‘Has it hurt you very badly?’ I asked. The old Accident Compensation Corporation system was scarily easy to take advantage of and was, to be honest, well overdue for an overhaul, but the drastic cuts to physiotherapy subsidies had been pretty rough on anyone in private practice. It’s amazing how few appointments people need when they suddenly have to pay for them.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I was just on the verge of expanding and getting someone else to help before the new system came in, and it’s taken us back to a nice workload for one. Now, what else? Braces and straps and things are all in this cupboard – I see lots of shearers with lower back problems. Hypochondriacs and the people who just come in because they’re lonely have a red dot inside their files, but Amber’ll tell you who they are anyway. I don’t think I’ve got any creeps at the moment. You know – the greasy, hopeful ones who tell you they think they’ve pulled a muscle in their groin.’
‘You don’t get nearly as much of that in a hospital,’ I observed. ‘For the last eighteen months I’ve mostly been doing rehab with stroke patients.’
‘I’m sure it will all come back to you,’ said Cheryl. ‘You’ll be fine.’
I was mildly amused and just a little annoyed by this; I’m good at my job, and I work reasonably hard to keep getting better. Also, I remember pulling an all-nighter in our third year of university to help Cheryl get to grips with some pretty basic anatomy before the next day’s exam. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Have you sorted out somewhere to live yet?’
‘Not yet. I’m staying with Rose Thornton in the meantime.’
‘The new accountant at Horne and Plunkett’s is looking for a flatmate,’ said Cheryl. ‘I’ll pass on your number if you’re interested.’
I wrinkled my nose doubtfully. ‘I was thinking more somebody’s farm cottage. I don’t know if I want to go flatting again.’
‘Josie, hon, you can’t leave your fiancé –’
‘He wasn’t,’ I protested.
‘As good as,’ said Cheryl impatiently. ‘Anyway, you can’t move from the middle of Melbourne to downtown Waimanu and live by yourself in someone’s farm cottage. You’ll go into a decline and slit your wrists.’
AS I TURNED the corner of the house, lifting one side of the lawnmower to stop it scalping the edge of a flowerbed, saw Rose appear at the back door and wave her arms wildly. I turned off the mower and she carolled, ‘Josephine! Phone!’
‘Hello?’ I said breathlessly, taking the portable phone and leaning back against the veranda railing. Rose’s lawn sloped steeply away from the house in every direction and mowing involved spending most of your time shoving the mower up hills and over the roots of fruit trees.
‘Hello!’ a woman said in a bright, chirpy little voice like a sparrow. ‘It’s Sara Rogers here. Cheryl called me yesterday and mentioned you might be after a flat?’
‘That’s right,’ I answered.
‘Well, Andy and I – Andy’s my flatmate – have a room spare if you’d like to look at it.’
‘I would,’ I said. This was not strictly true, but on reflection I’d decided that perhaps Cheryl had a point. ‘Thank you.’
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Any pets?’
‘Nope.’
‘And do you listen to loud music?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course I do play the tuba, and I like to cook naked.’
There was an anxious silence while she digested this statement.
‘Sorry, I’m just being an idiot,’ I said. ‘How about I come round and we have a look at each other?’
‘Okay,’ said Sara, sounding a little wary, and not quite as chirpy. ‘When would suit you?’
‘WELL?’ ROSE ASKED as I climbed out of the car the following morning.
I bent to pat a dog with one hand and the piglet with the other before making my way across the gravel to where she was taking sheets off the washing line.
‘All sorted.’ I took two corners of the sheet she was holding out and we doubled it over. ‘The house is fine, and they seem like fairly normal people. I’m moving in some time next week.’
‘It’s lucky I’m not easily offended, or I might assume it’s my cooking that’s driving you away so quickly.’
‘Not at all,’ I assured her. ‘Some may feel olives and broccoli are an unusual combination, but personally I think it’s a bold stroke of culinary genius.’
