Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  Elsie scowled. Her mother had no idea. In the Culvert Gymkhana ‘best hands and best seat’ class, Tilly Morgan kept muttering the word ‘mole’ each time she passed Elsie in the show ring. Elsie had sat shame-faced on Jasper: she couldn’t cover the mole due to her riding helmet and the ridiculous netting snood her mother had encased her long blonde hair in. Nor, at the tennis party, had her mother noticed Scarlett when she had plucked a date from her scone and squelched it onto her own face just above her lip and said, ‘Who am I? Who am I?’

  What was the point in explaining anything to her mother? She never spent time with her. She never listened. She never saw.

  Elsie stomped after her as Sarah made for the next rose bush with her basket and pruning shears. Sarah glanced up, annoyed at the treetop clusters of galahs, engrossed with their own private conversation and busy with their bark-stripping. Jasper dipped his head again to grab whatever he could from the garden. He jerked up a pale pink gladiolus, roots, soil and all, and, after tasting it, tossed it to the ground disapprovingly. Next, with his big yellow teeth, he tore at the neat low box hedge that flanked the lawn, rendering a dent in its perfectly square form.

  ‘Eleanor! Keep that awful pony away from my plants!’ Elsie tugged half-heartedly again at Jasper’s reins.

  ‘Gwinnie said I could leave Jasper in the paddocks at their house, if you said no to riding on the highway from here,’ Elsie continued. ‘And I asked Mrs Guthridge when she was on recess duty too, and she said she’d ask Reverend Knopf if I can keep Jasper in the church paddock while I’m at school. There’s an old bath for a trough and a tap. Tara and I made sure it works. So if Mrs Guthridge doesn’t mind and Reverend Knopf doesn’t mind and Gwinnie doesn’t —’

  ‘Gwinnie?’ Her mother frowned, only half listening.

  ‘You know, Mum. Mrs Smith. The twins’ mum.’ Elsie did not draw breath. ‘If Mrs Smith doesn’t mind, then it’s OK. Elvis said . . . er . . . Mr Smith said he wants Jasper’s manure anyway.’

  Sarah Jones stopped trimming the dead rose heads for a moment. ‘Manure? What does he want horse dung for? It’s not as if they’ve done anything with the garden since they’ve been there. I find that family rather odd. And I find it odd you seem to want to spend so much time with them. They’re not appropriate people for us. When you go to boarding school, life will change. And you won’t be so . . . so . . . involved with them.’

  Elsie felt molten lava bubbling up in her chest. The service station had changed since the Smiths’ arrival. Within the first week Mrs Smith had hung pretty red-checked curtains in the windows of the truck-stop cafeteria. Always on the go, and always cheerfully busy, she’d taken down all Chopper Reid’s pictures of big-breasted naked women, then freshly painted the walls a warm white and hung up artful photos she’d taken herself of natural beautiful things like flowers and spiderwebs and leaves.

  And although the Smiths still sold the standard fare of pies and chips, chicken wingdings and dim-sims and threw together instant coffees to satisfy the tub-bellied truckies, Gwinnie now also offered cappuccinos and lattes from a proper Italian machine along with herbal teas in groovy teapots with colourful cosies she’d crocheted herself.

  There were fresh eggs with orbs of sunshine that her two dozen chooks in their egg-mobile provided for all-day breakfasts for hungry travellers. The tourists often took snaps of the colourful chook caravan Mr Smith towed from paddock to paddock after the sheep had grazed there. And even though Mr Smith, or Elvis as he insisted on being called by Tara and Elsie, had been crook and was often away getting treatment in the city, he and the boys had overhauled the mechanics shop so that it looked clean and tidy, more like a car laboratory.

  Sure, the Smiths pilfered a few things from the tip to use as decorations or bricks and timber for shelving or old wooden crates for seating and, yes, everything was second hand, but the Smiths had a way of infusing old things with new energy so they looked more than good. ‘Retro’ was the word Tara kept bandying around. And ‘vintage’ with a dash of ‘shabby chic’. Tara was always coming up with terms like that, inspired from the magazines she pilfered from the doctor’s surgery. Her mother, Nora, was in at the surgery at least three times a week, demanding a new ‘description’ from Dr Patak for either her suspected ‘ammonia’ that she’d contracted after a nasty cold or advice on her self-diagnosed ‘early-stage old timer’s’.

