‘Kark,’ said Grace.
She wrapped herself around the branch. Sebastian pulled at small berries and started to line them up in strands, arranging the pile of peppercorns in the crook of the branch.
‘I asked Thistle. About the baby.’
It was as if he hadn’t heard her. He seemed happy for once, probably because Christmas was coming. He wanted a model plane and some sort of science toy that he would do real experiments with, using real chemicals. He’d told Olive he thought he had a good chance of receiving both.
Olive stood up, balancing on the branch, arms aloft.
‘Seb?’
‘What?’ He raked his head up.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Leave me alone.’ He went back to the peppercorns.
Olive swung out, over the ground. If she let go and dropped, her legs would splinter and break. Part of her wanted to do it.
‘Do you want to get the bikes?’
He shook his head.
‘Go to the dam?’
‘Nup.’
‘We could look at the guns?’
‘You hate guns.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Yeah, you do.’ He stopped throwing the leaves. ‘Remember? When we went rabbit shooting? Remember that? You’re such a hypocrite.’
‘I am not.’
She held on to the trunk of the tree. It was true. There’d been the night William had taken them spotlight shooting. She’d known that rabbits would get shot but she hadn’t known how she would feel about it.
They’d dressed in their warmest clothes because it was August. A short drive with the three children squeezed along the seat and they’d arrived at a place where William said there would be lots of rabbits. He turned off the headlights and they got out. He told them in a low voice to keep quiet. He’d left the inside cab light on so they could see the guns. William handed one across to Sebastian and took one out for himself. The guns were long and black in the night. William reached into the back for the box of bullets.
‘What about me?’ said Olive.
William started to object.
‘Why can’t I have one?’ she said. ‘I’m not going to just watch.’
‘Alright then,’ said William. He plopped the long thing across her outstretched arms. ‘Not loaded yet. None of them are loaded but you hold them like they are. Got it?’
‘Roger,’ said Sebastian, saluting and snapping his heels, then sidestepping the cuffing that shot out.
‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Seb,’ said his father. ‘Smart-arse and guns don’t mix. I’m bloody serious.’
‘Sorry, Dad. Sorry.’
William said that Archie would aim the spotlight and the three of them would do the shooting. They all had to be careful to stay in line with the car, just in front and not to the side, and no one was to change their angle. They had to stay inside the dark zone and let the light be out in front. That’s where the rabbits would be. When he counted to three Archie would turn on the spot and they would get as many as they could. He told Olive and Sebastian to aim for the ones closest and he would go for the ones at the back. They had to be quick because while the rabbits would stay still for a bit, staring at the light, eventually they would run. Olive listened. She nodded. She could work out what to do. She had shot at cans. She was used to the motion of the gun and the sound. She wasn’t an idiot.
She saw William was lifting a hand and he said the numbers. Archie flicked on the lights and she turned back. In front and to the sides of the ute were what seemed like hundreds of rabbits. Big ones and small ones. Some were sitting upright like in Beatrix Potter, their bobbled black eyes on the sides of their heads. Others were hunched as if shocked into a state of coldness and these were mostly the babies. Olive did not expect babies.
‘I’m not shooting babies,’ she shouted.
‘They grow up, girl, into big bastard bunnies,’ William called from behind them. ‘We have to kill them as well.’
Sebastian shot three rabbits by the time Olive said she wanted to go back. William made Archie turn the lights off and then came over to her.
‘You didn’t even load my gun,’ she said.
He took it and put it in the back of the ute. Sebastian was kicking dirt with his shoes.
She turned to William. ‘Do the mothers ever try and protect them?’
‘What?’
She said it again.
‘Look. I’ll stay here with Archibald. Unload, son.’
‘Dad,’ Sebastian moaned.
‘Unload I said, and put your gun in the back. Now.’
Sebastian did as he was told.
‘You go back with her.’ William cracked one of the guns open. ‘Off you go.’
