In the Clearing

by J. P. Pomare

  I let my head fall to the steering wheel. The Disco is still, the engine ticking. When I sit up, I see a dash of blood on the leather wheel.

  ‘I didn’t hit it,’ I say. ‘It’s okay. Just a roo.’

  I turn towards him, reaching out to run my palm down his face, forgetting for a moment about the blood. His skin is as cold as silk. When I take my hand away, I have left a red trail on his cheek.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I repeat.

  I start the Disco again, pinching my nose, tasting the blood and steering with one hand back out onto the road. My knuckles are bleached from strain and my fingers tremble with adrenaline. I wind down towards the river, over the crossing. The white van is still there. O-U-P.

  Trees extend over the narrow road from either side as if reaching out to embrace. It has been eighty years since fire last ripped through here. It’s only a matter of time before it happens again.

  Soon we pass the mouth of Derek’s driveway and his barley-can letterbox. At the end of the road I turn through our gate and ease the Disco down the drive. Gravel shifts beneath the wheels as I pull in beside the house. Billy opens his door and is already halfway out when I say, ‘Wait.’

  Rocky would normally be rushing up to the car, leaping about in a frenzy, but he is nowhere in sight. I lean forwards, scanning the backyard. The sense that something is terribly wrong is stirring again in my gut. I brace myself for anything.

  ‘Stay in here,’ I tell Billy.

  He turns his big blue eyes towards me. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I bloody well said.’

  Billy slouches back in his seat and crosses his arms. I take the keys from the ignition, open the door and climb out, locking the car behind me. I stride towards the yard, my eyes searching ahead for movement.

  ‘Rocky,’ I call. ‘Rocky?’

  Then I notice the back gate is open.

  AMY

  SHE WAS SCREAMING all through the night, stopping for hours then starting again. With all my brothers and sisters in the same room lying in their bunks, no one spoke. We just laid there listening to her while we waited for sleep. That’s where I sit now, daylight warming my skin through the window of the Burrow, on the edge of my bed brushing Annette’s hair – one stroke with my fingers, one stroke with the brush. I hear Asha’s screams start again out in the Shed. The sound rises off and on.

  I wonder if the realignment would happen quicker if I had put her to sleep faster. Maybe if I hadn’t hesitated it would be over by now. If she remembers the collection, it will take longer.

  I wince again as another cry comes from the Shed. Asha will come out of this healthier and happier. It will all be worth it. It’s about the ends, not the means.

  •

  I’m in the classroom at the back of the Great Hall that afternoon when, gazing out the window across the Clearing, I see Asha emerge from the Shed. We have been studying geography, learning about the world, the wars and violence. Ozone depletion and melting ice sheets. Our education is not to be taken lightly, Adrienne says. Jonathan, our teacher, is preparing us for the new age. Under Adrienne’s instruction, he is preparing us to lead. When our brother arrives, we will be twelve, and we will be complete. We will be ready for the new age when it comes.

  Asha steps out tentatively into the glare of the sun. She looks pale; her eyes are fixed on the ground. Her entire body rocks. She balls her new dress in her fists at her sides and, when she stumbles, Adam bends over to lift her back up. We all watch as she crosses the Clearing towards us.

  When the door opens, Jonathan, who is standing at the front of the room, stops talking.

  Adrienne enters. ‘Amy,’ she says, ‘come with me, please.’

  I follow her out of the classroom, closing the door behind me. She pauses and turns to face me.

  ‘The full moon is coming. This year it aligns with a leap day. What a special time.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘You still haven’t bled. You’re too skinny. You need more protein; you need more fat.’

  I swallow. She steps closer. Her face is beautiful, her blue eyes shining down on me. ‘That means extra food at dinnertime. Soon enough, you might be ready for your own child. One you can keep and raise here with us in the Clearing.’

  ‘My own?’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’ I feel myself smiling, listing towards her. ‘I would love that.’ I imagine holding a baby, feeding it, carrying it against my shoulder.

