Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  It was broad and weatherboarded in white, with a flowerbed running around its perimeter on three sides and a hard-won, foot-sharp lawn on the wings. People dropped their boots with a thud at the main arena of action: the wide verandah located at the front of the house. All kinds of properties were scattered across the rattan chairs and couches, in announcement that here resides a family. Books, plates covered with toast crumbs, Olive’s abandoned craft projects. Straw hats, dented and rusted cans of insect repellent. A discarded plaster cast from when Archie had broken his arm.

  The pit-like space underneath the verandah was enclosed with white latticework and it made the perfect spot for children to lie on their backs and eavesdrop on adults, waiting in the dark for secrets to be revealed. It was just Olive under the verandah doing the listening these days, though. Sebastian didn’t want to climb under there, he didn’t like getting dirty and complained that they never found out anything interesting.

  Another good spot for listening in was behind the thick drapes in the Green Room. Olive had stood there, motionless, waiting for someone to come in and reveal a secret, waiting so long it made her legs shake. Only once had anyone come and said something, but it hadn’t been interesting. It had been about Thistle, and how she had made something happen on purpose. But William and Rue hadn’t said what it was that she made happen, so it hadn’t been very useful at all. At least under the verandah Olive could lie down and relax. Sometimes she played her harmonica, but at other times she simply lay rigid, eyes closed and ears straining, only to emerge covered in cobwebs, which caused the sisters to start and clasp their throats, florid patches of pink on their cheeks as if here in front of them was a phantom, materialised from the underworld. Olive liked the idea of being a ghost and sometimes wished she could wander the earth at midnight listening at doors and passing through walls to stand beside the beds of sleeping people. She would reach into their brains and know their dreams and then she would write them down.

  •

  She had seen a ghost. Once, on a winter night, a little girl had sat on the end of her bed. Olive had lifted her head to look and in the moonlight could see the girl’s eyes were open. From behind the walls came the sound of an organ, like in church. Deep and spooky. Olive had lowered her head to the pillow and gone back to sleep. During the night though she lifted her head once more and the girl was still there. In the faint morning light, she watched as the ghost disappeared as fingers of cold sun stretched into the room.

  •

  They stopped in front of the house and Olive looked for her aunt Rue.

  ‘There she is.’

  Rue had heard the car and risen up out of her flower garden, a gloved hand at the brim of her hat, the other hand holding clippers. From the house came the three cousins, Sebastian, Archie and Mandy, all with birthdays in April. Archie was there at her door, shouting something about a magazine, his t-shirt collar pulled wide. He was a year younger than Olive and with a permanent cold that blocked his ears so he said ‘what?’ all the time. Just behind him was Mandy Milk, who was five and couldn’t sneeze without snot flying out of her nose. Mandy was pale and small and permanently startled, and when the sun caught her ears it made them glow a transparent pink. Whenever she could get close enough to Olive, Mandy clung to her waist, as she did now. And behind the two of them was Sebastian, gangly and ill-postured, two years older than Olive. Recently arrived in teenagehood, he’d been thrust deep into hormonal ravagement.

  Where Sebastian was quiet and slow, Archie gormless and Mandy pretty, Olive was none of these. She had the sudden sharp glance of a child who takes in everything and annoys most adults she came into contact with. And she was fast.

  ‘You’ve got the devil on your tail, girl,’ her uncle William would say, as Olive kicked off her shoes and streaked barefoot across the scree of the driveway. Sprinting to the wide-open spaces she’d do a circuit, then race back to hurl herself over the top of a gate, back to the house and plop herself down on the front steps.

  Now, even though they’d only just arrived, Olive ran in a circle around the house, looking for Grace. First to the tree, then down to the dam, but she couldn’t see her there either. She set off across the paddock, down the small path made from repeated tramping through the grass and looped back to the front of the house, where she ran up the steps and dropped into a chair. At the end of the verandah her mother was already settled in the seat she liked best, posed like a charming sphinx, insect net folded over her face. Audra didn’t look up, only wet a finger and flicked at a page of her magazine.

