The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  Breathing out mist with each exhalation, she crossed the flat. The mornings were very cold now when she rose in the dark and slipped her feet into the rabbit-skin boots, pulled the stiff, buckling cloak of skins about her, fastened it round with the belt, weighed down by the traps. Over the months she had pushed a knife through the skins to make buttonholes, then tied them with rags. On her calloused hands she wore great fur mitts, gauntlets glued with gizzards and stitched with gut.

  The sun was still hidden but a faint pink tidemark was rising with the dawn behind the ridge. On she walked, up the side of the dry basin. After a time she stopped to shift the traps on her belt. She looked back across the plain. She had climbed the hill in the gloom but now the sky was lightening she could see that the grass was pinwheeled with small frosted cobwebs: handspans of silver gauze suspended between grass-blades. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand of them, all across the paddock below her. She stood as the sky glowed, and more and more cobweb stars became visible. A Milky Way across the flat.

  She shivered and pushed on up the side, the traps chinking against her. The skins kept her body and hands and feet warm but her face was icy. The sun would soon be up; she would lift her face to its pale warmth.

  The days had settled into an easier rhythm since Hetty had delivered herself to Boncer and he spent his time sniffing and wheedling after her, ignoring the rest.

  Verla had her mushroom project, collecting and sorting and hiding. Rhiannon tramped off to the ute skeleton every day, driving herself to an imaginary coast. Leandra chopped kindling and fed the stove, playing house with Barbs, who carried the stockpot around, playing Little House on the Prairie with an infant on her hip. Hetty had given up her prayers now she had the doll to play with. Joy and Izzy and Lydia had their tweezers and makeovers and mantras (the skin is the body’s largest organ, Lydia preached to Joy and Izzy, who nodded reverently, picking through each other’s hair for nits). Maitlynd squatted by the tank feeding her fat lurking frog, or patrolled the windowsills, collecting moths.

  It could not be said, even if Yolanda still used her voice, but increasingly she found things beautiful out here in the paddocks. This pink sky, these starry cobwebs. At night she dreamed herself with claws, digging a burrow. Tunnelling out under the fence, into the teeming bush. Not returning to her old life, never back there, but inwards, downwards, running on all fours, smelling the grass and the earth as familiar as her own body. She dreamed of an animal freedom.

  Verla had her private dreams too, Yolanda knew. Not just her poisoning-Boncer plot (a fantasy, but who was Yolanda to puncture it?), but though Verla no longer mentioned it, Yolanda knew she still scanned the hillsides for her imaginary white horse, still believed it to come nibbling round the dogboxes at night.

  Three white cockatoos screeched overhead, their wings lit pink by the sunrise. She squatted over the first trap—empty, not for the first time here, she would need to move it. A cloud moved across the sun, making her shiver again. There was a noise: a great sigh coming from the ridge. It was not a cloud that made her stand and stare as a vast orange curve appeared, lipping the black trees.

  It was a balloon. A hot-air balloon. An enormous, pleated bulb in the clear brightening sky. Frosty breath plumed out from her lips. No sound came from her. The balloon rose higher. It was just high enough to skim the treetops. It swept, scooped across the air towards her, above her. It was like a planet from another universe, almost touching hers and moving fast, and soon it would be gone.

  She looked back down the bank of the hill towards the house, the outbuildings. No figures moved, no smoke rose, nothing was visible in the paddocks or around the dogboxes. Verla was not to be seen. There was no-one but Yolanda to take part in this visitation, this drifting dream. Her feet were rooted to the earth. A blast of air roared again, and the approaching planet lifted a little in the sky. Its immense shadow swept along, seizing Yolanda’s heart.

  There were people. Two, three, maybe five, looking down from their basket beneath the great canopy, swimming through the sky towards her. She could hear their voices. Yolanda’s fingers went to her belt, unbuckled it, dropped the traps. She began to run. She would scream, Help us. She ran, stumbling from looking up. Soon it would overtake her. Please, she called, but her voice was a low croak. Yet two faces peered down, saw her. She ran, began to wave. She could hear the people, their voices clear in the crisp air. They called to the others, and then all five appeared at one side of the basket, leaning over, pointing down at her. The balloon drifted, bounced in the air.

