Bookmark Days

by Scot Gardner

  ‘I’ll go,’ I whispered to Nan. ‘But don’t tell Hoppy, okay?’

  She nodded.

  I took my hat and kissed her on both cheeks. She hugged me tighter than she ever had before. I had a sense of being a small player in a much bigger story. The next chapter in the feud, perhaps.

  I was sitting in the ute, my heart slapping out a rhythm on my ribs, when Katie emerged from the house. Her hair was all over the place and she wore farm clothes. She had a startled, sleep-puffy look on her face.

  ‘Can I come?’ she asked.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nan said you’re going next door.’

  Some part of me wanted to say No, you have your own life, let me have mine in peace, but another part of me – an infinitely bigger part of me – was terrified of what might be in store.

  ‘Jump in,’ I said.

  It’s only fifteen Ks to the Carrington’s gate but it seemed to take forever. It was quiet in the cab until I put the indicator on to turn into their driveway.

  ‘Do you ever worry about cops?’ Katie asked.

  I jumped. ‘What?’

  ‘You know, police stopping you and wanting to see your licence and that.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve only ever seen the police on this road once in my entire life and that was the other night.’

  ‘You’re a good driver,’ she said, and I had to look at her twice. Three sentences had come out of Katie’s mouth – back-to-back – that weren’t about Katie.

  The smashed ute was in the paddock next to the driveway. I hadn’t expected to see that. It was somehow more sinister in the daylight – the gaps where the windows used to be looked like the empty eye sockets on a sun-bleached skull. There was a trail of what looked like dried blood above the remains of the driver’s door.

  Katie swore. ‘Is that the car from the other night?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He was lucky he survived.’

  They both were.

  I parked away from the house, in the heavy rectangle of shade from a machinery shed. Dogs yipped on their chains. I sat there for the longest time, the engine ticking and Katie staring at me.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked.

  ‘Now I work up the courage to go and knock on the door.’

  ‘Courage? I’ll do it, if you want. What do you want me to say?’

  ‘It’s fine. It’s something I have to do. Stay here.’

  I took a breath and opened the door. I forced my legs to do their thing. Halfway across the yard the back door of the house creaked open. I stopped. It was a struggle not to turn and run for the ute. The flywire door was butted open with a walking stick and Marilyn followed it into the daylight. She was smiling.

  ‘You’re safe!’ she sang in her croaky blues voice. ‘They’ve gone to the hospital.’

  Big sigh.

  Marilyn must have heard it. She chuckled. ‘Now, what would a nice girl like you be doing in a place like this?’

  ‘I decided to do something neighbourly for a change and offer to help. Figured you’re probably a good couple of hands short at the moment and it . . .’

  I shrugged. I didn’t know where to go from there. Under the harsh sunlight, the excuse seemed a bit frail and lonely but Marilyn hooked her stick in the crook of her elbow and dragged me into a hug. Her eyes were shiny when she eventually let me go.

  ‘That’s a lovely thought, Avril Stanton, and we could certainly use the hand.’

  The ute door slammed and Katie was beside us.

  ‘Katie, this is Mrs Carrington.’

  ‘Marilyn,’ she croaked, and they shook hands.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Blowed if I know,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’ll summon the foreman and see if he has any ideas. We can’t let an opportunity like this pass.’

  ‘The foreman?’

  My heart was flopping about in my chest like a pair of Nan’s big undies on the clothesline. ‘The foreman’ meant another Carrington and the options were limited. It was either one of the older folk, who hated me with varying levels of venom, or (much more threatening) the one person I hoped she meant. Marilyn hobbled to the shed and took the handset for a two-way radio from its cradle.

  She pressed the button to transmit. ‘You there?’ was all she said.

  ‘Me?’ came the reply.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. What?’

  ‘We have a visitor,’ Marilyn said, and smiled at me.

  ‘We do? Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. She claims to be our neighbour but I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  There was a long pause. When the voice broke through the static again, it was squeaky with excitement. ‘I’ll be right there!’

