Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  William clapped his tongs with satisfaction at the barbecue.

  ‘Wool you look at those coals.’

  Bruce rocked on his heels and smiled.

  William was a sheep man and believed that straight-haired women, like sheep, were badly bred. Sometimes he caressed his wife’s dewlap, an expression of affection that caused Rue deep embarrassment and made her twist her thumbs in her apron. When William walked the fences, running his hands along the wires, he would stop for long moments and call out to the animals. No one knew what he might be saying.

  If Cleg had been there he would have said something sarcastic like virile agitur and settled well away from the action with a glass of white burgundy, but as it was, these brothers had to make do with the sheep puns. Neither of them was able to remember any Latin other than alibi (William) and ovis (Bruce).

  Rue thought Cleg drank too much and that was why something had happened. Olive didn’t know about Cleg drinking too much but she was sure that William did. When he had a lot of beer or wine he started ‘going on’, which was what Rue called it. For a man who didn’t talk very much, he really talked a lot then, usually about rabbits.

  Olive lay on the picnic rug, looking at the splintered sky through the branches.

  ‘How did the tree get here?’ she asked.

  ‘How did any of us get here, girl?’ William replied.

  ‘Oh, tell her the story, Bill,’ said Rue. ‘Tell her about Lenore and the tree.’

  William flicked his hanky and blew his nose and told Olive that his grandmother Lenore, the lady in the gloomy painting in the Green Room, had carried the cuttings all the way from Melbourne in little jars of water with hessian tied on top. Then he started to explain how cuttings propagate. Olive stopped listening. William was best at talking about sheep. He knew that the average weight of a newborn lamb is about the same as a human. That a mother sheep sometimes will attack its new baby and have to be stopped from hurting it. While he admitted that goats had a stronger temperament, he could not see any reason for farming them. There was the noise, he said. Just to start with.

  Thistle was much better at explaining things. She liked to talk about history and included the interesting details, like what people wore and ate and how dentists worked. But Thistle wasn’t there at the picnic under the tree. Thistle was in the house, lying in bed with the blinds closed. For most of the year, Thistle was her normal self but in December she changed. Her phases became altered. Her mood dark.

  •

  William stood at the barbecue with his tongs in one hand and a rolled newspaper in the other. He kept looking at the sky. Recently Grace had taken to swooping at him. Rue took the newspaper from William.

  ‘I wonder why she goes for you all the time.’

  ‘Thistle says that ravens are the ghosts of dead people,’ Olive said. ‘But everyone’s alive, so it can’t be that.’ She sat up. ‘I wanted to have a raven in the play. I wanted Grace to be in it, but Thistle said no. Grace would be a good actor. I told Thistle that but she still said no.’

  Rue started separating the plates on the rug and counting out cutlery.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said.

  ‘Do we have to do the play next week?’ Archie’s voice was pitchy. He had always loved doing the plays.

  ‘Of course,’ said Rue. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because your aunt likes it. It’s important to her and she works hard on them.’

  Archie groaned. He was on his back, arms and legs angled like brown sticks, drumming a beat on his chest with his fingers.

  ‘Can we go to the dam, Mum?’ Sebastian asked.

  ‘Yeah, can we?’ Archie was getting to his feet, putting on his thongs.

  ‘But you haven’t eaten yet.’

  ‘I had sauce with bread,’ Archie said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Rue sighed. ‘The food won’t be much longer,’ she said. She moved the plates and neatened the forks. ‘Come here, Mandy, you look flushed.’ She put a hand to her daughter’s brow. ‘Slightly pyretic, I thought so. You can’t go. I don’t know why you all want to swim there anyway. Horrible place.’ Olive looked at her aunt who had stopped talking and was kneeling there with paper serviettes in her hand. Her mouth was open, like a fish.

