Read an excerpt from The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Natural Way of Things, is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. This is an extract from the book.
‘Who are you, the village idiot?’
There they were, in the middle of that day in their thick scratchy costumes, standing in a clump on the gravel. Ten girls, all their heads newly shaved (Yolanda felt again the cold snap of scissor blades near her ears, the hair landing in her lap like moths). All wore the same strange prairie workhouse tunic, the oat-coloured calico blouse. The rock-hard leather boots and coarse knitted socks, like out of some hillbilly TV show from the eighties. Or even older.
Yolanda stood thinking of the two stars she had seen in the night. Enormous headlights in the sky; one, as big as her fingertip, moving. Was this possible? In her drugged mind, she had thought it a spaceship come to save her.
The skinny man asked again if she was the village idiot, stepping up to stare right into her face. He was not much older than the oldest girl here – maybe twenty-five? The flaky skin on his long flat face was marked here and there with old acne scars. Now he was so close to her, Yolanda could see on his chin, just below the right corner of his mouth, the swell of a blind pimple beginning.
Already she knew better than to answer him.
He muttered to the ground for them to get in line. As he waited for them to shuffle into formation he pursed his lips sideways, gingerly pressing a fingertip to the rising pimple, and wincing.
One big girl, fair-skinned with fleshy cheeks and wide, swimmer’s shoulders, said irritably, ‘What? We can’t hear you,’ and then closed her eyes against the sun, hands on her hips, murmuring something beneath her breath. So she didn’t see the man’s swift, balletic leap – impossibly pretty and light across the gravel – and a leather-covered baton in his hand coming whack over the side of her jaw. They all cried out with her as she fell, shrieking in pain. Some of their arms came out to try to catch her. They cowered. More than one began crying as they hurried then, into a line.
The man Boncer cast an aggrieved look at them, as if they were to blame for the stick in his hand, then sighed. The big-cheeked girl rocked on her haunches and moaned, arms swaddling her head and jaw, which surely must be broken from the force of the belting. Yolanda waited for Boncer to move towards her, to send for first aid. To look worried. But he only stood fingering his pimple, until the girls either side of the beaten girl gently took her elbows and raised her to stand.
‘Now: march,’ Boncer said, petulant. Turning his brown leather stick in his hands, its hard, lumpily stitched seams like a botched wound. Like a scar that would make worse ones.
They stared at him in panic.
But another girl next to Yolanda, forehead shining with sweat, her gaze on the stick, began to swing her arms, marching on the spot. She knew what to do. As if she were leading a bunch of soldiers, not girls. Out of her small body came a scrawny little voice, crying: ‘ Left, left, left-right- left.’ Leading a – a battalion, her arms swinging high.
‘Ooh, yes!’ cried Boncer, skipping to her side. ‘That’s the way, ladies! Follow the army slut! You next, village idiot!’ He leaped along the line, clipping the girls’ leashes one to the other, then scurried to the front. He too began swinging his arms high and stomping out the rhythm, crying out left-right-left and leading the straggling line of beaten girls in their olden-day clothes out across the paddocks under the broiling white sun.
This, Yolanda knew, was true madness: she was entering it with these new sisters as sure with quiet awe as back in her childhood when she and Darren, seven and five, would step inside the cool dark of a beach cave at the end of the white sand when their mother took them to the sea each year.
Left-right-left.
Yolanda and Darren, stepping with their soft bare feet over the cold sea-washed pebbles into the watery cave, rippling half with fear and half with wonder.
*
The girls marched for two hours.
Yolanda held down panic by casting back through the years. She counted houses, schools, boyfriends, counted the years back to childhood again, till she reached the old flat in Seymour Road. Revisited her mother’s boxes of wax lining the musty hallway; other people’s hairs in the bathtub. The squashy green velvet couch piled at one end with the faded pink towels speckled with white bleach splotches. In their mother’s room, under the bed, the heavy porridge-coloured folding massage table that Gail would drag out into the lounge and snap into shape whenever she had a client.
The children never knew how she knew when a client would arrive, but Gail would say, ‘I’ve got Mrs Goldman coming at three,’ or, ‘Wendy Pung will be here in a minute,’ and the children would shift off their perches in the nests of the folded towels, and go into the bathroom to switch on the kettle, and then sit cross-legged on the floor to watch television while their mother ushered another thick-legged woman into the flat. Their childhood was the buttery smell of wax, the sound of sharp little rips and hissing breath as their mother tugged lumps of wax away and the women quietly gasped. Gail’s hands were smooth and cool and she patted and murmured over the women’s white skin, pulling their underwear this way and that. It was Yolanda’s job afterwards to melt the gobs of wax in the little battered aluminium pot on the electric stove, to fish out and throw away the cotton strips and to sieve the hot wax through the pantyhose into the big tin. (‘Of course it’s clean!’ her mother cried with fury, hands on her hips, at the health inspector that time, before she got the fine for running an illegal business.) All the coarse black hairs and the pale fine ones too, caught there in the stocking mesh.
*
Her boots began to scrape painfully at her heels through the damp socks. The only sound was the girls’ heavy, frightened panting as they marched, the trudge of their boots over the stony ground. And the fine, light tinkle of the leash-fasteners against the metal rings.
*
Sometimes her mother’s clients would lie on the table face up, their eyes closed and hands folded across their bellies while Gail basted their faces with custardy lotions, pressed wet cotton balls over their eyelids. Sometimes the women would chatter while Gail worked: about real estate, businesses that were closing, about their errant sons, the hospitalisations of their friends. Their voices were a pleasant purr beneath the cartoon soundtrack on television. Or sometimes the women would lie on their softly spreading bellies in their underwear while Yolanda’s mother massaged them, rolling the thick white flesh of their backs and thighs under her hands, working back and forth over their bodies, kneading flesh. These times Yolanda and Darren would lean backwards, silently, on their haunches to look at the woman’s face squashed into the padded oval hole of the massage table. The women’s eyes were always shut and their faces were flattened and stretched by the pressure of the surface, mouths wide and lips flat against their teeth, and they looked like those photos of the faces of astronauts going into space. Yolanda and Darren would smile slyly at each other as sometimes the women dribbled and made small grunting sounds as their mother worked away at them above. Occasionally one would fall asleep and begin to snore lightly, and those times even Gail would smile with the children.
When they were leaving at the end, almost every time, the women would glance across the room and then whisper to Gail, That girl of yours, my god. Sometimes it was people in the street who stopped and said, What a beauty. Made jokes about touches of the tar brush and how exotic and when she’s a teen and locks and keys and boys.
When the women had gone, the massage table was Spray- and-Wiped and folded away, slid under Gail’s bed once again, and towels were washed and the grumbling of the tumble dryer began in the bathroom, filling the flat with sweet-smelling, moist warm air.
