The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luce told her. ‘Where to?’

  ‘You’ll like it up the hill.’

  ‘Is there snow?’

  Feilding said another of her bad words before she breathed in deep and said, ‘I said a hill, didn’t I? I didn’t say a mountain.’ Then when it seemed this brat she was landed with might start to cry, she said again, ‘You’ll like it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luce said.

  Feilding put her hand on her cousin’s knee. ‘We’ll take you to see the bride,’ she said.

  Luce said nothing for a moment because it was very confusing. Then she said, ‘There’s no bride. I don’t believe there’s a bride.’

  ‘Oh yes there is,’ said Feilding. And then they talked very quietly, because that is one of the ways you know if a secret is true. ‘That’s what we’ll see but you’re not to tell them. Tell Mum and him.’

  So at lunch the next day when the sky was blue outside the big window, Feilding said, ‘Me and Luce are going for a walk, aren’t we, Luce.’

  Gentry took not much notice because he was looking at a newspaper he had spread out right across the table. Then he said, ‘I thought we might go across to Omakau. I got something to drop off over that way.’ But Auntie Lois said that could wait, surely? She laughed and said it wasn’t as though they had nothing to smoke over in Omakau until they dropped it in. ‘And it’s lovely Feilding wants to take her out. Don’t you think?’

  Gentry looked up to see Lois standing behind the girls, a forefinger of each hand pointing down at their heads, while she nodded quickly at him.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said.

  The rocks up the big hill behind the house looked as if they’d never stop, and the path between them was so steep it hurt Luce’s side just trying to keep up. ‘It’s so far,’ she said. She wanted to stop and lean against a rock.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Feilding said.

  ‘You’re so much bigger, remember,’ Luce told her. ‘You must have done this lots.’ She nearly wanted to cry but that was the last thing she must do. Feilding would hate her even more. Then they came to a small bridge for walking across a high narrow place where it scared you just to look down. It was on the other side of the bridge that Dougie came up to them and Feilding said, ‘This is Luce, the one I told you about.’

  ‘Hi, Luce,’ Dougie said. When he grinned down at her it seemed to cut his head nearly in half. He was very skinny and tall and his face made her think of an axe. Then he and Feilding walked on very fast in front of her so it was even harder trying to keep up. Dougie and her cousin were holding hands. When she did come up closer to them she said, ‘Is it very far to the bride?’ Neither answered her but Feilding pushed her face in close against Dougie’s. He turned and looked back at Luce and his skinny face cut in half again when he grinned. Later when they sat down near a rock bigger than a house he said to her, ‘Feilding says you know all about that girl who was killed and her father done it. It was on TV.’

  Luce thought, what do they know about anything? She tugged at a clump of long yellow grass beside where she sat. Pulling it, though, was like pulling wire and it hurt her hand.

  ‘Shut up, Dougie,’ Feilding said. Then to Luce, ‘You just sit there because you’re puffed and we’ll go over here for a bit.’ They went to where there was another giant stack of rocks and left her by herself.

  Luce sat and looked out across the flat spaces way down in front of her, and the road where a truck moved along like a toy, that’s how high she was. They must have climbed so far. Auntie Lois’s house she could only just see, behind a row of black trees, and the two sheds where Gentry kept another old car, and there were bundles of hay in the other one, piled to the roof. Only from here the sheds were like toys as well. The football posts in the paddock next to them were small as matches. And the road that went on and on, because this was further from anywhere than Luce had ever been.

  The wind was cold when it moved around the rocks. She was glad Lois had made her wear a jacket that was too big for her, the sleeves folded back halfway across her arms, over the top of her jumper. She didn’t care how long that stupid Feilding and Dougie were away. It was nicer just being here by herself. And she knew what Dougie had asked her was something he should not have said. It made her wonder about Bang. But back home and everything about it was so far away. She screwed up her eyes and when she opened them again everything down there, the road and the houses and the long black rows of trees, had become fuzzy to look at. She couldn’t even see the little sticks of the goal posts. Then a long time later her cousin came back and told her, ‘You just say we were walking all the time, all right? Don’t say Dougie was here.’

  ‘What about that special thing, though?’ Luce asked her. ‘What about that?’

  Dougie stood behind Feilding and said, like he was angry about it, ‘What’s that bull?’

