Leandra, who lay on her back with her knees bent, arms stretched behind her head with the backs of her hands against the soft silvery boards, snorted. ‘You wouldn’t know till you had it, you idiot.’
Lydia rolled onto her stomach, looked along her arm, lining it up with the floorboard edge. ‘I would. I’d have one of those scan things, and if it was a boy I’d get rid of it.’
Across the way Teddy and Nancy came down the storeroom steps with their arms full of boxes. None of the girls had been allowed in there for weeks; they had no idea how much food was left. Nancy chattered away at Teddy, who only muttered in reply. Teddy had begun to disappear periodically with Nancy to the sick-bay medicine cabinet, returning to the rabbit dinners with a glazed look, his lips wet and red.
The girls watched how Teddy used Nancy. He was disgusting, like all men, they agreed. It was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maiming.
‘Imagine if women ran the world,’ breathed Izzy.
There was a silence.
Rhiannon murmured, ‘But I like men.’
All faces turned to her, so she added quickly, ‘Not these ones, obviously.’
‘Imagine this place if it was just us,’ said Barbs.
The others considered this, in the quiet. Eventually Joy’s small voice said, ‘There’d still be Nancy.’
‘And Hetty,’ said Maitlynd.
They shuddered.
A flock of white cockatoos arrived, landing noisily down on the flat, the white line of them billowing and settling like a thrown bedsheet.
‘I miss peas,’ said Rhiannon mournfully. She used to eat them in front of her screen from a cup. Still frozen, with a teaspoon; or if they clumped together, she would lift a chunk and bite into it, the ice deliciously mashing with the peas, creamy in her mouth.
One frosty morning Teddy was seen slipping out of Nancy’s room, buttoning up his boiler suit, and later the girls heard Boncer and Teddy shouting from deep within the house. After that, Teddy let Nancy take his arm when they emerged from her room, glassy-eyed, let her lie beside him while he sunned himself on the yoga mat. They slumped together against the wall in the pale winter sun. Now and then Teddy would rouse himself, go for long walks alone, but each night he would return to Nancy and her pills.
Boncer grew nastier. He still watched Yolanda with hate-filled lust from the veranda boards as she trudged the paddocks, but she always carried her traps, and he knew better than to approach her. Instead his hatred of her, his need, spilled out onto the others. He would slink up behind them with his stick, thrust it between their legs to make them jump, run it up their necks as they ate, making them shrink from it. Sometimes Teddy or Nancy half-heartedly pulled him away, slurring, Come on, mate, but they all knew it was only a matter of time.
It was Leandra who found a way to remove the bolts from their cell doors and fix them to the other side. They locked themselves in at night now.
They are at the bench in the scullery, scraping fat off the skins, when Hetty says slyly to Yolanda, ‘Why don’t you?’
When the other girls realise what she’s talking about they stop what they’re doing, take a breath and wait for Yolanda to turn on Hetty. With her rusted steel, or maybe simply one of her strong filthy paws, grasping Hetty’s throat.
Yolanda rarely speaks anymore; occasionally she is heard mumbling something, or grunts some instructions to Verla, but to the rest of them she says nothing. Now she straightens up from the corpse on the bench before her and stares at Hetty. Verla is reminded of the kangaroos, when she and Yolanda sometimes come across them by surprise. They grow taller, stock-still, staring for one long slow minute before turning and leaping casually away, the undergrowth cracking around them. In this way Yolanda turns from Hetty’s cunning little smile now, and rips her knife into another stiff furred belly. Hetty is nothing but a curiosity, a whining mosquito. Yolanda has work to do.
The girls return to their scrubbing, but Verla watches them sneaking glances at Yolanda, assessing her now as Boncer might, as Hetty does. The strong jaw, the high noble forehead. Her wide, full mouth, the heavy-lidded Cleopatra eyes. The long, creamy body, somehow in her tatters of rabbit skins even more majestic. Her shorn hair has grown back in an oily black pelt. To keep her ears and neck warm in the early mornings in the paddocks she has fashioned a lumpen furry scarf. Its hard, unevenly tanned hide makes it sit high on her neck: a collar of fur that further emphasises her royal bearing, the clarity of her fierce grey eyes.
