Bev sighed. ‘You have the bloody possum. Just put it on the bonnet. I don’t want it in the tray with my groceries.’
Out on the road, in the blustery cold, Sadie picked up the wet possum by its bushy tail and laid it on the ute at the base of the windscreen.
‘Waste not, want not,’ she said cheerfully as she got back in, smiling at Beverly, who only shoved the gear stick into first and ground her dentures in frustration as she drove on.
As Sadie stared through the windscreen over the body of the possum, she recalled Muppet Man saying something about ‘surrounding yourself with positive people who support you’. She thought of all the times Beverly had berated her, belittled her, silenced her, just as Bryan had done. A small voice in her head became louder and clearer. It told her she deserved better.
‘If you don’t mind, Bev,’ Sadie said, as they neared the turn-off to Edenville, ‘you can just drop me at the corner. I’d like to walk the road home, alone.’
‘Walk? You? You’ll chafe your inner thighs again. Remember that time you and Bryan broke down and he sent you to get help? I had to lend you my 3B cream for the rash.’
‘Just stop!’
As Sadie got out onto the wintry gravel road, Beverly cast her a stinging look. ‘Lucky you’re not wearing those new fancy new shoes with the heels. You’d break a leg and we’d have to put you down.’
‘Oh, I think you’ve already done that enough, Bev,’ Sadie said, as she slammed the ute door and grabbed the possum from the bonnet. She lifted it to wave Bev away, then pulled the iPod earphones from her handbag and shoved them in her ears. Muttering, she clicked on ‘The Serenity Journey’, gathered up her shopping bags in one hand and her relatively fresh roadkill in the other, and walked on.
As she listened to the music and birdsong meditation, she took in the brightness of the winter sunshine and the way the grasses shone wet from the scudding showers that had earlier blasted their way across the mountainside. At the turn of the road she saw the vista of the valley below and stopped to draw in a deep breath.
‘Eden,’ she said in amazement. She had grown up here, but it was as if she had never truly seen it before. Today she saw the way the paddocks rolled greenly to the fringes of deep rugged bushland, saw how the creeks carved silver veins through the landscape. Far off in the distance she could hear Michael barking from his chain by the porch, as if guiding her home.
She set out down the hill, feeling uncomfortable at having to walk past the racing stables owned by the rich townies. She and Bryan had nothing to do with them, even though they were neighbours. They had bought the land for a huge price some forty years before and had proceeded to put up white fences and stock the place with sleek horses. Bryan still saw them as intruders and outsiders. He always instructed Sadie to avert her eyes when driving past in summer, because the girls and young men who worked the horses barely wore any clothes on their cinnamon-tanned bodies. On beautiful sunny days, Sadie sometimes peeked at the girls in bikini tops out feeding the horses, and the men who sometimes rode shirtless with just their chest protectors on, looking like gladiators.
No one was about today, save for some curious horses in their paddock by the road that trotted over to say hello. Sadie savoured the beauty of their shining dark eyes and healthy coats. She had never noticed just how heavenly horses were and she stood looking at them for a time, taking in their very essence.
With the iPod still playing, Sadie didn’t hear the clip-clopping on the road until a man on a horse was almost beside her. She looked up, startled, and was instantly struck by his handsomeness. Like his horse, the young man was incredibly fit and beautiful. Lean yet muscular with chiselled features, he cast her a dazzling smile.
‘Did you run over that?’
‘What?’ said Sadie, pulling out the earphones.
Still holding the reins of the jittery thoroughbred, he inclined his helmet-covered head towards the possum. ‘Did you run over that? You must be a fast runner.’
Sadie laughed. ‘It’s for my dogs.’
‘Lucky dogs. I’m Michael, by the way,’ he said, steadying the horse as it danced on silver-shod hooves.
‘Same name as my dog,’ she laughed.
‘Is he a naughty boy like me?’ Michael’s eyes twinkled.
‘You don’t look like a naughty boy,’ Sadie said. If she’d had a son, she would’ve wanted him to look like this boy. His blue eyes were kind, and crinkled at the corners, and his skin glowed from outdoor activity.
