The Farmer’s Wife

Three

Doreen and Dennis Groggan’s farmhouse was set in an over-grazed paddock in a narrow valley. Etched along that valley was a jagged, eroded tributary that, in times of rain, fed the larger Rebecca River to the east, the river after which Rebecca was named. The Groggans’ was a small, poor dirt farm surrounded by a swathe of bushland that swept up and over rocky gullies and ridges. The land and the isolation of the farm made it not so profitable, so as a result, on weekdays Dennis drove the school bus and Doreen worked at the school as the cleaner and groundsman. Judging from the state of the house, Doreen was good at keeping things in order at home too, Rebecca thought.

On their silver wedding anniversary, Dennis had painted the weatherboards yellow-green for Doreen after being inspired by the colours of their budgie. Rebecca looked at the meticulous yet overdone house and garden. The colour reminded her not so much of a budgie as of a pus-filled cheesy gland on a sheep.

‘What would have been so wrong with cream or white? That’s just downright tacky,’ she said, gazing long-faced at the neat-as-a-pin budgie-coloured house. They rounded Doreen’s turning circle of conifers, strategically placed bush rocks, wagon wheels and concrete creatures.

‘Get over yourself, cranky pants,’ Gabs said, this time sternly.

Rebecca almost hung her head in shame. Where had this dark mood descended from? And was it actually a mood? These days it felt more like a way of being. As if she had been like it for years.

The notion scared her. She looked out the window again, not wanting to socialise here with these women. Not wanting to be anywhere.

She could see most of the guests had arrived so the brittle yellow front lawn was already filled with a selection of battered dust-buffed country cars and utes. Rebecca rolled her eyes when she saw dark-haired Janine Turner totter forth aboard tarty ‘follow-me-home-and-fuck-me’ shoes of shining gold. Janine tugged down a purple negligee over ample Nigella-style hips while balancing a bowl of corn chips, her handbag and a purple horse-lunging whip in the other hand. She waved gaily to them as they parked.

‘Oh geez! Look at her get-up!’ Rebecca grimaced. ‘You never told me it was fancy dress!’

‘You never would’ve come.’ Gabs unclipped her seat belt, swung round to the back and dragged out a Woolies green bag. ‘Ta-da!’ she said, emptying the contents of the bag onto Bec’s lap. Rebecca pulled a face as she held up the items one by one: a sequined silver skirt trimmed with feathers, an orange boob tube, red high heels and a packet of red fishnets.

‘So? Do you like your kinky costume? I made the skirt out of one of Kylie’s princess dresses from the costume box. Don’t tell her. She’ll get the shits up. And I got the shoes on eBay. I think they had a bit of Baby Oil or something on them, but I cleaned them.’

‘You are joking, right?’

‘Shut up and get changed.’ Gabs grinned. ‘Or you’ll be the odd one out.’

‘What’s new?’

‘You could just thank me,’ Gabs fired back. ‘Where’s your attitude of gratitude?’

Rebecca shook her head, knowing her friend was right. What had happened to her life? She used to be so sure of her place in the world. She never went to women’s gatherings, preferring to be out in the pub or the paddocks. Sure she’d had to debate every decision every inch of the way in a three-way tussle between herself, her father and Charlie, but they had started out with what she thought was a shared dream. Then the babies had come. And life had changed. She found herself driving off to play group and doctors’ appointments and ladies’ fundraising lunches while the men punched sheep through yards, their world obscured to her by dust.

She would glance in the mirror at the two little boys in their car seats, Ben with his dark hair and sincere brown eyes and Archie with his wayward blond locks and dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes of blue. She loved them with every cell of her body, but the daily grind of domestics that they created was eroding her very being. Then there was Charlie. Rebecca pulled her thoughts up so they slid to a stop like a reined-in horse. Her thoughts drifted hopefully, involuntarily, to Andrew. But again she put on the brakes. She just couldn’t go there. He’s just a friend, she told herself.

Keep it shallow. Shallow, like her breathing had become. Shallow like her life.

‘Don’t just sit there,’ Gabs said as she applied a thick layer of blue glitter eye shadow to her heavy lids in the rear-vision mirror, then tried to pluck a solo chin hair out with her thick thumb and forefinger. ‘You’ve got tarting up to do.’

‘And what about you?’ asked Bec as she began to reluctantly kick off her boots and pull her socks from her hot puffy feet. ‘I don’t see you wearing a costume.’

