‘Cor-r-ection!’ Patty rolled her r’s in jubilation. ‘Gippsland’s luck is bloody marvellous. And to celebrate, I’ve organised a welcome-home treat for us all. So are you in? I betcha Bella and me can drink you under the table. We’ve been practising real hard up north.’ Patty looked almost jocular, which surprised Bella because Patty hated Prowsy. Then again maybe it was a look of pure cunning; Patty could drink almost everyone under the table.
‘I bet you, you can’t. I’m rather good at games,’ said Prowsy, narrowing her baby-blue eyes. ‘What’s the prize?’
Patty looked stumped for a minute . . . then her face cleared. ‘What do you say about a night out with any single man here? You choose.’
Bella, Prowsy and Jonesy’s voices competed with each other:
‘Patty, you can’t do that!’
‘Your brother?’
‘Me! Me! Choose me, girls!’
Bella didn’t hear Patty’s response. She was focused on Prowsy. Did she just say ‘your brother’? Patty only had one. Will. And there was no way a double-barrelled bully was getting a night with him; not if Bella could help it. She could just imagine those long French-manicured fingertips of Prowsy’s moving sinuously across his hunky, muscled chest. The thought of it made her want to puke.
Ever since Prowsy had shoved Patty’s head into a bucket of cow and horse shit twelve years ago at the Narree Agricultural Show, to stop her from entering the Miss Junior Showgirl competition, there had been battlelines drawn in the dirt between the three girls. Bella had used her fledgling stockwhip skills to belt the crap out of the older bully, who’d cowered in the corner clutching a bleeding cheek.
Later that day Bella – wearing a pink-and-white chequered shirt, hair tied into matching gingham ribbons and denim jeans with shiny riding boots – had been crowned Miss Narree Junior Showgirl. Prudence had flounced past, a poor loser in second place in her white chiffon party dress and silver-buckled high-heeled sandals, shooting dagger looks. Bella could just make out the slash marks down her left cheek, under the liberally applied make-up.
Prudence’s mother, Mildred Vincent-Prowse, hadn’t wasted any time honing in on the girls’ mothers in the cooking-and-crafts pavilion. ‘Your two girls are wild cats, heathens the pair of them,’ she’d hissed at a startled Francine Vermaelon and Helen O’Hara as they’d walked the pavilion aisles to see how their cooking and quilting had faired. ‘We’ll sue you both if there is a permanent mark on my little girl’s face,’ she’d threatened, before spinning on a spiked heel and prancing off.
Francine and Helen had looked at each other in horror and fled the pavilion in search of the two wild cats, who were finally found brushing down their horses ready for the early-evening novelty events.
‘But, Mum,’ said Bella, ‘she pushed Patty’s head into a bucket of poop.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Bella,’ reprimanded an exasperated Francine. ‘You can’t go cutting up people’s faces with your stockwhip, for heaven’s sake. I’m confiscating it for a month.’
‘But it’s all I had in my hand at the time . . . and she deserved it.’
‘Not another word, young lady, not another word.’
Meanwhile, Helen O’Hara had been picking pieces of horse shit out of her daughter’s matted hair.
‘That little bitch,’ Helen said to Francine later, out of hearing of the two girls. ‘She should know better than to bully other kids. She’s a couple of years older too!’
‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said a grim Francine. ‘Prudence probably deserved the beating she got, but I can’t condone Bella using that damned stockwhip to cut people up.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ Helen had agreed. ‘But I have to say I like her style. And my daughter stinks.’
‘Yes, well . . . have you ever known our girls to go down without a fight? You tussle with one, you tussle with two. God help Prudence, is what I say.’
Some things never changed. Here they were again, Bella and Patty, tussling with Prudence – alongside a truckload of other girls.
Bella’s vision was blurring at the edges; the air around her head spinning like crystallised sugar in a fairy-floss machine. She couldn’t see Patty anymore or any of the other competitors in the Cock-Sucking Cowboy Shot-Shooting Competition.
She could, however, hear the packed crowd in the large green canvas tent whistling and cheering and stomping their feet, chanting, ‘Skol! Skol! Skol!’ Fifteen young women were lined up on their knees as if in homage to the liquor set out on the makeshift bar, a battered wooden tabletop sitting unevenly on two A-frame trestles; young women whose drunkenness could be ascertained by the ratio of empty to full glasses.
