Janie bustled in clutching a Mickey Mouse pillow and doona and shoved them at Kate.
‘It was either Mickey or the Wiggles and I thought all those sexy Wiggles-butts would get you too excited.’ When she saw Kate rocking back and forth, Janie plonked into a chair. Kate clutched her arms around her knees and stared into space. ‘Kate? What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t believe I was playing that song when he walked in. How embarrassing! Oh my God, Janie, it was him! Nick friggin McDonnell! Arrrghh!’
‘Shhh. You’ll wake the kids.’ Janie threw a cushion at her and Kate covered her mouth and snorted laughter through her nose. ‘This is all a big joke to you, isn’t it?’
Kate smothered a smile. ‘No, it’s not. I’m deadly serious.’
‘Yeah, right. Sometimes I wish you’d just grow up!’ Janie tried to say it lightly but Kate heard the anger in her tone.
‘Grow up?’ Kate repeated. ‘God, Janie, you of all people know that I had to grow up. I’ve never been anything but grown-up. Surely now’s my time to have a bit of fun?’
Janie sat down on the arm of the chair next to Kate. She sighed.
‘You can still have fun and be responsible, Kate. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Kate said sarcastically.
‘There’s no need to gripe.’ Janie dropped down on her knees and sat in front of Kate, searching for her eyes. ‘From what I can gather you’re not giving Nell much sense of being grown-up.’
Kate crossed her arms. ‘Just because you chose to marry Big Dave and have kids at a stupid age and trap yourself doesn’t mean you can cast judgement on me! I didn’t have a choice, did I?’ Kate tugged the doona over herself.
‘Trap myself! You know as well as me I was trapped before I met Dave, not after! At least you got to finish school! And yes, the study was hard for you, I know it was. But you had a mum who let you know you were smart. I barely knew what a book was. So don’t give me lectures about choices. We both took up the dare that night, remember?’
‘Remember?’ Kate almost spat. ‘How could I forget?’ She pulled the doona up over her head. Janie stood, looking down at the shape of her friend.
‘Good night, Kate,’ she said eventually, flicking the light off and stalking out.
As Kate’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed moonlight seeping in under the doona. She could just make out the maniacally grinning face of Mickey Mouse on the pillow. Suddenly she wished Janie had chosen the Wiggles sheets. Peeling back the doona, she looked up at the moon framed in the top left-hand corner of the window. It had been a full moon on the night of the Rouseabout B&S. The night she had first seen Nick, and first worn that dress.
Kate smoothed the cherry-red silk dress over her hips and twisted around to do up the zip. Her mother would have zipped the dress up and laughingly complained that it was too short and the neckline too low. But then she would’ve kissed her and told her to go out and have fun anyway. Kate sighed, wishing her mother was there to call out, ‘If you can’t be good, be careful.’ But her mother wasn’t there to shut the zip’s tiny silver teeth that ran along Kate’s spine. Her mother was dead. Kate thought of her mother lying in the dark coffin beneath the black clay soil of the local cemetery. Raw grief ripped through her again, and she had to clutch the edge of the sink. Looking up, she took in her reflection in the bathroom mirror. A young version of her mother.
‘You scrub up well, Webster,’ she said sarcastically to her reflection, knowing that her glossy, glowing appearance hid the turmoil within her. The B&S ball tonight was a chance to get so blind she could escape the pain of the last few weeks. The Rouseabout! A Bachelor and Spinsters Ball. A weekend ticket to oblivion.
Will had smuggled Kate into her first ball when she was just sixteen. Her mum didn’t try to stop them from going. She had just quietly warned Will to keep his sister safe and not to tell their father. She’d cover for them. She was like that, Laney; willing to trust them both with enough rope. In her eyes, life was not only to live … it was to be tasted and drunk in and challenged and seized.
Turning away from the mirror, Kate steeled herself before she walked into the lounge room to face her father. He was slumped in an over-stuffed lounge chair with his feet up on an old, cracked leather footstool. His face was obscured by the Tasmanian Country, which he held in front of him.
‘Bye then,’ Kate said, hoping he would speak. Instead, he lowered the paper, took in the sight of her short red dress, shook his head slowly and raised the newspaper again.
