Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  Elsie was discovering that the ideal future of farming meant ignoring what the big companies and their paid scientists said, and recreating a farm that supported everyone on it, from kids through to grandparents. From her self-motivated studies, she knew that many farmers were already making the break away to no-till cropping and farming systems that embraced both old and new more balanced ways. She was learning the importance of building humus in the soil. Of direct selling to customers. Of honouring Mother Nature’s cycles rather than trying to control them with science. The more she discovered, the more she saw her brother and father just talked crap about ‘farming’. But what did it matter? Now she was back home the excitement of her learning had withered like the short-rooted plants in the dead soil on Grassmore. In this family she was a girl. She had no say. She was of no importance.

  She was about to shove her iPod earphones in and crank up some Green Day when her mother broke her thoughts, striding back in from her luncheon at the showgrounds. She ordered her to the mirror. ‘Hurry up, Eleanor! I still have to change too. Dad’s campaign has started, and tonight is important! We can’t be late. If he’s re-elected, it comes with a salary raise.’ Sarah Jones reached inside the wardrobe, her lips thinning crossly. ‘I know Zelda Rogerson is pushing Cuthbertson to challenge your father as mayor. The hide — after all we’ve done for them.’ She turned back to Elsie. ‘So if you could just wear this dress when you perform tonight at the Show Gala Ball, and not say anything on the mic, just sing, that would be wonderful. Do this, Eleanor. For your father.’

  Elsie looked at the green floral dress her mother held. Sarah had selected it from Laura Ashley in Bondi Junction. On the bed was a box that wore a ruff of white tissue paper. Inside were little matching flats. The same kind of shoes her mother had dressed her in when she was six. And again now, at sixteen. Elsie sighed. She knew she’d had enough.

  It felt weird to be back. The house paddock where Jasper had lived was sadly empty. Her mother had sold him three years back to a girl in Rington who wanted a start in pony club. A girl ‘from the right kind of family’, her mother had said. Sarah Jones had spent the money from the pony on ‘some nice new clothes’ for Elsie that she’d posted to her in Sydney with the news.

  When she lost Jasper, without even a chance to say goodbye, Elsie had cried for weeks. In fact she was still crying, sneaking out to the shed to inhale the scent of the few items her mother hadn’t found to pass on to the right-family girl. An old saddle blanket. A few lingering hairs in a bent-bristled brush. It was an ache she just couldn’t soothe. Even poor Marbles was so old and deaf now he barely wanted to come for a walk these days and lethargically remained on the verandah, Sarah Jones cursing him every time she had to step over his prostrate snoring body. Marbles would wake as he cowered away from Sarah’s angry energy, flattening his ears in shame.

  Elsie could relate to Marbles about her mother. Since boarding school her rare visits home were now torturously lonely. The state of the sheepdogs with their chain-mad expressions and ribby sides was just depressing. Her father’s working dogs were so conditioned to fear a boot in the guts, they were well practised at not being seen and so weren’t the sort to cuddle up to. They had little time for humans. No matter how many treats Elsie snuck out to them, they still whined and shrank in her presence.

  Adding to her loneliness, after her escape from the Grade Six formal, now over four years earlier, her mother had forbidden Elsie to ever see the twins again, let alone Tara, who her mother believed to be the ringleader of the entire shebang. Poor Tara, Elsie thought. Sarah Jones, on their drive back from the train station, had recounted the gruesome story of Tara’s mother being chainsawed out of the house. As she and her mother drove past the even more decrepit abattoir house, Elsie reasoned that it had been hard enough fitting in at boarding school, let alone staying in touch with a girl like Tara who all the other girls loathed.

  Elsie thought of Tilly and Scarlett in the dorm at school and how they entertained the other girls with stories of Tara. They made fun of her obsession with poo jokes, her fat guinea pig that looked just like her, her weird angel stories and crazy-lady language, not forgetting the obese mother. The other girls always shrieked with laughter, egging them on, and during those times, Elsie felt relieved their focus was off her.

