‘Where is that girl?’ he said. Couldn’t Sarah be more helpful in organising Elsie and getting her to the stage on time for his announcement? Kelvin could hear the swill of boozers who stood in front of the stage. He knew from the decades he’d been on council that the drunker the Culvert locals got, the less well received he was.
‘She better be here. Where’s Tammie? Can’t she go find her?’ asked Kelvin, looking around for his colleague.
Just then, Christine and Kelvin heard the corrugated door at the back of the stage open and close. From behind the stage curtain came the voice of a breathless Elsie: ‘Sorry I’m late. I’m here. You go on. I’m right behind you.’
Councillor-Mayor Jones rolled his eyes at his daughter before hauling himself up the steps onto the stage. What on earth was the girl wearing? A dressing gown?
The microphone whined. The stage spotlight lazily roamed this way and that until it at last found him.
‘You’d miss Skippy every time with that kinda spotlightin’, Blue!’ cat-called one of Chunky Nicholson’s sons to Bluey Bourke, who ran the bi-annual amateur theatre group and always got roped in to doing the lighting for the ball.
When the councillor-mayor took position centre stage, another lowly local from the edge of the bar called out, ‘The things you see when you haven’t got a gun!’
Ignoring them, Councillor-Mayor Jones looked out blindly, trying to see the audience beyond the screech of the light, but the crowd was unseeable. All he could feel was just a vast blackness of hostile locals. Like most people, they were simple. What they needed was strong leadership. It was up to him to soldier on and guide them.
‘Tonight, ladies and gentlemen,’ the councillor-mayor said, steeling himself, ‘we have an exciting announcement to make. One that will put the town of Culvert on the map and paint the town with a bright new future.’
‘Instead of being painted in shit like it is now!’ called out a clown from the bar. A murmur of laughter rumbled through the audience.
Kelvin persisted: ‘Then after our formal proceedings we have some wonderful music planned from the . . . er . . . the Whirl Me About Dearest Dancing, er . . . Dearest Old Time Whiz music band.’
‘It’s Waltz Me Around Again Darlin’!’ yelled out old Funky Baker, the drummer. He was in the wings, swigging straight whisky from a flask kept in the pocket of his baggy cord trousers. He’d just returned to the band after his second hip replacement and the drunker he got from his hip flask, the more repetitious his hip-replacement jokes became.
Councillor-Mayor Jones cleared his throat. He could feel himself losing his grip on the tough audience and he knew Cuthbertson Rogerson would be watching very closely.
‘But before much more ado about anything,’ he said bombastically, ‘we have a special treat for you. One of our very own talented local lasses has come back especially for us to sing the national anthem. Please be upstanding,’ he said to the already standing crowd, ‘and welcome my daughter, Eleanor Jones, fresh home from Primrose Ladies’ College to our proud town of Culvert.’
Councillor-Mayor Jones extended one of his arms stage left, and the audience applauded and whistled loudly, not because Elsie was coming to the stage but because they were pleased Kelvin Jones was getting off it. When Kelvin turned, he first noticed the shocked face of his fellow councillor Tammie and the raised eyebrows of his assistant Christine, but it was too late. Elsie Jones was already on the stage, stomping past him in cowgirl boots and the tiniest of ripped denim miniskirts. Her legs were as long as a giraffe’s; her skimpy top slung as low as a deep valley in the Swiss Alps. Her hair was tousled as if she had just gone several rounds with a testosterone-infused cowboy.
When she set her amp down with a thump and bent to plug it into the old timers’ powerboard, the men around the bar erupted into wolf-whistles and hound-dog howls. Cool as a cat, Elsie positioned her slick silver-and-black electric guitar in front of her and shrugged a shimmering diamante-bedazzled shoulder strap onto bare skin. Bluey Bourke cut the lights to one bold spot. Elsie’s father retreated to the shadows. If he dragged her off, there’d be a riot. He couldn’t watch.
Beside the stage, old Funky Baker muttered into his hip flask, ‘Hell yeah.’
At the back of the pavilion, Sarah Jones reached for Simon’s arm to steady herself. ‘Eleanor?’ she whispered, her face draining to the same white pallor as a bag of flour.
