by Holly Ford
Laughing, Tess got out a coin. ‘I’ll try.’
To her vast relief, she managed to make the shot again.
‘No way.’ Harry stared at the table. ‘No way.’
‘Here we go.’ Nate set the jug down in front of Mitch. To Tess’s surprise, he’d come back alone. The blonde was still at the bar, talking to a bull-necked guy in a rugby shirt.
Harry looked at Tess. ‘Can you do that again?’
‘I doubt it,’ she smiled. ‘It’s luck, mostly. There are a couple of tricks to it, though. You want me to show you?’
‘Hell yeah.’
Having run through the principles, she returned to her seat, leaving Harry to his practice.
‘So this house you learned to play pool in,’ Nate said. ‘Where was it?’
A few stories later, the barman drifted by, pausing to add their empty jug to his tray. ‘Last call for drinks.’
Tess glanced at her watch in surprise.
‘It’s my round.’ Mitch looked at Nate. ‘You want another?’
‘No, mate.’ Nate stretched his shoulders. ‘Not for me.’
‘Tess?’
‘No, thanks.’ She eyed the dregs of the twelve ounce she’d been nursing all night. ‘I’m all done.’
Nate looked at her. ‘Shall we hit the road?’
‘Sure.’ Tess stood up, feeling for the keys in her pocket. ‘Let’s go.’
Out in the car park, the night was still throbbing with cicadas, the air warm, an echo of the day’s heat bouncing up off the gravel. They were almost at the HiLux before Nate stopped and turned. ‘Where’s Harry?’
She heard Mitch swear under his breath. They all looked back at the hotel. Now that she came to think about it, she hadn’t seen Harry for a while.
Mitch sighed. ‘I’ll go get him.’
Watching Mitch walk back, Tess waited for Nate to go too. He didn’t. As they stood together in silence, the awkwardness between them returned, unhelped by the gentle rustle of the breeze in the gum trees behind them. With what might have been a sigh, Nate walked slowly over to the truck, assessing its pristine tray. The moonlight was bright enough to see him grin.
‘You ever get this thing dirty?’
Joining him, Tess leaned back against the rear door. ‘Why did you do that in there?’
‘Do what?’
‘You threw your shot. You let me win the game.’
Nate was silent.
‘Do you think you have to suck up to me? Do you think I’m some kind of megalomaniac who can’t stand to lose?’
He hung his head, running his hands out along the edge of the tray in a gesture that could have signalled defeat or exasperation.
‘I’m not the kind of person who fires an employee because he beat me at pool,’ she snapped. ‘And trust me, I don’t need any help to win games.’
Nate looked sideways at her. ‘Then you shouldn’t have missed.’
For a moment, Tess was speechless.
Slowly, he turned around, settling himself against the back of the ute. ‘I didn’t do it for you,’ he said. ‘I did it for Mitch and Harry.’
‘Mitch and Harry,’ she repeated, lost. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘They need to understand that things have changed.’ Nate raised his foot, resting the heel of his boot on her tyre. ‘If they start working for you like they work for me, you’ll see what they’re really worth to the place.’
Oh god. Tess felt the moral high ground crumbling under her feet. He was trying to give her his men. That hadn’t been a loss in there, it had been a surrender. She swallowed. ‘What about you?’
‘What am I worth?’
As he paused, she was acutely aware of his hand on the tray beside her.
‘It doesn’t matter about me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be gone pretty soon. We both know that. But Broken Creek can’t afford to lose guys like Harry and Mitch. You won’t find them again.’
‘It’s not about individual men,’ she said, as kindly as she could. ‘Broken Creek is a business, and right now it isn’t working. We have to fix that. Change the model.’
‘Change the model,’ Nate said. ‘Yeah, I guess a stockman like me wouldn’t understand too much about things like that. I should have played less pool and gone to more lectures, right?’
And chased fewer women. Yes. ‘Look, I’m not here to judge anyone,’ Tess said.
‘You’re not?’
Performance reviews aside. ‘It’s not personal,’ she told him, ‘that’s what I mean.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘we all get that. It comes through loud and clear.’
