The Natural Way of Things Page 2

  She was getting a haircut.

  In the relief she slumped and yes, nearly shat herself but didn’t, just went out to it again until it was over. For those moments she felt only the oily, woolly tips of the stoner’s dreads brushing against her neck and shoulders as he worked. Felt her head tugged at and released, tugged and released, surrendering to the touch as the scissors ground away at her hair, and she felt each new hank of cooler air arrive on her skin where hair used to be.

  In the flooding relief—it was a liquid, heavy and cold and silver like lead, like another kind of drug—she thought, that poor girl back there. But also despised her for the way her fear had leaked and spread. Find someone else’s fucking hand to hold, was what Yolanda thought then, there in the chair, closing her eyes again.

  She heard the stoner murmur, ‘These scissors are fucken blunt.’ And Yolanda swore there were footsteps, skittery female footsteps, behind her on the lino floor. She could smell a woman, a cosmetic female smell, and heard a soft giggle, and then that all sank away and Yolanda with it, until the cold burr of an electric razor began at the nape of her neck, shocking her awake once more.

  If there had been any woman she was gone. There was only the stoner again, breathing down over his work, shaving her head now, tracing her skull, making wide tracks with the razor on her fine, fine skin. Yolanda gasped aloud at the feel of her own half-shorn head. The razor stopped for a moment, held in mid-air. The stoner looked at her, irritable. He frowned and said, ‘Shut up.’ And then experimentally, as if testing the word, as if he’d never said it before, had just learned it, added, ‘You slut.’

  She looked down at the floor. Hair was only hair, as it fell. But there was so much of it, first in long shining straps, then little glossy black humps so the floorboards were covered in small dark creatures, waiting to be brought to life there on the ground.

  When it was done the man stepped back, flexed his shoulders and stretched his arms high above him again, like he’d done in the other room. The razor glinted in his hand—he was bored again, and tiring. He unclipped the leash and shoved at the chair so it jolted forwards, tipping her out. She fell but stumbled, recovering, upright. All the stoner’s placidness was gone now; he shoved at her, his strong hands at her back, yelling, ‘Next,’ as he forced her through a different door and Yolanda went sprawling, exactly as a sheep would totter down a slatted chute into the shocking light and shit and terror of the sheep yard, until she found herself in yet another room. Full of bald and frightened girls.

  THE SECOND man, pale and pock-faced, is back in the room with Verla. He turns towards the door. When his hand is on the doorknob he glances back at her and says, ‘Coming then?’

  Her mouth is dry, she understands nothing. Even the girl led away seemed to understand, or else why say in that flat surly voice that she would go first? What did she know? After the girl let go of her hand, Verla’s fingers flew to the windowsill; she must concentrate now to uncurl her grip.

  Finally, some instinct rises. She runs her tongue over her teeth, furred like her mind. She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, ‘I need to know where I am.’

  The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, ‘Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.’

  And he draws from his pocket a slender little lead like the one he attached to the other girl. He steps back across the room towards Verla, and bends to clip the lead to the metal ring at her waist. She smells him: sour, like old milk.

  ‘Come on,’ he coaxes, as if she is a small dog, and gives a little tug on the leash. She lurches forwards, follows him outside.

  On her blurred, faltering trot behind the man she tries to take in her surroundings. Outback is the first word that comes to her. Then rubbish tip. There are a few faded colourless fibro buildings, jagged black holes punched here and there in the panels. Roofs of mottled grey tin; crooked, hanging gutters. Narrow black slots of windows, paint peeling from frames. There are piles of corrugated-iron sheets and rotting timber, and old petrol drums on their sides. Tangles of wire. There is a rusted tractor, a jumble of metal pipes and prongs with dead white grass spiking through the gaps. No trees. And—she looks everywhere, quickly—other than the corroded, immovable tractor, no cars. No yellow bus.

