Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  Tara, once again, twisted her lips back and forth. ‘I understand.’ She looked down at herself. ‘I completely understand. Look at me. I’m shit.’

  ‘Oh, Tars,’ Elsie said, stepping forwards to set her things down and hug her. As she folded Tara in her arms, she felt the outer softness of body, yet the strength within her muscled frame. Elsie felt Tara shudder once, crying, then she quickly sucked in a get-it-together breath. She stepped back.

  ‘I’m all good now,’ Tara said, swiping the heel of her hand across her face.

  ‘And I am all good for you now too,’ Elsie said, more apology written in her expression.

  Tara nodded and for a moment there was a quiet knowing that the cracks in their friendship had already begun to repair.

  ‘You look great, by the way. Beyond bloody beautiful,’ Tara said, tapping above her own lip.

  Elsie’s fingertips flew to her face and fingered the puckered scar where the mole used to be. She blushed. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘Guess she couldn’t stand looking at me . . . it . . . any more.’ She hastily changed the subject. ‘You look great too.’

  Tara gave a high clear laugh. ‘Liar! I look like hell. It’s lucky they haven’t brought McDonald’s and KFC to Culvert. I’d explode. No matter what I do, I’m addicted to crap food.’ She rubbed her hand over her belly.

  ‘But Tara —’

  ‘Oh, shush, Elsie. Let’s start over. Even though I may look like hell, I can make your house look like heaven.’ She raised the mop and bucket and gave Elsie a shopping-channel smile, complete with theatrical wink. ‘Your mum rang and left a message after she saw my flyer in Sylvia’s window.’

  ‘Mum asked you here?’

  Tara’s cheeks flamed a little. ‘She doesn’t actually know it’s me. I put on a German accent. She thinks it’s a professional mob set up in Culvert. I’m pretty good on the computer so the flyers look profesh. Ja, madam. Vee ken cleanz your ’ouse!’

  Elsie laughed, pleased her mother was about to get another shock, and delighted that here was Tara. Tara. She could feel it deep within her now. Here was her true friend. ‘You’d better come in then. I could do with a dose of heaven.’

  ‘OK,’ Tara said, brushing back hair that trapped golden sunlight in its red curls, ‘and while I clean you can tell me how you rocked Culvert to its core last night. Word is on the street, Elsie Jones! You are a legend, a rebel and totally small-town famous! Totally! I want to hear all, pray tell.’

  Laughing, Elsie took the bucket from Tara, linked arms with her and steered her inside. ‘Let’s rock this joint,’ she said gleefully. ‘You clean, I’ll play. Amp you up from room to room.’

  ‘Perfect! At last!’ Tara said. ‘I’m back with my partner in grime!’

  They started in the kitchen, Tara dusting, scrubbing, wiping, shining, while Elsie started off with Miss Beechcroft’s borrowed acoustic, playing ‘Sadie, the Cleaning Lady’, changing the words to ‘Tara, the Master Farter’. They talked and sang and laughed. Then talked some more. About the twins and the demise of the Culvert Poo Crew. About small-minded locals. About awful girls in boarding school and how Elsie had tried to be like them, but had always been on the outer. About the books Tara had read. About the books Elsie had read. The music she loved. About their families, if Tara could call hers one. About Jasper being sold. About the farm dying. About what hadn’t changed in Culvert. By the time they had got to the lounge room to clean, Elsie had retrieved her amp and electric guitar from the back of the Pajero. She began serenading Tara as she polished the antique sideboard, with a beautiful Charity Buck song.

  ‘Far out, Elsie,’ Tara said when she was finished playing, ‘you are good. I mean really, really good.’

  ‘And so are you!’ Elsie looked around the room. Tara had moved like a river flowing through the space, shifting a chair here, a table there, lifting up items, dusting them, but setting them back in a new arrangement. Within fifteen minutes, the Grassmore homestead dining room looked ready for the royal family.

  ‘Get real. Good at cleaning?’

  ‘Yeah! Look at this place!’

  ‘Well,’ said Tara, dropping her gloved hands by her curved rounded hips, ‘there is an art to it. Remember that folder I found on the tip?’

  Elsie nodded, recalling the day the four of them had set out on yet another adventure.