‘Skol! Skol! Skol!’
The roars got louder.
Bella knew she was slowing down. She lunged for another shot – and missed, hands flailing in empty air rather than landing on glass. She had another go.
Got it. Lifting her hand to shoot the shot, she gasped as dizziness suddenly kicked in. Stopping mid-toss, she waited until her head stopped whirling like flotsam adrift in wild seas.
Images of Will flirted with her mind – dizzying reality duelled with the arousingly erotic. Her awareness took flight to another realm, far beyond its usual self. Unbidden, her tongue lapped, savouring the taste of the drink in her hand. It tasted so good. With growing abandon she lapped again, her mind flickering through images as vivid as the sun on a burning hot day.
A naked torso with tanned skin moulded over muscle patterned with russet down, snaking below a belly button into illicit depths.
She had to have it.
Tight bum cheeks wrapped in denim, a tattered brown leather belt tail hanging unrestrained, drawing attention to the nicely rounded bulge snuggling into the front zip.
Bella slid her tongue around inside her soft cheeks, touching the searing heat of the decadent liqueur. It was all too much. She couldn’t stop.
Brown eyes dripping like molasses – syrupy and sweet. Dimples that dived into cheeks of wickedness . . . and then there was the wink.
Succumbing, she swallowed.
Oh. My. God. It was good.
The smooth slide down her throat . . . velvet softness, the smoothness of cream, a slow burn and throb.
The taste of the lover yet to be hers.
Throwing all caution aside, Bella grabbed the next shot and then another, her desire to win driving her on.
Maybe tonight?
She sucked and gulped, again and again, until the very last drop of creamy liqueur was gone. The roar from the crowd ramped up an octave.
Bella smiled like a sated she-devil.
Tonight – if he was here.
The PA system crackled and gave a long squeal. Jeers erupted from the crowd, directed at the man holding the microphone standing atop a chair near the makeshift bar.
‘Sorry about that, folks.’ He cleared his throat.
‘Just get on with it, Jonesy,’ a voice yelled from the crowd.
Jonesy hitched up his strides, sniffed back hard.
‘Um, well . . . Here in front of you tonight is the Sheilas Only Cock-Sucking Cowboy Shot-Shooting Competition.’ Jonesy paused for a swig on his beer. ‘What a mouthful!’ He snivelled back hard again and shifted his weight so his hips pointed out towards the crowd.
‘And my, oh my, folks, wouldn’t we boys just love to experience the endurance of these cock-sucking sheilas tonight.’ Jonesy thrust his hips backwards and forwards to yells of approval and laughter.
‘Oh yes, siree, it’s quite a sight, ladies and gentlemen. If you’re not taking in the show, then wiggle those Wrangler butts up here and take a gander, before the cocks . . . or should I say shots, run out.’
The crowd roared. ‘Skol! Skol! Skol!’
For Bella, Jonesy’s voice and the crowd’s roar were just a loud buzz in an otherwise insular world. The erotic images of Will had long since departed. The only shot glasses left were the ones empty of temptation, held in her hands.
The butterscotch schnapps k
icked in; the Irish cream remained a memory.
Her knees started to go.
Eyes closed, she began to sway.
She was going down.
Bella slid sideways, taking little time to hit the ground. The shot glasses – those tiny, incongruous shells of glass responsible for her current state – followed, sliding from the clutch of her slack hands to the dirt, smashing together with a tinkle. Oblivious to the uproar around her, Bella lay in a drunken stupor, a tumble of limbs resting on mother earth.
‘Jeez, Hells Bells, don’t pass out on me now!’
Patty had flung herself sideways, trying to halt her mate’s slide into oblivion. Missing her only by inches, Patty cursed as Bella hit the dirt. Bella’s breasts started to slide from their position perched inside her scarlet push-up bra, her Wrangler singlet doing nothing to help contain the boobs so intent on escape. Patty gave her best mate a shove with the heel of her hand.
No movement.
Not even a flicker.
She softly kicked Bella’s boots. Bella stirred in response.
Patty nudged again. Bella grunted.
A cursing Patty shoved and kicked together.