On stage, shining like a diva, Elsie set her legs wide apart and stood strong. She reached behind her ear, pulled out a smoke and put it to her scarlet lips. Through narrowed eyes ringed black with make-up, she fished a cigarette lighter from the back pocket of her denim skirt and turned her head profile to the audience to light the cigarette. She sucked deep, tossed the lighter to the boys at the bar, then blew smoke rings into the air. More whistles followed.
Into the microphone she spoke. ‘How are ya doin’ tonight, fine citizens of Culvert?’ There was a loud collective whoop from the crowd. ‘I’m Elsie Jones. I may have been born and bred in this town, but I sure as hell am not your type.’
The grazier set stood transfixed, not sure how to react. The less constrained locals let out more raucous cries and enthusiastic clapping. The young men in the crowd shuffled forwards, hoping to see right up Elsie’s skirt, and Sarah Jones had to be found a seat before she fainted.
Elsie dragged again on the smoke, then jammed it in the tuners of her guitar’s headstock.
‘Here’s a little song I wrote back at Primrose for y’all. At least for some of you.’ Elsie set about plucking the devilish instrument at a fast trot, like a pony in a hurry to get home. The deep throb of her guitar filled the show pavilion with a rhythmic beat. The sound carried aggression, attitude and a touch of heat. She turned to the microphone and let loose a sexy sigh. Then she began to sing with a twang that was tainted with an American southern drawl.
‘I butchered my skin with a cheap and nasty tattoo.
I banged the team till I told ’em all to stop.
Pissed down the drain a whole bottle of good whisky.
No memory what I did then, all I know is it hasn’t stopped.’
The catcalls from the audience intensified as the younger people of Culvert clustered forwards with excitement. Some were making sure this actually was little Elsie Jones from primary school. Where had the scared mouse gone? Where was the mole?
Elsie wielded the guitar with conviction, as if it was a wand casting a spell on them. Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Colorado Buck and all the other bad boys and gals of country music seemed to channel through her, busting open the tiny minds of the Culvert show crowd. It was infectious. It was like a shot of something new. Soon Funky Baker was up on his doddery feet, grabbing his drumsticks from the pocket of his tweed jacket, which he dramatically ripped off, revealing a white T-shirt and a faded sagging tiger tattoo that grinned at the crowd. He rolled up his sleeves and attacked the drums with the air of someone who had jammed blues with the best. He backed Elsie up with the same hard-hoof pony-on-the-road beat.
Elsie cast him a siren’s smile as she strummed harder on her guitar and upped the tempo. There was now no reason to shield herself behind her hair from these people. Her disfigurement was gone and she was liberated. Not just from the mole. But from her whole family and their crappy farm and this entire shitty town and the people in it. She sought out Tilly and Scarlett in the audience: they stood in their demure dresses beside their mothers, open mouths of disbelief, and she winked at them as she sang.
‘Girls grabbed their phones and they started texting.
Can hear Mama now sayin’ she just can’t take it.
Don’t show them how you feel, only follow ya etiquette book.’
Elsie aimed her bile at her mother for getting rid of Jasper. She aimed it at the girls who had badgered her daily since kindergarten. Her father too, for his pompous self-importance. And at Culvert itself, for the way people had treated her, the twins and Tara.
‘It’s time for me to lea
ve your stupid old traditions.
Time for me to say it how it really is.
Won’t play the rules of all you crusty arseholes.
Ain’t gonna act like that lady that you made me.’
Her voice got stronger and stronger and Funky kept on following her trajectory. He was reliving the days when he was a man who could thrash a kit to submission and bring an audience to their knees.
‘Don’t you know we’re all a little crazy?
Just you’re not brave enough.
And a little bit lazy.
Not gutsy enough. Not fucked enough.
Culvert ’n’ all you can go and get stuffed.’
She strummed the guitar so that it distorted like an angry scream as she rose to the final peak of the song. She nodded to Funky, who thumped the drums in a giant finale so his sticks flew and his face shone with life. Half the audience clapped and cheered; the others stood silently as if they had all just been slapped. Funky joined Elsie centre stage and reached his gnarled old hand out for hers so they could take a bow together.
