Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  CC’s desk was positioned under the window, which gave him a view of the whole garden. When I went in to see him later and ask if he’d like a cup of tea I found him staring out of the window.

  ‘She adores you,’ he said, looking at Maggie stretched out on the grass. ‘You can tell by the way she follows you around. Benson was a playful puppy. He may have been a lot of fun and you may have loved him but he didn’t love you, not in the way Maggie does.’

  It was a long and surprisingly emotional speech for CC who rarely revealed the depth of his feelings. It must have taken him by surprise because he put his head down and made out he was concentrating on the line of figures in front of him, but I knew better. I knew exactly what he was trying to tell me and it felt like someone had taken a metal spoon and scooped out my insides. In that moment I understood just how much my infatuation with A3 had hurt him.

  ‘I want to keep her,’ I said, my throat constricting. ‘I want to keep Maggie.’

  CC nodded. His eyes were full of tears.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

  ‘And don’t worry, I’ll get over Benson. I will definitely grow to love Maggie,’ I said, smiling now through my own tears.

  The next day, New Year’s Eve, I took Maggie to the RSPCA to sign the official change of ownership papers. While we were there, it made sense to ask the vet to give her a quick health check. Far from being unnerved by the busy surgery Maggie trotted calmly into the consulting room.

  The vet bent down to stroke her head. ‘Hello Maggie, how are you?’ Maggie thumped her tail. There was something in the familiarity of their greeting that made me wonder if the vet knew her. ‘I do,’ he said in answer to my question. ‘Maggie’s been coming here since she was a puppy, haven’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Six or seven years then?’ I said.

  The vet laughed. ‘Maggie’s older than that.’

  He took a moment to check her record on his computer. ‘Here we go, she’s nine or ten, we’re not exactly sure.’ I nodded. I didn’t blame the owner for fudging her age; he just wanted to make sure someone would adopt her.

  ‘She’s a gorgeous girl, aren’t you?’ Maggie looked at the vet with trusting eyes. ‘I’ve never met a nicer dingo,’ he said.

  The air in the surgery felt charged. If I’d been a dog, believe me, my ears would have been pricked and pointing forwards. ‘A what?’ I said quietly.

  ‘A dingo,’ he repeated. ‘She’s got a bit of kelpie in her but she’s mostly dingo.’

  *

  Maggie padded up to CC when we got home and he scratched her behind one of her exceptionally large ears. She flopped to the floor. We were the proud owners of an adopted dingo. (‘Grandma, what big ears you’ve got!’)

  ‘Everything all right at the RSPCA?’

  ‘She’s not a red heeler,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t she?’ CC kept scratching and Maggie thumped her tail.

  ‘Maggie,’ I said, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘is a dingo!’

  CC looked remarkably unfazed by the news. ‘We had a dingo once when I worked at Arkaroola, in the Flinders Ranges. Lovely dog, it was.’ He smiled at the memory and that’s when I suspected he had known all along we were adopting a dingo. When challenged, he shrugged. ‘I knew she wasn’t a red heeler,’ was all he would admit.

  I googled dingo and multiple images of Maggie popped up on screen, all with the same ears, face, white paws and white-tipped tail. It turned out dingoes aren’t even dogs, they’re a separate subspecies – canis lupus dingo – ancient wild animals, according to Wikipedia, more akin to a grey wolf than a domestic dog. I read everything I could find, including Dreamtime stories that told of a close relationship between Aboriginal people and dingoes. Some Aboriginal languages gave dingoes living with them one name (Walaku) and those that lived in the wild another (Ngurakin). Whatever you called them, it was worrying to discover that you weren’t allowed to own a dingo as a pet in western New South Wales, an area that included Broken Hill. They were feral animals; vertebrate pests; according to the Department of Primary Industries. Australia’s famous dog fence, the world’s longest barrier at 5500 kilometres, was built to keep them out of grazing and pastoral land. The Wild Dog Destruction Board did exactly what it said, employing dozens of people to maintain the dog fence. According to one report, they paid ten dollars for each dingo scalp and farmers were allowed to shoot them on sight to prevent attacks on livestock. Thankfully the papers we’d signed had Maggie listed as a kelpie cross.

