Season of Shadow and Light

by Jenn J. McLeod

‘It helps. Big feet means less chance of sinking.’

  ‘Is that so?’ There was that cheeky smile again. ‘I knew a guy once who tried to impress me with big feet,’ she called through the rain.

  ‘I’m glad I’m amusing you,’ Aiden returned, wanting to laugh but holding back, careful not to spook the cow any more than he already was.

  Paige hovered on the shore, her attention back on the cow, sweet-talking it to provide a distraction. In that white over-shirt, now glued to her pale blue tank top, she was certainly distracting Aiden. As the cow lurched, shifting its weight and sinking further into the muddy bank, Aiden backed off. There was no way he was going to be able to budge her by himself.

  Retreating, he waded back towards Paige.

  ‘You’re not giving up, are you?’

  ‘We need The Beast.’

  Dragging himself up the small incline and struggling on the slippery verge, mud squished into the tread on his boots and made them kilos heavier. He trod as swiftly as he could to the truck and scooted Cargo away from the toolbox on the tray-top. He flung open the lid and hauled out the sling, one of several homemade contraptions Banjo swore came in handy. The heavy chain, with a heavy-duty canvas sleeve, was perfect for towing cars, dragging fallen logs and, from time to time, dead animals.

  And live ones, if all goes to plan!

  As long as he could get the sling around the cow, they had a chance of getting her out of the creek.

  Paige called to him. ‘What are you doing with that?’

  ‘Can you drive?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s a manual.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘I take that as a yes, then. Good,’ he said.

  Rain was coming down heavier now, forcing Aiden to shout over the din as drops drummed a deafening tune on the car’s metal roof. After backing The Beast as close to the waterway as he dared, he told Paige to hop in and wait for his signal.

  ‘When I raise my arm . . .’ He demonstrated. ‘I need you to accelerate. Not too hard, not too sudden. Easy does it, okay?’ Her nod, not a skerrick of concern on the woman’s face, let another momentary glimpse from his past morph before his eyes. He shook the image away and wiped his face with his shirttail. ‘We’re going to nudge her in the right direction little bit by little bit. When she does move, the sling will at least encourage her in the right direction. That’s the plan. Can you do that?’

  ‘Of course. Stop asking me. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘First you’re going to have to help me get this sling around her rump. Careful,’ he said, nearly slipping down the bank himself.

  When they were both standing in the floodwaters and up to their knees in mud Aiden decided on a wide berth around the animal’s rear end, wading up the creek a few metres, leaving Paige holding the opposite end of the sling. All credit to her, too. Aiden at least had the good end—if there was a good end in a situation such as this. The woman was staring a terrified and unpredictable animal in the face and yet she seemed unfazed by the commotion the cow was making as it sensed Aiden at the rear. Then, working without words, he signalled for Paige to move back. For a city chick she seemed cool and in control, despite being very close to a potential Macca’s quarter pounder—only four thousand times over. The young animal might be small in cow terms, but it could still equate to a few hundred kilograms of hamburger mince.

  With the sling in place and Paige back at the truck anticipating his instructions, Aiden leaned his shoulder against the animal and waved his other arm so she would see. Banjo’s Beast groaned, the wheels losing traction on the slippery slope and sliding dangerously close to the bank. Aiden flinched. For a second there was a chance his plan might backfire and they’d find themselves, car and all, joining the cow in the creek.

  ‘Come on, ya bugger, move it.’ He grunted and gave one almighty shoulder shove.

  The cow mooed her protest, but to his relief took her first unsteady step towards freedom, followed by another. All the while, Aiden silently urged Paige to keep the truck moving just right.

  She was doing a great job—a slow, consistent crawl away from the embankment, her concentration palpable as he observed her face in the big side mirror. When Aiden called for Paige to stop and the sling dropped away from the liberated lump of loin—as he’d hoped it would do—Aiden hissed a victorious ‘Yesss!’

  ‘Oh no, is he . . . is she all right?’ Paige corrected, as the creature collapsed in a shivering heap on the embankment.

  ‘Exhaustion, maybe a bit of hyperthermia. Those little legs would be feeling a bit mushy right about now. She needs time and we need to let PJ know. At least she had the good sense to walk out of the sling. I wasn’t looking forward to retrieving that.’

