Fifty Bales of Hay (11 page)

It was fortunate, given Garry’s lengthy performance, that Marrilyn was a strong, fit woman for her age. As she now pushed her pelvis upwards against Garry, she decided she would aim to move her hips as if competing at Grand Prix Dressage. It had been several years since she had been on a horse, but one never forgot.

The tilting of her pelvis back and forth as if doing a fine piaffe had an instant effect on Garry.

‘Oh, my lord,’ he declared in a deep baritone.

As she lay beneath him, she decided to try a half-pass this way, and then again that way, falling into a perfect pattern and rhythm with her hip raisings. Just when she felt Garry was on the brink, she executed a quick flying change and slowed her pace. Then Marrilyn began to piaffe again with her hips from beneath. This, to her excitement, seemed to elicit a strong sensation in her own body and clearly had the desired effect on Garry. With some big piaffe movements that snaked her body up and down on the floor, she could soon hear Garry’s home-straight heavy breathing in her ear as he galloped home. She joined him on the home-straight too, and as she sailed over a brush fence with a cry, she climaxed just as Garry ejaculated inside her. Delightedly she listened to Garry crying out as he belted past the winning post: ‘Oh ma’am, oh ma’am! Yes! Yes!’ as if the Queen had surprised him with a wonderful gift of a corgi or a Badminton horse, or some such thing.

As Garry lay on top of her, spent and puffing, Marrilyn patted his shoulder like he was her Hot to Trot. He had truly done a fine thing for her and she was well pleased, even grateful, for what had passed between her and this quiet, formal, kindly gent this afternoon.

‘I think we have had a successful joining,’ Marrilyn said, smiling, and Garry mumbled a happy agreement, his face still buried in the scoop of her neck.

Marrilyn had found this particular experience very invigorating indeed. In a kind of animalistic way. As if she had just ridden hard with the Hunt Club and scored a fox.

‘Another cup of tea?’ she asked, and Garry nodded acceptance.

A week later Marrilyn clipped King on the tray of the Glencraig work ute and climbed in to begin her routine morning drive to the sheds to give the workmen their instructions for the day. On the way she stopped at the big Glencraig letterbox, and was surprised by a parcel amongst the bills and rural papers.

As she undid the package, she discovered the most splendid-looking gift, wrapped in shiny, silken black paper tied with a wide, satin brown ribbon. Inside the box, carefully nestled in swathes of tissue paper, was the most beautiful fine bone china figurine of a kelpie, black and tan, just like King. There was also a note in a lovely rolling hand.

Marrilyn smiled as she began to fold the letter and place the adorable figurine back in the safety of its box. Just then, her mobile rang.

‘Hello. Mawwilyn Wuthbwidge speaking,’ she said.

‘Er. Hello. This is Humberston Peterson from Carnegie Downs. I’ve heard you offer services with your kelpie in your home?’

‘This is twue! Indeed I do offer joinings,’ Marrilyn said with a smile as she had the sudden realisation her life had just got very, very interesting. ‘When would you like to come?’

T
he green swathe of synthetic fake-grass carpet was illuminated vibrantly when Katie flicked the switches on the meter box. Suddenly the Royal Show’s beef and dairy cattle pavilion was flooded with fluorescent white light, revealing Katie’s band of five very merry, rum-soaked men who were running amok with her. For a moment she had to shield her eyes.

‘Fark me!’ said her friend Ben as he sank down on the first tier of one of the spectator stands and glanced around nervously. ‘The security dude is gunna catch us for sure. Katie, I really think we oughta pack it in and go back to our swags. We could all get fired. Or arrested. Or…’

‘Grow a set,’ Katie said as she thrust him a bottle of Bundy, ‘and chill.’