‘Dad,’ she said, reaching out to touch him. Angrily he jerked his arm from beneath her fingertips, the paper rustling noisily. ‘Bloody hell, Dad, can’t you say something nice? She’d be pleased we’re going out to have some fun.’
Her father twisted his body away from her and turned his head so that he now seemed to be staring at the stock report. She knew he wasn’t reading though. His eyes were clenched shut. Spinning around, Kate strode over to the mantelpiece where sympathy cards and dying flowers clustered together. She grabbed at the cards and tugged the flowers from the vases. Reeking green droplets splattered the floorboards.
‘Mum would hate all this,’ she said, throwing the crumpled cards and wilted flowers into the unlit fire. ‘How can you think it’s too soon to be going out? It was too soon for her to die! Don’t you get it?’ Kate was shouting now. ‘How else am I supposed to go on from here?’
Henry scrunched the paper in his fists.
‘Go!’ he said. ‘Just get out!’
Kate was about to scream that she bloody well would go and never come back when Will walked into the room in his op-shop blue velvet dinner suit and ruffled pink shirt. He took in the tangled mess in the fireplace, Kate’s flushed face and her father’s mournful look.
‘Come on, Kate,’ he said in a gentle voice. Then he turned to Henry and crouched down beside him.
‘The stock are all checked. Just the dogs need a feed tomorrow. I’ve left some wallaby in the meat shed. See you Sunday night. Okay, Dad?’
Henry didn’t answer. He didn’t look at them as they turned and walked from the room.
The Rutherglen homestead, washed in moonlight, looked beautiful but eerily cold as Nick drove towards it. The lights were all out, except for a dim gleam that shone from the side of the homestead. His father was still awake and probably shuffling about the kitchen. Should he mention to him that he’d seen Kate Webster at the pub tonight? But what would his father care?
Nick found his father, Lance, in the laundry. He was bending over a basket trying to tug a shemozzle of sheets into the washing machine. Nick could tell by the way his father fumbled that he was embarrassed. He’d wet the bed again, too sore and slow to get to the toilet. Or too bombed out on painkillers to realise.
‘Your mother’s got enough to do,’ Lance said. ‘Save her doing them in the morning.’
‘Here.’ Nick took the sheets from his father, but avoided looking him in the eye. It was hard to look at him these days. His grey eyes, filled with pain, were sunken in his sallow face. Nick also avoided looking in the direction of the bag that always hung beneath his father’s clothes. A bag that slowly filled with his father’s excrement. Tonight, under the harsh light of the unshaded globe, Lance looked like the walking dead. ‘I’ll do it. You go back to bed, Dad.’
‘Night then,’ Lance said, shuffling out feeling both grateful and humiliated.
Nick peered into the washing machine and groaned when he saw a mass of wet clothes plastered to the sides of the tub. He grabbed another clothesbasket and started heaving the washing out.
At the clothesline, strung between two old apple trees, Nick flung a sheet over the wire. The whiteness of the moon on the flapping sheet prompted Felicity’s toey show horses to snort nervously and trot about.
‘Settle down,’ Nick growled at them from over the fence. As he angrily pegged underpants, socks and old work shirts in a row he looked up at the moon again. It hung so near he could see swirls on its face. He remembered the night, years ago, when the moon had hung that close.
He’d been peering at it from under the dark covers of a ute tarp that had smelt of diesel and fly oil. His brother, Angus, had flipped the tarp away, and helped Nick out from the ute’s tray that was stuffed with eskies and swags.
‘Now remember, Nick, tonight you’re eighteen, okay? If any of those blokes behind the bar look at you funny, just disappear into the crowd and lay low for a bit. You’ll be right.’
Nick stood on the short pasture where scatterings of super-phosphate fertiliser glowed beneath the moonlight like unmelted hailstones. He tugged at the drooping dinner suit that hung from his skinny frame as the pounding music from the shearing shed thudded through his body. The inviting tang of mutton and pork spit roasts drifted in the air. Rows of cars and utes gleamed in the moonlight and beyond them figures like ghouls moved about the paddocks. Drunk buggers listing sideways, like they were navigating the deck of a storm-held ship.
