Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  Olive hovered in virtual splits and Rue appeared to run the bathwater out of the window to the garden. She saw Olive clinging to the sill and her exclamation of surprise made Olive drop to the ground.

  ‘You seem to be feeling better.’ Rue bent to the hose end on the ground. ‘Oh, look what you’ve done. I wish you’d keep your feet away from the soap, you’ve made it dirty, see? I’ve got the tree up and we’ll do the decorations in a minute. Isn’t anyone going to help?’

  Olive said she didn’t know.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said Rue. ‘You’ll be going home after dinner, it’s school tomorrow, and only two more weeks until Christmas. Isn’t that nice?’

  Olive said yes and walked around to the back of the house.

  AT DINNER MANDY said she was counting the sleeps and Archie said she couldn’t count that high. Mandy said she was going to start school next year and Sebastian said not to expect too much. Olive thought of the dam and how still it had been below. How it was strange that the places and people that were meant to make you feel comfortable could become altered in no time at all.

  Rue started to clear the plates, walking from table to kitchen and back again. She told Olive she had to finish her dinner before they could leave because her parents were tired and just wanted to get home. Olive wondered why they didn’t leave earlier, why they came in the first place. Why it was that the words adults said so often didn’t match what they did.

  Once she’d eaten all her dinner she was allowed to leave the table and go and put her things in her bag. She got in the back of the car and waited for her parents to finish their goodbyes. She wondered if this was how Lenore and Edgar had felt, far away from their home in such a strange place with everything turned upside down. In the back of the car she looked at her hands. The nails were bitten and the skin around her thumbs pulled.

  In her own bed the thoughts came, her mind turning and holding and turning again. When she slept, it was not for long. During the night, she woke to find herself standing outside the house, the doormat scratchy under her bare feet, the moon coming up over the next-door neighbour’s roof. Behind her the door was wide open. She stood there awhile looking into the front yard, at the fence and the moon, at the seam of light above the silver ash tree. Then she took herself back to bed, walking on her tiptoes through the house.

  AT HOME, THE house filled with commonplace tension. The air was sucked out as a tide pulls back from the beach and Olive was left as a solitary crab scuttering on the sand. She woke up on the Monday for the second last week of school. In the quiescent house she made her lunch as usual. Vegemite sandwiches, sultanas in a twist of paper, an apple, two bear biscuits and a crooked slab of cheese with the silver foil still on it. From the back of the class she concentrated on what Mrs Barton said as well as she could but the activities were stupid. Making paper lanterns, eggshell mosaics and Christmas cards to give to classmates.

  On the Tuesday, she sat on the edge of the playground, fiddling with small stones and bits of tanbark and thought about centaurs and what it would be like to be half girl, half horse. She also thought about what it would be like to be a boy, but mostly she kept coming back to what dead felt like. When Peter came up to her she told him to go away.

  On the Wednesday, something bad happened. She’d leaned on the shoulder of the pretty sports teacher at lunchtime, like the other kids had been doing. Snooky Sands was there as well, on the other side of the teacher, who was short and young, and she had put her arm on a shoulder and it had been okay. The teacher had smiled at Snooky Sands and was signing autograph books because the year was finishing. When a shoulder was free, Olive took a turn to lean and the teacher got cross at her.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, shrugging Olive off.

  Olive felt her face go red but she stood in the group of children surrounding the teacher until the bell went. She walked back into class with the rest of them.

  In the afternoons, she went home and wandered the house or garden, reciting Latin under her breath. She sat against the fence listening to the neighbours talking next door. She squatted near the incinerator and hummed and picked at the flaking rust, noticing how the sun filtered through the top of the high bush next door to throw splotches of creamy light on her bare feet. She missed the sound of her cousins’ voices, the way they layered on top of each other. How Archie’s runners made small piffing sounds as he crept around underneath the trees, peering upwards, looking for her, his eyes not catching her form as she moved behind the trunk. She thought of the sheep and how they turned their heads when she went near. She decided once and for all that she really believed she might be psychic and all she had to do was work out how to prove it.

  Every evening she waited for her father to come home from work. She hovered around the front door, checking again and again whether he was home yet, her head poking out of doorways, looking around corners, opening and closing doors with a listening period in between.

  ‘Olive!’ her mother would say if she was downstairs, exasperated to see her face again at the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Seeing if Dad’s home.’

  ‘Go and find something to do.’

  Olive withdrew and kept out of sight, listening but finding out nothing. There was an occasional phone call with her mother on the phone to Rue saying, ‘Yairs, mmm,’ but she never said anything useful.

  ‘Let your father get in the door,’ Audra would say, once he arrived. Olive’s need made her hateful and hot.

  ‘I think we’re having chops for tea,’ she said when her father got home on Wednesday. ‘And mashed potato,’ she added. She stood in front of him, stepping from foot to foot.

  She and her mother were two black planets and he was the only one who made the sky a little brighter.

