A slow smile spread over Elvis’s face. ‘You sure know how to pack a punch, Tara.’
‘Well? I’m not saying there won’t be pain for his poor family, and I’m not trying to say anything negative about that man either, but really, honestly, I think we’d all agree he’s in a better place now.’
‘Amen to that,’ Zac said as he got up and went to the barbecue, taking the dish of meat from Elvis. In the void of silence all of them turned their thoughts to Elsie. Where was she? How would she take the news?
All Zac could wonder was, will she come home?
‘So,’ Tara said eventually, passing the plates out, ‘looks like there might be room for me on council now.’
They all looked at her, surprised. ‘You?’ they chorused.
‘Whyever not?’ she responded brightly. ‘I’ve got some big, big plans, and to be on council will only help them along further. Positive projects. Make-a-difference-to-the-town-and-the-world kind of projects.’
She looked to each one of them and narrowed her eyes, her pretty lips held in a wry grin. ‘How are you going with your fuel experiments these days, by the way? Any progress?’ She paused as the Smith family’s minds ticked over.
Amos stooped to light the barbecue from a cylinder. It wasn’t the usual regimented shape of gas bottles held in cages at service stations.
‘Oh, those old ex-poo-riments?’ Amos said with faux-vagueness as he tapped the side of the bottle with his index finger. He then theatrically swept his gaze to more gas bottles on the side of the house and pipes that disappeared under the lawn in the direction where Tara knew the roadhouse septic system lay. She noticed a new shed there with a solar panel on it.
‘Funny you should mention those old experiments,’ he said with a broad grin.
She was back to the family she knew were her tribe: Gwinnie in a pinny with her hair bunched up on top of her head, smiling with love at her; Zac looking at her with a new kind of openness, his barbecue tongs at the ready; Elvis beaming at her as if his daughter had at last come home; and then Amos, who had lit the barbecue and was now coming towards her to top up her drink, smiling at the answer to all their prayers. Amos, the boy who had held strong for her.
Tara reached for a newspaper clipping in her bag. She spread the article from The Land newspaper onto the table. ‘I have some people who are keen to talk to you about partnership and improving their invention.’
The Smiths clustered around, taking in the pictures of the tractor that looked like it was wearing a silver radiator on its roof, with air-hose tubing that ran down the back. They began reading about the men who had designed a system that returned tractor exhaust to the soil.
Gwinnie read a section of the article aloud. ‘People think of exhaust fumes as toxic, and while they are to humans, they aren’t to plants. If you think about it, oil is really just composted organic matter.’ She looked excitedly at Tara. ‘But why use oil from ancient plants, when you can . . .’
‘Use human methane!’ they all chorused.
‘This system, plus ours, is the answer!’ said Elvis.
‘Yes!’ Amos was beaming. ‘If we can merge their technology with ours, we will have even more punch with our earth-friendly farming and another chance!’
‘The inventors are just waiting for your call,’ Tara said.
Elvis cast his head to the sky as if giving thanks, a grin from ear to ear.
‘Now you’ll have council on side, you’d better get that shed cranking again,’ Tara said to him.
‘Thank you, Tara,’ Elvis said as if he could breathe properly for the first time in years.
‘Now we’re cooking with gas,’ Tara said, laughing. She paused again and looked from the bottles to the meat on the barbecue. ‘Does that mean tonight’s meal will be cooked with pure natural methane gas produced courtesy of the Smith family and their passing trade?’
‘Yup,’ said Zac, snapping the tongs and holding up a sausage.
‘Food cooked from our family’s very own septic,’ Amos added proudly.
‘Just don’t tell anyone on council, when you’re on council,’ Elvis said.
‘At least I have a bottom to sit on council. Not like the last poor bugger.’ Tara grinned. And the family all fell about laughing. As they did, Tara thought how incredibly funny it was to be eating a barbecue using gas created by the very same family serving up the dinner. The perfect cycle. The poo-fect cycle, she corrected herself in her head. It sure was good to be home in Culvert and now she at last knew she and the Smiths were about to become ‘fart-most’.
