farted, and the potato-ish smell drifted over to the girls and they giggled and paddled the air as though drowning. He ignored them.
The sunflower stalks were thick and bristly, and the faces of the flowers too large to be beautiful, collared with pointed amber petals. Dorothy helped shake the seeds from the carpety black flower heads onto a white canvas sheet that had been spread in the light outside the cookhouse. She and Evelyn worked together, alongside an older girl who had changed her name by deed poll to Name. Name had got her face tattooed. She had a heart-shaped face and the tattoo was a love-heart outline framing all her features, tapering to a point at her chin, making it clear that the phrase ‘heart-shaped face’ was inexact.
Name worked for hours in the vegetable plot, hoeing and raking and digging, muscled shoulders moving up and down from the bow of her collarbone. Always a marmalade cat followed her, padding around as though inspecting the work. The sisters weeded along the rows, dirt packed beneath Evelyn’s nails, ingrained in Dorothy’s knees, everyone humming to ‘Cheryl Moana Marie’. They chewed peppery nasturtium leaves and Name rubbed the clinging earth off two radishes with her big square thumb and passed them to the girls. She told them the story of Rapunzel as though it had really happened, or was an anecdote they might never have heard. Name smoked a lot of weed and from the way she talked it seemed she believed that the story was true. Later, in the privacy of their cabin, the Forrest girls agreed that they feared for her.
Days passed free of lessons and duties. Time belonged to the sunlight, and the Forrests’ stay might have been a week or several months. The kids played rounders into the twilight, and hung around the scarred wooden table in the cookhouse, playing gin rummy and trying to be invisible while the wimmin passed a joint between them and bitched about the patriarchy. In the afternoons the best place to dodge the working bees was in the stand of native trees surrounding the stream. The children waded through sticky long grass to get there, biddy-bids catching on their shorts, the small diamonds of grass-flower scales in their hair.
There were glow-worms in the bushes that edged the compound and in the darkness their clusters mirrored the sky above so that Michael wondered if he was standing the right way up. A giggle floated from him, answered by the low hoot of a night bird. His neck still felt hot and bruised where Rena had kissed him and he rubbed at it as though the fact of the event might go away. It was confusing to be repulsed by her, her old mouth, her tongue pushing into his mouth, the possum smell of her hair, but also to be pleased she liked him, even though he had that coughing fit from the marijuana smoke, eyes leaking and nose running, his chest on fire before the weed dooshed off in his brain like a slow-motion water bomb. The candle in Rena’s cabin had hardly lit the place and they’d sat side by side on the bed. After a few more puffs, the wetness of the cigarette paper where her lips had been, he’d dropped the joint and the fear of burning the cabin down flared in his mind but she kicked it aside uncaringly and kissed him.
Now he felt a sticky shame that an uncertain amount of time had passed before he jerked away – that his hand had risen to her breast because man he wanted to know what a woman’s breast felt like, it was one of his main life goals so far. Her throaty moan when he touched her was awful. He’d snatched his hand away and she put it back there, moved her fingers up between his legs, grabbed him and he wanted to stay there holy shit a woman was touching his dick but then her hand was on the back of his neck pushing his face towards her lap, she let go her grip a bit to pull her shorts down and he got to his feet and knocked over the enamel nursery-rhyme candle holder, the light source suddenly out. The door wasn’t where he’d thought and for a long few seconds he hit against the rough battened wall, feeling for a way out, Rena laughing huskily from the bed. And here he was in the darkness, mosquitoes