‘That’s my spear gun!’ Teddy roars.
Boncer swipes the air with the silver point of it, aimed at Teddy, along with his smile. The spear, its savage hooks, suddenly visible. ‘That’s right. Now siddown and eat your fucking dinner.’
They sit. Teddy breathing hard, Nancy with her blank, hollow eyes shuffling closer to Teddy on the bench. Boncer’s sparkling violence, their own shock at what they have seen, commands them all. The girls sit and bleed, scrape their bowls in silence, the swallow of a sob now and then, grief pouring from the eyes of every girl for what Hetty has done.
For now they are all hostage to this ugly little family: Hetty in their stolen clothes, Boncer with his fearsome spear gun, and Ransom, their mouldering baby, splay-legged on the chair between them.
Hetty preens by Boncer’s side so they can thoroughly take her in. Beneath Verla’s red canvas jacket she wears Lydia’s black T-shirt with its giant orange spots; lower, her dirty thighs come out of Joy’s short shorts, pale denim, only just covering her arse. She wears Yolanda’s little gold reindeer around her neck. And on her feet, yes, Hetty wears Izzy’s new Chloe ankle boots, the ones Izzy has cried and cried over ever since they arrived. Black suede, six-inch heels. Hetty tilts one ankle, holds on to Boncer and then the chair in front of her. She flicks her dirty hair over her shoulder, and then clambers into the chair, her thick waist pushing against Verla’s jacket, the stitching stretching, and draws a bowl towards herself.
It is the colours of the clothes that so shock, that declare anew how degraded they have become. They cannot take their eyes off the red, the orange spots. It is pure, mesmerising, saturated colour. They marvel at it, in disbelief that they once took no notice of such shocking bludgeons, this startling beauty surrounding them, carried on their own bodies. They see themselves, each other, afresh. Filthy, grey-toothed, pock-skinned, lice-ridden. Their tunics colourless, torn, frayed and stinking. Their rotting brown boots. And how their skin has thickened with the cold and the wind and the sun, their lips blistered, their cheeks rasped. Even Hetty’s thighs are gooseflesh, though the rest of her body is warm beneath the red canvas and the pristine boots.
Verla knows the warmth and softness of that mourned jacket, feels her old life pulsing from somewhere inside it, held in by the snug toughness of the zipper sliding up over her breasts. She closes her eyes and swallows the strings of rabbit flesh, and returns to her dream. She pulls the head down, draws close the lambskin, its shreds of fat and blood and tissue clinging. This dreamed body she will occupy until Boncer is dead, and Hetty too, and then she will lift that red jacket away, as lightly as the petal of a poppy, and leave her lying naked to be picked over by the birds.
Ransom has begun to stink. The rank smell follows Hetty wherever she goes, but she will not put down the doll nor leave it outside. Only Yolanda and Verla know about the little corpse sewn inside. But they say nothing, even to each other, as with the others they cover their noses and mouths whenever Hetty totters near them, already scuffing Izzy’s boots. Let Hetty carry her decaying baby. Let her rot with it.
They line up along the table each evening, each evening the same plates are brought in, the same thing happens. Boncer eyes them while they eat the mushrooms and rabbit and weeds. Even Hetty eats it. She sits in her stolen clothes, the stinking doll beside her on a chair. Boncer is both king and royal guard, his spear gun vertical beside them, held in his fist as tightly as a beefeater’s bayonet.
Teddy is afraid of Boncer now. One afternoon he tried to talk him into unloading the spear gun shaft, told him how a single bump might set it off, kill Hetty by accident, even Boncer himself. Boncer eyed him, looked at the taut rubber band holding the shaft in place. But then he said, ‘Shut up, faggot,’ and pointed the gun at Teddy to make him run. So Teddy scrambled along the veranda with his backpack—a bright blue wetsuit arm flapped from its opened top and he carried orange flippers dangling from one hand—and moved into Nancy’s sick bay for good.
Here at the table Boncer watches Hetty eat. He has tried to stop her eating the mushrooms but she is too greedy. She gobbles them down as he inspects her, eyes watering with fear, watching her for signs of poison.
Like the others Verla eats the food without tasting, her eyes on the chipped greying bowl. H A R D I N G S spelled out around the rim. How strange that they once feared or expected Hardings, that mythical beast. They might as well have hoped for unicorns or dragons.