It was said without anger, but Tess was surprised at how much it stung. She raised her chin, staring hard at the dark. So? What did they expect from her? She had no more future at Broken Creek than they did. She was a strategist, not a leader. She modelled, she implemented, she streamlined, and she moved on. Hearts and minds weren’t her job. A lump rose in her throat as she realised that Nate had been wasting his time. She had no use for loyalty.
It would be up to whichever manager Carnarvon sent in next to build the team that would take Broken Creek forward, and nothing she’d seen so far had shaken her opinion that it should be a fresh team, not one bedded up to its axles in sentiment and tradition. What Nate was trying to do just proved that. He cared too much. It was the same old story, the one she’d uncovered time and again, the underlying flaw that made good farmers fail. They put their whole heart into the farm and it left them blind, unable to see what had to be done, the change that would get them out of trouble. It made them take the wrong risks. And they lost, like her father had lost. Like Nate, and his stepfather, had lost.
The reason she did not lose, the reason Mark trusted her to slice through a farm’s problems to the solution below, was that she didn’t care one iota more about the properties to which she was sent than she was paid to. The lesson she’d learned as a child was never to let a place get under her skin. It gave her clarity. And that little lurch of sadness she’d felt, just before – for Mitch and Harry and Nate, for the limits on what she could do for a place, the bonds she didn’t have time to make, all the places she left behind her – showed how fragile clarity was.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just have a job to do, that’s all.’
‘Maybe there’s more than one way of doing it.’
Yep. A right way and a wrong way. Tess nodded, looking straight ahead. ‘I always keep an open mind.’
‘Yeah,’ Nate said. ‘I’ve noticed that about you.’
She glanced sideways. Was he laughing? Uncomfortably, she waited for him to say something else. In the silence that followed, the trees’ rustle seemed to grow louder, stirring up further memories of her flight from Ash Fergusson’s shelterbelt. As the eddying breeze found its way under her collar, raising the hairs on the back of her neck, Tess shivered.
She felt the HiLux move slightly as Nate shifted his weight. ‘Are you cold?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m okay.’ The last time he’d asked her that question, he’d been just about to remove her underwear. Holding her almost-naked body in his hands. His fingers moving over her breast, the hollow of her inner thigh. Tess made an effort to breathe normally. She felt suddenly unable to move. Beside her, Nate too was motionless, as if the rising wind had glued them both to the side of the ute.
‘I can’t find him.’
At the sound of Mitch’s voice, Nate took an abrupt step away. Turning her back on both of them, Tess opened the driver’s door, breath returning as she settled herself on the side of the seat. A fat brown moth fluttered past her into the cab.
‘Do you mind?’ Without waiting for an answer, Nate leaned in, reaching across her to press his hand to the steering wheel. The blare of the horn made her jump, her knee brushing his leg as she did so. Tess edged back in the seat. Nate followed up the first long blast with three shorter ones.
In the paddock beside the car park, a light came on. As the cicadas, briefly shocked into silence, resumed, t
he door of the campervan opened and Harry, still looking at what was behind him, stepped down. A girl’s laughter drifted across the grass. Swinging around on the door, Harry disappeared back into the van, re-emerging a few seconds later to vault the post and rail fence and stroll over to the HiLux.
‘Sorry.’ Sounding quite the reverse, he opened up the back door and climbed in. ‘Didn’t mean to hold you up there.’
Wordlessly, Mitch and Nate got into the ute. Tess turned the key. They’d barely hit gravel before she heard a snore from the back of the cab.
‘Come on, mate.’ As they pulled up outside the homestead at last, Mitch nudged Harry awake. ‘I’ll drive you home. You can get your truck tomorrow.’
Standing in the driveway, Tess watched Mitch’s tail-lights fade into the night. Nate’s footsteps crunched over the gravel behind her.
‘Well,’ he said, his voice in the dark like a fingertip tracing her spine. ‘Goodnight.’
She waited, glued to the spot again, shoving down feelings she didn’t want to look at, let alone name, as without another word Nate climbed into his beaten-up truck and drove away.
Six
‘So give it to me in a nutshell,’ Mark said. ‘Thoughts so far.’