  It was dark by the time I switched off the computer. I pushed back my chair and Maggie lumbered to her feet from where she’d been snoozing under the desk. I could have handed her back and claimed we’d been misled, I could have admitted she was a dingo and told the previous owner we weren’t allowed to keep her, but the thought of Maggie being put down made my stomach lurch. I reached down to give her a hug and she rested her head on my knees, then flopped to the floor.

  Far from being an outdoor dog, our domesticated dingo came into the house at every opportunity. She was mild-mannered, timid and could sometimes be encouraged to play with a ball. She did all the usual things you’d expect a dog to do – buried her bone in the vegetable patch, shed enough hair to stuff a sofa and stole the bacon I was planning to cook for breakfast – but really all Maggie wanted to do was lie down and be stroked. Tickle her under the chin and she would flop to the floor, offering her belly for a rub. She loved hugs, hated being left alone and would rather sleep than go for a walk. She was obedient, friendly and a delightful companion, wary of large men but a gentle pushover with children. That said, there was no denying she was a dingo. When one of the chooks escaped from the enclosure and fluttered around the garden in a mad panic, Maggie couldn’t help but pounce. I found her moments later with a surprised look on her face and a mouthful of feathers. Where once there were four, now there were only three.

  CC wanted Maggie to sleep outdoors and I wanted her to sleep inside. There was a time when such intractable positions would have been a deal-breaker, proof of irreconcilable differences that marked the end of any fledgling relationship. Not any more. I’d learnt to negotiate, learnt to accept I couldn’t always get my own way, and so we reached a compromise. If the temperature dipped below double digits Maggie slept inside. On balmy nights she slept outside.

  As a child CC used to trap dingoes and sell the pelts, adding to his family’s meagre income in William Creek. When he discovered the dingoes were willing to chew their own legs off in an attempt to get away, he put strychnine on the traps. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of them dying a lingering death,’ he said. Maybe that explained his tenderness towards Maggie now, retribution for all the dingoes he’d trapped and skinned as a child. He’s a softie at heart. The first Christmas after his wife left, CC had laid a place for Boof at the dining-room table and they ate Christmas dinner together, he and his blue heeler sitting opposite one another on padded pink plush velour.

  The irony of the situation – that the dog we ended up with wasn’t a dog at all but a dingo – didn’t escape either of us and I shamelessly used it to my advantage. ‘You said a dog couldn’t come indoors. Maggie’s not a dog, she’s a dingo,’ I would say, pushing the back door wide open and watching Maggie trot past. She would head for my office where she would clamber onto the battered sofa and stretch out in luxurious comfort, arching her back when I sat next to her in the hope I might tickle her tummy.

  Benson quickly found another home with a young family, just like the RSPCA said he would, and I quickly got over losing him. He was a reminder of all those past relationships, good and bad, that never moved beyond the puppy stage. Much as I had hated handing him back, I’d known it had to be done.

  Maggie may have been a dingo but she was definitely the right dog for us.

  chapter twenty-nine

  So here we are, no longer him and me. We. CC sent me a Valentine’s Day card and scratche
d out the word ‘love’. I like you, he wrote. Friends like you are hard to find, I responded. There’s no rush, although at the risk of sounding like a middle-aged, loved-up babe from Broken Hill, CC is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, by an outback country mile. He’s the yin to my yang. He’s even dealt with PK, the nickname Frosty enough of a nod in her direction to acknowledge her existence, yet keep her in check. She’s happy with the choice of CC as mate; we’re well matched. I might have an edge in cultural awareness but he has far more native cunning, offset by a streak of decency that runs through his core like the writing in a stick of Blackpool rock. We make each other laugh.

