by Kim Lock
‘Snail bait, I think.’
Elsie shrieked and spun around.
Standing with her hands clasped before her was a young woman with the most striking green eyes Elsie had ever seen. One foot was placed further forward than the other, as though she had hesitated mid-step and decided not to come any closer. A floral shift dress hung shapelessly over her body.
‘Oh, hello,’ Elsie said breathlessly. ‘You gave me a fright.’
‘Sorry,’ said the woman with a fleeting smile. ‘I’m Aida. I . . .’ she pointed at the house next door and trailed off.
Yes. Elsie remembered the face. The flash of it from behind the curtain. ‘It was you,’ Elsie said. ‘In the window.’
The young woman stared at her, almost sizing her up. Thick, dark eyebrows framed those startling eyes and her cheeks were full and clear. She had sleek, straight black hair parted-off centre and pulled back loosely behind her neck. Elsie tried to guess her age – she couldn’t have been older than twenty.
‘You’re Elsie,’ Aida said. ‘And Thomas, your husband – he’s away.’ She cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I hear you talking, sometimes – the houses are so close together.’
‘Aida,’ Elsie repeated. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ She wiped her hand on her skirt and held it out. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around to visit, to be honest I didn’t even know if anyone lived there. Is your . . . husband home?’
Aida dropped her gaze to the hen in the dirt. ‘She ate the snail bait, I’d say.’
Elsie looked from the sick hen to the vegetable patches where indeed the pale green pellets of the snail bait she had scattered around the lettuce seedlings were visible amongst the mulch.
‘I didn’t realise they’d eat it . . .’
‘Chooks will have a go at almost anything.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Not much you can do,’ she said, gently. ‘She’ll die. Humane thing would be to make it quick for her.’
Elsie hesitated. ‘I’ve never done it before.’
Aida looked up at her again and Elsie felt strangely caught in the weight of those green eyes. Aida squatted next to the forlorn bird, her hair rolling forward over one shoulder. Slowly, Elsie sank alongside her. With steady fingers, Aida caressed the hen’s silken feathers before lifting her into her lap. She ran her hands over the bird, murmuring to her quietly, and Elsie watched the hen soften and relax. There was something hypnotic about the steady, assured strokes of the woman’s fingers. Tingles wound up Elsie’s spine.
With a snap, Aida deftly broke the bird’s neck.
Beneath the gum tree, Elsie dug a hole in the sand. Aida fetched a clean towel and wrapped it around the hen’s limp form before lowering it into the hole.
Together they scraped dirt over the body. Elsie’s skirt was scrunched around her thighs and gumnuts dug into her knees as she pressed the earth flat. More than once her fingers touched Aida’s, gritty with sand. Matching crescents of dirt formed beneath their fingernails.
Straightening, Elsie brushed off her skirt. ‘Thank you,’ she said. It was the first words they’d spoken since the hen’s execution.
‘You’re welcome,’ Aida said.
*
By 11.30am the following morning – Sunday – Elsie felt aimless. There was hardly any washing to do with her having been alone for two days, so she had washed the sheets again, and hung them out in the sun. She had mopped the tiles, vacuumed the carpets, dusted all surfaces and scrubbed the bathroom to a gleam. Again.
In the kitchen, Elsie waited for the kettle to boil and glanced at the clock. Thomas had said he would be home around four. She drummed her nails on the counter, ran her finger around the rim of her teacup. Perhaps she could call in on one of the ladies she had met at Mrs Watson’s? Clare Adelman seemed nice. But then she remembered it was Sunday – those women would all be busy with their families: children racing about, grandparents visiting, elaborate Sunday roasts being prepared.
Slowly, she made a cheese sandwich, cutting the cheese into even slices, buttering the white bread with care. Carrying her teacup and plate into the living room, she settled into her chair by the window, set down her tea and sandwich, and picked up her knitting.
