Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  She thought back to herself only a few hours ago. She’d been like that girl doing cartwheels just before her parents told her something very sad. She went to the window and the moon was gone, the horizon a pale line. To see that pink streak in the sky was painful. She wanted to go outside, to the tree, and see how the branches looked like big claws against the brightening sky. If she went there and climbed she could think about how it was that the places and people that were meant to make you safe could make you feel so wobbly. How it was that you could believe one thing about yourself but for the truth to be completely the opposite.

  ‘I wish I was a girl again,’ she whispered.

  She stood at the window, listening to Mandy breathe.

  IT WAS DAWN as she walked past the tree. She went to the dam and waded in because this was the place Thistle had gone when she was hurting, into the cold and wet. She waded out and lay on her back and let herself drift to the middle.

  If she tried would it hurt? Her clothes would suck the water in and become heavy and pull her down. The pondweed would cover her face as she sank but she would make sure to keep her eyes wide so she could reach for the open white spot. If she kept her ears open too she would hear the sound effects, a chortling blend of magpie and child. She would close her eyes and search for something and, if she found it, it would make her free. But she wasn’t doing that. She wasn’t doing anything like that. She was floating on her back, imagining.

  But William had been up unable to sleep. Standing outside the back door, he’d seen her walk across the paddock and followed, keeping at a distance. When he saw her go in he sprinted to the dam, his legs and arms pumping. She felt the vibrations of his flat racing dive and lifted her head to see him swimming towards her, his mouth gaping. He pulled her out and put her on the edge. His tree-trunk legs with the hairs on them were near her face and he was only wearing his underpants which were wet too.

  ‘No, girl, no,’ he said, breathing hard.

  •

  Rue made her get undressed and she sat in the kitchen with a blanket around her while her aunt called her mother and then went and found some dry clothes. Rue said very little and when Audra and Bruce arrived there was a short, brisk conversation about why she was there in the first place. They hadn’t even realised she wasn’t in her own bed until Rue’s phone call. They decided to take her to the hospital.

  ‘But I’m okay,’ Olive said.

  ‘You’re not,’ said Rue, lifting Olive’s chin. ‘Better for them to check you over. You might feel fine in your body, but…’

  Olive said she was definitely fine in her body, whatever that meant. She said she’d been sleepwalking but she let them take her. She had no choice but to lie on the back seat of the car with her head on her mother’s lap. Even though Audra was angry and looking out the window rather than downwards, Olive felt the sensation of the hard muscles in her mother’s thighs lengthening under her neck.

  She knew what it was now. What she’d been missing all along.

  She was a girl without her mother’s love.

  Her father said something and Audra leaned forwards.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said it’s enough now.’

  Audra looked out the window. ‘She seemed alright.’

  Olive didn’t understand who they were talking about, but one of her mother’s hands crept into her hair and it was not unpleasant. She lay limp, eyes shut so she wouldn’t see her mother. She wanted to tell them she hadn’t tried to do a suicide but that would make her mother’s hand stop so she kept quiet.

  The doctor had wild eyebrows and a purple nose which he put too close to her face. He checked her ears and throat. He listened to her chest and pronounced her fine.

  ‘Why did you go for a swim so early in the morning?’

  ‘She won’t tell anyone what’s wrong.’ Audra smoothed her skirt down the sides of her legs. ‘My sister tried to find out and if Rue can’t get anything out of her, well…’

  ‘Can you tell me?’ The doctor kept looking at Olive.

  ‘I was hot.’

  The doctor waited but she kept herself hard.

  ‘Keep an eye on her,’ he said, turning to Bruce. ‘It’s not usually something that children attempt, but they can.’ The doctor wrote something on a pad.

  During the drive home, Olive found her reflection in the window. She was a blob in the glass, her features almost gone. The lines on the road were flat like her. The wire fences at the swimming pool, the oval, the two schools, some connecting others running alongside each other and never meeting. Her mother sitting in the front seat now and her father’s profile occasionally showing as he looked across at the back of his wife’s smooth head. All flat. All finished. Gone.

