Back in her dogbox, Verla feels it tingle on her tongue. Russian roulette! But after a while she knows she is conjuring up sensations, imagining them. She is certain the mushroom is not dangerous. It is a disappointment.
She is not in danger. The longer she watches Boncer, the more it is he who is under threat.
THEY ALL had pets now. They were going mad, or finding some strange happiness.
Leandra crouched and coaxed her stove, talking to it, guarding it. Barbs cradling her giant stockpot, washing it and obsessively wiping it clean, carrying it on her hip each morning to the scullery, her heavy metal baby, and plopping in the bodies one two three.
Rhiannon had found the old ute skeleton on the side of the hill, its thin white bones protruding, barely visible among the yellow grasses. Each morning she trudged off up the hill and clambered over the rusted door, in through the space where the roof had corroded away entirely, and into the driver’s seat. She sat there with the spider webs and the shit of bush rats or mice, settling herself into the rotted cushion of the mouldy foam seat. Sat there, hour after hour, hands on the steering wheel, staring out through the empty windscreen space at the white sky and the crows. It was her job, each day, to march to the ute and sit there driving herself crazy, and at sunset each day one of the girls would fetch her back, leading her by the hand through the soft dusk. After a while, Rhiannon’s face was so sunburnt they made her wear one of the old bonnets whenever she left the veranda. Her hands were as black as soot.
Joy and Lydia—and Izzy too, now—had each other, and their tweezers. They were never apart, one’s arm always around another’s waist or neck. Grooming each other lovingly, plaiting one another’s filthy hair and tying it up with bits of rag, plucking each other’s eyebrows so fine they almost disappeared. Sitting in the sunshine, inspecting their legs and pubes and underarms, descending on each enemy hair when one emerged. Smoothing their hands over each other like Braille, eyes closed, to make sure no stray transparent hair escaped attention. Joy and Lydia and Izzy despised the rest of the girls, from their plucked little threesome, disgusted by Yolanda’s hairy calves, the faint down over a lip, Verla’s ranga armpits.
Maitlynd’s pet was real: a frog, a great ugly thing that lurked beneath the water tank. She patrolled the windowsills each morning for moths, grabbing and cupping at the live ones, filling the bowl of her skirt with dead ones like petals. She carried them and squatted beside the tank, crooning and whispering as she held them out and the thing darted and gobbled.
Hetty had got religion, and didn’t they all have to know about it. ‘God has seen us,’ she crowed each morning. ‘He’s seen us!’ Down on her knees praying in the gravel, ‘Lord, may You free us, free us.’ Hetty was a dickhead but it was contagious; even Yolanda began to feel something biblical, something destined in this turned tide, this famine ended. As if she with her traps was that Moses, and she had parted the sea and now all that was needed was for them all to walk to safety.
Free us, free us. But once Yolanda was out in the breeze, stalking through the grass for her traps, Hetty’s words were nothing but the same old eternal hopeless prayer, as much use as hey diddle diddle or i will survive. Hetty’s prayer was only words, as light and dry as old eucalyptus leaves, crumbling in your fingers.
On her walks for the traps, Yolanda often saw Verla across the grass. Always out first in the dim dawn light, searching out mushrooms in the dew. Weaving across the paddocks, occasionally dropping to her knees with a little cry. Yolanda, crouching and releasing or setting her traps, watched Verla. She knew it wasn’t only mushrooms Verla searched out as she stood for long minutes, scanning the hills and horizon. She was looking for that white horse of her fever dreams.
The song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. In the soft dewy morning Verla wanders, whispering Whitman. It surprises her, how much she remembers of the book he gave her, the lines rustling from her lips as she walks, searching for mushrooms, each morning. She knows by heart, of course, those early words he had murmured, nuzzling, when she thought she would burst like fruit from the heaviness of all that fermenting desire. His, her own. You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me. She trudges over the grass, feels the working bones of her own narrow feet in the cold leather boots. And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart. The currawongs dropping their silvery notes. Verla feels the old slow heat rising in her with the recitation. That ‘stript’. Before him she had never known that even spelling could be erotic. There are cobwebs starred with dew everywhere here in the wet green-gold grass. And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.
But now, the grass brushing her calves, soaking the hem of her tunic, and the sun softly warming the earth, it is not plunging tongues and stript chests (but oh, the sweet open planes of his chest, she could cry for it, and did) but other, surprising fragments, things she has not known she knows, that come to her. And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.
She sees, in the little well between tussocks, a swell of fresh white humps, moves to it. Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt.
Bending, she grasps the root end of the largest mushroom and lifts it to her face. It smells of earth and dankness, almost human. She runs her fingertips over the soft frills beneath its hood. It’s not the one she wants, probably. But still. She drops it with the other, smaller ones into the pockety gloom of the tea-towel sack.
The white of the mushroom cap is the same dusky, chalky white of the horse she had seen in the night. And of the unicorn, in Paris.
In the Musée de Cluny they stood before the tapestries, his thumb stroking hard, desirous, over the bones at the base of her neck. She leaned back into that rhythmic stroking, feasting her own mind and senses on the wondrousness of the tapestry. Shocked at the effect of these hangings on her when all the other old dead things he showed her only bored her, or confused. But here, the reds and bronzes, the small playful rabbits, and the monkey burying its little face in flowers. The virgin holding fast to that unicorn shaft, Verla knew what that felt like in her hand (she was never a virgin with him, but he liked pretending) and back at the hotel they turned over and under one another in the streaming sunlight, and the woven threads of the tapestries all merged inside her: the poetry, the tastes, the smells and sounds and visions, the flowers and harp and My Only Desire and the Body Electric, and Verla knew her life had truly begun.
That was long ago now.
She moves through the grasses, her body brought alive once more by this memory and the resurgent knowledge of what separates her from the others. She is not like them. She was tricked, yes, but not by him. He did not exploit her, assault or paw at her. She was worshipped, and wanted every bit of it. The curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over. Even after all this time, she knows it is true.
Bodies, Souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations. The denial forced upon him (he cried, he said, typing those words). Her fingers are cold, now, in the damp morning air. She pushes her fists into her armpits as she walks and searches.
The relations he did not have. But he did, fervently, and so did she, and somewhere he is missing her, sick with worry, wanting her back, whispering, Sorry, I’m so sorry with all his barestript heart.
HETTY WAS a fucktard, and yet it was stupid, ugly Hetty who gave Yolanda the secret to her pets: the skins.
‘Brughn,’ Hetty grunted one morning, through a mouthful of dried soup. She was standing, doggedly munching the grey dust, making slop and paste in her mouth, steaming breath in and out of her nose as she mashed.
Yolanda ignored her, concentrating on holding aloft another steaming boiled skin, dripping into the metal bucket. It might have been the rank smell of the failed skin, or it could have been Yolanda herself, her own smell beginning to merge with the animals’, that made the other girls hold their noses and make noises as they shoved past her.
/> Hetty swallowed finally and said stickily, audibly this time, ‘Brain. Should use that.’
Yolanda looked at her. Hetty picked at the grey sludge in her teeth with a dirty thumbnail, then ran her tongue over them, wiping her hands down her dress. Her cardinal used to watch that never-ending show about building houses, and then another one with the same Pommy dude who made his own little shed by hand. He cured a deerskin with its own brains, Hetty said. For why, who the fuck knew.
‘Mashed em up,’ she said. ‘Rubbed em in.’
Yolanda had been trying all sorts of things. Boiling water, salt, vinegar, none of it working or stopping the hides from curling and hardening in their matted stinking state.
The brains worked.
The first time, taking that fine little head in her hands, she felt a reverence, a loss. It was like a bird’s head, almost. She held it tenderly, the small closed face, ragged and bloody at the roots of its neck. But still: she scored the thin furry skin between the ears, and separated sideways with her thumbs, revealing the cold private slit of bright white bone beneath. She sat on the wooden veranda step, lowered the sleek dome of the head by its ears to the step below, lodged it between her feet. Took a knife and a mallet and whack as she whispered, Sorry, and then a clean split in two. The brain lay there, a gizzardy lump. She fingered it, plopped it into a bowl. Did not look at it when she made the first pushing, squashing mash, felt it burst and ooze.
She soon grew accustomed to it, and the wet raw gloves of the skins became her pets. The other girls, except Verla, avoided her even more now she took a hideous sensual pleasure in it, comforted by the rhythms of the tasks: the skinning and scraping off of fat and flesh. The dipping and boiling and stretching, the salt scrubbing, the slippery sliding of her brain-wet fingers, shampooing the smooth hides with the pulp. She felt she was giving love, in this emulsion. Massaging in tenderness and thanks to the small creatures through the inside of their skins.
Probably she was going mad. Verla would sit with her and tell her again about the paintings she had seen in Paris with that politician mongrel. Verla, poor thing, still believed in him. Yolanda didn’t argue as Verla carefully talked her way around the fact that she thought she was better than the rest of them.
Verla’s voice glittered when she talked about the paint on the pictures, how it piled up and sparkled under the lights of the galleries. How the actual curls and lumps of the paint made the picture dance, made wet oily stuff into cornfields and hospital gardens and crabs and sunflowers. It wasn’t the image but the paint, did Yolanda see? No, she did not see, Yolanda … only sometimes as she listened, watching her own fingers making a moussey lather of the brain mess, she thought she could see it, the light catching the whorls of the soft peaks on the brain suds.
Sometimes the two girls looked at each other, and Yolanda felt understood. To Yolanda, Verla was better than the rest of them, better than herself.
And then Verla would get up and take her glittering paintings and her strange filthy poetry back into the kitchen and chop up rabbit meat to eat. Verla, like the others, cared nothing about the pelts, they slavered only for meat, lined up along the bench, tugging and hacking and tearing with their blunt knives at the thin skinless bodies.
But for Yolanda, the skins were everything. So light, so easy to destroy—burning the fur away too soon, not spreading the brain mix smoothly enough, so they dried and hardened in the wrong places. At night she would tug at their edges, pulling and stretching so they softened and silkened, the miracle of the stiff dead thing slowly turning to softest chamois in her hands over the weeks.
Soon she would not be seen without two, three attached to her. Tucked into her waistband, flapping as she moved. Another, raggedy strip wound around her arm, tied there. Later, a kind of neckerchief, rabbit legs made into strange bonnet strings. She moved, and the skins drooped and swayed, bulking out her figure as she stalked the paddocks in the dawn.
She made drying racks for the skins on the south side of the veranda—too much sun was ruinous; it must be shade and gentle, steady warmth. She now carried skins with her everywhere, always smoothing and grasping at some piece, softening it over a chair back or scraping the fat and tissue away with one of the small sharp stones she carried now in her pockets.
Some of the girls said Yolanda had gone crazed, but she knew she was sane, and getting saner. Weren’t they all stronger, now they were eating meat? Wasn’t there industry now where there had been only captivity?
Yolanda felt some primitive strength mounting as she scrubbed and stretched, as she marched the paddocks and set and sprang the traps. It was a vigour to do with air, and the earth. Animal blood and guts, the moon and the season. It was beyond her named self, beyond girl, or female. Beyond human, even. It was to do with muscle sliding around bone, to do with animal speed and scent and bloody heartbeat and breath.
Covered in the reeking skins she crouched sometimes among the tussocks, watching Boncer looking for her and not seeing. She was becoming invisible.
IN THE meat locker Verla closes the door and hooks the latch. Only Yolanda knows about the mushrooms and she is at sea in her kingdom of rabbits, devoted, uncaring.
This is where Verla brings her mushroom catch: her laboratory. Nobody comes here, to this dark airy room of tattered flywire panes and a pressed earth floor, set away behind the old concrete laundry in the shadow of the water tank. If she sniffs the smooth curved surface of the butcher’s block, she can smell the greasy, rank odour of old meat. How long is it since the skinned bodies of sheep and cattle were dismembered here, cleaned of the last tufts of wool and shreds of hairy skin, hacked into joints and hung? The old ice chest with its hoary galvanised-metal face, its bulbous hinges, is just a cupboard now.
