The Hammonds

Olga Hammond’s fat, floured hands kneaded the scones while her pursed bee-stung lips whistled a cheerful tune. Her bean pole husband, Stanley wafted into the kitchen. He kissed her cheek and slapped her on her ample bottom. Lacey and Jack giggled and exchanged grossed-out looks while they played backgammon at the rickety kitchen table. A sound beyond the window in the street made them all turn to look. It was a long screeching and then a mighty bang that rattled the timber house to its foundations. With a quick whirring down, the fridge stopped humming and the fan slowed. The oven flicked off. All four Hammonds pelted to the street outside. The car was on its roof with glass still tinkling about. Some wheels were lazily circling whilst others were bent into the twisted arches. Stanley leapt about the car searching for the driver, a passenger, anybody.

“They’ve already gone, love,” called out Olga. “Dunno how they got out of that mess. Can’t be too badly injured, then.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Must’ve nicked it from somewhere. Betcha they’re keen to not be caught,” he added, stroking his narrow chin thoughtfully.

“Best call the police then.”

They wandered back inside to the desperate, demanding barks of the neighbours’ dogs. Stanley called the police. Olga went back to kneading her scones. Jack grabbed his solar oven that he made in shop class, desperate for his mother’s approval to use it when the oven wouldn’t work. Her laugh had made his heart sing when she nodded and said they would give it a go. Soon enough, red and blue flashing lights rounded the corner and tall, navy-clad men were scouring around the crumpled wreck. Lacey and Jack sat on the steps to watch but they couldn’t make out the mumbled conclusions the officers were concocting. Jack was desperate to get closer but Lacey was scared of the serious men and the guns in their holsters. She scrambled to grab his arm and pull him back down to the step beside her when he tried to saunter over there.

Hours later, with the power still out and the sun beginning to cast fiery golden halos amongst the lilly-pilly hedges. Olga wandered out the back onto the sagging veranda where a cooling breeze rustled the hem of her dress. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and she kept wiping the damp that gathered above her lip with the dirty tea-towel. Stanley was rummaging about in the garden shed, alternating between muttering and whistling. Olga smiled at his long, hairy legs and the briefness of his shorts. He had no shirt on to cover his silvering hairy back. After all this time, all these years and two children later, he made her heart happy. He provided. He still raised butterflies in her belly. She checked on the scones, laying out on the lawn in Jack’s solar oven. It raised her eyebrows to see them fluffing up. She wondered if they would ever get to the stage of the tell tail browning about the edges. Olga turned to go inside and clean the faded laminated bench of all the flour from her morning’s work. While she scooped the flour into a damp cloth, she thought of the car that must have been stolen, the people who owned it and how disappointed they would be that their expensive vehicle was totally destroyed. It had happened to her once. Not with a car, but a bicycle she had saved for months and months to buy as a young girl. Her neighbour, a nasty boy with a penchant for theft had taken it from the front yard when she and Stanley were first seeing each other. They were so caught up in their kissing on the lawn, they didn’t even see him swipe the bike from where it lay. They just saw him take off down the street. Stanley had tried to chase him on foot. Two days later, Olga and Stanley found the bike when they wandered down for a swim in the river. It had been purposely left on the railway tracks. Pieces of bike bent beneath freight train wheels were scattered about. Olga picked up the handlebars with the bell still attached. When she had gone home to tell her father, he had marched over to the neighbour’s house in a fit of rage, demanding to talk to his son. All he got for his trouble, was a rum bottle to his head. He was knocked unconscious. The neighbours all stood about, laughing and pushing each other in the pooling lamplight at the front of their house. Then her father was dragged on the bitumen road by his ankles to his own yard and left there for Olga to find the morning. He was not the same fiercely protective man after that night.

Olga heard a yelp from the backyard. She looked out of the window and saw Stanley beneath a flapping beige canvas tarpaulin, clutching at his thumb. The hammer was flung to the ground. He shook his hand, grabbed another tent peg and ran his fingers down the guy rope. He went back to driving in the peg. She had been so lost in her thoughts; she hadn’t even heard the hammering going on outside.

“Stanley Hammond, what in heaven’s name are you doing?”

He continued hammering the peg before clutching his back and slowly unhinging his lanky upper half. “Well, Mrs Hammond, you may have noticed we have no power.” He pointed at the peeling, buckling house with its rusting gutters with the next peg. There is a glorious breeze out here. I thought we could all camp in the yard. You, me, the kids and everyone.”

Olga stared at him and then turned to look at the house. It was an absolute oven in there with no ceiling fans and the night wasn’t set to be much cooler. A smile prickled the corners of her mouth.

“Jack and Lacey will love it.”

“Thought as much, myself.”

Once the canvas tarp was pulled taught, Stan called to the kids to tell them his idea. They whooped and cheered. Jack immediately wanted a small fire to toast marshmallows on. Lacey wanted to know that no one would be allowed to tell scary stories. Olga clutched Lacey to her apron front and rubbed her arms up and down.

“No one will tell a scary story, Lace. Not on my watch,” she murmured, looking pointedly at Jack. He sheepishly turned away.

“Right-o kids we need to bring all the mattresses out,” called Stan. He and Olga laid old protective sheets on the crisping brown lawn.

