Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  What the hell had happened?

  I switched on the television news and saw images of Sydney Harbour Bridge enveloped in a red haze so thick it was impossible to see from one side to the other.

  ‘Some Sydney residents are reporting birds falling out of the sky, with reduced visibility across the city and widespread disruption to travel. The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe weather warning for damaging winds in Sydney and across parts of New South Wales,’ said the presenter. ‘Just to recap on this morning’s news, residents of Sydney have woken to what some have described as a “Red Dawn”, a dust storm so vast it can be seen from space. The huge storm travelled overnight, at speeds of up to 100 kilometres an hour, reducing visibility across the city and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and ferries. The choking clouds of dust have wreaked havoc across much of the state.’

  The only good thing about the storm was the shut down of all major construction work. For once the house next door would be silent.

  Later that morning a friend sent me a link to a video clip on YouTube. It had been taken the day before, in mid-afternoon, and I watched a shaky camera film red sky and rooftops, not dissimilar to the sky I’d seen that morning in Sydney. Moments later a cloud of dust rolled across the screen and it darkened, turning black so quickly I thought the person filming must have dropped the camera. The only indication they hadn’t was the soundtrack. ‘Oh wow. Shit, that’s black. We’d better go inside.’

  The video clip had been taken in Broken Hill.

  The CSIRO estimated sixteen million tonnes of dust had been picked up from the deserts of central Australia and swept towards the sea. The dust reached as far as New Zealand. The storm had travelled at over 100 kilometres an hour and it slammed into Broken Hill before anyone could prepare for it. People were stranded in their cars and electricity to the entire town was cut.

  I rang CC, heart thudding as I waited for him to pick up.

  ‘I saw a video clip of the dust storm. Are you OK?’

  ‘We’ll live.’

  ‘I was worried about you.’

  His voice softened. ‘I heard it was bad in Sydney as well.’

  ‘At least we could still see.’

  ‘The worst of it’s over. The aircraft were grounded and there’s a lot of clearing up to be done but it was only dust.’

  ‘That was a lot of dust.’

  ‘It’s the graziers I feel sorry for.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘People on properties have been doing it tough. The drought’s been with them ten years now and that dust storm was the last straw. What sheep they had left were struggling anyway, and sand from a storm that big gets caught in their wool. Some of them just keel over with the weight of it and they can’t get up again. They get buried alive. Those that do survive will be impossible to shear. The dust blunts the shears. Hang on a sec –’

  CC put his hand over the mouthpiece and I could hear phones ringing in the background. He mumbled something I couldn’t catch, then reappeared.

  ‘I have to go –’

  ‘How are you? How’s work?’ I asked, not wanting him to hang up.

  ‘Busy. I’ve got a meeting in Tassie next week . . . the usual.’ There was a pause and I wondered if he was still there. ‘The week after, I’m in Sydney.’

  His words hung in the silence between us, so I took a deep breath and plunged in.

  ‘Would you like to meet up?’

  I’d had plenty of time in the preceding weeks to reflect on what had gone wrong and I realised I had survived a storm of my own making. I’d been unable to see through a haze of smoke left over from a fire that had burnt out long ago, and I hadn’t appreciated being with CC.

  I’d been foolish (and more than a little insensitive) in inviting A3 to stay when CC wasn’t there, and I had failed to appreciate his point of view, stubbornly digging in my heels and stoking the fires of moral outrage at his lack of trust. When I stopped to consider how I might have felt if the circumstances had been reversed, I had to acknowledge that I would have felt jealous and suspicious too, perhaps not to the degree CC had, but that was just a function of personality types.

  I’d also had time to reflect on what Metro Mike had said, about there being three women around CC, all of whom would make suitable partners. I hoped I wasn’t too late.

  We arranged to meet on the steps of the Opera House. I was there half an hour early so I spotted him well before he saw me, picking him out by the myriad tiny details that were uniquely his – the slim frame, the slight forward stoop of his shoulders and the way he sometimes closed his fingers on his hands when he walked with purpose, like he did now. In place of the usual tracksuit pants and rugby jumper, he wore jeans and a pale blue fitted shirt, and I have to say he was drop-dead movie star gorgeousness personified, from the top of his silky white hair to the tips of his RM Williams boots.

  I knew then that I wanted to be with him; how long for, I couldn’t honestly say and I didn’t care either, because for once in my life I wasn’t thinking about outcomes or happy ever after endings. It was the here and now I cared about. I cared about CC. He was the most considerate, attractive man I’d ever met and in all the time we’d spent together I’d never once had to pretend to be smarter, fitter, sexier or better read than I really was. I hadn’t worried (no more than I would normally) if the outfits I wore weren’t slimming and I could wear sandals without thinking, ‘Do my bunions look big in these?’ (The answer was yes, they always did.)

  ‘Hello, Frosty.’

  ‘Hello.’

  It was no Gone with the Wind reunion – we had too much talking to do first – just a smile and a simple peck on the cheek.

  ‘Shall we walk in the Botanical Gardens?’

