“I don’t know… lying out in the yard together… things that you’re not allowed to say when you’re a kid.”

“Amazing. Any siblings?”

“No. I think Rusty Dog was my dad’s way of telling me I was on my own, if you want to know the truth. Can we change the subject?”

“You talk a lot more when you’re angry.”

“Well, I guess Rusty wasn’t the only thing my dad gave me.”

“Amazing.”

The morning after the birds, I called into my job — low-level corporate marketing — sick. I whispered that it was tonsillitis, I could barely speak. I dressed and groomed only as much as I could get away with, and went outside.

I listened to the dogs and cats a lot, at first. Like all animals, their conversations centred around four areas: eating, killing, not getting killed, and screwing. Of these, there were two unifying concepts: The Hunt, and The Kill. These two ideas obsessed the animals, just as love and justice do us. Even the gentrified crossbreeds tied up outside cafes would talk about it, yapping like mad street prophets on helium. The Hunt was life. The Kill was either the end of life, or it was dinner.

Fear was constant, right down to the hamsters that scurried on plastic pet-shop wheels. Even the pampered pussycats that hung languidly from suburban fences were aware that one day, it might all change. One day, there might be a reason to attack the eyeballs of their lovingly tolerated feeder with their claws, which they sharpened daily.

I will hurt you, purred a puffy white Siberian, her collar bell tinkling in the breeze, her eyes yellow and black.

The next week or so passed thusly, a fuzzy, furry blur. I told my work I had swine flu, they said they didn’t know that people still got that, I declared outrage.

“You’re different, Davey,” Matilda said to me one night.

“How’s that?” I had a mouthful of meat.

“You don’t mumble as much.”

“Sure.”

“You’re more… direct,” she said, picking at her tofu and vegetables. “Like, you say what’s on your mind more.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I said, not looking up.

“It’s… a thing. A thing that’s happening.”

We ate in silence. I felt good, untroubled, as calm and single minded, as a dog feels, chowing down in the ecstasy of an unchallenged meal.

Matilda stabbed at her food. “These veges aren’t great.”

“I’ll get some more,” I said.

“You’ll go to the supermarket? At night? You hate crowds.”

“No. I like them. They’re fascinating.” I wasn’t lying. Watching, say, a middle-aged gent with a half-empty basket and a tan-line on his ring-finger stalk through the organic aisle was a lot like seeing a lone hyena following the scent of wildebeest calves.

“Do you know how hyenas hunt?” I said. “Really interesting. I saw it on TV.”

Matilda sighed. “How do hyenas hunt, Davey? Do tell.”

“Well. Hyenas don’t actually attack their targets, not directly. They chase their prey until the victim is too exhausted to mount a defence, collapses, and then the hyena will just gobble them up, alive.”

“Is that a fact. It’s a bit weird to say that people are “fascinating”, isn’t it? A bit Attenborough?”

I shrugged. I finished eating, still holding my knife. I locked my eyes directly onto Matilda’s big brown gooey ones, and I said, “I want you.”

“Is that seduction, or a warning?” Matilda asked.

I shrugged again, but I didn’t look away.

I started seeing The Therapist a few days later, something to make Matilda relax a little. It also got me reduced hours at work through a disability claim, as well as a note explaining away the fake sick calls as part of some schema.

“So, what about work? How’s it been since you’ve been back?” She sat, pen at the ready, voracious in her note taking.

“I can tell you who’s screwing. Apart from that, I don’t care. Even less than before.”

“Amazing,” she clapped her hands and adjusted her thighs. She was 60 years old with a thick South African accent. Her skirts rode halfway up her crossed legs, legs that bounced as she listened.

“And your folks? What do they think?”

I shrugged. Mum was dead, Dad was somewhere south in a beach house, embalming his gut in Jack and Coke. “Just amazing. David, I want to ask you something. How do you feel about television?”

“I like documentaries.”

“Ha, you’re a card, David, a card. No, I’m talking about you, on T.V. Well, you and me. I have a friend backstage on a show, he’s interested in us.”

“When?”

“Oh… sometime in the next few months. Best not to rush it. Look, it’s only an early morning thing, 10am kind of thing. But it could be the start of something.” She sang the –ing.

“The start?” I ask.

The therapist leaned forward, her skirt hiking up further. “It could be good. For you and Maggie.”

“Matilda.”

“Matilda. If she sees you on TV, sharing our story, being validated by the public at large… it might help remedy the distancing that’s happening between you.”

“Distancing?”