  ‘But before that happens, I want you to make Asha appreciate what she has. You must help to raise her, even if that means correcting her behaviour at times. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘Come on then, this way.’ She leads me out into the Great Hall. Asha has been moved inside and is sitting on a knitted beanbag. I can hear Jonathan begin to speak again in the classroom.

  ‘Show her your deepest love. Obliterate any fear or doubt she has with love.’

  Asha’s fingers clutch her jaw, nails chewed to the quick. Her eyes don’t seem to fully open. I can imagine what it must be like, this great cavernous room, all the plain wood, and all the new smiling faces.

  ‘Protect the Queen,’ Adrienne says.

  ‘Protect the Queen,’ I repeat, smiling up into her eyes.

  I lower myself to sit beside Asha on the beanbag. When my arm touches hers she retracts with a small gasp, as if I’ve burnt her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say softly. ‘No one is going to hurt you anymore.’

  I wrap my arm around her and she pulls away again, a slow twisting struggle, but she has no strength. When she speaks I can barely hear her.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Shh,’ I say. ‘You are home.’

  The other children must be scorching with jealousy. I am the one who gets to hold Asha first. I squeeze her against me, leaning forwards to kiss her head. I bury my nose in her hair and can smell something clean and sweet. It’s blonde enough already, I note; she won’t have to go through those stinging purifying sessions where minders soak our scalps in chemicals to whiten our hair.

  ‘The hard part is over,’ I promise.

  I know what she has been through. The drops they place on your tongue. The room shifting as the colours become louder. The Truth with which Adrienne fills your ears. In this way, you experience an entirely new dimension. The room bends and sparkles, things leap out in a thousand shapes and colours. To learn the Truth, we need to access that other world – the place only Adrienne can take us.

  When I woke after the first time I was realigned, I was five or maybe six. The smell was thick and choking; vomit, blood, other body fluids. As I began to come to, I felt the cold blast of a hose. After hours of hallucinations, hours spent in that other place, I was hosed down like an animal.

  I take Asha’s hands and tenderly kiss the bruises and scratches from when she tried to hammer her way through the corrugated iron of the Shed.

  •

  At dinner that night, I can feel Anton’s eyes on me from across the table. He’s huge and stooped, his hands strong and callused. He’s no longer a boy at all. I glance up to see that he is frowning down at my plate. I follow his eyes and find that, for the first time, he doesn’t have the most food; I do. Potatoes, carrots, peas, broccoli. More than all the younger children combined. My stomach knots.

  ‘Eat,’ Adrienne says. As one, we take up our cutlery. The hunger is painful. I eat quickly, protective of my larger portion. I have seen my brothers and sisters chasing spiders and eating them; I have seen children clutching handfuls of grass and chewing on it like cattle or scraping up crumbs into their palms. Food is worth fighting for. I glance up from my plate again. Anton is still watching me.

  FREYA

  Four days to go

  I RUSH TO the back gate, eyes scanning the bush. It had been closed when I left that afternoon, hadn’t it? Think, Freya. Think, you bitch. Yes. I had definitely closed it. That meant someone had opened it, someone had le
t Rocky out. I think about the flowers at my door.

  ‘Rocky!’

  ‘Mum,’ Billy says. I turn around to see him standing behind me on the lawn.

  ‘Get back in the bloody car, Billy,’ I order. ‘Lock the door behind you.’ Nice. Locking a child in the car again. This is different.

  I rush out the back gate towards the river. If the man is still there, I don’t know what I will do or say. It’s moments like this that I can feel the skin beginning to slip. Who else could have opened the gate?

  Then I hear Rocky rustling in the undergrowth. He emerges with his head down, a sorry look in his eyes.

  ‘Get home now.’ I point and the dog scampers past me. I fish for my phone in my pocket. Dial and hold it to my ear. It rings and rings.

  ‘Derek speaking.’

  ‘Derek, it’s Freya from next door.’

  ‘Freya, what’s going on?’

  ‘I was just wondering if you’d noticed anyone loitering around today?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like anyone you’ve not seen before. I had someone cross my property to get to the river.’

