own liquid contents. The coop smelled of straw, which smelled of feathers, which smelled of bird-shit, which smelled of sticks. There were seven eggs in total and the next day there would be a similar number, and the day after that and the day after that. You would not ever be alone at the commune.
The eggs rolled and knocked slightly against the smooth walls of the plastic tub, blueness glowing onto them around the edges, light shifting over her as she carried the container across the yard to the kitchen, dewy grass cold and ticklish on her bare ankles where the path ran out.
For a while the commune had financed itself from the orchard, Faith told her, but that income ran down over the past few years, with industrial greenhouses reaching tentacles across the countryside and the new supermarket a closer drive for most people in the town, and stocking organic produce anyway. A homeopathic-remedies venture was not cost-effective. She had seen the dark-blue glass bottles on windowsills and lined up along skirting boards, sprouting lumpy beeswax candles or pale at the shoulders with thick dust. Michael went into cider and exploded the storage shed. It was agreed that the commune would no longer try to make money, but grow only the means of their own survival. No extra cash meant relying on their own skills for everything. ‘All right if you’re bunging a diff in a car,’ said Mike, who was washing the breakfast dishes, scrubbing hard at the encrusted rings where fruit from a batch of muesli had burned to the oven tray. ‘Not so hot if you need a crown replaced.’ That explained the missing tooth.
Thane’s partner had objected, and she moved out and started up a craft market in the city, the success of which mystified the remaining commune dwellers, given that it sold ironic macramé and peg dolls, nothing that would actually be any use. ‘What’s it for?’ Faith asked the air, scattering sunflower seeds over her plate of stewed rhubarb. ‘What’s a block of wood that looks like a piece of soap for?’ The rhubarb lay in coiled wet ropes in her earthenware bowl like someone’s hair.
‘What about Daniel?’ Mike asked. ‘You in touch?’
Flickered with adrenalin, caught out as always at the mention of his name, she told Mike that last she heard he’d gotten married. Adulthood was like this – your voice calm, your face normal, while inside, turmoil, your heart still seven, or twelve, or fifteen.
‘So, not since I wrote to congratulate them.’ Daniel’s reply had intimated a possible move back home, nostalgic in my old age . . . but María’s family are here. It hadn’t been the time to mention her divorce. Since then, whenever the urge to contact Daniel came over her, she resisted. He had a different life. A vine had grown over the kitchen window and been cut back, leaving a tattoo of broken black swirls. Dorothy picked at the insistent tendril that crawled under the windowpane, its bright greenness probing the room, pale green shoots emerging like arrowheads, or the tops of the spades suit in a deck of playing cards.
There’d been some serious upgrades to the ablutions block since their childhood, with pump bottles of lavender soap and warm indoor showers. The water gleaming on Rena’s young body in the sun. Cobwebs clung stickily in Dot’s hair. She pulled at them in the tin-plate mirror but something that her fingers transferred, oils or heat or dirt, made them glue up and harden. When she flossed her teeth the taste of blood came into her mouth. It was normal, when first among new people, to feel more alone; of this she was sure. Just a little bit longer: first to feel at home here, then to leave. Her hibernation from the world could not be permanent. She didn’t have the capacity of a Michael or a Thane.
Dimly she noticed shouting from outside and dropped her toilet bag to the floor. Waves of panic crashed through the sheet iron and the non-tanalised wood although the words were unclear; sounds ran together the way dogs sometimes barked, unbroken.
She saw the car before she saw Mike. He lay on the ground beneath it, under the front wheel, his leg pinned, and Thane stood over him by the open driver’s door, one arm reached into the car, hand on the steering wheel. Mike’s face was bright red – burning red. People stood around, someone clutching her own head, someone with