The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

‘Guess I’ll have to bring ’er in with a salt lick up at those old yards.’ He cast his eyes to the back seat. ‘Kiddies, eh? Off to school?’ His laugh had a sneering note. ‘Well, when yer done learnin’ numbers, come an’ see my critters.’ He waited to see if that stirred them. ‘I’ve got freak animals. Goat with three horns. Mind-readin’ cockatoo. An’ a giant albino lizard!’

  ‘What about a thylacine?’ asked Griffin. ‘Tasmanian tiger.’

  ‘Not yet. But I’m gettin’ one! Raaaaagh!’ He roared at the window, fingers in an ugly curl.

  Raffy leaned away.

  ‘It’ll cost ya, but!’ Trapper grinned.

  ‘How much?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Five bucks a head.’ He sucked in his breath. ‘Mate’s rates.’

  ‘We need to go or we’ll be late.’ Greta forced a smile. ‘Good luck with the heifer.’

  She drove on, watching Trapper in the rear-vision mirror. She wished she’d mentioned the fire. She’d have liked to see his reaction. He took his time to follow them out. She waited for him to pass through the gate and closed it behind him, snapping the new padlock through the chain.

  Throughout the day, Griffin’s words knocked inside Greta’s head. If anything should happen, if anything goes wrong. She felt the land whispering it back to her, with its russet atmosphere of singed leaves and fronds, and the rusted vehicles matching them.

  In the afternoon, while the children were still at school, the silence closed in around her. There was an underground will to this place. She felt it keenly now she was alone. And at the heart of it was the lake, beating a secret pulse, drawing lines to the shack, the hut, the homestead.

  ‘Can we go to Trapper’s critter world?’ Griffin asked the day after the neighbour’s invitation.

  ‘No, we cannot.’

  ‘What would you do if I went by myself? Took Trapper’s stile over the fence?’

  ‘I’d worry he might lock you in one of his cages, make me pay to come and look at you.’

  Raffy gave her a serious look and took the jar of shells to his louvre museum, as he called it, either side of the front door. Along the glass slats he’d arranged feathers, red seeds and conical gum nuts. Cicada shells, a dead butterfly with blue wings. A piece of bark stuck with globules of blood-coloured sap. He sat a few seashells beside two bleached snail shells from the bush. Sand leaked onto the glass alongside grains of red dirt.

  ‘Do you think Trapper ever climbs over his stile and goes to the hut?’ he asked.

  Greta had a vision of Trapper creeping over the bridge to the secret valley and the hut where the girl hid, innocent, unawares. She decided she should speak with the local policewoman, Eileen, the mother of one of Griffin’s school friends.

  ‘Oh no, where’s it gone?’ Raffy rattled the shells in the jar and poked his finger inside to shift them. ‘Vivian’s necklace has disappeared.’

  He came over to give her the jar. The black and red beads were missing.

  ‘Do you think she’ll mind?’ he whispered.

  ‘I think she’ll understand,’ Greta whispered back.

  ‘Griffin says you’re not allowed to collect shells from beaches these days.’ He put the jar on the bench. ‘But I’m wondering where this came from?’ He brought her the spider conch shell.

  ‘A friend gave it to me.’

  ‘Your best friend?’

  She paused. ‘Like a brother, actually.’

  He turned the shell in his hand. ‘Are you still friends?’

  ‘He died. A long time ago now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Toby called him out to the green table to watch his four aces card trick. She listened to the slap of cards being dealt.

  ‘See how you can hear the ocean?’ Gavin had said, holding it up to her ear. ‘Keep this and you’ll hear it forever.’

  His face there, smiling at her! Hair stiff with sea salt, freckles across his nose, the sunburned streak on his cheekbones.

  She clutched the shell now and remembered one, two drops of red spotting the white, a penknife cut on Gavin’s finger, and one on hers too. Blood sister, blood brother.

  She pressed her finger onto the few grains of sand inside the opening and put them on her tongue. Grit crunched on her back teeth.

  ‘That kid! That kid’s the devil!’

  The words whipped across her forehead. She could see it all again. Gavin’s mother flinging open the door of her father’s cottage so hard it sent a crack line up the wall. Rain blowing inside. The house rocking with the fury of the dead boy’s mother. Greta’s twelve-year-old self kneeling on the floor, pressed against the cold metal leg of the bed, by a pile of books that might topple. In her hand a damp matchbox hid a curl of Gavin’s hair.

