Dutchy lifted his little bar flap and followed the drinkers out into the cool night to see what the lights and noise were about. ‘What the …?’
There, revving a gigantic new tractor in the middle of the road, was Charlie Lewis.
‘Basil Lewis, you mad bastard!’ Murray called out, using the nickname that had followed Charlie from Ag College, given to him because of the bed-hair that stuck up like a brushy fox tail in the morning. As Charlie Lewis opened the door of the tractor cab, he drank in the smiles of greeting from the pub crowd. In his larrikin way, he gave everyone the thumbs-up and a drunken smile.
He flicked on the rear light, illuminating the business end of the tractor. The new yellow plough was covered with a film of dust, but the edge of the discs that had been corroded clean by soil gleamed in the tractor’s bright lights.
‘Geez, Basil, you coulda taken the plough off before you drove in! Ya dick.’
Charlie shrugged. ‘No time to waste! It’s beer o’clock, according to the Tardis controls in here!’
After conducting a guided tour of the tractor and its features, Charlie was ushered into the hotel by the men, where a fresh bar-frenzy exploded. Dutchy, as he frantically poured beer and Bundy and rang the till, found himself wishing his wife, Amanda, would get back from the ladies’ party sooner rather than later.
‘They must be trying before they buy at this sex-toy party,’ Dutchy said as he pushed a Bundy and Coke towards Charlie. ‘It’s making me nervous.’
‘Sex-toy party?’ Charlie asked. ‘My missus told me it was a Tupperware party!’
Murray and his crew erupted into laughter.
‘Nah-uh. No Tupperware, mate,’ Dutchy said. ‘Wonder what she’ll bring you home! Or is she gettin’ it for someone else and givin’ you the lettuce containers?’
‘Sex-toy party? Geez!’ The penny dropped for Charlie. That would explain Janine’s photo earlier this evening. That wasn’t a black salami she had between her tits, he realised with utter amusement and a shiver of excitement. He’d not yet heard back from her. Part of him was relieved, but part of him was hoping she’d be lurking out there somewhere, looking to hunt him down.
‘If my missus went to one of them parties and came home with one of them sex-toy things, I’d tell her to pack her bags,’ Murray said, his stubble-covered jaw jutting out. ‘If my tackle’s not good enough for her, then that’s it. I’m not getting replaced by some made-in-China piece of plastic!’
‘No wonder she’s cleared out on you then, Muzz,’ Duncan, the cheeky board boy with the acne scars, said, wiggling his little pinky at him.
‘She did not clear out on me. I cleared out on her.’
‘That was only after she found out you were doing the lollipop lady at the Bendoorin high school,’ Duncan said, edging stupidly closer to a set of knuckles in the face from Muzz.
Charlie began to laugh. He remembered how word had got around that Muzz had been having a red-hot affair with the lady who held the stop/slow sign at the school. If they knocked off early, the shearers would try to time their travel home from the sheds to get a look at her. A lot of the women on wet-sheep days couldn’t work out why their husbands were suddenly interested in dropping their kids to school.
Muzz shook his head. ‘She was the one who stopped me!’
‘It was her job to stop you,’ Charlie said, hoping Muzz would again tell the story. Somehow it made him feel better about his own guilt. As if what he was doing with Janine was normal — acceptable in fact. Everyone else did it, didn’t they? They all cheated? Muzz had.
‘Yeah, well, she did ask me how my day was …’ Murray said, swigging his beer ‘… and I said it had been rough. We’d been shearing rams. Bloody bastards were full of prickles. As I dragged one out, there was a huge patch of fissles in one’s topknot. So I ended up with a fissle in me nuts. Painful as!’
‘A fissle?’ Dutchy asked, cocking an enquiring eyebrow.
‘Thistle,’ Charlie interpreted.
‘Oh,’ Dutchy said, pulling a face, then lifting both fair eyebrows.
‘So,’ Murray continued, ‘I told her I was in agony coz I had this fissle in me nuts and she said to me, “Well, I’ve got a pair of tweezers in me car, darlin’, and a certificate in First Aid.” Then she looked at me all funny.’ Muzz licked his wet beer lips and shook his head at the memory. ‘She had a real good body on her, but, by geez, her head was a bit rough.’
By this stage, the men about him were wetting themselves, wheezing and back-slapping.
‘So what’s a bloke to do when he’s in pain like that? Of course he’s gunna drop his strides for the lady to help,’ Muzz continued, pretending to ignore them, but savouring their mirth.
‘Oh, Muzz. You’re priceless, mate,’ Charlie said.
Muzz shrugged and swigged his beer.
‘So did she get it out?’ the board boy asked.
Muzz and Charlie looked at him blankly. ‘What? Get what out?’
‘The fissle.’
‘She got more than just me fissle out, Duncan, let me tell you! Stop! S … low! Stop! S … low!’ Muzz said, gyrating his hips.
The men laughed with bravado and swigged their beers with smiles still fresh, but Charlie felt his mind drift away from them. He knew this bawdy behaviour from them all was just a cover for the pain they held in each of their lives. Do they all share the same sense of dissatisfaction as me? he wondered. The dissatisfaction with their women? When he thought of Bec, all he felt was a quiet anger towards her. She had been so gutsy and capable when they had been at Ag College together. Sexy and fit too. Now, since the kids, she’d turned into a nag. A surly one at that. And she’d pressured him to have that operation. Like a Jack Russell at a rabbit hole, she’d dug and dug at him until he caved in. Since the vasectomy, he felt like half a man. A gelded stallion. A castrated cat. Emasculated beyond belief. After the op, one testicle had felt like an AFL football and the other a rugby ball and both were competing to see which could be the bigger code. It was agony. It was humiliating. No wonder in recent months Janine had lit a fire within him.
‘Least she never got you to cut your nuts out, like my missus,’ Charlie wanted to say sulkily, but instead he just downed his rum faster and pushed a ten-dollar note on the bar towards Dutchy. As he did, he noticed the Rural Land Management poster behind the bar advertising yet another no-till cropping and holistic grazing info night at the pub tomorrow. How many of those fuckers does the district need? Charlie thought.
He rolled his eyes. Andrew bloody Travis. Since RLM had been funding Andrew bloody Travis’s visits into the area, Rebecca, who had for the past few years gone quiet on the farm, was now hounding Charlie for change. He wasn’t sure if her old man’s death was what had prompted her sudden, intense concern with the farm’s management, or if it was purely that she had a thing for Andrew. She’d been begging Charlie to come along to one of the nights. Then begging him to change how he’d been running Waters Meeting. All the while parroting Andrew Travis’s crap.
When Charlie had first come to Waters Meeting to manage the cropping program and to see if he and Bec had a shot at being married, her father, Harry, was hell bent on grubbing out all the willows on the streamsides and fencing out the stock. The hours they’d put in dozing and heaping and burning. Then Bec had got hold of a book by Peter Andrews and she’d ranted at them daily that they should be doing the opposite. She said they ought to be slowing down the water run-off and letting the weeds choke the marshy places on the property. And she was spouting off that the riverbanks were now undergrazed and they should let the sheep, cattle and horses in from time to time. In the ten years he’d been