Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  In the doorway, Thistle held a finger up. The air flattened and then her aunt dropped her hand. Olive lowered the needle onto the third track. She didn’t know what it was called, this music. All she knew was that it was like clouds, a billowing of pulsing white energy that built from one thing into something else. It was the perfect piece of music, Thistle said, and it matched the first of the scenes they were about to perform. This was music that described an interior life, Thistle said, but to Olive it just sounded like strong round sounds.

  ‘No, it’s about feelings, not simple entertainment. Feelings about death and feelings about revenge, though I’m calling it a comedy. People are more comfortable with comedies, and it highlights the tragedy when you have both together. It’s about love, too.’

  Olive had wanted to ask what type of love it was. Was it for playing or a favourite food? Heidi had lost her love, which was the love for her grandfather and his mountain home. She’d thought to ask her aunt if it was that kind of love but then realised it was probably about loving a man which was the most boring type of love there was.

  Olive had heard her mother say to Rue that Thistle and her plays were ‘provocative’ and ‘ridiculous’. It had been mean to say that out loud and it was mean for her to say that about her own sister too.

  The music continued and they all went to their positions. Olive stood at her spot and felt sweaty inside her armpits. They read their parts, the lines that Thistle had insisted they recite word for word. One time, in the middle, Sebastian was speaking too quietly and William told him to speak up.

  ‘I can’t say it properly. Bio-logical ip- imp-erative?’

  Thistle nodded. She turned to the audience and broke character.

  ‘Quick exposition. Greyfriars Bobby was not a successful dog. The one on the tuckerbox, also not. They did not fulfil their biological imperative, which was to move on and breed. These dogs that lie mourning where their masters fell—not successful dogs.’ She nodded and went back into character and things proceeded.

  Olive had lost her place several times and kept looking up to see Archie, smiling in a superior way, pointing at his rewritten two pages.

  Everything went alright until towards the end when Thistle was doing her solo talk. Olive had stopped listening because it was long and dull, about the killing and stealing of love. Thistle had stopped reading her words and was ad-libbing, which made her aunt a double hypocrite. Olive looked at Sebastian and he glared back as if it was her fault, but it wasn’t. Nothing was ever her fault but she was always getting blamed. She didn’t tell their aunt to go on and on about putting poison into an ear. She couldn’t help it if she, Olive, was the prince and not Sebastian, that he was in a minor role this year. It was all mixed up but at least he didn’t have to play a girl part.

  ‘She moved like quicksilver upon that man,’ Thistle said. ‘Turned him to spurn. She will be guilty, look, see! Did she say “hate” where I told “love”?’

  Rue got up and went inside and Thistle’s head stayed fixed towards the empty chair. Then Archie stabbed Thistle in the stomach with the poison umbrella and she slid to the floor with hand to brow to say a few final words as she died. That was when Archie’s rectum emitted a high, tuba-like squeal. The children fell down laughing. Even Sebastian sat down on a chair with a smile.

  ‘That boy’s flatus,’ Audra said. ‘I just don’t know. Is it diet? Dairy?’ She breathed out smoke and answered herself. ‘It’s offensive is what it is.’

  ‘What, may I ask, is the problem?’ Thistle, resurrected, was getting to her feet and standing over Audra.

  ‘Nothing. Do go on.’

  ‘When the last days come, people will appear who will mock you.’

  ‘Oh stop that. Continue the play.’

  ‘I can’t. That’s it. I’ve died!’

  ‘I’m sure you can try again.’

  ‘Rue has to be here for this bit.’ Thistle went inside and came back out, steering her sister by the arm. Olive picked her nose.

  Thistle sat Rue down again and looked at the line of men at the back, where they leaned against the railing. She returned to her mark, tipped her head back and shut her eyes to gather herself. The children all moved back and found their spots as Thistle lowered herself to the rug. She lifted her arms over her head and looked at Olive to do the flowers.