‘Now, my little brother, the rules,’ Angus said, laying a dinner-plate-sized hand on Nick’s shoulder and stooping down to look into his excited eyes.
‘Rule one: if you get pissed and you’re gunna chuck, steer clear of my ute and my swag. Got it? Rule two: if you pick up, and you can get it up, use one of these.’ Angus pressed a crumpled condom into Nick’s palm. ‘Rule three: eating’s cheating.’ And he thrust a can of Bundy into Nick’s hand. The cold aluminium felt good against Nick’s palm.
Angus gestured towards the glow of the shearing shed. ‘Welcome to B&S land, little brother!’
Nick looked heavenward to the massive white disc of the moon as he swigged on the rum. He felt the harshness of the full-strength Bundy drag like gravel over the back of his throat. His first B&S and his heart was racing. Tugging on his over-sized jacket, he shuffled off in his older brother’s wake towards the glowing bonfire and the shearing shed.
Kate leant on the bullbar of Will’s Subaru ute in her red silk dress and pulled off her high-heeled shoes. She hung them on the rear-vision mirror and tugged on a pair of hockey socks and scuffed Blundstone boots. She waited impatiently for her brother to finish pissing and tug his fly closed.
‘Now are you ready?’ she asked.
‘Revved and ready,’ Will said, snatching up his beer from where he’d left it on the bonnet. They walked side by side over the bumpy paddock, past the rows of cars towards the thumping roar coming from the shearing shed.
On her right, a blue marquee begged or borrowed from the livestock company sheltered trestle tables laden with food. Buttered white bread stacked in tall columns, massive bowls of spud salad and chunky, mucky coleslaws were laid out. Piles of meat on silver throwaway trays. Some girls sat legs crossed, eating from plates, while the drunker ones held food in their fists and tore meat from bones with their teeth like Vikings. As Kate and Will passed, the queue of hungry diners dispersed momentarily as a young gun slung an entire bowl of coleslaw over his mate’s head. Kate smiled at the sight of the boy blinking mayonnaise from his eyes and slinging fistfuls of grated carrot and cabbage into the crowd. It was only eight o’clock and they were already running amok.
‘Let’s find the bar first and come back for tucker after,’ Will suggested. Kate nodded and they strode on. A massive bonfire sprayed up dancing sparks into the night sky. Clusters of people stood about, drinking and talking. Some sat on hay bales. Kate noticed a couple lying in the paddock, rolling in a kiss. The girl’s dress was pushed up high and everyone could see her pink undies – one bum cheek in, one out – and the dimples of her upper thighs, like the moon’s own pale surface. With a whoop, a group of boys busted open a hay bale and covered the couple in itchy-as-hell hay. They barely responded, simply kept on kissing, a slow wave and a sly smile from the boy the only acknowledgement of what they’d done. Kate walked on towards the bar. She was at The Rouseabout, Tassie’s rural big-bang annual event, and her heart was racing.
In the shearing shed, the smell of rum awash on the lanolin-and dung-soaked grating had revved the crowd into a frenzy. Like most seasoned B&S-goers, the mere whiff of rum and dung catapulted Kate into a kind of trance. Her only mission tonight was to get totally and utterly drunk. She wanted to go wild, like an animal. To tear away social boundaries and cleanse herself of all the niceties she had endured during her mum’s funeral and wake. Tonight she would strip away all pretence and let the rum shut out everything else in her life. She felt the crowd surge around her as people rushed to watch the riders of a mechanical bull.
‘Smell that, Janie?’ she called, breathing in hard as she slipped and slid over the shearing board. ‘Who needs to pop tablets when you can get high on sheep shit mixed with rum? The city kids just don’t get it.’
But Janie couldn’t hear her. She was too busy pushing her way through the crowd, looking pretty in her homemade, strapless peacock-blue dress. Her curly fair hair, piled atop her head in loosely entwined ringlets, framed her angelic freckled face.
