GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019/20

SUSANNA GENDALL
‘Hunting’

THE BUSH WAS THE BEST PLACE TO HIDE. All we had to do was open the back door of Rachel Cowley’s garage and there it was, sloping out before us into eternity. We’d heard there was an end but we’d never found it. You could smell the bark just standing there.

Rachel was already running.

‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Hurry.’

I watched her long white legs disappear between one fern and another, branches giving way under her feet. Rachel liked running. She did gym and played netball and tennis and games like tag. I didn’t. But I always said yes so she wouldn’t know how different we were. We were best friends – this was more a fact than a truth; something we had been told our whole lives without knowing exactly how it was so.

I didn’t feel like running that day. I had noticed how my body sometimes rebelled from what it was supposed to do.

The birds were singing. I often wished there was something else, but birds were all we had. There was no track in the bush; we didn’t need one. You walked straight down and then a bit to the side. The hut was right in the middle. Because we had never found where the bush ended we couldn’t be sure that the middle was exactly where we had determined it was, but that’s what we called it: the middle.

When I got to the hut I could tell Rachel was angry with me by the way she was rearranging the food. Her back had a way of carrying anger. She could conserve it there over extended periods, and I had to work hard at behaving, doing everything she told me, playing the games she wanted to play, saying the things she wanted me to say, waiting for the moment at which she would allow its release. Sometimes I just wanted it to be over, so I would intentionally misbehave. I would express my own feelings and tell her that I didn’t feel like playing ball tag right now. I just wanted to stay where I was, lying in the grass. Rachel would jump on the opportunity to unburden herself and shout at me that I never wanted to do anything, that I was no fun, that she was going to ask her mother to call my mother and get her to pick me up. And she would run inside, leaving the door open so I could hear her running up the stairs to her mother’s bedroom. I would lie there basking in humiliation but mostly relieved that it was over; that we could begin again. I wondered if today would be one of those days where she’d save it up for later, allowing it to ferment a little before offering it to me.

‘You should have run. They could easily have spotted you.’

She was going through the kawakawa leaves like they were a pile of banknotes, taking one out every now and then and tearing it into tiny pieces like I’d seen my mother do with her cheques.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I twisted my ankle.’

‘No you didn’t.’

I sat down on the log. The spider web that had been woven between the two tea towels on the washing line was still intact.

‘We need more food,’ she said. ‘It’s your turn to go hunting.’

Sometimes slavery could heal my sins.

‘What if they see me?’

‘Put on the cloak – and don’t be long.’

We’d made the cloak several weeks earlier out of fern leaves and bits of moss but it had turned brown and limp and left smelly bits all over our clothes, quickly losing its original dignity as a regal camouflage and degenerating into more of a disgrace.

I draped the pungent cloak over my shoulders and took the basket off the hook. ‘Hunting’ was actually one of my favourite things to do at the hut. It was better than ‘tidying’ or ‘washing’ or ‘look-­out’ or ‘mending’, which were the other jobs. I scraped some sap off the black beech trunks and picked a few leaves. I crouched down when I heard my mother’s voice calling my name from the top of the hill. There were kowhai seeds in the moss and I picked up one and rolled it between my fingers. Something in me felt like breaking the silence that was being absorbed into the bush, calling out ‘I’m here!’ and running towards her voice. But that would have been the ultimate betrayal. My mother would go inside soon and have a cup of tea with Allison and we would be free to play. The cloak was scratchy on my neck.

When I got back, Rachel had set the table. I put the fresh kawakawa laves, the nasturtium flowers, the sap, the three mushrooms and the kowhai seeds on the plate with the pieces of chocolate she had broken up. Some of the anger had gone from her back but not all of it. She was scrutinising the plate.

‘What are those?’

‘Kowhai seeds.’

‘They look poisonous.’

‘I saw a bird eating one.’

‘So? If you saw a bird jump off a bridge would you do it too?’ It was unclear whether she was imitating her mother or telling a joke.

I took off the cloak and hung it back on the hook.

‘Let us be seated,’ Rachel said.

I sat on my log. I smelt like a dead tree.

‘Let us say grace,’ she said.

We said it.

‘Let us eat,’ she said.

We both wanted to eat the chocolate but there was a sequence we adhered to that was respected at all times. I reached over for a kawakawa leaf and took a bite, holding the chewed up pieces on my tongue. Then I bit off the end of a nasturtium and sucked the nectar out of it, allowing it to offset the peppery taste of the kawakawa. Rachel took a piece of sap and rolled it up in a leaf and bit into it. I took a kowhai seed and sucked it. Even though the bright yellow made it look sweet and lemony, it tasted like nothing. Neither of us touched the mushrooms, which we both knew were likely to kill us.

