Elsie looked up at Gwinnie as she wrapped her lips around the straw and sucked. She had to think quick. Maybe if they were really good in the next two weeks, Gwinnie might change her mind. Hoping she could distract her, she asked, ‘Gwinnie? As a way of the boys saying sorry to you, can we do a favour for someone? Before my mum gets here.’
Red-faced and a little flustered, Gwinnie glanced up at her while Tara and the twins looked at her, puzzled. ‘What?’
‘If the four of us bag up Jasper’s dung, could you please help us by driving it down on the ute to Mr Queen’s? He really needs some for his garden.’
Gwinnie sighed. Then at last smiled.
Half an hour later, the kids set out six chaff bags filled with fresh dung against the fence that sheltered Mr Queen from the madness of the world.
‘There you go,’ Elsie said, gazing up at the house. ‘Manna from heaven for you, Mr Queen.’
‘A good deed done,’ Tara said. ‘At least the angels are smiling.’ And they turned, knowing that day was the last time they would share the journeys to school together.
Nine
On the night of the Grade Six formal, Elsie Jones gazed at her image in the bedroom mirror. Her reflection, bathed in late-afternoon light, showed a slim girl in a floaty lavender-blue dress with tiny white flowers embroidered on the bodice. Delicate straps lay on her bare shoulders and her small breasts could be seen budding beneath the fabric. She was still featherweight, but Elsie’s limbs had grown long and slender. So much so that Jasper sometimes laid his ears back when she first sat on him, and her boots almost touched the ground. Her mother was refusing a bigger horse as boarding school loomed next year. Elsie felt a tug when she recalled her mother suggesting she pass Jasper on to a smaller child in the district.
‘You won’t have time to look after him once you have high-school studies,’ Sarah said to her daughter. ‘And you do know, as Simon knows too, you can only come home on long term-break holidays. The fees are expensive enough, so we won’t be able to afford to bring you home mid-term just to see a pony you are now too big to ride.’
In her room she braced herself for Sarah’s return. Elsie had let down the bun Sarah had so meticulously curled and put up. It took seconds for Elsie to unravel it and she rummaged her fingers through her hair before simply pinning a single blue paper cornflower onto her ‘good side’. She thought the flower looked pretty, as did the dress, but all she could really see in the reflection was the giant mole standing out like a fat full stop in black permanent marker on her face. A full stop to any kind of life, she thought. Tonight she had painfully plucked a coarse black hair from it with her mother’s tweezers. The tug on the hair and the sheer ugliness of it close up in the mirror caused tears to spring to her eyes.
Now, hoping her mother had forgotten the formal, she padded barefoot over to her bed, picked up her guitar, sat and began strumming ‘Wild Thing’ with about as much wildness as a tax-office clerk on anti-depressants. Voices were drifting up from below through the open window where her parents were entertaining in ‘the best room’ at the front of the homestead. It was the room that led to the old ballroom wing of the house.
‘Of course it could do with some renovation,’ Kelvin boomed to their guests, the Rogersons, after a house tour, ‘but what with the fertiliser bill and the need for a new tractor, dear Sarah has to wait.’
Dear Sarah, Elsie thought. Her parents were really laying it on thick. Poor Marbles, who shed hair like a snowstorm and had a propensity for sniffing ladies’ crotches, had even been banished to the working-dog runs.
‘But the fundraising potential of having a functioning ballroom in the district delivers all kinds of opportunity for the community,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘I had forgotten Grassmore’s ballroom was so grand!’
Elsie knew that standing portly but barely reaching the mantelpiece would be Nathanial’s father, Deputy Mayor Cuthbertson Rogerson, in his hideous grey suit, and seated before him would be his wife Zelda, her beehive black hair towering, her chins falling in wobbling sequence below. The inflated couple were there for a dinner party while their only child, Nathanial, ‘enjoyed himself’ at the formal.
