‘Shut your mouth and get that milk.’
Donny creeps up the road, walking on the grass verge to muffle his footsteps. His legs are shaking. He’s hungry and miserable and scared. Outside his house, he stops and listens. There’s no sound, though the light is still on in the kitchen. Donny knows that when he feels like this he might hit someone, and is scared of that too. Scared of being sent back to prison, scared that Nightshade will hurt him.
He peers in the window and at first can’t see her. There’s the bottle on the bench, filled with milk and ready, just as he’d left it. Perhaps she’s gone to bed. He can’t stop his teeth chattering. ‘Whoo hoo,’ he whispers, ‘Donny can do this. Donny can.’ But he doesn’t move, because he’s just seen something else: Nightshade’s legs sprawled on the floor. He tries to swallow but can’t. He has no coat and his whole body is shaking now. He stretches up and peers sideways. Now he can see the rest of Nightshade. There’s blood on the floor and her eyes are staring right at him. Donny stares back. She doesn’t move, not even a twitch, not even the faintest breath, but her eyes stare at him.
Donny Mac stumbles to the back door, opens it, grabs the bottle and runs, leaving the door open. Light streams out, setting the frost on the grass alight, but Donny runs.
‘She’s dead, she’s dead!’ he shouts at Tracey. ‘There’s blood and she’s staring at me!’ He stands, shivering, by the wood-burner.
Tracey comes at him, murder in her eyes. ‘You’ll be the dead one if you don’t shut up. If you wake Sky again you’re out. In the cold.’ She hauls a blanket off the couch, throws it over Donny; shoves him down into a tattered old chair by the fire and hands him his baby. ‘Hold him while I heat this bottle.’
‘She’s dead,’ moans Donny, quieter now but still shaking. The baby hiccups in his own desperate misery.
Tracey hands Donny the warm bottle, zips up her giant coat and clumps off outside without another word.
Both babies are asleep by the time Tracey returns, white faced, wild eyed. Donny, wrapped in his blanket but warmer now, watches her apprehensively. She unzips her jacket, shakes off her boots, slumps on to the couch the other side of the fire. The black mascara which usually rings her eyes is smudged all down her face. Tears are still running. This is a new Virgin, one Donny has never seen. She seems suddenly even smaller — a woebegone child lost in a too-big world. Donny cries too, trying to keep the sobs inside, trying not to wake the baby asleep in his arms, but frightened to see this tough lady so at a loss. He would like to give her a big hug.
Tracey finally wipes a rough hand over her face, smudging the black lines even further. ‘We’re stuffed,’ she says, her voice tiny and cracked. ‘We’re bloody stuffed now.’
They sit in silence.
‘They’ll be all over us now,’ she says. ‘Police will be crawling everywhere, poking their noses. You’ll be back in prison.’
Donny hugs the baby.
‘They’ll find me and take Sky away.’
After a while she stokes up the wood-burner, puts a battered and blackened kettle on top, dips water from the big bucket into it. ‘Bloody fucking shithole Nightshade,’ she says, recovering slightly. She frowns over at Donny. ‘Did you hit her, Donny?’
‘No I never, I never! I just took Manny away from her. You saw, didn’t you?’
‘I reckon. But no one will believe us.’
Tracey makes tea. Donny stands, lays his sleeping boy back down in the armchair and comes to sit beside Tracey. He holds his mug in one hand and wraps the free arm around her.
‘Get your big mitts off me,’ she says, but doesn’t mean it. Donny leaves his arm where it is.
‘Should we run away?’ he asks. ‘My bike is working now.’
‘Shut up, I’m thinking.’
Donny drinks his tea.
Tracey speaks in a voice that is barely audible. ‘We could just bury her.’
Donny sucks in breath. He looks at her with dread. ‘In the ground? Here?’
‘We could bury her in the spare lot next door.’
‘She wouldn’t like that.’
‘She’s dead, Donny. She won’t care.’ But Tracey is crying again. She pushes away Donny’s arm and stands up. Looks down at him. ‘We’ve got to do something. Could you dig a hole?’
He holds out his hands and looks at them. They jerk and twitch as if electricity is running through them, but he says, ‘I could dig a hole, yeah, I suppose.’
