The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  After a time, she knows someone else is in the room, has been there, silent. It makes her afraid, but then she sinks under again. Sometimes she is aware that she is awake, feels her own heavy flesh, this grimy bed.

  At last she wakes and her head is opened, there is a space for clarity to come in, as long as she stays very still. Her mouth is dry, and her face is still a thick rubber mask, a moving mask of crawling viral matter. But she can turn her head and see that beside her in a chair is Yolanda, that she has been there all the time.

  Yolanda sits by her bed, untangling the legs of some chinking metal spiders, the long limbs of rusted dolls, and now Yolanda’s voice murmurs in and out of Verla’s fever dreams.

  Traps, she is saying. For food. The dolls and spiders are rabbit traps.

  She explains them to Verla, lifting, dangling them, into Verla’s line of vision. Each one has a long pin for stabbing into the ground, for hammering into hard compacted earth, and attached is a chain. The chain coughs in Verla’s chest, she hears it dragging across dry dirt. Then the jaws, the business end, says Yolanda, muttering softly.

  Verla sinks back beneath the surface, her own jaws shivering. Before she goes under she says a whispered prayer to Yolanda: Please don’t leave me.

  When she wakes again her gluey eyes are clearer. She lies, sticky lips parting to breathe in and out, watching the shape of Yolanda in her dirty grey tunic against the white wall, tinkering on a metal trolley she has wheeled to the bedside. She sits in a chair with her knees spread, boots up on the rungs of the trolley, the tendrils of her traps laid out in the apron of her dress.

  Verla lies with her eyes hurting against the light, sometimes opening them to make out what Yolanda describes to her, each pair of tongs ending at a trap, a square mouth with zigzag teeth. A sprung flat plate which, when fixed, when bloody working, would trigger the trap and snap shut the jaws. ‘Only, fucken thing’s rusted shut.’

  The crooked teeth knitted up against each other, unmoving. But Yolanda’s hands do not stop, covered in rusty grease and dust. She has the pin of a second trap in one hand, gouging and drilling out the rust between the teeth of the first.

  Verla dozes into the sounds of clinking and scraping. She has her own work to do inside her fevered mind. Small white stars in the blue dusk, that’s what Verla searches out, for even as she has swum into and out of death in this darkened viral state she knows she will kill Boncer. She thanks her sickness for the vision, for her walk in the kangaroo-thrashing bush, her horse, her swim in the warm brown river; all of this has uncovered the mushroom that springs up after rain. She steps through her fever, stalking it, willing herself to find it among the little white pinwheel stars, so delicate, and—

  ‘Ha!’ Yolanda cries into the quiet air, spitting and blowing at rust, and rubbing the traps with a grubby towel she has found on the floor.

  Verla watches Yolanda force the trap’s teeth apart and pull at a lacy thread of blackened blood and animal hair, and flick the filigreed bit of it away. Now she pushes the hinges with the heels of her hands, and then there’s a scraping noise and Yolanda yelps, jumping from the seat as the trap hits the floor. She grins down at Verla in the bed.

  The noise brings Teddy scuffling in through the veranda door. With the light behind him in the fevered airless room, Verla sees Teddy is looking gaunt, his dreadlocks spindling out from his head. He looks as mad as Nancy now.

  Yolanda bends down and opens the trap, sets the jaws, looks around the room. A pair of wooden crutches leans against a wall. Yolanda takes one and waves it carefully at the trap: bang. The thick wooden foot of the crutch is crushed.

  Teddy hisses in fright, jams his hands into his armpits. Yolanda grins, shakes the crutch, and the shattered end of it loosens and comes away. She picks up the trap, inspects the splintered stub caught between the jaws.

  ‘Those things are illegal, you know,’ says Teddy.

  Yolanda chortles, low and guttural. ‘Gunna call the cops on me, Teddy?’

  He frowns down and Verla knows he is thinking ugh at the two filthy girls, that he is freshly fearful of the lice eggs in their matted hair, of Verla stretched white with illness, of Yolanda and her rusted weaponry. He fears their thin feral bodies, their animal disease and power.

  ‘It’s cruel,’ he says, afraid.

  Together they snigger up at him, showing their small grey teeth.