Ben rolled his big dark eyes at her and adjusted the show ribbons that were slung about his neck. ‘C’mon, Katie, it’s nearly four. The sun will be up soon. You know you’ve got to get the cattle…’

‘Oh, shut up, Ben! You’re such an old fuddy-duddy. Live a little,’ she said, giving him a shove, then chuckling at the sight of him. Over Ben’s broad farmer shoulders
were draped satin ribbons in royal blue, vibrant red and white, and some were printed with gold embossed writing and had yellow tassels fringing their ends. She plucked a rosette from his checked cowboy shirt and plopped it on his head. ‘You look gorgeous, Priscilla Queen of the Show, so c’mon, don’t be a wuss. Play with the rest of us,’ she said as Ben looked at the toes of his R.M. Williams boots, a sullen expression on his face, while the other bleary-eyed fellas stood wobbly-booted around him.

The abundant ribbons with which Katie had dressed Ben were the result of today’s city Royal Show judging and Katie’s skill as a cattle handler. On Tuesday Katie would hand the ribbons and trophies to her boss, Ardlain Cattle Stud owner Mr Greenaway, when she returned to the property with the truckload of show cows and bulls. Old Mr Greenaway loved Katie and sent her around the country with his Herefords, from big inner-city shows to smaller country events. Thanks to her expert grooming, her no-bullshit-but-charming personality and ability to handle a beast in the showring, Ardlain was now attracting three times the going price for service fees and semen. Orders were so strong Mr Greenaway’d had to put another jackaroo on, a good-looking stupid one, much to Katie’s delight. And Mr Greenaway had a burgeoning trophy cabinet. When it came to work and cattle, there was nothing slack about Katie.

She now ruffled Ben’s hair. ‘Sook,’ she said, then with a determined look, fished around in her jeans pocket for a cigarette lighter. She turned to the boys and passed it to
Knackers, who stood centre of the group in his scuffed old Dogger boots and Irish rugby-union jumper. Next, Katie thrust an armful of show program newspapers at the tall, solid Skipper. ‘There you are, Skip, sunshine. You’re in charge of Tim and Knackers. You’re on. Now go get ready. It’s showtime!’

The boys grinned widely as if they had just been given the keys to a new V8 ute to play with.

‘I’ll be back,’ said Knackers in a deep Arnie Schwarzenegger voice, thrusting out his chest and flexing out his farmboy arms. Katie laughed as she watched them disappear — Skip, Tiny Tim from Tamworth and Knackers — swaggering with drunkenness around the corner. Dave and Ben remained on the seating, watching them go and passing the Bundy bottle back and forth between each other, Katie noting that Ben did not take a swig every time. Dave, on the other hand, was getting more and more legless.

‘This is gunna be good.’ She grinned.

Katie was more sober than the boys, as was her way. On big nights like this on the cattle show circuit, Katie played along with the boys, but underneath, she was enjoying her own private kind of game.

Like the conductor of an orchestra, Katie had become a master at guiding the moves and mindsets of the drunken boys. It was kind of like a hobby. She would set up scenarios for them to get into, then sit back and laugh as it unfolded or — in the case of most nights — unravelled. She liked to watch. And she especially liked to watch country boys in boots as they made total wallies of themselves. It was gold.

On nights she was in the mood (and most nights she was), she’d pick the best bloke of her group of cattle show mates and bed him for a night. The next day, acting still as if they were just mates, she’d key the random best-bloke’s number into her phone for the next time she came into that particular town with the cattle. Her phone was chockers with a few lovely larrikin fellas and a lot of adorable dickheads, kind of like a scorecard, and life for the moment as a young single woman and stud groom was good for her.

Katie had made a pact with herself to have a goal or two in life. It was during a bender on her twenty-first with her mate, Tina, a truck driver from Mildura, that they had decided it would be a great idea to set a target for Katie: her goal was to bed fifty blokes by the time she was thirty-one. She had ten years to do it, and she knew she’d reach the target easily. After her quota of fifty, she planned to settle down, maybe, and have a couple of kids to at least one of the fellas. She was in no hurry.

Tina had dreamed up only three rules for her to follow, which were:

Rule number one: Bedding the same boy twice didn’t count. She could only score him once on the card.

