Amos buried his face in her neck. ‘There’s nothing ordinary about tonight, Tara.’ He brushed her long curling hair from her bare shoulder and kissed her gently. She looked to his cheek, his acne failing to dim the way she saw him. As a perfect boy. A perfect man in the making. She pushed his hand away from her stomach. She hated it. Then she tried to push the deep emotion that stirred within her.
She began to sing, to the tune of Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’, substituting the words for ‘By the Shit Ponds’. But Amos did not follow her mood.
‘Shush, Tara,’ he said gently. ‘We don’t need jokes right now. I mean, I get it. At least I think I do . . . What you went through as a kid. Am I right?’ His voice trailed off as he felt her body stiffen beneath him, tension tugging her muscles taut. Technically Tara knew this wasn’t ‘her first time’ and that knowledge twisted a knot of devastation deep within her.
She lay in silence, tears spilling uncontrollably down her cheeks, wetting the thin pillow on the swag. She laid a hand across her face, ashamed.
‘We can stop,’ Amos said.
Tara’s face scrunched with emotion. ‘No.’
She tried to hide her ugly expression from him, turning her head. She heard the gentle murmurs from Elsie and Zac drift under the belly of the tractor, the hushed rustle of sheets, swag canvas, of skin on skin.
‘Why me, Amos? I mean look at me. Your brother gets her. And you get me.’
‘Lucky me, I say!’ Amos said, drawing her into a hug with his long arms. ‘C’mon. You know it’s always been you and me. You know it.’
Tara’s eyes searched the blackness above her in the rafters as ‘Dancing in the Dark’ blared through the shed.
‘OK, have it your way, stubborn mule,’ Amos said, rolling his eyes. ‘Whatever it takes.’ He straddled her and looked down at her face. ‘Tonight, Dr Amos Smith,’ he said in a Maxwell Smart voice, ‘is going to introduce you to sexual function one-oh-one. Currently, I only have theoretical principles, so in this session we are going to explore the practical aspects of the topic. Step one, stimulate the woman with foreplay by touching, particularly her breasts.’ Like a robot, Amos reached out and began to palpitate Tara’s breasts.
A giggle erupted in her. The feeling of safety with Amos restoring itself within her.
‘How does that feel?’
‘Like a doctor’s examination.’
‘Ha! Give me some credit! Step two, caress the woman’s clit-or-is.’
The way he said ‘clitoris’ caused another splutter from Tara and she couldn’t stop giggling when his exceptionally long fingers slipped under the band of her tracksuit bottoms and into her knickers.
‘Step three, maintain eye contact where possible and kiss her frequently. How on earth do you do that?’ Amos asked, trying to kiss her and look at her at the same time.
Tara squealed. ‘You idiot!’
‘You’re doing wonders for my ego,’ Amos said. ‘At least I won’t come in my pants. I am a detached scientist. Now are you ready for step four?’
But Tara couldn’t answer: she could feel Amos’s fingers working into her moist body, sliding gently in and out. She could feel his nearness, his leanness and above all the kindness of his human touch. There was integrity and intensity in his kisses and caring. She moaned. And soon, they were both in the river. Heart to heart. Skin to skin. Over quickly, but a lifetime of memory. The percussion beat of the drums echoing in the machinery shed along with their heartbeats. The proud presence of the giant tractor in her vision. The way she simply let this boy fall into her. Like all the angels had willed it, despite the odds. Despite the ugly odds that Dwaine and her tragic mother had cast against her. Tara was flying in the stars, under the well-researched touch of Amos.
The next morning, at dawn, the girls sat in the ute at a crossroad, both transformed. The engine idled like a purring kitten. The cleanskin bottles the boys had given them nestled upright behind their seats like children out for a Sunday drive. The secret of the shed was tucked deep within them along with the night they’d spent there. Marbles dozed with his head on Tara’s lap.
‘Left or right?’ Tara asked, looking up and down the highway.
Elsie clicked the indicator on to go left, to take Tara back to the abattoir house. Then she shook her head. She clicked the indicator right. That way would take Elsie back to Grassmore. She could drop Tara off later. The light on the dash ticked on and off like a question and an answer.
‘That’s the wrong way too,’ Tara said.
