Kate sat at her desk clutching a box of KFC. The partitions in the Department of Agriculture’s open-plan office did little to hide her hung-over state. Dimity from accounts, with her up-turned nose and round glasses, soon ferreted her out.
‘Heard you were a bit of a Tassie devil at the field day,’ she teased.
Kate shrugged and offered her a chip. When Dimity shook her mousy head, Kate crammed a chip into her own mouth. She was halfway through chewing it into a potatoey pulp when Buzz Thompson appeared beside her desk. She looked up at him.
‘In my office. Now.’ As Buzz walked off, Kate noted his bull-like neck and the cauliflower ears that gave away his passion for playing front-row rugby union.
In Buzz’s office Kate threw herself down in a chair and began to swivel from side to side, as if trying to dodge his steady gaze.
‘What was yesterday about?’
‘What do you mean?’ Kate asked.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Oh! The sheep counting. Yes. I won it. Great PR for the department, huh? Show the cockies that some of us bureaucrats have practical know-how.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’
Flashing to Kate’s mind came the picture of herself with the stockie in the field-day car park. She was pressed up against a mud-splattered Hilux ute, too drunk to care about passers-by as he groped her breasts beneath her Department of Ag. uniform shirt. The taste of beer and the tangy smell of stale manly sweat.
Kate cast her eyes down to her lap.
‘You’ve already had two warnings,’ Buzz said and all Kate could do was nod.
‘We took you on because you were bright. Very bright. But it isn’t working out for you here. I think you’re aware that your three-month review is due?’
Kate had a sense of what was coming. She looked at Buzz’s ruddy face and his tousled sandy hair.
‘I just can’t keep you on,’ he said. Kate was about to speak, but he held up his hand to silence her. ‘I know your personal situation. That’s why I’ve made some enquiries and I’ve recommended a transfer to Tasmania.’
Kate couldn’t help herself.
‘Transfer to Tasmania!’ she cried. Laughter spluttered up. ‘You make me sound like a convict!’
‘I’m serious, Kate. You’re not cut out to be in an office every day. You know that. And with your little girl, you need more flexibility. They’re crying out for departmental field agronomists and rural advisors in your district in Tasmania. Because of the politics down there, there’s been a big injection of funding into that area. You’ve got enough experience under your belt now for them to be really keen on you. You’ll be able to work the hours that suit you. Maybe even work from your family farm.’
‘Family,’ Kate said incredulously. ‘The only family I have is here.’ An image of her father came to her, sitting rigid at the helm of his tractor, harrowing the black loamy soil in lines straighter and neater than a pinstriped suit. The way he seemed to scrutinise her face, searching out her mother in her looks. Yet he seemed always stung when he found Laney’s image there because she, Kate, never quite measured up. She’d see him flinching from her over-loud laugh, a replica of her mother’s. Even here, sitting in Buzz’s office, Kate felt the sting of her father’s disappointed gaze. Panic gripped her at the thought of going back to Tasmania with Nell. She couldn’t go. Even though Will was there to prop her up, she couldn’t go.
Back in Tasmania, people would take note of the dark-haired mother and the fair-haired child and they’d work it out sooner or later, how Nell had come to be. They’d look at the girl and nod knowingly about the father. Sweat trickled down the small of Kate’s back.
‘Look,’ Buzz continued. ‘I’m doing you a favour. Another favour. Either you apply for the position or I’ll terminate your work within the department with no reference from me. I’m sure I’ve only heard half the things you’ve got up to in the past few months.’
Kate blinked, her eyes sliding away from him. Since she’d moved into town from Maureen’s farm, her private life had spun out of control and she knew Nell was bearing the brunt of it. Kate was bright enough to wing her way through work, good enough with clients to satisfy their needs, arsey enough to toss together a farm-funding application so that it shone out above all others. But with Nell she couldn’t wing it. Kate knew that to be a mother, to be there for her little girl, she couldn’t just fake it. If she lost her job, she could risk losing herself, and then maybe even her child. Kate bit her lower lip. Buzz stood up and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
‘Dimity has the details about the job in Tasmania and I expect you to apply today,’ he said sternly, but with kindness in his eyes. ‘And there’ll be no farewell parties either.’