  His mother knew nothing of the matchbox. She only knew Greta and her dead son. Her eyes were wild and her hand reached for the child on the floor.

  Greta’s father stepped between them, his hands seeking a truce.

  ‘Livvie, don’t.’

  Her eyes bulged in disbelief.

  ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  She shook her head. ‘Never, never!’

  ‘Take this then.’

  He held out his raincoat. She shook her head again. Raindrops flicked from her head, no, no, no. To his offer, to the death of her son. He watched her walk out into the lashing rain and stood there long after she’d gone, staring into the storm.

  When he turned back inside he said, ‘I’m going to take you away from all this, Gret.’

  He kept his word. They went inland. No memories for either of them. No sea, just the legend of an inland one. No talk from the waves, with their pounding of the inevitable truth. No constant staring at the rip and the quicksand that took her mother.

  Instead of fish, her father searched for rocks. Gems, opals, crystals. He taught Greta how to sand the residue away, polish the stone. She had held on to them, these talismans. Stones are solid. They are before the sand.

  19

  Just before sunset, Tori drove Greta, Brynn and the children to the Halloween party in her troopy. They took a turn-off twenty kilometres south along the highway, onto a dirt road. Cattle stopped to stare as they passed, and termite mounds glowed in the late sunlight. A cardboard witch greeted them at the gate, her long, skinny fingers like the birch in her broom. From the driveway, Tori followed signs to a clearing with a bonfire and a teepee. A line of skull and pumpkin lanterns were strung up above a small stage, with a mirror ball turning in the centre.

  ‘Hippies,’ muttered Brynn.

  ‘You’re not very dressed up,’ Tori admonished her, ‘though you’re skinny as a skeleton.’

  ‘I’m not into this American hoo-ha.’

  ‘Halloween’s from Europe,’ said Toby. ‘All Souls’ Night. Leave food for your dead relatives. Kill your beasts before winter. Blood on snow!’

  Greta remembered her aunt’s goats pushing inside the farmhouse when the butcher came to kill the sheep. They never liked the smell of him.

  ‘We should’ve left food out for them,’ said Griffin.

  ‘Who?’ Raffy asked.

  ‘The spirits, on Halloween night. Maria and Magdalen. Vivian, Frank. There’s a few in the family. They might drop by the shack.’

  Raffy paled.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Toby put his arm around his little brother. ‘We’re sleeping here.’

  Greta lugged her basket over to the food tables. The children carried the face paints and card table. A crowd had already gathered. Tori quickly disappeared. Speakers on the stage thumped out music as Greta looked for faces she knew. With each beat she felt more uncomfortable, a stranger. She wasn’t part of this town, of any town. It’s how it is if you’re always moving, Janna would remind her. Perpetual fish out of water.

  ‘I feel like an alien—do I look like one?’ Greta asked quietly.

  ‘Put your mask on,’ replied Brynn. ‘That’s what it’s for.’

  Greta secured her homemade cat face. She’d painted it gold, with black whiske
rs and eye markings. The op shop lace wedding dress she’d dyed black scratched her skin. Her black lace-up boots were too snug. The leather had turned stiff.

  She set down the kangaroo lasagne and urged her children to eat, but Griffin and Toby were off to the bonfire with friends to light sticks. Raffy hurried after them, an odd sprite in leggings and a skivvy, and a stocking balaclava with holes for eyes and mouth. He was a blood-sucking burglar, he said. He was back before long to give her the stocking.

  ‘Too sweaty.’

  She tucked it behind her pentacle belt buckle and pushed the cat mask up onto her head, overheated too. Her face was an elongated reflection in the stainless-steel urn beside her.

  ‘Here,’ said Brynn, handing Greta a thick orange cocktail. ‘Mango daiquiri. Surely you can have one.’

  A drummer and guitarist started playing on stage. Rhianna swept in and took the microphone. She wore a red taffeta dress with black dots. Her voice soared across the crowd, all jazz.

  ‘Isn’t she great?’ smiled Raffy. ‘Ray says she’s going to win those big music awards next time. That’s her brother on the drums.’

