Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Phase one of the project will be an audit of the existing treatment plant structure, then the construction of a state-of-the-art . . .’

  ‘State of the fart,’ sniggered Tara as she swirled a ladle through pumpkin soup in a giant pot. She turned to the women in the kitchen. ‘He loves his poo-pond pontifications so much they tell me he’s going to proudly and profoundly pronounce Project Poo to the people again tonight at the Culvert Show Gala Ball! Per-leeze!’ Tara rolled her eyes and grimaced. ‘I’m not going to it. I don’t want to hear this excrement again! How much hot air does that man need to blow out his backside? Everyone knows he’s full of shit. They probably need to upgrade the town’s plant because of the faecal content he alone speaks!’

  ‘Tara!’ cautioned Chunky Nicholson’s wife, Barb, red in the face from cooking under the pressure of a luncheon deadline and worried the CWA ladies would again object to Tara’s presence at the official function, even if she was only out the back in the kitchen. She had invited Tara to help because she was tired of seeing the girl wandering the streets of Culvert.

  For the past year Tara had barely been considered a member of the Grade Ten student community of Culvert State High School. Instead she was classed as a town vagrant on the streets of Culvert, with her wildly curling long dark red hair and frumpy op-shop clothes. Shopping bag in hand, book in another, reading as she went, lollipop firmly inserted into one side of her gob, she ambled about with no apparent destination in mind. She’d nearly been hit by many a passing car, ute or tractor as she dawdled across the street, which was a difficult task in Culvert. These days, when it wasn’t harvest time or school pick-up, you could fire a cannon down the main street at lunch hour and not hit a single soul.

  For the past two years Tara had spent the bulk of her days at home nursing her mother. Nora Green had grown more and more obese. Tara had all but given up trying to get to classes to finish Grades Nine and Ten, but her appetite for learning was voracious. Her mother’s care involved swiping a face washer in the crevices of her fat rolls, changing her nighties, so large that they resembled spinnakers after they were hoisted on the clothesline, and hauling her to the toilet. Then cleaning up the house after Dwaine. Cleaning, cleaning.

  For years Dr Patak had warned Tara that her mother was becoming morbidly obese. These past six months Nora Green had not once left the house, moving only from the bedroom to the lounge and back again, Tara tending to her every need, Dr Patak making house calls with increasing frustration and resignation to the woman’s commitment to self-destruction.

  When her mother slept after lunch, Tara bothered the women at the local library almost daily. She arrived at the counter to order book after book on all manner of topics. Most of them the librarians deemed inappropriate for someone Tara’s age, but knowing what sort of life she must live in that awful house, they’d ordered them for her anyway.

  The books were on subjects like feng shui, extra-terrestrial activities, conspiracy theories, suppression of information on alien visitations, books on angels, books on fairies, books on astral travel, on self-help, on more self-help, on forgiveness, on sexual abuse, on love, on making money, on changing brain waves, on dreams, on beautifying the home and even ones on guinea-pig costumes and knitted clothes for dogs, though Tara Green didn’t even have a dog. She was just plain weird, the Culvert Library staff decided, lovely and sweet, plus a little sarcastic, but weird nonetheless.

  After her library visits she would stop by the IGA for four pies with sauce, which went directly out of the pie warmer into her mouth, then she wandered on to the bakery for an entire tray of vanilla custard slice, of which she would save the bulk for her and her mother when she got home. All the while in her head Tara would argue with herself, after reading a book on the dangers of too much sugar and fats, why, no matter how hard she tried, she simply could not stop eating junk. She knew the bottom line on the eating business was she just didn’t like herself. In fact the word ‘hate’ barely covered her low self-opinion.

  On the other side of puberty, Tara now stood at almost six foot and nearly a hundred kilos and, after hauling her mother about, she was as strong as a Mallee bull. The beer-gutted Dwaine had long since given up his visits to her bedroom. The appeal for him — her childhood — was gone, plus one night not long after the Grade Six formal Tara had almost busted Dwaine’s skull with a fire poker before he could get on top of her. With blood falling in a veil down his face, and his screams as loud as the ones the pigs made when he slaughtered them, Dwaine had run from the room. Tara had, with a steely voice, dared him to call the cops. She had channelled the Archangel Michael for the task and she held the fire poker aloft in front of her like a sword, shaking within, but holding her outer self strong.

