“I don't remember any of that,” I confessed, and let her go back to reading them while I tried to do something about the plate of 'food' Rob had given me.
“Which means you don't know the great news,” Rob told me, turning off the gas to the barbecue and flopping down on the rocking chair with his plate of charcoal.
“Great news?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, taking a bite of his sausage. “The Swans trashed the 'Pies, 100-79. It was beautiful. I haven't cried so much since I was five years old.”
Sarah groaned. “Football.” She ran a hand over her face. “I can't cope with football right now. I have the worst headache in the history of alcohol. I will never drink again.”
“I have a box of painkillers that says otherwise,” I told her, and then ducked into my bedroom to grab a couple and returned to give them to her. She dry-swallowed them which was impressive, and then got back to her breakfast.
Rob finished his with a very loud, guttural burp. Both of us stared at him and he just grinned. “So, when shall we hit the road, girls?” he said, remembering too late and then looking with panic at me. “...people.”
I waved my hand dismissively at him. He was trying. “We've missed the opportunity for me to get a sunrise today, I think. I wouldn't mind seeing...” I glanced towards Sarah, wanting to say 'the proposed mining site' but also not wanting to give away anything to Rob after that whole John saga. “Confidential... things.”
Sarah just squinted at me as she stood stiffly. “That makes it sound like you're taking me out into the desert so I can give you a private show.”
I deadpanned. “Isn't that why I'm here?”
I expected Rob either to realise I was joking and laugh at me or have a really strong opinion about that not happening, but he just looked very confused about what to think.
Sarah laughed. “Sure, Min, just put on about 50 kilos of muscle and we'll talk,” she said as she yawned and stretched. “Maybe 70. Okay, I'm going to go and have a shower, maybe that will make me feel less like crap.” She hung on the doorway before she went back inside, though, swinging on it. “Oh, and just a question, in the event that you and I do actually hook up, should I wear a school uniform, or...?”
That was what made Rob burst out laughing. Blushing, I stink-eyed them both.
After Sarah had jumped in the shower, Rob rocked backwards and forwards in the chair playfully. “You got a photo of her?” he asked. “Your girl? Sare’s never showed me.”
'My girl'? I kind of liked that. “Yeah.” I patted down my pockets to find my phone, and when I unlocked it I discovered I had a new message. I thought it might be from the girl herself, so I opened it. It wasn't.
“Just landed in Seoul,” Henry had sent me last night. “I hope you arrived safely in Broome and aren't working too hard! ;)”
I cringed, but disregarded that message so I could find the photo of Bree in the red t-shirt I'd bought her. I passed the phone over to Rob who stopped rocking to look at it. His eyebrows went up and he nodded appreciatively. “Nice,” he said as he got up and drummed his full stomach. “You should've brought her.”
Now you all tell me, I thought, and stood as well. “I’ll wash up,” I said, holding my hand out to him so he could pass me his plate.
I spent the whole time I was doing our dishes wishing I had actually brought Bree. She'd be hanging over the countertop talking to me while I did this, I thought. Actually, who was I kidding? She'd be doing this while I leant on the countertop. She probably wouldn't even have let Rob cook breakfast, she'd have insisted on doing it herself. Then she'd have stood by with a delighted smile on her face watching while we ate her food. Thinking about those big smiles of hers made me smile.
She'd have loved it here, I decided. The temperature this morning was a really sort of pleasant early twenties, and the sun wasn't too harsh yet. It was great weather for swimming, but I personally wasn't going to be seen in anything less than a big t-shirt and jeans. If Bree had come, I could have just sat on the beach and watched her in that bikini she mentioned yesterday. I tried to imagine what Bree's definition of 'not much to it' in reference to the bikini meant, when there was not much to anything she wore even when she considered herself fully clothed. It was a very pleasant thought.
“Geez, Min, I wonder who you're thinking about,” Sarah said as she emerged from the bathroom, damp and grinning ear-to-ear.
