Two Wolves

by Tristan Bancks

  ‘Are you okay?’ Olive asked, leaning over him.

  His jaw was sore. It was light outside. The cabin was hot. He looked to Mum and Dad’s empty mattress. He sat up.

  ‘The door’s locked and the car isn’t there,’ Olive said.

  Ben stood and trampled awkwardly over his mattress toward the window. She was right. No car.

  ‘What do you mean it’s locked?’ he asked, stepping over Mum and Dad’s mattress. He pulled the door handle. It moved a little but did not open, which was impossible because Dad had broken the lock on the night they arrived. Ben pulled hard and something clanked outside but it would not shift.

  ‘They must have gone to get breakfast,’ Olive said.

  Ben looked at all the food stocked up on the shelf.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’ Ben searched around for a note from Mum. She always left a note. He lifted up the mattresses to see if it had slipped underneath. He shook out the sleeping bags.

  He tried the door again. It flexed and jangled. A chain. A thick chain. He walked back to the window and twisted the rusty metal latch. He hooked his fingers through the two metal rings at the bottom of the window and pulled upward, feeling a thick Y-shaped vein form on his forehead. The window was jammed and swollen from years without use.

  ‘Maybe Dad took the car and Mummy’s gone to get water at the creek. Maybe she’ll be back in a minute,’ Olive said.

  Ben thought of yesterday, when he had stood up to his father. He had asked too many questions when they were out hunting. He knew too much. And he had written it all down. He felt panic rise from his stomach to his chest and throat. He wished he was at Nan’s, eating Kingston biscuits out of her tall yellow biscuit barrel. He didn’t care how much cat fur was in among the biscuits or if there were weevils. He wanted to tell her everything while she drank a big cup of tea from her purple mug. She would know what to do. She always knew.

  ‘Let’s call out,’ Olive suggested.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ben.

  ‘Mu-u-u-um!’ She listened for a few seconds. ‘Mum!’

  Nothing.

  ‘Mum-my!’

  She waited.

  ‘Help me!’ she snipped at Ben.

  So he gave a half-hearted call. ‘Mum!’

  ‘Mu-u-m-m-y-y-y!’ Olive screamed.

  They listened. Ben looked around. He eyed the high, broken window in the open roof area. It would be near-impossible to get to. Too small for him to squeeze through and probably too small for Olive. Broken glass hung from the top of the frame like stalactites.

  Hungry.

  Ben was not sure what time it was but it felt late, much later than his usual wake-up. He had been sent to the cabin after Dad had finished reading his notebook. He had not been allowed out for dinner and had gone to bed hungry – apart from the food he had stolen from the shelf when no one was looking.

  ‘Where are they? And why is the door stuck?’ Olive asked.

  ‘I d’know,’ Ben said. But he did know. He knew that his parents had not sold the wreckers. There was no break-in. This was not a holiday. The police wanted them for some reason and Ben’s sloppy detective work had led to Olive and him being held captive.

  Ben spied the esky in the corner of the room and lifted the lid. Ice, cheese, tomatoes, juice, cold meat wrapped in white paper, all floating in icy water at the bottom. He grabbed a large block of chocolate and shook off the water. He unwrapped it and snapped off a row. Caramel.

  He looked at it, wondering if he should eat it. How much fatter would it make him? How delicious would it be? He could hear his mother’s voice: ‘It’s your choice. Don’t blame me,’ and he could hear the things kids sometimes said at school when they were picking teams. Ben was always goalie. ‘You just have to stand there and block the goal with your body,’ they would say, laughing. Ben would laugh along too, but it wasn’t that funny. And he remembered when the school had sent home BMI report cards – Body Mass Index. It was the only report where he had scored really high marks.

  Ben shoved the chocolate into his mouth.

  Knowing that it was Dad’s made it taste especially good. He devoured the row, then another. He offered some to Olive. She shook her head, bottom lip out, arms folded.

  Ben munched on another row, caramel spilling down his chin. Olive grunted. Her body stiffened.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She turned her back to him.

