The Natural Way of Things Page 4

  Then, directly at the other end of the table, she sees the girl from the room this morning. Staring back at Verla, meeting her gaze, expressionless. Did they hold hands, filled with terror? Had they spoken? Or is this some memory from childhood, sent through dreams to flicker and furnish Verla’s drug-fucked mind? They stare, the two of them, and Verla realises with a cold, slow shock that the face she stares into belongs to Yolanda Kovacs.

  Verla is not a child nor a prostitute nor a ward of the state whose parents have abused or abandoned her. She is a parliamentary intern, a rightful citizen, and she cannot be held in this place. But—Yolanda Kovacs is also a citizen by law, whatever sex she did or did not consent to with however many footballers, and here she sits with her heavy-lidded eyes and her famous mouth and unabashed stare, looking more fearsome now, more handsome than she ever did in any of the TV footage or the magazines or the newspaper front pages.

  Verla looks around the table then. Despite the shaven skulls, one by one the girls’ faces clarify for an instant—and then merge, and Verla knows that she and they are in some dreadful way connected.

  Boncer’s words return. In the days to come she will learn what she is, what they all are. That they are the minister’s-little-travel-tramp and that-Skype-slut and the yuck-ugly-dog from the cruise ship; they are pig-on-a-spit and big-red-box, moll-number-twelve and bogan-gold-digger-gangbang-slut. They are what happens when you don’t keep your fucking fat slag’s mouth shut.

  POXY BONNET on its hook.

  Even from the bed as she looked at it hanging there, Yolanda could feel its greasy, clammy weight. Its long beak pointing floorwards. And the fucking thing stank.

  Soon the beating on the doors would come and she would get out of the bed and dress in the other rank things: tunic, smock thing, whatever. The musty underclothes and socks, unwashed since they first arrived. Then she would take the bonnet from the hook and fit it to her grubby bald head.

  The visor of the bonnet was rounded, a long half-tunnel you looked down. When you had it on it was like playing blind man’s bluff, like wearing a periscope, you couldn’t see anything but a small round patch before you. If you wanted to talk to someone you had to swing your head right around and then all you saw was the side of their beak. It was clever, really. Even when you got up the guts to talk, it put you off.

  Until the door-bashing came, Yolanda would lie on the bed and wait. From the sounds and the gloomy light, it was still very early.

  She was used to the noises now; after three days, they all were. The ticks and cracks of the corrugated-iron sheets heating up and cooling, and the noises of the other girls in the night, their cries and calls. Sometimes, their lonely rhythmic breath. After that first day’s marching, then the food (so-called), they had been driven down here like dogs—Teddy this time, with a thick sharp stick he just picked off the ground—to what he called the shearers’ quarters. He yelled it, a command: ‘Get! Shearers’ quarters!’ They just stood there because they didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and that was when he started whacking the long stick on the ground. Turned out it made sense to herd them like dogs, because shearers’ quarters was what Yolanda had already seen and thought were kennels. They all did. That Verla especially went off, yelping and flailing and screeching, You will not put us in that box, so she was first in when Teddy did put them in there. He clipped them to a post outside in their shitty little chain gang, and then unlocked the padlock for each girl one by one, dragged her along the corridor, gripping by the upper arm—which hurt; he looked like a skinny feral but it turned out he was strong—and shoved them in through a door and bolted it shut after.

  Yolanda waited in line outside, taking in the corrugated-tin walls, the tiny window slots and thinking, I never knew shearers got kept like dogs. It didn’t matter, though; they’d all be dead by morning.

  But once you were inside you realised you’d been here already, that you’d woken up here that morning off your face, and so you went straight to the little slot of a window and sucked air into your mouth, and you didn’t suffocate after all.

  You heard things at night, padding around outside. Dogs maybe, maybe dingoes, maybe Boncer and Teddy, maybe that woman Yolanda thought she heard at the head-shaving the first day but had never seen since. Did she exist, and where?

