Finding Eloise
by Peter Ninnes
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
One Saturday in the middle of Grade 10, before she disappeared, I’d arranged to meet her in the tree after her softball game. She was panting as she dumped her softball bag on the platform with a woody clunk. Usually she would have left it in the house. It looked stuffed full of gear.
“Why’d you bring that up here? Isn’t it heavy?”
She gave me the look that a pitcher might give a batter before delivering a fast ball.
“Coach said I need throwing practice.”
I’d been to a few of Eloise’s games. She played third base. When she threw a ball across the diamond to first base, it was like a cruise missile zooming to its target. If she needed practice, her coach had absurdly high standards. Before I could express my doubt, the dogs burst out the back door, barking and growling. Mr Bowen threw a tattered soccer ball after them, then went back in, slamming the door shut.
“That’s lucky,” Eloise said. “I thought we might have to wait a few days.”
The dogs fought over the ball until it was shredded and scattered around the yard. Then they fell asleep in the shade of the old refrigerator.
She slung the bag on her shoulder and climbed a few metres up one of the branches supporting the platform. She jammed both feet in a fork to get a better view of the yard through a gap in the canopy,
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she unzipped the bag and removed a cube of wood. It looked like an offcut from her father’s building projects. She hefted it in her hand and then placed it between her feet. She took out a second bloc about the same size, feeling its weight. I followed her glance as she looked down at the dogs.
“Um, that’s not a good idea,” I said, glancing at Mr Bowen’s back door. What if she missed and the block bounced against the house? Mr Bowen would come out of the house. He might even spot us in the tree. As far as I knew, he’d never noticed us, usually because the dogs made such a racket. But then, we’d never thrown lumps of wood into his yard.
“You’re just going to stir them up,” I hissed.
Eloise ignored me. She drew her arm back. My eyes grew wide. My imagination bristled with consequences.
Before I could say anything, Eloise hurled the block. It hit the closest dog flush on the side of its skull then fell in the dirt. The dog’s head twisted to one side. It tried to stand up, but only its front legs worked. They buckled and it slumped in the dust. It didn’t move.
The noise woke the second dog. It jumped up with a low growl. It glared around the yard, trying to identify the source of the threat.
“Stop! That’s animal cruelty. They’ll lock you up!”
In reply, Eloise fired a second block through the air. The dog yelped as the block smashed into its rump.
“Damn!” Eloise said, reaching into her bag. The animal turned to look at its backside. The third block hit it on the back of its neck. The dog fell on top of its deceased friend without a sound. Its legs twitched, sending a puff of dust into the air. Then they were still.
A faint smile danced around Eloise’s lips. I stared at her as if I’d just stumbled upon a serial killer. The only sound was Eloise’s shoes scratching on the branch as she climbed down. Mr Bowen’s back door remained shut.
“It’s going to be obvious what happened,” I said.
“There are two of us here. You can say I did it, and I’ll say you did it.”
I didn’t know anything about the law. “Won’t I be guilty of helping you or something?”
“I’ll say I just went along. That’s what they do on TV.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “This isn’t TV. It’s real life.”
She shrugged. “I won’t get caught.”
I wondered what world she was living in. “There’s only one place those blocks could have been thrown from. Up in these trees. I bet the police could match those blocks to the rest of them behind your shed.”
She tapped the bag. “They’re all in here. We can burn them in the barbecue.”
“Let’s go,” I said, realising I couldn’t argue with her. “When Mr Bowen comes out and sees your massacre, the fires of hell are going to burst out of the ground and devour us.”
She started following me down. “You’re being too dramatic.”
We reached the ground. “Now what?” I said as she dropped onto the ground beside me.
“We can go light the barbecue, then sit on the couch and enjoy the silence and the smell of woodsmoke.”
I followed her onto the veranda. We had the place to ourselves. Her mum was doing a shift at the pub, and I’d seen her dad as I’d arrived, getting into his ute. He said he had an urgent job to finish.
Eloise raised the barbecue grill and placed the remaining wood blocks where the charcoal went. She poured lighter fluid on them and struck a match. She sat on the middle of the couch and studied the flames growing higher. I sat at one end, leaving a distance between us.