  They keep walking, the great hard leather boots—too big—scraping at her ankles.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he says, yanking the lead again. They pass a water tank on bricks with the disc of a lid leaning against it. Rust stains bleed from large ragged gouges in the side of the tank. The man jerks her along. ‘Christ, you’re slow,’ he murmurs, as if she were an elderly animal he is leading. She is thirsty. In this hard sunlight with no trees nearby, the low-slung buildings—one, two, three that she can see, plus the one they have come from—offer no shade. There is a grassy dirt track, trailing off into the white haze beyond the buildings. Otherwise, only the flat white sky and the dusty ground.

  It cannot be the outback, where Verla has never been. Has anyone? The outback is supposed to have red earth. This earth beneath her boots is not red. You could not even call it earth; just threadbare ground, grey gravel, dust.

  She swelters in these stupid Amish clothes. She says, ‘I’m thirsty.’

  ‘Shut up,’ says the man. He is bored with leading her around like a donkey. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. You can lead a whore to culture was something said about her in the comments. Verla thinks of the empty water tank; a weird laugh begins rising up from her belly but dries up before it comes out.

  Their feet crunch over a patch of stubbly dead grass, past a long concrete block—animal sheds, or disused toilets—then come upon another low pale weatherboard building. Up three rotting wooden steps to a narrow veranda. The man flings open an ancient flywire door so it bangs against the peeling weatherboards.

  ‘Admissions,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

  Inside is an airless makeshift office. A desk, a pin board stuck with curling bits of paper so old the printing has faded to nothing. He lets go of the lead and shoves Verla towards a green plastic outdoor chair, then sits down heavily in a torn vinyl office chair. He begins riffling through piles of handwritten pages on the desk. Verla tips her head back, breathing in the stifling air, and stares at the ceiling. Delicate webbed balloons of daddy-long-legs spiders dangle, wafting in the air.

  The man suddenly snatches up an old-fashioned ink stamp and stamp pad, begins madly stamping. Verla does laugh this time, out loud. None of this can be happening.

  The man stops stamping and looks at her patiently, bottom teeth combing his top lip. ‘What’s funny, Thirsty?’

  ‘Admissions! Do you not even have laptops? What the fuck is this place?’ Verla’s voice is high and confused. The effect of the drugs has almost left her now, but for her terribly dry, dry mouth.

  The man only returns to his crazed stamping, snorting a little laugh.

  She persists. ‘I need a glass of water, and then I need to make a phone call.’

  The man sighs and stops rattling paper. It is as if he is in a play, and his job is to make the sound of paper rattling, and Verla has interrupted his performance. He pays stern, close attention to the page he has in his hand before putting it down and smiling. He leans over the table and talks to Verla in a horrible baby voice. ‘Did you have your eyes shut on our little walk then, Thirsty? Why do you think I just showed you everything?’

  Verla’s chest constricts. ‘I need to speak to my parents.’ She does not say parent.

  He is annoyed now. ‘For fuck’s sake, Princess. Do you see any phones? Computers? Phone towers outside?’

  Disbelief rises in her. ‘No,’ she says. She means, I refuse. At last she is enraged, shoots to her feet to roar—for it is, finally, intolerable, this stupid, stupid game, performance, this bullshit—but the man steps nimbly around the table and in an instant plants his big black boot in her stomach so hard she is slammed back against
the wall.

  While Verla curls, weeping, on the dusty floor, Boncer returns to his desk and his rattling papers.

  ‘WHO ARE you, the village idiot?’

  There they were, in the middle of that day in their thick scratchy costumes, standing in a clump on the gravel. Ten girls, all their heads newly shaved (Yolanda felt again the cold snap of scissor blades near her ears, the hair landing in her lap like moths). All wore the same strange prairie workhouse tunic, the oat-coloured calico blouse. The rock-hard leather boots and coarse knitted socks, like out of some hillbilly TV show from the eighties. Or even older.

  Yolanda stood thinking of the two stars she had seen in the night. Enormous headlights in the sky; one, as big as her fingertip, moving. Was this possible? In her drugged mind, she had thought it a spaceship come to save her.