  You heard light footfalls in the dead grass, could be leaves or a plastic bag they were treading on. Could be someone eating their lunch from a paper bag, sitting out there having a picnic in the dark, in the baking soundless grounds of a girls’ prison made out of shearers’ kennels in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  Yolanda had heard them most nights. Someone walking around, creeping, while she lay in an old steel bed with a rippling tin door locked and bolted.

  Sometimes she got up and went to her window again, like that first night, to look for the two stars. That was when she heard the bird noises. In her dreaming mind these grew together, the bonnets and the girls with their weeping night-bird noises, and she became aware, convinced, that the bonnet beaks were made of bird bones. Cartilage from wings, from the spines of feathers, woven together or fused somehow under heat. They wore the bones of dead birds, and the night cries of birds and girls too were put to use.

  Sometimes Yolanda thought she was going mad, but maybe it was the drugs still. She wished she had them again now, the ones that made you forget. The ones dentists used, and abortionists.

  There were no mirrors here. Strange, but she could almost forget her body, that marvellous thing. She used to stand before the mirror, wondering at it. It was something, all right. Must be, to cause such fuss. She would stand there staring at it, trying to understand, to see it as they saw it. Filling her hands with the bosoms, cradling the soft belly. Parting herself gently for a moment with her fingers. V for victory. That was a joke, any rate.

  Was it the softness, perhaps, that made them want it so much? And hate it so much? The body was separate from her, it was a thing she wore. The things that were done to it had nothing to do with her, Yolanda, at all.

  But afterwards she was told it wasn’t the body, it was her own desire. What did she think she was there for, a cuppa Milo? She was up for it one hundred percent, all that jazz. But how could she be, she wanted to scream at them, when she wasn’t even there? She had floated out from herself, and away. She wasn’t even there. Still wasn’t, when she let that night come back to her.

  So now she lay on the bed and waited, which was kind of funny because doing that was what had started all this. But nothing could be more different, because here was the rasping nightgown even in the heat, the vast empty land outside coming alive and nobody caring where she was, even her troublesome body forgotten except for this: to march, to feel pain, to hunger and thirst, to eat and to sleep, to piss and shit and bleed.

  IN THE black night Verla wakes underwater. This submarine tinks and cracks with the great pressure of the surrounding water, above and below, at the thin skin of the vessel. Soon she will be hurled, engulfed by the ocean exploding inwards. She will be torn to pieces, and the only living part of her drowned. She lies panting in the hot air, smelling the night. Heart beating hard. Something is out there again, trudging and stopping, something tearing at the roots of the dry grass beyond this box. The corrugated iron bangs and creaks. Her heart slows, and she is submerged once more.

  Before dawn she wakes again with the birds. Kookaburras, cockatoos, somewhere far off. Her back aches, she needs desperately to piss. Light seams the door and the window slot, cracks between the iron panels, softly at first, then in sharp bright lines. The room … it is not a room—what is it? A shed, a stall for animals. A kennel with a dirty wooden floor and corrugated-iron walls battened with wood. A kennel big enough to stand up in, to contain a single iron-framed bed.

  The gloom slowly dissolves, the morning grows lighter. She lies on the bony mattress. The disinfectant smell is still here, but fading with each day. She counts the tin panels again, six squares made by the wooden batte
ns on each wall. The different colours of the grey iron, smeared and darkened in patches, with what? Oil, grease? Blood?

  On a nail banged into one of the battens is the uniform, already stinking of her body from the heat. And the vile bonnet. Beneath the bed, the tangle of hospital-blue plastic that she supposed had contained the worn floral sheets, the flat stained pillow, that first day. That afternoon they were shoved in here and the doors padlocked behind them and they sat on the hard beds with the faded sheets and thought they would die in the night, and later wished they had.

  She will keep the plastic, useful for when it becomes finally unbearable. She does not want to think of how much less bearable it could get. She imagines the plastic over her face, her eyes pressed closed.

  The tin walls are heating up already, blowflies dotting against them, their arrhythmic drones making it feel even hotter than it is. The clatter of dishes comes from up at the house, sound carrying easily on the still morning air.

