Will put his hands on his hips absent-mindedly and wandered into the garden, gazing out at the dark horizon. Sometimes, Teddy thought, it didn’t matter if you kept moving or if you stayed still; there was always something waiting for you. He seemed to be whispering to himself and he sounded angry. She wondered if it was with himself. She knew Audrey was waiting to see what he would do. So was she. He shook his head.
‘Dammit,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll go see her.’
Audrey smiled gratefully. ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said. ‘It will mean so much to her.’
‘But I can’t stay, Audrey.’
‘No, of course not, but perhaps you could cheer her up with stories about what you’ve been up to, let her know you’ll go and see her again the next time you’re home.’
‘I can do that,’ he said.
Audrey hugged him. ‘Thank you, Will,’ she said. ‘You are a good boy.’
‘Not that good,’ he grumbled.
‘Still pretty good,’ she insisted. ‘And with that, I’ll be off home. It’s late at night for an old lady!’
Will laughed and took Teddy’s hand in the dark. ‘Goodnight, Audrey,’ he said.
As her car disappeared down the front drive, Teddy looked up at him.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘About your mum, I mean.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s strange to feel like it’s too late. I’ll do better for her. Audrey’s right, I owe her that much. Even though it’s not been much of a relationship for a long time, I can do it for her.’
‘And what about you?’ Teddy asked.
‘Still don’t know. I think maybe I had my mothering from Audrey so I don’t need it from Mum anymore. But if she needs me, well, I can do that.’
When they got back to the fire, Deirdre was packing up. ‘Time for bed,’ she announced. ‘For both of you.’
Will put his hands on his hips. ‘Teddy may want to stay a little longer, Deirdre.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’s milking in the morning. You want to make her tired?’
Will grinned. ‘Love to,’ he said. Deirdre startled like a chook that had just caught the shadow of a hawk overhead.
‘Well! You can’t, she’s not for you! Not for a drinker and a fighter – and don’t you forget it.’ She marched off into the night before he had a chance to respond, but her words echoed around the campfire in her wake.
They stood in silence for a while until Teddy began collecting the tea mugs restlessly. ‘She’s probably right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be up early tomorrow. I’d better head in.’
Will’s hands were still on his hips. ‘Teddy.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve been warned off women before.’
‘Okay.’
‘And I should tell you, it’s never worked.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Look,’ he said, falling into step beside her as she made her retreat to the dark house. ‘I’m not great at having a conscience, or anything. You know, life’s short, mostly I just aim to have a good time.’ She waited for him to continue. ‘But, uhh, I feel this weird responsibility towards you, because . . . I don’t know, I can’t help it. Maybe it’s your dragon.’ He put his hands back on his hips, changed his mind and shoved them in his pockets.
She had reached the door; he hung back at the verandah steps. ‘Will, you really don’t need to freak out. Maybe you think I’m going to get hung up on you because you kissed me. Don’t worry about it, I’m a big girl. I’m not trying to trap you here.’
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘You’ve been listening to too many stories,’ she told him as she opened the door. ‘Goodnight, Sir William.’
He crossed the verandah in a moment and kissed her hard, pressing her against the wall of the house, where her head bumped the doorbell shaped like a sheep and it jingled merrily. His body was taller than hers but it fitted perfectly into her curves, hard and insistent. He stroked her hair and kissed her fiercely. Her hands crept up to explore his jaw, his hair and the muscles down his back. His mouth was hot on hers, his hands desperate to know her. She moved against him to feel the strength in his body and she breathed him in, awake.
Perhaps Deirdre had been watching for their lights to go on in their separate abodes, far removed from each other, but when her front verandah light went on, they didn’t notice for a long moment.
‘You walking her home now?’ Deirdre snapped. Will jumped and turned to find Deirdre standing in the garden with a two-litre jug of milk and an expression of deepest disapproval.
‘Uh, yeah, she’s scared of the dark,’ he growled, and cleared his throat. Teddy stood to attention.
