Bookmark Days (3 page)
Moving sheep takes practice. You have to keep them moving – not too fast and not too slow. You have to anticipate their moves, know the lie of the land and never underestimate how daft they can be. You have to be patient and when your cousins from the city are helping, you have to be doubly patient.
‘Go really wide, Katie,’ Dad barked. She was hemming them in too hard when we got to the gate at the yards. ‘Wide!’
She didn’t move. She wasn’t listening or maybe just couldn’t hear over the bleating.
‘I’ve got her, Dad,’ I said. One team to round up the sheep, another to round up the cousins.
‘Thanks, mate.’
I cantered Zeph along the fence and came up beside Katie. She was bumping through the flock at an uncomfortable trot. No matter how many times I show her how to rise into the rhythm of a trot she continues to flop about in the saddle like a rag doll.
‘Katie! Back off. You’re going to drive them into the fence.’
‘Sorry!’ she said, and reined Charlie hard. Too hard. He bent his head and cut a tight turn in the middle of the flock. The sheep parted in a tangle of legs, one bounced off the fence chest first, then Katie and Charlie were clear and the mob came together again.
Katie’s face was flushed. ‘I’m useless at this stuff.’
‘Rubbish, you did well,’ I said.
‘Look at you, though. As if you were born up there.’
I scoffed, but she was right. ‘I’ve had a bit of practice.’
Naomi closed the gate when all the baa-baas were yarded. We dismounted and rested on the rails to admire our handiwork. Chooka collected a single ball of dried sheep poo and flicked it, intending to hit Naomi in the back of the head, but it arced through the air and hit Katie in the nose.
She snorted. ‘What was that?’
Chooka was laughing and running away. Katie scooped up a handful of poop and pelted him. He ducked and not a single ball found its target. We rested back on the rails again but two seconds later Naomi had me by the collar and managed to stuff a handful of poo down the back of my shirt. She ran off squealing.
‘Right,’ Katie said. ‘This means war.’
Dried sheep poo isn’t great to throw. Fresh poo has a bit more body and travels further, but it stinks and leaves a stain on your hands and anything you hit with it. When sheep-poo wars get serious, fresh poo is the only option. With both hands loaded, I pretended I was running for Chooka. At the last minute I turned and gave Naomi both barrels.
‘Look out!’ Katie shrieked, but it was too late. Chooka unloaded a shotgun blast of crap that peppered the side of my head. I ran and dragged him onto the dusty ground. He was squealing like a piglet. I pinned his arms with my knees.
‘That wasn’t a very brotherly thing to do, was it?’ I growled. I wiggled my fingers like a pianist warming up and he started squirming desperately. He knew what was coming: the Typewriter.
‘Good-morning-Mum-and-Dad-comma,’ I said as I stabbed imaginary keys on his chest. ‘It-was-so-nice-to-see-you-all-atthe-Forsyth-Agricultural-Show-and-Ute-Muster.’
Chooka was incredibly ticklish. By now he was writhing and screaming with laughter.
‘Hope-you-had-a-lovely-time-signed-A-v-r-i-l-L-o-u-i-s-e-S-t-a-n-t-o-n-full-stop. Kiss-kiss-kiss-hug-hug . . .’
Before I could officially sign off on my imaginary letter, Katie released a double handful of sheep poo onto Chooka’s upturned face. It showered his nose and eyes, bounced off his cheeks and rained into his open mouth. I stood up and he rolled onto all fours, spitting and coughing. I crouched beside my brother, my hand over his shoulder.
‘You okay, Chooka? That was a bit mean. Sorry.’
He was rubbing his face. I thought he was crying but his spitting turned to smacking lips as if he’d just finished a meal.
‘Tastes better than Dad’s muesli,’ he said.
I laughed.
Katie gagged. ‘That’s just feral.’
The trip to Mildura usually takes a smidge over two hours in Dad’s truck, but in Aunty Jacq’s Honda it was a little under an hour and a half. She’s a bit of a leadfoot. Left Mum and Dad and the sheep for dead. Naomi sat in the front seat. Chooka sat between Katie and me in the back and we shared her iPod earphones over his head. Katie’s into rap music in a big way and there’s only so much of that you can stand if your idol is Troy Cassar-Daley. Still, I nodded my head to the rhythm and agreed when she made comment.
‘Oh, I love this song!’ she said about twenty times.