  Luce’s lip was shaking and she couldn’t stop it.

  ‘God!’ Feilding said as she turned to Dougie and told him it wasn’t her fault, the only reason she could get away in the first place was because she told Mum she was taking the kid with her.

  Then Luce said, ‘You’d better show me, Feilding,’ surprised she was brave enough to say it like that.

  ‘We’d better then,’ her cousin said, but saying it not to her but to Dougie who still looked as if he was angry now with both of them. So she walked ahead again and Dougie was behind her, not holding her hand any more, and Luce still trying to keep up with them. Once she slipped where the path was steep and the little stones were loose and her knee really hurt where it banged against a rock. She cried out ‘Ouch!’ even before she knew she was going to say it. She was glad they didn’t hear her. Her knee was bleeding when she looked down at it. Then they were at the top of the path where it crossed over a ridge and went down on the other side. Feilding didn’t even look round, she just stood there with her fists deep in the pockets of her windbreaker and her hood pulled up. But Dougie came up to her and put his hankie against her knee and said, ‘You’ll be all right. Everyone falls over sometimes when they walk up here.’

  Luce put her hand where the material on her skirt had ripped. ‘I think the rock did that.’

  Dougie said, ‘It’s not much, though. She’ll be right.’

  ‘I don’t care about that anyway,’ Luce told him.

  It was not much further then to where the path was smoother and it was so much easier to walk, a flat place where a small creek that even she could step across ran between the tufty bits of grass. The wind had gone very still and she could hear the water running like someone had not turned off a tap. Then she saw past Feilding to where there was an old tree with hardly any leaves, and Dougie was standing next to something she could not quite make out. It looked at first as though someone had tipped out dirty pieces of wool in a pile that had spread out flat, and things were mixed up with the wool. Then she saw the head that was mostly bone and eyes that weren’t there, and the shiny teeth with black stuff at the top and bottom of them, it was like they were trying to grin at her. It made her sick to look. And the wool was pulled up round it, like something that it wore. Feilding said to her, ‘There, you’ve seen it, all right? So can we go back now?’

  ‘You’re like ice,’ her auntie said when they got back to the house. She put the back of her hand against Luce’s face. It was so warm the girl grabbed it and held it there while Lois laughed and said, ‘Cocoa, I think that’s the story.’ She made it for them in big mugs that were rough to hold, like they hadn’t been properly finished, and they sat together on the sofa in the room that didn’t have walls like other houses but pictures painted all over them, trees and people with hardly any clothes and a horse with a horn growing out of its forehead and other animals that weren’t really real. Some of the birds had faces like people and one man with wings was halfway across the sky.

  ‘Paradise,’ Auntie Lois had said the first time they came into the room and turned the lights on so they could see them better,
and Luce couldn’t stop looking at the pictures that had so many things in them, and where the colours weren’t always right. There was a green dog and two of the ladies had blue skin. And there was Gentry in the middle, with a tree in front of him instead of proper pants, and Auntie Lois was sort of higher than him, and smaller, but there were two of her, one on either side. He had asked her if she liked the paintings and she said yes she did, she thought they were lovely, and he said, ‘Well, I’ll paint you too if you like before you go back home.’ Feilding made this sort of rude noise through her nose when Gentry had asked Luce that. ‘Paradise is right,’ she said. But now while Luce and Lois drank their cocoa Feilding sat in front of television in the other room until the phone rang and she went into her bedroom and slammed the door, leaving it for her mother to answer.

  ‘It’s for you, miss,’ Lois called to Luce. It was her Mum, all the way from home. Yes, Luce told her, she was having a nice time, yes, there were all sorts of interesting things to do. Into the mountains, yes, she said, they had been there too. And a fair they had gone to at the end of a lake. And the hay bales. Well, Mum said, it would be so good when she came home. ‘You’ve no idea how we miss you, Luce.’

  Luce swallowed hard and asked was he still there, was he, was Bang still there?

  Thomas? Her mum said. No, he was up in Hamilton now, he wouldn’t be coming back, now his father had gone away.

  ‘But if you see him,’ Luce said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if we will,’ Mum said. ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘But if you do.’

  ‘Yes, if we do,’ her mother said.

  ‘If you do see Bang,’ Luce said, ‘tell him I saw the bride. Say I said to tell him.’