The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  They heard Boncer shouting in the corridor, ‘March.’

  Hetty marches with her left arm swinging, holding her bad one gingerly at her side. She doesn’t ask where they are going, and nor does Verla. They follow Boncer through dark cardboard corridors, through the gloom of rooms leading into other rooms, more passageways, closed verandas, into and out of dark, narrow spaces, light green ones. The house is a concertina opening and lengthening and fanning out before them, compressing and closing behind. In the dusty weatherboard rooms as they pass through are signs of former lives: chests of drawers half open, framed faded watercolours flyspecked and hanging crookedly. A folded dusty swag on the floor of one room, a bare mattress on a black iron bed in another. In one dark corridor Boncer suddenly leans sideways and pulls a door closed, but not before Verla sees it must be his: sees a red sports bag unzipped, spilling clothes, a threadbare pink bath towel draped from a cupboard door. The corner of a pale blue bedsheet hanging to the floor, a balled pair of dirty sports socks. The vision disappears behind the white door with a dented brass handle. Boncer jerks around to inspect Hetty and Verla, to see what they have seen. They keep their eyes to the floor.

  ‘I said march.’

  Verla swings her arms, blinking hard to seal the image in. Remember where we are, retracing in memory the corridors, the spindly French doors leading from one room to another, the turns they have taken left and right, the steps up and down. She is quickly lost. All that remains in her mind are columns of light pressing through tall green curtains, the pink towel, doorways opening on to other doors.

  Now they are outside again, clomping along another rickety veranda, down three steps and around a rusted water tank on a rotting wooden platform, up another set of steps, and now stopped before yet another door on another veranda. Hetty is breathing hard, swallowing. Boncer lightly kicks the door ajar but doesn’t go in.

  ‘Something for you, Nancy,’ he calls out, looking up at the veranda roof and fingering his pimple. So it is true: Nancy. A woman.

  There is a muffled yelp from behind the door. Hetty and Verla wait, not daring to look anywhere but up, following Boncer’s gaze. All three stand in the stifling heat, watching the honeycombed grey nugget of a wasps’ nest forming on the tip of a rusted nail spiking from a beam above them. Three slow, long-bodied wasps weave their way, swaying, to the nest, finally landing, wriggling, disappearing into its holes.

  At last Boncer shakes his head and mutters fuck’s sake beneath his breath. He shouts, ‘They’re coming in,’ and shoves the chained girls through the door with the hard bulge of his stick.

  They stumble in, Hetty hissing in pain. The room is large, flooded with light. There are waist-high metal trolleys, and a leather-padded thigh-high table that could be a bed. It has a short blue plastic sheet with stippled white paper towelling over it, and a flat, mouldy-looking pillow. From the end of the bed extend two wooden prongs, each attached to a small, sturdy brown leather stirrup belt, unbuckled. On the floor between the prongs is a steel bucket.

  They can see nobody in the room. Near the window is a spearmint-green metal stool with a large metal seat like a bicycle saddle. Nearby, a white plastic commode chair. A battered aluminium tray lies on a trolley beneath the window’s soft spreading light, holding pieces of liver-coloured rubber tubing, metal cones and long, sharp steel instruments.

  Verla’s and Hetty’s hands clutch at one another just as an irritated mutter comes from behind the open door. ‘I’m not ready!’

  The door swings shut and they are enclosed in the room with a small figure crouched on the floor, rummaging in a pile of plastic shopping bags. They stare. The elbow wings are working now at some arrangement of her clothes, her short denim skirt rucking up her pale, skinny thighs. The figure jiggles a little, squatting on her flat feet in grubby white tennis shoes.

  At last she straightens, and a slight figure, a girl, stands facing them with a surprised, open-mouthed smile on her flushed face. A small round face, two dull blonde plaits just reaching her shoulders. She can be only a year or two older than Verla, perhaps twenty-three. She’s shorter than Verla, though, and wears a workman’s shirt far too big for her—it is made of the same thick blue cotton as Boncer’s and Teddy’s boiler suits. It comes nearly to the hem of her miniskirt. Two tiny gold crosses dangle from her earlobes. But what Hetty and Verla are staring at is what this Nancy has pinned to herself: bits of a child’s nurse’s costume. A little white apron with a thick red cross is safety-pinned crookedly across the front of her shirt. This is what she was rummaging among the bags for: the indigo velveteen cape she’s now tying around her neck so it sticks out behind her, just covering her shoulders. Most monstrous of all, a little white starched origami cap with a blue stripe across it, balancing on her crown.

