The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

  They stand in the dark corridor of the dogboxes. Verla smells Yolanda’s animal breath, feels the quick fine skeleton beneath her skin. She feels Yolanda’s speedy heart drumming in the burrow of her chest. Yolanda gathers Verla to herself one last time, then lets her go. She pulls the bulky cape of her skins about her and pads to the end of the corridor, out of the doorway and disappears into the glaring light. Verla sprints from the boxes, scrambles back up to the veranda. She turns to see the low silver flash of Yolanda’s skins only just visible, swift through the grass.

  She is already far in the distance when the coach finally heaves up the slope towards the buildings, dust rising in its wake. It is vast and modern, lurid unnatural yellow, brutally mechanical before them. HARDINGS INTERNATIONAL in small black lettering, clean and sharp along its side, as it nears.

  The coach jerks to a stop, the long hiss of its hydraulics sighing in the silence. The dust smoking up and hanging in the air. After a moment, the door slowly opens.

  A man—shaven, fatherly, in a clean blue uniform—steps down, calling out to them. ‘Hello, ladies, how are you this afternoon?’ He is so unmarked, so clean, has come from a land so far away.

  Then he sees them, their mess and damage. He says softly, looking along the line of them, ‘What have we got here? Dear, oh dear.’ The girls shift, suddenly afraid, under his stare.

  The man takes a step towards them. He says, ‘You poor, poor girls.’

  They stiffen, huddle closer together, stealing glances. Poor girls. The man steps back onto the bus, disappears for a moment, and emerges with a cardboard box. They strain to listen, but it is true, he has not said you sluts dogs fat slags bitches slurry. Said poor girls.

  The girls can hear each other breathing. They hold hands, afraid. The man has put the box on the ground and he now begins to lift out a crisp parchment carry bag, then another and another, looping them over his wrist as he counts. The thick paper of the bags is powder-coated creamy white, embossed. You want to run your fingers over the pure untouched surface, along those sharp clean edges. You want to hold them, to feel the swing and tilt, because of the weight, the shadow of deep green tissue, inside.

  The girls look about them, pressing together, trying to read the future in one another’s stricken faces. They stand motionless, too afraid to step down from the veranda, from this rotting wooden island, their mouldering home. They can smell the man now as he bends into the box, rummaging. There is the rustle of tissue paper. His sweet chemical odour rises up at them, like liquorice, like cinnamon, like a memory of long, long ago when they once were clean, when they knew other clean people. How naked he looks to them. How newborn.

  He steps towards them now, a clutch of the bags in each hand, twirling on their satiny black rope handles. The bags slither expensively against one another.

  Even from here Verla sees how clinically pure the man’s hands are, his nails clipped and pink. She curls her own into fists.

  ‘I’m Perry, by the way,’ he calls out across the dangerous ocean of mottled grass, and smiles. He stands in the sun. The bags slide against each other, alive, slippery, as glossy as racehorses. The girls cannot stop staring. At what? What is in those bags? A promise, a stirring of something: tenderness, ease, something from the history of love, far beyond this place.

  It is Lydia who whispers, in disbelief, ‘They look like Phaedra.’

  Can’t be.

  Barbs knows. ‘Real Phaedra costs, like …’ and can only shake her head, so no, it is not possible. But something is simmering, they all remember what Maitlynd told them one night, calling out from her bed. How her ex-boss once gave her a tiny Phaedra sample, and how unbelievable, even in that tiny amount, how like a whole new skin, she swore it. The girls look down, quickly, at their bitten, blackened hands.

  The man is waiting with his patient smile, but he begins to look uneasy. He turns towards the bus, the bags swivel. The girls feel their bodies longing, surging towards him, though they don’t yet move. Rhiannon murmurs, ‘Maybe it’s, like, a reward.’ And now something dawns on Lydia, who used to work in charity events: ‘Phaedra’s maybe a Hardings partner.’ They look at her. ‘A sponsor.’

  They cannot yet know, but what they see for certain is the unmistakeable embossed swirling P, some other smaller letters. And look, there again, the wisp of rich, deep turquoise tissue paper. Paper? More like silk, like an infinity pool. They each turn inwards, to their memories, their yearning, their long-ago breathtaken senses. Verla held the rich starched linen of that Paris hotel bed-sheet between her fingers. She put pastries of so many buttered layers in her mouth. And she stood in the street before the Louboutin window, that vertical slipper with its red needle heel poised in the glass dome like a jewel, a test tube, a syringe. Like a pharmaceutical thing to enhance you, heal you, cure you.

  In the long-distant past, Teddy’s and Boncer’s cold hands were folded across their chests. They are old ghosts from dreams now, like Verla’s dusty white horse, but here is the actual future, in a clean sharp uniform and a shining yellow bus, and in his hands these creamy parchment vessels bevelling sunlight. Verla just wants to touch, to run her finger along the perfect, knife-sharp pleat of that paper edge.

  They cannot take their eyes from the bags.

  Somewhere far behind them poor insane Yolanda is playing dirty animals. Still captive, twitching in the bush, shrugging into the leaves, digging, burrowing. Mad as shit.

