She clutched it to her and began to cry. ‘Hold me, please,’ she said in almost a whimper.
Amos encircled his arms around her, wincing his eyes shut tight.
She leaned into him, shuddering with tears. He held her. Every muscle fired with resistance as he thought of Tara, but he felt the lift of his cock beneath his shorts. His cheeks flushed red. The feel of her skin, the beauty of her there in this ancient magical place. But with it he could feel her desperation. He knew that fuelling Elsie’s desire was the so-human fear of death and the unbalance of grief. Added to that was the fact he was a mirror image of Zac, the boy she left behind. As she pressed her breasts against Amos’s chest, his conscience wrestled with his body’s reaction — Tara would understand that Elsie needed him right now. Tara would know he would always be hers, despite this moment, and — and Zac need never know —
He bent his head as Elsie lifted her face.
At the ringers’ quarters, Tara set down Elsie’s note, turned and walked towards the path down to the swimming hole. It would be great for the three of them to go for a swim at sundown. To wash off the energies of death and the tainted friendship between them over Zac and Jake. It would break the ice between her and Amos too, away from the crush of the older people on the station. She knew he wanted her physically, but all today it hadn’t seemed right to even kiss him, with Jake’s body still in the cool room and Elsie so shaken. Now, though, with the awful day behind them, she could let herself be the girl she wanted to be with Amos. She pictured kissing him in the cool waters of the billabong and then later, holding him all night in her tiny single bed. She looked up at the beautiful sunset and thought of Jake and his girlfriend, now being reunited with him so sadly in Mt Isa. Poor girl. Poor Elsie, Tara thought as she walked. She picked such a cruel one, when all along she could’ve had a kind one in Zac.
From up on the clifftop, she stopped and looked down to the billabong. She saw them. Elsie naked on the grassy bank, Amos lying on top of her, his shorts half down. Both writhing in sexual union like serpents.
Tara’s lip began to quiver. Her world folded into pinpricks of light. The air that had filled her lungs, the love that had filled her heart, now constricted in her body. She turned. She stumbled, she righted herself and she ran back towards her room.
From his verandah as he thought of the young lives that were scarred today, Gordon Fairweather saw Tara running past. He read her distress. He called to Elaine he’d be back soon as he stood up from his chair and went, not after Tara, but in the direction of the billabong.
The next morning, both Amos and Elsie stood silently as Hinchie dropped the plane steps for them. Gordon handed Amos his small backpack without so much of a glance. He then passed Elsie her bag and helped Hinchie store her guitars and the rest of the luggage in the hold. He waited for Amos to climb the steps up into the plane, then held Elsie there, his big square hand holding her forearm in a firm and honest grip.
‘Elsie.’ His outback eyes blazed at her.
‘Yes?’
‘Girls with looks like yours can become cruel and shallow. Don’t become cruel and shallow. Don’t break any more hearts.’
Back at the quarters, Tara pulled the pillow over her head to block the sound of the plane taking off, taking Amos and Elsie away.
Forty-two
The studio lights were hot and blinding and Elsie was finding it hard to centre herself. The past four days had been a whirlwind of media, makeovers and music sessions since her Tamworth competition win. She had so far liked being the centre of attention, posing for fashion magazines in front of Tamworth’s Golden Guitar and snapping one-liners at scripted press conferences. She was back in Sydney now, fast learning that TV was her least favourite part of it all, especially live TV like this show.
The studio manager was barking at her. ‘When the light comes on, the camera is on,’ he said. ‘Stand on this mark. Don’t move. And for godsakes pull the mic away when you hit the stronger notes so you don’t peak. I saw you do that on the Australia at Night show,’ he cattily pointed out.
Elsie looked at him, hurt, but then something overtook her. She was the rising star. Not him. She looked at his stupid supposed-to-be-trendy ‘Where’s Wally’ black-framed glasses and his orange sticky-up hair balanced at the other end by lime-green Converse sneakers that were like something a Muppet would wear. She lifted one eyebrow at him. She was, she thought, a kick-arse cowgirl after all and city dicks like him were wet dishcloths to her. Elsie channelled her best chilly Sarah Jones look.