Elsie smiled thinly and looked out to the audience, searching for Tara. But she was nowhere to be found. That had been the plan, to do this for Tara. To show her she was back and still worthy of the Poo Crew. That she was sorry for not being in touch over the years. That she was through with her mother and the boardinghouse girls. But Tara wasn’t there. Elsie Jones’s heart sank.
Up the back, in his coat and tie, hiding in the shadows, Nathanial Rogerson stood, his red face blotched with severe psoriasis.
‘Cool,’ he said as he watched Elsie jam the cigarette between her lips, unplug her amp and haul her guitar and gear from the stage as if she’d been doing it for a Rolling Stone’s lifetime. The screams from the crowd of Culvert youngsters took a full five minutes to silence so that Councillor-Mayor Kelvin Jones could get a word in on Culvert’s new poo plant. His heart beat hard like a drum, stress over what his daughter had just done crash-tackling his body.
Fourteen
In a rumple of sheets, Sarah Jones rolled over, fighting the hangover of memories that pounded in her head. Sharp images of her daughter spotlit on the stage looking like a Kings Cross hooker scrunched Sarah’s brain into a migraine. Her daughter’s tacky teenage rebellion had happened in front of the entire Culvert community! She groaned and shoved her head under the pillow.
Outside her bedroom, the homestead was in mourning for all the grand grazier dreams. The hallways were empty. The kitchen still. The place was saturated in regrets and poor decisions. Especially disappointments about not raising an agreeable daughter and leading an idyllic farmer’s-wife life, Sarah thought. It seemed impossible that Grassmore could feel any more subdued than usual, but it did.
The Jones men were gone at dawn, Kelvin tugging his boots on furiously at the back door. Elsie’s actions had sunk like a stone in the opinions of the show committee. For the rest of the evening, he had received the cold shoulder from the Who’s Who. Without saying it outright, the Culvert silverspoons had made it clear to Kelvin that his campaign to be re-elected had not been enhanced by his daughter’s performance. Kelvin had also been forced to receive one too many congratulatory back slaps from less wellbred locals, saying his daughter was ‘more than a bit of all right!’.
To top it all off, it still hadn’t rained, and the bank was on his case, what with Sarah’s new Pajero, Elsie’s surgery, Simon’s dental work, the need to put more super on his paddocks, where nothing grew. And then there was Sarah, bedridden with her migraines, again.
Simon had been shoved off home early by his parents just when he was about to get a grope of Tilly Morgan behind the Culvert Showgrounds toilet block, so he and Kelvin had stomped off to the ute in matching moods.
In her bedroom, Elsie hugged her knees to her chest, mascara from the night before still haunting her eyes. She had no idea what to do. She kept remembering what it felt like under the blinding heat of the stage lights, with the crowd gaping in shock and her guitar cast out in front of her like a weapon sending sonic shock waves of retribution through the crowd. She let the rebellion of her actions lift her, then, just when she felt herself in a place of strength, she would plummet again like a tiny doll falling from a cliff.
How could she have done that to her parents? They had sacrificed so much for her education, even with the farm going bad and the drought. They had paid for her operation.
But then the unruly she-monster would scream again that what they wanted for her and her life was completely different from what she wanted. And that the ‘drought’ that kept her parents’ mood pinched and angry was her father’s fault anyway, as was their focus on a perpetual lack of money and rain, and their constant worrying about what others thought. Plus she realised now she missed the twins, Gwinnie and Elvis, and Tara. They were ‘normal’ compared to her family and the tossers she’d met in Sydney, both at school and in the band scene in Darcy Kennedy’s garage, with his collection of too-cool-for-school young musos.
She’d met Darcy when buying a packet of chewing gum at the servo near the boarding school. He was carrying a guitar and a chip on his shoulder about mainstream music and private-school girls. After that day, Elsie had found herself fronting the fledgling pub band The Fat Fannies, made up of a mishmash of Sydney wannabes. She had also found herself in love with the stage and a rowdy crowd, and discovered that with the mole gone, she was totally attractive to boys, but uninterested in any of them. Music was her love.
