Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  ‘She’s bad luck.’

  They sat around the kitchen table. Their mother was still in bed, so Gary boiled the kettle while Jethro got the mugs out.

  ‘Get the milk,’ he said to Mark. John was still in bed, probably reading if he was awake.

  Jethro dug his teaspoon into the International Roast.

  ‘Jesus, this family.’

  He spooned sugar and motioned for Gary to pour. Milk in, stirred and slung the spoon back into the sugar bowl. He sipped his coffee.

  What the hell was she doing?

  He went outside, and backed his car into the garage. He put the dust sheet on. What a beauty. He’d bought it with money he’d saved since he was a kid. Birthday money, chemist-round wages, all the jobs he’d done. He’d saved most of the earnings, careful to hide it after his father asked to borrow some but had never paid it back. He’d been nine then and knew better now. Then his grandmother had died and left them some cash for when they each turned eighteen. He’d got his the year before, around the time his father had come back. It had been hard, keeping that money in the bank, with his dad saying how he owed him, that a good son would help his father out. In the end, he hadn’t managed to keep it all but he had been able to buy the car he’d wanted.

  He didn’t like anyone touching the Charger and no one was allowed to drive it. He was saving to convert it, get the roof taken off and a soft-top put in. After that, he would get it spray-painted ‘Ferrari red’. He’d taken a long time choosing the colour.

  ‘What are we going to do about Olive Lovelock?’ Gary said from behind him.

  Jethro rubbed his hands on a rag.

  ‘She’s a smart-arse and she’s also a snoop. Did you see those things around her neck? And that big kid that was there with the blond hair, sort of surfie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That’s the cop’s kid.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What if they tell, about the animals? I’ve already got warnings and you’ve got a record.’

  ‘Those things have got nothing to do with me and I told you to stop it. But you never listen.’

  Gary went to Jethro’s esky and got a beer, opened it, took a sip. He tossed the ring-pull onto the bench. Jethro watched him. He put a hand on the bonnet. Gayle.

  ‘They’re just old roos—most of them, anyway,’ Gary said. ‘The other things, who likes them? Who cares about snakes?’

  Jethro threw the rag on the bench.

  ‘We have to stick together,’ Gary said. ‘Especially against the Lovelocks.’

  Jethro didn’t want to talk about Olive Lovelock or her family.

  ‘Man, those teeth. If she was my sister I would have bashed them straight by now, right?’ Gary pressed his fingers until they cracked and Jethro stepped outside the garage and motioned for Gary to follow. He shut the garage door with a clatter. Gary hawked and spat a glob out to the grass. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  ‘How’s the arm?’

  ‘Sore.’ Gary finished his beer and cracked his neck with a quick side-side movement. Jethro stood and watched as his brother went up the back steps and into the house.

  IN RUE’S KITCHEN, Olive tried to eat a tomato and cheese jaffle but all she could do was break it apart into smaller and smaller bits, twisting the crusts into fragments and dropping them onto her plate.

  People spoke to her, they kept saying, Olive, Olive, but she didn’t hear them. She couldn’t eat, not while Grace was dead. There was something inside her that filled her body and stretched into her fingers and toes. It lined her back and chest and was thick and painful. From the kitchen drawer she got the cooking string and made lines in Mandy’s room, stretched between furniture, tied around knobs and shooting off in all directions. From the chair to the bed to the dresser and back to the chair again. Frantic white highways that crisscrossed the floor. She lay under her bed. She lay there for hours.

  ‘Olive?’

  Rue stepped in and made her way across to the bed. The springs above dipped a little.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Grace died,’ Olive said. Her hand was pressed to the skirting board and her eyes wandered over the springs under her mattress, the diamond shapes of the wire base. There was a small loop of thread hooked over one wire. It was red, as fine as a hair. She stared at that piece of cotton, seeing the way it was twisted.

