Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  AT THE BEGINNING of January her parents took her away to a place near the beach at the island, a holiday spot the brothers used to go with their cousins, when they were little. They stayed for two weeks and camped behind the sand dunes that lay in a straight ridge between tents and surf. It was a holiday Olive would have usually loved but she felt as if she was in costume, playing a part. A girl in summer shorts, eating lollies and trying to bodysurf. Rolling down sand dunes, reading comics in the cool of the tent. All of it would have been fun if things had been different but they weren’t. They were real. Grace was dead and Jethro gone and none of the fun touched her because she was away from the place she wanted to be. Home. She worried that Jethro would come back while she was away, that she wouldn’t get to do her revenge.

  Archie made some friends with other children who had older brothers and sisters and cousins there, a family from Gippsland. One night they’d sat around the campfire, saying which was their favourite Peanuts character. When it was Olive’s turn, she said Lucy. The other girls laughed at her. They liked Patty, they said.

  Olive argued her point. Lucy was a good character, she said. Interesting. ‘And she’s a main girl.

  ‘She’s mean and has black hair,’ said one of the other girls.

  Olive wondered what they meant by that. Lucy was mean, but she was also funny and tough. Olive understood Lucy. Did that mean she was mean too?

  They talked about other things but Olive stayed at the fire after the others went to do their teeth, saying she wasn’t tired yet.

  During the holiday, other things happened too. She lost her skiffle board the first time she used it. She’d found it hard to balance, had kept falling off onto her bum, and had dropped it down near the water and run to get a drink of cordial. When she went back the board was gone, that green smiling face disappeared into the waves and sand forever.

  Mandy had almost drowned in the surf and Cleg had to swim out to get her. Rue had been hysterical. Down by the water’s edge, as the mothers comforted Rue, one of them had sat down on the sand, her heaving belly the biggest Olive had ever seen.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘The baby’s kicking.’ She looked at Olive. ‘Do you want to have a feel?’ Olive had shaken her head, saying no thank you. She did not want to touch that huge stretched stomach. She did not want to feel anything inside. Then the mother had leaned over and vomited. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and started to cover up the sick by sweeping sand over it. Olive was embarrassed.

  She got sunburned and her back peeled twice. They saw a dead shark and she ran—screaming—up the path to the campground, her mouth stretched wide as she cut through a hovering cloud of gnats near the carcass. At the end of the track she bent double and hacked and spat them out.

  They surfed on the lilos and made sure they were dry enough to sleep on at night. Put on zinc cream, lost and found and lost hats. Chafed from wet bathers and had jaffles for lunch and it all stretched into an eternity.

  And she had a crush—at least that’s what Sebastian had called it—on the brother of the family from Gippsland. The boy was older than her and his white hair sat up in a funny wave across his head. He was kind and smiled at everyone, even Olive. One day he gave her a bug catcher, saying he didn’t want it anymore. Did she want him to help her find something to put in it? She said she did, so they crawled around together but really all they could see were some ants, so they got some and put them in. After that she always tried to see where he was because she liked to know if he was nearby. Then Sebastian thought he’d worked out what was going on and he told the boy and teased her in front of all of the others, saying that she loved the boy with the white hair. The feelings had been strong but it wasn’t what Sebastian was saying it was. She wasn’t able to explain that it was about someone being kind to her.

  The last evening they’d been there they got ready to do the night fishing with a net. It was unrolled on the beach and the kids had to walk along the edge and carefully check if there were any rips. One of the other fathers had some twine and a sharp knife and he tied up anywhere there was a hole. If you saw a hole you had to stand next to it with your hand in the air and he’d come along and fix it. Olive found two holes and he put his hand on her shoulder and said well spotted. That had made her feel good. The net was the biggest that she had ever seen. It was three big steps wide and much longer than that. She had no idea how many steps long it might have been.

  When they were ready some of the adults went down either end and the children all spread out along the length of it. They hoisted the net and the feeling of it lifting was great and exciting. The men went in the end, where it was deeper, up to their waists. They weren’t scared of sharks. The mothers and children took the rest of the net and walked along, and no one said anything about sharks, they just angled the net straight out from the beach and walked, not even for very long. Olive hoped they’d catch a seahorse and that she would be allowed to keep it, or a baby dolphin. But they didn’t sweep up anything like that. There were fishes—so many different types, including flounders with weird eyes—and back on the shore they divided it all up fairly between the families. Everyone had to help carry the fish back to the campsite, to the eskies that were filled with ice.

  Then there were the caves. Down the beach and around a lip of land where a small river joined the beach, halfway up a cliff that pushed out into the line from shore to sea. One was easily visible from the beach and the other two were hidden. The one that you could see was a wide gash in the yellow rock, an opening that loomed even at a distance. As soon as she saw it she knew she wanted to climb up there and go inside.

  ‘Let’s go there,’ she said to Archie, who was bent over great strings of kelp pulling at the round almost-opaque green polyps they called seaweed eggs.

  ‘These are more like grapes than eggs,’ he said.

  ‘Archie. Let’s go up there.’ She pointed.