‘Thank you,’ she said graciously. ‘It’s nice to have one’s genius recognised. Oh, and I’ve just been speaking to your mother – if you can’t live without the tin of hair goo please let her know, and she’ll send it up.’
‘I can live without it. It turned out to be an inferior type of goo,’ I said. ‘What are you planning to do with the rest of the day?’
‘Ah,’ said Rose. ‘Yes. I’m glad you asked me that. What are you doing, sweet pea?’
‘Something nasty, by the sound of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you’d rather not, but Edwin and Mildred are feeling the heat terribly, poor dears. Matthew is so busy I don’t like to bother him.’
I turned and looked over the back fence to where Edwin and Mildred, a pair of obese pet sheep, lay slothfully under an apple tree. ‘I’ll try,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but it won’t be pretty.’
‘I shall sharpen up the combs for you after lunch,’ said Aunty Rose happily. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be such a multitalented young woman?’
Multitalented is not the word that would spring to the mind of anyone watching me shear. Long, smooth blows with the handpiece are utterly beyond me, so I just chip off bits of wool at random in a performance with no flair or style. And Rose’s rotten sheep were not only bigger than me but had no manners whatsoever. The climax was reached with Edwin lying on top of both me and the hand-piece, kicking me repeatedly in the stomach. Aunty Rose was no help at all. Overcome with laughter, she merely leant on the fence clutching her sides.
‘I hate you,’ I told her as the horrible Edwin staggered to his feet and lurched off, his rolls of fat wobbling and little tufts of long wool I had missed fluttering in the breeze.
‘Oh, sweet pea,’ gasped Rose when she was finally able to speak. She dabbed at her eyes with a scrap of white lacy hanky. ‘I wish I had a video camera. You’ve made my year.’
I wiped my streaming face on the hem of my singlet. ‘I always suspected you were a nasty person. Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, you know.’
‘Come and sit on the veranda and have a cold drink,’ she said.
After a bottle of Corona (complete with lemon wedge, as Rose was feeling guilty) on the veranda, shaded by the big magnolia and surrounded by fragrant crimson roses, I felt sufficiently revived to go and shower under that pathetic dribble of water. I spent two hours stretched at ease with Cheaper by the Dozen, which I had found in the Pink Room’s bookcase, and then rolled to my feet and went in search of Aunty Rose.
I ran her to earth under a large shrub in the back garden. ‘Can I borrow your gumboots?’ I asked.
‘Of course you can. Are you going to go and help Matthew milk?’
‘I thought I might.’
‘Take him a beer,’ said Aunty Rose. ‘Have fun.’
In Rose’s gumboots, which were three sizes too big for me and made me feel like a yeti, I slogged down the steep driveway, across the road and diagonally up through three paddocks to reach the Kings’ cowshed. This was a charmless structure built of concrete bricks painted mustard yellow, with a sweeping view down over the effluent ponds. Now, in late summer, the cowshed caught the breeze and was cool and pleasant to work in, but in winter and spring the wind whistled off the mountains to the south and slid icily down the back of your collar.
Near the top of the hill I paused and looked back towards Rose’s place, the house crumbling gently in its overgrown garden and the scrub reclaiming the little paddocks that ran down to the road. It was still and very peaceful in the hot afternoon sun and t
he only sign of movement was one lazily circling hawk.
From where I stood I couldn’t see the house I’d grown up in because it was around the brow of a hill. Five years ago my parents had had some sort of rush of blood to their heads, sold up and moved down to Nelson to milk goats. They didn’t make any money, but as ex–sheep farmers they were quite used to that.
I was glad I couldn’t see our old house because the new owners were very energetic, apparently, and had added a conservatory, a retaining wall and swathes of yuccas. It may have been delightful (although I doubted it), but it’s hard to view the improvements somebody else has made to a place you love. I could see just a corner of the back paddock and the creek where a wily old brown trout used to live, and these looked reassuringly the same. Turning away, I walked quickly up the last slope to the shed.
