OLIVE AND SEBASTIAN circled the house a few times, steering clear of Shaggy on the end of his chain. They checked the bacon but there was still no sign of the lizard. Olive worked hard at keeping occupied, rehearsing her various movements and skills. How to walk along the line of rocks that edged the driveway without overbalancing. How to climb the peppercorn using only her strongest arm and then doing it again using her other arm. How high she could jump and how low she could do the limbo, using a stick they found by the shed. Sebastian said ‘not really’ almost all the times she asked whether he wanted to join in. They got apples and went to the pines along the drive and climbed one to keep a lookout for Archie. They took turns with the binoculars, watching for cars on the road in the distance, and observed William doing something around the shed, Rue at the side of the house, running the hose out of the bathroom window to the hydrangeas.
‘Let’s go down and check for yabber bubbles,’ Olive said and Sebastian agreed to that so they climbed to the ground just as Audra and Thistle drove past. They bobbed behind the tree. Car doors slammed and Audra walked to the house, not waiting for her sister, who followed behind with her head set at a funny angle.
‘She’s mad about something,’ Olive said, and wiped her fingers across the tops of the grasses that lined the base of the tree. There was a ripeness in the air that matched the thick line of clouds across the horizon.
‘Forget it, you’re not a psychic,’ Sebastian said and karate-chopped the grass.
Olive stood and watched her mother and aunt go into the house, her fingers moving across the grass. It had a pretty name, Thistle had told her: danthonia. She had been calling it wheat grass but her aunt told her it wasn’t wheat, just like the white butterflies in summer weren’t really butterflies but a type of moth. The only moths Olive knew were dust-brown and thick-winged, but these white butterflies were so small and pretty she’d insisted they had to be butterflies. Thistle corrected her—cabbage moths, she said—but Olive ignored her. They definitely were butterflies, she said, and Thistle had given in with her hands in the air, saying, ‘I can only try to teach you something, I can’t force you to listen.’
•
Later in the afternoon Thistle set up at the card table on the verandah. She looked over at Olive, who was sitting at the end of the couch picking at her toes.
‘Olya. Come.’
Olive didn’t like the name but went and sat beside her aunt who started to sort out the straight-edged pieces of the puzzle into two piles of grouped colours: white and blue. She picked up the lid and studied the scene. It was a mountain covered in snow with a sky background and small wispy clouds.
‘It’s the Matterhorn,’ Thistle said. She was organising the darker pieces now—browns and blacks—all the straight-edged pieces that would form the bottom of the picture.
‘In the Alps, along the line between Switzerland and Italy. People say they are two countries that could not be more unalike. One that professes neutrality and the other a nation of corrupt war-joiners. But I’ll let you in on a secret. At least one is open about it. Don’t be a denier, Olive.’
Olive promised that she wouldn’t even though she didn’t really understand what her aunt was saying.
‘Good. Now. Speaking of wars, how is your Lovelorn Lieutenant?’ Thistle turned over some puzzle pieces.
‘What?’
‘That Peter.’
‘He’s not my—what was it?’
‘Will you marry him one day?’
‘I’m never going to get married.’
‘Very good. One shouldn’t marry and not just because it’s dull.’
Thistle quickly started putting pieces together to make a section of the bottom frame, the foundation upon which all else would be built. She was a fundamentalist when it came to her religion and her jigsaws. She believed in an angry punishing God and pooh-poohed all that soft Jesus poppycock. The book said that people were small gods filled with the power of the Almighty and able to enact their own lives, dispense wisdom and justice. What people loved in others, they loved in themselves. What they feared and hated too. It was the simplest of truths but sometimes she wondered if she were the only woman on earth who could see it. She held up the box cover, studying the scene.
‘How come you’re not married?’
‘My bird and I, we disagreed.’
Olive reached out a finger to the pile of blue.
‘Bird is avis,’ she murmured.
‘Clegworth is a fool with that Latin nonsense, you children shouldn’t listen to him. That gesture he does with his tongue, it’s so déclassé.’
‘But didn’t you want any kids?’
Thistle leaned to the side, brought her mouth close to Olive’s ear. ‘They tried to come but could never break through. In the end, they were just gas and air.’
‘Gas?’
‘There was one stone baby but mostly they were gas. It might have been the mother wound that did it.’
‘What?’
Just then, Rue came out of the house, her white golf shoes pliant on the wood. They were ugly shoes with their removable top tassel and basket weave sides.
‘Audra and I are going for a game with Mavis.’ She snapped the press studs on her gloves. ‘What are you two doing?’
‘I’m helping Aunty Thistle.’
‘Clear as day, Rue, what we’re doing. And I’m telling Olive about the stone baby.’
On the verandah, Rue hesitated. Her fingers worked at her belt. She was uncertain, standing there in her cream culottes, her slim-fit collared t-shirt in orchid. Rue asked her niece if she wanted to come to the club. She could sit inside and have a Sprite and Mr Spooner would be happy to keep an eye on her. She could read a book.
Before Olive could say yes, that she did want to go, Thistle said she needed help because she was at a difficult part.
‘And you know how the beginning makes me nervous, how the anxiety stings.’
