His Brand of Beautiful

by Lily Malone

  The stick-tapping stopped. Beyond his shoulder, Sunshine’s tail swished; a white flag in the firelight. Tate took so long to speak, she wasn’t sure he would.

  “Jolie always nagged my father to let her come camping with us; she said it shouldn’t be just the boys who had all the fun. We never saw Jols in a dress. If anyone gave her a doll for Christmas or her birthday, she let our dogs trash it.

  “Dad caved on her ninth birthday and let her come camping out—we used to do all the mustering on horseback, back then. Jolie wanted to catch a rabbit for dinner. She had this book and the girl in it caught a white dove with a fish hook in its claw and she did it by pretending to be a tree. In the story the little girl crept up on the dove when it wasn’t looking and froze like a tree any time it turned around. So Jolie got it in her head she could catch a rabbit the same way. She tried for two hours to sneak up on one near this big mound of warrens where we camped.”

  Christina chuckled.

  “Lucky they were too quick for her. Imagine if she’d actually caught Bugs Bunny and my old man stretched his neck and skinned him and put him in the pot? There would have been tears for sure.” In the firelight, his eyes were dark as ink. “I didn’t mean to snap your head off before. When you asked about shooting a rabbit for dinner—it reminded me of Jolie. You do that a lot.”

  She batted the apology with a flick of her hand, wanting him to continue.

  “Big brothers are supposed to look after little sisters. It’s in our DNA. We’re supposed to vet the boyfriends, tell her none of them are good enough. Ian Callinan slipped past us both. Shasta and Bree were renovating the homestead—they’d just taken over Binara. My folks were a month into their retirement holiday around Australia in the campervan. Outback Brands was gaining real traction. We were all busy. The year Jolie met Callinan, I’d been to Singapore; Sydney for two conferences and Perth, twice.

  “Ah fuck it. Listen to me.” He scratched the stubble of whiskers at his jaw. “Nearly six years later and I’m still making excuses.”

  “What happened?” Christina prompted.

  “She met an asshole. That’s what happened.” He sat forward, stabbed the coals, threw his stick on the flames and watched it burn.

  “Ian Callinan was a cop—a rogue cop—only I didn’t know that till later. He almost killed a university kid over a stolen packet of biscuits on the Sunshine Coast in 2003. Jolie met him at a school in Hawker. He’d been transferred from Queensland to Alice Springs while the smoke from the university kid’s bashing died down. He was doing a Stranger Danger talk at Hawker on the same day Jolie held an immunisation clinic there—that’s what she studied. The teachers told me Ian and Jolie hit it off real fast. He could be a charming prick when he wanted to be, apparently,” he gave a thin smile. “That’s how he hid the beast.”

  “Not long after they met, Jolie rang me out of the blue to say she and Callinan were at Adelaide airport. They’d each taken unpaid leave and were about to fly to Africa for an overland safari. She wanted me to come out to the airport to meet Ian before they flew out, and I told her I couldn’t get there. I had to go see the real estate agent and sign the contract to buy my house.”

  Tate picked up a thick branch from the stockpile near the fire, tossed it a couple of times in his hand as if testing the weight. The remaining logs in the pile shuffled then stilled.

  “I sometimes think: what if I’d gone to the airport? Would I have seen through him?

  Could I have stopped her going?”

  “I don’t know, Tate,” Christina said, because she sensed he needed an answer. “No one could know that.”

  He threw the log on the flames. Sparks flew. There was no wind, they arrowed straight up, five, maybe six metres on the hot air.

  “Jolie and Ian quit the safari in Uganda. She said he fell-out with the tour guide over a change in the itinerary. Later, I learned he’d punched the guide hard enough to break his jaw. Ian liked using his fists.”

  Lily Malone

  “He beat her? Jolie?” Christina asked, horrified.

  “I can’t prove it, but I think so.” He took a deep breath. “Jolie wanted to stay in Uganda. She volunteered for an international program that helped women diagnosed with HIV and AIDS become more independent—set-up home businesses, develop their business skills—that sort of thing. Last time I heard from her, she was upbeat, she felt like she was making a difference. Then the funding for the program dried up,” his voice hardened. “Its sponsor decided there was more publicity in directing money to a campaign to provide Sudanese children with shoes.”