  Her room (not room: cell, dogbox) is at the end of the row. She can hear the girls in the adjoining boxes; next to her is Isobel Askell the airline girl, then Hetty the cardinal’s girl with the burnt and ulcerating arm, then Yolanda Kovacs, then the rest: Maitlynd the school principal’s ‘head girl’; then big Barbs; and next that morose gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty little gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, then Leandra from the army, then last of all, the girl the whole country could despise: little Asian Joy, from last season’s PerforMAXX. Who got fat, then thin after everything happened, and who could barely speak a word now, let alone sing one.

  She hears Izzy shifting on the squeaking metal bed, sighing into her sweaty rosebud sheets in the dawn.

  Verla gets out of bed, her bladder stinging now intolerably, and not for the first time steps to the corner furthest from the adjoining cell, squats and pisses onto the dusty wooden boards as quietly as she can. She chooses a spot with the widest gaps between the boards.

  They sometimes call out to one another. On the first morning their small voices were heard, muffled, passing from one dogbox to the next—hello?—and they learned that none of them had died in the night. Since then they have passed their stories to one another through the thin tin walls. For these first days there is only one story: the last thing they remember of their lives, the moment before they dropped into that dark molasses, that dragging down. The moment they were put under and handed over. The stories are different, the times and places—I was at the doctor’s; I was in a club with my sister; I think I was in a taxi—but the shame is shared, that none of them saw how they were being handed over. How foolishly lured and tricked.

  Despite her own shame, Verla feels sorry for the rest of the girls: nobody will look for them. When his staff’s treachery is discovered and Andrew gets her out, when she is released (not rescued, that word for stupid princesses and children), she will advocate for these girls. When Georgie fucking Mullan is excommunicated and Verla reinstated, compensated. It cannot take much longer. Verla was seen in that restaurant with Mullan and her falsehoods, people saw them, it will be all over the media by now.

  Verla straightens, steps away from the shameful little puddle. She knows her pissing can be heard by Izzy and more of the girls, possibly even smelled, but nobody says anything through the walls. She knows that she will be able to forget this when she is back home.

  She clambers back into the bed to wait for the beating on the doors. Outside a sweep of cockatoos passes overhead, screaming.

  Sometimes she hears weeping echoing along the boxes. Sometimes a muttering, like begging or prayer.

  It’s not only the girls Verla hears.

  Boncer and Teddy sit in two rotting, sagging cane chairs beneath her window outside the dogboxes at night. First it was to stop the girls calling out to each other at night—Boncer raining thundering smashes on the tin with his stick if he heard the slightest noise, even though the girls mostly fall instantly asleep from exhaustion. Now, each night, the two men simply sit, muttering and smoking. Boncer interrogates Teddy: Are you a faggot? And when Teddy sighs and says mildly, No, mate, I’m not, but I don’t think you should be using that word, Boncer merely titters, You so are, a fucking hippie faggot.

  Teddy has been backpacking, Verla learns. On his way across to the coast (what coast? She strains and strains to hear, but he never says where to or from), he took this gig for some fast cash—the mines had nothing for him—before six months of diving trips. When Hardings comes he’s off again.

  Each night, leaden with tiredness and pain—the span of it across her shoulders and neck from carrying concrete guttering all day, the sharp stabs in her stomach still from Boncer’s kicking the first day, the bloody blisters stinging anew every time she peels off the filthy socks, taking with them a layer of new skin—Verla has ground her teeth and tried to stay awake, to make sense of these fragments. Mines, diving coast, when Hardings comes.

  Yolanda and some of the others have spoken of a woman here somewhere, but she is never mentioned by the men. Verla has learned nothing from her listening, understands little but their low murmurs about girls they have fucked—Teddy says made love, but Boncer doesn’t, and calls Teddy a faggot again. She freezes in her hard iron bed the first time she hears the word girls, and then Teddy says it’s good they can’t fuck these ones, because of the bonuses and that, but also who wants sloppy seconds anyway? You’d feel sort of soiled after, he says, and Boncer, after a pause, agrees. Definite sluts, he adds. Then, a moment later, But if you did, which one would you? Teddy says nothing, thinking, and then says, Nah. There’s another pause, and, Think of the bonuses, mate. Verla hears a slap at a mosquito on skin, Boncer saying fuck off softly into the night air. Then Teddy musing, We’ll have to watch ourselves down the track though, I s’pose.