‘It’d have to be big. And deep.’
He sits there, looking at his hands.
Tracey is crying hard now, sobbing and hiccupping, but she’s the tougher of the two, understanding more clearly the consequences if they don’t do it. She goes out to the back porch, brings in her shovel. Then she shrugs off the big ski jacket and holds it out to him. ‘Put it on.’
Donny looks over at sleeping Manny. ‘You look after him? Don’t let him cry?’
She reaches up to help him with the coat. Zips him into it as if he were a child. He smiles at that, forgetting for a moment. She gives him a shove. ‘Go on, Donny, for fuck’s sake.’
Donny is frightened. He doesn’t want to go outside. ‘Where shall I dig,?’
‘Under … under the trees at the back.’ She can hardly get the words out. ‘But not close to a tree, or you’ll hit roots.’
He takes the shovel, pauses at the open door. ‘Are you sure it’s okay — doing this?’
‘Oh!’ she sobs. ‘Of course it’s not okay.’
‘But …?’
‘But they’ll take our kids off us if we don’t … don’t hide her.’ She flaps desperate hands at him. ‘Go on.’
Donny feels better digging. He has chosen a place by feel more than sight, it is so dark — an open space with big old beech trees encircling it. The ground is soft, like the soil in his own back yard. The rich smell is comforting. A ruru is hooting somewhere. Sign of death, Granddad had said when his own death was near. But that old owl hoots every night — there can’t be that many deaths. He digs steadily, soon stepping down into the hole and throwing the soil up carefully.
After a while he feels water seeping into his shoes. He wishes he had his gumboots. The water rises. Donny climbs out and goes back, stumbling across the lumpy, neglected paddock and over the fence to the Virgin’s place. She’s sitting there on her sagging couch, staring into the flames. When she sees him, the hope in her pinched little face warms him like a nice hot drink.
‘There’s too much water,’ says Donny.
‘What?’
‘I’ve hit the water table. Can’t go deeper.’ Donny knows about the water table. He hit it last year, digging his new long-drop.
‘Are you deep enough?’
‘I reckon. Have to be, anyway.’
Tracey swallows. ‘Well, you better bury her then.’
Donny doesn’t move. All his small pleasure at being able to dig the hole and knowing about the water table melts away. ‘Couldn’t you help? Wouldn’t it be better if we both …?’
‘The babies might wake.’
Donny pleads, his face pale in the lamplight, his hands shaking again. Tracey is pale too, as scared as him. She’ll come, she says, once he’s brought her across the road.
They think about wrapping her in a sheet or something; Tracey thinks it would be proper, but she hasn’t any spares. Donny thinks going into the ground unwrapped is better; that’s how they bury a deer carcass or wild pig — it seems quite respectful to him. Tracey nods, accepting his superior experience, which pleases — and surprises — him.
He gives her back the coat, creeps over to his house. Tracey has closed his back door and turned off the light. Donny leaves the light off — it’s easier not to see her staring. Nightshade is still lying there. Suddenly this seems very different from burying a deer carcass. Donny moans. ‘Sorry, Nightshade,’ he whispers, and grunts as he heaves her up onto his shoulder. ‘Sorry.’
Walking back across the road is noisy. He stumbles once and nearly falls. Donny is
terrified now. He hates the heavy way she flops; her head is bumping on his back and her bum on his shoulder smells — she might have cacked herself like a baby. He just wants it all to be over. He stumbles past the Virgin’s place, and there she is, clambering beside him across the rough paddock, holding his hand once to guide him when they hit a big clump of thistle.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ she says quietly.
‘What?’
‘You’re moaning.’
In the trees it’s better. The tall beeches are like friends standing around, making no judgment. Donny lays Nightshade alongside the hole. He keeps his mouth shut, like the Virgin said, but the sound is still there inside his throat, wanting to scream out. Even in this darkness he can see his mistake.
‘Shit,’ whispers the Virgin, ‘you made it too small.’
‘We can bend her legs,’ says Donny. All he wants now is to get it over with, get her down in the hole and covered and gone.
‘Drop her in,’ whispers the Virgin. ‘Go on, Donny.’