Elsie knew Nathanial would already be at the Culvert Hall terrorising his classmates with his ADHD behaviour. Most likely popping balloons, or sucking helium into his lungs and talking like a Smurf. Or entwining Tilly and Scarlett in red and navy streamers while they ran screaming to dob him in to a teacher. Elsie sighed. She could hear her mother on the stairs. The door opened and her mother entered.
‘You ungrateful girl! Why did you take your hair down? You look like a tramp now.’
Irritated, her mother fished under the bed for Elsie’s recently kicked-off new shoes.
‘It’s so silly of the school to schedule events at this time of year, with harvest and shearing on for many people. And now your father, organising an important dinner to talk about council matters, like the upgrade of the sewage works. He expects so much of me! How can I be expected to drop you at the hall and serve the entrée?’
Elsie put down the guitar and silently pulled on her shoes, stood and turned her back to the mirror.
‘I’m not sure you understand the sacrifices I make for you!’
In the flashing lights of the disco, Elsie first saw Mr Tremble going all out dancing to ‘Nutbush City Limits’, his glasses skewed on his face, his arms jerking as if he had some kind of neurological dysfunction.
Beside him, Miss Beechcroft, tipsy on a sneaky pre-formal glass or two of Riesling, mirrored him. She looked like a bird of prey, her black eyes gleaming behind her glasses, her sensible shoes stomping out a flat-footed rhythm, but all the while her beady focus was on the only single male at the event: Mr Tremble. Her wine-smeared goal was gaining access to the contents of his cord pants later that night.
Behind them Elsie could see Nathanial parodying the science and music teachers’ every move, making faces and movements like a randy monkey. That was until Mrs Guthridge glided over and discreetly guided him away.
It would have been amusing to watch had the twins been there by her side, but Elsie stood in the doorway alone. She felt self-consciousness painting her face in a blush and totally vulnerable in her flimsy dress. Elsie knew Zac and Amos wouldn’t be there tonight, thanks to their suspension. She scanned the room for Tara, but instead saw Tilly and Scarlett and their cluster of ‘cool girls’ standing near the drinks table. They spotted her and made their way over, like a posse of sharks, skirting around the edges of the hall, then leering at her from darkness shadowed more deeply by the flashing lights and spinning mirror ball.
‘Doesn’t your mother teach you anything about make-up?’ asked Scarlett, standing before Elsie in her red dress, looking dramatic and older than her years.
Elsie just stood and blinked, the throb of the too-loud music and the blinding strobe of the lights assaulting her senses, the circle of girls pressing in on her, scrutinising everything about her.
‘You could’ve put a bit of concealer on it, just for tonight, so we don’t have to look at it.’
‘Yeah,’ chipped in Tilly. ‘We’ve got a lot to teach you. But it’s all good. Have you heard?’
Elsie looked at Tilly blankly.
‘My mum’s changed her mind on boarding schools. And she’s told Scarlett’s mum and it turns out we’re now all going to Primrose Ladies’ College next year, like you! So we’ve got plenty of time to become besties.’
Elsie swallowed the news like a stone. Surely they were teasing?
‘How nice! We’ll all be in the boarding house together.’ Tilly looped her arm in Elsie’s. ‘But we’re going to have to give you some beauty tips.’
‘Come with us,’ Scarlett said, scooping up Elsie’s other arm and smiling. ‘We’ll help fix you up a bit.’
Before Elsie could protest, they had led her into the women’s toilets. There the bright fluorescent lighting revealed the ugliness of the girls’ intentions.
‘Now!’ Til
ly shouted once they were in the concrete confines of the toilets.
Scarlett and the other girls violently pushed tiny Elsie forwards. The door of a toilet cubicle sounded like a shot as Tilly kicked it open. Fingers like claws clutched at Elsie’s hair and thrust her to her knees. The stench of the Culvert Hall toilets made her retch: her classmates forced her head into the bowl. Then came the flush, the roar of the cistern and the scream of old pipes. Water splashed up into her mouth, over her face, blinding her eyes. The girls dragged her head back.
‘It’s not coming off! It’s still on there. Better give it another go,’ Scarlett said.