  Verla knows then what could be worse than now.

  TEDDY PERCHES in his usual spot on the veranda rail as Boncer leads them up the hill, still clipped together in their flimsy chain gang, to go back to the room where they eat. On the first day Boncer announced it as The Refectory, as if this place is an actual institution instead of a nightmare, as if the musty little room with its pitted table and faded curtains and mantelpiece has some sort of status, as if any of this is justifiable. Now he calls it the refucktory, sniggering every time.

  All the girls are mottled with bruises now after six days of Boncer’s stick. The bruises flower yellow and purple over their arms, legs, their backs and thighs and breastbones under the coarse tunics. They move like old peasant women, hobbling, trying to march as ordered, the ragged line of them limping and lurching in the morning sun.

  Verla aches too, and watches from the shadow beneath her bonnet’s beak as Teddy comes back into view, sunning himself, content, lizardy—eyes closed, face tilted to the sun—in the crook of rail and post. One leg lying along the rail, smooth bare foot extended, the other anchored to the boards.

  He opens his eyes and moves only his head to watch them as they march up the steps below him, surveying their parade with a benign curiosity, as if it’s a trail of ducks or goats he’s following with his sleepy gaze. At last he swings languidly down from the railing and stands on his elegant feet, flexes his long spine, rolls his shoulders. Like some yoga teacher on retreat, stretching and preening and saluting the sun. As Verla nears him, last in line, he lifts the thick seaweedy coils of his dreadlocks up behind his head, twisting them into a turban, his tall wobbling crown. Verla hears him following them into the dark house. A few blowflies, sinking in the heavy air, sail into the gloom, and the flyscreen slowly bangs to a close behind them.

  At the table Verla considers the curdling powdered milk in her bowl, turns her face from it so as not to gag, her bonnet pointing. The bowls have not been washed since the first day, and a hardened layer of translucent yellow stuff coats the ceramic beneath the ragged orange flakes and the sour milk. She cannot eat it, but she must. Boncer stands leaning against the wall,
heavy keys dangling from his belt, one boot toe resting on the floor. He stares through the open window at Teddy, who, his dishing-out duties done (the pile of filthy bowls flung onto the table), has once again taken up residence on the railing and now meticulously bites his fingernails. Pruning and nipping, working his way along the fine fingers of one hand, then the other.

  It’s not just Boncer watching Teddy; they all do. Teddy has the golden skin of a surfer, a busker. A delicate face. How old is he? Nineteen? Twenty-four? Beneath his Adam’s apple, inside the rough blue fabric of the boiler suit, a fine plaited black leather cord sits against his skin. He goes shoeless everywhere; not for him the hard leather boots the girls wear, scraping and gnarling their feet into bloody misshapenness after just a few days. Nor Boncer’s steel-capped work boots; Teddy walks the prickled ground and rough floorboards always barefoot, protected by his beauty.

  In the night Verla has visions of those feet crucified, a thick rusty nail driven through, piercing and splintering the fine bones, the golden skin.

  The off milk smell rises up at her. She stares at the bowl, willing herself to eat. They will be out in the heat and the work shortly. DIGNITY & RESPECT IN A SAFE & SECURE ENVIRONMENT. She will soon be starving.

  Beneath the faded wallpaper and the mantelpiece, Boncer—older than Teddy, peevish—stares out at the younger man through the open window, fondling his stick, fingers softly tracing the knobbled stitches of the seams. In his narrow, sulking face as he stares out at the younger man is some restless longing, or envy.

  Verla forces herself back to the dish, lowering her spoon, lifting the thickened clots, holding her breath—but she can’t help it: the milk revolts her and she drops the spoon as a convulsive retch hurtles up through her, and she knows from the instant soft sound of the girls’ turning bonnets and their inhaled breath that Boncer is beside her with his stick raised.