  ‘Since then I’ve been studying feng shui. Wind. Water. Balance. I figured if I couldn’t be beautiful and serene, then I could at least make my surroundings beautiful and serene and that in turn might change me. As much as you can create beautiful and serene in Culvert, with the poo blowing through it. And in an abattoir house.’

  At the mention of Tara’s house, the room turned cold.

  ‘Is he still there?’ Elsie asked.

  Tara looked at Elsie for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Fark,’ said Elsie. ‘You’ve gotta get out.’

  ‘I know,’ Tara said quietly, staring at the imported Turkish rug on which she stood. ‘I’ve given myself three months to get the money together.’

  ‘Then where?’

  Tara shrugged.

  Elsie shook her head and tears welled in her eyes.

  ‘What about you? Your father’s pretty bloody ordinary, in another kind of way.’

  ‘At least I have a mother and father,’ Elsie said sadly. The thought of Tara packing up and leaving Culvert on her own sent a shudder through her. Then she thought of her own dark future: more years of boarding school and the pressure to do well in the HSC, then university or a suitable husband. All she wanted to do was play music, and, if she allowed the truth, to farm Grassmore the right way. But neither of those things would happen despite her stance last night at the Culvert Show Gala Ball. Bugger them.

  Elsie let loose with a loud strum of her electric guitar, the leather cuff urging her on. The sound rifled around the room and bounced off the fine china vases and sideboard dishes, scuttling under chairs and diving behind heavy formal floral drapes.

  ‘Let’s mop and rock!’ Elsie said, but then stopped and leaned over her guitar from where she stood. She reefed open the sideboard, grabbed from it her father’s precious aged Scotch, dragged the lid off with her teeth and spat it on the floor. She took a deep slug and passed Tara the bottle. Then she began at full throttle to bash out AC/DC’s ‘Jailbreak’ and Tara began to whip the vacuum cleaner into a frenzy. Spinning, turning, singing, shouting and jiving as the motor whirred and the electric guitar distorted and fired machine-gun bullets of sound throughout the homestead, even shifting the dust in the old ballroom through sheer force of the vibration.

  The girls had got almost a full way through the bottle of Scotch when behind them, in the doorway, appeared Elsie’s mother.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Sarah Jones shouted. ‘What is going on here?’ Elsie and Tara looked at her, standing in her floral dressing gown, her eyes haunted and vulnerable but her hair perfect.

  Elsie’s guitar fell silent; Tara turned off the vacuum cleaner and set the almost empty Scotch bottle on the sideboard, quickly fumbling a coaster under it.

  ‘Tara Green?’ Elsie’s mother asked.

  Tara curtseyed. ‘Yes, madam.’ Then she giggled, but her giggle evolved into a suppressed snort of laughter. Elsie joined her and together they wheezed.

  Sarah Jones looked at the bottle of Scotch. The tangle of cords between the guitar and the vacuum cleaner.

  ‘I ordered a cleaner from Partners in Grime,’ she said. ‘There was an advertisement in Sylvia’s Silverspoon.’

  The girls went off in another spiral of laughter and snorts.

  ‘Ja,’ Tara managed, ‘I am zee partner in grime. And she’s my other grimy partner.’ She pointed at Elsie.

  Elsie scrunched her eyes, the Scotch tearing holes in the lining of her stomach yet fuelling her laughter, and lost it in a heave of belly-aching splutters. Even though the laughter felt real, it was hollow and defiant too.

  ‘Eleanor Jones!’ her mother said, her voice raised. ‘S
top laughing. There is nothing to laugh about.’

  Elsie drew her lips in and pressed them together tightly.

  ‘I have just got off the phone from Primrose. After last night, I’ve been asking a lot of questions. Mrs Morgan was kind enough to tell me what Tilly told her, and your dorm mistress has asked your other classmates, who have corroborated the story. You’ve been lying about your volunteering. Telling the staff at the old people’s home that you’re sick. Then, as we have discovered, you have been going to a residential house to practise in a garage with a band. Then on the weekends you’ve been sneaking out at night and playing in the band in bars. A band? In bars? At sixteen?’

  ‘Yes. The Fat Fannies. So?’

  Tara stifled a giggle.

  ‘I don’t care about your band. You’re a fat liar, Eleanor Jones.’

