by Scot Gardner
She’s with the Band Georgia Clark
Cassie Barry Jonsberg
The (not quite) Perfect Boyfriend Lili Wilkinson
Always Mackenzie Kate Constable
My Life and Other Catastrophes Rowena Mohr
The Indigo Girls Penni Russon
Step Up and Dance Thalia Kalkipsakis
The Sweet Life Rebecca Lim
Bookmark Days Scot Gardner
Winter of Grace Kate Constable
SCOT GARDNER
Thanks heaps to Eva and Sarah for making the whole business of writing this a pleasure. Thanks to my aunty Kay for introducing me to romantic fiction and believing I could do the same even when I had my doubts. And thanks to Christine Code for her insights into living in the country and doing distance ed.
This edition published in 2011
First published in 2009
Copyright © Scot Gardner, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax (61 2) 9906 2218
Email [email protected]
Web www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 74237 771 1
Design based on cover design by Tabitha King and Bruno Herfst
Text design by Bruno Herfst
Set in 12.5/15 pt Fournier by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in China at Everbest Printing Co.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jen and Belle
Contents
CHAPTER 01
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 01
My name is Avril and this story is about me and my cousin Katie, who is from another planet. My planet is run by sheep, hers is run by fashion and mobile phones, but we’re best friends anyway. The story also features our families, a few horses and dogs, lots of sheep, some local yahoos and one seriously hot guy – but I’ll get to that. There are some excellent fight scenes, like the sheep poo wars of September and the family feud with the evil Carringtons next door. And there’s some serious party action at the Forsyth Agricultural Show and Ute Muster. Woohoo.
Katie says my family is prehistoric and she’s not totally wrong. We have a computer that connects via dial-up but only on days when it feels like it, and even on a good day I can run faster than it does. But I do have email. Here’s a classic from Katie:
Cuz,
I’m hot. I’m so totally hot. I’m on fire. The sex queen of Pentland Secondary has struck again! It was the Year 10 formal last night. A STRICTLY alcohol-free event, so naturally we were all tanked. Music pumping, full-on laser show and stage smoke, it just WENT OFF.
I picked up not one . . . not two . . . but THREE!! major studs. The power to PICK and CHOOSE, that’s what I’m talking about! And I have photographic evidence on my phone to prove it! I could have sent them to you but you’d need a minimum of a MOBILE PHONE and MOBILE SERVICE! I know they haven’t been invented in Rockleigh yet. Wish you guys would hurry up out of the 1980s! Or is it 1880s?!? LOL.
Prehistoric is an exaggeration, obviously, but we’re a long way from the centre of her universe.
One good thing about living on my planet is that I don’t go to school. Ever (yay!). The closest school is in Mildura, which is 165 Ks away. I learn via correspondence, which means Mum and Dad and Nan and Hoppy (my grandad) help me with lessons set by teachers in the city. I read books. Hundreds of books. One whole wall of my room is fantasy and classics, horror and horses. I have my own private library but I only read one book at a time. It’s the one with the bookmark in it. Katie posted me the bookmark from Darwin when we were eight. It’s a mango leaf. She ripped it off a tree and stuck it in an envelope and it used to smell like the fruit but now it’s getting a bit fragile and it smells like dry grass.
Correspondence also means that there are no boys at school (except my nine-year-old brother Chooka, boo!), no girlfriends (no human ones, anyway, boo!), no actual teachers (yay!) and no formals (megaboo!). I study in the morning if there’s nothing urgent to do around the farm, and a few hours each night. It probably sounds sad, being all alone on my planet of sheep, but I love it. I get to sleep under the stars, help lambs into the world and ride my horse whenever I want. I’ve been driving the ute and the tractor since I was eleven and I can cook for twenty shearers. I’ve shot pigs and foxes and rabbits, chopped the heads off a hundred roosters and butchered a sheep. I can smell when it’s going to rain and I can kill a brown snake with a shovel if I have to.
Experience is a good teacher, Hoppy says. Maybe that’s why I know nothing about love.
CHAPTER 02
The Carringtons live fifteen kilometres away as the crow flies. We see them at the lamb sales a few times a year and they pass us on the track every now and then, but they never wave. A Carrington hasn’t deliberately waved to a Stanton since before the fires of 1968, but the strange thing is hardly any of us knows why. Even Dad doesn’t know what started it. Hoppy and Les Senior were in the war together. They were best mates then but now you’d think they’d been on opposite sides the way they carry on. It’s a full-on traditional family feud that’s been passed down the generations. Dad has worked with some rough blokes but the only fist-fight he’s ever had was with Les Carrington – that’s Les Junior – when they were about eighteen. He reckons Les came off second-best. Apparently eleven of our sheep died strange deaths after that blue. Could have been dogs, Nan said, but why blame the canines when there’s a perfectly good pack of mongrel humans next door? (That’s Hoppy’s slant on it.) Talk about love thy neighbour. Fifteen Ks is too close some days. Like the day Katie and her family were due to arrive. The phone rang early and I answered it.
‘Hello?’
