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"Did anyone recongise you?"
"No, Hollander. We're in a different fucking hemisphere."
They left the airport, while Shane nattered on and off about the cottage for the next two hours, filling the car with words about roads, the cottage itself and its secludedness. Ilya nodded in the appropriate places and learned absolutely nothing.
Ilya had seen the place in a documentary once. It definitely was not a cottage that Ilya knew of. Cottages were small. This one was not. This one was all glass and clean lines, perched like it was permanently posing for a drone shot. Turns out it was the North American rich people term for holiday house; Shane, being Canadian, didn't bother calling it something else while they were in Australia.
“We have two weeks,” Shane said, still talking. “I went and got us enough food. And enough Coke cans. Was two packs of twenty-four enough?”
“Should have gotten more.”
“If you want your veneers replaced, then yes.” Shane pulled in and parked, gravel crunching under the tires, and popped the boot to grab Ilya’s luggage case. Ilya got out of the car and tipped his head back, squinting into the sharp sunlight then followed Shane.
“Hey! I can take my own bags in!”
“You have a broken rib and you've just been on a fifteen hour flight.”
“It’s nearly healed. And I slept for most of that."
“Mister Cottage,” he called, while Shane stood by his house patting his pockets and looking his keys he’d managed to misplace one minute ago. “This is not a cottage. This is a glass oven.” He paused, considering. “Mister Oven Man.”
It was a nice place, which was deeply annoying to Ilya because it made him jealous that he didn’t have a fancy place like this to go to. Maybe he should have brought something on the Gorky Reservoir or something. Shane's cottage had a lake front, and a small green lawn sloping down to the shore. It must have cost Shane millions, which he had anyway, so that was not surprising.
Ilya immediately decided he would be swimming in the lake. It was a warm day, so why not?
The air smelled like lake water, dirt, and eucalyptus, and nothing like Moscow’s exhaust pipes and smoke. There was one thing that Moscow didn’t have: the goddamn sound of thousands of screeching colourful birds all in the trees.
“What the fuck is that.”
Ilya stopped dead at the foot of the steps.
A lizard nearly two feet long lay stretched across the welcome mat of the front door like it owned the place, striped body flattened, eyes half closed in the sun. It had been basking. The moment Shane came closer with Ilya’s case, it scampered away, tail swinging left to right and almost whipping Shane in the ankle as it bolted.
“That’s a water dragon,” Shane said. They watched as it went down to the lake’s edge. It ran quite fast, then dunked itself into the water and perched on a rock nearby to sunbathe.
“Is it a pet?”
“No. You can make it a pet if you want. Not that we have time for pets.”
“I want a dog.”
“A dog would love being here,” Shane said. “Chasing things.”
“…Like?”
Shane shrugged. “Like other animals.”
“This, Shane,” Ilya turned slowly, looking up at the birds flying ahead, and the ones in the trees. “Seems to be a fucking zoo.”
“It’s not a zoo,” Shane said. “But there’s wildlife.”
Before Ilya could respond, rainbow lorikeets streaked across the sky in a burst of colours, screaming like they were being murdered, before landing in only one nearby tree. The branches shook under them. The poor tree looked as if it was being attacked by Pride Month.
“They’re very gay birds,” Ilya announced, having to shout over the noise. “I am learning too much about this place already.”
He had not even gotten inside yet. Had not crossed the threshold of the glass oven Shane insisted on calling a cottage. Did he really want to go into a house where the walls were transparent and the outside appeared to be actively alive?
Yes. He did.
Shane opened the door.
Ilya stepped inside, automatically kicked his shoes off, and placed them neatly on the rack by the entrance. He straightened, looked up, and came face to face with a spider the size of the palm of his hand with a hairy body like the skin of a kiwifruit.
Ilya shrieked.
The spider was pressed flat against the wall near the ceiling, legs splayed like it had been nailed there for display. “Get that thing away from me!”
Shane glanced up as he put his shoes neatly away, barely reacting. “It’s just a huntsman.”
“IT’S A FUCKING HUNTSMAN? WHAT DOES IT HUNT? MEN?”
“Leave it alone. It eats the flies. We are not killing any huntsman.”
“Where’s your bug spray. Give me.” Ilya abandoned his things and started yanking open cupboards at random with increasing panic. “Where do you keep it!?”
“They eat flies and other insects,” Shane said calmly, following him. “They keep this place safe for me when I’m not here.”
Ilya froze mid-cupboard. “So they're your little bodyguards.”
“In a way.”
They stared at each other for a moment, while the spider continuing to exist somewhere behind them, which was completely unacceptable to Ilya.
In the end, Ilya refused to go back to the front door, as he was being held hostage by one of Shane’s bodyguards. Shane got a jar out and a piece of paper, removed the spider and put it outside where it crawled into a plant pot to nest.
“Happy?” Shane asked, coming back inside and closing the door.
Ilya scanned the walls, the ceiling, and the corners. “Any more animals in this zoo?”
Shane shrugged. “Outside, maybe.”
Ilya thoroughly inspected the house for every place a spider that could reasonably or unreasonably exist. There were no others he could see. Satisfied, he watched the bird orgy outside for a while through the glass before eventually giving in to jetlag and having sexy time/nap with Shane.
