Peter sat upright, hands holding his knees, his watch arm carefully on the outside of the other.
‘What’s so good about that watch anyway?’ Olive said, shading her eyes.
‘I told you, the war.’
‘It’s really old. It’ll probably break soon.’
‘Not if I’m careful.’
Nearby, a flock of galahs landed and began to circle in a cluster, turning as they shrieked. Peter stretched out his arm, looking at the watch.
‘I also told you, it was my grandfather’s.’
Olive rolled over and got to her hands and knees.
‘You’ve got bits of stuff in your hair,’ Peter pointed.
Olive got on her bike.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
•
The heat had a noise to it, a faint pulsing sound. They stood at the base of the silo. It was a three-cell structure, conjoined biscuit-coloured edifices that rose into the air where they loomed against the hard sky. The sun was sitting directly behind the main carapace and created an outline of the latticework, a conglomeration of metal staircases and walkways affixed to it. Down the shaft of the tower the words of the company were written in faded green letters: THE NEPEN GRAIN CO. Nearby at the back of the station were the buildings, abandoned since the 1970s. An old ganger’s hut, a farmer’s shed, a large corrugated-iron goods store and a fuel depot. Beyond the silo was a place called Soldier’s Paddock, a block of rutted land dotted with mines made by an ex-soldier who went mad looking for gold after the war. Two generations of children had been told by their parents never to go inside the fence, an imperative ignored by most.
Ganger’s was a squalid single-room shack with a broken window, jammed door and no working light. Inside were a small cot and empty beer bottles that lined the walls which were covered with abrupt statements about rooting and screwing.
Olive dumped her bike and walked over to the cement pipe that had been left behind after roadworks. She climbed inside. When the pipes had first arrived three years before they’d played in and around them, Sebastian trying to get a complicated spaceship game going and Archie saying he couldn’t get on top and wanting Peter to give him a boost. But all Olive wanted to do was lie inside and spread herself against the smooth wide curve of the walls. She loved being alone in the warm stone tomb, listening to the liquid rumbles of voices outside, the pings of their shouts. And when she wasn’t inside one of the pipes she wanted to drape herself on the outside, lay her cheek against it in a hug.
‘You wanna go up?’ Peter’s face was at the opening.
She made him go first and they climbed, wending a vertical path through the cloister of metal that scaffolded the sides. At the top, they lay down on their stomachs and looked over the edge at the flattened landscape scored by railway tracks, roads and pathways. Trains used to bring the grain that filled the towers and she could remember how the wheat dust flew in the air, specks of yellow illuminated by daylight.
The trains had almost completely stopped now.
‘Nothing is real down there,’ she said to Peter. ‘Our life is here.’
‘I guess. You’ve got little dots of sweat on your nose.’
She wiped an arm across her face.
‘We could burst into flames it’s so hot.’ She flopped back.
‘Yeah, spontaneously.’
There was a hairy caterpillar moving along one of the metal bars and Peter put a finger out to touch it.
‘Don’t, you’ll get itchy.’
‘I know.’ He kept his finger extended, holding it just above the hairs.
She watched him. ‘I said don’t.’
‘I wasn’t.’ He moved his finger away.
A train was coming. Olive watched as it slowed and trundled past the ganger’s hut and the group of trees that stood by the crossing.
She looked at her legs, at the hairs. She hadn’t even noticed them until Archie had said something. A grasshopper landed on her knee and she flicked it off.
‘Why’s there so many crickets?’
Peter said he didn’t know.
‘Maybe the plague is coming, like in the Bible.’
‘Maybe.’ He told her how his mother had a story about a mouse plague.
‘When?’
‘I don’t know, but it was a long time ago.’
‘Which year was it?’
‘I said I don’t know? But before my mum was born. It was her grandmother maybe. God, why do you always have to know every little thing?’
The caterpillar was almost at the ladder and she stretched her finger out to it.
‘All over the floors in the houses, small grey ones. They caught millions and millions in about two days.’
‘Your great-great-great-great grandma?’
‘Not just her. And they were eating all the wheat, the mice were, and my mum said that it was horrible—that’s what her mum told to her. That they had to sleep somewhere else, not in their beds.’
‘Where? In their cars? On a table?’
‘I don’t know, maybe it was.’
‘Maybe on a table. Like the mother who put her children to sleep on the table in the kitchen because there was a snake inside? I saw it in a movie at school.’
‘I remember. That was a good movie.’
Olive thought about mice chewing at the wheat, jaws running like machines. What if that many grasshoppers were coming right now, flying towards them in a cloud that would cover the sun?
‘It’s so hot,’ she said.
‘My dad told me that there was another kangaroo head at the station—out the back on the roof of the police car. It had a cigarette in its mouth.’ Peter lifted his shoulders and laughed in his special ghost voice, a laugh he’d been practising.
‘Who do you think it is?’ she said, and Peter stopped the laugh. ‘It’s probably Gary Sands,’ she said. ‘Sebastian’s scared, but don’t tell him I told you so.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Maybe it’s Jethro.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s really hot.’
The caterpillar was coming back. She put her finger out and touched it then pulled her hand away.