  We’ve been noodling for opals in White Cliffs, attended a two-day gymkhana at Innamincka Station, a cricket match in the middle of the Strzelecki Desert and even met royalty (nothing new for CC but I was in a lather of excitement, let me tell you). Their Royal Highnesses Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall flew to Longreach to name a new RFDS aircraft and CC was MC (sorry, couldn’t resist). He wore an Akubra hat pushed back on his head like a pro, affording a glimpse of the nine-year-old who’d lived in William Creek, then run off to muster brumbies.

  There was an ex-patient there that day, Jim Nunn, who told the royal couple about his life-or-death rescue by the Flying Doctor after an accident with an angry bull in Queensland. After the ceremony Jim came up to me. CC was busy talking to VIPs and Jim nodded in his direction. ‘Has he ever lived in William Creek?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I knew he was too smart to stick around there too long,’ said Jim. It turned out Jim was one of the stockmen who had taken CC brumby mustering all those years ago. They talked after the ceremony and it was the first time they had met in almost sixty years. Living in outback Australia is full of surprises.

  Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, that unknown Tasmanian who met her Danish prince at the Slip Inn on Sussex Street, also came to Broken Hill to launch a new breast care service for the RFDS. She was guest of honour at a glittering lunch held in the hangar and I was on the top table, a nerve-racking occasion almost ruined when I went to pick up my knife and fork before Her Royal Highness had lifted hers. ‘Don’t,’ whispered CC, saving me, and him, from acute embarrassment. That came later, when HRH got up to leave and we all stood up to say goodbye. The glasses perched on top of my head hadn’t been cleaned for a while and I didn’t want to miss seeing her plane take off so I whipped them off, grabbed the bottom of my shirt and cleaned them. It was an automatic gesture, something I do several times a day because I always wipe them on my shirt. On this occasion though I wasn’t wearing a shirt. In honour of the royal visit, I was wearing a dress. The saving grace was that Crown Princess Mary had her back to me. She was shaking hands with Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir, Governor of New South Wales and Patron of the RFDS, who along with the rest of the assembled dignitaries in the hangar that day had risen to say goodbye. If any of them had been looking my way (and I do hope they weren’t), they would have been afforded the briefest flash of clean white underwear. I didn’t even know I’d done it. After lunch dentist Lyn Mayne came up to me and said, ‘I wish I’d had a camera. That was priceless.’

  I don’t belong in a princess’s world, in spite of the endless diet of fairytales I had consumed as a child. Now I know there’s no such thing as the perfect mate or the ideal husband, just another person with flaws and failings like the rest of us. A person you can love.

  Among the many wonderful things Peter Ustinov wrote was this: ‘I am at my happiest with imperfect happiness. Perfection has no personality.’

  I was worried that because I hadn’t fallen in love with CC it meant we had no future. A lifetime of intense emotion had immured me to the quieter feelings of joy and pleasure, the warmth of a caress, the reliability of a trusted partner. I’d grown accustomed to sorrow, loneliness and disappointment; the familiarity and intensity of such feelings had been oddly comforting. Over the years I’d clung to them, nursing old hurts, reliving old disappointments, enjoying the nostalgia of looking back on something that hadn’t worked, revisiting the past and aching over lost love. I’d spent years carrying a sick feeling of dread and emptiness around like an old familiar, nursing the desperate last shreds of hope that lost love might be resurrected.

  I’m glad I didn’t fall in love with CC. That plummet through space invariably turned me into a helpless loon, a needy, nervous, anxiety-ridden shadow, eager and desperate for approval one minute, bullish and sullen the next (there are those who might be tempted to suggest that describes my normal behaviour but I beg to differ – falling in love did that to me). Not falling in love with CC was the best thing that could ever have happened. He saw the best, and the worst, of the real me and I saw a man I liked and admired, a man I respected. The longer I spent with him, the more I liked him. There are those who can handle love at first sight, and if you’re one of them, congratulations. I’m not suggesting a ‘sleep with someone you like and see what happens’ approach will suit everyone, but it suited me. I like having my feet firmly on the ground.