  I’d always been able to talk to CC, from our very first date, and it was a relief to find a quiet spot among the Moreton Bay figs and unburden the ugly truth I’d been hiding. I confessed the whole sorry stalking business and felt lighter with each sentence.

  ‘Yes, I loved him but that was a long time ago. I worshipped the ground he walked on,’ I said, ‘and he didn’t love me. I’m sorry I invited him to stay; I shouldn’t have done that, but please believe me when I say that nothing happened. Even if he had made a pass at me – which he didn’t, by the way – nothing would have come of it. It’s been four years now, I’ve seen him many times and nothing has ever happened. He hasn’t shown the slightest interest in me and I’ve always known in my heart that we weren’t right for each other.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry I didn’t.’

  In return, CC offered his own confession about a relationship he’d had that didn’t surprise me.

  ‘It was over before you and I got together,’ he said. ‘Both of us knew it wouldn’t last.’

  ‘Would you go back to it, even if you and I –?’

  ‘No.’

  We walked for a while, following the foreshore path towards Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, then we climbed a flight of steps to find another shady spot.

  ‘What about the third woman?’ I asked.

  He picked a blade of grass and rubbed it between his fingers, looking into the distance. ‘That’s harder,’ he said. ‘That could be one of several.’

  ‘What?’

  The shock must have shown on my face because he laughed. ‘Lighten up, Frosty, I have no idea who that might be. You’ll have to keep your eyes open.’

  And I laughed too.

  ‘What’s the house-sit like?’ he asked.

  ‘You can come and see it if you like; that’s if you don’t mind a dog that’s got fleas or cats that crap on the carpet or –’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  We caught the bus to Coogee. In spite of the immaculately maintained house he was accustomed to living in, CC professed not to care about
the cat hairs on the kitchen counter and the smell of cat pee on Casper’s coat, or the cat litter trays in the lounge room. If he did object, he sweetly said nothing and we were reconciled, with kindness, good humour and quiet grace on both sides.

  *

  Over brunch in a local café the next day we agreed that when the house-sit finished, as it would soon, we should try living together. That would mean me moving to Broken Hill. We both wanted to make it work and my biggest fear . . . actually I didn’t have a single biggest fear, I had a snake pit full of them. I was afraid our relationship might not work (an oldie but a goodie) and I worried I might not cope with life in a mining town in the middle of the desert. With no friends in Broken Hill, and very little paid work, not only would I be financially dependent on CC, I’d also be reliant on him emotionally. For a lot of the time it would be just the two of us. Then I worried I’d be a rubbish writer, afraid of snakes, terrified of spiders, allergic to sand, scared of pink velour. You get the picture.

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ said CC.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A pre-nup.’

  My notions of what constituted love and romance (which by that stage were about as threadbare as Casper’s blanket after endless washing cycles to remove the smell of cat pee) were threatened by the idea of a contractual agreement. The only people I had ever borrowed money from (I hope) were my parents and my friend Jane, who once lent me £250 to get to France. Since leaving home I had been financially independent; I hadn’t always made the wisest financial decisions (I can hear the hollow laughter of friends and family now) but I had made those decisions and I had suffered the consequences. Buying and selling flats in London had generated and subsequently obliterated significant amounts. If pressed I would have said I didn’t have much financial acumen – you wouldn’t expect me ever to win at Monopoly – but I had always survived and I had never been financially dependent on a man. I considered myself a pretty decent person and if anything were to go wrong with our relationship, I would simply walk away (woah boy, there goes that high horse again).

  So I had to put myself in CC’s shoes. He’d fallen in love with a woman fifteen years his junior, who constantly kept saying I like you, not I love you, and maybe a binding financial agreement was his equivalent of standing on the bank. He had assets and he didn’t want them to be swept downstream if the relationship failed.

  If I’d thought CC had been unromantic before the topic of pre-nups came up (sorry, binding financial agreements, BFA, let no one think we were about to get married), then once the subject was on the table CC’s actuarial approach made his previous behaviour seem positively Mills & Boon.

  ‘Never confuse love and money,’ said CC. ‘I’m very careful when it comes to the latter.’

  And he was. I was far more cavalier, which is probably why he had so much of the stuff and I had so little. In a funny way, that gave me a certain freedom; having so little to lose, it was easier to contemplate embarking on a crazy project at the age of fifty. Leaving aside the whole question of living with CC, I would be moving to a mining town in the middle of the outback in order to write the biography of Jane, a woman I’d met in London who had subsequently moved to a cottage in France. The thought did cross my mind that an old barn in the Loire Valley might be more conducive to writing Jane’s story but beggars can’t be choosers and I was, when all was said and done, extremely fortunate that I would have CC’s support while I battled to finish the book.

  The final hurdle was crossed after a tetchy few weeks with an aggressive lawyer, until I ditched him and found a woman who completely got that I didn’t want anything from CC if the relationship hit the rocks: I was signing the BFA to give him peace of mind, not me. I came with nothing and I fully intended to leave that way if it didn’t work out. As soon as the agreement was signed, CC went back to being his usual calm, considerate self.

