moment he teetered on the edge of the table, about to crash off and scald himself with boiling water. Then he recovered his balance. He crouched, enduring the agony, eyes closed, still clutching his treacherous burden.
‘Are you all right?’ Helen gasped.
Ben opened his watering eyes and nodded. He took a deep breath.
‘You’ve got to keep clear of me. You’ve got to crawl down to this end as I come up to your end. Ready?’
‘Yes,’ Helen whispered desperately.
He began to make his way unsteadily down the table. They passed each other in the middle. Ben staggered to the end.
He peered into the dark cupboard. And, yes, he could just make out the dreadful beast coiled in there. For a teetering moment he crouched, trying to take aim with his thirty pounds of boiling water, his arm muscles trembling with strain; then he grunted and he hurled the water.
It cascaded into the cupboard with a steaming crash, and all hell broke loose. The snake came bursting out in a great writhing knot, coiling and contorting, a twisting killer three yards long convulsing around the kitchen floor, flashing jaws agape. Helen shrieked and snatched up the broom and swiped down at it with all her might. It skidded across the floor, and she shrieked again and swiped again, and then there was a metallic crash as Ben Sunninghill hurled the empty cauldron. It landed on the beast’s head and he leapt off the table, snatched up the meat-cleaver from the sink and ran at the writhing mass. With one furious swipe he chopped the snake in half. Now two sections of it were writhing bloodily all over the floor. Ben raised the cleaver again, aimed wildly for the head, and swiped. He chopped the head clean off, but still the sections writhed all over the floor. Ben Sunninghill frantically chopped and chopped, scuttling around scattering pieces of bloody snake everywhere.
Finally he stopped and stood up, chest heaving. Helen was leaning against the cupboard, her hair a mess, her breasts heaving. She looked at Ben, then she stared at Oscar lying dead. Then her bright eyes filled with tears, her lower lip curled, and she cried: ‘Oh Oscar …’
She stumbled across the kitchen and fell to her knees beside the dog, gathered him into her arms and hugged him and rocked him.
‘Oh Oscar, Oscar …’ she cried.
They sat at the kitchen table, sipping brandy. The mess of snake had been cleared up, the floor mopped, and Helen had put on fresh jeans and shirt. Oscar lay on the verandah, covered in a blanket, awaiting burial in the morning. She was over the immediate grief of it now: the brandy was doing its work and she just felt numb.
‘Sorry, what’s your surname again?’ she said.
‘Sunninghill,’ Ben said. He had taken off his crash-helmet and gauntlets.
‘And how come …? I mean, what brought you here, like a guardian angel?’
Ben smiled. ‘I came to borrow a spanner,’ he said. ‘For my motorbike. I was having trouble and when I passed your gate, I thought maybe you had the spanner I needed. I did have one, but I lost it somewhere.’
‘Spanner,’ Helen said. ‘Yes, of course, all kinds of spanners in the barn.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But can it wait till tomorrow? I mean, it’s dark now.’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, I’ve got a bed for you. Plenty of beds here.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you,’ Ben said uncertainly. ‘As long as it’s no trouble?’
‘No, no, plenty of beds …’ She rubbed her forehead, then went on: ‘“Sunninghill”? Never heard that name before.’
Ben smiled. He was a funny-looking fellow with a ferrety sort of face, but when he smiled his cheeks puckered and all his teeth showed in a way that was both mysterious and charming. Mischievous. He was small, only about five foot eight inches in his high-heeled bikers’ boots. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘my real name is Sonnenberg, but my father changed it by deed-poll to Sunninghill. The English translation of Sonnenberg.’
‘Oh,’ Helen said.
‘He wanted to create the impression we weren’t Jewish.’
‘Oh.’
That smile. ‘Trouble is, he looks even more Jewish than I do.’
‘Oh.’ She was going to say ‘Really?’ but changed it in her mouth. She added hastily: ‘Sunninghill’s a nice name. A cheerful name. You look a cheerful type of person.’
‘Sure, I’m a laugh a minute. Remember, that was only my first snake, I’ll probably improve. Does this happen very often?’
She smiled wanly. ‘First time I’ve seen one in the house. Oscar chased it in.’ She dabbed the corner of her eye. ‘Seen enough in the bush, though, over the years.’
‘How many years have you lived here?’
‘Since I got married. Twenty years. Or nineteen.’
‘And where’s your husband now?’
She waved a hand to the south. ‘South Australia. Broken Hill, working on the mines.’
‘Oh.’ He was about to say ‘Why?’, then stopped himself. Helen volunteered the reason, as if reading his thoughts:
‘The kids’ boarding-school fees. With the drought we couldn’t make ends meet. So he had to go back to his old job.’
‘Oh. How long ago?’
‘Two years.’ She added: ‘He comes home at Christmas, when the kids get their summer holidays.’
‘I see. So you run the ranch all by yourself?’
For a moment she wondered what he saw. ‘No. We had to get rid of our foreman last year when we sold most of the cattle, but we’ve still got one Abbo stockman and his wife. They live about five miles away. So you really were a guardian angel, showing up like that, otherwise I’d have stayed on this table all night.’ She smiled wanly. ‘So, what brings you to Australia on a motorbike?’
‘Just seeing the world. I saw on your gate the farm’s called Whoop-Whoop. Does that mean anything special?’
‘The real name is Edenvale Station, because we’ve got a few wells that are usually quite good, but because it’s so remote we’ve nicknamed it Whoop-Whoop. That’s a mythical Australian place. It means to Hell and gone. In the middle of nowhere.’
‘Beyond the black stump?’
‘Right.’ She poured more brandy into his glass. She didn’t feel so shaky any more. Just grief for Oscar. Oh Oscar … ‘So, Mr Sunninghill, from New York. What do you do in New York?’
‘Used
