The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  They stand, dumb. But Verla knows what Hetty meant.

  ‘We have to make the doll,’ she says.

  It will be a thing of pillows and bootlaces, bottle tops and socks. Dead grass for stuffing. Feathers, bark, reeds, plastic bags papers wire rope anything. Go.

  THE RAIN eased, then stopped. Yolanda walked and walked, whispering, carrying her babies and their exhausted mother, who breathed softly now. Yolanda’s clothes and the skins made a pouch for the nubbling wet creatures, and the heavy, triumphant weight of the mother rabbit. No more shivering. She was sleeping, in the cradle of Yolanda’s animal self.

  Birds had started up in the newly light afternoon.

  She climbed carefully down the ridge. The others could make their doll but Yolanda would bring Hetty these real babies to pet, to hold against her cheek. She would feed and stroke them and this would feed the new self she must become, the fine wet membrane that must grow over her, like a caul. A new skin over the old wound that Boncer filled with his decaying self. It was possible to make yourself new, this was what Yolanda had discovered. This was what she would explain to Hetty, and show her how, when she told Hetty to close her eyes and hold out her hands and she set into them the soft, downy weight of such perfection.

  As she slipped along the kennels corridor she heard the girls murmuring in Verla’s cell.

  She must make a bed for her family, with the skins, keep them warm until the babies grew fur enough to separate them from the mother. On her knees on the floor of her dogbox, the fullness of her pouch swelling below, Yolanda pulled out the pile of skins, and made a little nest. Then, lowering herself so they had no distance to fall, she quietly untied the skins from her body, unbuttoned her tunic and let them fall, squirming, to the furred nest.

  The mother rabbit fell, a soft thud. The dark bulbous babies fell, plop slip. They did not squirm. Yolanda waited. They were all asleep.

  She scooped them together, the fat little wrigglers that did not wriggle.

  No no no.

  Pushed the babies to their mother’s belly. Come on, little ones. She bent her face to the nest, breathed whispering life to them. Wake up, wake up.

  IN VERLA’S dogbox they offer up their finds. She sits cross-legged on her bed, sorting through the offerings from their foraging out in the wet paddocks and the mouldy laundry and under the tanks and buildings. Offerings of rag and straw and strings and cloth, dumped on Verla’s bed. The girls lean in with their arms folded, drawn to Verla’s vision despite themselves. The wind is up again, rain clattering onto the tin roof. They are waiting for Barbs. Yolanda is still out in the fields, gone, she won’t help them, but Verla will go into her cell and get a skin or two.

  Then come footsteps, Barbs’s thundering run, along the corridor. The door is flung back and she bursts in, breathless. ‘I found this,’ she says, tossing a filthy plastic shopping bag to the bed.

  Verla rustles the wet, crumpled bag. Silted with mud, wrenched from some burial ground or rubbish tip.

  Barbs breaks into a sob. ‘It’s our hair.’

  What! They gather round. Where did she get it? Is she sure?

  Barbs wipes her face with her sleeve and rips the bag from Verla, pulls out clumps and plaits and ponytails. The girls snatch and grab at them, recognising their own in the tangled mess of hair, crying out like mother seals for their babies. They are all sobbing now.

  Verla searches for her own as the hands rummage and scrabble, finds the curling red fronds. It is astonishing, that this richness might once have belonged to her; even as she holds it to herself she cannot fathom it. Izzy clutches her thick blonde ponytail to herself and strokes it. ‘You’re not having this, it’s mine.’ The others repeat her words: they’re keeping their hair. Verla draws out a thick, glossy black swatch from the bag and runs it through her hands like velvet rope. She is returned, like a plunge into a cold pool, to the morning she came to consciousness in that room, Yolanda stumbling in, that frightening girl with the waist-length hair. She suddenly wants to cry too, not for her hair but for Yolanda, gone mad with rabbit filth and guts. She cries for the ordinary girl Yolanda once was, who will never return.

  She looks into the bag and sees the remaining mess of offcuts of her own red hair, and Hetty’s brown furze. And then she looks around herself: crouched on a soiled bed in a room no bigger than a doghouse, surrounded by girls squatting on their haunches, sobbing and combing their fingers through the dead bouquets of their long-lost hair.