  Then Scarlett and Tilly told tales of the loopy mad-scientist experimenting twins who had been kicked out of school. Elsie saw how the cruel girls divided the world into ‘cool’ people and ‘daggy’ ones, with no sense of how they fractured the world in doing so. Amos and Zac were top of Tilly and Scarlett’s list of dorks, so to avoid trouble and being put up there with them, Elsie followed Tilly and Scarlett’s lead. She knew she was being cowardly, but she chose to keep her head down and retreated into herself. She cultivated an icy ‘I don’t give a stuff’ rock-chick image, spending the bulk of her time with her iPod earphones jammed in her ears, music becoming her only refuge. Defeated by both her mother and boarding school, she stuck to herself on visits home to Culvert and shoved any thoughts of her former childhood mates aside.

  Alone in her bedroom, Elsie wondered if she should at least call Tara, but she felt she had left their friendship too long ago in the past. She also knew she had to lie low around her mother so that no suspicion was raised before tonight. She knew she’d so far been lucky not to be busted on her secret nocturnal activities in Sydney. She’d been sneaking out to play with a pub band on weekends. The rush that came from getting attention from an audience was her ultimate thrill. She wanted to keep that buzz with the band, and tonight she would claim that right. Still she felt utterly guilty for not contacting Tara, but what could she do? Her mother had made it all too hard since the night of the formal.

  Elsie still recalled with a flush of shame her mother’s painstakingly vague questions about that night. Gwinnie had told Sarah that she’d found ‘the kids’ singing and eating marshmallows around a bonfire. But Sarah would hear nothing of the truth. Nor would she accept that Elsie had been bullied by the girls at the formal. ‘The Morgans and Featheringtons would never raise daughters who flushed other girls’ heads in toilets!’ Sarah Jones had exclaimed, shocked.

  After that night Sarah looked at Elsie as if she was in some way even more tainted than the mole made her. Never would she ask Elsie outright about the boys. No way could Sarah ever just talk straight about sex.

  Elsie’d overheard her father raging about ‘having those young perverts charged’, but Sarah had said that even if they did take action, the publicity would be bad for his political career. So they’d let it go.

  Elsie now looked at her own sad face in the mirror. Tonight was the night to end this misery, she resolved. Her mother saw where she was gazing.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ Sarah Jones asked as she gathered Elsie’s long sheen of blonde hair and draped it back over her shoulder. Elsie was taller than her now. ‘The surgeon did a good job.’

  When her daughter didn’t respond, Sarah Jones went on, ‘It’s only the teeniest of scars, really. It’ll be all healed by the time you head back to boarding school next year for Grade Eleven. Make-up will conceal it for tonight.’

  Elsie looked blankly into the mirror, not recognising the girl there. She remembered how the operation had been arranged without any kind of discussion or warning. While inwardly she was relieved the mole was gone, the way her parents had organised it all had been the cruellest of cuts. Like the way they had simply sold Jasper without any discussion. They’d done the same with this and simply made the arrangement with not one word to her. Her parents were crap.

  It had been a dozy sort of prep time after classes when the neat-as-a-pin unsmiling dorm mistress had come knocking on her door one Friday afternoon.

  ‘Your mother is here,’ she’d said, then sniffed with superiority.

  Elsie had looked up with shocked surprise from the copy of Horse Deals hidden inside her biology textbook. She had been dreaming of one day owning a new horse and maybe ev
en being allowed a tiny turn at farming just a postage-stamp corner of Grassmore, the way she’d been learning about on the internet.

  ‘My mother?’ she’d echoed in almost a whisper. Her mother never came to visit.

  Sarah Jones had stood in the old hall beside the polished banister of the wide, grand stairs. Even though her mother was tiny, she looked just as imposing as the giant stern-faced clock behind her. In her neat outfit, perfect hair and make-up and freshly done nails, Sarah looked more like a kept corporate wife with too much time on her hands than a struggling farmer’s wife from the wheat belt out west.

  ‘Mum?’ said Elsie, frowning at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ her mother had said. Elsie noticed her own overnight bag on the floor beside her mother’s neat court shoes, and a waiting taxi outside.

  ‘Ready?’

  Elsie tilted her head. ‘For what?’

  In the taxi her mother explained that she and her father had booked Elsie into a leading Sydney cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon, and that by tomorrow ‘that dreadful mole will be removed forever’.

