The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  TWO HOURS of marching, the girls snivelling softly and their feet bleeding into their socks. Verla, last in the line, watches them hobbling up the slope before her, their arms no longer swinging in marching time—except when this Boncer turns around now and then to scowl at them—but flailing in an effort to keep their balance as they scramble up the pale tussocky hill.

  Boncer is hot; his blue overalls show dark sweat patches at his armpits and in a blurred crucifix down his narrow back. But the girls, in their calico and canvas clothes and buckles and rough woollen socks and hard boots with leather soles that slip and slide over the shiny dead grass, are hotter. Some girls have unhooked the bibs of their tunics so the flaps fall open down their fronts, but this makes it more difficult to walk. They must clutch at the waists of the dresses to hold them up. All of them have rolled up the rasping calico sleeves, exposing the skin of their forearms. When Verla glances up, instead of down at her feet and at the uneven ground meeting each step and threatening her ankles, she sees that all their necks and their raw naked scalps are burning.

  The land, which she first thought so flat, is in fact a wide shallow dish. Its lip forms a ridge, and as she looks around she sees it encircles the whole compound. It is one side of this dish they are climbing now, towards the trickle of scrub and bush creeping down the ridge to their left—with the sun so high it’s impossible to tell if it is east or west or what. But apart from this surging tide of bush, the bowl of land seems scraped and bare.

  When Boncer turns around, wheezing, his face is red to the roots of his greasy black hair and his upper lip shines with moisture. He does not look well. He turns back and trudges along at the head of the line, too tired now, it seems, to raise his stick or command them to straighten up or swing their arms higher as he did in the beginning.

  Where are they? One girl now and then lurches around and mouths this question to the girl behind: Where are we going?

  Verla’s mind fills with gruesome images from her studies, from global atrocities and wars, from snatched memories of news footage, blurry mobile phone pictures. Lines of men and boys marched to open graves and shot at the edge, falling in so nobody has to tire themselves moving bodies. No women in these lines; they are kept for other purposes. Verla’s bowels convulse. Yet Boncer has no weapon but his stick—or perhaps he does; she peers at the flapping fabric of his overalls, searching his body for a gun. It is impossible to tell—how would she, whose knowledge of crime comes from television and precise essays on international law, or more mundanely from the sad men and women her mother visits in prison, detect a pistol? How would she recognise it, or know what to do with it? It is ludicrous.

  What would happen if they refused to walk? He could beat one of them, but together they could overpower him. She assesses the line of drugged and weakened girls. Why have they been so stupid as to follow him? Why this trailing, limping obedience?

  They walk on, strung together with the little leads. The sun rises higher.

  The land moves beneath their feet, and the little clutch of buildings slides further and further behind them, until when Verla glances back it has become just a small swatch, a few messy angular brushstrokes of white on the scrappy brown land.

  As she marches, Verla carries other selves inside her.

  There is the terrified girl who feels the swollen, tender pain of her kicked stomach and bruised shoulder from this morning, who feels the skin of her heels slipping off in shreds. But who is already understanding with dull surprise that some pain is endurable, as the hard rims of her boots rub through the rough wool, sponging and scouring the skin away, and is discovering that she can breathe and breathe and keep on walking.

  There is another self, who stops walking and says, calm and commanding, Oh, enough. Let’s go home, to whom the man Boncer turns and weeps with relief, taking her soft white hand in his as they scramble back down the hill to a line of waiting cars that drive them home all through the day and the night.

  There is another Verla, who whispers a plan to the other girls through the line, and they round on Boncer, stove in his head with stones and make their way home, leaving his forlorn, pulpy body to the dingoes.

  And longest, most desperately, there is true Verla, one warm evening lying back on her elbows on the velvety boards of the small harbour jetty while her father fishes, the taut silver thread of fishing line triangulating the water, the blue evening sky, her father in his chair, the pole in his good hand. This self admires her own long legs stretched out over the wooden boards before her, the elegance of her ankles and toes. She feels her body pulse in its ease and smoothness, her own abundant youth, while she smokes a cigarette and her father frowns down at her but cannot speak and she promises, It’s okay, Dad, I’m only having one, and knows her mother to be at home scrolling through her emails and resentfully peeling prawns, and when her phone buzzes lowly beside her, turning its slow circle on the jetty boards, this Verla answers it softly and says, Okay, yes, we’re ready, and then reels in the line and gathers up the fishing things. And tucks her father’s feet neatly into place and turns the wheelchair for home.

