Big Sky

by Melaina Faranda

  Right now, this was my world, and there were people to meet, and a muster to organise. Not bothering to dry off, I wrestled the jeans over my wet legs and tugged my singlet on, then swung up onto Blue Dreamer and galloped home.

  Dan was standing at the horse paddock gate. The way he was leaning against the gatepost and watching me beneath the brim of his Stetson sent a thrum through my body that wasn’t just from gripping tight to Blue Dreamer’s flanks. The Stetson had a quirky bash in it – brim pulled up at the front and lower at the back. Since meeting Gran, he’d tucked a miniature Aboriginal flag with its red and black stripes and yellow sun centre into the plaited leather band. Good on him.

  As I slid off Blue Dreamer’s back, Dan crouched in front of my horse and rubbed his chest. Dad reckoned I’d spoiled Blue Dreamer for anyone else, but now he was nickering and butting up against Dan.

  ‘This is Blue Dreamer,’ I said, but Dan didn’t seem to be listening. Instead, he put his mouth level with Blue Dreamer’s muzzle. They stood like that, absolutely still, breathing in each other’s breath until, feeling as if I was eavesdropping on a private conversation, I coughed.

  Dan straightened.

  Normally, Blue Dreamer would shy at this sudden movement from another human, but he remained still.

  ‘How’d you name him?’

  ‘You know how horses have their own personalities.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Even when he was a foal, Blue Dreamer always had his head in the clouds.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘What do you mean? I was born on this station. I can keep up with the best of them.’

  He backed away, holding his hands out as if to reassure a cranky heifer. ‘I only meant that you seem to have this other side. Not like most girls. You’re . . . kind of wild.’

  I frowned. ‘I grew up here. Always had the run of the place. I like to be free.’

  There was a flash of that gorgeous slightly crooked smile before Dan dropped his gaze beneath the Stetson. ‘I can see that.’

  I flushed. Despite the scorching ride back from the river, my clothes were still damp. My singlet clung in a manner that was not a good look for a boss. And that was what I was going to have to be – a boss, not all skittish and nervy like a filly just because a hot young stockman was in my team.

  I swung myself over the gate and landed in fresh pile of horse dung. Nice. Elegant. Sophisticated and in control. I felt like a rodeo clown.

  Dan pulled the Stetson further down his forehead, but it didn’t hide his smile.

  Ignoring Blue Dreamer’s plaintive whinny, I high-tailed it back to the big house to change for dinner.

  It was a tradition at Bundwarra that everyone on the station shared Saturday dinner at the big house. It was a grand affair, with a whole side of beef from a killer steer that had been shot, butchered and boned by Dad, and potatoes, pumpkin and sweet potatoes from Gran’s vegetable garden – the works.

  Gran served it all on a long table draped with a starched white tablecloth and set with the family silver her mother had brought out from Scotland. We could almost have been in early twentieth century Scotland if it wasn’t for the blistering heat, the wallabies silently attempting to demolish a hibiscus shrub in the yard and the creak and slap of the screen door as people straggled in from the bunkhouse, clumping along in their brand new boots. And beyond the house, the bare, bone-dry limestone ridge instead of deer grazing purple heather beneath snow-capped mountains . . .

  For Gran’s Saturday dinner, ringers changed into their best: basically a buttoned-up checked shirt and clean trousers. Tonight, however, all the men except Dad wore jeans and T-shirts.

  The slogan on one T-shirt read: Save Bondi’s Blue Gropers, above a picture of a bulbous-eyed fish. I guessed it belonged to the actor from Sydney – Jonathan. A sole diamond ear stud gleamed. Bleached teeth, smooth skin, shiny hair pulled back into a micro ponytail. It was hard to tell his age because he seemed super-real, like a thirty-year-old actor playing an eighteen-year-old character in a bad frat movie. Jonathan started tucking in before Gran said grace. I pinned him as a brumby – a bit feral, with bite.

  As Gran continued thanking God for everything from the amount of chook eggs she’d found today, the weather forecast, my homecoming, right on down to the wonders of satellite internet, Jonathan rolled his eyes. He caught my stare and winked.

  Definitely a brumby.