Sitting at the kitchen table, Tess gazed along the two metres of spiralling cord that connected the receiver in her hand to the phone on the wall. It was typical of this place that nobody in the last hundred years had thought of putting a phone jack into the office. Such as it was.
‘I think,’ she began. The porch door opened. Hurrying to her feet, Tess got the phone cord out of Stan’s way just in time. ‘I think it’s doable,’ she continued, perching herself on the edge of the bench, ‘for under’ – she glanced at Stan, who had his back to her at the sink, washing the soil off a bunch of carrots – ‘the figure we discussed, but we’re going to have to take a hit on income first up. Especially beef.’
‘How much of a hit?’ Mark’s tone was measured.
‘I’m going to suggest a hundred per cent for the first two years,’ Tess admitted. ‘No weaner sales. We’ve got feed to burn’ – she winced a little at her choice of word – ‘and the place is carrying some of the best cattle I’ve seen in a while. I want to finish the lot. We sell the steers as prime, we double our money.’
There was a considering pause on the other end of the line. Over at the sink, Stan started to hum a little under his breath.
‘I can’t see the board having too much of a problem with that,’ Mark said. ‘What else?’
‘I’m going over a couple of different contract models,’ Tess told him, ‘for wool and store lambs. This year, we could probably finish them all, but long term …’ She sighed. The number of stock units they could winter long term depended on information she didn’t yet have. ‘I’m meeting the irrigation designer this week. Any word on whether we’ll have anything to run through the pipes?’
‘We’ve got a consultant working on it,’ Mark soothed.
‘Get me the water,’ Tess said, ‘and I’ll get you the grass.’
Mark sighed too. ‘And the staffing issue?’
‘Yeah.’ Tess eyed Stan again. ‘I’m still working on that. No progress so far.’ She paused. ‘I’ll be going over the situation in my report.’
‘Okay.’ Mark’s voice softened. ‘Tess?’
‘What?’
‘I know it isn’t easy.’
Tess was silent. Outside the back window, she could see Stan’s dog asleep in the sun on the porch step, white muzzle cradled in the crook of a salt-and-pepper paw.
‘We all appreciate what you’re doing,’ Mark said. ‘The senior leadership team, the board.’ He paused. ‘Me.’
She felt the familiar warmth in her chest, the glow that always came when he spoke to her in that voice. When he thanked her for himself, alone. The ember that could so easily flare.
‘How are Rachel and the kids?’ she forced herself to ask.
There was a momentary silence on the other end of the line. ‘Fine,’ Mark said briskly. ‘They’re fine.’
Another silence.
‘There’s one other thing I need to talk to you about,’ Mark said. ‘C.J. Mackersey wants to see what we’re up to over here. The directors want me to show him around Broken Creek.’
The chairman of Carnarvon? Was that wise? In the seven years she’d worked for the company, she’d never got so much as a glimpse of C.J. Mackersey outside of his photograph in the corporate magazine. He was less of a leader than a legend, like Castro, or Mao. Tess stared at the darker rectangle of paint – lead-based, no doubt – on the kitchen wall where a picture had hung until recently. This place might not be quite the trophy the New Zealand directors had in mind to show off to the corporation’s founder.
‘We’ll keep it short,’ Mark promised, reading her mind. ‘Chopper in for a few hours, then get out of your hair. Can you sort something out, make sure we show him a good time? He’s a pretty keen sportsman. Hunting, fishing, that sort of thing.’
Tess spared a thought for the red stags minding their own business up on the tops. ‘We’ll do our best,’ she said.
‘Do me a favour,’ Mark said. ‘Make it good.’
Oh, great. That was all she needed.
•
C.J. Mackersey’s itinerary was still occupying part of Tess’s mind when she set out along the river flats that afternoon, but as she walked the paddocks she hoped to irrigate, her regret that her helicopter pilot refused to take passengers began to fade. The short yellow stubble of the last cut of hay crackled under her boots. There was barely a tinge of new growth beneath it. She stopped at the fence.