Rule number two: Always practise safe sex and use a condom (because as Tina had pointed out, ‘after fifty bonks with random blokes your fanny will be like Shrek’s swamp — festy and green’).

Rule number three: Don’t (whatever you do) get attached, or you won’t make target.

At first Katie had gone on a spree, clocking up five guys in three weeks, texting Tina with her bounty. And Tina began to record Katie’s bonk numbers in the back of her trucking log book. Country pubs were the best source, Katie found. Easy pickings with all those blokes in their high-vis workwear, full as boots, and a lot of them not wanting to go home to their bored and bitchy wives.

‘You can spot the high-vis boys easy in the dark,’ Katie told Tina once.

‘Reckon we should’ve set the target at a hundred,’ said Tina, who seemed to live vicariously through Katie’s exploits as, weighing in at over one hundred kilos, and with a serious eczema problem, she never got laid.

Katie knew most of her girlfriends just wanted one fella, and would spend their time preening and prepping to bag a boyfriend. She watched them at the shows looking with puppy-dog eyes at the blokes. Blokes who would end up leaving them for another girl, or treating the girls like crap. Katie believed one bloke was trouble. You could get yourself stuck. You could get yourself hurt. Plus, she reasoned, why settle on just one bloke when there was an entire all-you-can-eat man banquet out there? To dine widely and frequently on an extensive menu of male was better than starving in a loveless, bitter relationship that beat you about the head and heart and eventually killed you … wasn’t it? That was what had happened to Katie’s mum. And Katie was buggered if she was going to suffer the same fate.

She remembered sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed, her mother’s hair falling from her paper-thin scalp
to drift around with the fur of the cat. At the time, Tigger could always be found curled in the crook of one of the bony angled limbs of her mother. The two of them dozing as both cat and human created tiny tumbleweeds of auburn and tabby hair that would eddy away across the bed on the breeze from the open window. Outside, Katie recalled seeing her father, stooped and swearing, jerking the resistant pull-start cord of the lawnmower. The grass was practically up to his knees.

Katie knew he was only mowing it because the neighbours had complained again and had threatened to dob him into the RSPCA about the flyblown sheep he kept on his one-acre block. He certainly wasn’t cutting the grass to make a nicer view from the window for her mother. He wouldn’t help move the heavy old metal bed and sagging mattress when Katie asked, so all her mother had been able to see were the oily old forty-four gallon drums lined up against the wall of the rusting, sagging shed. Most of the drums were overflowing with her dad’s beer longnecks and her brother’s empty cans of pre-mix grog. The other thing in view was the broken Hills Hoist that her youngest brother, Jade, had snapped when he swung on it one Christmas Day with Travis after they had snuck booze from the old man.

Katie sighed. One useless father and five drop-kick brothers — six men who couldn’t keep the garden nice, or do a load of washing to save themselves. They didn’t know where the kitchen sink was, let alone the dishwashing liquid. They only knew how to buy boxes of beer and seventy-five cent loaves of white bread, and how to leave toast crumbs
scattered across the kitchen bench. Katie constantly came home from school to dirty dishes where baked beans had erupted and overflowed like lava down the sides of plastic bowls. The microwave too would be crusted with acidic crud, like toxic waste, and there were the lidless containers of melting margarine sitting in patches of sunlight, drooling into oil slicks. No one would fix the dripping tap, or change the toilet rolls, or scrub the mould from the shower bay that was skid-mark brown with artesian bore water anyway.

Her father was just as bad as the brothers and contributed to the piles of teetering dirty plates and the soup of foul language and aggression that washed through the house. Useless, thought Katie again. It had been down to her … just because she had a fanny.
All because she had a fanny
. As far as she could figure, the boys got out of it because they had dicks. Where was the sense and logic in this world? Katie couldn’t reckon it.