Sebastian and Olive walked to the house. Above them the moon sat behind thick clouds. Sebastian hadn’t said a word to her all the way home.
Olive sat down again in the tree.
‘Maybe when Dad gets back, we could get him to show us the guns. Maybe,’ Sebastian said.
‘Where are they?’
‘He’s gone with your dad and Cleg into town. Probably to get more beer, knowing them.’ Sebastian made a scoffing noise. He hated his father drinking.
‘Not the fathers, stupid—the guns.’
‘Don’t call me stupid.’ His fingers worked at the peppercorns. ‘He keeps them locked in a cupboard in the shed.’
‘Know where the keys are?’
He said that he did and twisted another sprig.
‘Let’s have a look ourselves, we’ll be careful.’ She began to climb down, dropped the last little way and landed in a crouch, knees bent and fingers spread on the grass.
‘Like a cat,’ she said to herself.
‘No, Ol,’ Sebastian shouted. ‘He said never to.’
‘What about the ute? I know where those keys are.’
She was already running to the house. By the time he caught up, Archie was there too, hollering about how he could never find them and why were they always hiding from him. Olive was coming back out the door and held the keys up to them. Sebastian followed.
‘I’m driving,’ he said, meeting her at the car. He gripped the steering wheel through the open window.
‘No, you already know how but I need more practice.’ She was at the window, her hair swinging over her eyebrows as she tapped her finger on the open window. ‘I’m doing it.’
He opened the driver’s door and tried to push in beside her but she pushed too, edging her bottom onto the seat. There was a scramble as he reached for the wheel again but she managed to get her feet up into his stomach and shove him back out of the car. He sprang back.
‘You don’t know how to do the gears,’ he said, grabbing the wheel again. ‘Not properly.’
‘I do know. God.’
She peeled his fingers off and he saw the white lines of spittle on her lips and that her skin was shiny and splotched with purple. He let go and said ‘flock’ under his breath, then went around to the passenger side and got in. She slid forwards on the seat.
‘Just don’t kill us,’ Sebastian said. He clicked his seatbelt and crossed his arms.
‘I’m almost as good as you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
There was a sound at the back and it was Archie climbing into the tray, tapping on the glass window behind them. He had dirt under one ear and down the side of his neck. His tongue worked one of his lateral incisors, making it ratchet back and forth in its gummy bed.
‘Let’s go before Mandy comes,’ he shouted, and twisted to look back at the house. ‘What a pain, right?’
There was a face at the window. It was Mandy, holding a puppet.
‘I’m tellin’ on youse.’
‘Nick off.’ Sebastian leaned across Olive. ‘If you tell, a dingo’ll get you. And don’t say youse or I’ll tell Mum.’
Mandy retreated to the clothesline to watch.
Olive had a little trouble getting the key in the right way and then held
her breath while she turned the ignition. The car lurched forwards.
‘You gotta put it in neutral!’ Sebastian shouted, triumphant. ‘Don’t you know anything? Jeez.’
‘Shut up, let me think,’ said Olive. She moved right to the edge of the bench seat and pushed in the clutch, then moved the gears a bit. ‘You’re putting me off.’
After several tries to get the car moving, and stalling three times, and with Sebastian becoming increasingly pleased, Olive let go of the wheel and leaned back.
Sebastian reached over, and they tussled over the gearstick. She pumped the accelerator and started the car then slowly tried to let the clutch out. The car stalled once more. She pumped the accelerator again, batting Sebastian’s hand away.
‘You’re gonna flood it. You don’t even know what you’re doing.’
She got the car going and it started to move, then jerked forwards, the heavy heads of the long grass slapping the metal doors. She could hear Archie laughing in the back, and then she thought of her mother’s sadness and her foot went down and it was like she went into a trance. Sebastian yelled, telling her to turn, and she got confused and pushed the accelerator by mistake and the car increased speed. She panicked and pushed down harder and she turned the wheel to steer away from the fence that was coming at them in a rush. Too late she realised she hadn’t put her seatbelt on. She took her feet off the pedals and let go of the wheel and the car slowed down in the long grass and juddered into a stall. Archie was bouncing up and down and clapping, his feet thumping on the base of the tray.