  They have at last, quite thoroughly, been driven insane. Verla sits, floating on her nest above the circlet of mad girls, and is visited by the paintings in Paris. Madhouses, and mad deeds. The hospital garden at Arles. The hospital at St Remy. This is no hospital, but he made something of his madness.

  When she enters Yolanda’s box Verla is startled to find her there on the floor. Hetty’s rotting boots lie beside her on the boards.

  ‘I need you to help me make the doll,’ Verla says softly. ‘I’m using our hair. Barbs found it.’

  She holds up Yolanda’s length of hair and her own curling tails, one in each hand. Yolanda’s eyes are red-rimmed, her face smeared with snot. She looks blankly at the handful of her hair, and takes it from Verla for a moment. The foreign shampoo scent makes her draw back from it. She returns it to Verla. It no longer has anything to do with her.

  Only when Verla has taken up a skin from the pile in the corner does she see the little heap of furry bodies in the cradled apron of Yolanda’s lap. Yolanda meets her gaze then, and the tears come pouring down.

  Yolanda and Verla worked on the doll all night, in musty candlelight, in silence. Now and then they moved to follow the patch of moonlight on the floor. Through these dark hours the doll became a compulsion, their only purpose. Passing shreds and rags of cloth and rabbit leather back and forth, each following the other’s work with the needle or with string. The body was Yolanda’s old pillow—she had long ago abandoned it for her piled skins—roughly tied off in places to make breasts, thighs.

  It filled them each with something deep, slow-burning, some determination they did not understand, but slowly the doll’s misshapen, ugly body grew out of the shames and degradations of their own. One set of hands took over when the other’s grew sore from forcing the needle through the fine leather, the sacking and kapok.

  In Verla’s hands the pillow torso, stained with tears and sweat, takes shape. She works it in silence, first with delicate stitches of grass, embroidering. Scented herbage of my breast, he read to her. Loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine, his finger circled her nipples, moved everywhere. She takes another strand of grass, makes three stitches, it breaks. She takes a length of greyed and bloody gut sinew, her stitches growing finer and more beautiful (tomb-leaves, body-leaves), circling and circling with the needle and rabbit gut, and the breasts are worked and worked until finally the headless torso is finished. The breasts are spirals of longing, of lust. The charcoal nipples stick out in urgent pellets, whorled with blood-red stitches. Verla is frightened by this force, her desire. She pushes it from her and climbs up onto Yolanda’s bed, lies there with her face turned to the wall.

  Yolanda took up the body then, began at another scarred place, between its thighs. Digging, stabbing, forcing. The doll’s dirty pillow flesh yielding beneath her fingers as she pushed and thrust with the needle, crying, working and working at a dark little pocket between its legs, pushing and hollowing, carving out and pushing in.

  They had whispered things to her while they used her body. Some made sounds, some grunted, some called her dreadful things, but worst were the ones who used sweet words, horrible sugary epithets, as they rummaged and jerked in her, Yolanda, shapeless and formless and wordless in the dark. Their brothers watching. She did not move, she did not cry out, she would be blamed. She dug her way deep into the long dark corridor, this silent burrow inside herself. Did they know, as they emptied themselves into the rubbish tip of her, about the tunnel in her, was this what they were trying to reach? She
held the doll, there in the gloom, Verla asleep on the bed above her. The doll headless, but the body finished. Yolanda saw she had made a womb-burrow inside the doll, just large enough for a tiny rabbit kit. It was not finished.

  Verla wakes from this fitful sleep, the moonlight coming pale and bright through Yolanda’s window. Soon it will be morning and Hetty must have her doll, it must be ready. Below her on the floor she sees Yolanda still crouched over the body, her head bent to the task. Verla sits up against the wall, takes up the head from the blankets. Yolanda, still labouring, does not seem to hear her. Verla cradles the blank ball of the head firmly in the crook of her elbow and begins to work again, puncturing the leather scalp to stitch in the first hanks of hair.