‘You live on the place next door, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And your dad died a little while back, didn’t he?’
‘Not my dad, my husband.’ It wasn’t the first time she’d been mistaken for Bryan’s daughter.
‘Oh? I see. I’m sorry.’ Michael considered her again. ‘So, what’s your name?’
‘Sadie.’
‘Sadie? As in Sadie the cleaning lady?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, are you offering?’ Sadie looked puzzled. ‘Offering to clean, I mean.’
Sadie set down her possum, her parcels and her shopping and thought for a moment. On impulse she heard herself saying, ‘Well, I could be after a job. Do you have one?’
‘Leave it with me, Sadie the cleaning lady. I’ll ask the boss. We sure could do with some help.’
At this point, the highly strung filly lost her patience and, instead of merely fidgeting with the bit in her mouth, began to paw the ground and swing about.
‘Settle, petal!’ Michael said to the horse, before squeezing her on, then calling back over his shoulder, ‘Gotta go! But come back tomorrow, Sadie, my sweet.’
Sadie, my sweet? Sadie felt blood rush to her cheeks. What a lovely young man. His mother would be so proud of him.
‘Don’t forget to take your possum,’ she heard him call again.
Thoughtful too, she decided happily, as she began to walk the last few kilometres home.
At the woodshed, Sadie set the possum on the block and raised the axe. The little claws fell away easily with her expert chop. She bent to retrieve them, throwing them into the forty-four-gallon drum so the dogs couldn’t eat them. As she picked up the knife, she noticed the possum’s soft fur of mottled grey, black and brown and thought how beautiful it was. She had never thought of a possum as beautiful before and surprised herself by hearing the voice in her head blessing the life of the possum.
Flipping the stiff carcass on its back, Sadie was about to slice it up the middle to gut it when she noticed a tiny tail sticking out from a pouch. She frowned. When she pulled on the tail, out came a baby possum that was so small she could cup it in one hand. It had huge brown eyes and a pretty little pink nose. It was just starting to grow fur. Sadie could feel the feebleness of its life and its little feather breaths on her palm.
Before she knew it she found herself slumped down on the wet cold grass, her head bowed, the baby cradled in her hands as if she were taking communion. She stared at the possum and, as she did, she felt the last gasp of life leave its body and saw the light fade from its eyes. As she clutched the baby possum to her breast, she heard herself moan with anguish, a deep, pain-drenched cry. It set the dogs howling.
She scrunched her eyes shut, and the memory of the humiliation of Bryan’s rough grope at her crotch with his cruel hands came flooding back.
‘C’mon, show me your fanny, woman,’ she heard him say. She remembered the way he had shoved into her in the middle of the night like a boar, then rolled off her and snored back to sleep. She recalled how the terrible stomach cramps had begun on the eve of her twenty-first birthday. Then, in the night, she’d gone to the toilet and a dark bloody thing had slithered out from between her legs onto the bathroom floor. The baby had looked more possum than human.
Bryan hadn’t taken her to the doctor. He’d simply torn up old bed sheets for her to jam between her legs. The next morning, she’d watched from the bedroom window as he’d taken the baby in a chaff sack and b
uried it beneath a cold moaning pine in the front paddock. For weeks after, Sadie dreamt of the pigs digging up the sack and gobbling the baby down. Then she’d wake up crying, hating the pigs. Hating Bryan. Hating life.
‘Turning on the tears to get attention, are ya?’ Bryan had said to her, a week after it happened. ‘For Christ’s sake, give it a rest, you stupid woman.’
From that day on, Sadie Smith’s heart shut down and she had never cried again.
But here she was now, out by the woodshed, awash with grief. Crying for the baby beneath the pine and her other children never born. For the wasted years when she was closed off, unconscious to the beauty around her and the power within her.
Sadie cried and kept on crying until the cockatoos began to roost for the night, high above her in the big old gum tree. When at last she was stiff with cold, Michael came to her and licked her face. She smiled at the little dog and hauled herself up.
With a shovel, in the dark, she trudged to the pine tree and buried the possum and its baby near where her child lay. Then she went inside and stoked the fire. Michael settled down on the fireside mat as Sadie put on her iPod, shut her eyes and let the sound of rain wash clean through her.
