The Farmer’s Wife
by RACHAEL TREASURE

For Luella Meaburn, my true earth angel

and Colin Seis, a quiet grassroots revolutionary

and my children and my guides, Rosie and Charlie Treasure

and in memory of Dreams, now in the clouds with Pegasus

An environmentalist once asked a wise guru, ‘What use is your praying and meditating when you are not really doing anything to stop the destruction all around us?’

The guru replied calmly, ‘Even if you managed to clean up the rivers, oceans, soils and the sky, the pollution will all come back, unless you cleanse the human heart.’

Retold by Bhavani Prakash

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow; our life is the creation of our mind.

Buddha

The eternal feminine draws us upward.

Goethe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Acknowledgements

Two new ebook short story collections from Rachael Treasure in 2013

About the Author

Also by Rachael Treasure

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

One

‘You told me it was a Tupperware party!’

Rebecca Lewis folded her arms across her chest as best she could with two shaggy terriers sitting on her lap. She scowled at Gabs, who was swinging on the wheel of the Cruiser like an army commando. Gabs aimed cigarette smoke towards the Landy’s window and puffed out a cloud, then delivered a wide, wry smile from her unusually lip-glossed lips.

‘Get over it.’

The women were lumping their way over the wheel-scarred track, once a quagmire during a severely wet winter, but now a summer-baked road of deep jolting ruts. As they wound over shallow creek crossings and valley-side rises, Rebecca shifted under the weight of Gabs’s dogs and hunched her shoulders. She looked out at the dry bushland around them that ticked with insects in the evening heat.

‘I thought it would cheer you up,’ Gabs offered.

‘Cheer me up? Do I look like I need cheering up?’ Rebecca frowned at her own reflection in the dusty side mirror. There were deep worry lines on her forehead. Her blonde hair, dry and brittle on the ends, was carelessly caught up in a knot as if she was about to take a shower. Hair that looks as coarse as the terriers’ fur, she thought. Bags of puffy skin sat beneath her blue eyes like tiny pillows. She prodded them with her cracked fingertips. Her mouth was turned down at the corners.

Could she actually be a bitter old woman at thirty-eight? She closed her eyes and told herself to breathe.

‘How can you not be cheered up by that?’ asked Gabs, thrusting an invitation at her. Bec looked down to the silhouette of a woman naked save for her towering stilettos. The woman sported a tail and tiny horns like a weaner lamb. Horny Little Devils, the text read. Making the World a Hornier Place. Australia’s Number One Party Plan.

‘Tupperware party, my arse,’ Rebecca said, rolling her eyes. The tiniest smirk found its way to her lips. She looked ahead on the road to Doreen and Dennis’s farmhouse, tucked into the next valley. Maybe this party could be a turning point for me and Charlie, she thought hopefully. Ten years of marriage, two baby boys, the death of her father and a farm that failed to function. Charlie blaming the weather; Rebecca knowing different. Then there was her family, distant in the city. Her mother, Frankie, who seemed to not notice her, and big brother Mick, still treating her as if she was ten. And always, always, there was the memory of Tom. She sighed and pushed Amber and Muppet off her lap onto the floor and grabbed for Gabs’s cigarettes.

Gabs glanced over with concern as Bec fumbled with the slim rolls of tobacco. Hands shaking, she put the smoke to her lips and swore as her thumb ineffectively ran over the coarse metal cog of the lighter, creating feeble sparks but no flame. She hadn’t felt this down for years. Not since the years soon after her brother Tom’s death.

‘Oh, for god’s sake!’ she said, throwing the lighter on the dash and stuffing the cigarette back in the packet.

‘Are you right? Since when did you take up smoking?’

Bec shrugged.

‘Here,’ said Gabs, passing her a bottle of Bundy, ‘forget the ciggies, forget the Coke. Just cut to the chase.’

‘But we’ve got crutching and jetting tomorrow. And I’ve got to get the boys to the Saturday bush-nurse clinic. It’s Dental Day,’ she said, still taking the square bottle of rum from Gabs.

‘Dental Day! Again? Thank god Ted doesn’t have teeth yet and Kylie had hers checked last month when we were in the city. C’mon, ya bloody sook! Listen to you!’ Gabs made whining noises — a parody of the complaints that Rebecca repeatedly made, about Charlie, about the farm, about the weather.

‘For god’s sake, Bec, go have your period and jump in a shark tank! You need to make the best of your lot so suck it up, princess.’

Rebecca looked out through the heat-wilted wattles towards a stand of white-trunked gums and cracked the yellow top off the bottle. From where she sat, Amber sniffed at the rum and wagged her feathery terrier tail.

‘None for you,’ Rebecca said gently. She swigged deeply and grimaced at the rawness of the alcohol on the back of her throat.

Gabs looked across at her, softening now. ‘I know it’s been tough, with the mixed-up seasons and … you know … but build a bridge! You’ll have fun tonight. And I didn’t suck my tits dry with a pump for Ted’s bottle just for you to pike out on me.’

Her friend’s tone was humorous, but Bec wished it was harsh. She wanted a kick up the arse. She was used to harshness. She thought of Charlie again and the sight of his broad back as he’d slammed the door of the kitchen that afternoon, taking his fury with him into the yellow-and-green cab of the dual-wheel John Deere. She pictured him going round and round now in the dying light of the hot day, the big wheels crushing a track through the dust of the paddock. A paddock she’d begged him not to plough.

Once Rebecca had liked tractors, loved them in fact. And had loved Charlie within them. During the early summers of their marriage at Waters Meeting, she remembered the sweet smell of freshly baled hay. The big roundies bouncing out the back of the New Holland and rolling to a stop on the green meadows. The way the cab door would open and Charlie would appear like a Bullrush-clothing-catalogue, sun-kissed god. His boots landing solidly on the steps of the cab, socks covered by canvas gaiters, the golden hair on his tanned legs covered in a fine film of dust. His teeth glistening white in the sun as he smiled, stooping to kiss her. She remembered him taking the smoko basket from her and dropping it into the fresh-cut pasture, and how he’d pressed her back up against the giant tractor wheel, kissing her harder, putting his strong hand up under her shirt, the smell of the hot sun on the rubber tyre making the moment even sexier. His hands urging between her legs, which were smooth and honey brown in ripped denim shorts. Summer love. Newlywed love. Tractor love.

Rebecca shook away the memory. Long gone now. The farm and the river that had run through it and fed her soul had dried up — and so had that magic between her and Charlie. Nothing seemed to lift her out of a stupor that had only deepened when her second son had arrived. Nothing, except for meeting Andrew Travis. After that her whole world had begun to shift. Everything felt changed. She crushed her back teeth together till her jaw ached. ‘Maybe I should go on anti-depressants.’

Gabs butted out her cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. ‘Or maybe you should go on a ten-inch dildo!’

With the Bundy now starting to warm her, Rebecca couldn’t stop a sudden jolt of laughter spluttering up, just as Muppet and Amber nosed their way back onto the seat and sat like a pair of Ugg boots on her lap. Reaching over the dogs, she picked up the hot pink Horny Little Devils catalogue from the dash and flicked through it. ‘So what is a jelly butt plug and a Gliterous-G anyway?’ she asked, her head tilted quizzically to one side, her freckled nose wrinkled.

Gabs shrugged. ‘Dunno, but I’m sure we’re about to find out!’ And with that she floored the LandCruiser, setting it sailing over a culvert drain. They shrieked as the wheels spun mid-air. The Cruiser landed with a bone-jarring thud, tyres hitting the rims, smokes falling from the dash, dogs’ claws digging into Bec’s thighs, two-way radio handpiece falling down. Then on the women drove, their laughter drifting up to the sky along with the dust.

‘Fuckerware party, here we come!’ Rebecca yelled.

Two

Charlie Lewis took a swig of his stubby, then set it down in the drink holder beside him, belching out a puff of beer-soaked breath. He adjusted the revs on the tractor, feeling smugly satisfied with his choice. Why should he settle for a 224-horsepower tractor when he could go all the way to the top with a 300-horsepower one? Plus, as he’d told Rebecca several times, he could get a bonus diesel voucher from the dealer if he bought it before the end of January. And it came with not just one but two free iPhones!

‘One for the missus,’ the dealer had said brightly.

Charlie checked his phone to see if he was in range. It’d be good to call Murray to have a bit of a skite about the new Deere.

There was better mobile service at the top of the riverside block so he’d have to wait another round to make the call. The digital clock in the tractor was glowing 8.36 pm, exactly matching the time on his phone. He patted the tractor dash.

‘Legend,’ he said to it.

Murray, who had finished shearing at Clarksons’ today, would by now be taking the cut-out party of his rouseabouts and shed hands to the Dingo Trapper Hotel. Charlie wished he was going too, but he thought back to this afternoon and identified a foreboding conviction not to push his wife on the issue. She was still snaky with him for coming home at two in the morning after cricket training on Thursday.

Charlie recalled the sight of Rebecca’s jean-clad backside, which looked surprisingly broad from his angle, as she rummaged around in a kitchen cupboard.

‘Why can’t I find any fucking lids?’ Rebecca had said, jumbling through the clutter. ‘No matter what I do, there are never any complete sets of containers. And why is every bloody party organised round here “bring a plate”? I don’t know how many of my effing containers are scattered about the district! And now they want me to buy more at a bloody Tupperware party tonight! It does my head in.’

Charlie wanted to say, ‘Everything does your head in these days.’ Instead he bit his tongue.

In her exasperation, Rebecca began to crash things about a little too roughly for Charlie’s liking. He knew the plastic container cupboard was dangerous territory. It was the place where he had seen his wife lose her shit the worst. Particularly when it was school-bus time and Ben’s lunch wasn’t quite packed and ready to go. Best not to offer help at this stage, he thought, just in case. Charlie leaned on the bench, hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking down to the front of his blue checked flannelette shirt, where the buttons strained. He tried not to look at Bec, who was now kneeling on the floor holding a blue ice-cream container in her lap, staring at its lidless form. Her shoulders were hunched forwards, shaking.

Oh shit, Charlie thought, is she crying? Over lidless containers? Or is she laughing? He bit his lip and rolled his eyes, sauntering forwards, knowing he’d have to do something now.

‘C’mon, Bec, it’ll do you good to go to Doreen’s. You could get a new set of containers. Get a bit more organised. It’ll help you spend less on groceries.’

Bec swivelled around and delivered him a flash of fury so strong it was like a kick to the head. Charlie held up his hands as if surrendering to a firing squad. ‘I was only trying to help.’

Bec got to her sock-clad feet. ‘Help? You reckon help? Patronise me more like.’

‘I … I …’ he stammered.

‘When the fuck did my life become all about Tupperware and messy cupboards, Charlie?’ Tears welled in her sky-blue eyes, her face scrunched with emotional pain. She thrust the container violently at him and he received it like a mid-field rugby pass, clutching it to his stomach.

Charlie stared blankly at her, his mouth open. ‘What do I deserve that for? I work my arse off on your farm for you.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

‘What’s there to get, Bec? You’re always mad. You’re always sad. Not much I can do about it.’

‘Do you ever wonder why?’

Charlie shrugged.

‘Maybe it could be something to do with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar tractor we can’t afford,’ Bec said. ‘Geez, Charlie! A tractor we didn’t need. And then you went and got a brand-new fucking plough. And the fact that I’m stuck here! Stuck in this fucking house!’

‘Someone’s gotta do the house stuff. And you might think we don’t need the machinery, but I do!’

‘Why does the house stuff have to be done by me? That was never the deal! And you know how I feel about ploughing. Have you not listened to a word I’ve said on soils and no-till cropping? Since learning Andrew’s stuff, I never wanted to plough a patch of dirt again on this place!’

Charlie, who had tolerated her surly mood till now, turned his head to one side and shut his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, glaring at her. The anger rose. ‘Oh yes! That’s right! Andrew, Andrew, Andrew … your god of agricultural change!’ he said sarcastically. ‘Just because I’m not into your bloody New Age farming guff, don’t take it out on me! You’re just upping me because you like bollocking the crap out of me over nothing.’

‘That’s not true!’

Charlie thrust the ice-cream container back at her. ‘Put a lid on it, Rebecca,’ he spat. ‘Find another babysitter for the boys. I’m going ploughing.’ As he pushed past her, he made sure his shoulder collided solidly with hers. Then he walked out, slamming the door.

Now, in the dying light of the evening, crows with wings like vampire cloaks were haunting the plough, trawling the clods of earth for grubs and arguing with the white cockatoos, who screeched and flapped with indignation at their dark companions. Charlie sighed and glanced at his green eyes in the rear-vision mirror, noticing the lines around the edges of them and the way his once thick brown hair was now thinning on either side of his forehead. Where had the years gone?

And why did his time feel so wasted here? Here on a farm that had never been his. Waters Meeting. Rebecca’s place.

He ran his grease-stained fingertips over his rotund belly and scratched it through the fabric of his bluey singlet. So what if he had a bit of a gut? What was the harm in a few beers? He thought of Rebecca and the way she constantly badgered him on his diet too, while she dished up salad for the kids that she had grown in her vegetable garden. He would glower at her and defiantly toss shoestring chips from a plastic bag into the deep-fryer, along with a handful of dim sims.

‘What’s wrong with only wanting to eat peas, corn, carrots and spuds?’ he asked one night as he pushed aside her dish of cauliflower cheese.

‘The boys,’ she said. ‘Eating all types of good food is the most important thing for them to learn at this stage.’

He twisted the lid off a Coke bottle, relishing the loud fizzing sound, and eyed her as he gulped straight from the bottle.

She rolled her eyes in anger and turned away. She was so easy to bait like that. But bugger her, he thought. She could be so fucking self-righteous about everything.

For the first few years of their marriage it had been fun, and it was never about the fact that he ate mostly meat and spuds with a small side of peas, corn and carrot. She’d not minded then. She’d been a good chick and their days at Agricultural College had cemented their relationship into one of deep friendship. When he first moved to Waters Meeting, he’d felt a sense of relief that he’d escaped his own family tangles on their farm out west.

After Bec and he were married, Bec’s father, Harry, had been an all-right sort of fella to share the space of the farm with. One-armed since a posthole-digger accident, the old man had mostly kept out of Charlie’s way, badgering Rebecca about what should or shouldn’t happen on the farm. For the last few years Harry’d been too sick to do much anyway and stuck to himself in his log cabin. But since he’d died, Charlie had noticed a shift in Rebecca. A restless frustration. Some days her moods were too much to bear.

Then bloody Andrew Travis and his no-till cropping ideas and holistic grazing management seminars had got into Rebecca’s head and she had completely gone off the dial about how he should run the place from now on. She was chucking out over ten years of his good management all because of some Queensland guru who kept banging on about regenerative agriculture and all the profits to be gained from low inputs.

Even though Charlie knew there wasn’t much profit at the end of the day on Waters Meeting, couldn’t Bec see their production was better than the other farms in the district? He remembered their shared passion in the early days when she’d brought him in as ‘cropping manager’ and, of course, her boyfriend.

For the first few years the business had hummed, exporting hay that was cut from the rich lucerne flats to fancy stables in Japan. They’d even travelled to Tokyo for a month, living it up with fancy-pants racing people who couldn’t speak a word of ‘Engrish’, but could chuck back sake like you wouldn’t believe. But five years into the venture the Aussie government had pulled the pin on water rights due to salinity issues hundreds of kilometres downstream from the farm. Charlie knew it had more likely been due to political pressures after a documentary screened on prime-time television about the evils of irrigation. The water was shut off to them. Waters Meeting had become a dryland farming operation overnight. And once again, like when Bec had first returned from her time away at Ag College and jillarooing, they had had to fight to keep the farm afloat.

In the midst of the fight over water rights, Rebecca had fallen pregnant and she’d become annoyingly philosophical about their situation, saying the irrigation ban was ‘meant to be’. She’d said over time she’d realised that it didn’t sit well with her to be carting hay around the world. It wasn’t environmentally sound, she’d said. Bloody women always changing their minds, Charlie thought angrily. They’d busted their guts to set up the operation and now his very own wife was turning green on him like the rest of the wankers on the planet. What was wrong with her? Didn’t people realise farmers fed the nation? And so they should be supported accordingly?

Charlie glanced again in the mirror and watched the plough discs cut neat crumbling lines in the dry paddock he’d sprayed last week.

A plume of topsoil eddied in the gentle breeze. He twisted his mouth to the side. It was too dry to be cultivating: Bec was right. There was something in his gut that told him what he was doing was wrong, but he just couldn’t help himself. Kicking up dust was better than sitting at home watching Ben and Archie fight. He felt a twinge of guilt, knowing how crapped-off the boys would have been when they found out they were being plonked with Mrs Newton, their elderly neighbour, for the night again. They could’ve easily fitted in the spacious new cab with him. They’d been so excited about the new tractor.

Charlie swigged his beer and washed away the thoughts, instead choosing to focus on the new dream tractor. He loved everything about it, from the way the giant glass door pulled open, to the wide view from the cab through even more expansive glass. The massive John Deere was so sleek and modern it looked as if it belonged in one of Ben’s Star Wars animations. It didn’t just have a dash; it had a ‘command centre display’. There was even a gyroscope that automatically made steering adjustments when Charlie drove fast down the smoother gravel roads of Waters Meeting. He’d love to try it on the newly sealed main road. Plus the GPS, once he’d worked out how to use it, would mean that his furrows would be perfectly even and straight.

He reached for his fourth stubby and popped the top off it, enjoying the gentle bounce the hydraulically sprung seat offered. It’s enough to give me a hard-on, he thought wickedly, toasting himself in the mirror and cocking an eyebrow.