  ‘It’s time for lunch, we’ve got sausage rolls. And then I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Olive stayed under her bed against the wall, not interested in the flaking pastry and steaming meat, not caring about the sweet red sauce. The boys were sent to tell her to come to the table. They squatted in turn but finally Rue came and pulled her out by the arm. It left a salmon-pink mark.

  She went to wash her hands. In the bathroom mirror her eyes shone pale and her grown-out fringe flopped to her chin. She found some bobby pins and put her hair back and looked at herself again in the mirror. She’d always hated her hair being back, she liked it on her face and across her eyes, no matter what Rue said. She looked again closely, bringing her nose right up to the glass so that her breath fogged it in small puffs. Her eyes were hollow and round, and when she pulled back she saw she had a wide cavity for a mouth, her lips pulled into a new shape. How did it get like that? she wondered. She tried to smile, but it made her look like a hungry animal.

  At the table her eyes were sunken.

  ‘I know you’re upset,’ Rue said, reaching for her wrist. ‘Everything will be fine, you’ll see. You’ll be sad for a while and then it will fade away and you will feel better.’

  Olive pulled her arm away. Rue was always trying to feel people’s pulses as if the small beats could tell her something important.

  ‘Grace is dead. Nothing will ever be alright.’

  Later she heard Rue say to Thistle ‘that girl is becoming hard work’. It made her go to her bed and climb under again. She cried until her eyes puffed and her face hurt. Her jaw, her neck, her stomach. All of it was gathered in a tight bundle of pain.

  When they finally left, she sat in the back of the car. Rue pressed a lamington into her hand to take home, wrapped in a paper napkin. It was still warm and she knew it was her aunt’s way of trying to be sorry. But as she was driven home, she let it drop to the floor of the car where it would dry out and crumble over the next few days.

  •

  Olive’s last thought before sleep that night came in a gasp. It lifted her off the bed like an enormous muscle spasm, its attack coming just as her body and mind fell towards sleep. There was a word printed behind her eyelids in large magenta letters and it spelled GRACE.

  •

  She woke in the morning with a dry mouth, her sheet twisted off the side of the bed. The house was quiet. There were no magpies to be heard, no soft sighs coming from Mandy as she started to wake up. She could hear Mr McCullers next door clipping his trees and the sound of Mrs McCullers calling him from the back door, asking if he wanted another cup of tea. Even though that was all normal, as she’d slept, during the hours before morning, everything had changed.

  WORMWOOD

  IT WAS A few days before Christmas. Olive stayed in the cool gloom of her room as her parents loaded the car. Her body had been taken from her and she was floating, removed from her own self. She was now in a place—or a not-place—where she existed without knowledge of anything. The same origins, maybe, that babies came from. It might have been a place covered with water, or in the sky so far above that she couldn’t see the earth anymore. Wherever she was, everything had been taken from her. She didn’t care what cereal she had for breakfast and didn’t care either that she hadn’t seen Peter for days. With nothing to anchor her—no school, no companionship—she stayed suspended in the new place, noticing only noise and finding no comfort in any of it.

  It was easy to make it seem as if she was still there, where she was meant to be. Say yes to cornflakes and yes to cartoons. The old books she pulled off
her shelf, books she’d already read and reread, the people and countries and adventures she’d known and lived already. Familiar friends that she’d liked very much who couldn’t reach her now. Even Heidi was a stranger, a girl grown cold.

  Asleep she was whole, but awake, in parts. Every morning, as soon as she opened her eyes, she thought of Grace. Sometimes there was a moment of forgetting then things returned, visions and memories that had mostly been emptied out by sleep. She remembered Gary’s feet, his shoes, the way Grace’s feathers had bent in the wrong direction. It had taken her days to let herself know that the worst thing had been that Grace was playing. She’d made games and brought presents and shown her love. It was what hurt the most: that Grace had trusted Olive to not let any harm come to her. She had failed in the worst possible way.

  Her parents put the presents in the car as well as some cut-crystal bowls and extra salad serving spoons for lunch on Christmas Day. They set off, driving east with Olive in the back, looking at her reflection in the car window. She hated what she saw.