  •

  Up to and including that previous Sunday, when she had found herself with her world shifted Olive had been a smudge, with dirty nails and a wilful heart. In the past, whenever she’d started to feel the family atmosphere get too close to her skin she had gone to the trees, but at home she stayed on the ground.

  There were thoughts inside thoughts and she was remembering. Once she had been high in the peppercorn at the farm and seen something. They were at the end of a long and fractious game of hide-and-seek. From her eyrie she could see Mandy’s red-and-white frock moving across the grass in the thin dusk. She stayed quiet, pinned against the diminishing sky. She was waiting to see Sebastian or Archie, thinking she might drop some spit when she realised someone was coming. It wasn’t one of the boys though. What she saw was a man and a woman and they leaned against her tree on the side away from the house. She strained to see who it was but it was dim and there were too many tendrils of leaves and strings of red peppercorns in the way. She couldn’t let go to use her binoculars because she would fall, but as she tried to see, she knew the people were kissing, and, oh, was it Thistle? Cleg? She couldn’t tell, but the woman started to make noises, wet lippy sighs. The two people didn’t talk, just stood very close to each other and then the man touched the woman’s clothes a little bit and Olive didn’t want to know any more so she leaned back, wrapped her arms around the trunk and waited until she was sure they had gone.

  •

  Yellow shampoo smell. Red hair in water, spreading like seaweed and copper and blood. Had it happened in a bath? Her mother’s body floating in the bath water. Flicking her fingers dry and reaching for a cigarette, balancing a small cut-glass ashtray on the side or in the soap tray, placed on a wet face washer so it wouldn’t slip. An ashtray that said PERTH or NOOSA. Her mother liked baths and would lie for ages with the door locked, the only sounds that Olive could hear as she pressed her ear to the wood the watery swooshing sound of her mother as she lifted and dropped her hands, the faint plink of water from the tap. She could imagine steam clouding the mirror, the lines of wetness rolling downwards. Maybe it had happened in a bath.

  A proper memory arrived then, like mail through a slot. A little
girl, her, leaning on the back of an armchair. She is looking through the window into the garden and beyond, out to the street. Over there is the letterbox and there is the bush with the small berries she mustn’t put in her mouth. There is the tree that drops the prickly conkers and there is the crack that runs across the whole paving stone, the crack you have to step over as you walk holding the big hand. Sometimes the big hand belongs to her father but when it’s her mother’s she doesn’t want to hold it because it’s too tight and hurts.

  But now she was hovering out of reach, practising something new. If she held herself, with her breathing the only moving part of her body, she knew she could work it out about her sister. She sat in the middle of the lounge room floor or down by the fence in the backyard and let her mind click along the connections. Sometimes her mother would step into her bedroom and ask who she was talking to.

  ‘No one,’ Olive would say and turn back to the window.

  •

  On the Thursday, after school, she took the things to the woodshed and sat under the wall where her father’s wool samples were stored. She had found an old wooden fruit box and used it to make a display. A stolen candle, some drawings she’d done, two pretty pebbles and the photo of her dad with the baby in the yellow dress. She sat in the dust, speaking soft words and drawing circles on the floor with her fingers. She thought it was a safe time, that her mother would be asleep, so when Audra stepped around the doorway Olive jumped and made a fuffing noise.

  Her mother stood with the brightness of the day behind, her body white-edged and, at the centre of it dark and amorphous, her features pushed into each other. Audra stepped inside.

  ‘What have you got there? Who told you?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I can’t believe she dared, and you should not be playing with matches.’

  ‘It’s not playing.’

  On the wall opposite there was a spider, curled inside a home it had made from a leaf. Its legs poked out in a fan of sharp needles.

  ‘This—’ Audra waved her hand at the box and its iconography ‘—is too much.’

  ‘But I miss her.’ She had let herself begin to imagine what it might have been not to be alone.

  ‘You didn’t even know her.’

  Olive wrapped her arms around her head and brought her knees up.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She told me I had a sister who died.’

  ‘Did she say anything else?’

  Olive shook her head.

  ‘Has Sebastian said anything?’

  Olive shook her head again.

  ‘Alright.’ Her mother stepped forwards. ‘All you need to know is it was a terrible, terrible thing.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened to her?’

  Her mother didn’t answer.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘No,’ Audra said after a few moments. She walked to the shrine. ‘I can’t. But I want you to stop.’ Audra pointed. ‘All of this.’ She gathered the relics up in her arms and took them away.

  The back door of the house slammed. A sparrow flew in. It looked at her, twitching and dumb. It hopped once and again. It came forward a little, then to the side. She thought if she stayed still for long enough the bird might come right up to her, even hop onto her foot and up her leg and onto her lap, up her arm to her shoulder, where it could stay. The sparrow flew out of the shed.

  This was the reason no one had told her anything.

  It was because they didn’t know.

  •

  Later, when she was in the lounge, watching the path for her father, her mother came in. She wondered if a person could ever die of nothing. She thought of the book, of the spontaneous combustion and the charred bodies on floorboards and hearths where they’d spilled out of armchairs. Old brickwork, discoloured chimneys, thin rugs. Audra asked if she had anything to say and she shook her head. She wasn’t going to say sorry.