‘Grandma, is that milk for me?’
Teddy could see her mind working over. Deirdre glared from one face to the other, apportioning blame.
‘Who else?’ she snapped. ‘And here I find you sneaking around in the dark.’
‘We weren’t sneaking around in the dark,’ Will protested.
‘It’s a farm and it’s night,’ interjected Teddy. ‘It’s already pretty dark.’
‘You seem to have a pretty good handle on the sneaking thing,’ said Will. ‘Geez, did you go to the Grumpy Nana Ninja Academy? You nearly gave me a heart attack.’
Deirdre scowled. ‘Looked like you were giving yourself a heart attack, to me.’
‘Can we stop discussing this?’ Teddy asked. ‘Normal people would find this embarrassing.’ She opened the door and disappeared into the house, leaving the dragon and Sir William to glare at each other in silence.
Teddy didn’t sleep much that night, and when she did she dreamed of dragons. She rolled over in bed again and again, listening for Will’s deep voice and hearing instead her grandmother’s comfortable grumblings. She woke and lay gazing at the blank ceiling, wondering. Wishing.
There was a wind coming. It was blowing across from Bunbury, cold and wet, bringing rain. She heard it blast against the walls of the house, pushing and buffeting her home as if it could make her fly away.
Will caught her mid-morning as she was heading out to help Hamish with the sheep.
‘Sheepwork?’ he asked. ‘Can I help?’
‘Sure,’ she said, as if it was absolutely no skin off her nose and nobody had kissed anyone the night before. He fell into the ute next to her with a winning smile.
‘I can practise my whistle,’ he said happily, and stuck his fingers in his mouth. He glanced at her and produced a rather anaemic wolf-whistle.
She laughed, despite herself. ‘Hopeless.’
‘Well, pull over and help me then,’ he demanded.
She stopped the ute.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Whistle like you really mean it!’ She blasted out of the window into the morning and Dog leapt around in the back in response. ‘Like that.’
Will leaned in and watched her mouth. He followed her with another attempt. She sighed loudly, and took his hand. ‘Put it in to about . . . there. Is your tongue right over?’ He nodded. ‘You’re smiling too much!’ she said. ‘It’ll never work!’
‘Can’t help it,’ he mumbled back through his fingers. ‘I love to learn!’ Teddy fired up the ute.
They found the mob of sheep out in the old lupin paddock. It wasn’t hard because the lambs and ewes were calling to each other in the warm morning light. Small tangles of them were frolicking and running about, playing and nibbling on the grass before being called back to their mothers for a drink of milk. It was so peaceful that Teddy almost felt bad for disturbing them. They’d be back again before sundown, she told herself.
She glanced across the cab at Will, which was safe to do because he was observing the mob as well. He was effortlessly handsome. His eyes were clever and interested, and he sat in comfortable silence watching the movement of the sheep as they gathered and moved away along the fence line.
Teddy stayed behind them, but kept the ute 10 metres away from the outer side of the mob, to let them know they couldn’t make a dash for it in
to the middle of the paddock, and to cut them off if they thought about it. She wound her window down to the cool air and warm sun. The cheerful yellow capeweed, still flowering, stretched out across the paddock.
‘I wonder about you,’ Will said unexpectedly.
‘Really? Why?’ He was turned to her, but he didn’t speak. She glanced back at the sheep and slowed the ute. The mob was swirling around a mallee root they’d seen along the fence line and it was causing them to bulge out into the paddock. ‘No, really,’ she prompted him. ‘Why?’ He was watching the sheep again.
‘I dunno. I know you love it here, but I wonder about why you’re really at Stretton.’
‘This is my home, same as Grandma. We’ve been here for a hundred years, you know. Most of us are still here.’ She glanced around.
‘You’re looking at my great-grandfather’s first attempt at building a dam, and it’s not too bad.’ She pointed beyond the fence line. ‘And way over there are a thousand trees my dad planted to stop the salt creeping onto the place from the east. He knew he had cancer and he wanted to get the job done before he went.’
