Fauna

by Donna Mazza

  ‘He needs to be restrained, can you please strap him into the back seat before you keep driving?’ I agree and get out to do it while she walks around the car, opens the back door and taps details into a screen. My heart pounds. She leans over to inspect the numberplate. Dark hair in a ponytail.

  ‘Um, ’scuse me.’

  I look up at Asta, still stiff with terror.

  ‘You’ve got an issue here with the plates.’

  Tears prick at my eyes and I crouch down out of Asta’s sight, sobbing. She hands me a tissue and the dusty boots of another inspector joins her.

  She ducks down. ‘Would you like to tell me why you’re driving with your plates taped?’

  I sniff, work fast. ‘My husband, he’s abusive, I was just so fucking scared.’ I go with it. It’s instinctive, from years of listening to my mother. Bawling now. ‘I had to, I was worried about her. She’s special needs, you see, and he can’t deal with her.’

  She pats my back, tells me it’s all right.

  None of this is all right though, especially the twinge of pain with the word husband. He would hate me. He will. I sob more.

  The other guard speaks, ‘Come on, love, up you get, let’s get the next car in here.’ He shakes the bag of fruit, ‘Is this all you have to declare?’

  ‘Yes,’ I manage. Except my daughter, large-eyed and scared, not on the list yet. Both of us endangered species.

  He hands me the white tape. ‘Sorry but we can’t let you through with fake plates. Good luck though.’ He opens my door and we drive forward, stop the other side of the quarantine so I can blow my nose.

  Asta takes off her glasses and hat, ‘Ma, see Nanna.’ She smiles at me, wipes my tears with her hand. I kiss her beautiful forehead. Sometimes it feels that the world gapes wide, revealing its slavering threats to me. I am sure I will drop into it, into the vast misery that awaits me. That I deserve. Then she rescues me, touches my face. Calms me with her innocence and love.

  We drive. Signposts and wide roads lead to various mine-sites along the way. The landscape inland being ravaged and transported, emptied of all that is worth money. All that remains is worthless. The sadness of it resonates with my own emptiness and I stare up those long avenues, wondering what it is they are extracting. What they are leaving behind. A few tatty threads.

  At Kimba there are grain silos and a railway line, though no crops are growing. The road slices through hills, tall faces of rock either side. Towns grow larger and we stop again for fuel. My mother like a bee in a jar, anxious for our safe arrival, tells me of a campsite on the river where we can stop. The highway continues with its pale eucalypts and sparsely covered earth.

  Late in the day I spot the road which skirts along the river and we draw into a side track, find a quiet tree in the evening. There’s a public toilet here so Asta and I clean ourselves up a bit. Eat the last pieces of banana bread and sleep in the back of the car. Tayto barks in the night at the crush of wheels on gravel nearby. I tense.

  Winding up to the mountains, pale doubles of my young days stride out from the mist of early evening. The winters bring a sharp frost here, the air so chilled it is as though the world were breathless. The safe house has a ‘For Sale’ sign at the front and old paint yellowed from years of tenants. I park across the street and walk down the side. Tayto lifts his leg on the house stumps. The earth is dark, cold and exposed and we step across broken pavers to an outside toilet, where the key is hidden under a coil of garden hose. Through the back door it smells of mouldy carpet but, finally, I release the tension I have held in myself and put my handbag and keys on the laminex bench in the kitchen. The power is off but there is a box on the counter full of candles, matches and some food for us and the dog. The fireplace is set and I only have to strike a match for it to roar to life. My mother has really taken care of us and I can’t wait to see her, a feeling so rare that tears come to me, the tiny seeds from her biscuits stuck in the cracks between my teeth. I wonder if they will lodge in my oesophagus, seek out suitable ground for germination. I have raised the stakes between us and I feel it penetrate into my heart. She holds us in her nest, from where I have fled once already.

  Late in the night, she knocks gently on the door and holds us both to her, tight against the simple engine of her body. I sob and Asta pats me on the back gently.