  It was the first time ever her mother had mentioned the mole, and surgery. The word ‘dreadful’ swarmed in Elsie’s head. She felt nausea swamp her.

  ‘He’s very good,’ Sarah had reassured her. ‘Discreet.’ She patted her daughter’s knee.

  Arriving at the hospital in the taxi, Elsie felt vomit rise, along with shame, and then she hurled the remains of her lunch onto her school shoes and the floor of the taxi. The emotional upset of the news that her parents truly hated her face as much as she’d always thought had tripped her up inside. Her mother had let out a frustrated cry and exited the taxi as fast as she could, thrusting an extra fifty dollars, with barely disguised fury, to the taxi driver, who was shouting in Mandarin and gesturing wildly to the spew all over the floor of his cab. Briskly her mother had taken Elsie’s elbow and steered her into the hospital to meet the surgeon.

  The black-haired doctor was freakishly perfect-looking, as if he had operated on his own face, with its smooth skin, Superman chin and slick of black hair.

  ‘I’m Dr Day,’ he said as if he was a radio announcer. He looked directly at her mole. On hearing his name, all Elsie could do was roll the tune of ‘Camptown Races’ around in her head, with ‘do-dah-day’ running on loop.

  ‘So this is the culprit,’ he said to her mother after he’d stood to more closely inspect the mole. Sarah Jones had nodded and smiled, looking up at him as if she was in awe. ‘It’s straightforward,’ Dr Day said, cupping Elsie’s chin. ‘I work with the most complex of reconstructive surgeries following severe burns and with the most tricky of cosmetic procedures. This one will be a cinch.’ His breath smelled of mango. He sat back at his desk and grinned like a Botoxed hyena. ‘We’ll operate on her first thing in the morning.’

  Elsie had woken up groggy after the operation, uncertain who she was. Now three months later, she was even more unsure. The mole, she realised, had been part of her. Hate it though she did, it was at least a form of rebellion against her parents. Now she had become their ideal daughter and had had it removed just in time for her father’s mayoral campaign, launched via a family portrait in the Culvert Newsletter. As Elsie stood before the mirror, she wondered what the awful surgeon had done with the mole. Did they keep such things in tiny glass vials to show medical students? Or did they just burn them in hospital incinerators? The humiliation of her youth might have disappeared up a chimney stack and be floating as ash over the ugly cityscape. She decided if her youth had gone, it was time to claim her adulthood, and tonight she would show her family and Culvert just what she was made of. The pub crowds of inner-city Sydney didn’t just see her as little Eleanor Jones, daughter of the mayor. It was time Culvert saw her true self and it was time her parents learned she did not belong to them.

  ‘Mum?’ Elsie said to her reflection.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Sarah said, pleased her daughter was at last speaking.

  ‘Can I practise driving tonight, please, to the ball? It’s not far and I’d like to give driving at night a go on the way home.’

  ‘Why yes, of course, dear,’ Sarah said with relief that her daughter was showing an interest in something. Although the thought of Elsie driving the Pajero did jolt Sarah Jones a little, it was a small concession given her daughter’s mood — a mood that had seemed to last for years now.

  ‘Thanks,’ Elsie said quietly. ‘I’ll head down and put the L-plates on. Don’t want to get dust on my dress doing it later.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Sarah. Perhaps Elsie was learning something at that expensive school after all.

  The Culvert Show Gala Ball was held as always down the less leaky end of the giant show pavilion shed. People were arriving in clusters in their best suits and dresses. The night belonged to the town’s elite, so the sheep and wool producers were heading the charge to the pre-ball drinks. The local townspeople, the ones more inclined to go all out at footy finals, dragged their feet, seeing and understanding the unacknowledged class hierarchy and their place in it.

  On the grass outside the shed, Kelvin Jones alighted from the front passenger seat puffed up and furious that his wife had agreed to let Elsie drive them. His daughter had motored along the highway at no faster than forty kilometres per hour the whole way, sitting straight-backed and peering through the windscreen, looking out for kangaroos, clutching the steering wheel and veering a little too far over towards the guide posts for Kelvin’s liking.