She took her time. Sip, swallow, sigh. Bite, chew, swallow. She tasted the creamy cheese and the fluffy nothingness of the bread. The needles clacked rhythmically, the yarn slipping across her little finger. Eventually, she let herself check the clock again.
11.57.
‘Blast it all,’ she said, tossing her needles down. ‘You’re being ridiculous. You’re not bored – you have plenty to do.’
Striding down the hall, she pushed open the back door and hurried down the steps. On the washing line, the clean sheets were still a little damp, flapping limply in the breeze. Although still comprised mostly of weeds, the grass showed a greenish tinge now that it was being watered and mowed. The small patch of vegetables had a dubious, tentative aspect, but she hoped with time (and more chook poo, if she could keep the chooks alive) the garden would become productive. The three remaining hens scratched purposefully in the sand. After the loss of the hen yesterday, Elsie had frantically picked up every little pellet of snail poison she could find, but she was too afraid to let them loose in the garden.
Returning to the kitchen, she made a dramatic show of washing her dishes. Water gushed noisily into the sink, the bottle of detergent let out an urgent, wet blurt as she squeezed it. She tossed the cup into the water then cursed as she withdrew it from the suds without its handle. Dripping suds across the freshly mopped floor she threw the cup into the bin. She fished the broken handle out of the water and discarded it. With more care, she ran the sponge over the plate.
When she looked out the window, she was surprised to see the curtains at Aida’s kitchen window had been drawn open. In her mind, she kept replaying the deft, gentle stroke of the young woman’s hands across the hen’s feathers, the swift and assured tug and crack of the bird’s neck.
Elsie swallowed dryly and looked away.
*
‘Oh, bugger it.’
After she had slid the lump of butter into the flour, Elsie realised she was supposed to melt the butter first. Never mind, she thought, poking the slippery mound. Surely it would still mix together.
With some difficulty, she managed to rub the butter through the flour to make a bowl full of crumbs. With greasy-floured hands, she cracked one of her hen’s speckle-shelled eggs into the bowl and fished out a shard of shell before adding sugar and a large handful of chocolate pieces.
Fashioning the crumbly dough into neat balls wasn’t as easy as promised in the Women’s Weekly. Elsie frowned at the magazine propped open on an upturned saucepan on the bench and dragged the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a gritty smear. The chocolate pieces didn’t stay glued in the mixture – they kept falling loose and lolling onto the tray annoyingly, looking like dead beetles. Elsie picked them up one by one and pressed them back into the balls of dough. That would have to do.
A sense of satisfaction finally overtook her when she slid the trays into the hot oven. She washed her hands and strode to the bedroom to change. Pulling open the wardrobe, she deliberated for a few minutes before selecting a sunny yellow above-the-knee dress with a white collar. She brushed her hair, dabbed rouge on her cheekbones and touched perfume behind her ears.
Back in the kitchen, she was quietly thrilled by the sweet, homely waft of baking. The biscuits were not as flat and round as she would have liked, and as she set them onto racks to cool a cascade of crumbs shed onto the bench, but they were home-baked biscuits nonetheless.
*
Elsie gripped the warm container and stepped out the kitchen door.
The sun was high in the sky and musk lorikeets rioted in the trees. Her heels sank into the earth. After hesitating at the invisible cen
tre line between the houses, she decided to approach the front door. Politeness should abide despite the familiarity offered by the recently shared euthanasia of accidentally poisoned poultry.
Elsie walked along the narrow strip between the two houses, climbed the front steps and knocked on the door.
Silence came from inside the house. Insects clicked and whined in the grass; she could hear the lowing of cattle in the distance. A fly hovered around her ear and she swatted at it, before knocking on the door again, with more force.
8
The night before, Aida had lain awake in bed, staring at the moonlit ceiling. In her mind’s eye she kept replaying when she had looked through the back door and saw her neighbour – the woman, Elsie – on her knees in the sand. There had been something helpless about the shape of her body, slumped over the feathered carcass, that had overpowered her mother’s sage advice about keeping to herself. For weeks Aida had observed the newlywed woman as happy, bright and purposeful. Observing all of that disintegrate in the way her body crumpled over the hen . . . Aida had felt it. Felt it in her own gut. Before she knew it, she was out the door and walking into the yard.