Jack and Lacey bolted for the three back steps of the house. Together they flung Lacey’s foam mattress off the bed, grab an end each and raced, tripping for the back door.

“Just there, kids.” Stanley pointed with his claw hammer to a spot under the tarpaulin. They dropped the mattress and sprinted back for the next one. Olga and Stanley rolled out their own ancient canvas swags that they hadn’t used for camping since the kids were born.

“Still smells like campfire,” Jack winked at her.

“Pretty sure that’s from the night Jack came along.” Olga’s cheeky smile and sideways look took Stan back to that night and he blushed with the memory.

The Hammond family wandered about the yard and down the easement beside their land, collecting dried up palm fronds and sticks and leaves for kindling. A few branches had fallen from the overhanging trees from the neighbouring backyards. Stan had carefully stockpiled them behind the shed. Now he timidly plucked each branch out, looking for what might have formed a habitat amongst the timber. Eyes seeking for snake or spider or scorpion, he stomped on the branches to snapped them into smaller parts. A pyramid of kindling was constructed by Jack and Stan whilst the girls buttered the scones and ladled runny cream and sweet strawberry jam on top. The boys lit the little fire. Red lines of heat ran amongst the bracken. Jack breathed into the dry leaves, feeding the flickering flames oxygen so they might seize the rest of the kindling in a blaze. Olga handed out the results of her days baking.

“Scones for dinner. Yum,” mumbled Jack with his mouth full to bursting and jam on the tip of his nose.

“Your oven worked a treat, son,” said Olga, ruffling his hair and planting a kiss on his forehead.

There wasn’t a scratch of moon in the deepening blackness of the sky. The darkness made the stars seem bright and close. The Hammonds lay down on their beds beneath the tautly strung tarpaulin. They enjoyed the breeze and listened to the gentle whispering and rustling of leaves above their heads. They chattered about this and that. When Jack started on about a devil dog from the bush past the railway tracks, Lacey sat bolt upright and Olga said there is not a devil dog and stop scaring your sister. Stan just smiled into the dark. How had he gotten so lucky? Eventually, eyelids got heavier and Stan’s gentle snoring was the white noise that lulled them all to sleep. All except Lacey. For hours, nestled in the crook of her mother’s soapy-smelling arm, she listened. The cicadas seemed so much louder out here. The breeze whispered warnings in her ear. All the hidden things, the secret things. The things that wanted their time in the outside without being seen. There was something beyond their little camp. A slithering. Something pushing though the brown grass, crackling the stems of weeds. A seeking something.

Stan slept with one arm flung out above his head, the other resting on his wife’s thigh.

The crackling came closer. Lacey’s eyes bulged in the darkness to see. This wasn’t her being a silly little girl. This was something.

The taipan’s forked tongue flicked about, sensing heat, tasting the dry air. Its body tucked along side the mattress. It could taste the heat of them, taste their skins through the air. It slowly rounded the mattress corner and came upon Stan’s outflung arm. It lifted its head, long body strung out along the grass. Stan twitched in his dream. The taipan struck. Stan woke with a bellow. Lacey screamed. Jack leapt from his bed and swayed on the mattress, eyes fixed on the coiled brown ripple that was both flexed and rigid. Stanley Hammond groaned, Lacey was frozen and Olga was just snorting and sorting out reality from her dreams when Jack Hammond seized the claw hammer and smashed it down on the taipan’s tail. It flicked back to protect itself from the blow, but Jack was too slow. It recoiled, gathered itself and then flung its open mouth towards the boy, too slow to move. It struck him on the arm and before he had a chance to move, went again for the side of his face. Then, spent, the snake dropped to the grass and wove its way back towards the wood pile behind the shed.

Lacey had run for the phone inside and called the ambulance. Soon red and blue flashing lights swam about the trees and side of houses. Men clad in green this time ran into the yard with stretchers and tended to both Stan and Jack. Stan mumbled for his son, clutching at the air trying to reach for his boy. Olga’s sobs began quietly but soon her bosom began to heave. She held Lacey in a vice-like grip as both her men were loaded onto stretchers and swallowed by the back of the ambulance. Lacey was heaved along with her mother’s sobbing and was drowning in her own guilt. She had known something was there. She couldn’t see it, didn’t call out and now both her father and brother might die.

Lacey and Olga sat crouched over in hard-backed plastic chairs in the emergency hospital waiting room. A doctor approached them.

“Mrs Hammond?” he tentatively asked. Olga’s bloodshot eyes sought the truth he came to bear before his words could tell her for sure. “Your husband is all right. We were able to administer the anti-venom in time. He will be ok but he is sleeping now.”

“And Jack?” her tremulous voice cracked.

“I’m sorry to say, the two bites from a taipan were too much for your son. He was not able to be revived. Your son, Jack has passed away.”

Olga and Lacey stood still within the quiet of the emergency room. The doctor suggested they take a seat. Olga bent to comply. Lacey was pulled into her lap. The world reduced to the walls of the hospital, the flickering fluorescent lights overhead and the sweet sweating smell of her daughter’s scalp. Olga buried her face in her daughter’s hair.

“My Jack. My Jack.”