Bella moved to a half-sit. Realising she was semi-naked, she frantically helped Patty, who was trying to stuff her boobs back inside the gravity-defying bra.
‘Bloody hell. Why’d you have to be so well stacked?’ Patty frowned as her hands warred with Bella’s.
Laughter and cries of disappointment reigned equal among the watching crowd.
‘Let her go, Patty, you spoilsport!’
‘Let ’em rip, Vermaelon!’ mingled with roars of encouragement directed at the remaining drinkers still downing their shot glasses of cowboys.
‘Skol! Skol! Skol!’
Bella sat upright, startling Patty into letting her go.
Flinging her hands into the air, she screamed at the top of her voice, ‘I won! I bloody well DID IT!’
She turned and started pummelling Patty. ‘You owe me, sunshine. It was double or nothing. I won.’
‘You bloody well didn’t, you bag. I did.’ Patty launched herself at Bella, punching and roaring back. ‘You passed out. I didn’t. That means I won.’
Baring her teeth, Bella pushed Patty down on her arse. Throwing out an arm, Patty hooked Bella around the knees. The two girls tumbled together, wrestling their way across the ground, rolling through spilt rum and beer, cigarette butts and cow shit.
Some of the crowd moved with them, eager to see more female flesh. The rest stayed behind, eyes trained on the other contestants.
Gaining the advantage, Bella perched on Patty’s belly, hovering just above her friend’s prized crystal-encrusted belt buckle, the buckle awarded to Patricia Maree O’Hara as winner of the Nunkeri Muster Ladies Whip-Cracking Championship last year.
‘Give way, O’Hara!’ She started to move her hips backwards and forwards, riding Patty like a cowboy on a bucking rodeo bull. Hips thrusting, one hand in the air to keep her balance, Bella whooped with joy. ‘I won the bet. Yee ha!’
Patty gasped and spluttered.
‘Give her over to me, Bella; I’ll do a better job than that.’
The voice sounded familiar. Bella looked for the owner.
It was Macca, the man who no doubt had his heart set on getting Patty into his swag later that night. ‘It’s great to see you here, Hells Bells, but you ain’t got the right equipment, girlie!’ Wearing a belt buckle with bullock horns on a bright silver disk, Macca rocked his hips.
Bella laughed and punched the air with her fist. ‘I won! Say it!’
Patty reached out and grabbed Bella’s legs. ‘Stop! I think I’m going to puke.’
Bella wasn’t listening. If Macca was here, Will probably was too. And she didn’t need some silly drinking competition to get him in the sack for the night. But two slabs of rum-and-coke plus a hundred bucks? That was a different story. She wasn’t giving way until Patty conceded defeat.
‘I won! Say it, girl!’ Bella yelled again, throwing a hand into the air.
So Patty did the only thing she could do: she stuck up her palm for Bella to slam a high five. ‘Okay. You won.’
‘YES!’
‘Now . . . get the fuck off me!’
Chapter 12
Will stretched his long legs out towards the flames, more as a reflex than to gain warmth from the bonfire in front of him. With temperatures reaching the thirties during the day, the fire wasn’t really needed, but it was as much a part of the Muster as the Stockmen’s Challenge.
A massive construction, with whole trees placed side by side and then on top, the bonfire took all night and half the next day to burn itself down. A CFA truck stood on standby, although Nunkeri had had more rain this season than Tindarra and there was at least a tinge of green left up on this plain. Even so, the tanker was good insurance in case a spark got away. With his butt planted on an old gnarled gum tree log set a strategic distance from the leaping flames, Will tuned into the poem being recited by an elderly man on the other side of the fire.
It wasn’t hard to see that Wesley Ogilvie – cattleman, bush poet, legendary stockwhip-maker and Will’s neighbour at Tindarra – adored every minute of his annual Nunkeri Muster performances. For as long as Will could remember, Wes had regaled them with poems, bringing to life Banjo Paterson’s ballads and adding a few of his own. Every tale he told was played out on the grazing properties in the high country mountain ranges and valleys of Tindarra, Burrindal and Ben Bullen. Probably to some townies it smacked of a long-winded whine session but, unfortunately, Will knew otherwise. The droughts, fires and floods Wes wove into ballads – they’d had them all in the space of a few years, here in the towering blue mountains of the Great Dividing Range.
