The Farmer’s Wife

It wasn’t the only change the locals were dealing with. The previous summer the road from Bendoorin had been sealed right up through the valley so that rich sightseers wanting an easy glimpse of the summertime snow country could now drive their BMWs and Mercedes Benzes through the valley comfortably. There were also mutterings that the mining companies were sniffing about for new leases.

In short, Bendoorin was experiencing a renaissance. So much so that Candice’s daughter Larissa had opened a coffee shop that served flat whites and chai lattes to the Rivermont staff, new tourist trade and mining men.

Transition and change were in the air and, even though there were employment benefits (and sexy visiting tradesmen for the women to ogle), most of the locals didn’t like it. Particularly Rebecca. Her quiet backwater farm of peace and solitude had now become a thoroughfare for ski-bunnies, bushwalkers and weekend tourists looking to escape the city during holiday periods, along with four-wheel drives packed with workwear-clad men carting geo-equipment and core sample drilling rigs. And the conversion of Rivermont to a place frequented by pukka big-money corporates and the best racehorses on the planet was just another pain in her arse.

Absolute tossers could now be found at Candy’s store, asking for organic sourdough bread and low-fat soy milk for their coffees. And there was often a rowdy queue at the counter when the playful Rivermont staff zoomed into town in their sign-painted work vehicles and bought up all the sausages and steak from the meat section for their pissy barbecues, leaving none for the locals.

‘Bugger the Rivermont jockeys and the snobby bastards there,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m sick of their bloody helicopter flying over and upsetting me pigs!’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Rebecca, raising her empty glass.

Just as the other women joined them in a toast, in walked a stunning woman, dressed in skinny jeans and knee-high leather boots. A classy blonde pony tail pulled back from her clear vibrant face meant it was difficult to tell her age. She could have been in her late twenties or early thirties. Or she could have been a well-preserved forty. Rebecca looked at her with a tinge of regret. It was how she wanted to look. How she suspected she had looked before life had got in her way.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ the woman said to Doreen, glancing around the room.

‘No problems, duck. We’ve only just started. Everyone, this here’s Yasmine Stanton. From Rivermont.’

The ladies eyed her more thoroughly.

‘Yazzie, for short,’ she said with a big perfect-toothed princess smile. ‘Everyone calls me Yazzie.’

‘Jazzie Yazzie,’ Bec heard Ursula mutter, knowing news of the presence of the leggy blonde in the area had already spread like wildfire among the Bendoorin men. ‘More like fucken Barbie.’

If the woman had heard Ursula’s comments, she didn’t react. She just beamed a smile and graciously accepted a shooter from Doreen, downing it and eagerly grabbing up a second.

An hour later Doreen had Tom Jones blaring from the stereo. Some of the women were gyrating on the specially bought red shag-pile rug. Gabs’s terriers, who had now been allowed into the house, were up for some fun too, trying in vain to hump the rug and the leg of anyone who would stand still for long enough. Amanda Arnott was attempting to slide down the half-metre banister on the small stairs that led to the bedrooms and bathroom, getting her bum-crack wedged on the turned wooden knob each and every time before pivoting onto the floor onto her back, snorting laughter. Candice was peeking through Speedo’s cage, trying to feed the disgruntled budgie her hand-made ‘cheese dicks’.

Bec, who sat at the smorgasbord of sex toys, tried again to focus on her order form and ignore the chaos about her. What on earth should I get? she wondered, flicking through the catalogue, muddled by the rum. She decided to switch to water for the rest of the evening. What would Charlie like? He never even talked to her much about sex these days. It was as if he had shut down from it. It shocked her to realise she no longer knew what her husband liked. As her pen hovered over the order form, she heard a voice beside her. ‘Hi, I’m Yazzie.’

Rebecca looked up. ‘Rebecca.’

‘From Waters Meeting?’

‘Yep, the one and the same.’

‘I had so hoped to meet you!’ Yazzie said brightly. ‘My father isn’t so good at getting out to meet the neighbours. He’s never here, and I fear we’ve made a terrible racket getting the place built.’

‘It has been a bit of a whirlwind,’ Bec said a little coldly, thinking back to the times when she and Charlie had been furious at the way the workmen drove huge trucks around the middle of the blind corners of the tight-turned mountain roads, and about the chopper unsettling the calving cows and lambing ewes as the rich Stanton man from the city built his Taj Mahal of racing in their once quiet valley.