  In a little while she pauses and looks down to the floor, watching Yolanda finally unbend from the doll body in her lap. She stretches slowly, then reaches behind her, fossicking under the bed. She does not know Verla is awake and watching as she draws out a tiny dead rabbit kit from beneath the bed, cupped in her hand. She doesn’t know that Verla is her witness as into the shadowed pockety hole of the doll her fingers push the lifeless, hairless little grey body with a fistful of straw. Yolanda is whispering to herself, some prayer or tender curse or incantation, as she thumbs the creature in, and carefully sews up the hole.

  Once it is done, Yolanda lies down on the skins and falls into a deep sleep with the doll’s headless, laden body in her arms against her breast, while above her Verla keeps on working at the head.

  Sometime in the night there is a noise outside, a tufted ripping.

  Thank you, she whispers, as just outside her white horse softly wrenches grass and chews.

  At last the dawn sky lightened outside Yolanda’s louvred window.

  They got to their knees and crawled away from this doll they had made, and slumped back against the walls. It sat, stiff-backed, among the skins on the floor. Its new dark plaits stuck out, crazed, from its head, each plait strand different: one made of Yolanda’s liquorice hair, the second of Verla’s woolly red curls, and the third was made of lengths of the last dry ponytail they had found in the bag—Hetty’s own hair.

  Only now did the two girls look at each other’s faces in wonder at what they had made. A totem, it could be, or a ghost. It could be a warrior, voodoo doll, goddess, corpse.

  IN THE morning the doll sat, legs sticking out before it, on the veranda boards. From behind the scullery flyscreen door Verla and Yolanda watched Hetty approaching it, suspicious.

  It was the size of a large toddler. Its head was a swollen rabbit-leather ball, made of uneven crescents sewn together in difficult lumpy stitches with rabbit gut. Its legs and arms were socks stuffed with the dry grasses from the paddocks. Its body wore scars made with stitches; it appeared somehow tortured, or burnt. The charred-looking nipples made of black rabbit-gut whorls; the distended vulva torn, then savagely repaired. Hetty was hunched above it, peering down, appalled. But she was beginning to recognise what Verla and Yolanda knew, what all the girls would know: that these were battle scars. Something in this embroidered war paint compelled.

  Hetty lifted the doll by one stiff rustling arm, and then screamed and dropped it. She had recognised her own hair, plaited in with Verla’s locks and Yolanda’s thick black strands. She crouched beside it now, silent, staring at it, taking in its voodoo portent, its power.

  Boncer was there now too, gawping. He had followed Hetty out onto the cold veranda and stood in his bare feet, stepping from one side to the other, mesmerised by the shocking ugly doll.

  Hetty stood and rounded on him. ‘Where did they get this thing?!’

  He only stared, arms folded, his face shrivelled in marvelling disgust. ‘I dunno.’

  Something in the doll made him quail, and he turned back to Hetty, filled with fearful lust, with mummy’s-boy need. He reached out to touch her breast. But Hetty smacked his hand away. ‘Fuck off,’ she muttered. He reared back, injured.

  ‘It has no face,’ she said, peering down at the doll. But the body sat in a nest of Yolanda’s finest rabbit furs and Hetty could not resist crouching again, reaching out to touch. The morning was cold, and the fur was warm.

  ‘Come here, baby girl,’ wheedled Boncer, reaching. ‘I need you.’

  Only then did Hetty look up and see Verla and Yolanda waiting behind the screen door. Boncer stroked Hetty’s neck. Hetty stared at them while he did it.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, tugging at her dress.

  Hetty closed her eyes, sighed.

  ‘Come on,’ said Boncer testily. His old self returning. He did not have his stick, but his hand feathered the air for it, and Hetty heard it in his voice.

  ‘All right,’ she said in a low, resigned voice, fixing her gaze once more on the doll. As Boncer took her arm in his bony grasp she snatched up the doll. And she looked back at Verla and Yolanda, holding it to her chest like a baby or a shield as Boncer led her back up the veranda and into the corridor, away to his room.

  Late that afternoon they sat at the refectory table, waiting for the stew. It was Izzy and Barbs’s turn in the kitchen, so it would be edible at least. It was Barbs who had declared that eating only rabbit would kill them—Stephen Fry said it on QI, so it was true—and so sent the girls all foraging for weeds each day. She boiled up the piles of stalks and leaves in her stockpot with salt, testing and tasting the green muck. Three different weeds turned out to be edible—or at least could be taken without spitting them out for bitterness—but the prize, the most desirable, was the long, scalloped dandelion leaf. For weeks now whenever a dandelion plant—or, even better, a patch—was found, a little shout of triumph could be heard across the paddocks.