‘Now it’s time for pudding.’ Rachel said. She’d only taken one bite out of her rolled-­up sap. The rule was you had to finish everything you started. There were six chunks of chocolate on the plate, which meant three each. Rachel took her three pieces and cut them in half with the pocket knife so that she had six pieces. She was trying to confuse me. I put my three pieces all into my mouth at once, the pleasure of chocolate great and brief.

‘You’re greedy,’ she said.

She was still nibbling on her chocolate when she came outside and asked me what we should play. I was trying to push the pieces of moss together. We’d collected them to try and make a rug outside the hut but it looked more like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit together properly.

‘Maybe I should go. I heard my mum.’

‘Come on, just one game.’ There was chocolate in her voice.

We decided to play ‘Anne Frank’, which was our favourite game at the moment, although it wasn’t as good as it was in the beginning when we took turns being Anne.

Rachel put another piece of chocolate in her mouth.

‘You can be Anne,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had a turn for ages.’

Her kindnesses were irrational and unpredictable but I was careful not to dispute them.

‘Go into the attic.’

I went into the hut and sat in the corner being silent while she marched around it.

‘Now write in your diary,’ she called out.

I took the diary and pen out from the hiding-­place, careful as I reached across not to brush my arm against the walls of the hut. I flipped past the pages of Rachel’s handwriting onto a clean page and wrote today’s date in the left-­hand corner.

Dear Kitty,

Today we had to eat kowhai seeds for lunch. There is nothing else left. They are probably poisonous and we will die but what choice do we have? Daddy sprinkled some sugar on them and said they said he thought they tasted just like lemon barley sugars. Anyway, I would rather die from a seed than a —

‘Now you’re hungry. You have to get up to get something to eat.’

I put the diary softly down on the moss. I crawled silently over to the kitchen, moving the dry leaves out of my way as I moved. I wasn’t hungry at all, but I tore off a piece of kawakawa and sucked it, listening to Rachel’s marching feet. Then I crawled back to the corner.

‘What was that noise?’ Rachel stopped marching. ‘I thought you said there was no one else living here.’

There was a silent response.

‘Well, that was a big noise I just heard up there. You must have mighty big rats!’

Rachel listened carefully to another long, silent response. I could see her standing just outside the hut, pressing her long gun into the earth. She did drama on Wednesday afternoons.

‘Well, let’s just go up and have a quick look, shall we? I’m sure you’ve got nothing to hide.’

She suddenly burst into the hut, her gun hitting the doorway so some of the sticks we’d used to build it fell to the ground. I brought my knees up to my chest, trying to curl myself up into non-­existence.

‘Ah ha, what do we have here?’ She was still eating her chocolate.

‘You missed a part,’ I said.

‘A rat!’

‘You didn’t climb up the ladder.’

‘A very big rat.’

‘It was too fast – and I didn’t make any noise.’

‘A naughty, noisy rat!’

‘I didn’t make any noise! You’re supposed to wait until I actually make a noise!’

She pointed her long gun at me. The stick she’d found even had a trigger.

‘Get up!’

‘But it’s not fair! You didn’t give me a proper turn. I always let you have a long turn!’

‘Get up or I’ll shoot, you dirty little Jew.’ That part was not in the diary. We had never read about the other point of view.

She grabbed my arm so the diary fell out of my hands.

‘You don’t play fair! It’s not fair!’ I’d been trying not to cry but I became conscious of the salt lake rising up from within me.

‘You chose to hide and now you’ll have to pay the price. Turn around!’ She pressed the gun into my back. ‘Take small steps out of the attic. Don’t try and run or I’ll shoot.’

‘It’s not fair.’ My words sounded like they came from somewhere under water.

She pressed the gun harder into my back, its tip sharp like a pencil.

‘Walk!’

I did as she said, ducking to get through the doorway of the hut. It was beautiful outside – the sun had come out and remote strips of it glistened through the trees. We walked down past the biggest tree and across the bridge we’d built out of stones.

The sound of the stream receded. I kept walking past trees and over roots and leaves. I knew the names of most of the trees now – kauri, matai, beech, nikau, manuka, rimu – but they began to look the same. It was hard to tell if Rachel’s gun was still pressed into my back or it was just the pain that it had etched there. I kept walking on and on, the leaves and trees repeating themselves, until I finally passed out of existence.

After a while I got up and started walking back up the hill. The sun had gone and it became hard to see my feet. I wondered if the game was over yet. I could hear my mother’s voice. It sounded so small, just like a child’s.