  ‘I am not keen on that car parked out front with your number-plates showing for all to see.’ Shakes her head. ‘I’d be moving that somewhere. We can get it burned out in the bush.’

  I retract at the thought. I can’t. I can’t burn his car.

  ‘Leads them straight here. It has to go. First thing.’

  I am so tired I can scarcely speak and Asta just wants to touch her. Mum brushes the knots from her hair and braids it into thick ropes. Runs her fingers across the ridges of her brows and looks at me. ‘She’s grown a lot since I saw her.’ The grief of this statement pours in gulps, which I fail to swallow. Asta curls, staring at the fire and falls asleep.

  ‘You are right to worry.’ She hands me a glass of red wine. ‘But you can’t hide from it, darl, she’s nearly grown up. Poor kids. Nobody will escape the pain of this Stacey, but you know I’ll do all I can to help all of you get through this.’ We both know this is the first place they’ll look for us. ‘Emmy will understand, in time. So will Isak and Jake.’

  ‘I needed to see you, Mum.’ Just saying those words to her and really feeling them has knitted us back together.

  We drink the bottle and I sleep in her lap. Feel her lift soft blankets over the two of us and leave quietly. Her perfumed oils linger in the air.

  At dawn, there is a knock on the window and Isak’s shadowed face stares at me, eyes blank and hollow. My heart belts and I roll into a ball around Asta, who stirs and shouts ‘Dad’ when the door opens and he takes her away. Behind him, in dark glasses, is Lucas, bony arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Ma go see Nanna,’ Asta says to Isak.

  ‘Great work, Stacey,’ he growls, voice husky. Does not look me in the eye. It burns in me. A hot coal sinking through from top to bottom, melting all in its wake. I have died at my own hand.

  He takes her to Lucas and they speak. I am broken. Still.

  We arrive home after days of silent driving. The yard is scattered with feathers and all the chickens are dead. The children aren’t there. I walk in the back door and go to bed. I can hear him speaking to Asta and the skittering claws of the dog running through the empty house. I lie awake until he comes to me.

  He stands at the side of the bed, tells me to sit up and looks at me now, his face ragged and drawn by deep grey shadows.

  ‘How could you?’

  Silence draws out between us. The television burbles in the background. I touch his hand but he draws it away.

  ‘I had to,’ my voice is croaky. ‘I had to try, Isak.’

  ‘You should have talked to me.’

  ‘You would have talked me out of it.’

  ‘Yes. So how did you think it would work?’ Tears well up in his eyes. ‘And while I was at home,’ sobs—‘fuck. After all this time I haven’t seen my family and you do this. Now.’

  I cry, try to touch his arm, and just repeat sorry, sorry, sorry but it is empty and meaningless and it can’t possibly make any amends for what I’ve done to him.

  ‘Look, I understand why, Stacey, but why now?’ His voice cracks again. ‘Why do this to me?’

  ‘I love you, Isak.’

  He turns away from my eyes.

  ‘This is not an act of love—you don’t do this to someone you love.’

  I breathe deep and accept that all he says is true, but it was an act of love for her. I remind him of this and he nods, settles a moment.

  ‘Go back to South Africa.’ I promise to stay here. I won’t try it again. He will have to, he tells me, because the kids are still there. He rushed back on his own when he got the call.

  ‘There’s no point in you trying it again. They’ll find you. She has a tracke
r, but you knew that. You were there.’ He shakes his head but I am confused and don’t remember or know what he’s talking about. ‘They injected a micro-tracker. In her arm. Dimitra did it when she was a baby. When we moved down here.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Those visits were a blur and sometimes I left Dimitra alone with the baby. Just for a few minutes.

  ‘You and I signed off on it.’

  I don’t remember. I never read all the documents and fine print. It was overwhelming.

  ‘You were there.’

  I was there but I was not and I cover my face with my hands, search inside myself for the truth. I find a scrap. I was in the shower, heard her crying. Blood and syringes and a red lump on her upper arm but it wasn’t clear to me then. When I look up, he is gone.

