The Natural Way of Things Page 8

In the first month, early on, they all scratched through their tunics as their pubes grew bristling back, pulled up their skirts to ram a hand into their pants. Girls stood straddling the concrete blocks, raking like mad at their crotches, some more horrified than others at this sprouting hair, all over. Joy cried; she had never even seen her own fully grown pubes, her mother took her for waxing as soon as they began to appear. Hairless and smooth as marble was Joy, until now.

  Verla no longer cares about hair, nor does Yolanda, nor Maitlynd or Hetty. But Lydia and Joy have wheedled a pair of tweezers from Nancy and spend evenings poring over each other’s limbs, pincering out hairs one by one, wincing and yelping. Good for them, says Yolanda, they will be first in line when Boncer and Teddy finally decide they can have their pick.

  Now and then Verla remembers with a shock that they are not children, not actually girls, but adult women, in the world, in Australia. Somewhere in this same country there are cities and the internet and governments and families and shopping centres and universities and airports and offices, all going about their business, all operating normally. Verla feels a pain rising all the way up from her lower gut at governments. Was Andrew still striding the corridors, giving doorstops on the steps? Giving that charged ironic gaze as he took your hand and pressed the folder into it? She gets a cold feeling now, marching, the shame of wanting his hands again, the desire in her provoked by these images of him.

  The third time they met, he slid Leaves of Grass into her hands as he dropped her off in the city and his cab flew away. She read and read those unfathomable lines, not understanding but absorbing, so even now they drape about her memory in decorated prayers and incantations. Rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet.

  The few remaining bonnets bob in the line behind Nancy. The girls have mostly abandoned the hats now, one way or another. Verla burned hers in the incinerator, and one by one the others, too, got rid of theirs when they could: tearing them into pieces and saying the mangle did it, or burying it and lying—to the point of a beating, with Yolanda—that it must have blown off the brick pile as they worked, far into the scrub. But Hetty, Maitlynd, Joy, some of the others, have grown somehow attached to theirs, and wear them always. They depend on the snug containment of their heads, covering their ears, the obscured vision. Verla can understand it, though only from a distance. She used to hold them in contempt for keeping the bonnets; not anymore. But still, for herself that limp, stinking thing felt more like a prison than this whole place.

  Something is happening up the line.

  Nancy has jolted them to a stop and unclips Yolanda, sends her to the storeroom for whatever you can find. Yolanda and Verla meet each other’s eyes before she sets off.

  The rest plod up the hill, up the dry wooden steps and across the hollow veranda boards. No Boncer, no Teddy. They clomp into the damp linoleum coolness of the ref, are unclipped, sit down and wait, elbows on the table, staring at their dirty fingernails. A large lone mosquito drifts across the air before Verla. She blows at it; it tumbles in the air, then recovers. It should be too cold for mosquitoes.

  She returns to her fantasies in which she kills Boncer: with a heavy stone to the head, by strangulation with a leash, with a kitchen knife through the chest (they are all too blunt, she’s looked). By pushing him down some stairs, from a rock, off a cliff. The most practical would be the electric fence; they could rush him and hold him there—but how to stop the shock passing through and killing them all? By snake or spider bite; she looks out for them, tries to catch them but fails. With an axe. Suffocation in his sleep. Beating in his skull with his own stick. Staking him to the ground and hoping for vultures. Before now Verla never knew she could carry such violence in her. Even when Andrew was forced to dismiss and deny her, she did not yearn for vengeance like this. Her visions are not simply of Boncer’s death, nor her own freedom. The moments she dwells on are those of degradation, of Boncer abject and grovelling.

  The mosquito returns, hovering, strangely large. Verla sighs, claps again at the insect. But it only sails ahead of her hands, purposeful, gliding, steady. It is too cold for mosquitoes, but this one is fat, it knows the air.

  She is feeling odd. She smells peculiar too, she discovered last night when she went outside to piss in the grass, her head dropping to her chest with tiredness as she squatted. An odd smell came up from her chest. She sniffed inside her under-blouse to smell not just the familiar stink of her body, not just dirt, but something sour and sickly. She can smell it now, hovering just beyond herself. She lays her head down on the table, resting on her crossed arms.

