The sun is rising and there won’t be long before the gong goes and work starts, and with the hangover worming in my guts I try to roll softly from the bed. In a sitting position, I’m about to make it, when Greg springs from where he is lying and makes a noise like a lion, grabs me by the waist and wrestles me back into the bed, growling and grunting into my neck and squeezing me hard. It takes me a few seconds to understand that this is a joke and I laugh.
Just like the other times it has happened, the rest of the day we will catch little looks at each other and I will worry and feel good and feel sick and trip up over my feet. It is simple in a way I thought wasn’t possible. At smoko he will sit opposite me on the bench and touch my knee under the table, and when I look up at him he will wink. It’s getting so when he touches me I don’t even think about pushing his hand away and I will even give myself a shock by walking past him while he’s bent over a bucket washing his hands, and thwacking him on the behind before I can stop myself. He will jump up and crack a smile that cuts his face up into segments — it’s a face I like, it’s wide and has a tendency to smile.
Clare is missing from tea and I see him over at the phone-stand behind the shed. He’s nodding and he’s looking at me in a way that I don’t like. He turns his back, and finishes up the call. I drink deeply and feel better. It’s just the paranoia, and maybe I could lighten up on the drinking.
‘Who’s that?’ asks Greg when Clare comes back to the table. He doesn’t often use the phone, none of us do, other than poor Bean who misses his sixteen-year-old girlfriend in Rockhampton.
Clare looks up brightly. ‘Just Ben — letting us know what a dickhead he is. Reckons he likes the uni course, reckons next time we see him he’ll be air-conditioned and rich.’
‘Ha!’ says Greg.
‘Prick,’ says Connor.
Clare looks at me and smiles. I shift in my seat.
Bean sits apart from everyone else. Greg strides past and clunks a beer down in front of him without speaking, and the boy’s face opens and he looks happy as he sits there chewing his meat and drinking his beer.
Later, Clare is in a bad mood with the drink, and even Denis seems to enjoy winding him up.
‘Gettin’ a bit soft around the middle,’ Denis says, prodding Clare’s gut with a bony finger. ‘Finding it slows you down in the shed?’
‘Get fucked, you old cunt,’ says Clare, but it only makes Denis chuckle and his eyes shine. Denis is too old to say much to, and so Clare rounds on me, ‘Y’know,’ he says, ‘they won’t have a woman at sea — reckon it’s bad luck. They reckon a clothed woman on board is bad luck, angers the seas.’ I square myself up and look directly at him, but he doesn’t want to meet my eyes. I know I look hench, but I can feel a nasty beat to my heart.
He knocks back the rest of his drink. ‘It’s just not right, it’s just not!’ he belts out. ‘In me old man’s day, there’s no way they would have tolerated it.’
‘I dunno,’ says Greg, ‘your old man gave you a girl’s name. Reckon he might have been quite progressive.’ Everyone laughs a bit.
Clare is red in the face and Greg smiles behind his drink. Clare stands up abruptly and sways over the bench.
‘You’se are all fuckin’ poofs,’ he says and flounces away into the night.
With Greg breathing like a tanker next to me, I draw up a contract in my head with Dad. This will not go on for long, I will keep moving. In return he will sink beneath these new memories, just for a while. He only exists now as the money in my bank account. I can keep it all at arm’s length because there is nothing here yet to connect me to that time, with those people, other than the marks on my back which are pinked over enough to look like they happened in a past that can be left alone.
In the morning Greg traces the scars with his fingers. ‘Those are hell good,’ he says with real admiration in his voice. ‘How’d you get ’em?’
I turn and look at him and feel that countdown, how it could go either way. ‘Bad relationship.’
Greg shifts up the bed and puts his hand on the back of my neck, like there’s something I deserve comfort for. I can let myself believe it just for now that I am some kind of victim. He lifts my hair up and I can feel him looking. He kisses the top bone of my spine and says, ‘I’ll kill him.’ And there it is, the lie, and it becomes real, another contract signed, stamped and dated.
There’s a yell, which turns into a scream. Greg shoots out of bed in his undies and runs towards the noise. By the time I make it over to the shed, everyone’s standing in a circle around the grinder. Blood is misted up the wall and Bean is on the floor sobbing and holding what is left of his hand. Greg is trying to get him to hold it up above his heart, but the kid won’t have it, can’t stop looking at it.
Someone’s gone to call the Flying Doctors and Alan comes running out of the house, his face white and red at the same time. He pushes men out of the way and squats down on the other side of Bean, inspects the hand and holds out his palm to Connor. ‘Gimmie yer bloody singlet,’ he says, quietly, and Connor strips it off.
‘Okay, Arthur,’ says Alan to Bean, ‘bloody doctors are on their way.’ He tears the singlet in two down the middle and ties it with a firmness that makes me wince around the kid’s wrist. ‘There’s nothing here can’t be sorted out,’ he says and Bean carries on sobbing. There’s no getting to him.
‘What the fuck was he doing on the bloody grinder?’ Alan hisses at us. Clare is standing at the back with a hand over his face. He raises his arm.
‘He was sharpening my gear for me.’ There’s a silence, deeper than before, and everyone turns to look at Clare. Alan’s mouth drops open, but he doesn’t say anything. Clare walks a little way away from us.
‘We’ll get yer mum on the bloody phone,’ says Alan to Bean. ‘She’ll be there by the time they’ve got you sorted out.’
When the plane lands, they’re worried about the blood loss, and Alan goes with them to the hospital. Bean is blue in the lips as he’s carried, between Alan and the medic, into the plane. Clare kicks over and over again at a stump of wood stuck in the earth.
We get on with work, I go back to roustabout without being asked, just seems the right thing. Clare is slow and hardly makes his quota. No one talks. The next morning, Alan is back and you can hear him going off at Clare round the back of the sleeping shed.
‘What the fuck were you thinking? The bloody hand’s gone, mate. Kid can’t read. Certainly can’t fucking write now. What the bloody fuck do you think he’s going to do for a job? That’s it, you’ve fucking fucked it. I had to tell his mother — fuck, I told her I’d bloody look after him.’ It goes on, and every question Alan asks is left unanswered by Clare. Everyone pretends not to have heard any of it, and Clare comes limping pale into the shed, to start work. Most of the men make an effort to turn their backs to him, Denis mutters something under his breath. But Greg slaps him on the shoulder and says, ‘You right?’ Clare nods and takes up his position. I hand him a sheep and it’s all go but we work in silence.
Just after midday Alan comes in and when he sees me flinging a fleece onto the table he goes apeshit. ‘Why in filthy bloody fuck are you doing that?’ I stiffen and feel my eyes stretching wide. But the shouting’s not for me. He turns to Clare and points at him. ‘You, you useless fuck, until further notice, you’re bloody roustabout, not Jake.’ Clare’s mouth is open. ‘I’m not losing a prime shearer just because you can’t look after your own shit.’ I don’t know where to look or what to do. No one moves. ‘Jake, where’s your bloody kit?’