Dark Horse (10 page)

W
ind died away in those early hours of the twenty-seventh and the fog returned. Sarah led Tansy back up to her stable. This time the mare entered the enclosure enthusiastically. Sarah returned to the van with a similar sense of relief. Heath carried Sarah’s things. He’d put away the whiskey bottle and hipflasks, stored them somewhere discreet. She sat motionless on the bed. Heath climbed in beside her. Already he had his side, the right, and she had hers, the left. Their spooning positions were reversed: she faced away from him and he curved in behind her back. Neither of them slept. They weren’t uncomfortable, but they weren’t totally comfortable either. They had doubts, but at least they weren’t filled with doubt. His hand rested on the outside of her upper leg. She was wearing her thermals, encased in soft, grey merino wool from neck to ankle, and down to her wrists. He had on his cargo pants, black shirt and Explorer socks. His knee was strapped. His boots were paired at the foot of the bed. He was ready to run. Sarah was ready to stay.

World over, people were killing time and waiting. The days after Boxing Day and before New Year’s Day were lost days. Parliament wasn’t sitting, laws weren’t being made or changed, courts weren’t in session, moneymen were hedging their bets until the stock market reopened. Everyone was experiencing a fog of some sort. Everyone was experiencing the haze. Sarah sat with her chair close to the potbelly, the stove door open so that she could look inside at the flames, treating the fire like a television, seeing drama in the glowing coals and little flare-ups. Heath had found an old newspaper and was reading it, every single word in it. The mist was thick. The bush was oppressively quiet. All they had for noise were Tansy grazing in her yard and the ticking of the firebox, the hiss of wet wood in the flames.

They did the quiz in the paper.

‘Australian Steve Hooker is the reigning Olympic champion in which event?’ ‘Of which Asian country was Nara once a capital?’

When they were done, in the silence that fell, they realised they’d rushed the quiz. They should have rationed it to one question per hour.

‘Bugger,’ Heath said.

They were more careful with the crossword puzzle. The workmen had done the easy one, but filled in only two words on the cryptic. Sarah moved to the table and they sat close with their heads together over the page. Heath held the pen. He was the better problem solver, dropping hints for Sarah and waiting while she took twice as long to figure each clue out. He wrote in small, precise capitals, pressing hard into the paper.

The same thing again though – after three hours of stretching it out, they sat back from the completed crossword, pleased with themselves for a couple of minutes and then annoyed that they’d not made it last longer.

It was noon.

Sarah set about reading the paper. Heath leaned across and coloured in the o’s on the pages she had finished with. He drew devil horns and moustaches on pictures of people’s faces. He gave them monobrows. Heath’s need to be mentally and physically stimulated was more acute than Sarah’s. He got up and limped around for no reason. He leaned his weight onto his good leg, stared out at the fog, lifted his arms above his head, hands linked behind his neck, elbows poking up beside his ears, breathing in deeply.

‘You’re coming down with shed fever already.’

He was not like a cat in this way; he didn’t slip into a torpor and sleep to wile away the time.

‘What did you say about those cement bags? Let’s do that,’ he said. ‘Let’s tear the crappy bit of the fence down and rebuild it with those bags.’

‘Me carrying all the bags?’ Sarah was a little feline in that when she powered down she was reasonably content to stay that way. She had draped herself across two chairs and was picking the bark off a stick, revealing the smooth twig below. ‘Shouldn’t we be conserving our energy?’

‘I’m burning energy being bored. I’ll load you up.’

‘I’m only carrying one bag at a time. Unlike you, I don’t want to pull a muscle or tear any tendons.’

Tansy enjoyed the sudden activity and them working near her. She kept sticking her nose in, sneezing from the concrete and mortar dust that rose off the bags.

‘I could get you a job,’ Heath said, as though the sight of Sarah moving the heavy bags had prompted this conclusion. ‘Nothing exciting, work to tide you over – our neighbour has a dairy, he’s always looking for milking hands. You’d like it. All the cows have personalities of their own. You get to know them.’

