The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  Verla knows something terrible has happened to her moonlight horse.

  The roo’s shuddering noises, those testicles on the grass, her father in a hospital gown being helped to the toilet by her mother. Verla, eleven, watching the suddenly-old man’s entire weight supported by his wife’s one forearm. His skinny bare arse, the balls like these poor animal parts: shrunken, vulnerable in their slackened casing. Later, at home, his hoarse voice calling in the night. Her mother’s distaste at his wasting body, the ghostly mind. A storm gathers force in Verla, and there is her mother’s disgust about Andrew. Verla standing before her judges in the party president’s office, sobbing, shaking. Her mother’s sneering at them, Good god, in France this would be nothing, but really the disgust was for her, Verla, her daughter, once they were sitting in the car park in the dark. What a cliché you are. She said this to her daughter, then got on a plane and left.

  Verla’s father lies somewhere, afraid. Her horse too, afraid, trapped or sick somewhere. Death is coming to them all now—except Boncer, who should die, but he lives and they have killed this creature instead.

  She feels the cold wind coming from the sky, and begins walking back down the hill.

  Afterwards, Yolanda did not flinch as she cut the foot away.

  THE SMELL of raw meat is in the air the next morning when Nancy is found dead in her bed. Lydia and Izzy report that Teddy sat on the filthy sheets gripping Nancy’s jaw in one hand, weeping and fingering out white sludge and pill crumbs from her poor dead mouth.

  Haunches and lumps of kangaroo hang in the shade of the veranda by the scullery, dripping onto the wooden boards.

  The cockatoos wheeled and cried out in the dawn as the deep blue of the sky began to lighten.

  Nancy was dead.

  In her dogbox Yolanda lay in her rabbity nest and, for the first time in many long months, missed Robbie. She missed laying her cheek against the hard barrel of his chest, against his raspy sweaters. She missed his strong arms coming round her, fastening her to his body and swaying her in time with his own while they watched the football or stood beside his car in his mother’s front yard.

  Yolanda turned in her skin blankets and stared out at the fading stars.

  Teddy had left Nancy there on her bed and stumbled away into the dry paddocks with his arms wrapped about his head, as if to protect himself from a beating. From the veranda the girls watched him go, saw the figure of him weaving up the slope, dark against the yellow land, and they heard the sound of an adult man’s sobbing carrying to them for hours on drifts of air across the fields. Robbie had cried like that, unreachable, when Yolanda told him what had happened. And then he got up from her couch and walked away and did not speak a soft word to her again through all that followed.

  She still missed him. She allowed herself to wonder, briefly, if he missed her. The old her, that was, the Yolanda of a lifetime ago. If Robbie saw her now he would not recognise her as his once-loved girl. He would curl his lip in revulsion and murmur to a mate, Christ, check that out, would you hit it?, and they would laugh into the open tops of their beer bottles as they turned away.

  All day the girls collect kindling, gather the driest grass stalks and gum leaves they can find. They bundle up thick sticks and shreds of bark, all for the burning of Nancy. Verla walks the paddocks, snatching up tiny twigs and dragging old half-buried fence posts from the earth. Maitlynd emerges from under the house trailing long pieces of floorboard and plank behind her like a bridal train, and Leandra hauls some large hunks of rotten branch from her protected stove-wood pile. The heap of stuff grows higher.

  At last, they bring poor Nancy. Izzy and Barbs carry her between them, wrapped in the dirty sheet from the sick-bay bed. They do not struggle to carry her weight, for Nancy stopped eating several days ago and her body is as light as a child’s. Inside the sheet she is naked: they have taken away and burned already the boiler suit, and they washed her as best they could on the bed, scrubbing with a rag the odorous hollows of her armpits, between her thighs, behind her knees and ears. They wiped her stained face, cleaned away the crusts of vomit and smoothed her brow. They washed and combed back her hair.

