Fauna

by Donna Mazza

  I wonder how to approach such a monstrous revelation, how to slip it into casual conversation. I know that if I try too hard, like I have before, I will bumble it and sound awkward. But I can rely on my mother to pursue the secret she knows I am keeping and I have, after all, started the conversation. She is still sniffing the trail, seeking a truth unimaginable to any sensible person. I have long since abandoned any claim to be one of those.

  ‘The property was compensation.’ My hands are hot and I put the cup on the table, wipe them on my skirt. ‘After Asta was born.’ No way back now.

  ‘Something went wrong then. What the fuck are you two doing going for IVF anyway? You never had fertility problems before. If you were meant to have another child it would happen eventually anyway.’ She hooks me with her eyes. Tea in hand, she clasps it tight as victory.

  ‘It was a medical trial.’

  Her face visibly shocked. ‘Oh, stupid girl.’ She puts her tea down, starts to wind up, hands like birds. ‘Drugs or genetics or something else? Genetics, I’d say. I knew she wasn’t Isak’s.’ And she goes on, telling me off for not learning the lessons she taught, not being wary enough of institutions, the medical profession.

  ‘She is ours, conceived in vitro and altered.’ I am glad Asta is having her afternoon rest, curled up with Tayto in front of the television, and doesn’t hear my explanation, doesn’t hear me say Neanderthal—how I hate that word now, like all the poisonous, derogatory and racist crap uttered by our forebears. It is yet another way of oppressing, controlling and exploiting. Poor Asta doesn’t realise her difference yet—that she is not the same kind of human as we are—but soon she will. She is getting wise enough to compare herself to Emmy.

  Once the truth is out, Mum is silent. Staring out at the slow-moving trees, their tops rustling like crushed paper.

  ‘Why?’ she asks.

  It’s an albatross question. It travels long, wheels around my head sometimes and rarely makes landfall, unless shot. But she will have the truth, despite my shame and naivety, the tenuous logic I used to convince myself, and my poor, poor Isak. Even to me, nothing I say satisfies that question.

  ‘You two are broken,’ she tells me. ‘I see it.’ And I don’t disagree, but how do I resolve things, how do I rebuild it now it is torn apart? She has no solution.

  The truly difficult question rests at the edge of us. I hear it whisper, growing more distorted for the lack of light it is given. Like all horror, it grows in the darkness and still we do not open the trapdoor on it. The children’s steps are on the driveway and Tayto barks, tail whipping him into a twister.

  Our family feels doomed, poisoned from within, by my own rash behaviour. Yet, how can I regret her when she stands there with her purity, her sweet and curious face? She is my own, more than any child ever could be. She is my creation, my will. Mum sits Asta on her lap, watching her face with fresh awe.

  She cooks dinner, has the children eating large quantities of spinach and we share a bottle of red wine. She is quiet, just processing it all, she tells me. It’s a lot to process. She touches Isak on the shoulder as she puts the glass in front of him, and they make eye contact. He looks from her to me and back again and I nod. He rakes his fingers through his hair and takes a big gulp. Despite our brokenness, at least we can read each other. Some bonds are locked. He stands and hugs her for a long time. ‘Never, never, never tell a soul, Sandra. They’ll take her now if they find out.’ I feel released of the pressure of silence. As if, finally, she can be the mother I need.

  Sleepy from wine, I reach out in the dark and feel his warm chest under my hand. His voice vibrates deep with concern, but I distract him, unprotected by contraceptives just like we did when we were young and careless. The thrill and hope of it will buy us time, at least for a while.

  ‘Another one wouldn’t be so bad.’

  He pats my shoulder, ‘Just be happy, my love, be happy in the now, because things will change. They will all grow up.’ Sweet and bitter are locked together like hard fruit.

  My mother makes no move to leave, but seems to immerse herself into our lives. She cooks things I haven’t eaten for years, laden with vegetables, much to Isak’s disdain. Every time he suggests a barbecue her menu becomes more elaborate and we soon finish the case of wine—the only way he can take the curse off all those vegies, he says. In years past, I would have found her presence invasive and been chilly towards her, she would quickly read the signals and find reasons to move on. But now, with this secret held at three corners, it has changed the shape of our relationship. Isak blames her mellowing and need to care for someone now that Marco is gone, but I think it is her concern. She has always been drawn to a good tragedy waiting to happen.