Gabs glanced over to her slyly, then with a daredevil grin ripped off her oversized T-shirt.

‘Ta-da!’ she said again, revealing a black-and-red bustier, her white bosoms spilling up over the top of the lacy cups. Her farmer’s singlet tan lines made her look a lot like a paint horse of white and brown.

‘Frank goes nuts for me when I dress up. The other night we got pissed on Beam and he told me to get naked except for my cowgirl boots. And I did —’

‘Too much information!’ Bec said, holding up her hand and smiling. But internally she grimaced. How many years had it been since she and Charlie had mucked around like that? Since Ben was born six years back? Since before then? She couldn’t remember. She could only recall the cold wall of his back and the passionless way he grappled at her in the early hours of the morning, when her body was leaden with exhaustion. He entered her with primal thrusts that were absent of care or love. There was an air of aggression within him that had started to cloud his contact with her. Bec could even feel it in his touch. She rubbed at her shoulder that felt bruised from their clash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d shoved her in a rage.

As she pulled on the fishnets, she felt the shame of leading such a disappointing life hidden within her apparently functional marriage. On the neighbouring farm, there was Gabs, who must be pushing eighty kilos, naked in cowboy boots doing the wild thing with an even beefier Frank after ten years together. Frank and Gabs seemed madly crazy about each other still, apart from telling each other to fuck off every now and then. They had met at Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding. Gabs, her best mate from Ag College, was one of the bridesmaids and Frank had been invited along as he was one of the local farmers. A relationship had sparked between Gabs and Frank over a post-wedding-day carton of beer that they shared on the back of a ute by a dam. Soon Rebecca had found her good college buddy moving into her very own district and marrying her neighbour. At the time, both girls had thought they’d each stumbled upon a match made in heaven. Not so now, Rebecca thought. Only one of them had got it right. Here she was, practically a born-again virgin in wedlock. As Rebecca jammed on the red shoes, she noticed the way her lily-white sock marks were still evident through the fishnet stockings, drawing a line on her ankles that ran to summer-brown legs, a bit on the hairy side. Like Gabs, since motherhood, she too had put on weight and with the fishnets hoicked up to her hips, she imagined her thighs might look a bit like Christmas hams.

By the time she dragged on the makeshift sequined skirt and put on the boob tube so her slightly flubbery stomach rolled out, Gabs was doubled over laughing, falling about in her cork-wedge shoes on the lawn, trying, with her weak post-baby bladder, not to wet her G-string.

‘You look hot, Bec! Hot. Hot, hot, hot damn!’

Bec sucked in her stomach, stood up straight and held her middle finger up at her friend, then went to the back of the four-wheel drive to collect the platter of dips and biscuits that had been inelegantly thrown in a silver takeaway container and covered with cling wrap.

‘I’ll have you know I could make a lot of money dressed like this down at the Fur Trapper Hotel. A lot of money.’

After winding each window down a little for the dogs and finding a water container for them, Gabs came to stand near her. ‘You do look hot, seriously. Maybe we both could lose a bit of chunk round the middle, but check out the guns on us!’ She flexed her arm muscles. ‘Frank loves my guns — they’re particularly good since bale carting. We did six hundred little squares for the new racing stables. Said they’d double their order next summer, until they got their own paddocks set up.’

At the mention of Frank loving Gabs’s body again, Bec’s face fell. Did Charlie even notice her looks any more?

Gabs picked up the plummet in her mate’s mood. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, moving to give her a rough sort of hug. Bec felt tears well in her eyes. She wanted to see Charlie as a good husband. When she thought about it, he did put up with a lot. But then again, she put up with more! Was it normal to feel this way?

‘Hey,’ Bec said, extracting herself too soon from the hug, ‘people will think we do a lezzo double act with you groping me like that. Now let’s get inside and get this so-called Tupperware party over.’

She marched to the gate in her strappy eBay shoes, nearly doing her ankle in the process. Gnomes grinned at her from nests of white pebbles as she walked along a brown-painted concrete path, flanked with solar lights and identical plastic versions of Jamie Durie designer flax. The spiked dark-leafed plants were spaced as evenly and as exactly as soldiers on parade. Gabs and Bec came to stand on a porch enclosed with corrugated green Laserlite, adorned with hanging baskets overflowing with dangling plants of bulbous juice-filled leaves and infrequent drooping purple flowers.