  It was dark now. The mirror ball’s lights circled the ground, while the pumpkin and skull lights grinned on people below. Griffin yelled out as he whirled by, balancing on a rolling pipe, arms flailing. Greta set up her face-painting table. Children lined up to become witches, vampires, zombies.

  ‘No one has their real selves on tonight,’ Raffy noted.

  Toby had a white square fountaining red arcs on each cheek—the new washing machine spewing blood, he said.

  Raffy asked for his stocking head back and urged Greta to become a cat again.

  He led her to a food table and offered her a red jelly eyeball. Greta had just shifted her mask to pop one in her mouth when Erin sidled up. She wore a tan glittery dress, tight-fitting and very short. Her fake leopard-skin shoes were high-heeled and chunky. Raffy hurried off with his brothers to a piñata showering lollies.

  ‘Joel’s out at Connor Station with Gabe, I hear.’ Erin lit a cigarette.

  Greta nodded and sipped her daiquiri. The mask slid down her face. Everything contracted. Erin kept talking.

  ‘Used to stay out there for months those two. Get away from family. And us girls.’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘How’s it out on the block? Can’t be easy for a southerner. All by yerself.’

  ‘So far so good,’ said Greta, and instantly heard Vivian. Don’t speak too soon.

  ‘Sink or swim, my mother used to say. “An’ if you sink, Erin, I’m not raisin’ those five kids.” She reckoned she’d done ’er time.’

  Greta looked over to the jack-o’-lantern table where children were scooping out pumpkin flesh and carving faces. Griffin’s hands were draped with orange innards. He might be Jack the Ripper or he might be a surgeon.

  ‘You’ve only got three, right?’ Erin asked her.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That you know of, never could tell with those boys.’ She dropped the cigarette butt and crushed it under her shoe.

  Greta’s face tingled.

  ‘Not that I’m sayin’ anything. You ’n’ Joel look real solid. Just lettin’ you know—there could be kittens in the cupboard.’

  Erin slunk away. A child in a fluoro skeleton costume minced past. Griffin followed, holding palm twiggery as antlers. It was a parade of gory painted faces and garish costumes. The masks, the faces, real and unreal were blurring. It made her feel giddy.

  She went to find water. Remnants of that fever still lurked in her.

  Kittens in the cupboard. She could hear them mewing.

  A sudden vision of her father sliced in.

  He was knee-deep in the creek, clutching a pillowcase. His fist was a knot at its neck. The pillowcase squirmed on the inside, a bundle of pitiful wails. His face struggled against the cries, the wriggling under water. ‘It has to be done,’ he grimaced.

  She saw him fight with himself. He lost his footing and fell on his knees. And though he stood up quickly, the weight of his wet clothing and of what he held made him unsteady.

  ‘Your mother won’t have them. You know that.’ He bent over his task.

  ‘You don’t have to drown them,’ she’d pleaded, sobbing from the bank.

  ‘I do.’

  And the way he said it begged her to forgive him.

  ‘God, that moon’s big!’ Brynn’s voice cut across the pitiful kittens. ‘Harvest moon, is that it?’

  ‘Blue moon. Second moon in a month.’

  ‘I’ll believe you.’

  You and Joel look real solid. Greta remembered the girl’s lantern-lit face hovering behind flywire. There is no solid, she thought. We’re all masks in the strange-lit night. Questions spiralled into her with the mirror ball’s turning lights. About the Joel she knew and the one who’d been here before.

  Raffy came up to take her and Brynn to the sleepover teepee where a crew of giggling children welcomed them inside. Felt monster lights were strung around the canvas. The party’s host and mother of the birthday girl introduced herself. Red tagua nut earrings dangled by her jaw.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right to leave them here?’ Greta asked Brynn, after she’d helped the boys set up their swags.

  ‘Absolutely. I’d leave my own if I had any.’

  Greta waved Toby over to remind him to look after his brothers, and she would pick them up in the morning. He gave her a highfive. Then she and Brynn went to find Tori, who was at the stage, jiving to the music.

  ‘I’m not leavin’!’ Tori declared. ‘I’m dancin’ all night long!’ ‘We’ll have to lasso her,’ said Brynn.

  Greta waited until she turned onto the highway to ask her question. ‘How old are Erin’s children?’

  ‘Teenagers,’ Tori called.