  ‘Come the recorders,’ Sebastian said, and Archie stepped forwards and started playing ‘God Save the Queen’. Olive reached into the window where the record player spun with a gentle crackle, the music finished. She took out the bag that was filled with rose petals. As instructed, she sprinkled them slowly over Thistle, who lay dead. At the sight of the flowers Rue began to shout. Her roses! What had they done to her roses? But before anyone could say anything, Archie broke wind once more and Olive folded forwards with a quick sharp bray. Rue went inside again and Thistle stumped in after her. The men carried the furniture back to the kitchen and it was Audra who had to go to Thistle with a cool face washer.

  The play was over for another year.

  RUE AND THISTLE argued in the hallway. Olive had never heard Rue’s voice like that, a piccolo sound, high and constant. It made her think of a carnival ride, the music that was played as the carriages spun higher and higher. She went and opened the door, made a narrow crack to watch.

  ‘How could you?’ Rue was saying over and over. ‘My flowers. The show.’

  ‘I don’t care about your flowers, no one does.’

  ‘Audra does, she cares.’

  ‘She doesn’t. She just says that. My question to you stands: what did you say?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘What did you say that day? I was sick. I gave you the message. Did you say the word at all?’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous. What word?’

  ‘Did you mention love?’

  Rue’s face was awful.

  ‘You didn’t. Oh, villainy, HO!’

  ‘I have to get the dinner on.’ Rue went to the kitchen.

  Half an hour later, Olive walked down the hallway and stood outside Thistle’s room. She could hear muffled sobs. She opened the door and peered in. Thistle was lying prone in the middle of the mess. Her mother was there, helping Thistle, and it was a strange thing to see.

  ‘I want to die,’ Thistle was saying. ‘Again, nothing. All this time.’

  ‘There, there, dear,’ Audra said.

  ‘I won’t. Not there, not dear.’

  Audra got up and went to the record player.

  ‘What about some nice music?’

  ‘I can’t, it’s the violins. They sting me.’ Thistle’s voice was a hideous croak.

  ‘Shhh…’ began Audra, looking at the door and seeing Olive. ‘Dear—’

  ‘No, I’m not your dear. I’ll get one of the guns, William will give me one, he’d be happy to, he’s always hated me.’

  Olive stepped back and knocked an empty mug to the skirting board.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Thistle’s voice was muffled. ‘Is it him?’

  ‘It’s no one.’ Audra waved Olive back. ‘Do you want me to rub your feet with some cream?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  Olive closed the door. She wanted to go outside, get higher than the trees, scramble to the top of everything. She would climb the ladder at the silo, up and up, until she was above the world where she could sit calm and fresh in the hay-coloured wind.

  •

  At dinner that night Cleg drank a lot of wine and kept waving Rue away as she tried to put food on his plate. He pushed his glass forwards for Bruce or William to fill. Thistle called Cleg a wretched log and a thrown clog and he told her to keep her dirty anagrams to herself.

  ‘You impossibly dreadful man.’ Thistle held her napkin to her face and Cleg combed his beard with his fingers. He caught Olive’s eye and winked.

  ‘She’s just putting it on,’ he said. ‘It’s a performance.’

  He turned to Thistle. ‘You may not be the l
ithest anymore, oh sister-in-law, and she tilts.’ Cleg said this last bit to Archie, who was sitting next to him. ‘Let’s hit the list, let this, eh stilt?’

  ‘What?’ said Archie. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Stop it, you two,’ said Rue. ‘Please.’

  ‘Certainly, Ash Rune.’

  There was a tapping at one of the windows and Olive jumped up but it wasn’t anything. She sat down and cut up some of her sausage and held a tiny bit to her lips. She saw her aunt’s look and slipped it in and chewed.

  ‘What’s a anagaram?’ Archie said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cleg. ‘“Meaning”.’

  ‘It was never you,’ Thistle murmured. ‘It just wasn’t, wasn’t just, nothing just, nothing was.’ Then she announced she was going to the dam but in the end sat stiff in her chair, looking at her plate.

  Archie lifted a finger. ‘Sheepish, you look sheepish,’ he said to William.

  ‘Twenty and one,’ Thistle said. ‘Ten and eight and one and one and one.’