  THE BOYS SAT swinging their legs in the tree.

  ‘I wonder if it was on purpose,’ Sebastian said, picking at the rubber strip coming off along the edge of his runner.

  Archie was across from him.

  ‘She wouldn’t go for a swim with her clothes on,’ Sebastian added. ‘That bit, I don’t know. So maybe she was trying to—to—’

  Archie leaned out of the tree and let his dribble go down a bit. He sucked it back up and let it lengthen again.

  ‘I wonder if Jethro did something to her in the tunnel.’

  ‘How could you get a saddle up a tree?’ Archie said, after recalling his spit three more times.

  Sebastian told his brother it was a stupid idea and to forget it but Archie said it was Olive’s idea first.

  ‘She said Snooky had one up her tree and she said she was going to get one too. At her house. In the back.’

  Sebastian ripped at his runner some more. He remembered now. It had been her idea, one in a series of things she kept going on about. The tapping code, then the saddle up a tree, and after that it was the book with people burning in their houses. And once she’d even been sure there was a secret room at Serpentine and he’d had to help her look for hours until exhausted, yet unwilling to admit there wasn’t, she’d had a tantrum and thrown a small key at him.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, go ask Dad,’ he said to his brother.

  ‘Pffft,’ said Archie. ‘Dad doesn’t care. You always say you don’t know. You never help me.’

  Sebastian swung at him but his brother was already shimmying down the tree and swinging to the ground, to run back to the house with his hair flopping long as he ran up the serrated driveway.

  HER MOTHER WAS sitting in the chair beside the bed, dozing with an orange in her hand. Her chin had dropped to show between her lips a sliver of pearly teeth. The skin on the backs of her hands was translucent, shades of lavender and grey, and her nails were curved and polished with a frosted pink. Her shirt was open at the neck to the second button and the hollow at her throat shaded, like a bruise. Olive could see the ropy tendons at the side of her mother’s neck, how the bones of her clavicle were sharp against her skin and framed a tiny pump of movement.

  Olive was caught in those few seconds as dust motes float suspended in nothingness. She half closed her eyes and continued to study her mother and that’s when the noise began. She could see from the front that her mother’s face was falling into a hole. Her jaws worked, her eyes squeezed and her mouth formed the opposite of a smile. This was her mother crying.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake.’

  ‘Why do you have an orange?’

  Her mother told her she had decided to stop smoking so she planned to have a mint or an orange any time she wanted a cigarette.

  Olive sat up and said she was thirsty. Her mother handed the glass across and passed her a mint. They sat together, sucking the lollies. Olive wondered whether her mother had dozed off because her eyes were closed again.

  ‘I didn’t mean it, Mum.’

  ‘Maybe it was wrong, not to talk about her. People gave contradictory advice. They always do. It was hard to know what was right.’

  Olive kept still a while longer. She was going to ask. She was going to be magnifice
nt. Her finger searched for her thumb. There were things in the room that had been just out of sight and hearing, always ahead as her mother had been, turning corners and passing through doors. The sound of a felt-soled slipper on the stairs, or turning out of sight on the landing. At the front door pulling on tan and mustard golf gloves. Closing her bag clasp snip-snip-snap and calling out to the empty hallway: I’m going to the shops, the petrol station, the bank.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever hug me when I was little?’

  Audra put the orange on the bedside table and repositioned a tissue at her mouth.

  ‘I did try but you pushed me away.’

  This was an impossibility to Olive and she shook her head.

  ‘It’s true,’ her mother said. ‘I tried not to feel hurt but you’ve always gravitated more to your father, to Rue and Thistle. Cleg even.’