  It wasn’t just Nora who frequented Dr Patak’s rooms. Sarah Jones often complained of a headache, or a sore back from gardening, or general fatigue. Never would she admit she was at the surgery almost as often as Nora, despite her more privileged life.

  Unlike Tara’s sedentary, depressed mother, who had already destroyed the springs in one rancid couch since living with Dwaine, Gwinnie was always on the go, painting things brightly in a palette of gloriously combined colours, or sewing a jazzy cushion cover, or potting a plant, or cooking a cake to put in the glass cabinet of the truck-stop cafeteria, or icing biscuits for the giant jars on the counter. And since Elvis’s cancer, the twins’ mother was often found chopping up raw food for the ‘good health diet’ that she’d put the family on to help with Elvis’s recovery. She also cooked up fresh soups from the plentiful vegetables she grew in the old corrugated-iron tanks Mr Smith had cut in half for raised garden beds out the back of the house.

  And at the kitchen table after school Tara often sat talking with Gwinnie about ‘upcycling’, with eyes as bulging as her guinea pig’s in her admiration of the twins’ mum.

  Elsie noticed too that the family never used the words ‘sick’ or ‘ill’ or ‘cancer’. They always referred to their dad’s ‘recovery’ or his ‘journey back to health’, although judging by his thinning frame and papery grey skin and lack of hair, Mr Smith was a long way off that. Despite that, the roadhouse buzzed with love and activity. The girls gravitated there whenever they could after school.

  Elsie’s mum, on the other hand, couldn’t bear recycling. She preferred shopping for ‘designer new’ on twice-annual trips to Sydney. She preferred to patronise the only other café in Culvert, Sylvia’s Silverspoon Nursery Café, run by a grazier’s wife trying to bring some class to the town.

  ‘And what about Simon?’ her mother asked now. ‘Is he to walk to school with you and the pony? You know he’ll never agree to that. He’s already had to delay going to boarding school a year, waiting for you to catch up to him in high school. He’s made enough sacrifices for you.’

  ‘But Mum, what about you take him to the Silverspoon for a hot chocolate before school? You could have a coffee, and get some plants for the garden.’

  Elsie saw her mother’s body language soften a little. She might have been only twelve, but she knew her mum was glad of any excuse to get off the property and away from the endless jobs there, even if she said Culvert was a grubby backwater with no style.

  ‘So? Can I keep Jasper at the Smiths’?’

  Her mother let out a huff and, with a slender index finger encased in floral gardening gloves, hooked a loose strand of hair back into her perfect blonde bob. ‘You know I don’t like your little band of friends. The town is still talking about that incident. I can’t believe you let the twins —’

  ‘Mum! I’ve been good since. And it was part of an experiment. And the fire was only in a bathtub at the tip. And we waited for a rainy day, so it was safe.’

  Her mother huffed again, placing some cut roses for the house into the basket, before scooping the other side of her bob behind her ear. ‘Yes. The problem was what was in the bathtub.’

  ‘It was only pig poo.’

  ‘Eleanor!’ her mother snapped. ‘You know I don’t like it. And I won’t speak of it. So if I say yes to this riding to school, there are conditions.’

  Elsie let out a breath and grimaced. She knew what was coming.

  ‘Number one: you don’t ride on the highway. We’ll leave the pony at the Smiths’. And number two: if you ride to school each day, you are to go to classical-guitar lessons with Mis
s Beechcroft twice weekly.’

  ‘But —!’

  Her mother held up her gloved hand. Elsie knew the Morgans were sending Tilly to Miss Beechcroft so there’d be no worming out of it. ‘Not another word, Eleanor. Not another word.’

  Four

  The deep blue sky above Culvert puffed with sluggish Monday-morning clouds when Elsie’s mother dropped her at the roadhouse before school. Sarah cast Elsie a dark look when she saw Jasper’s paddock. Little wire markers adorned with numbered triangular cardboard flags scattered the paddock, marking Jasper’s dung piles. Elsie had stood with pink cheeks beside her mother, holding a string halter and lead rope in her tight little hand, knowing full well it was another of Zac and Amos’s weird poo experiments. Sarah Jones had twitched a bit with annoyance, then given Elsie stern instructions not to muck around saddling-up. She drove away sedately, her nose in the air, a sullen Simon in the front passenger seat, jaded that he now had to get out of bed half an hour earlier for the sake of his sister’s pony riding. Elsie watched as he fingered one of his pimples that had bulged into a sea anemone beneath his chin overnight.