‘You know the girl he used to go out with? Gary?’ she said. ‘The one with the straight hair that goes in a V down her back? I think he did something to her even though she was only fourteen, that’s what I think.’
‘Cindy?’
‘I think so.’
‘The really pretty one?’
‘Yeah. She’s got the bathers with the palm trees on them?’
They were silent.
‘So?’
‘So do you know anything about that?’ She closed her eyes. ‘Like does it hurt? They say that it hurts the girl.’
‘Who even knows.’
‘Are you ever going to do that?’
‘Nope.’
‘Never?’
He sat up. He looked over the edge again. ‘Stop talking about it.’
‘God, I’m just asking.’
‘The feelings—’ It took him a very long time to find the words. ‘It’s very mixed.’
‘Do you want to kiss?’ She edged herself upright. ‘Just a little bit to see?’
She thought he was going to look over the edge forever but he slowly turned and leaned forwards, closing his eyes. She kept her eyes open and watched his face as it came closer. When their mouths touched his was soft and he kept his lips closed but it didn’t feel like anything, just that someone was too close to her, which he was. He was breathing through his nose, pushed up against her face. She pulled back and they both wiped their mouths.
‘I used to think the man does wee inside the woman,’ she said.
‘Me too.’ Peter pulled his shoe off and shook dirt out of it.
‘Which is not right.’
‘Yeah.’
From a distance came the sound of motorbikes, a group of them going past on the highway.
‘Bikies,’ Peter said, lifting his hands to imaginary handlebars in the air.
‘You know bikies do things to girls when they have their, you know, their blood?’
‘Like what kind of things?’
‘Kissing? Down there?’ She flapped a hand at her school dress. ‘They train dogs to do things to women too when they blow a whistle; I think the bikies blow the whistle. Someone told me about it.’
‘That’s so off.’
‘And some people do it with dead bodies.’
‘The bikies?’
‘Probably.’
‘That’s really so off.’
‘Yeah. And some people eat humans, but I don’t know if that’s bikies, maybe that’s just people from another country. My aunt told me about that one.’
‘Thistle?’
‘Yeah.’
He made a face.
‘Humans are disgusting,’ Peter said.
A grasshopper walked on his arm for a while then flew off.
Olive got onto her hands and knees and started to move to the ladder.
‘I have to go.’
‘Yeah, your mum’ll be waiting.’
She edged her feet to the rungs. There were slices of shadow in the space formed by the cage around the ladder. The cage was to stop people from falling, to help them going up and down.
‘Can you come for a swim?’ he said once they got to the bottom.
She shook her head.
‘We’re going to the farm again, for the plays. It’s my aunt’s birthday.’
‘But it was your birthday last week.’
‘I know.’
‘Which one? Thistle?’
She nodded and Peter made a face again.
‘What types of plays? Can I come and see?’
‘I don’t know, boring Greek ones. She says she likes it to be free but really she just wants to be bossy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With the plays. She won’t let us say any of our own words. She won’t let Grace be in it and she won’t even say why.’
Peter shook his head. He didn’t understand. Sometimes she had to be very patient with Peter.
‘So you can’t come for a swim?’ Peter asked again.
‘No. But listen.’ The mention of the pool brought it to the front of her mind again.
‘What?’
She wanted to ask him about what Luke had said at the pool. Luke had said everybody knew.
‘Do you know anything about a sister?’
She followed Peter to the bikes where they lay on their sides near the hut.
‘Do you?’
Peter leaned down and hooked a little finger around a spoke and gently pulled. Then did it to another, and another.
‘Pete?’
He shook his head, still leaning down to the wheel.
She slung her leg across her bike and stomped on the pedals and lurched from side to side to get up speed. Through the hot air she flew, leaving him behind. As she passed the trees that lined the space between the buildings and the road, she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye—a shadow. Once out on the road she realised that it was her own shape thrown across the tarmac, bobbing up and down as they made their way back to town.
IN THE THINNING dusk and with hair damp against their heads after their baths, Olive, Sebastian and Archie went to the back garden in shortie pyjamas, their thongs snap-snapping down the flagstones. Each of them took a swing on the clothesline as they passed and then paused in a hushed line at the shed door, looked around once, before they started to go inside. There was a rush of feathers and Grace slammed into Olive’s chest and dropped to the ground. Olive stopped and the bird flew up to her shoulder.
‘No, not now.’ She pushed the bird off and slipped into the shed after her cousins.
When Archie had been sent looking for props for Thistle’s upcoming play he’d found something he wanted to show them. It was a magazine with rude pictures in it, pictures where you could see the hair. They looked through drawers and cupboards, on shelves and in boxes. They saw old tins of paint and gardening equipment, boxes of weedkiller and rat poison, but they couldn’t find the magazine.
‘Look at this,’ Olive said, lifting the box of poison from inside a white cane baby basket. ‘For when he gets too annoying.’ They both looked at Archie but he was at the back of the shed rummaging. Then Olive saw a flat box high on a shelf and pointed at it.
‘What’s that?’
She got up on a chair and brought it down. It was tied with string, with lots of knots and while Sebastian wanted to cut it open with his pocket knife, she insisted on untying each one.