  ‘Why is she saying numbers?’ Mandy said.

  Olive felt the pull of the trees. How would it be to float out of the window, up over the roof and away from the earth? To be far from the hard emotions that ran underneath the dinner noises?

  ‘Did you all know each other when you were kids?’ she asked.

  Rue folded her serviette and put it beside her plate. She tucked the edges under the rim but before she could reply Thistle dropped her cutlery and said she wasn’t feeling well.

  ‘But you haven’t finished, dear,’ said Rue.

  ‘I’ve had quite enough, dear.’

  Olive was a quid nunc. The lines were too complicated and she’d known not to ask. She was as bad as Archie, blurting things out like that.

  ‘Would you like me to bring it in to you on a tray?’ Rue asked her sister.

  ‘No, I would not. Please don’t bother yourself.’

  Thistle went to her room.

  ‘Well,’ said Rue, her eyes moving. ‘We all knew each other, of course, since school, but the first time we properly talked, I suppose you could say, as older people, as teenagers, not children, well, it was at ice-skating in the city.’

  ‘It bloody was not,’ William said. ‘Ice-skating.’ He made a blowing-out noise.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Olive.

  William kept talking. ‘It was the show. The Nash sisters. Of course, people joked about them being a singing group or something, didn’t they, Brucie? Country and Western? They were something, what a bunch of giggling gerties.’

  ‘I can sing.’ Thistle’s voice came from the doorway. ‘And Audra and I were never gigglers—that was Rue if you remember.’

  ‘That’s right, love,’ said William, closing his eyes. ‘You can and you weren’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t remember?’ Thistle glared at William from the doorway then walked down the hall to the verandah.

  ‘Well, you tell the story if you want to,’ Rue said. ‘And please don’t swear.’

  ‘Oh no,’ William said. ‘You’d be interrupting every minute anyway.’

  ‘Alright.’ She leaned forwards. ‘You can put in anything I forget.’

  ‘Were you teenagers?’ Archie asked. ‘Did you know them before?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. We’d seen them in town, around the place. At school,’ said Rue. ‘But our…our—’

  ‘Our mother didn’t like us mixing,’ said Audra.

  ‘So yes. At Nanango,’ Rue said. ‘Audra had agreed to come with me to see the cakes…’ Rue’s hand moved to her throat. ‘I was just little, about ten or twelve. I couldn’t go by myself, so Audra took me.’

  ‘It was Thistle,’ William said.

  Cleg leaned back in his chair. He rubbed his hands together and said something about circus maximus.

  ‘Was it?’ Rue said to her husband. ‘What a good memory you have for some things. Wedding anniversaries, well, they’re not the same I expect. The baked items had been wonderful the year before and I begged her to take me. After the cakes and the dogs, we decided to eat lunch in the stadium. I think the horses were on. Our mother had let us go but we had to come straight home.’

  ‘What did you eat at the show?’ said Mandy.

  ‘Sorry, dear?’ Rue’s voice was loud.

  ‘What did you have for the lunch? Was it hot dogs and chips?’

  ‘In those days you took your lunch, you didn’t buy food other than maybe a sweet but never a waffle. We probably had something like hard-boiled eggs, with some salt and pepper in a twist of wax paper, buttered bread. Maybe an apple each.’

  ‘Was it a toffee apple?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chips?’

  ‘No, no chips. Tea in a thermos, that was always nice, I liked the little cups we had. They stacked inside of each other, see?’

  Mandy was disappointed. ‘Not a waffle? Why not a waffle?’

  ‘Because of the cream, of course. It needs to be fresh and it never is at those places. Anyway,’ Rue went on. ‘These two boys started talking to us. Your father,’ she told Mandy and her sons, who weren’t listening anyway. They were looking under the tablecloth and whispering. ‘And yours, Olive. Two brothers.’

  ‘Who is the brothers?’ said Mandy. She was holding a sausage that she’d dipped into tomato sauce and there was sauce all over her peas as well. Mandy was in a ‘sauce phase’, as Rue called it. ‘You?’ Mandy said, pointing at Sebastian with the sausage. ‘You’re a brother?’

