As soon as he was gone, Thistle swung to the room, her arms aloft in Ophelia’s tragic pose.
‘You spoil everything,’ she said to Audra. Their faces were in a cross-fade as first one, then the other, was illuminated by indignant energy. ‘You can’t bear to think of me having someone for my own. Always had to have the limelight.’
‘I don’t know how you can even talk to that man.’ Rue folded a tea towel, opened it, then folded it again. Thistle swiped at the tea canister, sending it along the bench. It ricocheted off the wall and clattered into the sink, tea leaves spilling.
‘Good lord,’ Rue said, and sat on the stool. She looked at the lamb, glistening wetly on the laminex, while Audra went to the fridge to get the milk out.
OLIVE WAS AWAKE but still in bed, reading The Book of Lists. Mandy had already run in to say she had eaten all her chocolate coins and why wasn’t she getting up, it was Christmas. But Olive told her to go away. She wanted to keep reading about the twenty-five things that fell from the sky, including hay, golden rain, black eggs and meat. How in 1977 five hundred dead and dying blackbirds and pigeons cascaded to the streets of California for hours and hours. Toads also fell, and fish. That was in Australia, up in the Northern Territory. The book said fish falls were common, that whirlwinds could create a water spout over the ocean or a lake and then drop the fish down onto the land. She closed the book and imagined all of that. She opened it again. Peaches, too! Falling from the sky. She thought about that for a while. You could catch them in a box. Then she read about eclipses and lightning strikes and a psychic dog called Chris.
She heard a cough outside the window. She was going to go and see who it was—probably Archie, spying—when she remembered the sheep. When she’d been little, she used to think a man came in the night to stand next to the window but Sebastian told her that a sheep’s cough is exactly like a human’s. That what his dad had said.
•
Later Rue caught her slinking past in the hallway and asked her to come and help with lunch, so she went and did as she was asked. She made the stuffing for the chickens, with Rue directing her. She trussed them too but didn’t do a very good job and Rue had to do it again. Then she carved the ham, also badly, putting the slices onto a platter, wedges of meat thick at one end, thin at the other. She arranged parsley, partly to hide the poor display of ham, partly ‘for colour’, as Rue called it. She covered the plate with plastic wrap then they made the rice and potato salads.
Thistle came in and Rue asked her where Audra was.
‘Still in bed.’ Thistle’s eyes were on her sister’s face.
‘Oh, how nice. I’d love to be back in bed with a cup of tea on Christmas morning. How nice to know all the work will be done, she doesn’t have to lift a finger.’
‘You never let anyone help,’ said Thistle.
‘What?’ Rue said. ‘What’s that you said?’
Thistle said not to worry and went out again. Rue stood with her hands on her hips and considered the mess on the bench. The baking trays, the spilled stuffing, seeds from inside the tomatoes, the onion skins. She held up her hands. A nice drink would make everything fizz away.
‘I might open a bottle of bubbly,’ she said. ‘Can you get the glasses down for me?’ She pulled the stool over and held Olive’s legs as she stretched up to the cupboard.
‘Careful.’
She gave Olive a third of a glass, telling her not to say anything to her mother. Olive drank it quickly and refilled it when her aunt was setting the table.
Olive carried salads in and put them on silver placemats. Rue came through the swing door carrying two bread baskets and made the time call—ten minutes more she told the family, they may as well start sitting down. Her eyes hovered above Olive’s head for a moment then she turned and went back into the kitchen. Olive followed. On the bench was the serving plate with the cut-up chicken and beside it, a small butter plate upon which rested the two wishbones. Olive always got a wishbone at Christmas but the others had to take turns. Rue kept a list inside the cupboard door and when challenged by the other children said Olive got hers just because, that she didn’t have to explain it to anyone. Olive hadn’t split any of her bones yet, she was saving them for when she needed the most luck. This would be her sixth year and her sixth wishbone.
