In the Winter Dark

  She felt like hell. Head, limbs, even her mouth ached. She saw it all again, her dancing across the paddocks like that, knowing all the time she was having herself on, getting fuel enough from the booze to kid herself that she knew what she was doing. She must have been out of her mind! And that snail-slug of a bullet slowly turning across the dark at her to smack a hole in the umbrella just near her head. Yes, she remembered now. The breeze it made. Oh God, Ronnie, you’re hopeless. There’s no one now. Only you and this poor deformed little bastard in you, soaking up the poison. You’ll lose him, you know. Him too. A woman can feel it. Mother’s instinct. She laughed. Oh, mother dear. It was bitter between her teeth.

  For a while late in the day, Ida was able to read a book, but mostly the headaches were too much for her. The light of the bedroom was melancholy. She tried to find an explanation for the way life had come to a halt, but instead she came up with old memories. Like those stories she’d heard about American subs surfacing off beaches near here to get rid of mascots that had grown too big to be kept? Cougars, mountain lions, that sort of thing. And those prints someone’d found in the caves at Margaret River. And everybody the last few years talking about the thylacine, the marsupial dog or cat or whatever it was, coming back from extinction. And what about that time she’d come across that circus truck in the rain? Yes, she remembered that now. She’d had the feeling something dangerous had escaped there. Oh, there were so many things. Those thickets that ran all the way to the coast, and the miles and miles of forest. There were places for hidden things to breed. If they flourished, wouldn’t they widen their territory? For a moment she thought she could make some sense of things, but her head thrummed like the engine room of a ship and there was still that creeping feeling of a trick. She knew she was old and silly. Could it be a cruel game?

  Now and then Ida thought she would suffocate just thinking of it.

  In the end I couldn’t bear to see the steel-dark rain breaking up the earth, beating everything down, and so I went in to see Ida.

  I saw myself in the mirror. I looked insane, I guess, not right, and Ida looked suddenly terrified.

  ‘Ida, you ever wonder why Wally was blind? I mean what the real story was?’

  She gazed up. She looked pretty damn wild herself.

  ‘Everything makes me wonder. That brother of yours. He used to take the patches off to scare me. I s’pose I secretly thought your father’d poked them out for him.’

  That got me. It took a moment to recover from that. It wasn’t the moment for defending the old man, poor bugger.

  ‘I sort of wanted to tell you. The real reason.’

  Her jowls were all jumpy. She sat up in bed.

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you. It’ll explain things a bit.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me until you’re prepared to tell me what’s going on here, Maurice!’ She couldn’t hear. She was too frightened to listen. ‘What is it, what’s going on here? Who are you kidding? What kind of sick game, what is it?’

  She fairly reared up in bed and her breasts rolled about in her nightie as she reached for the wax cast and I felt it hit me in the belly as the shouting got louder and I fell back against the doorjamb. Then she began to scream without any words at all and the sound of it hit me harder than anything she could throw. It sent me back out of the room, that high squeal putting ice in me, coldness from another place and another time, it was the crazy woman’s scream pursuing me from the flames. I stood in the livingroom and heard it refuse to stop and I went hot and cold and shimmery and saw the gun and reached for it and put a shell in it and went back to the sound. I went in there. I shot upwards in that melancholy space and saw her mouth go wide and silent as plaster sprinkled onto the bedclothes. I put the gun aside and lay on the bed.

  ‘That was a bit strong, don’t you think?’

  Her eyes shone madly and then fogged over with weeping.

  I lay there listening.

  In a beautiful Guy Fawkes curve the burning cat finds the open door. The old woman shouts in surprise and the white house swallows up the cat. And the curtains, how quick the curtains take, spitting and crackling like fuse-coil, licking up the timbers, the panelling, the drapes. Now, listen to the awful keening noise, the cat sound of her burning. The Minchinbury house roars. The sky drinks it up, the noise and light, the smells of cooking flesh and fur. It’s the sound of hell, you know. She’s burning and her cats are burning, and he’s running, that farmboy, the silhouette, the flat shadow boy, he’s running. There I am, here I am, with my chest fat with panic. A silhouette. Light and heat behind. This is the light to which the dreams come like moths. They come from everywhere, to beat themselves against the white heat inside my head.