  I take her walking by the estuary, share with her the wondrous life of the birds here, where they gather in a rare landscape.

  One afternoon during Asta’s siesta, I log on to Ärva–LifeBLOOD®’s website and take her through some of the PregCam™ records. I tell her all about Dimitra and her close study of Asta as a baby. How they have left us to it for a while, told us to just try to keep things normal and healthy. Told her the story of the heart cells, shown her a glimpse of what lurks in the future. She is quiet with the realisation of what awaits Asta once she has ‘grown up’, even though the truth of it is very murky.

  She has mixed with a lot of conspiracy theorists and people prepping for the apocalypse so she interprets it all through her own paranoid lens. Some of it, though, makes perfect sense and touches on my own fears. The things I push down into the darkness. They probably still have you under surveillance, she says. We have to disconnect ourselves.

  ‘When you’re ready, you let me know—and I’ll help you get the hell out of here. I know how to escape.’ It’s true. She had us packed and unpacked so often, leaving a bundle of mail at some country post office to eventually be tossed in the bin. She kept us offline for years, unless we were living with Marco. Eventually he convinced her to let us be part of the world.

  I never wanted that for my children—all that instability, changing home and school so you never have any real friends. Isak would agree.

  ‘Think of Asta though, what the fuck do you think they’re going to do to her?’ She is near hysteria, eyes wild and wet. I am afraid of her like this, and wonder why I have told her the whole truth. What she will do with it if I don’t run, or if I do. I think of Isak’s words.

  I tell her about my long drives, the paths I have traced out into the wheatbelt. She knows someone out there on a station from years ago. Someone else across the border into South Australia. Very remote, on the fringe of an Indigenous community.

  ‘Wait, Mum, just wait until she’s older.’ Things will change, they will all grow up. Asta is a lot younger, the other two don’t need to be disrupted. We can’t all run off and live an itinerant life like I did when I was a kid. ‘Let them all be normal for as long as they can.’

  I want to keep our normal. I’m not ready to let it unravel.

  It is overcast when she leaves, warm with humidity, and Isak packs her expanded bags into his car. She lingers over breakfast, sitting between the girls on the couch, drinking them in.

  ‘This is what happens when people own houses,’ she tells me, ‘they’re not free to come and go as they please.’ She holds me for a long time. ‘Don’t let this place keep you from doing what’s right.’

  The kids stand in a row and she holds each of them in her arms. The wind has picked up and a thunderstorm is coming. Isak has started the car but she runs back to me, the door of the car open. She holds my face in her hands and looks intensely into my eyes.

  ‘I’m here for you. Just say when.’ Squeezes me tight.

  Despite myself, I cry and they drive out of our gate and the car fades into the distance.

  For days, we all quietly ache for her presence.

  SEVEN

  A storm rolls in across the peninsula and strong winds toss the heads of the trees. It roars in the night, estuary water
s surging high and covering parts of the low road. In its wake, the high-water line is marked with fragments of reed and broken sea grasses along the bitumen. Early in the morning, Asta and I survey the yard, noting the dropped branches and the anxious, ruffled chickens. Tayto is barking in a high pitch under the trees where she plays and as we get closer there is a dense pile of small sticks. It might be a nest, so I pick him up and turn it carefully. It is empty but there is a small magpie, fully feathered and damp with rain, slumped on the ground nearby. Above us, the whip of the air tells me the mother is swooping. I duck, throw my jacket over Asta’s bright hair.

  I hand her the dog, who twists to try and get to the bird. ‘Run back to the patio,’ my voice bleeds out into the wind. The baby is cold, but she moves a little at my touch and her oversized beak shifts. I collect her gently. Grains of sand cling to her feathers, her cold feet on my hand, and I place her back in the cup of the nest. She is almost big enough, but her flight feathers have not grown out yet, her wings are still too short to fly. On the kitchen table, we both look at the small bird, Asta with curiosity and me concern.

