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Praise for Chloe Wilson

‘The stories in Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire are full of wit, intelligence, savage humour, and dark surprises. They combine the brilliant menace of Ottessa Moshfegh with the insight and control of Helen Garner; the result is a new Australian writer who made me feel less like a reader and more like a conspirator. I was transfixed.’

Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest and The High Places

‘An astonishing collection. Astoundingly good. Suspiciously good, frankly, no debut should be this accomplished. These stories showcase a polymath’s mind and a poet’s sensibility in perfect, paranoid microcosms of our uneasy reality. Chloe Wilson writes with the surreal playfulness of Etgar Keret, the biting satire of Vladimir Nabokov, the delicious paranoia of Patricia Highsmith and the heart of Alice Munro. Tremendous.’

Liam Pieper, author of Sweetness and Light and The Toymaker

‘Chloe Wilson’s stories led me sentence by sentence down unpredictable, untrodden paths. I could never see what was coming. Never guess. Chilling, funny, and razor sharp – a writer in control every step of the way. How I relished this extraordinary and original collection.’

Sofie Laguna, author of Infinite Splendours and The Eye of the Sheep

‘Hold Your Fire brims with wicked humour and dark truths on the human psyche. Chloe Wilson’s writing is spare, sophisticated and totally assured – it’s hard to believe this is a debut collection. These stories are extraordinary.’

Rebecca Starford, author of Bad Behaviour and The Imitator

‘These stories are wonderfully strange, complex yet funny; they are otherworldly and unearthly but at the same time an expression of how we live in the world right now. Chloe Wilson is the magician who by her art brings to light all we usually prefer to keep hidden.’

Ceridwen Dovey, author of Only the Animals and In the Garden of the Fugitives

‘Chloe Wilson’s stories are spooky, profound, thrilling, hilarious and unbelievably beautiful. She shows us things we don’t dare see – desire and power, love and subterranean violence – with such mastery that the sheer beauty of them blows you away. I want to read everything she’s ever written, everything she’ll ever write. A truly extraordinary writer.’

Anna Funder, author of All That I Am and Stasiland

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The Leopard Next Door

My neighbour bought a leopard. He bought it when it was eight days old. He said it tried to roar and sounded like a bird.

He had to bottle-feed the leopard every few hours. It’s like having a baby, he said: getting up in the night, wrapping the little body in a blanket, and waiting for it to relax and become dead weight in your arms. I asked if I could pay the leopard a visit. He said there was too much risk I’d pass on a disease.

It seems relevant to mention that we lived on the ninth floor of an apartment block. The carpark was a popular location for drug deals, and a body had once been dumped in the lane that separated our building from the next. Real estate agents always claimed that this part of town was ‘going places’. Going where, I wondered.

I saw my neighbour almost every day in the months after he brought the leopard home. His beard grew out, and a faint, pissy smell wafted from his clothing.

‘How’s the leopard?’ I’d ask. He’d answer in one-word descriptions: ‘restless’, ‘irritable’. Once he said ‘depressed’, and I imagined the juvenile leopard sulking on my neighbour’s couch, watching re-runs in the dark.

Then I didn’t see my neighbour anymore.

I began to worry. I knocked on his door. I knocked for three days in a row, calling, ‘Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?’

That third day, I saw a shadow pass in the gap between the door and the carpet, and heard a noise, muffled, a sort of wumph – like someone sliding down a wall and slumping on the floor.

My neighbour had given me a spare key, in case of emergencies. The following day, I used it – I threw a raw steak into his hallway, and slid a bucket filled with water in after it. Then I slammed the door.

I did the same thing the next day, and the next. And we went on like this. Because something kept taking my offerings, and something kept wumphing and shuffling and pacing in that apartment.

Maybe I should have called the police. But I didn’t want to get my neighbour into trouble. Besides, I liked the idea of having a leopard next door – someone who stayed up nights, like me; someone else who knew they were in the wrong place but didn’t know how to get out.

Tongue-Tied

I knew it was her before she turned around. Gym teachers, unlike other teachers, don’t know their students seated and face-forward. We know their proportions, their ratio of muscle to fat, the smell of their feet, of their unwashed groins and underarms. We know their limits.