Suddenly Boncer’s hand shoots out and claws Yolanda’s plate towards him, leaving her fork in mid-air. ‘I’ll have this one,’ he says, and scoffs the plateful, his face close to the dish. He closes his eyes, just once, at the taste, finally, of the mushroom.
Each night after that he takes a plate from a different girl.
THE AIR has lost its sharpness, and the sun is over the ridge now. Winter is receding.
When Verla follows Yolanda like this, at a distance, other things recede too. Her thoughts can come and go with a simple clarity, unburdened by the gruelling marrow of misery lying along her bones in the dogbox, fouling her mind the rest of the time, in the ref, anywhere near Boncer or Hetty or Nancy. Or even Teddy, now at Boncer’s mercy too (but there is no pity for him, not from Verla). Out here in the paddocks and up on the ridge, she understands, they are … unregarded. Not threatened with sticks or being tied up or leashed or speared. They are not sluts or prisoners. Not even girls, here, but something like seeds, blown by the wind.
She looks up into the frail glimmer of the sun, which lights this ridge as it has done forever. She would like to thank it.
As if the cold morning air freshens her, Yolanda moves swiftly ahead, rapidly moving away from Verla in the furry mittens of her rabbit boots, gliding through the prickling grass and over the tussocky ground.
Today Verla follows easily, her scoping gaze careful, clean across the paddocks as she moves behind Yolanda. She knows now where mushrooms are likely to be found, predicts their small domed forms before she sees them, barely stops as she stoops to pull them from the earth and scoop them into the sling across her chest. Back in the meat locker, hidden in the hollow of the corrugated iron behind a post, are three sticky little death caps swaddled in a small piece of tattered cloth. She has not seen one for several weeks now, but the search is no longer urgent. Now that Boncer has taken to eating from a different girl’s plate each night, she has no idea how she will get him poisoned. He watches her bring the mushrooms to the kitchen each day, has searched her meat locker but found nothing.
To be so close to his death but unable to bring it about, is unbearable.
Yolanda turns and begins to labour up the western curve. Verla can hear no breathing from her, she moves without sound, though the walking is steep now and difficult. Verla scrabbles along behind with some effort. The sloping stony path makes balance hard. She no longer pretends she is fit enough to keep up. Eventually, Yolanda will stop and wait for her, looking past her down the long sweep of the hill to where they began their climb as Verla bends to catch her breath, hands on her knees.
Does Yolanda remember that first glazed, terrifying day, marching up here, clipped to the others and Boncer? How long ago that was, like a dream. How altered they are. Now, when Verla tries to remember herself, that long-ago girl struggling to the surface of her sedation that day, she cannot. It is as if she is trying to inhabit some other creature, some impossible existence, like that of a cuttlefish, a worm, a tree. Yolanda is more changed than any of them. Are they friends? Verla considers this, trudging. Perhaps, but in the bodily, speechless way of a man and his dog. Yolanda does not want human friendship, Verla knows. She looks for her up ahead—she has not stopped after all, is striding away up the hillside, not slowing or waiting, a small figure moving steadily, appearing and disappearing again against the land’s muted tones in the grey camouflage of her animal skins.
Verla pushes a strand of hair from her forehead and moves off again, sweat at her underarms and her groin.
The sun slowly lifts
.
She can hear the fence. Some days she thinks it has stopped—but when they’ve neared it, they realise it’s only that the sound is so familiar to them now it is as the sound of the birds or the ceaseless wind. Some days, like today, when the wind is coming from the right direction, its hum is loud. It will never stop, she knows bitterly; it is as endless as the sky.
Verla has not seen her horse in weeks. At night she gets out of bed and waits for it. Last night she took herself out beneath the moonlight, calling for it in a secret whisper, searching the dark plains and hills and outcrops of the buildings for a glimpse of its pale shifting form, her bare feet cold on the frosty earth, but she did not see it. She knows it is out here, plodding the hills somewhere, its long teeth grasping and wrenching at the grass. Sustaining itself, biding its time. It is another certainty that has come to Verla with the death cap: that the horse and she are bound in some way. That in a sense the horse is her, Verla, in some liberated, ghostly form. And one day—after things are done with Boncer—the horse and she will be united. She cannot say how, or what this will mean, but deep in herself she knows it. It will return, and she will clamber up to lie along its warm breathing body and rest her cheek in its ragged, burr-studded mane. It will carry her out to her rightful life, to the little Whitman book, to Andrew waiting with cries of sorrow and poetry.
