The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

  She was surrounded by angry voices, the pointing finger. Vivian rattling a strip of ruined negatives. Gavin’s mother spitting her grief and her fury. Joel’s dreadful silence, the children’s bewildered gaze on her. You lost him. If she hadn’t been up the mango tree with distracting thoughts; if she’d been counting children as a mother should …

  She heard a heavy tread behind her and spun around.

  A wallaby bounded out of the bush and scuttled down the bank into the water. Seconds later a dingo raced to the edge. The wallaby was swimming to the tumble of boulders on the other side. Greta watched, astounded. She’d never seen a wallaby swim before. The dingo sniffed the air and watched the wallaby scramble out and hop away. It waited for a moment afterwards, one paw off the ground, then was gone into the mosaic of rocks, cycads and termite mounds.

  The lake resumed its quiet. Disturbances in the bush settled. The air was humid, damp to breathe. Perspiration trickled down Greta’s face, her chest, her arms.

  Above her a sea eagle drifted in and out of merging clouds.

  ‘Watch for him,’ she whispered.

  A slight breath of air passed low over the ground, bringing with it faint noises. A far-off tapping, soft ringing. The more she listened the clearer it became, as if it would strengthen for someone who heard. Greta’s eyes searched for where it was coming from. She saw nothing at first but the flash of a lizard’s fiery red tail. It darted up a rock to a stick she recognised—it was the divining stick. From each twig a string dangled down to a star of delicate bones. The lizard watched her, sides breathing in and out, red tail flicking. The stick was pointing to a blackened branch with a single new leaf on one of its twigs. A line of miniature mirrors hung from a branch under it. They were square, like the ones from a mirror ball. She spotted one on the ground ahead, and another, and another, until she came to a cycad with luminous new fronds curling upright. It had a rusty bicycle chain around its neck. A black cockatoo feather was jammed through the chain. She pulled the handsome feather free.

  It is not a sign, she told herself of the blood-red mark. It is not an omen.

  But clearly she was being led along a trail. She was sure of two things. That Griffin had been here. And that the girl had planted these curious messages—not as markers to keep herself from being lost, but to lure another child. She shivered and remembered the girl’s fascination with the birthmark on Griffin’s neck, his father’s mark.

  Be good, my child, come go with me! I know nice games, will play them with thee!

  Vivian used to read ‘The Erl-King’ out loud. What kind of mother reads her child that poem at night? And what games might the stranger girl play with Griffin?

  The bushland called her deeper into an enchanted forest. Psychedelic green buds studded the dark arms of the ironwood trees. Cycads boasted new heads of feathery green. The charred trunks of sand palms were crowned with vibrant fronds. She could almost see the vivid threads of grass sprouting, as if the pressure of her boots had triggered this magic. It is the work of perched aquifers, tubers and rhizomes underground, she told herself. The secret sustenance. Brynn had told her about them. Subterranean networks keeping plants alive for months without rain.

  A line of burned cycad nuts, like dark marbles, led her to an odd sculpture balanced on a rock—a pyramid of rusted metal rods and skinny bones, with a delicate bird skull suspended in the centre. A red bead plugged each eye socket. She followed the skull’s line of sight. It took her to a doorless fridge lying in the red dirt. Two lines of barbed wire had been strung across the front and caught a flying fox. It was long dead, wings stretched wide, legs out stiff. A pink bead glinted at its ankle, bound with yellow cotton.

  Greta’s heartbeat quickened. Steady your breath, she told herself. Her mind kept spinning wild horrors, like the malevolence of the lake had crawled from the water and entered the girl to move on land. She stopped, disoriented. The bush closed in around her. Find a reference point, the voice in her urged. An anomaly, a unique feature. There must be one. But in each rock and tree she found a repeat of another. Her shirtsleeves clung damp to her arms. She breathed a humid fear. I cannot find him, I cannot find him.

  Thunder rumbled again. The dark clouds from the homestead had spread. The rejuvenated forest petered out. She no longer heard the gentle sounds that had drawn her along. Great tussocks of gamba rose around her, whipped with black marks but not burned. Her heart sank, until a red shirt among the stalks caught her eye. Griffin! She dived after him, calling out. The untucked shirt flitted ahead, just out of reach.