  Across the table the German couple kept their heads bowed. Elise looked reliable – handsome, mouse-coloured hair, square built, methodically chewing her beef.

  A big, dependable, Clydesdale.

  Franz was short and thin with spiky, mad-scientist hair. He had a way of jerking his fork in the air while he talked to the actor – definitely more energetic than Elise.

  Perhaps a Timor pony.

  As for Dan, there was something quiet and knowing and still about him. If it weren’t for his fine features, I’d have picked him for an Australian stock horse: stable, calm, bred for the terrain and good at endurance. He had the wiry build of a ringer and I’d bet my All-Around Cowgirl buckle that the inside of his calves had the hair rubbed off from riding horses all day.

  I didn’t join the dinner conversation. Instead I watched and listened, just as I would with a mob of cattle, getting the feel of them. Getting a feel for myself as their boss. I’d only ever been a ringer before, grumbling at Damien’s orders or riding alongside Dad. This was the first time I would have total control. The muster was up to me – if anything went wrong it was on my head.

  Franz was a computer programmer from Munich and he and Gran struck up an animated chat about gigabytes and download capacities. Elise sat quietly beside him, occasionally nodding and adding ‘Yah’ as Franz turned to her for confirmation of something he’d just said.

  ‘Are you into computers?’ I asked.

  Elise laughed. ‘No. I am not technical.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I work with – how you say it? Kinder?’

  ‘Kinder – you mean kids?’

  Elise nodded and held out a stubby, square-fingered hand to indicate small children.

  ‘How did you guys meet?’

  Her pale cheeks turned a fine pink. ‘A friend finds me Franz on the internet.’

  ‘No way!’

  She nodded. ‘We see and it was the same for both.’ She smiled and her cheeks bunched up. ‘In the eyes.’

  Over the course of the conversation, I gathered that Elise had been raised on a small dairy farm and had learned to ride horses with her father when he herded cattle in the mountains over summer. Franz had been trained at some posh riding school in Munich.

  At the other end of the table, Jonathan was entertaining Dad with a story about his time on the set of an ABC convict drama. ‘And they could see I had natural talent so they got me to jump from one horse to another while they were racing and then the stagecoach – a bit of old crap they’d spray-painted in props – exploded and I had to stop the horse from falling with it and —’ ‘Is that where you learned to ride?’ I interrupted.

  He nodded, his eyes sparkling and the earring glinting.

  Everything about him seemed shiny and larger than life.

  ‘It’s where I learned to waltz too,’ he added. ‘And how to wear garters and powder my wig and avoid being speared by the natives.’

  Dad roared with laughter. I chuckled, swept up by his infectious ‘haw, haw, haw’.

  Dan laid his knife and fork together. There was a flash of something in his tawny eyes. Anger? Jealousy? He excused himself from the table quietly.

  The screen door didn’t bang. Outside, I heard the night horse whinny, as if in welcome.

  FOUR

  A massive bull bore down on me, galloping at full speed. I had that stuck-in-the-mud feeling, like I was moving in slow motion and was never going to get out of the way. The beast’s eyes glittered red. A diamond glinted in its ear. I was clutching a square of cloth, just like matadors used in the bu
llrings in Spain, only instead of being red, it was an Aboriginal flag. I swirled the flag and stepped to the side. At the same moment I stumbled on a rock and lost my footing. I fell. The bull roared . . .

  I woke sweating. The gritty sheet was twisted around my legs and I had pins and needles. A deafening drone overhead shook me into wakefulness. I threw on Damien’s old ‘Whip it good’ T-shirt and pulled on my jeans then raced, barefoot, out through the house.

  A plane circled low in the sky. It wasn’t the sort of plane I was used to seeing fly over Bundwarra – they were usually ancient beaten-up Cessnas. This plane was sleek and new and . . . didn’t belong. The mail plane wouldn’t be here until next week and people didn’t just ‘drop in’ at the start of mustering season – so who was it?

  Dad must have wondered the same thing, because I heard the thump of crutches as he dragged himself across the verandah.

  The plane circled hesitantly then taxied in on the dirt runway behind the feed sheds.

  Ignoring the sharp stones digging into the soles of my city-softened feet, I raced over to the runway as the plane slowed to a stop.