  Now all the girls gather round. They take corners and edges of the sheet and haul Nancy up and onto the pile of sticks and wood, lifting the rolled-sheet cocoon like a stretcher, pulling and tugging until she is laid out in the centre of the pile. She is unwrapped then, her little bruised body exposed to the sky, the pale soft skin over her frail frame, the patch of thick pubic hair startlingly black beneath those sharp hipbones. Her head tilts back, her scaly lips just parted. Already her face looks skeletal, the sallow skin taut over the cheek and brow bones. The dry blonde tails of her hair spread out from her skull, tangling in her springy bed of sticks and twigs.

  The girls sit by the fire through the morning and all afternoon.

  They have hated Nancy, wished her dead, laughed without mercy when they knew she suffered. But now she lies there in her girl’s bare skin, they see she is only one of them, just skinny bone and sunken flesh, and for the first time they wonder if she has a mother too, somewhere in that little town she came from once, if somewhere a flatmate is still complaining about her unpaid rent, if the hot-bread shop owner ever asked where Nancy went.

  As the day crawls on and the fire burns, the girls huddle closer together, arms about each other’s shoulders. Tending the fire, keeping watch, holding vigil. Joy sings, clear and low, and Barbs and Izzy join in, their thin high off-key voices trying to harmonise in little hymns made of the joined-up songs of Rihanna and Gaga and Lana Del Rey. Maitlynd and Lydia turn their faces away and cry softly into each other’s shoulders as the flames take hold, as Nancy’s white skin slowly begins to darken and crackle, and burn.

  They have to keep stoking the fire, adding branches and dried thistle stalks and lengths of timber fencing dragged from the collapsing sheep yard in the dusk. By the time the sky darkens with cloud and a few large raindrops pat down, the fire is burning deep and rich and will not be stopped. Verla and Yolanda sit together, cross-legged on the ground, waving smoke from their faces. After a time their hands find each other on the dusty grass. Verla watches the flames and knows finally what Yolanda knows. The realisation has been coming all along: her midnight horse was never real, was never going to save her.

  Some hours after darkness falls, Hetty comes to stand and watch at the outer edge of the ring of girls, her eyes enormous. She stands apart, hands by her sides. For once she does not carry Ransom. Though Hetty has done nothing to Nancy they all know she is guilty, for she is Boncer’s girl.

  And more. Lydia and Joy nudge and whisper to each other, nodding at the growing curve of Hetty’s belly protruding beneath the hem of Lydia’s grubby T-shirt. Funny how clearly visible it is now, how the firelight finally confirms it, here in the quiet as Nancy burns. One body disintegrates in flame and another forms in water, cell by cell by duplicating cell, and Hetty stares into the fire, standing alone.

  Neither Boncer nor Teddy comes out of the house, not even to watch from the veranda. Here, laying the dead to rest, like washing and feeding and birth, is women’s work.

  IT WAS not a bird call after all.

  Yolanda looked up from where she squatted with the traps. Since the kangaroo she went out on her own again each morning. She did not want Verla’s company, and Verla no longer followed her. The kangaroo’s death had destroyed something between them, and Verla no longer spoke about her night horse. Yolanda was stealthy in the early dawn, the traps dangling from her belt, the comforting rhythm of chinking steel against her hip. She welcomed the dew now the weather was warming, lapping at her hem, soaking her thighs as she strode through the long grass.

  Yolanda had felt something strange just before the bird’s call—something had passed across her then vanished, like a smatter of the lightest summer rain over her face. Was it happiness? It could be, alone here with her work.

  She came to the first trap now and kneeled to her daily prayer
at the stiff furred body, knowing it as her own kind. She could merge, soon, with the ground itself, and there was so much longing in that knowledge, that sweetly speckled hallucination. Like those people who died in snow, the temptation to sink and sleep in the murderous ground must be resisted. Why? She did not know, except her instinct told her: resist. Resist.

  That was when she heard the new bird call and looked up towards it from her place down in the shallow valley. And she saw it was no bird, but knew it for a long, lonely human cry. A figure was moving up the distant hill. A calico smudge tracing its way, a little grubby star trickling uphill, letting out that strange owl’s cry.