As he rounded up to the top of the paddock, his phone beeped a message. Murray, texting to say it was humming at the Fur Trapper, the locals’ nickname for the Dingo Trapper Hotel. Charlie sent a text back saying he was on the chain for the night. Cranky wife. But bloody nice tractor.

As the sun dipped, and the fifth beer sank, Charlie settled into feeling a strange mix of boredom and friskiness at the same time. As if on cue, his phone beeped again with a text. He reached into his top pocket.

When he opened the photo up on his phone, he smiled and chuckled. There, on the small screen, was the image of Janine Turner in some rare kind of silky purple number with what looked like a black salami thrusting up from her ample cleavage. Come get me later, cowboy! came the message.

Charlie Lewis drained the last of his stubby. He paused for a moment. Knowing he shouldn’t, but with the blandness of his life pushing him on, he reached for his belt buckle with a wicked grin on his face. What was wrong with a little bit of play? Janine was always up for it. She was about to get a nice shot of his gear stick. That would fix her.

Three

Doreen and Dennis Groggan’s farmhouse was set in an over-grazed paddock in a narrow valley. Etched along that valley was a jagged, eroded tributary that, in times of rain, fed the larger Rebecca River to the east, the river after which Rebecca was named. The Groggans’ was a small, poor dirt farm surrounded by a swathe of bushland that swept up and over rocky gullies and ridges. The land and the isolation of the farm made it not so profitable, so as a result, on weekdays Dennis drove the school bus and Doreen worked at the school as the cleaner and groundsman. Judging from the state of the house, Doreen was good at keeping things in order at home too, Rebecca thought.

On their silver wedding anniversary, Dennis had painted the weatherboards yellow-green for Doreen after being inspired by the colours of their budgie. Rebecca looked at the meticulous yet overdone house and garden. The colour reminded her not so much of a budgie as of a pus-filled cheesy gland on a sheep.

‘What would have been so wrong with cream or white? That’s just downright tacky,’ she said, gazing long-faced at the neat-as-a-pin budgie-coloured house. They rounded Doreen’s turning circle of conifers, strategically placed bush rocks, wagon wheels and concrete creatures.

‘Get over yourself, cranky pants,’ Gabs said, this time sternly.

Rebecca almost hung her head in shame. Where had this dark mood descended from? And was it actually a mood? These days it felt more like a way of being. As if she had been like it for years.

The notion scared her. She looked out the window again, not wanting to socialise here with these women. Not wanting to be anywhere.

She could see most of the guests had arrived so the brittle yellow front lawn was already filled with a selection of battered dust-buffed country cars and utes. Rebecca rolled her eyes when she saw dark-haired Janine Turner totter forth aboard tarty ‘follow-me-home-and-fuck-me’ shoes of shining gold. Janine tugged down a purple negligee over ample Nigella-style hips while balancing a bowl of corn chips, her handbag and a purple horse-lunging whip in the other hand. She waved gaily to them as they parked.

‘Oh geez! Look at her get-up!’ Rebecca grimaced. ‘You never told me it was fancy dress!’

‘You never would’ve come.’ Gabs unclipped her seat belt, swung round to the back and dragged out a Woolies green bag. ‘Ta-da!’ she said, emptying the contents of the bag onto Bec’s lap. Rebecca pulled a face as she held up the items one by one: a sequined silver skirt trimmed with feathers, an orange boob tube, red high heels and a packet of red fishnets.

‘So? Do you like your kinky costume? I made the skirt out of one of Kylie’s princess dresses from the costume box. Don’t tell her. She’ll get the shits up. And I got the shoes on eBay. I think they had a bit of Baby Oil or something on them, but I cleaned them.’

‘You are joking, right?’

‘Shut up and get changed.’ Gabs grinned. ‘Or you’ll be the odd one out.’

‘What’s new?’

‘You could just thank me,’ Gabs fired back. ‘Where’s your attitude of gratitude?’

Rebecca shook her head, knowing her friend was right. What had happened to her life? She used to be so sure of her place in the world. She never went to women’s gatherings, preferring to be out in the pub or the paddocks. Sure she’d had to debate every decision every inch of the way in a three-way tussle between herself, her father and Charlie, but they had started out with what she thought was a shared dream. Then the babies had come. And life had changed. She found herself driving off to play group and doctors’ appointments and ladies’ fundraising lunches while the men punched sheep through yards, their world obscured to her by dust.

She would glance in the mirror at the two little boys in their car seats, Ben with his dark hair and sincere brown eyes and Archie with his wayward blond locks and dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes of blue. She loved them with every cell of her body, but the daily grind of domestics that they created was eroding her very being. Then there was Charlie. Rebecca pulled her thoughts up so they slid to a stop like a reined-in horse. Her thoughts drifted hopefully, involuntarily, to Andrew. But again she put on the brakes. She just couldn’t go there. He’s just a friend, she told herself.

Keep it shallow. Shallow, like her breathing had become. Shallow like her life.

‘Don’t just sit there,’ Gabs said as she applied a thick layer of blue glitter eye shadow to her heavy lids in the rear-vision mirror, then tried to pluck a solo chin hair out with her thick thumb and forefinger. ‘You’ve got tarting up to do.’

‘And what about you?’ asked Bec as she began to reluctantly kick off her boots and pull her socks from her hot puffy feet. ‘I don’t see you wearing a costume.’

Gabs glanced over to her slyly, then with a daredevil grin ripped off her oversized T-shirt.

‘Ta-da!’ she said again, revealing a black-and-red bustier, her white bosoms spilling up over the top of the lacy cups. Her farmer’s singlet tan lines made her look a lot like a paint horse of white and brown.

‘Frank goes nuts for me when I dress up. The other night we got pissed on Beam and he told me to get naked except for my cowgirl boots. And I did —’

‘Too much information!’ Bec said, holding up her hand and smiling. But internally she grimaced. How many years had it been since she and Charlie had mucked around like that? Since Ben was born six years back? Since before then? She couldn’t remember. She could only recall the cold wall of his back and the passionless way he grappled at her in the early hours of the morning, when her body was leaden with exhaustion. He entered her with primal thrusts that were absent of care or love. There was an air of aggression within him that had started to cloud his contact with her. Bec could even feel it in his touch. She rubbed at her shoulder that felt bruised from their clash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d shoved her in a rage.

As she pulled on the fishnets, she felt the shame of leading such a disappointing life hidden within her apparently functional marriage. On the neighbouring farm, there was Gabs, who must be pushing eighty kilos, naked in cowboy boots doing the wild thing with an even beefier Frank after ten years together. Frank and Gabs seemed madly crazy about each other still, apart from telling each other to fuck off every now and then. They had met at Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding. Gabs, her best mate from Ag College, was one of the bridesmaids and Frank had been invited along as he was one of the local farmers. A relationship had sparked between Gabs and Frank over a post-wedding-day carton of beer that they shared on the back of a ute by a dam. Soon Rebecca had found her good college buddy moving into her very own district and marrying her neighbour. At the time, both girls had thought they’d each stumbled upon a match made in heaven. Not so now, Rebecca thought. Only one of them had got it right. Here she was, practically a born-again virgin in wedlock. As Rebecca jammed on the red shoes, she noticed the way her lily-white sock marks were still evident through the fishnet stockings, drawing a line on her ankles that ran to summer-brown legs, a bit on the hairy side. Like Gabs, since motherhood, she too had put on weight and with the fishnets hoicked up to her hips, she imagined her thighs might look a bit like Christmas hams.

By the time she dragged on the makeshift sequined skirt and put on the boob tube so her slightly flubbery stomach rolled out, Gabs was doubled over laughing, falling about in her cork-wedge shoes on the lawn, trying, with her weak post-baby bladder, not to wet her G-string.

‘You look hot, Bec! Hot. Hot, hot, hot damn!’

Bec sucked in her stomach, stood up straight and held her middle finger up at her friend, then went to the back of the four-wheel drive to collect the platter of dips and biscuits that had been inelegantly thrown in a silver takeaway container and covered with cling wrap.

‘I’ll have you know I could make a lot of money dressed like this down at the Fur Trapper Hotel. A lot of money.’

After winding each window down a little for the dogs and finding a water container for them, Gabs came to stand near her. ‘You do look hot, seriously. Maybe we both could lose a bit of chunk round the middle, but check out the guns on us!’ She flexed her arm muscles. ‘Frank loves my guns — they’re particularly good since bale carting. We did six hundred little squares for the new racing stables. Said they’d double their order next summer, until they got their own paddocks set up.’

At the mention of Frank loving Gabs’s body again, Bec’s face fell. Did Charlie even notice her looks any more?

Gabs picked up the plummet in her mate’s mood. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, moving to give her a rough sort of hug. Bec felt tears well in her eyes. She wanted to see Charlie as a good husband. When she thought about it, he did put up with a lot. But then again, she put up with more! Was it normal to feel this way?

‘Hey,’ Bec said, extracting herself too soon from the hug, ‘people will think we do a lezzo double act with you groping me like that. Now let’s get inside and get this so-called Tupperware party over.’

She marched to the gate in her strappy eBay shoes, nearly doing her ankle in the process. Gnomes grinned at her from nests of white pebbles as she walked along a brown-painted concrete path, flanked with solar lights and identical plastic versions of Jamie Durie designer flax. The spiked dark-leafed plants were spaced as evenly and as exactly as soldiers on parade. Gabs and Bec came to stand on a porch enclosed with corrugated green Laserlite, adorned with hanging baskets overflowing with dangling plants of bulbous juice-filled leaves and infrequent drooping purple flowers.

Before Gabs even knocked, Doreen reefed the door open. She was wearing a very short nun’s costume, her legs like cottage cheese in her black fishnets and her feet like pig’s trotters shoved into black patent leather pumps. So big was her bosom, it looked as though she had an inflatable raft stuffed down the front of her nun’s habit. The fringe of her eighties-style bob had extra product in it and looked much like echidna spines as it protruded out from her black-and-white habit.

‘Hi, Sister Doreen! Say your prayers, baby! The goddesses are here!’ Gabs said.

‘Hello, strumpets,’ Doreen said. ‘How are you?’

‘Great, Dors. You look hot!’

‘Yeah, fifty going on fifteen,’ Doreen said.

‘I like your new garden. Those fake plants are pretty cool,’ Gabs said.

‘Least the fucken possums and wallabies won’t eat ’em,’ Doreen said proudly. ‘And they’ll only melt in a bushfire. Come in, come in. We’re about to start.’

‘Where’s Dennis?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Hiding in the shed,’ Doreen said over her shoulder. ‘He’s set the telly up in there with a couch. He’s got a box of beer and a DVD of cricket highlights so he’s happy. A bit terrified, but happy.’

They entered the kitchen, where they found Amanda Arnott, wife of the local publican, at the bench, carving a carrot into the shape of a penis. ‘Hello, slutties!’ she sang. ‘Just exhibiting my extensive creative talents!’ There was a glint of the knife and her large diamond rings shining beneath the kitchen lights as she waved a carrot at them. ‘Might try these as an extra to the side salads at the pub!’

‘There’ll be more orders for chips and salad than veg. Especially if you serve it up in that outfit,’ Rebecca said, nodding at Amanda’s skimpy French-maid costume.

They heard a collective shrill of laughter rise up from the gathering of women in the room next door.

‘Go through, but take a Cock-sucking Cowboy with you!’ Doreen said, handing them each a shot glass full of cream liqueur. Then she went back to putting bright red sausages onto a platter that had every kind of phallic-shaped food imaginable, including battered savs, gherkins and crabsticks.

‘Care for a cocktail before you go?’ Doreen asked, offering up a bowl of ‘little boys’ and larger saveloys, her grinning teeth framed by patchy bright red lipstick. ‘You’ve got a choice of big ones, or little ones. The little ones I call “disappointments”,’ she said as she picked up a small cocktail sausage and bit hard through it with her crooked teeth.

‘Oh. My. God,’ Rebecca breathed as she took up a little boy and dipped it in tomato sauce. ‘Tupperware indeed. I can see tonight is going to get messy. Very, very messy!’

Four

When Rebecca and Gabs entered Doreen’s lounge room, it was like walking into a teenager’s bedroom overflowing with excited hormonal girls. The giggling, chatting women from the surrounding districts were all dressed like hookers, trannies or tarts with feather boas, lace or sequins. Many of them weighed on the large side, to the point where some might even warrant a spot on The Biggest Loser.

Together they huddled around Doreen’s dining table as if it was half-time at the footy. Doreen’s demure lace cloth was covered with glistening folds of black velour, on which sat an array of naughty novelties, romantic remedies and (more disturbingly for Rebecca, who had been expecting lettuce containers and drink bottles) items such as vibrators, ‘bullets’ and egg-shaped ‘marital aids’. There were clear-faced boxes containing fetish and fantasy costumes. Rebecca noticed that Speedo, the Groggans’ budgie, whose cage sat beside the dining table, was discreetly covered with a sheet as if the items on the table would upset his avian sensibilities.

‘No Tupperware in sight,’ said Bec. ‘Don’t reckon I’ll be fixing my lunch-box deficit here.’

‘Nah,’ Gabs said, ‘but you might fix your box deficit problem.’

‘Hah! You dirty girl!’

‘You have to admit some of those things do look like kitchen appliances. You could mix a cake with that one,’ she said, pointing to a giant red vibrator.

Bec grinned at Gabs as the women turned to greet them warmly.

Candice Brown from the Bendoorin general store, two hours’ drive away, stepped out of the huddle to give Rebecca a quick hug.

‘Good to see you, Beccy. It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘You should come in and get your groceries personally, instead of getting them delivered on the school bus! I miss seeing your lovely smile.’

Nicknamed by the locals ‘Candy Shop’, Candice Brown was anything but the brown her married name suggested. She was as bright and colourful as a licorice allsort in both looks and personality. She had vividly dyed curly crimson hair that tonight was pinned up so that ringlets fell prettily about her friendly round face. At the store, she could always be easily found in the rows of groceries, wearing her vibrant pinks, reds and yellows teamed with black leggings. Tonight she’d opted for an electric blue taffeta number and six-inch heels, topped off with a hot pink boa and a plastic six-shooter held in place by a frilly garter belt on her bare thigh.

‘You look great!’ Bec said. ‘Like a Western gal who hangs out in the rooms above saloons.’

‘Brian almost wouldn’t let me out the door.’ She laughed. ‘Dirty old coot! He loves his Westerns.’

‘Here’s to whiskey and wild women!’ Gabs said, passing another Cowboy shooter to Bec and Candice. ‘You look good enough to eat, Candy Shop!’

Bec smiled as she thought of Candice’s husband, Brian, who also ran the store-cum-post office. He was the opposite of his near namesake, the lean, chiselled actor Bryan Brown. Instead he was tiny, skinny, rarely spoke and always wore beige. Bec couldn’t even imagine Brian getting randy. How was it that he and Candy were so different, yet after running the same store together for thirty years and raising a family of three, they seemed so happy together? Bec decided there and then, she really must make more of an effort with Charlie. Focus on his good points, instead of chewing through his bad.

She was about to search for a chair to sit on when she was distracted by the disturbing sight of Ursula Morgan on the lounge. Ursula was testing the seams of her white Lycra kinky nurse’s outfit with her giant Jim Beam gut, the indent of her belly button creating a crater like the moon’s. She was yelping with seal-like laughter as she took a photo on an iPhone of Janine Turner. Janine was lying back on the couch, stuffing a gigantic black dildo between the long line of her cleavage and pouting in her pose. Once the image was captured, Ursula began frantically texting.

‘I’ll tell him the blokes have finished fundraising for the moustache-growing month of Mo-vember and now it’s our turn. Us girls are now fundraising for Fan-uary! Growing your pubes for a good cause!’

‘Fan-uary!’ screeched Janine. ‘He’ll like that! Can I be in charge of Pubic Relations?’ Her crow-call laughter filled up the room.

‘I’ll need a whipper snipper for mine when I’m done!’ Ursula muttered as she texted. Janine waved the dildo about in the air as she grabbed another slurp of her drink, a satisfied smile on her fake-tanned face. Rebecca smiled wanly at the sight of them, wondering which poor bastard they were tormenting tonight with their text messages and dirty photos. What was it about women who lost all shyness and sensibility when they were on the drink?

The normally ultra reserved and often bitter Ursula was the daughter of a local logging contractor. She had, at the age of twenty-seven, already managed to help keep the tiny school at Bendoorin open with her brood — not to mention the gene pool nicely mixed for such an isolated region. She had four kids to four different fellas, causing confusion at school craft-making classes in the lead-up to Father’s Day.

Ursula still lived at home with her parents and treated them like crap daily because she could. Her Centrelink payments meant life ticked over and was OK, if a little boring. Bec often found it oddly creepy that Ursula’s portly father sometimes still referred to her long lustrous black hair, which she could sit on, as his daughter’s ‘crowning glory’. Because it was the only bit of praise from her father she’d ever received, the woman had never cut her hair. Sadly it was now greying slightly on her high forehead, but still fell way below her backside, which in recent years had expanded to the size of a large beanbag.

Her friend, or more accurately occasional drinking buddy, Janine, was the complete opposite to Ursula. She was one of the few ‘graziers’ wives’ from the larger properties in the district who tried ever-so-hard to be landed gentry. She walked for miles and miles along country roads to keep her body lean. She adorned said body in all the chunky jewellery she could order from the Country Style magazine classified section. Janine was great at dressing richly conservative and tossing her highlighted auburn locks with immense snobbery as she walked into sheep shows on the arm of her excessively quiet, red-faced Merino-man husband. But on nights like this, Ursula and her constant flow of Jim Beam were Janine’s undoing and all her airs and graces slid down to her ankles.

‘Oh, hello, Rebecca!’ Ursula said, her tone a little tainted with drunken sarcasm. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

Janine gave her a wave of the dildo and a wry smile.

