‘Harry,’ I muttered to the dark-skinned farmer, ‘do you need a hand?’
‘No, I think your aunt has it pretty well sorted,’ he said. He was leaning with his back against a tree, looking unfazed, but his eyes were a little too tight.
‘I mean, do you need a hand with her?’
‘Do you have any suggestions?’
‘Do you happen to have any chocolate-coated liquorice with you?’
He shook his head.
‘Then, no.’
My aunt noticed our exchange. ‘Lainie, what are you doing here?’ Her jeans were coated with drying mud and her hair windblown. How long had she been sitting there for?
‘Are you really surprised?’ Harry asked her. She didn’t reply but her face got that set look like it did whenever she caught me watching Game of Thrones.
I smiled at her. ‘I just came to ask, do you want yellow flowers or purple? You know, for the side of your combi van? I prefer purple. That way it will match your tie-dyed kaftan.’
‘This is not some Hippie thing, Lainie. This is important. And I would never buy another combi van.’
She really used to own one? Learn something new every day…
The sergeant crouched down in front of her and put on a very patient expression. ‘Lily, please don’t make me arrest you. I have enough legal paperwork from my ex-wife to deal with; I’d rather not have any more.’
Aunt Lily leant back against the machine again. Her hands were chained above her head. ‘I heard Sharlene’s getting married again. I’m so sorry, Mick.’
One of the Kolsom workers cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, but can I just point out that it’s getting late. I have a two-hour drive home and an unpleasant report to make to the office. Can the catch-up wait until she’s in jail, please?’
‘She won’t be going to jail,’ Noah said. ‘Because it’s too late in the day for any more work to be done anyway, so you might as well take the equipment back to town.’ He gave the Kolsom staff the sort of smile he used when he was confident he would get his own way. Which was all the time. Noah had an uncanny talent for getting people to suck up to him. He was fit, tall, had eyes as green as Kryptonite, and when he smiled that particular smile at you it was hard to remember that you hadn’t actually planned on making him a triple-layer Nutella sandwich. Guys at school tended to offer him their places in whatever queue he was lining up in, and girls just followed him around and giggled a lot. Clearly they’d never seen him as a three-year-old, dressed up in my aunt’s best negligee and high heels, or covered in blood and sloppy cow poo at the age of twelve with a massive grin on his face after he’d just assisted with his first calf delivery. I watched the Kolsom employees to see whether Noah’s magic would work on them too.
‘We’re supposed to leave it here,’ said a thin man with a fat moustache and a hole in his jeans.
‘Yes. Leave the machine here,’ my aunt agreed, pressing her face against the metal with false affection. ‘I’ll take good care of it.’
The sergeant rolled his eyes.
Noah cranked it up a notch, giving the Kolsom man a smile that said, ‘I’m on your side, mate. Trust me.’
The guy sighed. ‘I suppose it might be better to at least get it back down to the road before the heavy rain comes tomorrow.’
‘And you can’t work safely in that weather anyway, right? So you might as well check in with the office to make certain the locations are correct,’ Noah suggested. ‘Imagine finding out that she’s right about the boundary? That would look pretty bad in next week’s newspaper.’
‘I doubt our lawyer will have any problems proving that the work we’re doing is within Kolsom’s rights. We have approval from the state government to drill core samples throughout the valley. Besides, the access routes we’re making will assist with the local fire prevention strategy. Surely that can only be of benefit to you?’
Something in his words gave me a metallic taste on my tongue. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. All I knew was that I didn’t like the idea of them disturbing the area at all.
‘The valley is too steep and has far too much vegetation,’ Harry contributed. ‘You won’t be able to get in there.’
‘All the more reason for us to create fire access trails.’ He nodded towards my aunt. ‘Now she needs to either move or spend the night behind bars.’ The words were stern, but his voice held a note of uncertainty.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Aunt Lily declared, trying to flick her pale fringe out of her eyes with no hands.
Why did she have to be so stubborn? Noah was right. No more clearing was getting done today anyhow. A rock wallaby thumped past nearby, off for its evening graze, as if to point out to us what time it was.