  ‘Baby magpie,’ I say to Asta. ‘It’s cold, we have to warm it up so it doesn’t die.’

  ‘Baybee pie,’ she says, gently stroking its head.

  I put a hot water bottle under the nest. Tucked among the sticks are bits of string and thread from our clothing and a long strand of red electrical wire. Asta gathers earthworms for it, chops them up herself and it soon fluffs up, starts responding to her care. I try to teach her, but we are learning together.

  Soon, Pie is walking around on the patio and eating the dog’s food. The mother stays close by, warbling and talking, encouraging the baby bird. Eventually it flies away with her, but they both come back each day to eat the dog’s leftovers. Asta digs in the compost heap and leaves out plates of macerated worms.

  She is rarely sick, but in the winter the children bring home a terrible flu that passes on to all of us. I try to treat the symptoms with essential oils and hot herbal drinks but it is very persistent and Isak takes Jake to the doctor. Asta is listless with fever and lies around on the couch while I minister to her, despite being sick myself. I ring my mother for new ideas on treatments but she reiterates the things I have already tried. One night, Asta’s face is hot and she pulls at her ears, moans, eyes half shut and in a delirium. I sit beside her bed, cooling her with a damp flannel and trying to steam out the sickness with infused eucalyptus.

  ‘She needs to see a doctor.’ Isak stands in the doorway, his pyjama pants sagging. He confuses me sometimes; knows that we can’t take her to a doctor. ‘Maybe give her some of Jake’s antibiotics.’

  I can’t do that.

  ‘We could ask them.’

  I fear Ärva-LifeBLOOD®, like a terminator, like Nazis or torturers—what they might do. What they will do. But there is nobody else to ask.

  ‘I’ll get the screen, you want to do it here?’ He is worn down with nights of sickness himself and leaves me to deal with it.

  My hands shake as I call up the address and submit the request for a video chat. There is a quick response. A young woman answers and I ask for Dr van Tink—it’s an emergency, I tell her. But he is unavailable, so I ask for Lucas who soon appears on the screen in a clean office. I explain the sickness, her long fever and turn the screen so he can see Asta, then turn it back. ‘She has an earache,’ I tell him.

  He is animated, face like a sharp little dog. ‘Otitis media. The research points to it as a major health problem for the Neanderthals.’ The word fills me with tension. He smiles but his nose wrinkles like a sneer.

  ‘We have developed a new penicillin, made from a type of moss that grows in the Iberian pine forests.’ He grins and rubs his fingers. ‘It’s what they had so I think it will be safe. We have tested it on a child already.’ I assume it is a child like her but I know he won’t say if I ask.

  ‘You think it will be safe?’ I try to extract more detail.

  ‘Just keep up a probiotic diet just in case. The other child recovered in a couple of days.’ He looks over the screen and turns off the sound, gesticulating to someone else. His long hands chop this way and that with ample words, generous punctuation. A silent movie. Then he touches the screen, ‘I’ve had some couriered to you, just follow the prescribed dose.’ He pauses, waiting for me to respond. ‘Everything else okay?’

  ‘Where’s Jeff? Is he still working there?’

  He pushes his flopping fringe off his face and smiles unconvincingly. ‘Of course, just doing some field research. I’ll let him know, so he will be in touch just to see how she is.’ After a cursory goodbye, he ends the call.

  That night I barely sleep, between Asta’s fever and my thoughts, which skittle through the conversation again and range back into the past ones, resting every so often on the suggestion of my mother. It really is a big country and there must be remote places we could go. After Emmy and Jake leave school. And if she were sick like this, I would have nobody to help me. Nobody could spare her suffering.

  The following afternoon, a white car delivers a blank white package and inside are three boxes of Ärva-LifeBLOOD® medicines. The antibiotics in a plain box, dosage printed on top and two boxes of Poplar Painkillers from their website, New Children’s Formula. I wonder if the children are the new part, or the formula.

  Asta is still listless and heavy-eyed so I crush the tablets and mix them into some sweetened yoghurt. A day later, she is fine and a message comes from Jeff. No side-effects, I tell him, she’s getting better.