  Marilyn hung up the handset and turned to where Katie and I stood in the sunshine. ‘Says he’ll be along presently. Probably got time for a cup of tea. Interested?’

  It all seemed too easy. It was as if I’d parachuted behind enemy lines and instead of being met with bayonets and gunfire I’d been offered refreshments. Maybe it was the total Wizard of Oz craziness about it, but there was no way I was going to refuse.

  The house was cluttered with books and stacks of magazines – National Geographic and an assortment of craft journals. It smelled strangely familiar, though nothing like my own home. Marilyn made tea and pancakes. Katie scoffed five before she admitted to having missed breakfast. Marilyn just kept feeding her.

  I heard a bike arrive and my stomach flipped like one of the pancakes. I saw the trucker’s cap pass by the kitchen window and I suddenly needed to pee. I steeled myself, crossed my legs and sipped from my cup to distract myself. My hand was shaking and the cup rattled on the table as I put it down.

  Katie choked and started coughing into her hand when Nathaniel entered the room. He froze. He looked at his smiling grandmother in disbelief and then he looked at me. He dropped into the seat opposite and sat there – a grinning vision carved out of beetroot. Well, his face was as red as mine felt and that was somehow comforting.

  ‘I found her loitering outside,’ Marilyn grumbled.

  ‘Thought I recognised the ute,’ Nathaniel said, and dragged the cap from his head. ‘How are you, Avril?’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘Ribs are a bit sore. Nurse reckons I might have cracked one. Otherwise, I’m fit as a Mallee bull, so to speak.’

  Katie’s mouth was hanging open. I could see bits of pancake on her tongue. She was staring at Nathaniel.

  ‘Nathaniel, this is my cousin Katie.’

  They shook hands over the teapot. For once in her life, Katie couldn’t make a sound.

  He dropped her hand and turned his cap nervously in his fingers. ‘I’m sorry about the other night. About Grandad. He’s . . .’

  I nodded.

  ‘Avril’s offered to lend a hand while your father’s incapacitated,’ Marilyn said. ‘Thought it was too good an offer to leave it out in the sun, so you’ll have to think of something for her to do.’

  ‘And me,’ Katie cheeped.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Nathaniel asked, eyes boggling.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  ‘And me,’ Katie said again.

  He looked at his grandmother. She raised a single finger to her lips. ‘I’ll let you know when the others get back.’

  Nathaniel patted his cap back on to his head and stood. ‘This is . . . I . . . fantastic! What are we waiting for?’

  I grabbed my own hat. At the back door, we stopped to put on our boots. I spied Marilyn watching us through the kitchen window. She winked.

  Katie had worn runners. Nathaniel and I were almost at the ute when she called out for us to wait.

  Nathaniel stopped, but couldn’t stop staring. At me. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. His gaze was so full of . . . something . . . that it made my skin tingle. He couldn’t stop smiling, either.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ he said. ‘It’s so good to see you again,
Avril.’

  ‘Likewise,’ I said, and bumped him with my elbow. ‘So, what are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ve got thirty hectares of lucerne on the ground for hay. There’s about another thirty to cut. Have you used the hay rake before?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ I lied. It was more like a hundred times.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I’ll cut, you rake with the John Deere.’

  ‘Done,’ I said.

  ‘And me?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Might put you on bugloss patrol.’

  I nearly laughed.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Picking out the pretty blue flowers,’ I explained.

  ‘Really?’ Her face lit up. She didn’t realise she was being asked to pull weeds.

  ‘Better take the ute,’ Nathaniel said. ‘That way if the others get back before we’re done, you can undo that fence repair and drive through the paddocks to home.’

  CHAPTER 17

  It wasn’t exactly a romantic picnic in the forest. It wasn’t a candlelit dinner for two, either, but there was something deeply fulfilling about raking up windrows in the fresh-cut lucerne knowing Nathaniel was so close. Maybe it was the crazy way he waved every time our tractors came close enough to make it worthwhile, or the cheeky banter on the two-way.

