by Debra Oswald
Zoe strode away again, through the orchard.
Celia counted out a few slow breaths. What she needed to do now was gather up her strength, think her way through this, absorbing whatever pain might be necessary in order to do the right thing for her child.
*
In the late afternoon, Sheena woke up groggy, her face sweat-glued to the pillow. She remembered lying down on the bunk, just for a minute, to rest her eyes and maybe plan the next move. But it was hard to think clearly in the muggy air inside the cabin. The rain hadn’t let up all day, and as the moisture mixed with the unrelenting heat, Sheena felt as if she were breathing soup. After falling asleep for three clammy hours, what she needed now was a shower.
She flicked open the cabin door to find the rain had stopped. The whole place was sodden but the air was cooler, cleaner. Stepping outside, Sheena wondered for a moment if her eyeballs had grown a coating of mildew in that humid cabin – everything her eyes fell on was draped in a layer of mist. She then realised it was steam, rising from every surface, as the warm, soggy land met the now-cooler air. Vapour wafted up from the shed roof, from the fruit trees, from the ground itself. Still dazed from her nap, Sheena was caught off guard by the beauty of it, this layer of white mist – potent, as if the earth were in transition from one mysterious phase to another.
The shower was so good – sluicing off the sweat and the layer of gritty stuff that had stuck to the sweat. Sheena relished the tingly chill of the cooler air against her wet back. She could feel the ropes of muscle in her arms and shoulders, distinct under the skin after these days of picking work. She would’ve loved to stand there swaying under that shower spray for hours but she couldn’t do that. She needed to work out where the fuck Kieran was.
On her way back to the cabin, Sheena noticed Celia’s ute winding up from the road. She must’ve spent the afternoon doing errands in the town or whatever. When Celia spotted Sheena through the trees, she stopped the ute and signalled – Wait.
Walking across the orchard, Celia looked different. Maybe it was the white shirt she was wearing, unexpectedly brilliant in the diminishing light. Maybe it was her hair – normally she kept it tied back for work, but the dark curls were untied now, spilling over the shirt.
‘Do you need help with unloading stuff or anything?’ Sheena asked. ‘I’m not sure where Kieran is right now but I can find him.’
‘I want you and Kieran to move on.’
Blunt. Rude, even. Okay. Celia usually had a pretty straightforward way of speaking but this was different. Sheena could see some new mechanism had ignited inside this woman.
‘Well, that’s what I want,’ said Sheena. ‘Soon as I get enough money together for the car and we’ve built up some travel money.’
‘I just paid your bill at the mechanic,’ Celia replied. ‘I’ve asked Joe to drive your car out here for you tonight. I withdrew the cash I had in the bank. One thousand six hundred.’
She pulled a yellow envelope out of her bag. The car money plus that much cash – it was more than she owed them for the work so far. So this was a bribe, not payment for the job. ‘It’s yours,’ Celia said. ‘Travel money.’
Sheena could see Celia was shaking a little but her gaze was steady. If she was shaking, it was from the intensity of her purpose. ‘I want you and Kieran to leave tonight, without Zoe knowing about it.’
‘He won’t go for that idea,’ Sheena pointed out.
‘You should know that I know about Kieran’s police trouble.’
‘Oh. Right. So, you’ll go to the cops if we don’t leave.’
‘I’m not threatening you.’
‘Yeah, you are,’ Sheena shot back.
‘Well, I don’t want to make threats. I’m just trying to . . . Look, you want to stop this before it gets out of hand.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, this is a solution that suits both of us.’
Sheena looked down at the envelope Celia was holding out in her hand. ‘Fair enough.’ She took the envelope, tight around the fat wad of banknotes inside.
Celia exhaled then, as if she had been holding herself too tightly to breathe. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Make sure Zoe doesn’t know about this. Please.’
‘She’s going to wonder what the hell’s happened.’
‘I’ll work that out. Once he’s gone.’
Sheena winced. ‘Yeah, well, good luck with managing that.’