But he can’t bear the idea of letting her splash down. He lowers himself into the hole, feels the water up to his knees now and surprisingly warm. He reaches up and takes her down; her knees are stiff and they creak when he bends them, as if she’s complaining. But she fits.
Nightshade sinks into the water and it seems right somehow, not awful. ‘Goodbye, Pansy Holloway,’ Donny says. He won’t say Rest in Peace, because those words were for his granddad. Nightshade was not one for resting in peace.
But now he’s stuck. He moans to feel his feet trapped in the sticky mud, trapped by her body which has settled into it. He throws his shoulders this way and that, heaves against the lip of the hole, but one foot remains firmly held.
‘Stop it, stop it!’ whispers the Virgin. ‘You’re making it worse. Wait. Don’t move.’
He tries to do what she says but every inch of his body wants to fight its way out.
She slaps him on his head, hard. ‘Hold still! Really still!’
His heart is beating so fast he can hardly breathe, but he stops his thrashing. He feels her arms reach down to hook under his — wiry little arms but strong.
‘Let your foot go soft, let me do the pulling.’ She heaves, growling.
Donny is amazed that she can take his heavy weight. He feels his foot slide free, then heaves himself, and is out, lying panting on the quiet sweet litter from the trees. She is lying there beside him, silent, breathing heavily. He feels for her hand. ‘Are you okay?’
‘We got to cover her, Donny, we got to be quick.’ But she lies there — they both do — for another minute.
At last Donny climbs to his feet, takes the shovel and fills the hole. It takes longer than he expected. The Virgin has gone back to see to the babies. Donny wants to stop, to sit down under the trees and sleep, but he shovels on, treading the sticky earth down. When a faint light is showing in the sky, he decides to leave. There’s still earth left over and he tries to spread it around, then cover everything with beech litter. His arms work more and more slowly. He can hardly manage to walk back to the Virgin’s.
‘Go back home and wash everything off,’ says the Virgin. ‘I’ll bring Manny over when you’re clean. Go on quick before it’s light.’
‘What am I going to say?’
‘That she ran away and left you.’
Donny looks at her. He can hardly keep his eyes open. ‘She shot though,’ he says slowly, reciting it to himself. ‘She shot through. Like my mum and dad.’
His tired feet drag across the road, his muddy arms hanging limp, shoulders drooping. It takes a terrible effort to open the door and enter that room where her blood is still there on the floor, the smell of alcohol and dirty clothes — her smell — still hanging in the cold morning air. Donny goes in, closes the door and sits down. The tidy-up will have to wait.
Delia McAneny, standing on her back porch in the half-dawn light, sees him dragging home. She’s listening for sounds of the baby.
Vera pulls the heap of blankets closer, feels them damp where her breath has steamed. Some strand of the usual morning fabric is out of place. A smell, is it? A sound? She remembers the screaming last night, Donny’s voice pleading. Is that what’s bugging her? She lets her eyes close again, listening in the half-dark. No sound of magpies warbling in the macrocarpas, no hee-haws from George’s blasted donkeys. Is it the silence then?
A car drives past. Not George’s ute — something flashy. She hears stones, flicked out by the wheels, plopping into her garden. Vera swears. She lies rigid on the couch in the kitchen where she always sleeps, waiting for the next car, and the next. They come, ripping through the silence, flicking stones, radios blaring. Two together, then a gap, then another with young men whooping and yelping inside. Then, just as the first donkey dares to bray, some big old bone-shaker with a shot muffler.
By half-past eight the shreds of the shattered morning are gathering together, but Vera stays under the blankets. The bloody pot-belly has gone out, frost on the inside of the windows — and the first day of the ski season. What better recipe for the dumps! Hibernation seems the obvious option. At least I’ve got my fat, thinks Vera; I could last the weekend. She curses the Queen for having a wretched birthday, and the traitorous snow for falling in time for it.
Later, with the pot-belly lit and a strong cup of tea inside her, Vera is still cursing. In the front garden she leans over her Brussels sprouts, taking up handfuls of road metal and flinging them back where they belong. The army greatcoat and woolly hat, not to mention her stomach, get in the way. Vera feels old and lumpy, as she always does in the ski season.
