Two Wolves (8 page)

Dad sawed back and forth on the rabbit's left hind ankle with an old fishing knife. It made a
hawk
ing sound, like a dentist sawing a tooth. Then the foot came away and he held it out for Ben, who stepped back toward the fire that Mum was trying to start.

‘What? It's good luck,' Dad said.

It didn't look like good luck to Ben. He wondered who came up with the idea that rabbits' feet were good luck. Surely they were better luck if they were still attached to the rabbit. Imagine if rabbits decided that human feet were good luck, so they started sneaking down chimneys and through cat flaps and gnawing off people's feet in the night. A foot would be an extremely heavy thing for a rabbit to carry around and there would be millions of people walking around on ankle stumps.

Ben looked down at the rabbit. It was lying on its side on a low tree stump at the edge of the clearing. Dad was using the stump as a chopping block. The rings of the tree, stained with blood, seemed to radiate from the rabbit. The one brown eye that Ben could see looked alive but the rest of the animal was floppy and lifeless.

Dad poked the foot at him again and Ben looked into his father's eyes. They seemed less alive than the rabbit's. The Y-shaped vein stuck out on his forehead again.

‘No thanks,' Ben said.

Dad shook his head. It was a shake that Ben had come to know meant ‘What's wrong with ya?' or ‘Big baby'.

‘I'll keep it myself then,' Dad said with a grin, and he stuffed the bloody foot into his pocket. ‘Let's cook Bugs Bunny up. I'm hungry.'

Ben watched his father. ‘Why are we eating rabbit? We've got proper food inside.'

Dad did not respond.

Ben slumped down against a nearby tree as Mum tried to help Dad gut and skin the rabbit. Mum and Dad bickered as Dad made mistakes. Eventually Mum took over. Olive hid in the cabin. She had decided when she was three that she was vegetarian and had not willingly eaten meat since. Mum had once tried to trick her by hiding chicken in a pie with lots of vegetables but when Olive found out she refused to eat anything but corn thins for a week.

Ben sketched the rabbit as he had seen it on the tree stump – the glistening brown eye, the tree rings radiating from its body. He had never really thought that much about where meat came from, about the process of an animal becoming food. Did it become meat as soon as it died or only once it was ready to be cooked? Or was it always meat?
Am I meat?
he wondered.
Ben squeezed his bicep.
Maybe I am
, he thought.
I hope they don't eat me.
Somehow, in supermarkets, the fluorescent lights and the shiny, cling-wrapped parcels made you forget.

Dad put the rabbit on a stick and held it over the fire. Or over the smoke, really. There weren't any flames. Just some warm sticks that he kept prodding and blowing on and trying to spark into life. He sat on the edge of the chopping stump, turning the rabbit occasionally, watching Ben. ‘What do you write in that book?'

‘I'm not writing,' Ben replied.

‘What do you
draw
?'

‘Just stuff.'

‘Where'd you get it?' Dad squinted as the wind changed and smoke blew into his eyes.

‘It was Pop's.'

Dad snorted. He had always been jealous of Pop, even though Pop had been dead for years. He had died when he was fifty-six and had become a mythical figure, frozen in time. The stories about him became bigger each year: the way he helped people and gave his money away to friends who needed it. And how he did electrical work but didn't bother charging his customers. Nan said the one person that Pop had never had enough time for was his son.

The curling smoke changed direction again and Dad eyed Ben for a while but didn't say anything more.

Ben was starving. His father had already said he wasn't allowed to eat anything until the rabbit was cooked. When he was finished drawing he wrote down the interrogation scene that he had imagined between the Ben Silver in his movie and Dario Savini, zombie thief.

BEN

How did you get like this?

DARIO

Like what?

BEN

Like this. Don't you want a normal life? Kids in school, soccer on weekends, a regular job?

DARIO

I don't have a choice.

BEN

Everybody has a choice.

DARIO

I am who I am. I'm a monster.

It was another hour before Dad announced that lunch was ready. Ben looked up from his writing, his back still against the hoop pine. The last thing he wrote, in big letters, in the middle of a page was:

Can your own parents kidnap you? I think mine have. Help!

Dad held up the rabbit on a stick – a charred black lollipop of meat. Then he took to it with a knife.

‘Come try this,' he called, offering Ben a lump of burnt rabbit. Ben didn't know which body part it was but it did not look good.

‘I'm all right,' Ben said. He was trying to sound tough and manly while still refusing to eat the meat. He didn't like it when Dad said he wasn't tough enough.