  ‘Griffin!’ she shouted. ‘Griffin!’

  She was close, her fingers almost touched him. The boy’s head spun around to face her and instantly disappeared.

  ‘No!’ she cried out.

  He’d vanished. The grass spilled her into a clearing. A cow’s bones lay scattered at her feet, stark white against the cracked, orange earth. Sun-weathered hide clung to an arch of ribs. It was the skeleton from the lake, escaped in the night only to fall apart at daybreak.

  She drank the last of her water and checked her phone. There was no reception.

  Beyond the bones was a disintegrating car. Rubbish lay strewn around it, a detached bicycle wheel, a swollen esky, a shoe. And Griffin’s blue cap. She stooped to pick it up.

  Perhaps that little boy should bring them himself.

  Her chest tightened. She circled the vehicle. No one was there, but a muddied tarp draped over a small mound was pushed up against the front wheel. She stared at it, sickened.

  There’s consequences. Punishments.

  A crack of thunder split the silence. Large spots of rain hit the tarp.

  Get yourself together, she told herself. You can’t know it’s him until you look.

  She snatched away the tarp. Underneath was a grey dog. Long teats drooped from its swollen belly. A bullet hole neatly marked the forehead. The dog’s eyelids hadn’t quite closed. A fly buzzed in to clutch at the eyelid, explore the snout.

  Greta stepped away. Behind a nearby rock was a newborn pup. Dead, like its mother. She found two more and, just beyond them, Griffin’s thong. She snatched it up.

  The rain came down fast, slanting sideways to sting her face. In moments she was sodden.

  ‘Griffin!’ she called again, knowing there would be no answer.

  The rain intensified, became a veil. The land was altered, she couldn’t see far ahead of her. The trees and gamba, rocks and termite mounds were vague presences. Only one shape moved, walking towards her. Too tall for Griffin.

  With every second Elena became more real. Rain pelted her body. Her dress was soaked, clinging to her skin like the hair over her skull. Drops of water beaded her eyelashes.

  She must see me in the same way, thought Greta. We are each other’s mirror.

  ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘Come with me,’ the girl said above the clamour of the rain.

  She led the way across ground pockmarked from pigs and buffalo to a track flanked with new grasses. A Keep Out! sign was nailed to a woolly butt tree. Elena walked along the glistening track; the red dirt was carved with rivulets. She held out her hands, palms up, to feel the rain. Her dress was transparent. Beyond her the world was shrouded in rain.

  They stopped at a large shed Greta knew must be the slaughterhouse. There were no windows. The door at the end of the building had been pulled off.

  A spasm of light jerked across black clouds. Thunder bellowed. The girl ushered Greta inside.

  Rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roof. Greta stepped up onto the killing floor and called for her son. No answer. She moved further in, past the rusted knocking box and platform. The walls were scrawled with graffiti. A perished hose lay on the ground. Beside her were two skinning cradles, bolted to the floor, and an offal chute down to a trailer outside. She stepped around the carcass hoist and its dangling winch cables. The hooks on the hoist and the meat rail still had their stainless steel gleam.

  She looked behind
her, expecting to see Elena, but the girl was gone. Across the killing floor, one section of wall was missing. It made a giant, accidental window onto a small cattle yard with a ramp up to the knocking box, and an open shed with a bench where Joel would have salted and folded hides. In the distance a tree line edged the creek. She could just make out a figure heading towards it, fading between vertical lines of rain and grass.

  ‘Elena!’ she called out.

  The girl didn’t turn. A flock of black cockatoos flew slowly past, screeching their love of rain.

  The building tightened against the pull of the wind. Greta walked alongside a drain with a grate, to the coldroom at the end. The sliding door was jammed open. The meat hooks hung still and empty. As she went to step inside, a ferocious bark leaped out at her. She yelled and ducked sideways. A dog surged at her again, but was yanked to a halt. Its high-pitched yelp shot through the space. She saw a trail of barbed wire running from the inner thigh of the dog’s left leg, out through a hole in the wall. Thunder rumbled overhead. The walls and roof vibrated. The dog cowered momentarily, then started its hoarse barking again. So this was the dog Griffin had heard.