Both girls looked at each other. They clasped each other’s hands over the warm sleeping body of Marbles.
‘I’m with you,’ Tara said. She nodded in front of them, squinting ahead to the road that travelled west into nothingness. ‘Just gun it! Let’s just go!’
Seventeen
Saltbush dotted the landscape and drifts of red soil climbed the bases of slumping fence posts, gathered by outback winds. There was not a sheep in sight. Just the messages left by their deeply etched tracks between straggling trees. Lingering was the vision of their ghosts — thirsty sheep traipsing to old concrete troughs lined with cockatoos strung like fluttering white flags around their edges. The girls whirred over grids on a dead-straight road of single bitumen, occasionally veering two wheels on the dirt when a grey-nomad caravan shimmered into sight and passed by with no wave. Big road trains appeared mirage-like in the distance, then loomed and passed, rumbling dust and spraying gravel, roaring like jets. The sun was high, the dog was panting, the girls’ backs were soaked with sweat. The long and dusty miles fuelled their uncertainty.
‘Can we have the air con on just for a bit?’ Tara asked, the hot wind that blasted from the open window whipping red curls from pink sun-shocked shoulders. Elsie glanced at her friend apologetically. She sat straight-backed and tall in the driver’s seat, hovering on an even one hundred clicks. The roads here were so long and unrelenting, and her hangover so pressing, that she was having a hard time pushing concern away.
‘Sorry, Tars. Can’t spare the fuel.’
Tara tugged at the neck of her T-shirt to fan some air to her sweating breasts and looked at the pitiful cluster of cash and coins that lay in the grimy console of the ute.
Earlier that day, just a few Ks out of Culvert, the girls had tallied their money, looked at the state of the fuel gauge, and waited for a fleeting roadside sign of just a letter and a number, indicating the impossible distance to the next town. When they had realised they had not enough cash, hardly enough fuel and barely enough courage, both girls burst out laughing. Elsie had twenty bucks in her wallet, and all that was left of her train-travel money. And Tara had fifty from the first cleaning job she’d done yesterday before heading to Grassmore Estate.
‘Seventy-four dollars and eighty-five cents. We didn’t plan this too good,’ Tara had said. She turned her head around. The chipped old wooden tray of the ute contained just a pair of fence strainers and a drum of tractor lube. It seemed ridiculous that her mop was lying next to a spare tyre, with her blue cleaning bucket clipped onto a rusted chain like a working dog. From the bucket the rags waved at her, the cracked red lid of Mr Sheen only just hanging in there after the last blast of wind from a road train, a bottle of Windex looking entirely out of context in this brittle, dusty landscape.
‘Don’t you reckon Mr Sheen looks like John Howard? I’ve always thought that,’ Tara said.
‘You’re crazy,’ Elsie said. ‘Who would think that?’
‘This is crazy,’ Tara said. The girls looked through wiper-arcs in the dust on the windscreen out to the hot flat country and the giant, weighty blue sky.
‘You sure you wanna do this?’ Elsie asked, looking over to her friend.
Tara raised her eyebrows and breathed in deeply. ‘Are you kidding? This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me! I’m not sure what is happening, but I know it’s good and there’s not much else I’d rather be doing!’
Elsie’s heart sank. She was half hoping Tara wou
ld say, ‘Let’s be sensible. Let’s just turn around and go home.’
But where was home? Where in this vast landscape? The adrenaline of the fight with her mother, the magical night with the boys, the false bravado the booze had given her had dissipated. Elsie was beginning to feel not just sick, but unhinged. Lost. Panicked.
‘Last night I lost my virginity’ played on loop in her head. Elsie was mildly surprised every loop when another voice inserted ‘to Zac Smith’. She had always thought it would have been one day with some wild and wonderful grungy muso in Sydney. Many had chased her during the secret band rehearsals and gigs, but she mostly felt disdain for them. Without her mole she knew they were just after her for her looks. She’d not felt safe around them. With Zac she had. Skinny weird Zac. She sighed. Should she turn the ute around? If she kept on this road, she would lose her life as she knew it. Cut loose into freedoms that were more frightening than fun. She swallowed down a lump in her throat.