  “Jolie went to Kampala to sort out a flight home. On her way back to Bengala, the bus she was traveling in was hit by a truck.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Christina whispered.

  “That blue shirt with the daisies was the only thing of hers that came back to us. That and her diary. Everything else was gone.”

  “This Callinan guy kept her stuff for you?” Christina said.

  Tate shook his head, an angry jerk. “He wasn’t even there. He hadn’t been with her for months by then. The Australian Consulate representative told us she died at the scene, that it was quick. Shasta and I had to go over there and bring her body back. She’d always been so full of life and when we saw her in the morgue…” He couldn’t finish. “One of the women in the centre where she worked passed the diary and the shirt to the Consulate rep when he came.”

  Christina felt a prickle of tears, wiped at the one that spilled.

  “The day after we got back from Uganda, Callinan rang me from London.” Tate looked up and the expression in his eyes made Christina shudder. “He knew about the accident. He knew before we did. The Consulate had his number too. He was the emergency contact on Jolie’s visa.

  “He told me he needed money to get back to Australia for her funeral. So I bought his plane ticket. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask him how he could—” He stopped abruptly.

  “The prick didn’t even make it. He said he forgot the name of the funeral home.

  Funny how he remembered the wake was at The Stag. He drank our beers for hours.” Tate turned toward her, leaning against the backrest of the saddle and opened his arm to his side. “You know how an off-duty cop looks? Like they’re hanging out for some thug to steal a purse or shoplift a pack of cigarettes or something right before their eyes, just so they can bust him? That was Callinan to a T. Guy had a neck like a bull. When you really looked hard at him, he had these Rottweiler eyes.

  “Two weeks after the funeral he came to see me at Outback Brands. He was all apologetic about the timing, but he said Jolie owed him money. That he’d paid for the airline tickets to Africa and for the safari and that she never paid him back. I knew it was bullshit. Jolie never owed anyone anything in her life.”

  “Thank God she kicked him out,” Christina murmured.

  “Kicked him out?” Tate asked, confused.

  Christina nodded. “She didn’t stay with him and try to patch things up. There are women who stay in abusive relationships and can never get out. Thank God Jolie kicked him out. She was getting on with her life. She was doing something she loved.”

  “But how do you know she kicked him out?”

  Because it’s what I would do, and you think Jolie’s like me. “Didn’t she? Didn’t her diary say?”

  “I don’t know. The diary only started after—” he stopped. “It started after he’d gone.”

  Pain swam in his eyes, across his face. The muscle in his jaw twitched.

  She probed gently: “Bree said you and Shasta blame yourselves…”

  Tate took up the narrative again, but he sounded somehow less sure of the story. “If I’d paid more attention, I could have stopped her going. Or at least I could have stopped her going to Africa with him. She had her whole life in front of her.”

  Christina leaned across the fire-lit space, ignoring the pain that splintered in her ribs.

  She found Tate’s hand and he
ld it. “If Africa was in your sister’s blood she would have gone one day, with or without this Callinan creep. Africa’s like that. Most people go to see elephants and lions and come home with photos for slide night. Jolie didn’t need those things, helping people was her souvenir.

  “Blaming yourself for decisions Jolie made means you think those decisions were bad ones. I don’t think she’d see her choice like that, Tate. It was about helping the Ugandan women, not about him. Not in the end.”

  “When did you get so wise?”

  A miscarriage teaches a woman all about guilt. “None of this was your fault, Tate. Or Shasta’s. It just sounds like plain damn bad luck to me.”

  He lifted her hand, palm up, then turned it and rubbed her knuckles over the scratch of day-old whiskers at his chin. Low in her stomach, she felt a slow, delicious flip. Christina leaned closer—hungry for his wildness, his warmth—when pain knifed at her ribs and turned her next breath into more of a hiss.

  “What hurts?”

  “What doesn’t hurt? Right now it’s my ribs. They kill.”

