The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

There is the terrified girl who feels the swollen, tender pain of her kicked stomach and bruised shoulder from this morning, who feels the skin of her heels slipping off in shreds. But who is already understanding with dull surprise that some pain is endurable, as the hard rims of her boots rub through the rough wool, sponging and scouring the skin away, and is discovering that she can breathe and breathe and keep on walking.

There is another Verla, who whispers a plan to the other girls through the line, and they round on Boncer, stove in his head with stones and make their way home, leaving his forlorn, pulpy body to the dingoes.

She braces, bowing her head, but since the first day—the big girl, Barbs, with the broken jaw—he has not hit any of them above the neck. Barbs’s entire face now is swollen, purple-black, and she cannot eat anything, even these soggy flakes. To look at her now it is hard to remember the sheer physical charge she used to have, ploughing freestyle through the water. Fast lane to the Olympics, they said, till she had to open her mouth about the ‘sports massages.’ On the coach’s hotel bed. And then the whole team called her some slurry from Cronulla and that was it, no Olympic Dream for Barbs.

Verla knows Yolanda is telling the truth. And then, with the image of the kicking, bucking Yolanda who understood something terrible was coming, Verla knows that a month has gone by and she will not be released. She understands, like a bucket of cold water coming down, that nobody is looking for her. There are no petitions, no Facebook protest groups, no legal challenges, no private negotiations. The memory of the agreement she signed—oh, her own stupidity—makes Verla’s face hot.

One night it will come, she will crawl out, somehow, and climb onto that horse’s broad white back and lie down over its long body, twine her fingers in its mane, and it will take her away.

All these months, the disgusting shredded rags jammed into your underpants, soaking through. It was worse than anything, the beatings or the hunger, the infections or insults. The wet wad of torn-up tea towels and fraying curtain and threadbare sheet, of old underpants and flannelette shirt ripped into patches and strips, somehow rolled and folded into a horrible lump, forced upwards to mould up into yourself, but the loose stupid bloomers and all of it drenching too quickly, rasping your thighs as you walked, soaking and dribbling.

Yolanda hugged the squishy mint-green and baby-pink packages to her chest, squatting in the grief and shame of how reduced she was by such ordinary things. It was why they were here, she understood now. For the hatred of what came out of you, what you contained. What you were capable of. She understood because she shared it, this dull fear and hatred of her body.

When they reached the sheep yards Boncer said, ‘Get down.’ ‘What?’ ‘Get on your knees.’

She stood. I will not.

She tensed, prepared to hurl herself away, took a deep breath with which to scream or vomit or roar or bite. Then she saw Boncer’s white-knuckled hold on the leash strap. Saw his skinny pale mosquito-bitten wrists. She saw, finally, what Boncer was: a stupid ugly child, underfed, afraid. She saw his pocked old acne scars.

She heard herself say, ‘Don’t you ever get sick of this, Boncer?’

‘Get on your knees and suck my cock,’ Boncer said, his voice breaking. He was beginning to cry. He yanked hard on the leash, but Yolanda leaned back with her own force, refused to yield. How drab his grey malnourished skin, how sparse the hairs in his mousy moustache, how pathetic his unanswered dating profile, his ugly little neck chain.

‘Come near me and I will fucking kill you,’ she heard herself say. She had no weapon but still, she had made Boncer afraid. It made her stronger. ‘You will never—ever—touch me,’ she said, her voice low and steady. Shaking her head, leaning back, refusing the tug on the leash. ‘You’re repulsive, and you’re weak. And you’re probably getting sick.’

Boncer stood, appalled. Filled with shame, his fly open to show the fading red of his pilled polycotton underpants, the little wet push against the fabric. He saw...

‘Let me get these traps or you’ll starve with us,’ Yolanda said. He dropped the leash and she stumbled backwards, sprawling as she landed. He raised his stick at her, but still she felt his fear. ‘I wouldn’t touch you anyway, all the cocks that have been in you,’ he spat, as she got to her fe...

Something moved among them, between them, with this new strange Yolanda, this hunter. Delivering bloody flesh to them, bringing warm fur in from the fields. They folded their arms at her in fearful wondering, in hope.

But she still smelled the dank smell on herself, and breathed it in. She would do it, become hunter, or animal. She would gather up the gizzards and wear them, wrap herself in a cloak of guts. She knew that across the room, Verla saw. Verla understood.

I know my parents noticed and they’ve always loved me but after what I survived. I don’t know if other people noticed the hunter self because when I left the East Coast in 2005, I left alone. It was just me and my parents before.

The reason for their captivity has a blank clarity: they are hated. But why must they be kept so dirty?

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on TV that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they ‘disappeared,’ ‘were lost’?

Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshaled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

She heard a tread coming along the veranda. Her stomach tightened. Boncer. He had not come near her again but she could feel his hatred, how he watched her through the prism of his fear, how he liked to imagine her suffering. If she were an animal she could forever outrun him, through the grass, across the fields and up along the ridge, the scrub whirring by as she hurtled, fast as a rabbit or a hawk, spinning across the land.

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.

I was enjoying this book until I talked about it to my parents on the phone. I don’t know what happened but my whole body felt attacked and I raised my voice. I’m sweating but I wasn’t sweating before. When I raise my voice they attack me claiming that there’s something wrong with raising my voice when they harass me. I usually ignore them but when they attack me, and I know I’ve been attacked because I start sweating amd I wasn’t sweating before talking about that passage, I yell.

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 mold.

My parents noticed but they didn’t know how.

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.

A promise, a stirring of something: tenderness, ease, something from the history of love, far beyond this place.