Dad smiled and bit into the rabbit himself, smothering his teeth and lips in charcoal.

‘Good eating,' Dad said but, even from five metres away, Ben could tell that it looked red-raw on the inside. Dad jawed on it with his side and rear teeth, twisting the meat around and around.

‘Tastes like turkey. There's scrub turkeys around here too, y'know.'

Perfect,
Ben thought.
Let's eat them all. Anything that moves, let's eat it.

‘Come on, everyone,' Mum said, laying out salad and bread on a couple of towels close to the fire. ‘Olive!' she called.

Olive appeared at the cabin door and took a wide arc across the clearing, as far away from Dad and the rabbit-fail as she could. She sat on the towel as Mum buttered bread for sandwiches.

‘Your fingers look sore,' Ben said. Mum's nails and the tips of her fingers were bitten and raw.

Dad brought the meat over, carved up on a dark green metal plate. He sat on a camping chair next to the towels and put the plate with the other food.

‘Ray, that's not cooked,' Mum said.

‘Yes, it is.'

‘No. It's not. It's disgusting. You've spent nearly three hours preparing and cooking that and look at it.'

‘Oh well. Don't have any. All the more for me,' he said. But he didn't eat any more right away and Ben saw him drop the gristly piece that he had been chewing to the ground when he thought no one was looking. At home Golden would have snapped it up. Ben missed her.

Dad wiped charcoal off his lips and the others made salad and cheese sandwiches. As Ben reached for the tomato Dad snatched his notebook up off the towel.

‘Let's have a look at this,' he said.

Ben turned, dropped his slice of tomato and grabbed for the book. ‘No.'

Dad pulled it out of Ben's reach. ‘I want to know what you spend all your time writing in your little book. Wonder if there's anything about passports?'

‘Give it to me.' Ben's mind raced with the things he had written in there, the evidence he had gathered. He lunged for Dad, who palmed him off and stood, walking back a few steps.

He cleared his throat. ‘Very interesting.'

‘Give it back to him, Ray,' Mum said.

Ben stood and followed Dad to the other side of the fire pit.

‘Zombie thief, eh? Oh, and a little poem. How sweet. My son, the poet.' He flicked roughly through the pages.

‘Give me it!' Ben said in a low, threatening voice. He threw himself at Dad, who shoved him away.

‘Just give it to him,' Mum said. ‘He should be allowed some privacy.'

‘Hang on,' Dad said, backing off again. ‘What's this? “Pulled over by cops”. “Bag full of money”. “Sold the wreckers”. It's a diary, too.'

Ben ran at his dad and tackled him to the sandy ground near the smouldering fire pit. He wanted to stop but he couldn't. He grabbed at the notebook like a wild animal, screaming as Dad tried to get away but Ben wouldn't let him. That notebook was the one place Ben could be himself.

‘Ben! Don't,' Mum said, standing. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Ben!' Olive squealed.

Dad grabbed him by the arms and twisted his body, rolling him over and pinning him to the ground, sitting on his stomach. The notebook lay on the sand.

‘Don't you EVER do that to me again, you hear?' Dad shouted, spit flying from his mouth.

Ben struggled against his father's grip. Tears stabbed the backs of his eyelids. Dad gave a final, firm push-down on his arms, then stood. Ben rolled and reached for the torn notebook but Dad was too quick, sweeping it up off the ground.

‘I don't know what you know but I'm about to have a good read of this and find out. Keep your nose out of other people's business!'

Dad headed toward the cabin. A deep growl spewed from Ben's mouth and he stood to give chase, but Mum ran across, intercepting him, holding him across his chest. ‘It's okay,' she said, her voice shaking and breaking. ‘Let it go. Let him have it.'

‘You are the worst father in the whole
world
,' Ben shouted.

‘Boohoo!' Dad said as he disappeared inside the cabin, slamming the door.

Ben breathed hard, then screamed into the tall trees above. Everything he had written, all his thoughts and the evidence he had gathered in the past few days. He silently cursed what an idiot he had been to write everything down and to leave it lying around. Ben had no idea what his father would do once he had read the notebook, and he did not want to find out.

