‘You must tell me what’s wrong.’
Her mother’s lipstick was fresh and Olive found herself falling into that red patch. The white teeth, lips moving without meaning. The door opened and it was Rue.
‘You have to talk to her,’ Rue said. She shut the door.
Audra drew her hands into a ball in her lap. There were words coming but they were without force. It was as if her mother was whispering to herself, trying to make herself believe something. She put her hands to her brow, fingers shaking. She couldn’t believe it. Her mother’s hands were shaking. She was going to tell her now. Tell her mother that it was Jethro Sands who did it.
‘Mum, when Aster drowned, it was at the dam.’
Her mother gave the tiniest nod.
‘It was Jethro Sands who put her in the water.’
She waited for her mother’s face to change. To understand.
‘No, Olive.’
‘It was.’
‘Have you remembered something?’
‘No, but I worked it out. That’s what happened.’
Her mother closed her eyes and now her face was changing. She looked like the mother of Jesus.
‘Oh,’ Audra said, and reached for one of Olive’s hands which was fisted and damp against her hip. Olive coughed twice and clapped both hands over her mouth. She bent forwards with a chymic lurch and spattered herself and her mother, the bed and the floor. Audra called for Rue, for a towel, and Olive sat down and wiped at the puddle of vomit on the carpet. Rue came running. Towels and a wet cloth were produced.
‘Have you been drinking?’ Audra leaned forwards and sniffed at her daughter.
Olive looked at her aunt, who was behind Audra, but Rue put a finger to her lips and closed the door.
NEW ENERGY HAD arrived and it moved through her in a wave. Her brain was spinning fast, like a flat dish on top of a rod in a circus. When she thought about Jethro her stomach clenched. His arms were so big around the top muscle part. He would be very strong. To get her revenge she had to be smarter than him because she definitely couldn’t beat him in a fight, she was certain about that.
Her world had split when Gary Sands had done what he did to Grace. When he did what Jethro had told him to do.
This was the first truth about Jethro Sands.
He had told Gary to stomp Grace. He had held his neck and given him the signal and although it was something she was certain of at the same time she realised it was a slippery kind of knowing, a knowing that came from feeling. The second truth, the new truth, was that Jethro Sands had put Aster in the water. She had to get him back for that, as well as for Grace.
In her note-book she made a list:
1. Guns (too hard, don’t now how)
2. Stabbing—bit messy
3. Crash into him with car
4. Make his car crash with snake (alive OR dead)/big rock from overpass
5. Posion from shed
6. Quicksand?
7. Drug him with the pills
8. Bury???????
She wondered how to make quicksand. Maybe she could do it at the golf club, in one of the sand pits there. Or anonymous notes and phone calls to make him nervous and not sleep. A person could die if they didn’t sleep, she thought. Or she could try to find a snake, kill it and hang it on his car. Like a threat. She closed her eyes. She knew she couldn’t kill a snake. She had the feeling the answer was somewhere very close. Pits that opened up under trees and swallowed boys. Tunnels under roads. Concrete pipes. Holes in sand. Rabbit tunnels collapsing.
She wandered the house and waited. When it slid into place it was perfect. She went to the phone and called Peter.
‘Pete?’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I was there too.’
‘What?’
‘My sister. It was at the dam.’ She wiped her face with her hands. ‘I was there and so was Sebastian, and—get this—so was Jethro Sands. I think he murdered her and I blanked it out from being too upset.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’ He was making noises with his mouth. ‘What are you eating?’
‘Ice cream.’ He smacked his lips. ‘Choc-mint chip.’
‘I need your help.’
The spoon-scraping noise stopped.
‘I’m going to kill him, but in a way that no one knows it’s us. It will be the most perfect revenge.’
The spoon clanged into the bowl. He took ages to reply. Sometimes she had to be very patient with Peter.
‘Who?’
‘Jethro Sands.’
He groaned. ‘Don’t be crazy.’