  She watches Hetty and Verla registering all this, and grins. ‘Isn’t it a scream?’

  They glance at each other in disbelief. Verla sees a plastic stethoscope peeking from the shirt pocket. They are truly in a madhouse.

  Hetty falls against Verla, giving up, cradling her weeping arm and howling.

  The girl, this Nancy, is annoyed. ‘Joke, Joyce. Jesus.’

  She wipes her hands down her thighs and steps out from her nest of plastic bags to inspect the two girls. She nods at Hetty’s arm, grabs it roughly. ‘So what’ve you done to yourself, you silly bitch?’

  Hetty bawls more at this injustice, yanks her arm away.

  ‘You’re not a nurse,’ says Verla. She hears the low angry croak of her own voice. She sounds like an old, old woman.

  Nancy steps closer, grabs Hetty’s wrist again with her small strong hand and peers down at the burn. ‘Pee-ew!’ She rears back. ‘That is rank.’

  Verla scans the room. ‘She needs antiseptic and bandages. Her arm’s infected. I’ll do it.’

  All Nancy’s girlishness vanishes in the long appraising stare she runs over Verla’s body now. She stares at Verla’s dirty tunic, the ridiculous bonnet. Verla feels herself inside them, reduced.

  ‘Is that right, Miss Verla Learmont?’ Her voice is coldly adult now, saying Verla’s name—how does she know it?—with amused, disgusted pity. Junior school days come to Verla; the hot shameful moment of learning that other girls knew things you did not. That you were ugly, contemptible.

  Nancy stares at her and says, ‘You know what you look like? A seahorse!’ She cackles. ‘You really do.’ And she does an impression, a trembling stare from bulging eyes, makes her face long, translucent, horsey. Flutters her fingers in a rapid, nervy tremor at her thighs. Verla knows it is true, she does look this way. Mad and pale and terrified.

  Nancy grins, then turns to Hetty and snaps, ‘Get up there,’ pointing to the padded bed. Hetty will not let go her grip on Verla’s arm, but Verla is suddenly sick of everything. No longer afraid, just gut weary of it all, the fear and stupidity and madness of this sick incomprehensible game. She digs her fingers beneath Hetty’s and peels her away, shoves her off, moaning, towards the bed.

  Nancy clinks away in a corner with an enamel kidney dish and pungent antiseptic and turns to where Hetty now lies, her filthy arm in its rags of paper. She roars as Nancy paws off the toilet paper and begins sloshing disinfectant into the wound.

  Verla turns and stands looking out of the speckled window, out through a gap in the buildings, across the dry knobbled land. She no longer cares about Hetty, about Lydia Scicluna, or Isobel Askell or little Joy or Barbs or Yolanda Kovacs. She cares nothing for any of them, for she alone will get out of here. If she is not sent for she will escape. The force of her will for this—a great charge of it thrusting up through her body—fills her. She will walk to the fence, burrow into the ground like an animal, tunnel her way free. Or find some other way, over or under or through, but she will be free.

  She puts her head to the warm glass and silently draws air from the narrow gap between the sash and frame, drinking it into her lungs.

  ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ snickers Nancy into her ear, and there
comes a hard little snap as she closes a child’s plastic handcuff painfully around Verla’s wrist, snapping the other end to the radiator bar. Then she goes back to hurting Hetty on the bed.

  THE GIRLS lay in their boxes staring up at the cobwebby roof beams, calling to each other, rearranging their lists of most missed things. For Rhiannon, today, it was Salada biscuits with soft butter and Vegemite. ‘Oh yeah,’ shouted Maitlynd. Then: ‘No, not Saladas. Vita-Weats!’ But the same creamy butter worming through the fantasy biscuit holes, the same stacked brick of sharp-cornered crackers in your hand as you wandered freely through your own house, eating as much as, and whenever, you wanted.

  They lay there, tasting biscuits, conjuring luxuries.