The man’s tone softened. ‘When the side cameras’ lights come on, look into them. Got it? You have a lot to learn, sweetheart, and I’m just trying to help. Just for now, imagine you’re singing to one special person. And have fun.’ He patted her on the arm.
One special person? Elsie thought bleakly. Who would that be now? Now she had hurt them all so horribly?
Elsie nodded and gave him an almost apologetic smile, feeling guilty and also slightly horrified she was now adopting her mother’s expressions designed to slay people. She pushed away the self-loathing, guilty thoughts of what she had done to her friends and focused on her breath.
‘Ready?’
She nodded again and clasped her microphone with sweating palms. She felt her heart knocking in her chest so loud she was surprised the hosts a little way off to her left couldn’t hear it. Elsie watched as she was cued down from the count of ten from the ad break, then the camera light came on and Elsie Jones, first-ever winner of the Tamworth-to-Nashville Talent Search, gave it her all, letting the music fill her body. In her peripheral vision she could see the show hosts reviewing the rest of the morning’s segments. Since she’d got there at six she had come to see what gruelling work morning television actually was. Everyone was propped up on coffee and seemed slightly arrogant compared to the people on the station or on auto-pilot. But now was her moment. Her chance to sing to all of Australia. To find a new path for herself, seeing as her old one with her old friends was totally road-blocked forever.
And sing Elsie did. Viewers in their homes, in airport lounges, on their commute, were all captivated by her voice and angelic looks. Her voice was made for a cover version of Charity Buck’s hit ‘Kiss Me with a Song’. When she reached the climax and conclusion of the song, all the studio crew gave her the thumbs-up before they cut to an ad break. The studio manager, realising the full glory of her talent, now gushed as he ushered her to an orange couch that looked like a jellybean. He settled her with a different mic beside the hosts, Jenni and Rog.
Off air, they greeted her, congratulated her, then looked more at their clipboards than her until the countdown cue began again from the ad break.
It was as if a switch flicked in Jenni and Rog. Suddenly they were effervescent, raving to her about her talent, and about her stellar performance at Tamworth, and about how she was on a plane out of here to Nashville in just a week’s time to work with country-music legends Colorado and Charity Buck. ‘And with the chance to win a record deal and tour package with their infamously famous manager, Jacinta Tylermore,’ Jenni concluded. Then they fired her with pre-written questions and Elsie’s head spun.
In the Smiths’ roadhouse the rarely used TV had been turned on especially for the show. Everyone in Culvert knew that little runaway rebel Elsie Jones was going to be on the show that morning. Up flashed incredible images of the beautiful kid sitting small and fresh on the set of Australian Mornings. She was smiling as the hosts threw to a film package of her Tamworth win with her original composition, ‘Nothin’ to Do’. Golden confetti showering her, Lee Kernaghan and the Wolfe Brothers stepping forwards to congratulate her.
At the table, the Smith family watched. Amos, leaning against a wall, his arms folded. Gwinnie standing in the kitchen doorway, wishing Elvis was there to see it. She wondered if he was allowed to watch morning television in gaol. She was still adjusting to the fact her husband was hundreds of miles away. Thanks to the stack of charges the Culvert Council
and police had cooked up, his sentence was five years unless he got parole. Five years? She couldn’t help it. On days like this, watching her boys struggle, she felt as if her husband had let them all down with his big dreams on renewable energy. She knew she’d been swept away with his enthusiasm, never once thinking the piping of sewage from one place to another could have such hefty legal repercussions. She was sure the trial that had been held soon after New Year had been rigged from the start. The mayor had his contacts, and Constable Gilbert had given conveniently damning evidence.
Since the scandal, the Smiths were official outcasts in Culvert, relying more and more on passing traffic than locals, who had given their business a wide berth since the explosion. And with just the small farm and the workshop, the boys were working with a cloak of stress over their heads. She was toiling a gruelling seven days a week in the café and at the bowser to pay off the mortgage and the fines Elvis had been served with. They’d had a plan of affording employees by now to give themselves a rest, but there was no money for that either. The boys were surly with each other from dawn till dusk since Amos’s return from his shortened trip to the Northern Territory. Even though they worked side by side each day, the chasm between them was wide. Amos had never said what had gone on up there on the cattle station with Tara and Elsie, at least not to her. But the girls had suddenly stopped calling and writing.
