Dinner at Rose's (45 page)

‘Thank you, dear. Daylight robbery, isn’t it? Just like in an airport.’ She looked past Kim to me. ‘And this must be Josie.’

‘Hi,’ I said. Matt opened his eyes with an effort and found mine over the end of his bed. ‘Hey, Matt.’ Because you just
can’t
say, ‘My darling, I love you more than anyone has ever loved anybody in all the histories of all the worlds, and when I thought you were gone I wanted to die too’ in front of an audience. Actually, I don’t think anyone related to my father can say it at all.

‘Hey, Jose,’ he whispered.

‘I’m Myra Browne,’ said the woman. ‘Cilla’s mother.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’ It wasn’t, but ‘What the hell are you and your miserable daughter doing here?’ is another of the things you just can’t say.

Hazel looked up, her face crumpling like a child’s. ‘Oh, Josie,’ she wailed, and held out her arms. This was surprising, but I gathered her up obediently and patted her small trembling form. ‘He so nearly d-didn’t pull through. My baby boy – and R-Rosie has p-passed . . .’

‘In her sleep,’ I said soothingly. ‘It was very peaceful.’

‘Have a coffee, Hazel,’ said Myra Browne. ‘You’ll feel better for it. Was it cinnamon or chocolate on your cappuccino?’

Hazel sighed and released me, sinking back into her chair at Matt’s elbow and neatly cutting off access. ‘Cinnamon,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Cilla?’ Her mother held out a cup. ‘Come on, love, drink up while it’s hot.’

Cilla took a long shuddering breath and shook back her smooth pale hair. Her eyes were red and her face puffy with crying, and she had a long graze across one cheek. And yet she still looked like a little porcelain doll. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘He knows that, love!’ said her mother heartily. ‘Matthew knows it was an accident.’

Matt grunted painfully in the affirmative. Cilla hid her face again and I felt a twinge of pity – which was unexpected, since the girl was responsible for damaging my very favourite person. But imagine the remorse at having landed someone in intensive care combined with the writhing shame of providing the district with such a delicious snippet of gossip:
Jilted Ex-Girlfriend Flattens Local
Farmer!
Let she who has never paid that late-night, ill-reasoned visit to the boy who dumped her cast the first stone. Or something to that effect.

‘Jo?’ Matt croaked.

‘Yes?’

‘Is everything . . . okay?’

‘The farm, you mean?’

‘Mm.’

I smiled. ‘Yeah.’ If it’s affection in public you’re after, Matthew King is never going to be your ideal man. ‘No major dramas. Three new calves this morning, and milking went fine.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Where’d you put . . . cows?’

‘The milkers are in paddock forty.’ We’d had to leave the cows standing in the race after milking this morning until it was light enough to find them a paddock with sufficient grass in it. They had been most indignant about this treatment and returned in a body to the shed to complain.

‘Shit,’ said Matt, which was discouraging.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Spread . . . effluent . . . there,’ said Matt.

‘But we had about a hundred mil of rain last night,’ I said. ‘It’ll all have washed off, don’t worry.’

Cilla raised her head and looked at me with scorn across Matt’s bed. ‘Grass that’s been spread with effluent is very high in potassium,’ she explained. ‘And potassium inhibits the uptake of magnesium, so the cows are more likely to go down. Especially in bad weather.’
You dumb
townie
. She didn’t actually say that last bit, but I could hear her thinking it.

Cheers, Farmer Barbie
, I thought back. ‘Well, we did drench them with causmag. Andy’s putting them in that long narrow paddock with the poplars tonight – is that okay?’

‘Yeah,’ said Matt. His eyelids drifted shut, the effort of keeping them open being more than he could manage. ‘Thanks.’ Then, ‘You’ll have to do a . . . hot wash . . . tomorrow.’

‘Matthew, darling,’ his mother said tenderly. ‘Don’t think about the farm. You just need to rest and get better.’

He paid her not the slightest attention. ‘Remember how, Jose?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But it’s written down on the back of the milk room door, isn’t it? And Andy’ll help me figure it out. Where do you want the cows tomorrow?’

‘Josie,’ said Hazel quietly.

‘Sorry, but I need to ask.’

‘It’s hardly important right now, is it?’ she said. ‘Matthew’s very weak – he’s lucky to be a-alive . . .’ She pulled a hanky from the sleeve of her cardigan and pressed it to her eyes.

‘Milkers in seventeen,’ said Matt. He moved his head restlessly. ‘Springers have two more breaks, but give them both and don’t worry about feeding out. And . . . call Kevin Goulding about . . . relief milking.’

‘We did. He’s busy this weekend, but he’ll come on Monday.’

‘Good girl.’ He opened one eye just the merest sliver and smiled at me crookedly.

‘JOSIE,’ SAID KIM
, ‘you muppet.’

‘Be nice to me,’ I said defensively. ‘Or I’ll cry. It’ll be the next level down.’

We located the car eventually, five minutes after I announced it must have been stolen. It was two levels up from where we had started, behind a pillar that I was privately certain wasn’t there when I parked it.

‘Give me the keys,’ Kim ordered.

I fished for them in my bag. ‘No.’

‘And why not?’