  After that, Dwaine had retreated to a diet of internet porn and X-rated videos in the bedroom with her mother, leaving Tara be. Instead in the early hours of the morning Dwaine took to feeding Tara’s mother giant bowls of fried food and chocolate and playing sex games with her, like hiding a Mars Bar in her fat crevices. Tara could hear most of it through the thin walls of the abattoir house and little by little she retreated within herself.

  She also stopped going to the Smiths’ roadhouse after the night of the formal. The happy family there reminded her too much of what she didn’t have. What she would never have. She couldn’t face the possibility that Amos would never kiss her again either. It was better to remain lonely. Poor Elsie had got in a lot of trouble for running away from the formal to ‘be with the boys’, and Elsie’s mum had banned her from ever being in touch with Tara. Then the twins had started home-schooling, and the magic of that time was now in the past. The Culvert Poo Crew had disbanded. She never saw the twins now. She knew at some point Gwinnie had tried to intervene with Tara’s home life after Constable Gilbert came knocking on the door with some lady from a government social service. The fallout from Dwaine was unbearable, and after a few interviews, Tara, filled with fear for her own life and her mother’s, had bluffed them all. The home visits and psych tests had all come to nothing and eventually the ‘government do-gooders’, as Dwaine called them, had gone away. Now Gwinnie Smith and her family at the roadhouse were utterly blacklisted by Dwaine. Tara never walked that way: instead she wandered past the railway station, balancing on the tracks, reading, hoping she wouldn’t hear the train come and it would smash her out of this world and this life, but unfortunately for Tara, like the cars, trains were infrequent at Culvert. Gwinnie, if she saw her, tried to stop and chat, but Tara always shut the conversation down. She just couldn’t bring herself to open up to her. Shame fought within her body violently each time she looked in Gwinnie’s kind eyes.

  Now with the school year over, Tara knew the township folk would be less tolerant of her when they saw her in the streets. She also knew there was no way she was doing her HSC by correspondence with the other Culvert dropkicks. What they taught in school was crap anyway, she reckoned. Summer was rolling in and she was launching a career. She was about to earn her own money as a cleaner — she already had three clients interested in the business she had called ‘Partners in Grime’. Tara was yet to get a cleaning partner, but it paid to think big. If she had read correctly the signs the angels were sending her, her whole life was about to turn. Her Doreen Virtue angel cards had shown her, and she’d feng shui’d the Morton house so much her luck had to change for the better. At least she had been convinced of that until the previous week, when the centre of her universe had imploded.

  When she’d arrived home from the shops, Tara had made sure Dwaine was busy processing carcasses in the killing shed. She could hear the radio blaring eighties hits, and she knew his mind would be immersed in the issue of which horse to back on the TAB that night. Tara carried books in one hand and custard slice in the other into the house. The moment she stepped inside she knew the already dark energy of the house was altered to an even darker state. She had frowned, the hairs on her body standing up in dread.

  ‘Mum?’ she
’d called out, setting her things down on the kitchen bench.

  Nora Green didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. She was slumped dead against the toilet wall. Her potato-sack-sized undies draped about her rolled-roast ankles, eyes glazed over, her skin deathly grey. Lank greasy hair sat flat on her flaking scalp where she’d sweated and strained at her bowels until her heart had given out.

  Tara had stood in the doorway with her hand covering her mouth, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mum.’ Her voice quavered.

  She stepped forwards and laid a hand on her mother’s. The coldness of the skin jolted her. Tara felt the sorrow of the ages swamp her. She had loved her mother, but hated her weakness at the same time. She’d hated the way she’d left her exposed all these years. To Dwaine. To poor diet. To a lack of care. To everything. All the reading Tara had done on becoming a better person, on healing, on the afterlife and the eternalness of love couldn’t have prepared her for the rip of grief and shock that roared through her now. She knew she had to call the ambulance, Dr Patak or someone. But Tara first wanted to make her mother decent. She craned past her and flushed the loo, though the dreadful smell remained. Nora’s tragic gigantic white legs were exposed almost to her bubbled upper thighs, the thick dark hair on them bristling like unscraped pork belly, her undies showing a dirty skidding stain. Tara was ashamed she hadn’t helped her change them that morning.

