Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Well? Would you like?’ Michael asked.

  She leant towards him, close enough so that she could smell him. She brushed her lips on his shoulder and could almost taste the dam water on his smooth skin. Then she looked up at him with her big brown eyes.

  ‘I would like. Very much.’

  ‘Good. I’ll meet you for lessons later, but, first, playtime with the girls. Then I’ll be back to claim my cougar!’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Oh, never mind, Sadie,’ he laughed , ‘just be prepared for the time of your life!’

  Michael leapt up, tucking Eddie under his arm like a battering ram, and sprinted towards the water with a battle cry that caused the girls to scream with mirth.

  Sadie lay back in the paddock, looked up at the moon and smiled. Tonight, the mystery of the parcels had finally been solved. It was simply the synchronicity of the universe, she decided. The parcels had been heaven-sent.

  Across the Indian Ocean, as the sun was slowly bringing a beautiful dawn light to the African hills, Sally Smith of Forestdale Road, Edenville, Tanzania, rolled her rather hippo-like body over in bed. She wondered sadly how it was possible that the Tanzanian postal system had failed her a third time! She swallowed down a bitter taste and vowed never to go internet shopping after drinking too many gins again.

  McCubbin’s Lost Child

  She was lost. The young girl wiped away the stream of tears with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of dampened dust across her sweating face. She clung to the corner of her pinafore and took in another shuddering breath so her sobs could begin again. The deafening sound of cicadas shrilled in her ears. Their chorus of screams from tiny papery wings made her dizzy. An ant climbed the ladder of laces on her boots and with flickering antennae inspected her thick black woollen stockings.

  The girl wanted to sit under a tree, but there seemed to be no shade. The sun dappled through thin drooping gum leaves and spread onto the crackling dry yellow grass. In the distance, the grass misted white in the haze of heat. Soil baked in the sun, so that its warmth rose beneath her, making her skin prickle with sweat under her long blue dress. Her heavy, thickly braided hair clung to her neck and her straw hat made tiny impressions on her forehead that itched and itched. Lost.

  ‘Oh, why couldn’t I have been a Toulouse-Lautrec girl?’ she screamed into the vacancy of the dense bush that surrounded her lonely form. The artist had layered the paint on so thickly in gum-leaf blues and greens that she could not, no matter how hard she strained, see her way to the frame surrounding the painting.

  ‘Ohhh!’ she sobbed. ‘Why me? Why me? Stuck in a Fredrick McCubbin! In a dull blue dress and pinafore!’

  No one had a hope of seeing her pretty face, so shaded by the brim of her straw hat and covered with her hand. Viewers of the artwork had to peer through saplings to see her slim and solitary figure. They immediately felt pity and even sorrow for the girl, who was so hopelessly lost.

  ‘Arrrghh!’ She kicked at the dry grass under her feet in frustration. Oh, to be a Toulouse-Lautrec girl, seducing the eyes of the viewer with the flash of a long stockinged leg from beneath a billowing white petticoat. The pink, inviting flesh of a thigh peeping from a garter belt. Red lips, long black gloves and full flashing skirts. Perhaps even a glimpse of full white bosom. The young girl looked down at her pinafore that bore no shape of a full white bosom at all. Fredrick McCubbin had laid the oil on so thickly all she could see were solid folds of material. He hadn’t given her a chance. Contained here, in this blur of bush. Lost. Tiny glimpses of sky were all she had. There wasn’t even a waft of campfire smoke just to give her the smallest clue.

  A man with spectacles and grey shoes softly trod the floor of the National Gallery of Victoria and peered at the painting. His hands cupped together behind his back.

  ‘Even an Andy Warhol would’ve been better than this!’ she screamed at the man. ‘Having bright-orange hair and cherry-red lips and being surrounded by tomato soup cans would be a better option!’

  But the man didn’t hear her. He only felt sorrow for the lost girl in the bush. Black cockatoos mimicked her screeches as they shimmered through the treetops. The sun carried in the gloss of their wings. The man shuffled away over the linoleum floor in the empty gallery.

