Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  ‘But it’s not at you. Go to sleep.’

  It was another hot night, the air heavy and still. Olive lay flat on her back and tried to sleep but it seemed the more she tried the harder it was, as if her straining for the thing she wanted most pushed it further away. Mandy huffed and turned, complaining that her pillow was too hot and her neck was hurting as well. Olive ignored her. She listened to the sound of furniture being moved down the hallway and the voices of the grown-ups out on the verandah, their gentle murmurings in the distance making it sound as if they had moved back towards something approximating harmony.

  SUNDAY MORNING AND the sun rose on the bleached Mallee landscape and lit the distressed greens and greys. The magpies carolled before they left their trees to feed and the farmhouse began to stir. Grace was at the back door knocking on the glass. She had been under Rue’s sprinkler and as she sat on Olive’s lap, her feathers looked like they’d been sewn with dozens of tiny diamonds. Drops of water, sitting in perfectly round jewels.

  When Olive held Grace’s tail feathers in her hand, there was a soft sharpness to the edge against her palm, the interleaving feathers cross-hatched as they narrowed from the body to the tail. With her face right down close, looking on an angle, she could see that the feathers were not solid black at all. There were secret colours hidden, all types of purples and greens, and like petrol in a puddle they were iridescent, oily and beautiful.

  There were no mice in the traps so Olive soaked dog food and sat on the back step and hand-fed the bird as she walked up and down her leg. Then Grace sat awhile on Olive’s shoulder, pushing at her ear with her beak. A bird so shiny could never be a ghost or a harbinger like Thistle said.

  Nearby were some ravens, bigger than Grace, their feathers slick and wet-looking. Their noise was a gathering of ah-ah-aaaaahs.

  ‘Over there, Grace. Your friends.’

  Grace lifted her body, her head rotating.

  Sebastian came out yawning.

  ‘It might be her family,’ Olive said.

  ‘She’ll go with them soon.’

  Olive considered this. She ran her fingers meditatively along the frilly under-feathers of Grace’s chest, the ruffle on her throat. Her wings all tucked and neat, her feathers layered in a pattern. The breeze stirred her petticoats and made them lift.

  The touch of her was always surprising. How warm and alive she was. Like the snake Olive had held at the zoo on the school trip two years before. The muscular twisting length of it warm in her hands, not cold as she had expected. She’d stood there, the reptile laid out all along the span of her arm, its tail braceleting one of her wrists. As she looked at the class her eyes found Snooky Sands, who was watching, scared. Olive had smiled. Snooky was frightened of snakes.

  She picked up Grace and put the bird on her lap.

  ‘No, she’s with us now,’ she said to Sebastian. ‘She can’t go away.’

  She closed two fingers around one of the bird’s twiggy legs and made a wish.

  •

  Olive and Sebastian sat in the kitchen and ate their cereal. The toy had come out in Olive’s bowl and Sebastian seemed mad about it. It was a small green alien with big ears, one in the series he was collecting. She didn’t want it but refused to hand it over to him. He seemed to think just because he said he was collecting them that he should have it. She thought he was too old for it and said so. He said she always got the wishbone, which wasn’t fair, so why couldn’t she just let him have it. Before that they’d been talking about how to get the blue-tongue lizard out from under the house. They had agreed bacon would be best but then the alien had emerged from the cornflakes and stopped everything. Now Sebastian was in a bad mood they probably wouldn’t even try with the lizard.

  Thistle was at the table as well, having her first cup of tea and her triangles of marmalade toast. She didn’t make her s-s-s-s-s-s-s laugh because she was never happy around her birthday which Olive couldn’t understand. Surely it was the best time of year for a person. But Thistle wasn’t happy. She was bossy and wanted to lecture all the time.

