‘Beetroot—it’s just so risky,’ she was saying. She stopped rubbing and looked up. ‘What?’
‘We saw some pictures of one.’ Archie took another drink of milk.
Sebastian tried to kick him but missed, sliding down in his chair. He hit his chin on the edge of the table. Olive looked to see what her mother was doing.
‘Were you in the shed? You know you shouldn’t be out there.’ Rue didn’t often get angry.
‘They were helping me. Looking for realia,’ Thistle said.
‘Well, it was a kid but it had red hair,’ Archie said. ‘Maybe it was a girl but more like a boy, if you ask me. Aunty Thistle was holding him and he had a yellow top on. It was pretty short hair, but at the sides—’
Audra got up and went out. Bruce folded his napkin, put it beside his plate and followed her. William was chewing even though it seemed like he didn’t have any food left in his mouth.
Olive turned to the window. She wished she could go outside.
‘No,’ said Thistle. ‘Not mine, that one.’
Sebastian made a noise and it sounded like his mother, an expression of deep, low-seated tiredness. He swung his head to the side and scowled at Olive and she shook her head back at him. It wasn’t her fault. They both glared at Archie.
A tap-tapping at the window made them turn and William started to complain about the noise.
‘Well, it’s her dinner time too,’ said Olive.
‘It’ll be pecking the eyes out of lambs in no time,’ William said. It was what he always said.
Olive told him that she wouldn’t and she tipped her chin at Archie who ran out to shoo Grace away from the window. Olive shouted after him to give her some meat and Mandy joined him and their voices filtered back to the family.
‘Me,’ Mandy was saying. ‘Me.’
‘A pet crow has no place on a farm.’ William wiped his mouth with his serviette, rolled it and put his ring on it. ‘They’re just trouble.’
Olive looked at Thistle, who had drawn herself up in her chair.
‘Harbingers,’ Thistle said. ‘They bring truth to those who need it. Warnings even.’
William pushed his chair back. He left the room too.
•
It had been back in September, when the trial was on in Darwin for the baby taken from the tent. It was cold and windy and had been raining overnight. The grass was slippery and littered with sticks that had fallen and they heard her before they saw her, a tiny balled creature with no sign of pin feathers. Olive picked it up and carried it inside, careful of the bird’s neck and conscious of the staccato beat of its chest against her fingers. How it sat, cold as a rock in her palm. It was opening its mouth, a small rose-pink cave.
‘It’s hungry,’ she said.
Archie ran beside her, and she wanted to tell him to be quiet but she couldn’t even breathe because this tiny thing she held in her hands was so precious. Sebastian went ahead to hold open the door and call to his mother that they had a baby bird and they needed a box.
‘And it might be dying!’ he shouted.
‘We need something soft for a bed.’ Olive was whispering. The bird was in her hands and it was looking at her. Blue eyes.
‘I’ve got an old t-shirt,’ said Archie. ‘It’s too small.’
Crystal blue. Unblinking.
‘You never grow out of anything,’ Sebastian said.
‘What?’
‘You’re a shrimp.’
‘WHO SAID?’ Archie hadn’t grown much since he was seven, though this had nothing to do with the blocked nose and the hearing, everyone had agreed. The doctor in the city had no answers but Archie said he didn’t care because he wanted to be a jockey, like Grandad Fletcher.
‘Shhh,’ said Rue, coming into the kitchen. ‘You’ll wake the whole house.’ She went to the laundry. ‘I’ll get some rags and there’s a shoebox in the hall cupboard, I think. Down the bottom.’
‘What’s a good name?’ Archie said, pulling the stool over.
‘Better not ’cause it’ll probably die,’ said Sebastian. Rue came back in, sorting through a plastic bag. ‘Right, Mum? It’ll probably die?’
‘He’s so beautiful,’ Olive said. The bird’s neck was skinny and its eyes were shutting now, the lids like small blackish peas.
‘Not really,’ said Sebastian.
Thistle came in and began to make a cup of tea.
‘That is a raven, children, an Australian raven, the cleverest bird of all. I had one when I was a girl and he brought me messages. He sat on my shoulder. What a lovely deep voice he had.’