‘Thank you,’ Sarah said sincerely. ‘I would like that kind of work.’

He was dismantling a section of the old fence, and, having made this offer, he stopped working. Lost in thought, a sad and reflective expression passed over his features. Sarah could see that he’d forgotten things for a moment – the job offer had been genuine, but, in truth, he wouldn’t be able to get her work. Nor would he be able to have Tansy on his farm. Sarah believed Heath would like to help, but she didn’t see how he could. She would never go to his place for Christmas lunch, or taste his mother’s plum pudding. The most likely outcome: she’d never see Heath again after this.

Twenty-three bags from off the pallet, combined with firewood, made four neat and sturdy pillars. Each end of the timber rails was sandwiched between the heavy bags. Like sandbags would, the mortar and cement bags moulded slightly, and could be jostled and made to conform the way Heath wanted them to. With the rails in place, Heath pushed the timber planks to see how they held – not half as strong as the metal rails outside, but a big improvement on before. If Tansy wanted to she could kick down this section of fence; this was not a bad thing though. Sarah was reassured, knowing her mare had a way out if she was serious enough about leaving. It was how it should be. Tansy needed an escape route.

Now that the pallet was empty it was clear the gun wasn’t there. It hadn’t fallen down, out of sight somehow. The dead snake remained.

Sarah sat down on the empty pallet and rested. She thought about what she’d said to Heath in the hut the night before. Overtired, emotionally drained, at two a.m., had she opened up too much? He
had
moved the gun; of course he had. It was plain enough to see: he wanted control of the weapon. And there was sense in that. She did have the ammunition after all. She couldn’t argue. Legitimately she couldn’t argue, by pretending he didn’t have the gun he’d cleverly got around that problem.

They’d had their slanging match and found their truce. Fog mattered. Food mattered. Floodwaters mattered. Getting along mattered. The truth would have to wait.

Sarah went down into Tansy’s yard and, using the shovel, she picked up the horse manure and tossed it out into the grass beyond the fence. Heath was splitting kindling.

That afternoon they stood together in the van looking at the food. It was one of many anxious inventories. The supplies looked more pitiful with each twenty-four-hour period that passed. There were eight cans – three cans of sausages and vegetables (a favourite of the workmen’s apparently), one thick beef stew, one tomato soup, two cans of baked beans and one flat tin of smoked mussels in oil. There was an open and half-eaten packet of Salada crackers, an unopened four-pack of chicken instant noodles, and a three-quarter-full packet of stale Weetbix. No milk. When the hamper goods had been stacked alongside the workmen’s larder, the bench had been crowded with food. It wasn’t crowded any longer.

Heath pulled forward a can of sausages and vegetables. ‘So that’s tonight’s dinner. Starting tomorrow, we eat two cans and one packet of noodles a day.’

He divided the shelf of food into daily rations.

‘We eat twice a day, late morning, late afternoon, one Salada biscuit each with the can of soup, half the noodles each and one shared can for dinner. We’re not gonna starve on that much. And it gives us four more days. ’Til New Year’s. Something’s gotta happen by then.’

Sarah led Tansy out of her yard to feed. Grass in the pen was becoming trampled and wasn’t going to last. The fog was so dense that Sarah used the sounds of Heath to keep her bearings. He was in the shed taking apart the pallet with the crowbar, salvaging the planks of timber, removing the nails. Sarah stayed with her horse, walking slowly along beside her, soothed by her mare’s crammed mouthfuls and hearty chewing. There was no shortage of pasture around the hut and shed. Tansy wasn’t going to go hungry.

When Heath fell silent Tansy was grazing in an area where the ground was uniformly green. With no landmarks to guide her, Sarah’s sense of direction disappeared in seconds. All she could do was stare wide-eyed, wild-eyed, into the white around her, and wait until Heath made another noise. Tansy chewed on, unfazed. Sarah’s heart rate increased in those quiet minutes. She squeezed the reins in her hand and stepped closer to her mare.

