Alice rose with a slowness consistent with her sixty years, a hand pressing the small of her back as she carried her cup and the key to the kitchen sink. On her way she looked in on Mati and Liam, both children squished in the floral upholstered wingback chair in the small lounge room. The children had hit it off straightaway, surprising Alice; the girl didn’t normally make friends easily. There was one young girl, the significance of the initials BFF explained to Alice last year by a hyped up Matilda insisting on a slumber party for her sixth birthday.
‘Bee Eff Eff, Nana,’ she’d said, both hands clamped on her waist, her tiny head tilted at a curious angle. ‘Best Friends Forever.’
‘I see,’ Alice had replied. ‘And what about that girl at ballet? I thought she was your best friend.’
‘Yeah, Miti too. I can have two bestest friends you know. But not Meeko. He’s a boy.’
With doll-like features and the porcelain complexion consistent with their Japanese heritage, twins Mitsuko and Meeko were the most delicate dancers in Matilda’s ballet class. One Saturday morning, listening to the teacher tripping over the names Matilda, Mitsuko and Meeko, Alice found herself sharing a giggle with the twins’ mother. Exasperated after several attempts to pronounce the names, Madame Joilé’s tongue tied itself in knots, her false teeth close to slipping out of her mouth while calling out, ‘Mati, Miti, Miki’, which then had the entire class snickering.
Alice had been surprised to learn from the mother that the boy–girl twins were classified identical, yet they looked nothing alike; Alice suspected that the red-headed, Caucasian father with a broad forehead and Roman nose she’d met at last year’s concert may have been the reason. The twins’ shared mannerisms more than compensated for them not looking alike; in particular their synchronisation which was, in Madame Joilé’s words, ‘Magnifique!’ The cheeky pair was always laughing at the same thing at the same time and finishing each other’s sentences, feeding Alice’s natural curiosity about genetics. She was widely read on the subject and always particularly interested in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. To be able to study an example in real life satisfied her need to keep learning.
There was also no mistaking little Meeko’s flair for dance over his chubbier sister’s. The smaller of the siblings was more flamboyant and noticeably more graceful—the better dancer by far, his Arabesque superior. Alice would watch the twins’ antics and mull over the gay ‘issue’—that nature or nurture argument sometimes spoken about quite openly at dinner parties and on the television these days. How times had changed: vilification laws to protect, marches to protest, gay marriage, equal rights, token gay characters in TV shows, books and movies. Alice wondered what life for a mature Meeko would be like in years to come if, as she guessed, it turned out he was gay. The world was changing fast, everyone so loud and proud. An American TV show had recently featured an NBA player who’d outed himself on national television by presenting his straight twin, identical in looks, with a T-shirt, the words ‘I’M THE STRAIGHT ONE’ printed in big black letters across the chest.
Alice’s thoughts returned to her granddaughter. Matilda was good at ballet, not brilliant. She tried hard in class at school, and at home was mostly quiet and easy-care with occasional tantrums, usually over a favourite program or a very unfavourite food. Mati had a habit of making up her own words—like ‘bestest’ and ‘unfavourite’—and was becoming quite the chatterbox. Her antics kept Alice young; the gift of a granddaughter a dream come true for a woman who’d never dared imagine motherhood, much less being a grandmother. That thought would often—even after all these years—remind Alice how she’d disappointed her own parents by denying them the same opportunity; to share in the birth of a grandchild and spoil the baby with gifts each Christmas, birthday and just because occasion. Alice was lucky. Even now, before sleep each night, she said her own personal prayer, thanking Nancy for entrusting Paige to her.
The air suddenly cooled and the landscape outside the cottage door dulled, alerting Alice to the thick, grey cloud eclipsing the sun and casting blocks of shadow over the ground. With her thoughts shifting to her daughter presently travelling unfamiliar roads with a stranger behind the wheel of that abomination of a car, Alice tried not to think about the clouds as an omen, but merely as a reason to get the remaining suitcases off the small porch, but not before she ran a broom over the floors.