***
They had burgers for dinner. Shane made eight, which felt excessive until Ilya ate two and considered a third. Afterward, Shane lit a small fire.
“Does it ever stop being so humid here?”
“No. But it’s going to rain soon, anyway.”
“There’s no cloud in the sky.”
Shane pointed with his beer towards an ant mound near the edge of the deck. “Ant nest. Rain.”
“What?”
“They make little nests when it’s going to rain.”
Ilya watched the ants for a moment, their shadows flickering and stretching across the boards in the firelight.
Then there was a sound.
A throaty growl, followed by a low, wet bellow that seemed to come from everywhere at once. HONNNNNKKKK.
“What the fuck was that,” Ilya demanded, jumping and making the ants scatter from where they had been attempting to crawl into his sandals. “The fucking devil?” HONK.
“It’s just a koala,” Shane said. “Probably has chlamydia.”
“What? Why does it have chlamydia?”
Shane shrugged. “Don’t know. Everyone knows lots of koalas have it.”
“It’s going to kill me,” Ilya said flatly. “This place. With all its animals. I will die of a heart attack caused by terrible koala sounds and its diseases.”
“You don’t have anything like this in Moscow?” asked Shane. “Things that could kill you? I’m sure everywhere does.”
“No,” Ilya said. “No. Just people that jump out of windows in mysterious circumstances. Have to look up when I’m walking by rich people buildings.”
***
Trying to fall asleep was worse than a nightmare when another growl tore through the dark, just as awful as before.
“It’s just a possum,” Shane said, when Ilya shot out of the bed.
“I don’t know what’s worse, Shane! The possum or that fucking koala. Why do they sound like they’ve been smoking for fifty years?”
“Well,” Shane said, “They’re sound like you in fifty years.”
“I’ll quit by then!” Ilya flopped back down.
***
Ilya woke up at eight to several thousand screaming birds, the wall of sound practically shaking the glass walls. By nine, Shane opened his eyes to five kangaroos scattered across the lawn. One of them was at least two metres tall, all puffed up like a boxer. Shane definitely would lose that fight.
Shane got annoyed and ran out the door. “That’s my grass! Shoo!”
They hopped off, clearly offended that their breakfast had been interrupted.
“Are we going to have a nice, normal day, without your zoo attacking us?” Ilya called from inside.
“Probably not,” Shane said, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s have breakfast. Though for you, it’s probably dinnertime by now.”
Ilya had to be heavily encouraged to have his meal outside. Shane had brought out several repellent fans to keep the morning flies diving into their food. They ate leftover burgers for breakfast, then decided it was time for a morning cold dip in the lake.
“Hello, Mr Water Dragon,” Ilya greeted the lizard as he put his towel on the slightly sun warmed rock. The water dragon startled, looked at him once, then dipped away into the water with a small plop. “Shane, will there be anything in this water that could kill me before I go in?”
“Um,” was Shane’s answer from the grass.
Ilya glared.
Shane fished his phone out from the chair under the shade. “Let me check.” He wandered along the lake shore, waving his phone around trying to get signal, while Ilya perched on the rock like he was stranded on an island or something. “You should probably get down from there,” Shane looked a bit nervous.
Oh no.
Shane finally glanced at the lake. About a metre or two from the shore, the water rippled. “Tell me, Hollander,” Ilya said. Was he going to live? Or would he be stuck in this godforsaken zoo forever? "Will I be killed by being on this rock?"
Shane took a deep breath. “…There might be a bull shark in there.”
“A shark…” Ilya’s eyes snapped back to the lake, scanning the water for a potential grey fin. “There could be a FUCKING SHARK IN THIS LAKE?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“The fuck?”
“It flooded sometime ago,” Shane said. “Bull sharks can go in freshwater.” He frowned, thinking. “Guess we can’t go in the lake, or we find a spot around here that’s covered so they can’t get in. I can call the council if you want and see if there’s been any lake receding into the sea. Did you know snakes can swim too?”
Ilya was very close to having a heart attack and immediately cancelling his visa, moving back to Russia rather than staying here.
“If we see one, we’ll call up the snake catcher,” Shane said, catching Ilya as he managed to jump from the rock to the shore. “You just have to stamp or splash around. They don’t like the vibrations or disturbances in water.”
It took a while for Ilya to get over his fear of being killed by a zoo. They found a secluded area nearby, where a few trees grew in the shallow water, and draped netting between them to stop potential grey finned visitors. In fact, they spent quite a lot of time watching parrots and lorikeets of all kinds having fun, occasionally they had a dip in the water near them too.
“Anything other animals I need to know?”
“Stay away from cane toads. I’ve never seen one here, but…”
“A toad? In a lake?”
“Hollander. This is too much of a zoo. I don’t want to know what a cane toad is.”
“You don’t want to know. There's also a stinging tree... Never mind." The wildlife left them alone for the rest of the day. By evening, they were sick of burgers and had moved on to hotdogs.
That night, at exactly 1am, a disgusting, grating noise cut through the darkness.
“I cannot. I cannot sleep with this fucking noise that wakes me up,” Ilya groaned, flopping onto the pillow.
“Well, I know you didn’t like this feature,” Shane reached for the remote and slowly brought the curtains down. “But this might help.”