Yolanda stared, the girls tittering.
‘So they’re tryin ta work out how to pump her stomach.’
They cackled—hope she chokes on her own spew—as they crowded around Yolanda at the sink. They could smell the mud and death, could smell that things were changing.
Rhiannon helped Yolanda reach around and unbuckle her leash-belt. They watched Yolanda slide the cargo off, jerking the soft bodies to unstick them, forcing them off the end of the leash. She whipped the belt away and reclipped it round her waist. Bloody hand smears down each side of her dress.
The traps pulled away, rabbits in a pile.
‘Poor little things!’ said Lydia, reaching to stroke their stretched, soft bodies. Then she drew her hand quickly back, grimacing.
Maitlynd had her arms folded tight against herself, but peered down. ‘Ugh, I feel sick.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Barbs said. ‘Tastes like chicken. And I’m fucken starving.’
‘Who says it tastes like chicken?’ said Hetty, appraising Barbs with a look that said you don’t look starving. Then she said, ‘I’m not eating that. It’s disgusting.’
They looked to Yolanda for what to do now.
Yolanda sought out Verla’s glance across the room where she sat, exhausted, head tipped back against the wall, forgotten. Yolanda would need to get Verla back to bed—her own dogbox bed now Nancy was convulsing, hopefully dying, in the sick bay. But even half-dead, Verla could manage to roll her eyes about Hetty.
Yolanda smiled down at the animal. ‘Don’t have to eat it,’ she grunted, grasping one of the legs. ‘There’s always the garbage,’ glancing down at the wrappers on the floor. Now Hetty folded her arms, sulking.
Yolanda had no idea how to skin them.
‘Jamie Oliver cooks rabbit,’ said Barbs dreamily, shuffling in beside Yolanda. ‘In his little wooden shed.’
‘He’s a knob,’ said Leandra.
‘He isn’t!’ cried Barbs. ‘He’s wonderful. And kind. He cried on that show about the fat people in America.’ She looked to the ceiling wistfully. ‘He was sitting on a swing.’
‘How’d he cook it?’ asked Yolanda, stretching out the first animal, holding it spread-eagled on the bench. She took a breath and began. The others gasped as she jerked a knife along its belly skin. She heard the jagged tearing. It was difficult, clumsy. The knife was not sharp.
Barbs looked down at the torn creature sadly. ‘Something, I don’t know. Extra-virgin olive oil.’ She looked up at Yolanda, tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t remember!’ She turned on Hetty, scornful. ‘Italians eat rabbit.’ She sniffed. ‘Maybe he barbecued it. In a vineyard?’
They went silent, thinking of Jamie’s friendly fleshy face, his butcher’s voice saying darlin, saying gorgeous. His shimmying hips around the bench, flipping and chopping, his meaty hands working on flashing screens, music leaping.
Yolanda grasped the forelegs and lifted the rabbit, silhouetted against the window light. She felt the lump of glowing ember inside her, the ember that had begun to smoulder out there in the field.
The innards slithered out, a neat grey coiled mass, into the sink. She had to reach in and tug at the heart, the lungs, the kidneys that clung to the bones. She felt the cold round wetness of them, tiny beneath her fingers. She plucked them out. Felt her mouth filling with juice at the idea of meat.
‘Ughh!’ cried Joy, her hands flying to cover her mouth and nose. Yolanda wanted to fling the organs into silly Joy’s stupid pretty face, to smear her with them. She held up her bloody hands and waggled them, making Joy shriek and leap away.
Now to the skin.
The girls suddenly went quiet, and shuffled back as Teddy came into the kitchen. He was pale, looked even thinner. He stood among them, worn out. Staring down at the bench.
‘Is she dead?’ said Izzy.
Teddy looked at her mournfully, shook his head. ‘Really bad, but,’ he whispered. ‘Looks dead. Just breathing.’
A shudder of disappointment went up. ‘Fucking drama queen,’ muttered Izzy. They crowded back around Yolanda.
‘Skin it,’ ordered Hetty, and they all knew it was Nancy they wanted flayed, and Boncer, and Teddy next. They wanted meat. They wanted gore.