In the kitchen, Thistle and Rue were standing over the denuded frames in the trays. The air was redolent with tarragon, the bird cavities bright with the yellow of the lemons. Without pause, Thistle stepped to the side to make space for her niece who slid into place and reached for some skin.
‘Hurry,’ said Thistle. ‘The men will become restless.’
The door opened from the hallway and they all looked up. It was Audra, eyes fixed on the baking trays. They moved again to let her in. Olive knew her mother hated the slavering but was drawn to it, unable to resist the pull of what she called ‘the barbarism’. But she was dainty as she pulled morsels of meat from the bones, driving a single nail gently down the ridges to lift the meat. They stood at the laminex bench, mouths working, fingers flashing as they pulled the oysters from underneath, the thin skerricks along the lengths of the ribs and the stubborn bits that clung around the place where the thigh bones had been wrenched from the frame. It had been minutes already and they had to be quick, because in the dining room the others would be starting to serve themselves and if they were too long William might appear at the door asking if it was to be a vegetarian Christmas this year. He would stand there with that look on his face and they would all feel the shame of it.
The jostling in the kitchen, though, was warm and companionable and for Olive, it was a rare spectacle. There was no other occasion that the three sisters came together in anything even approximating harmony. No one called anyone feeble or a martyr. No one got huffy and swept from the room in high dudgeon. There was quiet, a hushed sense of almost-giggling as if the sisters might in a bizarre and spontaneous moment hang off each other’s necks to laugh about something from their childhood. It had never happened but there was the feeling that it could.
The door opened. Thistle was digging around inside to get at the neck and Rue was nibbling on a parson’s nose. Thistle hissed a signal and they left the birds in a single movement: Audra moved out the door, Thistle to the pantry wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, Olive to the sink and Rue to the toaster.
‘It’s only Archie.’ Olive pawed her shining fingers down his cheek. Rue gave Olive some papertowel and she wiped her fingers and mouth, then put the wishbones on the windowsill to dry. Rue picked up the platter of chicken to lead the procession back into the dining room.
‘Revolting,’ said William as they sat down.
Olive picked at her full plate, ears hot from the champagne. She looked around the table. Was there a fly inside? She flapped her hands in the air.
‘Do you want to go to the dam after?’ she said to Sebastian. He said no, he didn’t. He was going to start constructing the model plane he got for Christmas. Olive said ok, fine. He was being strange lately, as if he was too good for her. And it was like he didn’t care about what had happened at Ganger’s because he hadn’t mentioned Grace even once. He didn’t want to talk about anything anymore, he just wanted to be left alone. Olive could remember how interested he used to be in learning the codes—as interested as she was. But now, he couldn’t care less.
She looked around the table. Her head felt funny as if her brain was skipping. Her mother and snails. She leaned forward and spoke.
‘Mum, did you step on snails when you were little?’
Rue and Audra looked down the table at Thistle. Audra had speared a tiny piece of chicken breast, a thin slice of potato and an eighth of an asparagus spear on her fork and held it aloft. Thistle was layering slabs of butter on a piece of bread. Audra put down her cutlery and picked up her serviette, dabbed each corner of her lips. She carefully folded it and laid it back on the table.
‘Did you?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’<
br />
Thistle took a bite of bread. Snails, moving across a path, their trails silver in the rain. Antennae feeling the air, horns waving back and forth.
‘What did you say to her?’ Audra said, speaking to Thistle, whose face remained closed as she crammed the rest of the bread into her mouth.
‘Look at this,’ Rue said. Mandy’s cheeks were bulging. ‘You’ve got too much in there, spit it out. Out.’ Rue opened her hand and Mandy leaned over it. A ball of chewed meat and potatoes fell into Rue’s cupped palm.
‘What a maw,’ Thistle said.
‘My tummy hurts,’ Mandy said.
‘And no wonder,’ said Rue.
The table fell silent. The fly buzzed. The adults chatted about the usual things and the children ate quickly, wanting to leave and go back to their presents. Toward the end of the meal William began one of his low, rumbling oratories.
‘Hate the bunny,’ he said.