  As Elsie unhitched the gate, Jasper nickered, ambling over, ears pricked. Slipping his halter onto his speckled white face, she rubbed his forelock and ears and pressed her cheek to his for a moment.

  She thought back to yesterday and the thrill of riding him to the Smiths’. They had set off after a Sunday roast lunch with the last of the mutton from the freezer. She had trit-trotted the short-legged pony along the grassy verge while her mother followed in the Volvo. Jasper’s hooves clanked on empty beer cans and bottles that had been tossed from cars by local yobs. Elsie had looked down and wondered why, if it was so dry on the farm, there were still tinges of green grass stems buried in the thick yellow stalks on the roadside. Outside the Grassmore front gateway, Elsie’d had trouble hauling Jasper’s head up from the tempting banquet of long native grasses that stretched all the way to Culvert. If what her father said about ‘the drought’ was true, then why was it only on the farm and not here on the roadside? Did they have too many sheep? Surely her father would know that if it was true — it was so simple, yet why did her father fail to see it?

  Elsie had breathed in the hot wind that raced across the flat plains from the west and felt her spirits lift. She was on her pony. And when she was on her pony, the rest of the world and her worries melted away. Soon the roadhouse had come into view. She was beaming by the time Amos and Zac ran out to meet her, both boys’ smiles matching her own at seeing the cute pony standing near the bowsers. Today the boys were wearing Hawaiian-print shorts, Zac’s blue and Amos’s green, teamed awkwardly with Star Wars T-shirts. Elsie had at last learned to tell the boys apart by the fact Zac had ever so slightly curlier hair.

  ‘He’s so totally divine and equine!’ Amos said.

  ‘And astronomically economical!’ said Zac. ‘Only one horsepower.’ He had put his small lean hand on Jasper’s already sweating neck. ‘He won’t need much petrol.’ He took the pump from its cradle and waved it in Jasper’s direction. ‘Where do I fill him up, miss?’ He grinned up at Elsie, the sun illuminating the light sprinkling of freckles that ran over his nose and cheeks. ‘Did you know that animal methane is a sustainable closed carbon system, whereas the carbon emitted from fossil fuels is finite and very damaging to our ozone layer?’

  ‘No. I did not,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Why, I ask you, are we, the Smiths, running a petrol station for cars when we ought to be servicing poo-nies who do poos for the birds and the bees and the air and the trees?’

  Elsie smiled down at him and rolled her eyes. She was used to the twins’ daggy humour now since they had moved to Culvert over a year earlier. Often their science jokes and comments went over her and Tara’s heads, and the girls would look at the boys in bewilderment, but other times they couldn’t breathe for laughing at their silly banter. They had never met anyone as clever as Zac and Amos, but they’d also never met anyone as dorky or daggy either. Even Culvert’s Deputy Mayor Cuthbertson Rogerson’s son, the pale, red-haired, skinny-limbed hyperactive Nathanial, was less weird and received less teasing than the twins. Some days, thought Elsie, it was embarrassing to be their friends, but at the same time, they were a refuge. The Culvert State Primary School was a battleground. Standing alongside Tara and the twins was better than standing alone and facing the wrath that Scarlett and Tilly could conjure with their peers when the teachers weren’t about.

  Elsie had jumped from Jasper’s back and lifted the pony’s tail. ‘The nozzle goes in here, but I’ve lost the cap.’

  As Zac pretended to fill the pony, Amos bent his long lean body over like a set square and began to wheeze laughter.

  The sound of the Volvo’s slamming door and Sarah Jones’s voice evaporated their mood. ‘Eleanor!’ She wore her standard Sunday farm-day clothes of navy linen trousers and a floral overshirt and pearls, looking extremely uncreased despite the heat of the afternoon.

  Gwinnie Smith came banging through the screen door of the house and onto the verandah in a crumpled light blue sundress, her blonde hair sticking to her sweating brow. The freedom of the dress and her tanned lithe limbs echoed her youth in the eighties, pre-twins. She stepped into waiting thongs and almost floated down from the verandah towards them with a smile beaming on her face. ‘Oh! Look! Your pony! He’s so sweeeeet!’