  ‘Maybe she’s more intelligent than you thought.’

  ‘Unlikely. If she were smart, she wouldn’t have got in the creek in the first place. So, are you going to stand there smiling or help me out?’

  ‘Surely as an intelligent human being you can work out how to extricate yourself. I’m sure you don’t need me to help, unless those big feet of yours are like vacuums in the mud.’

  ‘Very funny. Now reach over and take my hand.’

  ‘Oh, right. Sure,’ she said. ‘I might be a city chick, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. You want me to reach over and grab your hand so you can pull me in. I watch too much TV to fall for that Hollywood cliché. Here, have this instead.’ She dragged the sling towards the edge. ‘Or you could wait while I make a call and get someone to drive out here to help you.’

  ‘Touché! Now drag the sling over the edge so I can grab it.’

  ‘If you insist. Here you . . . Arrrgh!’

  SPLAT!

  The big-eyed, wide-mouthed expression said her butt hitting the mud didn’t hurt half as much as her pride. Lucky for Aiden she laughed. He reached out a hand and together they scrambled up the bank using the towing rope, while the rain, heavier and falling in visible sheets, was enough to wash away some of the mud from their bodies.

  ‘What next?’ asked Paige.

  ‘I’d better get you back. People are going to start wondering what’s happened to us.’

  What’s happened to me? he asked himself.

  With the exception of Matt Boyle’s phone call earlier this morning, Aiden’s day had been free of the usual glut of sorry-for-himself moments, and boy it felt good, even though he knew better. What were the chances of having a smart, funny, attractive, single woman turn up in Coolabah Tree Gully? At least the lack of wedding ring suggested no serious attachment. The woman was obviously a single mother, stranded in town for a couple of days and not by choice. So what if she had a child? Aiden got on great with kids, didn’t he? He counterbalanced the sudden urge to wallow over missing three-year-old Jess by thinking on the bright side. Matilda was a cutie, and while his trust in people—make that women—remained tenuous, kids were at least honest. Too honest sometimes, if there was such a thing. And these days nothing was more important to Aiden than trust and honesty.

  Forgetting all that, the facts remained. Aiden Egan was a single bloke—also not by choice—and while his hometown’s drought might have broken, Aiden’s personal life this year had been too damn dry. Paige Turner would at least make fine fantasy fodder for tonight.

  That’s for sure!

  ‘Mummy, mummy, you’ll never guess what happened?’ Mati ran over to the truck as Aiden pulled to a stop in the rough driveway outside the cottage, the confusion on the girl’s freckled face at the sight of her mud-streaked mother clearly evident, although not enough to halt her announcement. ‘Sharni fell off a horse and she can’t walk.’

  ‘What?’ In his haste to get out of the car, Aiden hooked his leg in the seatbelt that hung loose around the door sill, tripping and cursing aloud. He’d been a klutz the entire day.

  ‘No need to panic. Sharni’s fine,’ Alice said, having caught up with her exuberant granddaughter. ‘She’s in the main house resting, although I doubt for long.
Not an easy one to keep still and quiet.’ The older woman had one hand shielding the sun from her face, her eyes darting back and forth between Paige and Aiden to make him feel like the boyfriend who’d missed curfew. ‘No damage done here,’ she reassured. ‘Yes, she fell off, but Banjo tells me she’s done that all her life and always bounces straight back into the saddle. From what I’ve seen, I believe he might be right.’

  Aiden was already en route to the main house when he heard the old lady saying, ‘Mati, while Mummy gets herself cleaned up let’s get your pills where they should be. In. That. Tummy.’

  Matilda giggled when the grandmother tickled her stomach and Paige followed on behind, calling out across the paddock, ‘Oh, and Aiden? Thank you for today. Please, let me know if I can do anything for Sharni.’