  The door opened.

  Aria’s face appeared at the doorway. For a moment she looked lost. Then, spotting me, she squealed and pelted down the steps and across the dirt. She threw herself at me, squeezing the air out of my chest and jumping up and down shrieking, ‘Omigod! Omigod!’

  I laughed, and sneezed from a nose full of the expensive perfume her father had bought for her from a Parisian parfumerie on one of his business trips.

  ‘It’s so hot here. What do you do to cool down?’ Aria demanded. ‘It’s raining back in Perth.’

  I disentangled myself and stepped back.

  Aria’s sleek black hair fell in a perfect line across her shoulders and she wore a bright pink dress with thin straps that looked deceptively simple, but which I knew had cost over five hundred dollars. The matching pink sandals with gold buckles had cost twice that.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Aria’s smile faded.

  I wanted to stuff my fist in my big mouth. My best friend had just travelled thousands of kilometres to see me! ‘I’m sorry. It’s such a surprise.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Aria squealed. ‘I planned it all with your gran, without you knowing.’

  ‘What? With Gran? How?’

  Aria rolled her eyes. ‘And you thought all that time I was texting some guy.’

  ‘I — But — I.’

  Aria jumped up and down. ‘You did, didn’t you? I had you totally fooled. I was emailing your gran from my phone.’ She gestured back to the plane where the pilot was helping to unload one, two, three, four designer suitcases. ‘Daddy let me come here in his jet.’

  ‘But what about the party?’

  ‘Cancelled it,’ Aria said flatly, ‘There’ll be other parties and it wasn’t going to be the same without you.’

  I felt the prick of tears and wiped them from my eyes. Before Aria and St Anne’s, I’d never had a best friend. If I didn’t count Blue Dreamer. This was amazing. But how was Aria going to manage alone with my father and grandmother while I was out on the muster? She’d be bored stupid after three hours. There was no mobile reception, and crappy TV, and, by the sounds of it, Gran would be hogging the internet. ‘What will you do while I’m out on the muster?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Aria exclaimed. ‘I’m coming with you. I’m here to help.’

  I crouched and pretended to pull a pebble from between my toes to hide my face. I knew Aria could ride – but that was prissy pony club-style not rough-and-tumble camp draft. It would be weird giving her orders. That wasn’t how our relationship worked. At school she was Alpha Gal and I was Sidekick Skye.

  ‘I’m going to be camp cook,’ Aria announced.

  My jaw nearly hit the ground.

  ‘What?’ Aria demanded.

  ‘Since when did you know how to cook?’ At boarding school we were served all our meals – endless stodgy pasta, iceberg lettuce and unripe tomato salads drowned in Kraft dressing. At Aria’s mansion in Nedlands, Rosita, their Filipina maid, did the cooking.

  Aria shrugged. The straps of her dress rose to expose perfect spray-tanned skin. Even when she was being exasperating she looked good. ‘How hard can it be, Skye? I did Food Tech in Year 9.’

  Where we learned how to cook microwaved cheesy spinach pasta and prepare parfaits. Cooking for hungry ringers in a camp oven over an open fire was just a teensy bit different . . .

  Aria added, ‘And I bought a copy of Gourmet Traveller to read on the plane.’ She looked around with a bright, critical gaze. ‘It’s so . . . basic out here. I’d kind of pictured something a bit . . .’

  ‘A bit what?’ I hefted up two ginormous suitcases.

  ‘Different,’ Aria said. ‘Sort of grander – like one of those ranches in America – you always made it sound really cool.’ I deliberately dragged Aria’s largest suitcase across the rocky ground.

  ‘When are we leaving for the muster?’ Aria asked.

  ‘Tomorrow. At dawn.’

  Aria trotted beside me with the two smallest suitcases. ‘Any cute cowboys coming along for the ride?’

  I thought about Dan and my heart gave a horrible squeeze. Aria got every guy she ever wanted. And every guy she didn’t want. All she had to do was widen those big dark eyes and click her fingers. I scuffed a fierce red patch in the dirt with my big toe. She’d just better not do that to Dan.

  I pushed open the gate to the yard of the big house.