  ‘Mum!’ He stood behind her, as if he’d never left. He held a metal bucket with a scoop of water in it.

  ‘Careful!’ she warned, as he set it down for the dog.

  ‘He’s hurt,’ said Griffin.

  She waited for him to be clear of the dog, then grasped his shoulders and pulled him close. ‘I thought something had happened to you!’ Her voice echoed around the building. She couldn’t repress a sob.

  He was mortified by her tears and tried to pull away. ‘Nothing’s happened. I’m safe.’

  She covered her face for a moment.

  ‘The bush isn’t a monster,’ he added. ‘It can’t eat you.’

  ‘What you don’t understand is there are places that can.’ She fought the tremor in her voice.

  The dog tried to move forward and yelped.

  ‘How can we get that barb out of his leg?’ Griffin asked, crouching to see it. ‘And whose dog is it?’

  There was no tag on the collar, just a short length of broken chain. Greta suspected it might be Trapper’s dog, possibly the mate of the dead female she’d just seen. She wouldn’t put it past Trapper to lead a pregnant dog onto a neighbouring property and shoot it.

  ‘How long have you been here, poor thing?’ She knelt by Griffin and instinctively reached out her hand.

  The dog lunged.

  ‘God!’ She clutched the puncture marks above her wrist.

  ‘We can’t leave him.’ Griffin raised his voice over the dog’s high-pitched yelps. ‘He’ll starve.’

  Greta stepped outside the coldroom. The rain had stopped, everywhere was the sound of dripping. She was overcome with the pain in her arm, the knowledge Griffin was safe, and shame that she’d suspected Elena of child-snatching when in fact she’d led her to him.

  ‘Did you follow anyone here, Griffin? Trail markers or a path? How did you find your way?’

  He looked at her and didn’t say yes or no.

  A car horn tooted outside.

  ‘Go and see who it is, Griffin. Quick.’

  Her wound throbbed. The dog watched Griffin go, eyes never leaving the space where he’d disappeared.

  He returned with Brynn.

  ‘Just the kind of hoo-ha you’d expect from southerners,’ she remarked, marching up with a pair of wirecutters she kept in her ute.

  Griffin persuaded the dog to let him hold it still. Brynn was quick with the cutters. She left a last curl of wire. It was too close to the embedded barb.

  ‘That’ll be a vet job,’ she said. ‘I’m not game to hook that out.’

  ‘What about Mum’s arm?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘We’ll just cut that off.’

  22

  The day after finding Griffin another fall of rain swept through. Greta went outside to feel it tapping on her skin. It had shifted something in her, the storm that brought her son back home with the surprise dog. She felt the mud across her feet claiming her, the land taking her in.

  She and Toby went up to the graves to plant a young kurrajong and a grevillea tree for Magdalen and Maria. Toby started digging a hole, because Greta’s arm was sore from the dog bite, but he soon stopped. Though she assured him no skeleton hand would poke out, he was curious, afraid.

  ‘Not much will be left by now, Toby. It’s the tropics.’

  ‘Bones last forever,’ he said, with such conviction she believed him.

  She motioned for Toby to help her position the kurrajong.

  He filled in the rest of the hole with the dirt mix Greta had made. She pressed it down with her boot. He was braver about the second tree and took up the spade again. He worked hard, determined to equal her efforts.

  ‘You’ll let us keep the dog,’ he said, ‘now we’ve called him Rex.’

  ‘I don’t know that your father wants a dog. We’re foster carers for a few weeks until he’s re-homed, that’s all.’

  ‘A few weeks!’ Toby huffed, more vigorous with the spade.

  ‘Someone might claim him yet,’ she said, though the council had told her no one had reported a dog missing.

  ‘What’s Dad got against a dog?’

  He was digging like a man now, foot on the edge of the spade, pressing in. Greta wiped her face with her shirt. The rash on her neck prickled. She pulled her hair into a bun and stuck a pencil from her pocket through it.

  ‘His sister’s dog took a poison bait. Died under the house while they were out looking for him.’

