Demons (5 page)

She became increasingly withdrawn and strange. She stopped going to school, or went
for a few hours only when it suited her. The principal contacted her mother who said
Elena was sick, then as she always did her mother went straight to her room and yelled
at her to get better.

Elena lived in her bedroom, a spartan space now bereft of the usual teenage clutter.
She took her tablets and rubbed the creams into her skin and bought her own organic
food which she ate in there, mostly raw. Without any modern gadgetry to rely on she
quickly lost contact with the few friends she’d had—including me, said Hannah.

Then one day, after the usual visit to O’Breen, outside the shopping centre where
she habitually changed buses, she let her usual bus go, waited at the stop for a
while, and caught the bus to the city instead. She got off at the depot near the
station, bought a ticket and boarded another bus that would drop her seven hours
later in the tiny coastal town where her uncle owned a small timber cottage where,
when they were young, she and Ty would spend the holidays, collecting shells on the
beach and fishing in their uncle’s boat at dawn on the vast, mirror-smooth lake.
She knew where the key was, under the rock, and let herself in.

The cottage smelled shut up and musty—her uncle had been sick in hospital lately
and had let the property go—but Elena soon threw open the windows and doors to let
the sea breeze in. She spent that first evening eating the woody carrots she’d pulled
out of the garden (they must have self-seeded, as had an ad hoc mix of potatoes,
pumpkins and spinach), sitting on a kitchen chair outside the front door looking
at the pelicans skimming the lake and listening to the surf on the other side of
the bar. The sunset was beautiful. She slept that night a peaceful sleep and woke
for the first time in months without a headache.

The cottage sat on a small hill above the lake that fed through a narrow channel
into the sea. The upper reaches of the lake branched out into rivers and creeks,
poking their way up, narrower and narrower, into the high mountains behind. (She
and her brother had gone with her uncle one day up one of these rivers, paddling
and then dragging their canoes until, high up, they reached the source.) There was
a grassy slope below the house with a few tea-tree bushes on it and a clump of denser
tea-tree where the land met the water. The nearest house was half a kilometre away.
At night you could hear the seagulls squawking and the possums scratching in the
roof, and beneath all that, like a low drone, the sea. Aside from the occasional
sound of a car gearing down to get up the hill on the far side of the point, there
was nothing human out there.

The house was built in the eighties from scavenged timber and tin, and the furniture
and fittings all dated from that time. The next morning, after curling up on the
couch in a sleeping-bag she found rolled up in the top cupboard, Elena set to work
cleaning the house and getting rid of anything she might be allergic to: the clock
radio beside the double bed, the portable radio on top of the fridge, the microwave
oven, the television, all the old soaps and shampoos and other toiletries from the
bathroom; the synthetic curtains, cushions and bed linen. She put all this stuff
out in the shed where her uncle kept his boat, the junk he had collected and the
timbers and windows left over from when the house was built. She left the fridge
in the kitchen—it was too heavy to move—but she didn’t turn it on. Last of all she
gave the house a clean from top to bottom, but with warm water only, heated on the
old wood stove, using a cotton singlet. There was a packet of beeswax candles in
the bottom drawer in the kitchen and one by one she set these candles around the
house.

That afternoon she went into the garden, wearing the old straw hat she found in the
shed, and started pulling out weeds. It felt good out there. It was one thing, she
thought, to be told you can’t tolerate anything new and artificial and that you must
be among only natural things, but it was another to live it. She felt an energy,
a vigour, she’d not felt in ages. Even her mood had changed; she was no longer grumpy,
pissed off with everyone, disillusioned about who she was; she just
was
, here, now,
out in the garden, under the sun, pulling weeds on this bright day. And always, above,
behind, beyond all this was the soothing sound of the sea, so unlike the things in
the box with the rubber band around it (
Without me how will you wash your hair? Without
me how will you drive your car? Without me how will you be entertained?
) that to
think of it swelled her soul to twice its normal size.