‘Ow,’ says Lovey, ‘watch out where you’re throwing, stupid.’
Vera looks up, grunts. ‘Here we go. Even the locals are catching on.’
Lovey Kingi, her father’s gumboots up to her crotch, an outsize jersey covering the top half, stands in the road. One arm is pulled taught by an indignant donkey-foal on a long rope. With her spare hand she gathers a handful of road metal and throws it back at Vera.
Vera sighs. ‘Bugger off, Lovey. I’m not in the mood.’
‘Come on!’ shouts Lovey, prancing stiff-legged, another tiny fistful held aloft. ‘Try and stop me!’
But Vera won’t play. She bends again to the garden.
‘I’ll let Dusty eat your sprouts! He loves loves loves sprouts.’
Vera straightens up. Her heart is pounding and black spots dance behind her eyes. She marches out onto the street, where Lovey is hauling on the rope furiously, the donkey fighting every step up the road. Vera grabs a bunch of jersey and drags the child to the edge of the ditch. Lovey screams and drops the rope.
‘You let that donkey,’ shouts Vera, shaking Lovey till the gumboots fall off, ‘you let Dusty near my sprouts and I’ll drop you in the ditch. You and the donkey both! And I won’t come and haul you out either!’
They both look down at the icy water. Neither of them would be tall enough to climb out.
Lovey starts crying. ‘I hate you!’ She beats at Vera’s hand where it holds. ‘I hate you!’
‘And I hate you!’ shouts Vera. ‘You little witch!’ But lets go.
She watches while the snivelling child rights the giant gumboots and steps back inside them.
‘Go and catch your bloody donkey,’ growls Vera, quieter now, ‘and tie it up down the road. Then come in if you want a scone.’
Lovey stamps off down the road without a word.
Slapping scone dough and banging the tray in and out of the oven calms Vera a little, but she is still frowning as Lovey kicks her boots off and sits at the table ready for her morning tea. The child chews quickly and silently. Her black eyes are alert for signs of further eruptions. After the first scone and a cup of cocoa, and when Vera finally sits down with her tea, Lovey feels secure enough to speak.
‘You’re grumpy today.’
‘I’m always grumpy.’
‘Well, grumpier then.’
Vera growls in the back o
f her throat but doesn’t answer. Watching all the time, Lovey reaches for another scone, butters and jams it quickly, and crams in the first mouthful. She watches Vera’s dirty fingernails, which her own mother would not allow near food, as Vera butters with deliberate, heavy strokes of the knife.
‘Is it the skiers?’ asks Lovey.
Vera snaps at her food, and chews, the hairs on her chin standing out stiff like bean sprouts. She swallows. ‘I expect so,’ she says, and glares out the window.
‘I don’t like the season either,’ says Lovey. A spray of scone crumbs flies through the air. ‘Pardon,’ she says.
Vera doesn’t want to talk, but is curious. ‘Why not? I would have thought you went for all that … that … racing around.’
‘Nah. You can’t do stuff when the townies are here.’
Vera suspects that ‘doing stuff’ is breaking into empty houses and stealing their biscuits. If not worse.
‘Dad doesn’t mind them,’ says Lovey, quite chatty now. ‘They pay him to haul their cars out, or to drive them up the mountain sometimes. He says you can have a good laugh in the ski season.’
‘Let him laugh then,’ says Vera blackly. A crusty bit has caught in a hole in her jersey. She fishes it out and chews. ‘It’s not funny to me.’
‘Why not?’
‘They make me feel odd.’
‘You are old.’
‘Odd. Barmy.’
‘Oh,’ says Lovey. Then after a silence, ‘I’ve finished, can I get down?’
Vera doesn’t answer.
At least it’s a fine day. The skiers are all up the mountain. When the ski field is closed, they’re coming and going all day: into Ohakune, zapping around on their mountain bikes, walking dogs and children, peering into her garden. Taking pictures of her as if she were something in a zoo.
At four o’clock Vera comes inside, draws the curtains. She turns the radio on loud, but it can’t drown out the cars returning, the furious revving as they turn into drives and jockey for position, the triumphant shouts from house to house:
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