  ‘My dad and your dad are,’ said Olive. ‘You already know that.’

  Mandy licked sauce off her wrist and wiped her eyebrow with her sausage.

  ‘William is my dad,’ Mandy said, putting her other hand on the sauce bottle and looking around the table. She spat up half-masticated food onto her plate and started crying.

  Rue felt her daughter’s forehead. ‘Anyway, it was the first time we’d spoken to them properly. Before it had been children calling out things, you know, running around and chasing each other, that sort of thing. Not any conversation like a grown-up would have.’

  ‘Stand-offish you were—or you two, anyway,’ said William.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you call being dignified so be it. People talk.’

  Rue cared a lot about what other people thought and it seemed to Olive that the less close the people were, the more important their opinions seemed to be. When she had asked who the people were, Rue couldn’t even say. So why did she care so much about them?

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Well, we tried not to talk to them. Our mother had told us not to fraternise with any show people. Gadabouts, she called them. “Worse than circus people.”’

  ‘He’s a clown, alright,’ William said, jerking a thumb at his brother, but Bruce didn’t look up from his plate. He kept chewing his food, bones sliding mechanically at the base of his cheeks, eyes on his plate. Cleg was laughing, watching Bruce.

  ‘What was the show?’ Mandy was looking at her father. ‘Was it puppets?’

  ‘A ram,’ said William. ‘We got first for it. We were there with our father.’

  ‘Dad’s haircut was funny,’ Rue told the children. Her voice had become very high and she was speaking fast. ‘The front bit would flop over his eyes, like Elvis. He got up on the bench in the stadium, he was tall even then, as a boy who was fifteen or sixteen. He stood over us, telling us about sheep and rabbits, and I was determined to ignore them because that’s what our mother had told us, but Thistle—oh…’ Rue looked at William. ‘You’re right, I remember now, it was Thistle. They talked us into meeting them at the milk bar the next week, for a milkshake. Well, William did. Bruce was the quieter one, not much to say back then either. William said to bring Audra if she wanted to come too.’

  Audra was pressing peas onto her fork.

  ‘Dad had a milkshake?’ Mandy said. ‘Was it a chocolate one?’

  ‘I did not, little girl,’ William said. ‘Neither
did Bruce. We never went in for that muck, but the girls did—sweet tooths they had.’

  ‘But why was it Aunty Thistle who went?’ Archie looked around at the adults. ‘Why didn’t you go?’ He was looking at Audra. ‘For your husband?’

  ‘Who was at the milk bar?’ Mandy said.

  ‘Oh, well, it was me and—me and Thistle and…’ said Rue, getting up. ‘I was a young girl, really, watching my older sisters…’

  William pushed his plate away and Audra picked up her menthols. ‘I need a break before pudding.’ She trailed long fingers across the table.

  Olive glanced at her mother’s plate. The usual moderate amount, barely touched.

  ‘Lots of scrapings,’ Rue said. ‘Olive, why didn’t you finish yours? Did you take too much?’ She looked at Mandy’s plate. ‘Licked clean. She’d eat the plate if she could, look.’

  Mandy sat, her wet face tight with shame.

  Bruce’s ears were red as he carefully continued to make his knife and fork do their work, but after a couple more chews, William tossed his knife onto his plate and left the table. Olive pushed her food around and Mandy asked if she was going to eat her mashed potato. She said no and scraped it off onto her cousin’s empty plate.

  ‘What about yer other sausage?’ Mandy said. She hooked a sly finger over Olive’s sausage and transferred it to her own plate.

  Rue rubbed at a new spot on the tablecloth. Did every one of them have a mark?

  William came back in with another bottle of wine. Olive knew the odd atmosphere that came over the adults on nights like these. They loosened, all of them, their faces got red and their talk accelerated and became louder. All except her mother, who stayed exactly the same. Cool, assured and untouched.

  •

  Olive looked over at Mandy’s bed and saw that her cousin’s eyes were open, watching her.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘I don’t like it when they’re angry.’