  ‘Mind the lizard doesn’t snap at your fingers, Olive,’ Thistle said in her deep voice. ‘He’ll leave them ragged and bleeding and take the tips back to his den for supper. Best to leave the bacon in front. He’ll smell it. Their sense of smell is the best of all the reptile fellows.’ She lifted her napkin to her lips. ‘They like snails. Maybe your aunt Rue has some. To spare.’

  Olive had just taken a mouthful of milk and she made sure she swallowed it before looking at Sebastian. Out of the corner of her eye she knew he was looking at her wanting to make her laugh. That meant the alien was forgotten.

  ‘Yes, in her garden, she crushes them when the pellets don’t work,’ Thistle said, finishing her toast.

  Olive heard Archie’s footsteps coming up the front verandah steps and she and Sebastian pushed back their chairs in one move and ran out the back door.

  They squatted around the side, watching for the lizard. They could hear Archie’s voice in the distance moving away from the back of the house. Olive snuck inside to get some bacon and when she came back they put it on a brick near the hole. They squatted again, their hands greasy.

  ‘She doesn’t care about my fingers,’ Sebastian said.

  Olive didn’t reply. In the dirt, where the weatherboards met the ground, was the hole, half hidden behind a small shrub. She lay down on her stomach and stretched her hand into the burrow.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Her cheek rested on the earth and she pushed her arm in further. The ground was rich with the sharp stink of ants and her shoulder began to ache. She pushed a bit deeper and her fingers closed on something. She pulled it out and showed what she had to Sebastian. A narrow bone, delicate in the bright morning light. She placed it on the ground beside her and reached in again.

  ‘What’s it even from?’

  Slowly, one by one, she pulled out four more pieces of bone. They were shapes, parts of a skeleton. She liked bones. Once she had been on her own digging down the back garden near the small wooden crosses and had found some bones that Sebastian said were probably from one of their cats or dogs. He’d been upset but she’d sat turning them over and over in her hands.

  ‘How would you like it if I dug up someone you cared about?’ he’d said.

  She’d said she probably wouldn’t care as much because she wasn’t a sook like he was.

  Beside the house she counted the fragments and tried to fit them together. There was a tiny skull, too. She couldn’t tell if they were from one animal or many.

  ‘Aren’t they interesting?’ she said, looking up at him. He was shaking his head. She offered him one to have but he said no, he didn’t want to touch them.

  ‘Are they rabbit?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He stood up.

  ‘Wait.’ She lay down again. ‘There’s something else.’

  This time she brought out a packet of pills. There was no box, just the silver-backed sheet and the white tablets in their bubble pouches.

  ‘Might be useful.’ She got up and put them in her pocket.

  ‘You’re such a weirdo.’

  Olive told him he was the weirdo. The weirdest weirdo.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘The lizard’s not coming out.’

  They left the bacon on a brick and agreed they’d go back later to check. Ants were already walking over the meat. ‘Extra vitamins,’ Olive said over her shoulder.

  FOR THISTLE AND Audra, it was almost time to leave for church, the only interest they seemed to share. They drove in on most Sundays, at Easter and at Christmas, the air in the car stained with a perverse martyrdom. When Thistle sang in God’s house it soothed her whereas Audra was made deranged by it because Thistle had a particular style. She would lean into the harder bits of the hymns and at the places where the other voices usually faded away she would get louder. She said it was the only time she could breathe properly. When Rue and Audra heard her say that it made them seethe, but
Thistle didn’t care.

  The church was an old red-brick building that squatted on the road on the other side of Stratford. The attached hall had pressed tin walls and scarlet-lined theatre seats with floors that had once been famed for being so polished they’d been known as the fastest in all of Victoria. ‘Kerosene and sawdust,’ it had been reported in the local paper, and in the old days, in the newly married days, Audra and Rue and their husbands would go to the dances, sometimes taking Thistle with them.

