The Natural Way of Things Read online

  He made her pay him back for them though, with interest. He says this with fierce satisfaction, swallowing the last of the cereal and running his tongue around his teeth. He looks across the yellow fields, considering this one victory over whining, bourgeois Hannah, and then yells for one of the girls to come and take his bowl away, holding it out without looking to see who takes it from him. Then he gets up from the table and stalks outside and along the veranda, moving his hips and stretching his arms like some languid jungle creature, towards his yoga mat.

  AT THE breakfast table Verla is overwhelmed by revulsion. Maitlynd and Yolanda are scraping their bowls and gobbling. She feels a sudden sweep of appalled, violent hatred for them. How long is it since the girls were all unleashed, since they have been able to come and go from the cells to the ref as they please? How long since Boncer started rationing the food, since she noticed the ceilingful of mosquitoes—last year? yesterday?—and how long has she been feeling so strange?

  She stares at the two girls across the white melamine plain of the table. Maitlynd’s eyes bulge horribly in their pale sockets as she lifts them to look back at her. But Verla is fixated by the blackheads on Yolanda’s nose. It is as if she has grown small enough to walk among the greasy tarry surface of these pits in Yolanda’s skin. When she thinks of the yellow wax beneath, how it would slowly spiral out, she is filled with nausea and wonder: how could she ever have thought Yolanda pretty? The fleshy gaping nostrils, her glassy lips. And Yolanda sits there watching her across the table, as if Verla cannot see her ugliness.

  She says, ‘What’s wrong, Verla?’ Her huge wet pink lips drawing up over her teeth, her mouth moving like a threat. Yolanda and Maitlynd exchange a glance then, and Verla can smell it. They begin to snicker and the sound of it hurts Verla’s ears: she covers them with her hands, which feel very tiny, like a baby rat’s claws. She closes her eyes against Maitlynd and Yolanda and their revolting, too-bright presence.

  ‘Please, shut up,’ she whispers, but in response they exude a terrible, rotten smell, and she thinks their laughter will shatter the windows.

  Verla hears a swarm of bees coming. Lying in the sick bay she hears it, a light hissing coming from far away. Locusts, from the Bible. In her bed she lies and watches the window; the sky darkens with locusts and the sound grows louder, whooshing nearer and nearer. She pulls the sheet to her chin and imagines the locusts descending, settling over Boncer and Teddy and Nancy like overcoats of turf, like the people of Pompeii, coated in molten lava, stilled by boiled stone covering their bodies. Boncer and Teddy and Nancy will have their clothes and hair and skin shorn off by the locusts, and be eaten to the bone.

  The sound is familiar from long ago.

  It is not locusts, not bees or lava or coatings of grass. It is rain.

  Verla throws off the covers and runs to the window. She can see flecks of it, sliding silver baubles on the dusty louvres. She hauls open the door, stumbles into the corridor outside the ref where the girls have gathered and are shouting, ‘It’s raining!’ And they pelt along the hallway and tumble onto the long wide veranda and stand there in a row, listening to the rain thundering on the tin awning above them. They stand with their palms stuck out, and some of them lick their hands. Then Yolanda steps down off the veranda onto the dirt, then they all do, Hetty and Lydia and Maitlynd and Barbs and Joy and the rest, thinking come what may they are going to get wet, Yolanda’s black curling hair getting soaked, only Verla standing undercover, unable to bring herself over the step because maybe this is a dream. Is it a dream? Her head burns but her heart thumps with the thrumming of the rain and she watches the dusty surface of the dirt eddy into swirls.

  After the rain, Verla goes walking. First she sits down on the veranda edge and takes off her boots. She looks at her once-beautiful feet. They are pale and raw and lumpen, strange unrecognisable loaves, the toes splayed and animal, the nails yellow and curved.

  She leaves the boots behind on the silvering veranda boards. She no longer cares if Boncer finds her, bashes her, ties her up. What can he do, other than kill her? Oh, plenty. She does not care. She walks across the yard, past the rusted frame of the old plough, now with weeds growing up between its angles. Picks her way over the gravel on these new, tender, old woman’s feet.