Will looked around the paddock, letting his eyes rest on the greying sheep yards in the corner. They were tumbling down, and there were only two yards and a race.
‘Grandad built it in the sixties. It’s not worth using any more. We take the sheep back to the main yards to do anything with them. We’ve probably used them once or twice for tailing lambs if it’s a small mob, but that’s about it.’
Dog started barking on the back. She stopped the ute. ‘Out ya get, Dog!’ she called, and he was away and up the side of the mob in a flash. ‘I should have let him out a couple of k’s back to slow him down a bit,’ she admitted as they watched the black and white flashes of Dog racing after the sheep. ‘Do-og!’
He heard her, ignored her, felt bad and forgot about it within a few moments. Teddy was banging the side of the ute to move the sheep along again, in case Dog sent them back.
‘Does Dog do that every time?’ Will asked.
‘Pretty much. He’s enthusiastic but we never trained him properly. We got him not long after Dad died, he had the touch with dogs. I guess we didn’t realise how good he was until we lost him.’
‘Do you think it’ll be that way with Deirdre?’
‘Huh?’
They paused. A lamb was wandering out into the paddock after something they couldn’t see. Teddy revved the engine a bit and the animal’s head snapped up in surprise, like he hadn’t expected them to still be there.
‘Well, I know you’re close, but do you think Deirdre would have supported you if you didn’t want this?’ He pressed on. ‘What is it with Deirdre and you? I just don’t get it.’
Teddy stuck her hand out of the open window and banged on the door a couple of times to move the mob along. Then she leaned her head on her hand as if she had forgotten he was even there.
‘When I was at uni, something happened.’ She could feel herself breathing faster. Slow down, she told herself. It’s Will. She turned to him to find he was looking at her with absolute attention but as her gaze met his, he turned away and looked straight ahead.
‘Go on,’ he prompted.
‘I was seeing this guy, he seemed really nice. We hung out, had dinner, went to the movies, that sort of thing.’ Dog scented a rabbit and dashed under the fence and into the next paddock. ‘Anyway, after a while I got, I don’t know, tired of him. He was doing Commerce, I was in History. I think he was after a cute non-threatening girlfriend, which I was. But I was spending the majority of my life pretending to like stuff I had no interest in, like endless football and Top Gear. When he got stoned, we did nothing other than watch action movies. It wasn’t how I wanted to be spending my first year of freedom from school. I broke up with him. We came home from the pub one Sunday night and I thought, he’s off on a footy trip with his mates in a couple of days, this is the day to cut him loose.’
‘What happened?’
‘I sat him down and did the whole “we have to talk” thing. He cried, and then he got this mean look that sort of settled over him. And he said we should have sex one last time. I said yuk, no way, we were over as far as I was concerned.’ Teddy let the ute idle after the sheep who were ambling along in the winter sunshine.
‘And then?’
‘Well – it’s creepy, sorry – he begged me. He said I owed him that much. That if I was going to dump him I could at least . . . and it wasn’t as if we hadn’t done it before.’ She pursed her lips together. ‘I’m going to stop talking now,’ she said.
Will reached out and took her hand. ‘Please tell me what happened to you.’
Teddy sighed and blinked in the winter sunshine. The sheep were moving comfortably along, bleating and bah-ing as they went. The air was cool on her face and there was a scent of golden pollen.
‘It was different. I did it out of guilt but that quickly turned to shame, and before I knew it I was crying while we had sex. It was so degrading and hopeless. Anyway, my tears made him angry. He started swearing at me, telling me I was a slut, that he’d done me a favour, that no one would want me, that he had only ever fucked me out of pity and all his friends were going to be relieved when he was done with me. I was horrified. I tried to stop it but . . . You know where this is going. He raped me, I suppose. He held me down and punished me for leaving him. And I couldn’t get him off. I guess all the footy had made him pretty strong. I cried the whole time, then I ran back to my dorm and kept crying. I showered for a couple of hours – I just couldn’t seem to get the feel of him off me, I couldn’t get his stink out of me. I think I lost time after that, it was like
I passed out for a while.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Then it was Monday morning and I had a lecture, so I went.’
