It is only a matter of time until Yolanda is taken, till they all are, but Verla has lost the will to survive, to outlast. She is so tired of all this striving, and it is only a small dull surprise that it is not Boncer’s life that will end this way, but hers.
The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes.
She tips the mushrooms onto her plate. A glaze comes over her as she moves through the syrupy darkness of the hallway, into the ref. She takes her place at the table. Until this moment she does not know if she will say goodbye to Yolanda. But no, she will not. She wonders, dreamily, if Yolanda will come and cry at her bedside again, as her liver begins to fail. Will she hold Verla’s head while she vomits blood, will she wrap her in rabbit and kangaroo skins, kiss her cold hands, try to smear the jaundice from her skin, her yellow eyes?
Across the table Yolanda slurps on rabbit juice, not looking anywhere but her plate. She is almost all animal now. She will not wrap Verla in her precious skins, will not hold her hand. It doesn’t matter. Verla stares at the little brown pieces on her plate, the secret waiting for her. Something like peace is mixing in now with her fear, she can feel it creeping up through her body. H A R D I N G S, she reads, and it will soon be over. She takes up her fork and closes her eyes.
When she opens them she is looking at the bare table. Boncer has snatched her plate away. Her mouth opens to cry out but Boncer is muttering something hateful to her, the words muffled by his gobbling. He has speared half of it into his wet red mouth. She stares at him, and her cry has turned to a low groan, moving from her throat into her own belly.
And then Verla is shot back from death into living, forced up and up, bursting through its surface, gasping, into air: Boncer will die. At last, he will.
Will he, though?
She sits immobilised, watching his every movement, arranging her face, breathing in the violet air as the world outside this room grows dim. Her chest dissolves from the inside, the crust of a sandbank carved out by water. Boncer swallows, spears another slice into his mouth, and swallows again.
Outside in the evening a wattlebird wrenches pieces from the brush tree at the end of the veranda. Wrenching and ripping, rhythmic, just like her old familiar horse. Verla’s limbs begin to flood. The relief—fear?—is an opened sluice in her, and with the flood comes a noise, a wheeze perhaps, or muted moan, and now Boncer stops chewing, suspicious. But he is already licking the taste from his lips, his derisive gaze sliding over Verla as he forks another mouthful in, fondling the doll with his other hand. None of them know what has happened except Verla, and she does not believe it. She has entered a lost white space, hears odd music and cicadas outside; the wrenching, ripping bird. Once she saw a coloured lizard’s neck-frill flare stiff and shrink flat, flare and shrink. This world is spinning through time, like a fast-forwarded scene of evolution: black space, water shifting, sludge becoming amoebae becoming fish becoming all sorts, giraffes and man and moon landings and computers and the lizard frilling and fading, frilling and fading, all leading up to this moment in time and space because Boncer will die.
Maybe.
He does not look as if he will die. He looks completely normal. He has swallowed it, definitely. All of it. Nothing has changed. He runs his finger around the plate, licks up the rabbit gravy. Leans back in his chair and sniffs, pulls at his nose. Dandles Ransom on his knee. Sucking his teeth and turning to croon something into the doll’s psoriasis-stained leather neck.
The lizard frill flares and disappears.
Verla picks up the dishes, picks up her heart still beating its strange knowing thud, and carries them into the scullery, moving softly on her new killer’s feet. She stands in silence at the sink, staring at the plate, not knowing what she has done, or hasn’t. Yolanda has followed her in, and watches her with the frying pan, obsessively rinsing and rinsing with boiling water. Verla knows Yolanda has noticed. Both killers now, she thinks. Perhaps Yolanda thinks it too, but it will be the working of her rabbit mind, not her girl mind, and she says nothing to Verla.
Verla handles the frying pan in wonder; such an instrument! This is all it takes. Perhaps this is all it takes, this small battered pan in her hand. She behaves as if nothing has happened. Because nothing has happened.
In her new ghostliness she goes to her own dogbox, shuts the door, shoves the pan to the deep recess beneath the bed. She climbs into the filthy cradle of it, lying beneath her mildewed blanket in disbelief and wondering horror.