‘And for dessert,’ Gwinnie proudly announced, ‘we’re cooking crepes!’
Yes, Tara thought again, she had come home to her tribe.
Fifty-two
The first thing Tara noticed when she stepped into the Grassmore homestead was how much the house was weighted down with the energy of depression and death. Tara shook the feeling off her and visualised protective energies about her.
Zelda Rogerson, the community nurse, was walking ahead of Tara down the hallway. Zelda’d taken up residence to care for the bedridden, cancer-riddled Sarah Jones, but all the locals knew the real reason she was there. It was because her husband, Cuthbertson, had kicked her out of their house following his discovery of Constable Gilbert in his marital bed the previous week. He had resigned as Deputy Mayor, now had the house on the market and was moving to Rington. Nathanial had moved in with the hairdresser from Snip and Clip, twenty years his senior, and was refusing to speak to Zelda.
Tara knew Zelda was now puzzling as to who she was, when she had stood brightly at Grassmore’s front door, asking for Mrs Jones. Maybe Zelda suspected she was another of the banker professionals coming for an assessment of the farm estate? Zelda cleared her throat and showed Tara the door into what had been the dining room she and Elsie had cleaned years before. The stairs must’ve been too much for the frail Mrs Jones, as the room had been converted into a bedroom. A morphine drip stood beside the bed, its stainless-steel stand out of place against the faded plush curtains and antique sideboard. Tara, who was not afraid of death as she didn’t believe in it from a spiritual standpoint, stepped inside and said cheerfully, ‘Hello, Mrs Jones.’
Physically Sarah was unrecognisable, but Tara saw she was unchanged within. The woman’s mindset of anger, bitterness, tension, jealousy and resistance to anything remotely spiritual had manifested into a body starved of life-force. Mrs Jones looked up with the eyes of someone haunted. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No,’ said Tara truthfully — Mrs Jones would never take the time to truly know her. ‘But I have met you before a few times.’
The woman frowned. She was not yet sixty and here she was a recent widow and a shell of a human. Cancer was eating her away.
Tara felt a wave of compassion. ‘I’m Tara Green.’
Sarah tipped her head to one side, her face blank.
‘From the abattoir house,’ Tara added.
Sarah Jones’s eyes widened and her dry mouth with the crusted lips gasped and rasped like Darth Vader. ‘No!’
She couldn’t match the well-dressed, beautiful, curvaceous healthy woman before her with her memories.
‘Yes.’ Tara fell short of doing a twirl for her.
‘What are you doing here?’
The question had a barb. Sarah Jones thought Tara had come to gloat.
‘I came to say how sorry I was that your husband passed over, and see if I could help you,’ Tara said.
‘Help me?’ Sarah shifted uncomfortably. All her life she’d spent worrying about the size of her backside. Exercising it, wearing underpants that reduced it, gazing at it in the mirror, not liking it. Now all she wished for was more padding. She was on her bones and pressure sores were oozing into the incontinence nappies Zelda now made her wear to save her taking her for an afternoon trip to the toilet.
‘Yes,’ said Tara gently, moving closer. ‘I’ve set up a business in town. I do healing work. Houses and humans.’
&nbs
p; Sarah snorted through her nose. ‘It’s a little too late for that,’ she said bitterly. She lifted a frail bony hand and waved it weakly about. ‘I don’t have any money to pay you.’
‘I’m not asking for money, Mrs Jones. I just want to make amends for the past. Elsie and me. Running away like that. I was very young. I was very desperate. I’m sorry.’
The mention of her daughter’s name froze Sarah Jones. ‘Eleanor? You’ve heard from her?’
‘No. We lost touch. After . . . after she left the cattle station for her music career.’
Sarah’s gaze slid to the blankets hiding her bony feet in their large corduroy crimson slippers. She was always so cold. ‘She sent an apology, via her manager, for her own father’s funeral.’ Sarah’s mouth twisted in anger and upset.
‘Does she know you’re sick?’
One shrug of an angled shoulder. ‘Sick? Dying you mean. They’ve given me two months more.’