Hetty hasn’t finished, though. ‘You could get privileges,’ she says. ‘He’d do whatever you wanted.’
Yolanda speaks then, her voice husky from lack of use: ‘Over my dead body.’ Cleaving through bone.
Hetty taunts, ‘He’d probably like that even more,’ and a snigger ripples around.
Izzy leans in the doorframe and says plainly to Yolanda, ‘But it’s not like you haven’t done worse, though, is it? Nobody heard you complaining when you did it back then.’
Verla sees a cloud of terrible pain cross Yolanda’s face, then vanish. Nobody moves or speaks. Izzy looks frightened, only now realising what she has said. Yolanda behaves as if she hasn’t heard, working away at the rabbit carcass, ripping skin from flesh, breathing steadily in and out. But Verla feels Yolanda’s heart pulsing in her own chest.
At last Yolanda turns to Hetty and croaks in contempt, ‘You want privileges? You do it.’
All the girls look at Hetty. Nobody has thought of this, that Boncer might accept anyone else. Especially Hetty. Even she appears not to have thought of it. But Verla sees it dawning on her, with the knowledge that Boncer is growing desperate. Hetty considers, rocking on her feet, staring out the window above the bench. She pushes past them, through the ref and off down the veranda steps.
Later, on the gravel, Hetty announces, ‘I’ll do it.’
Nine girls stand around her: spotty little Hetty, who lifts her chin at all of them, suddenly powerful.
‘Really?’ Leandra looks at her in disgust, but relief is also moving through them. If Hetty does it, if Boncer will have her.
‘I will need certain things.’ She speaks haughtily out of her stumpy little face. The thick lips, the pale lashless eyes; she is purposeful now as she has not been before.
Yolanda’s chest, crossed with furs, rises and falls. She turns to the others, ‘Give her what she wants.’
The other girls begin muttering indignantly—who made Yolanda the boss of everyone?—while Hetty chants a list. But they think of Boncer’s spindly fingers crawling over their own skin, his foetid breath in their mouths. If he will be satisfied with Hetty …
Verla looks up to the veranda, to see if they are watched. They can hear Nancy’s voice wheedling at Teddy from inside the house, and she knows that behind some darkened window Boncer waits.
Yolanda is already sitting in the gravel, wrenching off her boots and swapping them for Hetty’s with the one flapping sole. Some of the girls direct bitter looks at Yolanda as they yield to Hetty’s demands.
By the end Hetty wears the least rotted tunic, the best boots, has negotiated more food and less work. She stares around her in triumph, examining their clothes, searching for something else she can claim. She finds it.
‘And a doll,’ says Hetty.
For a moment they stare at her, not understanding, all their faces turned to her in the silence, the sky looming white above them. Boncer has appeared up at the house, leaning on the veranda rail. Hetty’s neck flushes, a peculiar mottle of white and red. Nevertheless she stares back at them, meeting all their eyes, and they know she means it. She wants a doll.
Barbs speaks first, in disbelief. ‘What, to play with?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like a baby,’ says Rhiannon, baffled.
Yes. Hetty isn’t flushed anymore. She stands defiant before them, in her new clothes, hands on her round little hips, shoulders back. ‘A doll. Or I won’t do it.’
There is a bewildered shiver, a wh
ere-does-the-stupid-bitch-think-we-are-going-to-find-a-doll murmur, but Boncer has moved to the top of the steps. He knows something is happening. He sees them watching him and grins horribly, planting his feet apart on the floorboards, fondling his stick.
‘We will make you a doll,’ says Verla.
‘By tomorrow,’ Hetty says.
‘Oh my god, you must be joking,’ says Lydia.
‘Tomorrow,’ Verla says.
Hetty turns to face the veranda.
COULD YOU be grateful to someone you despised? Yes you could, and Yolanda was. When Boncer had appeared on the veranda there was a tightening of the air. The girls went silent, and someone—not Yolanda, though she craved to do it—pushed Hetty forwards. Hetty, poor stupid little Hetty, stood with her hands by her sides, clenching and unclenching her fists. Did Boncer know at that moment, did he understand this offering, appeasement? He turned his stick slowly in his palm.
