by Sasha Wasley
And remember when we were thirteen and we went with our dads to Bowen’s to pick out a horse for you. I already had King by then and you’d teased me that you were going to get a horse bigger than King and secretly I was scared you would because I was so damn proud to have the biggest horse of any kid in Mount Clair. But then you saw that scraggy, neglected fourteen-hander on its own in a yard and you asked Mrs Bowen about it. She said it was a rodeo rescue pony, really good-natured and strong as an ox but sensitive around the withers because of poor-fitting saddles, and prone to bucking during mounting. You went over and talked to Tuffie and he snuffled against you while your dad discussed likely horse selections with the Bowens. I heard him talking. He would have spent pretty much any amount to get you the best-trained, most perfect mount. And then you came back and announced you’d made your choice. I tell you what, Banjo, it was lucky you had your dad wrapped round your finger because he almost put his foot down that time. Even after you’d talked him into it, Tuffie wouldn’t go into the float at first and you had to walk him up and down the driveway for about forty-five minutes and bring him round about two dozen times before he suddenly just went in.
The whole drive home with my dad, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You had all those top-notch horses to choose from and you chose the damaged pony who responded to your gentle voice. And even though you’d been looking forward to riding your new horse every day of those school holidays with me and King, you didn’t ride him for weeks. You researched saddles and saddle blankets and found the best ones to protect the withers. And then you walked him round for a couple of weeks with his new saddle until he was totally cool about it. And then finally you mounted him and he didn’t buck; he just quivered a bit and then walked on when you squeezed his sides. And from that moment on you and Tuffie were like one being, like a centaur. You were light and he was strong and you just got each other. He turned out to be one of the best muster horses at Paterson Downs. And it all started with your compassion for the hairy little broken pony all alone in his yard.
You know, that month, that day, that moment when you chose Tuffie and then worked your butt off to help him, that was when I knew I loved you. I already knew how much you cared about living things but that instance drove it home for me. I felt selfish and shallow when I saw your compassion. It was so powerful and pure that it put me to shame and filled me up with feelings for you I wasn’t even sure I understood. How ironic is it that I was so overwhelmed by your compassion that it made me go from friendship to love? And yet right now, when I need it the most – because let’s face it, this situation is worse for me than it is for you – your compassion seems to have evaporated.
Tom
August 31
Dear Banjo,
Time to talk about the elephant in the room. The kiss. *cue crickets*
I’m sorry my patience ran out. I never planned for it to happen that way. When we read our letters and we’d both made it into the course, we hugged, remember? I threw your letter in the air and held my arms out, and you slammed into me full-force. I lifted you up off the ground and you hung on tight, laughing your gorgeous laugh in my ear. I breathed you in and I’ve gotta say, I could get drunk on the smell of your hair, it’s that good.
Even when I put you down you kept your arms around my neck, looking up into my eyes with this tender expression that made my breathing get tight. Was this it? The moment I’d been hoping for forever? Was this my chance to break down this barrier you’d placed between us? Before the moment could disappear I made a split-second decision and pulled you close again for a kiss.
It wasn’t something I’d decided to do. It was a half-baked, spontaneous act based on something I thought I saw in your eyes. And then you shoved me away harder than I thought you were able, demanding to know what the hell I was doing.
Shit. Regroup, Tom. I’d kissed you and you wanted an explanation. I’d been dying to tell you I loved you for years, Banjo. But now I was terrified because you looked so bloody angry and I had a bad feeling it wasn’t going to go well. You wanted answers so I had to confess. I was all in, going for broke.
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but what I felt was that I’d loved you for years. You were – are – the first thing I think about every morning and the last thing I see before I fall asleep at night. All I wanted was to be the one you could depend on. I had to bite back the urge to ask you to marry me that day. Even I knew that that would be going too far. Especially because your face was getting more and more pissed off with every word I said.
Then that long, long silence, and when you finally spoke it sounded like you were literally shaking with anger.
‘Tom Forrest,’ you said. ‘We made a pact.’
I remember thinking, the pact? That pact we made when we were fifteen, and you were raw and hurting from your mum’s death, and I didn’t even know what the damn pact meant? Screw the pact!
But obviously the pact was still important to you.
‘How are we supposed to work together on our plan if you’re going to act like this?’ you asked me.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I mean, why would us being together mess up the plan? Whenever we’d talked about combining the stations, I’d get a warm feeling inside, thinking about how we would be together then. I kind of just thought that we would be together, married, starting a family. Frankly, how did you think the plan would work if we didn’t get together?Did you think our parents were just going to magically allow us to combine the farms, Banjo? You didn’t think there would need to be something stronger holding us together than a shared farming methodology?