Yolanda felt their need as she struggled. She jerked with the knife, ripped and tugged at the fur. But it only came away in shameful tufts and shreds. Her hands were stuck with fine fluff; it floated. She sneezed.
Now she no longer wore her dangling skirt of animals and traps, she had shrunk back into her ordinary self again. Not hunter, only girl. But she still smelled the dank smell on herself, and breathed it in. She would do it, become hunter, or animal. She would gather up the gizzards and wear them, wrap herself in a cloak of guts. She knew that across the room, Verla saw. Verla understood.
She turned to Teddy, now slumped against the wall with his face white, his eyes moist. She held the point of the knife at his belly and when he started in fear she hissed, ‘Sharpen this.’ And because he was Teddy, and both of them were altered, he did.
She tossed the first patchy, balding body aside, took up another.
‘Jamie would like this kitchen, you know,’ said Barbs then. ‘It’s shabby chic.’
While Yolanda worked and grunted, the girls looked around at the lead-paint-peeling walls, the dun-coloured cupboards. The battered pans and tins. The cobwebbed slow-combustion stove that nobody knew how to work. ‘We need to get that thing going,’ said Barbs. Ever since the power had gone out and they couldn’t boil the kettle they had been eating the dried noodles raw, and stirring custard powder into cups of dull tank water. Undissolved lumps of powder would burst in their mouths, sticking tongues to gums.
From her chair against the wall Verla slurred softly, ‘Need wood.’
They all turned to Leandra, who—Hetty said—surely must have learned wood-chopping in the army, somewhere in all that dykey boy-scout camping stuff. Leandra gave Hetty the finger, but shouldered her way outside.
By the last of the seven rabbits Yolanda had got the skinning right: one hard swift motion, like drawing back an arrow. Like cracking a whip, skin departing body in one pulled sock.
There was a pile of soft skins on the bench, and in the sink the pink bodies, curled like unborn babies, cold against the enamel.
Yolanda was warm with exertion. Her hands were slippery. She wiped them again on her smeared dress and then took each skin, stabbed another slit in it, and threaded them back onto her leash-belt with the traps. She left the room, draped in her new costume, her armour of bloody flapping skins and steel, caring nothing for the snickering and whispering that followed her. Verla understood, and that was enough.
THE SKINNED bodies are lining up along the bench as Verla finishes with them, adding one more to the row. Pink, faintly gleaming in the light from the speckled window. Through the window she can see Yolanda coming up from the paddock, a single rabbit dangling from each hand.
Every now and then Verla imagines her old self coming across this scene, across her own present self: her bony ribs, her hair matted, her coated teeth. The filthy greasy calico dress, something out of the nineteenth century. The bucket of rabbit heads beside her: staring eyes, stiff ears, the gory ragged hems of their necks. Her easy familiarity with all these things, as if she was born to this handling of little bodies like slippery new babies, flipping and turning the creatures as casually as the folding of pillowslips. The nimble plucking out of heart and liver and guts.
But might that old Verla, some part of her, have been drawn to this? The taking hold of the rabbit’s silky ears, and cutting off the head in one quick motion? The slick pleasure of the guts slithering out? There is some bodily relief in this emptying, voiding. The easeful tumble, the point at which the rabbit stops being itself, begins being food. The guts fall now, glop-glopping into the sink. Verla remembers the old pleasure of shitting, back when there was something to eat other than packet food and rabbit.
She can hardly remember what it is like to sit on a clean white t
oilet, indoors! Once she got a stomach bug, staying with Andrew in a Guangzhou hotel, and spent twenty-four hours wrapped around the white china bowl. She thought it disgusting, was humiliated at being so lowered, so abject. Having to kneel and put her face into the bowl for vomiting. Now she would happily drink from it.
Here, she now shits outside if she can manage it. A quick rage flares in her, a question for Boncer. The reason for their captivity has a blank clarity: they are hated. But why must they be kept so dirty?
