leave, there’s a fire.
Susan yelled, Shit, Mum, what’s happening?
Harold walked into the kitchen where the other three had gathered and said, Stop the yelling! What are you panicking about?
Jim grabbed his father’s sleeve and dragged him towards the window, pointing at the avalanche of flame, That! That!
Harold picked Jim’s hand off his shirt. Settle down, son!
There was an agonizing pause, filled with the rush of wind and flames. They all looked to Harold, who said, Jump in the bath, all of you. Jenny, turn on the shower and put the plug in the bath.
They were nonplussed, so frightened they did what Harold said. Then he vanished and reappeared with blankets, which he soaked under the shower. He threw them over his family, whom, truth be told, he didn’t really like. It was a shit of a life. He climbed into the bathtub, where they all crouched, squeezed together with the shower going and wet blankets over their head. Someone was crying, all were shaking, except Harold, who seemed indifferent. There was a whoosh of air like a vacuum cleaner, and the windows lit up orange. The world smelt putrid.
The new house was one of Geraldton’s talking points. Susan settled easily into her new role as one of the “wealthy girls,” though in truth they had less money than ever. Mortgaged to the hilt, her mother would complain a little too loud, Susan saying, Shoosh, Mum, my friends might hear.
Nouveau-riche status meant little to Jim, but he enjoyed being the center of a different kind of attention. A Guardian newspaper reporter had even interviewed him about his experience in The Fires, and Jim had used the occasion to lament the loss of many rare and probably little-known plant species. He called for the preservation of the area, which would certainly bounce back from fire if left untrammelled. He felt that his future as an environmentalist was assured.
When Jim told the story of the fireball that rolled over the tin roof of the house and blazed its way across the sandplain all the way to the ocean, his description was accurate as a naturalist would produce. He researched accounts of fire rolling over roads, across paddocks, and even the iron roofs of houses. Like waves surfing the earth. It made a poet of him. But he didn’t mention his father. He almost forgot his father had been there.
The more easygoing among us usually called him “Fossil,” but resorted to the standard “Carcass” when one of his more outlandish goals, or “victories,” was achieved. And for the purposes of the yarn I am about to relate, he most certainly deserved the name “Carcass.”
Carcass was a reasonable shearer, but never a great one. He could knock them off pretty fast, but was, as the cockies say, “rough as guts.” The sheep sliding down into his catching pen looked like they’d had a date with a bad surgeon—a plastic surgeon who’d been struck off but kept practicing, nonetheless. Merinos are renowned for the extra wool they carry in their skin folds, and it takes skill to weave the comb in and out of those mighty crevices, but Carcass was notorious for shearing straight on through—skin, wool, and anything else in the way. And he had that element of sadist about him that even the young blokes found a bit hard to stomach. The cockies who knew of him wouldn’t let him near their prize rams . . .
I am not one for painting backgrounds, and like to get to the point. But I will say that like those real estate adverts, so much rests on location, location, location. Or maybe I should say isolation, isolation, isolation. I mean, you’ve got to understand that when we’re shearing the stations, we’re a long way from anywhere, and you tend to get to know each other’s bad habits pretty well. Carcass has many, but his worst as far as the rest of the blokes are concerned—and I mean any blokes on the same team as him—is his habit of cracking on to every girl rouseabout he comes across. They’re a captive audience for him. Sometimes it’s a female wool classer, or even the cook. He’s not fussy: any size or shape or age will do. He claims they’ll all fall to his charms sooner or later. Seriously, the guy is grotesque, and stinks with it. And there you go, he hounds them, flatters them, jokes with them, drinks with them, smokes dope with them, and they eventually fall.
Then he’ll tell us of his conquest, describe qualities and flaws with intricate detail, to the point where even the young blokes don’t want to hear anymore. And the fallen girls and women—they just go red whenever he looks at them, or anyone else for that matter. Within a day or two, humiliated, they’ll hook a lift with the infuriated contractor, who’ll be muttering to himself, why did I do it, why did I get a girl on the job? They never think of dropping Carcass, he has that way about him. Returning, they’ll have picked up some young bloke from God knows where to cover for the girl.
So that’s the scenario, repeated over and over. But then the world turns upside down—for Carcass, for all of us. The contractor hires this beautiful young woman—sorry if that sounds off, but she was! I mean, really classy and gorgeous with it, and with a brain like a steel trap. He hires her because he’s drinking in the pub then playing pool and holding the table until he’s beaten by a chick and can’t get over it. And forgetting about his missus for a moment he asks her if she’s looking for work and she says she might be and he offers her well above the award and the next thing she’s on the team. With his hangover the next morning he packs his ute and finds her standing at the passenger’s side asking to be let in. He remembers, groans, but that’s it. She’s on the team.
The rest of us are already out at the quarters, sorting our gear out. Sharp-eyed, Carcass sees them coming down the gravel—Jeez . . . he says. Get a load of that. I’ll have her broken by tomorrow. We look up and see this burst of sunlight that’s not going to fry your brains, and snap back, You’ll be lucky, you dirty bastard. Okay, it’s our standard reaction when he declares an impending conquest.
So she unloads her gear and takes her room—we share two to a room, but she has her own—and comes out to meet us all. She’s okay. We all like her. She has an easygoing way about her. But she’s so sharp. Carcass drops innuendoes, and she throws them back at him with a laugh. It’ll keep, he says.
The working week begins, and there’s no sign of her breaking. As we watch Carcass’s efforts rebuffed with that laugh, we grow in confidence. Under his watchful eye, as he hacks the blazes out of a sheep, we banter with her as she sweeps the board. There’s a good feeling on the team for the first time in months. She has brought heaps of CDs and plays them. Even the old-timers get into them: the Slits, Sleater-Kinney, shit like that. The shed pumps. Carcass is clearly in crisis. He’s bad-tempered. Wallops the sheep with his handpiece, which really offends her. Lay off those sheep! she yells. If you carry on like that I’ll report you to the RSPCA. Now, normally, if someone—anyone—said something like that, they’d be out on their ear. But she can and does and no one holds it against her.
What does she look like? Well, you know, sort of agile, with smart eyes. A green color. Brown hair. No makeup—that doesn’t work in hot sheds anyway. Melts. But even out of the shed, on our days off. Just . . . natural. And tall. Leggy, Carcass says, spitting it out. Three weeks in, and nothing. He’s looking hunched, and “congested.” I’m not one for pulling the pud, he says to her, having now given up on all levels of decency. He’d molest her, we guess, if he thought he could get away with it. But he can’t—we’d beat the shit out of him, and he knows it. And she knows it too.
And so the shed comes to an end and the run at that, and with the cutout—a massive piss-up that sees her kiss all us blokes long and hard, and only peck Carcass on the cheek—we jump into the minibus and head back to town to be met by wives and partners,