  It is the grass she wants. Since the rain, the dustbowl around the dam has sprouted and a sheen of acid green has appeared over the ground like an algal slick. But it has stayed, and grown, and now it is there, thick green grass covering the whole bowl of the valley.

  She walks towards it, gets down on her hands and knees and crawls in the grass. She sees the fence posts moving. She lies down there, and sleeps in its soft mounds.

  When she wakes, her face printed with grass blades, she finds her way to a hillside of scrub. She walks in it like a dream, climbing the slope in the noisy silence. Silty leaves cling to the soles of her feet. There is the patter of wet droplets falling from the gently moving leaves far above. High squeaks and tin musical turnings of tiny birds. Sometimes a hard rapid whirr, a sprung diving board, and a large dove explodes from a vine and vanishes. A motorised insect drones by her ear. She looks upwards, upwards, and sees long shreds of bark, or abandoned human skins, hanging in the branches. The bush breathes her in. It inhales her. She is mesmerised by pairs of seed pods nestled at the base of a grass tree: hot orange, bevelled, testicular.

  Then a determined, rhythmic crashing starts up through the trees, through the viney cloth draped all about her like torn circus tents. Her horse! But even before she turns she knows it is not her horse but Boncer. She is caught; it was always coming. She turns as in a dream for him to shoot her, rape her, bludgeon her.

  It is not Boncer. The thrashing has stopped; she can see nothing in the silence. Then there it is: the stark, dark narrow face. A kangaroo, straightening itself, growing taller. It watches her, small black paws held delicately before it. They watch each other. Then she sees the other little malleted dark faces: three, six, ten of them—all stopped, all watching her as she slowly perceives their presence. She takes a breath, very still—and then they tilt forwards and make to leap. But then more noise, and more, and all the vegetation thrashes in syncopation; all the bush leaps into shocking life, and she stands motionless, captured, as the blurring streamers of twenty, sixty, a hundred animals overtake her, hurling past. Unseeing, unstoppable, magnificent.

  She waits for minutes, an hour, a day after they pass, skin prickling with joyous sweat, her mouth as dry as the leaves.

  It is possible this happened, she thinks in the drenched grubby bedsheets when she wakes. It is possible. She recalls the wind on her face as the kangaroos rushed, and afterwards, when they had long gone, how she and the horse walked together, her outstretched hand flat on its damp, sliding flank as they moved in peace through the dripping, rain-soaked bush.

  Nancy sings out from across the room, ‘It’s the virus! You’ve got the contagion!’

  Verla lies shivering with the thumping, thrashing brush vibrating around her, remembering the hidden river she had seen.

  Nancy is a shape against the window light now, her back to Verla in the bed, tinkling glass against metal, humming under her breath.

  The horse had led Verla to the river, through the trees: a strap of stippled brown leather seen through a gap, catching the sun. Here in the bed now she is so cold she must put her tongue between her teeth to stop the noise in her head, to still the exhausting movement of her aching jaws. She lets her eyes fall closed. If she could get to it again, the river would warm her. It would be warm sand beneath the soft rippled surface, tinted with tea-tree, moving with such ease, such a low quiet glide.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she whispers thickly, longing for the sun, that bath-warm tea water. She has said it to Nancy’s approaching shape, but Nancy is singing in her high girlish voice and pays no heed to what Verla has whispered, only gropes roughly beneath the blankets for her arm. There is the cold point of a thread pushing past the surface of her skin, a
wire or spangle of something hot or cold, and Verla wants to vomit, not knowing if this is relief or death.

  Nancy withdraws the needle and presses something to Verla’s ice-cold arm, pushes it back beneath the bedclothes. Then the weight of another blanket—so heavy, so welcome but not enough, she wants a steamroller’s crush—thumps down over her.

  The river is a wide rope of bronze silk twirling, and Verla hammocked inside it. She is a creature of the animals, of kangaroo and horse; she is a little brown trout very still in the water, then a twitch and it’s away, somewhere in that channel, scooped along by the river’s strong brown hand.

  THE JINGLING of rabbit traps came into Yolanda’s morning dream, a rhythmic chink of heavy iron, and she felt the beat against her legs, the weight of the dangling black steel fish carried in each of her fists.