Through the wires, one of Broken Creek’s massive Hereford bulls regarded her placidly, strands of dry grass protruding from his mouth as he chewed. Even lying down, he was damn near as tall as she was. Tess looked him over. Unlikely as it seemed, this dry land had produced every gram of him, bone, fat and muscle, blood and hide. Like the others dotted behind him, he was made out of this country, shaped by it and for it, the product of generation after generation born and bred in these hills.
A bit like Nate McAdam, you might say.
Tess studied the bull again. He had one brown eye turned towards her, and as she continued to watch him, he let out a long breath and rolled onto his side. Stretched out on the grass, job done for the year, his cows out of sight, he looked peaceful as a lamb. She’d have to be some kind of idiot, though, to assume he’d lost all his fight.
Sticking to her side of the fence, she followed its line across the flat, surveying the ground. This side of the valley wasn’t going to need a lot of reconfiguration work before the pivot lines could run – just those old shelterbelts ripped out, a few of these sheep fences down, some rocks to bulldoze, some dips to fill in. The other side of the road, the river side, where the ground had never been worked, was another story. With lamb and beef prices the way they were, development now was unlikely to be economic.
Her back to the undulating scrub of the old moraine, Tess imagined the pasture in front of her a thick, glossy green beneath the crawl of a brand new pivot line, the life-giving curtain of spray from a hundred sprinklers catching the sun. Out of pure habit, her mind added a scatter of black and white cows to the scene, equally glossy, busily converting all that grass to milk fat.
Tess stopped. Of course. That was it. The obvious piece of the model she’d been missing. Broken Creek might not have enough stock to make ends meet, but Carnarvon had two dairy units within a day’s drive of here with herds they needed to winter. She’d already been modelling a short-term surplus of feed. Instead of trucking it out, why not bring the cows in? They’d have to buy a lot more baleage to get through the ten weeks, for sure, but just off the top of her head, it seemed like the figures could work. Maybe the board might see a return this year after all. And the extra work … Tess stepped out with a little more spring. The extra work might just about be enough to save somebody’s job. Somebody junior, with a heavy vehicle licence
and plenty of energy. Somebody like Harry, for instance.
Ahead of her, a few stunted cabbage trees marked the ghost of an old watercourse, and beyond them the face of the first escarpment brought the flat to an end. Leaving the hectares above for another day, Tess circled left, following the imaginary perimeter of the pivot line’s rotation. Broken Creek’s vast tussock terraces were phase two. In her experience, with irrigation, as with so many things, it was best to start at the bottom.
By the time she got back to the ute, Tess was feeling more positive than she had in weeks. Maybe Nate had been right. For all the wrong reasons, of course, but maybe there was more than one way of turning this place around. Having made her survey of the terrain in the bull paddock from the safety of the HiLux, she drove down to the next gate.
Behind it, a single sprinkler was attempting to coax a crop of brassicas from the ground. Or had been. With a sigh, she walked over to check the hose. Finding it still securely connected, Tess followed its line. At its conclusion, she discovered Nate bent over the pump housing, his toolbox sitting open on the passenger seat of the ute beside him.
‘The belt’s gone.’ He glanced up at her briefly. ‘I’ve patched it up’ – not for the first time, by the looks of things – ‘but I’ll have to order a new one from town.’
‘Sure.’ Tess got out her notebook. ‘I can do that. I have to talk to them this afternoon anyway.’
As Nate flicked the starter switch, the decrepit pump clattered back into life and the irrigation hose juddered. Tess raised her voice above the noise. ‘Have you seen Mitch today?’
‘No.’ Nate heaved the cover back over the pump. ‘Not today.’
‘You know where he might be?’ Tess put the notebook away.
‘Right now?’ Nate glanced around the hills. ‘I couldn’t tell you. Sorry.’
‘I tried calling a few times last night, but I couldn’t get hold of him. They don’t seem to have the answerphone turned on.’ She frowned. ‘I need to have a word with him.’
Nate’s eyes narrowed.
‘Nothing major,’ Tess soothed. ‘It’s just about his annual leave, that’s all.’ And the fact that he didn’t appear to have taken any of it. Ever. She didn’t want to have to pay all that out when he left. Especially given how little work the station had on at the moment. Mitch could take at least the next fortnight off and no one would even notice.