Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Look this way, sweetie!’ called the man with the camera. ‘Smile!’ Her cheeks burned with self-consciousness, but soon to her relief the elderly couple were on their way and the twins were walking beside her in their rumpled hotchpotch second-hand uniforms stained with motor oil. Jasper moved forwards on lively little legs and Elsie relished the weight of her backpack bouncing on the curve of her saddle behind her. Her bare legs against the stirrup leathers and the thinness of her school uniform against the hot leather felt more than weird, but she chose to ignore it all. Her mother had tut-tutted her for wearing her school dress, suggesting she would be better off riding in her tracksuit, but Elsie had refused to change. The checked blue dress would be fine for the fifteen-minute trundle on the pony from the outskirts of town. Elsie sighed. She was in horse heaven. Especially with Amos and Zac beside her, and soon Tara. This was the best day of her life.

  ‘How much do you reckon he eats?’ Zac asked, squinting up at Elsie against the glare of the morning sun and laying a hand on the pony’s neck. A magpie warbled from a straggly roadside gum as if to enquire too.

  Elsie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Lots. He’s always eating.’

  ‘We’re attempting to establish how often he poos,’ Amos said. ‘And what his poo weighs, but we’re having trouble calculating the input. Maybe we could put him in the sheep yards for a set period of time and record the weight of his tucker, then after he eats, how often he goes and how much his poo weighs? Then Dad’s got some lab tests he wants to run.’

  ‘Yeah!’ said Zac, adjusting the strap of his canvas bag and tugging up his grey school trousers. ‘Could we, Elsie? Just for a bit. He wouldn’t be in the yard for long.’

  ‘What do you want to do all this for?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Just as an experiment. It’s something Dad and us are cooking up.’

  Elsie smiled and looked down to the boys. ‘Doesn’t sound like it would taste too nice . . . whatever it is you’re cooking.’

  They both grinned back at her, each almost a carbon copy of the other.

  ‘There’s always something to cook up in life,’ Amos said. ‘No point sitting still. Mum says the world is full of infinite possibility if you believe it, and as we live in an expanding universe directed by the vibrational energy of human thought, anything truly is possible. Theoretically,’ Amos said.

  ‘Or realistically, depending on what you believe,’ Zac added.

  Elsie shrugged and wove her fingers through Jasper’s mane as the pony pricked his ears towards the unusual smell of Morton’s Abattoir and Butchery, now looming on their left.

  ‘Sure. Anything’s possible. The experiment sounds great. Whatever it is you are talking about. Infinite poo-sibilities! Measure his poo if you like,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Fantastic!’ said Zac excitedly. ‘We can set up the ex-poo-riment tonight!’

  From her hazy cracked window, Tara felt the prick of tears when she saw Elsie riding along the roadside with Zac and Amos walking and laughing beside her.

  ‘Oh, phew.’ She was so grateful the day was beginning with her friends. She took in how pretty Jasper looked with his ears cast forwards and head raised. He carried his tail high and was swishing it in the golden morning sunlight. But Tara realised he wasn’t prancing happily. He was acting up because of the abattoir sheds and the stench of death that reeked from the place. Elsie had to kick him on and reassure him at the same time. Tara breathed inwards sharply; the shame of her home settled within her bones like a cancer. She watched as Zac reached for the reins and helped lead Jasper up to the front lawn, if it could have been called that.

  She saw Amos put two fingers in his mouth and let rip with a loud whistle. Even her brave friends were too scared to come knocking on the door.

  She turned away from the window. The poor pony will get used to it, Tara thought. She had had to when her mother moved in with Dwaine. Tara knew you could get used to a lot of stuff if you made yourself think about other things.

  She fought down her tears, walked from her bedroom, retrieved her scuffed school shoes from a dead pot plant and pulled them on, not retying the laces. Her aim was to get through the entire school term without ever untying the knots. They were her lucky knots, she had told herself, and they kept her safe on a pathway with angels. Shoes on, she stepped over the empty cans, bottles and food packets scattered on the grimy brown carpet in the lounge room. On her way past the cluttered kitchen table she reached for another handful of stale salt-and-vinegar chips and scooped some cold baked beans out of an already open tin and spooned them into her mouth, washing them down with a swig of Passiona, before grabbing up her school bag. She hastily looked inside to make sure Trev her guinea pig was still happily nestled in there with the fresh blades of grass she’d torn from the base of the abattoir tap earlier that morning. Tara was about to call out, ‘See ya,’ to her mother, but then she thought, what’s the point?