Cleg got up to go outside, saying he couldn’t tolerate one of his brother’s ‘quasi-mad rabbit operas’ just then. Olive too looked for escape, but William had already started. She slumped back in her chair.
‘Oryctolagus cuniculus.’ William settled with hands over his belly. Rue leaned over her husband to clear the plates and he reached a finger to her chin. ‘The humble rabbit and one idiot. Thomas bloody Austin, fool and ponce.’ He made eye contact with Olive, who looked at the door. ‘Wanted to shoot bunnies, he did. Wanted to feel at home. Rabbits love this country, the sandy soil suits them. There’s good drainage but a big problem for stock is the tunnels can collapse. Animals get their legs caught, can snap them and the farmer needs to shoot them because a cow or sheep with a broken leg is no good. Horses too.’
The burrows were like underground cities, he said. Mazes of pathways and residences. There was one with a total combined length of more than five hundred metres and one hundred and fifty doors. Olive couldn’t imagine that long in metres but she knew so many doors was a lot.
‘There he is. It’s the 1850s, he’s sitting on his estate near Geelong, probably in a white linen suit. He’s got his whiskey, he’s got his French soda siphon. Land in hand, near the river, shady and green, keeps the lawns nice and posh. But he’s missing home, Enger-land. Yessiree, he says, what I need is a couple of bunnies and maybe some game birds to hunt. He doesn’t feel at home, you see, without something familiar to crack a bullet at. Shooting roos just isn’t the same for this poor toff. He feels sorry for them, probably, sees them as exotics. But—and this is important—the bunnies we had here before, well, they weren’t the same as the ones back in England. He doesn’t want to hunt them.’
Olive looked at the door again.
‘Now, don’t get me wrong.’ William leaned onto his hands, eyes fixed on Mandy now. She’d edged off her chair so only one half of her bottom was still in contact. ‘I like a bit of a shoot now and again,’ William continued. ‘But what we had before were poodles and these ones were wolves.’
Mandy’s lips moved as she listened, mouthing wolf, her eyes on her father.
‘They say rabbits caused the Sahara. Canny mongrels, they know how to survive. They can breed almost anywhere. Their warrens are enormous, dangerous for livestock, it collapses underneath a cow or a group of sheep—did I already say that? The bastards run like the wind and out-breed anything else on earth. Six bunnies will eat the same as a sheep, so when a drought hits, the sheep are rooted.’
‘William,’ said Rue.
‘Warren is at my kinder,’ said Mandy. Her eyes moved to the wall opposite, where there was a small picture of a mother sheep standing over her dead lamb which was surrounded by a circle of crows. Mandy didn’t like that picture. She’d told her mother it gave her shivers all over and that she’d seen it in her sleep. Once, even, the mother sheep had come inside and stood beside her bed.
Cleg stuck his head through the door telling William to stop his nonsense and come outside. That it was better to sing when drinking, not lecture bored children.
‘With my brothers, three men all,’ he sang. ‘Come, patrem omnipotentem. Brucie-boy’s already out here.’
Rue tried to intercede but Cleg called her a woman with many regrets and Thistle clapped her hands and Cleg tipped an imaginary hat. Rue retreated to the dishes.
Olive sat in her chair thinking about what her uncle had been saying. There was something happening in her brain. She asked to leave the table and went outside and crawled into the cavity under the verandah. In the house people started to walk ponderously through rooms and she could hear their footsteps. She knew the older members of the family would soon be falling into chairs and on couches, digestion aided by interiority. William would finish his rabbit speech and he and Bruce would soon have hardback novels or cricket books resting on their chests, opened and ignored as their heads began to nod. They would fight sleep and fail, and fall to dozing.
Lying in the cool space Olive felt recast. The sun came through the side-wall slats in wide strips. She heard someone come out to the verandah. It was Sebastian, probably to set up his model construction. Olive thought about getting out and asking him why he was being such a weirdo but then she heard someone else step out onto the verandah. It was Thistle. They sat above her for a while and Olive was almost falling asleep herself when she heard Thistle ask a question.