  On her lap in the car was her school certificate and report to show Rue and Thistle. Mrs Barton had written that she was ‘stub-born’ and ‘intense’ and needed to think about her attitude before Year 7. She’d received the certificate for finishing grade six but it wasn’t anything special because Snooky had got dux. Olive knew she could have been dux if she had really tried.

  A dirge played in her head as she sat in the car, staring out at the land. Low and constant, the notes that she heard didn’t exist in real music. The effect was like the bagpipes on one of Thistle’s cassettes, wailing and unpredictable. Thistle loved the bagpipes, Rue called them ‘hideous’ and her mother ‘intolerable’. Her father would clench his jaw in mute resistance, but William would get up and leave the house, take himself off for long walks, announcing he would return once the caterwauling had ceased.

  In the car, Olive didn’t look out for dead animals up ahead.

  She had done her part but wouldn’t anymore.

  •

  They arrived. Rue came out to meet them and Olive walked towards the house with her aunt’s arm across her shoulders. Could Rue feel the change through her clothes? Her mother was ahead of them, fanning herself with a brochure. By the time Olive reached the verandah she could hear Audra’s shoes moving down the long hallway. Olive went to the back of the house and looked out to the peppercorn tree. Underneath was Cleg’s car, the Holden Premier covered in tape, the caravan parked once more in the same place. Why was he always here, anyway?

  She leaned against the window for a while then went to the kitchen to get herself a glass of milk. Her mouth felt like there was acid in it and her stomach was sore but none of it mattered. She would never be happy again.

  •

  She was sitting on the kitchen stool when Archie ran in and announced a dingo had eaten a baby. Rue was there too, going through the bin. She straightened.

  ‘Another one?’ she said. Archie looked confused and Rue looked confused too and then he was gone.

  ‘Thistle said that mother wouldn’t ever hurt her own baby,’ Olive said. ‘But Mum says she did.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Rue, peeling the apples. ‘Mothers never do that, they love their babies more than anything—it’s just that some women can’t show it for whatever reason. Sometimes there’s a sickness. Sheba, I need the sugar.’

  ‘What’s it called? The sickness?’

  Rue shifted things in the pantry.

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘What makes people hurt animals?’

  Rue was moving jars and boxes. ‘Oh, blast, where’s Thistle? Go to her room, would you? Knock on the door and ask her if she’s got the sugar. If she’s not there, just go in and see if you can find it.’

  There was no answer to her knock so Olive pushed the bedroom door open. It was chaotic. Thistle said it was a sign of a brain that moves fast, with no time for banal activities such as tidying. Any moron can tidy, was what she said.

  The first thing Olive saw was the empty packet of sugar pushed down inside the bin. She went in and shut the door. It was better to stay in the quiet of Thistle’s room than go back to the kitchen where her aunt refused to let silence just be. She looked around. Newspapers were stacked to hip height and clippings rested in piles on the floor. There were dolls of all shapes and sizes, baby clothes, finely knitted, jigsaws in their boxes and in small jumbled piles along the skirting boards. Easter egg foil, crusts of toast on plates, empty lolly bags and across the whole of it the strong odour of dirty sheets and spritzes of fruity perfume.

  The bed was pushed underneath the curtainless window.

  ‘Why on earth do you want it there?’ Audra had asked her sister when Thistle had moved in. It had been Mandy’s room but she was too little to protest the swap.

  ‘Because of the moon,’ Thistle had said. ‘I like to sleep with it on my face.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rue had said but Olive had thought a bed right under the window was a good idea. She would like her bed like that.

  There were drinking glasses that had furry stuff growing in the bottoms. Feathers and stones and bones on the windowsill, and in the corner the sheep’s skull. Thistle’s room was like an exciting nature museum and library in one. It was a place that you could talk in, walk around and touch whatever you liked.

