The Natural Way of Things Read online

  She braces, bowing her head, but since the first day—the big girl, Barbs, with the broken jaw—he has not hit any of them above the neck. Barbs’s entire face now is swollen, purple-black, and she cannot eat anything, even these soggy flakes.

  To look at her now it is hard to remember the sheer physical charge she used to have, ploughing freestyle through the water. Fast lane to the Olympics, they said, till she had to open her mouth about the ‘sports massages’. On the coach’s hotel bed. And then the whole team called her some slurry from Cronulla and that was it, no Olympic Dream for Barbs. Now across the table her broad shoulders hunch, and she can barely open her mouth at all. At the first meal Boncer tossed a waxed paper straw on the table before her and hissed, Don’t lose it. She draws it out at each meal, bent and wet, its end sodden and ragged.

  Boncer is beside Verla and she can smell his body, sour as the milk. She stares at the table, waiting for the strike, but instead his dry white fingers come into her field of vision, picking up the bowl. She hears him sniff it, and can tell from the expression of Lydia across the table that he has made a face. But he only drops the bowl in front of her again and says tiredly, Just fucken eat it.

  They are all surprised when he does not belt her but shuffles from the room, bangs out through the screen door to talk to Teddy.

  The girls stare at each other. They scrape bowls and tinkle spoons, eating in silence. Then the whispering starts up, barely audible. Where is this? they rustle. Why haven’t their families come? Will they be raped, tortured, starved, killed?

  ‘Shuddup,’ yells Boncer from the veranda.

  The bonnets point back at their bowls, in silence. Boncer begins murmuring again to Teddy.

  Then this, hissed: ‘It’s a reality show.’

  Hetty, the cardinal’s girl with the burnt arm, has spoken. Bonnets swivel. The silence stretches.

  She whispers again, ‘Like The Bachelor, but more edgy.’

  Her sister works at Channel Ten. The winner gets two hundred thousand.

  Hetty has a short, strong body, and inside the balloon of the bonnet her face is broad and flat. Her burnt arm rests on the table beside her bowl, wrapped in the ragged grey toilet paper Boncer gave her to wind around and around it. Verla does not want to look at the arm.

  Outside, they hear Teddy. ‘You can’t just decide you have chronic fatigue syndrome, man. A doctor’s gotta diagnose it.’

  Boncer replies, sounding hurt, that he has all the symptoms.

  Hetty whispers on: this is why they are all here, have been chosen. The scandals and all that. The bonnets listen, fixated, gaping. There will be challenges, says Hetty. Maybe even today the first elimination. She nods in awe at her own whispered words. Then the bonnets begin to nod with her, to bob and jerk around from Hetty to one another, disbelief becoming understanding. They begin mouthing inaudible questions.

  Verla is visited by another fantasy: seizing Boncer’s stick and unleashing herself with extravagant fury on Hetty, who has stopped talking now and sits back, smug, ferrying lumps of soft white bread from a plate to her mouth with her grubby good hand, back and forth, chewing steadily beneath the shadow of her bonnet. She meets Verla’s gaze and stares back, her fleshy pink lips moving wetly, her tongue working to dislodge the sticky glutinous bread from her gums.

  The Catholic cardinal, the never-published photographs of almost-underage Hetty, just sixteen and, it was said, lying like a fat happy baby in the purple satin and gold brocade. What the cardinal had seen close up, Verla knows now, was Hetty’s wet red mouth, the coarse black eyebrows, potent with some ferocious carnality. He saw what Verla could see now, that Hetty was a little muscled dog that knew how to bite, and how to indiscriminately fuck. If she were a male the pink crayon of her dick would be always out.

  People have thought this about Verla. She knows that; she read the comments at first. They’ve more or less said it to her face. But with Hetty it is true. The sour milk smell, the clotted mess of what Hetty is saying, the stink of her body all rise up in a curdled mist. Hetty is repulsive, a liar. Hetty can be blamed.

  At the other end of the table Yolanda Kovacs sits, saying nothing, but watching Hetty with open, marvelling contempt. As she turns her gaze away she catches Verla’s eye. Their bonnets sweep off in opposite directions. Verla will align herself with no-one.