  Yolanda ran, chasing and scrambling across the rough earth. She would cry out, We are prisoners. Get help. She panted, running and running to keep up. But no words came, only a whimper. The people watched her, waving, their arms swinging lazily, pendulums against the sky.

  ‘Hello!’ they called down. ‘Beautiful morning!’ There were delighted whoops as the balloon sank lower and then rose again, skidding across the valley. They cheered Yolanda as she chased. She stumbled but would not stop running. Help us, she tried to cry out. Could they hear her panting breath? Surely they must see, must hear her. The balloon began to lift higher and higher. She bellowed then: a noise, a wounded sound, not human. They cheered. Yolanda sprinted, roaring up at them, waving her rabbit-mittened hands in the air. The balloon was swept up then in a rush, and hoots of surprise and laughter came down. One of the people leaned over the edge, calling, ‘Byee!’ And there was a pop and they were drinking champagne.

  Yolanda roared her trapped-animal’s cry.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ they called, laughing and waving and clinking their glasses. The balloon lifted higher and drifted off across the scoured pink sky. It seemed to slow down and darken as it rose, up and up, and the blue sky was dotted now with pure white scuffs of cloud, and the balloon slowly shrank so that it was soon just a dark pinhole in the endless sky. Yolanda stood watching that other world that had come so close, spinning away.

  ‘HOW STUPID do you think I am?’ Boncer sneers across the table.

  How fucking stupid? He raises his stick and Verla ducks, covering her ears and head.

  Nobody else moves. The girls sit very still, staring at the table surface. Each inspecting the small patch of laminate before her, very intently and closely, as if it is an intricate map of a tiny country only she can visit, if she makes herself go still enough and small enough, while she waits for the table to jump and the bowls to shatter with a stroke of Boncer’s familiar rage.

  The plates are filled with rabbit stew, but for the first time there is also a little heap of sliced mushrooms on each one. It is this that has him on his feet.

  These last weeks he has been so altered, it has been like a holiday. But this evening, because of Verla, his old savagery has returned. She, with her mushrooms, has brought the old Boncer back and she feels like heat the girls’ anger coming at her. Even Hetty shrivels into her old furtive self, clutching the doll to her chest, watching Boncer sidelong, ready to duck from his raised stick if it falls in her direction. Nancy and Teddy are motionless, alert, at the end of the table.

  But Boncer does not hit anyone. He sees Hetty’s chin tucked under, resting on the doll’s head, and the lover’s tenderness laps over him again. He puts a hand out to Hetty, stroking her head like a puppy’s. She is always beside him now, Ransom clasped to her or slung across her body like a grubby satchel, limp sock-arm pinned to dingy foot, as Hetty walks. At mealtimes, it is either sat stiffly in her lap, so she has to reach around it to eat, or has its own chair drawn up. Sometimes Hetty jounces it in her arms like a real baby.

  Boncer gives Hetty an apologetic glance, and Verla sees Hetty remembering her new role, her triumphs and how to inhabit them. Her queenly bearing returns with a little nod to Boncer, and a nasty grin at Verla. She sits back in her chair, patting Ransom’s grass-stuffed back soothingly. It makes a thackety sound.

  To Verla, Boncer says, ‘You eat it, you murderous slut.’

  He spins his plate across the table to Verla so fast
she has to put out a hand to stop it, and the rabbit gravy slops against her skin, hot. She sucks a splash from her wrist. Then she looks him in the eye and fingers up a slice of mushroom into her mouth, chews it once, swallows. It is hard not to close her eyes at the pleasure of it. Boncer is hungry, watching her. She runs her tongue around her teeth, swallows again. Will she risk raising an eyebrow at him? No, she will not, the stick still in his hand.

  ‘You want me to eat more?’ she says quietly, wiping a drip of mushroom gravy from her chin.

  He’s yearning for the taste, she can see it in his face, but he says, ‘All of it. Off all the plates.’

  Then she does risk a smile, reaches for her fork. One by one the girls push their plates across to her, and she eats the mushrooms from each one. She chews and swallows, the squeaky portobellos cooked in rabbit juice, and the smell of it is unbearably good. The girls hunch with their hands in their armpits, sucking their teeth with hunger.