A deeply lined hand rested on my knee and squeezed. “We need to do this. I think it will be amazing. For all of us.”

This is what it is to be human: looking away from a beautiful woman when all your instincts tell you not to. It was one of the earliest things I lost. At first, Matilda would grip my wrist to tell me to quit leering. Later, she stopped coming out with me.

Dealing with people day-to-day was getting tougher. Subtlety and nuance became repugnant to me, hiding true meaning behind the pretty distractions of imagery and subtext. Every human conversation, be it at work, overheard on a bus or in a telemarketing call, became about the Hunt: Power, respect, sex. In every word, I heard the truth: I am predator, I want to devour. Or: I am prey, I want to escape. In some moments, I wanted to fight, to feel skin on skin violence, especially if there was another man in the room. I resisted, because I knew The Hunt wasn’t the only idea that animals believed in.

I wanted to tell strangers: Stop lying. I can see the look in your eye as you wish the young arts student working in the coffee shop a pleasant day while your wife stands metres away, lying to herself just as well.

Perhaps I should amend what I said: being human isn’t just looking away; it’s pretending to look away while you continue to undress her out the corner of your eye.

The therapy sessions, attempts to verbalise my experiences within the human-constructed myth of psychology, and amid clouds of liberally applied Dior, didn’t do much for me.

The zoo was more satisfying. Several times a week, I wandered between cages, like a partygoer seeking the hippest clique. The apes became my favourites, and amongst them, the orang-utan. I’d sit close to the clear wall, and the solitary alpha male, cheek flaps blown up to show dominance over no-one, would lurch across, sack blanket in hand. He was the only of my animal acquaintances who used memory a little like people do. He told tales, of sorts. Talking slowly, contemplatively, pushing his chin down and rumbling into his blubbery chest, plucking recollections and concepts at random. Sometimes his voice became too low, his body too still, for me to hear, and I think he was talking, in those moments, to the sack. He didn’t understand all the images he had in his head. He couldn’t comprehend the difference, for example, between gone and dead.

No more females, he’d say, though I couldn’t tell whether he was talking about females that the zoo had tried to place with him, or something before.

He said: To have a female is a good thing.

He was a fine storyteller, and we were close, but on the way from our conversations, I’d often feel the need to walk through the monkey enclosure, just to pick myself up. I’d say hello as I entered, and the spider monkeys would run laps, screeching and grabbing themselves in a vulgar parody of me. Hello! Hello! Hello!

I’d say good-bye, and they’d jump in the trees, swinging, hooting, calling me a bastard and cheering me on.

“Let’s go out,” I said. “Just us.”

“Where?” Matilda was cross-stitching.

“Out.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said. “I need to spend time with you.”

“Oh?”

“You’re suspicious. Come out with me. Out of the city.”

“Oh!” she clapped her hands, and I knew I had her. “A picnic!”

“Right!” I said. “A picnic. Exactly.”

We sat under a tree in a reserve, and when Matilda rested her hand on mine, I felt human again. Conversation wasn’t easy for me, but we tried. She asked me questions not about animals, and I tried to give similarly critter-free answers. But listen: we’re in the country. My nerves were shredding themselves.

“What are you hearing?” Matilda eventually asked.

I shrugged, but she didn’t look away. “Well,” I said, “the flies have found some nice dung, over behind the tree.”

She laughed, and a bolt of relief shot through my gut. I had forgotten the joy of making her laugh.

“What else?”

“Uh, there’s the grasshoppers’ song. One guy is singing to attract a mate, and another guy’s singing to tell the first guy to stay away from his mate. It’s a bit repetitive, though.”

Matilda giggled. “Like West Side Story or something.” She lifted an ear. “It all sounds like one really loud song.”

I tried to think of something else to say. “You know that owl that’s been around our apartment?”

“Yeah.” said Matilda.

“Well, for a couple of nights now, he’s been calling out. What he’s actually doing, is he’s trying to find his mate. She’s been gone.”

“Trying to find where his girlfriend is?” Matilda said, putting brie to cracker. “It must be true love.”

“Well, last night, she answered. He was over the moon.”

“If you’ll excuse the pun,” Matilda said. “That’s wonderful. It’s lovely.”

She lowered her head onto my lap. We stayed that way for a while, and it was easier to ignore the crush of conversations.

“What about the cows?” she asked, half-asleep.

“Huh?” I said. Then I heard them: low, guttural moans coming from beyond the other side of the rise. I tensed, accidentally tightening my grip on Matilda’s arm. She smiled, and squeezed my hand.

“Did you ever moo-hello at cows out the car window when you were a kid?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” I reached out for the nearest thing, which was a bottle of chardonnay we had picked up. “2010… I wish I knew more about wine. What do you think it’s like to really understand wine?”

“Moooo!” she bellowed. When the same sound returned, she bolted upright and turned to me with those big eyes almost exploding.

“Did you hear that? Maybe I can talk to animals too!” She collapsed into a deep guffaw that I had only heard a handful of times before. “What are they saying? Are they saying hello back to us?”

I looked at her with a weak smile and an even weaker shrug. Her eyes lost a touch of light, back to where they usually are, but she had her smile fixed. “Davey, what are they saying?”

She wanted me to lie, but I couldn’t.

“It must be weaning season,” I said. “It’s when they take the calves…”

“It’s when they take the calves from the mothers,” she said, and turned away. “I remember it from a school trip. They do it so they can take the mother’s milk, so we can drink it, instead of the calf.”

We sat there listening as a chorus of young screams joined the moans. It’s a god-awful sound, unearthly, if you’ve heard it.

“That’s what it sounds like when babies are taken from their mothers,” Matilda said.

“Cows,” I said.

“What a horrible place this is,” she said.

Driving home, Matilda gripped the steering wheel as if it was trying to get away from her.

“I don’t want you to do the T.V. show,” she said, finally. It was a little more than a week away. “I think that once you do that, once you let everyone know about you in that way…”

“My therapist is going to be there. It’s fine,” I said. “It’ll be good for us.”

She didn’t look at me again, not even eternities later when she said,

“You’re going to have to choose, you know.”

Minutes passed. “Choose what?”

She shrugged, and I felt a heat start to bloom in my belly, but I managed to push it away.

I told Matilda to take the motorway exit to the zoo. I wanted to show her that I needed her as much as I did the animals, something instead of cancelling the TV spot.

The orang-utan scratched his old-man head with one hand and kneaded his sack blanket in the knuckles of the other. I told him that I couldn’t go on visiting him anymore. I explained that it was bad for me on an emotional level. It was for my female, I said. He acted like he didn’t hear me, releasing a big, deep, geriatric huff, rolling onto his feet and shuffling away, and I understood that I had become a dead thing, a thing that was gone.

Matilda was standing by the guinea pigs, holding her canvas bag in front of her, staring blankly down at the little meat-sacks like an ambivalent god. I touched the back of my index finger to her unrounded hip.

“Want to know what they’re talking about?” I asked.

She smiled tightly, turning to leave. They were talking about shitting.

The seals across the way slapped their flippers and told us to go fuck ourselves, but that’s what they always say.

The Therapist tugged her skirt towards her knees. “We can’t continue our doctor-client relationship. Conflict of interest.”

“Oh,” I said. “The book.”

“No,” she said. “It is most definitely not about the book.”

“Because I won’t write the book.”

“I never asked you to co-author Wild Thing: My Year with the Manimal. I only asked you for public endorsement, which you refused. Anyway,” she said, waving her hands, shaking the 60 year-old jelly under her arms, “that’s neither here nor there. It isn’t about that.”

I didn’t say anything. In all honesty, it suited me fine, and if these sessions were severed by a hand other than mine, all the better for explaining to Matilda.

“It’s because,” The Therapist continued, looking around the room as if for inspiration. “Because I don’t feel safe with you.”

“Liar. Anyway, it’s not a year.” “What? Sorry?”

“We haven’t been seeing each other for a year. Four months? I can’t remember time so well anymore. But not a year.”

“Literary license. Effect. I wouldn’t expect you of all… people… to understand.”

I picked at a bit of leftover food in my teeth. My fingernails were getting long.

“I’m not doing the T.V. show,” I said. It was three days away.

“Well,” she said, “that’s too bad. Because I am. Wild Thing is getting a lot of pre-release hype. It’s amazing, just amazing. It’s a shame that you won’t be able to offer your side of the story. It’ll just be me and my impressions and, well, I don’t know that I could possibly do you justice.”

We stared at each other, and then I looked away. There’s something that every animal understands, even humans: No matter how big and dangerous you are, there’s always some beastie that’s angrier and toothier lurking in the ecosystem, and it will have you for lunch.

“You’re slipping, Davey,” Matilda said to me that night, standing in the doorway to our lounge, where I had taken to sleeping. Three words more than she had spoken to me since before the zoo.