‘Yeah, me too!’ I lied. About twenty times.
I lied, but I knew Katie wouldn’t notice. She’d spent the night whispering tales of love and lust again and I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Me, me, me. It was all about Katie and I got bored. She started telling stories that she’d already told me the night before. Well, different versions of the same stories. She’d told me the night before that she lost her virginity when she was fourteen with a seventeen-year-old guy named Ben. She apologised for keeping it a secret but she was so scared that if her mum found out she’d lock her up and throw away the key. It stuck in my head because until then I thought we’d shared everything and with that one story I realised she’d been keeping things from me for years. Big things. If the story of my life was in a book, having sex for the first time would be a page to remember. But when Katie was telling the story again the next night she lost her virginity when she was
thirteen
with a seventeen-year-old named
Tony
. Her life was a blur of boys.
We entered mobile-phone range about fifteen Ks from town and Katie’s phone started ringing. Her ringtone for messages was that stupid crazy frog thing and after three bursts everyone in the car was moaning and telling her to shut it up. Katie ignored us and did a little jiggle each time it rang, buzzing with the excitement of having re-entered civilisation.
‘Katie, can you please put your phone on silent,’ Jacq said.
‘Yes, Mummy,’ Katie sang.
The tone of her voice didn’t match her expression. Her eyes narrowed and she looked sinister for a split second. I wondered how often she said things she didn’t mean. I got suspicious of her again when we were in the shoe shop. She picked out a pair with too-high heels that were tight on my toes. She said they were a bargain but I didn’t believe her. I did believe her when she said they looked nice with the dress.
‘They’ll stretch a bit,’ she said. I hoped she was right – they were a hundred dollars.
Mum nearly swallowed her tongue when I told her how much they’d cost but it was my money I was spending so she only raised her eyebrows. ‘Hope you get some wear out of them.’
‘They’ll go with anything,’ Katie said.
My riding pants? My tracksuit? My pyjamas? I put them in the car and felt a bit stupid. I’d wear them once. A hundred bucks?
Katie checked her email for half an hour in an Internet café then offered to buy me a hot chocolate at the bakery to celebrate my new shoes. We didn’t get inside. There were three skater boys in their teens wearing big beanies and lounging at the table on the roadside in front of the shop. Katie just waltzed right up and sat down at the fourth chair at their table. I couldn’t believe it.
‘Hey!’ she said, and waved.
Two of them straightened in their seats, one waved back from across the crumb-flecked table. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘Nothing much,’ Katie squeaked. ‘Can you recommend anything from the menu?’
I stood there feeling beached and sunburned.
The guy who’d waved stretched and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘You like custard tarts? Tarts are good.’
One of the other boys chuckled and Katie did too. ‘Yeah? Don’t mind a tart every now and again,’ she said.
They all laughed then.
Then came the worst half hour of my entire life. Katie kept talking as if her pause button was broken. She said ‘like’ about ninety-four times. She explained that we were, like, cousins and stole a chair from the next table so I could sit down, but I couldn’t. My heart was pounding away in my neck and I just wanted to run and hide. She talked about, like, the Forsyth Show and our, like, mission to find me, like, some sexy shoes. One of the skater boys – the pimply one on Katie’s left – said he was going to the Show, that he and his dad lived on a farm at Kildambo and he’d been going since he was little. Katie got seriously excited then and tried to con the other boys into, like, coming as well, but they were less than ecstatic about it. I watched them as if they were on TV. I watched the boys watching Katie and felt like an alien again. Katie kept trying to drag me into the conversation, but I didn’t know what to say. She happily filled any gap.
We were supposed to be meeting Aunty Jacq back at the car at twelve o’clock. I wondered how early I could get away with using that as an excuse to drag Katie off. Twenty minutes? The car was just around the corner and I’d almost worked up the courage to whisper that it was time to go when things got infinitely worse.
A white Patrol tray ute with L plates parked on the opposite side of the road. I vaguely recognised the car but it wasn’t until the occupants were on the roadside that I realised it was the Carringtons’ ute. Of all the parking bays in the whole of Mildura, they had to choose the one directly opposite me having a meltdown! And the L plates belonged to Nathaniel. He had a clean trucker’s cap tugged hard over his wild hair and his navy T-shirt was too small in all the right places.