  ‘Ah, right. No, I didn’t notice anyone.’

  ‘Okay.’ I scratch my neck. ‘Strange question, but you didn’t happen to open my back gate today, did you?’

  ‘Me? No, I haven’t been near your gate. What’s going on? You think someone’s opened it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. I probably opened it myself.’ I laugh lightly. ‘I might be losing my memory.’ I do, after all, have a family history.

  ‘Well, we all lose it one way or another eventually.’ He laughs too.

  I say goodbye and hang up. I close the gate then cast my gaze over the lawn and up towards the house, looking for anything out of place.

  There are always sounds: birds, the distant hum of Derek pushing the lawnmower or line trimmer, the trickle of water, critters rustling in the bush. I know no silence. I climb up onto the back deck and look about the yard, the scrolled bark the pale eucalypts have shed. There is an invisible cord between me and Billy that stretches the further apart we become. I feel it tug now. Shit, Billy. I hurry around the side of the house to the Disco.

  Billy is sitting inside with his arms folded tight across his chest and his face turned away from the window. I use the keys to unlock the door.

  ‘Come inside now,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Get inside,’ I say, glaring.

  I see the shine of his cheeks. Maybe I am being too harsh on him; he is probably still shaken up from the near miss with the roo. But in an emergency it is best to be clear and direct. Others need to understand who is in control. Granted, this isn’t exactly an emergency, but it’s something. I just don’t know what.

  He slides out from the back seat and walks towards the house. I follow. The bouquet of wattle still sits near the doormat. I kick it out towards the garden.

  Inside, I open the roller shutters on the windows; the light expands in growing rectangles across the wooden floorboards.

  Rocky is standing at the back door.

  Billy rushes over to let him inside.

  ‘Careful,’ I say, as Rocky skips past him. Last year Rocky had knocked Billy over when the two of them were playing and Billy had broken his arm.

  In the kitchen, I begin chopping the vegetables for dinner while Billy sits on the couch and turns on the TV. If you don’t believe in the zombie apocalypse, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s already arrived; put a child in front of a screen and see for yourself. Billy sits with eyes and mouth wide open. One of his front teeth is missing; it fell out yesterday.

  ‘Billy,’ I call, ‘go put your tooth under your pillow. Don’t forget again tonight, or the tooth fairy won’t come.’

  ‘Soon,’ he says, eyes still fixed on the screen.

  I walk over and take the remote from him, turn the TV off. ‘No more TV,’ I say. ‘Do something else.’

  He drags himself to his bedroom and returns towing the mini easel I had bought him. In the room next to his, my study, I’ve hung lengths of brown butcher’s paper covered with Billy’s watercolour houses and cats on the walls for his own exhibition. He believes he will be a painter. In my mind, Billy floats somewhere between talented and prodigious, but don’t all mums think that?

  What had my mum thought? When I decided to study art, she was disappointed. ‘I think you should study something more normal,’ she said stiffly. Children learn from their parents’ mistakes. I will let him find his own path. I was always so afraid of letting Mum down. Jonas, my brother, is much better with her than me. Forty-one years old and still adores his mum. No wonder he’s single. He’s bought fifty acres way out in the country and doesn’t work at all these days; I guess he’s a farmer now. He’s got his hippie ideals and enough of Mum’s money to get by on.

  Billy is struggling to open a tube of paint. I take the pliers from the toolkit beneath the sink and help him.

  When I think of Billy’s father, I imagine a child obsessed with soccer or basketball, rather than a child who would one day endure the rigours of neurosis that come with being creative. He might grow out of it. He tangles himself around my legs whenever strangers try to talk to him, and he still likes it when I pick him up and carry him in public; he’s seven years old and seems intent on causing me a serious spinal injury.

  He manages to get hurt a lot for a quiet boy. When Rocky bumped him down the deck stairs, it took eight weeks in a cast for his arm to heal, and in that time Billy – who is right-handed – learnt to use his left hand for most things. I wonder what Aspen would have been like as a seven-year-old?