  I tiptoe outside in the night. He is asleep on the couch and the car is unpacked. The dog trails behind me. In the moonlight the white and grey feathers glow and shiver on the long blades of grass around the yard. It is silent.

  Barefoot in the pen, the nest is filled with eggs. It smells. Several dead chickens have been pecked to the bone. Ribs emerging from their flesh, feathers hard with blood. It settles inside me like ash.

  I collect the chickens in a wheelbarrow and bury them near the leschenaultia. Tayto follows me around excitedly, helping sniff out the corpses. It is an awful contrast to the strewn hens. I count them but they are not all there and I hope that perhaps the missing ones have found a safe place to hide. When I am finished I sit on the grass and watch the day break. I can’t imagine what it will bring.

  Isak brews coffee and speaks in Afrikaans, walking away from me with his phone. He looks thinner and his bare feet shuffle on the floor. Asta is still curled in sleep and I sit by her bedside, watching her. It must have frightened her. I have done this to her too. I run fingers along the inside of her left arm and she stirs. I find no sign of a lump now, or a device. I want to ask where it is. I would try to cut it out if I could feel it.

  He finds me there and calls me out to him, ‘I’m going.’ He keeps walking and I follow along behind him as he carts his bag out to the car. The dog follows him too. ‘Flying back.’ He turns at the back of the car, ‘You have to stay here. If you don’t they’ll take her off you right now so just fucking stay here. Don’t even go for a walk.’ His voice is flat and low.

  ‘Okay.’ I feel like dropping to my knees, please, please forgive me. ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Stacey. I need some time.’ He throws the bag in his car.

  ‘What about the kids and school?’

  His back is to me. He doesn’t answer my question but walks to the driver-side door and opens it.

  ‘I’ve spoken to your mother. She’ll be down here tomorrow afternoon.’ He leans down and scratches the dog’s ear. ‘You gave it a good try. And I’m grateful at least that she helped you. Who knows what might have happened to the two of you if she wasn’t there.’

  He slams the door and drives away, doesn’t look at me. Even now, he tries to make me forgive myself. The love he has for me is so much more honourable than my own. My shame is black as crows, it hovers at my back.

  My mother stayed for months. Long months where I cried and slept and sat dumbly on the patio staring out at the trees.

  Isak came back and went, and Emmy threw her arms around me, hot and sobbing. Jake held my bony hand as though I were an invalid and they left, tracking past me with bags and boxes. Moving. Back into our old house. Mum scented the rooms with rose and sandalwood. Bought some chickens for Asta and showed her things to cook.

  In that time, she had no siblings and was not a little sister to anyone. She grew and became quieter. One day a stream of blood flowed down her leg in the shower and I wailed so loudly the walls quivered and grew thin. Transparent. My fingertips dissolved in the air and the sound trailed out across the water, blasting back the sea.

  I have lost my children.

  We were soothed by the ministrations of my mother, who strode through it all like a winged victory. ‘The day would come,’ she said, ‘no point in crumpling yourself up and trying to hide from it.’ She swept the floor and told me the things I most dread would still come to pass whether I faced it or not. ‘You signed up for this and you will eventually have to honour the contract.’

  ‘Even you,’ I told her, ‘even you betray me.’ It was fortunate for us all that she ignored my accusations and remained stoic, caring for me as I tore at my flesh with my own teeth, locked in the bedroom.

  It was the dog scratching at the door who brought me home to myself, his mournful eyes reminded me to hold her in my arms while I could, to give the rest of myself to her so she remembers that she is loved. I came back for Asta.

  A sea eagle hangs in the sky, its wings still but it shifts like a kite in the current. Higher it soars, then with a screech disappears. Leaves no trace. I’m unsure whether its soaring takes it down to prey or up into the broad expanse. There is no sign of which way it went.

  The sand is churning in the waves, suspended in the water as it belts and roars against the coast. Curling and white, punctuated by wandering seagulls or a small, dark mass rising and falling on its journey to the shore. Four freighters are indistinct on the misty horizon and clouds, dense as felt, hunker over Bunbury as it scrambles out to a point in the sea.