Elsie had been so tragically grateful when Aida had put the poor bird out of her misery. A crunch, a split second. A life ended.
After lying awake with her palms resting on her belly, Aida had tossed restlessly in her bed, alternating between chastising and arguing with herself. The hour had ticked well past midnight before sleep finally came to her in misty, nauseating snatches.
And now, Aida crouched on her kitchen floor, peering around the cabinet, her face inches from the linoleum as her neighbour knocked on the door.
‘Hello?’ came the sound of Elsie’s voice, muffled through the timber. ‘Hello, Aida, are you home?’
Aida’s heart was beating in her ears. The door rattled as her neighbour tried the handle and her sense of shame swelled. Elsie seemed nice. Gentle, friendly, pleasant. She hadn’t pressed further about a husband or asked about Aida’s background or family – nothing fearful or embarrassing had come up. Nothing sordid like her mother had warned. And yet, here Aida was, hiding from her neighbour on her kitchen floor like a stowaway, despite how lonely she had been.
If she made friends with Elsie, Aida would have to keep seeing her. Any day now her condition would become obvious, no matter how loose her clothing. How would she explain that to Elsie? And what about when it was all over?
No, it was best Aida heeded her mother’s advice and kept to herself.
The knocking stopped. Footsteps started down the stairs, paused and turned back. The clink of something dropped on the doorstep. Then Elsie was gone.
9
Thomas was not quite five years old when his father died. After lying about his age to enlist in the Army at sixteen, Roy Mullet survived World War I, joined up again for World War II and died in the Mediterranean at the end of 1941.
The only child of Roy Mullet, Thomas barely recalled his father. Snatches in his mind of a distant, gently brusque man whose affection was limited to a scruff of the hair in the evening as he came in from the docks smelling of fuel oil and brine. But Thomas knew his father had been a man who had loved his wife – Thomas’s mother – with a palpable fierceness. The first war had taken its toll on Roy Mullet – as it did on the entire world – and as a result he had married late.
Perhaps that was why Thomas had grown up clearly his mother’s favourite. After his father’s death his mother had remarried, and had another son. But Thomas was always her first son, and his mother would pull him onto her lap until he was almost taller than her. You’re the spitting image of your father, his mother would say, running her palm over his hair. Some of the other boys teased him about it when they came over to play, or when they rode their bikes to the local rubbish dump after school. They ribbed him about how his mother fussed over him. They bruised his shins and pushed him into the dirt. But Thomas would always bounce up, laughing. Because deep down, although he couldn’t articulate it at the time, he knew any tyranny he faced from others was based on their own fears and insecurities. And when he was a grown man, Thomas would realise his father’s death hadn’t affected him in the ways it could have – that he had escaped his childhood, somehow, with a dogmatic kind of optimism. A belief that everything works out in the end.
Once, a boy in his first year of high school named Billy Fallon (whose father had also died in the war) had sniffed at him, ‘Everyone dies. So you’ve gotta be the best while you can.’
Billy’s words rung through Thomas’s mind now, as he accepted yet another crushing handshake from his boss and agreed how lovely Sydney was this time of year.
You’ve gotta be the best while you can.
He’d repeat it to Elsie tonight, he thought, as an explanation for another weekend apart.
*
‘But you’ve only just gotten back from the conference in Melbourne.’ He could tell Elsie was trying not to look crestfallen.
‘Two weeks ago.’ Thomas attempted to be consoling.
‘What’s so important in Sydney?’
‘Sales fair. It’s my new position as head of sales, love. I have to keep up with all the latest technologies.’ He put his arms around her and breathed her in, his little wife; she smelled of lemon soap, lavender and spray starch. Every day her scent was different, yet every day she smelled of her.
