familiarity. Indifference. Forgetfully, he sometimes runs his hand across her ribs. If it’s early on in the week, a Monday or a Tuesday, he’ll say, ‘That’s enough then. That’ll do you for the rest of the week,’ and she’ll lean into his knees, blissful at the sound of his voice.
Little Hazel walks to the Leitchville Road to catch the school bus into Cohuna. Her shoes scuff through the dirt. She carries her metal school tin with a date scone rolling around inside it. The sun is already high and strong in the sky behind her. She turns out of the driveway and into the road. The air smells warm and wet and faintly ripe like fruit just on the turn – a mixture of sun-baked cow shit and algae ripening in the irrigation channels of the dairy farm next door. She looks warily at a row of magpies on the wire fence. They aren’t looking at her, but it is nearly swooping season so she puts her school tin on her head just in case. She can see Mr Mues leaning on his gate up ahead. Her arm is getting tired holding the tin in place so she tries to balance it for a few steps like an African, but it drops and she bends over to pick it up from the dirt.
‘Michael not going to school today?’ Mues calls out to her.
‘Nope. He’s sick.’
‘How’s he sick then?’ Mues has a pouchy face and red-rimmed eyes with too much of the inner lid, the inner workings, on display.
‘He’s got the runs.’
Mues nods sympathetically.
Little Hazel walks on and is almost out of earshot when he calls out to her again.
‘Do you want to come in for a minute and see my pony?’
She stops and considers. Mues’s place is a mess of rusty old machinery and kennels and laundries and packing sheds. She’s never seen a pony, but perhaps he keeps it inside, or perhaps it’s new? She hears him sniff behind her and the sound of the chain jiggling on the gatepost.
‘It’s a Shetland pony.’
She follows him into a rundown shed – dim and thick with flies. She keeps her distance from him. He’s busy with something in the corner. She thinks he is shielding the pony from her to make it more of a surprise. It must, she thinks, be very tiny, probably just a foal. She is trying to look around him, into the corner, when he turns, his trousers slide slowly down his legs, the end of his belt curves around his ankles like a tail and she sees that he is not wearing underpants. That he is holding his shirt up on purpose to reveal his dick, all raw and swollen pink. It is hoisting itself up with wobbly effort like a mechanical toy. Little Hazel frowns, tries again to look behind him for the pony, then returns her gaze to the dick. She looks at the spot on the roof that the dick is pointing to. There are a few cobwebs draped between the rafters and several small shafts of light beaming through the holes in the rusty iron. Little Hazel doesn’t scream, doesn’t feel sick, doesn’t run away. She just feels disappointed. Hugely disappointed. She thinks that it has all been pointless – the cutting-out of pictures from magazines, the books borrowed from the library. The drawings attempted, rubbed out, attempted again in her treasured scrapbook where the Shetland’s neck was always too long or the Shetland’s legs too thin, or she’d had to use blue for the tail as the black had run out. At that moment Little Hazel understands that she will never, ever, get a Shetland pony. Her life will be no different to everybody else’s – made up of cobbling things together that are misshapen, ill-suited, imperfect. That wanting something badly is not enough to get it. And adults are part of this pretence – they hold one thing in their hand and call it another. Hazel picks up her school tin and leaves. She isn’t even late for the bus.
Betty tries not to look at her reflection in the co-op window. She glances. There’s nobody about. She stands in front of the glass, pulls her stomach in and smiles. The puffy flesh of her cheeks rises up around her eyes and she is brought up sharp by the sight of herself so doughy, so exposed, like when her hair has just been cut and set and there is too much