I ignored what she'd said, looking her up and down. She was really relaxed. “Yeah, but why are you so happy?”
She kept grinning. “I don't know what the hell is in those painkillers you gave me,” she said as she finished towel-drying her hair. “But I feel like I've just shot up or something. They are strong.”
I shrugged, drying my hands on a tea-towel. “Well, you said you had a bad headache.”
She draped her own towel over the back of a kitchen chair so it could dry. “Yeah, but I think I could pop two of those and not notice I was missing a leg. Anyway,” she said, yawning. “You want to go take the Range Rover out now to see if we can find the proposed site? It's actually not that far out.”
Of course I wanted to, so I put all my electronics in the back of Rob's big four wheel drive and we headed off. Rob waved us off from the front stairs, looking a bit miserable he wasn't allowed to come with us today.
“Maybe it would have been okay for him to join us,” I suggested, trying to figure out where the blinkers were on Rob's car, and turning on the windscreen wipers instead. I would have preferred that Sarah drive this big monster of a car, but I wasn't going to let her behind the wheel while she was high on my painkillers. “At least then he could have driven.”
“It's that kind of thinking that got you in trouble with Diane and Jason,” Sarah told me, and when I opened my mouth to have a go at her, she smirked at me. “Don't worry, Rob'll be fine. I'll make it up to him tonight.”
“By cooking him dinner?” I asked innocently, and then turned out onto the road.
Sarah found that really amusing. “Didn't you say Schoolgirl cooks for you a lot...?”
I ignored her, because she was terrible. “You're supposed to be telling me where to go,” I reminded her, and she sobered and started to actually give me directions.
The site really wasn't that far out of town — maybe half an hour up the highway towards Derby. We had to leave the main road to get to it, and I had expected there either to be no track or something really makeshift because the site hadn't been constructed yet. But it was a raked gravel road and it looked well-travelled.
To make everything even more confusing, there was an Approved Vehicles Only sign and the Frost snowflake, but it had the clear blue flame behind it which meant it was a Frost Energy logo and not the Frost International one.
“Weird,” Sarah commented as we drove past it. I agreed with her.
We had to drive off the gravel road to get to the proposed site which was just over the hill, but before I turned off the road, I pulled over and we looked up it. “I'm kind of inclined to go to the end and see what's there.” I looked across at Sarah, and when she didn't disagree, we continued up the road until we got to an enormous boom gate.
At least the signage was better at this end. On a big black placard beside the gate, the print read Waterbank Hydraulic Fracturing Well and had a whole list of facilities beneath it and ended with Frost Energy: Powering the Future.
Sarah leant closer to read the rest of the sign. “So this is where Rob works.”
I twisted around behind us to look back at the hill we should have turned off at. It wasn't far away at all. “...Really close to the proposed Pink mine.”
Since we couldn't get in and probably shouldn't have anyway, I chucked a u-turn and we went and drove back up the hill. I'd been hoping to take a look at the site in case it was pretty and I could paint it later—but it was just rock-solid orange soil covered in skinny trees and shrubs. It was also on the side of the hill and gave us a great view of Waterbank. We leant out of the car a
nd looked down at it.
“Okay, I'm totally convinced that the court case is to do with project Pink,” Sarah said eventually. “I could throw a rock down onto that site from here, it's so close.”
“Well, you couldn't,” I corrected her and shot her a sideways grin. “But I take your point.” I spent another minute or two looking at it. “Not that I didn't take that confidentiality stuff seriously, because I did, but wow, I really thought it was over something petty, like Diane eating the last Tim Tam or something.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I felt so bad not being able to discuss any of it with Rob, but now I'm pretty glad I kept my mouth shut.”
I didn't say anything to that, because while I hadn't breathed a word to Henry, I'd chatted about it with Bree. Who would Bree tell, though? She had nothing to do with Frost.
“Well,” I said, and then sat back and buckled my seat belt. “Fuck. I wish I had been assigned to some boring investment project, now.”