I started hyperventilating. I felt the skin on my neck chill with sweat. I locked my arms over my chest. Nathaniel and his father checked the road twice then crossed to where we were. They were going to the bakery! I stared at the footpath until Nathaniel practically brushed against my arm as he went inside.
Some small valve inside me felt as though it was going to burst. My skin was twenty hectares of blooming goosebumps and I could feel waves of heat coming off me. I knew I was changing colour but there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. I was frozen there – a multi-coloured exhibit at the museum of embarrassment – until Nathaniel came out again. He held a pie in a white paper bag and had just taken a humungous bite when he saw me. He looked at me but didn’t recognise me at first, then he froze, his eyes lit up and – to my sweetest delight – his face flushed. We probably caused an instant spike in global temperature. The pie was obviously hot too, and he covered his mouth as he nodded a greeting. His dad stepped past and headed across the road to the ute – Les Junior probably wouldn’t know me from a paddock of canola – but Nathaniel just stood there chewing and huffing.
‘Hi, Avril.’
He’d used my name. My heart stopped beating for a full second.
‘Hi,’ I said. At least I got something out. And I didn’t die.
Across the street, the ute door slammed. Nathaniel waved his hand around in confusion. ‘Sorry, got to go,’ he said.
I nodded. I watched him walk across the street, noticed his jeans low on his hips and the black band at the top of his boxers.
The best thing about the whole encounter was the fact that Katie hadn’t noticed. She was so wrapped in, like, trying to impress the boys at the table that she hadn’t even noticed me with my face on fire behind her.
‘I’m going, Katie,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you guys. Might see you at the show, hey?’
The boys waved at the same time, as if their brains were somehow linked, and Katie started stammering. ‘But . . . wwwait. Hang on! What . . . what about our hot chocolate? Where are you going?’
‘Back to the car. It’s okay, don’t get up. I’ll see you when you get there. Say midday at the latest?’ I walked off.
‘But . . .’ She jogged to catch up. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then what’s the big hurry? It was supposed to be a lesson. See the master in action.’
I laughed then, mostly at her joke but partly at the idea that she was, like, the master of picking up strange guys on the street. ‘I can’t just plonk down next to some stranger and start up a conversation with them as if I’d known them for years.’
‘Crap,’ she said. ‘We just need to work on your self-confidence.’
I felt a flash of anger then, rising up like that ancestral hatred of the Carringtons. I wanted to shout that she was a cheap-arsed sleaze and that throwing yourself at a hundred guys doesn’t qualify you as a master of anything. Except maybe sexually transmitted diseases. Thankfully, the words never made it past my lips. The anger rose up and faded away again and in its wake was pity. I felt sorry for Katie and her desperate attempts to feel wanted.
‘Thanks, but self-confidence isn’t something you work on,’ I said. ‘You either have it or you don’t.
You
have it. Truckloads of it.
I
don’t.’
She grabbed my hand. ‘No, cuz, it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.’
A loud air-horn blasted from the street. Katie and I jumped. The truck that made the racket had ‘L & M Stanton, Rockleigh’ painted on the door – our truck. I waved. The back of the truck looked empty, except for Rex’s shiny black nose sniffing between the boards.
Time to go home. Time to forget the pricey useless shoes, the skater boys and that alien world. Time to find some space, get some air in my lungs and maybe pelt my cousin with sheep poo.
I got sick of Katie’s incessant chatter that night. She was rabbiting on about the same stuff – her – and I thought about rolling my swag out in the shearing shed. It was
my
bedroom and she was
my
guest, not the other way round. Eventually, I just lost it.
‘Katie?’
‘Yes, Av? What?’
‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I don’t want to hear another story.’
‘But . . .’
‘Enough! Stop. That’s it. Shoosh.’
She was quiet for a second. Then I could hear her laughing.
‘What?’ I said. ‘I’m serious. Shut up.’
‘Whoo, big scary Avvie. Going to flip out. Fire up! Come on, dare you.’
I threw my covers off and swung my feet to the floor between our beds. Katie backed away and I heard a dull thud.
‘Oww,’ she said. ‘That was my head.’
I heard the bookshelf rattle. I thought it might topple and bury her. I held my breath but it didn’t fall and then I
really
lost it, only now I was laughing. My laughter got Katie going and we were sucked into one of those cackling whirlpools where you can’t stop until your eyes are shiny red with tears and your insides hurt.