  Bare feet without blisters. On carpet. Hot showers. Vodka. Coffee. Cigarettes (the ones who never smoked were lucky; every one of the rest had fleetingly, shamefully, thought of offering herself to Teddy or Boncer for a single drag, that hot draught in the lungs, that brief and wondrous extinguishment of need).

  ‘What about this!’ From Lydia: the Pavilion at Maroubra on a hot day, watching the surfers moving across that rich greeny ocean, a Skinny Dip in your hand, and a huge plate of fish and chips.

  They groaned. Hot chips.

  ‘And a hot guy!’ yelled Barbs.

  They murmured again, out of politeness, but it was the chips that stayed in the mind.

  BONCER LEANED sideways, unclipped a key from the bunch at his waist and threw it on the table before Yolanda. ‘Go get more food.’

  She looked at him, key in her palm. The other girls stared too. This had never happened, a key.

  ‘Christ on a bike, you’re a dumb dog. Storeroom.’

  Five minutes or she’d cop it from his stick, he said. Adding, ‘The real one,’ grinning and thrusting his crotch at her as she pushed past him.

  She was at the door by the time he shouted, ‘March!’ and as an afterthought sent the stick spinning to crash into the doorframe just beside her head. It clattered to the floor and she heard Boncer’s titter floating after her as she marched, arms swinging high, the little key sharp in her fist.

  It was dusk as she stepped outside, bird calls falling in light musical sweeps in the hazy air. This was the first time since arriving here that she had been allowed to walk anywhere alone, unleashed. For a moment she thought of bolting. But where would she go?

  Far off, over by the ridge, a wedge-tailed eagle was pursued by ravens, wheeling and diving against the pink sky.

  Five minutes. She hurried across the gravel to the faded salmon-coloured fibro shed on its crooked stumps, up the grey brick stairs, and worked the key into the padlock. The ancient trace of an ivy skeleton laced over one corner of the shed. She worked the bolt free and pushed open the door, its handle loose as a broken bone in her hand.

  She’d never been in here, none of them had; they’d only seen Boncer and Nancy coming and going over the weeks, stepping down from the doorway with boxes and cartons of packaged foods, always locking the door behind them.

  Inside was the stillness and disorder of abandonment. Light fell into the room through a tall, curtainless window at one end of the single room. The floorboards were thick with dust, and everywhere were towers and stacks of cardboard boxes. Some had been ripped open and the contents pillaged. There seemed no method or order to this; more as if animals had been. Yolanda thought of stories about old people dying in housing commission flats, of dogs tearing open their chests. She heard the wet rhythmic noise of animal tongues and breath, the steady, jerking tug of teeth working through muscle and organ, the crack of bone.

  In the churchy quiet she felt herself suddenly flood with fatigue. She would like to lie down in here, build a small house of cardboard boxes, tear up cereal packets and pour out the contents. Make a nest for herself from no-brand cornflakes and bran sticks and faded popped rice.

  Boncer would be waiting with his stick. Yolanda fought the madness off, must gather information. This she had planned in the first days, when adrenaline still filled her waking hours. Escape was the word she’d thought over and over back then, only weeks ago, but now that word seemed stupid, as childish as pixies or talking teddy bears.

  She looked, counted, committed to memory, working her way through the columns of boxes, left to right along the windowless wall. Thirty-four boxes, each containing twenty-seven Black and Gold two-minute noodle packs. Nineteen cartons of baked beans, thirty-six cans in each. Twenty-four boxes of Homebrand rice bubbles, twelve of bran flakes. Eighteen five-kilo tins of powdered milk. Even Boncer and Nancy and Teddy now ate this shit, when at the start they’d had real food, stored and cooked somewhere else. You could smell it at night. Onions, meat. The girls lay in their kennels in the heat, mouths filling with saliva.

  She went on counting. Twenty-six boxes of macaroni cheese, and there, glowing, a single carton of cake mix. She ripped it open, pulled out one of the boxes—Lemon Butter Cake—tore it open and thrust the blank foil sachet down into her underpants. She would eat it in bed.

  Later, she stood side by side with Verla at the scullery sink, Verla lifting the chipped bowls out of the tepid grey dishwashing water for Yolanda to dry. What had she seen in the storeroom? murmured Verla.

  ‘Nothing,’ Yolanda said. ‘Noodles.’