  One of the girls, on the verge of tears, begs Hetty in a plaintive whisper, ‘But how—how do you know this?’ It is scrawny Lydia from the cruise liner, left for dead in the toilets. Anonymous, unnamed, face blurred or blacked out, voice altered in every interview for her own protection. Well, now she has no protection and there beneath her bonnet is her gormless little face, small red-rimmed eyes, her prim thin-lipped mouth. And she has a name, Lydia Scicluna. She continues pleading into Hetty’s face: Where are the cameras? How will the challenges be decided? Who will judge?

  Verla can bear no more. She reaches over and puts her hand firmly down over the cruise girl’s curled fist. ‘She’s making it up. It’s not television. It’s real.’

  When Hetty’s indignant mouth drops open, Verla says, ‘Your arm is getting worse.’ And all the girls stare then at Hetty’s grotesquely puffing arm, its filthy wrapping doing little to stop the oozing pus.

  ‘Boncer,’ Verla calls out loud, staring Hetty down, hearing the girls gasp at her malice. Nobody has said his name before now. Verla has begun separating herself: she is not one of them.

  Boncer is instantly back in the room, groping at his side for his stick, Teddy at his heels. Boncer comes to Verla with the stick raised. She wills herself not to flinch, looks into his face. She sees the white head of the pimple crowning at his chin. ‘She needs something for her arm; it’s getting infected.’

  Boncer rolls his eyes at her, then glances at the burn and then away. He sneers, ‘Who are you, Florence fucken Nightingale?’, but there is something uneasy in his voice.

  She keeps her eyes on the pimple head, white in the angry red swell. She tries not to anticipate the stick, fear jingling along her veins. Hetty’s bonnet points floorwards. ‘She’ll get septicaemia.’ To bait them, to make something happen.

  Hetty’s bonnet jerks up then and she stares down its barrel at Verla in sudden terror. ‘What’s that?’ All her bravado gone.

  Teddy leans in to peer across the table, down at Hetty’s arm. He rears back in revulsion, crying, ‘Ugh!’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small clear plastic bottle of hand sanitiser. Still staring at the greening pus and scum of Hetty’s burn he squirts some of the gel into his left palm, pockets the bottle and rubs his smooth hands together. He tosses the bottle to Boncer, who does the same.

  When they’ve gone the mentholated smell fills the room.

  Hetty is crying now. The other girls slump in silence, some looking away, some staring at the glistening, spreading pus in the shallow pit of the burn.

  Hetty confesses. She doesn’t know anything, she made up the reality show. ‘But what else could it be?’ she wails through her sobs.

  Nobody knows. They have been here almost a week. Nobody has come, nothing has happened but waiting and labour and dog kennels and DIGNITY & RESPECT and beatings and fear and a pile of concrete guttering, and now perhaps infection is coming too.

  Verla feels Yolanda Kovacs watching her from the end of the table.

  Soon they are toiling again with the concrete blocks under the hot cloudless sky. They are to move a pile of concrete guttering pieces from one side of the buildings to the other. No explanation or reason except it has to be done for when Hardings comes. The pile is as high as the roofline of the house; higher than the kennel roof.

  The pieces must have been dumped here by tip truck or crane—each chunk of concrete weighs thirty kilos at least—but Verla has looked and looked and can find no road. There must have been one once, when this place was in use as a sheep station, or maybe a wheat farm, but any access road has long been overgrown. She can only discern the same faint flattened track over the g
rass, trailing into the distance in the direction they marched the first day.

  When Verla understands it she nearly drops to the ground. The girls are to build a road for Hardings.

  She trudges back and forth with the others, taking her turn to reach in and yank at the sharp angles of the concrete length and drag it free of the pile, careful not to set the mammoth pieces clunking and sliding, which happens every hour or so. All the girls have scrapes and cuts on their arms and hands from the concrete edges, from overbalancing into the pile or dropping a block. She drags a concrete log towards her, lugs the dead weight up against her body, hugging it to her. Sweat runs down her arms inside the rough fabric of her tunic, chafing and rasping. Her shoulders and forearms ache with the strain as she turns to walk.

  Each footstep over the flat dead ground sets off a spangle of grasshoppers into the air before her. Small black flies dart at her mouth and eyes, trapping themselves beneath the bonnet visor. She reaches the other side, panting, and drops the block, stumbling backwards so as not to hit her feet. She bends over, hands on her knees, breathes noisily. It is only the first hour.

