The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  Yolanda has told the truth about being taken, but is lying about the storeroom: she has seen things in there she’s not telling, things she won’t reveal. Yolanda and Verla hold themselves apart, for survival. This is their bond.

  Verla knows this because she too has her private mind, containing things she will not tell: her dreams, and the horse. She has heard her white horse in the night. The others have heard it too, but they think it’s a dingo, a possum, they think it is Boncer or Teddy or Nancy even, scuffing about outside the kennels, wandering in the dark. Only Verla has seen its white flank, passing close to her window in the moonlight, and she has smelled its breath. It lifted its long, fine head, held still in the dark, looking at Verla, breathing quiet and deep as she looked back at it, breathing her own quiet and deep reply.

  Come for me, she has whispered to it, and the horse knows. It will come.

  In the days, lifting concrete, she secretly scans the hills. This morning she saw its handkerchief-flash, just for an instant, up on the far ridge, in the black scrubby bush. One night it will come, she will crawl out, somehow, and climb onto that horse’s broad white back and lie down over its long body, twine her fingers in its mane, and it will take her away.

  Sink water sploshes. Yolanda takes another dish from Verla’s hands.

  Boncer comes in, chewing something. He pulls a chair up and sits, leaning back, legs wide, watching Yolanda work. Watching Yolanda’s body, Verla knows. Another thing she will not tell.

  Verla sees herself whirl from the sink, hurl a spinning plate to strike Boncer in the head. Sees her own strong calloused hands wrenching that chair apart, taking the splintered end of its broken leg to stab Boncer into pulp, her knees on his chest, her shoulders working the pole of the broken leg hard and fast, mashing and grinding, Boncer’s face unrecognisable, his blood soaking into the pits of the ancient linoleum.

  She hands another dish, dripping, to Yolanda. Outside, the cockatoos are starting up for the evening. Boncer sits, staring at Yolanda, running the leash slowly through his hands.

  When they finish the dishes he clips them together and leads them back out to the cells. It is not yet dark enough to see the stars, but the girls look up for them nonetheless.

  THE MANY faults of Hannah are Teddy’s favourite topic, and he returns to it often with Boncer. It is as though this is what he meditates on, breathing in a tantric way through his long, demanding yoga sessions on the veranda. On hot days he rolls his boiler suit down, right down to his hips, and the sweat gleams on his beautiful bare back as he rolls through his poses. Teddy has sharp pink nipples and his chest is covered with light golden hairs.

  Down at the roadwork, Rhiannon and Leandra agree that they wouldn’t mind doing it with Teddy. At first there is a general consensus that Teddy would be all right in the sack, but the more they hear him complain about this Hannah of the past, the more it seems that sex with Teddy would be like sharing a bed with someone having sex with himself. Hannah and her hairy legs, the thick way she breathed that he didn’t like, the way she fucking nagged him about pointless, bourgeois shit, and also her politics, which were pretty immature—all of these faults of Hannah are things the girls can imagine in themselves, and they begin to feel small and exposed, and it becomes more difficult to imagine wanting sex under Teddy’s intricately critical gaze. Teddy is the kind of guy, Izzy eventually declares, that would be out telling his mates how small your tits are the minute after you’ve sucked his dick. It is true, the girls agree, and after that they despise Teddy almost as much as Boncer.

  At night Boncer and Teddy still come to sit and smoke in the rotting cane chairs. Verla hears them talking about Boncer’s Scampr profile. He wonders about the responses lining up for him, worries what he’s missed, the momentary blossoming of love hearts and lipstick kisses of all the women ready and waiting, wanting him, but who for lack of a reply now may have moved on.

  ‘… the way a woman should be treated, so if you wanna dance the night away—I put that at the end,’ Boncer recites, wistful.

  There’s a silence before Teddy says, ‘Sounds great, man.’

  ‘You weren’t even listening, you prick.’

  ‘I was,’ protests Teddy. ‘I was just thinking.’

  There comes the woolly flare of a struck match. They have not yet run out of tobacco but are rationing. Teddy’s weed ran out several days ago. From her bed Verla imagines their two stupid faces illuminated for a moment, hears the suck and exhalation and smells the richness of the smoke, sees Teddy with one bare foot hooked across his knee, Boncer’s skinny legs straight out, stretched back in the sinking chair.