  At the whine of the mosquito in her ear she jerks upright, clapping her hands near her head. When she opens her hands it lies there, a huge squashed black thing, and her palms are bloody. Whose blood? She looks around at her sisters: their sallow, mosquito-bitten faces, the dark eyes deep in their yellowing skin, staring at the table or a wall.

  They have not eaten any fresh food since they arrived here. No wonder they look so grey and sick. Verla wipes her bloody hands down the dirty pleats of her skirt, tips back in her chair. She sees then that the mottled fly-spotted ceiling is covered with the fine hairs of settled mosquitoes. Hundreds of them; not moving, not searching, not hungry. Waiting.

  What fucking bollocks Nancy talked. Once Yolanda reached the cracked concrete step of the storeroom she turned around to watch the others straggling up the steps into the ref, Nancy behind them, nervily pulling at one of her own mangy plaits, searching the long veranda for signs of Boncer or Teddy.

  Meeting. Who with, and how? Unless there was a phone or laptop they didn’t know about. But Nancy had the wind up her, and there was a whiff of something bad coming. Something worse than usual.

  The storeroom smelled of dust and cardboard, and in one glance Yolanda discovered what she had already known to be true: by winter the food would be running out.

  Yolanda had kept count over the months, and now she found she had been almost right. The light coming in the spotty window revealed a room full of large empty boxes. She shuffled through them in the dry, echoing room: reaching, hunting, overturning, kicking at them to test for weight.

  Only thirteen of the boxes contained anything, and it was noodles, and dried soup. This could not be right. She started again, methodically moving through the boxes. Now and then a sachet dropped from beneath a folded flap on the base of a box, so she would have to pick up and shake each one.

  After twenty minutes and many empty cartons she had found only enough dried stuff to last for around nine weeks. And the cans were all gone. She rummaged through the packets and boxes: powdered milk, muesli bars, potato powder, freeze-dried peas. Powdered macaroni cheese.

  There had to be more. She started again.

  At last, miraculously, one large unopened box, heavy. She tore at it, thigh-high brown cardboard, unmarked except for barcodes and numbers. Relief swept through her: it would not be much, but anything to keep them fed would help.

  It was not food. It was bandages and dressings, medical tape, antibiotic ointments, latex gloves. A great breath forced up through Yolanda: someone had predicted they would need medical supplies. And here were antiseptic, antibiotics, saline solutions. Splints and cleaning supplies, disinfectant and detergents! Cotton wool, antiseptic, burn gel, Burn Aid Film Wrap. All those months, Hetty’s arm gummed sticky with gobs of pus-soaked toilet paper, infected over and over again, so now she would be scarred for life. And Nancy had never, ever gone near this box, not even looked for it. The girls knew they would be left for dead if they could not heal themselves.

  Rage pummelled up through Yolanda’s body, she could feel it rattling her bones, a freight train of fury charging. She wrenched the packages apart, pulling out everything. She would carry it all back, hurl it at Nancy, stuff the dressings into her nasty little mouth and suffocate her with them, slice these Sterile Carbon Steel Precision Tweezers across her throat.

  At the very bottom of the box was something Yolanda recognise
d from long, long ago. So small and domestic and ordinary she began to cry. It was the shiny pastel plastic packaging of sanitary napkins.

  Oh, oh.

  All these months, the disgusting shredded rags jammed into your underpants, soaking through. It was worse than anything, the beatings or the hunger, the infections or insults. The wet wad of torn-up tea towels and fraying curtain and threadbare sheet, of old underpants and flannelette shirt ripped into patches and strips, somehow rolled and folded into a horrible lump, forced upwards to mould up into yourself, but the loose stupid bloomers and all of it drenching too quickly, rasping your thighs as you walked, soaking and dribbling. The coppery smell, the chafing hatred in it. Then having to rinse them in dirty tank water in the trough outside the laundry, hang the fluttering rusty flags in the sun. Yolanda had retched into the grass the first three times she’d had to plunge them into the dirty water, clouding with her own trailing mess.

  And Boncer and Teddy standing on the veranda sneering down at them, laughing, hands over their noses and mouths, calling out, Ugh, pigs, shark bait, raw steak. Ah, gross—look out, it’s wounded clam.