They forced Elsie forwards again. This time the flush was weaker, but still the stench of urine was strong. Misery washed through her. A sob escaped her mouth. It felt as if wire ran beneath her skin as she strained against the clawing pressure of the girls’ hands. She was so much smaller than them. And mute to their fury, their jealousy. Elsie didn’t realise it at the time, but their envy was a bushfire fanned by winds of resentment. If the mole wasn’t there, she would be truly too beautiful for the girls to bear.
‘Try this,’ came one of the girls’ voices. Toilet paper was spooled off the roll and roughly Tilly swiped it across Elsie’s face, tweaking the mole painfully, yanking it. Blood seeped from its edges.
‘It’s huge!’
‘Don’t let it touch you!’
‘Fucking moll,’ said Scarlett and the other girls laughed. Elsie scrunched her eyes. She wished a teacher would come right now, but whenever she sucked up enough courage to say something about Tilly and Scarlett her words remained trapped in her chest. They were goody-two-shoes in front of the teachers. If her mother didn’t believe her, who else would?
Elsie felt herself give in. Her hair trickled toilet water down her shoulders and stained her dress a deeper blue. Blood ran from the mole and Elsie tasted its bitterness on her tongue.
‘Get off her!’ came a voice behind them.
From where Elsie kneeled on the grimy tiled floor, she could see Tara’s chubby feet, encased in reinforced-toe stockings and jammed into cracking silver op-shop sandals.
‘Let her go!’
There was a quiet strength to Tara’s voice.
‘And what are you going to do about it?’ Scarlett asked, her dark eyes glancing over to Tara.
For a moment Tara stood in silence, then she began to speak in a language Elsie had never heard before. It was partway Arabic, and perhaps partway Native American, but not, and it spilled from Tara’s mouth in a cascade of power. The words were unintelligible, but the meaning behind them very clear.
Elsie looked up. Tara had hit puberty earlier than the rest of them and she was bursting out of a second-hand dark green satin dress, her rounded breasts smooshed flat, the seams straining at the waist, her bum made bigger by the giant eighties bow that had been tied with no care by her mother. Her legs ballooned out from the unflattering hem of the dress.
But still Tara stood there, fearlessly, undefeated, speaking curses in a language none of them had heard. The girls stood transfixed at the sight and the sound.
‘You’re fucking mad,’ sneered Scarlett.
Tara’s eyes flashed open. They were wide and emerald with flecks of gold in them, and it was as if they held a presence within them that none of them had encountered before. She just didn’t seem like Tara.
‘You were almost right, Scarlett,’ Tara said. ‘You thought it was Elsie, but I am in fact the witch. I’ve been saving the entrails from Dwaine’s gut buckets and cooking them up in my cauldron all year, especially for you.’ She pretended to stir a pot and then waved her fingertips at Scarlett’s face for a more dramatic effect. ‘And yes. I am mad. Dangerously mad. And I have just put a spell on all of you. It won’t take effect today. Or tomorrow. But one day, when you think you’ve got away with this, your lives will all come crashing down. You yourself have sown the seeds of your own doom.’
‘Yeah right. Nutter.’ But the sting had gone from Scarlett’s voice. Elsie felt the girls’ grip release and soon they were stepping away from her, backing off, uneasy. Tara blocked their exit and ducked quickly into a cubicle. She grabbed up a toilet brush, dipped it in the toilet water and standing before them began to flick it through the air like a priest shaking holy water on her congregation. Again the strange language emanated from her lips, her voice deep and booming. At the feeling of the cold water splattering them, the girls all screamed, pushed past Tara and fled, banging the door behind them.
‘Good riddance!’ Tara said. She helped Elsie up, her chubby hands steadying her friend, her voice back to normal. ‘Are you OK?’
Elsie caught her reflection in the mirror: lank hair, the cornflower flushed away to the Culvert sewers, blood oozing from the mole, her inner being crushed like a butterfly hitting a truck in a rainstorm. ‘Yes. Thanks.’