Rue stood still. ‘Don’t fill her head with your mumbo-jumbo, Thistle. Please.’ The last word was soft and unexpected to all of them.
‘Oh, I shan’t.’ Thistle flipped over some puzzle pieces.
Rue went back inside, her legs pushing at the fabric of her culottes, kicking the pleats. To Olive, even her legs seemed cross. Thistle looked at the closed door for a long while and then they both went back to the puzzle.
•
Audra was waiting in the sunroom but Rue unsnapped her gloves and took them off.
‘What is it?’ Audra said through the door.
‘Nothing. I remembered I have to do these few dishes. I’ll be quick.’
Audra sat down to wait.
Rue did the dishes and set them to dry in the rack. She went to get her bag and Audra walked ahead to the car. Rue was always late, often forgetting things, and the longer it took her sister to appear, the more maddening it was for Rue. Finally, the door opened and Rue got in the car, apologising. They didn’t speak, other than Rue asking herself and confirming that the hose was off. She started to say that she must remember to give the roses a good soak tomorrow morning before the heat set in, that the show was soon and she needed some perfect stems to enter, but she caught herself and stopped before she said it. She held it as long as she could then let it go. ‘I thought I had a chance for the blue ribbon this year. Thistle can be so cruel and unthinking sometimes.’
‘Mmm, yairs,’ Audra said, and turned her head left.
•
Thistle considered the closed door through which her sister had passed. Where was the gratitude due her? All that she had done and it was a lot.
‘No,’ she said, turning a puzzle piece over and fingering the arc of the tab, moving her little finger into the slot. ‘I’ve always thought of these parts as slots and bubbles but did you know some people call these parts male and female? Makes sense, I think.’ She connected it to another piece. ‘But no. No. The mother wound is not on the outside of your body. It’s mostly inside where you can’t really see it at al
l.’
‘Like my—’ Olive was embarrassed ‘—hole?’
‘No, that’s just where they put the stuffing in at the factory.’
Thistle went back to the puzzle. She formed a section of sky across the top stretch, getting all the straight edges done, completing the frame and leaving the interior ready to be filled in. This was a girl deserving of protection. And yet. ‘It’s not the beginning that’s the hardest part, no that was a jolly fib to make that sister leave us.’ Thistle picked up another piece and scanned. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You’re here to help.’
Olive picked up a piece. Thistle was the person to ask when something was bothering her. She was the only one who explained what was wrong with the beetle. Olive had found the creature one day—electric and green—and carried it in her hands to her aunt and asked for a matchbox. They’d put it in and she’d listened for the rest of the day to the scratching noise coming from inside. Whenever she slid the box open, the beetle had been moving, its legs rowing against the cardboard, but by the next morning when she peeked, it had gone still.
‘It is dead,’ Thistle had confirmed. ‘Everything dies and once that happens it’s forever.’
But the beetle didn’t look dead so Olive kept it in the matchbox to show people so they could see how polished its nacreous casing was, how bright and beautiful. That even though it was dead it was still important. That time Thistle had been the only one to answer her questions but eventually she had to go to a special doctor because she was asking too much about the things they didn’t want her to. She couldn’t remember anything really about those visits other than that the doctor had eyes that made him look sleepy.
Olive turned a puzzle piece around in her fingers.
‘Do you know if there was ever a baby in my family?’
Thistle worked on the frame, head bent over.
‘One that died?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Nobody, just someone.’
Thistle looked out to the garden. In her hand, she held a piece of mountain.
‘Well, Olive, I’m not going to lie to you, as you know. I have always thought that it is better to know when you are being lied to. It’s important that we turn and face the mendicants, and show them that we know. Has your mother told you anything?’
‘Not really.’
‘No surprises there. Unlike my sisters and their fool-men husbands I believe in truth being heard. I said as much in the play.’
Olive tried to remember what Thistle had said in the play and couldn’t.
‘Did the baby have red hair?’
Thistle bent to her puzzle pieces. She searched for another piece to put along the edge. She did the side and the bottom part of the frame, hands working fast. It was natural the child would be confused but this was the moment, the moment. This girl was not of her, not from her, but thefted still.
‘You had a sister. She died when she was a baby.’
The car was coming along the side of the house. Olive kept her face on her aunt but her side sight registered the car, moving slowly. Rue always inched off the property in case a child darted out from around a corner. She said she would never forgive herself if she was responsible for the death or injury of one of the children. Sometimes the boys would run beside the vehicle, tapping on the window and laughing, which made their mother flap her hands at them, her mouth forming a silent yawp behind the glass. Then the boys would laugh and tap even more.
Thistle sat, her hand hovering over a piece. She picked up a long hair that had blown onto the jigsaw puzzle. Holding it in her fingers, she showed it to Olive.
‘Do you know how thin the line is between heaven and hell? See how fine it is, how we are so close to both.’
The hair floated until Thistle let go of the strand and the air took it away. She looked at Olive. Good on her, the sturdy rabbit, trying to control her face, her physiognomy crumpled, the fresh trust of a minute ago vanished. She had to know about it sooner or later and if Thistle left it to her sister, to either of them, this moment may never come and the girl would grow up blighted and ignorant. She did not want another girl in the family to grow up like that. Certainly not this one, her understudy, a girl only now beginning to step out of the hallucinatory world of middle childhood.