‘Otherwise they’ll know we’ve looked,’ she said. ‘Spies put a hair across the doorway, to see if someone’s gone in. That’s why you have to leave things exactly the same way you find them. Nine knots.’ Sebastian snapped his knife shut. Finally, she got the last one untied and took off the lid. There were papers in it and some photos. They looked through them.
The pictures were of holidays and birthdays. There was a Christmas photo with a small doubtful Olive looking at the photographer and holding out a toy telephone. Deeper in the pile was one of a baby in Olive’s father’s arms. It had red hair and was dressed in a yellow frock. She could see her father’s ears underneath his short hair and the hand that wasn’t holding the strange baby was at his side, stiff like a soldier’s arm. She looked at the next picture, another one with the same baby, being held by Aunty Thistle. Then the redheaded baby was in Audra’s arms with a small Olive standing at her side.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Sebastian reached over and tried to get them from her, saying to put them back. Archie came up behind and stood there, breathing.
‘Who’s that kid?’ He extended a finger towards the pictures.
Olive moved the box away.
‘Hey, that’s you.’
He tried to snatch the photo.
‘Pffft, I wanna see. Fleeeeece?’
‘Stop using my joke. Make up your own, Archibaldman.’
Archie blinked at his brother, halted by the low blow.
‘There isn’t any left, you’ve taken them all.’
‘I said go away.’ Sebastian turned back to the photos.
‘Wait, I don’t get it. That isn’t Thistle’s baby,’ Archie said. ‘She’s a sprinster.’
‘That’s my joke,’ Olive said, holding the pictures to her chest. ‘And they don’t have to be married, they just need the sexing.’ She slipped the photos onto her lap and put the lid back on the box. ‘I don’t think anyone would sex Thistle though.’
She waited for Sebastian to say something but he didn’t. Archie moved away. She wrapped the string around. ‘Nine knots,’ she said.
Sebastian got up on the chair and she passed the box up to him. Archie came up behind again.
‘Lookit this.’ He was waving a mousetrap on the end of his finger.
‘Put it down,’ said Seb. Archie moved away.
‘HEY, LOOK AT THIS!’ Archie shouted from the old shelving at the back.
‘I said SHUT UP.’ Sebastian was at the door now, about to leave.
‘I know about those,’ Olive said, looking at the board Archie held. In old-fashioned writing there were letters and numbers printed on the wooden surface, and whole words such as ‘YES’ ‘NO’ and ‘GOOD BYE’
‘What is it?’ Archie said.
Olive held out her hand to take the wooden slider. ‘It’s a Ouija board. You use it to talk to dead people, like in a séance. Thistle told me about them. I think she used to have one when she was younger.’
‘Did she talk to dead people?’
Olive said she didn’t know.
‘We should try it,’ Archie said.
‘If you do you’ll get possessed,’ Sebastian said. ‘Like the girl in that show. With the doll she burned in the oven.’
‘I’m taking it,’ Archie said. ‘I’m gonna use it to talk to some dead people, probably tonight.’
‘No you’re not,’ said Sebastian.
‘I
am.’
‘Not.’
Olive left the shed and walked back to the house. In the bedroom, she took the photos out. One was the picture of the red-haired baby with her father. She put it to the side. The second one she had seen before. This was an important photo. At home, she’d stood in front of the mantelpiece, trying to figure out its significance. It sat right in the middle of her mother’s collectibles, in a silver frame. In the line of displayed items above the fireplace there were a small vase with raised coloured bumps, a royal-looking ceramic Scottie dog, a fan from somewhere overseas, maybe China, and a smooth glass box with a gold keyhole. Olive was not allowed to touch any of the things.
Sitting on the floor, Olive studied the photograph. There was her young dad with his arm around her mother, around her waist. He was laughing so hard that it looked as if he was going to explode. What had made him laugh like that? And here was a person Olive had never seen in real life. The young woman in the black-and-white photo had the same pretty hair as her mother. It was done up in a bun at the back of her head. She had the same features as Audra. Her eyebrows, her chin. Her left hand was raised to clutch her father’s fingers on her shoulder. You could see her new wedding ring. It was a plain silver band and it shone white and bright. She had a frothy marshmallow veil on her hair and her face was tipped up towards Bruce, smiling. Olive had never seen her mother like this. Her teeth were very even and her eyes were so shiny they seemed wet.
As she studied the photograph there was a noise in the hallway. She stretched her legs against the door just as it opened hard against her feet. Mandy Milk complained on the other side. She said there was a wolf coming to get her and she wanted to come in. That it wasn’t fair, it was her room. Why was she always getting shut out? But Olive didn’t say anything, just stayed on the carpet, her knees locked and feet held firm, until her cousin gave up and went away.
THE FAMILY WERE at the table eating dessert when Archie drew in a breath.
‘Did you ever have a baby, Aunty Thistle?’
Olive’s neck tightened and Sebastian inhaled a crumb and coughed.
Archie took a casual sip of milk. He moved leisurely—authoritatively. Thistle was lifting her spoon as if she hadn’t heard what Archie had said and Rue was in the middle of a smile, rubbing at the tablecloth.
Little Gods Page 5