She watches Yolanda stride up over the little rise below the veranda, puffs of mist coming from her with her breath. She is the only one who looks healthy: she has blood in her cheeks, is fit from the walking and carrying. Soon she will arrive there in the cold kitchen, warming the air with her freshness and her lifefulness. Together she and Verla will skin the new ones, and Verla will listen to the little grunting sounds of Yolanda stabbing into the soft rabbit belly. There is something intimate about this shared work and purpose.
This is what makes Yolanda strong: the knowledge that without her, without her traps, they would have all perished by now. Only Yolanda is keeping them alive. Through the window she watches Yolanda clump across the yard, the two bodies swinging. She unhooks the traps from her belt and tosses them to the concrete for cleaning later.
Soon two more pink and elongated bodies join the others on the bench.
Each morning now brings new rabbits, and Leandra’s vigil by the slow-combustion stove continues. She sits by the little black cast-iron door, feeding it. The oven smokes intolerably if the door is closed; the chimney is blocked somewhere. But Leandra has discovered that by keeping it open just a finger-width, the flames draw well. She spends her days collecting kindling, dragging larger branches up from the paddocks, jumping on them to snap them into useable lengths.
Leandra crouches by the stove, feeding it tidbits: sticks, splinters of fine dry wood. They gather garbage for her to push in, each piece of plastic wrapper sending out sweet chemical plumes of coloured flame and smoke.
They understand now, after the first week of Yolanda’s catch, that the longer you cook the rabbits the more edible the flesh.
Verla thought she would choke on the first mouthful, forced into her mouth by Boncer’s long cold fingers. He wanted the meat for himself, she could see his lips wet at the smell of it, they all were crazed for it, leering down at the withered, brown dried-out roasted thing in the pan. But as Boncer had stabbed at it with a knife, Teddy put out a hand to stop him, cried out, ‘What about myxo?’
So Boncer turned to Verla, still weak with sickness, every part of her leaning, myxo or no myxo, towards the creature in the pan. During the cooking the rabbit’s body had twisted up on its haunches, and it now sat up, like some mummified cat. Verla’s mouth flooded for it: this holy thing; protein, life.
Boncer’s bony fingers pulling off a wodge of meat with difficulty, clawing and scraping it away with his dirty fingernails, but still she wanted it. He pushed it roughly into her mouth and she closed her eyes for it, welcomed it.
It was a piece of wood. She chewed and chewed but was unable to break it up, her jaw too weak. She opened her eyes, the other girls looking on, swallowing, leaning in, Verla trying harder, pushing the lump to the side of her mouth, gnawing with her molars. She turned it, sucked, Boncer and Teddy and all the girls staring, and then let drop the chewed wodge into her hand, fell back in her chair weeping.
Boncer said, Fucking useless bint, and snatched up the dry brown corpse, bit at it to drag off a strip of flesh, flung it back into the pan. Stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the floor, jaw working. But it was no good. He spat it to the ground, a hard pale lump of balsa wood.
Then Barbs’s patron saint, Jamie, visited her. ‘You gotta boil it!’ she cried out. ‘He did it in, like, some kinda soup! With carrots, and beer and shit!’
So each day now it’s Leandra at her vigil, kneeling by the stove, feeding it, wiping at it with a dirty cloth. There is Barbs at her big pot on the stove top, her face pink with condensation, peering into the water’s rolling simmer. There is Yolanda skinning rabbits in the scullery, tossing them in a pile in the sink and tramping out with a hump of dirty skins in her arms.
And each day it is Verla picking up one pink body after another by its Barbie-doll haunch, and cleavering through bone, imagining Boncer’s skinny wrists, his needle dick, each time. So each day there are no carrots and no beer but there is meat and salt and water and rabbit stew. All their hours and days circle the stove and curve towards the stew, and they might be pock-faced and sallow but they are eating, and Verla is strengthening.
Only Nancy still ails, mad from her pills, emerging now and then to scurry and scavenge, red-eyed, drifting, rambling.
The girls sit in the ref with their faces over the bowls and their elbows on the table, rabbit bones in their fingers and juice running down their arms, sucking at the bones like scrawny dirty babies.