She presses on, panting, up the crest. At last she catches up with Yolanda, who has stopped, standing above her, her hands clasped behind her head. Silhouetted against the sky, she is a warrior creature in furs, stinking of rabbit piss and death, muscled like a man. As soon as Verla reaches her, Yolanda turns and forges on. Only one more trap to check. It has the sense of a quest, today. Verla is tiring; she stops looking for mushrooms. She stays close to Yolanda now, just above her on the path, so she is face to face with the bunch of tied rabbits swinging from Yolanda’s belt. She watches their heads and staring eyes, their long soft bodies swaying with the motion of Yolanda’s stride.
Yolanda grunts as they round a large rock in their path, stopping so suddenly Verla bumps up against her. The furred columns of the rabbit corpses brush against her own body; she rears back, repelled.
Yolanda has stopped because there is no rabbit in the last trap. The earth in the clearing around it has been shovelled, ploughed. The trap’s long steel pin is still wedged beneath the great weight of the stone, but its jaws have snared the long, smooth foot of a large grey kangaroo. It is alive. It has been lying awkwardly on its side, but at their approach has shuffled upright. The trapped, bloody foot forces it to lurch and sway, its head dipped. Its little forelegs dangle, useless, at its chest.
Verla stood in the bush with the kangaroos hurtling past her. This happened, she thinks, it wasn’t just a fever. She feels it again, the rush of air. The velocity, that animal force. But now this bedraggled creature.
How has this happened? With any of the other traps Yolanda has set, a single jerk from such a large animal would have pulled the pin from the ground. The roo would have to drag the snapped trap with it, but would not be captive like this. But here, something in the angle of the pin beneath the rock has it stuck fast. As it jerks and strains, the pinned chain is yanked taut.
The roo is as tall as the girls. They can smell the animal breath coming at them, dank and afraid.
It stops struggling and stares straight at them. Ears vertical, twitching, quivering. The thick, muscular trunk of its tail presses into the dirt, supporting its great weight. The girls stand, unmoving, not speaking. Vainly, the kangaroo shifts and scuffles again. Then it lowers its head and lengthens its mighty neck, black eyes fixed on them, and lets out three long, hoarse snarls. Its snout fattens, nostrils flared. Panting with effort, it falls to rest back on the great stool of its tail. Little balls of shit lie everywhere about the clearing.
‘Have to unclamp the trap,’ Yolanda whispers, and takes a tentative step towards the creature.
Verla hisses, ‘You can’t!’ Its claws, even on the delicate forefeet, are long and sharp; the great hind claws are thick, carved blades. To free the trap, Yolanda would have to crouch with those black scalpels beside her face. She lowers herself to a squat, begins shuffling towards it on her haunches. The kangaroo lowers its long head and thrusts towards her, lets out another dry, warning growl: louder than before, higher pitched, a threat. Verla has a vision of the great body launched at Yolanda, her rabbit-skin belly slit open with one kick, the features torn from her face by the little black foreclaws. Yolanda scrambles backwards at its warning growl. She gets to her feet, flushed, shame flooding in after her survival instinct. Verla knows her heart is beating fast.
‘What will happen to it?’ asks Verla. In some hidden part of her a seed husk is cracking, peeling open. To do with this maimed kangaroo, to do with her night-stepping horse. A fear has been forming inside her, she sees now, since the horse went missing. And it swells in her, carrying with it a low thrum, like the hum of the fence. She wants to turn and run back down the stony ridge. She wants never to have seen this omen. Verla’s pallid, beautiful moon horse sick somewhere, caught like this.
The question needs no answer but Yolanda says it anyway. Perhaps to herself. ‘It’ll die.’
They stand apart, watching the kangaroo, its impotent weaving and panting. It is unbearable. They cannot leave it like this.
‘We’re frightening it,’ whispers Verla, grasping Yolanda’s arm to pull her behind the boulder, out of sight of the animal. If it could rest, perhaps it might heal, free itself.