We drove back to the highway. Neither of us had any ideas about how everything knit together; I didn't know anything about law that didn't relate to marketing and Sarah, despite being one of those people who seemed to know lots about everything, didn't either.
“There's heaps of really complex laws about mining leases and stuff,” she said. “I think we got told about that stuff in induction, but I don't remember any of it.”
“Would Rob know?” I wondered. “He works out here, after all.”
She shook her head. “Nah, he's a work-with-his-hands type of person, in case that didn't come across.”
I nodded, and then we spent another few minutes in silence. When Sarah spoke again I thought she was going to have another theory, but instead she just said, “Well, I'm hungry and I need caffeine. Want to go grab something in town?” When I was about to remind her that we'd had breakfast, she scoffed at me. “Please, tell me you ate anything he cooked. I love him, but he torches metal for a living.”
I wasn't all that keen on walking around the centre of Broome in broad daylight like this when Frost employed half of Western Australia. However, Sarah managed to coax me out of the car by promising me most of the FIFO employees would have flown back home for Easter and there would only be tourists.
Because I wasn't wearing my hoodie, either, I didn't have anything I could put over my ponytail. It wasn't even that I wore the hood up most of the time, it was just that I liked having it there in case I wanted to hide. Without it, I felt really exposed. “Do you have a baseball cap in here somewhere?” I asked Sarah, looking over the driver's seat into the back.
She groaned. “I told you, the hair just looks like a bad fashion decision.” She hauled me out of the car and closed the door before I could get back inside. “It doesn't make you look like a chick.”
“It makes me feel like a chick,” I told her, but she ignored that and dragged me toting all my electronics into a little café. It had been freshly painted and freshly furnished, by the look of it. Everything looked new and bright.
“Just cut your hair off,” Sarah said as she walked up to the counter. Whoever owned the place was out the back in the kitchen and not serving in the empty café. “Heaps of chicks have short hair. Get the hairdresser to give you something you can make look feminine or masculine depending how you style it.”
“Heaps of chicks aren't as tall or as boyish as me,” I told her. “Can you imagine how much I'd cop it at work if I chopped all my hair off? They're all weird about the fact I'm taller than them as it is. That, and Mum would kill me.”
The owner came through the double-doors, wiping his hands on his apron. “Good morning!”
“Good morning!” Sarah greeted him, and then turned back to me. “Your mum's in Korea,” she pointed out, as if that solved everything. It didn't solve jack. She had no idea what my Mum was like.
The owner was in his early sixties, had greying hair and the look of a cashed-up retiree. “Take a seat if you like,” he said, and when we did, he brought us out a couple of menus. We ordered breakfast and coffee and then he ducked behind the counter to deliver our caffeine fix. After that was sorted, he went back into the kitchen.
Sarah tested her latte. “He's nice,” she decided. “The coffee’s not bad, either.”
I had a sip of mine, too, but because I wasn't really a coffee drinker I had no idea if it was good or bad. I was happy as long as it contained caffeine.
Sarah still had that far-off gaze of someone who was lost in thought. “Maybe Diane’s angry about Sean for something else and just put the mine right there to spite him or something?”
I shrugged. That whole dynamic between Sean and Diane was a total mystery to me, and the more I thought about how fucked it all was, the more I really wished the project was over.
I must have looked a bit dismissive, because Sarah frowned. “Aren’t you interested in finding out what’s going on with those two?”
“I would be more interested if I wasn’t in the middle of it, Sarah,” I told her shortly. “I really, really just want to get these graphics done, get the pitch delivered and get the contract signed. Knowing what's really going on would be great, but it's not going to help me keep my job.”
She winced. “Whoops,” she said, looking very guilty. “I forgot about that meeting you had with Diane before you left work. Wow, sorry, that was really insensitive.” She changed the subject. “So how are you going to handle the graphics, anyway? Did you finish that one last night?”