‘He drowned my sister.’ She paused. ‘He did it and no one has cared anything about it.’ She twisted the cord of the telephone around her index finger. It fitted perfectly. ‘Her put her in the dam. Listen. No one will suspect kids. I’m still working it out but you have to help me.’
‘I’m not sure, Ol. Hey, you sound weird.’
‘I got drunk but I have to go,’ she said. ‘Oh, one more thing. What did your dad say again?’
‘About what?’
‘About panicking. Remember?’
She could hear him breathing. She knew he didn’t want to say but he was powerless against her.
‘He said—’ Peter swallowed ‘—he said that’s what people do and then they make mistakes.’
‘Alright. Write down anything else he’s said. For our plan.’
‘He said they don’t know what they’re doing and it’s best to take things slowly no matter what. Even if things go wrong, just stick to the plan. That’s what he also said.’
‘Okay, thanks. I have to go now. Bye.’
She hung up the phone and sat on the little stool in the hallway. She knew how she was going to do it. She was going to make Jethro go in the bunker at Soldier’s and trap him in there, make it collapse.
She was going to bury Jethro Sands alive.
SHE NEEDED A weapon. Jethro Sands would definitely have a knife or a gun. She went to the shed, where her grandfather’s woodworking tools were. She searched through drawers and stood on her toes to try to see on top of shelves, reaching up with patting hands. She was looking for something to stand on when she heard a noise outside and went over to the window. Archie was there, crouching so no one would see him. She tapped and he looked up. Disappointment spread across his face.
He came in.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Nothing.’ She opened an old closet. ‘Why are you spying on me?’
‘Wasn’t,’ he said. He went to the far wall where the special stone-cutting machine sat, an old army tent covering it, its white canvas marked with rust and old paint rings. ‘Mandy’s sick,’ he said. ‘Mum’s been looking in her book—you know, the one with the pictures. She thinks it might be epi-…ep-…something wrong with her brain. I said, “We already know she’s got something wrong with her brain,” and my mum started crying and your mum took me to the kitchen and said I was a bad boy.’ He kicked a box. ‘I don’t like your mum, she’s really mean.’
‘No, she’s not,’ said Olive. She went to Archie and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘She’s sad.’ She turned away to keep looking.
‘Hey,’ said Archie behind her. ‘Look at this.’ He was holding up a gigantic knife in a leather holder that closed with a press stud. The leather was brown and the knife was curved, the handle long.
‘Give it,’ she said. ‘I was looking for that.’
‘What for?’ said Archie.
Olive stood in front of her cousin. She needed help and maybe it had to be him.
‘It’s something I have to do but I’ll tell you later. I’m going to need your help but don’t say anything, not even to Sebastian.’ She smiled. ‘Promise.’
Archie was pleased. He promised.
‘Our first secret together,’ she said.
Archie raised a clenched fist up near his ear and then the other with fingers crossed.
•
When she was five she asked to sit in the
shed with her grandad Fletcher, in the corner where he had set up his knife-making table. He worked in there on Sundays. ‘Wood days,’ he called them.
She had been hoping for it forever and finally Rue said yes and she would sit with him as he carved the offcuts and their heads would bend together on those happy afternoons, the filaments from the shavings moving in the air like tiny stars. He only carved for her, he said, and explained the different types of woods, their relative hardness, their grains, their hearts.
‘Look at this one, little girl,’ he said. ‘A type of dryland acacia but not as good as the ironwood.’ He put it on the bench and took another. She didn’t understand, but she was old enough to enjoy how the wood felt in her hands, to look forward to the smell as she studied the tools and repeated their names. The baby was not old enough to be in there and she was glad. The baby cried all the time.
The wood-words were like fairytales, strong magic lodged in things called gidgee, fiddleback and beeswing. These words helped form the beauty of the knives but it wasn’t just about the handles, Fletcher told her. It was about how the handle accepted the blade, the iron taken into the wood. Two substances meeting in a join that created something new.
‘Strength and purpose,’ he said.
The olivewood was one of the hardest woods on earth and it was from the Bible. Olive sat up straight on her chair when she heard that. She was God’s favourite wood?