Tara held her tongue. She wanted to say: ‘Our bodies are all dying from our birthday until our deathday, but our energy lives on forever, that’s why it’s important to live life from a place of love, free of judgement of self and others, always.’ But Tara knew that Sarah Jones was not up for hearing that. She was one of the most closed-off women energetically she’d ever met and she knew Elsie, unless something drastic in life woke her up, would take on the same patterning as her mother.
Tara knew it was basic physics that lighter-frequency energies could push denser ones upwards to match them, so a bright, sparky person could shift the weight of a negative one. All Tara had to do was watch the meeting between herself and Mrs Jones from outside and stay in touch with her inner spirit, and Sarah Jones would come along with her. Like a sour, aloof horse, she would eventually choose to amble over. Sarah Jones shifted her body and her inner self a little. She began to talk.
‘We . . . I . . . send her emails from time to time. Sometimes her manager’s people answer, sometimes they don’t. Always she’s working. Same as Simon. He married a girl from Victoria. Moved down there to her farm. Wants nothing of us and this place. Both my children always too busy.’ Her eyes slid to a trashy magazine that lay beneath a dirty plate. The headlines loomed large. EJ to Tour Down Under. Lock Up Your Husbands! Zelda had got a lot of enjoyment out of bringing that one, just to watch her face. A face that gave away nothing, which was amusing in itself to Zelda, who was not brave enough to face her own misery.
‘Maybe you’d have more luck?’ It was the first time Tara heard Sarah’s voice soften a bit. Like she was reaching for some help. ‘It would be nice if she’d come to my funeral.’
‘I’ll try,’ Tara said. ‘In the meantime, you’re not dead yet. With respect, you’ve still got living to do, Mrs Jones. Let’s freshen up this room. It won’t take me a sec.’
‘Please, no.’
‘It’s no trouble. Then I’ll leave you be. But I’ll be back tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. We’ll soon have you feeling better, even enjoying moments.’
Tara moved over to the stereo, pulled out a cheerful-looking jazz CD and put it on. She drew open the curtains and, for the first time in weeks, sunlight poured into the tired old Grassmore dining room.
‘Just pretend I’m Elsie come home, Mrs Jones. Let’s just pretend.’
As sunlight glowed over her on the bed, tears slid down the bones of Sarah Jones’s face and she understood, finally, that there really were kind people in the world. It was time for her to stop being so unkind to people, and especially to herself.
Fifty-three
Tara stood right at the spot where the councillor-mayor’s bodily fluids had seeped from out of him after his death. ‘First things first. This carpet has got to go.’
Tammie gave a wry smile.
‘But it’s brand new,’ Christine said. She didn’t remember Tara from school days, having been quite a few years ahead, but she’d heard from the town gossips that at one stage Tara was a total heffalump and her mum was worse and had to be lifted by a crane out of the house when she had carked it. That story didn’t seem to match the woman she saw now, their new councillor and emergency acting mayor. Tara was definitely curvy but not fat. She was extremely attractive and also so dynamic.
‘Oh, come on, Christine,’ Tammie said with a snigger. ‘We all tried to talk Kelvin out of the carpet. Remember? You called it pornstar purple and got down to dry-hump it.’
Tara looked at both women with amusement. They clearly weren’t standing on ceremony in front of the mayor’s replacement. Tara admired them for it.
‘That was just for a bit of a laugh,’ Tammie explained to Tara.
Everyone knew Christine had taunted poor Kelvin Jones for years, right from when she’d come as a work experience girl in Year Ten from Culvert High. In fact everyone had egged her on, because they all found him so pompous and liked to see his face turn red. All that dimpled flesh and wobbling breast that she had on show for him at the photocopier, at the printer, at the pot plants dribbling water suggestively out of the spout of the thin nozzle of the watering can with her hip cocked up.
‘If only he’d had a sense of humour,’ Christine sighed.
Tara grinned at Christine. ‘We’re going to need a good sense of humour if we’re to hatch the plans we now have for Culvert.’