  ‘Were they there tonight?’

  ‘Sure! Out in the dark, trying not to be seen.’

  Kittens, kittens, sang the voice in Greta’s head.

  There was the click of a cigarette lighter and the first whiff of Tori’s joint.

  Greta kept her eye on the white line up the middle of the highway, the winking red reflectors on the side. Behind the rise ahead, a road train’s headlights beamed into the night. The sky went dark again briefly, before the truck appeared, bearing down towards them, lights piercing bright, flaring an aura around the cabin. Three trailers thundered past. The troopy shuddered.

  The sign to Old Mine Road was a welcome sight. The tyres slipped on gravel when she turned.

  ‘Dangerous!’ Tori called.

  Greta laughed and remembered the trepidation she’d felt when she first drove along this road. It was familiar now, and didn’t seem to take so long to travel. As they came to the T-intersection before the stretch that took them home, a brightly lit scene met them.

  ‘Film crew?’ asked Tori. ‘I heard they’re making a film.’ She put her head out the window to see.

  ‘Accident,’ Brynn said.

  ‘Holy fuck.’ Tori moved forward to see between Brynn and Greta.

  Just before the floodway a cattle truck had jackknifed and tipped. Flashing lights twirled. From the side of the road shocked cattle stared at the slowed cars. Inside the trailers shadows moved. A battered car was on the other side of the road.

  Two men in fluoro orange waved Greta on. Snippets of their talk floated to her. A tourist on the wrong side of the road. A truck driver in shock. The vehicles ahead picked up speed. As Greta crossed the floodway she glanced between the paperbarks. She saw a shadow person holding up a lantern. The pale face was unmistakable with its halo of white-blonde hair.

  Greta slowed to glance in the rear-vision mirror, but the headlights of the car behind were too bright and she saw nothing.

  Once home again, Greta lit the camping lanterns on the shack verandah. She had a mind to take one to the hut in the morning and ask the girl for her father’s in return. Tori found beers in the fridge and brought out three.

  ‘It was a mess, that cattle
truck,’ said Brynn.

  ‘Terrible,’ said Tori. ‘Poor truck driver, poor tourist. Can’t bring ’em back if they’re gone.’

  No, thought Greta. We can’t bring them back. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. The stranger taken from the car. And the dazed, wounded cattle, which seemed strangely connected to Toby’s slaughtered Halloween animals.

  ‘But I’ll give you a dare!’ Tori perked up. ‘Let’s go down to Trapper’s and break free his critters!’ Her face was shiny with the idea, as if it could right the way the night had tipped.

  ‘He’s invited the kids there,’ said Greta.

  ‘It’s a nightmare, I’ve heard,’ Brynn warned.

  ‘Someone should do something,’ agreed Tori.

  ‘What’s anyone to do? The guy greets everyone with a rifle.’

  ‘You can’t stop these people,’ said Tori. ‘It’s why they’re here.’ She stood, ready to go. ‘That’s why tonight’s the night for a dare!’ She stepped off the verandah. Her laugh skipped out across the valley. ‘Bring me the boltcutters! You’ve gotta run to the cages, free the animals and make it back! Person who snaps the most locks wins.’

  ‘Who’s dragging out the humans downed by Trapper?’ Brynn asked.

  ‘Trapper? He’ll be horizontal from his homebrew. Out to it after sundown.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Greta.

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life.’

  The night swam in this foolish, watery idea. Tori did a ragged waltz to the shed. She reappeared triumphant, waving boltcutters, and then disappeared.

  ‘We’d better go after her,’ said Brynn.

  They caught up with her on the track down to the boulders and the creek.

  ‘You show a sense of direction when you’re drunk, I’ll give you that,’ said Greta.

  ‘Turn that thing off!’ Tori waved away Greta’s torch. She was wide-eyed, a rabbit in the headlights. ‘All we need is the big light in the sky.’ Her arms swung up to love the moon.

  At the creek she stripped off her jeans and flung them over her shoulder to wade across. Greta hitched up her dress and followed. The lace hem dragged in the water. Stones bit into her feet, the current pushed against her legs. She remembered the creeks of her childhood, spotlighting yabbies with Gavin, him with the net and a torch, her with her father’s lantern. Tori was already at Trapper’s fence ladder.