Otto gives me a lesson in driving. He takes me out where there’s nothing to smash into and lets me turn slow doughnuts in the dust. When we stall and when I make the truck rattle with going too slow, he laughs at me, but I’ve never felt so capable, and I think about when the other truck is fixed and when I can take off down the dirt road and out onto the bitumen. If you have wheels, I realise, you are free.
After the lesson, Otto shows me what he’s doing to the other truck. The bonnet is up and inside is another language of tubes and cables.
‘See this?’ he says, slapping a black box with the flat of his hand. ‘Couple of loose connections in there I reckon, nothing major.’ He blushes a little and looks away. ‘I wanted to have her ready for when you arrived, but me flamin’ hands went crook.’ I put my hand on Otto’s shoulder and smile at him.
Late in the day, I’m standing out on the veranda smoking a Holiday and Kelly is standing on all fours barking at me like she really wants to go for me. Otto comes out looking uncomfortable.
‘No smoking here, pet, upsets the dog. Reminds her of Carole — she and Carole didn’t get along,’ he says and I exhale and look at the tip of my cigarette. I feel awkward and embarrassed, like a kid again.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘last one.’ It’s fine, I think, I’ll just have to do it when I’m on my own, but he comes and takes the cigarette out of my fingers and drops it cherry first into his mug of tea. Then he holds out his hand.
‘And the rest.’
‘That was my last,’ I say, counting up the packets I have left from the duty-free Karen gave me. I think there are two and a half-finished pack, but as long as I can find fifty cents here and there, I’ll be able to sneak a packet now and again, it’s not such a hardship.
‘Hm,’ says Otto, frowning. ‘Bad for a person’s health.’
Otto has a beer early and falls asleep in front of the afternoon soaps — he can watch them again in the evening runs, so it’s not a drama. Because the house is so hot, I leave a note and climb on my bike. Kelly lifts her head at me as I cycle off up the track to the sheep, but she doesn’t bark and wake Otto.
I fill their trough with fresh water and scatter some pellets around the place. They aren’t that interested and who could blame them. There’s almost no shade, and the ones with the paler faces must be blistering with skin cancers. Mostly, they crowd along the wall of the shed where the roof shelters them a little from the sun. The flies are swarming again, clouds of them, they muscle in at the sheep’s eyes and arseholes. I try spraying the sheep with the hose, but I can’t tell if it helps or if they like it, they just hang there on their feet. If I could get hold of a couple of lengths of wood, I could hang over a tarpaulin and give them a little shade. The man with the black hair in the photo on Otto’s wall wouldn’t object to that. Maybe it was just his crook hands that stopped him from looking after the sheep, maybe he just needs the extra help. I get on my bike and ride back to the house, slowly, thinking.
Inside, my last packets of Holidays are laid out on the front table.
‘Now, I’m not cross,’ says Otto, ‘because I know this is an addiction. But what we’re doing here today is we’re taking a stand against it.’
I stop myself just short of raising my voice when I say, ‘You went through my things?’
‘Your things, young lady, are in my house.’ He says it with an edge of hardness like he thinks he’s my dad, and it makes my heart beat fast. I think I will cry.
‘Come and stand next to me, pet,’ he says.
Kelly is sitting bolt upright in the dirt, waiting for something. Otto picks up the first packet and lobs it off the veranda to her. The dog pounces on it like it’s alive, snarling and growling, the flesh of the inside of her mouth showing, saliva greasing all over the cardboard.
She wrecks them, shaking the packet, slinging cigarettes everywhere, rolling on them once they’re out. And Otto throws the next packet. Kelly does not lose focus.
‘Now,’ says Otto, once it is all done and I am standing in silence next to him, gripping the wood of the veranda. He hands me a dustpan and brush. ‘You go and clean all that mess up and put it in the bin and we’ll say no more about it.’
Kelly does not growl at me while I sweep it up but she watches me and I’d like to kick her hard in the ribs.
I go to my room and sit on the edge of the bed with a feeling I can’t be exact about spinning round in my stomach. I look at my bag, which I hadn’t thought to unpack since I arrived.
Otto is bright and chirpy, and we have a busy day because it’s time to teach me to shear.
‘Bin thinking,’ he says, ‘about what you done with the pen, and giving the sheep a bit more space — p’raps it’s good for ’em — don’t seem so maggoty any more. If we could get those girls in a more acceptable state, might be a few we could mate, and we could get things going again. Arse has dropped out of wool, but maybe if we could get the meat sellable,’ he says, full of himself, chirruping away. I am tired and he looks hurt.
In the woolshed, he hands me some shears which don’t look far different from the ones Mum used to use on the triplets’ hair. He shows me how to work them, and Kelly sniffs round the place, in particular at the black stains underneath the meat hook.
‘Get yerself a sheep then.’ I look at him a bit blankly. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘you’re not shearing me!’ which he thinks is a hilarious joke and he doubles over laughing. I go and get hold of a sheep around the hips. She doesn’t struggle, but isn’t wanting to move, and it’s difficult persuading her up the ramp to the shed. She might be wondering which bit of her is getting cut, but I get her up there, and Otto shows me how to position her to start. When he has her pinned on the boards, a strange gentleness comes over him, I can see it in his face. It’s like how he looks at me when we screw.
‘You don’t want her to be sitting on her tail,’ he says, ‘cause that’s not comfortable,’ and he demonstrates on half of her how to go — when he does the throat cut I can see her wild eye and I want to tell her, It’s just the wool. He hands the shears over to me. ‘Some places they have you hanging on a strap,’ he says, ‘save using your back too much. But if you don’t use it it’ll never get strong, so you’ll just have to get used to that ache.’ And I do ache when the sheep starts struggling and whipping about and I have to hold her steady; I think I’m going to die from the ache afterwards. Because it is important, because if she is not still I will cut her skin, and she is eyeballing me like I’m going to slit her throat, and I want her to end this thinking, Wasn’t so bad. I manage with a bit of help from Otto, who inspects my work afterwards.
‘You’ve got to go deeper, girl — you’re not close enough to the skin, leaving all that good stuff behind, stuff that binds it together. You need to peel her like an orange — pith and everythin’.’ And so on my second go the sheep gets cut, and it’s horrible. When I see the blood I let her go, I can’t believe I’ve held her down and hurt her and that she couldn’t tell me. It is awful, it is awful, I never want to try it again, I can’t, and Otto looks surprised when I cry but then he laughs good-naturedly. ‘Jesus Christ, girl, you might look like a man but you’re sure not one, ay?’ I haven’t hated him before, but I do when he passes me the shears again and says, ‘C’mon, this is what you’re here for,’ as if that were true, and he makes me catch the same one and I have to finish the job on that scared and bleeding sheep. ‘Here,’ he says, coming up behind and putting his arms around me to hold the sheep, ‘feel her wrapped around you,’ and I make the sheep fit in the hollow between my breasts and my hips, somehow, and she feels safe there, locked in. ‘Now,’ he says, holding up his hand, ‘breathe.’