‘Hey,’ soothed Tara, sensing Elsie’s change of heart. ‘We can turn back. If you want.’
Elsie glanced over to her friend, grateful. She was about to slow the ute when she saw in the periphery of her vision, tucked behind the seat, her guitar and small amp. She recalled the feeling she’d had on the Culvert Show Gala Ball stage as she sang. Powerful, in control, admired. Free. None of the things she felt in her family.
She gritted her teeth and set her eyes on the road. ‘No way. Let’s just keep going.’ She suddenly realised she had always been exiled from her family. Always. Like the universe had somehow dropped her into the wrong house. And Tara had always been a refuge from them. Plus now she’d blown her own cover as a ‘good daughter’ at the Culvert Ball, she couldn’t simply head back to boarding school and continue to battle with her mum. In Elsie’s fractured mind that came from feeling so unloved and misunderstood by her family, she suddenly found immense comfort with Tara by her side, along with her guitar. She decided with both as her best allies, she could do anything. Anything!
‘No. I have all I need. I have my gui-tara,’ she said. ‘Get it? With you, Tara, and my gui-tara, we can rock the world. Let’s keep on going!’
‘Very funny.’ Tara grinned, reaching behind the seat and searching through the crap stored there, happily discovering Simon’s pale old work Akubra. She jammed it on her head. ‘I guess that means we’re at large! Or at least I am; you’re just running away.’ She looked down and patted her stomach.
‘Stop with the bad fat jokes,’ Elsie said.
‘You’re the one who started with the bad jokes! Gui-tara . . . that’s really lame.’
‘Yes, but stop putting yourself down. Each time you put yourself down, I’m going to hit you. OK?’
‘You are?’
‘Like this.’ Elsie delivered a swift punch to her friend’s substantial upper arm, the ute swerving a little as she did. She was more used to paddock bashing than roads.
‘Ow! Couldn’t you just give me an affirmation or something?’
‘Sure, but it needs physical reinforcement. Remember how Gwinnie Smith and Elvis kept on with their affirmations all through his illness? And how he had that rubber band on his wrist and he tweaked it each time he thought something that was not helpful to his healing. He’s cured now, right? There must be something in it. Could you try a rubber band?’
‘More like I need to try a lap band.’
‘Get real,’ Elsie said.
Both girls fell silent at the thought of the Smith family. Memories of the night before, with the boys. It took one glance at each other for them to be grinning, halfway mad with crazy-girl hormonal rushes.
‘Do you feel different?’ Tara asked.
‘You mean in the fanny?’
Tara spluttered up laughter. ‘No! Dick!’ she said. ‘I mean . . . in your heart.’
Elsie felt the wind lift her blonde hair from her tanned shoulders and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I wonder what the twins are doing right now,’ Tara said.
In the roadhouse kitchen Gwinnie was busy secretly beading silver drops of rescue remedy into a teapot for the benefit of Sarah Jones. She glanced out the swing doors to the profile of Constable Gilbert, who stood, looking much like a koala with his short limbs and round face and body, in the café. She hoped he wouldn’t think the remedy was an illicit substance. Gwinnie cringed when she heard Amos talking to the adults.
‘We used condoms,’ Amos said in a loud factual voice. ‘And we didn’t partner swap, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Sarah Jones let out a small cry. There was a cough from Kelvin Jones. Then came the sound of a thump, and ‘Ouch!’
Gwinnie assumed it was Zac whacking his brother on the arm to shut up. Rolling her eyes, she grabbed the teapot and made a dash for the room.
‘Jesus, Amos,’ Zac said. ‘Where’s your emotional intelligence? As if Elsie’s mum wants to hear her daughter’s been . . . been . . . deflowered. . . even with a condom.’
‘Deflowered?’ Amos said to his brother. ‘That’s an interesting term for it.’
‘Cup of tea, anyone?’ Gwinnie asked, her voice high and as tense as wire.
Elvis sat opposite his boys, fingering sugar sachets end to end, a mild look of amusement barely hidden on his face.
‘The girls have only been missing a couple of hours, Mrs Jones,’ Constable Gilbert said, his black police belt slung tightly under his broad belly. He sighed. He hated this posting and this shitheap of a town. This morning he’d simply come in to get a cup of coffee at the roadhouse and had inadvertently walked into a storm.