In response, Rebecca picked up what she’d read was a Gliterous-G and waved its pink jelly-like eight inches back at the two terrors. ‘Hello, girls,’ she said, then turned to Gabs. ‘I really need another drink.’ Before they could make their way back to the kitchen to mix a Bundy, though, Doreen was clapping her hands, shoving two fingers in her mouth and whistling loudly like she’d just called a Kelpie off the stock. The women instantly fell silent.

‘Ladies! It’s time to start! Welcome to the Horny Little Devils night,’ Doreen said in a drawling, twanging voice that made the word ‘horny’ sound like a motorbike passing. ‘This is Tracey and she’s our Horny Rep.’ Beside her stood a demure girl, dressed all in black, with heavy eye makeup and jet-black hair pulled tightly back in a pony tail.

‘Geez, check out the woman-child,’ muttered Gabs as she surveyed the sex-toy consultant. ‘As if she’d know how to use this stuff. She looks like she’s still in grade six.’

Bec stifled a giggle. Tracey stepped forwards. ‘Evening, ladies. I’ll walk you through the catalogue. We’ll start with our lingerie and finish with the boys’ toys.’

Rebecca flicked to the first page, where a fake-tanned, breast-enhanced, air-brushed bottle blonde was slipping off the strap of her hot pink, sheer Yvette Babydoll with matching G-string. Bec’s eyes meandered over a few more pages of ‘flog-me’-style black lace corsets with suspenders for the larger ladies. For the more demure there was the Courtney Gown in elegant duck-egg blue with ‘sexy thigh-high splits’. She wondered what Charlie might do if she turned up dressed in some of the clothing. Maybe as the raunchy police officer, complete with gun, baton and hat, whispering to him, ‘Frisk me?’ He’d probably laugh at her.

As Tracey passed a few samples around, the women began to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the potential the outfits could bring to their marriages and partnerships.

‘Now if Doreen here sells over fifteen hundred dollars’ worth, she’s in for tonnes of free product.’

‘Not used, I hope!’ Doreen snorted.

Tracey smiled patiently. ‘Which brings us on to cleaning. On page twenty-two, there’s a range of play wipes and safe sterilisers for your vibrators.’

‘So you don’t just wash ’em and hang ’em on the line?’ Janine chortled.

‘No,’ said Tracey, straight-faced.

‘Not in the dishwasher?’ Janine added.

Tracey gave her an ‘I’ve heard it all before’ look and soldiered on, holding up a six-inch iridescent blue Wallbanger complete with ‘additional dolphin’, flicking the on switch so the thing contorted like Flipper having a seizure. She passed it to Doreen, who shrieked and almost threw it to her daughter-in-law, Bonnie.

‘Oh my god,’ Bonnie said, blinking from behind her glasses, ‘I can’t believe my mother-in-law just passed me a vibrator! I’m going to need therapy!’

Rebecca reached for a crabstick, smiling as the other women laughed. Soon the buzzing Wallbanger got to her. ‘Here, Gabs, test it on your schnoz,’ she said, buzzing the vibrator to Gabs’s long, red-from-rum nose.

‘Oh my god!’ squeaked her friend. ‘I think my nose just went off! It’s not dripping, is it?’

Laughter erupted from within Rebecca. ‘That is most disturbing,’ she said.

‘I’d be gone before I’d even put the batteries in that thing,’ Gabs said, taking it from her. ‘That’s just too much!’

Next Tracey was holding up what looked like a fancy seat belt for a racing-car harness. ‘This is part of our Fetish Fantasy range and is the Door Swing. So you attach it to the door frame like this …’

‘Looks like a baby’s jolly jumper,’ Gabs muttered. ‘Ted would love a go in that, then once he’s in bed, I could let Frank have a crack at it with me in it!’

‘That is utterly gross,’ Bec said.

From the back row of women, Ursula called out, ‘Would it hold me? Reckon I’d bring the supports of the roof down if I got going in it!’ Some of the women struggled to stifle their giggles.

‘It takes up to one-twenty kilos,’ Tracey said.

‘That means I’d need a bloody small bloke,’ Ursula said.

‘You could grab one of those new jockeys from up the road to give it a go,’ Gabs suggested. ‘Come to think of it, if you weren’t in it, you could fit three jockeys in there. They’re only about forty kilos each, aren’t they?’

The women all laughed. Jockeys had been the focus of jokes lately since the sale of Rivermont. It was the district’s second largest farm after Rebecca’s Waters Meeting and a bit more sizeable than Janine’s husband’s Elvern Estate, and had in the past twelve months sold for three million. The new owners, who wanted to expand their racing operation from Scone, had dived in and proceeded to give the entire property and homestead a facelift and transformation that was beyond belief. Within months it had been cultivated into a premier racing training and breeding facility that would rival the Packers’ polo place.

It wasn’t the only change the locals were dealing with. The previous summer the road from Bendoorin had been sealed right up through the valley so that rich sightseers wanting an easy glimpse of the summertime snow country could now drive their BMWs and Mercedes Benzes through the valley comfortably. There were also mutterings that the mining companies were sniffing about for new leases.

In short, Bendoorin was experiencing a renaissance. So much so that Candice’s daughter Larissa had opened a coffee shop that served flat whites and chai lattes to the Rivermont staff, new tourist trade and mining men.

Transition and change were in the air and, even though there were employment benefits (and sexy visiting tradesmen for the women to ogle), most of the locals didn’t like it. Particularly Rebecca. Her quiet backwater farm of peace and solitude had now become a thoroughfare for ski-bunnies, bushwalkers and weekend tourists looking to escape the city during holiday periods, along with four-wheel drives packed with workwear-clad men carting geo-equipment and core sample drilling rigs. And the conversion of Rivermont to a place frequented by pukka big-money corporates and the best racehorses on the planet was just another pain in her arse.

Absolute tossers could now be found at Candy’s store, asking for organic sourdough bread and low-fat soy milk for their coffees. And there was often a rowdy queue at the counter when the playful Rivermont staff zoomed into town in their sign-painted work vehicles and bought up all the sausages and steak from the meat section for their pissy barbecues, leaving none for the locals.

‘Bugger the Rivermont jockeys and the snobby bastards there,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m sick of their bloody helicopter flying over and upsetting me pigs!’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Rebecca, raising her empty glass.

Just as the other women joined them in a toast, in walked a stunning woman, dressed in skinny jeans and knee-high leather boots. A classy blonde pony tail pulled back from her clear vibrant face meant it was difficult to tell her age. She could have been in her late twenties or early thirties. Or she could have been a well-preserved forty. Rebecca looked at her with a tinge of regret. It was how she wanted to look. How she suspected she had looked before life had got in her way.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ the woman said to Doreen, glancing around the room.

‘No problems, duck. We’ve only just started. Everyone, this here’s Yasmine Stanton. From Rivermont.’

The ladies eyed her more thoroughly.

‘Yazzie, for short,’ she said with a big perfect-toothed princess smile. ‘Everyone calls me Yazzie.’

‘Jazzie Yazzie,’ Bec heard Ursula mutter, knowing news of the presence of the leggy blonde in the area had already spread like wildfire among the Bendoorin men. ‘More like fucken Barbie.’

If the woman had heard Ursula’s comments, she didn’t react. She just beamed a smile and graciously accepted a shooter from Doreen, downing it and eagerly grabbing up a second.

An hour later Doreen had Tom Jones blaring from the stereo. Some of the women were gyrating on the specially bought red shag-pile rug. Gabs’s terriers, who had now been allowed into the house, were up for some fun too, trying in vain to hump the rug and the leg of anyone who would stand still for long enough. Amanda Arnott was attempting to slide down the half-metre banister on the small stairs that led to the bedrooms and bathroom, getting her bum-crack wedged on the turned wooden knob each and every time before pivoting onto the floor onto her back, snorting laughter. Candice was peeking through Speedo’s cage, trying to feed the disgruntled budgie her hand-made ‘cheese dicks’.

Bec, who sat at the smorgasbord of sex toys, tried again to focus on her order form and ignore the chaos about her. What on earth should I get? she wondered, flicking through the catalogue, muddled by the rum. She decided to switch to water for the rest of the evening. What would Charlie like? He never even talked to her much about sex these days. It was as if he had shut down from it. It shocked her to realise she no longer knew what her husband liked. As her pen hovered over the order form, she heard a voice beside her. ‘Hi, I’m Yazzie.’

Rebecca looked up. ‘Rebecca.’

‘From Waters Meeting?’

‘Yep, the one and the same.’

‘I had so hoped to meet you!’ Yazzie said brightly. ‘My father isn’t so good at getting out to meet the neighbours. He’s never here, and I fear we’ve made a terrible racket getting the place built.’

‘It has been a bit of a whirlwind,’ Bec said a little coldly, thinking back to the times when she and Charlie had been furious at the way the workmen drove huge trucks around the middle of the blind corners of the tight-turned mountain roads, and about the chopper unsettling the calving cows and lambing ewes as the rich Stanton man from the city built his Taj Mahal of racing in their once quiet valley.

But Yazzie seemed not to notice Rebecca’s coolness towards her, or, if she did, she was ignoring it. ‘What are you getting?’ she asked with the same pretty smile as before.

‘I really don’t know. Not sure if I need any of this stuff; plus what if my boys found my stash of sex toys?’

‘Just tell them they’re part of Mummy’s lightsaber collection,’ Yazzie said.

Bec laughed. ‘You’re right.’

‘Here, allow me,’ Yazzie said, taking the pen and the order form from her. ‘I’ll choose and I’ll pay. Think of it as an apology gift. I know what a balls-up my father creates in people’s lives. Trust me.’

‘No, really. No. That’s too much,’ Bec said, reaching for the form.

Yazzie pulled it away from her. ‘Please. I insist.’

Bec watched, amazed, as Yazzie sat down in the chair next to her. ‘You’re giving me sex toys? As an apology gift?’

‘Why not? And the policewoman’s uniform. You and I can go riding in them. That would be a hoot. I’m assuming you do ride, don’t you?’

Bec nodded. ‘When I can.’ But truthfully she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on Ink Jet, her horse, who was so old now Bec felt guilty even leaning against her, let alone chucking a saddle on her high-withered swayback. She’d wanted another horse and pored over the pages of Horse Deals, but never felt she could afford it. Or, more to the point, Charlie didn’t feel they could afford it.

His interest in horses had waned over the years. He’d ridden the runs with her in the early years of their courtship, holding her hand as they silently rode side by side, Charlie on Tom’s old horse, Hank. But as time passed, he would say, ‘Easier to take the steel horse,’ and he’d rev away in a cloud of blue-grey exhaust fumes. Nowadays, despite the ruggedness of the mountain country, he didn’t think it necessary to teach the boys to horseride. Instead he’d got them little four-wheel bikes that buzzed like bumblebees on steroids. Bec thought they looked incredibly dangerous when the boys were taking sharp turns, but Charlie had said no to ponies for them. She sighed.

As she watched Yazzie fill out more and more items on the order form, then pull out her credit card, Bec felt her cheeks redden.

‘Stop stressing,’ Yazzie said. ‘Let someone spoil you for a change.’

Should I be offended by this bright little rich girl sitting beside me? Bec wondered. Or should I soak up the vibrant energy she seems to emit? This Yazzie bird was almost as intoxicating as Doreen’s Cowboy shooters. She seemed to buzz.

‘While you do that, I’ll get us another drink!’ Bec said.

‘Thanks. This will bump up the party earnings!’ Yazzie said, tapping the end of the pen on her teeth. ‘Doreen’s going to get so much free stuff she could open a shop. And just wait till the parcel arrives! Your husband’s gunna love it!’

Five

By midnight the Dingo Trapper Hotel was fairly humming, thanks to the cut-out crew who, in a bid to shear the last of the wethers, had finished late at the Clarksons’ place. After a few beers on the board, the team had eagerly jumped in their utes, collecting some mates along the way, and poured themselves into position at the bar. Hours later, gun shearer Murray was still leading the charge with a huge smile on his boxy butcher’s-dog face. His bristly jowls had captured a few tiny locks of wool from the day’s shearing and lanolin still coated his clothes and skin. He was steering his men down a river of drinking that had flowed from beer to Bundy — and now several of them were even lighting Sambuca, then dowsing it with Blue Curacao, before throwing it into their gobs.

Billy Arnott, the bar owner, better known as ‘Dutchy’ (short for Dutch Cream because of his fair European looks and the fact his surname was a biscuit brand), was enjoying the pantomime that was playing out before him. He and his wife, Amanda, had only taken over the pub three years prior, after a ‘tree change’ from Sydney. The Arnotts had big shoes to fill following the death of the last publican, Dirty Weatherby, and Dutchy knew it.

Dirty Weatherby, who was buried at the church down the road, still had uproarious visits from his clientele, who would bring him a beer and stand and toast him around his gravesite. His old dog, Trollop, who was as fat and wide as a grizzly bear, would lumber along with the pub crowd and dutifully piss on her owner’s grave, much to the mirth of Dirty’s former clients, who loved him and the dog in equal measure. Tonight Trollop, full of leftover beef schnitzel, fishermen’s basket and chips, had settled herself into an armchair beside the pool table and was farting as powerfully as she was snoring, the resulting smell forcing the pool players to evacuate the area from time to time.

Dutchy was grateful the dog had stuck around.

Even though the former city newsagent was used to wooing a crowd, so too was Trollop. She evoked the memory of Dirty so strongly when people looked into her sincere brown canine eyes that when word got around Dutchy was keeping ol’ Trollop, even initially suspicious people would stop in at the pub to see her especially. One beer with the dog began to extend to three and four. And then the locals started to come back. Nights like these were now almost weekly at the pub that was nestled in a pretty river bend, almost entirely isolated from the town. Only the lonely hillside church, a few Ks down the road, was anywhere nearby.

As Dutchy ripped open another packet of chips, emptied them into a bowl and set it on the bar, he smiled at being given the chance to start life over in this part of the world. He and Amanda knew this area was about to awaken, thanks to the sealed road and hungry, thirsty, cashed-up travellers. And even though it was dire news for the district, there was talk of mining exploration for coal. The geos and their crews loved a beer and a chicken parma too, so the future looked bright for the pub. Suddenly life seemed more interesting for the local tarts as well, who’d helped the pub get its nickname, the Fur Trapper.

In the off-season, though, Dutchy knew he had to look after the locals. Give them free stuff to keep them feeling warmed and welcomed. Deliver complimentary trays of golden nuggets and sausage rolls to the bar, along with copious quantities of tomato sauce. Keep the wood fire blazing on cold winter nights. He’d also made sure he’d kept the music collection country as much as possible, despite the complaints from travellers. As another twanging Toby Keith song finished and the CD was about to flip to The Wolfe Brothers’ new hit song, there was a lull in the raucous pub prattle.

Suddenly a throbbing sound filled the vacant space. Bright lights blazed through the window like searchlights at a prison. At first Dutchy thought it was a helicopter landing on the road. Just at the very moment the first guitar chords from the Wolfies exploded, the pub emptied and the boozers spilled outside.

Dutchy lifted his little bar flap and followed the drinkers out into the cool night to see what the lights and noise were about. ‘What the …?’

There, revving a gigantic new tractor in the middle of the road, was Charlie Lewis.

‘Basil Lewis, you mad bastard!’ Murray called out, using the nickname that had followed Charlie from Ag College, given to him because of the bed-hair that stuck up like a brushy fox tail in the morning. As Charlie Lewis opened the door of the tractor cab, he drank in the smiles of greeting from the pub crowd. In his larrikin way, he gave everyone the thumbs-up and a drunken smile.

He flicked on the rear light, illuminating the business end of the tractor. The new yellow plough was covered with a film of dust, but the edge of the discs that had been corroded clean by soil gleamed in the tractor’s bright lights.

‘Geez, Basil, you coulda taken the plough off before you drove in! Ya dick.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘No time to waste! It’s beer o’clock, according to the Tardis controls in here!’

After conducting a guided tour of the tractor and its features, Charlie was ushered into the hotel by the men, where a fresh bar-frenzy exploded. Dutchy, as he frantically poured beer and Bundy and rang the till, found himself wishing his wife, Amanda, would get back from the ladies’ party sooner rather than later.

‘They must be trying before they buy at this sex-toy party,’ Dutchy said as he pushed a Bundy and Coke towards Charlie. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

‘Sex-toy party?’ Charlie asked. ‘My missus told me it was a Tupperware party!’

Murray and his crew erupted into laughter.

‘Nah-uh. No Tupperware, mate,’ Dutchy said. ‘Wonder what she’ll bring you home! Or is she gettin’ it for someone else and givin’ you the lettuce containers?’

‘Sex-toy party? Geez!’ The penny dropped for Charlie. That would explain Janine’s photo earlier this evening. That wasn’t a black salami she had between her tits, he realised with utter amusement and a shiver of excitement. He’d not yet heard back from her. Part of him was relieved, but part of him was hoping she’d be lurking out there somewhere, looking to hunt him down.

‘If my missus went to one of them parties and came home with one of them sex-toy things, I’d tell her to pack her bags,’ Murray said, his stubble-covered jaw jutting out. ‘If my tackle’s not good enough for her, then that’s it. I’m not getting replaced by some made-in-China piece of plastic!’

‘No wonder she’s cleared out on you then, Muzz,’ Duncan, the cheeky board boy with the acne scars, said, wiggling his little pinky at him.

‘She did not clear out on me. I cleared out on her.’

‘That was only after she found out you were doing the lollipop lady at the Bendoorin high school,’ Duncan said, edging stupidly closer to a set of knuckles in the face from Muzz.