Heath had only stopped for a drink or to rest his leg a moment. A drag of wood and the levering apart of timber put things right again. Sarah turned towards his sounds and led Tansy that way.

Heath called from inside the shed, ‘Sarah?’

‘I’m here.’

‘That fog can get on top of you in seconds,’ he warned.

She could picture him, crowbar in hand, injured leg bent slightly, dark head lifted, eyes narrowing. His lips looked softer with bristle thickening up around them.

After putting Tansy back in the yard, Sarah wandered up and stood by the potbelly. Heath was removing the venom sacs from the dead snake and gutting it. He made a bed in the ash and coals, ready to lay the snake in.

‘It smelt all right,’ he told her. ‘I thought – it’s now or never.’

They agreed to overcook the meat, let it char, so that any harmful microbes might be killed.

They pulled the snake out with a pair of tongs and used a fork to pick the flaky, baked flesh off the skin, stirred it through their canned meal. The meat was chewy.

With the timber from the pallet, Heath had made an area of flooring around the potbelly and over to the van door. The table and chairs were off the dirt. No more dust or muddy patches of bare ground to navigate, at least not in their little outdoor dining room and kitchen.

‘Well aren’t we civilised,’ Sarah said, her feet brushing back and forth on the clean boards beneath her chair, eating her snake hotpot.

H
eath took the toothbrush and cleaned it before putting it back. They washed their faces in warm water from the kettle. Bedtime was early because sitting around the fire had fast become the most banal pastime of all. Muted silver light seeped in the open doorway dimly lighting the van’s interior. Sarah wasn’t hungry or cold as she settled on the bed. Panic, fretfulness, concern, those things had to take some time out too. She lay on her stomach, her socked feet rested on her pillow. Her head was at the foot of the bed. She pulled one blanket over her and took in her view – down the van, from cupboard height, looking towards the door, a wedge of the ghostly grey exterior visible through the doorway. Heath was sitting up against the bedhead, a blanket over his knees.

‘I’ll tell you my relationship disasters,’ he said, ‘and you deconstruct them for me, and tell me what went wrong – from a woman’s perspective.’

Heath’s love life consisted of a string of amusing stories and predictable sexual encounters. Calling them relationships was pushing it. He’d sampled across the board, or maybe it just seemed that way because he gave each girl a distinctive name. The ‘Party Girl’ may or may not have been bookish in her spare time, and so not that unlike the ‘Librarian-looking chick with glasses’. Going by what Sarah heard, he’d never been in love.

He asked her, ‘Who was your first serious relationship with?’

‘Are we staying on this topic for any specific reason?’

‘You never introduce topics. I’ve told you more than you’ve told me. Now you know about all the women I’ve dated. I don’t even know if you’ve got any brothers or sisters.’

‘None.’

‘You’ve only mentioned your father, is your mum alive?’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘Same age as me.’

‘You’re so full of shit,’ she laughed. ‘Yes, she’s alive,’ Sarah said.

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Ten years. I got married when I was twenty-five.’

The maths laid out for him, Heath said, ‘Okay.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Who was your first serious relationship with?’ he said, returning to his original question.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Yes, you can, you just don’t want to tell me.’

‘You’re right, I don’t want to tell
you
.’

‘Why not?’ She could hear the unperturbed mildness in his voice. ‘I’m an understanding guy.’

‘What makes you think it’s something that needs understanding?’

‘Because you won’t tell me. All right then, tell me more about endurance riding. I know you’ll talk about that. How often do you compete?’

‘A few times a year.’

‘When did you get into that?’

‘In my early twenties. I had one other endurance horse before Tansy. She was getting old so I retired her.’

‘How much is a good endurance horse like Tansy worth?’

‘Depends.’