She spent a good while out in the garden, she seemed to have slipped through a hole
in time and come out at a place where clocks didn’t count; the day stretched out
in front of her; she felt vibrant, alive. When she was tired she’d sit down on the
step; when she felt like digging, she’d dig. The soil was sandy loam and the spade
cut it easily; before she knew it she had, as well as weeding the five beds already
there, dug out the grass and mounded up another five, moulding the furrows between
them.

At around four o’clock that afternoon she stopped, stood back to admire her handiwork,
then washed herself at the garden tap. She took off her top and bra, unafraid, splashed
water under her arms and breasts, turned the tap up full and let the water hammer
at the nape of her neck. She dried off, pulled on one of her uncle’s old collared
shirts from the cupboard—pure cotton, lemon yellow, green buttons and green stitching
on the cuffs—and set off around the point into town.

Can I ask you something? said Lauren, quietly. Sure, said Hannah. How old is she
now? She’s just turned eighteen, said Hannah. Everyone waited. Hannah went on.

The town was small, she said, a main street with a parking island, a pub, a shopfront
supermarket, a little restaurant-café, a real estate agent, a takeaway, a gift shop,
a tackle shop, and that was about it. It was after five o’clock now, and the town
was actually pretty lively, with the sound of voices and horse-racing coming out
of the open door of the pub and people walking in and out of the supermarket. A few
others were sitting at the tables outside the café; a tanned man in a suit outside
the real estate office gave Elena a smile as she passed.

She had enough money to stock up on basic supplies, after that ran out she wasn’t
sure what she’d do. Already, as she approached the supermarket, she could smell the
exhaust fumes and that vague smell—what was it?—of towns and cities: concrete, asphalt,
steel, plastic. It sat right up the back behind her temples and she could already
feel the headache coming on. She turned into the supermarket, intent on getting what
she needed as quickly as she could. She bought bread, milk, butter, unbleached toilet
paper, a cigarette lighter (she couldn’t use matches because of the sulphur), more
candles, vegetables from the little organic section in the fridge at the back and
a dozen organic eggs. At the counter a young man served her, he must have been about
her age, and Elena couldn’t help being conscious of her wet, uncombed hair, her uncle’s
shirt and the red rash she could already feel coming up around her neck. As he packed
Elena’s things into the box he kept his eyes down but when he looked up to give it
to her she could see he was blushing. Maybe he had allergies too? Thanks, come again,
he said, stupidly. Elena nodded and smiled.

The box was heavy and it was a long way back to the house but with the sun setting
over the lake and the sky full of seabirds squawking and the air so clean and clear
that you could actually
feel
it pushing the bad air out, Elena didn’t feel the weight;
or rather, felt it as a good thing, and the walk home through that alive and raucous
twilight as the start of something good. Back at the house she prepared to settle
in; she lit the beeswax candles, then the stove, and cooked herself an omelette with
some vegetables cut into it. She couldn’t sleep on the bed with its nylon mattress
so she took a candle out to the shed and found the rope hammock she and her brother
used to lie in under the tree and strung it across the lounge room, anchored at either
end by tying a knot and closing the window on it. She put the cotton and duck-down
sleeping-bag on it for a mattress, and a cotton sheet and woollen blanket from the
linen cupboard over that. She blew out the candles about nine.

In that small house in that faraway town Elena settled into a new routine that took
its cue from nature. She woke early, ate a bowl of yoghurt or oats with warm milk,
sitting on a kitchen chair in the sun, then she tidied the house and dug the garden.
At around three each afternoon she would take a nap in the hammock in the lounge
room, letting herself drift through mostly innocuous dreams until a bit after four
when she would start thinking about dinner. The meal was always simple, made from
the stuff she picked from the garden or had bought at the supermarket. While the
evenings were still warm and the days long she ate outside at the little fold-up
table on the veranda that looked down the grassy slope towards the lake. She always
brought a couple of candles out there, stuck into her uncle’s old empty beer bottles,
and would often stay until the sky darkened and the birds went crazy and the clumps
of tea-tree and the grassy slope and the mountain range beyond turned ink black and
all that was left was the glow from the lake. Then she would sit out there by candlelight,
looking and listening for mosquitoes, slapping her skin and holding her hand up to
see what she’d got (she couldn’t use repellent and had thrown the can out when she
cleaned the shed), doing little else except occasionally looking out across the lake
where on the nights when there were no clouds and a decent moon a silver sheen spread
like sheet metal, broken only by the occasional fish breaching the surface or a bird
paddling past or by a ripple from the breeze.