  Verla’s mushroom experiments were still a secret. Only Yolanda could know, lest the carelessness of the other girls alert Boncer. Verla trailed Yolanda when she went stalking her traps in the dawn, collecting and concealing the fresh mushrooms in her clothes until she could hide them in the meat locker.

  Now Yolanda slumped at the table and dozed, her head on her arms. Across the table Verla swayed in her chair, hardly able to keep her own eyes open. The others watched them, knowing they had been up all night doing something, but they had not yet seen Hetty’s doll. They still purred and whispered excitedly about their hair, the ponytails they had taken to their beds, nuzzling them, winding them between their fingers, tucking them beneath their pillows, into their nightdresses. They had been given new life, new hope, from these tendrils of their girl selves. If the hair was found, other parts of themselves might be recoverable too.

  Boncer’s and Hetty’s places at the table were empty, Nancy’s and Teddy’s too. Teddy had slouched around after Nancy since she learned about Hetty and Boncer. It seemed Nancy would be his sole responsibility now; he spent the day following in her wavering footsteps, trying to stop her cutting herself or swallowing pills. For an hour he tried to teach her some yoga poses, but she only slumped, moaning, on the boards beside him.

  Teddy came in now. A scrawny, clumsily made noose hung from his pocket.

  She couldn’t really mean it, the girls said, or she would have gone to the fence.

  A sweet, cloying smell mingled with rabbit came from the kitchen. They salivated with hunger. Days ago Izzy had found a carton of Home Selection Apricot Chicken powder sachets in the last box in the storeroom. The bright orange gloop made a pleasing change. In the restful dark of her folded arms Yolanda thought again of her grandmother, who used to make apricot chicken, but the real stuff: apricots in syrup from a can, and French onion soup mix. Yolanda’s own mother would roll her eyes, but Yolanda and Darren loved it. But that was chicken, actual chicken.

  She sat up when the door was flung open and Boncer came in, carrying an extra chair. He set it down between his and Hetty’s places. He pulled it out. The girls slowly straightened, waiting.

  Hetty entered. The girls gasped, for in her arms she carried the doll. Their faces swung to Verla and Yolanda, who had made this terrible thing, then back again to H
etty, who stood, allowing herself to be inspected.

  She looked exhausted, but in her tired eyes was a kind of violence, and power. The doll no longer disgusted her; she seemed to enjoy the air shivering when the girls saw it, clutched to her body. She approached the table, shifting the doll to her hip, as if she carried a real infant, moving with a queenly air. Some new nobility had settled on Hetty in the face of this thing, this appalling royal baby. She arranged the doll in the extra chair, flouncing out its rabbit-skin rugs, and then sat, dignified, beside it. Boncer stood behind and pushed both chairs in.

  In the dim light of the ref the doll took its place at the table.

  Izzy came in, carrying dishes of steaming orange slop. She saw the doll and jolted, let out a cry. Backed away from it, put down the two plates and fled again to the kitchen. When she came back, recovered, she was followed by Barbs, who had been warned, who stared but remained composed. They moved silently around the table, setting down plates. When Barbs got to Hetty she hesitated, held the plate aloft.

  ‘Does … ?’ Nodding at the terrible baby.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Hetty. ‘It’s a doll.’

  They sat and set to eating, noisily but without speaking, watched by Hetty’s faceless rabbit-leather doll.

  Later she would christen it Ransom, but now it was just the doll. The ten girls sucked on rabbit bones beneath its eyeless gaze.

  YOLANDA PADDED out of the dogboxes and past the house, moving silently in the dawn light. She had stuck Hetty’s flapping boot sole together with mashed rabbit guts, and then wound a long scrap of the skin around to bind it while the gluey mess of it set. She left it for a day and a night until the glue hardened, but in that day discovered the warmth of the rabbit fur. So with the next skin she wound a boot glove for her other foot. At first she rolled on the soles; it was like walking on knobbled grass. But her ankles grew accustomed, she found a new walk, and she soon felt naked without them.