I stood up, taking two steps forward and putting one hand out, laying it without care on her left breast. I looked into her eyes. Words were painful to use.

She brushed off my hand and turned away from me.

Lately, in moments like this, I wanted to lunge at her and tear out her throat. I don’t know if it was anger at her rejection, contempt for her vulnerability, or the more familiar frustration at not being able to make her understand, but a red-raw violence had been growing in my gut, behind my eyes, in my groin. It passes now as it always does, leaving in its place a terrible guilt and an awful neediness. Human feelings.

I’m scared of what I’ll be if I lose you, I said. It wasn’t until after she didn’t react that I realised I had said it in a way she couldn’t understand.

She sniffed and looked up again. “Don’t slip too far, Davey.” She turned and padded down the corridor to the bedroom, closing the door. I stood for a moment, fighting desperately the instinct to follow.

“Well hi there everybody! Welcome to Today, Hooray! We have a hot potato of a show today, don’t we Mark?”

“That’s right Susan, although maybe we should say it’s a hot dog of a show! Hahaha!”

“Hahaha! You know, philosopher Ludwig Witt… genstein… once said that even if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Susan, and besides, we have with us two people who would like to disagree with old Ludwig! Welcome guys!”

“Yes, welcome!”

The television studio stood as a shrine to the human obsession with artifice, from its fake living room set to its perma-tanned co-hosts, ridiculously exaggerated specimens of the male and female of the species. I had asked Matilda to come, but she had a migraine.

The interview was in two parts: a “chat” between the two hosts and The Therapist and me, and a very special segment to come after the ad break, a surprise that everyone seemed to be in on but me.

“Wild Thing: My Year with the Manimal,” said the female host, holding a blank-page mock-up to the camera. “Wow, what a read, what a great read. Well done.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” said The Therapist, “The pre-release feedback has just been amazing, just amazing.”

“Amazing?” said the male host, “That’s not even the start of it! I hear some lucky psychologist-slash-author-slash-it girl has been seen out on the town with Matt Davis, star of our very own hit daytime soap, A&E.”

The female host shrieked in rehearsed laughter, clapping her long-taloned hands together, “It seems authoring a soon-to-be-hit book gives certain perks!”

“Well, we’re hoping it’s a hit,” said The Therapist. “It’s been a long road here for us.” She squeezed my knee. I had heard that the divorce settlement with her former husband looked to be costly, though she had offered him custody of the two kids straight off the bat.

The hosts fired questions at me with a machine gun:

“When did you first start to believe you could talk to animals?”

“I think… perhaps… six months ago?… or… it was hot…”

“What’s the most interesting thing you believe an animal has ever said to you?”

“Well… um… worms are blind… they’re not really sure what we are or why we keep…”

“What would you like to tell the world?”

“I just want to… I don’t really know how to say it… Matilda, my girlfriend…”

“David, it’s so delightful that you’re here and so open with us about your condition, thank you.”

We cut to break, the smiles dropping from the hosts like guillotines. The Therapist gamely tried to talk to the male host, leaning forward with her hand on his bicep. He focussed on getting the attention of someone across the room. “And we’re back…”

The very special segment. An intern led onto stage a woman in her 40s with a haggard old yellow Labrador on a leash. The woman was blind, we learned, and the dog was badly arthritic. The fur around his knees had rubbed clean; the exposed skin black and scabby.

Griff had served the blind lady for over 12 years, through several bad falls, a cancer scare, and a failed marriage. Griff was, the blind lady’s voice said quietly, not long for this world. The female host crumpled her face in a simulacrum of sympathy, the male host shaking his head and clicking his tongue like a depressed mechanic.

“David,” The Therapist said. “Do you think you could talk to Griff for this poor, brave woman?”

I smiled weakly. It doesn’t really work like that…

After a moment of dead air, the blind woman spoke again. “I want to know… if Griff has had a good life. I want to know… I want to know that he knows that he is loved, and that I am grateful, just so, so grateful for him, for everything. I want him to know… I want him to know that I will miss him very very much. And that I love him. Does he know that? Does he know?” She put a tissue to her lips, but it was too late: not the gentle tears that you’re used to seeing on T.V., this was real human despair in all its snotty repulsiveness.

I swallowed. Everyone was waiting in a tableau of grief both real and assumed: the blind lady with her back hunched over, tilting her ear in my direction, the female host holding and patting her hand, the male host rubbing her knee and offering tissues, The Therapist looking at me with eyes that contained warnings and threats. Even the stagehands and cameramen were still.