As Kate walked back to her desk, her first reaction was one of dismay. But it was quickly followed by a sense of excitement. She was free. She could bundle up Nell and hit the road. Travel across Australia. Work up north at anything. Fruit picking. Burger making. Rouseabouting. Drive until they found themselves. But then the reality set in. Travelling across remote Australia was no place for Nell, especially now she was not far away from starting school.
Kate slumped at her desk and thought for a moment. She pictured her freckle-faced friend Janie, back in Tassie with her chubby baby twins and her rock-solid farmer husband, Dave.
Janie diligently sent over birthday presents for Nell and Kate. She regularly emailed photos of the twins and news of their milestones … when they had first smiled, first rolled over, first eaten solids. She signed off her emails with ‘Miss you’, and umpteen hugs and kisses. Kate had written back, but more briefly and never honestly about her life with Nell.
Janie seemed absorbed in motherhood, and thriving within it. Compared to Janie, Kate felt like a failure. But perhaps, Kate thought, if she went back, Janie could help her become the mother she should be for Nell.
She clicked on her email program. She would write to Janie and ask her what to do. But as she started to type, emotions welled up in her and the words got tangled on screen. She wrote about how lost she felt. That she was a negligent mother. That she was a slack friend. That she was out of control with men, searching for something in them yet not knowing what that something was. A page in, re-reading her melodramatic words, Kate scoffed at herself before hitting the delete button. Janie didn’t need to know all that.
Kate thought back to the time when she and Janie had first become friends. Janie had just ditched school and was working at her parents’ garage, opening up shop when her mother was too drunk or stoned to get out of bed. Wishing her dad would get back from his interstate trucking haul to help tally the accounts, but dreading his return in case he took to her mother again with his angry fists.
Sitting behind the messy counter stacked with chocolates, oil filters, fuses, fanbelts and past-their-use-by chips with a blow heater roasting her feet, Janie would pore over the frothy dresses of Hollywood brides in the latest Who magazine, all the while sucking on a red lolly-snake.
Kate, on her L’s, would drive into the tiny servo with her dad, the wheels of their ute making the bell ring cha-ching. As her dad glugged diesel into the ute, Kate would amble in and buy a roll of barley sugars for her mother. Glucose to keep her body going just that bit longer.
‘How’s your mum?’ Janie would ask.
‘Still crook,’ Kate would say. ‘How’s yours?’
‘Still useless,’ Janie would say.
‘I wish mine would get better.’
‘I wish mine would get dead.’
And then they’d both laugh, feeling a friendship growing between them. They were both living grown-up lives, both isolated from their peers, who were worrying about pimples and pubes and schoolwork. But Janie and Kate were tangled in tragedy that made them older than their years. And that’s how their friendship had formed; two girls who relied on each other. Inspired each other. Two girls who would never normally have mixed.
Kate loved Janie’s directness and the bitter humour she dealt out about her family, yet she also saw and appreciated Janie’s kindness. And Janie loved the way Kate could take her out of her bleak petrol-drenched world and into the rolling landscape of Bronty on horseback. They’d ride through she-oaks and Oyster Bay pines and stands of ironbarks clinging to stony outcrops, then down onto the flats, and on towards the sea, the soil turning from rich red to sandy. Kate could see them now, on the Bronty beach, at sixteen, swigging on cans of warm illicit rum that they’d stashed in their backpacks, sitting bareback on the horses. Janie’s brown legs against the chestnut belly of the horse, her long, curly blonde hair, darkened by saltwater, and her freckled face turned upwards, laughing, in the direction of the sun.
Staring at the blank screen Kate began to type. Short and sweet, she told herself, like Janie herself. Short and sweet.
‘G’day Janie. Been given the arse at work. Should Nell and I come home? Whaddyareckon?’ Then she hit the send button.
Next, she rang Will’s mobile number. Silence on the line and then the robotic sound of ringing. Would it go straight to message bank? Hearing Will’s friendly voice on the recording always brought his image to life and Kate could clearly picture her big, burly brother’s shining black eyes and messy black hair set off by his ruddy farm-boy cheeks. Will’s earthy charm reached everyone, including the farm animals, who followed him with their eyes. Pure adoration from his dogs, devotion from his horses. Trust from the sheep and cattle that moved around quietly in the presence of his steady ways.