‘Shit,’ I said. As we pulled in behind the tiny hatchback, I looked closely at the real estate agent with whom we’d be spending an idle, aspirational afternoon. She was standing on the pavement. Hearing our approach, she turned, smiling at no-one and hugging a clipboard to her chest. A mauve silk scarf was knotted around her neck. When she took a step towards our car, its tails blew into her face.

‘What?’ Pete asked from the driver’s seat. He was looking at himself in the rear-view mirror, pulling up a nostril to check his nose hairs. He had a small electric trimmer – a smooth, tapered thing like a bottom-feeding fish – for the express purpose of keeping them in check. He’d let it nibble away at him that morning, but the bright light in the car revealed the hairs he’d missed.

‘I know her,’ I said. ‘She was a student.’

Pete grasped an untrimmed hair between his thumb and forefinger and yanked. He grimaced, tears in his eyes, then inspected the end to make sure he’d ripped the root out.

Meanwhile she waited. Cilla Jones, with the same slight bow in her legs, the same bulge at the back of her skull. I felt a weird thrill, the way you might feel about seeing an ex-lover unexpectedly: that quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread.

Pete blinked away the tears. ‘Was she a loser?’

‘Worse.’

‘Worse?’ He sniffed hard and twisted the mirror back into place. ‘How does it get worse?’

‘She was… pathetic.’

There would be no avoiding Cilla’s company. This excursion had been arranged for us by the real estate agency, after we’d told them we were only interested in homes available for private sale. Pete had an aversion to games of chance, and this extended to auctions. The agency had agreed to send someone to show us around.

I wondered whether Cilla would be as shocked to see me as I was to see her.

I set my face into a teacher’s practised blankness and stepped out into the day’s strange weather – overcast, with white glare and intermittent blasts of dusty wind. I instinctively drew myself up to my full athlete’s height, sucking my navel towards my spine, rolling my weight from my heels to the balls of my feet.

Did she recognise me? She took a few tottering steps forward in her kitten heels to slip her small, hot hand into the hand I had extended. If she did know me she didn’t flinch.

‘Hiya,’ she said. ‘I’m Priscilla from George Jones Real Estate. I’ll be showing you folks around today.’

Hiya Folks. A rehearsed line, a new name, another uniform: the company’s charcoal suit and natty mauve scarf. But it was definitely her. The company must have been her father’s, which would explain the mystery of how she’d acquired a job at all. As soon as she spoke I remembered her voice: like a baby’s voice, breathy, dropping letters from her words. I remembered wondering whether it was an attempt to be cute, that voice, or worse – an attempt to be sexy. It rankled when I taught her; it rankled with me now.

Pete was already narrowing his eyes, scrutinising her.

‘You must be Mr Ford,’ she said. She closed her mouth and smiled with it and let her gaze drift back to me.

Cilla wasn’t stupid, exactly, and nor was she ugly. There were plenty of ugly, stupid girls who got through their schooldays just fine. Cilla was off. She had a musty smell, like a forgotten shoe dusted with mildew. She played the recorder, an instrument that everyone else – including the music teachers – regarded as a toy. She did nothing to extract or conceal the whiteheads that mushroomed along her hairline.

But the school, a private girls’ school, was genteel. No-one was openly unkind to Cilla, no-one called her names. Instead, stories circulated: she had let a tampon rot inside her and nearly died of toxic shock. She had licked a kidney that she was supposed to be dissecting. And so she seemed not only odd, but unclean, possibly contagious, and the other girls avoided her with the instinct that makes herd animals avoid any of their number too sick or small or deformed to survive. I didn’t blame them. I felt it too, the urge to take a step back from her, to try not to breathe in the air she exhaled, or touch her hand or her hair by accident.

And here I was, shaking that hand, trying to ignore the desire I felt to wipe my palm on my jeans.

A quick assessment told me that in the decade since I’d seen her she had grown taller, but not by much; had filled out, but not by much. Her bra was slack, and she had the loose-fleshed look of someone who does nothing to maintain their muscle tone.

If this sounds cruel, I suppose it’s because what they say about gym teachers is true: we are cruel. Had I felt a certain pleasure seeing someone pitch a ball into Cilla’s doughy, unformed body? Did I enjoy watching her noodly arms shake as they tried and failed to climb a rope? Yes, and yes. But I was not motivated by a particular sadism towards Cilla. I was angry with any girl who couldn’t wheeze her way through a single lap, or complete an entire push-up.