Charlie began to laugh. He remembered how word had got around that Muzz had been having a red-hot affair with the lady who held the stop/slow sign at the school. If they knocked off early, the shearers would try to time their travel home from the sheds to get a look at her. A lot of the women on wet-sheep days couldn’t work out why their husbands were suddenly interested in dropping their kids to school.

Muzz shook his head. ‘She was the one who stopped me!’

‘It was her job to stop you,’ Charlie said, hoping Muzz would again tell the story. Somehow it made him feel better about his own guilt. As if what he was doing with Janine was normal — acceptable in fact. Everyone else did it, didn’t they? They all cheated? Muzz had.

‘Yeah, well, she did ask me how my day was …’ Murray said, swigging his beer ‘… and I said it had been rough. We’d been shearing rams. Bloody bastards were full of prickles. As I dragged one out, there was a huge patch of fissles in one’s topknot. So I ended up with a fissle in me nuts. Painful as!’

‘A fissle?’ Dutchy asked, cocking an enquiring eyebrow.

‘Thistle,’ Charlie interpreted.

‘Oh,’ Dutchy said, pulling a face, then lifting both fair eyebrows.

‘So,’ Murray continued, ‘I told her I was in agony coz I had this fissle in me nuts and she said to me, “Well, I’ve got a pair of tweezers in me car, darlin’, and a certificate in First Aid.” Then she looked at me all funny.’ Muzz licked his wet beer lips and shook his head at the memory. ‘She had a real good body on her, but, by geez, her head was a bit rough.’

By this stage, the men about him were wetting themselves, wheezing and back-slapping.

‘So what’s a bloke to do when he’s in pain like that? Of course he’s gunna drop his strides for the lady to help,’ Muzz continued, pretending to ignore them, but savouring their mirth.

‘Oh, Muzz. You’re priceless, mate,’ Charlie said.

Muzz shrugged and swigged his beer.

‘So did she get it out?’ the board boy asked.

Muzz and Charlie looked at him blankly. ‘What? Get what out?’

‘The fissle.’

‘She got more than just me fissle out, Duncan, let me tell you! Stop! S … low! Stop! S … low!’ Muzz said, gyrating his hips.

The men laughed with bravado and swigged their beers with smiles still fresh, but Charlie felt his mind drift away from them. He knew this bawdy behaviour from them all was just a cover for the pain they held in each of their lives. Do they all share the same sense of dissatisfaction as me? he wondered. The dissatisfaction with their women? When he thought of Bec, all he felt was a quiet anger towards her. She had been so gutsy and capable when they had been at Ag College together. Sexy and fit too. Now, since the kids, she’d turned into a nag. A surly one at that. And she’d pressured him to have that operation. Like a Jack Russell at a rabbit hole, she’d dug and dug at him until he caved in. Since the vasectomy, he felt like half a man. A gelded stallion. A castrated cat. Emasculated beyond belief. After the op, one testicle had felt like an AFL football and the other a rugby ball and both were competing to see which could be the bigger code. It was agony. It was humiliating. No wonder in recent months Janine had lit a fire within him.

‘Least she never got you to cut your nuts out, like my missus,’ Charlie wanted to say sulkily, but instead he just downed his rum faster and pushed a ten-dollar note on the bar towards Dutchy. As he did, he noticed the Rural Land Management poster behind the bar advertising yet another no-till cropping and holistic grazing info night at the pub tomorrow. How many of those fuckers does the district need? Charlie thought.

He rolled his eyes. Andrew bloody Travis. Since RLM had been funding Andrew bloody Travis’s visits into the area, Rebecca, who had for the past few years gone quiet on the farm, was now hounding Charlie for change. He wasn’t sure if her old man’s death was what had prompted her sudden, intense concern with the farm’s management, or if it was purely that she had a thing for Andrew. She’d been begging Charlie to come along to one of the nights. Then begging him to change how he’d been running Waters Meeting. All the while parroting Andrew Travis’s crap.

When Charlie had first come to Waters Meeting to manage the cropping program and to see if he and Bec had a shot at being married, her father, Harry, was hell bent on grubbing out all the willows on the streamsides and fencing out the stock. The hours they’d put in dozing and heaping and burning. Then Bec had got hold of a book by Peter Andrews and she’d ranted at them daily that they should be doing the opposite. She said they ought to be slowing down the water run-off and letting the weeds choke the marshy places on the property. And she was spouting off that the riverbanks were now undergrazed and they should let the sheep, cattle and horses in from time to time. In the ten years he’d been here, the advice dished up to farmers had done an about-turn. And now here was Bec, snubbing the fertiliser reps when they called by with a new calendar and big plans for more business with them, then slamming him for ploughing, all because of this bloody New Age farmer Andrew Travis.

Suddenly Charlie found himself wondering why she hadn’t said it was a sex-toy party she was headed to tonight. Maybe there was something going on? He took note of what time the seminar started tomorrow. This time he’d go. Not to find out what the guy was on about, but to keep an eye on what was going on between the soil/grazing expert and Rebecca.

He glanced at his watch and wondered when Bec would be home.

Just then Dutchy’s wife, Amanda, sailed through the door with a waft of cold air and perfume. She carried a silver platter over her head with aplomb and her auburn hair, curled by the damp night air, framed her lively face.

‘Never fear, gentlemen, I am here!’ she called out as she set down the platter on the bar. ‘Leftovers from the ladies, for you!’

As she lifted the bar flap and took her position next to her husband, the men began inspecting the carved carrots with creamy dip and carefully constructed penis-shaped hors d’oeuvres made from tiny cocktail onions joined with toothpicks to sausages.

‘Not sure I like the look of those, Amanda,’ Muzz said, but with his crooked teeth he snapped the end of a carrot and dunked the rest in his beer, using it as a swizzle stick. ‘What’d ya bring Dutchy home?’

‘I’m saving my show-and-tell for later,’ she said coyly, then went to serve ol’ Bart, who was propping up the end of the bar. ‘It’s Charlie who’s gunna have the fun,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Stanton’s shouted her the biggest order.’

But Charlie didn’t hear her. His phone had buzzed and there on the screen was a text from Janine: Where R U? He wrote back, Pub.

Church, now, came her reply. For a fleeting moment he baulked at the mention of the church. Tom was buried there. The memory of Rebecca’s crippling grief after her brother’s death almost stopped Charlie going now to Janine. But as he looked again at the RLM poster and the smiling photo of fit and lean Andrew Travis with his George Clooney salt-and-pepper hair, Charlie felt the quiet anger rise again.

Next he was downing his beer and paying his dues. ‘Better get my tractor cranked,’ he said to the boys and out he wavered into the night. ‘If your missus is home, mine will be soon too. She’ll have my nuts. Again.’

‘You right to drive that thing?’ called Dutchy, but Charlie Lewis was already gone.

‘He’s keen to get home to try a few toys I reckon,’ said Muzz, watching from the window as Charlie turned the tractor and plough around and revved away into the night.

On the bitumen, Charlie hurtled the tractor to maximum speed. With a thrill he felt the steering wheel jump to its own bizarre robotic life as the automated steering function took over. He felt like he was driving a gigantic monster truck at a speedway. Sure he’d chewed up his bonus diesel voucher getting to the pub, but the laughs from the boys had been worth it. And now here was his chance for a quick stop-off with Janine before heading home. He knew Bec would have his balls for real if she found out, but right now he didn’t care. Within him lay an insatiable appetite for any excitement at all in his life. There was something eroding him away inside. It was the same gnawing feeling he’d had in the days when he was stuck at home on his family farm, living under the shadow of his father and constant pressure from his mother. He needed something to move him through this porridge of a life he now found himself in again.

Something like Janine. And there she was, standing in the headlights of the tractor beside the church. The breeze blowing her long dark hair, the coat that was wrapped about her flapping open so Charlie glimpsed the shiny purple fabric of a tiny negligee. Tonight she was all curves and wickedness. He didn’t care that she was Morris Turner’s wife and mother to two painfully shy teenage boys. He just wanted sex with her. And to forget. Charlie swung open the cab of the tractor and hauled her in.

Six

Rebecca half fell out of Gabs’s Landy on the mountainside and instantly felt a deep unseasonal chill in the air. The dark gums above her glistened with night-time dew and the roadside gravel beneath her feet felt damp and cold.

‘You sure you’re right to drive?’ asked Gabs.

Bec nodded as she hitched up her boob tube and wrapped her arms about her body. ‘The old girl will get me home,’ she said, thumping the roof of the battered Hilux, once a vibrant red, now faded, scratched and dinted. Knowing she had to drive thirty Ks home from the turn-off where she’d met Gabs earlier that night, she’d been drinking water since ten at Doreen’s and now felt horribly sober and incredibly tired. While someone thought it had been a good idea to seal the road, some of the bends on the southern slopes on dewy nights like this were sheened in a slippery concoction of oil and water. She intended to take it slow.

‘All right. Hoo-roo then. Enjoy Dental Day!’ Gabs said, delivering a gigantic toothy smile, folding her lips up above her teeth, before driving away.

Inside the ute, Bec turned the key and waited for the glow light to click off before she chugged the diesel engine over. She clunked the fan on flat-out for warmth, then headed off at a meagre speed, her headlights fanning across the summertime native grasses that bowed their seed heads with the weight of the dew. The roadside grasses prompted thoughts of Andrew Travis and what he had taught her about native grasses in the past twelve months. It was more than she had learned in a lifetime of farming.

At Ag College she’d never been taught the difference between a C3 and a C4 perennial plant that lay dormant at certain times of the year, depending on the warmth or coolness of the season. She hadn’t realised, until Andrew had taught her, that modern agriculture favoured annual plants and decimated perennial plants with herbicides and ploughing. Or how superphosphate fertiliser killed crucial fungi that fed plants essential sugars and nutrients. Mind-boggling stuff, especially when she considered how she and Charlie had been managing the place.

Along with Andrew Travis opening up Bec’s mind, she felt he was also slowly opening up her heart too. He not only spoke to her without judgement, but with utter respect; he not only praised her intelligence, but he also fed her what was rare to find in her industry — a positivity and hope that there was a bright future in farming.

Bec sighed and, even though she was a non-smoker, she wished she’d nabbed one of Gabs’s smokes. She now saw Andrew as a visionary, despite his quiet way. His work was ‘change the world’ kind of stuff. She admired him more than any man she’d ever met.

‘He’s nothing but a bloody Greenie tool,’ Charlie had said when she’d tried to explain Andrew’s ideas. Driving home now, she wondered how she could shift Charlie in his thinking, and make him come along to the seminar tomorrow at the pub, not just to listen. But to hear and understand.

What she’d learned from Andrew’s seminars was the only thing that got Rebecca excited about life on Waters Meeting these days. To her, it meant a chance to farm profitably and regeneratively … not the way they were farming now.

As she drove on through the winding mountainside, occasionally the eyes of kangaroos and possums gleamed in the headlights. She knew the steel bull bar that wrapped around the front of the ute like a grid-iron helmet protected the vehicle, but she slowed anyway, not wanting to take the life of any animal. In her youth, she’d barely flinched when she’d tumbled a possum on the road or swiped a roo, but these days, since her boys, she had softened. It was difficult to see any living thing harmed. Ironic, she thought, that I farm meat, yet love my animals so passionately.

Bec wondered guiltily how her boys were at old Mrs Newton’s place, and if they had settled down to sleep OK. The boys made her think of Charlie, which in turn made her cross again that he couldn’t just set one night aside for being with them. She tried to push the thoughts away.

Maybe tonight and the order Yazzie had submitted for them could kick-start everything for her and Charlie. Maybe they could bring back the days when he was a wild but caring party boy and she his happy, determined, capable girl. But something like a thorn still niggled inside her.

As she wound over river crossings and up around mountain turns, she began to long for the warmth of her bed. She imagined pulling Charlie to her. Making love to him until morning. Then the realisation came that she’d have to be up early to collect the boys from the neighbour. Then she needed to make smoko for the crutching and jetting crew, who were coming with their portable unit at nine to treat the ewes. She grimaced with disappointment.

Were Saturday mornings like that in other people’s lives? Wouldn’t most people be sleeping in? Television cartoons for the kids while the parents lay in bed cuddling, reading newspapers and eating toast and drinking tea?

She loved her farming life, she loved her boys, but some days she wondered how on earth there’d be time for just her and Charlie? Other farming families went camping together, didn’t they? Water-skiing in the summer, snow-skiing in the winter, country-music concerts on weekends, dinner parties on Saturday nights with neighbours? But not the Lewises. Charlie was happy with the pub, footy and cricket-training booze-ups and satisfied with his machinery shed and the fridge, bar and potbelly stove he’d installed for himself there. And he had his trips to the mountain hut with Muzz for hunting.

In the ute in the darkness, she spoke out loud. ‘What do I do, Tom?’ she asked the empty night, wishing her brother was still with her for quiet counsel. Suddenly, thinking back to Tom and his death, she felt like crying.

The old Hilux gave a chug and the engine cut out to silence, wheels crunching over the newly sealed road, rolling to a stop. As she peered out of the window, she guessed she was still about fifteen Ks from home and about fifteen Ks from the nearest farm, which was Rivermont, where newly constructed white fences flanked the roadside.

‘What? C’mon, girl!’ Bec said to the ute as she tried the ignition again with no luck. She sat dumbfounded. She’d told Charlie the ute needed a service — the oil light was glowing far too often these days. She turned to the passenger seat, where she expected to find the Woolies bag containing her own clothes and boots. ‘Bugger!’ she said: she’d left the bag in Gabs’s Landy. She didn’t even bother to look at her phone. She knew she’d be out of range on this part of the mountain.

She fished around in the grubby space behind the seats, looking for the oil container she remembered putting there months ago. All she could find was an old green high-vis vest with a silver reflector strip and the kids’ orange ‘Fright Night’ torch from a Halloween party at Ursula’s last October.

Still in her hooker’s costume, Rebecca got out of the ute, looked down at herself and laughed. It was rather funny, standing in stilettos as she pulled on the green fluoro vest. It offered small relief from the cold. A shiver shook through her body as she lifted the bonnet. She shone the torch into the engine and cursed Charlie: there was not only no oil, but very little coolant. Was it her job to check these things? Before the kids, yes, it had been, she reasoned; but surely now, how could Charlie expect her to think of every little thing? As she looked about in the ute tray for a water container or even a pair of boots so she could walk comfortably to Rivermont, she accidentally bumped one of the buttons on the ‘Fright Night’ torch and suddenly a ghoulish voice was echoing into the night. The voice screamed, then moaned, ‘Heeelp me! Heelp me!’

‘Shut up!’ she said, prodding at the buttons, this time causing a witch’s cauldron to bubble and a cackle to emanate from the torch. It was giving her the creeps. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Giving up, she got into the cab and tugged the vest about her, trying to snuggle into the grimy seat to catch a wink of sleep before someone came by in the morning or Charlie noticed her missing. Not long after she dozed off, her eyes sprang open to see in the side mirrors the tops of the trees illuminated in the distance behind her. A car was coming. At this time of night? On this road?

She got out of the vehicle, wrapped the vest about her torso and flashed the torch in the direction of the car. A gigantic, shiny black Kluger four-wheel drive pulled up beside her and slowly the window slid down, revealing a classically handsome man, complete with a flattering amount of facial stubble on his olive skin. He was looking her up and down with a slightly amused expression on his rather smug face. The man was wearing a dark woollen coat that was turned up at the collar and Bec thought he looked like a mysterious traveller you’d find on a European train platform in the 1930s, not on a back road to Bendoorin. From the glow of the dash, his dark eyes seemed to mock her a little.

‘Broken down, have we?’ he said in a rather haughty deep voice that was coloured with an accent that Rebecca thought sounded like Puss in Boots from the Shrek films. ‘At least I hope you have,’ he added, eyeing her tarty shoes and fishnets.

‘Well, I’m not looking for business, if that’s what you’re implying,’ Rebecca said snappily. ‘I’ve been to a fancy-dress party and I need to get home to Waters Meeting.’

‘That is a relief. You’d better get in then.’

‘And you are?’ Rebecca asked, trying to sound dignified and not at all insulted that the man thought she wouldn’t make a very good lady of the night.

‘Sol. Sol Stanton. We’ve just moved into Rivermont. I can run you home, but I’d better call into Yazzie first and let her know I’ve arrived. My phone won’t operate in these mountains. She’ll be worried sick.’

‘Fine. That would be great, thank you. I’m Rebecca Lewis.’ Just as she said it, she bumped the button on the torch and it promptly gave a werewolf howl. ‘Sorry. Kids’ torch,’ she said, pulling an embarrassed face. ‘All I could find.’

Sol Stanton looked again at her with a mix of pity and amusement. ‘Just get in.’ Then he muttered, ‘Mierda.’ That might have been Spanish, but she knew, whatever he said, it wasn’t good. She wanted to say rudely, ‘Only because I have to, Mr “You may have a Kluger, but you haven’t got a clue”,’ but in silence she stomped around to the passenger side and tried as best she could in Gabs’s poorly stitched sequined miniskirt, once a six-year-old’s dance dress, to look ladylike as she climbed aboard. Instead her thighs in her now laddered fishnets squelched on the real-deal leather interior and she heard the skirt rip noisily along the seams that ran over her backside.

As they turned off the road and drove along the recently renovated drive to Rivermont, Rebecca was awestruck at the changes there. Their power bill for one must’ve been huge. No wonder the Stantons had installed their own wind tower on the western side of the farm. French Provincial-style lamps lined the driveway, illuminating elegant oak trees and elms at least ten metres tall that had been trucked in. Two dozen of them now lined the wide drive like a welcoming committee for the Royal Family. The understorey beneath them had been laid with instant lawn, which sprawled richly like carpet and was lit by low solar lights. But more incredible was the transformation of the classical old Rivermont homestead. It was how Rebecca’s own Waters Meeting could have looked, had the seasons been better and the money flowed. Had Charlie been easier to motivate, she thought bitterly. Or, more likely, she reasoned, if I wasn’t so weighted down with my own sorry self. If only, if only … Why, despite her struggle and hard work, did her lifelong dreams seem to constantly wither and die before they’d even reached the budding stage?