  It is Barbs who cannot, finally, wait any longer. It’s big-boned Barbs who says to the man in a small, polite voice, ‘Can I’ve a look?’

  ‘Of course, love!’ sings Perry, beaming, standing at the door of the bus now. Barbs (of course, love!) steps across the grass in her rotten leather boots, and gingerly takes a bag from his hands. They lean, nobody breathes, watching Barbs reach in, peering, and she cries, ‘Oh!’ and pulls out a heavy black glossy box, and she shrieks, ‘It is Phaedra!’ and they see its velvet innards, the cut-glass lid. Barbs presses it to herself, looks up at the girls, her face alight. And then it’s all thundering off the boards, and they are squatting on the ground ripping open the little packages, not only Phaedra but, incredibly, from MarthaJones and Nyfodd and NaturescienceSeries II, the man smiling benignly down while they cry out and unscrew bottles and squish creams into their hands and press sticky gloss to their flaking lips with their dirty fingers. Verla looks up for Perry, who is no longer on the grass with them but slipping into the house. ‘Wait,’ she hisses to the girls, but they are all squealing because Lydia’s holding up a silver razor and hitching up her dress, looking down at her soft-furred legs and sobbing with grief and relief. They all dive into their bags for the shining thing and come up with it, a beautiful bullet, a scalpel in their hands. Verla’s heart begins to beat too fast.

  She stands and looks across the plains for Yolanda. She shades her eyes and traces with her gaze the plains, the curving hillside, the grassy paddocks, but Yolanda is nowhere to be seen, not with a human eye. And now Perry is back beside her on the grass with his perfumed, shaven male smell. ‘Let’s get you out of here,’ he says and there is regret and pity in his voice. Like he knows what’s been done to them here, and it must never take place again. Has he found Boncer and Teddy? He only beams again and does not even need to speak, for the girls have begun filing onto the bus, chattering and weeping, first looking behind them to the grass to make sure they have left nothing, lost none of their treasures. Their hands are filled with turquoise Phaedra tissue and gleaming white tubes and heavy glass vials, and they suck into their lungs the glorious, forgotten smell of flowers and herbs and money.

  Verla puts her foot on the step, her unexplored bag dangling heavy and rich and scented from her wrist. From inside the bus Leandra is heard to scream, ‘Chocolate!’ through her stuffed mouth. Verla hesitates an instant, but, ‘Up you go, sweetie,’ and Perry’s hand is at her back propelling her, with too much strength, too expertly, too fast up the steps and now she is on board, inside the cool fresh tunnel of th
e bus, with all the others. And the door has closed behind them with a soft whumping breath, sealing them all in. Perry swings into the driver’s seat and the engine roars into life. Each girl has dropped into a double seat—how soft is it!—and sits squawking in delight from her little nest of tubes and packets.

  The bus begins to rock and surge off down the road the girls have built—on our knees, with our hands—away from the compound, and a seeping, a deathly bleeding of something rotten, starts up in Verla. She doesn’t open her mouth, nor her bag. It sits, pure white, heavy across her knees. She stares through the tinted window, out across the paddocks, scanning the scrub. The sun is lowering in the sky. She cannot see her.

  You poor girls.

  The bus is filled with noise, the girls calling one to another like birds. Izzy has found a hairbrush at the bottom of her bag, and screeches, brandishing it, sending them all diving, and now they rake at each other’s bird’s-nest hair, and Leandra is scouring her face with citrus blossom cleansing wipes and gasping, Jesus, fuck, look at the dirt coming off. They hoot at their reflections in the window glass, oh my god oh my god.

  The road becomes a lumpy track where they had run out of concrete and gravel and the bus slows, heaving and rocking from side to side as it lumbers up, up the stony hillside, up towards the ridge. And then it looms: the fence. Huge, black.

  The girls are suddenly silent, open-mouthed as they press their foreheads to the tinted windows, each girl holding her breath to see if this is really happening. The bus slows, stops, juddering, while—nobody breathes—a massive wired panel of the fence slides, rumbling and rattling, open.

  In this slow-motion moment only Verla moves, darting from one side of the bus to the other. There is only grey, scrappy scrub. The bus moves through the open gate. Verla hooks her hands around her face at the window, praying please please, and then she sees: a little furred figure sprinting low alongside the great wall of bus. And the little figure is through the fence and veers away, spinning low and fast as a rabbit off into the scrub.

  Goodbye, Yolanda, Verla whispers to the glass. Goodbye.

  The creamy bag with its silken ropes rests against the upholstery of the seat next to her. The air is fragrant, a little sickly now.

  Verla reaches inside her tunic as the bus heaves off again, unpins a little grubby cloth and puts it in her lap. The seeping in her has not stopped with the closure of the gate behind them, and Verla knows now what to do.

  Inside this pocket on her lap is the remaining death cap mushroom.

  The sun is setting. The bus comes to a junction, and the girls are perched up on their seats now, all except Verla, staring in wonder at the long pale gravel road in both directions. Not yet a highway, but an actual road. The girls cheer and cheer, then burrow back into their treasures, not caring, not seeing that the bus turns west, not east. Not away from but into the setting sun. Verla sees Perry flick a look in the mirror at them, his cargo, then back to the dusty road.