Before Gabs even knocked, Doreen reefed the door open. She was wearing a very short nun’s costume, her legs like cottage cheese in her black fishnets and her feet like pig’s trotters shoved into black patent leather pumps. So big was her bosom, it looked as though she had an inflatable raft stuffed down the front of her nun’s habit. The fringe of her eighties-style bob had extra product in it and looked much like echidna spines as it protruded out from her black-and-white habit.

‘Hi, Sister Doreen! Say your prayers, baby! The goddesses are here!’ Gabs said.

‘Hello, strumpets,’ Doreen said. ‘How are you?’

‘Great, Dors. You look hot!’

‘Yeah, fifty going on fifteen,’ Doreen said.

‘I like your new garden. Those fake plants are pretty cool,’ Gabs said.

‘Least the fucken possums and wallabies won’t eat ’em,’ Doreen said proudly. ‘And they’ll only melt in a bushfire. Come in, come in. We’re about to start.’

‘Where’s Dennis?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Hiding in the shed,’ Doreen said over her shoulder. ‘He’s set the telly up in there with a couch. He’s got a box of beer and a DVD of cricket highlights so he’s happy. A bit terrified, but happy.’

They entered the kitchen, where they found Amanda Arnott, wife of the local publican, at the bench, carving a carrot into the shape of a penis. ‘Hello, slutties!’ she sang. ‘Just exhibiting my extensive creative talents!’ There was a glint of the knife and her large diamond rings shining beneath the kitchen lights as she waved a carrot at them. ‘Might try these as an extra to the side salads at the pub!’

‘There’ll be more orders for chips and salad than veg. Especially if you serve it up in that outfit,’ Rebecca said, nodding at Amanda’s skimpy French-maid costume.

They heard a collective shrill of laughter rise up from the gathering of women in the room next door.

‘Go through, but take a Cock-sucking Cowboy with you!’ Doreen said, handing them each a shot glass full of cream liqueur. Then she went back to putting bright red sausages onto a platter that had every kind of phallic-shaped food imaginable, including battered savs, gherkins and crabsticks.

‘Care for a cocktail before you go?’ Doreen asked, offering up a bowl of ‘little boys’ and larger saveloys, her grinning teeth framed by patchy bright red lipstick. ‘You’ve got a choice of big ones, or little ones. The little ones I call “disappointments”,’ she said as she picked up a small cocktail sausage and bit hard through it with her crooked teeth.

‘Oh. My. God,’ Rebecca breathed as she took up a little boy and dipped it in tomato sauce. ‘Tupperware indeed. I can see tonight is going to get messy. Very, very messy!’

Four

When Rebecca and Gabs entered Doreen’s lounge room, it was like walking into a teenager’s bedroom overflowing with excited hormonal girls. The giggling, chatting women from the surrounding districts were all dressed like hookers, trannies or tarts with feather boas, lace or sequins. Many of them weighed on the large side, to the point where some might even warrant a spot on The Biggest Loser.

Together they huddled around Doreen’s dining table as if it was half-time at the footy. Doreen’s demure lace cloth was covered with glistening folds of black velour, on which sat an array of naughty novelties, romantic remedies and (more disturbingly for Rebecca, who had been expecting lettuce containers and drink bottles) items such as vibrators, ‘bullets’ and egg-shaped ‘marital aids’. There were clear-faced boxes containing fetish and fantasy costumes. Rebecca noticed that Speedo, the Groggans’ budgie, whose cage sat beside the dining table, was discreetly covered with a sheet as if the items on the table would upset his avian sensibilities.

‘No Tupperware in sight,’ said Bec. ‘Don’t reckon I’ll be fixing my lunch-box deficit here.’

‘Nah,’ Gabs said, ‘but you might fix your box deficit problem.’

‘Hah! You dirty girl!’

‘You have to admit some of those things do look like kitchen appliances. You could mix a cake with that one,’ she said, pointing to a giant red vibrator.

Bec grinned at Gabs as the women turned to greet them warmly.

Candice Brown from the Bendoorin general store, two hours’ drive away, stepped out of the huddle to give Rebecca a quick hug.

‘Good to see you, Beccy. It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘You should come in and get your groceries personally, instead of getting them delivered on the school bus! I miss seeing your lovely smile.’

Nicknamed by the locals ‘Candy Shop’, Candice Brown was anything but the brown her married name suggested. She was as bright and colourful as a licorice allsort in both looks and personality. She had vividly dyed curly crimson hair that tonight was pinned up so that ringlets fell prettily about her friendly round face. At the store, she could always be easily found in the rows of groceries, wearing her vibrant pinks, reds and yellows teamed with black leggings. Tonight she’d opted for an electric blue taffeta number and six-inch heels, topped off with a hot pink boa and a plastic six-shooter held in place by a frilly garter belt on her bare thigh.