I was angry because I was also proof of that other cliché: those who can’t, teach. How well I remember being on the lacrosse pitch that day. I remember running after a girl, her long dark ponytail swishing ahead of me, the fat on her thighs vibrating each time her foot slammed into the turf. She stopped, so I stopped, and there was a sound – a factual little pop. I dropped to the grass. That was it; that was the end.

Now I was a teacher, and Pete was a nurse, and one thing we had in common was a shared bitterness about our careers – specifically, the paltriness of our salaries. This was why we had been considering a move to the country. We regularly discussed the subject of money, and how ours would ‘go further’ in a country town. Each of these conversations was tinged with the desperate sniffing-out-of-scraps that phrase implies.

‘People have died in my arms, Amy,’ Pete would say sometimes, chopping a cucumber or meticulously towelling between his toes. ‘I mean, if that’s not worth something, what is?’

I’d known, or at least I remembered knowing, that Cilla was from the country. I had imagined it must be somewhere tiny, fragile, hidden. A grotto, a dell, the kind of place that could spawn someone like her. I hadn’t thought of her being from a place like this.

The town was almost a city: too big to be charming, too small to be cosmopolitan. Its historical buildings were surrounded by larger, more recent developments, and the whole was encircled by an industrial fringe: a carpet manufacturer miraculously still in business, a fan-belt factory that wasn’t. We drove past empty storefronts, lower-end chain stores, bars that promised both topless waitresses and $6.95 earlybird specials.

But this town needed teachers, and nurses, and the government was willing to pay a little extra to lure them from the city. We could make a nice life here, Pete had said. And wasn’t that what we wanted? To have a nice life?

At the first house, Pete jammed his hands in his pockets. He was wearing shorts, despite the weather, as though he needed to prove something to the cold.

Cilla held up the key. ‘Shall we?’ she said.

We followed her along the path to the front door and I took in her too-jaunty walk, as confident as it was lopsided, with one hip rotating up and forward. I pictured the ball rolling in that socket. It set my teeth on edge.

The first house was also the cheapest. It spread to the edges of a wide block, and was dated, beige, with a garden made from jagged stones and huge, hostile yucca plants. The whole house seemed to be hunching low to the ground. As Cilla slipped the key into the lock she turned, and must have caught my expression.

‘It’s nicer inside,’ she said, and flushed beneath the powder she wore, which had settled on the blonde hair fuzzing her cheeks.

Cilla hadn’t lied, exactly. The house was nicer inside. But it had the thin, held-breath confidence of someone trying to get away with something. The bright throw cushions, the tall vase of flowers on the dining table; these details directed by an expert hand couldn’t hide how obsessively utilitarian everything else felt. The surfaces were clean, but what was most remarkable about them was how wipeable they were: everything was laminate or the kind of broad white tile you might find in an operating theatre. The place seemed designed to withstand regular hosing-down.

I tried to imagine who had lived here, who had designed their life around avoiding stains or bacteria, or living with any fixture that required care to be taken.

‘I think I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

But Pete was still looking. There was something that had captured his imagination: the security features. When Cilla showed him the alarm, CCTV, motion sensors and security light, he nodded in satisfaction, perhaps recognising in the hoser-downer a kind of kindred spirit. Pete loved security, not because he felt threatened by any imminent danger, but because he disliked the idea of someone getting the better of him. He didn’t even walk away when he was grilling chicken. He would crouch down and watch, taut as a guard dog, in case the wavering blue flame behaved unpredictably once his back was turned.

The only other extravagance in the first house were the lights, which could be switched on and off by clapping. Cilla demonstrated, or tried to; her hands connected but the sound failed to resonate. Pete clapped loudly and the lights vanished; he clapped again and they came on.

But once wasn’t enough for him. He stood in the bare, tiled living room and clapped his hands again and again, making the light appear and disappear.

‘Just testing its reflexes,’ he said, smiling at Cilla.

Cilla swayed on the spot as if she was about to dance and gave a breathy little laugh.

‘Would you like to move on to the next house?’ she said.

Pete clapped. On. Off. On. Off.

Cilla made a show of taking her phone out, exclaiming at the time.