Rue was wiping down the bench with the Wettex.
‘She didn’t have a crow, children.’
‘It’s not my fault if you don’t remember. He and his friends lined the roof, sat in the trees in the back garden and spoke to me all the day long. Besides, not a crow. A raven is to a crow as a wolf is to a dog.’
Rue kept rubbing at the laminex.
‘What did you feed him?’ Olive asked. ‘What was his name? Did he stay with you for a long time?’
‘I fed him chopped-up mice and other bits of meat. Cat food. The cat had died but there was still food in the pantry, wasn’t there, Ruey? Oatmeal. Hardboiled-egg yolks. Ground-up cow hearts. Peas. Not bread. Never bread.’
‘Where did you get the mice from?’
‘From traps. We had them behind the fridge and they snapped in the night and I collected them in the morning.’
‘It was revolting,’ Rue said over her shoulder. ‘Snipping them up with shears and once even my craft scissors.’
‘I knew you remembered.’ Thistle put two spoons of sugar in her tea, stirred and sipped. She leaned forwards to the sugar bowl and tipped in one spoon more. ‘My raven was called Claudius.’
They got the box and Thistle sexed the bird and Olive fought to name her. Rue made comments about mites and germs and said the bird really needed to stay outside, that she didn’t want it in the kitchen. Olive argued that it was just a baby and had no mother and Sebastian pushed for it to be on the stove top, just for a while so that it didn’t die. If it went in the laundry or outside into the wind it would definitely die, he said. He was almost crying. Audra came in and made it clear that the bird would not be coming home with them under any circumstances so Olive should not even think to ask. It was as if she knew how Olive’s mind worked because it was true, Olive had already started to fantasise about the bird sleeping in a white basket at the end of her bed and then, once bigger, riding around on her shoulder.
Thistle helped with a list of names and sulked only slightly when her suggestion of Azaria was rejected. She offered alternatives: Grace, Mercy, Joy. She told the children that the bird would grow to be their friend. That she would want to stay close to them, like baby lambs when they imprint. Ravens, she said, were loyal, smart and excellent problem solvers.
‘She will bring you treasures and make you laugh—but only for about four months, and then she will go away.’
‘What kinds of problems?’ Archie wasn’t very good at maths.
Olive wiped a finger across the baby raven.
‘She’s going to leave?’
Grace rotated her head to Olive.
‘Of course. A caged corvid will dement.’
‘But she’s not in a cage.’
‘She is but you can’t see it. She’ll drift off around January, I imagine.’ Thistle went to the fridge.
‘No.’ Olive’s chin jutted.
‘Consider it a summer romance,’ Thistle had said, even though it was still spring. ‘She can’t stay here forever, Olive. She’ll think she’s a girl.’
‘She can be a raven and a girl.’
Olive ran to her bed and lay face down. For someone who didn’t cry it was a shock, this almost-weeping that had tried to take over her whole body. Sebastian opened the door and she screamed at him to go away. She could hear him and Archie outside whispering and she screamed once more until the hallway became quiet. All she could hear
then were the faint sounds of William’s voice out in the paddocks and the grind of the oven door opening and closing in the kitchen. Olive became the coldest she’d ever been when she let herself think that Grace might leave. She decided it was impossible and pushed all thoughts of it away.
•
Later, in the hallway, Sebastian grabbed Archie around the neck and told him he didn’t get it, that you sometimes just needed to shut up and that he probably needed to do it more than most other people. Archie wriggled out from under his brother’s arm and ran down the hall, swinging his legs going ‘aaaahhhhh’ and saying he was Frankenstein while Olive leaned against the wall and wondered if she could ask for another piece of strudel.
THE VERANDAH AT Serpentine was like the deck of a ship. Out there the air was soft and the scent of Rue’s roses mixed with the sweet chemical tang of insect repellent. Mosquito coils burned along the wide window ledges as Archie went around touching the ash even though his mother told him not to. Mandy had been taken to bed saying she was scared to go to sleep, that it wasn’t fair, but Rue was impervious to childish terror.
