‘You’re going?’ Alarmed, Jonathan twisted around.
The pilot glanced at his watch. ‘Too right. Got a few more deliveries to make before I head back to Longreach.’ He climbed back into the plane, closed the door and gave Jonathan one more maddening thumbs up.
The plane taxied along the runway then soared towards the horizon with a drone. Soon it was a tiny speck, an insect buzz. And then it disappeared.
Silence.
Wind whipped the long, dry grasses nearby, bending them and swirling dust into Jon’s eyes. He cursed as he pulled a pair of sunglasses from his top pocket. Stifling heat lay thick in his nostrils and he took a deep, gulping breath.
Nothing. There was nothing here but the lonely hotel in the distance and an endless expanse of powdery red dirt. He shuddered. His editor really had him in her sights.
He didn’t need to glance at his watch to check the time. The sun was high and his shadow clung to him as if seeking shelter from the fierce heat. Overhead, a pair of large black birds wheeled on the breeze. His gaze shifted downwards. A sun-bleached animal skull lay abandoned like a child’s toy in the grass. He peered at the hotel again, willing a car to come.
But there was nothing but the thin, reedy whisper of wind rustling across flat land.
Finally he picked up his bag and started towards the hotel. He could die out here, standing on an airstrip in this heat. It was so bloody hot he might not even make it to the hotel. They’d find him with ants already crawling over him, into every orifice of his body. The bile rose in his throat.
If his editor had wanted to punish him, she was well on the way.
He hated Aristo and its uppity style. The magazine was full of Hons and Earls, the ‘right’ sort of people. Not one of them would be interested in coming out to the middle of nowhere. He should know: the Hartley-Huntleys had spent generations arguing about whether they’d arrived with God or the conqueror.
Sweat trickled down his chest, the expensive linen shirt clinging to it. He pulled it away with one hand and watched it slap depressingly back against his ribs.
He hated his job, shuttling from resort to resort just one step ahead of the hoi polloi. He had to find the new and exclusive before readers did, and then make them feel like they were ahead of the crowd. Just a few words from his editorial alter ego could make or break a new resort, or put an unknown location on the map.
But most of all he hated that natty little top-hatted caricature nestled against the by-line of his Jonty’s Jottings column. At thirty he was hardly old, yet it made him look like he was born during the reign of Victoria rather than that of the paparazzo. A prize fool.
His ankle twisted painfully and he let out an explosive curse. Where the hell was the bloody transport? He looked down and saw a treacherous rabbit hole. And then another. His hand twisted sweatily around the handle of his case.
He was close enough to see the hotel properly now. The deep verandah cast the front in shadow and it looked, if not cool, at least like a refuge from the sun. He picked up his pace until he stood on the far side of the worn bitumen that ran in front of the hotel, before petering out a hundred metres on either side. A handmade signpost beside the road pointed to towns and cities unimaginable distances away. A large wooden board nailed to the post advised travellers to boil their billy at Bindundilly. He rolled his eyes and crossed the road.
The hotel was unnaturally quiet, which seemed strange given the number of four-wheel drives parked out front. They looked dangerous, with big tyres that could cut through scrub and ford rivers. And gun racks on top. He’d seen Wolf Creek.
Shouting erupted from inside the hotel, a great, masculine roar of approval. Jonathan switched his bag to the other hand, flexing the aching one. He staggered towards the hotel. What kind of place was this?
A large aviary sat on the verandah beside a set of double doors with textured glass inserts and faded gold script. A cockatoo squawked and ran along his perch as Jonathan passed, practically mocking him. He pushed the door open and paused. The shouting had stopped and Jonathan was confronted by a solid wall of men, their backs turned to the door. He stepped inside and let the door swing closed behind him. The inside of the hotel was dim and cool with music playing, something whiney about a dog and lost love. He hated country music. The scent of beer and pressed bodies assailed him as he started to push his way through the bodies. He half expected to see a naked woman at the front, but then noticed a few women threaded among the crowd.