‘Les Carrington here. Your maggots are in my rape. You’ve got an hour until I start shooting the ferals.’
And he hung up.
It took a minute to process what he’d said. Your maggots (our sheep) are in my rape (canola – stinky green crop with yellow flowers, used for oil and margarine). You’ve got an hour until I start shooting the ferals (domestic animals gone wild).
Hoppy rolled his eyes when I told him and gulped the last of his tea. He grabbed his hat. ‘You can drive, Av.’
Dad was already out somewhere on the tractor, planting our own canola crop, so it was just me and Hoppy in the ute, bouncing through the paddocks to the western boundary. Apparently that fence was the first thing replaced after the fires. I had my sunnies on but the golden glare from the Carr
ingtons’ canola field still hurt my eyes as I scanned the paddock for loose sheep. We crested the ridge where the land falls away to the creek and spotted the mob way off in the distance, on our side of the fence.
Hoppy was swearing under his breath. ‘Stupid idiot. They’re not even on his place. Woah, stop Av! Hole here.’
I parked the ute across the slope (handbrake doesn’t work) and we got out to inspect the damage. A good thirty-metre section had peeled off its posts and it lay curled up on the yellow flowers. There were sheep tracks everywhere, so the mob had been next door. Hoppy set about collecting tools from the ute and I dragged the fence back into place. Wires had been snapped, a steel post bent. Strange. Sheep don’t snap wires. Kangaroos do, but even a kangaroo can’t snap six strands of ringlock and bend it all out of shape.
Hoppy inspected the break. ‘This wasn’t the sheep. No way. This was done by machinery. One of those Carrington nutters has hit the fence with the cultivator. Wasn’t even our fault.’
I could feel myself getting fired up like Hoppy. Carringtons are mongrels.
I heard an engine in the distance. Sounded like our quad bike.
‘Look out, here they come,’ Hoppy said. He straightened like an old bull kangaroo.
It wasn’t our bike but the Carrington one, heading in our direction. I felt a flutter in my chest and my pulse quickened. There was only one way to communicate with a Carrington and that was with fire in your eyes and broken glass in your words.
The rider wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had on a dark trucker’s cap that held a mini haybale of wavy blonde hair mostly in place. It was the son – Nathaniel Carrington. It was five years since I’d seen him this close – and getting closer – and he wasn’t a boy any more. He was tall, his sleeves were rolled above his elbows and his arms were work-wiry and tanned. He stopped the bike and sprang off, approaching us with a disarming smile. Hoppy didn’t see it, he had his eyes down while he wrestled with the broken fence. Hoppy couldn’t look and I couldn’t drag my eyes away. Thank god for my sunglasses.
‘Wasn’t even our bloody fault,’ Hoppy growled. ‘The fence has been broken from the other side.’
‘Ah, yes. You’re right there,’ Nathaniel said. ‘My fault. Sorry about that. I hit it on my first run around with the seeder and forgot all about it.’
‘And the mongrel has the cheek to ring us and abuse us.’
Nathaniel blushed. The colour swept down his neck and under his collar. He yanked on the peak of his hat. ‘Sorry you copped that. I remembered as soon as I heard Pop on the phone. Came straight out. Thought I might beat you to it.’
‘Bloody Carringtons couldn’t grow ice in Siberia.’
‘Hoppy!’ I snapped. ‘He’s saying sorry.’
Nathaniel laughed and shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He took a step closer. ‘I’ll fix it if you want, Mr Stanton.’
Hoppy stood with his jaw set in disapproval. He looked at Nathaniel for the first time. ‘No, I want it done properly. I’ll bloody fix it myself,’ he said. He waved his hand, dismissively. ‘You can get on your bike and go and tell your grandfather to get his facts straight before he starts mouthing off.’
He turned his back on Nathaniel.
My face burned.
Nathaniel looked at me and I mouthed, ‘Sorry’.
Nathaniel nodded, defeated. He looked like a kicked puppy. He got back on the bike and left.
I watched him go, and just as he was about to leave the paddock, he looked over his shoulder at me and waved – a big arm-overthe-head sort of wave – and I waved back.
I’d learned to hate a lot of things about the Carringtons. I discovered with that wave that it was going to be very hard to hate the youngest one.
CHAPTER 03
It’s called a paradigm shift. I learned it in psychology. Like when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket and someone behind you smacks you in the leg. You spin around ready to bite their head off, but then you realise they’re blind. They’ve hit you with their cane. The sudden change you feel in your head – from wanting to punch them to wanting to help them – that’s a sort of paradigm shift, and I had one that day. It was the biggest one in my life and it left me reeling. It was a whole mix of things that messed me up, like seeing my grandfather adding fuel to a fire that he’d always said blew in from the other side of the fence. Seeing a boy I’d been taught to hate and feeling the way Juliet probably did when she first saw Romeo.
I was thinking about this as I was cutting kindling for the fire. It’s not good to be distracted with an axe in your hand, especially the one Hoppy has honed sharper than a kitchen knife. Luckily, the only blood spilled that afternoon was the blood of two roosters for dinner.