  THERE WAS still light in the sky when Jaccob drove across to Ronnie’s with some soup and a lumpy little loaf he’d baked from a CWA cookbook. No lights were on. He stood on the verandah. The cow looked at him dolefully from across the fence. He’d made a friend there. He looked at the door a moment and decided to let himself in. It was a small place. Even in the twilight he found the bedroom quick enough. Ronnie was sitting up in bed. She must have heard the car. She looked afraid.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be sleeping. I brought you some food.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You have to,’ he said, trying to sound gentle. ‘For the baby.’

  ‘There’s no baby anymore, it’s dead.’

  Her voice was toneless. In a flurry, he put down the food and whipped back the blankets to reach for her. Ronnie squirmed away.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ He felt like a fool.

  She looked amused. ‘Nick’d never do that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked at the bone-coloured wall. ‘Can’t you feel it kicking, or something?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes, I can. I was being stupid. I think I’m going crazy.’

  Jaccob got off the bed and went to the window to hide his face from her. She’d scared him. He didn’t even know her, and the idea of her losing this baby made him panic. The room was almost without light now. Outside, the rain was hammering the ground into mud.

  ‘Haven’t you ever done anything bad?’ she asked. ‘When you knew you couldn’t help yourself, wouldn’t help yourself? That’s what I do. Do you? Or are you always calm and smart and kind?’

  He turned to face her. She sounded so young, but he’d heard that kind of sarcasm before. Was it sarcasm or innocence?

  ‘I’ve done things.’

  At this she smiled, and Jaccob turned his back to face the grey-blue evening light.

  ‘No use looking out there,’ she said. ‘It’s us.’

  Then they heard the sound of the shot from down the hill. They saw each other in the gloom.

  In the morning I woke to the water thunking onto the end of our bed. I’d made a nice old hole in the roof with that shot. The water made such a miserable sound that it drove me out into the day. Ida had slept nervously beside me as though I might cut her throat in the night. I could feel her relief as I got out into the morning chill.

  Fowls hung grimly to their roosts, shaking themselves in the rain, and up on the pasture steers stood unmoving in the mud. The forest stood like a fortress behind. I got into my raincoat.

  The lower pastures were mirey, and I moved everything up to harder ground, leading them up with a few bales of feed on the back tray of the ute. It was cold and lonely moving around out there. I knew it’d be better out there with Ida. I loved that complaining chit-chat we could keep up in the cab when there were things to be done.

  I drove slowly and let the stock follow and they snuffled and slapped tails and smacked mud and crud about. It was lonely, but peaceful enough.

  Up at the northernmost reach of the property, in the stumpy pasture before the thicket country, I found twenty sheep with their bellies torn open and their skulls punctured.

  It was a long day for Jaccob. Ronnie was determine
d to stay at her own place and he felt anxious for her in a way he couldn’t explain to himself. He kept out of the rain, pacing, reading Thomas Wolfe, puzzling.

  At dusk the rain stopped. Jaccob went out to split kindling for the fires. Under the lean-to by the machinery shed he got some pleasure for himself seeing the hard-grained jarrah stripped down to sticks.

  He rested on his axe and smelt something burning. Like carpet. Like wool. The wind was coming around from the west again. Now there was the stink of burning flesh. He bent and took an armful of wood in, and when he came out the light was gone. He sorted the kindling into another manageable load and smelt that whiff of barbecue. Lights were on down at the Stubbses’. He stood still and felt his skin prickle. Everything was hard to pick out in the dark. Jaccob made slits of his eyes and tried to pare the darkness into parts.

  ‘Anybody there?’

  What a rube he felt, saying that.

