Chapter 6 Riley #2
What they need is for a space to open up. Riley cuts that thought off, stops it dead.
Midnight leans over the stall door. ‘Time to work.’ Her baby peeks out of the swaddle at her chest.
Riley gets up quickly. ‘Ready.’ Prove your worth.
The baby smiles at Riley as she opens the stall door and she nods at it in surprise. It is cute, she supposes. She’s not really into babies or children. She loves Oliver but that’s because he’s Oliver.
Midnight takes a step back. ‘Don’t touch any of the kids here, ok? Keep your distance.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ Riley says.
‘It’s just they’ve grown up here, their immune systems aren’t prepared for all the stuff you guys probably brought in.’ Midnight turns away, shielding the baby from Riley.
‘Whatever,’ Riley says, stung. She doesn’t want to touch the gross baby anyway.
There are two smaller barns behind Home.
Both are full of activity. One seems to be for vegetables – preparing them, preserving them.
At each table someone is doing something useful.
Riley takes Oliver’s arm to help him across the grass.
Midnight takes his other arm gently and Riley reluctantly likes her for that.
It’s weird how the bodies of the people you love can feel like your own, if they’re hurt.
Riley feels a slice of pain every time Oliver winces.
Outside the low barn she puts him in front of a big basket of potatoes. ‘Can you peel?’ Oliver nods and Midnight gives him a potato peeler. ‘Not going to cut your hand off or anything like that?’
‘No,’ Oliver says. ‘I know how to peel a potato. Riley taught me.’
Midnight takes Riley to a dim shed a short distance away where meat hangs from hooks. She points at a pile of rabbits, soft and grey on the table.
‘Skin them,’ she says, holding out a knife. She wants Riley to be upset.
‘Sure,’ Riley takes the knife.
Midnight shrugs and goes.
‘Good talk,’ Riley calls at her retreating back. She doesn’t need to be liked. She needs to be indispensable.
Riley makes cuts along the back legs to leave the belly fur intact, then pulls the hide off the bodies.
The rabbits slip out of their skins, buttery smooth.
She guts the carcasses and puts the skins to one side, ready to be scraped and cured.
Soon the twelve rabbits lie side by side on the trestle table, naked red things, like a neat row of just-born babies.
She hasn’t seen anyone at Nowhere wearing fur; she guesses that no one here knows how to treat a hide. Riley can help with that. She touches the soft grey fur with a finger then turns the hide over and starts to scrape it free of fibres. The activity soothes her.
‘I came to see if you need help.’
A girl stands in the doorway, a large cooking pot held to her left hip. She is younger than Riley. Twelve maybe. She’s so thin all over, it seems like if she turns sideways, she’ll disappear. A large overbite gives the impression that her mouth is pursed in thought.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think Midnight wanted you to mess that up,’ the girl said, putting the rabbits neatly in the pot. ‘But you’re really good. I’m Dawn.’
‘Riley.’
‘If you’re all done, come to the kitchen.’
They walk through the long grass, cicadas singing. The sharp peaks rear up, all around.
‘How did people used to get in and out of here?’ Riley asks. ‘Before.’
‘The main gate,’ Dawn says, kicking a rock ahead of her. ‘But Noon welded it shut. No one can come get us, now. The fly is the only way in or out.’
In the trees to the left, there’s a large empty pit carpeted with rotting leaves. There’s something naked and bad about the big hole yawning in the ground. Riley thinks, plague pit, bodies, elephant trap.
Dawn sees and she laughs. ‘It’s a swimming pool.’
‘Oh.’ Riley can see glimpses of shattered blue tile, now, beneath the leaves.
‘And it’s the prison,’ Dawn says. ‘If you mess up, Noon throws you in there and puts snakes in with you.’
Riley freezes for a second and Dawn hits her on the arm.
‘Not really. We did keep Samson in there for a while.’ She smiles. ‘Samson was a piglet. He was delicious.’
The kitchen is an old shed with a hole in the roof.
It’s warm. In the centre of the earth floor is a pit filled with glowing embers.
An intricate rigging of ironwork sits above it.
There are pulleys and spits and hooks. Dawn rubs the rabbits with salt, wild garlic and herbs, and pours something into the bottom of the pot that smells like beer.
Then she puts the lid on and shoves the pot out onto the rigging, over the heat.