Ben ground his teeth as the dream thundered through him. In his mind's eye he was at the creek floating on his raft. He looked across the smooth water to find something watching him from the bank. He kept his eye on the face of the thing as he bobbed gently up and down. The wolf had his father's eyes and it stole quickly into the water. Ben began paddling as the animal swam quickly to the edge of the raft. He crawled to the far side to get away but the raft tipped. He fell in, panicked, and began to swim but he could only swim in circles around the raft, and soon he felt a slicing, twisting pain in his left calf. He kicked and fought the wolf but it was too strong. He could not overcome it. Would never. As water filled him, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Where's Mummy?'

Ben's eyes jerked open. He heaved air into his lungs.

‘Are you okay?' Olive asked, leaning over him.

His jaw was sore. It was light outside. The cabin was hot. He looked to Mum and Dad's empty mattress. He sat up.

‘The door's locked and the car isn't there,' Olive said.

Ben stood and trampled awkwardly over his mattress toward the window. She was right. No car.

‘What do you mean it's locked?' he asked, stepping over Mum and Dad's mattress. He pulled the door handle. It moved a little but did not open, which was impossible because Dad had broken the lock on the night they arrived. Ben pulled hard and something clanked outside but it would not shift.

‘They must have gone to get breakfast,' Olive said.

Ben looked at all the food stocked up on the shelf.

‘Yeah. Maybe.' Ben searched around for a note from Mum. She always left a note. He lifted up the mattresses to see if it had slipped underneath. He shook out the sleeping bags.

He tried the door again. It flexed and jangled. A chain. A thick chain. He walked back to the window and twisted the rusty metal latch. He hooked his fingers through the two metal rings at the bottom of the window and pulled upward, feeling a thick Y-shaped vein form on his forehead. The window was jammed and swollen from years without use.

‘Maybe Dad took the car and Mummy's gone to get water at the creek. Maybe she'll be back in a minute,' Olive said.

Ben thought of yesterday, when he had stood up to his father. He had asked too many questions when they were out hunting. He knew too much. And he had written it all down. He felt panic rise from his stomach to his chest and throat. He wished he was at Nan's, eating Kingston biscuits out of her tall yellow biscuit barrel. He didn't care how much cat fur was in among the biscuits or if there were weevils. He wanted to tell her everything while she drank a big cup of tea from her purple mug. She would know what to do. She always knew.

‘Let's call out,' Olive suggested.

‘Okay,' said Ben.

‘Mu-u-u-um!' She listened for a few seconds. ‘Mum!'

Nothing.

‘Mum-my!'

She waited.

‘Help me!' she snipped at Ben.

So he gave a half-hearted call. ‘Mum!'

‘Mu-u-m-m-y-y-y!' Olive screamed.

They listened. Ben looked around. He eyed the high, broken window in the open roof area. It would be near-impossible to get to. Too small for him to squeeze through and probably too small for Olive. Broken glass hung from the top of the frame like stalactites.

Hungry.

Ben was not sure what time it was but it felt late, much later than his usual wake-up. He had been sent to the cabin after Dad had finished reading his notebook. He had not been allowed out for dinner and had gone to bed hungry – apart from the food he had stolen from the shelf when no one was looking.

‘Where are they? And why is the door stuck?' Olive asked.

‘I d'know,' Ben said. But he did know. He knew that his parents had not sold the wreckers. There was no break-in. This was not a holiday. The police wanted them for some reason and Ben's sloppy detective work had led to Olive and him being held captive.

Ben spied the esky in the corner of the room and lifted the lid. Ice, cheese, tomatoes, juice, cold meat wrapped in white paper, all floating in icy water at the bottom. He grabbed a large block of chocolate and shook off the water. He unwrapped it and snapped off a row. Caramel.

He looked at it, wondering if he should eat it. How much fatter would it make him? How delicious would it be? He could hear his mother's voice: ‘It's your choice. Don't blame me,' and he could hear the things kids sometimes said at school when they were picking teams. Ben was always goalie. ‘You just have to stand there and block the goal with your body,' they would say, laughing. Ben would laugh along too, but it wasn't that funny. And he remembered when the school had sent home BMI report cards – Body Mass Index. It was the only report where he had scored really high marks.

Ben shoved the chocolate into his mouth.

Knowing that it was Dad's made it taste especially good. He devoured the row, then another. He offered some to Olive. She shook her head, bottom lip out, arms folded.

Ben munched on another row, caramel spilling down his chin. Olive grunted. Her body stiffened.

‘What's wrong?'

She turned her back to him.

‘Are you angry at Mum and Dad?'

She didn't say anything. Ben put a hand on her shoulder. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she buried her head in his side. He wanted to say, ‘Don't be a baby,' but Olive never cried unless it was serious.