  The drip of sagging gutters. No stars, no moon.

  He must have known when to turn because he caught the movement out behind the shed, though it was less than he’d seen before.

  He flinched. The phone was ringing inside the house. He hugged the wood to himself and ran.

  For a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. Plenty of things rolled through my mind. But he answered. Breathless, sounding scared as hell. I stood there smelling of petrol and scorched meat. Those sheep had made a lousy fire. Ida looked at me as though she hadn’t heard what I’d just told her.

  ‘It’s you, then,’ Jaccob said.

  ‘What’s up? You sound a bit shaky.’

  ‘I think I just saw something.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘What?’ He was getting his breath back. ‘What’s up with you, then?’

  ‘Twenty sheep, that’s what.’

  He took a moment to let it register.

  ‘Come over,’ I said. ‘Bring the girl.’

  ‘Go to hell. You come here. I’d drive if I was you.’

  It was raining and Ida noticed it. She could smell manure and upholstery and Maurice’s shaving soap in the cab of the ute. The hot apple pie roasted her thighs through the tea-towel. There was a strange electric taste in her mouth. It was what her old mum used to call a queer feeling.

  ‘Here we are driving next door,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well. Under the circumstances . . .’

  He looked normal enough. He had the gun behind the seat. She saw him put it in.

  ‘Why didn’t we have any sons, Maurice? Sons would have been nice.’

  She saw the lights of the big white house through the scarecrow regiments of fruit trees. Maurice looked nervous now.

  ‘Sons? We weren’t given any, I s’pose.’

  ‘You think they’re given?’

  ‘Gawd, woman, I don’t know.’

  ‘Because if they’re given, then, you know, they’re not given as well. Withheld, I mean.’

  ‘That what they tell you in church once a year?’

  She decided to let this pass. Her cheek rested on the cold window.

  ‘You think we’ve done something?’ she asked. ‘Like “the sins of the fathers” and everything?’

  He stopped the car. Right there. Right then.

  ‘Ida, I’ve tried to tell you. The answer is yes.’

  He drove on and she felt all breathless and confused and the serenity was gone and she knew she couldn’t trust him.

  That great looming white place looked at me as though it remembered. I could still feel that fourteen-year-old hysteria, thinking the fire would chase me down the hill right to the river itself. I thought: this night has been waiting for you all your life, Stubbs.

  Ida noticed how dirty everything was. The big dining room table was in need of a polish. The walls were bare and wanting paint or paper, she thought, and some nice things hanging, like a picture of a waterfall, or men on horses. It was the kind of place Ida imagined people took piano lessons in. Jaccob didn’t look right in it, as though he wasn’t quite master of the place. Maurice looked like something was about to bite him. And Ronnie. Ida had the urge to tidy her up a bit too. You could see the blue shadows of veins in her, she was so pale. She seemed grubby tonight, and cool. The coolness caught Ida unawares. It made her careful; it made her look closer at everybody.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ Maurice murmured as they were shown into the livingroom.

  ‘Nothing, dear, what?’

  ‘You were grinning like an idiot. What’s funny?’

  ‘Was I?’ She felt a thrill of panic. The queerest feeling. She had no idea.

  Jaccob and Ronnie came in behind them and everybody found chairs. This was a meeting. Ida felt away from it all.

  ‘Why don’t I fix us a cup of tea?’ she asked, before anyone could speak. ‘I brought an apple pie.’

  Jaccob looked at her strangely. Perhaps I sounded too cheerful, she thought. They were all looking at her the way they really shouldn’t be. Ronnie’s eyes were narrowed. Maurice looked puzzled. She didn’t like it. She got up and found the kitchen anyway and heard them talking tensely out there. The kitchen was a real bachelor’s effort. Everything looked wrong, badly organized, unhygienic. She stood in the kitchen while the billy boiled and she could hear their voices coming and going. Now and then the pitch would be raised a little. Ronnie used some strong language; heard that plain enough. They prefer it this way, she thought; there’s things they don’t want me to hear. She planned to surprise them. When the tea was in the pot she found a tray and some spoons and plates and she ran the water and left it running as she crept back to the livingroom.