  ‘And bloody Tilly and Scarlett are fat dobbers. They didn’t tell you everything, did they? Once I had the surgery, I could suddenly be their friend. Not before though, Mother. No, before that they flushed my head in the toilets. But you didn’t believe they’d do that, did you? Anyway, just so they’d be nicer to me, I snuck them out as well. Scarlett’s banging the drummer and Tilly practically dry-humps the bass guitarist even though she’s supposed to be going out with your precious Simon and shagging him.’

  Sarah’s eyes widened.

  ‘I’m the only one in the dorm still a virgin, Mum. You oughta be proud of me. That boarding school you brag about is not all it’s cracked up to be.’

  Sarah Jones’s cheeks flamed red. ‘Proud of you? Proud of you?’ Her voice was like the engine of a plane — it had both a low grumbling sound to it and a high-pitched whine. ‘You ungrateful little bitch! You, miss, are gated.’

  ‘So?’ She scowled. ‘I’ve been grounded all my life.’

  Mother and daughter stood glaring at each other. The years of tension holding them locked in a stream of distrust and dislike.

  ‘And for the last time,’ Elsie seethed, ‘stop calling me Eleanor. I hate that name.’

  ‘Mrs Jones,’ breathed Tara, trying to turn on her energetic capacity to calm people. She’d read a book about it once. But fuelled with Scotch herself, standing before the lady of the house, it just didn’t seem to be working.

  Sarah Jones turned on Tara. ‘This is all your fault. Right from the start you’ve been dragging my daughter down. You lowlife! How dare you? Now get out. Get out! I want you out of my house. You, you . . . fat . . . fat . . . abattoir girl.’

  Sarah Jones’s thin neck was alive with angry veins. Her voice was like icy knives.

  ‘If she goes, Mum,’ growled Elsie, ‘I go.’

  ‘You?’ Sarah shouted with fury. ‘Go? Go where? Where on earth to, Eleanor? You’re just a selfish, ungrateful, spoiled little girl. You’ve got nowhere to go.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Elsie, grabbing up her guitar and amp. ‘Fine. C’mon, Tara, I’ll show you out. And I’ll show myself out while I’m at it.’

  Fifteen

  The paddocks of the roadhouse farm were almost unrecognisable to Elsie as she drove the battered old Grassmore Estate ute through the side gate to the Smiths’ property, Tara and old Marbles the dog riding shotgun. The cab stank of Marbles’s excitement at the sudden action after his sedentary years on the Grassmore verandah.

  When the Smiths took over, the roadhouse farm was a tufted, dry, overgrazed landscape of rocks and bare soil, much like Elsie’s own farm, but now before her lay an Australian grassland paradise. It was beauty beyond description. She had only ever seen such grasses in photos during her boarding-school internet roaming, an exploration that took her into an alternative virtual rural world.

  Forms of new-age agriculture she’d never known as a child were now within her reach. She could find reasons for her family’s dysfunction and the malaise of Grassmore and the district generally. Elsie had discovered websites showing beautiful natural grass species that had once covered the entire region. They were the very same grasses her grandfather and father had ploughed out and replaced with weak European varieties. Plants that withered at the first sign of heat and no rain and needed annual shots of superphosphate to keep growing. But now here before her, wallaby, kangaroo and weeping grasses wavered in the afternoon breeze. Poas saluted her with tall wisping yellow-and-green shoots, while a sprinkling of woody-stemmed shrubs brought a depth of olive green to the pale yellow summer landscape. Amid the grasses and shrubs were wildflowers as well: pretty daisies in bright white, violet and yellow fairy-clusters.

  In the next paddock content woolly Merino sheep and dozing Brahman cows with hides like polished brass chewed lazily on their cud in the deep shade beneath restored self-sown clusters of young gums. In the paddock behind them chickens free-ranged around their colourful caravan. Young trees reached their leafy arms up to a blue sky as if in celebration of what the family here had done to the land. A family simply allowing the plants to live and to grow, to die and to breathe again in soil that was breathing and living, dying and cycling too.

