‘Dr Sinclair.’
I’ve said his name ten times in a row, mostly without a stumble. And it’s not like I’d have to use his surname anyway. I draft words in my head: I hope you managed to reschedule your commitments in Sydney. I’ll be in touch about the final meeting with Douglas Farquhar by the end of the week. Goodnight.
By ten o’clock, I can barely keep my eyes open. Has Sinclair had a drink and decided to stay overnight at the Holdens? I’ve been sleeping on the top bunk near the window. His bag, with neatly folded sheets and a blanket laid on top, is on a bottom bunk near the door. I eye it warily as I dress in pyjamas—a loose-fitting blue gingham shirt and matching shorts—and convince myself he won’t be back until tomorrow.
‘I’ll message when I get home,’ I say through a yawn.
Like I’ve done every night in the past two weeks, I shrug into a thigh-length oilskin coat, clean socks and boots. If I wasn’t staying here, no one would check on the cattle, but I always say goodnight to the animals I have at home.
The night is clear but crisp, with thousands of stars and a bright half-moon. The bulls are out of sight in paddocks on the far side of the windbreak, but the cows and calves are still by the yards. Most are lying in a loose semicircle, but four cows are standing near the water trough. The gate creaks as it swings open and all of the cows—except for one—move back.
It’s only as I walk clear of the gate that I see the calf, his coat predominantly brown, lying awkwardly in the dirt. The cow watches as I drop to my knees. Her calf is bloated, his stomach filled with gas. A bacterial infection? When I lift his head and prise his shoulder off the ground with my knee, he struggles to his feet.
‘Good boy. It’ll be easier this way.’
The calf strains, his back arched, as he tries but fails to defecate. He grunts, a strangled cough. If the gas can’t escape it could expand further, putting pressure on the calf’s lungs and possibly suffocating him. When I pull him through the gate, his mother attempts to follow, but I push her back.
‘I’ll take good care of him.’
The calf is as tall as my waist, too heavy to carry, but I manage to keep him on his feet as I manoeuvre him into one of the holding pens near the shed. His eyes are dull, his head is down. I collect my vet case from the bunkhouse, then scour the shelves of the shed and throw supplies into a bucket as I call Tom. Then Billy. Finally, I try Maureen. No response.
‘Damn.’
The calf is on his knees by the time I get back and I help him to stand again. When I press a stethoscope to his stomach, his intestine sounds sloshy. He gasps and grunts, clearly distressed. If I had a portable ultrasound, I’d be able to assess him better. As I don’t, I’ll do what I can.
I wedge him into a corner of the pen and press my knee against his shoulder. Then I tip back his head and open his mouth, feeding a length of plastic tubing over his tongue until he swallows. Feeling my way, I slide the tube down his oesophagus to his stomach. I change the angle of the tube, once, twice, three times …
A puff of gas escapes through the end of the tube. Another puff. And another. I breathe easier myself.
‘Good boy.’
An arc of light swings around the side of the shed followed by the crunch of tyres on dirt. A car door slams.
I don’t particularly want to see Sinclair, but … ‘Hey!’
He runs around the corner of the shed. ‘What’s—’
I stumble through a brief explanation and for the next twenty minutes, we take it in turns to hold the calf and reposition the tube until, after passing wind several times, he defecates.
Then, as if that’s a signal for the work of the day to catch up with me all at once, my hands begin to shake.
Sinclair must see—he extends a hand and withdraws it. But his eyes stay on my face as I carefully ease the tube out of the calf. He gags a cough, but by the time I’ve crouched next to him, he’s sucking in breaths. And, as I rub around his throat and chest, he belches. And belches again.
‘You’re doing well, little one.’
If Sinclair bothered to look, he’d see the deep V of my pyjama top and the hems of my shorts jutting out beneath my coat. My legs are bare, and my socks have disappeared into my boots. I’m not wearing a bra. When I straighten, my knee creaks in protest.
The cow is still at the fence. Does she know her calf is okay? I feel for the singed hair where his horn buds were. When I press around the site, there’s no reaction. He’s not in pain. He’s not bloated any more but …
‘I’ll stay with you and your mum for a while.’
Sinclair rubs around his shoulder, rotates the joint. He winces. ‘What did you say?’
‘It’s too … soon to put him … with all the others.’ I keep my eyes on the calf, which is snuffling my palm. ‘I don’t know … what caused it. It could happen again. I’ll keep … watch.’
Sinclair considers what I’ve said. Then, ‘When can we talk?’
‘About the calf?’
‘No.’
How long ago did we meet? Six or seven hours? The stubble on his face is darker than it was. I wipe a hand across my face. Two hands.
‘Give me five minutes.’
He looks towards the bunkhouse. ‘In there?’
‘Out here.’
After reuniting the calf with his mother in a small yard adjacent to the pen, I return to the shed. I find two neatly folded groundsheets, dusty but clean, and shake them out before spreading them over the dirt. A gust of wind picks up a corner. When it flaps around my legs, I stamp it down and hold it in place with a bucket.
The bunkhouse is just as I left it, not surprising when Sinclair hasn’t had a chance to come inside. After I wash my hands and face, I remove my towel and handtowels, replacing them with fresh ones. I pull on a sweater and another pair of socks before refastening the press studs of my coat. Then, scooping up my pillow and doona, I take them outside and leave them on a mound on the groundsheets. Sinclair is in the yard bending over the calf, but as soon as he sees me, he stands back.
