In the kitchen I make a pretty terrible mess, the air thick with smoke from the fat off the chops. Once it’s done, Otto shovels in what I’ve made him, says he loves it, even though I could only work out how to scramble the eggs, and they are crumbly and the pot I cook them in needs to soak for three days before the burn comes off it. The sausages are pink in the middle, and the chops are fatty, surprising when you look at the type of sheep they came from. I pick at my food but Otto eats all of his.
That night, he comes for me while I’m in the shower, and I panic. I always managed to keep on my T-shirt before. He gets in with me, his hairless belly grazing me and his cock hangs in that in-between state like the end of it is attached to a thread. I try and keep him occupied with my boobs; I wiggle them about, but he’s less interested than I’d have hoped — I have never been the kind of girl who is about the boobs. He wants to scrub my back, and do all the kind of things I suppose you’d want to do in the event of caring about someone. I think I would rather a sharp jab in the back of the throat, because as he puts his arms around me and slides his hands over my ribs and along my spine, his breath catches and his fingers stop on the ridges on my back. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t stop him as he turns me around to look. He traces the scars with his fingertips, and he says, ‘My god, my god,’ as he does it. ‘Why didn’t I know about this?’ And I wonder if he’ll dump me back in Port Hedland and find another less ruined girl to cook his chops and share his showers.
‘Was it a customer?’ he asks and I nod, letting the lie set immediately. I make it the man with the bleach-blond hair and shaved balls who wanted to put his dirty socks in my mouth. He came in my face and on his socks. Then he took the socks out of my mouth and he put them on his feet and put his feet in his sandals and trotted off home. I made it him, but instead of socks he’d undone his buckled belt — in reality he was the sort that didn’t wear a belt and preferred everyone to be able to see the top bristles of his shaved bits. I tell this story to Otto as he sits on the toilet seat with a yellow towel wrapped around him and I lean against the sink, feeling how loose it is from the wall.
Otto wipes tears from his eyes. ‘You girls,’ he says, ‘what a time of it you have.’ And he gestures that I should come and lay my head in his lap, kneel on the toilet mat, and he sobs over me as I race through the details of my lie in my head, file it away in my memory and close the door on it. Slowly Otto moves aside his yellow towel and that’s how I end up giving him head while he’s sat on the toilet.
Around the house is a paddock of tall strange grasses. They are strange because of the things hidden in them that poke out into the air — push-bikes without wheels, farm tools that are the colour of earth from rust. Every now and then if you pass the paddock on your way to the dunny, you spy a sheep’s skull among the tin cans and broken chainsaws. Sometimes it’s like there’s a tiger out there, like it can see me but I can’t see it. If I stand looking for too long, Kelly is liable to stand up and ask, What are you loitering for, and don’t test me to see if I’ll bark.
Kelly doesn’t like me. She’s not like a dog really; she’s more disapproving than a dog. She sees things differently to the way most dogs do — she’s not into pats on the head, she won’t take food from my hand. I offer her the meat from my sandwich one time and she stands, looking through me until I feel embarrassed and put it back in the bread. Another time I absent-mindedly bend down to scratch behind her ear while Otto is telling me how he likes his home kept, and she snaps at my hand, breaks the skin on my little finger. Otto frowns. ‘She doesn’t like that,’ he says. She watches me in a way I recognise, but not from a dog.
I have not seen a phone in the house, and I ask Otto about it.
‘Phone?’ he says. ‘Who would we call? The Ghostbusters?’ He laughs. This is a thing I’m learning about him — he likes to laugh at his jokes.
Somewhere into the fifth week, Otto has only called for sex a dozen or so times. He’s just a kind, lonely old man. He only ever wants it in a normal way. He drives us into town to get supplies, to the store which has everything — food and hardware and furniture and animal feed and rat poison and grog. My palms sweat. Otto has given me $100 for groceries, which is more than I know what to do with. I pick up a can of cream, the same kind that Mum used to squirt onto her daiquiris. She called it a grog float. I put the can down carefully and turn away from it. I remember what Otto said about Carole’s cooking, and I find eggs and bread, some cheese. Otto does not have a deep-fat fryer, so I do not put the great sacks of frozen chips or, though I eye them, the ready-dipped calamari rings in the trolley. As a gift, he buys me a pink shampoo with a picture of a horse on it. At the checkout, I go to give him a peck on the cheek, and he stiffens. ‘You’re my niece,’ he says, ‘remember that.’ And I glance over at the checkout lady who looks quickly down at her till.
I wonder how those sheep are still alive, how long they’ve been trapped there next to their slaughterhouse. Since Carole left? I don’t know how long that has been.
The pen is made up of flimsy metal barriers that can be linked or separated and moved one at a time. The sections are not heavy and the sheep, if they had a mind to, could probably break out, but they don’t do a lot of anything much, just shift their weight from their hips to their shoulders and stare out at the horizon while the flies eat their backsides.
The earth in their enclosure is coated in shit and just a few feet to the left of their pen is a dusting, at least, of grass. I start to shift the pen, panel by panel, expanding it slightly, edging the sheep over towards the grass. When they get in my way, I herd and shoo them, waving my arms. They are not bothered enough to be scared, but they more or less go where I tell them. They move with the weight of ghosts and I notice a few are resting on the front joints of their legs, like they haven’t got the strength to stand. It takes me two hours, during which time Otto and Kelly drive up to see why I’ve been gone so long.
Otto frowns at first, but then he shrugs. ‘Might get some meat on them I suppose,’ and he drives back to the house while Kelly watches out of the back of the ute.
The flies drink out of the corners of my eyes, and crawl all over my shoulders, and I let them crawl. I’m not sure what I was expecting, to see the sheep dance gratefully around in the puny grass I’ve found them, but they just stand there, a silent little group. I try to move them about, but they’re not scared of me. Resigned is what they are, and I tell them, ‘You can move around if you want to,’ waving my arms and jumping about, but they just sway a little in the hot fly air. I look at the woolshed and see the meat hook and I shift onto my other foot. ‘Fair enough,’ I say and cycle back to the house, and put the sheep far in the back crevice of my mind, with those other things that only come out in the dark when my guard is down and I stare at the night behind my window cage.
There’s a black and white photograph on the wall in the telly room and Otto sees me looking at it. It’s him with dark hair and a trim waist, and he’s holding some kind of trophy.
‘Golden Shears, 1962,’ he says. He’s standing with a woman who wears high-waisted trousers and an old-fashioned hairdo and who is presenting him with the trophy, a pair of scissors soldered onto a plinth. ‘That’s Candy Mulligan — she was the weather girl from ABC. She had a thing for me.’
I look at the man in the picture with the sun-crinkled face and the straight back. Dark hair feathering out from under his hat.
He turns up the volume on the TV. ‘Ah — it’s me programme,’ he says.