  He looked, hands on hips, considering the steep climb. They could do it, Olive assessed. They just needed to be careful.

  ‘Is it going to be dark in there?’ Archie said.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Olive. ‘Probably.’

  They started to go up the rocks, her leading the way. At first it wasn’t so very steep and they didn’t need their hands, just had to lean into the incline. Then it got harder and they began to reach and clutch at rocks and plants that were probably not going to hold them if they slipped. There was a small ledge about halfway and they sat for a few minutes. The rock beneath them was rough and in parts very hot from the sun. They looked back along the beach to where the families were, small as they moved around on the sand. Mandy running to the water and back with a bucket, Sebastian on his towel under the beach umbrella reading. The women with their shirts and hats and sunglasses.

  ‘We’re pretty high,’ Archie said.

  Olive looked out at the blue, the waves cresting white as they broke, and beyond that, a calmer field.

  ‘There would be sharks out there,’ she said, thinking of the film and how the massive fish had bitten people in half.

  ‘No way I’d go out that far,’ said Archie. ‘Not even with a surfboard.’

  ‘I would,’ she said. ‘I would go out, even just swimming.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘that’s a lie’, but she was getting up and moving on.

  They got to the mouth of the cave and walked a little way inside. There were burned stumps of candles near the walls, cigarette butts and empty bottles, the typical refuse of people in places where they shouldn’t be. Olive went in a bit further. There was a smell too, of animal, of damp fur and feathers, but that was all there was. No sound, no movement.

  ‘Come on, we can go further.’

  In they went and then down quite a way but because the opening was so wide there was plenty of light. At the end was a drop to a broad sandy interior. Olive calculated that if they jumped down they’d be able to get back up. There was a built-up area of rock, like steps. They could com
e back up that way. She jumped. It wasn’t far but as she hit the sand it was hard and jolted her teeth. It hurt. She stood up and told Archie to come down.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Archie disappeared. She called to him but he didn’t come back. She put her hand on the rocks to climb back up. Archie appeared.

  ‘Let’s go to one of those down there,’ he pointed. ‘One of the smaller ones.’

  She climbed out and they walked a little further along the same level and then down a little walkway cut into the cliff. Here were the other caves. This entrance was closer to the base of the cliff. They would have had to get on their hands and knees. She looked over her shoulder at the water. The waves were bigger and it seemed the tide was coming in.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ she said. ‘We might get stuck if we go inside.’

  They stood and watched the cave. In less than five minutes a surging messy cascade of water rushed inwards and was sucked back out through the hole. As the water rushed out of the cave Olive imagined she could see the open eyes of a small face being carried along in the water. Archie said let’s go, but she stood until all the water had gone to make sure.

  SCHOOL WAS STARTING and Jethro wasn’t back. Olive went with her mother to buy her textbooks and new uniform. She stood on a chair as her mother took up the hem, managing only a lukewarm battle about the length. She dutifully covered her books with contact, taking ages to get it right, and wrote her name inside the covers, inventing new ways to do fancy Os and Ls. She made space on her shelves for the thick maths book and the English one, the German one too. She packed away her childhood books into boxes: her pony books and English girls’ boarding school books, the child investigator books. All her Beatrix Potters. Heidi and The Guinness Book of Records.

  The Book of Lists and Unexplained: Things You Just Won’t Believe stayed on her bedside table and she read a few pages each night before going to sleep.

  She ran through her mental lists after she turned off her lamp and as she lay there her mind went to Jethro and the plan. He would come back, he had to. Jethro Sands was the reason she managed to perform all the things she needed to do. Getting ready for school, beginning Year 7. The unbearable routines were made tolerable only because she could feel her rage as it shifted inside of her, alive and hot and ready.

  The first day at school was nothing special. All the kids were the same and she’d come home disappointed. She had thought maybe she would find a new friend, but it didn’t matter. In class, more than one of her teachers told her off for staring out the window and they called on her to answer questions when they knew she hadn’t been listening. She was sure they did it on purpose and that made her angry too. The way they picked on her wasn’t fair.

  She said no to her mother when Peter rang.

  ‘Have you two had a fight then?’

  ‘I just don’t feel like it.’

  ‘If you could listen for the phone,’ her mother said, ‘maybe you could answer it sometimes. You know I like to lie down in the afternoon.’

  Olive said okay and went to do her homework.

  TIME HAD STOPPED and the moon had been full twice in a month. It was rainy and clouds skidded across grey-washed skies. The entire state had been hit with thunderstorms, weather that Rue called ‘biblical’ and Thistle ‘sublime’. It was the wettest it had been since 1910, since Lenore and Edgar arrived in their dray from Melbourne. The adults talked about how odd it was for March—or any month, they said—and all after a ten-year drought.

  William kept reminding everyone that it had only been last winter that the widespread frosts had killed the banksias, rupturing their cells across wide areas. And the previous month there’d been the big dust storm that shifted all the topsoil to Melbourne, and then, just the week after that, the fires where people had died. But Olive didn’t care about the drought or the weather, or the stupid Al Neenyo or whatever it was that William kept going on about. She was thinking about Jethro Sands. She was thinking about him all the time.

