Lyrebird Hill (23 page)

I gazed around in dismay. ‘But it’s outside.’

Pete grinned. ‘There’s no one around for miles. Even if there was, they’d never see anything through the bottlebrush.’

There’s
you
, I wanted to say. And the bottlebrush trees were all very well, but they weren’t
walls
. There was no door to lock. No roof. I looked up at the sky. What if a plane went overhead? And how was I supposed to undress in the open air, climb into a tub of steaming river water, and get even halfway clean while staying alert for prying eyes?

‘There’s a towel,’ Pete said, dazzling me with a smile, ‘and a fresh block of Esther’s handmade soap. I’ll leave you to it.’

I stared after him. Then I went over and looked into the tub. The water was greenish, and smelled faintly of pebbles. At least the white towel was soft and fluffy. I picked up the chunk of soap and sniffed it. Roses and lavender.

The bath was nearly full. Turning off the tap, I sat on the rim and slipped off my runners. Reluctant to muddy the fragrant water, I checked the gap in the hedge and then slid out of my
filthy track pants. What the hell, I thought, and stripped down to bra and knickers. I dipped my toes in, then my feet. Hot, soothing water lapped my knees. I wet the soap and lathered it over my legs, and the heat of the water released the full heady perfume of roses.

I scanned the wall of bottlebrush, and realised that Pete had been right: even if someone was standing on the other side, they wouldn’t have been able to see through the dense hedge of prickly foliage. I glanced at the break in the hedge, where Pete and I had entered the bathroom clearing. A dog sat there; I could just make out the reddy-brown haunches and white-tipped tail of the female, Bardo. Maybe it was the strangeness of bathing outdoors, or perhaps the weight of all I had on my mind – but her presence didn’t seem to faze me.

Closing my eyes, I slid into the water and let myself drift.

Despite my best efforts to ignore it, the heaviness under my rib cage persisted. Partly, it owed to Rob’s betrayal. My cheeks still flamed every time I thought about my discovery of the lipstick-smeared champagne glass in his bathroom. At the time, I’d been mute with shock – but my brain had since come alive with questions. Who was she? Where had they met, how long had Rob been seeing her? Did he love her, and if so why –
why
– had he kept insisting he loved me?

Sighing out the tension, I sank deeper into the water.

The ache in my chest was also for Esther.

It pained me that she was gone; pained me that she had lain out in the storm, injured and cold and alone. I bitterly regretted that we’d never had the chance to catch up and continue our conversation, as we’d planned. My memories of Granny H were still vague for the most part, but they were slowly trickling back.

Unlike my memories – or rather, non-memories – of Pete.

We were at school together
, he’d said. And he
had
seemed hazily familiar; but I must have known him the year Jamie died, because any real recall of him eluded me. Although, as I inhaled
the fragrant steam, there was a stirring in the back of my mind, a shadow; a glimpse of darkness and trees and silhouettes moving stealthily through the night—

I shut my eyes.

And then, taking a breath, I let myself slide under the water.

An hour later, I was sitting on the verandah blissing out. It felt good to be mud-free, wearing clean dry jeans and T-shirt, dozing in the sun, listening to the happy chatter of birds.

I had almost drifted off when I became aware of a faint crunching noise. It sounded like gnawing.

I looked across the grassy slope to where Pete was stoking the barbecue, feeding the glowing embers with twigs and leaves, sending great puffs of smoke billowing overhead. The kelpies – until now, ever-present in the vicinity – were absent. An uneasy prickling in my scalp told me they were nearby, but my careful scrutiny of the garden failed to detect them.

Suddenly I needed to identify the sound, pigeonhole it, place it in the box marked ‘no threat’. Getting to my feet, I went down the verandah steps and around the side of the house. A bank of grevillea screened the house from the old stables, and the noise seemed to be coming from behind it.

As I crept past the trees, I saw them.

A pair of dogs with pelts that gleamed like dark honey, their legs and muzzles dipped in gold. The crunching sound was coming from them; each had a small carcass in its jaws, devouring it with evident relish.

I rubbed my shoulder. Why was I even standing here? Why wasn’t I running helter-skelter back to the house, diving into bed and pulling the covers over my head?

In the back of my mind, I heard Rob’s voice:
This is just one of those curve balls life throws you once in a while. You’ve got to learn to deal with it.

I stared hard at the dogs, forcing myself to watch. Suddenly, it was Rob they were feasting on. Rob dismembered, his magnificent gym-toned body torn asunder, his flesh ravenously devoured; Rob’s skeleton cracked apart and its marrow licked out by a pair of hungry dogs.

‘So well deserved,’ I muttered darkly, and in a murky, vengeful corner of my mind, I imagined I could hear the echo of his screams—

‘There you are.’

I jerked around, my heart bounding.

‘Rabbits,’ Pete said, indicating the dogs with a tilt of his head. ‘That’s what they’re eating. I caught a couple this morning. You’re not squeamish, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

Pete’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s not cruel, if that’s what you’re thinking. The rabbits don’t suffer. I use box traps, and wring their necks in a flash. It’s all very humane.’

‘Right.’

‘Come on,’ he said, and touched my arm softly, briefly. His hair and beard glistened with droplets of water from his swim. ‘There’s bacon and eggs on the menu. Hope you’re hungry.’

‘Starving,’ I muttered.

Leaving the dogs to their gruesome breakfast, I followed Pete back down the slope towards the house. On the way, we passed the chopping block where presumably Pete had butchered his catch: a length of tree stump, its top end scarred and stained with blood smears. Propped beside it was a small sharp-looking hatchet. Pete kept walking and vanished ahead of me around the grevilleas, but I lingered. The scarred old block made me pause, its pitted surface holding me transfixed.

