The Fancies, page 26
Col Morton was trying to follow what was happening, but his teeth were clattering together so loudly he could not hear everything that was being said. They’d all heard Honnie Zabowski had died of an overdose, somewhere in remote Western Australia, many years ago—why were they talking about her now? And why was Jessica Bram acting surprised at something Old Dick Fancy had just said?
And what was this about duct tape?
What is going on? Sheila Rocket thought. When Jessica had spoken Honnie’s name, Sheila’s heart had gone ka-thump in unbridled excitement. Sheila expected, like last time, a flare-up was about to begin. Anticipation swelled. But then something unexpected happened: things began to calm down.
Twenty-four years ago, when the town had mustered like this, it was supposed to have been a town meeting but devolved swiftly into a kind of … what would be the word? Sheila wondered now. Riot wasn’t quite right—there were no baseball bats or looting. Commotion would be closer, but it felt a bit dull.
Sheila strained forward, trying to catch what Abigail Fancy and Old Dick were saying to Jessica, and the word uproar came to her and she decided that would have to do. Twenty-four years ago the town had gathered like this in order to talk about the baby and instead became an uproar. Sheila had not seen the rock thrown herself but she’d heard it—a low, thick thwack. Did Abigail start it or Jessica? It didn’t matter. Everyone knew the Fancys and the Brams had blamed each other for Port Kingerton’s ills since time immemorial. That particular thrown rock had simply been the final crank in the opening of a steam vent, and there’d been no stopping what burst out.
It had been no small thing, having detectives from the city come to town. Interrogating the locals, canvassing the beachfront and shops and public toilet block; they even staged a recreation, with a mannequin in a wig and everything. For days Port Kingerton had crawled with police, news vans, reporters thrusting microphones in faces and photographers running sideways, snapping like paparazzi around royalty. At first everyone had been excited by the novelty of it, the sense of righteous importance. But it didn’t take long before tolerance stretched thin. Tempers boiled over and everyone was very, very emotional, broken-hearted for that poor baby.
At least the nurses had given her a good name. Strong, after Joan of Arc. Because she had been a little fighter. It was because of that name that the women were galvanised when some menfolk suggested the females volunteer themselves for inspection. Gallantly. Self-sacrificingly.
Except, of course, for Abigail Fancy, who at the suggestion had stuck up her middle fingers and, eventually, fled town. If that was not an admission of guilt, Sheila, and so many others, did not know what was.
So now Sheila was waiting for the rocks to start flying. She was waiting for the wrestling and the hoarse-throated shouts. But instead, it just kind of … fizzled out. Because last time, Sheila recalled, hadn’t it been the twins, the Fancy boys, Hamish and Dylan, who’d started throwing punches? And they were gone. Banished, some said, at Young Dick’s bidding. Here came Nell Fancy and her men—Twitch, Col, the Turner brothers, Spike—and then came Young Dick, and the next thing Sheila knew, in spite of Jessica Bram hailing them with questions, the Fancys were piling into their vehicle and driving away.
Sheila’s interest sparked to note that Abigail did not leave with her parents, climbing instead into that new vet’s four-wheel drive, but even that proved nothing of intrigue, because the vet followed the Fancys. Nothing happened that could indicate a family attempting to disguise nefarious activity or possibly being rent asunder—no driving in opposite directions, no piqued peal of tyres on bitumen. No middle fingers thrust out windows. Nothing. Just a quiet convoy driving, together, in the direction of home.
OLD DICK
The death of Ed Bram was an accident.
I’ll admit it might depend on your definition of the word ‘accident’, but I maintain that’s what it was.
People fall in the water all the time. Take a look at any headline from the local rag over the last hundred years and you’ll see: MAN DROWNED OFF JETTY; BOY DROWNED OFF ROCKS; AN UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT—WOMAN FALLS IN WELL.
It happens.
But the nice yellow-haired girl seemed to think I had something to do with Ed Bram carking it, and I told her, how could I push a man off the perch when I’m about to drop off it myself?
You hated him.
He hated me. Fair’s fair.
She shook her head like she didn’t believe me. You started it, she said.