  ‘You can go a little faster,’ he’d said angrily. He was used to telling her to slow down when she revved about on his paddocks, fishtailing the old rattler farm ute in the back end and spitting up dust doing circle work when she thought he wouldn’t catch her. And here she was trundling along like she was driving Miss Daisy to a flower show. She was deliberately trying to antagonise him, Kelvin realised. He cast her a dark look and Elsie knew her father had caught on that she was stirring him.

  In the back seat Sarah, perfect in a black Carla Zampatti dress, sat next to a freshly washed and neatly groomed moleskin-clad and RM-Williams-booted Simon. He was straightening his tie and slicking his hair over to one side, a mirror of his father’s.

  ‘She’s just trying to make you late, Dad,’ Simon said, ‘and get your goat.’

  ‘Am not, dick brain,’ said Elsie, frowning at her brother in the rear-vision mirror. ‘I’m not after anyone’s goat. If I hit a roo in this wanker-mobile, I’m in shitter’s ditch, so shut up, you bloody backseat driver.’

  ‘Eleanor!’ her mother said.

  Elsie pivoted around in the driver’s seat. ‘Oh, I do apologise, Mother,’ she said in her best Queen’s English, placing the palm of her hand on her chest. ‘I forgot myself.’

  Her father huffed. What an attitude, he thought. Now arriving at the ball, Kelvin Jones tugged his suit jacket over his belly and marched over towards the show pavilion, leaving his wife to make her own way. There he extended a hand to Deputy Mayor Rogerson, who was standing beside Zelda and Nathanial.

  ‘Ah! The outgoing mayor,’ Cuthbertson said through a gritted smile. ‘Good to see you, old boy!’

  ‘Very funny, Rogerson. Very funny,’ said Kelvin, shaking his hand, but without a smile, glancing about for staff from the council offices to back him up.

  Watching him through narrowed eyes, Elsie got out of the car and opened the door for her mother. I have to take it easy, she thought, even though she was ready to explode. ‘OK?’ she asked, forcing a smile at her mother.

  Her mother nodded stiffly as she applied lipstick in the small round mirror of her make-up compact. Getting out of the car, she held her posture straight and smoothed down her clothes. There were strings of tension that ran in cords beneath the skin on either side of her long slender neck. She patted her hair back into its perfect blonde bob.

  ‘You go on, Mum,’ Elsie said. ‘Dad needs his chief campaigner by his side. Thanks for letting me drive.’

  ‘I’m watching y
ou,’ Sarah said coldly before walking towards her husband.

  With relief Elsie saw Simon too had leaped from the car and was headed towards a cluster of young male farmers who were already standing about swigging on glasses of beer at the entrance to the pavilion. They met him with a collective of deep noises, like the baritone voices of rams.

  Sarah glanced back at her demure-looking daughter, standing calmly in her pretty green dress with its blooms of tiny flowers. Her strange demeanour made Sarah feel uneasy. She walked back over to Elsie. ‘I know you will do your father and me proud. You look so pretty now.’

  Now? Elsie felt the knife. She waited until her mother was out of sight, disappearing inside the pavilion in the wake of her husband, then began to get the guitar case from the back of the Pajero. She flipped up the tartan picnic blanket Sarah Jones always took to tennis and instead of the acoustic guitar they had borrowed from Miss Beechcroft for the night, she emerged with her own electric guitar and amp. The one her mother didn’t know she hauled around the pub gigs in Sydney. The one her mother forbade her to play.

  Thirteen

  The red-curtained display board of the planned sewage plant was now reset on a bigger stage in the show pavilion. The building was festooned with a woeful tangle of haphazardly hung balloons and streamers. On the stage stood the silent instruments of Rington’s old-time waltz band, impossibly named Waltz Me Around Again Darlin’. In the wings, Christine Sheen, the mayor’s assistant, swathed in a bold patterned purple dress with a plunging neckline, straightened Councillor-Mayor Jones’s tie. She thrust her breasts out further just to see Kelvin’s eyeballs roll when he saw her huge cleavage so close to his nose. He cleared his throat, tearing his eyes away, and looked down to his speech notes. The wickedly funny Christine smiled to herself. She got him every time. The councillor-mayor glanced at his watch.