The Farmer's Wife

by Rachael Treasure

  Then bloody Andrew Travis and his no-till cropping ideas and holistic grazing management seminars had got into Rebecca’s head and she had completely gone off the dial about how he should run the place from now on. She was chucking out over ten years of his good management all because of some Queensland guru who kept banging on about regenerative agriculture and all the profits to be gained from low inputs.

  Even though Charlie knew there wasn’t much profit at the end of the day on Waters Meeting, couldn’t Bec see their production was better than the other farms in the district? He remembered their shared passion in the early days when she’d brought him in as ‘cropping manager’ and, of course, her boyfriend.

  For the first few years the business had hummed, exporting hay that was cut from the rich lucerne flats to fancy stables in Japan. They’d even travelled to Tokyo for a month, living it up with fancy-pants racing people who couldn’t speak a word of ‘Engrish’, but could chuck back sake like you wouldn’t believe. But five years into the venture the Aussie government had pulled the pin on water rights due to salinity issues hundreds of kilometres downstream from the farm. Charlie knew it had more likely been due to political pressures after a documentary screened on prime-time television about the evils of irrigation. The water was shut off to them. Waters Meeting had become a dryland farming operation overnight. And once again, like when Bec had first returned from her time away at Ag College and jillarooing, they had had to fight to keep the farm afloat.

  In the midst of the fight over water rights, Rebecca had fallen pregnant and she’d become annoyingly philosophical about their situation, saying the irrigation ban was ‘meant to be’. She’d said over time she’d realised that it didn’t sit well with her to be carting hay around the world. It wasn’t environmentally sound, she’d said. Bloody women always changing their minds, Charlie thought angrily. They’d busted their guts to set up the operation and now his very own wife was turning green on him like the rest of the wankers on the planet. What was wrong with her? Didn’t people realise farmers fed the nation? And so they should be supported accordingly?

  Charlie glanced again in the mirror and watched the plough discs cut neat crumbling lines in the dry paddock he’d sprayed last week.

  A plume of topsoil eddied in the gentle breeze. He twisted his mouth to the side. It was too dry to be cultivating: Bec was right. There was something in his gut that told him what he was doing was wrong, but he just couldn’t help himself. Kicking up dust was better than sitting at home watching Ben and Archie fight. He felt a twinge of guilt, knowing how crapped-off the boys would have been when they found out they were being plonked with Mrs Newton, their elderly neighbour, for the night again. They could’ve easily fitted in the spacious new cab with him. They’d been so excited about the new tractor.

  Charlie swigged his beer and washed away the thoughts, instead choosing to focus on the new dream tractor. He loved everything about it, from the way the giant glass door pulled open, to the wide view from the cab through even more expansive glass. The massive John Deere was so sleek and modern it looked as if it belonged in one of Ben’s Star Wars animations. It didn’t just have a dash; it had a ‘command centre display’. There was even a gyroscope that automatically made steering adjustments when Charlie drove fast down the smoother gravel roads of Waters Meeting. He’d love to try it on the newly sealed main road. Plus the GPS, once he’d worked out how to use it, would mean that his furrows would be perfectly even and straight.

  He reached for his fourth stubby and popped the top off it, enjoying the gentle bounce the hydraulically sprung seat offered. It’s enough to give me a hard-on, he thought wickedly, toasting himself in the mirror and cocking an eyebrow.

  As he rounded up to the top of the paddock, his phone beeped a message. Murray, texting to say it was humming at the Fur Trapper, the locals’ nickname for the Dingo Trapper Hotel. Charlie sent a text back saying he was on the chain for the night. Cranky wife. But bloody nice tractor.

  As the sun dipped, and the fifth beer sank, Charlie settled into feeling a strange mix of boredom and friskiness at the same time. As if on cue, his phone beeped again with a text. He reached into his top pocket.

  When he opened the photo up on his phone, he smiled and chuckled. There, on the small screen, was the image of Janine Turner in some rare kind of silky purple number with what looked like a black salami thrusting up from her ample cleavage. Come get me later, cowboy! came the message.