By the time Kate got through the crush of black suits, Janie was standing beneath a banner that read The Rouseabout Bachelor and Spinster’s Ball with a cartoon of the Footrot Flats dog getting sozzled on grog. The DJ was tucked safely near the wool bins. In his shiny puffy tracksuit, baseball cap turned backwards, and reflector sandshoes, he was the only person who didn’t seem to fit. At least he knew how to please the crowd. He put on Adam Brand’s ‘Dirt Track Cowboy’ and a chorus of whoops rang out and rattled off the corrugated-iron rooftop. Adam’s sexy voice, as smooth as bitumen, revved the crowd up more.
Intoxicated by her surroundings, Kate nudged Janie with her shoulder.
‘Go on. Dare you!’ she said as she shoved Janie forward towards the mechanical bull. Janie turned to her and beamed. She was up for anything too, set loose from the sadness of both Kate’s loss and her own troubled home.
She stumbled towards the matting, hoisted her satin dress over her stocky thighs, kicked off her work boots and clambered on. Her golden hair tumbled over her pretty, plump shoulders as the bull began to slowly rock and spin. Then faster and faster, winding up. Janie flung one arm into the air and leant back into the movement.
‘Spur him, Janie!’ Kate yelled. ‘Ride that bugger! C’mon!’
Rocking and rollicking, Janie whiplashed back and forth as the crowd buzzed. A fast sharp buck finally tipped her onto the matting. The crowd clapped and roared at the gutsy, busty girl! She crawled, laughing, over to Kate and Will.
‘Eight seconds just isn’t a long enough ride for me!’
As she stood catching her breath, a young boy was pushed into the centre of the arena to ride the bull. His curly blond hair was wet from rum. He staggered slightly and grinned from ear to ear. Kate took in his angelic smile, and the way his baggy dinner-suit trousers were hitched up around his skinny frame with orange bale twine.
‘Check out that little spring chicken,’ Kate said.
‘An underager for sure. He’s bound to get busted,’ Will said.
‘Depends what you mean by underage, Will,’ Janie said. ‘Isn’t that Angus McDonnell’s little brother, Nick? He’d be seventeen now, wouldn’t he? That puts him as illegal for grog and illegal for being at a B&S … but definitely legal for sex.’
‘Oh, you’re feral,’ said Will.
‘He sure has turned into a cute little puppy though,’ Kate said, taking in his curly gold locks and smooth golden skin.
Nick McDonnell clambered onto the bull with its kitsch acrylic red and white hide. The crowd cheered and clapped. He rode with style, despite the clothes he was wearing. His shirt came undone as the bull bucked harder, his bare chest exposed to the crowd.
‘That is one cute McDonnell,’ Kate shouted over the ruckus.
‘Yep. Sure is. You should tell him to ring you in a year when his hormones have finished him off. He’s bloody cute,’ said Janie.
Kate laughed. There was something so compelling about him. He had a presence. His looks were one thing, but he seemed to shine with confidence and vitality despite his tender age. She laughed again as another huge buck from the bull sent him flying off. He landed lightly and tumbled twice, like Jackie Chan, then rolled to his feet. Nick held his hands in the air as he acknowledged the cheering crowd.
Next, a bloke as big and square as a giant hay bale ambled forward, grinning.
‘Now there’s a hunk and a half,’ Janie yelled to Kate above the noise. ‘Dave Shaw. Jackaroo from Woodsden. He’s cutting his teeth there before he goes back to his dad’s country not far from you. You know the Shaws?’
‘You’re talking like a land-grabber,’ Kate joked.
Janie eyed the big man on the bucking bull.
‘Land ain’t what I’m thinking of grabbing tonight,’ she said.
Kate turned to Janie with a grin.
‘Dare you to kiss him!’
‘Get serious!’ Janie said. ‘I’m on a mission to snare Johnno.’
She looked over to a square-jawed dark-haired boy, who was trying to balance a stack of plastic cups on his head. His mates egged him on.
‘Oh, come off it. Will you look at him? You’ll never drag him away from Simmo and Blue. Plus, they’re bloody mainlanders. No future there.’
Janie took in tubby Simmo, skolling beer, and Blue, a true carrot-top with the freckles to match, dancing about like an idiot. Both were in awe of Johnno and the three came very much as a party package, spending all they earned as Deniliquin jackaroos on going from one B&S to the next.