  ‘You missed a bit, over,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘That wasn’t me, over.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re blaming your cousin? Over.’

  ‘Definitely, over.’

  ‘I’ll tell her that, over.’

  ‘She knows it’s true, over.’

  Maybe it was the sheer delight in seeing my cousin sweaty and dusty and shooting daggers up at me in the air-conditioned cab of the John Deere every time I drove past. She was doing a good job. The fact was she couldn’t do what I was doing, not without endangering property and the lives of others, anyway. There wasn’t much vipers bugloss (or Salvation Jane or Paterson’s Curse or whatever you like to call it) in the paddock but enough to warrant picking it out of the hay. I’m sure Nathaniel had done bugloss patrol before. I know I had. Seemed entirely appropriate that Katie start her farm work at the lowest rung.

  But her time on the lowest rung didn’t last long.

  ‘Picked up a hitch-hiker, over,’ came the voice on the two-way.

  I couldn’t work out what he was talking about for a full minute until I realised Katie was no longer on the ground. Next time we passed each other in the field, I saw her sitting beside Nathaniel in the tractor. They were both waving, but Katie’s was a clenched-fist wave of victory that made my skin crawl.

  I’d kill her.

  If she messed with Nathaniel just because she could, if she flirted and seduced him, if she fell in lust with him and used him and dumped him just to spite me, I’d take her down the back and put a bullet in her head. I’m serious. I’d treat her the way you’d treat a dog that gets a taste for killing sheep – give it a couple of ounces of lead and a shallow grave.

  She had no shame, no sense of what was right and what was wrong. I knew that if she sensed I had an interest in Nathaniel, she’d go out of her way to prove that she could have him. Even if he were as ugly as a baby galah, she’d have him. Every lap around the paddock the knot in my stomach and my grip on the steering wheel grew tighter. I knew in the rational part of my head that they were stupid things to think about but I couldn’t help it. They just kept going round and round until I felt I was being sucked down their whirlpool.

  If she really was the sex queen of Pentland High and she really could have any guy she set her mind to, why did she have to choose Nathaniel? It was as though she lived in a peach orchard but she couldn’t be satisfied until she’d climbed my only peach tree and scoffed my only peach, a peach that had been ripening for sixteen years.

  Nathaniel’s voice burst over the two-way and slapped me out of my tizzy. ‘You there, Avril? Over.’

  ‘Yep, over.’ I could hear Katie giggling in the background.

  ‘Did you really make your brother eat sheep poo? Over.’

  Katie had been telling stories and, as usual, hadn’t let the facts get in the way.

  ‘Negative. That was Katie, over.’

  ‘She says it was you, over.’

  ‘I may have done in the past but at the most recent event it was Katie who fed my brother poo. Over.’

  There was a long silence. The cab of the tractor may have been air-conditioned but I felt suddenly hot. Katie was a fox in the chookpen of my mind and I wanted her out. I needed a weapon like a stick or a rock to scare her off.

  I found one.

  ‘Have you asked her about the mark on her neck? Over,’ I said.

  I imagined the conversation that followed and where Katie would take the story. She’d tell him it was a golfing accident. ‘No,’ I said into the two-way. ‘It wasn’t a golfing accident. It was most likely a guy named Daniel but we can’t be sure. Over.’

  There was a long, satisfying silence that was broken by Nathaniel whistling.

  ‘Whoah, that was a bit cruel,’ he said.

  I felt instantly sick. My mouth had made the words and then I heard what I had said, like I’d been possessed by an evil bitch and had no control. I wished I could take it back. Not for Katie’s sake – she didn’t deserve his sympathy – but I didn’t want to be a bitch in Nathaniel’s eyes.

  When our tractors came close again, Katie stuck her middle finger up at me. It was a picture that painted a thousand words – most of them swear words – and there was no smirk on her face to soften it.

