Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  Olive nodded and Rue came in.

  ‘What have you said to her now?’

  ‘I found out what she asked me to, Rue. That is all.’

  Rue stacked plates, sniffing, until Cleg told her she should get a tissue.

  ‘I’ve got one,’ she howled. ‘It’s in my sleeve.’

  She went back into the kitchen and Olive finally put down the crust she’d been holding and slid back in her chair.

  OLIVE WOKE AND listened. Surely it was only a minute after she’d turned the light out. The room was lit from outside and she went to the window. It was still raining and the sky had a wild maroon overlay filtered across it, the clouds electric and full. Paler shapes hung like lanterns, the sheep huddled against the rain. Again and again sheet lightning illuminated the paddocks in a sweeping flood. Before she could think to count for the clap, before the world returned to black, she saw a figure lurching across the grass. She turned away from the window and the next flash of light showed that Mandy wasn’t in her bed.

  Olive found her in the hallway, near the kitchen door, walking but still asleep. She took her back to bed and put the covers over her. She went to her own bed and sat wondering what she should do. She didn’t know so she got in, right under the covers. The sky boomed. She was unsure. She didn’t want to be a dibber-dobber like Mandy. Thistle was a woman of independent inclinations. Finally, though, she decided. She went out into the hallway and opened Rue and William’s door. Rue was quickly awake, turning on the bedside lamp asking what was wrong. Olive told her that Thistle was outside in the rain.

  Rue pushed William. ‘Wake up.’

  ‘I’m awake. I’ll go.’

  He went down the hall and pulled on his boots at the door, as well as his hat and raincoat. Rue came forwards with a torch and Bruce arrived in his pyjamas. They waited while he too got his shoes and a coat, then he and William went out into the night, towards the dam.

  ON THE FAR side of the dam, Thistle sat on the edge, puffing. She should have brought some sweeties—Rue had some hidden in the pantry, on the high shelf behind the big canister of rice—but it was too late to go back now. The risk of meeting sisters in the night, one mordant the other pernicious, no. Too late now. Besides, the sugar gave her reflux, another thing she’d had to abide far too long.

  There was nothing left for her. He hadn’t come, hadn’t come. They thought they were dulling her into submission with their doses of opium, sassafras and treacle. Thinking them disguised with modern-day names, but she knew. They were treating nothing. Her lability was manufactured by circumstance. Her mind, there was nothing wrong with it. They thought she was exzentrisch at best, übergeschnappt at worst but she wasn’t, she wasn’t. She was from a family of liars and secret makers but she had been a truth-teller and she should have used a real dagger not just tried to speak one.

  ‘We can be so hurtful to each other.’ She spoke the words to the night and took off her slippers. The little barbs that prick and pull at another’s skin. How they settle into the flesh and start to rust over time, especially with the swill foaming over them. Once this happens, even a person’s breath becomes toxic. You can breathe in and out and not utter a word but those hooks have done their damage. The poison seeps in and everything becomes ruined. ‘So unkind.’

  There was no rush, plenty of time now.

  The level was lower than usual but it didn’t matter. That thinning was not important here. She had failed the young girl, the one she used to be. She had failed her boy too but she could taste change and it subsumed the bitterness and became golden on her tongue.

  Here she was. She looked up to the sky. He was coming, on the clouds! Everyone would see him, including those who took him. A white horse, a rider. The conqueror. Then the sixth, an earthquake. The sun already gone, the night around her coarse and black.

  She took off her first skin, dropped the wet cardigan. The joints in her shoulders rotated and she could hear their crepitus. She was not so old but her teeth were cracking and food would get caught. Sometimes she suffered the most dreadful toothache. The wet was a good thing she supposed, for the farmer, but it had been an interminable wait and she was relieved of everything except her pain. She struggled to take off her second skin but her arm caught in the sleeve of the cotton nightie and she decided there was no point removing it. What had she been thinking? That her final gesture would include the revelation of her bloated body to men? There was more dignity in being found clothed.

  All that was left to her now was to go.

  How poor are those that have not patience.

  She turned an ear heavenwards and listened for the trumpets. They would scale across the sky with brassy flourishes but there were no swoops or moans. Not anymore. The water was quickly at her waist. She didn’t look to see if there was a moon but no matter, its pale pull had never affected her even when the colour of blood. She was too smart for madness and entirely unknown to all. That person who collected bird cards and completed jigsaw puzzles was just her outer shape. Her real self was a sensualist, sleeping with sheets twisted around her body, a girl who had seen the flashes in the sky too, their bright vertical tails, just once she’d seen them.

  Pushing forwards the water came to her chest, a sea of glass mixed with fire. She raised heavy arms and let out her hair, dropping the pins into the dam where they spiralled into the oily depths. She spread her limbs and the dam started its work. Her ears filled and it came across her eyes. She remembered the hospital room, her own strong self in the bed, what a girl she’d been. Magnificent. She had felt her strength deep in her bones. She wasn’t going to let them take him. People hadn’t been happy but she didn’t care, did not care. She’d hidden it until it was too late for her mother to do anything. Had got the baby started under her loose dresses and managed to grow him before anyone noticed but still she’d tried, the old bitch. Wanted to make him slip out of her with a long walk on a hot day and after that laxatives and finally a bucket of cold water thrown over from behind, but nothing had made her clever foetus loosen its grip.