The silence stretched, then Jonathan followed the movement of the heads in front as they tipped back and tracked something travelling through the air. He heard a sharp crack, followed by a clunk, and the crowd roared their approval again.
He inched closer, squeezing between a burly, akubra-hatted man and a skinny woman. The crowd fell silent, waiting, and this time Jonathan saw it. A gold coin sailed in an arc above the bar, seeming to hang and spin in a shaft of sunlight, before hitting a plaque on the wall and dropping out of view.
‘Pardon me,’ he said, pushing further towards the front and earning an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked a square-jawed man beside him.
Square Jaw didn’t even look at him. ‘RFDS, mate.’
‘RFDS?’
‘Royal Flying Doctor Service.’ He roared with the rest of the crowd then moved aside. ‘Go on, you Pommy bastard, get in there. You’ve gotta see this. Charlie should be playing for Australia, she’s that good a shot.’
‘Playing what?’
Square Jaw gave him a pitying look. ‘Who cares? Anything. She’s got an aim like a Wild West gunslinger.’
Jonathan wedged into the space vacated by the man and, between the shoulders of the spectators in front, caught sight of the young woman behind the bar. Dark-brown hair in a carelessly choppy cut framed a heart-shaped face and fell in rippling waves to her shoulders. A plain white T-shirt emblazoned with The beer’s better at Bin was tucked into a short black bar apron tied around her slim waist. As she turned to take a can from the refrigerator at the back of the bar, Jonathan swallowed. Tiny black shorts covered a bottom that sat like a ripe peach on top of impossibly long, tanned legs, slim ankles encased in work boots.
Someone slid a coin across the bar and she smiled as she picked it up, her mouth quirking up at the corners as she said something he couldn’t catch. She had dark, finely arched eyebrows and little crinkles at the corners of her eyes.
The crowd hushed as she turned side-on to the bar and bent her legs into a half-crouch, face clenched in concentration and eyes shut tight. The coin gleamed as she balanced it on her index finger and weighed it for a moment, flexing her knees before her arm lifted and, with a flick of the thumb, the gold coin sailed in a wide arc over her head, before hitting the wall behind her with a loud ping. It dropped into a bucket below with a satisfactory plunk.
Jonathan’s mouth dropped open. The bucket had a sign on it, Royal Flying Doctor Service, and was half full of gold coins. His eyes tracked back to the girl and found her staring at him.
‘Okay, one more and then I’ll get back to the drinks. What about you, mate? When did you blow in?’
Aware of the crowd’s sudden, watchful silence, Jonathan’s gaze locked on her eyes; they were a soft blue that reminded him of the bluebells in the woods behind Hartley Hall, which was ridiculous given he was on the other side of the world, in a land of harsh light and extremes.
She was waiting, one slim hand on her hip, the other hooked around a beer tap, the fingers tapping slowly against the icy surface. Everyone was waiting.
He had never felt more conspicuously English, or more uncomfortable in the presence of a group of men, some of whom had eyes that looked perhaps a touch too close together. But he called on generations of Hartley-Huntley confidence, took a step forward and drew himself up. ‘I didn’t blow in. I walked.’
‘My bloody lettuce!’ Charlie grabbed a set of keys and threw them across the bar. ‘Neil, can you whip over to the airstrip an
d save my lettuce? Oh, and there’s some mail and a —’
Her eyes swivelled back to the man in front of the bar. Oops.
‘— guest.’
Sensing that the entertainment was finished for the moment, the crowd drifted away until only the stranger stood in front of her. Perspiration beaded his forehead and gleamed along a razor-sharp, finely-stubbled jawline that was raised just a fraction too high, as though challenging her. His hair was short, dark and well-cut with the merest touch of silver at the temples. City hair, that looked like it saw the attentions of a barber regularly. Her eyes moved lower. An expensive-looking linen shirt clung to his chest. He’d worked up quite a sweat for the piddling walk from the airstrip to the hotel, and it wasn’t even high summer. She almost said as much, but when she raised her eyes to meet his, she paused. Dark grey, with long lashes and a slightly haughty look, they stared her down with a stiff self-assurance that would get him nowhere in Bindundilly.