‘Just Mummy,' she said, muffled by sobs.

‘You're just cranky at Mum?'

She nodded and howled to herself.

‘Why?'

‘Because Dad's a big Maugrim-ish idiot but Mummy knows better than to be mean and bad. She's the worst mum in the whole world EVER!'

Ben held her for a few minutes, her warm tears making the side of his t-shirt soggy.

‘At least we can eat Dad's chocolate,' he said. He snapped off a row and offered it to her. She took it and ate it quickly, then asked for another. Ben wondered if he was already fatter.

He looked around the room, sighing. He had not seen a screen in days. Back in real life he watched TV, made movies or played games from three-thirty in the afternoon till nine at night. They always ate dinner in front of the TV. Dad would get angry if anyone tried to eat at the dining table when a good show was on. He said it was rude. When Ben stayed at James's house, they didn't even have a TV, which was weird. And Gus was only allowed to watch it on weekends. But, to Ben's family, TV was like bad glue. They needed regular doses to keep all the cracks hidden.

The roof of the cabin clicked and creaked, expanding in the sun. Rosellas made a mad tweeting racket in the pine trees behind the cabin.

‘I need to go to the toilet,' Olive said.

Ben needed to go himself. He leaned the air mattresses up against the wall and paced around the cabin, squeezing his bottom lip. How long would his parents be gone? Too long for Olive.

‘Where can I go?' she asked. ‘I'm going to explode!'

Olive went from not needing to go at all to nearly exploding every time. It drove Dad crazy, especially when they were driving.

Ben heard the creek in the distance and, for a moment, it seemed to flow through him, making him feel as though he might explode, too.

‘We have to smash the window,' Olive said.

‘No! Go in a cup.' Ben moved quickly to the shelf and grabbed her an orange plastic picnic cup that Dad had bought the day before.

‘I'm not a boy! I can't go in a cup,' she said.

Ben had already thought about smashing the window but what if his parents really had gone to get breakfast? What if Dad was coming back with cheese and bacon scrolls and strawberry milk to apologise for reading Ben's notebook?

‘We can't smash the window. They'll kill us,' he said.

‘Well, I'll already be dead from an exploding bowel.'

‘Bladder.'

‘What?'

‘Wee is held in your bladder.'

Olive punched Ben hard on the arm. ‘They can't just lock us in. Kids are people, too.' She picked up a saucepan and went to the window.

‘Don't!' Ben said. ‘They'll be so angry.'

‘They're gone!' Olive shouted. ‘They've left us to be eaten by lions and possums and . . .'

‘No, they haven't. Possums can't eat you and there are no lions in Australia.'

‘We saw –'

‘
Except
at the zoo,' Ben said.

‘Well, what if they escaped?' she said, raising the pan over her shoulder.

‘Stop!'
Ben grabbed her arm. ‘Let's . . .' He tried to think of something to distract her. ‘Let me tell you a story. It'll take your mind off it.'

‘Let me go or I'll bash you with the saucepan.'

‘Do you promise not to smash the window?'

‘Let. Me. GO!' she screamed and he dropped her wrist.

‘What about?' Olive said.

‘What?'

‘What's the story about?'

The saucepan hung by her side, threatening to rise again if Ben didn't come up with something good. He searched the room for inspiration. His backpack lay on the floor next to his camera, dead battery and the torn notebook. Dad had thrown it at Ben after reading it and told him that his detective work sucked.

Ben could tell her the story of Dario Savini, zombie thief, and Ben Silver, Sydney's toughest cop, but it seemed a bit dark. The ancient, dog-eared copy of
My Side of the Mountain
sat, cover up, on the floor near his notebook.

‘How about a story about a kid who has to survive in the wilderness by himself for a year, living in a tree.'

Olive dropped the saucepan to the floor with a
clang
and sat on one of the camping chairs, thumb in her mouth. She and Bonzo waited.

Ben breathed a stuttering sigh and picked up the book. He climbed onto the table, leaning his back against the wall next to the window. He began to read the author's note at the beginning – how when she was a kid she had packed up a suitcase and told her mother she was going to run away from home.

Over the next few hours, Ben and Olive unravelled the story of Sam Gribley, the kid who left home to live in the mountains for a year with only a weasel and a falcon for company. As he read the book aloud his mind pedalled ferociously in the background.

I hope it wasn't me who sent them away, with all my stupid evidence and notes. They'll come back for sure. They'll be back by lunchtime. I know they will.