  But this pure Verla is unreachably in the past. Before honours year and internship, before that European trip and her unravelling by poetry and paintings and politics. Before Andrew.

  As the procession climbs the nubbled grey ridge, the high dry air begins to vibrate in waves, shrilling louder as they march. Cicadas. Verla remembers prep school Bible glimpses: plagues of locusts, punishments from the skies. She looks up now, expecting a teeming cloud, but the sky is still cloudless, white with heat. Soon they cannot hear anything, not the powdery trudge of their steps on the earth, not the tinkle of the leash-fasteners, only the screaming insects, filling all their eyes and ears and nostrils and pores with that acid warping of the air.

  Verla keeps her eyes on the girl in front of her. Now and then the calico shirt slips and Verla can see the smudged edge of a tattoo on her shoulder: gaudy pink, a sickly orange, a thick dark outline like stained glass. She cannot make out the picture.

  After a while she hears rhythms in the insects’ noise. Pulses, exhalations, as though the bush is breathing. You need to know what you are, this Boncer had said to her. In the cicadas’ rhythmic shrilling the words hover, almost visible, in the air. The words and the cicada noise become Verla’s own pulse trying to answer, every nerve in her responding to this membrane of noise pressing in. She cannot know where she is, or why, and yet something in her knows her survival depends on this electric white question. What am I?

  The cicadas are deafening now, warning. The girls struggle up the ridge and soon are walking among small slender trees, sweating with effort. Then a straight line distinguishes itself between the rippling trunks: a soaring metal fence and, beyond it, a dirty sea of scrub. On this side of the fence are the leaning scrappy trees, the scuffed earth dotted with low scrubby bushes that scratch at their calves as they walk. On the other side, pressing in, the thick unknowable bush.

  Boncer stops walking. He turns to face them at the head of the line, wipes his face with his sleeve. He yanks hard on the leash so they make a little stumbling caterpillar, until he has them bunched together.

  They stare at the fence, and see it is in fact a huge black gate. On its other side, very faint, a sort of track is discernible between the trees, though nothing you could call a road. More a vague, wide path through the shrubs and broken-off twigs, the track soon disappearing among the bushes. Fire trail is the term that comes to Verla, though how she knows it she has no idea.

  A low hum can be heard inside the cicadas’ wall of noise. Already, against their weird colonial clothes, the fence seems futuristic, fantastical. The gate has no hinges that Verla can see, no visible padlock or latch. It would have to slide. Its anodised black poles match those of the rest of the fence, reaching into the vast air, at least two storeys high, and angling back towards them at the top. Every few centimetres, from the ground upwards, is a taut strand of new barbed wire, secured
to the post spine with a thick black plastic knob. At the top, where the poles change angle, a large coil of thicker barbed wire runs the length of the fence, as far as Verla can see, in both directions. Every twenty metres or so rises another stern pole, studded from bottom to top with the beetle-black knobs.

  Still, Verla thinks, her heart thudding, I could climb that.

  Then she understands that the wires are humming. It is this bass note lying beneath the cicadas’ shimmering noise.

  With the other girls, Verla stares at the knobbled poles, but what comes to her now are visions not of electrocution but of church spires in Barcelona, crusted and castellated, crenellated with knobbles against the high blue sky. When Andrew took her on his infrastructure and transport tour, they visited churches. It was not Andrew’s art history lectures or the poetry that came out later, of course, not the gore of crucifixions, the holy agony and the thorns and blood; all the media cared about was hotel bills and cocktail prices. The Verla of that trip was nonplussed in the face of all that Spanish slaughter and violence, for what could she, ripe with willingness, with risk, with being chosen, ever have known of suffering?