Before anyone realised what he was up to, Noah climbed up onto the driver’s seat of the dozer and within seconds the beast rumbled to life.
All of us yelled at him in unison, while my aunt scrambled to her feet and Sergeant Loxwood leapt up after him.
‘Noah, you moron! What the hell are you doing?’ I tugged at my aunt’s chains. They were fastened with a combination lock that I recognised. It was the one from my old school locker that Bane had set on fire, so I started to swivel the dial around while my aunt tried to push me away.
‘Leave it, Lainie, Noah won’t do it,’ she said.
‘Oh yeah?’ I looked her right in the eye. ‘Remember that time he threatened to walk through the town stark naked if his mum didn’t let him watch the new James Bond movie?’ Not only had he made good on his threat, but he’d proven to everyone that he knew exactly how to drive his mother crazy. Mrs Ashbree was such a terrible prude that I’d often wondered how Noah had even managed to be born. My friend knew exactly how to push people’s buttons when he didn’t get his own way.
Aunt Lily’s face paled, and she stopped jiggling around. The problem was, the reason I’d bought a new lock after the fire was because this one had warped slightly, and wasn’t always that reliable. Beside us, the front bucket shuddered and began to lift.
‘Noah Ashbree, turn the engine off immediately, or I will arrest you.’ The sergeant’s face had turned a peculiar shade and his hand was actually hovering over his gun.
The stupid lock jammed for the second time.
‘Noah, it’s stuck! Please don’t hurt her,’ I begged.
Just then, the chains slid down and rattled to the ground. They had been hooked around a part of the lifting mechanism that had released when he’d raised the bucket. They were still done up, but were no longer attached to the bulldozer. The machine puttered down to thick silence and I looked up to see Noah with his hands up, holding the key and grinning at the policeman.
Not for the first time, I vowed that I was never going to speak to him, ever again.
Chapter 2
A wide yawn cracked my jaw as I meandered down the crowded school corridor. I’d spent the last few nights cramming my study and then staying up even later to research coal seam gas mining, and so quality sleep was now a forgotten luxury. Kolsom had taken away the bulldozers on advice from their office but I knew the standoff was far from over. My aunt had been to see a solicitor the day after her near-arrest but didn’t seem to have come away with any clear plan as to how to keep the miners away. Late last night I’d heard her in the study, rummaging around the old filing cabinet but had been too tired to get up and ask her what she was looking for, and I’d left for school before she’d returned from the morning feed run. Perhaps when I got home I’d see if there was anything I could do to help.
Pale green walls framed dented lockers all the way along to the main doors. It was Friday afternoon and everyone was clawing their way towards the weekend. As I was pummelled by a multitude of clammy teenagers I tried to pick up my pace a little because as tall as I was, I still felt as though I could trip and be trampled at any moment like a baby lion under a he
rd of stampeding wildebeest. Something squishy slid under my shoe but I didn’t dare to look down.
Almost within sight of freedom, I was shoved from behind and bounced against a metal locker frame. One of my classmates, Tessa, coughed out the word ‘fruitcake’ as she pushed past me. Her friend giggled at her weak insult, but instead of feeling embarrassed or annoyed, I stumbled to a wonky halt with a sudden vision, almost clear enough to taste, of Tessa standing in front of her bedroom mirror. Tears were streaming down her face because she was upset about the shape of her eyes. What the hell? Her eyes were gorgeous. They had that stunning Asian tilt from her mother’s side of the family that had the rest of us girls wishing we had even a sprinkling of genes from somewhere more exotic than the arse-end of nowhere. I shook my head as the vision cleared, leaving me with the residual after effects of her intense jealousy. Typical. Like all the other girls, she was jealous of something I didn’t even have. Noah was my best friend, and he was dating Claudia, but somehow I knew Tessa still assumed there was more going on. Far more disturbing than that, however, was the sudden fear that what I’d just imagined might not have been just some random daydream. The dream I’d had about my aunt and the bulldozer had been playing in my mind over and over again until I’d chosen to pretend that I had simply made it up somehow. It wasn’t like I really could have seen what was going on, after all. That would be ludicrous. Almost as ludicrous as knowing what Tessa was upset about.