‘Mmmm, good point,’ she said.
‘Dave’s a much better bet. Once you show him those big bazoon-gas of yours, you’ll be in. I dare you. I dare you to crack onto him … and …’ Kate thought for a moment. ‘And give him the old blowjob in the back of the ute trick. He’ll love you for life.’
Janie threw back her head and laughed.
‘You’re off, Webster!’
‘I dare you!’ Kate persisted.
‘All right then, Maggot-features … you’re on. But it’s my turn to dare you something.’
‘Go on then. What?’
‘I dare you to …’ Janie paused and looked around the crowd. Then her face lit up. ‘I dare you to scalp that little toy boy over there.’ She pointed to Nick McDonnell.
‘Scalp him?’
‘Yeah,’ said Janie. ‘You know? Take his virginity as your prize!’
‘He’s hardly a toy boy, Janie. He’s only two years younger than us!’
‘Yeah, but he’s definitely a virgin. You can just tell. I dare you.’
Kate smiled, feeling the tingle of desire and possibility flow through her. Nick was very cute. But still she shook her head.
‘Huh! You’re full of it, Webster,’ Janie said, shoving her a little. ‘You say you’re having a wild night tonight, but you’re all talk.’
Kate felt her skin prickle. The glow of the night suddenly faded. She felt the coldness of her mother’s death creeping up on her again and she shivered. She grabbed a rum from Will’s clutch of cups and slung it back.
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’ll take on your challenge, you monstrous wench! I will take on Virgin Boy. I could do with some young blood! Teach him a trick or two!’
Both girls threw back their heads and laughed. Then they clashed plastic cups together as if they were chalices.
‘I’ll have my conquest by sun-up!’ Kate tossed her dark hair dramatically and turned on her heel to make a beeline for Nick.
‘Katie,’ Will said, gently holding her back. ‘Just go easy, hey?’
‘What are you?’ she spat at him, shrugging off his hand. ‘My mother?’
Nick looked up at the pressed-tin ceiling of his bedroom. The moon cast shadows across the ornate designs of leaves and lines. He thought about Felicity, and the way she’d made him feel tonight in the pub. Pressured. It was the way he felt a lot, ever since his dad’s accident. He stood up, unfolding his strong legs from the bed, and trod over the cold floorboards to the window. Standing in just his boxer shorts, he wrapped his arms about his broad chest. He felt trapped here in this bedroom. Like he was too big for it. Footy pennants and pony-club ribbons, faded and gathering dust, hung down from the window’s pelmet. Model tractors and farm machinery cluttered there too, like a ramshackle miniature clearing sale. The weight of the low ceiling seemed to press down on him. He felt stooped over in here, like he was not allowed to be a man in this room. Not fully grown.
Down the hall he heard his father cough and his mother murmur. Nick wondered how Alice found the energy to console her husband even in her sleep.
He’d got used to the fact his parents now slept in separate beds. Two singles jammed up against the walls of their bedroom, with a roomy chasm in between. A change from the one big soft island of comfort he had clambered into as a child. In between the beds now was a white melamine cabinet filled with all the medical equipment needed to keep his dad’s body ticking over: colostomy bags, tablets, rolls of cotton wool, bandages and tape to hold tubes in place, painkillers and tranquillisers. Paperwork from the specialists, X-rays in giant folders, half-empty glasses of water, kidney dishes filled with syringes, fat and thin. The presence of the cabinet and the single beds had stripped Nick of his childhood memories of that room. But the room wasn’t the only thing that had changed.
Since the night they’d got the call to say his dad’s ute had hit the big old pine out on the Tin Pot Marsh Road, everything had changed. For Nick, life seemed to stall. It felt like he was wading through mud. He was numb to the world outside. He’d become old overnight.
In his head he battled fear, in his heart he grieved for his father, and his anger towards their situation now resulted in long silences that sometimes stretched for days between them. Nick felt the stab of guilt as he repeated a silent chant in his mind, ‘Why didn’t you die that night, Dad?’ If his dad had been an animal, he would’ve been put down; a gun barrel to the head and a single shot between the eyes. Nick wondered why humans focused so totally on preserving life, even though that life might not be worth living. This new life of his father’s was far too hard, a long, drawn-out ‘recovery’ that Nick now knew would never happen. His father would never get better. Only worse.