  So if I don’t belong in a fairytale princess world, where do I belong? I think it must be with CC. He fell off his bicycle not long after we met, a competitive race across a desert track that ended abruptly with him flying over the handlebars and breaking several vertebrae in his back, effectively ending any future tennis, running or mountain biking. He’s left with swimming, so we swim together. The fifty-metre open-air heated swimming pool is one of the many things I love about Broken Hill.

  Of course, embracing CC means letting go of the notion that I could jump on a plane, fly to Paris and fall in love with a Frenchman smoking Gauloises and drinking pastis in a basement jazz bar (then no doubt wandering lonely along the Champs-Élysées after I discover he’s having an affair with a student thirty years younger). It means letting go of the idea that I could audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, land a lead role in a production of Macbeth and join a six-month tour to the Indian subcontinent where I might fall in love with a maharajah (who in all probability would turn out to be an imposter from Peckham with no money and three ex-wives). Pick any unlikely scenario, any fantastical notion and it’s a possibility denied if I jump in the river with CC, who of course represents the biggest adventure I could ever embark on.

  When love turned up unexpectedly at fifteen, the feeling was so intense I couldn’t resist; it was the kind of passionate, burning desire poets write about. Instead of sharing the pain of that disastrous first love affair – with my Mum, my sisters or any of my girlfriends – I locked it away. Give sorrow words. I couldn’t. The self-destructive behaviour that followed only added to the tally of disasters as the years went by until eventually I grew to mistrust love, and falling in love. Still, at least I can take heart from studies that have shown that passionate phase only lasts about six months, then your hormones go back to normal and you wake up one morning wondering what you’re doing with the fallible, complex, entirely human person lying in bed next to you. If you’re lucky, you’ll still love that person.

  This morning, emptying the kitchen bin behind the back door, I understood that phrase, ‘seek and ye shall find’. It was a phrase that had always got under my skin. How could it be that easy? What if I was the kind of person who didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it? Seek what? Find what? The expression irritated me, largely because it contained a nugget of wisdom I couldn’t grasp, until this morning. Tying the top of the plastic bin liner I realised it meant I would find what I was looking for. So if I expected to find a selfish, bullying coward who treated me badly, I would; if I looked for a lost soul with nothing but heartache in his pockets and hurt in his eyes, that’s what I would find.

  And with another blinding flash of insight (maybe I should try doing the ironing one day as well) came another revelation. You can turn that around. Expect to meet someone good, decent, kind and considerate and you wi
ll. Seek and ye shall find.

  Last year I planted Lynne’s gift of strawberry plants and I was disappointed at the meagre crop of misshapen, tight little berries the plants produced. I thought about digging them up and moving them, thought about buying more plants, a different variety, better stock, heavier croppers and did none of it, partly because I couldn’t be bothered to uproot the plants and dig over a new bed, and partly because of a faint hope that they might do better the following year. This summer I picked a bumper harvest of ripe, succulent fruit, a crop we savoured each morning, bowls full of ripe berries warmed by the sun. And after weeks of continual harvest, when I’d picked the plants clean, I left the woodlice, slugs, ants and birds to have their fill of whatever I’d missed. We went away for two weeks, set the watering system to automatic and came back to find the plants had thrown out more shoots with more berries, bigger and juicier than before, and in another week or so the harvest will begin again. Sometimes it’s worth waiting and hanging in there to see what might happen.

  CC asked me the other day what emotion I thought was stronger: love or hate? I’d always thought love was stronger than hate, based on what I’d read and heard from others. Now I know it’s true. Hate feeds on itself and turns inward like a canker; love looks out. The more you love, the more that love spreads, infecting everyone it touches with light and joy.

  Many years ago my grandmother was in service as an under-house parlour maid at Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire. She walked with the man courting her through the historic gardens, following ancient paths that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn once trod. Her suitor stopped at an ivy-clad wall and got down on one knee to propose. ‘You see the way that ivy clings to the wall?’ he said. ‘That’s how closely I’m going to cling to you.’ Decades later, Gran showed me the spot when we visited the castle, tears in her eyes as she recounted the story. I couldn’t imagine anyone saying something so beautiful to me.