  It wasn’t a kill day today so her mother and Dwaine were still snoring their heads off, smelling manky from all the Jim Beam they had drunk the night before. She hated nights before a non-kill day at the abattoir house. The gloom of no sleep, Dwaine’s angry shouts at the Fox Sports coverage of the dish-lickers as another greyhound he backed failed to finish in a place. The fug of cigarette smoke crawling uninvited under her bedroom door. Her mother crunching her way through chips, then chocolate, then lollies. Washed down with Beam. Then later. When her mother was passed out from booze and sugar, the creak of the door and another uninvited visitor.

  Dwaine’s steps wavered and his weight was solid and ugly. The smell of animal fat, smokes, booze and urine. The press of one pudgy palm over her mouth while the other hand, which had each stubby sausage finger tattooed with the letters L-O-V-E on their back, stubbed into her. Tara would scrunch her eyes tight and pull her mind into a tiny pinprick of light. She would wait until she had controlled the hot panicked breath that flew rapidly in and out of her two small nostrils. When she roped in her panic so that her breath came slowly, she would then feel her body soften. She could float out and hover in the realm of angels she had danced with in her dreams.

  All the while, the toad-like form of Dwaine pumped with his own hot breath in and out. When he spilled himself onto her, he would let out a quiet moan, like a drought-thirsty beast dying in a pool of its own muck. He would stumble off into the distasteful darkness of the house and climb into stained sheets beside Tara’s mother.

  When she heard him begin to snore, a fear-frozen Tara would roll over and hug her knees to her chest, reach under her pillow for the silvery wrapped chocolate she had placed there earlier for this exact moment and, sucking on the chocolate, she would cry herself softly to sleep, begging the angels and fairies to come and play with her in her dreams.

  Now, with the sun raining down outside, Tara ran from the dimness of the stale house, slamming the door. She was a kid again, standing with her friends. The sunshine was too pure to let the craziness of the night cloak her any more.

  ‘Wow! A real live unicorn on my lawn!’ she said, jumping up and down in front of Jasper, who was rubbing the sweating line beneath his brow band on his outstretched leg. She felt the shadows of the house sliding off her skin up to the puffy white clouds that drifted by. She found a mint in her school uniform pocket and shoved it in her mouth.

  ‘Unicorns are a mythical beast, Tara,’ Amos said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Ohnee if oo fink ay are,’ Tara said as she chewed on the mint and swallowed. ‘Jasper is definitely a unicorn. You just can’t see his horn in the daylight. The moonlight makes it visible and on a full moon you can actually see his wings.’

  ‘Really,’ said Zac sceptically.

  ‘Yes, really,’ Tara said. ‘It’s true, isn’t it, Elsie?’

  From up on Jasper’s back Elsie looked down at her friend, whose face was pleading up at her as if everything depended on her answer. Tara had a ring of baked-bean sauce around her lips and her hair wasn’t brushed again this morning.
Elsie frowned but also smiled at the same time.

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s true. Amos himself told me it was a world of infinite possibilities, which he then told me means that anything is possible. So yes, Jasper is, in fact, very possibly a unicorn.’

  ‘Touché!’ Zac said, shoving Amos. ‘She gazumped you! She’s right.’

  Elsie saw Tara’s body relax and then the four of them, along with the little white pony and Trev the guinea pig, made their way towards Culvert State Primary School. What would a life look like, Tara wondered, if anything really was possible? She unhitched her undies from her backside and swung her little legs out wider so her inner thighs didn’t rub so much. For a start, in her world of imaginings she would leave Culvert and never come back.

  ‘Today is going to be a great day!’ she said. ‘I can feel it!’

  They were just walking past what they all called the Dolls’ House, where the town’s recluse, Mr Queen, lived, when, from over the high private fence around the beautiful leafy garden of his perfectly gorgeous storybook house, he turned the hose on them.

  ‘Begone, varmints!’ Mr Queen cried out in his shaky old-man voice. Jasper shied, Tara squealed and the twins laughed before they all hurried on their way.