Pfft. That grudge went a long way back, girl. Like bloody England and France. One bruised pride begets another. One stolen craypot makes missing bloodstock makes a girl shotgun-wedded makes three hundred acres extorted makes blackmail makes ransom makes a licence swindled from a deathbed—next thing you know, a hundred years has passed and we’re still tatting for some other bastard’s tit.
Richard, let’s go home.
No. I want to watch the boat burn.
The boat sank.
Dad, here, take my arm—those hips aren’t made to be stood on.
You worry about your own hips, I’ll worry about mine.
Mr Fancy?
Jessica, not now.
You knew, Mr Fancy? You knew about Honnie?
Jess, for fuck’s sake, mind the fucking door?
If you knew—Mr Fancy!—Hey!—Why didn’t you—
The door slams and there she is in the window, yellow-haired, open-mouthed, but I can’t hear what she’s saying because we’re driving away.
ABIGAIL
The house appeared, lit up in the dark, windows gold against a backdrop of stars. The sweeping driveway, salt-bleached stone, those cheesewoods oozing oversweet—whatever way you looked at it, Abigail thought, it was just a house. This castle of Kingo, this house of parliament—it was still just bricks and trusses mortared together by generations of hubris and baggage. Ordained only by belief; stop believing, and did any of its power exist at all? Did anyone’s?
Abigail pressed her hot forehead to the cool glass of the car window, and as they passed the house to drive around back to the stables, she followed the bright house lights with her eyes, not moving her head, until her eyes hurt. Nate parked by the stables. When she climbed from the four-wheel drive she couldn’t help a groan. Nate asked if she was okay.
‘Just waiting for a goose up my arse.’
The vet laughed but she saw him glance nervously about in the dark.
Inside the stables, soft light spilled from the end stall. Nate’s footfalls along the cobblestones were controlled and noiseless. Abigail sweated with the same effort to tread lightly.
They stopped some distance from the stall. The pregnant mare was pacing, churning up straw, biting at her flanks. Her tail was wrapped up in a red bandage and it swung like a baton. Next door, the mare’s stablemate stood motionless, nose through the rails and ears pricked, and there was a long moment of stillness as Abigail watched the companion horse and Nate observed the pregnant mare, all of them quiet together.
Then her mother appeared.
‘Nate,’ Nell whispered. ‘Thanks.’
Abigail felt there was an element in that single word from her mother—thanks—that went deeper than simply acknowledging the vet’s presence in the stables at this particular moment in time.
Nell clicked her tongue. ‘She waited till we were all gone.’
‘Of course she did,’ Abigail said. ‘People around here have a tendency to feel entitled to peer up vaginas.’
Nell made a choking noise in her throat. Slowly, her head swivelled to Abigail, and Abigail could see all the whites of her mother’s eyes.
Leaving the mare in privacy, Abigail and Nate tucked themselves into the cramped feed room. Nell declined to stay, and Abigail thought her mother walking away from a prized mare in labour showed how blisteringly uncomfortable she was in her presence.
And so she found herself alone in the dark with the vet. It had just gone midnight. Between moments of activity the mare dozed. Abigail felt the tug of sleep herself.
She was very close to Nate. Sitting on a stack of hay bales, pressed together shoulder to thigh; she could hear the breath going in and out of him. Beneath the earth and straw scents of the feed room there was something she imagined was his skin: warm and spicy.
‘Why are you staying?’ she asked groggily. ‘Are you worried about her?’
Nate exhaled slowly. ‘Which “her”?’
‘Ah,’ she said, understanding. ‘You’re worried about pleasing Nell.’
‘I have to.’ His head turned to her. ‘This fucking town.’ He said it so gently, with such an almost endearing humour, that Abigail felt herself smile.
‘Precisely,’ she said.
Everything she’d feared about returning to Port Kingerton had come true. Her mother’s martyred silence, her father’s lead-weight burden. Gossip, slander, grotesque made-up stories. But—by some miracle—she was still here. She had not fled.
‘Duct tape,’ she said. ‘And a burner phone? Even for Kingo that’s a next level fantasy.’