  ‘Chicks dig dancing,’ Teddy says in his smoke-husked voice. ‘You could practise with Nancy.’

  Boncer sighs—‘Nah’—but there is longing in his voice.

  Verla’s pulse knows what’s coming. A red-bellied black snake moves through her mind, sliding through the grass.

  ‘So …’ says Boncer slyly. ‘Which one would you?’ Then he and Teddy both at once say, Kovacs, and break into sniggers.

  Teddy starts his usual warning about shitting in your own nest but trails off into silence. It is a long time since they have mentioned the bonuses.

  A hopeful tension enters Teddy’s voice then, when he says, ‘So you reckon Hardings are coming, this time?’

  Another pause. Moths tick against the tin.

  ‘First week of next month, they reckon,’ says Boncer. ‘But they’ve said that every time.’

  A glum silence falls. The night swells, and Verla’s snake slithers back into hibernation beneath the floor. She sees Teddy gloomily stroking the long arch of his foot resting across his knee.

  ‘Cunts,’ says Boncer.

  After they have gone, Verla stands for a time at the window looking up at the stars. Eventually she goes to the bed and falls in and out of sleep, straining to hear the soft, irregular steps and chewing breath of her moonlight horse, but it does not come.

  CLOUDS COLLECT and steepen, build then collapse, silver empires rising and falling in the vast blue skies.

  Months have passed.

  They no longer ask about going home, no longer strain to listen for aircraft or truck or tractor sounds. The bonnets are worn soft, the shoe leather too. Their days are a rhythm of marching, labour, sleep, a little food from the packets in the storeroom. Some of the girls have sickened and mended, others still limp. Barbs’s broken jaw has healed, though badly; she will never bite straight. Hetty’s burnt arm is angry with a stretched, glossy scar of deep red, but the itching has almost stopped.

  Boncer still carries his stick everywhere and occasionally savagely strikes, but it mostly hangs unused from his belt. He no longer has the daily energy for it. Teddy ties up his dreadlocks now with rags torn from Hardings tea towels; DIGNIT and PECT and ONMENT, reads the tiny blue print on torn white linen rags winding through his murky fronds. Nancy has abandoned her miniskirt in favour of an oversized boiler suit like the men’s, which she wears with sleeves and trouser legs rolled. Her costume props have gone except for the toy nurse’s cap, which she still wears bobby-pinned to her ratty blonde hair. The cap is bent and grimy with finger marks, but she won’t give it up. She complains all the time of boredom, until Boncer shouts at her, For fuck’s sake you’re worse than them, and then she sits sulking on the veranda, eyes rimmed red, watching Boncer, trying to please him.

  The girls are still clipped together when taken to and from the cells. In the field they labour, chipping weeds, shovelling gravel, raking. The pile of concrete chunks has gone, the pieces laid out end to end into the distance. The road corridor has been cleared, the hard dry dirt graded with their hands and ancient hoes and rakes. Edges have been dug and sloped to stop erosion. As they scraped and cleared the knee-high grass they have shrieked and dropped their tools and leaped from the slithering path of brown snakes and red-bellied blacks, or the stomping shuffle of the thick-necked, weaving goannas. Bird calls drop from the skies all day long and, taught by Leandra,
the bird nerd from the army, they recognise them now: not just the screams of cockatoos and corellas or the squawking lorikeets, but also the floatier melodies of wagtails, butcherbirds, thrushes and kites. At night the mournful, mournful stone curlews cry.

  Hardings is still coming, they say. They believe Hardings is coming.

  The girls’ bodies have hardened, thickened with muscle. Their skin has grown tougher under manual work and sunburn and dirt. Most of them have lost their bonnets, and they scratch furiously at their thick, ragged new hair. Somebody always now has lice.

  The sun is losing its heat, and the nights are growing longer. The darkness creeps in early, and stays.

  A GREAT huntsman spider patrols Verla’s ceiling, lurking in the same spot for days at a time. The dogboxes are cooler now in the nights. Verla dreams of clawing at faces, spitting and fighting.

  One morning she wakes in stillness. Boncer has not come bashing on the tin walls, but she can tell by the quality of the light that it is no longer early morning, and she can hear the others shifting on their beds.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she calls out.

