Gillian Hagenus

Really, Tracie is a bit of a daredevil. This is something that Lola has discovered. Tracie likes ice skating the most, but it doesn’t give her the thrill she craves. So, when Toby comes into their bedroom and asks, ‘Wanna send Tracie down the hill?’ Lola agrees only because she knows Tracie is growing tired of the pool party.

‘Wait,’ Lola says. ‘Tracie needs to change.’

Toby is already waiting for them out the front. He is eating Uncle Toby’s Fruity Bites, dry, out of a snap lock bag—he’s always trying to say he invented them, on account of the name—and Lola asks if she can have some. Toby holds up the bag and considers the quantity before dropping two Fruity Bites into Lola’s hand. They walk to the driveway. Toby’s holding the Jeep by its window frame and Lola’s got Tracie all ready to go in her purple spangled ice-skating costume, her hair in a crooked ponytail—the best Lola could do on such short notice.

The thing about the driveway is that Lola and Toby’s house is built on a hill, so the driveway is on a very steep slope. When adults park their cars here, they’ve got to pull the handbrake extra tight, because if they don’t, their car will go rolling down the hill, over the road, and into the Ravine on the other side.

That’s what the Ravine does. It swallows things.

Lola knows this about the Ravine for  two reasons: reason one is because Lola’s parents always tell her and Toby they can play out the front, but just don’t go in the Ravine because it’s dangerous. Reason two is because it’s most likely what took their cat Noddy. Lola thinks about how Noddy never had a mum like she and Toby do—they found him behind the Para Vista Shopping Centre, next to the blue St. Vincent de Paul bins that vomit clothes and plastic bags from their mouths. They tried to give Noddy a good life, but he was a daredevil too, like Tracie. He loved exploring in the Ravine’s mouth and didn’t know not to go out on a day when the Ravine was dry and thirsting. It swallowed him for sustenance though, really, Lola thinks Noddy would have hardly satisfied the Ravine, him being only a small cat. It would be like eating only one chicken nugget. Or two dry Fruity Bites.

Lola hesitates at the top of the driveway because the Ravine is hungry again. Crouching across the road. Feasting on the light. Lola checks her Saddle Club watch and invents a time that feels right—it’s maybe five o’clock, maybe half past five, and the Ravine is darkening. It’s always the first place to go dark. Lola’s dad explains it like this: Remember that time we went up onto the roof, Lolly? And we could see all the way out to the ocean? Lola remembers. There were the tops of gum trees stuck out from the Ravine like a witch’s crooked fingers, the houses on the other side, the distant hills of the landfill, all brown like grandma’s teeth, and then the blue, blue ocean. Largs Bay maybe. Or Semaphore—though, squinting, she couldn’t tell if there was a Ferris wheel or not. Her Dad explains: The ravine is kind of like a hole. The land is much lower than all the rest, which means when the sun goes down, way out there on the beach, the lowest places are the first to lose the light.

Looking at it now, Lola is certain the light is lost only because the Ravine steals it.

Even so, Toby is committed to sending Tracie down the hill. The game is very simple and works like this: one of them sits at the top with the Jeep, and one sits at the bottom to be the catcher. The one at the top puts Tracie in the Jeep and lets go when the catcher is ready, and Tracie drives down the hill.

Lola is almost always at the top because Toby doesn’t trust her reflexes. The concrete of the driveway is rough on her bare legs and still cradles the day’s heat. Toby sits cross-legged in the gutter, arms out like a goalkeeper. Lola installs Tracie in the driver’s seat and levers her arms at the wheel. Tracie looks determined, daredevil eyes fixed firmly out the windshield. Toby calls 3, 2, 1, and Lola releases.

Immediately, Tracie starts to drive the Jeep wide, outside of the reach of Toby’s arms. No, Tracie!

There are no seatbelts in the Jeep.

The purple wheels rattle. Tracie’s ponytail jumps as the Jeep kicks off the end of the driveway and onto the road, jolting at speed across the cracked tar. The Ravine waits with its mouth open. Here comes the chew-chew train.

Tracie crashes into the curb on the other side of the road and the back wheels lift and carry over, capsizing the car and trapping Tracie underneath. Lola holds her breath and waits for the Ravine to reach out its snaking fingers and snatch Tracie from the wreckage. She already knows the sounds Tracie would make going down. Lola had lost a half-deflated netball to the Ravine in a very similar game last school holidays. It had leaped through the trees, too eager, and disappeared. Lola and Toby had stood and listened to the snap and crackle of the netball being digested. Toby said, ‘It had a hole in it anyway,’ and the Ravine belched a flock of rosellas into the sky.

Now, Lola stands and runs unsteadily down the driveway, stopping at the curb. This is as close as she’ll go, but Toby is braver. He looks both ways and crosses the road, bending on the other side to lift the Jeep. Tracie comes tumbling out of the open roof. The Ravine has marked her for slaughter; dry gum leaves cling to her hair and catch in the sequins of her dress. Toby stacks the victim and her plastic death trap in Lola’s arms and says, ‘Idiot. Next time do it in a straight line.’