  Every two hours they are allowed a ten-minute break. They flop on their backs in the orange dirt, too worn out to speak, and guzzle the minerally water Teddy carries in a plastic bucket, passing a chipped white mug from girl to girl.

  Verla turns onto her side to get the sun off her face, dozes a minute. When she opens her eyes it’s to the soft white face of Isobel a little way off, resting on her grimy hands, eyes closed, her mouth slack. Strange seeing that face in the flesh. Verla remembers another close-up: the Sunday-night interview, Izzy’s smooth peachy face and her big glassy blue eyes filling the screen, the furrow between her soft blonde eyebrows. The airline CEO meanwhile hurrying his wife and children onto a first-class flight to Europe. Izzy’s soft trembling voice speaking of her ruined career, of justice that must be done. And beyond the screen, behind it all, the voices of girls everywhere snorting into their vodkas, not as if he even raped her, sneering all that for a snapped bra strap! And imagine him going for a little fatty like that! Quite pretty in the face though, it was argued; Mile-High Izzy could maybe be a plus-sized model if she wanted. But still.

  In the cell next to Verla’s, Izzy has not stopped crying at night in her thin high whimper. Half the time she seems most distraught about the Chloe boots, bought with the settlement and only worn three times before she was taken. After just a few days Verla knows the sounds of Izzy’s crying almost as well as her own. But seeing her up close is different, and so she stares now at famous pretty-but-fat television Izzy lying exhausted in the dirt, a grubby bonnet tied tight beneath her soft chin, her cheeks dotted with infected mosquito bites, oily with dust and tears, her closed eyes ringed with shadow, a yellowing crust of spit in the corner of her dry lips. All that money, Chloe boots and all, and now look at her.

  Above Izzy’s head, far off in the west, a low, deep purple bank of storm clouds smears the sky. Somewhere, far away, it is raining. But here the air is as dry as the hard yellow ground, and Verla tastes nothing but dust.

  Boncer blows his whistle. Izzy stirs, they roll over, crawl to their knees.

  ‘At least we should all lose some weight,’ whispers Izzy to Verla, pushing herself up from the ground.

  Teddy and Boncer stand with their arms folded, inspecting the work on the road, shooting the breeze while the girls toil on their knees.

  Sometimes Teddy brings his breakfast with him, eating from a red plastic bowl with a spoon. He does not eat with the girls nor even with Boncer, who breakfasts somewhere away from the girls. But Teddy has his special collection of jars and plastic-lidded tubs lined up along one bench in the kitchen, each container sticky-taped with a homemade label of lined note paper: TEDDY’S FOOD DO NOT TOUCH scrawled in thick black marker.

  Yolanda once unscrewed the lids and sniffed, then wrinkled her nose and told the girls Teddy didn’t need to worry, all the jars smelled like BO. The tubs contain black shreds of special teas, or ugly faded-looking dried fruits and various powders and supplements: linseed and psyllium husks and goji berries, according to Izzy, and weird bits of stuff that looks like bark.

  Lydia, sweating and grunting as she hauls a long piece of concrete kerbing, murmurs to Verla that Teddy definitely has some hash somewhere, she sometimes smells it late in the night, wafting from far up in the house. She has no doubt that Teddy packs cones and gets high, the lucky bastard.

  ‘Jesus, I would kill for some weed,’ whispers Maitlynd. She and Verla squat, their backs straining as they hold the concrete block and Lydia rakes the gravel beneath it.

  Up the line Boncer and Teddy stop talking and watch the girls. ‘Straighter,’ yells Boncer. ‘That’s crooked.’

  They begin again.

  Teddy is reciting to Boncer a list of what he would normally eat, back home, and Boncer is pretending to know what these things are. In the back of the fridge are more of Teddy’s special foods, manky little plastic-wrapped blocks of things almost nobody but Teddy recognises: a grey wad of uncooked clay stuff that turns out to be some kind of yeast, and another block of solid yellow curd that smells Indonesian or something, and which Joy diagnoses as tempeh. Joy rolls her eyes at the girls for not knowing what tempeh is.

  Boncer and Teddy stroll along the line of struggling, sweating girls, talking all the time. Verla thinks of slave masters in old black-and-white movies.