  Yolanda watches her with the rest.

  Another plate comes her way; she picks off the mushrooms and again swallows them. Pushes the plate back, takes the next, eats from it, wipes up the juices with her finger and licks it. Boncer stares bitterly, one arm draped around Hetty’s neck. They all wait. Then, when she has finished all the mushrooms and the plates of rabbit meat are in front of the girls again, they are allowed to eat. They lean in, gobbling like dogs. But Boncer won’t touch his. He watches Verla, all malevolence. He turns and takes a good long look at Yolanda bolting down the meat, her face near her plate, her black hair a mass of dirty tails. Boncer looks hungry, but not for food. Still staring at Yolanda, he leans and kisses Hetty violently, like a bite, on the neck. Hetty jerks sideways, startled, but she is accustomed now to these incursions on her body. She closes her eyes and regains her balance, as a mother sheep withstands a lamb’s butting, and keeps eating.

  Verla sits trying to will herself warm. She is so cold, she can’t remember what it is like not to be cold, this clammy air on your skin. Every part of her, even beneath the blankets at night, is damp and cold. Outside, the rain beats down, as it has done all day and all the night before. The ceaseless thrum of it will accompany Verla’s sleep, never deep, her legs drawn up, searching all through the night for warmth.

  And now Boncer knows her plan. She rubs her hands between her knees, curls and uncurls her toes inside the damp rotting leather of her boots. Across the table Yolanda hunkers, her plate in both hands, licking it clean. Oblivious to the cold.

  A funky warm stink rises off her skins.

  That night it is so cold that Verla gets up from her bed, leaving her thin ratty blanket. She slowly slides her bolt across and lets herself out of her box, pads down the corridor to Yolanda’s. She knocks softly on the door, and whispers, ‘It’s me.’

  She hears the squeak of iron bedsprings, and then, tall and naked in the icy moonlight, Yolanda stands at the open door to receive her. She draws her in, closes and bolts the door behind Verla as she clambers into Yolanda’s furry nest. And in a moment they are curled together, Verla’s knees drawn up beneath her nightdress, soft with the months of grime and wear, the warmth of her friend’s body curved around her back. It is so long since she felt the pulse of another human heart. But it is an animal’s heart that beats in Yolanda now.

  Verla dreams that a lamb’s head is brought to her, and she must wear it. She pulls it on, her own head squishing up inside the wet opening of the lambskin neck, tugging until its narrow skull is forced down, hard, over hers. The neck opening, dripping, reaches to her shoulders. Its sodden woollen fronds cold against her bare neck. Then she must don the body of the lamb, the skin, her body replacing its own, its entrails spilling out like bathwater. She must occupy the lamb’s body. She looks out of its blood-rimmed eyes at a cold, pink-stained world.

  Back in the meat locker she tries again, with a new kind of mushroom. It must be hallucinogenic, for each nibble takes her away. Her father, what would he be doing now? He will miss her, speechlessly, and nobody will know.

  This briny bulb, pressed to her nose, is the smell of seaweed wrapped around her ankle at the little sandy beach beneath the jetty. She lets the vision take hold of her in the damp dark room.

  There were days she would wheel him down to the jetty and park him there while she smoked, and then unwrap the fish-and-chip paper and feed each sliver into his grinning, vulnerable mouth. Salt crystals on his white tongue and his cracked lips, his leaning yellow teeth. His ghost’s hand caressing the air with his gentle, tender mania.

  She never knew it then, only puzzled over her mother’s frozen immobility and how it mirrored his, as if his brain insult fired in her hemispheres too, before she left again for East Timor and almost never came back. But she knows now, inhaling her damaged baby-brained father with the mushroom’s spores, that only the young could do these things for the old. Now she has been aged by her months here, she understands that only a girl with a blithe enjoyment of her own living flesh, only the young with a peach-fat, glossy mind could joyously thread hot potato chips into the mouth of her witless old father. Back then she could not conceive of waste or decay. She could offer her pitiless attention because his decay had nothing to do with her living.