  ‘Are you angry at Mum and Dad?’

  She didn’t say anything. Ben put a hand on her shoulder. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she buried her head in his side. He wanted to say, ‘Don’t be a baby,’ but Olive never cried unless it was serious.

  ‘Just Mummy,’ she said, muffled by sobs.

  ‘You’re just cranky at Mum?’

  She nodded and howled to herself.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Dad’s a big Maugrim-ish idiot but Mummy knows better than to be mean and bad. She’s the worst mum in the whole world EVER!’

  Ben held her for a few minutes, her warm tears making the side of his t-shirt soggy.

  ‘At least we can eat Dad’s chocolate,’ he said. He snapped off a row and offered it to her. She took it and ate it quickly, then asked for another. Ben wondered if he was already fatter.

  He looked around the room, sighing. He had not seen a screen in days. Back in real life he watched TV, made movies or played games from three-thirty in the afternoon till nine at night. They always ate dinner in front of the TV. Dad would get angry if anyone tried to eat at the dining table when a good show was on. He said it was rude. When Ben stayed at James’s house, they didn’t even have a TV, which was weird. And Gus was only allowed to watch it on weekends. But, to Ben’s family, TV was like bad glue. They needed regular doses to keep all the cracks hidden.

  The roof of the cabin clicked and creaked, expanding in the sun. Rosellas made a mad tweeting racket in the pine trees behind the cabin.

  ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ Olive said.

  Ben needed to go himself. He leaned the air mattresses up against the wall and paced around the cabin, squeezing his bottom lip. How long would his parents be gone? Too long for Olive.

  ‘Where can I go?’ she asked. ‘I’m going to explode!’

  Olive went from not needing to go at all to nearly exploding every time. It drove Dad crazy, especially when they were driving.

  Ben heard the creek in the distance and, for a moment, it seemed to flow through him, making him feel as though he might explode, too.

  ‘We have to smash the window,’ Olive said.

  ‘No! Go in a cup.’ Ben moved quickly to the shelf and grabbed her an orange plastic picnic cup that Dad had bought the day before.

  ‘I’m not a boy! I can’t go in a cup,’ she said.

  Ben had already thought about smashing the window but what if his parents really had gone to get breakfast? What if Dad was coming back with cheese and bacon scrolls and strawberry milk to apologise for reading Ben’s notebook?

  ‘We can’t smash the window. They’ll kill us,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’ll already be dead from an exploding bowel.’

  ‘Bladder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wee is held in your bladder.’

  Olive punched Ben hard on the arm. ‘They can’t just lock us in. Kids are people, too.’ She picked up a saucepan and went to the window.

  ‘Don’t!’ Ben said. ‘They’ll be so angry.’

  ‘They’re gone!’ Olive shouted. ‘They’ve left us to be eaten by lions and possums and . . .’

  ‘No, they haven’t. Possums can’t eat you and there are no lions in Australia.’

  ‘We saw –’

  ‘Except at the zoo,’ Ben said.

  ‘Well, what if they escaped?’ she said, raising the pan over her shoulder.

  ‘St
op!’ Ben grabbed her arm. ‘Let’s . . .’ He tried to think of something to distract her. ‘Let me tell you a story. It’ll take your mind off it.’

  ‘Let me go or I’ll bash you with the saucepan.’

  ‘Do you promise not to smash the window?’

  ‘Let. Me. GO!’ she screamed and he dropped her wrist.

  ‘What about?’ Olive said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s the story about?’

  The saucepan hung by her side, threatening to rise again if Ben didn’t come up with something good. He searched the room for inspiration. His backpack lay on the floor next to his camera, dead battery and the torn notebook. Dad had thrown it at Ben after reading it and told him that his detective work sucked.

  Ben could tell her the story of Dario Savini, zombie thief, and Ben Silver, Sydney’s toughest cop, but it seemed a bit dark. The ancient, dog-eared copy of My Side of the Mountain sat, cover up, on the floor near his notebook.