  She ran for fresh ones, then stooped to tear away the stained knickers and lift her mum’s feet into the clean pair. She tried to hoist them up. Her mother was heavy in life, but now in death, she was like a mountain, unmoveable. Tara sobbed as she tried and tried again to pull the underpants up over her mother. Eventually she went back to the bedroom and grabbed a freshly washed coverlet she’d bought Nora from Manky’s Department and Haberdashery Store one Mother’s Day and draped it over her. She looked ridiculous in the floral quilt with her crusty mouth cast open and her jaw so slack her chin disappeared into her neck. Tara went to the bathroom for a hairbrush. She drifted back to her mother’s body and, crying, she began to brush her mother’s hair.

  Dwaine had found Tara like that over an hour later. She had almost brushed one side of her mother’s head bald. She brushed over and over, murmuring and crying, all the devastation of their ugly, wasted lives rippling through her.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ screamed Dwaine when he took in the vision of the dead mother and the vacant daughter. She felt a hard backhand to her head. She cowered at her mother’s feet, then, fearing his steel caps in her back, she had crawled past Dwaine, whimpering and knowing that she was now totally alone in this world.

  Dwaine was shouting, ‘Nora, Nora! Wake up, you silly bitch!’ and shaking her.

  Not wanting Dwaine to touch her mother any more, Tara at last dialled Emergency Services.

  As it turned out, it had been no good getting an ambulance. They’d had to get Chunky Nicholson’s fire crew in. Nora Green was so wedged in the dunny, it took five of Chunky’s crew to crowbar and carry her out, even firing up the chainsaw for the door. The stench left behind made three of the men vomit. From the hallway, Tara had watched, blank. White. Cold. Humiliated. As the men had at last got her mother into the ambulance, Tara felt a comforting hand on her shoulder. She turned and smiled.

  ‘Michael,’ she said, ‘I knew you would come.’ There was no one there. No one at all. Then Tara Green had gone and lain down on her bed and pretended she wasn’t there either.

  As it was early summer, with already scorching temperatures, and their cool room was getting rather full from a run on elderly deaths, the Vanderbergs at Rington Funeral Service wanted to bury the fat woman quickly, so Nora Green’s existence was all over within a few days. Dwaine insisted on a private funeral so not even the Smiths could come. It was just Tara, Dwaine and the half-cut Reverend Knopf. Done and dusted in an hour. Afterwards when Dwaine went out, getting blind at the pub, Tara sat on the sunken couch where her mother had sat. She wore her only dress, which strained against the fat rolls under her arms and over her back. Tara vowed she would get some money together and leave the abattoir house and this way of being.

  As she did, she heard Gwinnie Smith knocking on the door, front and back, calling her name, but the shame of herself and of her mother kept Tara trapped on the couch like lead weight. Instead Barb Nicholson had stepped in later, banging bossily on the screen door, getting Chunky to force the lock. Chunky had recounted to his wife the horror-show story of getting the body out of the house, with the young daughter hovering and muttering like the girl from the movie Nell. The Nicholsons made everyone’s business their business. Everyone in Culvert knew that without them the footy club would be stuffed, the cricket club buggered, the bowls twilight tournament dead in the water, and there would be no local show. The fire crew would also suffer, as no other bastard wanted to be on call twenty-four/seven — especially not to drag morbidly obese women out of dunnies. And so Barb made Tara her main ‘project’; she had started by pressing the CWA to give her a role as a volunteer in the show kitchen. Which was why Tara was there that day wearing plastic gloves, a food-hygiene hair net and CWA apron, and listening to Elsie’s wanky father. The councillor-mayor boomed on as she tumbled a pile of warm bread rolls into a basket.