‘How much did you pay for her?’

After some consideration Sarah said, ‘I didn’t pay for her.’

‘She was given to you?’

‘No. I took her.’

‘Is this about to get incriminating? I’ll lower the cone of silence.’ He made a humming sound while he mimicked the action of a dome closing down over them.

‘I was looking for a new horse, I was at one of the best endurance horse studs in Australia.’ Sarah’s nose couldn’t help but wrinkle as she thought of the place. She could see the gates, the sweeping driveway, a limousine parked alongside a line of horse floats. ‘I could only afford to pick from the horses in the first stables. All the top horses, million-dollar horses, were down the back. So I snuck down, out of curiosity, to look at them.’

She could feel Heath’s gaze on her face. The tension was already in her voice. She was aware of her own body, growing more rigid on the bed.

‘I was sneaking photos on my phone, to show everyone how amazing the place was – like a five-star resort, but for horses . . . Until I went the long way around to get back to the front stables, trying to stick to all the quiet places where nobody was. I heard this sound, not even whinnying, not even like a horse.’

Heath sighed. ‘I don’t know if I want to hear this.’ He said it in that tone people use when they are resigned to finding out anyway.

‘She was screaming,’ Sarah said. She touched her lips a moment and breathed to clear the nausea that came with the memory. ‘Like a child screaming.’

‘Yeah, I’m not gonna like this.’

‘She was inside a disused stable. They were using a cattle prod on her. Training her, they tried to tell me later, but it certainly wasn’t that. They were deliberately hurting her, laughing. I won’t tell you exactly. I don’t want to. I don’t tell people because . . . Tansy is beautiful, that’s what she is; she’s not what was happening in that shed. She was barely a filly, just a foal really. I think she’d been a disappointment to the stud because of her dark coat. Greys are best for the sport. Her mother was a grey. They would have been hoping for Tansy to be a grey. But she was black. Black horses tend to overheat over the long distances. The big buyers wouldn’t have wanted her. It was the owner’s son who was hurting her. I’ve since heard what a twisted bastard he is. I don’t think her dropped price was the reason behind it though, he just likes to hurt things.’ Sarah clenched her teeth. ‘I managed to get some photos. I emailed them to myself, and went to the main office. I told them there was a fire – it made them come quicker. I also didn’t want to give the stud time to hide her. I went back to the shed with a crowd and then I wouldn’t leave, not without her.’

Sarah fell silent, thinking back to the day, the blue sky, the sounds and smells, the breeze, the owner storming down a narrow lane in his white suit and black shirt, his leathery tan and shiny bald head, and Sarah’s voice clear in her own ears, raised and threatening, demanding, unafraid, in what was probably a dangerous situation. Sheiks, in their flowing white robes, had watched on from afar.

‘It really felt to me like I had to rescue her,’ Sarah said. ‘Like you wouldn’t leave an abducted child, you wouldn’t walk away from that.’ She frowned at Heath as she said it. ‘Finding someone, something, being hurt like that, and then saying,
Oh, don’t worry I’ll send help later
. I couldn’t walk away. They said
I
was crazy because I wouldn’t leave.
They
were crazy, to try and brush aside that kind of cruelty. They didn’t call the cops on me though; they knew they were in the shit.’

‘You did the right thing not leaving.’

‘I knew it wouldn’t be as critical to everyone else, not even the RSPCA; they see it every day. They would have cared, but gotten to her
eventually
. And then her removal would have been bogged down in red tape. Plus it was the owner’s son; they weren’t going to admit to anything or sack him.
I
heard her screaming.
I
heard her fear. You can’t walk away from that sort of thing.’

‘I know what you mean. I’ve heard that scream. My dog, the bloodhound, he once got trapped headfirst down a wombat hole – I’d searched for hours. He was screaming like that, muffled though, underground. Not an animal sound, beyond that. I’ll never forget it. I would have done anything to save him too – I did, I dug him out with my bare hands. Like you, I couldn’t walk away. I didn’t even go for a shovel, had to save him right then.’