  Now, she will know pain. Staring up at these lethal humming spires, Verla feels it, in a great tidal sweep. She wants to get down on her knees, beat her head on the stony earth, she wants to roll in ashes and cry out, I understand.

  There is a yank on the lead, and Boncer is shouting to be heard over the cicadas’ cries and the fence. ‘Six metres high. If you try to climb through and your head or neck touches an electric wire—they are all electric—you will be rendered unconscious, and if you fall unconscious on the wires you will receive multiple shocks over a period of minutes to hours and in this case your heart will stop and you will die. This event happens quickly. The fence is electrified afresh every zero point seven kilometres.’

  So Boncer recites, their disillusioned tour guide, picking delicately with his thumbnail at a flake of skin at the edge of his nostril as he speaks. He looks past the girls as he lists amp figures and voltages, then trails off, distracted by something far off in the distance. The girls follow his gaze along the fence line. Every so often they can make out the hump of something—a rotting animal—at its base. Here and there on the fence itself is the black flapping rag of a burnt bird or bat.

  ‘Look over there,’ Boncer orders. They shuffle, turn in the opposite direction. They squint along the ridge, following his pointing finger. Can see nothing but haze of heat wobble, some far, far distant hills. But all the way round, the faint, sketched thread of the fence is visible. ‘The electric fence travels the entire ridge, all the way around the station,’ Boncer shouts.

  The girls lick their lips, shading their eyes. They can barely stand now. Most are bent forwards, hands on their knees, nodding at the ground. The girl who was hit stands breathing carefully with her eyes closed, cupping her swelling jaw with two hands, tears sliding down over her wrists.

  ‘Time to go back,’ Boncer shouts over the cicadas. Then casually, but so fast—how does he possess such speed?—he grabs the shoulders of the nearest girl in the line and shoves her hard so she overbalances, one forearm forced to the fence wire. Her arm jerks wildly and now she is on the tussocks, shrieking and curling in pain, the others yanked to the ground after her, beads on a string. The girl with the broken jaw bellows as she, too, falls.

  ‘Well,’ yells Boncer, ‘some of you slags might not of believed me.’ Again the aggrieved, sulky face.

  Suddenly the cicadas stop. Boncer looks through the fence at the wall of scrub. They all do. The only sound now is the ticking bush, a trilling bird somewhere, the humming fence, the panting and moans of the injured girls.

  ‘Get up.’

  He moves along the line, checking the little locks on the leads—Verla can smell his sweat—and then unclips and reattaches himself, this time to a ring at Verla’s back, so he is now last in line.

  He marches them all the way down the hillside. Every now and then he jabs at Verla’s spine with the leather stick, and during the next hours—everyone is slower descending than climbing—he reaches past her twice to thwack at the ears of two girls he thinks have spoken. But it is only the hot, empty wind.

  It is almost sunset when they reach the buildings again. They limp in the dust. Some of the compound is familiar to Verla from this morning, now the sedation has worn off. The buildings are not on level ground after all, but the gradual start of the land’s rise. The flat is beyond, down in the paddocks, where she can see a patch of murky brown water: a near-empty dam. They pass the office. The long shed she thought was concrete but now sees is unpainted fibro, grey and brittle. Some of the walls have been patched, like the flat eave-less roof, with corrugated iron. There are other buildings too, ones she did not notice before. All look abandoned, except by vermin.

  ‘March,’ says Boncer, but hoarsely. He too is weary. They are nearing the largest building. Verla thinks it is the place she first came to consciousness all those years ago this morning, in the room the other girl entered.

  ‘Teddy,’ calls out Boncer, in half-hearted greeting. And there, waiting on the veranda, leaning against the post in his blue overalls, hands in his pockets, is the younger man with the dreadlocks, the head-shaver. As the line of girls scuffs towards the steps he turns to go inside, holding the screen door open for the first in line, but not looking at them. He stares instead at the floor.