  Audra waited for Thistle in the sunroom, rubbing the ends of her fingers together in small circles. She was always ready well ahead of time and would not have considered her sister might delay on purpose. Rue never came with them. She was out in the garden, having got up early, unable to lie in. She had to see if she could do anything with the roses. There was no chance for the Nanango Show but maybe she could salvage something for the house. She walked down the rows of nubbed bushes and tried not to cry. Kneeling in the garden bed she noticed a fresh hole, partly filled in. Pushing some dirt out of the way she saw there was something shiny in it. She knelt down, reached in and pulled out several packets of pills. She sat back on her heels and wiped her top lip, looking at the house.

  •

  Audra drove and Thistle began to open her side window, to let some of the quiet out. Silence had always disturbed her, ever since she was a little thing, just a blob of hot meat lying on a thin rug on the floor with legs walking all around her. As she grew older, once she became a jazzy twist of girl, she’d been left alone with noiselessness all around her.

  ‘Can you please leave it closed?’ Audra said ‘Because of the dust?’

  Thistle closed the window and stretched a finger towards the radio.

  ‘Thistle, really, it’s quite a nice drive.’

  She pretended to forget, forget, but remembered more than they would guess. A sound in the distance, the front door opening and slamming, perhaps the wind but more likely rage. Along the windowsill, a fly buzzing, fat and laden with age, its time ending. Another fly in the window. It lifts, a furry zeppelin batting against the glass, sad in its attempts to reach the outdoors.

  One hour, two hours since, and years later, a girl sat in a house that was overstuffed in the way of cushions, couches and table lamps. The soft carpet underfoot denied the atmosphere, tried to stifle it, but could not win. Could not win. A profile, a finger against the backdrop of white, a set, the four walls converted to scrims, hard plaster become transparent enough to show a view of this inside world but at the same time with an opacity that removed sharp profiles and rubbed them into vagueness. What category of horror, the whitened masks and vampire fangs and undead rising decomposed from dusty graves?

  There were kinder set pieces flat on the wall, gentler to young eyes. They didn’t shout or exhale with impatience. They didn’t meow and scratch and bite. They whispered, these paintings, and this was a good thing for a young girl whose mind was dishevelled but not yet lost.

  They arrived and failed to find a park in the shade and Audra said Sheba under her breath. By the time they got inside the church and sat down they were fanning themselves with their hands. The minister gave his sermon on the typical themes and they sang the usual hymns, Audra in her self-conscious falsetto and Thistle’s deep voice echoing in the space, sounding a moment longer when the other voices paused. Even as a child she had sung long and hard in church despite what her mother did afterwards. It was a terrible thing, the sight of Gladys Nash counting to ten as she walked down the long hallway, head tipped to the ceiling, numbers booming as she pulled off her Sunday gloves. But still, in church the next week, Thistle sang her loudest.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ Audra had asked her one Sunday evening. They were two girls sitting rigid in front of lamb loin chops, peas and thin mashed potato, their mother about to join them from the kitchen.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ Thistle held her arm gingerly. She never told the sisters that she did it for them. That she was suffering for the littler children.

  At the front of the church the minister read from Isaiah.

  ‘“Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”’

  Thistle shook her head. Red and white, white and red. Forgiveness comes next, probably the Ephesians. Why bother with it all? You wait, you wonder, you are patient, but in the end it all comes to nothing.

  ‘“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”’

  Thistle stared at the minister. She tried, yes she did.

  ‘“Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. Be happy and glad, for a great reward is kept for you in heaven.”’

  A snort through her nose, she couldn’t stop it.

  ‘“You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But now I tell you: do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too.”’

  Thistle lifted her head and blinked and the collection plate went around and it was over. Audra shook the minister’s hand in the doorway on the way out then stopped to talk to Mavis Sands. Thistle went ahead to the car. She didn’t want to talk to Mavis Sands. She hated Mavis Sands. Mavis Sands was a quid nunc.

  Thistle waited in the shade for her sister. Slander, forgiveness, no. Revenge and cheeks. You have heard that it was said, as if it was a mistake, or misreported. But that was the old God, in the original book. These New Testamenters. Twisting it right under people’s noses. Changing the message.