  ‘Well, let’s get a dogger out here, straightaway,’ Jaccob was saying. ‘This has gone far enough. Someone’s got to tell the authorities and get —’

  ‘Authorities, authorities!’ Maurice yelled. ‘People suddenly want to be told what to do. This isn’t the city, mate.’

  ‘Oh, cut all the country bullshit. At least we could get someone out here who knows what they’re doing. This thing could go mad, it could kill people. We need someone from the shire or the government. This is serious.’

  ‘They don’t know what they’re on about. They’ll tell you it’s a dog and they’ll take some notes and set some baits and tramp over our land with their badges and uniforms, putting their noses where they’re not wanted. They’ll laugh at us, you fool. It’s just bloody interference.’

  ‘Let ’em laugh,’ Jaccob said. ‘What’s a bit of pride, for Godsake? What’ve you got to lose?’

  ‘Or hide?’ asked Ronnie tonelessly.

  The room got quiet. Ida stood in the doorway, holding the tray. Her arms were beginning to shake with the strain. Yes, she thought. What have you got to hide, Maurice? And then she looked at them all. Their faces were hard with fear and secrets, she could see it straightaway.

  ‘Nothing,’ Maurice said. ‘Not a thing.’

  He was lying. What he said in the car. He was lying.

  ‘Come on,’ Jaccob said, softening. ‘You might as well tell us. Like you say, we’re in this together.’ His mouth twisted a little with irony. ‘Neighbours, and everything.’

  Ronnie smiled. ‘He’s growing dope in the forests.’

  Jaccob looked startled.

  ‘It’s not true,’ Maurice protested. ‘You need your arse kicked, girl.’

  ‘Face it,’ she said with a laugh, ‘you haven’t got the legs for it.’

  Ida felt herself harden up against Ronnie. No, it wasn’t drugs. Maurice didn’t know the first thing about them, not like this tart. Ida could see she looked the sort.

  ‘Well, you must admit,’ Jaccob said, ‘that from where we stand you’re sounding a bit paranoid. We’ve got something dangerous here and you don’t want to do anything about it.’

  Maurice was floundering now, she could sense it. He was holding his hands up against their innuendo like an old politician.

  ‘It’s only natural for us to think that we’re not quite in the picture,’ said Jaccob.

>   Natural! Ida thought. None of this is natural. Something is going on here. The whole land, the night, the valley is poisoned. What have these people been doing? What have they meddled with? What weird rites have they fiddled with? Why did you people come here? she thought.

  Ronnie curled her lip in a sneer.

  Then she saw their hands. They all had tumblers of whisky in their hands.

  Maurice stood up and emptied his glass. He noticed Ida then, saw her at the door, and he looked at the empty tumbler and then at the tray she was holding.

  ‘I have done something about it,’ he said. ‘I set fire to those carcasses up on the hill. I thought it was time to bait them up. Tonight we’ll cut some saplings to make a blind and we’ll drive up to the back of my place, camouflage the ute, and wait until it shows. Or them. There’s a lot of meat out there. Anything that comes will be startled a few seconds by the headlights, long enough to give us a good shot.’

  ‘A good shot? You must be insane!’

  ‘It’s here!’ Ronnie shouted. ‘Jaccob saw it just now out the back and you’ve left all that meat out there? Ow. Ouch. Oh, shit.’

  No one spoke. They looked at Ronnie. She’d gone way back in her chair with her hands on her thighs. She looked a long way away. Ida felt herself going away. This was all a trick. Leave here, a voice told her. Get on the bus, say the Our Father. She was slipping.

  ‘Is that a contraction?’ Jaccob asked after a while when all of them seemed to be going away down the wrong end of a telescope.

  ‘How would I know what a fucking contraction is?’ Ronnie shouted up the lens.