Normally punishment for Constable Gilbert’s habit of off-duty drink driving had been working for a long stint in the dull-as-dog-shit radio control room at Rington. But eventually his boss had drawn the line: he’d been caught shagging the ‘very married’ Wendy from Rington Ringlets hairdressing. The local fallout had been substantial, so his boss had sentenced Constable Gilbert to Culvert. It was only supposed to be a twelve-month posting. But here he was twelve years on, with no sign of a transfer back to Rington. He looked at the mayor and his uptight wife and thought his boss was an utter bastard.
‘My daughter’s been missing since yesterday, Constable,’ Mrs Jones said, the frost settling in her voice.
‘But they weren’t missing, technically,’ Amos said. ‘They slept in our swags.’
Zac thumped his brother again.
‘Ow!’ complained Amos. ‘Stop doing that.’
‘Stop being insensitive.’
‘Tara didn’t think I was insensitive. And Elsie seemed to like your sensitivity, judging from the noises she was . . .’ His voice trailed off when Mrs Jones let out a sound like a cat being run over.
Constable Gilbert told Amos to shut his smart-arse little mouth.
‘Mrs Jones,’ he continued, ‘this won’t become a police matter until they remain unlocated for a period of forty-eight hours. And as all parties are over the age of sixteen, there is no transgression of the law. The only issue is the Green girl is technically a ward of the state unless her stepfather steps in.’
‘That would be a backward step,’ Amos said, teasing the policeman for his ungainly choice of words. ‘Dwaine’s not Tara’s father! We are simply teenagers exploring our sexuality with a couple of other teenagers doing the same. Where’s the crime in that? And so what if they’ve gone for a raz in the old farm ute. They won’t get far in it anyway. Once their endorphins decrease, they’ll probably be back for more sex.’
At that point, Sarah Jones, whose red-tipped nose looked like it had been nipped by the same severe frost that was contained in her voice, burst into tears, sobbing like a dog stung by an electric fence.
‘See,’ Zac said, exasperated, looking to his parents for help. ‘Can we try those flash cards on him again to improve his social skills? He’s a walking faux pas.’
Elvis and Gwinnie cast Zac a cautionary glance.
‘None of you seem to realise my daughter
has disappeared!’ wailed Sarah Jones.
Zac tried to seek out eye contact with her. ‘She’s probably just taking some time out with Tara. And for the record, I love your daughter,’ he said earnestly. Sarah let out another cry and Gwinnie Smith spilled the tea.
Elvis Smith patted his son’s back proudly, while Elsie’s frozen father suddenly became animated and grew larger, like a rooster fluffing up his feathers, and blurted out, ‘They ought to be whipped! Your boys ought to be whipped!’
‘For what?’ Elvis asked, turning calmly to him. ‘It’s a natural progression into adulthood.’
‘It’s a disgrace! Your boys are disgusting!’
Elvis stood suddenly. Since the illness had left his body Elvis Smith was once again a man who commanded respect. He was tall, tanned, sculpted well by physical work on the farm and in the mechanics shop and above all centred in himself. Here was a man who had faced a death sentence, healed and was now soul-strong. Here was a man not to be messed with.
‘Do you whip your son, Mr Jones?’
Kelvin Jones purpled. ‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Are you sure? I know you punish the soils and plants on your farm and treat your animals harshly. So maybe you stunt your son and daughter in the same way — put fear into them the same way. Your farming habits and mindsets are criminal. Controlling your dear daughter for the sake of ancient social beliefs. Making your poor son a carbon copy of you for your own ego. Limiting this town with your egotistical, narrow-minded politics. You’re a megalomaniac!’
The words landed like acid rain on Kelvin Jones. His mouth flinched violently and he stepped closer to Elvis. ‘How dare you, you grease-monkey upstart?’ Both men stood before one another, their chests puffed out like angry chimps. Zac and Amos stared incredulously at their father. They had never seen him like this.
‘Stop projecting your warped sexual values onto my young sons,’ he said. ‘I don’t want my kids’ first experience with women tainted by your limited judgements. Zac and Amos respect those girls and care for their wellbeing. Which is more than you do!’
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