Little Gods Read online

  If the older girls weren’t beside the diving pool, they lay on their towels up the back of the mound along the fence, smoking, and with their oily hands on each other’s shoulders, leaning, merging, laughing. They didn’t eat anything, not even one hot chip, rather chewed gum and spoke with their hands over their mouths and propped themselves up on their arms, stomachs flat. They turned their heads when the lifeguard walked past, thongs snicking against his hardened heels.

  Olive climbed the few steps up to one of the small boards. She walked to the end and stood. The surface was gritty under her bunched toes. She always delayed the jump, like the last scrapings of neapolitan in the bowl. The boys behind her shouted, telling her to stop taking so long, but she waited a moment more before making a small bounce and stepping off the end, her fingers pinched at her hips as if holding the edge of a dress.

  The smack of cold was revelatory as she went down to the other world and back up to the surface made choppy as more and more bodies plummeted from the other boards. She swam to the ladder as quickly as possible and went and jumped again—ker-plish-plosh—and rose, wiping the hair from her face once she breached.

  ‘Move, idiot!’

  An older kid was looking down at her, shouting from the board above. His tummy tubbed over his shorts. ‘Get out of the way.’ He waved his hands and then he was coming. She swam to the edge and behind her came the sound of his body slamming the water and the push and pull of it against her legs as she hauled herself up the ladder. She was scared that one day someone like him would jump on her and crack her bones. If that happened she would be lost and sink to the bottom, where she’d drift in the deep and it would take too long for anyone to find her.

  She did five more bombs off the low board then got out and sat on the edge watching Peter do pin drops off the high board. Then he climbed out and sat next to her.

  ‘Still no?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Maybe after Christmas?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  They watched the older boys doing horseys and both saw it when Gary’s brother Luke Sands landed wrong, hitting the water with a flamboyant belly-whack. He shot up and swam to the ladder, his face reddened against the blue tiles. His eyes met Olive’s.

  ‘What’s so funny, binocular girl?’

  He climbed out and walked over to them. He stood behind her, dripping water down onto her upturned face. She got up and Peter got up too.

  ‘I reckon your boyfriend’s pretty funny if you ask me.’

  Olive looked at Peter, then back at Luke.

  ‘You’re a dickhead, Luke Sands, and your brothers are rapers, everyone says so,’ she said.

  ‘What did you just say to me?’ Luke Sands cupped his palm and batted at the side of his head. ‘Say it again?’

  ‘I said you’re a dickhead and your brothers are rapers.’

  He took a step closer, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. Her teeth clacked and she expected to be let go and fall backwards into the pool but he stopped and she was still upright. She looked at his face. He had a small scab near his bottom lip. He let go.

  ‘I know about you,’ Luke Sands said. ‘And your cousin, the dwarf with a tail.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ she said.

  ‘What’s not true? What about your sister then?’

  He was smiling at her. One of his teeth looked grey and it was very small. ‘Yeah, we’re not supposed to talk about it but everyone knows.’

  Olive stepped forwards and placed both of her hands in the middle of his chest. She pushed and he windmilled, righted, wobbled again and went backwards into the diving pool. The lifeguard blew his whistle and came over as Olive stood on the edge. She looked down on Luke Sands as he trod water, ready to push him back in with her foot if he tried to climb out.

  ‘You’re dead meat,’ he shouted. The guard blew his whistle again and told Luke to get out.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Peter pulled at her arm. They walked away. Olive could hear Luke’s high voice protesting that it wasn’t his fault but she didn’t look back. She and Peter were almost at the towels when she spoke.

  ‘I’m not your girlfriend, you know.’

  ‘I know—God, Ollie, me neither. He just said it and I didn’t say anything back because if I did he would only say it more.’

  Peter kept looking over his shoulder. He was right but sometimes his big teeth bugged her and the way he always put extra pressure on some words when he got upset.

  ‘It’s not true about Archie.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘Did you hear what else he said?’

  ‘So what? He’s an idiot.’

  Peter bent down and tied his runners.

  ‘You made it worse.’

  ‘Why are you even angry at me?’ Peter asked. ‘You shouldn’t of pushed him.’

  ‘What?’

  He stood up.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Why not? He was saying those things. Besides, he would have pushed me if he was quicker.’ She lifted a leg and raised her arms slowly to what they called the stork position. ‘I’m like the wind, though. No one can catch The Olive.’

  ‘I don’t know, you just should have been scared. I just think that.’

  ‘Well, I’m not scared. Not of him and not even of Gary.’

  ‘Well, you should be,’ Peter said. ‘Of Gary especially.’

  Olive put her dress on over her bathers. She held out a hand and clicked her fingers.

  Peter gave her three snakes and she shoved them into her mouth.

  ‘Do you want to come around tomorrow?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not here, which I did tell you about. I’m at the farm.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For my birthday. You never listen properly.’

  They were walking to the bike rack. Olive balanced her towel in a sheik roll on top of her head and Peter flicked his fingers in a way that made them crack. He counted under his breath each time he did it: Whone, twhoo, thuree, foah, fahv.