One corner, one tree and some loose gravel and all their lives had been smashed beyond recognition. Lance McDonnell, driving too fast because he was late for beers at the fire shed.
Nick sighed as he stood at the window. Once he married Felicity he could take it all on. The farm. The fathering. A husband to both his mother and Felicity. He could start looking after it all. Get married and grow up quick. Start moving forward. A future beyond simply living each awkward day with his broken father. Nick would be the responsible one. He had to be. Surely his father could see that.
He and his parents knew they couldn’t rely on his brother Angus. Absent Angus – always had been, always would be. Adventures on pearlers in Broome. Skippering yachts in the Caribbean. Running ski tows in Switzerland. Jetting to Dubai to look after an oil baron’s racehorses. Nick knew that Angus wouldn’t come home for the wedding. Angus who scoffed at family traditions. Ridiculed monogamy. Niggled at niceties.
‘Frigid Felicity’ Angus had dubbed her, and Nick had almost thrown a punch.
Angus had last visited a few months after their father’s accident. Like a gangster, he had swaggered into Nick’s room dressed in his European tailored clothes and thrown a wad of cash onto the bed.
‘You can have your farm, Nick. I don’t need it. Look what a bit of entrepreneurial initiative can generate.’ He’d fished more money from his pocket and waved the cash in front of Nick’s face.
‘Earned cleverly, but always honestly. There’s nothing clever about being a farmer, Nick. Nothing. Look at old Misery Guts in there … he was half-dead before he hit that tree. When did he ever stop to truly enjoy life? Now he’s stuffed. It’s too late. Live for now, I say.’
Nick had wanted to slam his shoulder into his brother’s beefcake body and pin him to the wall. But he hadn’t. He’d just slunk out of his room, like a dog kicked in the guts.
Nick looked down at his body in the moonlight. His white torso and dark tanned arms. He was fit and strong from his work. He loved farming. It was his life. But now, with no rain throughout the autumn and no clear direction for the future, he felt broken inside. He looked out onto the barren paddocks. The moon cast eerie shadows from the trees. Sheep that would normally be camped at this time of night ambled hopelessly about looking for food. Others stood in clusters with their heads hanging. The deep black shadow of the skillion shed reminding Nick that there was no hay left.
He was committed to this farm, no matter the weather – and committed to Felicity, too, no matter how many sparks had flown the moment he’d seen Kate Webster again. It was Felicity who’d seen his parents through the worst of the accident. She was now his future.
At that moment a cloud pulled away from the face of the moon, which shone so brightly Nick had to squint. Angrily he pulled the curtains shut and clambered back into his tumbled bed. But still the moon persisted, painting a bright stripe across the bedhead. As he lay awake he began to remember.
She was standing in front of him in her red dress and long dark hair. She’d grabbed hold of his hands and dragged him onto the dance floor. He was only just taller than her and couldn’t take his eyes from the swell of her plump pale breasts rising from the tight swathe of red fabric that could barely be called a dress. Even in rumpled hockey socks and work boots, her strong legs looked good. Of course he knew her name. Everyone in the district knew Kate Webster. She was the prettiest, funniest girl around. In town, the older boys at boarding school always had her at the top of their ‘wank’ list. And here she was dancing with him at the Rouseabout B&S. He was seventeen. And Kate Webster was dancing with him.
His cheeks flushed as he wondered if he looked cool or not. The beat of the Violent Femmes’ song was tricky to dance to. He wished it was another song. He felt her hands all over his body. His back. His buttocks. Inside his shirt. She swivelled her hips. Pouted her lips. Leaned towards him, dragged his head down with interlocked fingers behind his neck, so his nose nearly touched her cleavage. As he reached out and tentatively placed his hands on her hips, Nick McDonnell was too drunk to notice Kate turn her head and deliver a sly wink. And the group of girls who were watching and laughing at them winked back.