  Teddy has a yoghurt maker in his backpack, he tells Boncer, but it doesn’t work anymore, and anyway it wouldn’t work with this bloody fake milk they have to drink here. Teddy is disgusted by the paint-thick white UHT milk. He used to only drink soy, he says wistfully, scratching at the wispy goatee that has begun to crawl down his neck.

  He took the yoghurt maker from the last place he lived, where his then sort-of girlfriend Hannah (who was amazing at giving head) made really awesome yoghurt every day. To eat with nuts; Christ, he misses nuts, almonds especially. Boncer wants to hear more about the head, but Teddy waves his hand and says this Hannah unfortunately started to get hung up on all sorts of neurotic bullshit and ended up just giving him the shits.

  The sun beats down on the girls.

  ‘Can we have a break, please?’ asks Barbs—it is always brave Barbs pushing for rest stops, even after her broken jaw that first day—and Boncer looks pained at the interruption, then looks at his watch and blows his whistle. ‘Five minutes,’ he snaps.

  The girls mostly just drop the concrete blocks and sit where they are in the dust, too tired even to go and lie on the dried grass. They sit with their heads on their arms across their knees.

  Teddy talks on about this Hannah and her long ugly toes, how they didn’t curl neatly in descending order like girls’ toes should but stuck straight out in a horrible separated way. He said how, for a not-bad-looking chick, she was remarkably unattractive when she cried. She was also way, way too hairy. In general. Teddy likes them natural but, let’s face it, some of them are, like, really hairy. Both Boncer and Teddy shudder in disgust, looking at the girls where they sit slumped in the dirt.

  Something had gone out in that cardinal’s girl, Hetty, by the time they got back. Yolanda was first in the door, to find Hetty still sat there at the table, a fresh pile of dunny paper beside her and her fugly bloated arm resting, wound upwards, on the table. But her bonnet was off, fallen on the floor. Her pale bald head gleamed in the gloom. Now and then she used the dunny paper to blot at the liquid seeping from her wound. She’d been crying all day, by the look of her, and now sat motionless, head turtle-low on her neck, barely moving as they all clomped in. Shit scared she was, right down deep inside, more scared than all the rest of them now.

  The girls trooped in, staring at the poor bitch. Mostly the staring was out of pity, but Yolanda felt some other instinct shivering too, same as happened among the hens in her nana’s chook yard. The button eyes taking a good look, circling, sizing up the weak. Looking around to see who might go in for a lunge, for the first
darting, investigating peck.

  The girls fell to the benches, most of them too tired to hold their heads up and keep on staring. Except old Verla Learmont, the cabinet minister’s moll with a pole up her university arse, who gawked at Hetty but didn’t look so pleased with herself as she was this morning, predicting gangrene. In fact she looked green-sick, like she thought she might have brought this down on Hetty herself. Maybe she did.

  Yolanda watched Verla slide in next to the burnt girl, trying to look into her face, but Hetty didn’t seem to notice, just stared at the table out of her sickly eyes. They all watched then as Verla got up and scuffed out the door and along the hallway to the kitchen, then came back with a big plastic cup of water and set it down in front of Hetty. Who just kept staring.

  Behind Verla came Boncer with his stick. It seemed Verla would not be hit or even yelled at this time. He stood, annoyed, and pointed his stick at the cup. ‘Drink it,’ he ordered Hetty, so she pulled the cup towards her, took a little weary drink. Still in her turtleish dreaming sickness, but she sipped. All the other parched, sticky-mouthed girls would have to wait, watching Hetty drink, and Yolanda joined them in hating her for being so slow.

  Then Boncer said, ‘Christ al-fucking-mighty. Come on then.’ He grabbed Hetty’s upper arm and dragged her to her feet as she howled.

  The bonnets jerked up everywhere to see this, Hetty letting out a bawl and her good hand shooting out to grab at Verla’s sleeve and not letting go, so strong, no matter how Verla tried to prise her fingers off. They saw Boncer shrugging and saying, ‘You too then, looks like,’ clipping Verla’s lead to Hetty’s and violently yanking so the two of them stumbled away from the table and out of the door.

  Fat Izzy from the airline reached out and snatched up Hetty’s cup and drank down all the water in it before the next girl could knock the cup from her hands. It bounced, empty, to the floor.