  Olive lay flat on her back. Maybe they had given her some medicine. Here was her mother speaking in a gentle voice, patting her with soft hands, refilling her water glass and saying that she had to go downstairs to start dinner. She left, quietly shutting the door behind her. Olive lay stiff with her mother’s ministrations on her skin like a fine coating of oil, her legs and arms stretched into straight, well-boned lines.

  •

  Things settled like a bedsheet that has been lifted and falls through the air. All she wanted to do was sleep. The first day her mother had carried in toast and milk on a tray. A bowl of cornflakes for breakfast the second morning. The third morning porridge. She stayed in bed and played solitaire and did some of her Knitting Nancy.

  Rue visited and brought yellow roses but they were too bright for the room. She also had some of Archie’s How and Why books, and a jigsaw, one of Thistle’s favourites. Venice. Thistle had liked the idea of a sinking city, had thought it romantic but Rue laughed at that. She said that Thistle was a woman with some odd ideas and handed over the bird cards in tall stacks, rubber bands holding them together.

  ‘I took them out of the albums.’

  ‘Are they in order?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Olive knew they wouldn’t be.

  Holding the cards made her sad. Rue said she knew that Thistle would want Olive to have them out of everyone but Olive knew she didn’t deserve them out of anyone.

  ‘Are you feeling much better?’ her aunt asked from the chair. ‘I’ve got a card from the boys.’

  Olive took it out of the envelope and it was a funny card, designed to make her laugh, so she did. Rue and Audra both leaned forwards with their hands out and Olive held it in the air and Audra took it first, read it and passed it across to her sister.

  Olive sat and drank her Milo. The ghosts felt very close. She wanted to ask why she felt so altered and why she had an ache deep in her stomach. She had been thinking about her new name—her sobriquet—and she had it now. She knew what it was, the only thing it could be: Olive the Bad.

  •

  She dozed and woke and the light was different. Her mother and aunt were talking. Olive made her eyes into fuzzy slits. Her mother was by the window with her back to Rue who was in the chair, searching her pockets. She pulled out a tissue and another and put both hands over her eyes and began to weep, the sounds small and hushed.

  ‘She couldn’t have kept him, not with her temperament,’ Rue said. ‘Fanciful and meddlesome. Says it all, really.’

  ‘We could have helped her, I told you that.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t much matter now, does it?’ Her mother turned from the window. ‘I don’t know what to do with her.’

  Through the line of her lashes Olive felt her mother look at the bed, at her. They were talking about her now.

  ‘Has she had it yet? You know, her…’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That would explain the—all the—’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Hormones. They have a lot to answer for.’

  Audra started to open the blinds.

  ‘I’m going to wake her up for lunch in a minute,’ she said.

  ‘Do you remember the card he wrote?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Sands boy. How he wrote that card, saying sorry. That he had tried so hard, managed to get Olive but couldn’t find—’

  ‘I don’t remember any card.’

  ‘It was very sad, that card.’ Rue blew her nose. ‘Mavis said he wants to go back to the city but not stay with the uncle next time. Get his own place. She said he liked it there. Felt there were…what did she say? Opportunities. And I said what type of “opportunities” and she said no, not like that. That he had told her he wants to straighten out but she didn’t use that term. Was it distance? I can’t remember. She said he told her he wants to have a good life and feels he can’t, here. With the influences, I suppose. Again, this isn’t her language, it’s my interpretation.’

  Audra moved to the door. ‘Can you wake her? Would you like some soup?’

  Rue said no. She gave a brisk double-tap on Olive’s shoulder and said lunch would be soon then followed her sister downstairs. Olive heard her aunt’s chatty voice disappear then got up and went to the toilet. She could hear them talking in the kitchen. She walked all the way back to her bed with a noise clanging in her ears.

  •

  Hot soups. Tomato and cream of chicken. A bath once her mother thought she had rested enough. She let herself be guided into the bathroom and immersed. Her mother wanted to keep the door ajar and called to her every five minutes.