Then you said the words that answered this question. The words that really burned. ‘Tom, we need to be able to maintain a business partnership.’
It still makes my head spin to think about that moment. Was that really all I was to you? A business partnership? I denied it could be true that you really felt that way. I told myself it was my fault; I should have waited. You weren’t ready. In a couple of months, we’d be in the city together, studying, sharing class timetables, getting to know new people and socialising – that’d be an adventure we could share, something that would naturally bring us closer. Then I looked at your face, full of anger and betrayal, and I doubted myself. Hadn’t I been waiting long enough for the girl who I thought was my destiny? I was the only guy in your world. Why couldn’t I be the guy in your world? How long until you noticed me? How much longer was I going to be this pathetic lovestruck loser pining for the girl next door?
My dreams started crumbling around the edges. You didn’t love me. Why would going away to uni change that? You didn’t dream of marrying me and combining the stations. You dreamed of a thriving organic cattle operation.
Somehow I’d deluded myself into thinking you would come around, realise you loved me too, and we’d live happily ever after. And all the while you were dreaming of separate homes, separate lives, and a sustainable farming business partnership.
Ironically, when I looked in your eyes, you looked hurt.
‘You broke your promise,’ you said.
Well, Banjo, you broke something that day, too.
Tom
September 20
Dear Banjo,
I’m getting used to writing to a silent, unresponsive entity. It’s kind of like keeping a journal. I’ll just talk away to myself here and hope some of it filters through the diamond-hard walls of Banjo’s anger.
Dry season’s coming to an end early this year. We’ve already had some big downpours. Climate change strikes again. We never really talked about how we would deal with that, did we? The more this year goes on, the more Dad brings me into the management of the station. It’s made me realise some of our plans wouldn’t have worked. Maybe you’ve realised that too, through your studies. It’d be good to compare notes at some point to see how our ideas have changed over the past nine months. But it would require communicating, and that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
As much as it kills me to say this, I think I’m going to defer my course again. I’m not sure I’ll take up the offer at all. Dad’s relying on me more and more. It bothers Mum. She keeps pestering me to go to Perth. Maybe it’s her pride. She was so bloody excited when I got my uni acceptance. She probably wants a son who’s graduated with a degree,but I’m not convinced it’s that important any more. I do a lot of online research and I’ve got this journal subscription now. I’ve joined an online biodiversity network and I listen to their podcasts. Some bloke’s even coming from the Department of Agriculture next month to give a talk in town about progressive farming. I don’t know if it’ll be much good but I’ll go and listen anyway. I think I can do this without university. Anyway, I’ll give it a shot.
So yeah. I’m still going to pursue my dream. Half of it, anyway.
Tom
October 12
Dear Banjo,
I hear you came home last week. Another Banjo visit to Mount Clair with no contact.
The flooding’s been bad. The Westons lost a few head of cattle into the river and they’re finally moving their fences further away from the banks. Hey, do you remember how we talked about that? How the Gundergin mob always built their fences without thinking ahead? It shits me because we even spoke to Beryl Weston about it. We did that big ride out along the western boundary of Patersons and we could see the flooding well up the riverbanks, past Beryl’s fencelines. And we made an effort to tell her because we’d heard it was only going to get higher in the next couple of years. And you said her cattle would be attracted to the new green growth towards the end of the dry season, and they might get stuck in the mud.
And she laughed her arse off at us because a couple of sixteen years olds were trying to tell her how to run her station, and she said the river rose and fell from year to year like clockwork. We sure proved her wrong this time, huh? Pity it was at the expense of a dozen healthy cattle.
This is me trying to talk about things other than the mess that’s you-and-me.
Shit, Banjo. Have you checked the date? Nearly a year. Close enough, anyway. It feels like a decade. This has been the longest, hardest ten months of my life. I’ve always been pretty easygoing – pretty positive. But I think, this year, I came close to finding out what depression feels like. You’ve been depressed before, after your mum died, so maybe you’d know. It’s like those Gundergin cows that wandered into the mud and got stuck, but instead of struggling like they did, I just want to stay there in the mud, sinking deeper until I’m in up to my neck and don’t care whether my face goes under or not. Is that what depression’s like? It’s a new one for me. I’ve never felt this shitty before.
This is me being weak and giving in, and getting down on my bloody knees.
Please make contact. Please? I can’t do this any more. Forget love – how do I even continue to call this friendship if you won’t talk to me at all?
This is me making a deal I never wanted to make.
If you will just contact me, just reboot our friendship, I promise I’ll never try to kiss you again. I will never cross that line you drew. I’ll never make you uncomfortable like that again. I don’t like doing life without you. I’m miserable.