‘Fruit, Ol. You almost crashed.’ Sebastian got out of the car.
‘I didn’t, nowhere near. You put me off.’ She walked back to the house, tasting blood. She would never make that mistake again. She turned and looked around. Sebastian was reversing the car in a half-circle to get it back to where it had been.
At the door, Mandy was sucking her thumb and Olive pushed past her, reminding her that everyone hated dibber-dobbers.
When Sebastian came in a few minutes later she was sitting in the kitchen. He went to the fridge to get the milk.
‘You were pretty scared.’
‘What’s w-wrong with you?’ He swung around.
‘Hey, S-Seb. You gonna s-start that again?’
He ran over and pushed her and she pushed back and then they were on the kitchen floor, pulling each other’s hair. She tried to bite his leg but he managed to lock her head in place with his knees, gripping her ears so tightly they stung. If an adult had come in and called them animals, Olive wouldn’t have been surprised, in fact she was expecting it to happen soon. But no adult did appear, there was only Mandy, standing at the doorway with her fingers at her mouth, and Archie was there too, saying, ‘Go, Ollie.’ Eventually, the two of them fell apart, exhausted, Sebastian gulping while she lay on her back, put her hands behind her head and smiled hard at the ceiling.
MANDY TOLD OF course. William roared at Sebastian and sent him to his room until dinner but Audra waited, and Olive waited too, and now was the moment as they sat side by side on the verandah, in the late afternoon.
Her mother began. She talked about responsibility and respect, about taking care with physical safety, especially if others were involved. Olive watched Rue in the garden.
‘Mum,’ she said, as soon as her mother had finished, ‘why didn’t you have another baby?’
Audra half turned her head. There were subtle lines on her face, her skin shaded by the fly-netting on her hat and faint colours that rested there—lilacs and mauves. ‘Why is it just me?’
‘It’s quite rude to ask that.’
In the front garden Rue was bending and straightening with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. Olive felt a separation from her body as if she was a puppet in Mandy’s homemade theatre. There was a hand up the back of her clothes, moving her arms and making her talk. Maybe it was rude but she wanted to know.
Audra brushed away an invisible fly. Olive ran her finger along the edge of the couch cushion and the seam went under her nail. Her mother took a long time to speak.
‘No other babies came.’ She kept looking at her magazine.
She’ll say something about God now, Olive thought.
‘It’s God who decides when a baby is born, and when they come they need to be taken care of. It’s a lot of work to keep them safe, but—’ and here Olive felt her mother look at her ‘—if they don’t stay safe, sometimes it’s nobody’s fault. Accidents and the like.’
She thought about what her mother was revealing to her. There it was. God didn’t think it was safe to send another baby to her family. Her mother was giving her a message about what happened to her sister, a kind of code. ‘Babies need a lot of care,’ her mother was saying, but Olive didn’t hear her properly. All she knew was that the stream of water coming out of Rue’s metal can was as clear as what her mother was saying. She saw the row of bushes her aunt had just clipped, how straight they were. Clear and straight.
Audra went back to her magazine and Olive saw the skin inside her mother’s ear, pink and clean.
‘Mum?’
Audra raised her hand to the bridge of her nose and rested it there. It was the smallest movement but it said a lot.
Olive got up. ‘I’m going inside now for the punishment.’
‘Good girl.’
She was careful not to let the screen door slam behind her. She walked past the kitchen, down the hall and into the bedroom. There was the hum of the washing machine spinning the clothes and Mandy crying outside and, behind all of that, the faint sound of heavy furniture being dragged across wooden floors.