But Yazzie seemed not to notice Rebecca’s coolness towards her, or, if she did, she was ignoring it. ‘What are you getting?’ she asked with the same pretty smile as before.

‘I really don’t know. Not sure if I need any of this stuff; plus what if my boys found my stash of sex toys?’

‘Just tell them they’re part of Mummy’s lightsaber collection,’ Yazzie said.

Bec laughed. ‘You’re right.’

‘Here, allow me,’ Yazzie said, taking the pen and the order form from her. ‘I’ll choose and I’ll pay. Think of it as an apology gift. I know what a balls-up my father creates in people’s lives. Trust me.’

‘No, really. No. That’s too much,’ Bec said, reaching for the form.

Yazzie pulled it away from her. ‘Please. I insist.’

Bec watched, amazed, as Yazzie sat down in the chair next to her. ‘You’re giving me sex toys? As an apology gift?’

‘Why not? And the policewoman’s uniform. You and I can go riding in them. That would be a hoot. I’m assuming you do ride, don’t you?’

Bec nodded. ‘When I can.’ But truthfully she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on Ink Jet, her horse, who was so old now Bec felt guilty even leaning against her, let alone chucking a saddle on her high-withered swayback. She’d wanted another horse and pored over the pages of Horse Deals, but never felt she could afford it. Or, more to the point, Charlie didn’t feel they could afford it.

His interest in horses had waned over the years. He’d ridden the runs with her in the early years of their courtship, holding her hand as they silently rode side by side, Charlie on Tom’s old horse, Hank. But as time passed, he would say, ‘Easier to take the steel horse,’ and he’d rev away in a cloud of blue-grey exhaust fumes. Nowadays, despite the ruggedness of the mountain country, he didn’t think it necessary to teach the boys to horseride. Instead he’d got them little four-wheel bikes that buzzed like bumblebees on steroids. Bec thought they looked incredibly dangerous when the boys were taking sharp turns, but Charlie had said no to ponies for them. She sighed.

As she watched Yazzie fill out more and more items on the order form, then pull out her credit card, Bec felt her cheeks redden.

‘Stop stressing,’ Yazzie said. ‘Let someone spoil you for a change.’

Should I be offended by this bright little rich girl sitting beside me? Bec wondered. Or should I soak up the vibrant energy she seems to emit? This Yazzie bird was almost as intoxicating as Doreen’s Cowboy shooters. She seemed to buzz.

‘While you do that, I’ll get us another drink!’ Bec said.

‘Thanks. This will bump up the party earnings!’ Yazzie said, tapping the end of the pen on her teeth. ‘Doreen’s going to get so much free stuff she could open a shop. And just wait till the parcel arrives! Your husband’s gunna love it!’

Five

By midnight the Dingo Trapper Hotel was fairly humming, thanks to the cut-out crew who, in a bid to shear the last of the wethers, had finished late at the Clarksons’ place. After a few beers on the board, the team had eagerly jumped in their utes, collecting some mates along the way, and poured themselves into position at the bar. Hours later, gun shearer Murray was still leading the charge with a huge smile on his boxy butcher’s-dog face. His bristly jowls had captured a few tiny locks of wool from the day’s shearing and lanolin still coated his clothes and skin. He was steering his men down a river of drinking that had flowed from beer to Bundy — and now several of them were even lighting Sambuca, then dowsing it with Blue Curacao, before throwing it into their gobs.

Billy Arnott, the bar owner, better known as ‘Dutchy’ (short for Dutch Cream because of his fair European looks and the fact his surname was a biscuit brand), was enjoying the pantomime that was playing out before him. He and his wife, Amanda, had only taken over the pub three years prior, after a ‘tree change’ from Sydney. The Arnotts had big shoes to fill following the death of the last publican, Dirty Weatherby, and Dutchy knew it.

Dirty Weatherby, who was buried at the church down the road, still had uproarious visits from his clientele, who would bring him a beer and stand and toast him around his gravesite. His old dog, Trollop, who was as fat and wide as a grizzly bear, would lumber along with the pub crowd and dutifully piss on her owner’s grave, much to the mirth of Dirty’s former clients, who loved him and the dog in equal measure. Tonight Trollop, full of leftover beef schnitzel, fishermen’s basket and chips, had settled herself into an armchair beside the pool table and was farting as powerfully as she was snoring, the resulting smell forcing the pool players to evacuate the area from time to time.