  The skinny man asked again if she was the village idiot, stepping up to stare right into her face. He was not much older than the oldest girl here—maybe twenty-five? The flaky skin on his long flat face was marked here and there with old acne scars. Now he was so close to her, Yolanda could see on his chin, just below the right corner of his mouth, the swell of a blind pimple beginning.

  Already she knew better than to answer him.

  He muttered to the ground for them to get in line. As he waited for them to shuffle into formation he pursed his lips sideways, gingerly pressing a fingertip to the rising pimple, and wincing.

  One big girl, fair-skinned with fleshy cheeks and wide, swimmer’s shoulders, said irritably, ‘What? We can’t hear you,’ and then closed her eyes against the sun, hands on her hips, murmuring something beneath her breath. So she didn’t see the man’s swift, balletic leap—impossibly pretty and light across the gravel—and a leather-covered baton in his hand coming whack over the side of her jaw. They all cried out with her as she fell, shrieking in pain. Some of their arms came out to try to catch her. They cowered. More than one began crying as they hurried then, into a line.

  The man Boncer cast an aggrieved look at them, as if they were to blame for the stick in his hand, then sighed. The big-cheeked girl rocked on her haunches and moaned, arms swaddling her head and jaw, which surely must be broken from the force of the belting. Yolanda waited for Boncer to move towards her, to send for first aid. To look worried. But he only stood fingering his pimple, until the girls either side of the beaten girl gently took her elbows and raised her to stand.

  ‘Now: march,’ Boncer said, petulant. Turning his brown leather stick in his hands, its hard, lumpily stitched seams like a botched wound. Like a scar that would make worse ones.

  They stared at him in panic.

  But another girl next to Yolanda, forehead shining with sweat, her gaze on the stick, began to swing her arms, marching on the spot. She knew what to do. As if she were leading a bunch of soldiers, not girls. Out of her small body came a scrawny little voice, crying: ‘Left, left, left-right-left.’ Leading a—a battalion, her arms swinging high.

  ‘Ooh, yes!’ cried Boncer, skipping to her side. ‘That’s the way, ladies! Follow the army slut! You next, village idiot!’ He leaped along the line, clipping the girls’ leashes one to the other, then scurried to the front. He too began swinging his arms high and stomping out the rhythm, crying out left-right-left and leading the straggling line of beaten girls in their olden-day clothes out across the paddocks under the broiling white sun.

  This, Yolanda knew, was true madness: she was entering it with these new sisters as sure with quiet awe as back in her childhood when she and Darren, seven and five, would step inside the cool dark of a beach cave at the end of the white sand when their mother took them to the sea each year.

  Left-right-left.

  Yolanda and Darren, stepping with their soft bare feet over the cold sea-washed pebbles into the watery cave, rippling half with fear and half with wonder.

  The girls marched for two hours.

  Yolanda held down panic by casting back through the years. She counted houses, schools, boyfriends, counted the years back to childhood again, till she reached the old flat in Seymour Road. Revisited her mother’s boxes of wax lining the musty hallway; other people’s hairs in the bathtub. The squashy green velvet couch piled at one end with the faded pink towels speckled with white bleach splotches. In their mother’s room, under the bed, the heavy porridge-coloured folding massage table that Gail would drag out into the lounge and snap into shape whenever she had a client.

  The children never knew how she knew when a client would arrive, but Gail would say, ‘I’ve got Mrs Goldman coming at three,’ or, ‘Wendy Pung will be here in a minute,’ and the children would shift off their perches in the nests of the folded towels, and go into the bathroom to switch on the kettle, and then sit cross-legged on the floor to watch television while their mother ushered another thick-legged woman into the flat. Their childhood was the buttery smell of wax, the sound of sharp little rips and hissing breath as their mother tugged lumps of wax away and the women quietly gasped. Gail’s hands were smooth and cool and she patted and murmured over the women’s white skin, pulling their underwear this way and that. It was Yolanda’s job afterwards to melt the gobs of wax in the little battered aluminium pot on the electric stove, to fish out and throw away the cotton strips and to sieve the hot wax through the pantyhose into the big tin. (‘Of course it’s clean!’ her mother cried with fury, hands on her hips, at the health inspector that time, before she got the fine for running an illegal business.) All the coarse black hairs and the pale fine ones too, caught there in the stocking mesh.