  He was always doing things with his body. Jumping on things, climbing things, skipping over or under or trying to walk in funny ways, kicking his legs up high or bent so far over that his palms touched the footpath in front of his feet. Olive thought it was stupid and they’d had an argument. He tried to say she used to like those things, that she used to laugh, and she told him she never had. Never.

  At the entrance, people were pushing out through the gates, families going to their station wagons in the car park, weary but happy as if a good day’s work had been done. For Olive, it was more than that. Being at the pool, she was real. Her body was real in the water, the way it enclosed her with its vivid blueness. Her fingers were real as they opened the plastic wrapper of a smooth-bottomed pie or pulled an icy pole out of its sticky paper sheath. She was real lying on the hot concrete with her stomach and leg tops almost burning, water outlining her body in small warming puddles. The pool was one of the places where she came into her body and she wished she could stay there forever. She always held back in the real as long as she was able, whether at the pool or in Peter’s backyard or astride her bike at the park. She tried to stay as long as she could in all of those other places but eventually she had to leave the real. She had to leave those places and go home.

  Olive and Peter rode away from the pool, Olive in front until Peter, without comment, peeled off at his house with the jasmine bushes along the drive. She went the extra three blocks, down Violet Rise turning left at Kellda. This was her street, where the houses were all neat. The nature strips mown short. The neighbours clipping bushes and pushing hand-mowers, the burring sound of the rotating blades clipping across the grass. The scrape of a rake at the edge of the footpath, metal on cement.

  She went in at the driveway to her place, braking hard on the gravel so that she skidded sideways to a stop. She checked the cast-iron letterbox and dropped the lid hard. The noise of it slamming into place was so particular and marked
the end of another afternoon.

  Entering the house, coming in from the brightness of the day to the orderly dim of the interior, was like a shrinking. She went up to her room to wait for her father to get home. She sat in the little window nook and looked out. Down on the street, a green Charger rolled past the house and turned right at the end near the walkway that linked the tennis courts with the back of the Catholic church.

  Jethro Sands.

  She could see his sunglasses, the ones with the wire edges. Jethro Sands was driving his car around the streets. She sat in the little window nook and watched the car as it turned the corner and disappeared.

  JETHRO SANDS WAS the oldest of five brothers from a family that had leaned hard on a spread of generations. Sands brothers rode their bikes in baleful posses through the streets of Stratford. They loafed against the milk bar window, glaring and powerful. Assorted brothers gathered beneath the diving board ladders at the pool each summer, forming groups of thinly muscled boys that pushed ahead in the queue and pulled at the ties on girls’ bikinis. They were responsible for the abandoned shopping trolleys by the freeway entrance and the broken bottles smashed outside the scout hall. Sands boys had also been behind a destructive rampage that saw the systematic shredding of the memorial plants along the main avenue with plant matter strewn along a length of a hundred metres or more.

  Snooky was the youngest and the only girl. Olive used to feel sorry for her but not anymore. Snooky and the triplets were in Olive’s year and she had tried to work out how it was possible.

  ‘It has to be because they’re stupid—the triplets, that is,’ Olive had said to Peter and so far, no one had come up with anything better than that.

  Gary was the next oldest down from Jethro, four years older than Olive and Peter. People said he’d been dropped on his head as a baby. He was sly and hands-on, a kid who would stop you on the street and twist your forearm until you cried and gave him whatever you had in your pocket. The year before he’d tried to do it to Olive but she’d stood there unblinking, glaring at him until he let go.

  ‘You think you’re better than me?’ he had said, his face nasty, his nails digging into her arm.

  She had wanted to say yes.

  Gary Sands was missing half of one of his fingers. Some people said it was chopped off by an axe in a game of chicken but others said it had been caught in a door—whether car, house or garage, no one really knew. A final theory was that he’d been on a flying fox and had fallen off but that somehow the bit of finger stayed behind, hooked into the handle, continuing on to the end of the ride. However it happened, it was Gary Sands’s finger—or his not-finger—that intimidated other kids the most. He would hold it up, stand with the stump of his index finger raised, palm facing backwards. What he was saying with that not-finger was: Look. I am a kid who lost a finger and survived.

  Luke Sands, who was a year older than Olive, was one of the triplets. The others were called Mark and John. Adults called them the Apostles but Thistle said that there had never been a good Sands. Olive thought John was the best of them. Once he’d played with her, Peter and her cousin Sebastian for a day. It had been summer-time and they were riding to the blackberries near the highway. John had gone with them, dinging his bell on the street as they flashed past on their bikes, and he’d ridden fast to catch up and be absorbed into the group. No one had remarked that he’d appeared, and for the afternoon they’d wandered the bushes, John wordless among them, as they ate berries and made jokes about teachers at school, shopkeepers and television ads.

  John Sands had long yellow hair and freckles that spread over his entire face. He even had some on his lips, small brown flecks. When he talked, his tongue was visible between his teeth, pointed and pink. He laughed often and as he did so held his slender belly with both hands, rocking backwards, eyes closed, astride his motionless Dragster.