  Another Yolanda might have responded differently; the old Yolanda might have dropped the traps and shouted, called out, as she had with the balloon. But she knew that little smudge was Hetty, clambering and scrambling. The stolen clothes discarded, the old prisoner’s tunic on her again. Yolanda knew the chaotic breaths and sobs that would be coming out of her as she climbed, the painful work of breathing and crying, the shimmering fear in her. She knew the direction Hetty was taking—up the ridge, up the bald stony track that Boncer had marched them that first day.

  Later, Yolanda would go up there with the others, carrying a shovel.

  She watched Hetty’s slow crawl up the hill, growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared. Yolanda stood, observing her own stillness, watching herself not running back to the yard, not raising the alarm, not giving chase, not trying to save Hetty. The Yolanda who might once have done those things—who ran after the balloon, real or mad dream—that Yolanda might also at least have whispered, Goodbye, Hetty, but she did not whisper anything. She stood with her hands on her hips, watching until Hetty was gone. Then she breathed out a long, quiet exhalation and dropped back into her crouch, put her hands to the little body in the trap and released its crushed foreleg. She turned and stroked the creature before undoing her belt, threading the leather strap through the slit she’d cut into the rabbit’s leg between muscle and bone, and rebuckled it around her waist.

  She took the trap and teased the hair and fine shattered bone and the blood off the steel jaws with a certain tenderness, as if this perhaps might be Hetty, already returned to the earth and transformed, having offered up to Yolanda the rich warmth of her skin, the protein of her flesh, the useful pharmacology of her guts and mashed brain. She had given herself once before, why not now?

  These things made Yolanda strong and let her know her time here was coming to an end. Sometimes when she thought about the end she grew a little empty. Then dragged herself heavily back, as she did now, to the one quiet, animal triumph: survival. Nancy was gone, the rabbits had died, Hetty would die, and each of these other deaths meant Yolanda would go on.

  Verla sees Boncer’s face when Yolanda returns from the traps and speaks. She stalks in and tosses the rabbit bodies onto the scullery bench, runs a hand down her dress. She peers down at her chest and picks a trail of gizzard away from her dress, then says, ‘Hetty’s gone to the fence.’

  Boncer whirls around. ‘Fuck off,’ he says, with only mild irritation, but reaches for his spear gun. He yells at Izzy to go and fetch Hetty. She looks at Yolanda, and scurries out. They all know something is up: the air has gone tight. When Izzy returns she’s bug-eyed. She makes sure to stand at a distance from Boncer’s spear gun when she holds out Ransom to him by one rotting arm and says, ‘Can’t find her.’

  Boncer is pale and swallowing strangely. He tucks the spear gun into his armpit and takes Ransom into his arms, staring at Izzy. He holds the doll against his chest like a baby, as Hetty used to do.

  Yolanda led the way, marching with the shovel carried across her chest. Boncer trudged behind her, Ransom clutched beneath one arm, the spear gun upright in the other. Then Verla and the rest of the girls, and Teddy at the end.

  When they found her, her hands were still gripped around the wires of the fence, though her head lolled back now. She hung there, bowing and bending the wires. Verla looked past the strange stiff body of Hetty at the world beyond the fence.

  Yolanda turned to the earth, ploughed the spade into it.

  Boncer and Teddy had brought rubber gloves, taken from Nancy’s sick bay. Teddy for once wore his rubber-soled work boots. The fence ticked and hummed. They each took up a wooden stick, and in an instant Hetty’s body was levered off the fence, falling to the soft yellow grass with a thud. Teddy threw his stick down and stepped away, folding his arms. He would not go near another body after Nancy.

  Boncer crouched by Hetty, the doll still in his arms. He stared tearfully at the destroyed body, the buckled skin. He would not touch her. The girls gathered round her, at first afraid to touch her little blackened hands like kangaroo paws, her face discoloured and distended, her hair singed.

  Behind them, Yolanda lifted the spade and shunted its sharp blade into the hard ground, again and again.