  •

  The four children were ranged around the Mixmaster as Rue made a birthday cake. Olive was saying she should have both beaters because it was her special day, and probably the bowl as well. Sebastian and Archie argued their own positions while Mandy kept trying to climb higher on the kitchen stool as the others pulled her down. Once she managed to get to the cushioned top and leaned over the bench, hair swinging forward. Rue shrieked and pulled her daughter’s plait away from the beaters. Sebastian and Archie laughed and Rue said she didn’t want to go into the details of neurocranial epidermal removal again. The boys danced around shouting, ‘SCALP SCALP SCALP!’ and slapping their mouths, and it was all Rue could do to keep her voice low, asking them not be so disrespectful to their mother.

  ‘I’ve just about had enough,’ she said, once she’d piled the mixture into the tin and slammed it into the oven. She unplugged the Mixmaster and went and sat in a chair for a moment to despair about how her sons could treat her like that.

  ‘Why don’t you use normal words instead of that medical terminology all the time?’ Audra was standing in the doorway. ‘The children don’t understand haemal this and mucosal that. No one’s going to get “asphyxiated”. You worry about the wrong things entirely. You’re always saying you’re tired, so save your energy for the things that matter, why don’t you?’

  Olive stood in the kitchen with chocolate ringing her mouth. She had once heard Rue call Audra ‘a flinty piece of work’ and that she thought herself capable at everything. ‘Except children,’ Rue had added in a loud whisper.

  Rue was the youngest and most cheerful of the three sisters but could be a bit damp and breathy. She used to be a nurse and had kept the tiny torch from her rounds. It cast a light no wider than her smallest fingernail, and sometimes she used it to check on the children as they slept, making sure they were breathing when babies and in pursuit of worm infestations once they became mobile. But the thing that most seemed to upset Rue was when the children said ‘what’ instead of ‘pardon’. She would lift her chin, inhale deeply, close her eyes and say nothing, and it was the silence that made clear the magnitude of the offence.

  The sisters were locked in an ever-moving constellation of shifting alliances. Sometimes it was Thistle and Audra against Rue when she was being ‘sensitive’ and ‘neurotic’. Other times, Thistle was the one left out, with Rue and Audra labelling her ‘difficult’ and ‘wilful’. ‘Attention-seeking’. Audra was the only sister who enjoyed consistent partisanship and she passed briskly through her neat world with face and lips set tight.

  While the cake baked Rue fossicked in the bin for a while and then started to get the table set. Olive drifted around, ignoring her aunt’s instructions to wash her face and unpack her bag.

  ‘If you organise things now you won’t have to do it later when you’re tired. Just go and look in the mirror. You look like a clown.’

  But Olive went to the back door to check once more for Grace. She stood awhile, eyes moving to the sky, the trees, the roofline of the shed with its corrugated metal that had rusted into dark stains. The sun was going down and there was a horizontal piping of pink at what looked like the edge of the world. She wondered how long it would take to walk towards that line.

  She went to Mandy’s bedroom and quickly unpacked her things. Then she went to find Thistle.

  WHERE RUE WAS the kind one and her mother Audra was the quiet one, Thistle was the inte
resting one. Of the sisters, Olive liked this aunt the most. Thistle was the oldest, big and pretty, and with a snaky laugh that elongated her s’s. Sometimes her breath burned and she wore plaits pinned around her head and she’d retained her interdental lisp from childhood. Thistle had always lived at the farm with Rue and William even though she was also a grown-up and didn’t much like the night-time so slept with a lamp on. Apart from that there was nothing else that made her bend. She was an assiduous collector of the Tuckfield’s Australiana Bird cards (there were one hundred and ninety-two in the series) and every time she dug a card from the packet she lifted it to her nose and proclaimed how much she loved the smell of the tea-leaves.

  Thistle adored theatricals. She called her cardigans and slacks her ‘skins’ and wore them like a uniform. She moved through space to either a silent beat or thunder and chaos, syncopated with her interior state, and never missed the opportunity to remind people that she’d had a career once, as a Kindergarten Teacher Assistant. She emphasised the words with her fingers in the air, not seeing that others shuddered at the thought of defenceless toddlers being ‘assisted’ by Miss Thistle Nash.