  ‘Oh! Look at this old place. It’s so . . .’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Um, you know, kind of old and um . . . I like the um . . .’ Biting my lip, I led her onto the verandah and through the house, straight to Damien’s room.

  Dusty trophies and belt buckles crowded the top of Damien’s chest of drawers. A grey army blanket was folded on the end of his bed and a collection of mounted steers’ horns lined two walls. The room smelled of stale beer, cow horns and old boots.

  ‘It’s so —’

  I cut in, ‘I’ll let you unpack.’ Pointing to the flyscreen windows I added, ‘Air conditioning.’

  I bailed up Gran in the kitchen where she was overseeing the rising of a Kununurra Agricultural Show prize-winning sponge cake.

  ‘Don’t you think you should have asked me before you invited Aria up for the muster?’

  Gran continued to whisk cream in one of the yellowing ceramic bowls she’d had for as long as I could remember. ‘Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise.’

  ‘But that’s the point!’ I snapped. ‘It’s enough of a surprise that I’m going to have to lead an inexperienced team. So far, apart from me and Dan, there are the German WWOOF-people and a method actor.’

  ‘Then you should be pleased that your friend is joining you,’ Gran said crisply. ‘She told me she’s been riding for years. Girls are always better working the yards – they’re less volatile, calmer with the animals.’

  ‘You could at least have asked me,’ I grumbled, taking a swipe of cream from the bowl. ‘Aria’s a city girl.’

  Gran batted me away with the spatula as I dived in for another dollop. ‘She’s prepared to work for free.’

  FIVE

  ‘Ta da! What do you think?’

  I forced a smile. ‘Where did you get the shirt?’

  Aria shrugged and frowned, trying to remember.

  I reached behind her and pulled the dangling price tag off the collar just beneath the ridiculous red scarf knotted around her neck. Pure linen: a bargain at $349.99

  .

  I already knew that the jeans were from some swanky winter collection. They hung so low I could see the dimples on either side of her tailbone.

  As for the boots . . . a pair of Italian leather cherry red knee-highs with hooks and eyelets up the side. No. No. Definitely no.

  ‘Aria, you can’t wear those boots. They’re going to get trashed.’

  Aria shrugged. ‘That’s co
ol. I’ll get some new ones when I’m back in Perth.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. Those boots might be dangerous. What if you get hung up?’

  Aria’s celebrity-shaped eyebrows arched.

  I sighed and folded my arms across my checked blue flannel shirt. We hadn’t even left the station yet . . . ‘Being hung up is when you get your foot caught in the stirrup and the horse drags you.’

  Aria mimicked her mother in the drawling fake-English aristocrat voice that usually cracked me up. ‘We must all make sacrifices to look fabulous, Darling.’

  ‘Where are the rhinestones and shoulder tassels?’

  ‘It would have to be diamonds,’ Aria said. ‘Daddy’s talking about acquiring a diamond mine.’

  Any ringer would have laughed at Aria, not with her – she was the classic city slicker slumming it in big country with designer cowgirl gear and an immaculate hat so new I could still smell the shop on it. But there weren’t any real stockmen on the muster – only Dan. My gut tightened, leaving a gap between my belly and belt. I’d yet to meet the male who could resist Aria’s perfect, petite figure, huge eyes and rippling laugh . . .

  My worn jeans, yellowing at the knees, and Damien’s oversized shirt weren’t exactly flattering, but they were practical – the jeans had give and wouldn’t rub me raw, and the hugeness of Damien’s shirt would give better ventilation to make my ride cooler. Still, Aria looked like a model on a country and western shoot. Her pristine white linen shirt was cinched in with an alligator skin belt and the sleeves were rolled to reveal the delicate gold bracelet her parents had bought her back from their latest trip to Hong Kong.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to go catch me a cute cowboy.’

  The power plant was on and the CD player blared in the common area to drown out the persistent thrum of the generators. There was no other source of power on Bundwarra and although the power plant had been baffled, it could get on the nerves of newcomers unaccustomed to the noise.

  Elise, Franz and Jonathan sat at a table Dad had knocked up from a door and old packing crates, chatting about sailing around Sydney Harbour. Dan wasn’t in sight.