  He kissed the middle of her palm, lips open, breath hot, and it felt like he’d branded her with his mouth. His teeth grazed the pad of flesh at the base of her thumb, nibbled to her wrist, sent shivers racing up and down her arm.

  “Do your ribs still kill?” He asked, voice husky. “Or have I made you forget about your ribs?”

  “They still kill.”

  He leaned closer, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “More distraction then?”

  “Hmm. Please.” She tilted her head, raised her lips, waited for the exquisite press of his mouth on hers.

  That sweet contact never came.

  Tate’s free hand extended toward her breast where it jutted through Jolie’s teal shirt. His index finger traced the swell. Circled—but didn’t touch—the pointed tip.

  The throb between her legs was instant. It made her ache for his kiss, for his hands and his lips. For his touch on her nipples, on her skin. Everywhere.

  She leaned into him, pressed her lips to his neck, all aches forgotten, head filled with nothing but the heat and smell of him, breathing him in. Breathing…

  Christina’s nose wrinkled. She pulled away so she could meet his eyes. “You smell like sweaty horse and fly spray.”

  He laughed and the tension broke. “Shasta’s hut has a shower. We can see if you like how I smell tomorrow night.”

  ****

  Lily Malone

  Nylon rustled in the dome tent.

  Christina had been in there for about an hour and every time Tate heard that sound, he let himself imagine for one crazy second that she—like him—couldn’t sleep; that she might be coming out.

  More than once he’d thought about going in. Unzipping that tent and taking her in his arms. He didn’t think she’d stop him. It made his blood race.

  But something held him back. He wanted her to be sure. He wanted to be sure.

  Because whatever was going on here, it felt too important for him to fuck it up.

  Tate stared up at the sky, found the Southern Cross, Alpha and Beta Centauri, the pointers. He’d banked the fire to last the night and it didn’t crackle any more but its ember base moaned beside him, basting his swag and the tent in an orange glow.

  A telltale series of dull thumps sounded in the dark to his right and seconds later the smell of horse shit reached his nose. It didn’t worry him. Shit fit out here.

  As a boy camping out, he used to lie back at night and look at the stars. He’d count his blessings, like Nanna Newell always said he should.

  At thirteen he’d been thankful for his family, his dog. Mates on School Of The Air, his birthday coming up or Christmas just gone, chocolate at Easter; that his mum agreed Coco-Pops were okay for breakfast.

  In his twenties he counted his health, his family, the marketing degree he completed, the Crows winning back to back flags, meeting Jancis Woody, whichever girlfriend he had at the time.

  It was years since he’d counted his blessings. Years since he thought he had any blessings to count. Not since Jolie died.

  He knew she was up there, outshining the stars, baby girl at her breast.

  She felt close tonight. No surprises there. Binara was her home too and firelight did tricky things with the shadows. There were times he could have sworn she was right there, poking at the fire with a stick, smiling the way she did when she’d just made one of her crappy jokes.

  Where do watermelons go for their holidays? John Cougar’s Melon Camp.

  Tate worked his arms out of the swag, flexed his fingers and cradled his hands behind his head. His hair tickled the fresh welt and it stung.

  He hadn’t told Christina everything. He hadn’t told her Jolie was six months’

  pregnant when she died. Whenever he thought about it—and he tried not to—his mind would fill with the consulate photographs he’d seen of broken vehicles and broken bodies, clothes spewing from busted suitcases, feathers of dead chickens coating the pot-holed road. He didn’t want those memories tonight.

  Could Christina be right? Could Jolie have been the one to kick Ian out? He’d always assumed it was the other way round. That Ian left when Jolie got pregnant.

  There was a time he had thought Callinan should have done the responsible thing.

  Married Jolie. Looked after his family.

  That’s what Tate would have done.

  But that was before he knew Callinan. Marriage to a man like that would have locked Jolie in hell.

  Over the chorus of frogs, nylon rustled again and his stomach clenched. Was she coming out? Should he go in?

  Firelight winked on the tent zipper’s metal teeth. A sudden flare of flame fired it white-yellow, as if a shooting star shot across the black velvet skies and burned itself out in the sands.