Dutchy was grateful the dog had stuck around.

Even though the former city newsagent was used to wooing a crowd, so too was Trollop. She evoked the memory of Dirty so strongly when people looked into her sincere brown canine eyes that when word got around Dutchy was keeping ol’ Trollop, even initially suspicious people would stop in at the pub to see her especially. One beer with the dog began to extend to three and four. And then the locals started to come back. Nights like these were now almost weekly at the pub that was nestled in a pretty river bend, almost entirely isolated from the town. Only the lonely hillside church, a few Ks down the road, was anywhere nearby.

As Dutchy ripped open another packet of chips, emptied them into a bowl and set it on the bar, he smiled at being given the chance to start life over in this part of the world. He and Amanda knew this area was about to awaken, thanks to the sealed road and hungry, thirsty, cashed-up travellers. And even though it was dire news for the district, there was talk of mining exploration for coal. The geos and their crews loved a beer and a chicken parma too, so the future looked bright for the pub. Suddenly life seemed more interesting for the local tarts as well, who’d helped the pub get its nickname, the Fur Trapper.

In the off-season, though, Dutchy knew he had to look after the locals. Give them free stuff to keep them feeling warmed and welcomed. Deliver complimentary trays of golden nuggets and sausage rolls to the bar, along with copious quantities of tomato sauce. Keep the wood fire blazing on cold winter nights. He’d also made sure he’d kept the music collection country as much as possible, despite the complaints from travellers. As another twanging Toby Keith song finished and the CD was about to flip to The Wolfe Brothers’ new hit song, there was a lull in the raucous pub prattle.

Suddenly a throbbing sound filled the vacant space. Bright lights blazed through the window like searchlights at a prison. At first Dutchy thought it was a helicopter landing on the road. Just at the very moment the first guitar chords from the Wolfies exploded, the pub emptied and the boozers spilled outside.

Dutchy lifted his little bar flap and followed the drinkers out into the cool night to see what the lights and noise were about. ‘What the …?’

There, revving a gigantic new tractor in the middle of the road, was Charlie Lewis.

‘Basil Lewis, you mad bastard!’ Murray called out, using the nickname that had followed Charlie from Ag College, given to him because of the bed-hair that stuck up like a brushy fox tail in the morning. As Charlie Lewis opened the door of the tractor cab, he drank in the smiles of greeting from the pub crowd. In his larrikin way, he gave everyone the thumbs-up and a drunken smile.

He flicked on the rear light, illuminating the business end of the tractor. The new yellow plough was covered with a film of dust, but the edge of the discs that had been corroded clean by soil gleamed in the tractor’s bright lights.

‘Geez, Basil, you coulda taken the plough off before you drove in! Ya dick.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘No time to waste! It’s beer o’clock, according to the Tardis controls in here!’

After conducting a guided tour of the tractor and its features, Charlie was ushered into the hotel by the men, where a fresh bar-frenzy exploded. Dutchy, as he frantically poured beer and Bundy and rang the till, found himself wishing his wife, Amanda, would get back from the ladies’ party sooner rather than later.

‘They must be trying before they buy at this sex-toy party,’ Dutchy said as he pushed a Bundy and Coke towards Charlie. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

‘Sex-toy party?’ Charlie asked. ‘My missus told me it was a Tupperware party!’

Murray and his crew erupted into laughter.

‘Nah-uh. No Tupperware, mate,’ Dutchy said. ‘Wonder what she’ll bring you home! Or is she gettin’ it for someone else and givin’ you the lettuce containers?’

‘Sex-toy party? Geez!’ The penny dropped for Charlie. That would explain Janine’s photo earlier this evening. That wasn’t a black salami she had between her tits, he realised with utter amusement and a shiver of excitement. He’d not yet heard back from her. Part of him was relieved, but part of him was hoping she’d be lurking out there somewhere, looking to hunt him down.

‘If my missus went to one of them parties and came home with one of them sex-toy things, I’d tell her to pack her bags,’ Murray said, his stubble-covered jaw jutting out. ‘If my tackle’s not good enough for her, then that’s it. I’m not getting replaced by some made-in-China piece of plastic!’

‘No wonder she’s cleared out on you then, Muzz,’ Duncan, the cheeky board boy with the acne scars, said, wiggling his little pinky at him.