‘You look great!’ Bec said. ‘Like a Western gal who hangs out in the rooms above saloons.’

‘Brian almost wouldn’t let me out the door.’ She laughed. ‘Dirty old coot! He loves his Westerns.’

‘Here’s to whiskey and wild women!’ Gabs said, passing another Cowboy shooter to Bec and Candice. ‘You look good enough to eat, Candy Shop!’

Bec smiled as she thought of Candice’s husband, Brian, who also ran the store-cum-post office. He was the opposite of his near namesake, the lean, chiselled actor Bryan Brown. Instead he was tiny, skinny, rarely spoke and always wore beige. Bec couldn’t even imagine Brian getting randy. How was it that he and Candy were so different, yet after running the same store together for thirty years and raising a family of three, they seemed so happy together? Bec decided there and then, she really must make more of an effort with Charlie. Focus on his good points, instead of chewing through his bad.

She was about to search for a chair to sit on when she was distracted by the disturbing sight of Ursula Morgan on the lounge. Ursula was testing the seams of her white Lycra kinky nurse’s outfit with her giant Jim Beam gut, the indent of her belly button creating a crater like the moon’s. She was yelping with seal-like laughter as she took a photo on an iPhone of Janine Turner. Janine was lying back on the couch, stuffing a gigantic black dildo between the long line of her cleavage and pouting in her pose. Once the image was captured, Ursula began frantically texting.

‘I’ll tell him the blokes have finished fundraising for the moustache-growing month of Mo-vember and now it’s our turn. Us girls are now fundraising for Fan-uary! Growing your pubes for a good cause!’

‘Fan-uary!’ screeched Janine. ‘He’ll like that! Can I be in charge of Pubic Relations?’ Her crow-call laughter filled up the room.

‘I’ll need a whipper snipper for mine when I’m done!’ Ursula muttered as she texted. Janine waved the dildo about in the air as she grabbed another slurp of her drink, a satisfied smile on her fake-tanned face. Rebecca smiled wanly at the sight of them, wondering which poor bastard they were tormenting tonight with their text messages and dirty photos. What was it about women who lost all shyness and sensibility when they were on the drink?

The normally ultra reserved and often bitter Ursula was the daughter of a local logging contractor. She had, at the age of twenty-seven, already managed to help keep the tiny school at Bendoorin open with her brood — not to mention the gene pool nicely mixed for such an isolated region. She had four kids to four different fellas, causing confusion at school craft-making classes in the lead-up to Father’s Day.

Ursula still lived at home with her parents and treated them like crap daily because she could. Her Centrelink payments meant life ticked over and was OK, if a little boring. Bec often found it oddly creepy that Ursula’s portly father sometimes still referred to her long lustrous black hair, which she could sit on, as his daughter’s ‘crowning glory’. Because it was the only bit of praise from her father she’d ever received, the woman had never cut her hair. Sadly it was now greying slightly on her high forehead, but still fell way below her backside, which in recent years had expanded to the size of a large beanbag.

Her friend, or more accurately occasional drinking buddy, Janine, was the complete opposite to Ursula. She was one of the few ‘graziers’ wives’ from the larger properties in the district who tried ever-so-hard to be landed gentry. She walked for miles and miles along country roads to keep her body lean. She adorned said body in all the chunky jewellery she could order from the Country Style magazine classified section. Janine was great at dressing richly conservative and tossing her highlighted auburn locks with immense snobbery as she walked into sheep shows on the arm of her excessively quiet, red-faced Merino-man husband. But on nights like this, Ursula and her constant flow of Jim Beam were Janine’s undoing and all her airs and graces slid down to her ankles.

‘Oh, hello, Rebecca!’ Ursula said, her tone a little tainted with drunken sarcasm. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

Janine gave her a wave of the dildo and a wry smile.

In response, Rebecca picked up what she’d read was a Gliterous-G and waved its pink jelly-like eight inches back at the two terrors. ‘Hello, girls,’ she said, then turned to Gabs. ‘I really need another drink.’ Before they could make their way back to the kitchen to mix a Bundy, though, Doreen was clapping her hands, shoving two fingers in her mouth and whistling loudly like she’d just called a Kelpie off the stock. The women instantly fell silent.