‘Ruby?’

My mother’s voice drifted out of the past. Time seemed to slow, then teeter for a moment before looping back on itself,
rewinding. The chopping block and hatchet hazed out, and I heard my mother calling, as if from far away.

‘Ruby?’

I shrank lower, trying to be invisible. I was sitting on a flat boulder near the clothesline, out of view of the house. I’d spent the morning scrubbing grass stains out of my nighty and it was taking forever to dry. Which was okay by me; the worst time of the day was approaching, and all I wanted was to stay out of Mum’s way.

‘Ruby!’

The kids at school thought Mum was weird. Most of their parents were farmers – sheep for wool, or beef cattle. They all thought Mum was crazy for owning three thousand acres without even attempting to make money off it.

Which wasn’t true, because all our money came from the orchard or the vegetable garden. Every Saturday Mum collected a big box of vegies and another two boxes of Fowlers jars crammed with preserves – apricots in honey, halved peaches, last year’s apples cut into chunks and studded with cloves. It was my job to help Mum pack the boxes into her car early in the morning so she could take them to the growers’ market in Armidale. Armidale was a couple of hours’ drive from Lyrebird Hill, which meant that Mum wouldn’t be home until mid-afternoon. That was the good thing about Saturdays – I got to spend most of the day doing as I pleased. The bad thing was dreading what we invariably had for dinner: roast chicken.

‘Ruby, I know you can hear me!’

To be honest, Mum
was
pretty weird. For one thing, she hated the modern world. She hated pollution and loud noise and garbage trucks and power lines. She even hated men – which always puzzled me because plenty of women contributed to the ecological disaster as well. Of course, Mum wasn’t
all doom and gloom. There were tons of things she was mad about – batik dresses and incense and Joan Baez and steamed vegies – but there were days when her list of dislikes seemed to eclipse everything else.

I shifted on my rock, picking my scabby knee. Mum thought she knew everything, but how could she? Life looked wonky through the bottom of a wine bottle. I knew because I’d checked. One day I’d held up one of Mum’s empties and looked through it like a telescope. I’d seen a wibbly-wobbly world where objects sprang about. Near, then far . . . then near again. Interesting for a while, but then I’d gone a bit giddy and some wine had dribbled into my eye and made it sting.

I glanced at the clothesline, at the nighty flapping gently in the breeze. When I was with the Wolf, the world didn’t spring about and make me giddy. It seemed bright and stable, a happy place. I never stuttered or mumbled or did stupid things when I was with the Wolf. I stood taller, felt somehow prettier, smarter. Able to do things I usually fumbled.

‘Ruby, I need you here. Now!’

I stood up, brushing leaves off my jeans. Going around the bottlebrush hedge, I dragged my feet back to the house.

Mum was standing near the chook shed. My heart dropped. She was holding one of our hens upside down by the legs. Its body was as limp as a rag, brown feathers littering the ground. It was only when I got nearer that I saw the snowy tuft of tail feathers.

‘Esmeralda!’ I cried, running towards my mother, but I was too late. Mum was already positioning the little body across the chopping stump. She looked up and saw me.

‘Get me the wood-handled cleaver, will you, Ruby? This one’s blunt.’

I couldn’t move. My arms went limp.

Mum looked at me and heaved out a sigh. ‘Oh, Ruby, how many times have I warned you about getting attached to the
chooks? Silly girl, you shouldn’t have named them all. They’re not pets, they’re here to provide eggs and meat. And this one’s stopped laying. Now fetch the cleaver before she goes cold.’

My eyes began to sting. Esmeralda hadn’t been a pet . . . she’d been my friend. She’d followed me around the yard, pecking after my feet or letting me pick her up and cuddle her, all the while chattering in her special soft language.

‘Don’t just stand there gaping. Get the cleaver and stop this rot.’

I gulped back tears. What would the Wolf do? Certainly not break down and blubber like a baby. He’d let out a bloodcurdling growl and spring at my mother, ripping her body in half like a ragdoll and spilling her guts all over the place, maybe even chop off her head and legs with the cleaver, then hang her up on the fence to bleed – just as she was planning to do with Esmeralda.

‘Bitch,’ I muttered.

Mum flinched. ‘What did you call me?’

‘Bitch,’ I said again. I thought of the Wolf and yelled, ‘A horrible old bitch!’ Then, before Mum had a chance to react, I turned and ran.

It took me twenty minutes to reach the old shearing sheds. They’d been abandoned nearly a hundred years ago, and had been overrun with tea-tree and cassinia, and tall silvery grasses that pushed through the derelict sheep ramps. Their iron sidings were buckled and eaten by rust, the paddocks surrounding them shaded with black-trunked ironbarks and red gums.

The Wolf was waiting by the shed.

‘You’re early, Roo . . . Hey, what’s up?’

Normally I’d have felt a twinge of disappointment to find a boy where there should have been a dangerous beast – but today I was glad.

The Wolf took my hand and dragged me into the shade, his gaze serious, his eyes full of questions as he searched my face. I couldn’t speak at first, due to the lump in my throat. As we
leaned against the shed’s corrugated siding, I bit my lips and tried not to cry.

‘Mum killed Esmeralda.’

‘Oh, Roo.’

I slid down shed wall and sat on the ground. The Wolf flopped beside me. ‘What a blow,’ he said softly.

‘I hate her.’

The Wolf’s face was pale beneath its splash of freckles. His dark hair stood on end. He looked fierce, much fiercer than a boy of twelve had any right to look.