To take the calf’s pulse, I place two fingers on the vein under his jaw and count. ‘I don’t think he’s in pain.’
‘It’s not indicated.’
As the calf rushes back to his mother and drinks, I nod stiffly. ‘Thank you for your help.’
‘You didn’t need it.’ He jumps the fence and stands back as I climb through.
‘What did you … want to talk about?’
He frowns. ‘Why wouldn’t you change your schedule?’
‘Why should your … work come first?’
‘A colleague’s wife had a heart attack. He asked me to cover for him. Billy said he’d explain.’
Guilt clamps my chest. I should have followed up, asked questions. ‘I had to finish my … work in the district. I have to get back.’
‘To your friends?’
‘Don’t put … words in my mouth.’
‘Give me your own.’
Tired and lightheaded, I point to the bedding. ‘I … want to go to … s—’ Most people look away when I stumble over words. He doesn’t.
‘Our meeting with Douglas Farquhar,’ he says. ‘I want to get it over with.’
Careful to pick up my feet, I walk to the shed. Leaning against it, I unlace my boots, kick them off and wait by my makeshift bed. Sinclair’s image blurs as I yawn.
‘I’ll look at my diary tomorrow.’
I gather my coat around me as I slide down the wall to the groundsheet. And, when the door to the bunkroom clicks shut, I lie on my side, pulling the doona up and over my shoulders. Should I have put hay in the pen so the cow and calf could lie down more comfortably? They look happy enough, curled up in the dirt. I’m reasonably comfortable too. I check the time: 12.22. The air is thick with scents from the farm. Grass and hay, cow dung and dust. I bury my face in the pillow.
When I was a child, in addition to giving me bronchitis medications through a nebuliser and puffer, my mother would pour a few drops of eucalyptus oil into a steamer and leave it in the room I shared with my sisters. If I had a cold, she’d put a eucalyptus rub on my chest to ease my breathing. She sprayed eucalyptus as a mosquito repellent and patted eucalyptus ointment on bumps and scrapes. After I showered tonight, I put the same ointment on the burn on my hand.
Sinclair’s colleague’s wife had a heart attack. Just like my mother did.
I was seven years old—pigtails, missing teeth, freckles on my nose—when it happened. We were at the school gate on a hot summer’s morning and my backpack was lying on the ground. It was a Tuesday, library day. Mum undid the zip of the backpack and looked inside to check I’d remembered my books. The drawstring bookbag with an appliqued dolphin on the front was a hand-me-down from Patience. Mum pulled out the bag. She stilled. And then she staggered.
‘Mummy?’
As she fell to the footpath, the bag dropped to the ground and the library books spilled out. If You Were a Penguin, Why the Lion Roared, Sammy the Slippery Seal.
‘Mummy!’
Memories of my mother are like the pages of a book. Some memories are sharp and I see them big and bold. If the fonts start to blur, I blink and strain to focus. Occasionally, all of the pages are blank. I turn them, frantically searching, even though I know the truth: there are no words.
I bunch up the doona, hoping to warm my legs and feet. Halfasleep, half-awake, my mind spins in cartwheels. Coloured lights and flashing memories. My mother. My father.
When the calf bleats, I prop myself up on an elbow. His head is up. He looks around before snuggling up to his mother again. Which one of the bulls is his sire? The calf wouldn’t care, neither would the sire. I shouldn’t care about my father. I don’t.
Do I?
I consider setting an alarm, but I always wake early. Tom said he’d be back at first light because that’s what Sinclair would want. As I reposition the pillow and pull the doona around my shoulders again, an image of Sinclair, unbidden, unwanted, sharpens in my mind.
He called me Primrose.
My sisters and I are in the bedroom we shared as children and a waterfall of primroses in blue, pink and yellow hovers above my bed.
Primrose. A perennial that appears at the end of spring in the northern hemisphere. Before I was born, Mum completed her doctorate in mathematics at Oxford University. Afterwards, she lived in Primrose Hill near Regents Park. Phoebe remembers Mum cultivating brightly coloured primroses in our garden in Dubbo. After she had the heart attack, Mum had a stroke. She moved to New Zealand so her sisters could care for her. No one watered the garden in Dubbo; the primroses died.
Would my father want flowers at his funeral? What would he say if I could ask him? He hated interruptions, loud noises, even soft ones: Be quiet! He worked as a mathematics professor, an academic. He wrote journal articles and non-fiction books. Books with equations and graphs, not illustrated books about penguins, lions and seals.
Other parents at the gate gathered around Mum. When the ambulance arrived, a teacher took my hand and told me she’d take care of me. I wanted to go in the ambulance with Mum, but I didn’t know it was possible, back then, to argue with a teacher. And then there were the library books, still scattered on the footpath. Why the Lion Roared was face down. The pages were bent and would be dirty. In their hurry to get to Mum, someone had kicked Sammy the Slippery Seal into the gutter. I was afraid I’d get into trouble, that I wouldn’t be allowed to borrow books from the library any more. I felt guilty about that later, worrying about the books when I should have been thinking about Mum.
I’d left Sammy the Slippery Seal to read last because it was the book I was most looking forward to, but it had more chapters and words than I’d anticipated. I was up to the part where Sammy was trapped between two rocks. That’s why we were late—instead of getting ready for school, I was sitting on my bed in my pyjamas and reading. As Mum tied back my hair, she reassured me I could renew the book. She also told me she was very late for work and her students would be waiting. For many years, until I figured out it took more than a stressful morning to cause a heart attack and stroke, I felt guilty about that too.