‘Not much about life is fair, my girl,’ she said and walked her inside.
Thistle was in the corner where the light from the weak bulb barely reached and the shadows made her features shift from aunty to ghoul and back again. It was the place she liked to sit so that she could make her sideline comments.
William had his back to the rest of them, his hands on the railing as he stood looking out across the land. He talked about the excellent dark-sky sites he’d known as a child and how the moon was pulling away from the earth a bit more each year. Olive didn’t like to think of the moon leaving like that. It made her sad. Then William mentioned something called sprites, said that he’d seen some once, when he was a boy. Olive asked if they were like fireflies. She was desperate to see a firefly. Thistle started to reply but Sebastian cut across her.
‘Not like that, dummy,’ he said to Olive. ‘Like lightning but different. You never listen properly.’
Thistle clapped her hands.
‘I was going to contribute,’ she said. ‘Sprites can also be spirits, or ghosts. If they hear you say something, like a wish, they make the opposite happen. That’s why we say “break a leg” in the theatre.’
‘Well, that’s not what I’m talking about now,’ William said and turned back to the dimming sky. Rue came back out and stood next to him and he reached for her under-chin.
Olive sat on the rattan couch on the verandah with everything made strange about her. It often happened at the end of the day that she realised she wasn’t in the world. She could see that all else was as usual but that somehow she wasn’t. The same trees lined the drive. The sprinkler tetched in lazy circles near Rue’s garden. But things turned and were made solemn by the departed sun and the growing shadows, the quietness of the adults’ voices and the children’s pleas against bed. They were too tired to do their teeth. They were thirsty and wanted another glass of milk. They wanted to read, just for a little while. Anything to elongate the uneasy transition between day and night and forestall the inevitable submission to sleep.
The areas around the front of the house deepened as the navy garden transformed into an enchanted place, one where even the shadows made shadows. Olive didn’t go into the garden when it was full night, no matter how much she might hope to see the outline of an owl against the sky.
Rue started to talk about the big fires, when they’d all had to stand in the dam. The wind had been hot and impossible and sparks had plumed hard, straight up into the night sky. Thistle had refused to leave, saying if the house was to burn it was best she went with it. Only William had been able to make her walk to the dam. As they waited, with the water up to their necks and wet towels on their heads, Bruce and William made puns to keep everyone’s spirits up.
‘Enjoying the dip?’ they’d said.
Later, they found the stock had burned and were lying on their backs like charred pincushions, legs sticking up in the air. There’d been no jokes then as they got the ute and began to drag the bodies into a pile to burn them once more.
‘Did we help?’ Archie asked his mother.
‘It was before you were born, before Olive too, but we had a small Sebastian with us.’
‘How little was he?’ Even more than stories about disasters Archie liked hearing about a time when his brother was small.
‘Too young to stand on his own so we had to hold him in the water.’
Archie smiled. ‘Was he scared?’
‘I wasn’t scared,’ said Olive.
Sebastian pushed her leg with his foot. ‘You weren’t even there.’
‘I was.’ She crossed her arms. She remembered it exactly as Rue said.
‘Of course we were frightened. The sound of the fire was like a roaring monster,’ Rue said.
‘But why did you go in the dam?’ Archie said. ‘I would drive away in the car.’
‘Fires are too fast for cars.’
‘Pffft, you can’t even drive,’ Sebastian said to his brother.
‘But I still would. If there was a fire I could do it, I bet I could.’
Rue had forgotten what she was saying but Thistle’s prompt came from the corner.
‘It was like hell. God burned the moon orange that night and it was that boy who started it.’
‘Not now, dear,’ said Rue.
‘What boy?’ Olive said.
‘The children should know how it changed and what a bad colour that can be. They should know how to play with the talking board too, how to keep safe,’ Thistle said. ‘Is someone going to make another pot?’
Moths were around the bulb above.
‘Which talking board?’
‘Our old one.’
‘Yours, not “ours”,’ said Rue. ‘Mum got rid of it, I thought. Are you saying they have it?’