‘She did not clear out on me. I cleared out on her.’

‘That was only after she found out you were doing the lollipop lady at the Bendoorin high school,’ Duncan said, edging stupidly closer to a set of knuckles in the face from Muzz.

Charlie began to laugh. He remembered how word had got around that Muzz had been having a red-hot affair with the lady who held the stop/slow sign at the school. If they knocked off early, the shearers would try to time their travel home from the sheds to get a look at her. A lot of the women on wet-sheep days couldn’t work out why their husbands were suddenly interested in dropping their kids to school.

Muzz shook his head. ‘She was the one who stopped me!’

‘It was her job to stop you,’ Charlie said, hoping Muzz would again tell the story. Somehow it made him feel better about his own guilt. As if what he was doing with Janine was normal — acceptable in fact. Everyone else did it, didn’t they? They all cheated? Muzz had.

‘Yeah, well, she did ask me how my day was …’ Murray said, swigging his beer ‘… and I said it had been rough. We’d been shearing rams. Bloody bastards were full of prickles. As I dragged one out, there was a huge patch of fissles in one’s topknot. So I ended up with a fissle in me nuts. Painful as!’

‘A fissle?’ Dutchy asked, cocking an enquiring eyebrow.

‘Thistle,’ Charlie interpreted.

‘Oh,’ Dutchy said, pulling a face, then lifting both fair eyebrows.

‘So,’ Murray continued, ‘I told her I was in agony coz I had this fissle in me nuts and she said to me, “Well, I’ve got a pair of tweezers in me car, darlin’, and a certificate in First Aid.” Then she looked at me all funny.’ Muzz licked his wet beer lips and shook his head at the memory. ‘She had a real good body on her, but, by geez, her head was a bit rough.’

By this stage, the men about him were wetting themselves, wheezing and back-slapping.

‘So what’s a bloke to do when he’s in pain like that? Of course he’s gunna drop his strides for the lady to help,’ Muzz continued, pretending to ignore them, but savouring their mirth.

‘Oh, Muzz. You’re priceless, mate,’ Charlie said.

Muzz shrugged and swigged his beer.

‘So did she get it out?’ the board boy asked.

Muzz and Charlie looked at him blankly. ‘What? Get what out?’

‘The fissle.’

‘She got more than just me fissle out, Duncan, let me tell you! Stop! S … low! Stop! S … low!’ Muzz said, gyrating his hips.

The men laughed with bravado and swigged their beers with smiles still fresh, but Charlie felt his mind drift away from them. He knew this bawdy behaviour from them all was just a cover for the pain they held in each of their lives. Do they all share the same sense of dissatisfaction as me? he wondered. The dissatisfaction with their women? When he thought of Bec, all he felt was a quiet anger towards her. She had been so gutsy and capable when they had been at Ag College together. Sexy and fit too. Now, since the kids, she’d turned into a nag. A surly one at that. And she’d pressured him to have that operation. Like a Jack Russell at a rabbit hole, she’d dug and dug at him until he caved in. Since the vasectomy, he felt like half a man. A gelded stallion. A castrated cat. Emasculated beyond belief. After the op, one testicle had felt like an AFL football and the other a rugby ball and both were competing to see which could be the bigger code. It was agony. It was humiliating. No wonder in recent months Janine had lit a fire within him.

‘Least she never got you to cut your nuts out, like my missus,’ Charlie wanted to say sulkily, but instead he just downed his rum faster and pushed a ten-dollar note on the bar towards Dutchy. As he did, he noticed the Rural Land Management poster behind the bar advertising yet another no-till cropping and holistic grazing info night at the pub tomorrow. How many of those fuckers does the district need? Charlie thought.

He rolled his eyes. Andrew bloody Travis. Since RLM had been funding Andrew bloody Travis’s visits into the area, Rebecca, who had for the past few years gone quiet on the farm, was now hounding Charlie for change. He wasn’t sure if her old man’s death was what had prompted her sudden, intense concern with the farm’s management, or if it was purely that she had a thing for Andrew. She’d been begging Charlie to come along to one of the nights. Then begging him to change how he’d been running Waters Meeting. All the while parroting Andrew Travis’s crap.