  That left me to do all the fretting. It didn’t help that any time I mentioned the words ‘Broken Hill’ to friends in Sydney they would invariably reply with something along the lines of, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be forever, you can always come back if it doesn’t work out.’ Often they simply looked blank and said, ‘Where?’ The answer provoked a look of anxious concern. Not one person said, ‘Hey, fantastic!’

  Miriam and Jack eventually came back from Canada (I’m sorry about the carpet) and I handed back responsibility for their precious pets with a huge sigh of relief. Broken Hill beckoned.

  I was jumping in at the deep end and it didn’t get much deeper.

  chapter twenty-three

  I moved to Broken Hill in autumn, my favourite time of year in England when apple trees laden with fruit bend heavy branches to the ground and long drawn-out evenings are filled with the sound of bonfires crackling in the chill damp air. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ according to Keats. Not in Broken Hill it’s not.

  Excuse me for saying this, but the weather in Broken Hill arrives like a whore on a weekend trip to an oil rig. It slams into town, gets the job done and then shoots through. Dust storms can turn day into night in seconds, rare cloudbursts have been known to dump six months’ worth of rain in a few hours, and forked lightning can start bushfires that rage for days. Most of the time, though, it’s hot and dry in summer and cold and dry in winter.

  The epic dust storm that slammed into Broken Hill and then raged across the southern half of Australia in September marked the end of a decade-long drought. Rain fell in torrents across most of the eastern seaboard as well as many inland areas. Drenching, flooding rain. In the sweaty, steamy months that followed, nature did its thing. Grass grew in the desert, crops flourished further south and insects multiplied. Like specks of dust in a haze of smoke, the insects went on the move – mating, eating, moving, mating, eating, moving out on those vast empty plains – and the only thing that got in their way was Broken Hill. The locusts arrived with explosive force, erupting like the forces of evil from Pandora’s box.

  I arrived at about the same time.

  ‘I’ve got a spare bicycle you can use to get around town if you like,’ said CC.

  Cycling to the post office that first day was like riding through a series of puddles, brackish water splashing up to my calves, only it wasn’t water, it was locusts. The fluttering, clacking noise of a swarm of insects shooting into the air as I rode through them conjured up childhood memories of pegging pieces of cardboard onto the spokes of our bicycle wheels for the joy of hearing it flutter. That was fun. This was frightening.

  The roads were thick with squashed insects, and windows were plastered with them. Shopkeepers had to sweep a path through piles of dead bodies – locusts that had crawled in and died overnight – before early morning customers could reach the checkout. Swimmers at the pool ran the risk of swallowing mouthfuls of locusts on each inward breath; only a hardy and committed few ventured in. CC was among them. Was he trying to show me that it didn’t matter? That a plague of locusts was nothing to worry about? I’d never experienced anything like it. Children playing on the grass at the edge of the pool ran screaming with delight through carpets of insects that rose in a noisy black cloud before settling back down to the job of mating and eating.

  I retreated indoors and read the Barrier Daily Truth, Broken Hill’s local paper, watching insects flinging themselves at the screen door. According to the paper, this was the start of what might lead to a major infestation. Might? How did this not already rank as a major infestation? The article pointed out that ‘one female can lay between 250 and 300 eggs’. Apparently Broken Hill and the surrounding area was where those eggs might hatch the following spring.

  CC’s house was a welcome fortress against the locusts, moths and crickets that swarmed around any available light source so I shut the doors and windows and stayed in until the infestation passed. The evaporative air-conditioner was set to maximum. The system blew air across a curtain of water trickling do
wn vertical panels on a box outside then circulated that ‘wet’ air inside. It was a neat system but it could only reduce the temperature by three or four degrees so it was still hot, thirty-two degrees of hot, and it wasn’t even summer.

  A more effective defence against the heat were the trees that CC had planted on all sides of the house, and several grapevines smothering the walls. The garden looked prettier than I remembered (even when viewed through windows smeared in dead locusts). Six old-fashioned standard roses bloomed near the back fence and the lawn was surprisingly green (my father had exacting standards when it came to lawns and CC’s would have passed with flying colours). There were daisy bushes and fruit trees and a near empty bed to one side that, given the amount of sun there was in Broken Hill, could do quite well as a vegetable patch.

  The plague of locusts left as quickly as it had arrived and by the weekend all that remained was a mass of dead bodies and a bad smell.

  The older I get, the more I like gardening. It can put colour in your cheeks, it’s mucky and you can do it in front of the neighbours, according to the folks at the BBC. Gardening’s the new sex, didn’t you know? All I knew was that I never really felt at home in a new place until I got a garden sorted.

  CC’s shed was a gloomy storeroom holding thirty years of someone else’s story, cloaked in red dust. Furniture, cartons, trunks and boxes were all closely wrapped in plastic – and coated with a thick layer of dust. I moved slowly through the dark heat, looking for tools and compost to fork into the sandy soil.

  I found the compost beside a delicate mess of spiders’ webs. I dragged the bags into the light, brushing away the remnants of brittle webs that crumpled like ancient paper doilies.

  Having read stories of spiders biting bushies on the bum when they spent too long in the dunny (it hadn’t taken long to knock the edges off my English grammar school education), I thought it best to play safe and I hauled the old compost bags towards the house.