‘I don’t get it,’ Olive said.
The station wagon was moving into the distance, the back of it aflame with the reflected sun. It had passed the ant-bacon, the side of the house, the beginning of the verandah rail, the front garden beds, the first of Lenore’s pines straight in their row. It had passed all of those known things, the places where she could have run after and caught it to knock on the door yelling that she wanted to go with them, that she did want to sit at the club and have a Sprite and read her book. She did not want to hear any of these things on the verandah but it was too late now because she had asked the question and it was a mistake.
‘Yes. Red hair. You had a baby sister and her name was Aster and she drowned. They should have talked about it, I told them not to complain to me about it later, when you became an angry teenager, possibly going “off the rails”. But you’ve come to me, you have, and that’s a good thing.’ Thistle’s voice was singsong and Olive’s ribs sucked inwards. ‘We need to do the sky now.’
‘Aster?’
‘That’s right. Sweet but what a noise-maker—howled constantly. Water soothed her, but you can’t keep a child in the bath all the day long.’
Olive helped her aunt put more pieces of blue into the frame. There was one piece she was sure fitted but she tried it every possible way and in the end it wasn’t right. She put it back on the pile.
‘How did she get in the water and drown?’
‘Someone put her in but it wasn’t their fault. Do you understand what I’m saying, Olya?’
‘Not really.’
‘I’m saying they didn’t mean to. It was an accident.’
Olive saw the dryness of her aunt’s skin, the dandruff along her sketchy hairline. They all knew about Thistle’s little bald patch and how in the middle of the thinning hair was a raised red spot like an especially non-delicious raspberry.
She wanted to go inside the house but couldn’t move.
‘I think the person meant to hurt Astra.’
‘Sometimes it can be painful and it can embarrass us if we are thinking one thing, because to be wrong is very hard. Do you understand?’
‘No,’ Olive said, even though she probably did.
‘An example is you thinking you were in the dam during the big fire.’
‘But I was.’
‘We only had Sebastian, you weren’t born until the next year. You need to learn about oscillation, Olive. It’s an important part of growing up.’ Thistle placed another jigsaw piece. ‘Disaster is like a grey smoke cat and wherever it settles, that’s the spot for trouble. The doctor gave Audra medicine and told her not to have another baby for at least a year. There were plenty of baths but no more babies for her, for her. One tried to come but she lost it in the lavatory in a clump of jelly.’
Olive looked at her aunt.
‘All those headaches and complaints. Such an Olga.’ Thistle was slowing, her eyes looked sleepy now. She would have a nap soon. ‘A queer woman, she always found things a struggle, wanted to sleep too much. Gave thee life and bid thee feed, but after you were born do you think we could get that woman out of bed? Odd behaviour, even then. So-called migraines.’ Thistle hummed. ‘Stepping on snails after rain when she was little.’
‘The Sands brothers have smoke around them,’ Olive said. ‘They hurt animals and sometimes people.’
‘Most of that is just braggadocio. Talking about a girl’s body parts as if they are somehow separate to a person who might have feelings. The girl ceases to matter, just holes.’ Thistle’s voice trailed away. ‘People don’t like it when a girl is strong and while we think it’s men who try to control us it’s the mothers mostly.’
There were ants on the railing.
A linear stream of movement and purpose. Insects, sisters, nieces. On one level, they were all the same.
‘There’s nothing so powerless as a girl child and what are women but former little girls grown up? Which is why we have to enact and reach. You are crossing over shortly, better to be equipped.’
‘I have to go to the toilet now.’
‘Alright, dear, you go ahead.’
Olive went inside but in the hallway, she stopped. There were two things in her head. One was the word SISTER repeating in a scroll like on the movies. The other was an awareness, something that was the width of a single red hair.
OLIVE WAS IN the peppercorn but her mind was higher still, wedged in the crook of a limb at the top. She hung on, ignoring the bird that walked from her knee to branch and back again. She was trying to remember. She’d always been the one with the good memory. At parties, playing the memory game, it was Olive who recalled everything on the tray once the tea towel was put back over the spoon, the clothes peg, the safety pin, the salt shaker, the playing card, the newspaper, the nail scissors, the toothpick, the packet of jelly, the golf ball, the lipstick, the shower cap and the tea strainer. She was so good at it the other kids said it wasn’t fair, that she shouldn’t be allowed to join in. That she had cheated. But she never cheated. She didn’t need to because she was a girl of magnificent brain. She could remember what she got for Christmas the year before. She could remember too that they had been mad about anything to do with tennis balls back then and rode the streets of Stratford looking for a good brick wall to play against. The year before that she got a bee sting on Boxing Day and Rue had scraped it out with a knife and put a wet, blue bag on it. And the year before that she’d been recovering from chicken pox at Easter time, and Rue kept telling her off for scratching her itchy scalp as she sat in front of the television. But before that, she couldn’t remember anything of what Thistle had talked about.
‘Go away,’ she said to Grace. ‘Leave me alone.’
Little Gods Page 10