Yolanda leans against the stone, pinching her lip. Her rabbit-skirts trailing from her belt. She is of the earth now, Verla thinks. She has animal comprehension, will find a way. She squats in the shadow of the rock, sits on the damp earth.
‘We have to get it water,’ Verla says.
Yolanda shakes her head. ‘Kinder to hit it on the head.’ She begins scanning the grass for a stone.
‘No!’
That cold, hunter’s gaze turning on her. ‘What’s the matter?’
If they bring it water and food—Verla pushes a thumb over and over across her palm, she knows she is begging—it might grow strong enough to dislodge the pin from beneath the rock. (Her horse, somewhere, panting, captive.) It mustn’t die.
Yolanda snorts. ‘Then what? It drags the trap around, dies more slowly, in agony, of infection?’
But she peers around the rock, and Verla can tell that even the hunter in her is moved by the roo’s exhausted, mournful face, its terrible aloneness. She recognises it. The animal is separated from all of life, yet in anguish still blindly lives. It is her trap that has done this.
When she turns back, Verla sees her face and knows they will return with food and water.
They creep around the rock to take one last look at the struggling creature. It pants at them again, and they breathe it in. Before they turn to go, Verla unwinds her mushroom cloth, tosses the pieces to the ground near the roo. Yolanda shakes her head at this foolishness.
‘It might take them,’ Verla says, but the roo only shuffles again, frightened by the rolling things, and then flops down again, watching them with its helpless, glittering gaze.
They walk and do not speak. They will tell nobody what they have seen. They think of Boncer’s spear gun, his braying laugh. They hold their own secrets to themselves as they walk: of burrowing claws, of sorrow, of pale slow-moving shapes in the moonlit night.
The next day the kangaroo did not stir as they made their way through the grass around the rock. They sat in the shadow of the stone, watching it. The flies were worse over its foot, now swollen around the metal of the trap. Now and then the animal let out a low grunt, a suffering sound. It was too near death to have touched the water bowl or the grass they had pushed towards it with a stick yesterday. They could see the black blowflies bubbled along the jaws of the trap, busy at the jammy blackened wound. The kangaroo’s head now lay in the dust. It gazed down at the foot with clouded disinterest. A few more small flies slowly orbited it
s head. Its ears flicked occasionally, ineffectively, to ward them off. Its mouth was open, panting softly.
‘We can’t do anything for him,’ said Yolanda, stepping out from under the curve of the rock. Except what she could do with the stone in her hand. There was something human about the roo’s fallen shape, the back arched, the good leg drawn up to its belly where the little hands were crossed. The thick trunk of the tail stretched out behind it, limp and useless now. The testicles lay exposed in their sac on the flat yellow ground.
When Yolanda sat down cross-legged in the dirt beside it, the kangaroo no longer started or lurched. Verla stared from alongside the rock, her hands jammed into her armpits. Her gaze was on the free foot and the forefeet claws, but she looked vacant, outside herself and this place. Yolanda shuffled nearer to the animal, lifted its long, elegant face into her lap. It was too weak for anything but a small, unresisting shudder. Yolanda took the jar and tried to tip water into its mouth, but it could not swallow. The water soaked its fur and Yolanda’s tunic. She saw something coming from its nose. She had to hold her breath to stop from inhaling in its rank smell, lifted her head to the side and gulped air now and then. She looked across at Verla, the dying animal in her lap.
There was no point in trying to remove the trap now, and there would be no need to use the stone, for it would very soon be dead. The kangaroo’s belly rose and fell with rapid, shallow breaths.
In Rome, Verla saw the marble mother cradle her gleaming dead son. Andrew explained how miraculously out of proportion was the Pieta, in order that Mary’s arms could hold the whole man; he went on about stone and sculptor, but in that bustling domed space Verla felt there was only herself and the woman. She understood her, as if those were Verla’s own fingers pressing against slack lifeless flesh. The limp and dreadful shoulder hanging, the mother’s strong fingers pressing. And now here Yolanda sits, her own pieta in the dirty grass beneath a bright cold sky, crooning and snuffling, murmuring into the dusty fur, cradling and rocking.
The Natural Way of Things Page 16