  Thistle had never married but she’d had suitors, oh yes-s-s-s, she assured Olive.

  Sometimes, Thistle tried to teach the children some German. She had studied it at school, and learned more from little books she ordered from overseas. (She ordered her jigsaw puzzles from overseas too.) And sometimes she hosted theology and philosophy salons in her bedroom, where they read from the scriptures or other texts. Certain afternoons would see a keen Olive and stupefied Archie—mouth-breathing, chewing forlornly on a piece of Stimorol gum, an inferior bribe from his aunt—sipping green cordial and discussing things like ‘Is there a God?’, ‘What is life?’, and how good and evil worked.

  ‘It’s in all of us,’ Thistle would tell them in her special posh explaining voice.

  ‘What?’ said Archie.

  ‘Evil?’ Olive was excited.

  ‘All of it, in all of us. The capacity for both. Usually it’s not either/or. Usually it’s both, or everything even.’

  ‘What?’ Archie was shaking a finger in one ear.

  Thistle talked and Olive interrupted with questions. Olive liked it because her aunt could be easily persuaded away from the usual adult topics. At dinner, the conversation was boring. They talked about the weather, who was sick, who was going to have a baby, who had just had a baby, who had died and what had been wrong with them. Rabbits and sheep (William). The dates for the Nanango Show or something ‘of interest’ that had been in the newspaper (Rue). It was never of interest to Olive, Rue was wrong about that.

  The topics that she most wanted to talk about were: murders, ghosts, whether it was possible to dig a hole to the centre of the earth. Also: aliens, snakes, various types of poisons, poison in darts, poison in fangs, scorpions and their poison, mummies in Egypt, zombies and cannibals. Thistle had talked to her and Sebastian about cannibals, about the Menschenfresserin. Dark Teutonic stories of men eating men and sometimes children.

  The summer before, Olive and her cousins had talked a lot about how Phil Simmons said Jack Ralton had a tapeworm growing inside him and that part of it had come out of his mouth and the other part out of his bum. They also talked about how Sebastian had heard from someone that the cleaner at the high school found a baby in the girls’ toilets. It was only as big as a Freddo Frog and alive.

  Recent whispers between her and Sebastian had been concerned with whether there really were people who did it with dead bodies and animals, ideas that to Olive were fascinating and revolting at the same time.

  For a time, the children had been obsessed with Rue’s old nursing book, a compendium of illness and disease with colour plates that displayed pustules, wounds, rashes and infections in exacting purple and nicotine tones. People with scaling skin or hideously enlarged legs, their veins snaking under the flesh like thin sausages. Children with smallpox, chickenpox and measles. Old people with misshapen knees that were far outsized for their stick-thin limbs. Weeping bedsores and bulging necks. Bulging eyes and yellowed faces.

  Olive was enthralled by the book well beyond the time her cousins lost interest and she would spend hours with it in absolute wonder, lying on her back in the Green Room, turning the pages, the book propped open on her chest.

  For Olive, it wasn’t ever dull being with Thistle, as long as her aunt was in one of her good phases. When things got too much for Thistle, though, Rue would try to make her sister lie on the couch so she could hold her feet. If that didn’t work, the family would brace for long weepy tirades at the dinner table and classical music played far too loudly. She would move the furniture around in the middle of the night and think it a good idea to go for long walks in her dressing-gown. Once she’d even been brought back to the house at 4 am by Fred Spooner from the golf club. He’d found her walking along the road into town. It had been lucky she wasn’t on one of the bends, he told Rue, because she’d been in the middle of the road.

  ‘I could have hit her,’ was all he said.

  When Olive had been little, before the salons, Thistle would read to her from the Bible. While Olive loved all the stories, her favourite part was the Book of Olive.

  ‘It’s to help with her self-esteem,’ Thistle explained to Rue, who’d been hovering at the door and heard her announce the day’s reading. ‘I know it’s Exodus and you know it’s Exodus, but I want her to feel strong about herself. Girls need extra help in that department, especially Olive.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ Rue said. ‘That is a child who has plenty of self-esteem or whatever you want to call it.’