  Rue was a mother who created worries out of thin air like a magician pulled knotted scarves out of a fist. Her knots could be small things, like how the dust got everywhere and made it impossible to keep a clean house. The bigger knots covered everything from broken necks to gashed chests to accidental stranglings by assorted means. Hoods of parkas slipping down to mask a cycling child’s eyes, curtain cords, filled and waiting bathtubs. The dam.

  The point at which Rue’s catastrophising had worsened was marked in the family’s communal memory. It was the time when the entire milk bar family, including their dog, was obliterated at the rail crossing while driving home from a picnic.

  ‘Just awful,’ Rue had wept at the kitchen table. ‘And after such a nice day out.’

  When younger, the children had barely been able to escape the house without interrogation. They would sneak away to avoid questions about where they were going, for what purpose and with whom. Even now she kept track of them, marking their movements by their far-off voices, the distant dings of bike bells and the thudding of feet as they ran through the house.

  ‘No running inside,’ she’d call happily.

  The older children stood in a line of three and she waved a hand at them and turned back to the knives. They ran off to the house leaving Mandy behind, whirring with upset on the blanket. Olive went to look for her bathers. It was a good room, with floral curtains that had ruffles. She would like some curtains like that. She went to the end of her bed and looked in her bag, dumping things out onto the floor. She found her damp bather bottoms and quickly put them on before Archie came in. He was always doing it and no matter how much she told him to knock he always forgot. She put on the bather top, struggling her body and arms through it without untying the strings. Then she found a damp t-shirt and held it to her chin before dropping it back on the carpet. She hunted for a dry one, then pulled her shorts back on.

  Outside she grabbed a towel from the line, baked rough in the sun. The coloured-plastic fly strips over the back door swung apart as the boys came out and they all ran, with Shaggy roused from the coolish shade barking and making them run faster before stopping at the end of his chain. Olive didn’t like swimming in the dam very much. She didn’t jump in from the edge, she waded in. A few summers before the dog had grabbed Archie’s heel as he jumped in, and his heel had ripped open and blood splattered on the ground in big drops. His father and mother had taken him into town to the hospital, and he’d come back with twelve stitches which he’d shown proudly to Olive and Sebastian. What Olive remembered of that day, though, was how her cousin’s mouth had been stained orange and she and Sebastian had been upset there’d been no icy pole for them. Sebastian cried for a long time and had refused to come out of his room. After that, Shaggy was always on the chain.

  The dam had been commissioned by Lenore. It was all in the diaries that Thistle had found. Lenore—a natural observer—had recorded the details of early life at Serpentine. She wrote about the trees, the cuttings and the landscape. For the dam, she had envisioned a kind of scenic pond from the old country, with fish and special plants and a little stone seat. She chose a site under a medium-sized swamp box and for several years had tried to foster the growth of submerged water plants: hornwort, ribbon weed, water thyme. It hadn’t worked very well, and while the swamp box had once featured a tyre swing, that was gone now.

  At the dam, Archie launched himself off the edge with a flattened dive and a cry of ‘Omnia extares!’, his legs bending back at the knees. Olive bobbed in the shallows with the silty base in between her toes. She watched Archie duck-diving out in the middle. How could he bear to go down so deep? At the pool she could swim almost all the way across with one breath, bu
t here she’d never wanted to go under.

  Archie swam over.

  ‘How come your mum always looks sad?’ he asked.

  Olive looked over at Seb, who was sitting on the bank swiping a stick in the air.

  ‘She calls me dear but her voice doesn’t mean it and she looks cross even when none of us haven’t done anything wrong.’

  Olive dipped her head into the dam and her long fringe caught the water. Hair streamed over her face, the ends reaching her chin. She ducked her head again and propelled herself across the surface to the middle, her eyes stinging. She lifted her head, took another breath and went down. She kicked and felt in front with her hands. Eyes jammed shut, everything was silent apart from the beat of blood in her head. She found something to grab, a branch from the felled swamp box and, with her arm stretched, held on and let herself rotate at the shoulder. Her body wanted to rise. Her other arm was spread wide. She relaxed in the deep, let herself tilt like a wet star. Her breath was saved and she held it and held it and pushed her mind forwards. Ending, ending, but still she stayed under just to be in that cool distant place for a while longer.