I looked out, beyond the cameras, hoping in vain to see someone I knew. All I could see was me staring back in close up from several monitors, at two different angles. Was that really my face? How much time had passed since I had properly looked at it? I was gaunt, my skin tight and brown, leathery from too much sun. My eyes twitched weirdly, involuntarily. Even under the make-up that the studio had foisted on me, several sores were visible in front of and under my ears and nose.

Griff had collapsed on the floor, heavy jowls spreading drool on the special warming mat they had put down for him. I cleared my throat, and then again louder, and he looked up at me, bloody eyes indistinct beneath milky cataracts.

I flicked my own eyes and scrunched my nose at him; I rumbled in my belly so deeply that I don’t think the microphone picked it up. I couldn’t decide what to say, so I settled on, Everyone wants you to know that you are good. A good dog.

Griff offered no response.

The hosts were moving their eyes between each other and to someone behind me. The Therapist coughed.

Again, I leaned down to Griff. The lady doesn’t want you to die.

Nothing. I couldn’t lie, and I needed this to work, to really work. I thought about Matilda.

Griff. Tell me about the Hunt.

Griff’s eyebrows fluttered slightly. Painfully, slowly, Griff pushed his head up off the floor. It swayed unsteadily on a fragile neck.

The voice I heard creaked so heavily under the weight of age that it felt as if it could burst into dust at any moment.

The dog said, Every night, I’ve dreamed of her blood in my teeth and whiskers.

He licked his nose, and added: I want my testicles back.

A man in his mid 30s with a clipboard and an earpiece escorted me through the studio building with a tight grip and tighter lips, an obese security guard with a goatee following close. We passed The Therapist, who looked as if she was going to be sick. The male host tried to put his arm around the shoulders of the female host, but she was in mid-rant at some poor lackey. A long-taloned finger flew in my direction, knocking the male host’s latte over his shirt, he swore, and threw the quarter-full mug at the wall. I was having difficulty making out the conversations around me. Clipboard Man, the guard and I reached a Fire Exit that opened onto the parking lot around the back.

“Bloody animal,” I heard as the door slammed shut.

I paced around the city streets, my chest heaving, my breathing sharp, my stomach in knots. Sweat cascaded down my brow, the show’s make-up stinging my eyes, and I couldn’t see clearly. Unthinking, I half-ran to a park, where I spent unknown hours having aborted conversations with the ducks and the possums and the pigeons. They didn’t know, of course, what had happened. That I was the crazy man off the television, that I was ejected from the premises while a blind lady wept and a therapist threw out words like “psychosis” and “delusional” and “major revisions pending.” But the animals knew, somehow, that I had been shamed. Lumbering and desperate, I was the saddest of all creatures, and most deserving of scorn: a displaced alpha. I radiated it on a level that I couldn’t control. Even the goddamned koi in the pond flicked their tails in a way that said: You lost.

It got dark. It was cold. I felt the burning in my gut, and it was more intense than ever. I needed to go somewhere that I could claim as my own.

The apartment is unlit, but I can smell cooking, a lone piece of lukewarm steak in cling-film on the kitchen counter, and the heater is on in the lounge over the couch, my makeshift bed. I’m not hungry, not for steak, and I don’t want to sleep. I stalk slowly to the bedroom, slow enough that I’m able to remove my clothing, piece by piece, noiseless except for the sharp intakes of breath through my nostrils.

I turn gently on the handle of the bedroom door — closed but not locked. I stand in the frame of the doorway, naked, surveying the mounds of Matilda’s body curled up under the duvet, facing away from me. She looks small. Helpless.

I step forward, my movements careful and certain. I want an end to the constant struggles and compromises. I want an end to talk. I wanted what was mine to take.

I take the nearest corner of the duvet in my fist, and pull. The duvet slides off in one slow movement, tracing the contours beneath.

No movement. Completely still. Playing possum.

She’s wearing her neon pink flannel pyjamas that she favours when it’s cold, the ones that make her look like a girl. I put one knee up on the bed, and then the other. It’s a big bed, too big for the room. We bought it years ago when we thought we’d only be in the cramped apartment a few months. I crawl forward across the empty side of the mattress, using my arms to steady myself. My breathing is deep and fast, catching the phlegm in the back of my throat, creating a low rattle with each inhalation.

A gap between the pyjama top and bottom has created a window of pink flesh on Matilda’s hip. I push my hand down into it. The softness and the warmth shoots through me, a tsunami of lust and rage and a desperate desire for something, something I had heard about before. I now know The Hunt, and I can feel The Kill.