  ‘Damn you! Damn you, Fredrick McCubbin!’ Her sobs rose again. ‘Oh, and to be hung in this gallery!’ Tears flowed and mixed with sweat on her face. Why couldn’t it have been somewhere with more class and flamboyance? Not to mention more art-lovers. Why not the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere? She could have been the beautiful girl in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.

  ‘Ah … Der Kuss,’ she sighed. Such a clear view of beauty. A face with rosy pink cheeks flushed by the touch of her slim-fingered lover. His dark hands on her soft white skin. Eyes shut in lovers’ bliss. And all shimmering in gold cloth. Her head tipped back in a swoon as his dark skin and wanting lips place the kiss on her cheek. Flowers entwined in rich red hair. Making love in soft green meadows filled with spring blooms of purples, cornflower blues and pinks.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ cried the young girl as a blowfly buzzed around her head, landed on her cheek and crawled across her skin. She looked at the grey trunks of the gum trees and the dull greens of the wattle. Dried brown bark peeled its way down the trunk of a tree.

  ‘No lover would ever want to lay me down in this,’ she said to no one in her lonely lost world. Amidst the dry grass were little ant hills that teemed with the busyness of ants. ‘Especially here. And especially not in this dress!’

  The girl began sobbing softly again and looking hard through the trees for the gilded edge of the frame. But there. Yes, there! She felt it. In her lost world she felt it. Just a glimmer of gratitude. The slightest flicker of gladness in her heart. At least she didn’t look like daggy old Mona Lisa!

  Mother Nature

  Wild wings fluttered against the grimy glass.

  ‘There’s a bird stuck in the wood heater again,’ Valerie called wearily to nobody listening. She took the old towel in her hands. Her parents had brought it back from Hawaii for her when she was a child, and it had been her prize possession. She had loved the image of a girl dancing the hula under a palm tree. Now faded and scratchy, it had become the household bird-catching towel, and lay ready in the wood basket beside the sleeping heater.

  ‘We must put some netting over that chimney to stop them getting in,’ she said, again to nobody. A terrified beady bird’s eye watched as Valerie opened the door of the heater. The hula girl’s outstretched arms danced nearer and nearer into the dark corners of the firebox. A flurry of wings whipped up storms of fine ash from last winter’s fires. Valerie no longer muttered useless words of consolation to the birds. The daily ritual had made her bitter towards the greasy-looking starlings.

  ‘We really should knock them on the head so they don’t keep coming back,’ she said, wincing as she clasped the towel tightly around the bird’s bony body. ‘After all, they are introduced,’ she called over her shoulder to her husband and children, who didn’t reply. The term ‘introduced’ always amused her. She smiled vaguely as she imagined a British soldier walking down the gangplank of a tall ship with a pair of starlings on his arm, their yellow-grey claws clasping his stiff woollen uniform. The soldier formally introduces the birds to the vast continent: ‘Mr and Mrs Starling, I’d like to introduce you to Madame Terra Australis,’ with a slight bow. The large lady continent would not be at all amused at receiving such unattractive and demanding guests, thought Valerie. She had mentioned the annoying starlings to her brother on the phone when she first moved into the house.

  ‘You should put chicken wire around the front of the heater and you’d have an instant aviary and a great talking point in your home,’ her brother had joked. He didn’t understand. In his tidy city house with his tidy city wife, all he ever did was get into his freshly dust-busted car and drive over bitumen to his tidy city office. Once, on a visit to her brother’s house, Valerie had de
lighted in offering half a biscuit to the black beak of a semi-tame magpie. It wavered and warbled on her sister-in-law’s Hills Hoist. Her sister-in-law had warned, ‘If that bird shits all over my washing, I’ll know who to blame,’ and the bird was banished to the corrugated-iron rooftops.

  Valerie stood at her back door with the starling wrapped in the towel. It would be so easy to kill it. Just pick up a brick and drop it on its little head. But Valerie opened the towel and the bird flew chirruping and terrified into a cloudy sky. It settled on the machinery shed where it perched on steel, puffing beneath drab feathers.

  Around springtime in the old house baby birds screamed and shrilled to be fed above Valerie’s head while she tried to write her shopping list. Scaled claws scratched above in the old wooden ceilings, and dust and bits of grassy flotsam dropped onto the freshly wiped kitchen table. Should she get a cat and put it in the roof? Should she poison them? But she knew she couldn’t kill anything. Some mornings she just couldn’t face picking up the bird towel and rescuing another introduced species as hideous as the starling.