  She told Gladys she didn’t know who the father was.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know? There was more than one?’

  She had enjoyed seeing that look on her mother’s face, as if she had her fingers on a switch turning it this way and that, making her mother’s knowingness dim up, dim down, and out.

  In the hospital, things were different. While she didn’t care about their talk of moral deficits and turpitude, in the end powerful men and women held her down and gave her needles and, while she was sure she didn’t sign any papers, in the end in the end she returned home alone. Forever after that in her imaginings her baby remained at the hospital. Perpetually there as if stuck behind glass, swaddled and mute in a distant nursery down a sterile run of corridors. Silent and stopped. Fixed like a butterfly on a pin. In the end, she’d had no choice but go home, go home.

  The noise registered, minor tremors as if from far away. In the cold dam her arms drew her downwards and her final thought was one of a parade of babies trying to find their way back to their mothers, endless numbers of them moving like small clouds across skies, following roads, through cities and over country pathways. The men went into the dam but it took them too long to find her and by the time they hauled her out nothing could spoil her dark rapture.

  •

  Olive refused to go back to bed and Rue sat with her while the others went to make phone calls.

  ‘Poor vulner bilis,’ Cleg said.

  ‘Her clothes must have pulled her under,’ Rue said, crying. Audra cried too.

  They found a note, a piece of paper that had, down at the bottom in tiny handwriting: Olive. Don’t let any quid nuncs take your baby away.

  Olive couldn’t stop sobbing and it was Cleg who finally pulled her onto his knee and bear-hugged her until she calmed. No one would answer her question about Thistle’s soul and what would happen to it. She asked and she asked but eventually she stopped and became still.r />
  •

  Before they left the next day Olive leaned her cheek against the peppercorn tree. She put her arms around its girth and listened to the beat that came from deep below. The message was that she was right to get revenge, that the Bible said so. It was her duty, for her sister, for Grace. Thistle had said not to let them be taken. It was the right thing to do.

  How poor are those who don’t have any patience.

  That’s what Thistle always said but she, Olive, had patience. She was very good at it. She would wait as long as she had to for Jethro to come back.

  OLIVE WAS CONFUSED about how someone could do a suicide. How a person could destroy themselves, especially someone who talked so often about life the way Thistle had. But neither parent would talk to her about it so Olive read her books and lingered once more over the spontaneous combustion section, studying the stockinged legs in front of open fires, half-bodies propped in armchairs, women who’d been reading, knitting or dozing before bursting into flames, a pinpointed conflagration that left the rest of the rooms untouched. Had these women’s lives been so unbearable that they simply exploded out of sadness? Had they sat in chairs in front of fires, sewing buttons for so long with their insides heated by such despair and anger that their bodies shuddered one final time and burst into flames? Maybe the same had happened to Thistle.

  She thought about the milk bar family. She had been too young to remember any of them properly. The story had been that one of them, the middle son, had made a fist and looked inside it. He saw a demon and told someone at school and then a week later the whole family died. Then there was Peter’s story of the boy in his old town who was found hanged in a tree, from a skipping rope, in his back garden. Olive had been surprised to learn that children really could die. That something so bad could happen to them like that.

  Olive asked her father if she could stay up to watch Tales of the Unexpected and he said yes. There’d been several phone calls during the evening. Audra had sat on the stool in the hallway for more than an hour, first talking to Rue, listening mostly and saying, ‘mmm, I know’ and ‘yairs’, and talking about quiches and scones and when the funeral might be. Then they talked about the weather. The only thing they didn’t talk about was their sister and how she was dead.

  After that, Mavis Sands had rung and Olive heard Audra agree that it was very sad, and after that she talked again about funeral food. Olive sat up on the couch when her mother said something about Jethro but around the time of the click of her mother’s lighter and the wafting smell of menthols, she fell back on the couch. In a few more minutes she was asleep, even before Tales of the Unexpected had started.

  THE DAY BEFORE Thistle’s funeral Peter came over.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he said at the front door. ‘I’ve been calling you.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘But when I ring your mum always says you’re not at home.’ He held up a present. ‘Sorry about your aunty. I got you this.’

  They went and sat on the back step. The gift was wrapped badly in Christmas paper, the corners folded and refolded where he’d tried to get them even.

  ‘I didn’t get you one.’

  ‘That’s okay. My mum got it ages ago, when she was doing the shopping. I kept forgetting to give it to you.’

  She ripped the paper open and inside were a sketchpad and three bottles of ink and an old-fashioned pen. There was a card which said To Ollie from Pete around the printed greeting.

  ‘Your writing is still like a spider’s.’ She put the present on the step beside her.

  He was wiping his hands up and down his legs and saying he got a magic set for Christmas.