Her grandfather explained. The dove that went from the ark in one of the stories brought back a broken bit of olive branch. It meant that the water was pulling back, that there was land out there, somewhere to be found. It meant that God was no longer angry. Jesus prayed under an olive tree before he died and he died on a cross made from olivewood. Grandad Fletcher said ‘tied to’ but Thistle had told her the truth. She said ‘nailed to’ and it had made Olive stare at the steel nails on the bench in the workshop for a long while.
Olive trees were also called the Sacred Tree, the Peace Tree, the Tree of Light. She loved all those names but especially the last one. She thought about her tree, the peppercorn, but no matter how she stretched her imagination she could never think of that one as anything but a tree of darkness.
And then there were the gemstones, a collection Grandad Fletcher had gathered since he was a boy. Milky ones, heavy in her hands. Smooth jade. Spiky purple amethyst.
‘Stones can bruise,’ he had told her and she hadn’t believed him. She said that he was trying to trick her.
‘No, little girl. They can. Alabaster especially.’ He showed her a piece that had a discoloration. ‘And this one.’ A veined green stone, greasy and vitreous. He placed it in her hand. She weighed it in her palm the way she’d seen him do it.
‘Serpent rock.’
‘But this is a bruise.’ She held out an arm. She always had haematomas, as Rue called them. How could it be that such a tough wild girl could bruise so easily? her aunt had wondered.
‘They call it a bruise,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’s the same thing.’
‘But it’s not the same,’ said Olive.
‘If you say so, girl.’
‘I do say so.’ She gave back the stone.
‘You keep that one. Green stone for a tough girl. Keep it so you can remember me.’
‘Are you going away?’
‘Not anytime soon.’
When Fletcher was dying he lay rigid and sweating on his bed, reciting poetry and relaxing only when someone brought him a particular lacquered box. He opened it and one by one took out the blades, his precious beauties. He talked to each, gave it a final touch, a loving swipe of the finger, then endowed it to a chosen family member.
‘No more trailing serpent’s tooth to fear
Let him who by the dragon’s fang hath bled,
On the dire wound serpentine powder spread,
And in the stone his sure reliance place,
For wounds inflicted by the reptile race!’
The sons were embarrassed and without comprehension. It was Rue who shooed them out and brought wet face washers and sips of cool lemon water to her father-in-law. For her trouble, she was given a medium-sized kitchen knife and Audra a neat nail one, for doing her cuticles. Later, no one would remember which one Thistle got.
‘Probably a standard dagger,’ Cleg said.
The sons were given a couple of hunting knives each. Bruce put his down on the kitchen table but William hefted and balanced his in turn across a finger, checking their lines before sliding them into his belt. He blew his nose once and then set off to check the perimeters for the rest of the afternoon. Olive got the small knife with the olivewood handle. She was a bit older by then and it made her feel special.
Just before Fletcher died, he slid into delirium and talked about ‘polishing’ and ‘fine grits’ and ‘Danish oil’. The children weren’t allowed to see him as he became more agitated, and the end came with him shouting, ‘BURL!’ at the wardrobe.
Olive pushed the knife from the shed into the back of her shorts like a mugger on a police show and went to the house. In the sunroom, she took it out and sat, thinking about the sand pits at the golf club. It could be a back-up plan. She swung her legs around and there was a noise from under the couch. It was Mandy Milk.
‘What have you got there?’
‘Nothing.’ Mandy pulled a cushion in front of whatever it was. Olive pulled it from her. It was the ouija board.
‘Where’d you get it?’
Mandy shook her head.
‘You shouldn’t play with it. Come out.’ She reached under the sofa and grabbed it. ‘Come on, where’s the thing?’
Mandy handed her the planchette.
‘How long have you been playing with it?’
Mandy looked up at her, her tongue pushed into the gap where a tooth was loose. She moved it in and out.
‘You can’t play it by yourself anyway,’ said Olive. ‘It doesn’t work just with one.’
‘It does,’ Mandy said.