A gasp of admiration almost escaped her when she saw the illuminated homestead extensions helped along warmly from the lights within the home. A glass conservatory had been added, and what looked like an entire wing of rooms flanked by a verandah that perfectly matched the original.

‘You’ve done some work on the place,’ she said, trying to make conversation, intimidated by Sol Stanton’s silent haughty presence. He didn’t answer, his dark eyes fixed on the road ahead. Bec suddenly felt foolish. State the bleedin’ obvious, Rebecca, she thought crossly.

As they swung past the box hedges and softly lit fountain complete with elegant bronze racehorse statue, she was met with the lovely vision of a gently floodlit old stone barn that had been decked out and extended into what looked to be state-of-the-art stables. Reflecting the yard light beside that was a brand-new Colorbond shed with giant air-conditioners on the side. The shed stood no chance of remaining at odds with the stables and homestead. It was already getting a makeover with a pretty cladding of freshly planted climbing roses. Rebecca wondered what on earth the shed was for, but looking at the stern face of Sol Stanton, who was not dissimilar in aloofness and grumpiness to Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy, she bit her tongue. If he kept on like that, Rebecca decided she was ready to be truly rude. Surely such an excessive display of wealth was distasteful. Some may even find offence in what they had done to the old McDowell property. Marty McDowell would be rolling in his grave, she concluded. He had been a humble farmer and after his wife died and his boys refused to take on the farm, he’d mostly kept to himself. In truth, he had been a stingy old Scotsman who ran wormy cattle, but Bec preferred to side with the memory of him tonight ahead of this dark, stinking-rich stranger, who was now driving his brand-new vehicle into a new-made-to-look-old expansive three-car garage that already contained a Prado and a pristine blue Colorado ‘farm’ ute.

‘Follow me,’ he said with his chocolate voice. She was starting to feel as though Antonio Banderas had taken her prisoner.

‘I’d prefer to wait here.’

‘And I’d prefer you to come,’ he said impatiently, as if addressing a wearisome child.

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and mouthed ‘OK’ as she got out of the car and tottered in her heels, following Sol to the back door. She found herself in a freshly tiled ‘mudroom’, into which not a skerrick of mud had found its way.

As Sol swung open the kitchen door, Yazzie looked up in surprise from where she stood in a magnificently renovated kitchen in her peacock-blue silk robe, clutching a mug and distractedly flicking through a magazine at an island bench that was large enough to be one of the Maldives. Somewhere in the house Rebecca could hear dogs barking excitedly, clearly overjoyed to know their master had come home. There was a moment of confusion when Yazzie saw Rebecca, but then her expression turned to joy when she saw Sol.

‘Rebecca? Sol! Oh! Thank god you’re here,’ she said, rushing forwards to give him a kiss and hold him at arm’s length, surveying him. ‘I imagined the plane went down! Where have you been? I left the lights on for you.’ Then she looked at Rebecca, puzzlement and concern on her face. ‘And what happened to you?’

‘I could see that you had illuminated the entire district, and the plane was just delayed,’ said Sol. ‘Then I found this one on the side of the road broken down.’ He looked at Rebecca as if she was roadkill.

‘So you had to endure Mr Cranky Pants, did you? He’s terrible when he’s tired,’ Yazzie said, looking at Bec with a glint in her eye.

‘I’m very grateful he came along. I would’ve been very stuck.’

‘How could you be very stuck? You are either stuck or you are not stuck,’ he said pompously.

‘Yes, well, now you’re stuck here,’ Yazzie said to Bec, taking her by the arm. ‘I’m not letting you go before you’ve had a hot chocolate,’ Yazzie insisted, ‘with a dash of something stronger to warm your cockles, you poor thing.’ She smiled and winked, obviously pleased she had company.

Bec shook her head. ‘No, thanks, really. I’d rather be getting home.’

‘Well, I want a drink. It’s been a long journey,’ Sol said bluntly.

Rebecca looked at him in surprise. Maybe all exceedingly rich people were this rude? She shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have one too then,’ Bec said.

‘Great,’ said Yazzie, clapping her hands and teasingly tugging on Sol’s coat. ‘I see you’re still an old grump.’

As Yazzie extracted all kinds of café noises from the giant designer coffee machine in heating the milk for the cocoa, Rebecca thought she better at least make polite conversation with the grim but incredible-looking man before her. Before she could open her mouth, though, he was muttering something about getting his bags from the car and saying hello to the dogs and was gone.

‘Sorry about him,’ Yazzie said, digging out a container of marshmallows before generously splashing Irish whiskey into the cups. ‘He’s jetlagged. And licking his wounds from missing out on a big gig.’

‘Gig?’

‘With the Orchestra of Paris. He’s a piccolo player.’

Rebecca almost burst out laughing. ‘Piccolo? You mean one of those tiny little flutes?’ She remembered the sight of his large man’s hands gripping the steering wheel. His long strong fingers looked as if they’d more easily hold a rugby ball than a dainty little silver instrument. She internally giggled at the thought of him playing his tin whistle.

‘Here,’ said Yazzie, handing Rebecca the mug. ‘Follow me! Come and see my new toy!’

Rebecca wasn’t sure if Yazzie was drunk from the expensive champagne she’d brought to Doreen’s party earlier or if she was always this bubbly, but as she followed her down a wide passageway that was freshly painted and carpeted in classy cream, Bec suddenly didn’t care. Yazzie seemed so nice. Like a breath of fresh air.

They made their way through what Rebecca thought must be Sol and Yazzie’s bedroom, where a gigantic four-poster bed was spread with a gold-and-black quilt. Next she found herself standing in a huge bathroom with the heat lamps blazing.

‘Ta-da!’ said Yazzie, holding up what looked like a panel beater’s spray gun. ‘My new spray-tanning machine!’

Rebecca looked blankly at her, wondering if she should mirror her excitement. Was this woman serious?

‘C’mon, strip off,’ Yazzie said.

‘Me?’

‘Yep. I’ll show you how to do it. Then you can have a go with me. I’ve had them done in the salons enough, so we’ll be right. I kind of know what to do.’

‘I’m not —’

‘C’mon!’

‘But —’

‘C’mon. It’ll be a hoot.’

‘Are you completely pissed off your head?’

‘No … I just love having a bit of fun. This will be fun. Come on, Rebecca! Don’t think I don’t see it.’ Yazzie narrowed her eyes and suddenly pinched her arm.

‘Ouch! See what?’

‘That you are a can-do jillaroo. You’ve forgotten that, haven’t you? You’re stuck in a rut, sister.’

Rebecca’s eyes widened as she stared at Yazzie.

‘I only see it because I’ve been there too.’

‘You’re too young … to —’ Rebecca began.

‘Too young! What are you talking about? We’re practically the same age!’

Rebecca caught a glimpse of them both in the mirror. They shared the wayward look that came from a night on the grog, but, standing there under the bright dazzle of the heat lamps, Rebecca looked like a beat-up ute parked next to the Porsche-like Yazzie.

‘They say never judge a book by its cover …’ Yazzie said, following her gaze. ‘But we all do. Look, a good friend of mine — Evie; you’d love her, by the way — once said, “If you wake up and do the same things every day and think the same things every day, you’ll get the same results. But if you change how you think and what you do each day, then life will change!” So come on, Rebecca, live a little!’

Live a little? Rebecca wondered. By having a spray tan? Was this little rich girl nuts? She pictured Charlie back home in bed, snoring his head off. Scratching his nuts. Gut rumbling with his belly full of beer and deep-fried food, brewing farts for the morning. But then maybe it was her view of him that was the trouble? Maybe if she did change how she thought of him and of herself, life could get better?

‘OK. I’m up for it. I’m living a little,’ Rebecca said as she began to peel off her clothes. She looked down to her rather daggy black underpants and the hair that curled out from under the elastic. With the Baileys Irish Cream warming her up, she said dryly, ‘Cripes, my George W could do with some attention. It’s like a bloody national park down there, full of blackberries and suffering from undergrazing!’ She looked back up at Yazzie. ‘C’mon then, let her rip!’

It was three-thirty in the morning by the time Charlie crept up the big wide wooden stairs of the old homestead at Waters Meeting. In the bedroom, Rebecca had already passed out after devouring a large bottle of Baileys at Yazzie’s. His socked feet trod on the worn carpet that ran the length of the stairs. No matter how gently he trod, he still couldn’t avoid the creaks from the old steps. Even the solid oak door would not comply with the secrets he was trying to keep from his wife and it moaned loudly as he gently opened it. He quickly shed his clothes onto a pile on the floor and ducked into the bathroom.

Since Tom’s death, Bec had been a light sleeper so he made sure the door was shut before he switched on the light. In the bathroom, he cleaned his teeth roughly and swiped his body over with a sodden face washer and soap, hoping to erase the smell of Janine. He caught his image in the mirror. The beer belly, the brown hair receding at the sides. Lines around his once iridescent green eyes and dark circles he knew were from a stressed-out liver. He looked a mess. He felt a mess. As he gingerly opened the bathroom door, a shaft of light speared into the darkness of the bedroom.

There he was met with the sight of his wife lying spread-eagled on the bed. She was wearing a little white G-string and a floaty kind of see-through dress with white fur trim. But what was most unusual was that she was as golden brown as a potato wedge. All over. He crept closer and peered at her skin. In patches, it looked like she was splattered with water from a muddy puddle.

What on earth had she been doing? Something was not quite right. Andrew Travis came to his mind.

As he slid softly into bed beside her, he could smell the booze on her breath.

Phew, he thought. She was drunk and wouldn’t wake.

But next thing he knew Rebecca was reaching for him, rubbing her body against his and making sleepy noises of desire. He shut his eyes and sighed, knowing he’d have to oblige. How long had it been since she’d asked for it? Slowly, with a blank, shut-down feeling within him, Charlie began to caress his wife.

Seven

Only a few hours later that morning, as Rebecca dragged the bent and rusted gate open, she cursed her lack of sleep and the fact that none of the gates on Waters Meeting swung easily. She stooped and dragged a bleached limb that had fallen from the nearby stone-dead gum onto the track to the shearing shed. How many times had she said to Charlie they should fell the tree? It was dangerous. As she got back into the vehicle, she cursed her hangover and the chorus of whingeing from a very disgruntled Ben and Archie in the back seat. They were still sleepy and still crapped-off about being dropped at Mrs Newton’s last night.

Rebecca gunned the Toyota four-wheel drive wagon towards the corrugated-iron and timber shearing shed that sat on a flat-top knoll above the river. Knowing she was already pushed for time, she hastily grabbed the smoko basket from the front passenger seat, almost tripping over Charlie’s feathery sheepdog, Stripes. The tri-colour collie had been lured from the yards by the enticing scent of hot sausage rolls and party pies and was now wagging his tail frantically, delighted to see both Rebecca and the food. But Rebecca was in no mood for Stripes’s enthusiastic welcome.

‘Git out of it, Stripes!’ she said, just as she stepped in a fresh pile of sheep manure in her good town cowgirl boots.

She glanced up and saw Charlie’s broken-down Hilux, still with the tow rope attached to one of the crutching plant crew’s cars like a tethered horse. Phew, she thought. Charlie must’ve called the boys to pick it up on the way. That was one less job on her lengthy to-do list. The sight of the vehicle prompted memories of her bizarre night. Sol and Yazzie Stanton flashed into her mind. What a weird night. What a weird couple.

She looked down at her splotchy tan and grimaced.

‘Mum!’ called Ben from his booster seat. ‘Can I get out? Pleeease!’

Rebecca shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. ‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ll never get you back in and we have to get to the health clinic! We’re late as it is.’

‘Oh, but Muuum! I want to see the sheep machine! Daddy said I could.’

Ben’s little brother, Archie, joined in. ‘Mummy! Get out? Pleeeease!’

‘No! Enough of the begging! I don’t care what Daddy says. He never has to get you anywhere on time! Plus Daddy insists on using nasty chemicals on the sheep. I don’t want you near the sprays,’ she said as she slammed the door, barged past Stripes and jogged with the basket over to the shearing-shed yards.

As she rounded the side of the galvanised-iron shed, Rebecca baulked at the intensity of the work that met her seedy senses. The contractor and his crew’s team of barking dogs were noisily pushing Merino ewes up and into a mobile shearing plant. A diesel generator was adding to the din. Each sheep was unceremoniously tipped upside down on her back into a metal crate for the men to treat. Kelvin the contractor and his workmen stood on the trailer platform, wielding their handpieces through the wool around the startled faces of the ewes, then jabbing through the dags on their rear ends.

When she saw the pile of dirty wool crutchings accumulating in the bins, Rebecca felt another wave of disappointment and frustration. She’d asked Charlie not to put the ewes on the rich monoculture diet of oats, which messed with their digestion and led to shitty dags around their bums. She’d reminded him the animals needed mostly dry feed to fill their gut, with just a bit of green pick.

It would soon be joining time, on Anzac Day, later than most places due to the altitude of Waters Meeting, though Charlie never seemed to manage to meet even that deadline, putting the rams in too late, thereby pushing lambing out too late and missing the feed burst in spring.

‘If you don’t crutch them before joining,’ Rebecca had yelled at him one recent Sunday afternoon, ‘the bloody rams won’t be able to get their dicks past the shit!’

Charlie had simply looked up at her with annoyance from his football viewing, feet propped up on a stool, a row of empty stubbies beside the chair. He had waited until a goal was kicked and the TV flicked to an ad break, then he’d turned to her. ‘Not only are you a screaming banshee in front of the kids, but you’ve got a filthy mouth,’ he’d said to her mildly. He swigged his beer, then turned up the volume some more. Rebecca had quietly taken herself off into the bedroom to cry and fold washing.

She looked down to the river flats now. They seemed exhausted to her. Bare soil that she knew would sprout weeds in between what was left of the oats. She thought of the luscious vibrant feel of the farms she’d visited with Andrew. There, the farmers had waited for the perennial plants to become dormant as they did at certain times of the year. Then when they had grazed the plants down, they had sown the oats directly into the soil, without the need for a single pass of a chemical spray unit or a plough. The farms looked untidy with the long dry grasses and vast variety of plant species, yet as Andrew explained, the grass was simply hay left standing for the animals. The array of plant species offered the animals a banquet of healthy options. She had seen first hand on those farms how the stock thrived. When she suggested to Charlie that they try the same so the animals could self-medicate on herbs, forbs, annuals and perennials, he’d looked at her as though she’d dropped her guts in front of the Queen.

Couldn’t he see today that the ewes looked terrible, weighted down with dags from the too rich, too lush oat crop?

Rebecca noted the shorn strips of dull green wool that ran up the backs of many of the ewes. They had been flystruck and maggots had taken hold, eating their flesh away. Charlie’s jetting looked to be way too late.

Despite that, he seemed happy with himself, keeping the flow of the wigged and crutched ewes moving through the jet that sprayed anti-fly mix over their bodies. The sheep packed tightly onto the trailer as the frantic commotion of men, dogs, metal yard gates clanging and machinery buzzing rolled on. Some sheep were sinking to their knees in the crush of bodies. Rebecca hated to notice the weak ones among them.

In the let-out yard, the processed ewes stood watching, their faces now bright white. Some occasionally nibbled at the short yard grass while others planted their feet, cast their heads low and shook their bodies, sending any excess of the bitter-smelling jetting-fluid droplets into the air.

‘Smoko!’ called Charlie when he noticed Bec clearing a place on Kelvin’s ute tailgate for the basket. Each shearing plant was pulled out of gear and as the last sheep was dropped from the trapdoor release, the dogs were told to ‘siddown!’ Soon all that could be heard was water running from the tap at the tankstand as the men washed their hands.

‘Better late than never,’ Charlie said as he shoved a sausage roll into his mouth, looking pointedly at Rebecca. A simple ‘thank you, darling’ would be nice, Bec thought bitterly, but she bit her tongue. She was still angry with him for not being at home when she’d arrived back from Yazzie’s. He spent more time at the pub than he did at home. Then there was the shameful, embarrassed feeling that had clung to her this morning — when she’d made a move on him to make love, he’d been unable to keep going for her. In the dark in her ridiculous borrowed negligee and even more ludicrous spray tan, she felt humiliated and repulsive as Charlie’s penis had withered in her hand. She had cried silently, drowning in misery and the expensive perfume Yazzie had drenched her in.

‘And how’s Mrs Lewis this mornin’?’ Kelvin asked.

Rebecca grimaced internally, displeased to see him back on Waters Meeting. Charlie would’ve told Kelvin about the humdinger of a fight they’d had the first time he’d come last winter. Charlie was not big on tact, especially if it made Rebecca look foolish. He would’ve told Kelvin she’d wanted to hire another contractor, George Pickles.

Rebecca knew George had a passion for understanding stock movement and used his brilliant team of Kelpies to shift sheep through the yards quickly but with as little stress as possible. With George came a wicked wit too.

In the early years, before the boys, Bec had loved to work on the plant with George’s crew of cheeky, flirtatious young men. For Rebecca it had been a godsend to find a stockman like George after years of butting heads with her father over his motley crew of ill-trained working dogs and his rough, yelling ways around animals.

But it seemed since having children, Rebecca had left more and more of the stock work and decisions up to Charlie. George was ten cents a sheep dearer than Kelvin and so last year Charlie had decided George wouldn’t be coming back to Waters Meeting.