Then Yolanda, too, turned away and left Hetty there to be picked over. Boncer leaned against the veranda post, one foot crossed over the other, confused, inspecting Hetty where she stood below him on the gravel. She waited, lumpish and squinting. As the girls hurried away they heard Boncer snarling in outrage, ‘This ugly dog? Call the fucken RSPCA!’ And then his voice went low and horrible, saying things to Hetty they were glad they could not hear. They scuttled to their boxes, ashamed, and slammed their doors.
In her cell Yolanda took up a fatty uncured skin from the bad-smelling pile and sat on her bed, scraping at it across her knees. Images came and went—a gruesome naked Boncer, his probing stick, Hetty’s clenching hands. She let them fall through her mind and quickly away, a hard scattering of marbles. In the clattering were things that had come to her in dreams here: a barking dog’s vicious mouth, a flapping of wings, a body staked to a road for the vultures.
They had offered Hetty up to what should have been Yolanda’s fate.
In their own boxes the girls were first silent, waiting for shrieks from up the hill. Then someone said Hetty was their virgin sacrifice and someone else snorted hardly. The sniggering passed from cell to cell. They would not be sorry. The silly bitch had offered herself.
Yolanda scrubbed and scrubbed, felt again the dissolving collapse of her own rib bones, the torrent of relief beneath them when Hetty had said, I’ll do it.
The girls’ sniggers stuttered, petered out. There was an accusing silence. Yolanda felt it through the iron walls. Then Verla called out, ‘We have to make the doll.’ This was met by another silence, which this time meant: Make it your fucking self.
Yolanda could not stand thinking of Hetty anymore. She took up her traps and set off, the corrugated-iron door of her box crashing behind her.
It was beginning to spot with rain, the sky lowering. Yolanda marched, her traps bumping against her thighs, thinking of the animal waiting in her trap, its cold blood congealed on the black iron teeth. In her head she counted the uncured skins drying outside the kennels. She felt her own breath drawing into her lungs, pulled the skins and collar closer about her to keep the rain from drizzling down her neck. It was getting colder.
At last she came down the balding slope and found the trap, near an ancient half-buried rotting branch. In the trap a large buck, brown-eyed, its neck crushed, stone-cold dead.
She squatted to release it. She put her fingers out to the soft fur, but something stopped her. It was the same as all the others, but now she was halted for a moment by its particular beauty. The carved elegance of the ears. The rounded contours of its body, the subtle tortoiseshell pattern of its fur now powdered with a fine crystalline mist of rain. The stark white of the tail, and the resignation of its glossy brown eyes.
Then Yolanda thought she heard the faintest, muffled whine. She started, looked behind her across the knobble of ground. It took her a few moments to see, a little way off, tucked between two deep tussocks, a rabbit hunched, quivering.
In all this time she had not seen one alive, close up. She crouched, watching in silence. Surely it would see her, dart away. The rain began to thicken the air. She shifted on her haunches, to show herself. She thought the rabbit saw her—it must have—but it only shivered more, hunching into a ball, seemed to convulse. It was sick.
She shuffled closer. The rabbit knew she was there, hunkering down in its jittering body. She heard again the faint, faint sound. It was in pain. The rain began coming down properly now, dripping down Yolanda’s nose, running inside her furred collar. Somewhere back there Hetty was curling under Boncer, offering herself to his foul breath, his cold urgent grasp.
A slow throb rolled through the rabbit’s body and Yolanda suddenly understood it was giving birth, or trying to. In the cold and the rain. The rabbit babies, the kittens, would die out here, unprotected.
Yolanda’s hands reached and grasped hold of the rabbit. She gathered it up, now kicking and convulsing, and thrust it inside her tunic, between her body and the cloth, whispering, trapping it. No kittens yet lay on the earth where the animal had been. She would warm it with her own body, calm it. But the rabbit kicked at her stomach, its fierce claws scratching. Still, she would not yield; she would bring it to a safe warm place. She managed to stand unsteadily with her screeching, jolting cargo, winding her belly skins tighter around herself, pressing the animal to her. (Was Hetty pressed close? Was she repulsed, did she kick?) But the skins, the skins, she urged it; couldn’t it smell its own kind? She was its kind.