Will could turn his hand to anything. His welds were perfection, his fencing stays were square, his fertiliser mixes and seed ratios were measured to exacting specifications. And he always had energy for everyone. Energy for the farm. For his father. For Kate and her drunken midnight phonecalls. Even for Annabelle when she needed cajoling. He seemed to ignore the bumps and furrows of their fractured family life by burying himself in the work of Bronty. He and Kate rarely spoke of their mother.
Kate wondered now how he’d take the news that she’d been sacked. When at last he answered the phone he sounded breathless, clearly busy at something on the farm.
‘You’re not a recording? It is the real Will I’m speaking to?’
‘Live and larger than life,’ he said. ‘How’s my sis and her little Smellie?’
‘Good. I’m good. She’s good. We’re good.’
‘And …?’
Kate glanced about the office. Dimity ducked her head and resumed her work. Kate swivelled her chair so her back was to her and lowered her voice.
‘Buzz has just sacked me.’ As she spoke, she felt the prickle of tears surprise her.
‘Ah, Kate.’ She could hear it in Will’s voice, his deep concern, his frustration at her. But she could also hear his love.
‘Well, not exactly the sack … but close enough. He’s lined up a transfer to Tassie. There’s even a chance to set up a home office. What should I do?’
‘You know what I think. It’s simple.’
‘But I can’t come home, Will.’
‘You can, Kate. You can come home.’
‘But …’
‘There’s no buts. It’s time. I’ll look after you both, I promise. And Dad’ll be fine. I’ll sort him.’
‘And Annabelle?’
‘Leave her to me. I’ll fix her.’
‘But —’
‘Kate,’ Will’s voice cut firmly across hers, ‘a good job is being handed to you on a plate. You’d be stupid not to take it.’
‘But —’
‘Kate, Mum would want Nell and you home, here, at Bronty, no matter what. You know that.’
Kate fell silent. Will had played his best hand and she felt her bravado melt away. She was scared of being alone in the world with a small child and no job. She was tired of always wondering what life would be like if she moved back home.
She sighed.
‘I need you down here, Kate,’ Will said. ‘It’s time we got this seed idea off the ground. I need you to start that. So come home, please.’ He paused. ‘I’d like to share Nell’s life too. You hog her all the time over there! Come home.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ was all she could give him before hanging up. As the rumour of her ‘transfer’ spread through the office like wildfire, Kate dropped her face into her hands. Could she really do it? Could she go home?
She recalled the last time she’d seen Will, when he’d gingerly ducked his head around the maternity-ward door. He was carrying a silver and blue balloon that announced, ‘It’s a boy!’
‘Sorry,’ he said, nodding towards a pink-swaddled Nell, who was sleeping in the perspex crib beside the bed. He handed Kate the balloon. ‘Only one left in the hospital shop. Seems there’s been a run on girls in here.’ Then he spoke with less bravado. ‘Aunt Maureen phoned to tell me you’d had her. How are you, Sis?’
Kate started to cry. Will was in some ways like their father; so cautious, so measured. Yet here he was. He’d dropped everything and flown from Hobart to Sydney, then taken a train all the way out to Orange just to see her. He brought with him all the memories of home. As she hugged him she could smell the sea air on his jacket and the faint earthy scent of the old split-timber shearing shed. Kate shut her eyes. If Will knew about the arrival of the baby then her dad must know too. Why, then, hadn’t he come? Or even called? Will sensed her hurt.
‘Dad had to stay to look after the farm. He said to say congratulations.’
Still traumatised by the birth, her hormones running riot, Kate cried even harder. Had her father really said that? She felt so ashamed. The shame of Will seeing her with a baby. The shame that her father knew she now had a child.
‘Hey,’ Will soothed as he held her close. ‘She’s a beautiful baby. There’s nothing to cry about.’
But there was, Kate thought. She was just twenty and she had a baby! And her mother wasn’t here. What would life be like now? Will held her at arm’s length.