  It had been a week since Verla began babbling and now lay mad with fever at the mercy of Nancy and Teddy playing nurses and doctors. Whenever Yolanda thought of them with the supplies she had dumped on the table, their gleeful riffling through packets of needles and vials and phials, their searching out poor Verla’s faint veins and digging their fingers into her shivering white arms, squirting fluid from needles into the air like they’d only ever seen on ER, she went cold and could only think, Fuck me dead, Verla, I’m sorry.

  She had secretly shared the pads and tampons among the girls. They fell on them like Christmas. But she had also delivered the news of the food, and Boncer began rations, keeping the storeroom key around his neck and fetching each day’s meal packages day by day, with extra portions for Teddy and himself, though not Nancy. So this morning when hunger came unfurling again in Yolanda’s belly, it was with the sense of a sudden patch of blue sky after rain that she recalled a pair of ancient traps she’d seen hung on a nail at the end of the collapsing woolshed.

  She had seen kangaroos here—a family of them, in the distance, every few days when the girls still worked on the road, their slow looping progress across the flat—but not rabbits. But she reasoned there had to be some on this place, its earth so scoured and gouged raw, and if not why were there traps?

  She went to Boncer where he was watching Izzy and Joy sorting the packets of food in the scullery. The sluttery he called it, about eight times a day, sniggering. They were no longer chained with the leashes, but after his first day of mourning he had grown savage again with his stick, and they were still locked in at night. Yolanda knew he longed to belt her, or worse. When he saw her standing there he looked her up and down, trailed his sticky gaze all over her. She wanted to spew.

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘We can eat rabbits. I know where there are traps.’

  He looked at her face then, sneering. ‘You wanna eat rabbits. Like some povo bogan bush pig.’

  She folded her arms, covering her povo bogan bush-pig tits, but still he took a good long look. ‘It’s that or wait till all the food runs out,’ she said.

  He left the two girls in the kitchen and drew out a lead. He would not let her go without humiliation, at least. He leashed Yolanda up, herded her past the dogboxes to the sheep yards, walking behind her with his stick. She knew how he watched her moving. Same as it had been all her life, but with him her skin crawled more than ever.

  She thought of a television puppet from her childhood, a talking bulldozer with a clanking mouth that opened and shut with the sound of hauled metal. The unease that would build in her when the thing appeared on the screen: its loose, unpredictable body, its long swaying neck, the flapping steel mouth. Its driven mechanical power, its imperviousness. If it chose, it could traverse all surfaces—water, sand, rubble, a child, herself, squashed into the gravel—with crushing, inevitable force. And yet it could also wheedle, and laugh monstrously. Her child self understood only that she was compelled to look away when the bulldozer appeared, and that a sour tension in her settled, dissolving, when it was gone.

  When they reached the sheep yards Boncer said, ‘Get down.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get on your knees.’

  She closed her eyes. That old sick fear glimmering through her gut, but she would never again submit. She stood. I will not.

  ‘Get down,’ he said. Standing there with his legs apart, leering at her. Fingers of one hand working at his fly, the other holding the leash taut. He turned briefly, checking again how far they were from Teddy and the house, how alone beneath the high sky and the wheeling birds, and how dark and muffling the woolshed, just there. Licking his dry, flaking lips. He twitched the leash, jerking her towards him.

  She tensed, prepared to hurl herself away, took a deep breath with which to scream or vomit or roar or bite. Then she saw Boncer’s white-knuckled hold on the leash strap. Saw his skinny pale mosquito-bitten wrists. She saw, finally, what Boncer was: a stupid ugly child, underfed, afraid. She saw his pocked old acne scars.

  Pity fought fear.

  She heard herself say, ‘Don’t you ever get sick of this, Boncer?’

  Before he could stop it, a cloud of relief, of gratitude passed across him; his eyes watered. Pitiful, pitiful. He stared at her, breathing hard, his eyes red.

  ‘Get on your knees,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, feet planted.

  ‘Get on your knees and suck my cock,’ Boncer said, his voice breaking. He was beginning to cry. He yanked hard on the leash, but Yolanda leaned back with her own force, refused to yield. How drab his grey malnourished skin, how sparse the hairs in his mousy moustache, how pathetic his unanswered dating profile, his ugly little neck chain.