You’ve been eighteen for almost a year. I’ve been eighteen for over six months. We’re adults. Let’s try to be grown-up about this, yeah? You win. I suck. I’ll do anything to be in your life again. I will do everything possible to squash down any emotions that aren’t acceptable to you so I can just be Banjo’s friend again.
I can’t go any lower than this. You’ve got all my pride, all my hope. Crush it or agree to be my friend again. If I don’t hear back from you by your birthday, I’ll leave you alone for good.
Tom
November 5
Dear Banjo,
Happy birthday.
I’ve got a present for you. I’m going to stop writing to you.
I’m done. I’ve been apologising for a year and for what? For having the cheek to fall for you? And you haven’t sent as much as a text message.
You know what? Fine. You did a damn good job of fooling me for eighteen years that you were this great big bundle of amazing angelic compassion and love. Well, you go and save all the cows and kangaroos and parrots and ponies, Banjo, but don’t worry about the humans you trample all over because clearly we don’t matter.
I’ve notified the university that I won’t be taking my place in the course and they can give it to someone else. I’ve told Dad I want to work alongside him instead of studying and he’s agreed to bring me on as junior manager at the station.
Enjoy uni. Enjoy learning how to save the future of food production. Enjoy your career, and making connections and networking and forming business partnerships. God protect anyone who tries to get closer to you than that – anyone who dares to love you.
And I’ll take this opportunity to say enjoy your life, Banjo, because I’m obviously not welcome to be part of it.
Tom
The clock showed four a.m. Willow had managed an hour’s sleep before she woke up and the raw pain of reading Tom’s letters hit her all over again, bumping her heart rate up to painful levels, making her mind whirl. She felt guilty – devastated. She’d cried so hard during his last letter, she could barely make out the words.
It was so unfair. He’d assumed she’d read all his letters and had chosen to ignore them. And he’d allowed that to change him forever.
But he knew her. He’d been her best friend. How could he honestly believe she would do that to him? If she’d read those final letters, she never would have abandoned him like that. She would have called him in an instant, told him she forgave his stupid mistake – she would have ‘rebooted’ the friendship. He should have known she wasn’t reading them. She wasn’t the hard, cold, pitiless person he’d accused her of being.
But, whispered her heart, you didn’t read them. You were scared of the pain the letters would cause so you hid them in a drawer. He was reaching out to you. Your best and only true friend reached out to you, and you ignored him.
But I was grieving for Mum, she pleaded with her heart. I didn’t know how to take any more pain after she died.
There was no relief. She hated Tom for thinking that of her, and she hated herself more for being something utterly despicable – for being compassionless. The truth was plain: she should have been braver. She wept for her cowardice and wept even harder for her terrible betrayal of her best friend. Worst of all was the utter, helpless paralysis deep inside. There was nothing she could do to fix this. The pain she’d caused ten years before had corroded Tom’s natural happiness so badly that he’d become a different person. Her sunny, laughing Tom had become a cold, bitter man.
In the morning she stared at her hollow eyes in the mirror and tried to regroup. She was twenty-nine years old, had a master’s degree in biodynamics, and was at the helm of a thriving cattle station. Her father was depending on her. Yes, there was a messed-up incident in her past, but it was ten years ago and these things happened. Regrettable. Confronting. Painful – but hardly unique. It wasn’t something that could be fixed now, so she was best off avoiding the Forrests as much as possible. She would just have to soldier on through the discomfort and hope that one day she would reach the state of cool indifference that Tom had obviously achieved.
She got a huge jolt when she switched on her computer to work on the business plan for Hegney and found an email from Tom. No subject line. No words in the body of th
e email. Just an attachment titled Document1.doc. She opened it, feeling sick.
It was a list of wholesale suppliers of organic, ethical and fair-trade foods, their delivery days, and the closest towns to which they delivered. Willow didn’t know whether to be disappointed, grateful, or some other emotion that was filling her eyes with tears of anguish. Again.
She rubbed her eyes savagely and printed the page before hitting close on her inbox. She had to pull herself together. She had a station to run, goddamnit.
Willow knuckled down and finished the business plan. Here, finally, was their map for the station’s journey to organic certification, and she was proud of it. It contained everything she’d worked so hard to master since she’d left Mount Clair combined with her deep knowledge of the land on which she’d been raised. She’d painstakingly detailed and rationalised each strategy, along with estimated costings and timelines, knowing Hegney might not be familiar with some of the methods. It definitely wasn’t a document for her father’s eyes. Apart from the fact that he only ever used spreadsheets to prepare his station plans, some of the humane techniques she wanted to use would go against the grain for a born-and-bred, Kimberley cattle-station man like Barry. Seeing the proposal would cause him stress.