‘Was the wombat down the hole?’

Heath nodded.

‘That’s always terrible. But you got him out?’

Heath opened his hands and rubbed his palms together. ‘I tore my hands apart doing it. Not as many scars as Jasper ended up with.’ He smiled. ‘The wombat survived too. He was already a gnarly looking bastard.’

A stretch of silence passed before Sarah said, ‘I couldn’t leave her.’

‘I understand.’

‘I agreed not to go public if the stud let me have her right then. But I made sure word got around anyway. The right people saw the photos. The stud deserved the backlash they got, they really did.’

Sarah took a shaky breath.

‘What was she like, when you got her home? Was she okay?’

‘She was more settled than you’d imagine. Really brave. But she couldn’t be stabled. She hated stables, still does, hates walls and doors, concrete floors. It took ages until she would walk into a shed at all. I know she still remembers.’

A large moth fluttered into the van. The wing beats purred as it did a circuit of the darkened van. It left as effortlessly as it had entered, vibrating its way back out the door.

‘Can I touch you?’ Heath said.

Sarah sat up and turned around on the bed to face him. She’d pulled her knees in to her chest and wrapped her arms around her lower legs.

‘Why would you say that?’

‘I meant a hug, a touch. It felt like you needed it.’

‘Well I don’t.’

Mist had blocked the stars and turned the full moon into a fuzzy grey disc. Sarah squatted behind the shed and looked up into the eerie miasma. Heath was around the corner from her, peeing too. Foggy silence amplified the sounds of urinating. Heath began singing as a way to mask the sound. His free hand on the shed, he tapped the beat with his fingers.

She straightened and pulled up her thermal leggings. She could hear him zip up.

‘I’ll tell you why I hate fog,’ he said, his song over. ‘It reminds me that everyone breathes the same air. It feels like this patch of air around us is stagnant and we’re breathing it in over and over. Don’t you think?’

Sarah grunted in half agreement. She shone the torch and they walked together into the shed.

‘It brings home the truth,’ he said. ‘It’s this . . .’ he gestured to the fog, ‘. . . closed-in conditions – right the way around the globe, the same air, trapped by the atmosphere. I take in what someone else has exhaled. Cities make my lungs tight. I don’t mind it so much here, it’s not a populated place and I’m with you, I don’t mind sharing your air, plus I know it’s come across the ranges and must be reasonably clean. Even at the beach sometimes I’ll get a face full of air and think – where has that been? It’s a bit claggy, you know? I’d feel more comfortable knowing it had come across a timbered valley. That’s why I love the bush, because when it’s a clear day you can smell how clean the air is. You can taste it. It’s so good you want to drink it in.’

They stepped up into the van.

‘I’d be really struggling if I was trapped in this kind of fog in a city block with hundreds breathing in and out all around me.’ He shuddered.

Sarah sat down to take off her boots and Heath collapsed face first onto the bed, boots on. He’d limped heavily and she could tell he was tired of his ailment. It wasn’t the creek that had him trapped; it was his leg and the mist.

‘You’re a loner,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s why you’re single. You’re not a people person. I mean, God, you don’t even like breathing in the same air as other people. It’s you who keeps your distance. You don’t want people to get close to you. That’s why no one has.’

She put her boots aside and pulled his off for him. Sarah put his shoes square and neat together, the way he liked. Heath got under the blankets. She switched off the torch. The mattress took up the end of the van, stretching wall to wall. The only way onto the bed was from the bottom. In the dark, on all fours, Sarah crawled to the top and felt her way in under the covers. Heath reached out and pulled her into him. Sarah let him hold her. The clinch had an almost sibling feel to it. He didn’t touch her, other than his arm tight around her waist and his chest against her back, his face tucked into her neck.

‘I don’t mind being close to you,’ he said.