  The house with its dead bodies, the broken buildings, the dogboxes are far behind them now. Verla sees a swatch of birds glitter and turn in the sky. You poor girls. This Perry did not mean what had happened to them back there. He meant what was to come.

  She unwraps the little cloth bag, breaks off a piece of mushroom and holds it with the cloth, in her fingers.

  She needs to know what she is. She is a daughter, and she whispers sorry to her father as she sees herself doing it, putting this piece of mushroom in her mouth, chewing, mashing it up, resting her head against the vibrating window, swallowing. She closes her eyes and forgives her mother, says goodbye to her father. Says to Andrew, Look for me under your boot soles, and feels with no pain the plain small fact that he did not love her and never had.

  The girls chitter in the seats behind her. Verla holds the little fatal mushroom piece in her hand and before she puts it to her tongue she calls through the scrub in her mind to Yolanda, her protector, fellow creature: I love you. I am your sister, and you are mine. And at last Verla knows herself loved. She presses the mushroom between her fingers, through the cloth.

  But then Yolanda speaks back. Her voice comes from a fine grey blur spinning through the grass, across the plains, right into the centre of Verla, and it is not old dead Walt Whitman’s voice she hears but the fresh, living rhythm of a beating heart, of surging blood and paws thrumming over the earth. Verla feels this pulse, urgently, in her body. The bus changes gear again, Perry rests back in his seat, settling in for a long drive ahead. And two words force their way through everything in Verla, pushing through all these months, through failure and fear and degradation, fighting through this last defeat. They thrust up through Verla’s centre, bursting into flower in her mouth. Two words: I refuse.

  She is on her feet, moving down to the front of the bus, swinging into Perry’s face, startling him. ‘Stop driving.’

  She feels the air change behind her. The girls’ squawking has quietened. The bus hums on, and Perry has to look up from the road. The sun is in his eyes, he squints beneath the visor. He says, ‘There’s a toilet at the back, love.’

  Verla, louder: ‘Stop. Let me off.’

  Irritation crosses Perry’s face before he turns a cold smile on her, his powerful hands gripping the huge black steering wheel. ‘Just sit down, all right, love? It’s against health and safety.’

  But girls have begun moving down the aisle. He hears them, though he stares at the road, his face steely. ‘Everyone sit down, please,’ barks Perry.

  Joy’s voice rings out, pure above the motor’s noise. ‘Let her off.’ The girls shift and bristle around her, around Verla. Perry glances into the mirror then back at the road, quietly angry now. But he has seen them in that glance, the girls standing there, looming, lit brilliant by the lowering sun. There are eight of them. Framed in his vision they stand: mud-streaked, teased-haired, some with horrible orange lipstick now, some with garish beads and ribbons. They have been made strong by labour and brutality. They are ablaze.

  ‘Get back into your seats!’ he yells, and he starts fumbling beneath the dash, but he’s afraid, they can feel it, they know he has seen Boncer and Teddy back at the house.

  Verla feels the wall of girls, the strength of their hard warm bodies at her back, standing with her. Suddenly Leandra darts in, yells, ‘Hold on!’ and yanks the steering wheel, making the whole bus tilt, swerve savagely on the dirt road.

  ‘Jesus fuck!’ bellows Perry.

  When she has picked herself off the gravel—die then, mental bitch—Verla stands alone on the road, tasting the powder of dust in her mouth, the dry, dry air settling over her skin.

  The water bottles the girls threw to her lie dented in the dirt. Her shoulder hurts like hell; her knees and forearms are bleeding, but not badly. The bus is gone. She looks back down the road, in the direction they came from.

  She can have no possible idea where Yolanda is; she is already far away, fully animal, released. Thinking of Yolanda now, so vigorously alive in her rabbit self, Verla remembers that other self of her own, called up once in her fever dreams. That little brown trout, hovering motionless in the water, waiting.

  She turns away from the setting sun and wipes her sleeve across her sweaty face. It will be dark soon, and will grow cold. It will be hard. She might die. She bends to gather the water bottles, shuffling in a circle in the pink dust. When she has picked them all up she begins trudging down the gravel road.

  The little brown trout twitches, and is gone. Only the clear water moves in its wake.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THANKS TO those who helped me write this book, often without knowing it: Rebecca Hazel, Alison and Mary Manning, Ruby and Lily Johnson, Jane Doepel, Kerry and Deborah Bennett, the Bundanon Trust, David Whish-Wilson and Curtin University, Joan London, Eileen Naseby, Lucinda Holdforth, Vicki Hastrich, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Ailsa Piper, Caroline Baum, Hannie Rayson, Dorottya Fabian, Anne Brewster, Stephanie Bishop. I thank all the writers who generously took part in The Writer
’s Room Interviews; each conversation has influenced my work in profound ways. Thank you to Jenny Darling, Jane Palfreyman, Ali Lavau, Siobhan Cantrill, Clara Finlay, Lisa White and all at Allen & Unwin for their expert care. Always and most of all, thanks to Sean McElvogue.