The first time Thomas met Elsie she had smelled of milkshakes. At the library, in the quiet hush at the card catalogue, he had been bent over the drawer, rifling through the cards, when he felt the subtle shift in air pressure of a person beside him. Before he looked up he caught the scent of vanilla and her skirt had brushed his leg; she had smiled at him briefly, and Thomas had immediately forgotten what he’d been searching for. It had taken him almost two more months of incessant library visitation, and a few strong nips of brandy, before he had summoned the courage to ask Elsie Rushall on a date. Seven months later, they were married.
‘It’s all going to be worth it, you’ll see,’ Thomas said now, kissing the tip of Elsie’s nose. ‘And besides, you’re busy with the house. You’ll barely even notice I’m gone.’
Face pressed into his shirt, Elsie nodded. But her body stiffened and he felt her draw away, an extra breath of space opening up between them. He felt it like a problem that needed an instant solution.
‘How about a walk, Mrs Mullet?’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful evening.’
And it was. The sky was filled with a golden sunset and the air was warm and still. Eucalypts left fragrant litter on the ground, their bark and leaves crackling underfoot as husband and wife strolled along their quiet street.
Church Street skirted the edge of the new suburb. Unable to grow much further east because of the hills, or west because of the ocean, Adelaide’s sprawl had ballooned north. Nudged at its southern boundaries by Adelaide’s northward progress, Gawler spread outward too. Farm blocks were subdivided into small portions like cutting a sandwich – perfect first homes for young married couples. But what Thomas had loved – and he’d known Elsie would, too, as it would remind her of her childhood home – was that some of the original farmhouses still stood, impervious to the new houses cropping up in their neighbouring paddocks like crocuses after winter. Drops of nostalgia amongst the modern sprawl. The effect was a brand new neighbourhood with a quiet, country ambiance.
With her arm looped through his, Thomas and Elsie crested the top of a small hill. They squinted into the glare of the setting sun as they stepped through the narrow, squeaking gate.
The small cemetery was the original burial ground for the area. Set on the side of a hill, the graves were arranged outwards from a central path. Inscriptions detailed births and deaths dating back to the late 1800s: the English Williams and Johns, German Augusts and Johanns, and wives of the above.
The gravel crunched beneath their feet. ‘Have you seen the lady from
next door again?’ Thomas asked.
‘No.’ Elsie shook her head. ‘But she returned my biscuit container. She left it on the back step. I didn’t know it was there until I was taking the laundry out and almost tripped over it.’
Thomas gave her a long, sideways look. He knew his wife was curious about – almost preoccupied with – the young lady who lived next door. Maybe she was in need of more female contact, like she used to have when she worked with the other secretaries, and he should encourage her to befriend some other ladies from this side of town. Housewives with children, with whom she might have more in common.
‘You enjoyed meeting Watson’s wife a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you?’
‘It was fine,’ she murmured.
‘And you’ve joined her knitting group? That will be fun. Or that Scott family living across the street,’ he went on brightly. ‘Maybe you should pop over one afternoon with scones?’
‘I’ve already met Mrs Scott,’ Elsie said. ‘That lady always seems so busy. It sounds like she has a dozen kids.’
‘Perfect, I’m sure she’s a wealth of knowledge.’
A pink hue rose in his wife’s cheeks.
At the bottom of the hill, they stepped off the path and made their way under the trees. The ground was spongy with a thick layer of cypress needles and ridged with a tangle of exposed roots. Alongside the largest tree, they stopped.
Unlike the marble and granite of the other old headstones, the grave marker here was a thin slice of a chipped grey material, like cement. It tilted so far to the right it almost butted against the tree trunk. Lichen clung in starburst patches. The grave seemed out of alignment, randomly assigned to a patch of dirt at the edge of the cemetery.
‘Hello again,’ Elsie said to the headstone.
The inscription read:
Here he lies.