  ‘Olive?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She kept quiet and cooperated, and on the fourth evening, Audra let her up to watch some television. It was strange to be permitted what she’d taken for herself previously. She begged to be allowed to watch Dallas but her mother said, ‘We’ll see,’ which usually meant ‘no’. Olive didn’t care so much because Audra was doing something else. Tucking her into bed. Checking she’d done her teeth properly. Asking her how she’d slept.

  At times she lay in bed and drifted before she remembered and called for her mother, thinking she might vomit. Her mother came with a bowl and sat with a feathery hand on her back, then left to heat more soup. The bowl remained beside her bed with a towel over it. She hadn’t been sick but the nausea was real.

  She sat in a chair by the window with her knees all the way up to her chest in the way her mother hated but let pass unremarked now. She was bored with the puzzle, the Knitting Nancy and the books. It was true what Thistle always said, that trouble is around a person like air is, and you breathe it in. She made sure to sleep with her jaw clenched and woke in the mornings, wrenched out of her sleep, heart throbbing with a dream-fear so thick and real it was as if she might make everything come true just by imagining it.

  •

  She went downstairs to the phone.

  ‘I’ve been calling you,’ Peter said.

  ‘I’ve been sick.’

  ‘Every day I tried, but your mum said you couldn’t talk.’

  ‘I didn’t want to talk, especially not to you.’ Her head was sore.

  ‘Did you do it? The plan?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ She heard a voice in the background, it was a girl. ‘So you can tell Snooky?’

  ‘She wants people to call her Vanessa now.’

  ‘You’ve been playing with her. Is she there?’

  A shaky ‘um’ from the phone.

  ‘It’s not really playing,’ he said. ‘We’re in Year 7 now.’

  Olive thought of the bird cards on the blanket hills of her bed. The Knitting Nancy, her Spirograph set. Her slinky.

  ‘But she’s there.’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘I have to go.’ She hung up.

  She went back to bed. It was all wrong. Who cared about high school? It didn’t matter anymore. She lay in her bed staring at the ceiling. The ache in her tummy got worse so she turned on her side and tucked her knees up, closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She had stolen the things off h
is car and she would get in trouble. Maybe go to juvie. She got the badges out of her jewellery box, the ballerina rotating on her single plastic leg. She didn’t want to go to juvie. She hadn’t done the plan but still she’d done things that were definitely wrong. She was sitting on her bed when the door opened. She put her hands behind her back.

  ‘Peter’s here,’ her mother said. ‘I told him no more than ten minutes.’

  He sat down on her bed.

  ‘Why’d you hang up?’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘You have to tell me. Did you do the plan?’

  She stared at him. He was asking her if she’d trapped Jethro Sands in a tunnel and left him there to die.

  ‘You owe me.’

  He’d been closer than a brother, closer even than Sebastian or Archie. If anyone owed anyone, he owed her. She counted to ten in her head. She was trying not to do things so quickly these days.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do the plan and if you’d asked Vanessa she’d tell you he’s fine.’

  He got up. ‘There’s a show about sea turtles on tonight, you should watch it.’ She heard him running down the stairs and, in the distance, the sound of the front door closing.

  She got the tape recorder out from her backpack. Rewound it and pressed ‘play’. The first bit was her and Archie mucking around when they were little. She fast forwarded. Now it was her voice, slightly older, but high and thin, singing ‘A Scottish Soldier’. She heard the flattened sounds of someone who thinks she is a good singer, has confidence. The way her voice cracked on the highest ‘green hills’ notes made her ashamed for that young girl, made her want to tell her she couldn’t sing, to not even try because it was embarrassing. That carefree girl, cartwheeling on a spring lawn, while her parents were inside, arguing about whether to tell her something in five minutes. A girl who wanted to stay in the unknowing place because she didn’t want to go inside and listen to what they had to say. It could be they wanted to tell her about someone who died, about a truth that would be hard to hear, so in the meantime, during those safe five minutes she had left, she turned in the air, over and over, across the grass as their loud voices carried from the open window.