  10

  The morning sun had not long ago peeked over the mountains to the east. With the daylight hitting his back, Aiden’s shadow stretched before him, long and lean over the roughed-up earth of the horse paddock, the lack of light tinting the exposed dirt a deep russet. Standing alongside his horse, Aiden watched his cousin in the adjacent round-yard working her latest project. With only one good hand and one mud-encrusted Ugg boot—gentler on what turned out to be mild bruising to her ankle, along with a suspected wrist sprain—Sharni coerced her latest charge into trusting her. Getting the horse to this point had been a challenge, but with patience and persistence that Aiden envied, she’d managed to break the mulish mount that many locals claimed was only good for the doggers yard.

  She’d bragged about her achievements one night at the pub, telling a group of local blokes how she was both willing and very able to break their beast anytime. Aiden had laughed. Sharni could get away with saying that stuff, the halo effect in full force. Her good looks, a fusion between Irish Banjo and Honey, her Filipino mother, made for a unique and striking combination. Who knew someone as butt-ugly as Banjo could produce such a beauty? Aiden recalled the shock of seeing his pretty young cousin so worldly when he landed in town last year. On a rare trip back, years ago, he’d seen only an annoying brat everyone called Li’l Sharn. The Coolabah tradition—always—was to nickname locals: Gil got Gorilla—sometimes worse, Patrick John got PJ. Then there was Hap, the local Rural Fire Service team leader. No one knew how he’d come by that name: Haphazard? Mishap? Happy? The guy fit all three. Now here was Li’l Sharn—fully ripened, reliable and a responsible mother doing a fabulous job raising a cute-as-a-button kid, currently perched on the top rail to call his own race while whipping his thigh like a jockey on the home straight. Although no one seemed to refer to Sharni by her nickname these days, on Aiden’s first night in the pub after a twenty-year absence he was once again good ol’ Aido.

  He’d first left for the city not long after the girl he’d always thought would marry him up and left town.

  Gone, without a word.

  Women in his life seemed to do that, starting with his biological mother when he was young—too young to know or understand what had happened to make her leave a toddler behind. He’d cried a lot as a boy—first because he missed not having a mum when all the other kids had one, and later when the snipes and gossip about her sudden departure from their lives started. As soon as he was able, Aiden had left Coolabah for Brisbane, until the lure of Sydney grabbed him via a chance meeting with a café owner from Leichhardt’s Norton Street, the capital city’s Mediterranean food mecca. Subsequently, he’d spent his twenty-first birthday tossing his guts up in the disused dunny lane, one of many that criss-crossed their way through the backyards of what was once a simple working-class suburb in Sydney’s inner west. From time to time he’d call the Coolabah pub and listen to ten minutes of Banjo’s gossip, although his uncle’s regret whenever Aiden asked about Sharni’s whereabouts had been obvious over the phone. She’d got out too, until necessity forced them both to return, one by one: Sharni with a kid on the boob years ago, and Aiden more recently with his tail between his legs. Despite the age difference and her indomitable independence he and Sharni had hit it off straightaway.

  On the rare occasion his cousin asked for help with the property—usually something mechanical, or something that required brute strength—Aiden would drop by. What was once a landmark property on the outskirts of town, Nevaeh—as it was known in its heyday—was today a neglected parcel of land that Aiden would offer his last dollar to cultivate, expanding on the business concept that had been germinating in his brain since his return to Coolabah. Forgetting the business aspect, just the challenge of sprucing up something so neglected, giving it life again, appealed to Aiden. Maybe because that was how he saw himself: void of life, neglected, in need of a sprucing up. But as the place wasn’t his to do anything with he could only help keep it tidy for Sharni and safe for little Liam. Mostly he slashed paddocks while Sharni looked after the large lawn area out front where Liam played. According to the pictures on the wall of the Ladies Lounge at the pub, where there was a photo gallery of the local horse studs, Nevaeh’s front lawn was once an established rose garden. Now the compound around the house required regular work to keep it maintained and therefore safe from snakes and other nasties.

  Sharni had offered Aiden a room when he’d first arrived in town, but the place held too many bad memories. The more he visited, however, and saw Sharni working the run down place, the less he thought about the previous occupant. Or how, as a boy, he’d trod the path through the maze of fenced paddocks that separated his family property from the adjacent Nevaeh to access his favourite bit of river. Since Paige and her family had moved into the cottage, Aiden was finding reasons to visit Nevaeh, and jobs to prolong his stay. Today’s task was bagging manure. The quality of feed these horses ate made their manure top shelf and exactly what his vegetable garden needed.