  The vinyl car seats were hot, so Audra pulled out the striped beach towels from the back so they could sit without their thighs burning through their frocks. Audra drove home, her fingers splayed on the wheel as if she had just applied nail polish and Thistle faced the yellow scenery breathing so heavily through her nose that it whistled. She thought about babies and birthdays. About sisters. How the gardener came home when she, Thistle, was almost five. She remembers everything from that day. How her mother called out ‘Can you bring her in?’ to her father and walked ahead to the house, opening the clasp on her handbag and getting out her set of keys. Thistle had stood by the car watching her father and the baby they told her was to be called ‘Rue’. Inside the car it was starting to make cat noises and her father smiled and opened his hands.

  ‘What the heck do we do now?’ he said. He carried the basket into the house.

  The baby had a red face and there was a dent in her forehead and a small scab with dried blood. She was wearing all pale pink clothes because she was another girl, wrapped tightly in a blanket, like a grub with no arms or legs, which was maybe why her mother was angry. Coming home from the hospital Thistle had sat in the back with the new baby and her job had been to hold the white wicker basket so it didn’t slide off the seat. She had held on to it tight.

  Her dad picked up the crying Rue. He held her to his chest, knees bent as if the baby weighed a lot. The blanket was beginning to fall open and her father’s glasses were slipping down his nose.

  ‘Here, you have a hold. Open your arms, that’s it.’

  He put the baby on Thistle and she looked at the legs that were kicking and something squished inside her and it felt like it might be her heart. Her father watched them both, jingling coins in his pocket with his happy face. Thistle tried to cover the baby’s legs with the blanket but it wouldn’t stay in place. Then she heard the toilet flush and her father came forwards to pick the baby up.

  ‘Maybe she’s hungry?’ Thistle said to her father.

  ‘No.’ Her mother came in. She’d put more lipstick on. ‘She’s been feeding off me endlessly for the last week. I swear that child would eat me if she could. I’m starting her on formula today a
nd I don’t know why I let anyone suggest I feed her myself. They said it would help with weight loss but it’s such a hideous sensation. The others had bottles.’

  Gladys dropped her slender figure in a chair.

  ‘Dennis, what are you doing? Wrap her properly.’

  He went to the couch and laid the baby down.

  ‘Pass me the Ronson, will you?’ Gladys opened her cigarette case and pulled one out. Thistle got up and passed the heavy silver lighter. When her mother bent her head to the flame Thistle saw the part at the centre of her head and it was like a knife slash.

  ‘Give her to me.’ Gladys waved and breathed out smoke at the same time.

  Thistle stepped away and her dad handed the baby across. The blanket had fallen to the floor and baby Rue’s legs were hanging free. Thistle worried that the ash would get on the baby’s head—she already had a sore and no hair—but Gladys rested the cigarette in the ashtray on the little side table and rewrapped the baby. She had her up against her shoulder in seconds and her hand slapped the baby’s back, which didn’t seem to hurt rather made Rue a little bit quieter.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ her father said. ‘Three little girls now.’

  ‘What’s that sore on her head?’

  Dennis was quiet but Gladys said she’d got stuck and they’d had to pull her out with tongs. Thistle wanted to ask stuck where.

  ‘It will heal,’ said Dennis.

  The middle sister Audra came back from the neighbour’s house and they had sausages and bread with butter for tea, and sometime after that her father went away and it was forever but Thistle stayed in that house for as long as she could, until her mother was lying strapped in a hospital bed, her beakish nose lifted to the ceiling and arms ribboned with scratches. Her life was leaking out and it was a joyous thing to stand over her and see her on her way. Clap her to the abyss with love from the double-skinned daughter.

  Going to church and singing always made Thistle remember her mother but the readings about forgiveness were the only ones she refused to amen. She sat in the car and looked out the window, her fingers curling in her lap.