She has not thought what they will do once Boncer is dead.
She dreams of Hetty and that small mouldering thing inside her, dreams that Hetty walks the paddocks bleeding, then squatting and bearing tiny rabbit babies in the grass. Yolanda and Verla sit with her while she rubs and grunts herself into the earth, panting. They sit and stroke her back while she labours. Sorry, Hetty, they say, sorry, but she doesn’t hear them, intent only on the work of being female.
In the morning Verla wakes with her pulse skimming. She lets herself out of the dogbox early, walks out into the morning and picks mushrooms as if everything is the same. In the distance Yolanda’s silvery movement is visible as she goes about her work.
Verla takes her mushroom catch—only two small ones—back to the kitchen where the other girls are dawdling. Boncer is not there. But nor is Izzy. He is doing things to her in his room, Verla thinks. She peers up the dark hallway but hears nothing.
The clatter of dishes around her begins, the hollow sound of empty cardboard boxes crushing. The storeroom is completely empty, but the girls go through the house whenever they get the chance, opening cupboards and peering into cardboard packing cases, now and then yelping with triumph when they find a stray rat-nibbled packet of mothy cereal or broken noodles.
Verla moves through the air that has become a thick gel, bubbled with possibility. Someone pushes past her, she does not say anything. Stands at the window and looks out across the paddocks. She cannot see Yolanda now.
She will not speak, it would break the spell. Is he sick? Dead?
Izzy comes into the kitchen, sniffing, rubbing her rib. Verla’s breath seizes. She will not ask. Izzy is rummaging through drawers, looking about. Verla will not ask. The lizard frill flares, quietens. Izzy says nothing, only rattles until she finds a spoon, then shuffles to the pile of chipped dishes, as if nothing has happened. Nothing has happened.
Then it comes, the great tide of failure comes surging in, the thing she has never considered, not for one moment: it was not a death cap. They were not death caps. It was an ordinary mushroom she fed Boncer. She would not even have killed herself. She lets out a muffled groan. The girls glance at her, at each other. ‘What’s up?’ says Lydia, but Verla cannot answer. Existence has never been less tolerable than at this moment. She leaps to her feet, snatching at things, will run from here, now. Get to the fence like poor Hetty, grasp hold of it, let the surge of it frazzle her brain and smoke her flesh. It must end, now.
But Izzy is blocking the doorway, fidgeting, her hand on the frame. When Verla looks at her out of her failure, devastated, Izzy says, ‘He’s vomiting.’
HOW LONG does it take?
Will Boncer come hunting them in his raging sickness? When Verla tells them what she has done, all the girls lock themselves in their cells from the inside and wait. He does not come.
Do they gather silently outside his room to watch the spectacle? To watch him crawling about, shitting green and vomiting? Do they press their faces to the window glass, as gleeful as a circus to see him suffer? Do they go through his drawers and cupboards while he moans and thrashes in pain, and do they hand his possessions around, take everything? Is this what they have become?
Yes they do. Yes they have. Yes, and yes, and yes.
Except Yolanda, who hears their cackling, takes up her traps and disappears out into the paddocks.
After the first day none of the girls can watch Boncer’s suffering any longer. But Teddy has taken fright. He seizes back his spear gun and stands guard over Bo
ncer’s failing form, ordering the girls to bring boiled water, nurse him. Izzy takes pity first, cleaning his arse, washing him in the tepid tank water, emptying his vomit bowls away. For two long days he begins, it seems, to recover—and then sickens again. They take shifts then, Teddy sitting in the corner pointing, commanding this or that with the spear gun, while the girls come and go, cleaning up, smelling the scent of approaching death. At first Boncer cries for Ransom, but later he nudges her off the edge of the bed, and the rotting fabric of her finally gives way.
Verla bends to gather up the pieces of the doll, its lolling head intact but the rest mostly rag now, and scattered grass and dust. As she lifts it from the floor a little dark nub, like a dried prune, makes a tocking sound as it falls and meets the floorboards.