  Yolanda had once seen an elephant on YouTube, giving birth. The great animal bellowing, swaying, ears flapping in pain as a great silvery pendulum slowly expelled itself, swung and panted its way out, the agony of it, stretching and lowering, and then finally burst onto the ground, exploded, and then torrents and torrents of bloody water came. The elephant kicked and shuffled the lifeless slimy lump over the floor, swirling and sliding in the muck. Wound its trunk around the small body, yanking and dropping until the baby opened its pink yawling mouth and roared. It was supposed to be beautiful, its slipping and staggering to its feet (So cuuuute! I loove that baby! Wow, what a great mom!), struggling to live. But then came something terrible: a huge liverish slide of innards plummeting out. The zoo people grasped the great meaty fleece of the placenta. Pulled and stretched out the slippery, shaggy scalloped thing. Alien, monstrous, female.

  Yolanda hugged the squishy mint-green and baby-pink packages to her chest, squatting in the grief and shame of how reduced she was by such ordinary things. It was why they were here, she understood now. For the hatred of what came out of you, what you contained. What you were capable of. She understood because she shared it, this dull fear and hatred of her body. It had bloomed inside her all her life, purged but regrowing, unstoppable, every month: this dark weed and the understanding that she was meat, was born to make meat.

  But only now it became clear to her that her body and her, Yolanda, were not separable things, and that what she had once thought of as a self, somehow private and intricate and unreproducible, did not exist. This was what the footballers in the dark knew, somehow, when they did those things to her. To it. There was no self inside that thing they pawed and thrust and butted at, only fleecy, punishable flesh. Yolanda herself was nothing, a copy of any other flesh. Meat, tissue, fluid, gore.

  She crouched there in the storeroom, rocking and crying till the snot ran down her face. Eventually she stopped and sniffed, and wiped her face on her filthy dress. She began unwrapping the pads and tampons and stuffed them, as many as she could fit, down into her dress. Removing any wrapping that would make a noise, inhaling their poetic, pharmaceutical smell. And shoving them down. She would make them last. Those she could not fit she wrapped in the empty plastic and packed them at the bottom of a large dented box marked DRIED POTATO. She shoved other empty boxes down into it over the bundles, pulled it into a corner of the room, covering it with balls of plastic bags.

  She threw the medical supplies into the half-full carton of food packages, gathered up the box and walked stiffly, thick with padding, from the room. She locked the door and made her way down the concrete steps, out into the pale yellow day.

  When Verla sees Yolanda’s face—when she finally shows up in the ref—it is clear she has been crying. This more than anything alarms the girls, who stare as Yolanda drops the box to the table, moving stiffly as if injured. She has stuffed things down her clothes—food, Verla supposes—but the other girls are not looking at her, only into the box from which Yolanda draws out package after package, slamming them onto the table. Bandages, sterile clips and safety pins, cotton wool, Dettol. Eye wash, anti-itch cream, antibiotics, more and more packets she slams to the table, staring at Nancy all the time.

  ‘Oh!’ says Nancy, coming over to see, nervy at the murderous look on Yolanda’s face. But then through the door bursts Boncer, Teddy shuffling behind him in downcast reverence.

  The girls scramble immediately to sit, bracing shoulders and training eyes on the table, waiting for Boncer’s stick to strike. But he says nothing, goes to sit not on his wooden stool by the mantel, instead hitches himself up onto the windowsill and sits there sideways, legs drawn in, curving into the window frame. His eyes are red. He sits there, a thumbnail between his teeth, staring sadly out through the spotted flyscreen, across the land.

  Teddy stands a moment with his arms folded, watched by the girls, by Nancy, whose small head jerks as her gaze follows Teddy’s movements, alert as a squirrel. He sighs and pads about in his bare feet, unlocking and unclipping the leads, one by one. The girls are motionless, wary, as Teddy unclips them. It is Lydia who stands first, silently sliding from the bench, and stretches her arms above her head, her large breasts rising and falling as her arms slowly windmill. Then Maitlynd copies her, stands and stretches sideways, all of them silent, watching Boncer for any sudden movement. Teddy just gazes mournfully at Boncer. One after another the girls stretch, for this rare chance must be taken, each bending to touch her toes, or reach her arms backwards, clasping hands behind her back. Eyes always on Boncer, ready for him to strike. But he keeps staring out the window, as if to sea.