  Back at the house Leandra had found their old clothes stuffed into her oven: the red jacket, even the Chloe boots, all charred, wrecked, irretrievable. It was one more thing to hate Hetty for—but now they had her little body here, beneath their hands, they could not hate her. They went to work, worrying away at the body in silence, removing Hetty’s clothes. The burnt patches of the tunic could be mended, her boots—Yolanda’s old ones—were still better than most of theirs. Their hands worked over Hetty, industrious, unbuttoning and removing her dress, the socks, the underclothes they’d swapped with Hetty when she was given to Boncer. They searched her knotty dirty hair for hidden rubber bands or hairclips, ran their fingertips over her body for any remaining threads or hints of jewellery. They picked her over.

  The hole was dug—not deep, but deep enough to cover her for now, until the dingoes came, or the hawks.

  Yolanda was sweating. She straightened, grunting with the effort of the last shovelful. And then poor Hetty, heavier than the girls had expected, was awkwardly lifted, then dragged, curled and naked, to the edge of the hole. They tried not to graze her skin as they rolled her in. They looked away as Yolanda returned to the shovel and dropped the first rain of dirt down on Hetty in the ground.

  Boncer stared down as Hetty was buried, the tears running down his face. He had attached Ransom sash-like across his chest as Hetty used to, and held the spear gun solemnly before him with two hands. It pointed straight up as if, were he a soldier with a rifle instead of clasping a spearfisher’s stick, he might begin a twenty-one-gun salute.

  Teddy hovered behind him, swaying a little, hands crossed at his groin in reverence. His eyes were bloodshot and his pupils enormous; he carried a little yellow tube of pills with him everywhere now, pulling it from his pocket now and then, flicking a pill or three into his mouth. As Boncer turned to walk back down the hill, Teddy put his arm about Boncer’s shoulders—still carefully eyeing the spear gun—and offered him the pill bottle. Boncer unfurled his spare hand and mashed the pills into his mouth. They were brothers once more.

  Yolanda turned to follow the procession of silent ragged girls, each carrying something of Hetty’s, when she saw that Verla had trudged off alone along the fence line. She stood in the distance staring into the grass.

  When Yolanda reached her, she was standing on the yellow earth, rocking on her feet, staring at the ground in silence. At first Yolanda could not discern what held her gaze, what kept her rooted there, wavering in that terrible way. She put out a hand to Verla’s arm—and then she saw. At Verla’s feet in the grass was a swag of rotting grey canvas. The submerged, decomposing ribcage of a horse lay half buried in the ground, still partly covered in a hide as pale and mottled as the face of the moon.

  Verla turned to Yolanda and sobbed against her strong musty body, and Yolanda cradled her and rocked and cried with her, staring down at the pewter bone-cups of the hoofs, the sagging balloon of the belly, the long, noble jaw of the head decaying into the earth. It stared up at them from the round black hollow of its empty eye.

  Afterwards, as the procession makes its
way down the hill, leaving Hetty in the cold ground and the white horse decomposing in the grass, fresh silver lines come spangling into Verla’s mind.

  I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me.

  It is as if cold mercury is seeping into her veins. She doesn’t know these words, but she knows where they are from.

  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

  The understanding slowly comes. That Verla’s self, that true naked self she had unwrapped and offered up, the self she had thought so particular, so vividly unlike any other, was not … seen. Andrew was not seeking her now, because he never did. In his every moment with her, his every act, it was his own self he saw and coldly worshipped. The mercury spreads through her, icy, unstoppable. She was an empty space to be occupied. When she was gone he would find another. Has already done so.

  This knowledge comes in, clear and burning white: a constellation distinguishing itself from all the surrounding stars.

  THIS NEW constellation still glitters at the centre of her when, that evening, Verla serves up the death cap to herself.

  Her feet on the cool linoleum, she stands before the ancient stove top and shakes a pan in which the torn-up death cap rolls and sears. She was careful to pick it up with towelled hands. Now it is in the pan, hissing as its juices spread, it is benign. Surely this little thing cannot do what she wishes. To cease upon the midnight with no pain, except there will be pain, all right. She fears the pain. Oh, yes. She begins to cry a little again as she jiggles the pan. The others all have their plates, are eating already. They will all survive, Boncer too. This afternoon, after they buried Hetty, he pointed his spear gun at Izzy and ordered her into his room.