“Yeah. It's a bit rough, I'll add detail this afternoon, maybe. You want to see?”
She did, so I set up my laptop and tablet to show her what I'd done. I was busy going over what I thought about the placement of text when the owner came back with our food and I had to hurriedly close everything.
He looked amused. “What were you guys looking at in my café?” he asked with a grin, obviously assuming it was porn or something. I probably would have joked about it, but I didn't know this guy and I didn't know if he'd get my sense of humour.
“Oh, Min's an artist,” Sarah told him. “But sh—he's working on some confidential stuff right now.”
To my discomfort, the owner sat down beside us. “You're an artist?” he asked me, immediately interested.
I shot Sarah a look. “I’m not an artist,” I told him. “I work in marketing. I just enjoy painting and I sometimes do the graphics for our campaigns.”
He leant forward on the table. “Is that right?” he asked. “Would I have seen your stuff anywhere?”
Sarah laughed briefly. “Probably, we work for Frost.”
“So, can I see?” He gestured at his walls. “I'm in the middle of decorating, and I'm on the lookout for some good work to put up.”
Sarah and I glanced at each other. I couldn't show him the project paintings, but there seemed to be no good reason not to show him my general pieces. I had some of them saved in folders on my laptop so I opened them up and passed him the tablet. “They display better on that,” I explained, and then tabbed through them for him.
He looked very impressed. “These are great,” he said. “Would you do a request? I want to get a big beachscape for this wall. No people, just a long sandy beach, maybe with some driftwood or a palm tree or two or something like that. Nice and relaxing. How much do you think you'd charge for that kind of thing?”
It sounded like something I really didn't have time for, to be honest. The wall was a good six or seven metres long, and that was a lot of work, probably at least a full week. I didn't want to say that, though. “I normally just do graphics for work,” I told him. “I've never thought about what I'd charge.”
“Well, can you think about it and give me your card?” he asked. “I think it would look great.”
I wouldn't have given him my work cards anyway because they had 'Miss' on them, but fortunately I didn't have any with me. I just scribbled my private email on a serviette with an old pen he leant me, and then put my computer away and got stuck into my breakfast as he left.
I scoffed at her. “Yeah, I'll do it in all the stacks of free time I get by working at Frost.” I had a bite of my toast. “Besides, freelancing sucks, you never know where your next paycheque is coming from. I stress out enough as it is, I don't need to worry about not knowing how I'm going to pay for my next meal.” Or how I'd explain to Mum why I no longer had anywhere to live, which was a much bigger problem.
“I didn't say anything about freelancing,” Sarah pointed out smugly. I sighed at her and kept eating.
We headed back home when we were done with our real breakfast, and just as I was pulling out of the car park, my phone rang from my laptop bag.
Sarah dove on it. “If it's Schoolgirl, I'm answering,” she said, unlocking it and then looking surprised. “Okay, I'm not answering.”
I glanced over at her and saw 'Henry' on the screen. Fuck. “Yeah, just leave it. I'll call him later.”
She looked uneasy as it kept ringing in her hand, and only put it back in the laptop bag when it fell silent. A few seconds later it chimed to let me know I had a voicemail. I made a face at it, but didn't say anything. Sarah didn't bring it up again, either.
When we got back to the house, Rob was waiting for us on the porch like a Labrador and showed us inside where he'd rearranged the furniture so there were three comfortable positions in front of the TV. “I'm going to induct you into the wonderful world of AFL Live,” he announced, to which Sarah put her head in her hands. It was an Australian football game for consoles. He looked unaffected by her reaction as he told me, “You might love it.”
I very much doubted I would love it because sports games were not my thing, but I was willing to give it a shot because Rob was very excited and I wanted a good reason to avoid calling Henry back.
Rob sat me down to explain the rules and the controls, and Sarah sat politely with us but spent the first quarter messaging people on her mobile and the second quarter dozing off in the armchair.
Under My Skin Page 55
