Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  She pressed fast forward again and then it was Jethro saying the bit about the beetle on the leaf. She listened to the rest of it, clicked off the recorder and got back into bed.

  She realised now that things mattered. Everything did, including the smallest flowers, the least valuable rocks and minerals, the plainest woods and the ugliest, most stupid people. The other thing she realised, sitting in her bed with pillows propped behind, her childhood distractions on top of the blanket and her hands over her eyes, was that she, Olive May Lovelock, could be wrong.

  •

  She lay on the couch. The mother turtle struggled out of the sea onto the beach in the middle of the night and crawled up the sand, using her flippers like arms, pulling her broad-shelled body to a spot where she dug a hole. The mother turtle cried black tears while she laid her round eggs, covered them up then went back to the water. Olive wished for an adult to be with her so she could ask why the mother was crying and how the baby turtles were going to find her once they were hatched. Did she stay nearby somewhere waiting for her children. But there wasn’t time to go and find her father, no time to get the encyclopaedia, because now it was early morning and the beach was growing sunny and hot, it was baking and the baby turtles were hatching themselves, cracking out of their shells and digging their way up and out of the sand and trundling madly down to the sea. But oh! No! Seagulls were waiting to eat the baby turtles and some of the babies got taken away into the air. Others made it to the ocean, rushing as fast as they could on their mini flippers to swim away, their little bodies frantic, but still, lots were eaten or got stuck and dried out to death on the beach. The man who was talking said only one in every thousand would grow up to be big.

  Olive started crying and found she could not stop and it was worse even than the time her parents told her about Aster, after they’d called her inside from where she’d been playing outside on the grass.

  She lay on the couch, her hands made into flippers. Her father came to carry her to bed and on the way up the stairs she pushed her face into his neck. He tried to make her feel better. He spoke her sister’s name and told Olive she was a great kid and that everything would be okay. He told her it would all be fine and she had no choice but to believe him.

  SHE FOUND THE sketchbook she’d got for Christmas—she couldn’t remember who had given it to her—and started drawing, making shapes and doodles in ink, close-up studies of found objects she had. While she was saving up again for her typewriter she would be an artist and so started with a pine cone from Serpentine and a carefully selected sheath of grass with a heavy load of seeds that she’d found in her backyard, down near the fence. She drew the smallest parts of things and it helped her imagine that she was a small girl crouched over nasturtium plants, studying the cups of soft green with their drinks of raindrops.

  She remembered how the drops of water sat on Grace’s feathers, brilliant and luminous. How a surprising row of delicate feather strands decorated the top of her beak in an unexpected fringe. She let herself draw parts of Grace—her feet, her eyes—and if she could have illustrated life at the atomic level she would have done that too. She avoided the larger frame of things, wanting to keep her registration of the real small and in manageable segments. Tiny doses of reality, the only way she could proceed. She went into the backyard to collect more things to draw. Shreds of bark and cross-sections of beetles, flowers and ants. She would often be down there, drawing, when her mother called to her, saying she’d baked a cake and would Olive like a piece. She wouldn’t want to stop her work at night until her mother had told her several times to turn off her lamp and go to sleep.

  Other times she sat and looked through her binoculars at the world. She saw the neighbours as they went about their days, taking rubbish bins to the nature strip, mowing lawns, hanging washing. She tracked cars as they moved along from one end of the street to the other, turning into and from roads, and in the distance were the goalposts of the footy oval at her old school.

  Once, as she stood in the window in her bedroom looking over all the back gardens, Mrs McCullers from next door spotted her and raised a hand in greeting. Olive waved back, worrying as the old lady tottered along her uneven garden path, carrying the empty clothes basket inside. She watched Mrs McCullers walk all the way up the path to the back door, keeping her fingers crossed, hoping she wouldn’t fall over. Then she got the six wishbones from the ledge where they’d dried and, pinkie to pinkie, snapped them all.

  A NEW SET of kids were riding their bikes through the streets. Olive had seen Archie in the middle of the group and waved at him. He turned his wheel so that he was facing the other way.

  The police didn’t come and arrest her and she didn’t go to juvie. She’d taken the car badges back to Jethro and he’d said no harm had been done. She watched as he straightened the bent one and walked to his car to reattach them.

  She’d seen Peter outside the fish-and-chip shop, talking to older boys who were in the footy team and who stood, blocking the footpath and being rowdy. They talked about who would play which position that year. They drank Big Ms and ate fried dim sims, laughing with their mouths full and with bits of food falling out onto the ground. Olive was with her mother at the chemist, already embarrassed, and when they exited—she was holding the paper bag because her mother hadn’t brought a shopping bag—she and Peter looked at each other. Before he could say anything she walked very quickly to the car.

  He cornered her in the school library one day.

  ‘I never see you.’

  She looked up from her book. ‘I’m around.’

  ‘Not really. I see you in the distance but then you disappear.’ He sat down.

  Sitting at the table with her textbooks open in front of her, Olive thought about disappearing.

  ‘There’s been stuff,’ she said. ‘You know. I’ve been at home, reading, plus we have harder homework now.’

  ‘I didn’t tell anything to my dad, you know,’ Peter said. It seemed important that she believe him so she said that she did. Then he talked a little bit about the grasshoppers, how they were still appearing and people were joking about the end of time. And then there were the fires in the area. His father had told him they were deliberately lit.

  ‘Do they know who it was?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Peter. ‘But people are saying it’s the Sandses. Gary, Jethro and that.’

  ‘It’s not Jethro,’ she said. ‘It’s not him and it won’t be Johnno either.’ She closed her book. ‘Did you know? All this time?’