  Once, driving with Andrew through the back roads of his electorate, Verla got out to open a gate, and by it was a tree. From the tree dangled a line of strange laundry: the dead bodies of feral dogs. Long, skinny gutted things. Andrew said they’d been there since he could remember, slowly twisting in the air, lengthening or shrinking over the months, feet only just off the dirt. Skin growing stiff and leathery over the years, then dry and light as paper. Verla looks up at Teddy and sees him, and Boncer and Nancy, in a row, hanging, abandoned, from a tree. The rotted leather slippers of their feet almost but not quite brushing the earth. Inside her frizzling skull she says, You’ll know cruel, and grins.

  Teddy steps back from them, shuddering away from their madness and disease, and slams the rickety veranda door behind him.

  Verla wants to put out her hand to Yolanda because she knows now that please don’t leave me was not her own prayer. It was what Yolanda had whispered to her.

  Rabbits are long and skinny. Ribbed, fleshless things, filled with tiny bones like a fish. And the tiny bones will break quite easily, and the rabbit skins will be warm.

  Verla knows that despite Teddy’s scurrying fear it is Yolanda who is really frightened, sitting at her bedside with her murderous traps, frightened Verla will die. She wishes she were strong enough to push her hand out of the bed and reach across the space and say, Fear not, for one day soon, when Yolanda comes exhausted into the room, Verla will be sitting up, and she will ask Yolanda to take her elbow and lead her in a slow walk from the bed to the door, across the threshold, step out onto the dry creaking sun-warmed boards, then down the concrete steps and around the compound.

  She will have to hold her hand up against the light, too bright, but Yolanda will steer her back into the shade, and she will walk, and Verla will tell her all the things she’s seen.

  ‘I left my boots here,’ she will say, patting the veranda boards. ‘The kangaroos flew past me.’

  Yolanda will hold her arm, firm and gentle, supporting the weight of Verla, who will feel like a small bird perching, a small breathless bird, but she will recover. Despite Nancy and Teddy, despite the fever, she will get better.

  Now, in the room with Yolanda chinking and scraping her traps, Verla wants to offer her something for this tenderness. She says, her voice thick with spittle, ‘I saw a river, Yolanda.’

  Her eyes are closed but she feels Yolanda stop and watch her face, which she is making shine with the memory, the glisten of the river. She opens her eyes and looks into Yolanda’s deep grey eyes, nodding. ‘There’s a river. And my horse, that will come for us and carry us out.’

  Yolanda gives a small soft smile which means you poor mad thing, and says, ‘Maybe you better go back to sleep now.’

  Yolanda can’t believe her. It doesn’t matter. For the second time since she arrived here her hand reaches out for Verla’s and grips it, gently this time. She is stronger than me. The two girls sit together, hands clasped on the thin grey bedspread in the grim afternoon light. Beyond the room and the veranda, out there in the blue dusk, the cicadas shimmer and the mushrooms push their white butting heads against the earth, and the horse treads its great hoofs into the soft black soil.

  WHEN THE power goes off during the night, nobody notices. The lights are off, Verla still lies sleeping fitfully in the sick bay, the other girls locked in their kennels. There is no sound other than a final jerk and shudder from the empty fridge.

  It is Barbs who discovers in the morning that the kettle won’t boil for the instant noodles. The dusty power cord is suspected, but then the washing-up water only runs cold. The fuses are
checked, but it is not that. Teddy hurries through all the buildings then, flicking light switches up and down and saying, Fucking hell, fucking hell.

  As he does it one thought flits through each startled girl’s mind: the fence. But Boncer is ahead of them, clipping Leandra to himself and setting off up the ridge.

  For four hours the girls wander the paddocks arm in arm, waiting and jittery, picking prickles off each other, passing time by making more lists: of most missed items, what you would do for your bridal shower, songs with the word love in the title. Clothes you are surprised to find you miss the most: Izzy’s soft cotton yoga pants, Maitlynd’s white singlet, Joy’s big brother’s chequered hoodie (the others smirk: seriously, could you get more bogan?), Lydia’s black sequinned boob tube. They go quiet then, for how can she miss that thing, after everything it means, what it led to, what people said? But they have learned enough now, in these months, not to wonder too hard at such things. They let her keep it as a most missed thing.

