Twice more I make them bleed and then I get the angle, I get the understanding of it, and it is like taking the skin off an orange, or more accurately like peeling a mandarin, when the skin is thick and the pith attached and there is something satisfying about it, and when I do it right the sheep doesn’t struggle or cry, it just lies there and lets me get on.
I spray the hose in my face to wash off the flies and they come back quickly to suck up the beads of water on my skin. I lean on the fence for a while, looking away from Otto’s, watching the mirage, and I let myself believe it is the sea, and that the desert ends in a gentle slope down to the water’s edge, which hides my house, with my people who are living in it. A rabbit shifts on the mirage and it’s gone. A whistler circles above it.
I’m sweeping up, which is important with all the blue bottles. The amount of shit and maggots I’ve taken off the ewes is disgusting, and sweeping the great hunks of black wormy wool out the door is satisfying. Afterwards, I give myself another hose down. I put my thumb over the nozzle to try and get a stronger spray, and run the water over the dark stain under the meat hook. The pressure is not great and it doesn’t have much of an effect. Water starts to run over the boards and into the corner of the shed, where the feed is kept in a large plastic barrel. I’m checking that there’s nothing behind the barrel that shouldn’t get wet and I find an earring. It’s a small gold heart with a teardrop of opal hanging from it. It sits in my palm like a dead beetle. I put it back where I found it and cycle back to the house to make Otto his lunch. My hair dries before I’m back, and in the bathroom mirror I see the sun has worked me over, left me pink and brown, picked out the new bulges of muscle on my arms.
Later, back at the woolshed I roll up the fleeces, and I find some string to bind them all up neatly. When Otto comes out with the truck and I show him, he laughs.
‘Pretty impressive, pet,’ he says, ‘but no one wants shit an’ maggots in their carpets. Maybe on the next shear there’ll be something better.’
We load it up anyway and when we’ve driven back to the house, I help throw it all into the paddock. ‘All good fertiliser,’ he says, but I’m not sure I believe him. Kelly sits on her behind and when we’ve finished chucking them in, she goes to investigate, comes back with fleece sticking to her muzzle and a hacking cough from eating hair.
I think about the earring that night when Otto comes to me and bends me over the bed. I think about how he took my little penknife, that really couldn’t do much damage to anyone, and how he never mentioned it to me.
While we are lying there in the aftermath and he is collecting himself, he tests one of my biceps, pinches it between his fingers.
‘Getting some guns on you, girl. I like a useful body. Just don’t go getting too manly.’ He laughs as if he has told a joke.
I can hear his guts churning in him because he had a late supper. I ask, ‘How long ago did Carole leave?’
He looks at me and there’s something nettley in his eyes. ‘How come you want to know about that?’
I skate a hand over his windy chest and roll over, try to look cute, which is not easy for me. ‘I just wondered how long you had to cope all on your own out here. Must’ve been lonely?’ And he softens, and closes his eyes, lets his head fall back, and relaxes after his exertions.
‘She left probably a year before you came.’
I want to ask more questions but I can’t figure how to get away with it. I want to know what she looked like, how tall; the kind of woman to wear earrings on a sheep farm — what kind of woman is that?
‘You don’t need to worry about Carole,’ he says and wheezes out of his nostrils loudly, because there is detritus up there. ‘She was a slut. Not like you. You’re a little girl in a slut’s skin. She was the other way.’
There’s a small stereo in the telly room, and the CDs are mainly things like Slim Dusty and Tales from the Mallee, which I don’t think much of, but among them are INXS and Cole Porter, and I know both those names. I put Cole Porter on and Otto comes in the house. ‘Course Carole always liked a dance,’ he says. I think that will mean I have to turn the music off, but he does a neat little four-step and takes my hand in his fingertips, turns me twice and then finishes with a little flourish, leaning me back like he’s a gentleman. Kelly is barking at the door in fury, and out the fly-screen I catch her eye as he dips me. I win this round, mother superior.
I think of when I first arrived in Port Hedland with the pizza parlour bed-and-breakfast you could pay ten dollars to work out of, how the owner called us jobless sluts, giving her restaurant a bad name. But she still let us in for ten dollars, so long as we didn’t use the towels, which you wouldn’t anyway because they stank of smoke and sometimes they had a little trail of something wiped on them.
I feel hopeful here; even in those moments I’m searching the sky for an airplane, I think, can’t complain, because it’s been worse, much worse and the two of us laugh that night and drink a beer and Kelly sits outside in the dust, biting at her fleas. There is one last Holiday left in a packet I find stuffed into the pocket of my jeans, along with a book of matches. I hide it and think about it often, and wait for the moment when I need it most. It makes me feel better, just knowing it’s there.
17
The fence around Don’s lawn was decorated with more dead moles, some flapping in the wind, a few still moist enough to draw flies.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘a visit from the hermit crab. You look better. Had a kip? Was going to drop by you later today in fact — bloody stupid woman at the fishmonger’s keeps giving me fish. I hate the stuff — sort of rubbish your lot eat. She’s gone sweet on me, silly cow, can’t stop giving me her stinking flounder.’ He smiled at me. ‘Heard you made it down the pub the other week with your new fancy man.’
‘Samson came to see me the other night,’ I said, and Don’s face sagged a little.
‘Did he do anything?’
‘No. Not really.’
‘Come in. Come in and I’ll make you a coffee.’
Don’s kitchen was pine and chrome in a way that reminded me of hospitals. He turned on his electric kettle and made me watch as a light strip on its side turned from blue to purple to bright red.
‘Ever see one of those before?’ he asked.
‘No, never,’ I said.
‘Got that for nothing — came with the kitchen,’ he said and put a sachet of instant coffee in each mug. He added water and stirred. It was the kind of instant coffee that already had milk in it — it had a grey-looking head on it. ‘Seen that before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘Aye,’ said Don, looking proudly at his mug. ‘Aye, it is. They call it instantchino.’
We sipped the coffee and I nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good,’ I said. It was not good. But Don looked pleased, and offered me one of his sweeteners from a tin that dropped them when you pressed a button. I took two to be polite and he nodded again.
‘Margaret would have a conniption fit.’
I smiled. The room was thick with the smell of our instantchinos.
Don sighed and said, ‘I’ll bet you didn’t know that Margaret was only forty-three when she died.’ His face had a look to it like he’d won a treasure hunt.
‘I don’t know anything about her,’ I said, though I had always thought of her as being Don’s age, I realised — a timely death, sad, but not unexpected. Don lifted himself up out of his chair and went over to a drawer in the kitchen. Out of it he pulled a colour photograph: Don, looking much the same as he did now, the oilskin coat the same, the boots. A different shade of shirt on underneath the oilskin and a thicker quality to the white hair at the side of his head, but that was all. The woman next to him could have been his daughter, her blonde hair in a ponytail, a long beaked nose and her mouth open, laughing. Her hand rested on the head of a small dark child, who held a fistful of her turquoise bomber jacket in his paw. The boy wore dungarees and had his hair parted to the side; he was maybe four years old, but I recognised the look, the deep frown and open mouth of Samson.