  ‘Can I have the photo back?’

  Audra said that she had thrown it away but it was a lie, one thousand per cent. The falsehood sat small and wormlike in the air, in front of both of their faces. Olive made her eyes go hard. It was easy to do.

  ‘We talked about it once with you but you didn’t seem to remember and we didn’t want to make you sad. It might have been a mistake but that’s what we did.’ Audra paused. ‘Do you remember going to the special doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  Her mother wasn’t even looking at her, she was at the doorway doing something with the knob. Olive looked at the things on the mantelpiece. The Scottie dog, the little glass box that looked like a coffin for a fairy. The wedding picture, her father laughing, his eyes wide. Her mother’s mouth, how it showed her happiness was real. She decided she did have something more to say. She told her mother that she’d seen her father kissing Thistle at the farm. Her mother said to go and read a book, to please just find something to do. Olive said alright and went and did that and her mother stayed in there for a long time, even when her father got home. Olive ate her dinner and lay on top of her bed, eyes closed in concentration. They didn’t know but she would. She would find out what happened to her sister and then she would know. And she would tell them and they would look at her with wonder. A girl of magnificent brain.

  THE PLAN

  PEOPLE WERE TALKING about Christmas and pudding and decorations but for Olive there was only one thing and it had nothing to do with the time of year. It was a short song, one with seven notes, and it came at her hard. Like a message, a question, urgent and rushing: What happened to my sister?

  She had realised she needed to become a better spy, a more cold-blooded one. She would wait and be patient, in a tree or on the ground, behind the embroidered curtain in the Green Room. She would ride the streets with her binoculars hanging around her neck. She would find the answer somehow. She would try to trick people into giving away everything that they knew, and then she would put it all together. The song was in her head almost all the time now, repetitive and insistent.

  What happened to Aster?

  •

  Peter lived two streets away and on Saturday they were in his back garden, working their way through a pile of plums. They talked about the bits of dead animals that were being found around town. A kangaroo head in the bin outside the newsagent and a sheep head at the oval. Dead snakes, too, hanging from trees and fences, their lank forms sinister and threatening. Peter’s father had said whoever was doing it ‘had problems’.

  ‘He asked me if I knew who it was. I told him it was probably the Sandses,’ Peter said, chewing a plum pip and spitting it at the garage wall. ‘I wish I had a brother, maybe two, but not like them, more like Seb and Arch. To play with. Five more each,’ Peter said.

  ‘Brothers aren’t that great, besides, your mother’s too old now I think, no offence,’ Olive said.

  She got up and climbed the tree, stepping off it onto the garage roof. She started to throw tennis balls and a couple of footballs down to the grass.

  She stood, positioned her fanned fingers, one across the top of the other so they were made cheliform. She held them up to him. ‘Can you do this?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Flippers.’

  Peter shook his head and went back to the plums. ‘Five more each,’ he called. ‘What about you? Didn’t you want a brother or a or a—’ He stopped.

  She shook her head. ‘I know why my mum didn’t have more and why I’m never having one when I grow up.’

  ‘Because they hurt when they come out?’ He spat another pip. ‘Mum said it did hurt a bit with me.’

  ‘No, it’s mainly ’cause they can die.’

  Peter blew into his cheeks and said he guessed that was true.

  She climbed down.

  ‘You’re really never having one?’ His hair hung across his eyes.

  ‘Nope. But listen. I have to tell you something. It’s about a séance and we’re going to have one soon. We found a ouija board, Thistle calls it a talking bo
ard. In the shed. I haven’t worked out where to do it yet—somewhere spooky, though. I’ve decided I’m going to find out what happened.’

  ‘What are you even talking about? Find out about what?’

  ‘I did have a baby sister but she died.’

  ‘Woooah.’

  She was satisfied with how long his mouth stayed open.

  ‘She drowned. I think in a bath, I’m not sure yet. I’m going to start my investigations, which is why we need to have the séance.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What I mean is I’m going to find out what happened to her.’

  His lips made another shape.

  ‘But the grown-ups would know. If you ask them they’ll tell you.’

  ‘I did ask my mum and she said she doesn’t know. And I asked Sebastian. He doesn’t know anything about it either. But Thistle told me. Thistle said it was true.’

  Peter looked down at his hands.

  ‘But Thistle told you the weird fairytales. She lied about that.’

  Olive had to agree. Thistle had changed those stories. She remembered when she’d consulted with Peter and he had told her the proper endings.

  ‘And what happened to Goldilocks?’ Peter had said, wide-eyed.

  ‘The bears ate her. Didn’t they in yours?’

  ‘No way. She broke the chair and ate the porridge and went to sleep in the bed. All that’s the same. But when the bears came home they were all friends and that was the end. Even though they’d been angry at first.’

  He had another thought.

  ‘What about Hansel and Gretel?’

  ‘Both eaten.’

  ‘Snow White.’