  That truth had stung. Seeing her react like that prodded my inner bitch and the anger was there again, all bristly and red, and I felt she’d deserved it. She could say what she wanted, but she couldn’t always get what she wanted while I was around. I could be her conscience in the absence of her own.

  I could rake faster than Nathaniel’s tractor was cutting – the rake is nearly twice as wide as the mower – so I was only ten minutes behind when they finished and pulled up beside our ute. Nathaniel was out of the cab in a flash and picking through the windrows for bugloss. Katie sat in the the driver’s seat of the ute, door open, looking more like my city cousin than a threat to my only peach. Maybe she was prettier and more experienced in some things than I was, but she was an alien on this planet. She didn’t know our customs or even really speak our language.

  I parked the John Deere and flung the cabin open to the heat of the day.

  Nathaniel didn’t look up for ages and when he eventually did he looked right through me.

  ‘Better be getting back,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. We can do another paddock if you like. We’ve got plenty of . . .’

  ‘Thanks, Avril. You’ve helped enough.’

  He looked at me then and his mouth was smiling but his eyes weren’t.

  I felt like crying. I’d stuffed it. Correction; Katie had stuffed it.

  A grumbly voice crackled through on the two-way. ‘You going to be long, Nate? The other guys are here and I’ve got some lunch ready. Over.’

  It was Marilyn, warning us in code that the car was back from the hospital.

  Nathaniel hopped up into the cab of his tractor. His voice was squeaky on the radio. I hoped it wasn’t as obvious to the folks listening on the other end. ‘Won’t be long. Fifteen minutes?

  Over.’

  ‘Right you are, love. See you then.’

  I jumped to the ground and threatened to close the ute door on Katie’s leg. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Katie stepped out.

  Nathaniel thumped to the ground and jogged over. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming over. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘No worries,’ I said.

  He hugged me. It was an awkward stiff-as-cardboard hug. As we parted, Katie stepped in. She hugged him and kissed his cheek and her hand was way too far down his back and she gave a little squeeze-moan that made me want to drag her off him.
Drag her to the ground by her hair as though she was a lamb that needed to have its tail docked and its balls cut off.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and walked off.

  ‘Can I drive?’ Katie asked.

  ‘No.’

  She snorted and crossed her arms.

  ‘Will you be right with the fence?’ Nathaniel called.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. The tools were still in the ute from the last repair job.

  I turned to wave but he’d already started the tractor and pointed it home.

  I undid the wire Hoppy had repaired, drove the ute back onto our place and restrung the fence. It wasn’t as tight as Hoppy’s job but it would keep the sheep in and unless you actually stopped to shake it, you’d never know it had been taken apart. I erased the wheel marks with a dried old canola branch.

  Katie was shaking her head when I dropped into the driver’s seat again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re so sly, Av. Nobody’s ever going to know that we’ve been to the Other Side.’

  ‘Yes, and I’d like to keep it that way.’

  ‘Would you now?’

  I shot her a dagger that would have killed a lesser beast, but Katie just grinned. ‘Finally, some dirt on Avril Louise Stanton that’s actually worth something.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone anything.’

  ‘What, don’t tell your mum and dad that you’ve got the hots for a Carrington?’

  I hit the brakes. Katie braced herself against the dash.

  ‘Just leave it alone!’ I shouted.

  She made an O shape with her mouth. ‘Woohoo. Fire up, Avvie. Look at her go! Bit of a raw nerve there, hey? Just a little hint of sexual tension, perhaps?’

  I lost it. I punched her. Hard. Right in the arm. There was nothing playful about it. Her mouth dropped open, then she clenched her teeth and punched me back. It was a wild flailing thing that skimmed off my shoulder and slapped into the seat but it opened the gates on our fury. Nails like claws tearing at hair and clothing. She was squealing and kicking and trying to get away. The back of her hand connected with my lip and I felt it all the way to my toes. She had a handful of hair, dragging me towards the seat. I grabbed blindly, found her singlet, and shoved her with everything I had. The singlet ripped and her head clubbed the glass beside her.