‘What happened?’
She was so exhausted she answered without thinking. ‘I opened their mother wound.’
He looked at her. ‘Their what?’
‘It took me twenty years to work that out,’ she murmured. ‘Before that I always assumed they just thought I was a slut.’
Nate continued to gaze at her without speaking. The mare was quiet in her stall.
‘You’d think I’d be untouchable. Dad could tell practically anyone here to jump off a cliff and they’d happily ask which one. But you know what dies harder than anything? Misogyny. Not even their respect for my father could trump their hatred of me.’
She searched his face. It was too dark to make out his expression, but she could see the line of his jaw, the rough side of his cheek. She recalled the shocked relief that came when he spoke up for her in front of the farmer’s wife, his casual confidence, downplaying the moment into something manageable, unremarkable. She remembered crouching barelegged beside the four-wheel drive as he’d quietly handed a clean pair of pants across the bonnet, his eyes politely averted as he broke from his usual reserve to keep up a gentle but steady patter of conversation about nothing in particular, distracting her. Making her human.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard about the baby?’
She felt the tidal wave rushing behind her. The urge to run was so compelling she clamped her hands together. Fear and trepidation roiled through her. This had to come out. This had to come out of her.
Nate said, ‘You want to talk about it?’
She said, ‘Yeah.’
They were fifteen. Fifteen. Not girls, not women. They had bodies that could do everything a woman’s body could do but Abigail wore a Tweety Bird nightie to bed and couldn’t go to sleep until her mum kissed her goodnight.
Fifteen.
They knew the power of their bodies, the allure of their bodies, was dangerous. To exist inside these beings felt illicit, something that was both shameful and also, somehow, potent and vital. They were witches’ potions, they were the strong dark liquor at the back of the cabinet, they were cigarettes smoked crouched behind brick walls. Forbidden, stolen, intoxicating.
Honnie had not wanted to go home. They’d been skulking around town, skidding their feet on the swings, folding long limbs into the tunnel slide together against the cold. Night fell and the two wan streetlights came on, but Honnie would not be drawn inside. Pooling their coins they bought a parcel of hot chips, tearing an opening in the paper and picking out chips that burned their tongues. Abigail kept suggesting they go home—to hers, to Honnie’s—but Honnie was unsettled and refused. She didn’t feel well, she said, and her mum would make her go to bed. And Honnie didn’t want to go to bed.
‘What do you wanna do?’ Abigail asked, but Honnie just looked away, shaking her head.
So they kept walking. They peered into darkened shop windows, they hung around the back door of the second fish-and-chip shop, stealing a ciggie with Ricky Leake until Patty Smith ordered them to clear off on threat of Ricky losing his job.
For a while they sat at the playground. Shivering in the old timber lighter, breath fogging in damp clouds, ocean churning in the dark. Abigail’s parents knew she was with Honnie, and if she didn’t come home with the dark, they would assume she was at the Zabowskis’.
Honnie needed to pee. Hurrying to the public toilet block, scurrying inside, arm in arm beneath the ugly glare of fluorescent light. Pine needles crunching like dead insects on the concrete underfoot. It felt even colder inside, the stone walls radiating the chill night. Abigail turned the hand dryer on, giggling at the roar of hot air as Honnie went into the stall.
The dryer clicked off. Abigail turned it back on. Off, on again.
‘Honnie?’
No answer.
‘You still peeing?’ Abigail laughed.
No answer.
Shrugging, Abigail set the dryer going again. She must have set it a hundred times. The whir of hot air grew deafening. No one came in—why would they? It was Port Kingerton, a tiny fishing town at the butt-end of South Australia, in the bleak depth of winter.
After a while, Abigail wandered to the stall door. ‘Honnie?’ She put a hand on the timber, pressed it lightly.
The door swung open.
Abigail has spent her entire life trying to make sense of that moment. Flinging herself from planes, drinking until the world spun, plunging down freeways—all of it an attempt to parse the moment in life where nothing makes sense, when that split second feels like you’re living something unreal: a fiction; a nightmare; a tale told by other people. But it wasn’t happening to other people, it was happening to them. To Honnie, to her.