  She saw Magdalen on the floor of her room, distraught, and the dog lying beneath. ‘Your father said he’d never have another dog.’

  ‘Rex’ll change his mind.’

  Rex was recovering at the shack, doted on by Griffin.

  Toby handed the spade back to her. He didn’t trust the bones. Greta powered on. She was no longer thinking of Rex, but her visit to the State Library in Darwin the day before while the vet extracted the barb. She’d searched microfiche pages for death notices or an article about Magdalen’s fiery car accident. No obituary, no report of the highway tragedy. She was beginning to think Trapper might have been telling the truth. Perhaps the car near the mango farm was the one.

  The groan of a cow crossed the hill, and then a shout, steel clanging, the grunt of an engine. Greta stopped to listen.

  ‘That’ll be Trapper come to claim his cow. Up at the old yards, sounds like.’

  Think of him and there he is, she noted.

  ‘Tori says good luck to him with those yards,’ said Toby, helping her lift Maria’s kurrajong into position. ‘She says a stockman died there once, and no cows ever went in again. Donegan had to build new yards.’

  Greta poured water from a drum onto the trees. ‘We’ll have to water these until the proper wet comes in.’

  She gave the clouds a hopeful look. They billowed in white towers above her. The cow’s noise became more urgent.

  ‘I’m going to see what’s going on.’ She headed up behind the homestead.

  The clanging sound returned and then a series of shouts and the low groan of an engine. A tilt tray truck slowly approached, with two quad bikes either side. Trapper was driving. As the truck chugged past, Greta saw a hog-tied cow roped onto the tray.

  ‘I offered to sell it to ya!’ Trapper yelled.

  The quad bikes sped down the track out to the road.

  ‘If Tori saw that she’d be wild,’ said Greta.

  Tori who was always saying, ‘We look after our animals. Don’t frighten the cows.’

  ‘He heard you,’ Toby said from behind her as the truck slowed to a stop. He was standing on a tall, stately termite mound.

  ‘Get down!’ she told him, ready for the mound to crumble. ‘You’ll damage it!’

  Toby stood where he was, eyes on Trapper striding back to them.

  ‘You can mind yer own business, girly! An’ keep off my land! Next time youse go snoopin’ rou
nd me prize animals I’ll blow yer bloody brains out.’

  Greta narrowed her eyes at him. Toby was a silent giant behind her.

  ‘Got it? Stick yer nose in yer own shit. I seen ya down at the hut! Lookin’ for another fella, eh? Like young Magdalen. Sniffin’ roun’ Devil while ’er ole man’s away workin’!’ He laughed at her. ‘She mighta been missin’ somethin’ upstairs, but there weren’t nothin’ missin’ downstairs!’

  ‘You can go now, Trapper.’ Greta kept herself calm.

  He didn’t move, squinting up at Toby instead. ‘Whatcha lookin’ at, boy?’ He sniffed, shot a last fierce glare at Greta then marched back to his heifer. The truck crawled away.

  ‘Toby.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I said get down from that mound.’ She turned to him.

  As he jumped she saw a hunting knife strapped to his right leg. Stab injuries flashed through her mind. A knife through a boy’s skull, heart, thigh. A mother looking on too late. He thudded to the ground, scrambled up unscathed and dusted his hands, smiling under the broad-brimmed hat.

  ‘What’s that on your leg?’ She asked him.

  ‘A knife.’

  ‘Bring it here.’

  He didn’t move at first, but she stared him down. The blade was long and glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘It’s my pigging knife,’ he said proudly.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Down near the hut.’

  She gave him a displeased look.

  ‘You’ll have to take it back,’ she said. ‘It’s not yours.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to anyone!’

  ‘Lucky Trapper didn’t see it—what if it’s his?’ Or the girl’s, she thought.

  It looked home-crafted to her, like Elena’s fishing knife.

  ‘Dad said I could keep it!’

  ‘Dad’s not here!’

  ‘I asked, on the phone.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  When they’d finished planting and returned home, Greta hid the knife on the shelf above the laundry trough. Toby was distracted already, dressing up in Axel’s motorbike gear to ride the dirt bike that was on loan.