‘Gosh, sorry ’bout that. I got a bit carried away. Anyway, all for a good cause.’ She smiled brightly and wiped her hands down the front of her apron.
He looked like he couldn’t give a damn about the cause.
She plastered on her best smile and shot a hand across the bar. ‘I’m Charlie. Welcome to Bin.’
He looked at the hand for a second then reached out and shook it. ‘Jonathan Ha . . .’ Laughter from a nearby group drowned out the rest of his response.
She jerked a thumb towards the other end of the bar. ‘The reservations book is back there. It’s a bit quieter.’
She could feel his eyes on her as he followed her down the other side of the bar, lagging a step or two behind. She hit the corner and reached under the counter for the battered school exercise book kept there, along with an avalanche of paperwork. Charlie pulled the book out and leaned her elbows on the bar, glad to take a break. But she could see him out the corner of her eye, standing stiffly in front of her, a leather-clad foot tapping impatiently on the bare floorboards.
‘Okay.’ Charlie flipped the pages until she found the right date, then ran her finger down the page. ‘I’ve got you here as Jonathan —ʼ She squinted at the untidy scrawl and tipped her head to one side to see if it made more sense. ‘Hmm, Jonathan Hardly Hunky. That can’t be right.’ She chewed the nail on her index finger and heard a sharp intake of breath. She glanced up. ‘Or is it?’
She had to agree. He wasn’t hunky, at least not in the muscled, six-pack and low-slung jeans kind of way. But as well as the classical good looks, there was something about him, something sophisticated and urbane, that made her skin prickle with awareness. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to remember if she’d brushed it since breakfast.
His face tightened. ‘Hartley, hyphen, Huntley,’ he enunciated. He pronounced the ‘h’ in Hartley and Huntley like an exhalation on a frosty morning. It was the sort of name that might suggest wealth and breeding elsewhere. Out here a name like that was more likely to be owned by misfits and square pegs. She wondered if Jonathan Hartley-Huntley was a square peg, and decided he had to be. He had a hyphen and he was in outback Australia.
‘Sorry. Must have been noisy in here when the booking was made. Anyway, we’d best call you Johnno round here,’ she said, slamming the book closed and turning to snag a room key from a board leaning against the wall.
‘Jon will be fine,’ he said firmly.
She turned and gave him a considering look. He sure was uptight. ‘C’mon, I’ll show you your room before the boys scent fresh blood.’
She lifted the counter flap and gestured him in. ‘Your room’s out the back.’ She led him through the kitchen and out the back door to a long, covered breezeway running between the rear of the hotel and a row of prefab cabins. A strip of concrete ran down the centre of the breezeway with an orange plastic chair and a sand-filled ashtray neatly placed beside each door.
‘You’re in number two.’ She handed him the key and jerked her head towards the nearest door.
‘That’s my room?’ The raised eyebrow almost reached his hairline.
‘There’s a problem?’
He stared at her open-mouthed. ‘I hardly know where to start.’
That ‘ha’ sound really got on her nerves. ‘It’s a donga, mate.’ She slapped a little more outback around her answer than was strictly necessary – she didn’t have time for princesses. It had been good enough for her and Cliff, so it would have to be good enough for Jon.
He took the key, holding the string between two fingers. ‘Donga,’ he repeated faintly, dropping his bag and reaching for a small notebook in his pocket.
She leaned back against a wooden post and folded her arms. ‘That’s d-o-n-g —’
‘I know how to spell,’ he said, grimacing as he tucked the notebook back in his pocket. ‘I’m just struggling to come to terms with the fact that I am sleeping in a site shed. Bloody Caro.’