She looked at the impossibly beautiful Elsie on the TV screen and wondered what had happened. ‘Oh, look at her! She looks so young. Too young!’ She could only see the back of Zac’s head as he sat gazing up at the screen. She turned her attention back to the host Rog, who was leaning towards Elsie.
In the studio Elsie steeled herself for another question.
‘Word’s out, Elsie, you’re not just a talented musician: you are a bit of a cowgirl. Before your big break, you were up on an outback cattle station, weren’t you?’
Elsie smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
God, all this crap. Talking about herself when she just wanted to play music. To live and breathe music. It was where she felt safest. She loved an audience, but she didn’t want to talk to them. On that couch without the shield of a guitar and a song, or the company of a band, she was raw and confronted. They were probably about to ask her stupid questions about rounding up cattle. She pasted on a smile, even though her heart was chugging like a steam train.
The male host looked at her directly. ‘We understand it was your boyfriend and fellow ringer, Jake Cleveland, who registered you in the competition, but tragically Jake was killed in an accident on the station just before Christmas, right? How do you feel now?’
Elsie’s mouth fell open. Pictures of Jake from the NP Co website, grinning beneath the brim of his sweat-stained Akubra, were being flashed up on the monitor screen in front of them and beamed out to the nation. His smile was perfection.
‘Jake and I . . . We . . . I’m . . . not . . .’ Tears roamed in her eyes. Panic sprinkled fireworks over her skin. She sweated. The camera operator invaded with a close-up. The studio manager gave the thumbs-up at the hosts and grinned. Good television.
Elsie licked her dry lips. ‘I’m not really over that yet.’
Her female host dived in to showcase an act of compassion, as if rescuing her. ‘So really, all of this, and everything you might achieve in the US, is thanks to the love you and Jake had for each other?’
Elsie was trying to draw tears gently away with her fingertips so she didn’t ruin her stage make-up. She was nodding mutely, thinking only of Zac, imagining him and Jake’s girlfriend watching. Guiltily picturing Amos at the billabong. Jake in the bush shower. Zac at home with his injuries, thinking she was his girl. She felt cold through to her core.
How did these people find this out? her mind screamed. Had Tara, Skye, Gracie or Gordon let that angle of the story leak out of anger towards her? It wouldn’t be like them. But then she remembered Jake’s story was the perfect ‘story’ for marketing purposes. Jacinta flashed in her mind. After her Tamworth win, she remembered Jacinta Tylermore had plied her with Scotch until the whole story had tumbled from her own lips.
Elsie had met the bizarre manager the night of the competition and the next night, in an upper-class Sydney hotel, had signed her life away to Jacinta Tylermore Music Management. If she was good enough for Colorado and Charity Buck, who was she to question her? Elsie had been ushered into the hotel bar by a PR rep from CMT USA. The young woman, who spoke like a slide guitar, drawled out, ‘No doubting we’ll find her in the oxygen room.’
Elsie had only just stopped herself from saying, ‘What’s an oxygen room?’ Despite her days in Sydney at school and in the pubs, she was more hick than she had realised, and found it difficult to focus amid all that heavy gilding and marble in the hotel lobby. She was led towards a glassed-in area with a discreet sign above its entrance: Smokers please. A painted finger pointed to a doorway.
Inside the plant-filled room, drawing on a cigarette with her arms folded across a concave stomach, was a tall woman who was waving at them. From a distance she looked commanding and attractive due to her leanness, stylish black dress and height, made greater by the bright orange suede stilettos she wore and a beehive of black hair. But up close, Jacinta Tylermore was freakishly overdone, her features just past human, the hair polished like wood and the make-up thick and severe. Elsie found she couldn’t stop staring.