  ‘I’m leaving it for someone else to do,’ she’d call. But each time the front door slammed shut with another departure for the day and the house grew quiet she would hear the scratching of claws on glass and feel a stab of guilt for being so cruel. Sighing, angry, she’d pick up the towel.

  After holidays she dreaded coming back to the house. Birds had scratched, shat, panicked and fluttered until they died in piles in the dark ashy prison of the heater. Then the flies came into the chimney until the hollow carcasses of birds writhed with tiny maggots. The smell of death permeated every room of the little farmhouse – she even smelt dead birds on her pillow. But no one else seemed to care.

  ‘Right. I’ll bloody well do it myself,’ Valerie spat, after a bird had escaped from the hula-dancing girl and flown headlong, splat, into a window. It sat on the carpet dazed and shitting. Valerie stomped off to the shed to find some chicken wire and a ladder. Rummaging around in the shed, she heard the annoyed question from her husband, ‘What are you doing there, woman?’

  ‘I’m going to block those birds once and for all,’ she told him, but her husband didn’t hear. In his hand was a letter.

  ‘There’s a job going – driving tractors on a station in Queensland. Hundred bucks a day, the house and the rest thrown in, starting in two weeks,’ said the large silhouette in the shed doorway.

  ‘I guess there’s no need to fix the chimney then,’ she said tiredly.

  She wrapped their life in newspaper and put it into boxes and stretched screeching brown tape tight over the top. On departure day, he slammed down the bonnet of the car. ‘Right to go!’ he said, and the lot of them crammed in, kids, dogs, eskys, their life. Looking up at the chimney she said to herself, ‘Goodbye, birds!’ and sat back and smiled at the sound of tyres crunching over the gravel drive for the last time.

  In the new house air-conditioning hummed and cupboards opened up wide with promise. Valerie smiled. There was no wood heater. No cracks in the ceiling. In the bathroom she stroked fingertips over the new easy-to-clean sink.

  ‘I now declare this toilet open,’ she said as she lifted the toilet lid. Suddenly she jumped and let out a shriek. There, greener than any manmade plastic, was a big shiny frog staring up at her with glassy black eyes. Its toes were suctioned fast to the bowl. In a flash, she flushed. A mass of frogs cascaded and tumbled out from under the rim. Frogs’ legs, brown and speckled. Green and cream. Suckers desperately trying to avoid being swept away by the rapids into the S-bend pipe.

  ‘Damn,’ she muttered. She’d have to find a tree or go behind a shed. There was no way she could pee on a frog. That evening, as they sat on the newly positioned couch watching the newly placed TV, she let out a yip as a frog hopped across the carpet and plopped itself under her couch. At the sink, Valerie sucked in a shock of air as a green frog dashed its way upside down across the gauze on the window to snap hungrily at a moth. In the shower she yelped as a little brown frog leapt when she moved her bottle of New Lady skin polisher. It hopped up the tiled wall, thinking it was perfectly hidden under the soap dish. But she could still see one of its little circular toes. Dripping wet, she rummaged around in an unpacked box to find her bird towel. She sighed sadly. Her bird towel had now become a frog towel.

  The dogs were barking at the new strange night sounds. Valerie got up to silence them, floundering in the dark to find the switch. With horror her toes squelched on something soft. She stifled a scream. When she flicked on the light she saw a grey gecko scurrying across the floor and up the wall to hide behind the newly hung clock. It left a little black speck of poo as it ran. It stuck to the wall like adhesive mouse dirt.

  ‘The frog towel will have to double as a gecko towel,’ she sighed. As she lay beneath the whirring ceiling fan, enveloped in Queensland heat, she told herself to give it time. She’d get used to it. After all, frogs and geckos weren’t introduced and if she tried really hard, she would probably get to like them. In the morning she crossed a spongy buffalo-grass lawn to introduce herself to the stockman’s wife next door and ask her what to do about the frogs and geckos.

  ‘I used to think they were cute,’ she said to the leather-lined woman drawing up the smoke of a Winfield Blue, ‘but sharing a house with them annoys the crap out of me.’