She goes to the wooden crate hidden behind the ice chest and pulls away the sack covering the contents, her drying mushroom haul, and tumbles her day’s catch into the crate. It is half full now. She drags it across the floor and reaches into it, drawing out each foamy weightless thing one by one, laying each one on the broad surface of the butcher’s block. Once again she arranges them in rows, to inspect and categorise, learning the shapes and markings, the subtle differences in smell. The wide flat brown ones are easy: portobello, simple field mushrooms. Dull to look at, but still she likes to run her fingertips along the under-frills (a memory of Andrew racing through her mind with the shirred-satin flip-flip-slip beneath her touch).
She puts those to one side. The others are the ones with possibility, the ones to test. There are the tiny, delicate, silver pinwheels. These are so fine they almost dissolve at her touch; she has learned to pick them at their stalk using two fine twigs as pincers. They melt on the tongue, and beyond a slight bitterness, nothing. There are the ridiculous fairytale ones, bright red with white spots, and the narrow tawny hooded ones, the monks’ hoods with slender pale stalks. Another set of bulbous lurid yellow domes with stained, meaty stalks. When she turns these over the undersides of the hoods glisten with sticky honeyed stuff. It’s this one she must try today: surely there is promise in this acid yellow, those gouts of bloody mould.
She dabs a finger to the honeydew and puts it on her tongue. Now she must wait, and time any response. She scratches a number and a symbol for it into the dirt floor beside the ice chest, alongside the rest, and begins counting the seconds. While she waits she lays the mushrooms out in rows by shape and colour and size, keeps counting the seconds.
After five minutes, nothing. She has to give it an hour before she can leave, forty-eight hours before she knows for sure. She paces and circles the meat locker, thumbnail between her teeth, waiting, counting, marking off the minutes in blocks of five, then ten, on the floor.
On two days there have been glorious hallucinations—rippling, breathing, magnificent—but only with one kind of brown monks’ hoods, and she has not found any more. Another time she fell asleep for almost half a day, and was visited again by the little brown trout from her sick-bay fever. In the dream her s
leek, speckled fish body was weightless and at peace, suspended in water, hovering.
Afterwards she woke dry-mouthed, terrified of discovery, but nobody had come. She brushed the imprint of earth from her cheek and stumbled back to the dogboxes. None of these effects are what she wants. But she is grateful to that little brown trout within herself, gathering stillness. Sometimes she takes it with her into sleep.
She paces, waits; an hour passes with no effect. She grows reckless. She crumbles off a thumb-sized chunk of the yellow hood and chews it (ugh, so bitter), swallows it down. Starts counting again, and collecting and storing away her hoard once more.
Perhaps she has already begun hallucinating, perhaps some of them send off psychoactive gases, else why does she spend so many hours here in the damp sporey gloom, walking round and round a butcher’s block staring at fungus, so drawn to them, so loving? Because Yolanda may have her rabbits, Hetty her religion, they may all have their pets, but only Verla has a plan. Observe, identify, classify. Preserve, conserve, bide your time, wait your chance. Then: act.
Sometimes in the night she has lovely visions: Boncer crawling, maimed, on the floor while Yolanda and Verla stand above him, their arms folded, unmoved. He scuffles, convulses, begs things of them. Debased.
But today will not bring those visions. She still feels absolutely nothing. And she knows more nothing will come on her in the night, or the morning, and the raucous yellow mushroom will prove as fraudulent and harmless as the rest.
IF LYDIA had a baby she would call it Dakota or Siena. Or Judith, after her grandmother. Some of the girls were lying on the western veranda boards in the late afternoon, warming themselves in the last thin pale strip of winter sun before the day’s end. Dakota was nice, they agreed dreamily. What if it was a boy? said Maitlynd, but Lydia wrinkled her nose. ‘I’d abort it,’ she said.
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