  ‘How about a story about a kid who has to survive in the wilderness by himself for a year, living in a tree.’

  Olive dropped the saucepan to the floor with a clang and sat on one of the camping chairs, thumb in her mouth. She and Bonzo waited.

  Ben breathed a stuttering sigh and picked up the book. He climbed onto the table, leaning his back against the wall next to the window. He began to read the author’s note at the beginning – how when she was a kid she had packed up a suitcase and told her mother she was going to run away from home.

  Over the next few hours, Ben and Olive unravelled the story of Sam Gribley, the kid who left home to live in the mountains for a year with only a weasel and a falcon for company. As he read the book aloud his mind pedalled ferociously in the background.

  I hope it wasn’t me who sent them away, with all my stupid evidence and notes. They’ll come back for sure. They’ll be back by lunchtime. I know they will.

  Ben worked the small, jagged blade back and forth across the floorboard. He was starting to make a decent groove now. As he worked he listened for the sound of a distant engine but there was nothing.

  ‘Shine it over here,’ he said.

  Olive focused the torch beam on Ben’s work. Rain hammered the old tin roof.

  They had read My Side of the Mountain in two sittings, one before lunch and one after. They had taken it in turns to read aloud and had finished the book by torchlight as the sun abandoned them for the day. Ben had never loved reading. He liked movies or a teacher reading them a book but he did not like wading through millions of words alone. But this book played on the cinema screen in his mind, like when he imagined his films. No one was showing him pictures but he could still see them.

  Olive had peed in a cereal bowl. She had made Ben turn his back and reminded him of the time that he made her drink apple juice. Well, he had told her it was apple juice but it was not. It was something else. Something that looked like apple juice. Ben laughed but he still felt bad. Why did he do those things to her? It was as though there was a bad-Ben inside him, forcing his hand.

  My Side of the Mountain had given them comfort and light and warmth but when it was done all they had was heavy rain, leaks spattering the floor around them and small, unseen animals making nests in the darkest corners.

  After dinner Ben had said, ‘Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow, this day will feel like a dream. They’ll be here when we wake up, you wait.’

  ‘Liar,’ she had said, darting across the cabin to grab her saucepan and heading for the window.

  ‘Stop. We don’t want to be out there at night. And we don’t want to smash anything. Think what Dad will do.’ Ben had already been thinking about a way out of the cabin that would not get them into too much trouble if Dad came back. And if they really had been abandoned, they needed to be able to come and go without smashing a window. ‘Why don’t we cut a hole in the floor, something we can cover up. A trapdoor.’

  ‘I love trapdoors,’ Olive had said.

  ‘I know that.’

  She lowered the saucepan. ‘What do we cut it with?’

  Ben had pulled his knife out of his pocket and shoved the rusty, green metal trunk across the floor. He had run his fingers over the pine floor, found a small knothole about thirty centimetres from the wall and started to cut away at the board.

  ‘That’ll take ten years!’ Olive had said. ‘Lemme smash the window.’

  It did take a long time to get going and the blade stuck regularly in the wood but Ben was determined. Olive held the torch but her mind wandered regularly and so did the torch beam.

  ‘This is payback for those dirty dogs leaving us,’ she said.

  Ben moved the blade back and forth, back and forth. Dirty-dogs. Dirty-dogs. Those words sawed through him. Dirty on the forward motion of his saw. Dogs on the backward. The more he thought, the more he sawed, the more he became certain that he and Olive needed a way out, that maybe Mum and Dad were gone for good. But why would they do that? Why would they lock Ben and Olive in?

  ‘Do you think he’s real?’ Olive asked, sitting above Ben on the camp chair.

  ‘Who?’ Ben asked. Dirty-dogs. Dirty-dogs. Sweat rained from his forehead making fat splats on the floor.

  ‘Santa.’

  Ben stopped sawing. He looked around the dark room. ‘Who said anything about Santa?’

  ‘Just me.’

  Ben started sawing again. ‘Yes. He’s real.’