  Teddy goes into his poses on his mat and Nancy crouches beside him, prattling, ignored. From her work with the traps in the sick bay Yolanda sees Nancy through the window, wittering on to Teddy about her most missed things: her friends at the hot-bread shop, the roadhouse uniform which was much nicer than this, tugging at the fraying cuffs of her boiler suit.

  ‘Do you think we’ll be able to get out now, Ted?’ she pleads into his silence, staring up at the ridge. ‘I hate this fucken place.’

  Still Teddy ignores her, slinking through another asana on the mat, exhaling noisily and long, his eyes closed against Nancy’s witless voice and her hope.

  Yolanda picks at her traps, watching Verla lying pale and feverish on the bed.

  After midday a cry goes up: Boncer and Leandra are seen making their way down the ridge. They all gather on the veranda, Teddy and Nancy too. But as Leandra and Boncer trudge closer, red-faced and sweating, both are glum and silent. Some of the girls begin crying, and Teddy’s face is taut as Boncer tells them what they don’t need to hear. The fence is on some deeper power source, and hums on unaffected.

  LIKE FISH scales, like platypus hair, Yolanda thought, except it wasn’t river water or rain but the dew that shaped the wet fur into elegant points down the rabbit’s long back. Its legs huddled up together for comfort, coiled once the trap had snapped shut and crushed its head. Its long silky feet perfectly aligned, side by side.

  Something ancient throbbed in Yolanda. She had trapped an animal, and now she would skin it, and eat it. Somehow.

  The air was soft with the peepings and chimes and high whirrings of small birds, insects. Flies. She had searched and searched through the wet grass, trying to find the marker where she had left the trap. Her boots and bare legs, and the stiff bell of her tunic, were wet with the dew. The grass at her thighs rustled like trailing taffeta. A vague dread had risen in her, the cast of a grey cloud moving over her. She trod carefully: what if she couldn’t find it, or, worse, set it off herself?

  Then suddenly it was there at her feet. She almost stepped on the rabbit’s small head with her crusted boot.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said in fright, gruffly, aloud to no-one. But it frightened her. The rabbit looked so dead, squashed there. It was she who had killed it.

  Yolanda squatted there in the grass beside the trap, watching the rabbit. It must be dead, for there was no possibility of life with the teeth of the trap clamped across its neck, so clearly broken. But she did not wish to touch it, not yet. She watched it for any movement, for its nerves to twitch. Wondering how to get it out.

  She examined herself for signs of remorse: she found only some smouldering, some ember.

  She put out her fingers to touch its belly. The fur was wet, the body firm; it yielded but did not spring back at her touch. She was relieved no warmth or life met her fingers. She got to work, using her fingertips and a short stubby knife she had talked Teddy into giving her to tweezer the head out from between the trap’s jaws.

  They had watched her from the veranda setting off: Boncer, Teddy, Nancy. All three were afraid of her now, and hungry with it, watching her out of their hollowed eyes. Boncer kept his distance, but when he was with Teddy he would still yell out at her, call her names. She smiled and knew he was afraid when he grabbed at his thrusting crotch, yelled out needs this lot in her mouth, permanently, and stitched up as she passed him below the veranda, her leash-belt hung with traps, clanking and swinging. Swaying already with her armour, smelling of hair and blood.

  Boncer whispered things into Teddy’s ear that even Teddy turned from in disgust, shaking his head while Boncer hooted. Nancy stood by cackling too loudly, hands in her pockets, all the time waiting for Boncer to glance her way. He didn’t. Nancy had taken to twirling up her manky hair in a ratty turban, copying Teddy. When she joined in laughing at Yolanda, saying, You can smell her rank stinking thing from here, Boncer only turned and stared at her coldly, then walked away.

  Nancy was unravelling. Nancy was crazier now than any of the girls, for Nancy had begun eating up her pharmacy stores in the hours she played nurses on poor Verla, and now she spent her days trailing after Boncer, pale and scratching, pleading for his attention. He ignored her, and once the girls heard him shouting from the other side of the house, Why don’t you just fuck off? After that Nancy trotted around after Teddy instead, moaning in her injured, mystified voice, Why won’t he talk to me?