‘He loves it, doesn’t he?’ a soft, cultured voice came from the darkness behind Will.
He swung around. Dressed in a faded pink-and-black chequered woollen bushman’s shirt, under which there appeared to be at least two more layers, a small rotund figure stood watching old Wes.
‘Aunty Maggie! Aren’t you hot in that get-up? I didn’t think you were coming until the morning.’
‘Neither did I.’ Disgust was evident in Maggie O’Hara’s voice. ‘And no, I’m not hot. It’s colder when you’re older, sober and away from the fire.’
‘What changed your plans? It must have been good to get you swagging it. You haven’t been too keen on the idea since Uncle Hughie died.’
‘Yes, well I’m not happy. I love my own bed these days. Getting old and set in my ways. But the woman we’ve brought in to judge the bush poetry competition tomorrow decided she wanted to try “this camping-out business” as she called it. She’s from Melbourne. As I organised the competition, I felt obligated to keep an eye out for her.’
‘She’d have no better mate than you, Aunty Maggie. Did you give her your famous camp-oven rabbito for tea?’
‘How could I do that when my favourite nephew wasn’t there to shoot, skin and de-bone it?’ Maggie’s voice was teasing and accusatorial at the same time. How did she manage to do that? She made him feel like a naughty school boy caught out by the Catholic Brothers all over again.
‘I’m sure you would have managed it. My guess is the lady poetry judge wouldn’t have managed watching you do it, though?’
Maggie grinned then affected rounded vowels. ‘Yars, I really could not stomach any bush cuisine tonight, thank you, Margaret. Surely you have some smoked salmon and basil pesto? Oh, and a little sour cream with some sun dried tomarrr-toes on top would be simply scrumptious.’
Will laughed. ‘That bad, is she?’
‘Yes, that bad.’
‘So what did you feed her?’
Maggie giggled, eyes crinkling in the corners. ‘I served up baked bean and cheese jaffles straight from the fire and she loved it. Asked me for the recipe and where she could buy one of those “contraptions” to cook them in.’
‘You really can pick them, Aunty.’
Mag
gie looked sad. ‘Yes, I know, love. My Hughie, God bless his soul, always said I was a dreadful judge of character. But she sounded okay on the phone. A bit up herself, but she seemed to know her stuff.’
‘You still miss Uncle Hughie, don’t you?’ said Will, a gentle but concerned note in his voice. ‘Even after twenty years.’
Maggie nodded and blinked hard before turning her attention to Wes and the fire. The silence floating around them stretched out. Will adored his spirited and fiercely independent aunt but he barely remembered her husband Hugh.
A vague image came to him of a large but stooped man sitting near the honey-coloured stone fireplace at the homestead at Tindarra, cleaning his pipe. As a boy Will had been fascinated by the brightly coloured, fluffy pipe cleaners the old bloke used to poke and prod at the tobacco encrusted in the pipe’s stem. Hughie had a knack of turning those pipe cleaners into twisted wire animals, in varying shades of blue, green and red, delighting the child at his knee. Will was sure he still had one at home somewhere, probably tucked away in an obsolete corner of the kitchen dresser. It was a shame the couple hadn’t been able to have kids.
Maggie still ran Hughie’s place down the road from his own, and Will understood why she had stayed in the valley after her husband died despite having no children to raise and keep her company. Tindarra had a tendril-like spirit that twined itself through your body and buried runners deep within the very marrow of your bones.
For Will, the valley, which wove a pattern into the landscape with its golden pastures, lush river flats and soaring hills of grey-blue trees, lifted his soul into the very heart of the rugged mountains and held him hostage with a yearning to be there.
On his trip up north with Macca he hadn’t been gone three weeks before he found himself desperately longing for home; yearning to feel the sweet rush of mountain air hitting his face as he stepped outside at sunrise, hungering for the deep-scented tangy smells of the bush that were normally only a breath away.
The loud crack of a tree limb falling onto glowing coals and Maggie’s soft voice murmuring at his shoulder brought his thoughts back to the Nunkeri Plains. The smell and feel of Tindarra receded from Will’s mind, leaving a sense of loss in their wake.
Bella's Run Page 8