  ‘See you soon,’ he responds.

  It hangs like a threat, and I’m uneasy, unsure of what to do with this promise, this curse.

  After the interruption to our lives, everything returns to our kind of normal. Emmy has a lot of work to catch up on. Since Mum’s visit, I regularly switch off our connectivity so I feel safer and she studies at Milly’s house after school. Isak always drives to pick her up, Nanny Ray communicating directly with him to arrange things. I wonder if she perhaps sees it as a charity to my daughter, who I expect complains about the problems I cause her. Sometimes I send eggs to compensate for them feeding her so often, taking her to netball. Isak drives around for their sports and I am home with Asta day after day.

  The sky is heavy. November looms and claws of heat stretch out for days, broken by quick bursts of rain. Asta has her seventh birthday on an overcast day, squawking with birds rearranging themselves for the shift in season. Isak has made her some robust play equipment, a swing seat hanging from a big old peppermint tree, a rope ladder up to the high fort, which Jake abandoned some time ago, and a smooth monkey bar. She loves them and spends most of the day playing there, hiding in the hollow tree when it rains. Mum sent a parcel with a colourful hand-knitted jacket and a matching rag doll. In there was another parcel for me marked ‘private’—she sent her old map book, marked with places we stayed when I was a kid and inside a handwritten list: ‘what to take’. I tuck it deep into a box in the laundry where Isak never goes.

  In the evening, the weather has cleared a little so I set up a picnic for her under the trees and we all have dinner there to celebrate. I ordered a portable aquarium for her online, to store the creatures she catches in the estuary or under the trees and hopefully delay their death. Emmy has bought her something special, she says, wrapped up in rainbow paper. It’s a girl thing, she says, and sends Jake and her father back to the house for the tomato sauce. Asta tears the paper, excited and holds up child-sized bras, laughing and putting them on her chest. I lurch inside, glare at Emmy.

  ‘Really, Mum?’ she asks. ‘You didn’t notice?’

  Asta pulls the bras off the hanger and over her head, squeezing them over her shirt.

  ‘They fit?’ Emmy kisses her head.

  I can’t stop the tears that spike at me but they are busy fitting the bras under Asta’s T-shirt, exposing her enlarged nipples for a moment. When she raises her arm, a small patch of dark hair. Too early. This is all too
early. And so quick I didn’t see it arrive.

  Emmy sits back beside me, serving up potato salad and chatting happily about Asta being a big girl, and what it was like for her to be a tween. She doesn’t say that she was eleven or twelve, not seven, though she surely must know that. I want to slap her, but I hold myself and walk into the house to get something. Serviettes, I think I said. My head is thick and pulsing and I hide in the bathroom, try to gather together some calm. It doesn’t come and I cry and cry, for I don’t know how long.

  ‘You okay?’ Isak calls. I don’t answer and he stands outside the door. ‘Stacey?’ I am silent and he opens the door anyway. ‘The bras?’ I nod, cry more. He kneels down by the toilet and wraps his thick arms around me. We can’t stop it, he says and strokes my hair. ‘It’s bound to happen.’

  ‘I’m not ready yet.’ I never will be.

  ‘She’s still only seven,’ he says. ‘And they don’t need to know. She’s not grown up yet.’

  ‘It’s a sign, Isak. You know what “grown up” means, don’t you?’

  He nods and hugs me tighter. ‘I know how you feel, they’re all growing up.’

  ‘It’s different though, you know that. When she starts to bleed, that’s what they mean and this is the start of puberty. At seven.’ She is too young.

  He’s never really understood the depth of my bond with Asta. She’s not like the other children. The other two have grown into their own people but she is still little. What I gave for her is not what I gave for them. I gave them up for her.

  Days later, the bras go into the washing basket. I bury them under the leschenaultia. Asta looks for them but I tell her they are lost. Emmy is busy and doesn’t try to find them. My mother calls and I thank her for the gift. I’ll be here for you, she reminds me.

  Isak has a long conversation with his uncle about his mother’s difficulties living on the farm. He is volatile afterwards and hurls accusations at me. The kids scatter, Emmy taking Asta’s hand.