  She saw a white tree filled with meringue-coloured cockatoos and one girl-bird, Grace, sleek on the top branch. Just as she started to hear singing she let go and felt herself turn and rise. She broke the surface—wildly, blindly—and shouted out in surprise. Treading water, she wiped her eyes and looked around. Sebastian was squatting on one side of the dam with Grace next to him. Archie was already out and running across the paddock.

  ‘It’s okay, she’s here,’ Sebastian yelled to his brother. Archie braked and turned with hands on his head. He started to walk back.

  Olive climbed out and picked up her towel. She sat down and Sebastian sat next to her on the dirt, hugging his knees.

  ‘Do you know anything about a sister?’ Olive sucked at a twist of her hair, scissoring the ends with her front teeth. It tasted like soap and metal. ‘Anything?’ she asked.

  Sebastian’s nose was peeling and had a pimple. He scratched in the dirt with a rock.

  ‘Mandy?’

  ‘Not her.’

  He threw the rock away. Over the other side, Archie rolled down the slope, dirt and leaves sticking to his body, his eyes shut and mouth open.

  Olive picked up her own rock and scratched in the dirt too.

  ‘Well?’ she persisted.

  ‘Nope.’ He shook his head.

  ‘I went down,’ she said. ‘It was good.’

  Grace was on her knee, shifting her head to look her right in the eye. Olive touched the bird’s back where the warm feathers bent a little under her fingers, like fragile spongy ridges. She loved everything about Grace. The way she looked at things with her whole body, how she moved when she saw something, lifting herself taller when she spotted an interesting thing or angling towards a bright glint of treasure, her tail following her movement like the end part of an arrow, a sleek pointer. The way her eyes searched for and found Olive’s even if she was high in the sky, even if Olive was in the car looking out the window. Whenever Olive and Grace looked at each other Olive felt it in her heart, a deep tug of love.

  ‘It was really good.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I liked it, going under.’

  ‘Okay,’ Sebastian said. He looked away. They sat as Archie played in the dam, running in and running out, shouting across to them, words that they ignored. They sat until a short while later Rue began to call to them across the paddock, her voice reedy and mosquito-thin.

  AT SCHOOL ON Monday everything went wrong. First, Olive got in trouble for throwing a pencil across the room. Bosco Scully kept putting it on her desk. She said it wasn’t hers and put it back on his. They moved it back and forth until she flung it. Mrs Barton had stepped outside for a moment and she came back in just as the pencil hit the door frame beside her and fell to the ground at her feet. The teacher asked who threw it and Olive put her hand up. She was sent to the office and the principal was very angry and said she could have taken out the eye of one of his best teachers. Olive wanted to argue with him. She was sure she could explain why Mrs Barton was not an especially good teacher. She was sure too that she could make a convincing argument why something as light as a pencil could probably not push out someone’s whole eyeball, but she kept quiet.

  And then just before the bell, they got a new project. The water project. They had to work out how much water their family used in a week and they had to start counting that night.

  Olive put her hand up.

  ‘But how do we count the water?’ She couldn’t understand how they could possibly know the number of litres in a flushing toilet or how much went down the sink after her dad did the dishes. How were they meant to measure all of it when the water disappeared? What about hoses in the garden? They had two, one at the front and one at the back. What about those two hoses?

  She wondered if Sebastian had done the same project. How had he measured all the water they used at the farm? Rue with her garden? Did he have to count the dam? It was impossible as far as she could see.

  ‘You have to estimate, Olivia. You can work out exactly how many litres in a bucket. And then approximately how many buckets to a full sink for washing the dishes. Or a shower, for having a five-minute shower.’ Mrs Barton smiled but it was stiff and mean.