  ‘I’ll take them, thanks, Tara,’ Barb said now, grabbing the basket.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want a hand?’ Tara offered, wanting to get a closer look at the new improved shit-ponds picture. ‘I can take Mr Poop’s soup out to him if you like.’

  Barb looked Tara up and down, taking in the clothes beneath her apron: Tara’s pilling grey tracksuit bottoms, tatty runners and the red hoodie with stains on the front. It clashed with her hair horribly. Barb waggled her permed head and pursed her thin lips.

  ‘Beverly won’t have it. You know how she gets,’ Barb said of the CWA president who was second in command to Barb on all things community and often tussled for leadership with her.

  Tara knew Barb was trying to be kindly, but she was over being treated as either a charity case or a bogan loser. She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  She grabbed a roll, tore it open, slathered it with butter and scoffed it in two mouthfuls, chewing and smiling at the other two irritated CWA women who were now ferrying bowls of soup out to the show guests. The other reason she wanted a stickybeak was because she could see the back of Sarah Jones’s neatly bobbed head as she sat at the front, sipping water. She wondered why Elsie wasn’t at the luncheon. She had heard Elsie was back in town. That in itself made her nervous: she really didn’t want Elsie to see what she’d allowed herself to become. When she was nervous, she was hungry.

  She reached under a tea towel for a scone and shoved it in her mouth, surveying Sarah Jones as she chewed. She still looked like a prize snob, too far above the rest to help in a kitchen, preferring to organise posh pyramid-selling parties and luncheons with her upper-crust grazier ladies as fundraisers than to mix with Barb and Beverly and their type. As far as Tara was concerned, Elsie Jones must’ve gone the same way. Elsie hadn’t been to see Tara once since she went to boarding school four years prior. Not once. And even though Tara knew she was back, Elsie hadn’t even been in touch about her mother dying. Even if Sarah Jones may have forbidden her to call in, Elsie still should’ve at least tried to keep in contact. What kind of friend did that?

  Twelve

  Outside in the paddocks at Grassmore Estate, Elsie’s brother, Simon, went another round in the combine harvester, severing the heads off uniformly short wheat soldiers, dwarfed and battle weary in tired dry soils. There was no point waiting for harvest time for this crop of pinched grain. It was stunted and stuffed. Simon and his father had decided to gather what they could early and store it in the giant bellies of their on-farm silos instead. It would only be a matter of weeks before the dams ran low and the grass dried up to dust, blowing away in the hot northwesterly that frazzled any hope of profits.

  Then, from a rattling feeder, Simon and Kelvin would dail
y trail the gut-slicing hard-husked grain to sheep. Sheep that were already too weak to digest the pitiful crop, tottering on doddery hooves, punch-drunk from hunger, the acid of the grain burning their insides. Then the men, congratulating themselves on a job well done, would come inside, drink tea thirstily from cups, help themselves to Sarah’s caramel slice, then sit and complain bitterly about the drought. About always being on the end of a grain auger, and the fact they had had to let all but one of the men go. Now it was basically just a father-and-son operation. Times were tough in farming, they constantly said. From her bedroom Elsie looked out at the depressing scene and the cloud of topsoil hovering in the air. What her father and brother did to Grassmore was, in her mind, a travesty.

  Elsie’d chosen Social Science as a Grade Ten elective and had madly gone about Googling ‘technological agriculture and its impact on humanity’ as a project. At boarding school there was a zippy city internet connection and hours to spare during the sprawling lonely weekends. The more she discovered on the net about the damage caused by big corporations pushing synthetic fertilisers and chemicals on already struggling farmers, the disastrous consequences to soil health from ploughing and over-grazing land and poor farming practices in bare-soil irrigation, all backed by ignorant banking systems, the more she felt her insides turn with anger at the stubborn self-righteousness of her father and his protégé son. Their ignorance inflicted on the land. As a young woman, she could now see the way the men of her family were blinded by fancy catalogues and the flattering house calls the fertiliser reps made. The bigger the tractor, the bigger your balls, Elsie thought sarcastically.