  She walked across the littered floor, over the plates and food wrappers, single socks, lace-edged bloomers, teacups, groups of bird cards arranged in fans ready to go into their albums. There were music tapes, dozens of them, and shelves of books, and more stacked on the floor in piles. The Beauties and Furies. Hypatia. The Theban Plays. The Bloody Chamber. Lots of Shakespeares. For Love Alone. Modern Women in Love. Dark Places of the Heart. And the strangest cover was the book with a headless lady’s suit made of skin with handles on the sides of the hips. The plays, multiple rehearsal copies of the sisters one and the seagull script also. Crossword books and acrostic puzzles, empty pill bottles on the floor, lotions beside the bed. She went to the window, where the glass was fingerprinted, smudged with a milky-brown dried paste. On one of the panes, the words You-You, written in groups of two.

  Back in the kitchen she told Rue she couldn’t find the sugar. Her aunt made a noise and asked her to please get the honey from the larder.

  ‘No matter. Sweet is sweet.’

  Maybe it was true but maybe, also, at the same time, it wasn’t.

  •

  Half an hour later Olive roused enough to yell at Archie, who was excited and kept bothering her. He didn’t listen when she kept saying to leave her alone, that she didn’t care it was almost Christmas. Rue told her off for shouting in the house and asked her to stay away from him, to please just behave. She went out to the tree where she lay, face down, her narrow form squeezed in at the base, arms wide, holding on to the sprawling mass of roots. It might have felt like a hug if she wasn’t so sad. She wasn’t interested in wrestling Archie, playing their usual game where she would try to punch his bum five times whack-whack-whack-whack-whack or bite his ankle as he sat on her head to fart. She lay on the ground and wondered if a person could just die because of nothing.

  After a while she heard Cleg moving around inside the caravan. She wiped her eyes and turned her head. To the side was a piece of grass, a slender shoot, green and new. How did it manage to grow in this world? She touched the bark. A tree didn’t have to make a journey and there were no places of decision because a tree didn’t have to do anything other than just be in the air and face the wind and rain for all of time.

  She sat up and leaned against the trunk. Sheep stood close by. Dry paddocks. Tank. Fences all around. Dead Girl’s had been a waste of time, Ganger’s too. The whole séance idea had been a stupid one from the beginning. If they hadn’t gone to Ganger’s, Grace would still be with her, up above in the tree right now, or lying in her lap the way she used to, feet sweetly raised in the air, head tilted so she could watch Olive’s face. When she thought
of Grace’s eyes it was awful. She lay back down and clung to the earth and waited for the world to slow its spin.

  CLEG SET UP a workstation for Olive to help him with the mother work. He ran a power cord from the shed to the caravan and showed her how to type in the names and addresses of women and hospitals, dates and birth details, from a handwritten sheet. She had to do it using a typing board which was attached at the bottom of the computer box. She would be paid two dollars for one hour and he said because it was still morning they could probably do quite a bit that day. Every hour or so, he explained, they would save her work to a cassette in a small deck that plugged in to the computer.

  ‘That way it won’t get lost if something goes wrong,’ he said.

  It was slow work but she liked it. As she typed, Cleg told her about the women who’d lost their babies. She asked questions, either about the typing or the mothers, and she found she was fine there, that day, in the small space of the caravan. She had a ruler to keep track of where she was on the list, and a red pen to do a tick to show that she had typed in the information.

  Cleg found a packet of biscuits that weren’t opened and they tasted okay even if they were a bit old. She tapped on the computer and wondered whether this was what it would be like to play the piano. She wondered whether her job when she grew up could be something to do with typing. Maybe she could use her savings to buy a little typewriter. The high school had a typing subject. She could do that and then grow up and be a typer. It could be alright, she thought.

  Olive liked being around Cleg. It was Cleg who had taught them the Latin when they were little. Olive’s unique phrase was inter urinas et faeces nascimur, which Rue hated, saying it was an inappropriate expression for a young girl. Archie’s was the omnia one he used every time for the dam, which meant ‘let it all hang out’. Cleg was very specific. This should always be used with at least one exclamation mark and was to be reserved for occasions when a person was jumping into, onto or from something, preferably nude.