  Olive put her hand up again.

  ‘Come and ask me any more questions after class,’ Mrs Barton said, and turned back to the board. Once the bell went Olive had tried to pack things into her desk quickly so she could go and tell Mrs Barton her other questions but she was still too slow. The teacher had already left the room.

  •

  Peter offered to help her with the water project and her father did too, but she said no to them both. Thursday night saw her in dramatic collapse at the tap in the front garden, lying there holding onto the pipe, her clipboard beside her and pencil jammed into the grass. When she looked through slitted eyes at the house she could see the outline of her mother standing in the lounge window, arms crossed. Her mother couldn’t help her. She had said she wasn’t good at maths.

  In the end, Olive made it up. She worked out ten jugs to a bucket, and three buckets to a sink. She guessed thirty for a bath and one hundred for a shower. She didn’t care about being right. She wouldn’t get a good mark for it but she didn’t care anymore, she really didn’t. Not at all was what she told Peter on the Friday morning, waiting for the bell.

  ‘Talk about the dumbest project ever,’ she said.

  To make the whole thing even worse, after school she saw Snooky in the hall outside the classroom near the bags, telling Mrs Barton that she’d really liked doing the water project and that she hoped they had projects like that at high school next year.

  Olive wrenched her bag off its hook and walked to the bike shed where she waited for Peter.

  ‘You know you’re soaking in it!’ he said as he approached.

  ‘Snooky is such a suck,’ Olive said. Snooky always wanted the teachers to like her. She gave them cards and little presents at the end of each year. Olive supposed she would do the same this year too. ‘She said she liked the project. Let’s go to the silo.’

  Peter put his bag across his front.

  ‘Alright. I’ll dink you to your place to get your bike?’

  She climbed onto his pack rack and shoved her school bag in the gap between her chest and Peter’s back.

  ‘You can hold on to me if you want.’

  Balancing her toes on the cog set, knees set wide, she said it was okay and gripped the metal rack behind her. They rode on the footpaths and sprinklers tossed wet arcs of water over fences, loops of spray that caught their bare legs and pattered across their chests, their foreheads, their arms. Peter shouted hey! each time, but Olive just perched behind him, upright and grim.

  At her place, she left her bag and got her bike and they were off again. Pedalling down the side streets she was in front. The air cooled her skin as they flew under th
e plane trees. She avoided the bubbled mounds in the bitumen, all the places where the physics of heat and rupture had created fissures in the road, the spots of molten tar that had pushed up, their crusts glinting in the sun. She knew every depression and every bump. The spots where she had to swerve to the right or left, rise up off the seat, bend down under a low-hanging branch. Behind her was the hum of Peter’s wheels, the rhythmic tick of the saddlebags buckled onto his pack rack. A couple of summers before he’d had a bunch of spoke clackers from cereal packets, plastic clips that made so much noise as he rode that she said he had to take them off. They were too loud and made people look. Olive liked to stream past humans, dogs and parked cars in a way that felt like invisibility, delivered into a kind of trancelike state of ecstasy where everything she did was swift, high and complete.

  They cut through the housing estate, a wasteland of rubble and smooth new bitumen, courts curved and broad in contrast to the gridline streets of Stratford proper. Then they rode away from Shady Villas! and headed in the direction of the outskirts of town. They passed the memorial pines and the English-style shrubs and emerged on the old highway where the gums grew right up to the road, large bushy blocks that abutted twisted barbs of wire fencing. Here were the beginning scraggles of blackberry bushes that grew on the verges, sprawling thickets with berries still green in their cups.

  About halfway to the silo she started to get dots across her eyes and a hollow ache in her head. She held up a hand and they pulled off the road under some trees where she lay down in the dirt with her arms spread wide. She wondered if she was getting sick. She never got headaches or dizzy but lately it had happened a few times.