I stared at Tessa’s back, trying to suppress my insanity and find my way back to the much safer world of blatant denial.
Visions? No way. Sleep deprivation and too much study. Much better explanation.
Way ahead of me, I glimpsed Noah’s pale hair just as he disappeared through the main doors, so I broke into a jog to catch up and almost reached daylight when my shoulder was jerked back so hard I nearly fell. Another firm tug on my shoulder strap, and I felt my school bag rapidly become a lot lighter. I spun around just in time to see two pears, three apples and all my books spill out across the hall. Bane was standing right behind me, flicking closed a pocketknife. A knife? At school? That was going way too far. In stunned disbelief, I watched a series of emotions spread across his face. Instead of looking smug, he seemed just as shocked as I was. That was soon replaced with revulsion, and then a look of fury so vicious that my shout of righteous protest was cut off mid-breath. We both froze for a second, staring at each other, invisible sparks of mutual hatred glinting in the dusty air, before he took off back down the corridor at a run.
Most of the other students in the hall had stopped and were staring at me with looks of amused confusion. I had no idea what to think. His pranks were getting increasingly ridiculous—and dangerous. We were in our final year of school for heaven’s sake, why would he slice open my bag halfway down a busy corridor? Trying to steal something? Trying to expose my not-so-secret fruit fetish?
A shrill cry of alarm followed by a loud metallic bang startled us all out of our eerie silence and then the entire school seemed to rush out of the doors like water down a plughole. Snatching up my books, I abandoned the bruised fruit and fought my way out to the car park, clutching my bag together as best I could. Noah was sitting on the kerb with his head between his knees, next to an old white hatchback that had backed into the school fence. Dropping my bag altogether again, I rushed over to see if he was hurt.
‘Missed me by a country mile,’ he said, but his skin looked even paler than usual. ‘What does that even mean? Is a country mile supposed to be longer than a city one? Whoever decided that clearly hasn’t tried driving through Sydney lately.’
I peeled back his eyelids to check for concussion.
‘Lainie, stop,’ he complained, batting my hands away. ‘I didn’t hit my head and I’m perfectly fine.’ At the top of the school steps, Tessa had fainted in a tangle of drama and glossy dark hair, and was being flustered over by her friends like the princess she was. Seriously? Playing the fainting maiden when Noah was the one nearly killed? That was just plain pathetic.
I turned back to my friend. ‘You have no blood left in your face. Are you woozy?’
‘Don’t be stupid. I was only stressing because I assumed you were still right behind me. I actually looked for your mangled body under the car. Where did you go?’
‘Bane again is the one to blame,’ I sang with false cheerfulness, trying to pretend I wasn’t shaken up at all, but the world had taken on a pale tinge. If anything had happened to Noah … ‘The car hit pretty hard,’ I noticed, screwing up my nose at the twisted cyclone fence. ‘How’s the driver?’
‘I’m fine—for now,’ said Jake, a thin-faced fellow VCE student with far too much hair product in his long faux-hawk. He was inspecting the damage to the rear bumper. ‘But Mum’s going to kill me.’ He finally turned his attention to Noah. ‘I’m so, so sorry, mate. My dog jumped onto my lap just as I started backing out. I guess he distracted me.’
In the passenger window I could see a sturdy tan Staffy staring at us and fogging up the window with his slobbery dog-breath. There was a look in his black eyes that creeped me out a little, as if he was trying to ask me a silent question and would be cross if I gave the wrong answer.
‘He must have dug under the backyard fence again,’ Jake continued, fiddling with his car keys as Noah stood up. ‘I found him raiding the bin near the oval. I am so dead. Look at Mum’s car! Oh crap, look at that.’
‘Mr Davis is heading over,’ Noah pointed out.