She looked at me. Again the odd smile.
“What?” I asked. “Shouldn’t I be shocked?”
“I guess.”
She studied her fingernails. I’d tried unsuccessfully to convince her not to bite them. To compensate for her gnawing, she’d file the ends smooth and paint the nails black.
A breeze had sprung up. The wood blocks had turned to ash. The fruity smell wafted over from the trees.
“Did I tell you, I’ve been seeing a psychologist?” She stared out at the trees.
I fixed my gaze on her face. “You? A psychologist? Until today, you were the sanest person I knew.”
Now she turned her face away a little, tugging at a piece of stuffing protruding from the arm of the couch. “He said I have misophonia.” She looked at me. “Severe irritation caused by certain noises.”
“Certain noises?” I was starting to sound like a parrot. “What noises?”
“Washing machines.”
“Huh?”
“I know you worry about my nails, but I never told you why I bite them. Every time Mum uses the washing machine, I have to leave the house. I climb the tree or go for a walk. The sound drives me crazy. If I don’t get out of the house, I chew my nails in bed with my head under a pillow, trying to block the noise.”
“What about,” I tried to think of another common household machine, “what about when your mum makes a cake?”
“That’s fine. But there is another noise. Dogs barking and growling.”
My mind crunched through that information, like it was eating a muesli bar. “Plenty of times we were up the tree and the dogs barked and fought.”
“I hated it. It was better with you, but only just.”
I rubbed the side of my head. After being her friend since childhood, I didn’t know who she was. “This misterphobia...”
“Misophonia.”
“Okay, this phonia, I don’t think it justifies—”
“It’s crazy, right? But that’s what I am. I yearn to live in a place where there are no dogs, and I have a maid I can send to do the washing at a laundromat.”
“That’s unrealistic.” I screwed up my face. “Every town has dogs. In a small town like this, you can hear them barking all over the place. And how are you going to afford a maid?”
She looked at me and sighed. “That’s my dream, Phil. Maybe my psychologist can find a better solution.”
After university, I ended up working for a biological research organisation in Brisbane. I specialised in the medicinal qualities of wattles, which took me all over the state looking for new species. From time to time, I ended up in the vicinity of our little town and I’d spend a night with Mum.
She retired after forty years in the bakery. Although the pay was rubbish, she’d been frugal and had a nest egg, along with a bit of super. I found a spot for her in a retirement village in Gympie. Soon after moving in, however, she developed motor neuron disease. She couldn’t get out. Her condition worsened. One day when I was up near Cairns collecting plant specimens, I received a call from the nurse at the village. Mum was in hospital. The doctors were doing all they could, but I should come straight away.
Mum’s funeral was on a Friday in Gympie. I almost expected Eloise’s mum to be there. Our old mechanic, Jack, came. He lived in the same retirement village. He told me Eloise’s mum had died the year before. According to Jack, she’d never heard anything about Eloise, Barry, or the girlfriend. “Her heart was broken for years,” Jack said. Maybe mine had been, too.
I planned to do some field work the week after the funeral in one of the national parks a couple of hours’ drive west. The little town where I grew up was on the way, so I decided to stop and look around, as a way of remembering my mother. I sat in my SUV looking at our former house. The facade had a bright new coat of yellow paint. Fresh zinc sparkled on the roof. A room had been added on the back. The owners had done a great job. I wished Mum had seen it.
Eloise’s old place was different. The Carpentaria pines towered into the cloudless winter sky. Below lay the shell of the house. The windows were smashed. The lopsided front porch peeked out from a mountain of weeds.
I fetched my bush-bashing machete from the back of my vehicle. The front gate creaked as I pushed it open. I thrashed away at the weeds, trusting my sturdy work boots and heavy trousers to protect me from snakes lurking in the undergrowth.
As I worked my way into the backyard, a deep sadness overwhelmed me when I saw the remains of the back veranda. The roof had collapsed. The couch and barbecue had disappeared. The Moreton Bay Fig trees now stretched to a tremendous height.