Kelvin had arrived last winter for footparing during what had been an incredibly hard time due to days and days of huge rains following three years of drought. With weak stock, muddy yards and a rough team of pushy men who looked as if they belonged in prison, the whole experience had been a disaster for Rebecca.

There were lame sheep everywhere on the property with foot abscesses, foot scald and a bad run of foot rot. Bec had been furious with Charlie for not paying enough attention to rotating the stock around the paddocks properly. Charlie had put sheep in boggy marsh paddocks and let mobs onto pasture that needed resting for regrowth.

There was also the issue of quarantining treated stock from contaminated soils that held intestinal worms and foot rot within them. All the while that winter, Bec had also battled the inconveniences of an ever shabbier house with a leaking roof, the seemingly endless domestics created by two small children and the disquiet in her mind, as the rain fell and fell. She felt guilt for everything. Even the fact she had begun to resent the rain after such a long dry spell.

One very dark afternoon, after dragging yet another weak in-lamb ewe out of a gully wash, she’d drawn up a hundred-day paddock rotation for Charlie to begin, based on Andrew’s seminars. With a bit of fencing sub-division, they could push the grazing out to a hundred and fifty days so the paddocks rested for longer. But Charlie hadn’t taken a scrap of notice. She knew it wasn’t entirely him. Rebecca knew deep down after Archie was born she had been hit with waves of post-baby depression that had never seemed to lift. Too proud to seek help from others, Rebecca had begun to let life on the farm slide on by without her. And with it went Charlie.

Hitting the gin one night after the boys had gone to bed, Rebecca had angrily thrown all the plans in the bottom drawer of the desk in the farm office and left them there. It had all got too hard and she simply didn’t have the energy any more to battle with herself, let alone Charlie.

It hadn’t rained since that wet winter and now in the dry, Bec was faced with Kelvin again. Grubby, rough and toothless. She glanced at the body of a sheep that had been tipped over the fence. A broken-necked ewe that had hit the railing hard in panic, singled out by dogs not taught to ‘steady’. Bec clenched her jaw. By the end of the day, she knew there would be more ewes piled there, with their glassy-eyed death stare.

Busily she laid out the cakes, biscuits and savouries and tried to ignore that she had just been called ‘Mrs Lewis’ in a voice that was tainted with the weight of disrespect.

She clamoured to find inside her the young woman of her youth, who had worked alongside the men at the sale yards or in the shearing shed. Instead she attempted a smile for the man who stood before her. Like always, Kelvin was dressed in grimy jeans and an even grimier tractor cap, with brown hair that was almost matted into dreadlocks sticking out from under it.

‘I’m feeling pretty ordinary, thanks for asking, Kelvin,’ she said.

‘Big night?’ Kelvin’s blue eyes narrowed and his thin smile twisted at one corner as he looked her up and down.

‘Yes, it was a bit of a big night. I’m not terribly piss fit at present,’ she said. ‘Not like Charlie here.’ She intended it as a dig, but Charlie seemed to pay no heed as he patted his belly proudly.

‘Yep, I’ve been working on this baby for a long while.’

‘Charlie tells me you got some nice Tupperware on order,’ Kelvin said slyly.

‘You blokes!’ Bec said. ‘And you say we women gossip! Really!’ She turned to Charlie. ‘I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back well after lunch. There’s sandwiches made and could you please switch the slow cooker on for tea? It’s ready to roll. I thought we could eat at home rather than the pub. Save the dollars as you say. You are coming to the info night with Andrew, aren’t you?’

Charlie seemed to tense up at the mention of it. ‘If the boss says so, I suppose I must,’ he said, glancing at the men.

‘No doubt who wears the trousers round here,’ Kelvin said, tucking his tongue cockily inside his cheek and raising his eyebrows at her.

Rebecca felt frustration simmer within. Then Ben arrived at the yard gate, Archie behind him, both little boys looking guilty. Sheep manure was already squelched into their town shoes, and paw marks, compliments of an overexcited Stripes, now smeared their once clean shirts.

‘Get in the car. Now!’ Rebecca said through clenched teeth.

As she ushered the boys back to their car seats, she heard Kelvin call, ‘Nice fake tan, by the way. Next time use something other than molasses.’

As she strapped the boys in again, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at where she found herself in life. She looked at the beautiful round face of her dark-haired Ben, who was suddenly growing long and lean now he was six. There, next to him, was quiet little Archie, who had the most beautiful sandy hair in ringlets about his fine-featured face, much like her own. They were the dearest little fellas. Her best mates.

Surely while they were this little, hanging in there with Charlie and feeling shut out from the farm was worth it? Things would improve over time. She knew it. She breathed in her resolve and puffed air from her mouth.

As she turned, she saw Charlie walking towards her, sleeves rolled up, his khaki work shirt tucked into brown RM Williams jeans, his Akubra obscuring his face so it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

She thought by the way he approached her he was about to give her a serve over something she had done that he disapproved of. She felt her internals flinch, then she steeled herself.

‘About last night,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. Y’know, I’ve been under the pump lately.’

Rebecca wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the abysmal love-making that had ended in a flop of failed sex, or the fact that he had been out all hours yet again, or his guilt over the ploughing, but she was relieved that at least he was talking. She waited in silence, hoping for more from him.

‘Let’s, you know … give it another go. Give it a red-hot shake,’ he said.

She searched his face, but he gave her little to go by. ‘You know me. I’m up for anything,’ she said. And next he was pulling her into his embrace, holding her close to his chest. He smelled strongly of lanolin, dirty-tailed sheep and fly chemicals, but she let her face be pressed against him; starved of his affection, she drank the moment in.

‘Yes. Let’s give it a go,’ she said. ‘’Specially for the boys’ sake.’

As he pulled away from her, he muttered, ‘You know I love you, babe.’

And that was all Rebecca needed to hear.

Eight

As Rebecca drove away from the stockyards and shearing shed, thoughts tumbled in her mind. If Charlie felt that way, surely they could solve anything in their marriage? She took comfort from his hug and those few precious words, as if they were a rope to which she could cling. As she passed her father’s now vacant log cabin, she looked at it, suffused with emotion. The dwelling sat low and lonely on a tree-lined rise in the heart of a river flat. She didn’t want to be like her parents. Ever. Separated and surly with each other. Surely she and Charlie wouldn’t suffer that fate?

When Bec’s mother, Frankie, had left, taking with her a carload of her vet equipment, life at Waters Meeting had spun out of control. Frankie thought she was doing the right thing and had waited for years until her children were ‘old enough’. Bec, the youngest, was sixteen when her mother left, but the impact had been huge for all of them — even her brothers, Mick and Tom, who were young adults at the time. The three children of Harry were left at Waters Meeting to deal not only with his temper and drinking, but also his hurricane of negativity, which battered them daily. Burdened with memories of parents who no longer cared for each other, Rebecca had keenly felt the struggles of the whole family.

After Harry’s death, Bec felt guilty that there were days when she was relieved her dad was no longer on the place. His once green lawn, kept vibrant by the house grey-water, was yellow and bleached. The vegetable garden was now filled with long rank grasses and weeds. Some days it hurt Bec too much to look at it. Let alone go into the place.

Bec had watched age soften her father a little, so that by the time he’d died, most of the bridges between Rebecca and him had been rebuilt, if only cosmetically. Even though her father’s love was unspoken, Rebecca tried to believe it was there. Like the river. Sometimes it flowed, sometimes it didn’t, but the bed of it, the vein of it, was always there. Deep inside, though, she knew she was telling herself a lie. Her father had resented her. Loathed her tenacity. Her unmovable commitment to remaining on the land, despite the fact he didn’t want her there. He wanted his sons.

Bec looked at the verandah and imagined her father sitting there. His one arm resting on the squatter’s chair, the stump with the pinned sleeve held close to his chest. His solitary wave as she and Charlie passed his house, both of them busy with the farm. At first he was supportive of her and the plans she and her rural counsellor friend, Sally, had put in place, but then as the seasons stalled and, as she now knew thanks to Andrew, the soils began to decline from their outdated farm practices, Harry’s bitterness and disbelief in her ability had returned.

Bec suddenly wanted to find a tenant for the cabin so that new memories could be made there. Charlie had reservations about having strangers in their space. But she was ready to move the memory of her father on.

It was four years ago this summer that Harry had died. On a sweltering day in February, in the same bush clinic she was taking the children to now. His stomach cancer had worsened. Bec had driven him, Harry wincing at each and every pothole. With the morphine no longer hitting the spot, his face had blanched a deathly grey. She hadn’t thought it would be the last time Harry would draw in the fresh Waters Meeting air. Rich clean oxygen, seeping from millions of trees. Instead Harry ended up breathing from a canister, the mask on his face slipping sideways, his inhalations slowly softening until his life was no more.

When Harry’s casket was lowered into the grave next to Tom’s, it was as if her wounds were torn open again. She didn’t want him buried so close to her brother. Now, four years on from Harry’s death and over a decade on from Tom’s, she still felt wide open and raw. Bec had not a clue how to heal herself.

The minister in his sermon encouraged the sentiment that it was nice that a father would be reunited in Heaven with his son, but Bec thought bitterly that Harry was the last person on the planet Tom would want to see.

Even though she had made peace with her father, the shadow of Tom always sat between them. She still got chills as she passed the spot where the old wooden garage used to be. The rafters on which he had slung the rope, long since burned and blown to the wind, gone since the night she took to the structure with a tractor and a chain, followed by a drum of fuel and a match, in a wild rage of grief.

She often talked about Tom to Ben and Archie, trying to keep the memory of him alive through her words. She rarely spoke of their grandfather. It was sometimes difficult to find positive things to say about him. Ben remembered little of his granddad and Archie had been a baby still being carted about in a front pack by Rebecca when Harry had died. But it was the energy of Tom she wanted to foster in her boys.

‘He was so different from your Uncle Mick,’ she would say to them, often when she was busy so the little ones couldn’t see emotion contort her face. ‘He was smaller than Mick, but very, very handsome. And brilliant at art. You know that painting in the dining room? Of his horse, Hank, and the hut? He did that. Before he died.’

When Ben sometimes asked how their Uncle Tom had died, Bec would go quiet. How could she explain suicide to a child?

‘The angels called him away because they needed him,’ she would eventually say, then change the subject. But the shadows of Tom were all about Waters Meeting and the light of him. Some days she was overjoyed to see the sun paint the mountainside golden and she felt sure he was there, still up at the high-country hut, where he had long ago sheltered from the storms in his own head. Other times, in the half-dark, when her own mind was awash with despair, she felt the torment of his haunting.

As she passed the big double-storey Waters Meeting house on the hill, she wondered why, no matter how much she pushed and worked, she could never seem to transform the place to anything other than a tired old homestead that struggled, alongside a farm and a family that struggled. The visit to Rivermont the night before had made the feeling even more sharp. Bec was failing. Failing life, failing her boys, failing herself. Her dreams were dying before her eyes, yet the reason why was beyond her reach. Did she not pour enthusiasm into everything she did? Did she not try her hardest?

She glanced at the plastic bag on the front seat; it contained Yazzie’s freshly washed baby-doll nightie. She must’ve been so drunk to borrow it and put it on for Charlie! Along with the spray tan! She felt such a fool. Wheels whirring over the grid onto the bitumen, Bec settled into the drive to Bendoorin. Again she reassured herself that things would be OK. Once the parcel from the sex-toy party arrived, she and Charlie would get back on track and she would feel alive again.

As Rebecca drove into town, her bleak mood shifted to one of amusement when she saw the sign that announced the current campaigns of the state police. A wag with a big black Texta had defaced the sign. The formal overzealous state budget font read: POLICE ARE NOW TARGETING … And in the space provided some clown had scrawled CRANKY CHICKS.

She burst out laughing. That was something she and her college mates would have done in their wild Ag College years.

‘Police are now targeting cranky chicks!’ she said, giggling again. ‘Huh! That’s funny.’

‘What, Mummy?’ Ben asked. ‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Oh, nothing, sweetie. Just a silly sign. Not very politically correct.’

‘Not very what?’

She smiled at Ben in the rear-vision mirror, his serious dark eyes looking at her, curious.

‘Politically correct. It’s when very nerdy people don’t get jokes and take life far, far too seriously for their own good.’

She now looked at her own image in the mirror and wondered if she would be considered a ‘cranky chick’ these days. She suddenly realised she too had become a very serious person. With a start, she wondered when? And how had the seriousness set in? Why didn’t she do anything crazy any more, like she had done at Ag College? Where was it in the rule book of life that you had to grow up and be sensible? Even at the sex-toy party, she had barely let herself go. She resolved that she should be more fun, like Yazzie had suggested. Rebecca realised she was in one huge deep rut — she needed Charlie’s bloody stupid new big tractor and a chain to pull herself out of it. For herself, for her boys and, of course, for Charlie. With that resolve in mind, she cranked up the CD of The Sunny Cowgirls for the last hundred metres of the main street, rocking to ‘Summer’ until she turned into the car park of the health clinic.

An hour later, after the dentist, Bec found herself whizzing the boys in a trolley up and down the supermarket aisles of Candy’s store, making V8 engine noises. At Ag College they’d had many drunken adventures with the sturdy steel contraptions. Why shouldn’t she have fun with them at this age? But even as she whizzed the boys from the canned goods section to the sauces, she felt her mood was forced. Strained. She knew the Who’s Who of Bendoorin would be lurking in the aisles to find out the gossip from the scandalous party at Doreen and Dennis’s. Luckily Bec managed to avoid too many encounters, making it to the checkout with only one ‘Hello, how are you?’ from Mrs Newton, who looked equally knackered from minding the boys.

At the checkout they found Candy also looking frazzled from the party. Her bright orange poncho with blue knitted flowers cast a sickly hue across her greenish-grey face.

‘What a night! I feel so undone!’

‘You’re not alone,’ Bec said, loading groceries onto the counter.

‘Nice tan, by the way,’ Candy said, starting to bip the goods past the scanner. ‘One of Yazzie’s, I’d say. She got me last week when the parcel first arrived. We took the bloody thing upstairs into my shower and she turned me into a Polly Waffle.’

‘Hah! Yeah, it’s not the best look,’ Bec said, holding up the palms of her hands to reveal patches of tanning lotion.

‘It’ll wash. While you’re in town, you should get yourself a coffee and some lunch for the boys. Larissa’s new shop is open for business. I know I’m her very proud mother, but she really does make the best coffee. She can give you a double shot. Get you over the line back to Waters Meeting this arvo. There’s also the hoodoo guru’s new shop next door. You should check it out.’

‘Hoodoo guru?’

‘Yeah,’ Candy said as she bagged a few groceries. ‘Some blow-in woman from somewhere opened it this week. Filled with crystals and Buddhas. If you’re into that sort of thing. The kids might like it. Loads of colours, fountains and that funny-smelling incest stuff.’

A smile lit Bec’s face. ‘Don’t you mean incense, Candy?’

‘Oh my god! Did I actually say incest?! I must still be drunk. Incense … Oh dear, I’ve been in this tiny town too long with people like Ursula!’

Bec shook her head, smiling. ‘Now I’m intrigued about this shop. I’ll have to take a look.’

‘She’s got clothing in there too. But I can’t see you in a kaftan. Bit hard climbing fences in one of those numbers, and the tie-dye colours may scare the sheep. Me though — I bought five of them!’

‘Before yesterday, I couldn’t see myself in a bondage suit either, but apparently Yazzie’s ordered me a Catwoman outfit. Never say never.’

‘Look out, Charlie, when the parcel arrives!’ Candy laughed. ‘He won’t be driving his new tractor to the pub! He’ll be at home with you.’

A cloud of puzzlement passed across Bec’s face. ‘He drove the new tractor to the pub?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

Bec shook her head and felt her cheeks redden in humiliation and anger as she handed Candy some cash and gathered her grocery bags. ‘I was asleep when he got home. Then we had the livestock contractors out early, so I’ve not really seen him much.’

‘Sorry,’ Candy said, searching for eye contact as she handed Bec the change. ‘I thought you would’ve known. He’s a wild boy, your Charlie Lewis. Always was. Always will be.’

‘Oh, there’s a lot I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s no biggie. Funny really. The tractor to the pub. What a nong,’ she said, forcing a smile and only glancing at Candy.

With the little boys in tow, Bec felt a chill as she stepped out through the brand-new automated sliding doors of the general store, despite the summertime heat.

She glanced at her stern reflection in the window of the shop. ‘Wish they sold senses of humour in there too,’ she said absently. ‘I think I need a new one.’

‘What, Mummy?’ Ben asked.

She was momentarily distracted by the handsome face of Andrew Travis, who smiled back at her from behind the glass. His picture was on a large RLM poster advertising that night’s information seminar at the pub. ‘I wish the store sold men like that too.’

‘What, Mummy?’ Ben asked again.

‘Nothing, darling. Nothing. C’mon, let’s eat.’

A while later, full from Larissa’s home-made hamburgers and chips, and Rebecca rejuvenated with a frothy chocolate-dusted cappuccino, they ventured out again onto the now sweltering main street of Bendoorin. Bec was amazed to see on her new iPhone that it was almost two o’clock. She and Larissa had lost themselves talking and laughing about the sex-toy party and who had ordered what. The boys, happy with the toys in the corner and soothed by the air-conditioning, had enjoyed the comings and goings of their other little mates, who had also been dragged in for the half-yearly dental check.

Bec, who was often tetchy about getting back to the farm as there was always so much to do, surrendered to her hangover and the heat of the day. Surely she could let Charlie sweat it out in the yards with the fellas and she could have an hour or two off for lunch once-in-a-Saturday-while?