  Nothing, they say. From Verla’s window she can see no movement up at the house, there is no sound. Nobody knows anything.

  Then Hetty yells cheerfully, ‘A sleep-in!’ and begins reporting last night’s dream. As usual, it is of food. But it is not the food she knows. She dreamed she was on safari, that she was a sleek animal, a predator. She dreamed of pushing her sharp teeth through the soft belly flesh of a zebra. She describes an ecstatic moment of puncture. Of burying her face in blood and still-pulsing wet flesh.

  ‘That’s not about food, it’s about sex!’ yells Maitlynd from three cells away.

  ‘So gross.’ That is Lydia, from down near the end.

  ‘Lesbian sex!’ yells Maitlynd.

  ‘You wish,’ Hetty sneers in reply.

  They settle into quiet again, sinking back into the creaking beds. The cicadas start up outside and Verla falls into a loose, shimmery sleep.

  When she wakes there is still no sound but the buzz of flies and the ticking of the roof and the walls as the sun gets higher.

  At last, Leandra calls through the walls, ‘Joy, sing for us?’

  Joy has barely opened her mouth since she arrived, and has told almost nothing about what happened on PerforMAXX. All they really know is what everyone knows from the papers and the court case, of Gordo’s fatherly ‘bear hugs’, the weigh-ins and threats, the on-screen faltering and tears everyone thought were about the competition, about Joy losing her nerve and wasting her talent, when it was really about what Gordo liked to do to her in the soundproofed cave of the studio when the others had all gone home. And Joy got eliminated and stopped singing for good.

  There is silence from her cell.

  ‘Please?’ says Rhiannon, but no answer comes. They know she won’t; she never has, no matter how many times they have asked. Hetty has started up again about her dream, when a low rhythmic scratching sound is heard. It is a sound both familiar and strange, and it’s coming from Leandra’s cell. Hetty stops talking, they all strain to hear as the scratching grows louder, knowing yet not quite placing this sound, wanting it to go on. Chunk-a chunk-a chunk-a, comes the scratching, something they recognise from long ago. And then it works: the scratching calls up Joy’s voice, compelled by rhythm alone, her body responding. The beat coaxes it from her, strong and rich and clear. ‘There’s a fire,’ she begins, ‘starting in my heart.’ Verla hears it, they all hear it, travelling along the beams of the roof and the ripples of the tin. That voice, lush and low, and they are hearing Joy’s song, the one she was going to win with. The cover song every teenager in the country watched her take possession of each week, practising at the piano, crying in corners, starting again, getting better, her voice growing in power and conviction. The girls lie completely still, listening to the dark honeyed voice of Joy, growing louder. Then the second verse begins and a drumbeat rises up from the boards beneath Lydia’s heavy boot, and then Rhiannon joins her, a hollow tribal booming from the tin wall of her cell. Then Maitlynd starts drumming too, and then Barbs, and this deep jungle beat seems to rise up from the earth itself, spreading through the fibres of the floors and walls, through their bodies, along the cells from girl to girl, and above it Joy’s voice climbs, and soon the whole kennel building is thumping with this belly-driven rhythmic song. Joy’s voice strengthens and soars, crying out with bitter fury, crying out the scars on her captive heart, singing up from the depths of her despair. The girls are all standing now, beating at the drums of their walls, beating out with boots and fists the months of grief and rage, each drumming for herself but most of all for Joy, until at last the song is ending and cell by cell the drumbeat eases and quietens and stops, until the only sound is Joy’s pure human voice: steady, rich and bitter. The voice of Joy, who almost had it all.

  It is mid-afternoon by the time Nancy’s skittering footsteps come down the gravel track. They hear her enter the dark corridor, sniffing liquidly as she moves along the line of dogbox doors and calls, ‘Get up, you lazy slags.’ But she’s taking longer than Boncer does, struggling to turn the keys in the rusting padlocks.

  Barbs shouts, ‘What’s going on, Nancy? Why have we not been let out?’

  Verla lies, listening.

  ‘Mind your beeswax,’ Nancy says, but she sounds nervous.