  Her boots began to scrape painfully at her heels through the damp socks. The only sound was the girls’ heavy, frightened panting as they marched, the trudge of their boots over the stony ground. And the fine, light tinkle of the leash-fasteners against the metal rings.

  Sometimes her mother’s clients would lie on the table face up, their eyes closed and hands folded across their bellies while Gail basted their faces with custardy lotions, pressed wet cotton balls over their eyelids. Sometimes the women would chatter while Gail worked: about real estate, businesses that were closing, about their errant sons, the hospitalisations of their friends. Their voices were a pleasant purr beneath the cartoon soundtrack on television. Or sometimes the women would lie on their softly spreading bellies in their underwear while Yolanda’s mother massaged them, rolling the thick white flesh of their backs and thighs under her hands, working back and forth over their bodies, kneading flesh. These times Yolanda and Darren would lean backwards, silently, on their haunches to look at the woman’s face squashed into the padded oval hole of the massage table. The women’s eyes were always shut and their faces were flattened and stretched by the pressure of the surface, mouths wide and lips flat against their teeth, and they looked like those photos of the faces of astronauts going into space. Yolanda and Darren would smile slyly at each other as sometimes the women dribbled and made small grunting sounds as their mother worked away at them above. Occasionally one would fall asleep and begin to snore lightly, and those times even Gail would smile with the children.

  When they were leaving at the end, almost every time, the women would glance across the room and then whisper to Gail, That girl of yours, my god. Sometimes it was people in the street who stopped and said, What a beauty. Made jokes about touches of the tar brush and how exotic and when she’s a teen and locks and keys and boys.

  When the women had gone, the massage table was Spray- and-Wiped and folded away, slid under Gail’s bed once again, and towels were washed and the grumbling of the tumble dryer began in the bathroom, filling the flat with sweet-smelling, moist warm air.

  The walking was harder now the track had run out; the line moved slower as they scrambled awkwardly up the hillside, ascending the slope in their slippery leather boots that could not grip. The path that had been not even a track really, just pale flattened grass, had turned fainter and disappeared after the first half-hour or so. Boncer stopped now and then, squinting into the sun, looking east
and west, then turning back to cast the girls a surly, contemptuous look before moving ahead. Did even he know where they were going?

  The people in the next-door flat were German, with an Australian flag on a proper flagpole sticking out from their balcony. They complained to each other in thick accents about the smell from Darren’s mice, which lived on Yolanda’s mother’s balcony in a birdcage. The mice did smell: sourly nutty and musty. Every few weeks more mice would be born, and the floor of the cage became a slithering mound of dusky pink thumbs, hairless and menacing with their rawness and need. When the babies were ten days old (their hair so fine you wanted to hold them against your closed eyelid, but they squirmed and stank), Darren would scoop them up with the dustpan, drop them into a bucket and carry them down the stairs. At the back of the block of flats, up near the privet behind the laundry block, he would tip them tumbling out of the bucket and watch them run blindly in all directions. The mama mouse and the two big fat black ones barely seemed to notice that the babies had gone. The fat ones sniffed around the edges of the cage. She supposed they were the fathers of the babies that never stopped coming.

  Yolanda feared that mother mouse and her cold, incessant production. It was something to do with her, she knew, not Darren. It had something to do with the hairlessness of the women on Gail’s bench, the squirming babies, with all the creams and lotions, with their whispering to her mother, What a beauty, but meaning something adult and uneasy and expectant.

  And it was to do with this place, Yolanda knew; with her presence here in this line of bewildered, trudging girls. Some limped heavily now as they jerked and stumbled along, chained together like prisoners. They were prisoners.