  Aiden had to focus on jobs that paid; hence the extra midweek shifts over at the Calingarry Crossing pub where he’d covered for the cook’s nights off—until floodwaters prohibited him from doing so safely at night. No amount of money was worth tackling floodwaters, except sweet smelling city chicks with a soft spot for cows, it seemed.

  While his cousin seemed content to make a life for herself and Liam in their old hometown, there’d be no putting down roots for Aiden. This come home to the country gig was about refinancing a return to the life he’d been forced to leave behind as a sought-after Sydney chef at the top of his game.

  Funny, he mused. Why did that thought no longer provide the same rush? Why was the first image of healthy green shoots sprouting from rich soil in his vegetable patch so uplifting? And why, now Sharni had guests, did Aiden have a compulsion to drop in on his way to and from work?

  This morning, probably because his only decent jeans were soaking in a tub, his once white runners along with them, he’d rescued his father’s old workbooks from the myriad boxes stacked in the back shed on the farm Aiden once called home. Right now the dilapidated shed served as a roof over his head—at least the mould-scented caravan attached to it did, helping him escape Eamon’s constant criticism. With no interest in making the quarters more liveable, Aiden chose to make do. Should his brother decide to show a little more hospitality, agree to extend the small corner of the property to allow Aiden to grow more vegetables, or even entertain discussions about new meats trending, Aiden had no intention of getting attached to the place, or to life in this town.

  ‘Hey there, cowboy.’ Aiden wandered over and plucked Liam off the top railing of the fence. ‘The view’s safer and no different from down here.’

  Aiden gave the boy a gentle poke in the ribs and Liam’s squeal earned both of them a glower from Sharni as she soothed the startled stallion. Aiden gaped at Liam, opened his mouth in an ‘Um-ah, you’re in trouble’ kind of way then . . . Phuff! He ejected a mouthful of spittle, jettisoning the opportunistic fly that buzzed his lips.

  ‘You’re funny, Uncle Aiden,’ Liam giggled before trotting off to be nearer his mother.

  Funny or not, Aiden wasn’t cut out for fatherhood
. He’d made a terrible father to Jess. Far too cautious, apparently, and not only with three year olds. His over-protectiveness not only smothered Jess, he was also suffocating Rene. According to her, Aiden held on too tight. While he could explain his need to cling was the result of losing so much in his youth, what he failed to grasp at the time was that Jess wasn’t really his to hold. As the arguments and accusations escalated, Rene would lash out at Aiden, critical of things he did and things he didn’t do. Aiden had tried to keep up until overnight, or so it seemed, she’d become impossible to please, picking on him as if deliberately goading him into a fight. One day, even more suddenly than it had started, the arguing stopped. Aiden should have clicked then. With the clues clinging to every criticism as obvious as coconut on rum balls, he should have known something was wrong.

  Twelve months later, with the worst period of his life still haunting him, Aiden’s hurt too easily morphed into rage. ‘So she screwed you in more ways than one, mate,’ someone had said in a Sydney bar one night. When Aiden had wanted to punch the guy who said it, he decided to add anger management to his growing list of issues and take time out in the country.

  The day Rene vanished, so did everything else: the money they’d saved, the future they’d planned, the family they’d created together with young Jess. And, last but not least, she’d taken away his trust, leaving Aiden with only one option, the start-over plan simple enough . . .

  Two words.

  Toughen up.

  The same two words he’d heard repeatedly in the old days, whenever looking for sympathy and understanding from tough chick Rory.

  ‘Toughen up, princess’ she’d tell him when he was picked on at school.

  Little had Aiden realised then how often the rigours of commercial kitchens would have him chanting Rory’s diktat over and over in his head. He did toughen up, building a solid reputation in an industry that gobbled up the weak. But he’d had to work hard, party hard and walk the talk, all in an attempt to fit in. He even got himself inked: his shoulder, back and thigh. He maintained a veneer of the hard-nosed professional until meeting Rene when she and little Jess managed to sucker-punch his heart.