‘Who’s Caro?’ Whoever she was, she wasn’t too popular right now.
His lips thinned, although there was a slight twinkle in his eyes. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’
‘Now I remember. You’re from a magazine, right?’ She knew there had to be a reason someone like this had dropped into the middle of nowhere. ‘You’re doing an article on the floods.’
‘So it seems,’ he said through gritted teeth. He looked a little wild-eyed right now as his eyes tracked over the concrete path, the battered plastic chairs and back to her with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Charlie decided to cut him some slack. She straightened and gave him a smile. ‘You look like you could use a beer. Drop your gear and come back inside and I’ll shout you a coldie.’
Jonathan watched the cute little bartender head back inside the main building. She obviously thought he was some kind of tosser, the way that faintly amused smile had played around her mouth. He fished the key from his pocket and stared at the worn piece of string that constituted a key ring. Just three weeks ago he’d returned from an exclusive Caribbean island resort. The handle of the key to his room had been a gold-plated seashell of stunning simplicity and after the shaft had slid easily into the lock, the door had opened into sumptuous luxury.
But that had been before the small problem with Caro.
Now he jiggled the key in the lock until the door opened with an alarming creak. He gave it a shove and stepped inside. The walls were formica with a faux timber finish and a nasty sheen. He supposed they were easy to wipe down. That was if they did wipe them down. It was like standing in an oversized 1960s kitchen cupboard. The floor was springy as he stepped across and tested the bed with a flattened hand. Hard as a rock.
He placed his bag on the floor and moved to the window, pushing aside the net curtain to gaze at the view out to the back of the pub. It was no different to the front: miles and miles of nothing. A few yards away, a mangy-looking dog nosed around in a tangle of weeds and broken-down car parts. That wasn’t a dingo, was it? There were at least twenty ways to die in the outback and he had no intention of exposing himself to any of them. He turned to face the room again and let out a dejected breath.
It wasn’t sex that had got him into this. That had been mindless and uncomplicated, and he was certain Caro had enjoyed it. But how was he to know that she would want more? He could have sworn she was on the same wavelength. Publishing was a tough game; things happened. Caro had been tracking him ever since she’d arrived as managing editor of Aristo, watching him with her predatory, heavy-lidded eyes, marking him as one of her crowd.
She’d called him a lot of names. Tiger, at first, and he thought he’d heard Spanky moaned in the heat of the moment, but afterwards, when he’d failed to follow through with anything approaching a relationship, it had been cad, scoundrel, boor. Her almost old-fashioned outrage had been qualified by some creative invectives. As a journalist, he’d had to admire her grasp of language.
And before he knew it she’d spun a globe, found a story and sent him as far away as possible. He pulled his
notebook from his pocket, scanning his itinerary, mentally recalibrating for the time difference. He was here for twenty-four hours before he could move on. He needed to interview someone about the flood and get out there to have a look at it, but apart from that there was nothing to do in this godforsaken place.
His thoughts skittered back to Charlie. She seemed like one of those typical carefree, tanned Australian girls, the sort who lobbed into London and got temping jobs, partied hard and then moved on. Uncomplicated, fun-loving girls.
Tempting.
But it was that sort of temptation had gotten him into his current fix. And right now, according to his family, he was meant to be thinking of the future – correction, the family’s future – not just indulging himself in typically self-centred fashion. He closed his eyes against the vision of his mother’s imploring face and his brother’s embarrassed one. He tried not to think of the spirits of his Hartley-Huntley ancestors, all swirling around him, demanding that he shape up and save the family.
He pulled his shirt free from his trousers and looked around for the door to the bathroom. There was a bathroom, wasn’t there? Then his eye fell on a handwritten sign taped to the wall.
This is an outback hotel. Bathrooms are out back.
Note: 2 min showers. Please keep towel for reuse.
His shoulders slumped and he picked the towel up off the bed.
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