***

The next day Lola and Toby’s father cuts back the ivy blanketing the back fence. He’s wearing long sleeves and thick gardening gloves, but Lola can see that the skin on his neck is already hiving. He fills up the green waste bin quickly and Toby is allowed to stand in the bin and crush it all down if he puts on long pants and his gum boots. Lola asks what their dad will do with the rest of it.

‘We can dump it in the Ravine,’ he says, and Lola’s heart catches. ‘It’s technically not allowed, but I can’t have it lying around.’ He wipes sweat off his brow with his sleeve.

‘Won’t that make it angry?’ Lola asks.

‘Who? The council?’

‘No, the Ravine.’

Toby says, ‘The Ravine doesn’t have feelings, boofhead.’

Their dad grabs him by the armpits and lifts him out of the bin. ‘Don’t call your sister a boofhead.’

Lola looks at Toby really hard. He’s always doing things like this, like pretending he doesn’t believe in stuff when Lola knows he does. Just yesterday, after Tracie’s car crash, they had talked about how the trees seemed to whisper to them, birds they couldn’t see screaming from somewhere deep in the Ravine’s throat. Probably the reason is this: Toby thinks he’s too old to be scared of the Ravine now. But Lola thinks that it’s their fear that has kept them from ending up like Noddy.

***

Their dad guides wheelbarrows full of ivy back and forth from the Ravine. Toby follows him around, still in his gum boots. He’s not wearing socks and will probably be sitting on their bunk bed at the end of the day with his feet all bare and pongy. But that’s a problem for later. Right now, Lola watches from the top of the driveway as her dad enters the trees with ivy in his arms and disappears. She can hear crashing, like rain on grandma’s metal roof, and reckons he must be wrestling with the Ravine. It’s not worth it, Lola thinks. It’s not worth losing their dad just so they can get rid of the ivy. Toby is hanging around at the curb and the next time their dad comes out, he asks Toby if he wants to see down to the bottom. No, Toby!

Toby says yes.

Lola watches as he holds onto their dad’s arm and tilts over the edge. Lola holds her breath.

Toby comes out unscathed and runs up the driveway to where Lola stands.

‘Lolly! You won’t believe it!’ he says, breathless, his cheeks flushed like he’s been playing Marks Up in the cold.

‘What did you see?’ Lola asks. Her voice sounds very small. She pulls it back in and tries again. ‘What did you see, Toby? Not that I really care. It’s whatever.’

‘A trolley.’

‘A trolley? A shopping trolley?’

‘Yeah! From Coles. It’s all dented and twisted like the Ravine’s been chewing on it.’

Lola tries not to panic. ‘But how did it get there?’

‘Telekinesis. Has to be.’

This is new. This is new and too much. If the Ravine has developed the power of telekinesis, none of them are safe.

***

In the evening, Lola is standing on the Bear Chair at the island bench, helping her mother peel potatoes for tea, while Toby gets to play on the computer. Tracie is on the bench next to her. Lola has fashioned Tracie-sized shin and elbow guards out of an old toilet roll and some rubber bands. Just in case.

Lola’s dad finally comes inside and her mother looks up from her potatoes—she has peeled three, quick and efficient with the small paring knife, while Lola is still working on one, trying to dig out the dark spots with the peeler.

‘God, you look a mess,’ Lola’s mum says. She’s right. His hives are crawling up onto his chin and his shoes are thick with dirt and dust. Lola checks for teeth marks.

‘Found something interesting in the ravine,’ he says and then stops, seeing Lola there at the bench, frozen mid-peel.

‘What did you find, Dad?’

‘Never you mind. Where’s Toby? Go and get your brother and the two of you can pack up all my tools into the shed. Leave the sharp ones for me.’

But Lola doesn’t go. She stays just inside the doorframe of the hallway where her dad can’t see and listens to him tell her mum about finding a severed cat’s head.

‘Noddy?’

‘No, poor bastard’s only dead recently. Head clean lopped off, like a fucking guillotine.’

***

Two weeks later, at the dinner table, Lola and Toby’s parents announce that they are looking for a new house and also that they are going to have a new little brother. Lola and Toby look at each other very hard over their tuna mornay. Lola had told Toby about the cat’s head and they both agreed that the Ravine was becoming more monstrous. There is nothing, Lola thinks, that monsters like more than babies. Lola will miss the black and white checkers on the kitchen floor, the hallway long enough to sprint down, and the clowns with their cheerful red noses on the curtains in their bedroom, but she cannot bring herself to be sad.

That night, before bed, she and Tracie stare out the window at the Ravine eating and eating the light, waving skeleton arms, rattling and hissing in the wind, and she whispers her dad’s forbidden swear word to the beast. F you, she says, her voice just a breath, but her mouth making sure it forms the words, e-nun-ci-a-ting like the music teacher always tells them. She goes to the doorway, flips on the light, and her reflection replaces the Ravine. With two big hefts, she draws the curtains closed and thinks about what her new bedroom might look like.

---

Gillian Hagenus is a Brisbane-based emerging writer, book vampire, and gothic fiction enthusiast. She is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Queensland. Her short fiction has appeared in various Australian venues such as Island Online, Aniko Press, and The Saltbush Review and has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards. She is the programme coordinator of the Australian Short Story Festival and in her free time enjoys much of the same activities as she completes for work: reading, writing, haunting, etc.

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