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.
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.
‘You sure you’re right to drive?’ asked Gabs.
Bec nodded as she hitched up her boob tube and wrapped her arms about her body. ‘The old girl will get me home,’ she said, thumping the roof of the battered Hilux, once a vibrant red, now faded, scratched and dinted. Knowing she had to drive thirty Ks home from the turn-off where she’d met Gabs earlier that night, she’d been drinking water since ten at Doreen’s and now felt horribly sober and incredibly tired. While someone thought it had been a good idea to seal the road, some of the bends on the southern slopes on dewy nights like this were sheened in a slippery concoction of oil and water. She intended to take it slow.
‘All right. Hoo-roo then. Enjoy Dental Day!’ Gabs said, delivering a gigantic toothy smile, folding her lips up above her teeth, before driving away.
Inside the ute, Bec turned the key and waited for the glow light to click off before she chugged the diesel engine over. She clunked the fan on flat-out for warmth, then headed off at a meagre speed, her headlights fanning across the summertime native grasses that bowed their seed heads with the weight of the dew. The roadside grasses prompted thoughts of Andrew Travis and what he had taught her about native grasses in the past twelve months. It was more than she had learned in a lifetime of farming.
At Ag College she’d never been taught the difference between a C3 and a C4 perennial plant that lay dormant at certain times of the year, depending on the warmth or coolness of the season. She hadn’t realised, until Andrew had taught her, that modern agriculture favoured annual plants and decimated perennial plants with herbicides and ploughing. Or how superphosphate fertiliser killed crucial fungi that fed plants essential sugars and nutrients. Mind-boggling stuff, especially when she considered how she and Charlie had been managing the place.
Along with Andrew Travis opening up Bec’s mind, she felt he was also slowly opening up her heart too. He not only spoke to her without judgement, but with utter respect; he not only praised her intelligence, but he also fed her what was rare to find in her industry — a positivity and hope that there was a bright future in farming.
Bec sighed and, even though she was a non-smoker, she wished she’d nabbed one of Gabs’s smokes. She now saw Andrew as a visionary, despite his quiet way. His work was ‘change the world’ kind of stuff. She admired him more than any man she’d ever met.
‘He’s nothing but a bloody Greenie tool,’ Charlie had said when she’d tried to explain Andrew’s ideas. Driving home now, she wondered how she could shift Charlie in his thinking, and make him come along to the seminar tomorrow at the pub, not just to listen. But to hear and understand.
What she’d learned from Andrew’s seminars was the only thing that got Rebecca excited about life on Waters Meeting these days. To her, it meant a chance to farm profitably and regeneratively … not the way they were farming now.
As she drove on through the winding mountainside, occasionally the eyes of kangaroos and possums gleamed in the headlights. She knew the steel bull bar that wrapped around the front of the ute like a grid-iron helmet protected the vehicle, but she slowed anyway, not wanting to take the life of any animal. In her youth, she’d barely flinched when she’d tumbled a possum on the road or swiped a roo, but these days, since her boys, she had softened. It was difficult to see any living thing harmed. Ironic, she thought, that I farm meat, yet love my animals so passionately.
Bec wondered guiltily how her boys were at old Mrs Newton’s place, and if they had settled down to sleep OK. The boys made her think of Charlie, which in turn made her cross again that he couldn’t just set one night aside for being with them. She tried to push the thoughts away.
Maybe tonight and the order Yazzie had submitted for them could kick-start everything for her and Charlie. Maybe they could bring back the days when he was a wild but caring party boy and she his happy, determined, capable girl. But something like a thorn still niggled inside her.
As she wound over river crossings and up around mountain turns, she began to long for the warmth of her bed. She imagined pulling Charlie to her. Making love to him until morning. Then the realisation came that she’d have to be up early to collect the boys from the neighbour. Then she needed to make smoko for the crutching and jetting crew, who were coming with their portable unit at nine to treat the ewes. She grimaced with disappointment.
Were Saturday mornings like that in other people’s lives? Wouldn’t most people be sleeping in? Television cartoons for the kids while the parents lay in bed cuddling, reading newspapers and eating toast and drinking tea?
She loved her farming life, she loved her boys, but some days she wondered how on earth there’d be time for just her and Charlie? Other farming families went camping together, didn’t they? Water-skiing in the summer, snow-skiing in the winter, country-music concerts on weekends, dinner parties on Saturday nights with neighbours? But not the Lewises. Charlie was happy with the pub, footy and cricket-training booze-ups and satisfied with his machinery shed and the fridge, bar and potbelly stove he’d installed for himself there. And he had his trips to the