‘Because I’m older and uglier than you. And I had at least some sleep last night, which is more than you can say.’ I unlocked the car, and we climbed in.

‘I reckon I got at least half an hour on a chair in the waiting room.’ She sighed and leant her head back against the seat. ‘The surgeon told us he’s lucky to be alive. They couldn’t get the rescue helicopter in through the storm, and he could easily have bled to death during the ambulance ride.’

I gulped, started the car and backed smartly into the pillar. There was a short, shocked pause.

‘Shall I drive?’ Kim suggested.

I swallowed. ‘Okay.’

Chapter 40

‘G
ET OUT OF
it,’ I said, gently because after all they were orphans now.

Nobody paid the slightest attention.

‘
Get out of it!
’ Kim roared, and dogs and pig fell back, abashed. ‘You’ve got to say it like you mean it, Josie.’

I passed her the takeaways and patted Percy. He leant his full weight against my leg and squinted up at me lovingly. ‘Traitor,’ I told him, scratching him behind his left ear.

It was very nearly dark, and the cloud had lifted just a little to sit on the shoulders rather than the knees of the ranges. It looked like it hadn’t rained for at least half an hour, which made a pleasant change, and smoke curled up lazily from the kitchen chimney. Kim went in while I fed the dogs and gave Percy three apples from the shelf in the woodshed. Then I went slowly up the path and let myself in at the kitchen door.

The kitchen, bleak enough when I left it to depress even the most determined optimist, now radiated warmth and comfort. Kim was unwrapping fish and chips at the table while across the room Andy crouched in front of the roaring stove, critically adjusting the damper. His hair, lacking its normal half-kilogram of wax, stuck up at the back like duck fluff and he had missed that tricky spot just below the elbow while scrubbing, so that he had a green stripe on the back of each forearm.

‘How did the afternoon go?’ I asked, opening the fridge to hunt for the tomato sauce.

‘Fine,’ said Andy. He closed the door of the stove and stood up. ‘A bloke from the bike shop came out with an old quad bike to use until Matt’s is fixed. Or written off.’

The bike had actually started when Chris went to retrieve it that morning, only to stop halfway up to the shed as the last of its oil drained out of the crack in the tank. And retrieving a hundred and fifty cows from a two-hectare paddock on foot – in the rain, mind, and with only the light of a torch – made Dallas Taipa’s socks look pretty good.

‘Thank goodness,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t looking forward to walking all the way to the back of the farm to get the cows in the morning.’

‘I thought you liked that sort of thing,’ mocked Kim. ‘You’re always heading off up some random hill to feel the wind on your face.’

‘I like it less at half past four in the morning in the rain,’ I said.

Kim served our fish and chips off Aunty Rose’s favourite silver platter with the wart-like grapes. She had set out the good crockery and the silver salt and pepper shakers in silent tribute to her aunt, and filled a little lattice-work china bowl with lemon wedges. Aunty Rose was fond of quoting the late Isabella Beeton at meal times, and used to inform us that a well-laid table was one of the refining influences that home should bring to bear upon the young mind. And this from a woman who died at the ripe old age of twenty-eight – I bet
she
was the life and soul of every party. Of course, Mrs Beeton wouldn’t have approved of me either. I have spent years perfecting the art of simultaneously straightening my hair, moisturising my legs and

‘How’s Matt?’ Andy asked.

‘Three broken ribs,’ said Kim. ‘Internal bleeding, a hole in his liver, a catheter because he can’t get up to pee – is that all, Josie?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘He’s a sort of pale grey colour and they’ve got him on so much morphine he can hardly keep his eyes open.’

‘Bloody hell. He’s not going to be farming for a while, is he?’

‘According to him,’ said Kim, ‘he’ll be fine by Monday.’ She ate a chip in a pensive sort of way. ‘Idiot. He’s
awful
when he’s sick.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said. ‘We’ll tie him to the chaise longue by the ankle, or something. Andy, did you get a look at the roof before it got dark?’

Andy nodded. ‘The builder came over to the shed on his way home. He said he’s just tacked it down and covered it with a tarpaulin, but he thinks it’ll keep out more water than it has for years. He didn’t want to do anything more serious, since the whole place is bug—’ Realising a little too late that this was hardly a tactful remark when the house’s owner was not yet cold in her grave, he stopped abruptly and took a large bite of fish burger instead.

‘Poor old house,’ said Kim softly. ‘Dad always said the only thing keeping it together was the borers holding hands. But Aunty Rose didn’t care.’

AFTER DINNER I
left the two of them washing dishes and withdrew to the swamp at the end of the hall to continue the happy job of sopping up water with a towel, wringing the towel out over a bucket and every now and then getting up to empty the bucket into the bath. Half an hour later I was cold and wet and getting fairly sour about the whole thing, but the swamp had not noticeably diminished. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering anyway – the sensible thing to do would be to remove the books and crockery and about a tenth of the furniture from the house and bulldoze the rest flat. A smidgeon callous, perhaps, but it was that or plant rice along the hall, because at the current rate of progress I’d be here till sometime next year.

‘Josie!’ Kim called.

I dropped my sodden towel into the bucket and went back into the kitchen to see Andy and Scott nodding to one another and exchanging gruff and manly greetings, about an octave below their normal voices.