She wasn’t happy, that would be a strange thing to say, but she’d found a way to
be content. She didn’t know how long this contentment would last, though compared
to her moodiness, anger and confusion back in the city this might be as close to
happiness as she’d get. She knew they’d come looking for her eventually, all those
people who wouldn’t have missed her before, who wouldn’t have even known she existed.
But she was a whole day’s travel away, had got almost to the border; if she kept
her head down she’d be okay for a while. Maybe, she thought, she could take some
of this good health back to the city with her? Maybe tell others what she’d found?
You can’t preach for one life over another but you could always show by example.

So that was it, those were her days. Most mornings early she would take the old rod
and reel from the shed and the bucket of sandworms she’d pumped at low tide and fish
off the jetty below the house until she caught something for dinner. (At first the
reel didn’t work; she took it apart, piece by piece, then cleaned and lubricated
it with oil.) There were mussels, too, out on the rocks, and crabs in the estuary
shallows. On moonless nights the prawns would run from the lake to the sea on the
tide and all you had to do was stand near the entrance, look out for their frightened
phosphorescent eyes and scoop them up in your net.

One morning when she was sitting outside drinking tea at the table a figure appeared
at the bottom of the grassy slope where the track wound its way around the lake.
She’d sometimes see fishermen walking that way, their rods glinting in the early
light, but this figure didn’t have a rod and had now started to walk up the slope
towards her. He pushed his way through the tea-tree and stopped at the fence.

Hello there! he said. Beautiful morning! I’m Lyall from around the corner. It was
awkward. Elena sort of half smiled and waved. There was an excruciating pause before
Lyall returned the wave and said: Well, have a nice day! Then he headed off back
around the track.

The next morning at the same time he was there again, waving, calling out, and this
time crawling through the wire and walking a few metres up the slope. You’re new,
aren’t you? he said. Did you buy Peter’s place off him? Elena told him Peter was
her uncle, he wasn’t well; then she left a long pause so Lyall might get the hint
to go. Instead he walked a few more metres up. If you ever need a hand with anything,
he said, just give us a yell, I’m only around the corner. For the first time Elena
got a good look at him: a small-town bogan, early thirties, maybe older, with wiry
hair cut into a mullet and a salt and pepper goatee beard. Even from that distance
Elena could see the missing teeth.

One day Lyall didn’t come from the track but appeared suddenly from around the corner
of the house. Elena was just finishing her breakfast, staring at the lake which on
that morning held a soft green sheen. Lyall’s hair was wet and his goatee trimmed
and he smelled of shampoo and aftershave. Good morning, he said, bouncing on his
heels. You keep saying you’ll let me do things around the house for you but you never
invite me up, so I’ve invited myself up anyway. After that there was a heavy silence.
Look, I’m just being a good neighbour, said Lyall, glancing around for a chair to
sit on; it’s a small town and pretty well everyone knows everyone so it’s best we
know each other too. I’m Elena, said Elena, and she stood up to shake his hand. It
was hard and callused, like an old man’s hand. I’ll get you a chair, she said. She
went inside and came back out with a chair and set it down beside the table for him.
Lyall sat on the very edge with his knees splayed and his hands gripping his thighs.
So what’s your story? he said. Everyone here’s got a story. You don’t end up miles
from anywhere like this unless you’re running away from something. Me, it was a bad
marriage and then just badness generally. What about you?

Elena told him. She told him about the situation at home then how she fell sick and
dropped out of school and didn’t know what was wrong with her. She told him about
O’Breen and described what went on in his room in great detail. She listed her allergies
and the symptoms of each. I’m allergic to the modern world, she said; not enough
to kill me but enough to stop me and the modern world getting on. Even your aftershave,
now, she said, and your shampoo; they’re making me feel not quite right. So I jumped
on a bus and came here. Maybe it’s temporary, I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet.