‘At all?’ I panicked. ‘Doesn’t he have some sort of compulsion to get back here? He has a job to do, right?’ My voice climbed about an octave.
‘You’re here now. He might not … remember to come back. Harry said that once you cross into Eden this world can sort of fade from your list of priorities. If you weren’t here it might be different but since you’re around to guard this side … well, I’m worried he might forget how unprepared you are.’
That was unthinkable. I needed to talk to him. I had way more questions to ask him and we hadn’t even finished with the three he was prepared to answer yet. I clenched my jaw. ‘I’ll just have to go and remind him then.’
All the colour drained from my aunt’s face, and she stared at me, like she was about to cry.
‘What is it now?’ I asked, shoulders slumping. ‘Do I have to slay a dragon to get into Eden or something?’
‘What? No! Not as far as I’m aware. I just don’t want you to go, that’s all.’ She fiddled with the gate latch. ‘I wasn’t kidding about this world fading from your priorities. I mean, look around you, Lainie. Do you really think this place can compare with Paradise? Why would you bother coming back?’
A bit self-consciously, I wiped some chook poo and feathers off the edge of my shoe onto the dead grass.
She didn’t notice because she was busy staring at nothing with tears welling in her blue eyes. ‘What if you decide to stay there too? I’m not ready to lose you yet, honey. I know I have no right to keep you here, but I can’t just wave goodbye to you and not know if I’ll ever even see you again …’
Her tears felt hot against my neck as I hugged her. ‘Okay,’ I soothed. ‘I won’t go. I think you’re wrong anyway. Harry will be back soon, I’m sure of it.’ She sobbed and crushed my ribs and I realised how she must have felt when my mother had left us. ‘Besides, I would never do that,’ I mumbled into her ear. ‘This is my home. I don’t care how pretty the Garden of Eden is—I would never just abandon you.’
She sniffed and wiped her eyes as she let me go. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’
The following week was spent trying to teach the bane of my life all there was to know about farming. Astonishingly I found it was kind of fun when he wasn’t shouting at me. It wasn’t until I tried to teach someone else that I realised just how many skills I had that I’d taken for granted, from fixing water pumps to simple things like opening hay bales and feed bags without a knife. I laughed openly as he practised driving the tractor around one of the smaller paddocks, having to pop it into reverse each time a corner came up. He only hit the fence once. Then I had to teach him how to re-strain a fence.
The day he couldn’t find one of his shirts I told him it was in the hay press. He gave me the usual scowl but didn’t ask, so I sighed in mock exasperation, led him out to the hay shed and lifted off the top couple of bales. Somehow I kept a totally straight face as I revealed a stash of freshly cleaned laundry that had been neatly folded and pressed under the heavy blocks of meadow hay. I really hated ironing.
The next day when he took his work gloves off he found that his hands had turned bright red because someone had filled them with the powder we used to mark the lambs with. He tried to get me back by putting snails in my work boots but picked the wrong ones. It still worked though because Aunt Lily refused to believe he’d done it and blamed me anyway.
As we argued our way through the endless jobs, I noticed he was becoming much more at ease. He barely looked down at his shoes anymore and was starting to make regular eye contact when we spoke. Surly, angry eye contact, but at least it was honest. The looks he threw me when he thought I wasn’t watching were distinctly less vicious, which made a nice change, and by the end of that first week we were almost civil to one another. His eyes were still serious, the grey taking on a bluish tinge when he was outdoors, and he still never spoke to me unless he had to. Finally, however, I had a major breakthrough on the day he agreed to help me tie-dye Aunt Lily’s pyjamas, although he had no idea why it was so funny. I was smugly encouraged by his progress, until he ruined it.
As I hung them up on the clothesline, I noticed him staring at his bright purple fingers in confusion, probably wondering how he had ended up in such a strange situation.
‘Do you always do this?’ he asked.
‘Dye my aunt’s sleepwear? Nope. First time. Looks good though, don’t you think? Maybe we should dye something else. Do you own anything that isn’t black?’
For a brief second his face almost softened into a smile. Almost. But then his thunder-face reappeared.
‘I mean, do you always play these tricks? I thought you were only doing it to embarrass me, but now you’re targeting your aunt as well. If I’d realised you didn’t have her permission to do this, I never would have agreed to help.’
Embarrass him? That stung. Just because he hated the universe and everything in it didn’t mean that I was that cruel. In my mind’s eye, the rinse bucket of bright purple water tipping triumphantly over his head made a glorious sight, but instead of indulging my fantasy I tried to see things from his point of view. I had to try. I couldn’t start a fight that would end with him leaving and suffering the ridiculously unfair paranormal consequences. So I took some deep breaths. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium … Once I had a semblance of control back again, I opened my eyes and smiled as politely as I could.
‘I play tricks to make people laugh, Ben, not to embarrass or irritate. Despite what you think I would never be that nasty. Not even to you.’
The look on his face was one of astonished disbelief, but I just had to walk away before he could see my hurt and angry tears betray me. There were not enough elements in the Periodic Table to calm me down.
If anything, he became even crankier after that. The snarky comments and fits of temper he tried so badly to control made my worst days of the month seem as charming as Snow White at a tea party.
‘We’ll be here all day if you don’t hit the stupid thing properly!’ I snapped at one point, frustrated with all his muttered cursing when yet another staple pinged away from the semi-petrified ancient fence post and disappeared into the netherworld.
‘I can’t hit it when you’re holding it like that!’ he shouted straight back, throwing the hammer down and only just missing his own foot.
I swore loudly with my mouth clamped shut. It had been a long morning and Aunt Lily had gone into town, leaving us to fix the latest hole in the gully fence on our own. The stupid sheep always managed to find the weakest spot in any stretch of fence, and this time one of them had managed to tangle herself in it, dragging a good forty-metre length of rusty ring-lock with her across the paddock before giving up and waiting to be rescued. She was fine now, although prettily graffitied with purple antiseptic spray. The ring-lock, however, was proving to be unbelievably fractious, bending in ways it was never designed to. That meant hammering in a lot of staples. Staples were just plain evil.
‘How else am I supposed to keep it tight?’ I asked with patience that was fizzing away like a bath bomb. I peeled my leather gloves off and rubbed my fingers where the wire had bitten into them. ‘Please can you just let me do it?’ I begged yet again.
He literally growled. I’d only hit my thumb once, but that had been enough to trigger one heck of a tantrum until I’d finally relinquished the hammer. Swapping jobs had been fine until we’d reached the end post. I was struggling to get the mesh to cover enough of the post for him to be able to hammer it on, and so I was pulling it as tightly as I could, gripping it very close to where he had to whack the staple in.
I tried to be reasonable. ‘Either let me do the hammering or trust yourself not to hit me,’ I said.
‘I can’t!’
‘Oh for the love of—’
‘You don’t get it, Lainie! I literally can’t!’ He threw his own gloves away in utter frustration. ‘I don’t have the control t
o guarantee that I won’t hit you, so I can’t make my hands do it!’
As his words sank in, I sat down with a graceless plop, and the ring-lock escaped and ran away in curly glee. ‘Really?’ I asked, surprised.
He refused to even look at me. ‘It feels as impossible as if I was trying to hammer my own thumb. Hard. On purpose. I honestly believe I would feel twice as much pain as you if I hurt you. I can’t make myself do it.’
My eyes narrowed thoughtfully. ‘Reeeally?’ I asked again. ‘You can’t hurt me?’ I stood up and looked him squarely in the eye, assessing. And then I punched him on the shoulder.
‘Agghh! You cow! What the hell was that for?’ he yelled, hardly breathing in his fury.
‘For calling me a cow!’ I shouted illogically, dancing on the balls of my feet with my clenched fists in front of my face, the way I’d been taught by watching all those stupid Rocky movies that Noah had forced me to sit through. Then I hit him again, but he was ready this time and didn’t flinch. He didn’t speak either, he just screamed at me with his eyes. I grinned evilly. ‘That one was for dobbing on me last year when I climbed up to get the ball off the roof of the toilet block for the grade six kids!’ He flipped me the bird, so I stomped hard on his foot. ‘And that was for all the crude gestures you’ve made to me over the years!’
‘What’s wrong with you? You stupid—’ He grunted when I elbowed him in the stomach, and wisely didn’t try to finish his sentence.
‘That one was for biting Noah!’ I yelled, surprised to find that I was actually still a bit genuine in my anger at that one. He was doubled over now, but didn’t retreat or try to fight back.
‘What the hell is your problem?’ he gasped, grey eyes flashing. The tendons in his neck were so tight I was worried they might snap.
‘My problem? I have no problem! I just figure that if you’re going to hate me anyway, I’d like to deserve it! Don’t you think beating someone up who can’t fight back deserves a bit of hate?’
He stood straight. Painfully. Gritting his teeth he said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve done plenty to deserve it.’
‘Such as?’ I challenged, readying my fists again.
‘How about dragging me away from detention just because you wanted to play footy at lunchtime? That earned me a week-long suspension!’
I slapped him, trying not to let him see my relief.
‘And what about all the times you went to Melbourne for the weekend and left me puking my guts out, trying to prove to my mother that I hadn’t been drinking?’
My carefully controlled punch hit him squarely on the jaw. Rocky would have been proud.
‘Aagh! And what about the time I had to tip over your beaker in Chemistry to stop you from adding water to your sulphuric acid instead of the other way around?’
Now he was getting it. I kicked him in the shins and smiled.
‘Damn, girl! That one hurt,’ he said, stumbling back a step. ‘Why couldn’t you just have waited for Noah to help you that day when you needed to get the stupid poster paper down from the top shelf in the art room? Why’d you have to make me throw that paint?’
He caught my fist a split second before it connected with his cheekbone. Wow. He had incredible reflexes. I hadn’t even seen him move.
‘That one would have sprained your finger. You have terrible technique.’ Warmth flooded my fist where he gripped it, making me gasp. Quick as a flash, he picked up my other hand and slid his fingers across the back of my thumb where I’d whacked it with the hammer. Fire spread through the bruised joint, fading to a light tingle within moments, and even my ever-present weariness eased a little.
Swaying slightly, he closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, fighting off dizziness. When he opened them again, his eyes looked subtly different. I turned my hand so that I was gripping his instead, and concentrated hard. The excruciatingly sharp self-loathing I’d ‘seen’ every time I’d hit him had diminished to a bearable ache. Each punishment I’d inflicted for every relived memory had resolved something intrinsic in his ragged ego. He wasn’t healed yet, but at least some of the bitterest strain seemed to have finally been mitigated.
Maybe now we’d be able to get some work done.
‘Lainie?’ Aunt Lily found me a few days later leaning on the side of the door to the hay shed, playing with the cat’s ears and chewing on the end of my ponytail. Inara, who was perched on the shelf by the door, mewed happily and left me to suck up to my aunt instead. She was a pretty and affectionate cat but a faithless companion.
‘Hmmm?’ I was watching Bane stack bales. He had his shirt off. I really should have stopped him to let him know that was a bad idea because he was going to end up with a terrible rash from the hay, but I couldn’t seem to make myself interrupt him. His lean torso showed new tan lines from all the time he had been spending outdoors lately. Steadily he made his way through the pile, checking underneath each one in case there were more unexpected items of clothing. Pfft, as if I would ever use the same prank twice. Besides, I had backed right off the practical jokes since he’d told me they embarrassed him. The strange thing was, when I’d refrained from taking advantage of him the previous day when he’d thought the garden hose was blocked, he’d almost seemed disappointed. Perhaps he’d just been hot. I chewed on my hair some more.
It was tricky to get the bales to the top of the stack, but he and his muscles were doing just great. Despite the fact that working with him was like being followed around by the world’s most miserable thundercloud, I had to admit that at least he never backed away from putting in the hard yards. He was no bludger. Startled, I suddenly realised he’d finished the last bale when he turned and caught us both watching him. I tripped over my aunt as I fled out the door.
‘What was it you wanted, Aunt Lily?’ I asked as we hurried away, trying hard not to sound flustered.
‘I honestly don’t remember!’ she admitted, laughing. I laughed too as I head-butted her playfully on the shoulder. So what if I looked a little? It wasn’t until much later that I remembered that he would have known I was there the whole time.
As the week progressed we learnt more about each other’s skill set, and we both made an effort to be more polite, at least to each other’s faces. He taught me to play ‘Lainie had a Little Lamb’ on our old piano and I taught him how to wrestle a sheep.
His protectiveness was kind of handy sometimes too—at least when he wasn’t trying to convince me he should be the one to use the chainsaw. Honestly, did he think he would be any safer? He’d never even touched one before. Besides, I really didn’t mind watching him stack the wood.
While I rested, waiting for the machine to cool down, I gently placed a large Huntsman spider on his shoulder so it could get a better view of the world. He still didn’t laugh as he stumbled over the woodpile trying to get it off, but instead of the angry tantrum I was expecting, he just looked resigned. So later, when I’d finished cutting up the pile I was working on, I carved him a present to celebrate.
‘Because the last spider wasn’t big enough?’ he asked while I emptied some of my drink bottle over my head to cool down. ‘You had to make me a bigger one?’
‘Spider?’ I despaired. ‘It’s supposed to be a Batman logo!’
‘I know.’ His mouth twitched in something that would have resembled amusement if I didn’t know better. ‘I was watching when you entered the chainsaw carving at the Nalong Show last year. The judge said you would have scored better if you’d given it the right number of legs.’
He somehow managed to evade the water I threw at him.
After a bit of training, I did let him start cutting up some of the bigger logs. They looked harder but were actually much safer to cut, and I just no longer had the energy to do it. It was just as well I wasn’t trying to run the place on my own anymore. We’d finally run out of bottled fruit and if Harry didn’t return soon, I was going to have to be t
aken out to the back of the shed and dealt with humanely. It was Bane who finally made me take action a couple of days later.
I was filling the ride-on mower with petrol—badly—when he took the canister away from me and put it down. He took my hands in his. My skin buzzed warmly the way it always did when we touched and I felt better immediately, but I knew it wouldn’t last for long.
‘Your hands are trembling again, Lainie. What’s going on?’
I’d been wondering how long it would take him to pluck up the courage to ask about it.
‘It’s getting worse,’ I mumbled, trying to pull away. He wouldn’t let me. There was no point trying to avoid it any longer, I would have to tell him something, but I felt sick at the thought of telling such a ridiculous story to the one person who I knew hated me.
‘I’m not entirely … normal, Ben.’ He raised one eyebrow as if that should have been common knowledge. I suppose I deserved that. ‘There’s a reason you and I are linked that I don’t exactly understand, and I’m going to sound mental if I try to explain it.’
‘Well you may as well try me. I’m kind of used to you being mental.’
Not this mental. How do you tell someone you’re not human? I still wasn’t entirely convinced myself. I was done with waiting for Harry to come home. The last thing I wanted to do was upset Aunt Lily, but I needed to find some answers of my own.
I peered up at him. If I couldn’t explain it, then maybe I could show him instead. ‘Have you ever paddled down a river on a blow-up mattress?’ I asked with a sly smile.
It was time to enter Nalong’s Barramundi Triangle.
Chapter 16
The familiarity of the rendered brick farmhouse with its clipped roses and homemade garden sculptures calmed my jumpy nerves as we climbed the three steps up onto the Ashbrees’ porch the next day. It was a relief when Nicole answered the door. With a bright expression that showed she was hoping to get a reaction out of me, she told us that Noah was in town with his new girlfriend, and I could see her smugness grow as she scrutinised Bane hovering behind me. She clearly assumed there was gossip to be spread. Luckily I’d already told Noah about him coming to work on the farm.
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