She found herself outside the brand-new ‘guru’ shop admiring a lovely display of potted herbs, vibrant and strong despite the heat. Heaven is Here! proclaimed the sign on the awning. Pretty prayer flags strung underneath it spoke clearly of peace, and silver and bamboo wind chimes adorned the shopfront with colourful sounds.

The boys and Bec hovered, looking at the display of what Charlie would undoubtedly term ‘hippy shit’. Then the boys, holding the strong work-worn hands of their mother, plunged inside.

The smell of sandalwood, gentle light from many candles and drifting piano music engulfed Bec’s senses. Peaceful smiling statues of Buddhas, fat and thin, sat or stood in various places all over the shop. Silk lotus flowers floated in small fountains that tinkled silver water. Crystals of all shapes and sizes reflected light and gleamed in glass cabinets.

‘Wow!’ said Ben while Archie let go of his mother’s hand and stood, his little head tipped back, blue eyes wide, gazing about the shop.

‘This place is boooootiful!’ he said in awe.

‘It sure is,’ Bec said, feeling too coarse and too undone by her mood and attitude for this place. ‘Don’t touch anything!’ she warned the boys. The serenity of the shop was shattered by an outburst of yapping.

‘Jesus Christ!’ a woman’s voice yelled. ‘For god’s sake, Jesus Christ! Put a sock in it!’

Next thing a little Jack Russell came scampering towards the boys, wagging its entire body and flicking its tongue madly like a monitor lizard.

Out from behind a curtain stepped a woman who had striking white hair, plaited like a Native American’s and tied with elastics sporting summer daisies.

‘Jesus! That’s his name,’ she added as explanation. ‘I’m so sorry about the dog.’

Despite her white hair, her face was tanned and youthful-looking, even though from the look of her slim strong hands she was definitely old. Her eyes were stunningly green and seemed to see right into Bec. But it was her serene and generous smile that told her all. This woman was utterly alive. How long has it been since I put flowers in my hair? Bec wondered. This woman, whoever she was, looked so energised and above all free from troubles, apart from a crazy dog.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ the woman asked, scooping up the dog.

‘Gosh, where to start?’ Bec laughed quietly. ‘No, I’m fine. Thanks. Candy from the store said I should come and have a look.’

‘Ah, bless her. What about your little ones? Can I help them with anything?’ The woman stepped forwards and stood before the boys. ‘Hello, I’m Evie,’ she said to Ben and Archie, ‘and that little cretin you are patting is Jesus Christ. Annoying little mutt.’

Archie tilted his head to the side and looked up at her, clearly fascinated.

‘Here, pick a crystal that you’d like to put in your pocket,’ she said to the boys.

‘Really?’ Bec asked. ‘Are you sure …?’

The boys hesitated, blocked by their mother’s discomfort.

‘Go on,’ Evie said.

Archie reached out, his small fingers hovering over the counter that had crystals sorted into boxes, then he plucked out a perfectly rounded reddish-brown polished stone with mysterious swirls embedded within.

‘Ahh, good choice, my son,’ Evie said. ‘The carnelian. This little crystal will help you connect with your inner self and give you courage!’ She looked directly at Rebecca with those green eyes that could be crystals themselves. ‘It also has a reputation for rekindling intimacy within marriage,’ she said above the heads of the boys.

Rebecca’s eyes slid away. Her cheeks coloured.

Ben, who was normally the more forward of the two boys, reluctantly reached out for a black speckled crystal with blue hues and a dusting of white, like the Milky Way was somehow captured within.

‘And you, young man, you’ve chosen the sodalite. “The longest distance you will ever travel is the journey from your head to your heart.” This stone will clear confusion and give inner peace. It can help clear rifts and arguments. Now I know you don’t fight with your brother, but this stone has called you. Maybe to help others around you who are arguing?’ This time both the boys and Evie looked at Rebecca.

Ben looked back to the palm of his hand where the round polished stone lay. ‘But how do they work?’ he asked, clearly awed both by the stones and the strangeness of the woman.

‘Rocks contain energy. You’re from a farm, right?’

Ben nodded, eyes wide with curiosity.

‘Well, all that land you walk on and the mountains around you has an intelligence, an energy. A universal intelligence and energy. The same as what is in your body, my body, your mummy’s body. You with me?’

Ben nodded. ‘It’s life,’ he said.

‘And death and everything in between,’ Evie said. ‘Science has proven that everything in the universe is in a constant state of vibration. You know vibration?’

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Like when Mum drives on the corrugated road and the things on the dash vibrate off onto the floor.’

‘Yes! Good boy! Well, even you hold a vibration. And crystals are the same. If you look at them under an electron microscope, you can see them actually vibrating. Unlike us humans, who waver between good and bad moods, being happy and sad, these crystals are stable and their vibration is steady. Because of this they can help us heal our unsteady vibration.’

Ben closed his hand over the crystal.

‘And now for you, Mum? A store-opening gift for you?’ Evie asked.

‘No, please, really … You have a living to make.’

The woman smiled gently at her. ‘You must allow people to give you gifts,’ she said.

Just as Bec felt compelled to select a crystal, her phone buzzed.

It was Charlie.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, pulling the phone from her battered old leather handbag, the one her mother had given her for Ag College graduation years back. She flicked the text onto the screen: Too hot here to work. The crew has knocked off early. They’ve gone to pub. I’m fixing ute.

Bec couldn’t help herself rolling her eyes. Sure he was fixing the ute. He’d be at the pub. Always the pub. If she could pick up the Fur Trapper Hotel and fling it off the mountainside, she would. How many times had that place kept her husband away for hours and her at home trapped with the babies and the blowflies? Guiltily she looked at Ben and Archie. They were such dear little boys. If only she had time to enjoy them. But everything seemed to be crammed in around running the house and the farm business. And running after Charlie’s apathy. This was the first day Bec could remember ever taking it slow with them.

Sensing Bec’s mood, Evie had ushered the boys to the largest fountain and had passed them twenty cents each to make a wish. Her kindness made Bec feel obligated to buy something, and this too made her feel a little flushed and annoyed. Charlie counted the pennies she spent.

She cast her eye over the colourful racks of clothing — perfect for Candy, but not at all for her. Come wintertime she knew the summer Indian cottons would be replaced by alpaca beanies and jumpers all looking as if they were made from yak fur. In her mind, she echoed Charlie’s sentiments: ‘Hippy shit.’ She felt rude thinking such thoughts. What if the old woman could read minds?

Instead she wandered to the book section. Her eyes, used to popular fiction and agricultural publications, grappled with the titles: The Anatomy of Peace, Practical Spirituality, A New Earth, The Children of Now, The Vortex.

‘Anything that catches your eye?’ the woman asked.

‘I really don’t have time to read.’

‘You have an iPhone. Perhaps a downloadable CD, then you could listen to it on that. I sell earphones too. Or you can listen when you drive. You must drive a lot.’

Bec was beginning to regret coming into the shop. This seemingly kind shopkeeper was actually a pushy saleswoman. She had to get out of here and back to the farm. She’d call in at the Dingo Trapper Hotel and drag Charlie out by the collar on the way. Surely she couldn’t be expected to feed the dogs and dish up tea, along with all the washing to get in off the line, all before the seminar? Especially after his secret trip to the Trapper the night before in the new Deere. If he got back on the booze today, he’d be rotten by tonight and wouldn’t take in anything Andrew had to say, let alone be ready to put in a full day’s work on Monday on the farm.

Just wanting to get out of the place, she grabbed up a CD titled The Law of Attraction by two rather normal-looking Yanks, Esther and Jerry Hicks. ‘I’ll take this one.’

‘Good choice. If you’re open to it and ready for it, this book could be the start of you creating a life beyond your wildest dreams. It comes with a booklet. It’s out the back. I’ll get it for you.’

Before Bec could say ‘don’t bother’, the woman was gone.

Frustrated now, she gazed out the shop window onto the quiet Bendoorin main street. Across the road the service station was adding on a takeaway shop and next to that the motel was receiving a facelift. Then at last the woman was back.

‘This book will show you that if you can master your own mind and always seek positive, appreciative thoughts, your whole world will open up to new ways for you. Money, health, relationships. It teaches you that you create your own reality, good and bad, through your thoughts,’ Evie said.

‘That’s nice. OK, well, thank you,’ Rebecca said, trying to usher the boys out the door.

‘Enjoy your journey — and remember, always follow your bliss!’ Evie called after them.

‘She was nice,’ said Archie as Bec strapped him into his booster seat.

‘Kookie more like,’ she said.

‘No, she wasn’t, Mum,’ Ben retorted. ‘You should think more good thoughts, like the lady said.’

As she shut the car door, Rebecca stood in the sweltering heat. Her son had a point. When she was younger, she had believed she could achieve anything, but the more life had moved on, the more and more she had been steered by others and life no longer lit a fire in her belly. How could she rekindle it? She looked down at the book and CD she had just bought. They said books landed in your lap for a reason, didn’t they? This one looked way out of her comfort zone. She flipped open to a page that told her that it might take some time to adjust to the notion that she was creating her life through her thoughts, not her actions.

‘Huh?’ she said out loud before reefing open her door and throwing the book on the front passenger seat with a huff. The CD slid from the back sleeve of the book and dropped to the floor.

‘Bugger it,’ Bec said and started the engine.

By the time they’d passed the Cranky Chicks sign, both boys were asleep. The shopping will be almost roasted, she thought. She should’ve left the groceries until last and she shouldn’t have spent thirty bucks on a book and audio she never wanted in the first place.

‘Get over yourself, Rebecca,’ she muttered crossly to herself. ‘Think good thoughts. Not bad ones.’

Maybe she could pass the CD and book onto her city sister-in-law, Trudy, so it wasn’t wasted. She glanced at it, taking in the swirling cover art of outer space. There was no way known that Trudy would like it. Maybe her mother, Frankie, would be interested. With all her veterinary science knowledge, she might find something in the pages. Didn’t all this New Age spiritual stuff have physics and other science at its heart? She was again distracted by her phone.

There were already two missed calls and two voice mail messages to retrieve and now a video call was coming in from Charlie.

Video call? she wondered, frowning. He’d never made one of those to her. She rolled her eyes again. He was probably trying out things on the new phone that he’d so proudly scored in the tractor deal. Being married to Charlie felt like she was mothering three boys, not two, most days!

She pulled over onto a roadside verge, the Cranky Chicks sign still in sight in her side mirrors. Her index finger pressed the answer button. ‘Hello,’ she said.

There was a rustling noise and Charlie’s breath, then the blurred and darkened image of what looked like the inside of his jeans pocket.

‘Hello? Charlie!’ she yelled at the phone. ‘I think you’ve accidentally called me. Charlie! Char … lie! Charlie?’ Behind her in the back seat, her boys stirred, but did not wake. She smiled at them. Shearing-shed babies, she thought. They would sleep through a hurricane. She looked back at the phone and called Charlie’s name again.

It sounded like he was walking up a hill, his breath coming fast. He must be out ploughing again, she thought irritably, and he’d be out checking the sods of earth, where she knew billions of soil micro-organisms would have been butchered.

She pressed the end button, not wanting to waste money. Not wanting to think of the Waters Meeting soil she knew they were buggering with bad farming practice. He’d been going off lately about the high phone bills. Never mind that he spent bucketloads on fertiliser that she hated and fuel to run the machinery that he brutalised the landscape with. She sighed, glad the no-till cropping and holistic grazing night was tonight and she could get a good dose of Andrew and his positivity. She so badly wanted Charlie to click with Andrew, so that things on Waters Meeting could begin to change.

She was about to pull the vehicle onto the road when a video call came in from Charlie again.

‘Hello!’ she said, this time crossly.

In the palm of her hand, the iPhone screen lit up, revealing a glimpse of dry grass and again what was the edge of Charlie’s jeans pocket. She could now not only hear Charlie’s breath, but also his voice.

‘Oh yeah,’ he half whispered. ‘Oh yeah, baby.’

A faint smile arrived on Rebecca’s face. After their early morning attempt at love-making and his peace offering in the sheep yards, was he sending her a naughty message? Her heart skipped a beat. She glanced back at the boys to make sure they were asleep. In an instant, she felt elation. The possibility of a rekindled relationship flooded her with hope. A marriage at last back on track. This iPhone could be fun for them …

Then Charlie’s phone must have taken a tumble onto the ground and all she could see on the tiny three-inch screen was the tanned dimpled thigh of a woman and what looked like a part of Charlie’s backside pumping up and down. Then she heard the woman moan and Bec felt sick. Shock punched pain throughout her body. Winded.

She dragged her eyes from the screen, tears blurring her vision. With the horror of the moment crawling into her mind and body, she turned to take in the sight of her beautiful sleeping boys in the back seat. Their faces unguarded. The perfection and innocence of their youth giving them the aura of angels. All the while she heard the moans of the woman. She looked back at the screen to witness the thrusting of flesh, raw and ugly in the sunlight. Her husband’s breath coming fast, the way she’d heard it in her ear in the early hours that morning, before he had withered so quickly with lack of desire. She ended the call and sat for a time, gulping in air, holding the phone in the palm of her hand. Then slowly she steeled herself as she dialled the message bank. The first recording cut out almost instantly, but the second revealed the rustle of clothing and the same moaning of the woman and heavy breathing of her husband. Rebecca shut her eyes and felt her entire life as she believed it to be dissolve. With shaking hands, she pressed the end button.

Nine

Rebecca stood at the Rivermont front door and rang the brass bell. She barely registered the presence of a blonde Cardigan Corgi and the elegant auburn German Short-haired Pointer sniffing at her weary, just-woken boys, who were standing beside her. She clutched the bag containing the baby-doll nightie, wondering what on earth had possessed her to turn into the Rivermont driveway.

The Stantons were strangers. Having only met Yazzie the previous night, why wasn’t she seeking out Gabs as a friend to share her despair? Wouldn’t she be better to crumble at Gabs’s doorstep with the news of what she had just seen? And heard? Her husband’s sex-breath, matched with that of another woman. Something deep within her, a shame, a sense of failure, wanted to keep the grubby knowledge of her husband’s infidelity away from Gabs and out of the loop of gossip that permeated the district. Gabs seemed at this time too close to home, whereas Yazzie was virtually a stranger.

Rebecca knew that shock had brought her here to this massive glossy white door, and maybe it was something else too? Maybe it was Yazzie herself. A hope that somewhere left inside her was a way of being, similar to Yazzie’s vibrancy and enthusiasm for life. The hope that the young jillaroo she once had been still remained. But that was stupid, Rebecca reasoned. Maybe she should just bottle up all her feelings and shove them deep down inside? Put up and shut up. Get on with it. Thousands of men had done this to thousands of women over the ages. And vice versa. Maybe she was overreacting? And everyone grew old and down and disappointed, didn’t they? She could sort this out herself, couldn’t she?

She was about to turn away when the door was reefed open by Yazzie, looking gorgeous in a little floral rose-print dress teamed with Ariat work boots. Her loose hair was casting a long straight silky curtain of blonde over her ultra brown, slightly streaky but definitely tanned shoulders.

‘Geez! You scared the pants off me! I didn’t hear the bell. I thought it was the Rivermont ghost and the dogs were after him. Oh, hello,’ Yazzie added when she noticed the boys behind Rebecca. ‘Tell Wesley and Ruby to go away if they’re annoying you, boys. But they are very friendly dogs! They love children.’

She barely glanced up at Rebecca, continuing with her bright monologue. ‘Are you as hungover as me? I tried working my horse, but no good. No good. And those tans! Mine is so bad … I look like a caramel slice. Can you believe we did that?’ she said, lifting the hem of her already short dress. ‘Ah! I see you’ve brought back my nightie.’ She took the bag from Rebecca’s hands. ‘Thanks. I suppose you washed it,’ she giggled, ‘I expect you did. There’s nothing of it so it takes no time to dry. So tell me, did it work with your Charlie? Will there be another little farmer for Waters Meeting in nine months’ time?’

‘Yes, I did wash it,’ Rebecca said, finally able to get a word in. ‘And … no. No babies. Charlie’s not capable. You know … he’s had the snip …’ stammered Rebecca.

Yazzie was about to giggle some more, but her face clouded with concern as she noted the strain in Rebecca’s voice, then fully took in the sight of her red-rimmed eyes and hunched shoulders. ‘Oh, Rebecca. God, sorry, I’m gibbering. What’s up? Tell me. What’s happened?’

‘It’s Charlie … It’s …’ Rebecca cut herself off, looking at the boys. Sensing their mother’s upset, they were sidling closer to her, Archie putting his little hands about her legs and burying his face in her thigh. She stooped and swooped him up in her arms.

‘Come in,’ Yazzie said gently. ‘Boys, would you like a milkshake? Yazzie makes the best milkshakes! With blueberries. I’m Yazzie Stanton, by the way. I’m new here. What’re your names?’ she asked, glancing over her shoulder at them, laying a caring hand on Bec’s shoulder as she ushered them into a grand entranceway.

As Yazzie got busy making milkshakes, Ben and Archie gazed at the giant house with gobsmacked expressions on their faces. Their eyes kept tracking back to the beautiful, friendly lady. A huge black-and-white French Provincial clock ticked quietly on a stone wall in the kitchen. Giant white lilies in a clear glass vase sat on a simple wooden dresser. Striking artwork of a galloping horse, created by swathes of black dribbling paint, hung on a pure white wall. A long wooden kitchen table that had enough seats to host the entire Australian cricket team was decorated with summertime flowers arranged Country Style in a glass bowl beside a white china bowl filled with lemons. The dogs still hovered, dropping chewed teddy bears and slobbery balls at Archie’s and Ben’s feet.

