I come off the bike when I hit a rock, and it throws me over the handlebars. Apart from skin off my knees and hands, I’m fine, but it’s hard to get up. There’s a shrub that casts a small shadow and I wheel myself over to it, and slump there. There is salt on my lips, I am thirsty and burnt, but not unhappy. I lie there and watch a whistler high up, riding the hot air, and I imagine it is a seagull and I am in the bottom of a boat, jumping with sea lice. Karen is with me, we’re drinking Cokes and she’s got her fingers laced through mine. I will stay here, I think, I will pull up the anchor and lie in the hull of the boat and let it take me to wherever the centre is.
I walk down the corridor of my brain and don’t even look at the doors either side.
When I wake up, Otto is standing over me, his face a rage. He picks me up, puts me over his shoulder, and the feeling is of my sunburnt skin being pulled off. A taste of what it is like to be burnt, properly.
When I wake a second time, I am in my bed and Otto is feeding water into my mouth, and then he rubs cream into my back and over my face. ‘Bloody disgrace,’ I hear him say.
The next morning I have a fever and the room spins. Otto isn’t talking to me, just comes in with a sandwich now and again, stands over me till I eat it, until I am well again. When I feel well again, I come out of my bedroom in a towel and Otto is there in the living room watching the soaps. He doesn’t look at me.
‘Well,’ he says to the TV, ‘the princess awakes.’
‘I got lost,’ I say.
‘Got lost in a straight line? That’d take some doing.’
‘I was looking for a waterhole,’ but while I’m trying to think up a story, my eyes catch on something out the front of the house, and I trail off. My bike is lying on its side, wrecked. It has been driven over repeatedly, squashed flat into the ground.
‘My bike,’ is all I can say.
Otto looks at me. ‘I didn’t see it,’ he says, and he doesn’t even try to make me believe him.
Later that night, I am in my room and he unlocks my door, lies down next to me and wants sex, but I don’t want anything to do with him. I am angry and I push him away.
‘What’s this?’ he asks.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You sulking?’ I don’t reply. ‘You’re lucky I don’t beat the hell out of you with the back of a brush, girly,’ he says and stands up. From the doorway he says, ‘You don’t fool me.’ And then he slams the door and makes a point of locking it noisily. I hear him go to the living room and put the TV on. The fridge door closes and shakes the house.
In the morning, he greets me with a grim look in his eye.
‘Low on meat,’ is all he says and takes me by the wrist to the truck, where Kelly is already waiting, panting with excitement. We drive out to the sheep and from the back of the truck he brings a heavy black canvas bag. I think about the shoe under the house. The earring in the woolshed. The things Kelly finds to eat in the tall dry grass.
Otto grips a ewe with a dreadful kind of strength I haven’t seen before — like he’s been keeping his muscles in hibernation until this point. It is different from the strength he uses when he is shearing — it’s cruel, like he wants her to know what’s coming. He swings her up the ramp in front of him, and she gives out a terrible sound, and I stand there outside the woolshed, mute. Kelly is also silent; she crouches low to the ground by Otto’s side, slinking here and there with those cloudy eyes and a look of a snake about her. The rest of the sheep have their ears forward and are backed into the far corner of the pen. One by one, they must be thinking, and I tackle the urge to kick down the fence and tell them to flee. They will only stand there. From where I am, I can see into the woolshed, the hook with its dark stain beneath it.
‘Get in here, girl, I want you to see how it’s done,’ shouts Otto, and I pretend I can’t hear him, because I can’t move. I see him shake his head and the sheep’s cries rattle my bones. He takes a wide-bladed knife from his bag and slices once across the white throat of the sheep and she is still alive and trying to bleat. Otto holds her firm between his thighs, and her back legs are going like crazy and the red comes out of her neck like a tap has been turned on. He cuts again and her voice fades out into a gurgle as he goes through the windpipe, and the stamp of her hooves weakens. There is a scream in me that wants to come out, but I won’t let it, I won’t look away.
Otto drops the ewe, who still moves, but softly, she is not going anywhere, and only now does Kelly start to bark, baring her teeth close to the sheep’s eye which is rolling back, showing the white; the dog lunges again and again at the sheep, not biting, just snapping at the air near her face. I hear my name shouted again and I follow, and inside the woolshed is the smell of new blood.
‘You need to learn how it’s done.’ He wipes his forearm under his nose to get rid of the sweat, and leaves a streak of brown blood on his face. He stares at me, an unbroken gaze that prickles the hair on my neck. There’s something about him in the blood fug that is natural. A bird squawks from on top of the shed. Otto shrugs and the tension breaks. ‘No matter, we’ll do another.’ My knees weaken.
The sheep is dead now, and Kelly drools over it; no longer concerned with scaring it, she’s waiting to be given a taste. Otto takes a smaller knife and cuts the tendons at the sheep’s back ankles before poking some hooks in and hoisting her off the floor with a pulley and rope. I see a bead of blood land in her open eye.
‘And that’s how them Muslims do it,’ he says, a smile of satisfaction on his face. He cuts off one of her front feet and gives it to Kelly, who accepts the hoof like it has always belonged to her. She stands, legs apart, and grinds her teeth into it.
‘Right,’ says Otto, ‘go and grab one then.’ I stand still. ‘Come on, get a move on.’
‘I can’t,’ I say.
‘I’ve seen you pick a sheep up. Come on,’ says Otto, ‘don’t be wet.’
‘I don’t want to.’
Otto looks at me through a narrowed eye. ‘Part of having animals, girl. I told Carole about this, an’ she didn’t listen either. Didn’t pick you out as being spooked by a bit of blood.’ There’s a small smile around his lips; he’s trying not to show it but he is amused, and he is enjoying seeing me scared.
I can feel my strong arms floating from my shoulders, as weak as feathers. I want to do something to make him understand that it is important that this doesn’t happen. I am sorry for my bad behaviour, I want to tell him, I want to say I won’t do it again, I promise. I will take the beating with a brush, but not this. But all I can make is the word ‘Please’.
He stomps out of the shed and comes back with a wild-eyed sheep, the one with black spots on her nose. Otto has a smile on his face, he’s let it out, doesn’t care what I know about him. He looks at me like I’m a kid who’s thrown a tantrum and he is going to teach me a lesson and then laugh about it afterwards. It is going to happen regardless of how much I don’t want it to happen, and I can see he has a hard-on through his shorts, and he is doing this because he likes me best when I’m small and like a child and he can tuck me into bed and feed me with a spoon and I see the horrible certainty of the challenge, and I will show him that I am stronger than he thinks, and the sheep with the black spots on her nose will be the sacrifice.