Katie and her family arrived when the chooks were roasting. There were the usual squeals and hugs and Nan burst into a round of ‘Happy Birthday’ even though it wasn’t anybody’s birthday.
Nan was the first to notice. ‘Where’s Tim?’
I hadn’t realised my uncle was missing.
‘Tim stayed home,’ Aunty Jacq said. ‘He’s umm . . . doing the bathroom renovations in peace while we’re away.’
We unloaded their stuff from the car. Aunty Jacq helped Mum and Nan in the kitchen, Chooka and Naomi plugged in the PlayStation in the lounge and Katie and I went to my room.
Katie dumped her bags and flopped onto my bed with a huge sigh. ‘Oh . . . my . . . god. It’s so good to be here. So good to see you, Avvie. What have you been up to? What’s the goss?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Good.’
She frowned at me then. Were we perfect cousins or perfect strangers?
I frowned back and she snorted a laugh. The ice was broken. I sat on her guts and bounced up and down. She shoved at me but I just bounced higher and higher until a dainty little fart squeaked out of her and we both fell about in hysterics.
You don’t get much choice as far as your cousins go, so if they’re good ones, you’re in luck. If they’re your best friends in the whole world it’s a double-triple bonus. When Katie is around, I feel like a ten-year-old again and we just go feral. Suddenly it’s like school holidays even if you don’t go to school.
Dinner was a typically rowdy catch-up. Naomi was sitting opposite me wearing a lime singlet top and I noticed she had boobs. Boobs at nine years old! I mean, they were just little bumps but I don’t think I even had that when I was nine. I thought when I lost a tooth, when I found a hair down there, when I got my first period, ‘I’ll remember this day forever’. They were bookmark days, but the only thing I really remember now is thinking that I’d remember.
Katie brought clothes. Der. I mean she brought clothes for me to wear. She gave me a full bag of stuff from her wardrobe. They’re not strictly hand-me-downs because she hasn’t grown out of them or worn them to death; they’re more like hand-me-across-to-the-poor-fashion-deprived-cousin items. After dinner we closed the door on my bedroom, put on Katie’s CDs one after another and held a fashion parade for two. Except for our feet, we’re exactly the same size. She’s a size six shoe and I’m a size eight, which is a real bummer because she has a shoe fetish and lots of great footwear that I would love to share.
My favourite from the bag was a printed cotton summer dress in pale teal and gold. It was low-cut but not plunging and she’d lifted the hem to mid thigh. It made me wish I’d shaved my legs.
Katie noticed and patted my shin. ‘Go on, do it.’
I came back smooth ten minutes later.
‘Looks better on you than it ever did on me and I loved it,’ Katie said. ‘Must be the colour of your hair.’ She’s a sort of rusty blonde and my hair’s nearly black. She grabbed my bedside lamp and lit me up so I glowed in the mirror.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but seeing that feminine-looking stranger in the mirror, I thought, ‘Wonder if Nathaniel would like her?’
‘I’ll buy it,’ I said, hands on hips. ‘Do you take American Express?’
Later that night – much later – we talked in whispers about her boys and her crazy sexploits. Well, she talked; I listened. She’d not only read the book of lerve; she’d written it. No, she’d lived it – every steamy page – and I hadn’t even seen the cover. It was hard to believe that it had all happened to one person in a single year, but she showed me the pictures of her and her boys on her phone and they at least tallied with the emails she’d sent me.
‘This is Parko,’ she said. ‘Underneath those clothes is the body of a god, I swear.’
I lay there, repulsed and enthralled at the same time, feeling stranger and stranger until Katie fell asleep mid-story. I lay awake for a long time after, too, staring into the gloom and thinking how she’d changed. I had trouble fitting together the Katie I’d known forever and the girl in the pictures she’d been painting in my head. At one stage she was whimpering in her sleep.
‘Katie? You okay?’
But she didn’t answer.
It wasn’t just shoe size and hair colour that made us different; she really was from another planet. Part of me wanted an express ticket there, but part of me wanted – what? I fell asleep wondering.
CHAPTER 04
When I did finally fall asleep, my dreams were all broken and nonsensical. One minute I was digging for something (what?) in the sandpit, the next I was lifting a lamb into the back of the ute, only I wasn’t tall enough to get it over the side of the tray (which probably did happen a few years ago). My eyes opened at 5.25, the way they always did. Katie was already awake. We got up and ate breakfast with Dad and Hoppy and Nan but I didn’t really wake up until Katie and I were on the horses, making long dawn shadows through the paddocks. I rode Zeph and Katie rode Dad’s horse Charlie. Katie wanted to canter as she always does (equestrian rev-head) so we rumbled and raced until the horses got tired. We walked them to the creek, dismounted and let them graze on the patches of green the sheep had missed. We sat on the bank and threw lumps of soil at the shiny black trickle of water. There were birds under the trees along the creek – a family of choughs – and they were chatting to each other, chirring and clucking gently. Sounded like a discussion about lamb prices or the weather.