When I let myself in through the gate at the top of the pit Matt was teat-spraying a row of cows with a little Cambrian sprayer and singing along loudly to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on the radio, only slightly out of tune. The cows shifted uneasily at the sight of a stranger and he looked up.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Beer?’
‘It would be rude not to. Let the row go, would you?’
I did, and the cows began to drift out. I removed a bottle of beer from each of my pockets and handed one over. ‘Bugger. I forgot to bring a bottle opener.’
‘Don’t worry. Pass it here,’ said Matt, whereupon he twisted the two tops together and opened them both.
‘Slick,’ I remarked.
‘It’s almost my only skill.’ He handed one of the bottles back and took a long swig from his. ‘Jose, you’re a legend.’
‘I know,’ I said modestly. ‘The cows look nice.’
‘How would you know?’
I grinned at him, unoffended. ‘Condescending prat.’
‘They are looking pretty good. I’ve been getting all serious with feed budgets. What have you been up to today?’
‘I’ve been highly productive,’ I said. ‘I’ve found somewhere to live and shorn the two most disgusting sheep on the planet.’
‘Mildred and Edwin? I’ve been putting that off for months.’
‘I hate to break it to you, but you’re doing it next time. It nearly killed me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘Revolting overfed animals. Good effort.’
‘They don’t look very pretty,’ I admitted.
‘Who cares?’ He reached up to shut the gate at the front of the bail and the first cow shuffled into position. ‘It’s nice to have you home, by the way.’
‘Thanks.’ And a large aching lump in my throat, which had in the last month or so begun to appear at the most embarrassing times it possibly could, decided that now was an appropriate time to turn up. I took a hurried mouthful of beer to dissolve it, which was not a well-thought-out move because I promptly choked and Matt had to pound me on the back. ‘Th-thank you,’ I spluttered.
‘No problem.’ He removed the cups from the front cow on the left and began deftly to slip them onto the udder of the front cow on the right, a great fat red thing that looked about a hundred years old. With his eyes fixed on the cow he asked casually, ‘Been having a rough time, Jo?’
‘A little bit.’ I put down my bottle of beer and began to change over the next set of cups, the cow twitching indignantly at my unfamiliar hands. If I expanded on the subject I would probably cry, and that would just embarrass us both. ‘I’m not really being any help, here; you’d be quicker without me.’
‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have you around.’
Chapter 3
I MET ONE of Cheryl’s hypochondriacs on my first day at work, a pudgy fellow in his thirties who worked, he informed me, as caretaker at the high school – when the rod of fiery agony that was his spine allowed him to. He couldn’t bear doing nothing; he was one of those blokes who would go to work even if he was at death’s door rather than let people down.
On his way out he told Amber he would fix us up next week, that he was heading to the doctor’s for the ACC form and he would drop it off at his next visit without fail. She smiled at him with chinless charm and said that would be lovely; there would be no problem at all with refunding him and in the meantime that would be forty dollars, please. Eftpos or cash, Ron? Now, you have a lovely day and make sure you take really good care of yourself.
‘Plonker,’ she said dispassionately as the door closed behind him.
‘You have a gift,’ I said with some awe. ‘That was brilliant.’
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘He’s as thick as two short planks. Never done a day’s work in his life.’
‘I sort of gathered that.’
‘I heard you say that you could tell he was normally really active, and that it was lucky because it would be so much better for his back than sitting still,’ she said accusingly.
‘Do you reckon it’ll work?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Amber with slow-dawning comprehension. ‘Were you doing that reverse psychology thing on him?’
‘That was the idea, anyway.’
I MOVED INTO my new flat on the outskirts of town on Wednesday night, having purchased from Cheryl’s sister-in-law a bed that didn’t, unlike the one for sale at the Waimanu Second-Hand Palace, have suspicious dark patches in the middle of the mattress or a faint smell of urine. ‘But you’d be putting a sheet over it!’ the lady running the Palace had protested. ‘And it’s such a reasonable price, dear.’ I declined to purchase it anyway and reflected that perhaps big-city living had made me a bit precious.