‘Ladies! It’s time to start! Welcome to the Horny Little Devils night,’ Doreen said in a drawling, twanging voice that made the word ‘horny’ sound like a motorbike passing. ‘This is Tracey and she’s our Horny Rep.’ Beside her stood a demure girl, dressed all in black, with heavy eye makeup and jet-black hair pulled tightly back in a pony tail.

‘Geez, check out the woman-child,’ muttered Gabs as she surveyed the sex-toy consultant. ‘As if she’d know how to use this stuff. She looks like she’s still in grade six.’

Bec stifled a giggle. Tracey stepped forwards. ‘Evening, ladies. I’ll walk you through the catalogue. We’ll start with our lingerie and finish with the boys’ toys.’

Rebecca flicked to the first page, where a fake-tanned, breast-enhanced, air-brushed bottle blonde was slipping off the strap of her hot pink, sheer Yvette Babydoll with matching G-string. Bec’s eyes meandered over a few more pages of ‘flog-me’-style black lace corsets with suspenders for the larger ladies. For the more demure there was the Courtney Gown in elegant duck-egg blue with ‘sexy thigh-high splits’. She wondered what Charlie might do if she turned up dressed in some of the clothing. Maybe as the raunchy police officer, complete with gun, baton and hat, whispering to him, ‘Frisk me?’ He’d probably laugh at her.

As Tracey passed a few samples around, the women began to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the potential the outfits could bring to their marriages and partnerships.

‘Now if Doreen here sells over fifteen hundred dollars’ worth, she’s in for tonnes of free product.’

‘Not used, I hope!’ Doreen snorted.

Tracey smiled patiently. ‘Which brings us on to cleaning. On page twenty-two, there’s a range of play wipes and safe sterilisers for your vibrators.’

‘So you don’t just wash ’em and hang ’em on the line?’ Janine chortled.

‘No,’ said Tracey, straight-faced.

‘Not in the dishwasher?’ Janine added.

Tracey gave her an ‘I’ve heard it all before’ look and soldiered on, holding up a six-inch iridescent blue Wallbanger complete with ‘additional dolphin’, flicking the on switch so the thing contorted like Flipper having a seizure. She passed it to Doreen, who shrieked and almost threw it to her daughter-in-law, Bonnie.

‘Oh my god,’ Bonnie said, blinking from behind her glasses, ‘I can’t believe my mother-in-law just passed me a vibrator! I’m going to need therapy!’

Rebecca reached for a crabstick, smiling as the other women laughed. Soon the buzzing Wallbanger got to her. ‘Here, Gabs, test it on your schnoz,’ she said, buzzing the vibrator to Gabs’s long, red-from-rum nose.

‘Oh my god!’ squeaked her friend. ‘I think my nose just went off! It’s not dripping, is it?’

Laughter erupted from within Rebecca. ‘That is most disturbing,’ she said.

‘I’d be gone before I’d even put the batteries in that thing,’ Gabs said, taking it from her. ‘That’s just too much!’

Next Tracey was holding up what looked like a fancy seat belt for a racing-car harness. ‘This is part of our Fetish Fantasy range and is the Door Swing. So you attach it to the door frame like this …’

‘Looks like a baby’s jolly jumper,’ Gabs muttered. ‘Ted would love a go in that, then once he’s in bed, I could let Frank have a crack at it with me in it!’

‘That is utterly gross,’ Bec said.

From the back row of women, Ursula called out, ‘Would it hold me? Reckon I’d bring the supports of the roof down if I got going in it!’ Some of the women struggled to stifle their giggles.

‘It takes up to one-twenty kilos,’ Tracey said.

‘That means I’d need a bloody small bloke,’ Ursula said.

‘You could grab one of those new jockeys from up the road to give it a go,’ Gabs suggested. ‘Come to think of it, if you weren’t in it, you could fit three jockeys in there. They’re only about forty kilos each, aren’t they?’

The women all laughed. Jockeys had been the focus of jokes lately since the sale of Rivermont. It was the district’s second largest farm after Rebecca’s Waters Meeting and a bit more sizeable than Janine’s husband’s Elvern Estate, and had in the past twelve months sold for three million. The new owners, who wanted to expand their racing operation from Scone, had dived in and proceeded to give the entire property and homestead a facelift and transformation that was beyond belief. Within months it had been cultivated into a premier racing training and breeding facility that would rival the Packers’ polo place.