  Out in the daylight they stand. They are still bristling with the power of Joy’s bitter broken-hearted song, and even though Nancy could not have missed the noise she behaves as if she heard nothing. Verla looks along the line, sees with new eyes how changed they all are. How dirty and aged and toughened. Would they be recognisable now to their own mothers? Their hair returning as thick pelts over their heads, like possum fur. Heavy with dirt, oily as feathers, thinned and coarsened by the dry rubbish they eat. Verla’s is the worst, they tell her. Bushy and dull, like coarse fur beneath her fingers. She wouldn’t have a clue what she looks like. In this whole place there is no mirror, except for the shard Izzy was once found with, out in the paddock one day. She had found it, rust-speckled, among the spider webs and rat droppings behind one of the troughs outside the old laundry and carried it gingerly inside her tunic. Then slunk from the roadwork at midday, off into a paddock, standing there holding it high in her two hands, flicking and tilting it, scanning the sky. There had to be satellites up there—Google Earth, hello?—and someone would see a mirror flash. Rhiannon snorted that Google Earth didn’t bother updating shithole landscapes in the middle of the desert where nobody lived, and though they all knew Rhiannon must be right, Izzy was hell-bent on rescue and stood out there with her mirror even after they yelled at her that Boncer was coming. He beat her so badly she still couldn’t walk properly, and that was well over a month ago.

  ‘Where is Boncer?’ Yolanda asks Nancy now.

  They all eye her as she moves along clipping them together. They could easily overpower her, Verla thinks—Nancy is skinnier than any of them, pasty-skinned, ratty-haired. But what would be the point? Where would they go? The strength of Joy’s song is leaching away from her, the romance of it turning foolish now out in the hard light of the day. The thickening bush creeps down the ridge, the nights are getting cold.

  Nancy clips them together, one then another. At Boncer’s name she blinks rapidly down at her busy fingers. Something is happening.

  ‘He’s … in a meeting!’ she says, grimacing, trying to extract a key from the sticky lock of Joy’s leash.

  The girls snort, looking at each other. Verla swats at a mosquito. The large, slow insects have been getting worse, breeding down in the muddy shallows of the dam. All the girls are covered in bites, some of them red and scabby with infection.

  ‘What fucking meeting!’ It is Lydia, her little black eyes glittering sarcasm, hands on her hips. For a second Verla sees her on the cruise ship dance floor, chin tilted, glossy hair up, the black sequinned boob tube that was in all the photos. Those eyelashes thick
with lust and mascara, wide sexy mouth all teeth and laughing. Before everything that happened, when Lydia was just a pretty Maltese girl at a party, a little drunk and up for it, when even that drug-fucked lowlife in the muscle T-shirt might have called her Lydia instead of that thing, that black ugly dog.

  Nancy turns and slaps Lydia’s face, striking hard with her flat palm. Lydia shrieks; the others cry out in shock, then grab Lydia’s arm to stop her punching Nancy back.

  ‘Mosquito, sweetie, sorry!’ sings Nancy nastily. She turns back to her job, tugging hard on the leashes. ‘Okay, march! You fat things.’

  In the line as they tramp up the track Verla watches Barbs’s thick muscled shoulders moving beneath her tunic, the strong cords of her neck, her angular skull. The unbalanced swell at the side of her face from the broken jaw. Long before today they have mastered the rhythm of marching when chained so none of them is jerked or stumbles. This way of moving, shackled together, has become part of them, unremarked, unconscious. But today they shift and step out of time, unsettled. Where is Boncer?

  Verla scans the surroundings as they walk, this strangeness of Nancy leading them making her see things as new again: the leaning fences of the stock yards, the collapsed shearing shed, the low concrete corridor of the sheep dip, and the ramps and chutes to the rotting dark interior of the shed. She searches the ridge for the white horse, but she has not seen it for weeks.

  She’s yanked forwards. In front of her the tongue of a tattooed butterfly wing creeps from beneath the coarse fabric of Barbs’s tunic—a tip of pink and orange wing, one coal-grey antenna—curling up the back of her broad red neck from her left shoulder. The line moves awkwardly as Nancy jerks on the leashes, making them trip and stumble. Verla must watch the movement of Barbs’s boot heels, scuffed almost white and salty with tidemarks of sweat. Her solid calves sprout thick black hairs.