Rebecca perched on a stool at the kitchen bench. Yazzie had plonked a box of Kleenex near her and Bec was now gradually making a small pile of scrunched tissues in front of her like a wedding-day meringue as uncontrollable tears silently slid down her cheeks. She fixed what she hoped was a smile on her face so the boys wouldn’t notice her distress. The blender roared as blueberries were mushed into milk and ice-cream.

Soon Yazzie settled Ben and Archie outside with their drinks in a shaded, picture-perfect courtyard beside a fenced swimming pool, the dogs lying panting at their feet, waiting for the ball action to commence. Bec watched them sadly from behind the white wooden wall-to-ceiling bi-fold doors that made up one entire side of the kitchen.

Inside, after Bec had hastily sketched out her story, Yazzie ushered her to one end of the monumental table and they both sat staring at the now silent iPhone that lay between them. They eyed it with suspicion, as if the thing would come to life and jump up and bite them. It had already bitten Rebecca today, savagely.

‘Are you sure it was him on the video call? Could he have lent his phone to someone else today?’

‘I’m sure it was him. He accidentally called me too and the phone went to message bank. Listen.’

Yazzie’s eyes lit up. ‘No, don’t play it!’ But it was too late. The kitchen filled with the muffled moanings. Rebecca let the recording play longer and suddenly the voice of Charlie said, ‘You wanna play tennis? Do you? Huh?’ Then there were some scuffling sounds and a woman began to moan, ‘Oh yes. Oh, Charlie!’

‘Yuck! Turn it off!’ Yazzie said, grappling for the phone. They sat staring at it once more until she eventually spoke again. ‘Maybe he was just tossing off. You know, blokes do. They are, after all, most of them, just apes. Wankers, quite literally.’

‘Yuck. No. You heard. There was a woman there.’

‘Maybe they were actually playing tennis and it was a really hard game?’

Bec shot Yazzie a look.

‘Sorry.’ She passed Bec another tissue. ‘Did you see on the video call what she looked like?’

Bec shrugged and wiped her nose. ‘I don’t know. Does it matter who?’

‘What are you going to do?’

She hunched her shoulders up and down, then hung her head and devastation swamped her. Life as she knew it had just ended forever. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

Outside Sol Stanton pulled into the garage and collected a giant box of groceries from the back of his Kluger. He whistled to let the dogs know he was home, but already he could hear them barking from the other side of the house. There was a strange vehicle in the drive, and he wondered which local had dropped in with some trivial excuse for a sticky beak. Yazzie had often complained in her emails of the fine balance between building their dream and not offending ‘the natives’.

As he went to the back door, Sol almost dropped the box; he swore in Spanish, as was his habit. He was having trouble adjusting to the time zones. He’d woken far too early, his body clock still geared to the Northern Hemisphere, and now the day was dragging. He still had the seminar evening to get through tonight and badly needed a coffee.

He thought briefly of the trouble he’d left behind in Paris. The delicate lead violinist with her shocking English but sexy accent screaming at him and hurling a bunch of flowers. Her extreme Italian behaviour was a parody of itself and even though at the time Sol was laughing on the inside at the clichéd Mediterranean tantrum, he also could feel her pain. Not so much the pain of his leaving, and his going home to Australia, but the pain caused by his indifference to her.

He had bedded so many women like her. Ones he could be indifferent to. Ones who left his heart still closed off and hard like a stone. The European orchestra scene was far too abundant with women who were both beautiful and volatile. Maybe it was time to settle down? He decided there and then, as he leaned the box against the door and grappled for the doorknob, that he ought to go on the fidelity wagon for a time.

Settle back into a domestic existence. Just him and Yazzie. He was looking forward to at least six months in Australia if his workload would allow, mostly based at Bendoorin, working to get the racing stables up and running. It was just the thing he needed.

No more women, he vowed.

Sol at last swung the kitchen door open and walked in juggling the giant box of groceries. He stopped momentarily when he saw a pretty and curvaceous blonde woman at the table. He couldn’t stop his eyes running over her tight jeans and the slightly torn, checked blue cowgirl shirt that hugged her curves. Pearl press-stud buttons nearly popped at her breast line and her décolletage was tanned deeply. So different from the thin pale Italian girl he had recently bedded. There was something about her … Then he realised with a start that it was the same woman he’d met the night before.

In the light of the kitchen, even with Yazzie’s terrible spray tan blotching the woman’s skin and no makeup, she looked prettier than he’d remembered. One of those natural earthy types, he concluded. And such blue eyes! Eyes that had been crying. There was no vanity in her as she stared back at him. A contrast to his Parisian orchestra women, all dolled up, looking stunning, but with ice-cold agendas inside them. Ones who still tried to look attractive even when they cried. He knew the women played him for his wealth and connections ahead of his Spanish-born soul.

Sol realised as he looked at … Rebecca, that was her name … that she still held the same aura of sadness and uncertainty she’d carried with her the night before, only today the sadness seemed deeper. Maybe some teasing to cheer her? Sol thought.

‘I see you’re a little more clothed than last time I saw you,’ he said as he set the box down on the kitchen bench. ‘Get any business last night? How’s the hangover? As bad as the tan?’

‘Leave her alone, Sol,’ barked Yazzie.

He shrugged and began unpacking all the contents of the box onto the island bench.

‘What are you doing?’ Yazzie said, irritated. ‘Do you have to do that now, Sol, honey? We’re having a very important girls’ chat.’

He cast her a dark look with his intense brown eyes. ‘I’m sure it’s infinitely important. Earth shattering in fact.’ Sol steadily laid out flour, eggs, vanilla essence and an array of cookbooks.

‘Sol,’ Yazzie growled.

‘Shush!’ he said loudly so that Rebecca started, her nerves frayed. ‘I’m on a mission to make a “Man Cake” for the Home Industries section at the Bendoorin Show. I saw a poster at the store.’

‘You have got to be kidding,’ Yazzie said. ‘Spare me.’ She put her head in her hands.

‘The theme of the show is Prime Lamb, so my plan is to work in and around that theme,’ Sol said. ‘There is a comedian who promotes Aussie meat who will be judge of the cake competition. It’s the first of its kind.’ He waved his arms around as if conducting an orchestra.

Bec frowned, momentarily distracted from her plight with Charlie and slightly annoyed by the arrogant man who had burst into the room. No matter how good-looking he was or how endearing his Spanish accent, he still spoke to his wife far too haughtily — and was he serious about the cake cooking? How insensitive and rude! Couldn’t he see that she was distressed? Could he do nothing but think of himself and bang on about baking cakes? She concluded Yazzie was married to an arsehole, and all men — no matter what nationality — could be selfish and thick at the worst possible times.

‘You do know the show isn’t until October,’ Bec said coldly.

‘Yes, of course I know, but I want to perfect it now,’ he said with a theatrical sweep of his hand.

Yazzie let out a frustrated scream while Bec thought, what a pansy! A piccolo-playing pansy!

‘He’s always like this, Rebecca! Mr Pedantic Pants!’ Yazzie turned to him. ‘Just because you didn’t get your orchestra gig doesn’t mean you can slip back into being Mr Slack-arse-I-do-bugger-all around here other than bake cakes for shows. That’s bent! You’re bent! There’s a tonne of work to be done out there. Dad would be livid. Get out of my kitchen.’

‘Your kitchen? Shut up, Ms Vocal Velocity. I briefed the staff this morning before I left for town. You seem to forget I’m the one with the jetlag. You are the one with the hangover.’ He cast another dark gaze at her and Yazzie poked her tongue out at him like a child.

Rebecca shut her eyes, not wanting to witness the strain in other people’s relationships. Yazzie picked up on Bec’s discomfort and dropped her tone to one of gentleness. ‘Please be nice, Sol. Rebecca’s not had a good day.’

‘You make your bed, you lie in eet,’ he said, his accent thickening with his theatrics.

Rebecca knew Sol was referring to her hangover, but she felt a twinge of deep upset. She had made her bed. She had tried so very hard to create a life on the farm with Charlie. But nothing seemed to work. She had tried to be everything to everyone. A good daughter to her father as his body shut down with illness. A good daughter to her mother, even though she was always absent. A good mum to her boys, tending to their every need with as much grace as she could muster. A good wife to Charlie.

Even when the boys had been tiny babies, she had still summoned all her mental and physical strength to both work the farm and put a meal on the table. She had strived to be a good workman beside Charlie in the paddocks, despite the internal drag of depression within her. She had mixed memories of those times, some of them fond, some of them forlorn, of having to pull up in the paddock or the yard to breastfeed the baby or change a nappy or both, either on the seat of the ute or on a blanket that picked up thistles from the barren paddocks. Sometimes she felt strong and empowered like women of the ages who had worked in the fields, but other times she felt completely uncherished and used up.

There were days when all she wanted to do was fall to her knees and cry with exhaustion. She had been everything to everyone, but nothing to herself. And it had all come to nothing. Or at least not nothing. It had all come to a ten-second vision of Charlie humping into a bare and moaning woman via an iPhone. It was Rebecca who felt stripped bare. Punished as a witness.

At that moment bickering between the boys could be heard coming from the courtyard. Rebecca groaned and stood up.

‘Leave it to me,’ Yazzie said. ‘I’ll fix them. Now, Sol, please get out of the kitchen. I’m not used to having you in here, hulking about with icing sugar and food colouring. It’s just plain wrong. And take Rebecca with you. Give her a tour. Cheer her up for me.’

‘But the information night at the pub with Andrew is on soon,’ Sol protested, ‘and I’ve only just got in.’

Bec glanced at Sol. So he knew Andrew Travis? The fact startled her. They were so unalike. From different worlds.

‘There’s time,’ Yazzie said, glancing at the clock. ‘Rebecca can come with us. You were going, weren’t you, Bec?’

Bec shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I can. Not now —’

‘Rubbish,’ Yazzie interrupted. ‘I have a plan. After your tour, give me thirty minutes and I’ll transform you into a diva to die for. Charlie won’t know what’s hit him when he walks into the pub. If he’s cheating on you, then he deserves to be shown what he’s so carelessly destroying and throwing away.’

Rebecca glanced at Sol, who was still busy unpacking his ‘Man Cake’ ingredients, his dark eyebrows pulled down over his broody eyes in a frown. Should he also know all her business? ‘I really better get going,’ she said, trying to block any more involvement with the Stantons, regretting the fact she’d come here. ‘The information night starts at six-thirty and I have to get the boys’ dinner. It’s almost five now!’

‘Stay,’ Yazzie implored. ‘I insist.’

Bec looked at the other woman’s pleading blue eyes. She noticed they were not only filled with compassion but also, perhaps, a hint of loneliness. It was too late. She had a brand-new friend. Yazzie was now heavily involved in the grubby secrets of her life. And so too was Sol Stanton, whether she liked it or not.

‘Why go back to him right now? Give yourself some space and time for reflection. I’ll fix the kids something. After Sol’s shown you around, you can go have a soothing bath and then I’ll do your hair and makeup. I’ll pick out a dress for you to wear.’

‘A dress? To the pub? The Dingo Trapper?’

‘Yes! A dress. Oh, there’s strategy in what I do!’ Yazzie said. ‘We’ll show him. Beauty, if used correctly, is strength. And strong you shall be. Sol, don’t just stand there. Take her for a tour. Get her mind back to the place where it should be.’

Sol set down the packet of flour and looked at both women, unimpressed. Just when Bec thought he would refuse, he abruptly said, ‘OK. Follow me.’

As uninviting as his tone was, Rebecca followed in the wake of his expensive cologne.

‘You have a way of cheering up ladies, don’t you, Sol?’ Yazzie called after him in a voice that sounded a little too sarcastic for Rebecca’s liking. Not at all wanting a farm tour, but not knowing what else to do, she followed him meekly.

Ten

Sol ate up the distance of the long glass-faced hallway with his stride. He wore classic navy shorts, his legs fit and handsome with skin a delicious-looking milk-chocolate brown. He barely slowed for Rebecca, who had to jog to keep up with him, feeling pummelled by his tail wind. He flung open a door at the end of the wing and held it for her, letting her pass. But then he was off and racing again towards another stone courtyard, this one flanked by rows of beautifully crafted stables of deep red wood, made even more glorious by shining brass latches and hinges.

Giant wine barrels spilled with red and white geraniums, the Rivermont racing colours if the flag flapping in the wind was anything to go by.

At the centre of the yard was a stone horse trough that had a small bronze fountain at its heart. The sound of trickling water soothed the stable courtyard, giving it an aura of tranquillity and opulence. At the other end of the long line of stables, one man was unloading feed bags, another trudging a wheelbarrow filled with stable waste out a side gate and yet another was scraping water from the sides of a deep bay gelding in a washbay. A tiny pasty-faced girl, clearly a trackwork jockey, waved as she carried a saddle pad and disappeared into a stall.

Surprising Rebecca, Sol whistled low, then called out in a deep voice, ‘Hello, my beautifuls! Come talk to me!’

Over the tops of the stable doors came the heads of tall thoroughbreds, classy and glossy, their brown eyes bright with curiosity. Some shuddered out a welcoming whicker. Others flicked their ears in Sol’s direction, pawing at the doors and tossing their heads.

Rebecca was slightly amazed. This big-wig rich man, who had just barked at her and Yazzie, and behaved like a complete self-absorbed tosser, had the whole stable of horses under his spell. She could tell the horses were drawn to his deep cooing noises and giant peaceful presence. She watched as he tenderly rested his brow on the starred forehead of a black racer and lifted his hands to either side of the horse’s face. Just then, as if the gods had flicked a switch, the most beautiful sunset draped golden light across the jet-black hair of the man and the midnight sheen of the horse. Rebecca saw, roaming in the darkness of the horse’s coat, a silver light. She took in a hasty breath and goose bumps spread across her skin. She surprised herself by feeling so moved by this moment of tenderness as she watched the big handsome man communicating in silence with the giant horse.

She remembered the woman’s words in the shop, how thinking thoughts of positivity and gratitude and living in the moment would allow her life to transform. Suddenly she was grateful something had brought her here. Just this snapshot vision was enough to fill her with hope. Then there was the kindness of Yazzie to be grateful for.

For the first time Bec really understood the true richness of the gift of seeing how life could be.

Beauty and bliss were everywhere, if you knew how to look.

As she continued to feast on the visuals of Sol and the horse, she suddenly thought how the man before her would make a beautiful lover. Shocked, she stamped the brakes on her thoughts. Where did that come from? she wondered. Her cheeks flushed and she swallowed nervously.

Then Sol was off again, striding down the length of the stable doors. ‘We have thirty horses in,’ he said over his shoulder to Rebecca, who was still jogging to keep up, ‘and only five running at present until we get properly set up. The rest are just young stock we’ve picked up in our travels. Racing blood from America, Ireland and Japan. All a bit of a gamble, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

He walked up to a dark bay horse and laid his hand on its face. The horse dropped its head into the pressure of his hand, half closed its eyes and let out a contented sigh. Bec wondered if his hands on her body would prompt the same reaction.

‘This one here is our hope for the Melbourne Cup in a few years. We’ll see how we go, won’t we, Arthur, boy?’

But the warm stillness and slowness of Sol as he stood with the horses didn’t last. Without warning, his aloof, abrupt mood seemed to return. He spun about and was off again, quickly pointing out an enclosed sand roll, a high-fenced round yard for education of horses, the heated indoor horse swimming pool, and the tack room where not a bridle or a lead rope was hung out of place and every bit of metal on the gear threw bright reflections out to the world.

Before she could take it all in, Rebecca was ushered through the door of the staff room.

Around the table sat a collection of fresh-faced girls, an older man and an extremely good-looking young bloke. All of them were downing beers or bottles of brightly coloured lolly-grog drinks.

‘I see you’re hard at it, you lazy lot!’ Sol said in his deep Spanish-draped voice, but the smile in his eyes told Rebecca he spoke in jest. She sensed he was as glad to see them as they were him.

‘Just finished the night feed-up, boss,’ said the young man, who was showing no signs of discretion in the way he eyed Rebecca’s breasts.

‘This is our neighbour from Waters Meeting, Rebecca Lewis.’

‘Saunders,’ Rebecca corrected. It came out of her mouth so suddenly it surprised her. Rebecca Saunders — the name she’d had when she was young. When she was a jillaroo and single. Her days before becoming a farmer’s wife. Before she married Charlie. A name, after today, she wanted again.

‘Rebecca Saunders,’ Sol said, sounding slightly irritated once again. ‘I’m giving her a tour.’ He took a step back and surveyed her. She couldn’t tell if his gaze was cold or mocking.

‘Rebecca, meet some of the staff who’ve come with us in the move from Scone. We couldn’t get rid of them,’ he said, his fond tone returning when he addressed them. ‘This is Daisy Peters, our foreman; Kealy Smith, our stablehand; Bill Hill, our everything; Simply Steph, because no one can say her surname; and —’

‘Don’t introduce her to Joey, boss,’ the older man, Bill, said quickly. ‘He’ll race her off to the sand roll when youse aren’t looking.’ The girls all sniggered.

Sol Stanton cast them an amused look. ‘Yes, well … and this is one of our riders, Joey,’ he finished.

‘Rider’s right,’ muttered the pint-sized Daisy cheekily.

‘One of?’ Joey said. ‘Your best rider.’ He had jet-black curly hair and violet-blue eyes, and he scraped the legs of his chair on the timber floor loudly as he abruptly stood up. He half bowed, reached out and shook Bec’s hand. Then he stooped over to kiss the back of it and, as he did, Bec took in the stubble on his chin and the twinkle in the eyes smiling wickedly up at her. His looks set him up to be more like a pretty-boy actor than a jockey.

At the table, the strong-looking, curvy, short-haired girl in the Blue Heeler Hotel singlet, Steph, gave a mock cough behind her hand. ‘Man whore,’ she hacked. The girls giggled as Steph ‘coughed’ again.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.