She began walking, talked to it, You are safe, you are safe, kept walking. It kicked and shrieked but Yolanda was the protector in the driving rain, walking and whispering, Be calm, be calm, and slowly she felt the rabbit’s cold body warming, quieting. It struggled less, only now and then a convulsive kick. Come on, she whispered, I’m sorry, and, Soon you will be safe, and the pulsing body eased and calmed with the motion of her walking. She rounded the hill, convincing, willing it, and felt the pulsing of coming life. Then oh! a throb of birth, she felt it against herself, a wet warm slide. It was coming, it would be safe. Another nuzzling wet slide, and she walked so tenderly, curving and cupping the mother and the soft wet bulbs of the babies with her arms and body, and it was her own live born she carried, she was animal now. Yolanda was a creature moving as she should, held to the earth with purpose and gravity, labouring in the work of birth out in the darkening fields beneath the raining sky.
AFTER YOLANDA bangs out of her dogbox and storms off across the paddocks, the girls stop talking and the silence returns. Verla lies on her bed. The light outside is deepening and the temperature has dropped; soon the air will be bitter and cold, and there will be rain. Verla does not think about Hetty or Yolanda, but rain, and the white heads of mushrooms nudging upwards through earth.
In a moment there are footsteps through the grass towards the dogboxes, and a faint panting. It is Boncer leading Hetty to her cell. A whisper starts up through the walls as they hear his tread, the keys jingling from his belt, and they understand that he wants them to hear what he is going to do. They stay in their kennels but open the doors a fraction to watch Hetty coming down the corridor. They cannot abandon her for this last procession. She shuffles, flat-footed, behind Boncer, clipped to him once more with the lead; he owns her now. The damp air wafts up as they pass, and a couple of large paint shreds drift to the boards in the wake of this macabre wedding march.
As she passes Verla’s door, Hetty meets her gaze through the crack, and Verla knows the other girls in their cells are waiting and watching too.
She brought it on herself, they repeat to themselves. They silently spit her name, call her a stupid slut for giving herself up. She made her bed.
After they pass, Verla edges through the doorway to watch Boncer lean his shoulder into Hetty’s dogbox door to open it, go inside. At that moment Hetty turns and stares up the corridor to all the girls. Her lips are taut with fear. In this moment her mind is changing, this is the plea from her eyes, but it is too late and she knows it. Boncer yanks on the lead and she jerk
s forwards from the waist, and stumbles into the cell, out of sight. The door closes with a heavy shunting sound.
There is a thundering as all the girls burst from their doors and scramble out, away, up the hill. They will not listen to what Hetty has brought on herself.
They clamber to the veranda and huddle, out of the rain, idly scanning the paddocks for Yolanda, not seeing her grey-furred figure moving softly between the dead grasses in the grey light. The rain comes harder now, blowing in drifts beneath the iron roof, churning the gravel into mud. The girls stand, cold and damp, crossing their arms for warmth, waiting for Hetty’s bargain to be done with.
When Hetty and Boncer come out of the kennels the storm is over. The sunlight comes slanting from between the black clouds, moving swiftly across the land, lighting up the row of girls on the veranda, waiting. Boncer comes first, then Hetty. Hetty knows she is watched; she glances up at the girls, and straightens her spine. She wears her nightdress—she is barefoot, padding over the muddy wet grass—and carries a bundle, her tunic wrapped around what must be Yolanda’s boots, perhaps her underclothes. She is Boncer’s new pet and he is taking her away. She performs her walk, her head high.
But Boncer is the surprise. Boncer is altered. He blushes as he nears the veranda. There is an air of triumph about him, but also something else: surrender. He holds the leash in his hand as he leads Hetty—she is no longer clipped to him—and his stick swings by his side, untouched. As he reaches the steps he pauses and holds out his hand. But Hetty shakes her head, swiftly, not looking at him. She will not be seen holding Boncer’s hand. She is not that stupid.
They step up the stairs and into the house. Hetty sweeps one look around at the girls, lingering on Verla, before turning into the doorway.
The Natural Way of Things Page 13