  As it rained Olive thought about the banks of sand pushed up by the wind against dead trees. She thought about the bunker at Soldier’s and the empty mine holes slowly filling with frothy brown water. If the bunker collapsed on its own her plan was definitely over.

  She rode her bike home from school down streets that smelled of wet leaves. At night in bed she listened to the cracks of thunder rolling across the sky. Sometimes she crept out at night and went to the park, drawn to the dark streets. She enjoyed being alone out on her bike in the night air, her raincoat flapping as she rode. On the few dry days she went to the silo and climbed to sit cross-legged on the waterlogged platform. Up high she found a cleaner type of air where she could steady her breathing. She listened for the determined mosquitoes and slapped at them, wiping their crushed bodies away, leaving a smear of blood on her jeans.

  THE LAND WAS becoming green from all the rain. Cleg had returned to the farm from the city. He had come to talk to Thistle and everything happened dramatically after lunch one day.

  Olive’s cousins had finished and left the table and it was only Olive who remained, struggling to eat her sandwich. Rue had told her she wasn’t allowed to leave until it had all gone, crusts included, but Olive wasn’t hungry. These days she was finding it hard to swallow anything.

  ‘There’s a woman speaking at a conference later this month,’ Cleg began. ‘She was a district officer in Bendigo and did the placements.’

  Thistle looked up. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Shall we go in the other room?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For privacy?’ Cleg gestured to Olive.

  ‘I don’t care about privacy. Olive can hear. Let them all hear.’

  Cleg moved his chair. ‘The woman from Bendigo, she’s written a book.’

  ‘What kind of book?’ Thistle put down her glass. ‘Where is the conference? Will the babies be there?’ Thistle’s voice was loud.

  God, Olive thought.

  ‘Tell me.’ Thistle was preparing to stand.

  Cleg went and sat next to her, and took her hand. She let him.

  ‘What is her name?’

  Cleg took out a note and checked it.

  ‘Wendy Davis.’

  ‘I remember. Short, round. Orange hair.’ Thistle dropped her chin and she placed her hands wide on top of the tablecloth in the position of a person playing a very forceful song on a piano.

  ‘She took one of my client’s babies and told her he died when he was alive. But yours she took home for herself.’

  God, Olive thought again.

  Thistle’s face had tipped forwards and Olive could see the roundness of the back of her neck. The Nash hump, the sisters called it. She hoped she wasn’t going to get one of those when she was old.

  ‘She kept my boy?’

  The white collar of Thistle’s dress was half in and half out and there was a smear of Vegemite on it. Olive could hear her cousins’ voices, carrying through the wire door at the front. The clock ticked.

  ‘The book is about her and him,’ Cleg went on. ‘There’s nothing in it about her time as a district officer, no mention about the ethics of taking a child for herself or of giving babies to friends and relatives. We know it’s the right woman and we know she had your boy. We’ve got hospital and agency records under FOI.’

  ‘I don’t need records, not FO anything.’ Thistle said. ‘The book tells about him? How can she write about him? how dare she. The mother is the one, who writes, about her baby, how can she write—how is it possible, that this person can steal— It’s my baby.’

  Cleg shook his head as if he didn’t understand the question.

  ‘Can we find him?’

  There was a piece of egg stuck to Thistle’s eyebrow.

  ‘I’m sorry, Thist, he didn’t survive,’ Cleg said. ‘His name was Steven. He died four years ago.’

  The crumb dropped to Thistle’s lap.

  ‘Well, that explains it. He w
as sick?’ She sounded as if she was at the drycleaners, asking why her coat wasn’t ready.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Cleg. ‘He killed himself.’

  Thistle was folding and rolling her napkin. She reached for the pewter ring and slid it on.

  ‘Where is this book? Do you have it with you?’ Her voice was bright, a playful reed melody but blown by a piper running out of air. It was a voice Olive had never heard emerge from this aunt. Rue was the one who forced cheer, not Thistle.

  Cleg went and got it. On the front was a photograph. Thistle held it up to them.

  ‘Look at her. The same eyes, smiling at the camera as if she were someone normal. A woman with nothing close to, to sadism, in her, standing in her lovely garden, in the garden. With her white shirt and brown slacks. I remember the hair, the same hair, cut short back then too. Look at her, that meaningless smile. Look.’

  Olive wondered if Thistle was about to cry.

  ‘It will be hard to read,’ Cleg said. ‘She’s trying to get people to feel sorry for her because her adopted boy didn’t turn out the way she expected. She talks about his asthma, his wheeziness. And how his “angelic” white hair belied a stubborn instinct. That he was “overly needy” and “pathetic”. Unfortunately, it will sell very well.’

  Thistle took a long time to get to her feet. Cleg helped her.

  ‘I hate to think of her smiling like that at my boy,’ she said at the door. ‘But thank you. Thank you for finding this out.’

  ‘I’m not sure we’ve done the right thing,’ Cleg said once Thistle had left. Olive sat very still. ‘Surely not knowing must be worse than hearing even the most terrible news?’ He looked at her. ‘Surely?’