  I have been thinking about Aspen more and more today. I guess it has something to do with the missing girl. The familiar feeling when I reflect on that time: a sinkhole opening in my gut. When I lost Aspen and was alone again, I would occasionally drive to playgrounds and kindergartens to simply sit in my car and watch all the happy children. I haven’t done that since Billy was born.

  I finish chopping vegetables then reach for my phone and check my emails. I see I have an email from Corazzo, an old friend. It’s a news article about Henrik but I’m not in the mood to read it. I know what it’s about already; he’s being released from prison in just a few days. I don’t know how Mum met Henrik but he was the closest thing I had to a father.

  Billy is painting Rocky, who is lying in a square of sun on the floor. The nib of Billy’s tongue sits in the corner of his mouth as he concentrates. I should start painting again. One of these days I will. I’ve got all that unsold art out in the fire bunker. Oil on canvas, scenes of the bush with a black square obscuring the centre of the image. I hate them, but they’re an insurance policy. I could sell them if I run out of money.

  I take my chopped vegetables and a tray of eggs and make frittata. I put it in the oven before heading outside to the yard in my boots. Sweat rises instantly and runs down my cheeks. Fingers of late-afternoon sun pass between the trees. I rake the leaves, the eucalypt bark and other debris, weary of the long grass. I’m always on the lookout for brown snakes at this time of year.

  The heat is a presence. It presses down on my skin. The drone of the air-conditioning unit thrums over the yard.

  Despite countless visits to Olivia, my psychologist – when I first lost Aspen I was ordered by the court to see her – the sense that disaster is imminent blooms inside. Olivia would tell me that my fear is irrational, borne out of trauma from the past. She would tell me I shouldn’t be afraid because there is nothing to fear. But what if she is wrong? I know the heat is flustering me. I need to cool down.

  I finish raking, then hose down the lawn all the way to the door of the fire bunker. From where I stand, I can see through the bush to a patch of river.

  ‘Billy,’ I call, without turning around. ‘Billy!’ Louder still.

  The door opens. ‘Yeah?’

  I turn. He’s standing half in, half out, like a child dipping his foot into a hot bath.
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  ‘You want to go for a swim?’

  ‘No.’ He twists as he says it.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m painting.’

  ‘Right. Well it’s hot and I feel like a swim.’

  ‘Can I stay and paint?’

  I don’t know why I feel so reluctant to leave him alone. Yesterday it wasn’t a problem. Freya Heywood isn’t a helicopter parent … or maybe she is. Maybe when I think of Aspen and the past, when I think of the girl who was taken, I become a helicopter parent. It will only be ten minutes, I tell myself. Is this what a good mother would do? the other voice in my head says.

  ‘Alright,’ I say, stripping down to my underwear there on the lawn. ‘I won’t be long. Could you lock the door while I’m gone?’

  He nods enthusiastically, happy that he got his way. The door closes. A moment of concentration on his face as he twists the lock.

  ‘And the front door too,’ I call through the glass. I just need to cool down, gather my thoughts.

  He looks serious as he nods again and rushes towards the front door.

  When I see he is back at his easel, I make my way down to the river.

  There’s no sign of the couple I’d seen earlier. Relieved, I step out of my underwear and unhook my bra, let it drop to the ground. I walk into the cool water. My neck feels stiff and tense, a tingling sensation spreads. I am not self-conscious about my scars and my naked body, the skin rippled with lightning storms of stretch marks at my belly and my breasts from Aspen first, then Billy later.

  The wind comes on strong, bringing the heat down from the hills. The drought has driven the river level lower, rocks long submerged now breach the surface and still pools are isolated from the flow of water. I suck in a breath and turn over, holding my head beneath the surface for as long as I can.

  I think about Aspen’s father – my ex, Wayne. I think about what he took from me. I think about Henrik Masters. He’ll be out of prison soon enough. I stay under the water, feel the pain starting deep in my brain; my arms and legs ache. My heart is thudding. Just a few more seconds. Someone is watching me. Is someone watching the house too? I rise, drag a breath deep into my lungs, feel the ache begin to subside.