  Charlie Lewis drained the last of his stubby. He paused for a moment. Knowing he shouldn’t, but with the blandness of his life pushing him on, he reached for his belt buckle with a wicked grin on his face. What was wrong with a little bit of play? Janine was always up for it. She was about to get a nice shot of his gear stick. That would fix her.

  Three

  Doreen and Dennis Groggan’s farmhouse was set in an over-grazed paddock in a narrow valley. Etched along that valley was a jagged, eroded tributary that, in times of rain, fed the larger Rebecca River to the east, the river after which Rebecca was named. The Groggans’ was a small, poor dirt farm surrounded by a swathe of bushland that swept up and over rocky gullies and ridges. The land and the isolation of the farm made it not so profitable, so as a result, on weekdays Dennis drove the school bus and Doreen worked at the school as the cleaner and groundsman. Judging from the state of the house, Doreen was good at keeping things in order at home too, Rebecca thought.

  On their silver wedding anniversary, Dennis had painted the weatherboards yellow-green for Doreen after being inspired by the colours of their budgie. Rebecca looked at the meticulous yet overdone house and garden. The colour reminded her not so much of a budgie as of a pus-filled cheesy gland on a sheep.

  ‘What would have been so wrong with cream or white? That’s just downright tacky,’ she said, gazing long-faced at the neat-as-a-pin budgie-coloured house. They rounded Doreen’s turning circle of conifers, strategically placed bush rocks, wagon wheels and concrete creatures.

  ‘Get over yourself, cranky pants,’ Gabs said, this time sternly.

  Rebecca almost hung her head in shame. Where had this dark mood descended from? And was it actually a mood? These days it felt more like a way of being. As if she had been like it for years.

  The notion scared her. She looked out the window again, not wanting to socialise here with these women. Not wanting to be anywhere.

  She could see most of the guests had arrived so the brittle yellow front lawn was already filled with a selection of battered dust-buffed country cars and utes. Rebecca rolled her eyes when she saw dark-haired Janine Turner totter forth aboard tarty ‘follow-me-home-and-fuck-me’ shoes of shining gold. Janine tugged down a purple negligee over ample Nigella-style hips while balancing a bowl of corn chips, her handbag and a purple horse-lunging whip in the other hand. She waved gaily to them as they parked.

  ‘Oh geez! Look at her get-up!’ Rebecca grimaced. ‘You never told me it was fancy dress!’

  ‘You never would’ve come.’ Gabs unclipped her seat belt, swung round to the back and dragged out a Woolies green bag. ‘Ta-da!’ she said, emptying the contents of the bag onto Bec’s lap. Rebecca pulled a face as she held up the items one by one: a sequined silver skirt trimmed with feathers, an orange boob tube, red high heels and a packet of red fishnets.

  ‘So? Do you like your kinky costume? I made the skirt out of one of Kylie’s princess dresses from the costume box. Don’t tell her. She’ll get the shits up. And I got the shoes on eBay. I think they had a bit of Baby Oil or something on them, but I cleaned them.’

  ‘You are joking, right?’

  ‘Shut up and get changed.’ Gabs grinned. ‘Or you’ll be the odd one out.’

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘You could just thank me,’ Gabs fired back. ‘Where’s your attitude of gratitude?’

  Rebecca shook her head, knowing her friend was right. What had happened to her life? She used to be so sure of her place in the world. She never went to women’s
gatherings, preferring to be out in the pub or the paddocks. Sure she’d had to debate every decision every inch of the way in a three-way tussle between herself, her father and Charlie, but they had started out with what she thought was a shared dream. Then the babies had come. And life had changed. She found herself driving off to play group and doctors’ appointments and ladies’ fundraising lunches while the men punched sheep through yards, their world obscured to her by dust.

  She would glance in the mirror at the two little boys in their car seats, Ben with his dark hair and sincere brown eyes and Archie with his wayward blond locks and dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes of blue. She loved them with every cell of her body, but the daily grind of domestics that they created was eroding her very being. Then there was Charlie. Rebecca pulled her thoughts up so they slid to a stop like a reined-in horse. Her thoughts drifted hopefully, involuntarily, to Andrew. But again she put on the brakes. She just couldn’t go there. He’s just a friend, she told herself.

  Keep it shallow. Shallow, like her breathing had become. Shallow like her life.