‘Did it hurt?’ he asked shyly. Kate rolled her eyes.
‘Hurt? Hurt! The whole baby thing is a bloody conspiracy. Women who’ve had kids lie to you. When I was pregnant, they said, “You’ll forget all about the pain once the baby arrives.” Crap! I’ll never forget that pain. Never. Just be thankful you’re male.’
When she’d first arrived at the hospital with every muscle tensed, Kate tried hard to listen to the gentle commands of the midwives, who helped her move about on the big double bed. It was a bed designed for women and their partners to share in the ‘joy’ of the birth. As the labour pains worsened, the room closed in, so all Kate knew was that bed. The taut blue sheets getting more and more scrunched and the plump pillows becoming grimier with sweat as the pain ripped through her in waves, hour after hour. The bed became both her haven and an island of horror all at once.
‘Breathe through it, Kate. You’re doing well,’ the midwife soothed.
‘I can’t do it!’ Kate screamed after the hours ran into one blinding stretch of time. ‘I can’t! It hurts too much.’ Pain hijacked her mind and she felt she would go mad, or die. ‘I’m scared,’ she sobbed as sweat trickled from her brow, sticking strands of black hair to her scalp. Another contraction. She clutched the pillow, knuckles white, teeth clenched.
‘What are you scared of?’ the midwife asked calmly.
Kate wanted to say she was scared of dying, like the ewes, or of giving birth to a perfect, but dead, little lamb. But another contraction hit her and all she could do was crouch on all fours and grunt through it. The next thing she knew, Aunt Maureen was by her side, looking ruffled from discovering late in the day that Kate had gone into labour at college that morning. She felt Maureen rubbing her back and heard her soothing voice.
It felt like her mother was there now. Kate calmed a little. The midwife was handing her a corrugated plastic pipe with a blue mouthpiece on the end.
‘Suck it in, Kate. It’ll help. Trust me on this one,’ she urged.
And it did. Kate felt herself float up with the ether. But the gas wore off and the pain would come again. The guttural sounds from Kate’s throat seemed to come from someone else. She felt all animal as a deep moan rose within her.
‘Blow out the pain, blow out the pain, Kate,’ a frizzy, red-haired midwife said. ‘It won’t be long and we’ll tell you to push.’
She couldn’t speak. Her pupils dilated with fear like those of a trapped animal; she didn’t understand what was happening. Then she was on all fours again with the midwives urging her to push. She felt her joints in her sockets being ripped apart as if two tractors were having a slow, excruciating tug-of-war on either side of her pelvis. She imagined the heavy hooks of the tractor chains tearing apart red muscle, creamy ligaments and the white of the bones. Just when she thought she would die, she felt the head of the baby pass over the solid cup of her bones. Then the shoulders and with a final push the baby slithered out in a pool of liquid. And Kate felt what the women had talked about. The amazement. The joy that rose up, beyond all that pain, shock and fear. Tears streamed down her flushed cheeks as she gazed at the gasping, glistening baby.
‘Hello,’ she said to the tiny blinking being, who looked more alien than human.
‘Well done, Kate,’ the midwife said. ‘You’ve got yourself a beautiful little girl.’
Four days later, Kate was in a cycle of sleeplessness and pain. Hospital hell. She fed Nell from cracked and bleeding nipples. She became quite used to the midwives grabbing hold of her lumpy, bursting boobs and bossing her baby’s lips to them.
There was the endless clatter from the corridor; the ceaseless hospital traffic of cleaners, nurses and kitchen staff. They all swept in and out of her room, pushing trolleys, mop buckets or medical machines, the wheels clacking and rattling over the floor. Night and day blurred into one behind the venetian blinds. She tried to read her university textbooks but the words swam and blurred on the page. And in between the snuffling, squeaking and crying from Nell, Kate was trying to get her busted body to work again.
‘Do you need more Voltaren?’ the nurses asked. Kate giggled at the name despite her pain. Each time they said ‘Voltaren’ she pictured a bronzed, topless beefcake with long blond hair from a romance novel cover. She imagined ‘Voltaren’ sweeping into her room to rescue her. He’d pull back the curtain dramatically, swipe away her packets of Ural, haemorrhoid cream and maternity pads and take her up into his arms.