  Lily Malone

  Chapter 11

  Christina woke way too early and knew there would be no peaceful drift back to oblivion.

  Not this morning. Not while the shriek of cockatoos whirled overhead and a bored-sounding crow qua-aarked to its mates. Not on a mattress that held all the comfort of a wooden plank. And not when her mind picked up right where it stopped plotting last night.

  I could have a baby with Tate. I’m not going back on the pill and he never needs to know. If it happens. It happens. Bugger the odds.

  Dawn light filtered through the canvas tent. It held no hint of warmth but the sound of dry branches snapping outside did, so too the poke of a stick trawling through coals. She rolled to her side and gasped as pain shot through her hips.

  In the corner, crumpled clothes lay with her riding boots on top. Everything smelled of horse, sunscreen, bug spray, dust. She sniffed at her underarm. Sweat.

  She ran her hand over the warm mound of her stomach—like patting a bubble-wrapped pillow—cupped the swell of her left breast, loose and lazy with gravity.

  I want him. The nipple hardened in her fingers.

  Last night’s orgasm had left her slippery and wet. She’d lain like a mummy on the nylon sleeping bag trying not to make it rustle, knickers halfway down her thighs as her finger circled her clit. Now her hand tracked lower, arrowed toward the patch of hair at the junction of her thighs. Her ovaries squeezed. She could picture them in her head, warm and ripe, like cherry tomatoes.

  “Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty.”

  Bugger. She rolled to her knees.

  The jodhpurs prickled as she pulled them up her legs, Jolie’s teal shirt hung dirty and limp, but the jacket that had spent the night masquerading as a pillow smelled fresher, and when she upturned her boots, at least no spiders fell out with the horse-hair and dust.

  Christina opened the tent zip and poked her head out to a morning that smelled of instant coffee and wood smoke.

  “Good morning,” Tate called, Santa Claus-bloody‐cheery by the fire. He had a coffee in one hand and his swag already rolled in a neat bundle at his feet.

  “Morning doesn’t start till the school bus
arrives.”

  He smiled. “How’s the backside?”

  “Don’t ask.” She duck-walked forward and straightened when her shoulders cleared the tent opening.

  “You’ll be fine once you warm up. Move around a bit.”

  Hands on hips, she lunged forward over her bent left knee, straightening her right leg and pushing the right heel to the ground. She held the stretch till her right calf burned then repeated the exercise on the opposite side; caught Tate stealing an eyeful of her butt.

  “Lacy’s a stickler for warm-ups. I guess all those exercises have to be good for something.”

  He cleared his throat, held out a tin mug of coffee that looked strong enough to float the spoon. She took a sip and made a face. Powdered milk cleaved to her tongue.

  “Last night when you asked me about shooting that rabbit, Christina? Can you really shoot a .22?”

  “I can hold my own,” she said carefully, trying another sip. The stuff tasted like cornflour.

  “Are you up for a side-bet then? Let me win my hundred bucks back?”

  Her coffee hit the sand with a schlupp. “Sure.”

  Tate’s eyes lit up.

  Breakfast was a sachet of oatmeal mixed with hot water and a little sugar and she ate it from the same tin cup now empty of coffee. Once it was washed out, she brushed her teeth in the same cup emptied of oatmeal, and spat toothpaste to the sand. When they’d repacked everything and packed the horses, Tate took the .22 aside. He dumped the last of the billy water into the fire, kicked sand over the coals then led the way to the river.

  Christina followed, leading Sunshine and Charlie Brown.

  Twice Tate stooped to pocket rocks in a fold of his shirt. At the river he secured the horses into a copse of trees and searched upstream till he found a flat branch, made where a broken bough lodged in the ‘v’ of a neighbouring trunk. It formed a platform about five feet high, parallel to the ground.

  “Chin height for you,” he said.

  He placed four rocks on the platform, stepped out twenty generous strides then gouged a line in the sand with the heel of his boot.

  “Ladies first. Need a sighter?” The .22 shone in his hands, bolt-action, timber stocks gleaming.