‘Hide me, someone?’ He shoved his pack of cigarettes into the glove box before the principal could see, and then we helped him roll the car back into the parking bay.
‘He pulled a knife on you?’ Noah asked, trying to catch my evasive eyes. The crowd had dispersed and we were heading to his ute, which was parked in the street. His footsteps had become noisier as I’d outlined the incident.
‘Well, sort of. He attacked my school bag, not me. Speaking of which, could you please help me carry this lot? There’s not a lot of actual bag left to do much carrying …’
Noah stopped dead still, staring ahead.
‘What now?’ I groaned, craning my neck to see what he was staring at. Footpath. Street light. Mother trying to reason with a fractious toddler who was flatly refusing to keep his shorts on. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe he was still in shock? I turned back to him and realised that his eyes had glazed over a little, the way they did when he was trying to do quadratic equations, and he was chewing on his tongue. ‘Noah, what is it?’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing. Let’s just go home. This place is crazy and I think it’s about to rain again.’
He grabbed a couple of textbooks from my arms and strode away on his long legs. Trying to get him to explain was pointless; besides, the idea of just getting home to the sanity of pulling stuck lambs out of angry ewes was starting to sound strangely appealing.
When we reached his car, Noah got into the driver’s seat but then just sat there silently, staring at the windscreen. Perhaps he was more shaken up than he wanted to admit. I waited for him to speak and eventually he turned the full force of his charming green eyes on me. It would have been enough to make half our class swoon, but I was immune. More or less. He did look a bit unsure of himself, which was unusual enough to make me pay attention.
‘Lainie …’ He swallowed nervously. ‘There isn’t much of school left, and next year who knows where we’ll be?’ My chest tightened in sudden fear of where this was going as he cleared his throat. ‘What I mean is, graduation is coming up and there’s the dance …’
Ah, now it made sense. Claudia went to the Catholic school, and the dance was only open to Nalong College students. Going with anyone else would have been a bit … inappropriate, so he needed me.
‘And, I know, we’ve more or less just always gone together to things like that automatically,’ he continued, ‘but I just thought it might be nice this time if I for
mally invited you. You know, ’cos it’s our last one.’ He smiled his best charismatic smile at me, his raffish blond curls framing his face. ‘Lainie Gracewood, would you do me the honour of attending the graduation dance with me?’
My mouth wanted to laugh in his face for being so corny but there was no way I would let him down, no matter how much I would have liked to see Claudia squirm. So instead I took a deep, serious breath. ‘Of course, Noah, I would be honoured to be your date, so long as you understand that I will dump you like a sack of potatoes if anyone prettier comes along and asks me to dance.’
‘But nobody’s prettier than me,’ he said. I punched him on the thigh. Hard. He just grinned and started the engine.
The deafening roar of the rain on the tin roof finally began to ease up enough for us to hear ourselves think. My aunt and I had become thoroughly drenched finishing the evening feeds out in the dark. Not the best part of farming, but the wood heater was starting to do its job so all was beginning to feel right with the world again. I laid my wet socks over the edge of the couch to dry.
‘Can I have some extra money to buy a dress for the graduation dance?’ I called out to the kitchen in half-hopeful expectation. Let the negotiations begin. ‘Noah asked me officially. So I need to officially pretend to be a real girl. That means a dress. And shoes. And maybe a manicure.’ No way would I get all that, but negotiating meant starting high.
Closing the thick green floral curtains against the weather, I made a note to myself to clean out the gutters on the next dry day, then crammed as much wood as I could on the fire and slammed the door shut quickly so it wouldn’t all fall out again. Inara, Aunt Lily’s skinny grey cat, stared ungratefully at me as I brushed a burning ember from her fur with the poker.
‘Sure, no problem.’ Aunt Lily’s voice sounded distracted.
When I finished choking I swung around the corner to see her sitting at the dining table, cradling a mug of tea and peering at large sheet of paper. She tucked her damp hair behind her ears, then looked over at a map held down by the fruit bowl and the pepper grinder.
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