For a second it looked like Celia might respond, but she just gave a brisk nod. She walked back to her ute and Sheena continued down to the cabin, with the yellow envelope folded up in the bundle of sweaty clothes she’d peeled off for the shower.
Sheena couldn’t believe she was agreeing to this. Except that Celia had given her no fucking choice. Sheena was caving in to a threat rather than agreeing to a deal. Offensive was what it was. The woman thought Sheena and her brother were scum, such repulsive, dangerous scum that she was willing to clean out her bank account to pay them to rack off. Evidently, it was worth several thousand dollars to Celia to make them vanish from this lovely little fruit world she’d created for herself and her precious daughter – the precious daughter who had set her sights on Sheena’s gullible brother and his stupid eighteen-year-old-guy cock.
By the time Sheena was back in the cabin, her gullet was burning, resenting not just Celia and Zoe but every person on the planet with money and university degrees and peach farms and lovely peachy families and the power to make things go the way they wanted, the power to disrespect losers like her and Kieran, the power to eradicate her brother from their smug universe. And now those privileged fuckers were giving Sheena a gut ache from resenting them, which was one more crime to add to the list of shit that had been done to her.
And the most annoying thing was that the deal Celia was offering, this act of blackmail, was the best idea going in the current almighty mess. She hated Celia for it but in another compartment of Sheena’s brain, she was forced to respect what she was doing. Celia had balls of steel, or whatever the right expression was for what she had. Ovaries of steel. A uterus of steel. Whichever. The woman was doing what she needed to do. Fair enough.
Sheena flinched when she heard Kieran bound up to the cabin in one of his bouncy moods. It would make what she was required to say that much harder.
‘Sheena! How you going? Zoe and me’ve been hanging out at this old shearing shed, left over from when the farm had sheep way back.’
‘Kieran, listen.’
But he was too juiced-up to listen. ‘All the wood inside has a sheepy smell. Zoe reckons it’s the lanolin that’s still soaked into everything, even though there hasn’t been a single sheep there for a lot of years. It’s mad.’
‘Kieran, shoosh up and listen.’
‘You’ve gotta come and check it out. Now the rain’s stopped —’
‘Kieran, shut up!’
‘Okay.’ Once he’d shut his mouth, he engaged his brain sufficiently to notice there was a backpack sitting on Sheena’s bunk bed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re leaving tonight. You need to pack your stuff.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Celia knows about the Sydney mess. She’ll dob you in to the police if we don’t clear off. We leave as soon as our car gets here.’
‘I don’t – huh? What are you talking about?’
‘She’s paid the bill on the car and given us a wad of money on top of that. The deal I made with Celia is we go tonight.’
Kieran started to move in the small space of the cabin, scuffing his feet from the edge of one bunk to the other, twisting his body back and forth as if he could wriggle his shoulders into some new space that would open up to him.
‘No. Hang on,’ he said. ‘I gotta talk to Zoe about this.’
‘That’s the other part of the deal. You can’t tell Zoe.’
‘What? No way, no way, no way.’
Sheena aimed to sound implacable without being cruel. ‘There’s no choice.’
‘W
ait, wait. Let me think a second. Let me think,’ muttered Kieran.
‘Plenty of time to think once we’re in the car,’ said Sheena. ‘I reckon this is the best thing.’
‘It’s not the best thing for me! Fuck.’
Kieran was circling now, waggling his hands in front of his chest, muttering to himself. He was generating too much frantic energy in the tight space, creating a density in the air that was pressing in on Sheena’s skull. She had to do something. She had to settle him down quickly. She resorted to the familiar slap-down.
‘What makes you think a fuckwit like you is a good thing for this girl?’ she said, loud and sharp enough to cut through to his brain. The words tasted bitter in her mouth, but she was doing what was needed to extract him from trouble. ‘Come on, mate. The way you are – you’re no good for a girl like Zoe. Wake up. No wonder her mother wants you gone.’