‘What plans are those?’ Christine asked, trying to catch up to Tara, who was now walking purposefully throughout the offices. Christine began taking notes as fast as she could, as Tara fired off dozens of suggestions to alter things. She knew change was a scary thing for the women in her company so when she was done with her office audit, she spun around. She could see the women were summing her up. They wore suspicious expressions as if trying to suss out what the catch would be with her. She understood why they were hesitant with her. After working with so many overwhelmed women in her feng shui business, Tara knew so many had lost their inner compass of self-love in this crazy modern, highly masculine world. Adding to that was the media that only undermined their trust in other women. Tara resolved to set them straight.
She could also feel the whole town reeling from the shock that Tara had been elected to council and as acting mayor. Everyone of course liked her. She was like a dose of sunshine after a long winter. She was like a shower of rain after the dusty dry. But a woman? As mayor? Leading council? In Culvert? Even the ones who voted for her had felt a shiver. It was as if the gods had orchestrated the entire thing, taking hold of people’s senses at the emergency ballot box. Which of course they had. Tara knew that. She was tapped into the power of the greater good and was doing this for love not money, so she knew all would be well.
‘Just for the record, my friends,’ she said, beaming a smile at them, ‘I’m not just here to redecorate. I’m here to help breathe life into this little town. If you hadn’t noticed, Culvert is dying like a fly.’
She buzzed a bit and waved her hands around like zizzing wings for comic effect. The council girls chuckled.
‘We’re at the mercy of all those big-wig bureaucrats, those fuel giants, the agricultural monopolies, right through from the supermarkets to the seed companies: it’s crushing us. I need you, my dear girls, to open your minds. Open your hearts and see this town as the place to be. The centre of the world. The hub of change. It’s up to us to be the inspiration for the town. For the sake of not only ourselves, but our children and our children’s children. What this council and the people of Culvert can achieve is beyond the scope of human thought at this time! And we are the people to do it. You and me, united. And do you know where it starts?’
Tammie and Christine shook their heads, though Tara’s passion and the fire in her words had done their work.
‘It all starts with the Culvert Waste-Treatment Plant.’
Tammie’s and Christine’s energy flopped for a moment and they groaned within.
‘The shit pits?’ Christine asked, frowning. So much for a new broom. Here was another mayor banging on about the same thing as the last one.
Christine looked at Tammie, wondering how she should act from this point. She’d never been in the company of someone like Tara before, a woman who seemed to not follow any of the rules on how a woman should be.
‘Poo power? For the people?’ Tammie looked sceptical.
‘Yes. Imagine if all of Culvert’s council vehicles ran on the town sewage. We could get to work for a quarter of the cost. The Smiths have the technology to adapt your engine and fuel your vehicles with pure natural methane gas. Cheaper trips between here and Rington to see . . . what’s his name? Your fella? Gavin?’
Christine nodded.
Tammie narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re not talking about using the Smiths’ shed to make poo fuel? Are you? Surely not?’
Tara stood before Tammie and pulled in all her positive energy. ‘It’s not poo by the time it becomes fuel. It’s a similar gas to the ancient stuff they pipe out of the earth to put in cars and cook with now.’
‘Really?’ Tammie asked.
Tara nodded. ‘What’s the one thing your husband grizzles about the most on the farm, Tammie?’
‘Not enough fellatio.’
Tammie whacked Christine on the arm. ‘Shut up.’
‘Besides that,’ Tara said, smirking.
‘The fuel bills.’ Tammie grimaced, folding her arms.
‘Imagine this. Your husband, what’s his name? Phillip? Phillip ordering a tanker of cheap methane gas delivered to the farm tanks. Then imagine the tractor the Smiths have modified for him, which he can fuel at a quarter of the cost. Not only that: using the machinery the Smiths have developed, he directly sows grain into the soils when the perennial grasses are dormant. No need for going round the paddock several times for ploughing or harrowing. That’s another huge saving. Plus you are building up your soils by putting the tractor exhaust back in using another innovative invention we’ve just heard of. And making the farm more efficient. And any organic waste the farm produces can be sent back to the biofuel plant so you earn carbon-recycling credits. The farm works more efficiently, benefiting the environment and your bank account. You could cut your hours here on council, job-share with another mum and spend more time with your children.’
Cleanskin Cowgirls Page 33