Relieved they weren’t holed up in a rat-infested, termite-ridden, cobweb-covered shack, she unpacked the essentials needed for a couple of nights. After that, they would be gone from this town. There was no need to use the drawers—of which there were several, and surprisingly clean, sparking Alice’s curiosity about the building’s original purpose. It surely wasn’t old enough to have been built as servants’ quarters, and the lack of windows on both side walls suggested an artist’s studio was unlikely, unless the artistic endeavour required little natural light.
A photographer’s studio perhaps? Alice mused while scanning their temporary quarters.
Cosy in its dimensions, to one side was a small bathroom and a basic kitchen with the bare necessities: crockery, cutlery, an upright stove, a sink, bench space and a small fridge-freezer painted over several times. A flimsy dining table with gold-speckled laminate and chrome legs was very seventies, as were the seats padded with orange vinyl.
‘It will do for a day or two,’ Alice mumbled, plugging the refrigerator into the wall socket and flicking the switch. The weary whitegood rattled and groaned, and when Alice opened the door she visualised the mould spores dancing their way into her nostrils. Diving a hand into her bag on the table, she groped around. Hand wipes and antihistamines would be required before tackling this appliance. Maybe she’d leave the job for Paige. With any luck, the experience would have her daughter biting at the bit to get back to her chef’s kitchen and shiny Smeg appliances.
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
e.e. Cummings
9
Aiden
The first rain hit the windscreen hard, each plop of water quickly carving tiny canyons through a film of red dust, until the web of watery veins spidered in an upward direction, splaying out beyond the reach of the car’s wipers and partially obscuring Aiden’s vision of the road ahead. He tried the windscreen washers, but all the spray jet did was groan the word ‘empty’; not that it mattered as at that precise moment the heavens opened to wash the car clean in no time at all. Cargo had resumed his metrical barking as Aiden drove away from Saddleton township, adding to the thud-swish, thud-swish, thud-swish of the window wipers, and now Aiden’s fingers tapped along on the steering wheel, the rhythmic action helping him ignore the headache looming over one eye. With the river crossing still ahead of them he had to stay alert and focused—and on more than the sweet-smelling city woman sitting beside him.
‘She’s up a bit further. The river, that is.’ The clarification prompted a further whitening of the woman’s knuckles. Had she been wearing her nerves on the outside he was certain they’d be as frayed as the aging vinyl seat, its edges scrunched tight in one fist under her thigh, the other hand strangling the life out of the door handle.
You dumb arse, Aiden! He should have thought about this more, should’ve seen the way she was fidgeting in her seat and fiddling with her phone. The woman was terrified. Silence on the trip back probably wasn’t helping, but his mind had been elsewhere.
‘You’re not worried, are you?’ he asked. ‘We did well to get in and out early.’
‘No, no, I’m not. Keen to see my daughter, that’s all.’
‘Not far to go. There’s the bridge.’
The river crossing didn’t bother Aiden. He was familiar enough with the waterways through this valley to know what he should and shouldn’t attempt. What was bothering him—what had taken all his attention since leaving Saddleton—was how good it felt to be in the company of someone who happened to smell like a woman, and the unexpected pleasure of finding a kindred spirit. His cousin, Sharni,
had no appreciation for food and always smelled of horse and hay. The blokes at the pub . . . Well, they smelled like blokes at a pub. And Aiden right now . . . ? He shifted slightly, raised his elbow to rest on the doorsill and draped a wrist casually over the top of the steering wheel. Then even more casually—at least he hoped it was casual—he pretended to stare at something upstream as they inched towards Drovers Crossing, at the same time inching his nose towards his armpit. A couple of sniffs later . . .
Cooking oil!
Aiden’s armpits smelled of kitchen grease, despite showering and donning freshly laundered jeans and a T-shirt this morning. One benefit he had found from dating someone from the same profession was at least you both smelled the same.
Great! His years in the business had etched the odour permanently in Aiden’s skin. Other than that, he loved his trade, loved working food into culinary works of art, but the smell . . .