  She’s always so cheerful, Elsie thought. So were the boys. It was as if they lived in a magic land. Even with Mr Smith’s cancer, they were still always smiling. And joking and laughing.

  ‘Sweet like you, Elsie my girl!’ said Gwinnie as she gathered Elsie up in a warm hug and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘Every time I see you, you make me long for a daughter. Dear girl. Once Mr Smith is well, I’ll have to have a word with him! He needs to get back in the saddle and give me a baby girl!’ She delivered a wide grin and a cheeky elbow nudge to Sarah Jones, who was flushing from simply being seen at the truck stop. Normally Sarah’s Sunday afternoons were reserved for tennis with the Featheringtons, Miss Beechcroft or the Morgans, but this week was cancelled because the Featheringtons were away at their beach house. Not impressed by the blatant disclosure by Gwinnie Smith of her private bedroom status with her husband, and missing the routine of the weekend tennis, she hustled Elsie along.

  ‘I must get back. Your father will be expecting me back to replay Landline for him on the video. Find a place for your saddle and bridle. I’m sure the twins will help.’

  ‘I can’t entice you in for a cup of tea?’ offered Gwinnie, her summer-wheat-coloured hair lifting slightly in the warm afternoon breeze.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ said Sarah matter-of-factly. Elsie’s whole being cringed.

  ‘Zac! Amos!’ called Elvis from within the deep belly of the machinery shed. ‘Have you boys been playing with the workshop toilet again?’

  Both boys scurried towards their father’s shed and Gwinnie gave Sarah a rueful look.

  The slamming of the Volvo door and the aggressive rev of the engine told them what Sarah Jones thought about the situation.

  Her mother had been no more civil this morning to the Smiths, driving off without even going into the roadhouse to see Gwinnie.

  Elsie decided to push her thoughts of her mother aside. The important thing was Jasper was here and she was about to ride to school on him!

  ‘Hello, boy,’ she said happily. This was her dream come true. She led him out of the paddock and over to the mechanics shop, where she had left her saddle yesterday. Elsie passed the café window and Gwinnie waved enthusiastically from inside as she set down plates of breakfast in front of some travellers. The man and woman, clearly grey nomads given the caravan parked out front, were sitting prime position in the sunny window, obviously loving the warm Culvert welcome Gwinnie was dishing up along with free-range eggs, crispy bacon and creamy coffee.

  Elsie was still smiling from the sight as she rolled the giant wooden door of the workshop back. It took some time for her
eyes to adjust to the cool shady interior of the shed. There she saw Elvis Smith under the hoist, casting a bright light up into the guts of Miss Beechcroft’s green VW and indicating to Zac what needed adjusting. Zac, a long curl of dark hair dropping over one eye, was biting his bottom lip with effort and hauling on a silver shifter as he stood on a milk crate. Amos was at the workbench taking a part out of a box, while on the CD player Johnny Cash was hearing a train a’comin.

  Elsie smiled even wider. She loved this family. They were always up to something. The boys were never far from the shed, joyfully helping their father, who had his good days and then his not-so-good days.

  ‘Hiya, Cowgirl Jane!’ Mr Smith said when he saw Elsie. ‘And hello to your trusty mustang.’ Both boys grinned to see Elsie and the pony framed in the bright square of morning sun.

  ‘Must be school time!’ Elvis said, taking the shifter from Zac. ‘Thanks, boy-o. Best get that grease off your hands, go kiss your mother and we’ll fix Miss B’s Beetle up after school.’

  Elvis drew Zac into a hug and Elsie felt her heart tug a little as she watched her friend close his eyes, smile softly and hug his father back.

  ‘Thanks again for your help,’ he said, ruffling the boy’s hair.

  Amos put down the part on the workbench, ran to his dad and offered up a ‘see-ya’ hug too. Releasing both boys from his long arms, Elvis began to sing along to Johnny Cash shooting a man in Reno. Elsie turned the pony away and tried to remember the last time her father had hugged her. She couldn’t. Had he even hugged her as a baby? She couldn’t remember a single time.

  With Jasper saddled, Elsie, holding a fresh warm cheese muffin provided by Gwinnie, posed awkwardly for the caravaners as they clicked a shot on their camera of the cute kid on the pony. Elsie made sure she turned her head away, as she did in all photos, so only the acceptable side of her face showed, though the position of the mole made it virtually impossible to hide.