‘Yes, I’d love Voltaren,’ she’d say, keen for the fogginess that the drug brought to her. Strong painkillers didn’t just help the sting from the raw wound where the baby had torn her. They helped her block out what her life might be beyond the hospital walls. A life with this tiny delicate little creature in it. Her daughter, Nell.
As Will stooped over the swaddled, doll-like baby Kate knew what he was thinking. Nell was the image of her father with her cute little ski-slope nose, bright blue eyes and fair hair. The paperwork for Nell’s birth certificate lay on the shelf beside the bed. Kate had tried to fill it in but she got stuck at the part that asked for the name of the father. She wanted to ask Will if she should just lie and write ‘unknown’, when a cluster of college students burst into the room.
‘Hey!’ Kate said, propping herself gingerly up on a pillow to avoid knocking her stitches. She could still see the doctor bent over her spread legs with the light gleaming down on her. Despite his private-school manner, he had felt as rough as a shearer tugging dental floss through the bright, bloodied cut of a half-shorn sheep. Kate hoped her visitors wouldn’t notice the meaty smell of warm blood that was still seeping out of her. She pulled the hospital blanket over her legs up to her waist.
‘Congratulations,’ Bindy said, rushing forward to hug Kate and gush over the baby.
‘Bindy, everyone, this is my brother Will.’ Kate gestured in his direction. ‘Will, these are some of my mates from college. But don’t mind them.’
‘G’day.’ Will nodded at them and stepped back to let them gather around the crib.
‘Where’s her second head?’ quipped a red-faced Bilzo.
‘And her webbed feet and hands so she can get back across Bass Strait?’ said Freshie.
‘If he was a boy were you gunna ringbark him?’ asked Bilzo cheekily. ‘We know what you Tasmanians are like on tree trunks.’
‘Shut up,’ Bindy said, slapping them both on the shoulder. ‘Lucky they didn’t circumcise you, Bilzo, or you’d have nothing left to wee out of.’
‘Ooo!’ chorused the boys. Kate looked at them and smiled. They had gradually become her mates at college, despite her pregnant state. They weren’t from the coolest crowd and Kate loved them for that. They began to bring her into their world by teasing her good-naturedly. Calling her the ‘breeder’. Buying her milkshakes from the college canteen to ‘fill up her milkers’ and making jokes about her growing ‘beer gut’ and about her sharing the genetics of stumpy, rotund Tasmanian cricketer David Boon. But now, on the other side of childbirth, Kate felt so removed from them.
‘Speaking of wee,’ Bilzo said to Kate, ‘mind if I use your loo, Boonie? We had a few roadies on the way here. Gotta go have a chat with the unemployed. Might drop a coupla friends off at the pool while I’m there.’
‘Sure, Bilzo. Go for your life,’ Kate said. ‘Don’t slip on the afterbirth,’ she called as he shut the door.
‘I thought motherhood would civilise you! Still as gross as ever, eh?’ Bindy said, then she stooped over the crib and said gently, ‘Oh, Kate, she’s just gorgeous.’
Bindy looked up from the baby with an expression that was more sad than joyful. It was as if to say she was sorry Kate had stuffed her life up so early. But then she brightened as she moved over and sat a heavy shopping bag on the bed.
‘Sorry it’s not wrapped.’
Peering into the bag, Kate let out a cry of delight.
‘Bloody fantastic,’ she said as she pulled out a blocky six-pack of Bundy and cola onto the bed. ‘I’ll have to hide it from the midwives. Thank you so much.’ At the bottom of the bag was a Bundy rum bar mat with a polar bear on it and black and yellow lettering.
‘The boys pinched it from the pub. Thought you could use it as a baby vomit cloth or something.’
‘We washed it,’ said Freshie, stepping forward. ‘And we brought you this.’
He thrust forward a Utes Annual magazine with a muscly looking girl wearing a cap and a Deniliquin Ute Muster blue singlet on the cover.
‘Thanks, Freshie,’ Kate said, taking it from him. ‘I’ll treasure it.’