‘C’mon,’ Tara said and she took Elsie by the hand and wrapped her other arm around her shoulder, ‘let’s blow this joint.’
As they walked away from the throbbing music and lights into the darkness towards the outskirts of town, Elsie turned to Tara. ‘Were you for real back there? About the spell?’
‘No!’ said Tara, giggling. ‘But yes. Sort of. If they ever have a crappy time, they’ll think it’s my spell. Genius.’
‘And the language . . . What were you speaking?’
Tara shrugged. ‘I’ve seen it on one of Dwaine’s horror movies. Dunno. That’s just what comes. Who knows what it means? It’s been happening a lot lately.’
‘Are you OK?’ Elsie asked.
Tara shrugged again. ‘I suppose. Yes. I’ve just gotta be.’
They trudged on in silence on the side of the road. Tonight it was hard to make sense of anything, but both girls knew exactly who would help them try.
Ten
The twins’ faces were not only illuminated by the dancing flames of the bonfire, and the recent wonderful news that their father’s test results had come back as ‘clear’, but their expressions were also lit up by the fact Tara and Elsie had arrived. Walking to them out of nowhere in the darkness, turning up without warning at the Smiths’ giant machinery shed beside the shit-ponds fence.
Not only that, the girls were wearing dresses, and to the boys, in the swamping shadows of the night, they somehow looked magical beneath the sprinkle of stars above and the glow of the firelight.
‘Friend or foe?’ Amos had asked, peering into the darkness, a crooked grin on his freckled face.
‘Jeez. What do you reckon?’ replied Tara, trudging forwards, flicking yet another burr out from under the pantyhosed toes that poked like tongues from her sandals. ‘These shoes are certainly not friends! I think my blisters have blisters.’
Zac rolled another two log stumps from the woodpile and patted their surfaces while Amos reached down to fill cups from a cooler containing Gwinnie’s homemade lemonade and stood to pass them to the girls.
‘Don’t you know we’re getting into fire season?’ teased Elsie, who had pushed the toilet incident away as her hair dried on their walk. If Tara, who didn’t have pretty clothes or a lovely room or a pony, could be OK — sort of — living in that horrible house with her horrible stepfather, who was Elsie to complain? She sat on one of the stumps, slipped off a ballet flat and began to rub her foot, determined to stay brave. ‘We could see the flames all the way from the road. You’re lucky Chunky Nicholson’s DJing back at the hall tonight, or you’d have his fire crew onto you.’
The boys laughed sheepishly.
Gwinnie and Elvis had planned this night well in advance, knowing their boys felt shamed to be excluded from the formal. The Smiths were so incensed at the limited thinking of the people in the school system about their gifted boys that they had declared they would home-school Zac and Amos from now on. Their decision wasn’t reactionary nor from a place of self-righteous parenting, and came with a lot of coaching for the boys about the behaviour and beliefs that had got them in trouble in the first place.
The boys had looked at each other.
‘But he —’ began Amos in a quiet voice.
Gwinnie pulled a face. ‘No buts.’
Her sons, a mirror image of each other, shuffled their feet in unison, studying the toes of their scuffed work boots. Their mother’s tone was rarely cross and the boys were chastened.
‘You were a little persistent with Mr Tremble, weren’t you? Wouldn’t you say you kind of knew you were pushing him too far?’
The boys both nodded.
‘Some people don’t and won’t think like you,’ Gwinnie had said. ‘You need to let some things go so as to get on with as many people as possible, even if they don’t think or act like you. OK?’
‘We understand, Mum. He’s still a nong but.’
‘Each to his own, Amos, each to his own,’ Gwinnie said, shaking her head. ‘Some people are slower to wake up. Especially adults and especially teachers who have been in systems for a long time,’ she said. ‘And yes, he is a nong but. But this is Culvert Primary we’re dealing with, and the culture can even influence the smartest of boys but. Especially when it comes to speech but.’ She laughed, then scruffled her fingertips through their curly black hair. ‘Now go on. Git. Your father needs a hand . . . And he has a surprise for you.’
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