‘Good man,’ says Greg. ‘Now I don’t have to get involved with this horse shit,’ he says, nodding at the fruit salad and pinching open the purple wrapper as he does it. Clare ambles on by, saying nothing, just giving me a sidelong glance. Greg breaks the end off his bar and hands it to me. While Greg is turned away from me, I crumble it to dust under the table.
I pick up my shears from the shed, and do not think about what will happen next. The shed smells good. Sweat and dung, lanolin and turps. I can’t imagine being away from it. A possum scratches on the tin roof. I walk slowly back to my quarters, stand for a moment in the dark where I can see the warm slice of light in the dinner shed, where I have a side view of Greg, who is laughing, who brings a beer to his lips, who drinks, who puts it down and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I bite the tip of my tongue and I try to think of some last-minute plan that can stop this. Nothing comes and I turn away and follow my feet back to my quarters.
Clare is lying on my bed with his boots on, smoking a roll-up. I stop in the doorway, but he’s heard me coming and he’s ready with a toothy smile for me. I stay in the doorway wondering if I can turn around, walk back to the woolshed, hide under a fleece.
‘Know where I was all week?’ he asks, swinging his legs off my bed. ‘Come in out of the doorway, love,’ he says, ‘you look like a prostitute.’ He grins wider, if that is possible. He blows smoke out and it fogs the air between us. ‘Planning a trip?’ he says, in the voice of someone off the TV. He kicks my backpack gently. There is so much excitement in his voice.
‘Ben tipped me off about the posters — pictures of you plastered all around the place down there. Did you know that? I had to go and see for myself — but they’re you all right.’ He pulls from his back pocket a scored and folded piece of paper. He unfolds it slowly, chuckling to himself, and holds it up to show me. There I am in black and white sitting on my pink pony doona cover, smiling for the camera. There’s a stuffed bear on my lap and my hands are digging into it, not that you can see my hands, not that you can see the bear or the doona cover or the old man taking the photograph or the dog guarding me outside. You can only see my face, the smile for the camera. In capital letters it says MISSING at the top and I catch the words ‘granddaughter… danger to herself’, at the bottom, but I can’t read it all because things have gone dark.
‘I rang the number, Jake, and you know what I found out?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not my grandfather.’
‘Oh, I know all that. That poor old bloke, “Otto”. We had a good long chat. I went to see him on his farm, just a pen of dead sheep, and all he can talk about is how you killed his dog and how you took his money and he was only trying to take you off the street. Said you took everything that was dear to him, took his truck even, poor old cracker couldn’t get into town, had to rely on the Salvos to come once a week with groceries until he got his old banger working. Saw what you did to that too, smashed it up pretty bad.’
‘I didn’t, I just—’
‘I saw it. The old bugger cried when he talked about his dog.’
‘I just—’
‘Shhh,’ Clare says, but loudly. He gets up off the bed in one fluid movement and walks towards me slowly, takes my forearms where they hang limply by my sides. He moves me over to stand in front of the workbench and he leans on me, crotch heavy.
‘You might have fooled them, but you don’t fool me.’
My mouth waters. I look over at the doorway. What would happen if Greg appeared in there now?
‘What you’ve got, is you’ve got two options here. Maybe I’d be persuaded to keep my mouth shut.’ Clare’s breath is hot fudge on the side of my face. He whispers in a way that sounds like soon he’ll be shouting. ‘You can show me some of what you’ve shown everyone else at the Hedland…’ My heart tumbles around my body. A stupid part of me thinks, He might not say anything, and is quieted by the part of me that knows it will not end, and I cannot stay here. ‘Little bit of affection — I’m not asking for much — I wouldn’t fuck a mate’s lay — maybe just the mouth.’ And I can see exactly how it will all be, the back of the throat, the hair grasped in a ponytail, and the words he will say while he does it, and then afterwards how it will only be worse, how he will be rid of me either way, and with a flourish. ‘Or,’ he says, trailing his finger along the outer curve of my breast, ‘or I can let old Otto know where to find you, and the police.’ He starts to unbutton my shorts, and he tugs my singlet out from them, and puts a hand down, scrabbling with his fingers to get beneath my underwear. ‘I won’t even have to tell Greg, they’ll do it for me.’ He scrapes a finger over my crotch, and like a mechanical game at the fairground, something is triggered and I punch him in the jaw with my right and he goes down, out cold and bleeding on the floor.
I cannot do up my shorts because my hand crunched badly against Clare’s face, and it has turned into a meat fist, throbbing and swollen.
I leave the room without looking back at him, but I can hear him shifting about in the dust and a wet groan comes from him. I am fairly sure that I have broken his jaw.
3
I watched Don drive down into the valley in the last of the light, stayed there with the wheelbarrow in the sleet, with Dog sheltering behind my legs, until he’d disappeared over the crest of the hill to the other side where he lived. My boots made a crumping sound as I walked back down the path to the woolshed. There were times I felt how unnatural I was in the place, the way my skin still stung at the cold, the way the insides of my nostrils and the back of my throat prickled. The smell of wet wool and rain-dampened sheep shit were aliens to the dust-dry smell of the carpet sheep in their wide red spaces back home. The way the land seemed to be watching me, feeling my foreignness in it, holding its breath until I passed by. I’d asked Mum once, What kind of Aussies are we? Did we come over on the boats, or did someone take us here later on? Mum’d looked up from where she was struggling to get the triplets’ bare white arses into undies, and blew a hank of hair out of her face. ‘I’ve been here for ever, darl,’ she said and swatted one of the kids on the legs to try and get them to keep still. I’d never pushed further than that.
I tried not to look too hard into the trees which were black even in the morning, but from the corner of my eye I saw something flicker and I started, thinking the trees were on fire but there was nothing, just some slight movement in the wind. The sheep coughed and bleated. I parked the wheelbarrow in the woolshed and closed the door. My teeth chattered and when I got inside the house, I pulled on my coat and sat on the sofa. Dog climbed up damply next to me.
I hadn’t called in over a month. The last time no one was in and I let it ring out thinking about the phone in the front room, how the sound of it made the magpies lift off the veranda and then settle back down. How the air moved with the ringer, the air that smelled of washing left too long in the machine, of three young boys and their socks and undies, the long-gone deep-fat fryer whose smell, as I remembered it, still soaked into the walls. Mum’s back-door cigarettes that we weren’t allowed to know about, and somewhere from an open window, the smell of sugar and eucalyptus, the hot breath of the trees.
I dialled the code to withhold my number and tapped in the long sequence that I knew by heart. It took me through the tones and silences of connection to home. It would barely be daybreak there, but Mum was an early riser — always had been. It rang out twice and I stroked the arm of the sofa to hear the sound of Mum’s voice.