  ‘Come near me and I will fucking kill you,’ she heard herself say. She had no weapon but still, she had made Boncer afraid. It made her stronger. ‘You will never—ever—touch me,’ she said, her voice low and steady. Shaking her head, leaning back, refusing the tug on the leash. ‘You’re repulsive, and you’re weak. And you’re probably getting sick.’

  Boncer stood, appalled. Filled with shame, his fly open to show the fading red of his pilled polycotton underpants, the little wet push against the fabric. He saw her looking, shoved a hand down to cover it.

  ‘Let me get these traps or you’ll starve with us,’ Yolanda said.

  He dropped the leash and she stumbled backwards, sprawling as she landed. He raised his stick at her, but still she felt his fear.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch you anyway, all the cocks that have been in you,’ he spat, as she got to her feet and turned towards the collapsing woolshed, adrenaline surging through her. She knew where the traps hung on the shed wall, knew the trap jaws, knew how they could snap bone. And now, even with Boncer yelling obscenities after her, insulting her body, describing what other men had done to her, crowing all this in his bully’s whine, his tears gone, all she felt for him was pity.

  It was like a drug.

  She clambered over fences, through the pens to the woolshed, and stalked along the side to where she knew the traps would be, dark against the silvery wood. And there they were, rusting steel rags hanging from a nail. Not a pair but six, seven, nine traps. She wiped her muddy hands on her dress.

  Boncer watched her, panting, his eyes desperate, red-rimmed. His thin voice was calling out the usual things—but as Yolanda pulled down the traps with a clunking, heavy noise, his voice stopped in his dried mouth. In the iron sound of her traps she knew Boncer heard her new knowledge: she was strong, and he was weak.

  She felt the weight of the traps, and all of that—slut slagheap fat-arsed ugly dog bitch—was finished. The sound of the traps in her hand was the sound of a battle won, an exhausted peace falling. She held in each hand a drooping bouquet of rusting steel, strode with a heavy step down the rickety ramp. She stepped near to him and twirled her handful, and Boncer flinched at the wide swing of her arm, he had to duck back his head to avoid the bestowal of her pity, the swoop of its rusted chain.

  She walked away.

  Boncer followed her, not even trying to pick up the leash, as she carried the traps back through
the yards, across the combed grassy paddock, up the pink scoured gravel to the veranda. She heard doors open, and girls and Teddy and Nancy stepped out of the doors to see her swing the traps in a dark iron arc in the air, crashing them onto the wooden boards.

  Boncer saw the others watching, hurried to catch up, to take hold of the leash and stand over her, to posture and sneer, fondling his stick.

  But only Boncer heard her murmured voice.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said to him softly. ‘Fuck off now.’ She picked up the traps and slung them over her shoulder, and carried them into the sick bay where Verla lay.

  VERLA LIES with her eyes closed against the light, the cicadas from outside crawling in through her ears and nose and mouth, filling her veins and nerves with shimmering fever. It’s this that wakes her from her muddy dreams: the cicadas’ sparkling threads of pain moving through her body. In the moments she is dredged up from the bottom of her dreams there is not a part of her that doesn’t hurt: hips, finger bones, each vertebra in her neck. Her chest is shrunken, thick with cobwebbed veils.

  Despite Nancy’s attentions, Teddy’s too, she feels she will die. Because of them, perhaps. Throughout her sickness she has felt the two of them, their hands, lifting and prodding at her. Their curious, experimental voices. They crouch over the ants’ nest of her, poking with a stick, heads together, their breath close and loud. Perhaps they are trying to kill her, and then they leave her to die, and then they come back and rattle little jars and wonder, do more things to hurt her, say mysterious things (shit really hit the fan, what’s emetic, for fuck’s sake don’t drop that) over her sinking, failing body, over her vomiting into a dish, over her soft high crying like a sick baby. There is one of Teddy’s wide brown hands grasping the back of her head, gripping her jaw with his thick tobacco-stinking fingers, forcing little nubs of something into her throat, and Nancy hissing no the other way how many what’s antipyretic how do you and sloshing water and making her swallow, each time gasping so as not to drown.