  ‘Don’t just sit there,’ Gabs said as she applied a thick layer of blue glitter eye shadow to her heavy lids in the rear-vision mirror, then tried to pluck a solo chin hair out with her thick thumb and forefinger. ‘You’ve got tarting up to do.’

  ‘And what about you?’ asked Bec as she began to reluctantly kick off her boots and pull her socks from her hot puffy feet. ‘I don’t see you wearing a costume.’

  Gabs glanced over to her slyly, then with a daredevil grin ripped off her oversized T-shirt.

  ‘Ta-da!’ she said again, revealing a black-and-red bustier, her white bosoms spilling up over the top of the lacy cups. Her farmer’s singlet tan lines made her look a lot like a paint horse of white and brown.

  ‘Frank goes nuts for me when I dress up. The other night we got pissed on Beam and he told me to get naked except for my cowgirl boots. And I did —’

  ‘Too much information!’ Bec said, holding up her hand and smiling. But internally she grimaced. How many years had it been since she and Charlie had mucked around like that? Since Ben was born six years back? Since before then? She couldn’t remember. She could only recall the cold wall of his back and the passionless way he grappled at her in the early hours of the morning, when her body was leaden with exhaustion. He entered her with primal thrusts that were absent of care or love. There was an air of aggression within him that had started to cloud his contact with her. Bec could even feel it in his touch. She rubbed at her shoulder that felt bruised from their clash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d shoved her in a rage.

  As she pulled on the fishnets, she felt the shame of leading such a disappointing life hidden within her apparently functional marriage. On the neighbouring farm, there was Gabs, who must be pushing eighty kilos, naked in cowboy boots doing the wild thing with an even beefier Frank after ten years together. Frank and Gabs seemed madly crazy about each other still, apart from telling each other to fuck off every now and then. They had met at Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding. Gabs, her best mate from Ag College, was one of the bridesmaids and Frank had been invited along as he was one of the local farmers. A relationship had sparked between Gabs and Frank over a post-wedding-day carton of beer that they shared on the back of a ute by a dam. Soon Rebecca had found her good college buddy moving into her very own district and marrying her neighbour. At the time, both girls had thought they’d each stumbled upon a match made in heaven. Not so now, Rebecca thought. Only one of them had got it right. Here she was, practically a born-again virgin in wedlock. As Rebecca jammed on the red shoes, she noticed the way her lily-white sock marks were still evident through the fishnet stockings, drawing a line on her ankles that ran to summer-brown legs, a bit on the hairy side. Like Gabs, since motherhood, she too had put on weight and with the fishnets hoicked up to her hips, she imagined her thighs might look a bit like Christmas hams.

  By the time she dragged on the makeshift sequined skirt and put on the boob tube so her slightly flubbery stomach rolled out, Gabs was doubled over laughing, falling about in her cork-wedge shoes on the lawn, trying, with her weak post-baby bladder, not to wet her G-string.

  ‘You look hot, Bec! Hot. Hot, hot, hot damn!’

  Bec sucked in her stomach, stood up straight and held her middle finger up at her friend, then went to the back of the four-wheel drive to collect the platter of dips and biscuits that had been inelegantly thrown in a silver takeaway container and covered with cling wrap.

  ‘I’ll have you know I could make a lot of money dressed like this down at the Fur Trapper Hotel. A lot of money.’

  After winding each window down a little for the dogs and finding a water container for them, Gabs came to stand near her. ‘You do look hot, seriously. Maybe we both could lose a bit of chunk round the middle, but check out the guns on us!’ She flexed her arm muscles. ‘Frank loves my guns — they’re particularly good since bale carting. We did six hundred little squares for the new racing stables. Said they’d double their order next summer, until they got their own paddocks set up.’

  At the mention of Frank loving Gabs’s body again, Bec’s face fell. Did Charlie even notice her looks any more?

  Gabs picked up the plummet in her mate’s mood. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, moving to give her a rough sort of hug. Bec felt tears well in her eyes. She wanted to see Charlie as a good husband. When she thought about it, he did put up with a lot. But then again, she put up with more! Was it normal to feel this way?