Kieran turned to her, with the bewildered face of a slapped child. ‘Why would you say that to me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sheena. And she was sorry, but she couldn’t risk losing momentum. ‘I’ve gotta look out for you. What if Celia went to the cops? Do you want to get done for the vet-lab thing?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to go to jail?’
‘No, no.’
‘So, we have to go.’
Kieran was cursing in staccato bursts, revving himself the way he could do sometimes, like a toddler trapped in a self-lacerating tantrum.
‘I get it, Sheena. I get it. But I need to see Zoe before we go.’
‘Not a good idea.’
‘Listen to me, okay, I’m just asking if —’
‘I’m the one who has to look at things realistically.’
‘No, you’re not listening to me! I love her.’
‘I know you think that.’
‘You don’t know. You don’t,’ said Kieran firmly. ‘You’ve gotta understand – when I’m with Zoe, it’s not a screeching mess in here.’ He jabbed his fingers across his skull. ‘When I’m with her, things are so clear in my head and I think, Right, Kieran, this is what it should feel like. It’s fucking incredible. Are you listening to me?’
Sheena was listening, still trying to get used to this version of her brother.
Kieran stood still and resolute in front of her. ‘Let me just see Zoe one more time before I have to go. Please, Sheena. Please.’
Sheena knew she should say no to him. But she was so sick of saying no all the time. Why did the job of looking after Kieran – keeping her stupid, beautiful fuckwit of a brother alive and safe and out of jail – why did it require her to be a negative bitch so much of the time? And now look at him, enraptured, as if getting himself love-struck over this girl was his conversion to a religion that promised all the solutions to life’s shitful smorgasbord. The burning smile on Kieran’s face – Sheena had seen that smile on a girl she knew who’d been sucked in by Pentecostal Christians, to the point where she’d started swooning onto the shiny tiled floor and yabbering nonsense. The full three courses of crazy. Kieran was as misguided and as likely to crack his head open as that girl. Still, it felt vicious to be the one saying no to him in the middle of his rapturous state. Maybe Sheena could allow him a couple more hours to paw at Zoe or gaze into her eyes or whatever the hell they did.
‘What if I said you’ve got until ten o’clock?’ she offered. ‘A bit of time before we have to head off.’
‘Yes. Yes. That’s all I’m asking. That’d be brilliant, Sheena.’
He grinned at her. Now he was too buoyant. She needed to hammer down a few tent pegs around that giddy happiness to keep Kieran on the ground.
‘But then you stick with the deal and leave without making a fuss. Okay?’ she said sharply.
‘Okay.’
‘You don’t want to go to jail, do you?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t want to get Zoe in big trouble, do you?’
‘No. No.’
‘You want to protect this girl, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which means you can’t tell her we’re going. Tell me you understand that. Say it aloud.’
‘I understand that.’
There was definitely fear on Kieran’s face when she pointed out the risk of jail. Then the suggestion that he could bring trouble to Zoe – that was the clincher. He would want to protect the princess. Sheena had managed to scare him sufficiently. He would go along with the plan.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Take my watch so you can keep track of the time. Ten o’clock, be back here and we go.’
‘Thank you. Yes, yes. Thank you, Sheena.’
And he disappeared through the orchard, on his way to find Zoe.
It didn’t take long for Sheena to finish packing – their piss-weak pile of possessions only half-filled her backpack and Kieran’s sports bag. She stripped the sheets off the two mattresses and rolled them into an efficient bundle for Celia to wash. Maybe there would be two new pickers staying in this cabin after they’d gone and those people deserved clean sheets if they were going to work their arses off picking peaches. She swept bits of grass and leaves off the tiny floor area of the cabin and out the door, using the edge of one of Kieran’s thongs.
Very quickly, Sheena exhausted the jobs that needed doing. She lay down on the bare mattress, figuring it might be good to get an hour or two of sleep, to bank up energy to drive, once she had the car back.