  Hetty turns her face to the others, eyes wide. No stick, she mouths.

  It is true, Boncer’s belt holster is empty. They look quickly back at Teddy, yawning with his back to the wall, eyes closed. He has no weapon either. He closes his mouth and opens his heavy-lidded eyes, and looks miserably around the table at the waiting girls.

  Boncer swings down off the windowsill and strides from the room.

  In the silence they stand, straining for clues.

  Eventually Nancy snaps into the gloomy air, ‘Well?’

  Teddy turns his tearful eyes to her. ‘Hardings isn’t coming.’

  They stare at him, confused.

  His gaze moves across the girls, one after another, as if seeing them freshly, dreadful. ‘We’re stuck here,’ he says to Nancy, his voice thickening as he realises. ‘Like them,’ he says, and puts his hands over his face.

  It is the afternoon that everything changes.

  Until evening the bowl of land is dotted with the ten wandering girls. Some take off their clothes and trail them in the dirt. Some lie down naked in the sun. Some go in search of food, some for clothes. Yolanda and Izzy and Lydia go down to the dam, lie back in the murky green water, arms outstretched, heads resting in the reeds, pubic bones peeping from the water.

  Boncer only sits in the window again, staring out at the dry brown land.

  HARDLY ANYONE ventured into the ablutions block anymore. In the beginning they were herded in there by Boncer each morning, and they held their breath and did it because they had never in their lives thought it was possible to shit outdoors. But later, when Yolanda began going off in the mornings and squatting in the grass, they saw the sense of it. Digging a hole in fresh grass with a stick was less revolting, less frightening, than that slimy dark place with its filthy blocked drains and its stench, the brown water dripping out of the tap. When the toilet paper ran out they used newspaper. When that ran out they got accustomed to grass, and were careful with their hands. Under Leandra’s army discipline they washed their hands obsessively with squirts of dishwashing liquid, but that didn’t stop a wave of gastro coming now and then, laying them all out, vomiting for days.

  Sometimes in the early mornings a cry went up in the kennels because B
arbs had done one of her deadly farts and it spread, pernicious, under the corrugated-iron wall into the next cell. Urrrgh, fuck’s sake, Barbs, yelled Maitlynd out of the muffle of hands cupped over nose and mouth, and disgusted mutterings would thread from one dogbox to the next in judgement of Barbs and her lavish, astonishing smells. Barbs would call out, ‘I can’t help it, irritable bowel runs in my family!’, shrug up beneath the thin blanket and nest further into her bed, breathing in the comforting fruity waft and smiling softly to herself.

  Teddy still spends long minutes inspecting his reflection in the window glass. Sometimes he goes up to the glass and polishes a little patch of it with his sleeve, then settles back to his appraisal.

  Most days he displays himself on the veranda, dragging his ratty purple yoga mat around the building to follow the sun, sliding effortlessly from downward dog into cobra and back up, undulating and arching his smooth-skinned limbs. Or slowly, gingerly unfurling into a headstand like a dusty brown flower. The soles of his beautiful feet press together, the legs of his boiler suit fallen down so you can see the perfect diamond made by his muscular calves and thighs.

  Another thing about old Hannah was that she was lazy, and she started to get fat. Even though she could have had a good body, she didn’t have Teddy’s discipline and he couldn’t be with anyone who didn’t respect their body. Teddy’s voice takes on a bitter, angry cast as he describes to Boncer one morning the unceasing nature of Hannah’s bitching, through a mouthful of cornflakes—they are sharing the remaining boxes between themselves, and Teddy sprinkles in the last of his psyllium husks. Hannah, he said, suddenly got on his case about, oh, just anything—who did the fucking dishes, who was late with their rent—like some harpy kindergarten teacher. And—and, he says to Boncer, the pitch of his voice rising, letting loose a few small spits of milk, she took his really expensive diving booties and threw them on the lawn so her mangy little dog could chew them.