“Please don’t.” The voice is small, barely audible.

The words have no impact on me. The pathetic bleating of a lamb that had found its neck between the jaws of a wild dog. I slide my hand from her hip down to her legs.

“Davey, please.”

Now she turns towards me. Her body first, then her head. Her eyes closed, like a child who believes that the monster can’t get her if she doesn’t look.

She does look, though. She opens her eyes, those big brown eyes, and she looks straight at me. It’s the first time she has held my gaze in weeks. Her eyes are huge, watery, the skin around them is red and inflamed.

She tries to say something, but chokes. She turns away, tightening her mouth and clenching her jaws while her cheeks redden.

She tries again. “You’re not an animal, Davey,” she says. I try to put my mouth on hers, but she turns her head. “You think there’s no difference, Davey, but you’re wrong. You really are.”

I grab her wrist, and make a sound borne of the phlegm in my throat, a guttural, hoarse growl. Matilda tries to scream, but her voice gives out again, a dry rasp. She slaps me hard with her free hand, and at the same time, manages to curl up one of her long, awkward legs and kick out with her heel into my chest.

I fall back, cracking my head on the wall. My cheek burns. My chest aches, a broken rib maybe. Winded, I sit gasping. Then I see Matilda.

She is on one knee, glaring at me. She is defiant, ready, it seems, to fight to the death. We stare at each other.

I am motionless. In my gut, new feelings are rising against the brutality of the lust and the desire for power: regret, guilt, self-loathing, and love. Wildly useless emotions, fit for a species of beast so far removed from its own nature by its assumed superiority that it is at best, ridiculous, at worst, horrifying. I feel the violence of these useless feelings rip through me, overloading every sensation and thought, and I know now that I don’t want to feel these things any more, ever.

So when Matilda says for the last time, “Davey?” in a throaty, almost inaudible gasp, her face ever so slightly softening, I can’t answer. I don’t have the words.

For a moment longer she stares at me, and then her face turns scarlet, her eyebrows turn upwards, her mouth pulls outwards and down, exposing her lower teeth, her breath turns to gasps and then heaves, and in one slow, inelegant, unbalanced movement, she folds forward, groaning madly, until she is hunched face down on the bed, her long body convulsing. Her hands are claws, scratching at the bed sheets and the back of her neck, pulling at her hair. Matilda lifts her head, her eyes full of more fear than I have ever seen there, but also, now a new thing, a deep, profoundly authentic rage. She screams at me. A terrifying, raw, wild, scream.

And for the first time, I understand her.

Time passes. I’m never sure how much. I remember hots and colds, lights and darks. I stayed in the apartment after Matilda was gone. I’m on some government scheme where I don’t work. My father, having seen me on the T.V., emerged from retirement to set up some system where the small monthly cheque I receive from Wild Thing pays my bills and keeps my landlord from stopping by. My father visits once a week with groceries, mostly cans of tuna, though I notice he’s been slipping in fruit and vegetables lately. He doesn’t seem to mind the state of the place, so he’ll sit for a couple of hours. We never talk, not even a word.

I stay inside. I still don’t like the birds much. A spider walks through my apartment every few days. She’s okay. I hear her fading into earshot as she rounds the corner, nattering away about spider business. I tell her if I’ve seen any juicy flies around, and sometimes she says thank you very much before disappearing, still talking, around another corner.

A short time ago, when it was a bit warmer and the days were longer, I got a letter in the post. The writing was loopy and uneven, more careful at the beginning than at the end. After a few false starts, I managed to read it. She’s moved down country with some guy she met, an anaesthesiologist/musician who looks after her, makes her feel safe. She says she’s happy, she says she cares for me very much, she says she hopes I will write her, though I wouldn’t know how even if I wanted to, and I’ve forgotten what she looks like though I can still get a slight scent of her in my nostrils if I try hard enough, and for some reason it makes me think about the mating habits of meerkats.

I’m at a loss as to what to do with the letter. I wander down to the bedroom and put it on the floor, where the bed used to be. It seems right.

Sometime later, a rat I know from around scurries into the lounge, sees me curled up in the corner in my dirty blanket, and asks if he can have the paper from the bedroom. He needs it for a nest, his female’s just had babies. After a moment’s hesitation, borne of a feeling I can’t understand, I let him take it, because a few pieces of thick paper like that makes excellent nests, and, if you want to know the truth, it is very, very cold.