The summer heat at the stables was so intense that black spiders fell dead from the tin roof onto the concrete, prompting Sadie’s workmate, Tania, to scream from time to time as she mucked out the stables. The other stable staff worked through their jobs listlessly and sprayed themselves more than the racehorses in the wash bay. At lunchtime they took to the shade of a twisted willow on the lawn beside the smoko room. There they lolled like overheated lionesses. Sadie lounged with them, while Michael the dog panted by her side.
Sadie’s hair, longer now, was tied up in a mass of thick rich brown curls, and her legs, no longer hidden under long baggy clothes, were honey-tanned and smooth from Tania’s recent waxing. For the past eight months, with encouragement from the girls, Sadie had walked to and from work, and she could now fit into her new size 14 Wild Child shorts. She tugged them down over her Rembrandt thighs as she stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ mumbled Sally from where she lay on the grass in her red bikini top.
‘The saddle blankets.’ Sadie pointed to the stiff squares on the fence railing. ‘They’re dry. Cooked even.’
‘Sadie,’ groaned Sally. ‘Stop working! Just relax. It’s too hot to do anything.’
‘But I’m not done for the day,’ she said.
‘Yes, you are,’ Steph said. ‘You’re a workaholic. You put us all to shame!’
Sadie sat back down. Sally and Steph were right. Today was not the day to do much of anything.
‘And for God’s sake, Sadie, take that shirt off. You make me feel even hotter just looking at you,’ came Tania’s sleepy voice as she rolled over, revealing her own tanned torso beneath her skimpy singlet.
‘But …’
‘Off!’
Reluctantly Sadie pulled off her shapeless man’s work shirt. Underneath, she wore a new Western Wear black singlet that read, in hot pink, ‘In your Buckin’ Dreams’. Steph wolf-whistled.
‘Michael’s going to faint when he sees your knockers out on display. They are something to behold.’
‘Cripes,’ Sally said. ‘You should get ’em out more often, Sadie. I would if I had ’em. Not like these two little pimples.’
Sadie looked down at herself and giggled. With no Bryan to demand chops for breakfast, roast for lunch and casseroles and dessert for dinner, Sadie had rediscovered her waist and beneath the fat she found a body already nicely toned from farm work. She resisted the self-conscious urge to put her top back on when she heard a diesel engine announcing Michael’s return from his beer run to town. Beauty comes from within, she told herself as she hoisted up her bra strap.
They all cheered as Michael came around the corner with bags of groceries, an esky and a box perched precariously on top of it.
‘Snags, beer, munchies! It’s party time!’ He waved the box at Sadie. ‘This was at the post office for you.’
Sadie sat up, frowning.
‘But I didn’t order nothing.’
There had been no more mystery parcels since the iPod and mirror had arrived months before. Every day Sadie was grateful for the original mistake. Every day, she did her morning affirmations in the mirror and her milking meditation with Mavis. The iPod now also held a special ‘Sadie mix’ of new music downloaded for her by the girls. Music even sexier than Tom Jones.
She’d thought the days of surprise packages were over. But here was another one with no return address and the very same label.
‘Go on. Open it!’ Tania urged.
Sadie tore off the brown packaging to reveal a box featuring a picture of a buffed half-naked cowboy with washboard stomach.
Michael, Steph, Sally and Tania whooped and laughed.
Puzzled, Sadie looked from them to the box. ‘What is it?’
‘What is it?’ Steph said, and the rest of them fell about laughing. ‘Oh, come on. You ordered it!’
‘No, I didn’t. But what is it?’
‘Oh, geez, Sadie, what planet are you from?’ said Michael. ‘It’s a blow-up doll! You know … a jiggy-jig doll.’
‘A what? What’s it for?’
That set them off on another round of spluttering hysterics. Eventually, Michael wiped away his tears, and looked sympathetically at Sadie.
‘Give him to me.’
Words failed Sadie as Michael dragged out what looked like a deflated mannequin wearing cowboy chaps and not much else. He began to blow it up, while Sally read out the print on the side of the box.