  ‘Magic is for kids,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a professional one.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  When they were younger and on the seesaw at the park, Peter would sit at the bottom and she would be up the top, her legs gripping the wooden plank to stop herself sliding. She felt like that now.

  ‘I don’t know how she could do that.’ She pulled at a little weed that pushed up between a crack in the steps.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know why but I don’t understand how. I would never want to die.’

  ‘What about being buried inside the tree? What about that?’

  ‘That’s for when I’m very old and I die from age.’ She plucked the slender green shoot from the ground.

  Peter was lifting his wrist to his ear. Shook it, and listened again.

  ‘I really think it’s broken,’ he said. ‘It keeps stopping, since Ganger’s.’

  ‘Give us a look.’

  He hesitated, then took his watch off and passed it to her.

  ‘I’m still going to do it,’ she said. ‘The plan. He’ll come back eventually, he has to.’

  ‘I don’t get why Jethro Sands would even put your sister into the dam.’

  ‘That’s what I have to find out. I’m going to make him confess and then do the revenge. My detectivising will get the last piece of the mystery. Why he did it.’

  ‘That’s not a word.’ He put his head on his knees, looking at the watch in her hands.

  ‘Anyway, I need your help.’

  ‘I told you, you can’t just decide, Ollie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well…’ He swallowed. ‘I was going to tell you anyway.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘It’s about the group pressure.’

  ‘You told your mum.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ But he wouldn’t look at her. ‘Are you serious about it?’

  ‘Say yes.’

  ‘It’s okay for you—you just do things without thinking.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Like last month when you ran into the middle of the oval during the dust storm when everyone was freaking out, even that teacher? She was shouting about the grasshoppers and saying it was the end and you came back and your face was just covered, all red, and you were laughing.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And when you drank the milk? With tomato sauce, chocolate sauce and chilli powder. And what was it…’

  ‘Soy sauce.’

  ‘You always pick dare, never truth. It’s like you don’t care if something is dangerous.’ He looked at her through his hair. ‘It’s like…’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve got to go.’ He sawed his arm across his eyes and stood up. ‘I just wanted to give you the present.’

  She passed the watch back to him and he strapped it to his wrist.

  ‘Maybe it’ll be okay.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s stuffed.’

  They walked around to the side of the house and he picked up his bike. ‘I don’t think you’re psychic or whatever they call it, not even a little bit. Maybe you’re a good guesser but only sometimes. You don’t know what people are thinking, you never guess what I’m thinking. I dunno, I can’t explain it properly.’ He touched his bell hammer.

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘And it’s normal to get scared. My dad said he does all the time when he sees it, when people die. If they get squashed by tractors or drunk in their cars, he said it breaks the families and the mothers cry and not just them, the kids cry and the fathers, they cry all the time. He goes to say sorry, you know, he goes back to see how they are, to ask if he can cut their grass or wash their car and they’re still crying and it can be weeks after even, all of them crying, all the time.’

  ‘My family’s not like that,’ Olive said. ‘No one cries in my house.’

  Peter got on his bike. ‘I used to want to be in the police but I think I’m changing my mind. It sounds too sad.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s just this once and I won’t ever ask you to help me again. It’s important, more than a watch or some family your dad’s met because of his work. I’m your friend.’

  He readied the pedal.

  ‘Your best friend.’ Peter’s face stayed closed, his eyes on the hydrangeas.

&nb
sp; ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t listen. You say one thing but you do the opposite, like a hypo-…hypocritical. And when people want to say “no” you don’t let them. You always have to be the boss and everyone always has to do what you want. Sebastian got sick of it too.’ He got onto the seat, one leg planted. ‘I feel sorry for those families,’ he said and rode away.

  ‘I got sick of Sebastian first,’ she shouted after him.

  She sat on the verandah steps. She stretched her legs in front of her, her knees knobbled and brown, the four pink gravel scars. She cleaned out the gunk between her toes and went into the house. In the hallway, she put both palms on the wall and felt the stretching within.

  At the phone, she opened her mother’s teledex to S. The first time it was Mrs Sands and she hung up. She waited ten minutes and rang again. That time it was John, his voice quiet on the phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi,’ she said and hung up.

  Half an hour later, she rang again.

  ‘Hello?’

  Bingo.

  ‘Is Mr Wall there?’ she said.

  ‘Listen, bitch, I know that one. I know who you are and I’m going to get you. I don’t care if you’re a girl.’

  She heavy-breathed into the phone but Gary Sands made his goofy laugh, puffy and light.

  ‘Wanna root?’ he said.

  ‘Tell your brother I’m going to get him back as well as you. For Grace and for other things.’

  ‘Who’s Grace? Is that your cousin, that girl?’

  She hung up. He didn’t even know who Grace was.

  EARLY IN THE morning it was dry and there was hope for the day, that the burial hole wouldn’t be sodden, its bottom turning to mud. They were gathered at Olive’s house, her cousins sitting glumly in the lounge room because Rue had told them not to run around, to just sit still and be quiet. Olive couldn’t remember the last time they had been at her place. They sat and looked at each other with discomfort.