‘What’s that?’ Paige said, out of the blue.
Aiden was seconds away from apologising and explaining his odour as a hazard of the job when he realised she was pointing downstream to the dark smudge at the edge of the muddy creek, Paige’s body straining against the seatbelt, cutting her ample breasts down the centre to exaggerate the generous serving.
You always did appreciate generous servings, Egan! He managed a quick internal chuckle before chastising himself again. Don’t even go there, dickhead.
Hadn’t he learned his lesson? He was still recovering from the pain of losing his family—the closest thing he’d had to one.
‘It’s a cow,’ she exclaimed, squinting through the rain-drenched windscreen as The Beast hit solid ground on the other side of the crossing. ‘What’s it doing there?’
Aiden slowed, reaching for his phone in the glove box compartment, his hand coming tantalisingly close to her knee as he fumbled with the latch.
‘Ouch!’ she whimpered as the drop-down section landed on those very knees with a thud.
‘Bugger! Sorry about that. Need my phone,’ which he retrieved before slamming the glove compartment closed, feeling bad as the woman’s hands massaged the hurt away.
‘Do you think he’s stuck—the cow?’
‘For a start, he is a she, but I reckon you might be right. Stuck good and proper, too. My guess is she’s from the Dargan property. I’m calling Banjo to get a message to PJ. The bloke won’t be too happy. I remember one flood he lost an entire chook shed—chooks and all—last seen headed downstream with a disused corrugated iron water tank. Hang on while I call.’
He pulled the truck to one side of the road, although why he hadn’t propped where he was in the centre to avoid the soft shoulder he didn’t know; they hadn’t passed a single car going in either direction today.
He moved his mobile phone around the cabin. ‘No signal. We’ll have to wait until we get back, or at least closer to Coolabah.’ He tossed the device onto the small shelf under the dashboard.
‘Wait? You can’t,’ she said.
Paige already had her door open. Why? Aiden had no idea. What was she planning to do? Drag the damn thing out herself?
Worry pushed her voice up a notch. ‘How long will that take? How much further is it to town? Then you’d have to make the call to this . . . this PJ, who would then have to get out here to get him . . . err . . . her out, and all before the river peaks.’
‘We don’t have much choice, I’m afraid.’
‘There’s always a choice,’ she said, raising her voice over the clanging sound of hard rain on metal. He wanted to disagree, but she wasn’t letting him. The woman had that recognisable fire-in-the-belly thing Aiden had seen plenty of times in the past, at school and as a young SES cadet. ‘And this is not a hard one. The poor thing needs our help.’
‘You’ll get soaking wet out there.’
‘So? You’re worried I’ll ruin the car seats?’ She flashed a smile—a strangely familiar one—then reached down and prodded one of the many tufts of fluffy stuffing poking through a split in the vinyl. ‘Come on, it’s only water,’ she said, stepping into the rain and standing tall, palms raised to the sky. ‘It’ll wash off. Have you not heard the saying? “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”’
So she was planning to dance the damn cow out of the creek? He couldn’t wait to see that.
Aiden slipped out of his driver’s side door, his body hunched as he followed her through the now pelting rain, his defensive posture reminiscent of city commuters ducking as they took turns to step out from under the shelter to board their bus, as if ducking somehow stopped them getting wet. It didn’t, of course, as evidenced when Aiden straightened out of the hunched position to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with this curiously familiar woman, droplets landing on his eyelashes that he quickly blinked away.
‘She’s bogged all right,’ he offered, spluttering out the raindrops now trickling freely over cropped hair, down his cheeks and into his mouth.
With the current snaking its way around the collapsed bank and already lapping at the animal’s ribs, they had a small window of opportunity to encourage her out, but only if they worked quickly. If not, the fast-flowing tributary would continue to carve out the riverbank, widening the watercourse and making the unsuspecting cow’s situation grimmer, their task impossible.
From some dark corner of his brain Aiden remembered a lesson his father had taught him. They’d been working together—a boy and his dad—to bring in a mob of cows. Aiden would have been twelve or thirteen at the time.