The smartest plan was to drive all night, to transport Kieran rapidly away from this place and from Zoe. Judging from the parade of destructive behaviour Sheena had observed so far in her life, people were more likely to make moronic decisions during the night, in the dark. Kieran was a shocker for such misguided night-time choices. She could envisage her brother hurling himself out the car window onto the pitch-black embankment of a country road in order to run back to Zoe, howling like a mongrel dog. But if Sheena could just keep him sitting in the car long enough, hopefully sleeping, hurtling along that highway through the night, then when the dawn came he would be more likely to see the sense of the thing.
It turned out there was no way Sheena could sleep now – because of that sweaty nap earlier and because her bones were gritty, scraping inside her flesh with self-loathing. She was lonely, cranky and worn out from making decisions on her own for so long. Mostly lonely. She thought about Kieran and Zoe holding each other right at this minute, skin to skin. It would be good to have that for a moment, however self-deluded you’d have to be to think it solved anything. But it would be good to have that for a little while.
After ten minutes of that soft-headed, self-pitying rubbish, Sheena shook herself back to the thumping reality of how things worked on the surface of the planet. It struck her she might be sweating on the bare mattress, so she jumped up, untied the bundle of bedding and put one of the fitted sheets back on. But then, instead of lying back down on the bed, she decided some fresh air might help her toxic mood.
She dragged the esky across to wedge open the cabin door and then sat on the front step, gazing out into the dark orchard. She might as well make the most of her last hours here. She’d never spent time in the country as a kid, and as an adult she’d always felt out of place in a rural setting, as if her presence there was a distasteful or laughable mistake. The old Hungarian lady said that when you worked hard on a piece of land and the sweat from your labour had soaked into its soil, you grew a connection to that land. Sheena was not taken in by such mystic bullshit but she had to concede she felt some affection for this farm now, a sense that she had some right to be here after the hours of shredding work she’d put into it. Part of her was sorry to be leaving – admittedly a very small part that was crusted around with resentment.
Some minutes later, Sheena heard footsteps swishing across the wet, mulchy stuff on the orchard ground. It wouldn’t be Kieran – she didn’t expect him back until the agreed time – so it must be Celia, wanting to check things were going to plan. Then Sheena realised Joe was t
he one walking towards the cabin.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I left your car down by the gate.’
‘Right. I guess I should say thanks.’
Joe dropped his head down a little. Was that a smile on his face? What the fuck did that look mean? What had Celia been saying to him? Joe had always appeared less judgey about her than she expected a guy like him to be. He had even, amazingly, seemed respectful towards her. Had that soured now he had more information? Did Joe reckon she and Kieran were low-life scum? Well, whatever. Sheena didn’t have the emotional stamina to take that on right now.
As he stood at the cabin door, she asked him, ‘How will you get back into town?’
‘I’ll stay the night at my mother’s. Wouldn’t mind escaping my place for a bit.’
Sheena wasn’t sure if that was an invitation to ask further questions about his home life. It was better to keep her snout out of his business, so she responded with a noncommittal tip of the head.
‘Where’s Kieran?’ asked Joe.
‘He’ll be back soon, then we’ll head off. Don’t worry. Kieran knows he doesn’t have any choice, unless he wants to get arrested. What time is it?’
‘A bit after eight.’
Joe came close enough to drop the car key into her hand. Then, to Sheena’s surprise, he gestured at the empty section of the step – Can I sit there? She shuffled sideways to make room for him beside her.
‘You know, Sheena, you made things harder for Kieran by helping him skip town.’
‘By the time I found him, he’d already missed those court dates.’
Joe nodded. ‘Well, the cops want to talk to him about some other matters now.’
‘Oh. Right. Doesn’t surprise me.’
‘The vet-science lab.’
‘Yeah, those morons stole a shitload of drugs the vets use. The security guy wasn’t supposed to be there at the time.’
Joe nodded, letting Sheena run off at the mouth.
‘But the guard was there,’ she said. ‘And then – I don’t know, exactly. Mick laid into him. Beat the poor guy up pretty badly, from what Kieran told me.’
‘And Kieran was part of it?’