Cheryl’s husband (his name is either Ian or Alan; I never can remember which) kindly brought my new bed around to the flat on the back of his ute and helped to manhandle it up the front steps and in through the sliding door to the sitting-room. ‘Where to now?’ he asked.
‘Right down the hall to the end and then left,’ I said.
‘I hope you haven’t bought any more furniture,’ he remarked, propping the mattress against the wall. ‘This isn’t a bedroom, it’s a cupboard.’
Sara, who was small and plump with a large bust only barely contained by her low-cut singlet, came and leant in the doorway as I dropped my two bags on the floor next to a little stack of towels and bedding lent to me by my mother. Everything else I owned was, hopefully, on its way between Australia and New Zealand by sea. Although according to my friend Stu, who had shipped his possessions from Britain to Melbourne a few years before, my belongings were more likely on a random wharf in Papua New Guinea, either uncovered in a tropical thunderstorm or being chewed by rats – or both.
‘Is this all your stuff?’ Sara asked, no doubt looking surreptitiously for tuba cases.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit minimalist, isn’t it?’
‘I’m cooking tonight,’ Sara said. ‘Do you like chicken chow mein?’
Dinner turned out to be a stir fry made from bottled sauce, chicken pieces and frozen vegetables, served in a cereal bowl over boil-in-the-bag rice. There was nothing the matter with it, but it made me feel I had gone wrong somewhere. My ex-boyfriend, when he cooked, would whip up a squid-ink pasta and prawn dish and serve it with a glass of pinot gris on the deck. Yet here I was on someone’s shabby couch watching Shortland Street with my bowl on my knee, while outside the boy racers drove laps around Waimanu’s residential area.
Andy, the other flatmate, was in his early twenties and a stock agent. He said almost nothing over dinner and vanished into his room with the phone as soon as he had eaten, not to reappear for the rest of the evening. As Sara kept a firm grip on the remote, watched dire reality-TV shows and crunched boiled sweets steadily until she went to bed at ten, I completely saw his point.
AFTER THE FIRST fortnight, I was starting to get used to the way things were done – or not done, in Amber’s case – at Waimanu Physiotherapy.
On Tuesday afternoon I was typing up the notes from my three-thirty appointment (
a delicate blonde girl called Cilla who’d strained a muscle in her shoulder; she informed me proudly that she had fallen from the roof of a barn at a particularly good party) when someone put their head around the door and said, ‘Josie?’
I turned in my seat to see a round-faced girl with dimples and glossy dark brown hair cut in a long fringe over her eyes. She wore a Waimanu High School uniform and swung a battered leather satchel.
‘Kim!’ I said. ‘Crikey, you’ve got pretty. But don’t you go to boarding school in Hamilton?’
‘Not anymore,’ said Matt’s little sister with satisfaction. ‘I told Mum that if she didn’t let me come home I’d drop out and work at Woolworths. So I transferred last week.’
I grinned. Even when Kim was little her mother was no match for her at all. Of course, neither was anyone else. I should know – I used to babysit her. ‘Does this decision have anything to do with Aaron Henderson?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just that single-sex schools aren’t good for social development.’ She spoilt this speech somewhat by adding, ‘How did you know that?’
‘Matt mentioned you were seeing someone.’ His actual words had been, ‘The silly kid’s taken up with some pimply little git,’ but I am nothing if not tactful.
Kim came right into the room and closed the door behind her. ‘So,’ she whispered, ‘what did you think of the lovely Cilla?’
‘It would be unprofessional to discuss a client,’ I said primly. ‘How do you know her?’
‘She’s Matt’s girlfriend.’
‘Is she?’ I asked, startled. Somehow I wouldn’t have thought she was his type.
‘Yeah,’ said Kim. ‘Needs his head read, if you ask me. She thinks she’s the cat’s pyjamas – she’s all “I’m such a good keen farm chick and I can strain up a fence and I drive a wanky big ute”. I’m sure he’s only going out with her because he wanted to get laid.’
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