Thistle hooked a finger at Archie who stepped forward as if pulled by a string from his chest. Archie was a bit scared of Thistle, especially after she’d told him about the boy who’d been swallowed by the sand dune in America.
‘We found it,’ he said. ‘In the shed.’
‘I told you not to go out there—just before I told you, didn’t I?’
‘It was the same time. We’re gonna use it to talk to some spirits.’
‘You most certainly are not,’ said Rue. ‘Go and get it now, please.’
Archie went thudding inside and came back carrying the ouija board. Rue took it from him, along with the heart-shaped planchette. ‘You won’t be playing with this and I’m taking you to the barber next week.’
Archie collapsed in a moan. ‘But it’s my strength.’
‘This is your doing,’ Rue said over her shoulder to Thistle.
‘Come here, boy,’ said Thistle. ‘Shhh, it grows back, you know that.’
Rue went inside with the board.
Archie wrapped an arm around Thistle’s neck. ‘Tell me about the boy again, Aunty Thistle. The boy who was underground.’
In the story, there’d been tunnels—sandy pits—that the boy from Maryland had fallen into. The first time they heard it Olive had been asking about the Devil’s Triangle and Thistle had been the only one who really knew anything about it. She told them of planes pulled into the ocean, instruments spinning. Ships that disappeared, sucked down to where the giant squids lived.
‘I think I’d just like to stay on land,’ Olive had said, and that’s when Thistle had told them that the land could be just as dangerous as the sea. That it can move when it shouldn’t and swallow children up. Then she’d told them about the Maryland boy.
Olive hated the story. Her aunt’s descriptions of the sand, making it sound as if it flowed like liquid, consuming rocks and leaves like a hungry river coming to rest around trees whose roots formed caverns under the ground. Thistle’s announcement that nature had no sensitivity, formed no attachments in the way humans did, were concepts that she only half grasped. That people were weak and e
motion ruinous. She wondered if her aunt was right. That it might be better to be a plant instead of a girl.
On the verandah, Olive tried to push the image of a shifting body of sand away because she didn’t want her own bad dream to come, the recurring one she’d had as a younger child. She’d tried to tell Sebastian once about the wall of sand that filled all her scope and throbbed forwards and backwards to the sound of a drum.
He had been unimpressed. ‘That’s it? That’s not a nightmare, not if it’s just sand. Nightmares have monsters, or bad guys with missing fingers.’
‘But it has the sound, too, which is actually the worst bit.’
Sebastian had been unconvinced and gone and locked himself in the bathroom.
In her corner, Thistle kissed Archie’s head and told him to go and play.
He stepped away from her and looked down into the hydrangeas and agapanthus. The thought of being in the garden on his own at that time made him go and sit near his father.
Things fell quiet and Rue started to say again it was time for bed. She began to collect the teacups but before she could take them inside they saw that a car was making its way up the drive, beam-lights slightly rotated so they scissored through the darkness. Archie jumped down the steps to run towards the slow-moving vehicle.
‘Oh,’ said Rue and put the teacups down. ‘It’s Cleg.’
CLEGWORTH LOVELOCK WAS the third brother and the sisters were unified in their distaste for him. Cleg was the oldest and had taken the name but left the farm. The city had beckoned. Melbourne: mater urbium. Nothing was dull or predictable in the city, Cleg said, and besides, there were jazz clubs.
‘Show me a jazz club in Stratters.’
For Cleg it was his lack of love for the country, not his penchant for claret, which had ended his own small family. It wasn’t that he’d driven on Boxing Day night, rather it was his haste to get back to civilisation. Rue had begged him not to get in the car but William had shushed her and called her ‘woman’ and waved his brother and pregnant wife off down the driveway. Rue never said anything like ‘I told you so’ to either William or her brother-in-law.
Cleg had applied himself to his work and post-prandials, adding female company to the mix after a suitable mourning period. He was a lawyer and kept a nine iron under a tartan blanket across the back seat of his car—in case he needed to fat shot some bloke’s head, he said. His richer clients subsidised his poorer ones, and William was always telling him if he didn’t catch up on his invoicing he’d go bankrupt.
Little Gods Page 6