  But Thistle read the passage to her niece, and after a while Olive would ask for it. Her aunt obliged, adding extra bits ‘for context and verisimilitude’.

  When Olive saw what a fine baby Moses was, she hid him for three months because bad people wanted to take him away and give him to another woman. But when she could not hide him any longer, she took a basket made of reeds and covered it with tar to make it watertight, like a little boat. She put the baby inside and placed it in the tall grass at the edge of the river and watched it float away. The baby stopped crying as the water rocked him. She was a good girl with brown hair and blue eyes and she stood some distance away, watching to see what would happen.

  ‘The Old Testament is not for children, one wouldn’t think,’ Rue would say. ‘You’ll give her bad dreams talking about snakes and floods.’ But the stories from the Bible didn’t ever give Olive bad dreams. She liked hearing about the serpents, the flames, God and his punishments, and such things never pushed their way into her night-time fancies. Her dreams were usually more dislocated than that. Sometimes there were dreams inside of her dreams: falling or flying, pursuit and persecution—all signs of grandiosity, Rue had said to Audra when Olive had mentioned them. But Thistle confided she’d had the same dreams when she was a girl, that she’d flown and hovered above the earth like an angel.

  ‘Splendid,’ Thistle had said when Olive had first told them, but Rue and Audra had looked at each other and Rue had gone to get a piece of paper from the kitchen drawer for Audra to make a note.

  •

  Olive no longer asked for the story of the baby and the woven basket with mud on it. Just like she’d given up on trying to learn and create new ciphers and codes, including an elaborate tapping version with Sebastian, she had moved on in her reading interests. Now she was preoccupied with Unexplained: Things You Just Won’t Believe, a book Thistle had received as a free gift when she’d ordered two jigsaw puzzles from America. It was about all the strange things that happen in the world, such as how identical twins can feel each other’s pain, how once a woman had her twin inside her and another one had teeth in the back of her head. And the book was right. They were all things she couldn’t believe. She read about people who’d been buried alive in a coffin and when they were dug up there were scratches on the inside so they started putting in little bells. A man whose fing
ernails grew so long they curved into his own palms. All of it was absorbing, but what was strangest and most thrilling, what she couldn’t seem to stop herself reading about, or even thinking about, were the three pages on spontaneous combustion. People, usually women, who had simply burst into flames for no reason and burned up. There were pictures that showed half-charred legs sticking out at angles, shoes on feet, usually near fireplaces.

  Olive learned a new word: macabre.

  ‘Why on earth do you want to look at such horrible things?’ Rue said and told her not to bring the book to the table. But Olive couldn’t help her interest. It was a peculiar, sharp feeling that came over her like a shudder, being drawn and repelled at once. She kept reading the book, careful to keep it out of her aunt’s sight.

  THE EVENING WAS hot and cicadas were spinning their legs under the dry earth, their cacophony bending the air. For tea, Rue decided on a picnic so William and Bruce carried the barbecue out and set it up under the tree.

  The peppercorn hulked in its spot. On the brightest days its lush canopy cast a shadow as big as a house. Once it had been struck by lightning and smoked white for a week before rain had dampened the smoulder.

  They carried tartan rugs and folding chairs and plates and a card table for the salads and buttered slices of bread. They filled the wheelbarrow with ice and pushed bottles of beer and lemonade right down into the frozen cold. Olive flopped on the rug and her cousins started to flick each other with fingers dipped in the icy water, until someone dripped down the back of an adult’s neck and they were told to cut it out by William.

  Bruce and William stood around the rickety barbecue, its tripod of metal legs barely held together with fencing wire. While they waited for the coals to be ready, Rue fussed first about whether they had enough meat and then if it had been out of the fridge for too long. Under the tree Audra sat classic and still. With her glamorous lipstick and an unopened magazine she was a study in serenity, her long white fingers limp like dead birds, graceful in her lap. She stretched out one leg to rotate a slim ankle, then the other. To someone else, she might have looked like she was thinking but she wasn’t. She might have looked like she was waiting but she wasn’t doing that either.