‘Hold on, cowgirls, ’cause here’s a cowboy that’s good to ride. Enjoy hours of galloping pleasure from this lifelike inflatable adult toy, with attachments. Batteries not included.’
‘Batteries! Quick! I’ll get some batteries!’ Steph said, leaping up and dashing inside the smoko room.
‘She’s not going to use him now, Steph!’ called Tania. ‘At least I hope you’re not, Sadie.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘It says lifelike,’ Sally said, holding the inflated doll up next to Michael and frowning. ‘I suppose he looks more real than you,’ she teased.
‘You’ll never know,’ Michael teased back.
‘But what’s it for?’ Sadie asked again.
‘You seriously don’t know?’ Sally said. ‘Oh, Sadie, you poor darling.’
‘Wait, we haven’t got out the attachments,’ Michael said with a grin. ‘Then the penny should drop for our sweet Sadie.’
Tipsy on beer and high on life, Sadie dragged Eddie out of the water and threw him on his back. His inflated, digitless limbs pointed to the early evening sky.
‘The stars, eh, Eddie, my love! You want me to look at the stars? Oh, you’re a romantic bugger,’ Sadie said, laughing as she stared into the doll’s vacant eyes. She turned to see the giant yellow disc of a full moon rising up over the mountain and casting golden ripples on the dam’s dark surface.
To the west, the sun had sunk behind the mountain range so that the sky there also shone gold, punctuated by a bright evening star. Sadie felt the day’s heat still radiating from the soil beneath her bare feet, and the droplets of dam water on her skin made her whole body tingle. She sucked in a breath. It felt so good to be alive at this very moment. She reached out to hold Eddie’s squashy stump of a hand.
‘Oh, Eddie,’ she sighed. She rolled over onto her stomach and eyed the picnic blanket that was scattered with the remains of their summer feast. There was a ravaged platter of strawberries, raspberries, cherries and blackberries, all gathered from her garden, and the remains of their feast of home-cooked chook, crisp snowpeas, and freshly baked bread rolls smeared with handmade butter. She picked up a strawberry and offered it to Eddie.
‘Not hungry?’ Sadie popped the ripe fruit in her mouth, the sweet juices exploding on her tongue. ‘More for me.’
‘Hey, you two!’ Michael shouted from the dam.
‘Come back in!’
Sadie smiled as she watched Steph with Sally on her shoulders. With a powerful leap, Steph tossed Sally up high so she speared the air with flailing limbs and shrieks before hitting the water, sending up a fountain of spray. Screams, laughter and shouts rang out across the water. Michael called to Sadie again.
‘Give me back Eddie! I need him to float on so I can drink my beer!’
Sadie watched as Michael came out of the water, wearing only his shorts. His tanned torso gleamed wet in the moonlight.
‘C’mon, Sadie,’ he said. ‘We want Eddie.’
‘But I want him.’
Michael dropped down next to her, his broad smooth chest rising and falling with each breath.
‘I’ll get jealous,’ he teased.
‘But a handsome young blow-up boy is just what’s been missing from my life,’ Sadie joked.
‘Is it now?’ Michael said, his voice deeper and more serious. ‘Do you actually know how to use him?’
‘Ah, well, no, not really. But I’m sure he’ll have instructions.’
‘Why bother, when you can have the real thing?’ Sadie jumped with pleasant surprise as Michael’s hand gently brushed her thigh. He leant towards her. ‘Perhaps later, I could help you with the instructions. But really, why use him when you could find out how a real cowboy rides? Sadie, I’m offering.’
Sadie bit her lip. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because I like you … and it would be fun.’
Sadie glanced at his beautiful young face. He was looking earnestly at her. A million questions raced in her head. Was he really being serious or simply teasing her? A hundred doubts, a hundred fears rushed in at her. The old Sadie began ranting at her about her ugliness, her fatness, her uselessness, the sin of it.
But there in the moonlight with her new friends around her, she managed to silence the voice that tried to drag her down. Be in the moment, she heard the calm voice of the new Sadie say. Live life to the full. Live for now. And don’t let your fears stop you. Life is not meant to be so serious.
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 13