‘This is fun,’ Pete said, looking at me. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘I guess,’ I said.

He clapped once more and the lights flicked off.

On the way back to our cars, I saw Cilla work a handkerchief – a tightly folded white square – out of her sleeve. While she thought she was unobserved, she dabbed at the corners of her mouth. Another memory surfaced: Cilla and her handkerchiefs. I recalled a day when her class was doing a gymnastic circuit. At one station, students had to perform a rudimentary hang on the uneven bars. Cilla had no hope of holding up her own weight. Her muscles started shuddering almost instantly, even while I held my palm against the knobs of her spine.

I remembered her handkerchief dropping from her pocket to the floor, and I remembered how quickly she detached from that bar to retrieve it, how lightly she landed. She gathered the handkerchief and scurried off the mat. It was the most agile sequence of movement I ever saw her make.

In the car Pete sniffed.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said.

‘About what?’

‘That woman. She’s not right. She has a real shit-eating grin.’

At that point, I thought to tell Pete the story of the poo phantom.

It happened when Cilla was in year eight. Rumours about the first incident spread with that invisible, light-speed energy they have in a school: all at once, everyone knew that someone in the D-building restrooms had, after hours, written a message in shit on the walls. A week later it happened again and an assembly was called. The vice-principal – a tall undertaker of a man who wore faded colours and had a loose, low-hanging paunch – stood on stage and through a series of euphemisms asked the perpetrator to seek help, promising complete confidentiality.

After the assembly, I asked one of the other teachers what the messages were.

‘The first said Hi,’ she told me. ‘And the second said Help.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s all?’

My colleague gave me a wry look.

‘I guess she had to keep it short,’ she said.

Suspicion took a while to fall on Cilla, but when it did, it stuck. We never knew for sure that it was her, but as far as the other girls were concerned, she still had shit on her hands. At the end of that term she vanished. And once she was gone, she wasn’t missed.

I almost told Pete this story, but something stopped me. From early on I had understood that ours would not be a relationship of gradually communicating our strangenesses, our weaknesses, our undignified moments, to one another. He had, for instance, never once passed gas in my presence. I don’t know how I became aware of this, but it resulted in my feeling that I shouldn’t pass gas in his presence, either. This was a discipline I now rigorously observed. There had been nights when I woke myself up either by passing gas or having a vivid nightmare in which I did, and then lay there with my heart racing, hoping he hadn’t heard.

He would not, I decided, appreciate the story of the poo phantom. And I didn’t want the shame of what Cilla had done – what she might have done – to stick to me.

What had attracted me to Pete in the beginning? Looking at him, his eyes trained with ferocious concentration on Cilla’s hapless, apologetic hatchback, I felt both drawn to him and repulsed by him. I liked his certainty, his untroubled conscience, his sense of purpose. He was someone who woke up before the alarm and then took pleasure in switching it off. He often asked to speak to the manager. He would not allow strong-smelling foods into our apartment – no anchovies, no curry powder, no blue cheese. I knew that these were irritating traits. And yet I admired them, saw something heroic in them, the way you might think it heroic for someone to fight a wildfire with a water pistol.

I met Pete when he was the nurse at my local doctor’s clinic. I was there because I needed a series of antibody injections. Specifically, rabies antibody injections.

When the clinic said I had to make an appointment with the nurse, I pictured a woman with middle-aged spread in shoes with solid arch support. Not this tall, healthy man with a face that managed to be boyish and pious at once.

‘You haven’t noticed any symptoms?’ he said.

‘No…?’

‘No thirst, sweating?’

I shook my head.

‘You’re not foaming at the mouth?’ He smiled, pleased at his joke.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

He retrieved a refrigerated bag and withdrew the vaccine, then began assembling the things he’d need, each wrapped in its own sterilised package.

‘Dog bite?’ he asked, confident, peeling the packaging away. I could see that his abdomen was a flat, disciplined plane, and I had an athlete’s appreciation for the denial that had gone into its making.

I smiled. ‘Bat.’

That got his attention.

‘A bat? Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Show me.’

I was charmed by his enthusiasm for my wound. I showed him my hand – the small but deep impressions left by the bat’s fangs.

‘So you’re a vampire now?’ he asked. ‘Feeding on the blood of the living?’

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