‘Just whack ’em,’ his father had shouted, wanting his son to hurry the dawdlers.
‘It’s the mud slowing them down, Pops.’
‘Rubbish! They can move a damn sight quicker than that horse of yours, boy.’ He’d been ‘boy’ rather than ‘lad’ all his life. ‘Cows have cloven hooves,’ his father had yelled over the backs of the mooing mob. ‘They’ll distance a horse in a boggy gallop anytime by spreading their toes. A horse’s hooves sink, but a cow’s feet widen so they don’t sink as deep as a solid hoof.’
Aiden had quizzed his father further at the dinner table that night while his new and annoying baby brother had tossed pureed peas from his highchair.
‘It’s how God made them, with a cleft between their toes. It puts air in the muddy hole as the foot is raised, while a horse’s hoof doing the same thing creates a kind of vacuum.’ His father cupped his hands on the table and marched them up and down on the spot, knocking his beer bottle over. It started a domino effect: first to topple over was the kissing gondoliers—his first wife’s heirloom pepper and salt shakers, followed by a small vase of marguerite daisies from their garden, and finally a bent candle from its holder. Oblivious to his second wife’s frantic fussing, Aiden’s father continued. ‘That sort of thing shakes a horse’s self-confidence and wastes a lot of muscle effort. Buggers them good and proper. Give me a cow any day.’
Where did that memory come from? Aiden’s knowledge of cattle these days was more about cuts and cooking times.
‘Aiden?’ The woman was staring at him. ‘I asked if she can get out herself?’
‘Hmm?’ Aiden was too busy wondering if Paige would be impressed with his considerable knowledge of cleft hooves? ‘Probably not,’ he finally answered, satisfying her question and his pondering.
‘Can we bribe her? I have snacks in my handbag. I’m a mother; a mother’s bag is an abyss. I have one of everything in that bag.’
‘I doubt snacks will help. They’re not the brightest creatures. A little smarter than sheep, but nowhere near as intelligent as a horse.’ Right now, with an agitated Cargo barking out an obvious warning from his position on the back of the tray-top, and Aiden and Paige standing in the rain talking about feeding a stranded cow a snack, Aiden was questioning human intelligence.
‘Whoa there!’ He grabbed Paige’s arm as she stumbled. Only she wasn’t falling, she was . . . ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m taking
my runners off.’
‘I can see that. What I mean is, you don’t enter floodwaters. And you definitely don’t walk through floodwaters without shoes. The current could be washing down God knows what under that silt.’
‘So tell me what we can do.’
‘We are not going to do anything for the minute. I need to think about this. You stay put.’
Something about the glint in her eye told Aiden she wasn’t the kind to be told. Not too different to the young local girl he’d known a long time ago who hadn’t known the meaning of ‘no’ either. The trouble with Rory was she needed to help any creature unable to help itself. That same single-mindedness, just witnessed in Paige, had Aiden feeling eighteen again: eager to impress, prepared to ignore protocols, remembering the thrill of the forbidden, of pleading eyes and persistent hands tugging, urging him to hurry.
‘Come on then.’ A hand closed around his, making Aiden’s breath catch in his chest until he blinked that earlier face away. A different face stared back at him now—an impatient one. ‘Let’s go, Aiden. The cow, remember?’
He was remembering all right—too much.
Time to get your head out of your arse and back to the task, Aiden Donlan Egan!
He breathed deep, then half-jumping, half-sliding, waded along the bank to approach the animal from behind. Cows were easily scared and this one was no exception; the mooing and head thrashing as the creature eyed the humans on the bank was proof of that. He needed to earn the animal’s trust so that when it made a move, Aiden could encourage it to head to land, not into deeper water.
‘What if she’s really stuck?’ Paige asked.
‘Unlike a horse’s solid hooves that create a vacuum when they raise their feet, the split in the cow’s toes spread, broadening the base and putting air in the muddy hole,’ he said, repeating his father’s lesson.
‘That’s a good thing?’ she called.
Season of Shadow and Light Page 12