She stood and pulled on some ragged jeans she’d hidden in the back of her wardrobe. They were the ones she used to ride Jasper in and had rips in the backside and on the knees. She swivelled before the mirror to watch as she hitched a thick leather belt through the keepers and reefed it closed. She dragged on one of Simon’s bluey shearer’s singlets that she’d pinched out of the laundry and knotted it. From beneath her bed, she searched out the old cowgirl boots she’d bought in a Paddington second-hand market and pulled them on over a pair of dirty socks. She loved those boots. They symbolised freedom. In Sydney, traipsing along the concrete pavements, they had been her one defiant link to the country, while the other girls had tottered in their trendy high-heel shoes.
All dressed down, but with nowhere to go, Elsie sat and listened to a fly beat itself senseless against a windowpane. After a time, in almost a trance, not from boredom, but from a sense of imprisonment within her own life, she grabbed one of Jasper’s old stirrup leathers also stashed in the wardrobe, and began to finger it and cry. She missed that pony, and the Culvert Poo Crew.
She gathered up some scissors from the wicker sewing kit her mother had given her. She began to fashion a wristband from the leather and thread it with a piece of leather thonging. For an hour, stooped over at her dressing table, she carved and cut so eventually the cuff fit perfectly around her slim arm. Her strumming arm. It’ll look cool, she thought. Then after delicately indenting it with intricate patterns using some nail scissors and a school compass, she ran to the kitchen for some oil and began to polish the thirsty bit of leather in a rhythmic soothing action. Over time, she worked it into a beautiful rustic piece of jewellery carved with stars, barbwire, hearts and horseshoes.
‘Kick-arse cowgirl,’ she said as she knotted the leather band around her wrist, cinching it tight with her teeth and holding her arm out to admire it.
Just then someone clanged the old metal doorbell.
They rarely had visitors to the house. Most daytime visitors searched out her father in the yards or machinery shed. Elsie stomped down the stairs, making sure her boots were extra loud — a reminder to her mother that nothing had changed from the night before. She was on a rampage to freedom, even if she was trapped in her bedroom. Trapped on Grassmore. Trapped in Culvert.
Marbles used to bark when people arrived, but these days Elsie knew he would just flop his feathery tail from where he lay on the doormat. Whoever it was was being impatient. The doorbell clanged insistently again.
‘Coming!’ Els
ie swung the giant front door open and gasped. ‘Tara?’
‘Yup. Cool wristband,’ Tara said, waving the mop she held at Elsie. Then she stooped and picked up a blue bucket filled with rags.
‘Thanks,’ said Elsie as she tried to comprehend how big Tara had got. She still had a pretty tumble of beautiful dark red-brown hair that was lovely and long now, and the most amazing green-flecked eyes and full pretty lips, but they were swamped by her body, small against the fullness of her face and roundness of her shoulders. Elsie could barely believe the giant girl standing before her was the same person she had trundled to school with. She had boobs now that spilled up into a giant pillowed cleavage, and the Elmo T-shirt she wore was stretched and threadbare. Her tracksuit was pilled and sagging.
‘I thought your dog had died,’ she said, looking down at Marbles, ‘but he opened his eyes, farted and wagged his tail so he could share it with me. Nice dog.’
Elsie laughed. Tara. Still funny. Still talking about farts. It made a nice change from the up-themselves girls at boarding school. Suddenly Elsie realised she too had become an up-herself girl from boarding school, deliberately shutting Tara out to save her own skin these past few years. She pushed away regret, frowning guiltily at Tara.
‘Speaking of dying,’ Tara continued, ‘Mum did. She died.’ She twisted her mouth and looked away, biting her lip.
Elsie’s eyes widened. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
The silence went for too long. It was filled with pain for Tara, guilt for Elsie.
‘The girls at school can be bitches . . .’ Elsie’s voice trailed off, the comment aimed mostly at herself. She gave Tara a look of deep apology. ‘It was a bit hard . . . you know?’
‘I think I do know,’ Tara said, the hurt in her voice highlighting the gap between them.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elsie said, meaning it. She saw that her compromise to herself just to be accepted into the ‘in’ crowd had been a betrayal to both Tara and herself. She looked hopefully at Tara, knowing that the tussle in herself was over.
Cleanskin Cowgirls Page 11