But there is Boncer, too, licking at bones, getting stronger. He might have given up Yolanda—she still swings her traps wide if ever he comes within a yard of her or Verla—but now he watches the others with a simmering, vengeful need.
WHAT WOULD people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they ‘disappeared’, ‘were lost’? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.
MAITLYND AND Rhiannon made up a sort of tennis-cum-cricket game, using sticks with little broom-like twiggy ends and a ball of wound grasses, that they played every afternoon, squinting into the sun, for weeks. One afternoon they dropped the sticks and fell upon each other shrieking. They clawed and slapped and spat. Nobody knew what the fight was about, but all the girls came running and lined the veranda watching, calling to the two girls—half-heartedly—to stop. Boncer and Teddy hooted and clapped. Afterwards Rhiannon walked stiffly to her dogbox, lay on her bed, and sobbed and sobbed.
PULLING ON her boots, Yolanda heard the soft squeal of a hinge and the muffled judder of a flyscreen door closing. She listened: nobody was ever up at this time. The sky was a deep dark blue, and the air tasted clean and wet. She shifted, yanked on her second boot and laced it quickly. She heard a tread coming along the veranda. Her stomach tightened. Boncer. He had not come near her again but she could feel his hatred, how he watched her through the prism of his fear, how he liked to imagine her suffering. If she were an animal she could forever outrun him, through the grass, across the fields and up along the ridge, the scrub whirring by as she hurtled, fast as a rabbit or a hawk, spinning across the land.
She saw the hawk circling, sometimes, as she approached the traps. Sometimes the bodies had been got at, faces torn away. Sometimes Yolanda carried a stick, and looked up.
But it was Verla who rounded the corner now, picking her way over the boards. She passed by Yolanda’s shoulder and stepped down onto the gravel, stood with her arms folded. She was stronger now, almost well again.
‘I’m coming too,’ she whispered.
Yolanda shrugged the two traps further up her shoulder. With Verla there was no need to speak.
They set off through the wet grass. It had rained all yesterday, and most of the night. The sky lightened quickly as they walked down the bowl of the valley and over to the other side. They would gather the kills from the traps there and reset them all the way back.
They reached the first trap. Yolanda crouched. It was large, this rabbit. It seemed old,
its fur matted. It had been in fights, was a warrior. On one foreleg it carried a bald, dirty, scraped patch, as if it had been caught or mauled before, a long time ago, and survived. But it was dead now. Its whole back thigh was crushed in the jaws of the trap, the grass and earth were black with blood. She held its head briefly in her palm, feeling the weight of it and looking into its black eye. Sorry, she said to him silently. Thank you.
She had found she had begun to feel differently about the rabbits over the past weeks. She looked at their faces first now. There were some days when she felt a settling, a relief in the belly, when a trap was empty. She looked up at Verla, expecting wincing or disgust, but Verla wasn’t watching anything to do with the rabbit or the trap. She was staring away, at the ground. Yolanda cleaned off the trap with some grass, and tied the rabbit (the forelegs on this one, the back were too mangled) to her belt. Its large soft head hung sideways. Verla said nothing, but when Yolanda stood, she was ready to move again.
‘Why did you come?’ Yolanda said finally. Her voice was dull in her throat; she had not spoken in days.
Verla scanned the grass. Then she muttered, ‘Huh!’ and darted sideways, diving to the ground. She came up with something in her cupped hand.
Yolanda looked at the white mushroom. She had seen them every time she came out. Now she wondered why she had never picked one. ‘It might be poisonous,’ she said.
Verla looked down and considered it, her pink mouth bunched. ‘I wonder.’
What did she mean?
They kept walking, Verla darting and bending, slowly filling the sack of her held skirt with mushrooms. Yolanda was searching now too, suddenly seeing the little growths everywhere. String-stemmed feathery grey ones, slimy orange shells, and one huge puffed powdery sponge the colour of honeycomb, along with the glowing white bulbs.
‘How will you know?’ said Yolanda. They worked companionably now that she had handed a sack to Verla for the mushrooms, and shown her how to tie up the rabbits’ legs. But Verla did not answer, only smiled her strange smile.
The Natural Way of Things Page 11