‘Sorry it’s creased, but I already read it.’ As the boys picked up the book to argue over the Ford and Holden utes, Bindy perched her backside on the bed while Will sat in a chair.
‘How are you?’ she asked in a quieter voice.
‘Fine,’ Kate lied. ‘When I look in the mirror I scare myself though. Imagine waking up to discover your body looks like Pammy Anderson on the top half and Humphrey B. Bear on the bottom half. That’s me nude at the moment. Bloody scary, I can tell you!’
Kate wondered if she would ever be brave enough to let a male touch her again. In the harsh lighting of the hospital bathroom she had picked up her flaccid belly in both hands and jiggled it. It was like someone had let the air out of a tyre. She’d also been shocked to see the glaring red stretch marks that ran over her skin, like tropical-fish stripes. Kate hadn’t known how much her body would change. She didn’t know then that the marks would eventually fade, but her hips would widen and her tummy would always remain softer. It felt like she’d left her teenage body behind somewhere. She hated the body she had now.
Bindy was about to reassure her when Bilzo emerged from the toilet. He was snapping on a pair of the latex gloves that were shelved on the wall.
‘Look what I found,’ he said, waggling his fingers in the air. Then he reached around the corner of the bathroom door, pulled a maternity pad from its packet and held it aloft. ‘Check out the size of these, boys!’
As the boys whooped Bilzo started dancing around the room with the chunky pad singing a Beach Boys surfing song.
‘For God’s sake, Bilzo, settle down,’ Bindy said crisply. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’
Kate glanced at Will and smiled apologetically. He had shuffled to her bedside and whispered, ‘I’ll come back later.’ Before she could protest, he’d gone.
That night, with the bundle of Nell asleep beside her bed, Kate let the illicit taste of rum tingle on her tastebuds. She propped herself up on a fat hospital pillow and flicked through the ute magazine. Her eyes fell on a photo of a group of smiling girls, their arms around each other as they sat on the back of a ute, holding stubbies. They wore hospital bands on their wrists, signifying that they had not only paid to get into the ute muster, they belonged. They belonged to the crazy, piss-drinking crowd that was getting dusty, loud and dirty. Kate stared at the picture and fingered her own hospital tag, thinking of Janie, thinking of the last time she’d worn a tag like this one. The time she went to the Rouseabout B&S Ball.
My God, she thought. She felt so old and damaged she couldn’t imagine going to a B&S ever again.
‘Should you be drinking that?’ came a voice from the doorway. It was Will. ‘I know it’s past visiting hours, but the nurse let me in.’
Kate smiled, feeling a rush of warmth that he was there. Now, sitting at her work station with Buzz’s words running round her head, Kate smiled. After all this time, she was going home. Home to Will.
Two weeks later, Kate found herself outside her low-slung brick house with Aunt Maureen. Her aunt reached out and smoothed down Nell’s hair, fighting back tears. Kate sensed her aunt’s tension. She waved the lunch box that she held in her direction.
‘Thanks for the tucker, Auntie Maureen.’
‘Much better for you both than truck-stop food.’
Kate heard the quaver in her aunt’s voice. They both knew what Kate was going back to in Tasmania … or rather, what she wasn’t going back to. Laney wasn’t there anymore. She no longer lived on that sometimes bleak but sometimes glorious island. The old stone and weatherboard house by the sea would seem hollow, like a shell. But Kate recalled the excitement in Will’s voice when she had told him she was coming back. She held onto his love and faith in her as if it was a safety rope pulling her back to shore.
Maureen stepped forward and gathered Kate up in a hug. They held each other tight for a moment. Then they stepped apart. Maureen helped Nell clamber up into the back of the twin-cab and pressed a kiss to her brow before clicking her seatbelt in.
On the front seat of the ute, crammed between bags and boxes, Sheila panted slowly, licking her lips and looking worried. Kate slammed the ute door shut and turned the engine over.
‘Drive safely,’ Maureen called out.
Kate nodded. She wanted to say thank you, Maureen, for helping her with everything. Everything. The pregnancy. The birth. Getting her through college. Everything. But she pressed her lips tight together and grimaced more than smiled. Then she drove away from her life in Orange. Forward to her past.