‘Geez. You went.’
‘Because I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened to me. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been so degraded and beaten. I still don’t. As I left the lecture theatre a girl I had been to high school with came over to me and said, Uhh, do you know your boyfriend is telling everyone you’re a slut who screwed half the football team at a party on the weekend?’
There were tears in Teddy’s eyes now. This was her house. He had found it, and she was letting him dig it up.
Will’s hand gripped hers tightly. He stared straight ahead. ‘What did you do?’
‘I got in my car and came home.’ She glanced at him, because he knew the next part. ‘And I never really left again.’
Teddy realised that Dog had taken the sheep up ahead on the race, and she was still paused at the gate. She turned off the engine, exhausted, and watched their woolly bodies gently bouncing into the distance and turning the corner to home.
‘Dad got sick and moved to Perth with Mum for treatment, Grandma needed me, and it slowly became my life. I didn’t tell anyone why I’d really dropped out, I just came back to help out and never left. I think people have forgotten I was ever away. And I think part of me has, too.’ Will was staring ahead at the last of the sheep as they disappeared.
‘You could still press charges against that prick,’ he said.
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to relive that time of my life. I want to get on with it.’
‘And are you?’ he asked quietly. ‘Getting on with it?’ And there he was, digging up another piece of her house.
‘Maybe not,’ she whispered. ‘I think I got stuck.’
Teddy climbed out of the cab to close the gate. He followed her out.
‘Hey, Teddy,’ he said.
She latched the gate. ‘Yeah?’
He crossed to her and pulled her to him. His arms were strong and warm and he smelled of sandalwood and pepper. He stroked her hair and breathed her in. She settled into him as if she was never going to leave. As if he was never going to leave.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he murmured into her hair.
‘Don’t say anything.’
/> ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you,’ he whispered. ‘I wish I could fix it.’
She checked over his shoulder to see how far the sheep had gone but they were out of sight, and Dog was coming back to see what was keeping her. Will gently pulled her back against him.
‘You can’t,’ she said.
‘Deirdre knows, of course?’
‘Yeah, I didn’t tell Mum and Dad because they were going through enough, and later, after he died, it seemed mean to dump it on Mum. And now, well, it’s ancient history, a buried house.’
‘So Deirdre’s been your self-appointed protector for the past few years?’
‘I guess so. She scares people off, shuts them down if they want something from me she doesn’t think I can cope with. She’s very loyal. Very strong.’
He stayed silent and held her there in the winter light for a long time until she stirred.
‘Come on,’ Teddy muttered at length. ‘They’ll almost be home by now.’ They headed back to the ute, and it rumbled to life as she turned the key. Her heart was beating too fast, fluttering nervously. She had told someone. She had told Will and now her shame was leaking out of her like smoke and floating away.
They came up over the rise which overlooked the homestead; the farm was laid out before them. It wasn’t a large property, only 1200 hectares. There were stands of trees to the south and long pale stretches of sandy soil to the west. The new wheat was emerald green, the capeweed bright yellow and the sheds and houses she knew so well were down the hill, waiting for her. It was beautiful, it was safe and it was her home. She had sheltered here when it had happened, and she could still feel the sweet relief from when she walked into her grandmother’s house to find her making tea. Home again, eh? Deirdre’d said, and she’d reached up and pulled out another cup. Teddy smiled to herself as she pulled up after the mob.
‘Hey, Teddy,’ Will said gently. ‘Do you think you could leave here one day?’
The sheep got a run on and made a dash for it up the race. There was a light thundering of hooves, like a thousand pebbles being dropped to the earth, and the sheep pressed together then unravelled and streamed apart as they surged up the next rise.
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