‘You’re scaring the sheep.’
‘Right,’ he whispered.
‘If you grab her around the back end, I’ll get the front end.’
‘The back end,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Good.’
I gripped her under the armpits and felt the give while I waited for him to prepare himself at the other end. It involved a lot of stretching and huffing. He kept looking like he was going to put his arms around her and then leaning away at the last minute into a shoulder stretch. Finally, and with his head straining away from the sheep, he got hold of her.
‘You’re doing well,’ Don crowed from up the hill.
‘Right,’ Lloyd said. ‘Right.’
‘On the count of three, pull upwards, and keep hold of her.’
‘Right.’
‘One, two, three,’ and we both pulled and the ewe’s legs sucked in the mud, and she popped out like a cork. She started to kick and tried to scramble, and before I could tell him to keep hold he let out a yell and fell backwards. The ewe kicked and kicked, horrified by the noise. She bored past my grip and I fell face first into the mud. Dog ran up and down the bank barking and rearing about. The ewe took about three leaps before getting stuck again. I dragged myself up and went over to where the man sat in the mud holding his chest, white and staring.
‘What happened? Are you all right?’ I said. He looked up at me with disbelief, and I thought, Jesus, is he having a heart attack? He puffed out, long and slow, and then started to cough again.
‘I just didn’t expect it to move that much.’ His eyes were watering. ‘They’re so much bigger close up.’
Up on the hill, I could hear Don laughing. ‘You’ll need to give that another go!’ he managed to croak out.
The man looked at me from his seat in the mud. ‘I think I might be afraid of sheep,’ he said.
10
Otto is watching his soaps with his sun-browned and knotted hands resting snugly on top of his groin. He’s told me before that the heat those parts make is good for his arthritis. In the time I’ve been here, he’s grown so used to me that on hot days like this he doesn’t bother to put his shorts on.
I pretend to go out to the dunny, but instead, once I’ve made sure Kelly is not watching from her bed on the veranda, I nip into the tractor shed and peer into the open bonnet of Otto’s spare truck, the truck that was supposed to be mine, which I know works, because I’ve heard the engine. It’s greased all over and I have to be careful not to get any of it on me. I use a creosote-stained rag and I reach in and yank at the wires towards the back of the engine. I don’t know what I am doing, and those could just be the wires that make the windscreen wipers go, and so I also take the monkey wrench that’s resting on the edge of the bonnet and I take out three important-looking washers, cringing at every squeak they make. But I can hear the television spewing out of the house, and so really it’s just Kelly I have to worry about. I think about taking the keys out of the ignition too, but I imagine Otto passing by and seeing them gone. At least with the engine, he might not see it straight away. There is nothing I can find that is sharp enough to pierce the tyres, so I have to leave it at that. When I come out of the shed, I turn away from the house and throw the washers one by one as far as I can into the tall dry grasses of the paddock where they can sink into the rest of the rusted scythes, the broken cages and the bicycle tyres. I can smell the carcasses of the sheep we killed last week, and I keep my gaze above the line of the grass, because yesterday, I caught sight of the ewe with the black-spotted nose while Kelly was moving her body around the place, deeper and deeper into the paddock. I rub my hands in the dirt to get rid of any trace of oil and then I count my steps back to the house, and it’s my countdown, there’s nothing to be done now, my hands have made the decision for me. I’ll need to be gone by the next time Otto starts work on his truck. Please god not today.
I pass Kelly out on the veranda, on her rag rug, and she lifts her head to smell me as I go by. It’s not a smell of Hello, it’s a smell of What are you up to?
Back inside Otto looks up from Shortland Street and gives me a smile. He is always happiest at this time of day, with a full belly and a beer in his hand, the show on the TV, which I have to pretend to enjoy. A woman dressed as a nurse orders a lime and soda in a pub and my hands clench. I will go in the morning, that is when his old bones are slowest.
My night is sleepless, and I listen to Kelly snoring outside my window. She cries in her sleep. When the sky starts to lighten, I hear her get up and go and pee a little way from her sleeping ditch, and then I hear her slump herself back down for the final rest before the day. If she is awake, she watches the blue come into the sky, and a single bush curlew from another place cutting across the open spaces of the paddock. The flies start to thicken the air.
By the time Otto unlocks my door I have filled my pockets with everything I can carry without looking suspicious. Before I leave the room, I look at all of the things that need to stay behind and say goodbye to them. I slide the knife from under my bed into the very back of the cupboard, where it might never be found. Even after everything, I wouldn’t want Otto to know I’d ever thought about slitting his throat.
I cook a breakfast of chops and eggs, and he wipes a slice of white bread around his plate and sighs happily. I force down an egg on a heel of bread, to look normal, but it starts to come back up, and I have to run to the loo and Otto rubs my back when I come out.
‘Remember last week? Maybe it’s the morning sicks,’ he says, hopefully. ‘When my mother was preggo with my little brother we had to give her meadowsweet just to keep water down. I’ll pick some up when I’m next in town.’ Not: when we’re next in town. That time has long passed. I wonder how long it would take for him to get me pregnant. Every time we finish, I squat in the shower and try to flush everything out.
‘Roight,’ he says, slapping the meat of his gut, ‘to the day’s business.’
He scrapes back his chair and lays a large dry hand on my shoulder as he passes by. The last time, I think, and it sends a jolt through my belly, and when he thumps down the steps of the veranda, and heads out towards the dunny, throwing Kelly his chop bone as he goes, I feel a prickling on my skin. The key for the ute hangs over the oven and it catches the light. I take the can of money from under the sink, and the key from its hook, and I walk as calmly as I can out of the door. Kelly is chomping her bone, standing with her legs planted far apart, and she looks up at me from hooded eyes as I pass by, considering. I tell myself I am fetching something from the truck, so that if she can read my mind she won’t know. But the second I slot the key into the ute’s door, she drops the bone from her teeth and starts up, jumping on the spot with fury, loud loud loud.
The dunny door opens, and Otto crouches with his trousers around his ankles, a red face, his yellow legs bowed. I’m inside the ute and the door is closed, and the key is in the ignition. Kelly jumps at my window. I have to keep a calmness in me so that the truck doesn’t stall, but Otto has left it in gear which I didn’t notice, and so it does, and he has pulled up his trousers, and the panic is setting in on me, I’m already trying to think of an excuse, that I was practising my parking, or that I thought I’d drive up to the sheep, nothing I know that will wash, and Otto is running at me, shaking the rolled-up comic book he’s been reading, like he’s going to flog me on the nose with it; his face is an open hole of anger, and the truck starts again, and I jerk away from the dog, and Otto reaches me just in time to slam his whole body onto the bonnet and we look each other in the eye for the count of one and I know somehow that this will be it, that if he catches me, my body will end up in the tall dry grasses of the paddock, with Kelly shifting me deeper and deeper in every few days and the flies will blow me as I bloat up and the sun peels the skin from my bones.