CHAPTER THIRTY

While Marnie was in hospital, Ange came to the house to feed the dogs. She put food in my dish too, but I wouldn’t touch it; I still remembered how to fend for myself. Chin Scar fed out to the sheep, and he tried to get the dogs to obey him, but he didn’t know Rob’s whistles and calls and couldn’t do Rob’s voice, so they ignored him.

There was little left of the woolshed. Men arrived and scrutinised its remains, took photos of the burnt wiring, the steel bones of the wool press, the stumps that had held up the floor. They poked at the panels of corrugated iron all buckled and crushed. They examined the black guts of the couch. It looked like an accident, they said. Conditions couldn’t have been better: the weeks without rain, the old timber. All the lanolin in the wood.

For a few days Rob’s shirts still clung to the clothesline by their cuffs, not a breath of breeze to stir them. Then Barbara and Ange came in their rubber gloves, and they ripped down the shirts and shoved them into rubbish bags, followed by the rest of Rob’s things still in the house. His jeans and socks and jumpers, his underpants, his shoes, his boots that stood dusty at the back door. His hairbrush, his toothbrush, his sunglasses, his wallet. His ten golden axes. His balaclava. His cigarettes. Away it all went. Rubbish.

‘Jase rang me,’ said Barbara. ‘Offered to help with the funeral. I told him that was nothing to do with us and he could contact the undertaker himself if he wanted to. Goodness me, what is the man thinking? That we’re sitting around deciding between Amazing Grace and Nearer My God to Thee?’ She tore another rubbish bag from her endless roll.

‘I’ll feel much happier once he’s in the ground,’ said Ange. ‘Or is it a cremation? I mean, it’s half done already.’

‘Burial,’ said Barbara. ‘At the local cemetery, where his parents are. Only one more day to wait.’

‘Do you think she’ll stay on here?’

‘She says she will. The bloody bird, I suppose.’

‘Language.’

That night I dreamed of a man-sized box made from planks of pine. It started to shake and splinter, and an axehead tore through the side and the lid split in two – and there was Rob chopping his way out, his hands on fire.

In the morning I flew to the place of the dead: the graveyard I’d passed on the way home from my abduction. I saw a fresh hole near the bottom of the hill, deeper than anything Help could dig, deep enough to hold death. I waited in the eucalypts that were shedding their skins. To either side of me, just beyond the fenceline, the gorse was taking over the hot hills, the black pods popping, spreading their seeds. On the graves the little windmills started to flutter: something was coming.

The long black car crept along the road with barely a sound, and stopped not far from the hole. The mourners followed in their own cars: men wearing crooked ties round their necks, women in their best casualwear smartened up with pearls. The axemen wore their team uniforms – white trousers, black singlets – and with their axemen’s arms they bore the box to the hole. Then I heard it: wingbeats disrupting the hot thick air. I looked up and saw the sky full of birds, full of magpies – my own flock, my own blood, landing all around me in the scraggy eucalypts. The mourners looked up too, and the axemen set the box down on the planks that straddled the hole, and Chin Scar said, ‘I wonder what that means.’ I thought I should say something, but I did not know whether to speak or sing. And then, as the axemen took up the ropes and started to lower the box, my father threw back his head and opened his throat and began to call This is my son, my own boy, who has killed the man who killed his mother. Rejoice, rejoice at the work of my child! And the rest of the flock joined in: See what our boy has done, our precious boy born in the pines. He has killed the killer of magpies, the chopper of trees. Rejoice, rejoice! The man with the gun is dead, the man with the beetle-black car is dead, the man with the axe is dead. On and on they carolled, and I sat at the centre of the song and felt their every note buzz in my blood.

Barbara wanted to stay with Marnie when she came home from the hospital, but Marnie said she’d prefer to be alone. That first evening, I remember, she and I sat on the back porch and watched the sky change colour. Up on the hillside the remains of the woolshed were nothing more than a smudge of soot. I thought of the night it happened: how quickly the fire had grown from Rob’s dropped cigarette. The shock of the heat. The noise of it. The flames surrendering themselves to the sky. My father drawing near to see. And then, after he’d gone, someone else drawing near too: someone walking up the hill, slowly, gingerly, every step an effort. Marnie, my Marnie, coming to find me. Standing beside me while everything burned and collapsed. ‘I suppose we should call the fire brigade,’ she’d said. ‘I suppose we should call an ambulance.’ But there we’d stood, she and I, watching the flames cast their beautiful light, as if we had found the source of the Sun-Woman’s fire.

On that first evening home, as we sat on the porch, she took a photo of me silhouetted against the twilight and a photo of me perched on her cast. When the sky was black-black we went inside, where the only reminders of Rob were the clues I’d stored under the bath, against the gurgling pipe that vanished into the ground. And he too had vanished into the ground, and he would stay under the ground, a great white root, and one day I would return to the graveyard and tilt my head to listen for the corpse grubs, deep, down deep and chewing. And in a little while, after Marnie’s belly had swelled to an egg, and the baby had begun to flutter in the soft close dark, held in that membranous press, we’d be a family.

Marnie cleaned her teeth in the speckled bathroom, and I watched her in the mirror as she brushed and spat and brushed and spat and rinsed, and she watched me watching her, and the sooty mould crept across the ceiling and around the lightshade that looked like the moon if the moon were filled with moths, and it crept down the walls and over the window and along the skirting boards, and there was no stopping it.

In the master bedroom Marnie lifted the cushions from the master bed: the cushion with the sheepswool sheep and the cushion with the dead lavender and all the satiny heart-shaped cushions. Then she folded back the blankets and climbed in, and I climbed in too. The rain began to patter on the roof.

‘Good night, Tama,’ she said.

‘Good night, Tama,’ I said.

And then we slept.