  Five

  The shit ponds, as the local kids called them, lay adjacent to the Smiths’ six-hundred-acre farm behind a high woven-link metal fence. As if the sturdy seven-foot fence wasn’t enough of a pronouncement that human poo must be dangerous stuff, two strands of barb had also been strung across the top. Seven pink-bellied galahs perched there now, chattering above Dolly Parton’s ‘Coat of Many Colours’, which was drifting from Elvis Smith’s ute speakers. The raucous birds were also tilting their heads, keeping one eye on the human activity below.

  Elvis and the twins were unloading timber lengths from the ute and stacking them inside a giant old weatherboard-and-corro farm shed. Over the years the huge shed had acquired a lean due to the steady push of the plains winds. Beside the shed a clump of ironbarks mimicked the shed’s easterly stagger.

  Tara, perched on the thick bullbar of the ute, Trev nestled on her lap, sucked on her cola Chupa Chup and looked up at the fence. ‘Who would want to break into a sewage plant?’

  Elsie followed her gaze to the raised beds of the sewage ponds and the brittle tufted grass that surrounded them. Further, beyond the ponds, were a large Colorbond shed, a cluster of higher tanks linked with large piping and a pathway to a small portable office, outside which a white Culvert Council vehicle was parked beneath the far-from-generous shade of an old contorted gum. Beyond that, behind yet another fence, a small rusted yellow Bobcat dawdled over the humps of the rubbish tip beneath a cloud of circling birds.

  Scratching her calf beneath her school sock, Tara looked up at the twisted, jagged barbwire. The fence reminded her of the bleak war films Dwaine watched in the dead of night. The too-loud movie soundtracks would rip through the abattoir house, ricochet off the furniture and smatter up the walls, rattling Tara’s fairy pictures on the other side and blasting flickering light under her door as she battled to sleep. Tara pulled the Chupa Chup out and twisted her mouth from side to side as she pondered how peoplepoo in a pond could invite break-ins. Elsie, who was sitting on Jasper, rubbing her reddened knees, was again reminded of Trev as Tara jutted her top teeth over her bottom lip and thought deeply.

  ‘Kids, I suppose,’ Elsie offered.

  ‘Yeah, but we’re kids and do we want to break into the shit ponds?’

  ‘Well, we broke into the tip.’

  ‘We didn’t break in. The gate was open,’ Tara reasoned.

  ‘Yeah, but the shit ponds? I wouldn’t want to get in there. If I did, Mum would kill me anyway. I dunno,’ said Elsie, struggling with Jasper as he tried to rub his sweaty forelock on Tara. The warm afternoon breeze shifted its direction and thankfully took the waft of the ponds away to the east.

  Elsie grinned. ‘Maybe it’s the poo that wants to break out,’ she said, ‘and rampage through Culvert.’

  ‘Yes! That’s it!’ Tara’s eyes were wide as she scratched Jasper behind the ears. ‘Giant poo monsters that come alive on Wednesdays, trying to find the people who flushed them!’ She held her hands out in front of her zombie-style and made slurping and groaning noises while crossing her eyes.

  ‘Wednesdays? Why Wednesdays?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘Because it’s a shitty day of the week. It’s the furtherest from the weekend.’

  Elsie giggled. ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘No. Not really. We’re the only sane ones here in Culvert.’

  ‘Really? How do you know?’

  ‘An angel told me.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yep. He did. We’re the only ones in the town that the poo monsters won’t touch because we are sane. We are completely sanely nuts-o.’

  Elsie’s smile broadened and she let a loud shriek of laughter escape. The sound lifted to the blue and even silenced the galahs for a moment.

  It felt so good to be out there. For the first time in as long as Elsie could remember it had been an OK sort of day at school. Jasper’s arrival in the morning closed the gap between the other girls and her and Tara. A few had broken from the pack and come to ask if they could pat Jasper as she settled him in the church paddock. Elsie had hastily unclipped her helmet, rummaged her hair forwards and combed it over her face with her fingers, answering, ‘Of course.’ She knew the novelty would soon wear off, but at least today the other girls had spoken to her, asking her questions.