  Inside it is cool and dark. The girls sigh in relief at this welcome gloom, shuffling along after Teddy on their leads through rooms and corridors. It is some kind of house. There are mantelpieces and faded curtains at the windows, and tables, and even bookshelves—empty. Teddy leads them on, through the maze of tacked-on room after room. There is a large blank sitting room, with four torn red vinyl couches, bulging and sagging, and nothing else but an ancient bulbous television in the corner, unplugged. Through another door, along another narrow corridor, lined with closed doors. Bedrooms, surely. Verla almost sinks to her knees with longing at the thought of a bed, any bed. But on they march. She waits for the room in which she woke, but it does not come. Then suddenly Teddy stops. They are in a broad, light room with dirty floral curtains at a window, an ugly painted mantelpiece, a long wooden table with a white melamine surface. Pine benches line each side of the table.

  Teddy moves along the row of girls, unclipping the leads. From one, a whispered question: ‘Can we sit down, please?’, and he shrugs. They fall, their legs buckling, to the benches.

  There is nothing on the table. They slump over the white surface, faces buried in their folded arms. There will be no washing of hands or faces, no changing of dust-crusted, bloody socks, no water. The big girl with the broken jaw sits straight-backed, still cupping her face with one hand, as she has done all day. For the first several hours she whimpered and softly cried. Now she makes no sound; her lips are grey. The side of her face—jaw, cheek, eye—has ballooned and the skin appears to be tightening painfully. Across the table from Verla, the girl who Boncer pushed onto the fence lies with her face on the table, cradling her burnt arm in her lap.

  It is not over.

  ‘You three—up,’ says Teddy, prodding the three girls nearest him.

  They drag themselves up, limp after him through a door, turning at the last second to cast terrified glances at the rest. Verla can only sink deeper with relief at being left, lays down her head, closes her eyes. Boncer has disappeared. Nobody speaks. In a moment Verla will—must—learn things, but just now she is too exhausted. Her blisters bleed into her socks, but her feet are mercifully still.

  She is roused by the clunk of crockery near her head. Shallow thick white ceramic bowls and white enamel cups are dropped in front of each place by the first girl who followed Teddy out. Verla sits up, and sees the second servant girl walking carefully, a large battered aluminium saucepan heavy in her hands. Behind her is the third girl, with a ladle. They proceed along the table, ladling some unidentifiable, bright yellow slop into the bowls.<
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  Teddy reappears with two jugs of water and moves along behind the girls, sloshing water into the enamel cups. Every girl seizes her cup, sucking and slurping. A look of sympathy flashes across Teddy’s face, but he recovers. He fills the cups again and says, ‘After this it’s bore water. Unless it rains.’

  Verla feels the room contract with fear: Boncer is back. He drops a handful of spoons on the table. Girls’ hands dart and snatch, and then Teddy says, ‘Well, eat,’ and they lunge at their dishes like dogs.

  Verla gobbles with the rest, at whatever this muck is. Later, she learns it is supposed to be macaroni cheese, powdered, from a packet. For now she does not care, spooning the sandy yellow stuff into her mouth, swallowing, spooning again. The only sound is scraping cutlery on china. The artificial cheese leaves a lurid, watery residue in the bowl. She has to resist an urge to lick it. She feels strength flicker, then fall away again. She sits staring at the empty bowl and the enamel cup before her. She notices now that the bowls are printed with curving pale blue text around the rims. HARDINGS INTERNATIONAL, Verla reads. DIGNITY & RESPECT IN A SAFE & SECURE ENVIRONMENT. The bowls around her are scraped with spoons and the girls breathe through their mouths like animals.

  You need to know what you are. Verla is not an animal. She looks up from her bowl, around at the blank faces of these other girls. Sallow, fat, thin, red-eyed, dark-circled. Pink-skinned, thick-lipped, foreheads shiny or grazed with fine pimples. Their shaved heads the pink of raw sausage—or dirty, dark, like the shadows in armpits. Misshapen, all. Strange what shapes a skull could be, how much ugliness is hidden by hair. Some have little scabs of dried blood where the razor has nicked them.

  She herself has been brought here unlawfully.

  Verla knows they will all say that. But knows herself, too, as separate from—beyond—the rest of them. She will be released from here.