‘No, it can’t.’
‘I play with Mr Cracker.’
Olive squatted down beside her cousin.
‘What’s that on your arm? Those marks?’
Mandy said they were nothing. Mr Cracker said they were secret.
‘You should show your mother.’
Mandy shook her head.
‘You should. Go on.’ Olive went and put the board and planchette under her mattress and lay down on the bed. She had her weapon and she had her plan. She would get him and win. She was a genius, a mastermind, a smart girl the likes of which the world had never known before. Clever and brave and sure.
LITTLE GODS
IT WAS A chance comment that Mrs Sands made at the New Year’s Eve party that let Olive know everything was over. They were at the golf club and the night was stinking hot. Mr Spooner was making shandies and serving lemonade and sweet wine at the bar. Tables were arranged outside with umbrellas open for shade, but they were mostly empty as people formed gendered groups, crowding around the tinny evaporative cooler. The women pulled at their necklines and the men stood with red faces and blew their cheeks and licked beer foam from their top lips and talked about the expected cool change of thirty-five that was overdue.
Raffle prizes were displayed on trestle tables set up under the felt pennants strung along the wood-panelled wall. Mr Spooner wore a toga and was meant to be from old Rome but looked embarrassed, Olive thought. Thistle was dressed as Cleopatra and sat on her own, away from the crowd. She had her hair coiled into loops on her head and a snake bracelet winding up her arm.
Olive stood near her mother holding a plastic cup between her teeth like a pig’s snout and her mother told her not to do it, that she looked silly. Jethro’s mother was there too and she was showing off. First about Snooky with her dux award, and then about Jethro getting a job with a carpenter, in the city. He was staying with Mr Sands’s brother, the younger one, and Olive, hearing this, had blinked back strange tears. She’d listened to how Jethro’s car had boiled
over like a kettle on the trip up to the city, how he’d got three quotations for repairs, how they all said it was the head gasket and would cost almost a thousand dollars.
‘I don’t think he’ll be back anytime soon,’ Mrs Sands had said.
She started to greet another person and Olive and her mother were released to the crowd. Audra had gone over to where Rue was sitting with an intense look on her face, looking up at Len Sands, the butcher. Olive went and sat in the corner, itchy in the frock Rue had told her she had to put on. Her sandals rubbed because they were a bit small and she sat there and hated everyone. She hated Mandy who was excited about the sparklers and walking around in her Jeannie costume with a new puppet—Little Red Riding Hood. She hated Archie who was dressed as a cowboy, standing at the food table with its bowls of chips, kabana and cubed cheese. He was pipetting Passiona drops a few at a time into his mouth with a straw and eating handfuls of food.
Olive remembered being a girl who was excited about sparklers. She remembered being a girl who didn’t care what people thought. Someone who just wanted to practise cartwheels outside on the lawn. A girl who, when she came across a bowl of Cheezels, would stand there and eat with commitment until they were gone. She didn’t care that adults might tell her off, insist that it was polite to share, or call her from the front door telling her it was time to come in, that they had something very important to talk to her about. She would keep turning on the grass until she could do it perfectly or stand by a table and eat Cheezels in a deeply meditative state until there were none left in the bowl.
She was almost asleep on her chair when Rue came and shook her arm, telling her to come on, come on, it was almost time. She let herself be shepherded outside by her aunt and opened her hand for the sparkler. She stood with the other children as they counted down from ten. She waved the stick in the air obediently until it guttered. Then she watched the other fireworks. The Jumping Jacks, Catherine wheels and rockets. Children were asking for another sparkler, their faces under-lit with white light but there was no joy in any of it for her. She went back inside to sit and wait until they went home. Her mother passed by and said they were going soon and she knew it was a lie, one thousand per cent. Rue told her to cheer up. It was a new year. Thistle said that she should think of her resolution and that it was a good idea to make it something achievable. She knew, from experience, how important that was. There was only one resolution she cared about though. Getting Jethro. But he had left town and there was nothing she could do about it.
Little Gods Page 21