Outside this room, back at the ref, the girls divide up Boncer’s belongings. They share out the shiny flotsam of his stuff—an iPad (dead, of course). A satellite phone with a mildewed leather cover: dead too. The wallet with pictures of his family. ‘His mother looks so normal,’ Leandra says sadly, passing this mystery around. Joy wears his jeans and his red surf T-shirt till Teddy bellows and, spear pointing, orders her into the sick bay to undress. Then he keeps her in there with him each night, threatening her with the spear if she strays too far.
The bag with Boncer’s laptop and Xbox stuff is shared out in shock, solemnly pored over. ‘I remember this old shit!’ whispers Rhiannon, turning the games over and over in her hand as reverently as holy cards. Even right back at the start, when there was electricity, there was nothing to play these on. A little wash of new shock comes over the girls: even Boncer hadn’t known what he was coming to.
There is no more morphine left, Nancy took it all. The rest of the pills they try on him in the first days, but nobody knows what they’re for. Some seem to make him sicker.
Some of the girls leave their dogboxes and move into the house, opening rooms they have never been in, making up beds on the old red couches they saw on the first day and never again till now. But Yolanda no longer comes into the house at all. She eats with her hands, sitting on the veranda, leaving bowls licked and bones scattered for the rats.
It is Verla who volunteers for the night shift, listening to Boncer’s ragged breathing, his delirious whimpers for his mother. On the last night, as she lies slumped in a chair, she hears his breathing alter. His face is grey against the pillow, his lips dry and opened, his cheeks sunken. He already looks like a corpse and a smell—soft, rotting, like fruit turning—has been rising from him, but still he breathes. Now his shallow exhalations take on a rough irregular clatter. For a moment the breathing stops, and the air is quieter than it has ever been—and then it begins again, the air dragging in and out of his body.
Verla stands and watches, sorrowful. It has been inevitable, she whispers to him. This was always going to happen. It is as unstoppable as the seasons that Boncer will die. He has brought it on himself, but Verla cannot help taking his pale hand in hers, and holding it. The skin is dry and cool. It slides, loose over his bones. She thinks of all the times she held her father’s sad old hand, and for a fleeting moment she holds Boncer’s to her lips.
As if in echo of Boncer’s dying breath, a vast, low sound rises up from beyond the room, as if the building itself is dying too. Then a slit of shocking white appears beneath the door. Verla lets go of Boncer’s hand and goes to the door, opens it to see lights flaring on all through the house.
The power has come back on.
Boncer dies quietly, alone, while the girls run shrieking up and down the corridors.
AT FIRST they cannot not look up, scampering through the rooms beneath the glare of the fluorescent tubes, hands cupped over their brows. It is so bright!
It is a sign, Joy says when she comes into the ref, where the girls have gathered, blinking and staring. Little Joy, sweating and breathless, holding the spear gun—shortened without its shaft—in her small hand. She doesn’t even know how she did it, except when the lights came on she knew it was a sign and before she understood what she was doing she had leaped from Teddy’s bed and found that thing and ploughed it into him.
Joy rubs at her shoulder above the dangling weapon. ‘This thing fricken recoils.’ She shivers, triumphant, grinning in her ragged dress. The tube of light blares down and there is blood, all right. She stares around at them, grinning out of her smooth little face, waiting for applause. ‘It was just, like, a reflex,’ she says. Her chest heaves, in, out, with what she has done in the still night air. Then she drops the spear gun to the floor, and wipes her bloody hands on her skirt, and her little body begins to shake all over.
The power coming back on means one thing, and they all know it. Hardings is coming.
They stayed up all night, walking the corridors, laughing, crying. Chattering or silent, taking up space, enthralled.
At the end of that night and through the next two days a quiet fell over the place, like the night before Christmas. It was an awe, filled with longing and wonder, as their old lives came seeping, then trickling, then hurtling back—the jobs, the streets, the houses where they lived. The boyfriends.
Would their families recognise them? Where would they live now? The outside world: imagine. Did it still exist? Would it receive them? Who would be waiting?
They had no idea how long they had been here.