  ‘Hey,’ Bec said, extracting herself too soon from the hug, ‘people will think we do a lezzo double act with you groping me like that. Now let’s get inside and get this so-called Tupperware party over.’

  She marched to the gate in her strappy eBay shoes, nearly doing her ankle in the process. Gnomes grinned at her from nests of white pebbles as she walked along a brown-painted concrete path, flanked with solar lights and identical plastic versions of Jamie Durie designer flax. The spiked dark-leafed plants were spaced as evenly and as exactly as soldiers on parade. Gabs and Bec came to stand on a porch enclosed with corrugated green Laserlite, adorned with hanging baskets overflowing with dangling plants of bulbous juice-filled leaves and infrequent drooping purple flowers.

  Before Gabs even knocked, Doreen reefed the door open. She was wearing a very short nun’s costume, her legs like cottage cheese in her black fishnets and her feet like pig’s trotters shoved into black patent leather pumps. So big was her bosom, it looked as though she had an inflatable raft stuffed down the front of her nun’s habit. The fringe of her eighties-style bob had extra product in it and looked much like echidna spines as it protruded out from her black-and-white habit.

  ‘Hi, Sister Doreen! Say your prayers, baby! The goddesses are here!’ Gabs said.

  ‘Hello, strumpets,’ Doreen said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Great, Dors. You look hot!’

  ‘Yeah, fifty going on fifteen,’ Doreen said.

  ‘I like your new garden. Those fake plants are pretty cool,’ Gabs said.

  ‘Least the fucken possums and wallabies won’t eat ’em,’ Doreen said proudly. ‘And they’ll only melt in a bushfire. Come in, come in. We’re about to start.’

  ‘Where’s Dennis?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Hiding in the shed,’ Doreen said over her shoulder. ‘He’s set the telly up in there with a couch. He’s got a box of beer and a DVD of cricket highlights so he’s happy. A bit terrified, but happy.’

  They entered the kitchen, where they found Amanda Arnott, wife of the local publican, at the bench, carving a carrot into the shape of a penis. ‘Hello, slutties!’ she sang. ‘Just exhibiting my extensive creative talents!’ There was a glint of the knife and her large diamond rings shining beneath the kitchen lights as she waved a carrot at them. ‘Might try these as an extra to the side salads at the pub!’

  ‘There’ll be more orders for chips and salad than veg. Especially if you serve it up in that outfit,’ Rebecca said
, nodding at Amanda’s skimpy French-maid costume.

  They heard a collective shrill of laughter rise up from the gathering of women in the room next door.

  ‘Go through, but take a Cock-sucking Cowboy with you!’ Doreen said, handing them each a shot glass full of cream liqueur. Then she went back to putting bright red sausages onto a platter that had every kind of phallic-shaped food imaginable, including battered savs, gherkins and crabsticks.

  ‘Care for a cocktail before you go?’ Doreen asked, offering up a bowl of ‘little boys’ and larger saveloys, her grinning teeth framed by patchy bright red lipstick. ‘You’ve got a choice of big ones, or little ones. The little ones I call “disappointments”,’ she said as she picked up a small cocktail sausage and bit hard through it with her crooked teeth.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ Rebecca breathed as she took up a little boy and dipped it in tomato sauce. ‘Tupperware indeed. I can see tonight is going to get messy. Very, very messy!’

  Four

  When Rebecca and Gabs entered Doreen’s lounge room, it was like walking into a teenager’s bedroom overflowing with excited hormonal girls. The giggling, chatting women from the surrounding districts were all dressed like hookers, trannies or tarts with feather boas, lace or sequins. Many of them weighed on the large side, to the point where some might even warrant a spot on The Biggest Loser.

  Together they huddled around Doreen’s dining table as if it was half-time at the footy. Doreen’s demure lace cloth was covered with glistening folds of black velour, on which sat an array of naughty novelties, romantic remedies and (more disturbingly for Rebecca, who had been expecting lettuce containers and drink bottles) items such as vibrators, ‘bullets’ and egg-shaped ‘marital aids’. There were clear-faced boxes containing fetish and fantasy costumes. Rebecca noticed that Speedo, the Groggans’ budgie, whose cage sat beside the dining table, was discreetly covered with a sheet as if the items on the table would upset his avian sensibilities.