When Charlie had first come to Waters Meeting to manage the cropping program and to see if he and Bec had a shot at being married, her father, Harry, was hell bent on grubbing out all the willows on the streamsides and fencing out the stock. The hours they’d put in dozing and heaping and burning. Then Bec had got hold of a book by Peter Andrews and she’d ranted at them daily that they should be doing the opposite. She said they ought to be slowing down the water run-off and letting the weeds choke the marshy places on the property. And she was spouting off that the riverbanks were now undergrazed and they should let the sheep, cattle and horses in from time to time. In the ten years he’d been here, the advice dished up to farmers had done an about-turn. And now here was Bec, snubbing the fertiliser reps when they called by with a new calendar and big plans for more business with them, then slamming him for ploughing, all because of this bloody New Age farmer Andrew Travis.

Suddenly Charlie found himself wondering why she hadn’t said it was a sex-toy party she was headed to tonight. Maybe there was something going on? He took note of what time the seminar started tomorrow. This time he’d go. Not to find out what the guy was on about, but to keep an eye on what was going on between the soil/grazing expert and Rebecca.

He glanced at his watch and wondered when Bec would be home.

Just then Dutchy’s wife, Amanda, sailed through the door with a waft of cold air and perfume. She carried a silver platter over her head with aplomb and her auburn hair, curled by the damp night air, framed her lively face.

‘Never fear, gentlemen, I am here!’ she called out as she set down the platter on the bar. ‘Leftovers from the ladies, for you!’

As she lifted the bar flap and took her position next to her husband, the men began inspecting the carved carrots with creamy dip and carefully constructed penis-shaped hors d’oeuvres made from tiny cocktail onions joined with toothpicks to sausages.

‘Not sure I like the look of those, Amanda,’ Muzz said, but with his crooked teeth he snapped the end of a carrot and dunked the rest in his beer, using it as a swizzle stick. ‘What’d ya bring Dutchy home?’

‘I’m saving my show-and-tell for later,’ she said coyly, then went to serve ol’ Bart, who was propping up the end of the bar. ‘It’s Charlie who’s gunna have the fun,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Stanton’s shouted her the biggest order.’

But Charlie didn’t hear her. His phone had buzzed and there on the screen was a text from Janine: Where R U? He wrote back, Pub.

Church, now, came her reply. For a fleeting moment he baulked at the mention of the church. Tom was buried there. The memory of Rebecca’s crippling grief after her brother’s death almost stopped Charlie going now to Janine. But as he looked again at the RLM poster and the smiling photo of fit and lean Andrew Travis with his George Clooney salt-and-pepper hair, Charlie felt the quiet anger rise again.

Next he was downing his beer and paying his dues. ‘Better get my tractor cranked,’ he said to the boys and out he wavered into the night. ‘If your missus is home, mine will be soon too. She’ll have my nuts. Again.’

‘You right to drive that thing?’ called Dutchy, but Charlie Lewis was already gone.

‘He’s keen to get home to try a few toys I reckon,’ said Muzz, watching from the window as Charlie turned the tractor and plough around and revved away into the night.

On the bitumen, Charlie hurtled the tractor to maximum speed. With a thrill he felt the steering wheel jump to its own bizarre robotic life as the automated steering function took over. He felt like he was driving a gigantic monster truck at a speedway. Sure he’d chewed up his bonus diesel voucher getting to the pub, but the laughs from the boys had been worth it. And now here was his chance for a quick stop-off with Janine before heading home. He knew Bec would have his balls for real if she found out, but right now he didn’t care. Within him lay an insatiable appetite for any excitement at all in his life. There was something eroding him away inside. It was the same gnawing feeling he’d had in the days when he was stuck at home on his family farm, living under the shadow of his father and constant pressure from his mother. He needed something to move him through this porridge of a life he now found himself in again.

Something like Janine. And there she was, standing in the headlights of the tractor beside the church. The breeze blowing her long dark hair, the coat that was wrapped about her flapping open so Charlie glimpsed the shiny purple fabric of a tiny negligee. Tonight she was all curves and wickedness. He didn’t care that she was Morris Turner’s wife and mother to two painfully shy teenage boys. He just wanted sex with her. And to forget. Charlie swung open the cab of the tractor and hauled her in.

Six

Rebecca half fell out of Gabs’s Landy on the mountainside and instantly felt a deep unseasonal chill in the air. The dark gums above her glistened with night-time dew and the roadside gravel beneath her feet felt damp and cold.