  In this way she and her father had wordless conversations through the long afternoons, about many things. After she had begun with Andrew, and it had got complicated, she found it soothing to wheel her father down there and sit by him, his weathervane hand coasting the air, watching the pelicans and the gulls sink and lift in the dirty water. Sometimes she would reach up to adjust his neck scarf, and he would close his eyes in approval, and murmur his only remaining word, bloody, but she knew he meant it as gratitude.

  The whole spring and summer of Andrew she would do this, arrive in the hallway and snap the folding wheelchair open, saying, ‘Come on, Dad,’ and smile over his shoulder at the prim-lipped nurse. Verla put her arms around him to lift and guide him in their shuffling little corpse’s rhumba to the chair, then let him drop—hughh—into it. Then she tidied his limbs, packaged him up and slung the scarf around him, ignored the nurse about therapy and time for this or that.

  Verla would charge him down the ramp, veering too fast and dangerous, jerkily halt for the turn around the corner (sometimes seeing his frightened hands grip the armrests), but once out on the street they would calm down, she would wheel him slower and feel him relax into the chair. And she would silently tell him everything as they wheeled and strolled, eased by his warm dumb animal presence, and the fact that he loved her effortlessly, the fact that he was her father.

  In the gloom of the meat locker, Verla holds the brittle mushroom and mashes it to her mouth and nose and crumbles it, softly mourning the comfort of her father, sorry for his loneliness and his wondering why she hasn’t come to see him.

  After a time she brushes the crumbs of the mushroom away. Her father may be dead or alive, stuck in his chair in the respite day centre, or perhaps somehow liberated, driven off the end of the jetty and drowned. She sends him out a prayer: I am still your daughter.

  She gets to work, documenting this one. Dry, briny, a piece of brown coral, one and a half thumbs high, three fingers broad. So far—that was, within seventy-two minutes—flooding memories, hallucinations maybe, but no poison.

  She makes a little hoop of bark for it and puts it in the ice chest to dry.

  When she finds the death cap it is so clearly, so obviously itself that she almost laughs out loud. How could she have mistaken those others? She knows it instantly, even from here, yards away. Even before she kneels at it in the wet grass, something in her starts up at the sight of it, the burnished glisten of its hooded cap. Up close, she sees the butting, insistent head, the thick white stalk, the useless flared skirt beneath the cap. And when she inspects it with a stick, the gills. Pure white.

  Verla lies on her belly in the wet grass, holding off picking it, admiring it, wondering at it, in love. Then she turns onto her back, staring up at the sky. A pleat of
blue has opened up in the clouds. It is a long, fresh valley, waiting for her.

  When Hetty totters into the ref the next day, the bloody lamb’s head of Verla’s dream returns to her. The plates of her own skull bones begin cracking inwards as the beast’s suedey skull is forced down over hers, her vision laced with blue-veined membranes. It must be the dream, this net of blood across her vision, or why else does Hetty seem to be wearing Verla’s own red zippered jacket?

  Now a scuffle across the room, a bellow, chairs knocked sideways and down. Yolanda has her hands at Hetty’s throat, Lydia screams, You fucking slag, they are all tearing and clawing at her, even under Boncer’s flashing flailing stick. It strikes bone, breaks skin, they fall away gasping and roaring. Teddy is there, dragging Yolanda off. Hetty hides behind Boncer, winded and sobbing, pressing her flat hand to what must be Yolanda’s little reindeer necklace from Darren at her throat.

  The room is panting and screaming. Yolanda no longer bellows, knocked to the floor with blood down her neck in a bright twirling necklace of her own, but mutters, her breath heaving, staring bright and vicious at Hetty, You are gone, you are gone, you are gone.

  Teddy has Barbs’s upper arm gripped; she struggles and spits at the treacherous bitch, and Teddy hisses at Boncer, ‘Why’dja even bring her in here, you fucking idiot?’

  Boncer’s voice has a calm new ferocity and he is telling the truth when he says, ‘Any of you touch her again and I will kill you.’ And now they see that it is not his stick he has been hitting them with but a long black pole, and he is pointing it at them. It weaves through the air, his black and silver wand. They stare, for what is it? Some kind of mop, some pruning shears, hedge trimmers, but there at the end, a pistol handle.