  Collectively, the plants gave the farm life that Elsie had never felt before in this landscape. She’d read The Biggest Estate on Earth and learned how Indigenous Australians had made and managed the continent, creating a paradise of rich grassy parkland just like the one in front of her. Grassmore could be like this. She just knew it.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  Tara nodded. ‘They sure are something, those Smiths. Most folk say they’re nuts. Creating a fire hazard with all the long grass. Chunky Nicholson is onto them all the time to burn off. They’ve dodged the council that many times about the long growth next to the neighbour’s wheat crops. It was even in the Rington paper. Elvis Smith said it’s regenerative holistic agriculture and time-controlled grazing, but the locals call it a mess and madness. Whatever it is, though, it’s working. Can you feel the place? There are that many land devas and forest fairies flitting about, and it’s teeming with sprites. The angels sure are singing about this.’ Tara was looking out across the paddock, swimming her hand dolphin-like through the warm air.

  Elsie looked over and smiled. Her friend was still into that weird stuff. For the most part, her whacky childhood friend with her crazy beliefs remained intact, buried beneath the weight and the hurt of her upbringing.

  Elsie let her hand drop down outside the door of the ute as she drove on, her fingers brushing the seed heads of grasses, noting the green tinge beneath the long yellow stems, where a summer fire would have trouble taking hold. This was how she imagined the lost continent to look. The Australia that existed prior to 1788. She wished Mr Williams could see it.

  ‘My history teacher, Mr Williams, says there was a Grass Rush long before the Gold Rush,’ Elsie said to Tara. ‘The Aborigines and their grasslands gave the newcomer white fellas all the riches they needed in the form of tucker, fresh water and abundance.’ She cast her head down before looking again to the landscape. ‘When you see the land like this, it makes me realise how much we’ve buggered the rest of it. Not to mention what the Aborigines went through and are still going through, of course. And to think I’m part of that white fella dynasty!’

  She squinted against the late-afternoon glare of the sun as it sank behind them and reflected back at her in the grimy mirrors of the ute. She ‘got it’ at sixteen, about overgrazing and the introduced grass species, so why couldn’t her father?

  From the shed the twins heard the deep throbbing of what sounded like a chaff-cutter’s engine and came out into the fading light, each shading his eyes with a long thin hand. A ute with more dings in it than a wrecker-bound car was thumping down the infrequently used side track towards them. The ute’s once-white body was now blotched with rusting drizzles on its metal creases and its bullbar, bent and slightly crooked, listed downwards on a slant over the number plate as if the vehicle itself was drunk.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’ Zac asked. He glanced at Amos nervously and looked behind him to the recently carved and then covered trench that wa
s only just starting to settle and seed over and shush its secret back in the long grasses of the paddock.

  Amos shrugged. ‘Whoever it is, they can’t drive too well. And they shouldn’t be coming that way. No one comes that way.’

  The boys waited, standing outside the big shed until the ute halted. Their looks of concern surged into smiles when they saw Tara and Elsie get out, followed by an ancient Golden Retriever who nose-ploughed into the dirt as he tried to alight from the cab. Snuffing a little and shaking his head, the old dog padded over to the boys, a doggy smile on his aged face and his tail sweeping a greeting at them. The boys patted the dog, sniffed the putrid scent they now had on their hands and looked at the grinning pair of girls before them.

  It took the friends just a glance to see how all of them had changed. And it took just a breath to see that everything still remained the same between them. The Culvert Poo Crew was back.

  The twins had remained lean, but had shot up so that their feet and hands were even bigger, and seemed to dangle from the ends of their very long limbs. They each had a galaxy of reddened acne across their fine high-boned faces and the darkness of their hair and thick eyebrows was striking above the round brown eyes. Both twins were wearing the same checked farm shirts and faded jeans, so Elsie was reminded suddenly of two Woodys from Toy Story. She knew which was which, and reckoned Tara did too. Zac standing to the right of Amos. A double vision of boys in boots, each carrying different energies within.

  The boys too were surveying the girls. Elsie was dressed like she’d come out of the shearing shed in a bluey and ripped old jeans. Her blonde hair was ruffled and the leather cuff on her wrist looked cool, but they didn’t register her as ‘hot’ like most boys did. She was grown up, of course, and totally beautiful, but she was Elsie. She was, to them, more than her body and face. She was their mate from when they were little. They hadn’t seen her around as they had Tara, whose spirit shone past her bad clothes and weight gain. With that mole gone, Elsie seemed weirdly damaged and vulnerable. And judging from the smell of alcohol and their slightly ragged gaits, both girls were sorely in need of friendship.