  We have driven across the causeway to rock-craggy Buffalo Beach, an unlikely landing place for early settlers, with buffalo and palm trees, a haven for long-departed hippies. It is a front line to the lashing waves of the Indian Ocean, endlessly swiping back layers of sand and serving up the leftovers of life. Sand and wind, sand and wind.

  She scuttles off, wary of the violent surf, printing her wide step into the beach. We walk towards the great mass of lumps in the distance. They quickly form themselves into a crop of stones as we draw nearer. Amid the wracks of weed, Asta gathers hard balls of sea grass, tumbled along the seabed and glued with grit, and keeps them in her cloth bag. Shells and sponges, floral-like shapes long and tufted, spread like fingers, gathered like bouquets. She arranges shells into a group on the sand—three smooth forms like creamy snails, a stick running beside them. She picks it up and drags a long line in the sand towards the fizzing backwash then runs backward, laughing as a wave washes her line smooth. At the rocky mounds she crouches down, laughing at the collected variations of sea-smooth stones and keeps a few in her bag. I sit on a high point covered in fossilised tree roots, encased in limestone. This place is ancient and quiet today. There is nobody but us—no fishermen or dogs or other children. Just the seagulls and the soaring eagles. Asta’s bag is weighty with her collection but she rambles along, stuffing it full.

  Then she nears something soft and pink, a lump of flesh. I run. Breath short. Signalling with my hand for her not to touch it.

  ‘Dat,’ she shouts in the wind, hair lashing and stiff with salt.

  We stand together in the pelt of the waves. It quivers in the wind but it is not real flesh—something made to resemble it. I kick it with the tip of my thong and it rolls over and then I see it is a rubbery torso, an adult’s toy. I catch Asta’s hand, quickly turning her from the poisoned remains. I have never seen such a thing but the imprint is a stain—its image rocking in the wind. Washing in the sea.

  We walk swiftly, slowing as we put more ground between us and that. I am glad for the violent sea. Its force a match for any man, washing clean but sending it back—our conscience. Asta finds a large carcase, turns the pelvis, sand blowing up at her with a vile fishy stink. She rubs her eyes and I wipe her teary face with my skirt.

  Clouds are shifting ever closer and the hunting eagles are gone. I put some speed in my walk, imagine the cocoon of the car. Battle the bile which rises. Torn hunks of foam skate across our path. The tide is closing in, working its way swiftly up the sand. I take Asta’s weighty bag for her. A dead fish, its fearful eye and wide-spread mouth gaping with the horror of being cast ashore. Scattered cuttlefish like discarded sa
nitary pads tossed across the sand, crushed by the tyre tracks of four-wheel drives. And above the patchy dunes a light bird fights off two predators. The black pair hover above the car park. Crows. The rescue helicopter patrols the coast, its thrumming blade extinguishing the belt of the sea against the beach. I want to get home—angry that our beautiful walk has been eclipsed.

  It awaits, I know it and the hard reminder terrifies me.

  As we drive around the head of the estuary towards home, a hundred black swans hang in the water, like questions aimed at the heavens.

  There is a white car in the driveway.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This story is set in Wardandi and Whadjuk Noongar country and I respectfully acknowledge their elders, past and present.

  This novel began as a short story called ‘The Exhibit’, published in Westerly Magazine, and I am grateful to the editors for their encouragement. I have enjoyed two residencies to Varuna, the National Writers’ House in 2018 and 2019 and this was invaluable for the development of Fauna, as was the collegiality and encouragement of the writers I met there.

  I am hugely thankful to my agent, Gaby Naher, publisher, Jane Palfreyman, the editors who polished this work, Ali Lavau and Deonie Fiford, and the people at Allen & Unwin, who have helped the novel find its way.

  Edith Cowan University has supported me to research and write this novel with a period of study leave from teaching. I am grateful to my colleagues and the postgraduate group at the South West campus for their support during my absence, and my presence.