  ‘Dirty little buggers,’ the woman said as she exhaled smoke. The stockman’s wife couldn’t kill the frogs, but was unwilling to let her captives free outside, for fear they would invade her territory again. ‘Freezer,’ she said, drawing another puff, ‘I stick ’em in the freezer. That way, the freezer’s killin’ ’em, not me. At one stage I had ninety frogs in there, eh!’

  She wheezed as she laughed. Valerie tried hard to hide the horror on her face as she thanked the stockman’s wife and said she’d better get back to her washing. When she was nearly across the lawn, the stockman’s wife yelled out, ‘It’s the mice and the cane toads you gotta watch!’ Valerie smiled and waved before shutting herself inside the house.

  When she saw her first cane toad she was overcome with loathing. It was so ugly it was almost painful to look at.

  ‘How could anyone have introduced them to this country?’ she said to her children, who were busy poking the toad with a stick. She wasn’t sure if it was the cane toad at her back doorstep or the little torpedo-shaped mice poo she found in her bed, her cupboards and on her kitchen bench that made her hiss, ‘It’s war.’ She pulled on her pink washing-up gloves and spooned bright-green poison pellets into little cupcake papers.

  ‘Dinner’s served,’ she said between clenched teeth as she put the poison in the corners of the house. On the porch she pitched deadly capfuls of Dettol onto the backs of the toads and with a hideous mix of delight and horror watched them hop off to die in the leafy garden. As her husband slept she smiled with steely satisfaction as she heard the mice rustle poison pellets behind her bedside table.

  But soon Valerie was no longer satisfied with poisoning. She wanted more. She wanted bodies. A massacre. So she could line them up, count and gloat. From the local store she bought little wooden traps. She tried different types of bait in each one. Beef gristle, cooked rice, baked beans, even sultanas. From her bed she heard traps snap shut. The temptation to jump up to look at her victims was too much. If she was quick enough, she’d get to see them twitching in the traps before they died.

  As the body count grew so did Valerie’s passion. Counting them was the best. She loved to pick the mice up by the tail and lay them in rows on newspaper before throwing them in the big wheelie bin outside. On the back of her shopping list, Valerie drew a neat little table and kept score of her killings each week. She hid it from her husband and children in a recipe book. She felt delighted by it, like a serial killer would, she supposed. But the mice were not enough for Valerie.

  One warm night, when a fine misty rain was falling, Valerie’s family awoke to hear her shrieking on the lawn outside. Scrambling out of bed the
y met in the hall, confused and dazed. Valerie’s husband flung open the back door and switched on the light. There was Valerie, barefoot in her floral nightdress on the lawn, wearing a head torch. She was looking down at a cane toad, which was sitting immobilised in the beam of torchlight. She had in her hands her eldest boy’s three-iron golf club, which gleamed like a sword.

  ‘Fore!’ she shouted into the night and the club struck the cane toad with a dull thwhack. She let out a shriek of delight as the cane toad flew a few metres and then landed twitching with what looked like pink brains oozing from its eyes.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, woman?’ the husband hissed. ‘Have you gone mad? You’ll wake up the whole bloomin’ station!’

  ‘But they’re introduced, darling!’ Valerie chirped in delight, and her crazy eyes searched the beam of light to find the next toad. ‘Fore!’ she cried again and swung the club high into the night air.

  The Wife

  She thought it would change after she married him. Her hands in the hot water seemed to make her blood boil and her face burn. He had been late again and Jenny was sure she could smell the sex of another woman in his hair. Over a greasy baking dish she watched him through the grimy kitchen window. He was sharpening a knife on a stone. Her thoughts simmered in her head in the hot little kitchen. She wiped her numb red hands on a tea towel and pushed open the sagging screen door.

  Call to him from the verandah like a good little wife …

  ‘What are you up to?’ He was just off to the yard. A couple of ewes had gone down with pregnancy toxemia and had to have their throats cut. ‘Can I come with you?’ He turned his back.

  ‘I’ll just grab a coat.’ Sweet wifey voice.

  Her hot cheeks cooled in the icy wind as she ran to him. He was at the dog kennels, smiling, talking softly to his best bitch.