  ‘How many?’

  She could feel Verla looking at her. ‘Dunno,’ she said. Thirty-four, twenty-seven, nineteen, thirty-six. She knew Verla knew. She said, ‘Didn’t have time to count, he’d already tried to hit me once.’

  Verla said nothing.

  They stood, dipping the smeared dishes in the water, picking off the dried yellow paste with their dirty fingernails. Yolanda had a sudden urge to tell Verla the truth.

  ‘I wasn’t tricked, you know,’ Yolanda said.

  ‘What?’ said Verla.

  ‘Into coming here. The rest of you all said that when you got taken, you were tricked. I wasn’t tricked; I fought. I knew those arseholes wanted me gone.’

  So Yolanda told her story to Verla, standing there with her hands in dishwater. Told of the late-night meeting, how Darren and Robbie drove her there, waited outside the room. Let her go in by herself, and there were the CEO and human resources and the gender adviser, and there was the money offered, written right there on paper.

  Yolanda looked at the dirty water circling Verla’s motionless wrists and told how she knew it was lies coming out of that gender chick’s mouth, else why was this happening at night, why was the gender chick in trackie daks and no make-up instead of jackets and heels for the cameras? All lies talked at Yolanda, this bitch nodding about community standards and completely unacceptable but all twitchy, very nervy, and the men nervous as hell too, standing by staring down at the table with their thick arms crossed over their chests, wearing weekend clothes, T-shirts and cargo pants, not the handsome suits with bulging blue ties they wore on television getting into and out of cars with cameras all around. And over and again they said it, unacceptable and inappropriate, and Yolanda spat, ‘What, like being late to the fucken opera? Like what happened to me was a case of bad manners?’ And she kept looking at the door thinking where’s Darren, where’s Robbie, but the gender chick kept on and on with legal shit and recompense and gestures of goodwill and all like that and the two dudes looked on, nodding at the table all solemn, giving Yolanda their sad little there’s-a-good-girl smiles.

  Verla and Yolanda could hear clicks and frogs outside because it was getting dark, and Yolanda gripped a shiny wet plate to her chest with crossed hands as she told Verla how even at that point her mind didn’t actually know, her dumb dog’s mind was trying to believe this shit—but oh, her body knew. Like always, her dumb dog’s body knew, and when she looked at that crescent of polished fingernail beside the space on the paper and the pen just there and a little x marks the spot, it was what her body knew that refused to take it this time, that pushed her up out of that chair towards the door, and then the large hands came gripping and it was her body kicking like fuck an
d spitting and screaming as the gender chick walked into the corner of the room and put her face in her hands, and Yolanda bucked and shrieked. And outside that room Robbie and her darling Darren knew what was happening, and had delivered her up.

  ‘So. I wasn’t tricked. And I fought.’

  Verla knows Yolanda is telling the truth. And then, with the image of the kicking, bucking Yolanda who understood something terrible was coming, Verla knows that a month has gone by and she will not be released. She understands, like a bucket of cold water coming down, that nobody is looking for her. There are no petitions, no Facebook protest groups, no legal challenges, no private negotiations. The memory of the agreement she signed—oh, her own stupidity—makes Verla’s face hot. Georgie Mullan, chief of staff, has made that thing never exist, has burned the Walt Whitman too, and somewhere Andrew is nodding sadly at Georgie’s all for the best, believing her bullshit about Verla leaving the country, Verla in hiding, Verla under protection, that stone-hearted Georgie steering Andrew back to his wife and children and everything is for the best.

  And Verla the Stupid let this happen, eating oysters and handing over the Whitman ‘for safekeeping’, gratefully signing fake legal papers, at the same moment as Yolanda roared and kicked and bit. Yolanda resisted, but Verla complied. She is stronger than me.

  The other girls have muttered to one another all through the days, forming pacts, whining, coaxing, telling their stories, inspecting each other for ticks, for nits. Comforting, telling lies, making alliances. Crying for their mothers and fathers, for home, and Verla has felt shame and pity for them, knowing Andrew would get her back, believing herself protected and missed.

  She wishes for one thing only now, here at the sink: to be back in that quiet restaurant so she could send her wineglass shattering and snatch up that fancy French steak knife and push it deep and downwards into Georgie Mullan’s throat.