  Tilly and Scarlett, jealous, had of course kept away, muttering to each other behind cupped hands. The niceness would be short-lived. Elsie knew they would be plotting something, maybe spreading the word that if you touched Elsie Jones or her pony you would catch the mole-disease and soon your face would be covered in them. But for the moment, Jasper’s mere presence had opened a once-closed-off door just a tiny chink.

  Elsie’s and Tara’s day had got even better when Elsie’s mother had left a message at the school that she had taken Simon home with gastro and could Elsie wait at the Smiths’ after school? Elsie had quickly saddled Jasper and the four of them had headed out of the school gates. Passing Mr Queen’s house, Tara peered through a crack in the high weatherboard fence. The back of the Dolls’ House was even prettier from this angle with a secret garden of winding garden beds interspersed with neat green lawn, sheltered by well-spaced European trees. She could see a couple of Mr Queen’s cats sunning themselves in a conservatory that was attached to the high-pitching pretty white house. The slanted roof was broken by several large attic windows. A stone fountain burbled at the centre of the scene, dribbling water over a winged cherub.

  An overripe tomato landed on the trodden-dirt path beside her. Two more followed quickly and squelchily.

  ‘Take your leave, vile intruders!’ called Mr Queen.

  Again Jasper shied, again Tara squealed and, as they scampered away, again the twins laughed, clutching each other as they ran.

  When they’d arrived at the roadhouse, Gwinnie Smith had come out of the café to tell Elsie that her mother would be delayed. One of the Grassmore tractors had broken down and Sarah had to drive to Rington to pick up what must be an urgent and crucial part.

  ‘If your mum’s coming later, why not take the chance to ride Jasper out to the back of the farm?’ Gwinnie suggested. And so she and Jasper had followed Mr Smith, with Tara and the boys piled on top of the timber in the back of the ute.

  Now in the paddock, Jasper was happily nibbling on grass while the boys sweated, stacking the heavy lengths that would be used to reinforce the building. Elsie noticed how happy the boys were with their father; they were all excited that the defunct farm shed was about to get a facelift and they could expand their experiments out to the paddocks. Already in the shed were some second-hand machines and as Mr Smith, a former farm boy and mechanical engineer, had told the girls, they were about to convert them.

  ‘We’re going to tr
ial no-till cropping and study the soil and native pasture regeneration that we hope will follow,’ he said to the girls.

  Not really understanding what Mr Smith was on about, Elsie still listened keenly to his excited spiel on doing away with ploughs and man-made synthetic fertilisers.

  Even though he was chemo-thin, Elvis was brighter than life itself that day, standing tall in his cobalt-blue work shirt and denim jeans. He was talking fast and waving his hands excitedly.

  ‘I don’t have time to die,’ he said over the compilation of country music that was, as always, blaring from the ute. It had rolled from Dolly Parton being an island in the stream with Kenny Rogers to Jimmy Buffett on his way to Margaritaville. ‘Do I, boys? There’s too much to be done. A whole world to change and inspire! When I saw this place advertised, I knew, just knew, it was my calling!’

  Both boys grinned up at him from where they were stacking the last piece of timber. Elsie edged Jasper nearer and Tara came to sit in the tray of the now-empty ute.

  ‘Sometimes what seems like the greatest crisis in life is the greatest gift. Y’know! I had to do away with the belief system that I was a victim. I was ousted from my own family farm cos I was the youngest, years back, but now with my love for agriculture and my engineering experience, this place is my nirvana! Life forced me to see that my health stems not so much from my inherited DNA, but my ingrained neural networking processes that were, I’m afraid to admit, looped on negative. But now, with the study I’ve been doing on human cells and vibrational energy and metaphysics, I’ve discovered I’m not a victim to cancer or the limits of my DNA! This is my chance to wake up! Through this, I’m being forced to truly live! And here I am in Culvert on this farm! Right, boys?’

  Zac and Amos grinned while Elsie and Tara watched Elvis with fascination. Neither girl had ever heard so many words uttered from a man in one stretch. In Elsie’s case, her father talked in sentences of no more than five words to her and it was always about the farm or the troubles he had on council. His talk was always about lack. Or trials and tribulations. Or what Elsie hadn’t done, or couldn’t or shouldn’t do. And Tara never heard a man talk about his feelings if she didn’t count rage expressed via frequent expulsions of the F-word.