‘Four hours,’ she says happily. ‘Then the meat will just fall off the bone. What?’ she added, seeing Riley’s look. ‘I like to cook.’
‘Great. I like to eat.’
‘I hope you like carrying trash to the compost too.’
They labour across the meadow in the sun, the bag of food waste heavy and warm between them. The compost lies at a distance in a shallow pit in the shadow of two tall crags. It reeks, healthy and humid.
Riley and Dawn work through the morning and early afternoon.
There’s always something to be done when you live in the wild.
Riley’s least favourite activity is shovelling soil into the earth toilet.
Prove your worth, she thinks, wrinkling her nose.
Despite herself, Riley is unspooling like wire.
It’s been so long since she did anything normal like talk to another girl.
After they went to Cousin, Riley kept herself to herself at school. Cousin didn’t approve of friends.
Dawn whistles really well, the sound reaching hard and high into the air and Riley scrubs and sweeps to the tune of half-remembered country songs.
It feels like those Saturday mornings with Mom when Riley was younger.
They would clean the house, talking all the while, Blondie pouring from the old record player in the living room.
Other Saturday mornings they went to the woods together.
Riley still feels her mother’s hand on her back sometimes, feels her quiet whisper in her ear – showing her how to train the rifle, their hands wrapped around the stock, holding in the mist of their breath in the cold air.
That was before all the mornings went bad.
‘How did you get here?’ Riley asks Dawn.
‘My parents,’ Dawn says, cheerful. ‘They took me up to the pass one day. Told me to get in the car, we were going for a picnic. I should have known – they never took me out anywhere. A picnic? Plus it was winter. Anyway my dad stopped the car at the top of the pass and my mom got out and opened the back door and pulled me out onto the road. Then she got back in the car and they drove away. That was two years ago. They liked drugs. I think they couldn’t afford to feed me anymore.
Midnight found me.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t miss them. They’re probably dead now.’
‘It’s lucky she found you,’ Riley says. She remembers the cold up there, the way the white whirling air seemed both inside her and out, as if she hadn’t been there at all.
‘Noon sends someone to walk the trails every few days. There’s almost always something on the highest part of the road through the pass.
Pets, usually. Dogs. A frozen sack of kittens.
Why do people always leave them just there?
Maybe if the snow kills them, the owners feel like it’s not their fault.
So far I think I’m the only human being who’s been dumped.
’ She clears her throat. ‘Midnight found me on the road,’ she says.
‘But it was Nowhere that sent her there – to bring me home, where I belong.’ A second later her grin is back. She squints up the sky.
‘Nearly sundown,’ she says. ‘Time for worship.’
Riley nods.
Dawn looks at her for a moment. ‘Noon told me that you don’t want to worship – but it’s not god, you know. It’s more … it’s our own stuff.’
‘Sometimes that’s even worse,’ Riley says.
Things with their mother had been bad for a while so when Riley walked into the kitchen and saw her bent over Oliver, she was glad, at first. She thought, oh, good, they’re bonding.
Mom was ok with Riley but she had always been a little – puzzled by Oliver.
Like she couldn’t remember ordering him and it was too late to send him back.
Lately, Riley often caught her looking at him in silence.
There were things in that look which Riley didn’t like.
So she was glad to see Mom and Oliver together like this.
The sun lit them in a halo against the picture window.
Riley saw the board laid out on the Formica table.
The letters and numbers, waiting for the dead to speak through them.
That wasn’t unusual. She had been spending more and more time with the Ouija board recently.
Later Riley wonders if it wasn’t the first step – her mother prying open the gate to death just a crack, which she would soon open fully and walk straight through.
A sound from Oliver made all of Riley alert.
She saw something gleam in her mother’s hand.
It was a pin. Her mother was piercing Oliver’s little thumb.
A crimson bulb swelled up where it sank in.
Mom wanted Oliver’s blood for the board.
She had begun to speak about this recently – how the board wanted blood.
Oliver’s face was all squeezed up, but he wasn’t crying, he was trying to be brave.
‘You can’t use family blood,’ Mom said brightly to Riley. ‘If I want to talk to your father I need someone unrelated. Otherwise I would have asked you.’ She said this as if Riley was correctly disappointed at the loss of this opportunity.
In this moment Riley understood the expression ‘blind with rage’. It would be easy to assume it’s a metaphor or whatever. Riley saw that it wasn’t because her world went black. Everything stopped existing for a second.