‘Back in my room.’
‘Go and get it, you’re on.’ I take a second to respond. ‘G’wan, get!’ he barks, and I scuttle off across the yard to my room. It’s awful; it’s humiliating for Clare, poor Bean’s life is wrecked, Alan is all kinds of fucked-up, but I can’t stop smiling.
7
I watched out the kitchen window as the sun melted behind the wood. The fading white shapes of sheep on the black grass. When the air turned thick and dark I drew the curtains above the sink and turned on all the lights.
A sheep coughed loudly from the bottom paddock and Dog pricked up his ears. Stew sweated in its pan on the Rayburn. The radio played out the soccer report and I spread the table with newspaper so I could pick apart my shears, sharpen the teeth and oil and polish them. I took my time, put a pot of coffee on the stove, stirred the stew. I sharpened every tooth until they were perfect. I finished my coffee and poured whisky, restrung my shears, and then wondered what would happen if I tried to shear the dog.
I cut fat slabs of white bread and left a black thumbprint in the butter. I spooned stew into a bowl and poured another whisky to go with it. I poured some into the stew as well. The cough came again and I remembered that I’d moved them all to the top paddock away from the woods. I cracked my mug down on the counter and Dog let out a small growl. I went upstairs for the gun and tried not to think about why I was getting it. There was not supposed to be much you could do with a gun in England you couldn’t do with a rock, but I was less sure of that now.
The night had settled in, but a full moon lit up the paddock, slid over the backs of the sheep in the top field. Dog let out another deep growl — and the cough echoed from inside the woolshed, not the field. I stayed still. The sheep were motionless on the hillside. A field of ghosts.
Dog was snuffing at the shed door and barked. The cough again, this time followed by a moan. Blood pumped in my fists. Just a wounded fox, I thought, just the wind rattling through a fracture in the grate, just a ringing in my ears.
The shed door was a crack open and inside the darkness coddled like black water. Dog disappeared into it and I cocked the gun and went for the switch. The light blinked on, ticking, flashing green and then yellow, and I watched in slices as in the corner Dog attacked something large, hacking and snarling. I was stuck for a moment with my mouth open, then I trained my gun.
‘Jesus!’ screamed a man’s voice. Dog had hold of his wrist, shook it hard.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ I shouted and whether I meant it or not, my gun went off. Dog fell to the floor, and for a terrible second I thought I’d shot him, but he was just gun-shy. The man covered his face with his hands and didn’t move. My arms shook, and I lowered the gun. No one was dead, and the man didn’t appear shot. I had to put the gun down before I dropped it.
‘What do you want? Did you kill my sheep? Who sent you?’ I barked. The man didn’t answer, just sat there, covering his face.
Dog sloped back to stand next to me, his fight gone.
‘What do you want?’ I said again loudly. I thought about getting the gun again but my arms had lost their strength, I felt them flapping at my sides.
‘I want to sleep,’ said the man. ‘I only want to sleep.’ His voice was thick and swollen, just a croak. He lowered his hands. It was the man from the hedgerow. ‘You didn’t have to shoot at me,’ he said and met my eyes. ‘God,’ he said, ‘you look awful. Do you cut your own hair?’
I took a step forward to look at him in the green light. A wet sleeping bag draped around his shoulders.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked again in my most menacing voice. I could smell the drink on him. His beard had crept up to the very tops of his cheeks. His exposed hand had a number of punctures in it, from Dog. I swallowed. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I just wanted to sleep in your shed—’ The end of his sentence collapsed into a coughing fit.
I cleared my throat. ‘Is it you? Have you been killing my sheep? Have you been in my house? Have you been banging around in my house at night?’
He looked at me with eyes pink from coughing. His jaw shuddered from the cold. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said.
There was a fleck of blood on his lower lip, from where he must’ve bit himself.
He looked at me, one of his eyes drooped a little. ‘I did not kill a sheep.’
He was having trouble keeping his eyes open. My heart pumped thickly.
‘I didn’t shoot you, did I?’
He opened his eyes again. ‘What on earth are you on about now?’ he said, exasperated, like I was bothering him with some kind of ridiculous information. Rain had started up and it drummed on the roof. I didn’t know how I could move him.
‘I’ll call the police if you don’t leave right now,’ I said. The man made no response. I watched him for some time. He didn’t move, just his chest rising and falling, just the moustache hairs blowing in his breath. I nudged him hard in the leg with the toe of my boot.
‘You can stay here the night,’ I said. He opened his eyes wide again. ‘But in the morning, you have to leave.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If you don’t leave in the morning, I will shoot you,’ I said, but his eyes had closed and he was already asleep.
He was sitting on the bare concrete, wrapped sadly in his wet sleeping bag. I left him there, turning off the light as I went and taking my gun.
It could have been the air, the wind. It could have been that out there in the dark, all of my sheep had turned to stare at me. Or that something pulled itself out of the sea and lumbered up the path towards me. But it wasn’t. It was only the night like I’d seen it a thousand times before, alone.
Inside, I looked at the telephone, imagined the sergeant’s face and then turned away from it again. I thought of how Don’d tell me to call on those young farmers.
In the kitchen I looked at the bread I’d cut. I put the coffee back on the stove and sat down. I got up and went to the boiler cupboard and found a scratchy blanket and took it back out to the shed. I could hear his breath wheezing in and out of him at the doorway, and I didn’t need the light on to know where he was and that he was still sleeping. I cleared my throat a few times, but he didn’t wake and so I laid the blanket over him then walked back to the house, trying to go without urgency. I bolted the door and checked the windows.
I poured whisky into my coffee and took it upstairs to bed. Dog came with me. I sat on the edge of the bed a while and then went back downstairs with Dog. I pointed at the front door. ‘Stay,’ I said, and Dog raised his eyebrows, but lay down with his chin on his paws.
I took the bottle of whisky up with me, and half an hour later came back down the stairs and found Dog curled on the sofa. I rang home and no one answered, everyone was out, living their lives in the way that they did. If the phone was in the same place in the hallway, resting on its same wicker cabinet, it faced out towards the front garden, unkempt, fireweed and dead leaves, brown snakes and bindi-eye. Butcher birds caught mice in those places, speared them on the branches of the jacaranda, dead mice and voles. I hung up. I collected all the knives I could find into a roasting tin, and on second thoughts the carving fork too, and took them up to bed with me. I turned off the light and pulled a stool to the window and propped the gun up next to it. I sat and waited for my eyes to get used to the dark and I watched the door of the shed with a mug of whisky in my hand.
8
By the time I reach Kalgoorlie, something is rattling badly under the bonnet of the truck. The kangaroo seems a long time ago, but it did more damage than I’d first thought. There are no papers in the glove compartment, only WD-40, an open bag of peanuts and an empty pack of condoms. The best I can do for her is to sell her to a scrapyard. I cut the engine in the wreckers’ yard and count the ticks for the last time. When they stop, I know I’ve arrived somewhere else.