  His face flattened. ‘Know what? What are you talking about?’ He stood up and walked away from the table without pushing his chair in.

  SHE WAS STANDING outside the pool, thinking about going in. The weather was back to normal, so hot that the skin inside her nose hurt. It was the last day the pool would be open until the next summer.

  ‘Hey, it’s Ollie Lovelock.’

  She turned around. Behind her was a boy in a blue singlet with long blond hair sitting on a low wall. He had a towel over his shoulder and his legs were stretched out in front of him. He was clicking his thongs against his feet. There was a chip out of one of his front teeth that she didn’t remember and his shoulders were peeling. His freckles were the same though. He made a viewfinder with his hands and looked through them at her.

  ‘Hi John,’ she said. She looked over at the car park. More people were arriving. His friends called out to him across the space. He held his hand up, palm outwards. He didn’t move.

  ‘How’s your mum and the brothers?’

  ‘They’re good, I suppose.’

  They looked across at the entrance where Peter was standing and Snooky too.

  ‘Are they going out?’

  John said he didn’t know. Maybe. ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  He stood up. ‘Well, I’m going in. Come and find me?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He went and joined Snooky and Peter, merging into the group as
it moved through the gate but Olive stayed in the shade outside. She watched them through the cyclone-wire fence as they found spots on the grass slopes, put down their towels, the girls standing waiting for the boys to go in before they raised their arms to pull off dresses. Peter was taking off his t-shirt and dropping it on his towel and Snooky was standing closest. John was facing the entrance, shading his eyes with his hands. She started to walk home thinking she’d spend her money on lollies at the milk bar, but when she got to the end of the street she turned and walked back to the pool.

  The last day of March. She needed to do it.

  She took off her thongs and got out of her dress and sat away from everyone else. She could see Peter across the way with Snooky sitting cross-legged beside him. She was talking but he wasn’t listening to her. He was lying on his back with his hands under his head.

  She lay face down on her towel but soon someone came over and sat beside her. She turned her head and saw the freckled face of Johnno Sands. His teeth were very white. He talked about high school and about permaculture, how he was interested in it, in maybe doing it when he was older. She didn’t know what it was so he explained and it wasn’t about hairdressing. She listened and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. Then she said she was going in and she ran down the grass and made a little skip at the end onto the concrete.

  •

  Years later, in the flat near the city beach, there’d be fixed memories for Olive. Thoughts would tap at her in a random series of small images that dropped into her head, without cause. All the smells and shapes of childhood. Here a particular perspective of the schoolyard. The curved lip of the brick back steps. The sound of the kitchen window sash being raised by her mother, that juddering squeal of the hardwood in the frame. The way the light flooded through the green bubbled glass above the back door. How the camellia flowers dropped to bruise and moulder in the garden bed outside the dining room window.

  These were the brightly lit scenes she memorialised. The farm with its rustic tableaux of things left on the verandah. The froideur of her mother. The sisters with their rotating, collective umbrage. The silence of the brothers. How you thought you knew yourself when really you were only at the beginning. How right and wrong seemed so distinct but weren’t, not really.

  Sometimes the past was very close, but there was the comfort of Sunday night fish and chips and sitting on the floor in the new place with high ceilings. Baby Lila asleep in her cot in the tower and she and John Sands holding hands, side by side. But even in those paused moments she thought about the way life caught and spun as quickly as a strobe, how time pressed forwards in a series of flashes of light in a way that made you unsettled, hopeful. And that even though she had arrived in a place that was clean and cool, she had once been a girl who went to the high places. She knew herself—her old self—was still a paper doll within, a girl who was wilful, fanciful and brave.

  •

  There was no queue so she climbed the ladder and walked without hesitation to the end of one of the big boards. Suspended above the cobalt of the diving pool she thought of the dam. She wondered if it would hurt when she hit. She bounced once and stopped, letting her loose knees settle. Her fringe curtained her eyes but she didn’t move it, rather looked through it. She bent from the waist, her upper body perpendicular to her legs. Her back was flat, her neck long as her hands slid down beside her knees. She straightened, bounced again and jumped into the air and came down in a fast roar with both knees tucked under, one hand clasped across to hold her folded legs. Mouth wide open, a soundless scream in a slow-motion bomb, her free hand pinching her nose shut. In the water, the dark-tile lines on the bottom were closer. She rose and lay a moment on the surface, face down, spread like a starfish, then lifted her head and looked around. She got out and went back to her towel. She lay down on her back and kept her face to the sky. The whiteness of the sun entered her thin lids and combined with her insides, the interior of her complete world, and it travelled and pushed through her pipes to all her corners and shadowed places, where she lived and hid and turned and realised. And finally, everything became orange.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The first thank you must go to Sallie Muirden, early teacher and reader of this story, whose critical feedback and encouragement meant the world (and still does). It was Sallie who made me think I could do this.

  Enormous gratitude and thanks once again to Virginia Lloyd for her invaluable professional help with developing this manuscript, and additional support over the last few years. Without her guidance and belief in me this would have been a vastly harder task.

  A huge thank you and eternal gratitude to Allen & Unwin for publishing this book, especially the magnificent Jane Palfreyman for her belief in my work. Also, to Siobhán Cantrill and Ali Lavau for their painstaking, professional and patient editorial attention.

  For reading and feedback on countless early versions, much gratitude to Pam, Roger, Elly, Erina, Serje, Christina, Athi, Paul and ‘Alex’.

  And thank you, as ever, to my family, especially Anthony for his ongoing love and support.