As Jacinta gushed and praised and waved her hands about and repeatedly hugged her, Elsie was both drawn to and repelled by her. She talked like a truck revving too fast in the wrong gear, as if the wheels and the motor were out of sync. Elsie Jones didn’t so much feel as if she had met Jacinta Tylermore as if she had collided with her. It felt freakish enough for Elsie to be standing in a room that piped oxygen into it for smokers. That in itself spoke of human madness, but to also have her senses assaulted by a towering, wildly gesturing, loud woman made Elsie feel as small and helpless as a mouse in a cosmetics laboratory. She had tried to focus on details about Jacinta’s plans for Elsie’s world tours with the Bucks, websites, social media and promo videos, along with new hit singles, but she was clearly in some freaky ‘Hotel California’: she had checked in but she could never leave.
From that first night, Jacinta seemed to invade every waking minute of Elsie’s day, controlling when she woke, deciding what she ate, what she wore, who she saw, what she bought, so that soon it felt as if Jacinta had taken the place of Sarah Jones. It was like having a mother/manager on speed. (She probably was on speed.) Just when Elsie was about to explode, Jacinta would soothe, cajole and bribe her with the most manipulative behaviour. And who was Elsie to argue? She had no one else in her life. She remembered Jacinta saying that night at the hotel as she poured more straight Scotch, ‘Honey, if I am going to represent you, I need to know it all! All the dirt. All the scandal. Every little bad thing you have done, so I can protect you. The media are monsters.’
But far from protecting her, Jacinta Tylermore had served her up. She had crafted the story to suit the marketing. Now, her past, her mistakes, were being broadcast for all of Australia to see.
And seeing it now was Zac, in front of his family. He stared at the images on the screen of the impossibly handsome, now-dead ringer who had apparently been Elsie’s boyfriend. He turned to Amos and glared at him.
Amos was already heading out the door, though, his face red, his need to get away overwhelming. Images of him and Elsie at the billabong, of Tara’s distraught face, were haunting him. He fled to the workshop.
‘Zac,’ came Gwinnie’s gentle voice. But Zac was already on his feet, stalking to his bedroom, shutting the door, resting his forehead against the wall, trying to find breath for his winded soul. Next he found himself sitting on the bed, tearing up the letter and the song that Elsie had sent him, with all her love.
On the TV Jenni from Australian Mornings thanked Elsie and said, ‘And now to the nation’s weather . . .’
Showers for Brisbane and
Sydney and cloudy in Melbourne. Gwinnie switched off the TV and stood in the silent, empty roadhouse. ‘Well, I guess that’s it then,’ she said to no one. ‘It’s all over.’
Forty-three
On the other side of the world Colorado Buck felt his phone buzz in his jeans pocket.
He fished it out. It was a text from Charity.
Jacinta wants a word about the new Australian talent.
He texted back an OK.
He swung towards the house, driving the electric golf cart right onto the lawn. Leaping from it, he strode up the grand front steps of the ranch house two at a time, passing the inviting aquamarine waters of the large pool, where he noticed his youngest daughter, Sunlight, had left another floater. There would be no swimming for him that evening after his song-writing session. He swore as he trod on a squeaky dog toy that belonged to their new Giant Poodle pup, Snuffles, and almost tripped on an inflatable ring. He wished Charity would get the staff to clean up after the kids and her a whole lot more. He’d have to call Jose Luis in the staff quarters or clean it up himself.
Swiping the white cowboy hat from his head, he sauntered in through a side door in his Cuban-heeled boots to the kitchen and promptly trod in puppy poop. He held back from cussing as he scooped off his boots and tossed them on the floor. He found Charity and the kids whizzing up some fruit smoothies at the giant kitchen bench. The house was airy and cool from the air conditioning, but the smell of dog crap was lingering in Colorado’s handsome, perfectly even nostrils.
In the kitchen, pool water puddled on the imported terracotta tiles from discarded swimmers, and mini lakes of fruit juice spread on the benchtop. Snuffles was creating a puddle of his own under the kitchen table. The blender roared and the kids and Charity barely glanced up when Colorado arrived, now with wet socks from another poodle puddle. Over the sound of the blender, with a high-pitched scream Sunlight wielded a stick of celery at her large dolly, battering it about its blonde curled head, shouting, ‘Lipstick taser, lipstick taser!’
Cleanskin Cowgirls Page 27