IT HAD ALWAYS been Rue she’d run to when William threw a dead lamb into the incinerator behind the shed, or she skinned her knee so badly the blood dripped down her shin. She would climb dry-eyed onto her aunt’s lap to have her back scratched for a quick minute. It was a furtive thing they’d shared, this offering and receipt of comfort.
Olive knew Rue would put an arm around her if she sidled up and leaned into her hip with a sly question about a sister but her aunt wasn’t one to talk to about things other than suncream and biscuits. Thistle was the one who explained how ants breathed, how birds made babies and how butter came from milk. Thistle could say how old stars were but Olive knew Thistle had told her all she would.
She had thought happiness was to be found at the farm. All the weeks and years as if she’d lived there, grazing it with her fingertips, able to forget herself and her mother’s dark glow. When they’d been little, William and Rue had let their children come in their room on Sunday mornings to bounce and snuggle on the bed, and Olive would be welcomed along with her cousins, even though Sebastian would give her a bit of a look. He didn’t like sharing his parents, which she understood because she had her own. It wasn’t as if she was an orphan or anything melodramatic like that.
‘Why are you always here, anyway?’ Sebastian had shouted at her once. They’d been walking along the driveway, dragging their feet to make dust clouds on their way to the dam. He had made a net from a pole, some wire and a pair of his mother’s old stockings, and she had told him he wouldn’t catch any yabbies with such a stupid-looking net. He told her to rack off and she pushed him so he tripped and fell across the line of stones that edged the driveway. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know why she was always there, why sometimes she was there even when her parents weren’t. She was brought and taken and had no say about any of it.
‘Get your things, Olive, we’re leaving,’ or, ‘You’ll be here a few days, I don’t know how long exactly,’ her mother would say.
‘Why don’t we ever stay at your house?’ Archie bleated one time.
‘Are you my sister?’ Mandy had asked another.
She floated between the two houses and each set of parents as if they were essentially interchangeable and it had always been so.
•
After her punishment, she went to find Rue in the rose garden. Rue stood with the hose in hand
watering the nubbed stems, all the colour stripped from her plants. She had been there for a while as there were puddles all around on the ground. Olive positioned herself in front of her aunt.
‘I want you to tell me,’ Olive said. ‘About the baby.’
Rue put a hand to her throat.
‘Can you say what happened to her?’
‘Go and turn the hose off for me.’
Olive did and by the time she got back Rue was moving on the other side of the bushes.
‘Can you tell me?’
Through the gap Rue waved her secateurs and said it was not her story to tell. That there was nothing to tell. She fumbled for a moment at her belt, tucking in the sharp blades. She pulled on her gardening gloves and said she wasn’t able to get into the specifics of it.
‘But do you know?’ Olive said. ‘Do you know what happened?’
Rue shook her head as if testing for coins in a money box, checking the weight of what was in there.
‘Your mother always tries to do the right thing. So much so it could be capitalised, the importance she puts on it. Sending RSVPs in that formal third-person style. Taking fruit to visit someone in hospital.’
Rue walked down the row, reaching out a hand to her decimated bushes as she went. She bent and coldly took hold of the base of one of the bushes. She started to tug. It didn’t move so she pushed and pulled it in the garden bed until it levered its way free. She lifted it, shook the wet dirt from the roots, lifted it over her head and tossed it to the side with a grunt. Rue was stronger than she looked.
‘Our mother was tough on the three of us but hardest of all on Thistle.’ Rue moved to the next bush and started to do the same.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What?’ Rue turned. ‘What?’
Olive took a step back.
‘Nothing. But why was she so mean to Thistle?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Rue took her secateurs and started snipping at leaves and slender twigs, her hands blurred. She stopped, tucked the clippers away again and grabbed another bush. She rocked it back and forth and pulled. It lifted out of the mud.
‘I want to know.’ Olive’s hands were sweaty. ‘I want you to tell me what happened to my sister.’
Little Gods Page 11