  When Nancy cried, Teddy would only roll his shoulders and shrug and flex, then close his eyes against her, bend his scrawny body into a downward dog on the veranda boards, and smoothly breathe, unspeaking, through his poses until Nancy wandered off to sulk and sit cross-legged against the wall. She raked at her scaly arms and bitterly watched Boncer circling the girls, inspecting them from the veranda, staring, teeth nibbling his flaky lower lip.

  Crouching here by the rabbit, Yolanda smelled the wet grass, the scent of mud, of decay. Perhaps Nancy was right: perhaps it was coming from her own body. It was hard to tell, now. She prised the trap jaw open with the stick, held down one edge with the side of her boot, and—tugging by the ears—pulled the creature out. When the body came too she was relieved; she had feared the head might come away. Why did that thought sicken her, when she would soon have to tear it to pieces? She gulped the green air and let the trap spring shut again. She turned the rabbit over, pressed the belly, and yellow piss came streaming out of its pizzle, running over her boots.

  The girls were gathered at the kitchen door, peering in at something on the floor by the overturned garbage bin, when Yolanda came in. They looked up, took in Yolanda’s bloody hands, the rabbits hanging from her belt, then turned back to the spectacle of Verla crawling in garbage.

  ‘She’s after salt, we think,’ said Barbs.

  Verla crouched in her dirty nightdress, her frail white hands scrabbling through the contents of the bin, strewn in a wave across the streaky green lino floor. Tiny ants crawled over the bits of torn plastic packets and pocked polystyrene cups and bags, the squashed sauce tubs and sachets. And the ants laced over Verla’s hands and wrists as she snatched up another noodle sachet, flayed it open with her thumbs and darted her tongue into it, licking and sucking at the coating of yellow powder filmed over it. She tossed that down and took up a macaroni cheese box, ripped out a clear cellophane bag in which a few lurid orange crumbs remained. She licked the silver interior of a soup packet, nibbling into its corners. Wrapper after wrapper she opened and licked, opened and licked and discarded, until Lydia came pushing through.

  ‘I found proper salt,’ she said, jerking her head in the direction of a mouldy cupboard across the room. ‘There’s heaps of it.’

  The girls jostled to watch as Lydia worked the lid of the grubby white plastic bottle.

  ‘Don’t give it to her!’ cried Joy. ‘She might have blood pressure! You should of asked Nancy first!’

  But the others shouted her down, and Lydia snorted, ‘Nancy.’ She yanked Verla’s hand open and puffed a little p
ile of salt into her palm. Verla scoffed it, tongue lapping again into her hand, eyes cast up at Lydia gratefully. Someone else brought water, and Lydia poured in the salt, swizzling it with a fork, and they got Verla to a chair where she sat, gulping, bulgy-eyed and panting. Then they gave her another cup of water, without salt, and she guzzled that too, as Maitlynd held the cup to her face.

  ‘Thank you,’ Verla said in a small weak voice. She sat in the chair and lay back against the wall with closed eyes, and the girls all turned to look at Yolanda now.

  She stood on the lino, seven dead rabbits hanging from her waist.

  In the paddock she had worked out how to force a slit in the back legs with the knife, thrusting the stubby blade through the soft fur, jerking it along the bone. Squatting in the grass at each trap, she unclipped and forced her leash-belt through the slit, then through the trap chains too. By the end she wore a ragged skirt of rabbit bodies and chinking steel traps. Fur, steel, fur, steel. The flesh soon glued to the belt with blood; the heads and ears swung like heavy feathers as she moved.

  The girls stood in the kitchen, their feet amid the plastic and tinfoil rubbish and crawling ants. Something moved among them, between them, with this new strange Yolanda, this hunter. Delivering bloody flesh to them, bringing warm fur in from the fields. They folded their arms at her in fearful wondering, in hope.

  ‘Where are they?’ she muttered, dipping to look for Boncer and the others through the window.

  But the girls, gleeful with knowledge, had news of Nancy and Boncer. They looked to Izzy, the proud discoverer, to answer. She tried not to grin.

  ‘Nancy’s gone and overdosed. Teddy reckons Boncer found her passed out on his bed.’