  Olive had spoken the truth when she told Peter she wasn’t scared of Luke Sands or even of Gary. But Jethro Sands was different. Jethro Sands was a man with a thick neck and black hair. Everyone had a story about Jethro Sands, the oldest brother, and rumours had circulated about him for as long as Olive could remember. People said he had started a fire in the rubbish bin at the petrol station when he was thirteen and that he went to juvie.

  Jethro had a scar near one of his eyes, an angry tear that scraped through his eyebrow and reached up to his forehead where it disappeared beneath his hairline. In winter he wore black motorcycle boots and a checked sheepskin jacket that was orange and brown. He had sideburns like a man’s and the other kids said his eyes were like laser beams in comics, that your face would explode if he even looked at you. That was why he wore those steel-rimmed reflective sunglasses, they said, as he cruised around in his car with his hairy arm out the window, fingers spread wide on the door.

  Jethro Sands was like the scariest crackers on Guy Fawkes Night. He was the loudest thunder, the meanest dog. Out of everyone she was scared of Jethro Sands the most. She imagined buildings and trees bursting into flame on either side of the road as he drove along, turning his head slowly from side to side. He was threatening, noxious. Dark.

  OLIVE WAS LYING on the couch imagining what it would be like to be Heidi when her father got home from work. As her parents moved around the house, carrying things to the car, she stayed on the couch. She wondered what goat’s milk tasted like, and how it would be to live on a mountain. Heidi had been taken away from her grandfather, from the mountain, and was so upset by it psychologically that she started to sleepwalk. She felt trapped in the nice house in the city, where she had been taken to be a companion to the sick girl. Olive thought about how it would be to be trapped like that, in a house where you didn’t belong and that you hated so much it made your brain go different and you started to do things you couldn’t remember. Like walking while asleep.

  ‘Are you ready?’ her mother said. ‘Do you have your things?’

  Olive nodded. She always had her things ready to go to the farm. Once she had told her mother she would like to live at the farm with her cousins and had been surprised when her mother seemed angry.

  ‘But it would make sense,’ she said. ‘I can catch the bus to school with the others. Rue wouldn’t mind.’ Her mother shifted her shoulders in a way that let Olive know it was a very bad idea, and told her it was time for bed. Olive had wondered what it was about her suggestion that had been so wrong.

  •

  They drove out to Rue’s place from Stratford. Once they were past the church, Olive sat back and closed her eyes to wait for the buttery flashes inside her eyelids to deepen to reddish-black. The shift in colour meant they were almost at the highway. With her cheek resting against the window, even without peeping, she knew they were driving through the war trees. She could see in her mind how their knobbly branches tried to embrace across the top of the road. Stretching but never touching.

  Her mother looked out the window and her father’s head swivelled left to reveal his profile, the Lovelock nose, his lips pressed together. Olive knew it even with her eyes closed. She turned her face left too and opened her eyes and lifted her binoculars to the landscape as it blurred, the light and shadows blending to brittle greens and greys. She couldn’t wait to see Grace.

  Once they reached the highway she put the binoculars to the side and sat up. She checked the seat pocket. The plastic bags were there. The nail scissors too. She leaned forward and scanned the road ahead, alert to the animal forms that might appear, in front or to the sides of the car. Wherever they might appear, she was ready. She knew that you had to check the pouches of struck animals and always made her father stop so she could run back along the road. The first time she’d done it her mother had been appalled, saying it was disgusting. Olive sat in the back with a wombat infant, the dismembered teat still in its mouth. The next time they’d seen a fallen animal—a kangaroo—Audra had told Bruce to keep going, but Olive emitted a noise set at such a drilling pitch her father had been forced to turn the car
and go back. There’d been maggots that time and a barely alive joey. As they drove on to Rue’s, Audra had ordered her daughter to touch nothing. Olive had sat like a gruesome surgeon, her hands held aloft all the way, the tiny thing shifting on her lap. Once they got to the farm she was goosestepped inside the house and her manky hands scrubbed puce by Audra.

  Olive kept a record of animals saved, written inside the cover of her diary, and Audra kept a supply of plastic bags and thick rubber bands in the glove box so she could bag up her daughter’s hands. They’d arrived with several native rescues over the years, Audra walking in stiff-backed and glowering, Olive smug and golden, her hands mittened in plastic, being steered from behind by her mother’s finger in the middle of her back.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Rue would call.

  ‘Bring the Pine O Cleen first,’ Audra would call back.

  The joeys were repatriated by a local woman who wore tea cosies as hats and Olive’s campaign to keep the babies at the farm was swiftly smothered by Rue, Audra and even Thistle.

  ‘They need to go back to nature,’ Thistle said. ‘You’ve done your part.’

  No matter how much she begged, she wasn’t allowed to keep even one.

  •

  They pulled off the road into the driveway and Olive looked for her first glimpse of the house. She loved the house at Serpentine. She never visited her own place in dreams yet wandered the rooms of this building, passed through its doors and around its corners as if her feet were floating above the polished wooden boards, the old floral carpets, the linoleum.