‘How are things with you these days?’
‘Alright.’
‘How is Olive?’
‘She’s alright.’ Olive looked sideways to the lattice. She was about to crawl out and surprise them—maybe tell them she wasn’t alright, that in fact she was pretty awful because Grace was dead and she was starting to have a headache as well but then Sebastian said something else.
‘I’ve been avoiding her. She’s always going on about Aster.’
‘It seems she has no memory of it. Of the day.’
Sebastian didn’t say anything. Olive could imagine him shrugging, or making an expression on his face. He lifted his chin and pushed out his bottom lip. She had told him it made him look dumb but he still did it.
‘But you remember, don’t you?’ Thistle said. Her voice wasn’t mean but it did sound a bit sly to Olive, as if she was trying to find out something without the other person knowing that it was significant.
‘Was it at the dam?’ Sebastian’s voice cracked on the final syllable.
‘Yes,’ Thistle said. ‘It was at the dam.’
‘And I was there too.’
‘You were there too.’
Olive had never guessed that Sebastian really might know something. It was obvious now and she was a quid nunc for not thinking of it. She could have made him talk. She would make him talk. It was the dam not a bath. Now all she needed to know was WHO and WHY.
‘None of you were to blame, not you, not Olive, not even that boy. He might be a fire-starter but something like this, no sir.’
‘Gary Sands was there?’
‘Not him, though he’s the dangerous one. He’s like his father and uncle, and you must be careful with him. No. I was talking about the older son with the funny name. You don’t remember?’
‘Jethro?’
‘Yes. Him.’
More muttering as the wire door sounded overhead—Rue coming out to ask if Thistle wanted tea. Thistle said yes and after a moment she went back inside. Sebastian was there. She was there. And Jethro Sands was there too. He was there when Aster died. He took her to the dam and put her in. She knew he had done it on purpose, she was filled with hot certitude. Sebastian hadn’t mentioned it to her, probably because he was scared—and Jethro had covered it up. Somehow he’d got away with it. It all made sense. It was Jethro. He told Gary to stomp Grace so of course he killed Aster too.
She got to her hands and knees and crawled out. She peeped up over the side of the verandah and saw Sebastian sitting there at the card table, snapping the plastic model pieces out of the frame. He’d been really pleased that it was a Luftwaffe plane and he said he was going to start collecting them.
It had stickers and paint included. His pleasure had seemed too much for just a grey plane. Sitting at their stockings earlier Olive had called him a Nazi for being so happy about the model plane. But now the annoyance toward Sebastian evaporated. Olive went along the side of the house and in the back door. She got the half-full champagne bottle from the fridge and took it into the laundry. It made troubles fizz away—that’s what Rue said. Next thing she knew she was standing in the laundry, the empty bottle in her hand. She went and sat in the sunroom and watched the rug and after a while the pattern on it started to move in lines so she went to the hallway but then her limbs began to detach and float off down the hall, her legs heading to the back of the house and her arms swinging to the front. She thought about Thistle and her mother and Rue. Of herself as a little girl standing beside the dam and a bigger boy dropping a baby into the water. She had probably been crying. While she could see how none of it was fair, she didn’t understand why any of it had happened to her and why she was the only one who seemed to care about it, not just about Grace but about having a dead sister and about finding out what the truth might be.
She went to where the adults were sitting in their chairs. She stood in front of her mother and arched her back and screamed, the noise shattering the brumous fug of the room. The napping adults jerked from their seats, books and newspapers sliding from laps. She screamed and screamed again.
Audra held Olive’s arms, telling her to stop. A glossy magazine—Sweden Cruises—was underfoot and they almost slipped over on it. Rue came running in but it was William who took his niece by the hand.
‘Come on, big girl,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
He steered her out.
‘What happened?’ said Rue, following.
‘I don’t know,’ Audra said.
Rue started crying.
•
With the door closed, Audra sat on the bed.
‘Sit down,’ she said, but Olive refused.
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