He couldn’t recall clearly how it happened. She first kissed him beside the ute, her mouth hot and sweet with rum. Her body pressed against his. He must’ve eagerly dragged his swag from Angus’s ute and carted it to the fenceline with the beat of the music far off in the distance. He did remember the smell of young wattle already wet with heavy dew as it brushed his face. He’d tried to roll the swag out under the trees so no one would see. He wasn’t sure why she was keen on him but he was going with it.
When he’d flung back the swag she’d laughed at the rumple of sheets inside. Thomas the Tank Engine.
‘Geez. What am I doing?’ he heard her whisper to herself. Then she’d giggled.
‘I think I can. I think I can,’ she chugged and dragged him down onto the swag. She lay on top of him and he felt her tug at the bale twine that held up his pants.
‘I need my bloody pocketknife for this,’ Kate said. Instead, she tackled the knot with her teeth. Perfect white teeth and red, red lips, lit softly by faraway floodlights from the B&S. Her dark hair fell on his chest so that he writhed with desire and, at the same time, terror. She ran her fingers over his bare belly and down his skinny white legs.
‘It’s okay, Tom Tank Engine. You’ll love it. Trust me,’ she breathed as she kissed him along his neck and ran her fingers through his curls. He felt her wiggle beside him, lifting her brown legs out of her knickers. Then she straddled him.
‘Oh God,’ he moaned. He’d lost his jacket, he remembered thinking. He’d lost his jacket and in it was the condom.
‘Oh God,’ he moaned again …
Kate’s eyes snapped open at the sound of curtains being whipped across the rail. She blinked and saw the silhouette of a large man in front of the window. Early dawn light flooded the room.
‘Still dreaming, Kate?’
‘Dave?’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘Where’s Janie?’
She propped herself on her elbows and took in the sight of Dave Shaw. Shoulders broad as a butcher’s chopping block, hands like meat cleavers. A square-chiselled face that could have belonged to a first-grade rugby league player, framed by a mop of brown hair, and small hazel eyes that exuded kindness. There was an air of simplicity about him, matched by his slow drawling voice. One thing Kate had learnt about Dave, though, was that despite his appearance and the way he spoke, he was as sharp as a tack.
‘Janie’s sick as a dog in bed. Thanks to you.’ He threw a towel at her. ‘Better get moving, Webster. The kids’ll be up soon and you’re fair game down there.’
Kate groaned as she stood up, dragging the doona cover around her. She smiled crookedly at Dave, who was now in the kitchen crumbling Weet-Bix into bowls.
‘Did Nell go to bed okay?’ she called as she wiggled back into her jeans.
‘Good as gold. And still out to it now. I just looked in on them all. Snoring their heads off.’
Once dressed, Kate wandered into the kitchen and slumped at the kitchen table.
‘White with three, thanks,’ she said. Dave raised two thick fingers at her and in his deep voice grumbled like a giant, ‘Get your own, Webster.’
‘It was a big, big night.’
‘Yeah. From the way Janie jumped me, it must’ve been. Women who have twin toddlers don’t jump men like that normally.’
‘You should be thanking me for getting her blind.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, tossing a piece of toast in Kate’s direction, ‘She babbled on about you seeing Nick McDonnell again last night. How’s he look to you now the hormones have kicked in?’
‘Funny bastard, aren’t you?’ she said, narrowing her eyes at him.
‘You gunna sort all that out? You know. Tell him he’s got a kid and everything?’ Dave asked.
‘God! Don’t you start!’
‘We know you too well, Webster. That poor bugger will be on his deathbed before he even knows he’s got a little heifer trotting about with his genes in her.’
‘Shut it,’ Kate said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of her tone.
‘Well, look bloody useful and go get the kids up for me. I’m going to take them to their gran’s. Get them out of Janie’s hung-over hair. It’s time you took Nell home to meet her own step-gran.’
Kate rolled her eyes. ‘Huh. Don’t remind me.’
‘Kate,’ Dave said as he waved a spoon at her, ‘it’s about time you stopped your disappearing tricks. Will needs all the help he can get out there. Believe me.’
‘Will? Huh! He’s a big boy. He can look after himself.’ But as she said it, Kate felt a wave of guilt. He did need her. Not just to help with the farm. He was outnumbered on Bronty now Annabelle’s kids were there. She and Nell should help even the score.