And Abigail could only watch in horror, she could only witness, and Honnie looked at Abigail with a face that she could never forget, the naked terror, the face of a child abandoned. And what could Abigail do, when Honnie said, Please don’t tell? Please don’t ever tell, oh my god, Abigail, you have to promise me. Never tell. There was blood on Abigail’s jeans where Honnie clung to her, on Abigail’s shoes where she had stood in it. Other things too, unmentionable things, substances they did not know could come out of themselves and at one point, Honnie, who had been sick, said, ‘Looks like I didn’t chew my chips enough,’ and why did they laugh? Because it was absurd, beyond belief.
‘Is it …?’ Abigail said.
‘I don’t know,’ Honnie said.
They looked down and tried to see, tried to understand, but they could not. How could they?
They were fifteen.
Cold, metallic taste in Abigail’s mouth. The stench of urine and rotting seaweed and something different, musty and earthy and unknown but also—impossible!—familiar. Somehow known. How was that possible?
The world lies to women and to girls. It tells them they are petty, catty, each other’s worst enemies. Cat fight, bitch fight, mummy wars. But when that stall door creaked open and Abigail saw Honnie cradling her arms, curtain of sweat-soaked hair and thighs streaked with red, Abigail knew one certainty: she was here. There was no cleaving from this. She was here for this girl, this abandoned, hurting, barely-woman, and she would not break. Whatever Honnie asked her to do, Abigail would do it. She knew this with the same certainty she knew the sun would rise tomorrow.
So Abigail asked, ‘What do you want to do?’
And then she did what Honnie wanted.
That’s where Abigail stopped. It felt crude to have said it all aloud, but being divested of it she was empty, all of it sucked out like water down a plughole.
She got to her feet and went to the feed room door, where she watched the mare pacing in her stall. The pony would fold herself to her knees, roll to her side, only to stand back up again. It looked like colic, but she knew the horse was simply repositioning her foal. It was instinctive behaviour, engrained in the mare’s biological wiring. Just like that escaped heifer would nine months or so from now, this female animal was responding to the messages of her body. Both passenger and driver, both helpless and entirely her own, and only, source of power.
‘Honnie didn’t know she was pregnant,’ Abigail said. ‘She thought she had a stomach ache.’
She felt something, a slight ticking sensation on her hands, folded on top of her belly. Surprised, she looked down and saw she was crying.
Shouldn’t it be easier for her, she often berated herself, that what happened had not happened to her directly? It was not her inside that toilet stall. It had not been her bedroom snuck into night after night, year after year. But vicarious trauma is still trauma—she’d learned that at bullshit group, too. A cousin of survivor guilt; the unmarked boy soldier holding his gun in trembling hands while his brothers’ insides are heaped on the dirt around him.
Abigail returned to sit alongside Nate and put her face in her hands. For one beat of time it was as if there was nothing but awareness, a sense only of her beingness, and she was spellbound by it. And then, finally, the wave crashed. She cried for a long time.
When eventually she looked up, she saw her parents were in the room. Nate had taken hold of her hand. The space felt airless and heavy.
‘She didn’t know,’ Abigail repeated. ‘I didn’t know. But she told me not to tell anyone, so I promised. I was shitscared. I thought they’d put us in jail, Honnie and me.’ She gave a short, ironic laugh that faded to bitterness. ‘They always throw the women in jail.’
‘The baby was alive,’ her mother said quietly. ‘We tried to tell you. This could’ve been different.’
In the beginning her parents had begged her to allow them to tell the truth, in order to take the heat off Abigail. Just quietly, her father said. We won’t make a fuss of it. But Abigail’s terror had been so overbearing, so absolute, that she had not wanted anyone talking about Honnie at all. The idea was unthinkable. Talking about it felt to Abigail like standing in that grotty, stinking bathroom all over again. And bizarrely, her grandmother agreed. There’s no getting through when men have their blood up, Lucy said. Better to keep it hush-hush. Her brothers came home with bloodied knuckles, but it made no difference. Women’s business, her grandfather had called it. Not our business.