I felt a sudden urge to climb up. The wooden rungs and the platform had rotted long ago. Still, I wanted to look. Why hadn’t Eloise ever contacted me? Was she still alive? What had she done with her life? I thought I’d pushed everything into a locked drawer in the back of my mind but, looking up into the trees, the memories and the pain rushed back.
To my surprise, a few centimetres of nails remained, poking out of the trunk. The tough soles of my boots had no trouble gripping them. Thumping the machete into the trunk for support, I made my way up.
Mr Bowen’s house was gone. In its place stood one of those box-like duplexes developers love so much. It was as ugly as Mr Bowen’s yard had been filthy. I tried to ignore it as I climbed.
The platform was gone, but I could still see the marks in the trunk where the branches had begun to grow around it. I lodged the machete in the trunk and perched myself in the fork. A breeze clattered the heavy leaves through which sunlight danced.
A noisy miner screeched. A truck changed gears a couple of blocks away. A techno song started up in the duplex. Its hypnotic beat snaked out and wrapped itself around me like an anaconda. I felt my chest tighten. My head started to ache. For the first time, I had a sense of how noises made Eloise feel.
All at once, from some source deep within me that I couldn’t identify, I knew Eloise had found her quiet place. Where it was, I’d never know. But she had found it. The uncertainty and worry that had followed me around for the last several decades fell away. I was no longer bothered that she had left without a word. She had ended up where she desired, of that I was certain.
Before I could consider that idea further, another sound reached my ears: a deep growl. The hair on my arms stood up. The noise came again. My hand went to my machete as I turned slowly around. A beast ten times the size of Mr Bowen’s dobermans perched farther along a limb that had supported our platform. It snarled and bared its fangs as it spied my face.
My throat constricted. A stabbing pain tore through my guts. I clung to a branch with one hand, the machete poised in the other. I reached one leg down, searching for a nail on which to begin my descent. If I jumped or fell, I’d break my skull. Saliva dripped from the animal’s mouth. Before I could find the nail, it leapt at me. I had no time to get out of the way. I dug the fingers of one hand into the branch. Knowing it would do little good to save me, I swung the machete.
I’m sure I scored a direct hit across its chest. But the beast didn’t howl. It didn’t lock its angry jaws around my head nor scratch my face with its terrible claws. Instead, the machete went right through it without a sound, and the beast went right through me. I spun around as much as I could without falling. I couldn’t believe it. The thing had landed on the branch behind and turned to face me. Not a scratch on it.
It leapt for me again. This time, I swiped the machete clean through its neck. There was no resistance. The head did not fall. The claw that swiped at me went through my chest. I didn’t feel a thing but sheer terror.
My legs trembled, but I managed to touch a nail and begin to inch down. The great dog stared down, growling and slobbering. I kept one eye on it while navigating the nails and thunking my machete into the trunk to support myself.
It didn’t leap at me again. Maybe it had made its point.
When I reached the ground, I ran at full speed to my SUV, and drove off without regard to the speed limit. A kilometre out of town I pulled up, still shaking. I retched into the grass, smothering an ants’ nest. Its residents popped up through the muck and danced around in an angry horde.
* * *
At my next appointment, I showed Dr Singh the story. After reading it, he placed the manuscript gently on his desk. He scratched his chin and looked at the window to his left, studying a fly crawling up the pane. The fly took off toward the ceiling light.
Dr Singh turned to me. “Since you were here last, word has come out of a new drug undergoing trials. Given this” — he cleared his throat and tapped the front page of my manuscript — “I suggest you participate.” He passed me a flyer. “Scan the QR code for details.”
I looked at the flyer. Dr Singh began typing on his keyboard. He handed me the document coughed out by his printer. “Here’s a referral. Let me know how you go.”
He turned away and began inputting his notes. His back blocked the monitor from my view. The fly flew down and landed on his right ear. It seemed to be peering at Dr Singh’s screen. I got up to leave, wishing I was that fly getting a good look at what Dr Singh really thought about my case.
Copyright © 2025 by Peter Ninnes