  Olive was quiet.

  ‘Do you think kids in Africa are dying right now?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Are other kids in Africa getting born?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course.’

  ‘Why don’t kids in Africa get Christmas presents?’

  ‘They do,’ Ben said, wiping sweat off his face with his shoulder.

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Ben wanted to work in silence but at least the chatter stopped him from thinking about Mum and Dad and what they had done.

  ‘Movies,’ Olive said. ‘In Christmas movies Santa never goes to Africa.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked, surprised. He tried to think of one where they did.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ Olive said, sucking her thumb now while holding the torch.

  Ben looked up, blinding himself for a moment by looking into the torch beam.

  ‘Stop sucking your thumb.’

  ‘You’re not my dad.’

  No. And you wouldn’t listen to me if I was.

  Ben felt the saw go all the way through the timber for the first time.

  ‘Give me the torch!’ he said, blowing sawdust aside. He lay down and put his eye to the crack, trying to squeeze the torch as close to his eye as he could. Through a tiny slit, Ben could see corrugated iron on the ground and lots of old bottles. This pinprick of hope pushed him up off the floor and he worked double time, hacking away like his life depended on it. And maybe it did. He would have to cut through three floorboards to make a hatch wide enough to escape. His hand ached like when he was forced to write for a long time at school, but it was easier now that he could push and pull all the way through the board. After almost an hour he had cut across an entire floorboard. He pushed down on it and the rusty nails near the wall bent and twisted and the board came away.

  ‘Ya-a-a-a-a-a-y!’ Olive said, shining the torch into the gap. Ben used the piece of floorboard to scrape away the twisted mass of spider webs beneath, and reached his arm down into the outside world, laughing for the first time that day. Breeze. He could almost touch bare earth.

  ‘Let me, let me!’ Olive said. She lay down and spat into the hole. ‘Coooooooeeeee!’ Her voice skittered into the night.

  Ben shoved her aside and began cutting the second board.

  ‘We’re like burglars,’ Olive said, climbing back into her camping chair, ‘except we’re try
ing to get out, not in.’

  Ben smiled at her weirdness. The feeling in the cabin had changed now. Hope had blown in. The rain had settled into a steady sprinkle.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Olive said. ‘I’m a burglar!’

  ‘Now you just have to become a judge and your life will be complete.’

  ‘I’d need a wig for that.’

  Ben heard a noise and stopped sawing. A bird or animal scratching the tin roof.

  ‘This is a secret, okay?’ he said. ‘A proper secret. Like, if they come back, we cannot say anything about it . . . or you’re dead.’

  Olive nodded and yawned. It was around nine o’clock, Ben reckoned. She went to bed at eight at home. He wondered what they would do once they had made it through the three boards. Would they really go out into the night by themselves, the only humans in all that inky forest-ness? And what then – tomorrow and the day after?

  They’re not coming back. The annoyingly honest and fearful part of Ben’s mind whispered these words. He hated them now, and hated himself for making them go. Why did he think he could play detective? He slipped with the saw and cut the top of his finger. The pointer, right where he had sliced it on the sharp reed down by the creek. Fresh blood spilt from the slit onto the floorboards. He put the finger to his lips and sucked for a few seconds, then pressed down hard on the cut with his thumb, trying to stop the flow. It stung but he knew that he had to keep working. Two boards to get through.

  They’re not coming back. These words helped him to saw faster and harder. Droplets of blood spat onto the floor. Twin angels of fear and anger drove him on. It was easier now with one floorboard gone. Three-quarters of an hour later he was through another board. The third board seemed to take forever and he wondered if the saw on his knife was getting blunt. He sawed until he forgot about his parents, forgot why he was sawing and, soon enough, he pulled up the third board. The hole he had made was the length of a school ruler wide and long.

  They were free to leave.

  He looked up. Olive had her eyes closed, resting her head against the window. He rocked her. ‘Hey, we’re through.’

  ‘I’m going first,’ she mumbled, taking her thumb out, sitting up.