None of this they spoke aloud, but as they trailed through the house freely now—lost, soon to be rescued—gradually they found themselves returning to their rituals: Leandra at the stove, Maitlynd clucking to her frog, Barbs with her stockpot. Rhiannon crossing the paddocks to clamber once more into her skeleton ute.
Yolanda had never stopped roaming the paddocks, and barely came near the house.
Only Verla stopped her mushroom hunt. She sat on the veranda in the weak sunlight, staring into the air.
Joy and Lydia and Izzy cleaned up the messes of Boncer and Teddy and left them on their beds, combed their hair, folded their hands like saints. Had to leave the spear shaft in Teddy, packing rags around it so it grew out of his chest like a warrior flower. Izzy wanted to use the spear gun on Boncer’s head too but they talked her down: You’ll never get over doing that, Iz. Have it in your brain forever, you don’t want that.
The folder of Incident Reports they gathered and read in silence around the ref table. How Boncer had reduced Hetty, that was unforgivable. They had believed even he had loved her, in his strange dreadful way. She was carrying his baby. And now here was his cramped schoolboy lettering, making her as small as three words. Client suicide: electrocution. Lydia was solemn, too, after her search of all the rooms and every drawer and cupboard. All their real clothes burned by Hetty, it was true. Nothing of their old lives remained.
How were they to prepare for freedom?
These last nights were crazed with celebration. Even Yolanda came inside to eat, and Izzy flung the bowls of stew to the table, singing that soon they would never have to eat mushroom-fucking-rabbit-fucking stew ever again! They cheered, whooping. Some began to chant: Hardings is coming! Hardings is coming! They made a little song, and Joy and Rhiannon danced ring-a-rosie around the table.
Only Yolanda did not smile, but nibbled on pink rabbit flesh and grunted, as if she always had been this way.
And now the girls turned to look at Yolanda, beheld her in her stinking bloody skins, eating with her blackened hands, ripping meat from bone. Who was going to want that, back in the world? Glances were exchanged, smirks covered with hands. Imagine that filth in an apartment, an office. Imagine Yolanda shopping. They began giggling.
Yolanda did not appear to notice. She took up the Incident Report pad and started scrawling on it with her mudstained paws.
THE NEXT afternoon, as they know they will, they hear it coming. A cry goes up, the girls go running to the veranda to stand and watch the tiny vision of the yellow coach winding down from the ridge, disappearing into the scrub, appearing again in flashes through the black trees. Its lumbering pro
gress over the grass, around the dam, crushing all things.
The line of girls. Tangle-haired, dirty, skinny. Their body hair grown, their breasts slumped and low, hips wide or narrow, wild creatures such as they have never been in the ordinary world.
The yellow coach appears and disappears, angular through the tussocks, along the gravel road built by the girls. Its faint sound growing.
Yolanda is not in the line. Verla has been looking for her since dawn, out in the paddocks, all through the outbuildings and storerooms, the house and the dogboxes. The bus drones louder, and Verla runs through the house once more, then stumbles down to the dogboxes, calling and calling for Yolanda.
When she enters Yolanda’s box for the third time, she finds it bare. All the skins gone. No piles of little bones or shreds of fur.
She has not even said goodbye.
Verla looks around for a scrap, something to take, but the room is empty of everything that was Yolanda. From the road the bus’s rumbling comes. Verla’s heartbeat is quickening. It is time to go. She takes a last look around the empty box, turns out of the door, and steps straight into Yolanda.
Yolanda stands, breathing steadily, belted and laden with skin blankets, traps, a dangling knife. She nods at Verla and jerks her head towards the fields, holding out her dirty mittened hand. Verla stares. The bus is coming.
At home her father waits in his chair, his ghost hand waving. At home there are the soft jetty boards, the glinting water.
‘Quick,’ whispers Yolanda. They can both hear the bus, coming over the rutted gravel road.
Verla finds Yolanda’s fingers inside the furred gauntlet and takes her hand. She looks into the small dark animal eyes and says, ‘I want to go home.’
The Natural Way of Things Page 18