She could see her dad from where she sat on her mum’s bed. The red flush of his wide frustrated caveman forehead, his giant belly rounding out in front of him. As he stooped over the mower again, adjusting the choke, Katie wanted to take a tyre wrench to the back of his head. She felt her jaw clench. Her mum’s big haunted gaze had slid across to where Katie was looking, her eyes blinking slowly and her pale tongue dragging hopelessly over parched lips.

‘Arsehole,’ her mum had said. ‘He’ll never win. He can’t get me now.’ She plucked at the chenille bedspread with a clawlike hand.

But Katie knew he already had won. He had got her mother. And soon, Katie knew, she would be alone.

Before her mum died, she had told Katie to ‘live life to the full’. Several times. ‘Don’t make the same mistakes I did, girl.’

She made Katie promise that she would. At the time, Katie wasn’t sure what ‘living life to the full’ meant. After the funeral, when Katie had cleared out for good, hitching with just one bag on the roasting highway north, she had pondered the concept often. ‘Live life to the full.’ How did you do that?

Surely it meant not marrying a dirty down-and-out loser who would beat his wife and children and would hire hookers on trucking runs?

So, Katie’s target of fifty men and her complete freedom remained. Her job as a well-travelled stud groom meant life was full and interesting. She smiled beneath the bright spotlights of the pavilion and glanced over to Dave and Ben and wondered wickedly which stud she’d choose to groom tonight.

Ben was out. He was a sulker and a bit of a poof. Not as in gay, but as in that soft-cock, sensitive kind of way. When she saw him at the shows, he would rush up to give her big bear hugs and tell her she was beautiful. He would bounce around her like a happy dog wagging not just its tail, but its whole body, and when Ben was done gushing with ‘It’s great to see you again, Katie!’ he’d hang around her like a bad smell. Plus, he was always trying to have deep and meaningful chats — a ‘D&M’, as he put it — with
her about how she was feeling after her ‘mum’s passing’. Ben’s mum had croaked a few years back too, so he kept trying to tell her they had a lot in common. Ben was always saying he wanted to spend time with her, so they could help each other through. Help her through
what
? Katie had wondered. She was out of that house. Her mum was dead and buried. She was through.

And what did they have in common? Everyone’s mother died, eventually. He was the lucky one. Nothing for
him
to work through. He was the son of a big-time cattle farmer who had everything, whereas she came from nothing and had nothing. Plus, he was always trying to persuade her to go out to dinner or the movies with him, ‘like a proper girl on a proper date’, and she knew, even though he never said it, he didn’t like this whole fifty men thing she and Tina had dreamed up. When she talked about it, he went quiet. Then he’d softly ask her again to come out to his beef property, ‘to see his cows’ and for some ‘time out’. Time out from what? Katie wondered. From living life to the full? He really gave her the shits. Ben was very good-looking in that chunky beef farmer kind of way, but his behaviour towards her was just plain weird. Best to steer clear of him, she thought tonight, as she stood in the cattle show pavilion.

She turned her attention to Dave. He was a redhead so he wasn’t an option. Nice though he was, she’d always questioned the temperaments of redheads … a legacy of her father’s rude and arrogant red kelpie, aptly but unimaginatively named Red. The dog had bitten her
suddenly and sharply on her hand once when she’d reached up to climb into the cab of her dad’s truck. So if Ben and Dave were out, that left the other three.

At that moment, as if on cue, and as Katie had suggested to them, the rest of the mob, Tim, Skip and Knackers, came flaring into the showring, rolled newspapers set alight and jammed in their butt-cracks. They sprinted with flames and smoke streaming from their arse cheeks, not a stitch on, save for their boots. They did a couple of victory laps, arms held upwards to the high metal beams of the giant empty shed, Bundy cans clutched in their hands, penises flipping from side to side as they ran, tails ablaze. The newspaper ash drifted down to the carpet of green where only a few hours earlier dairy cows with giant udders had paraded slowly by like a fleet of ships emerging from the doldrums. How different was this parade, Katie thought gleefully, as she watched the naked idiots flying around the arena.

‘Flaming arseholes!’ chorused Tiny Tim from Tamworth and Big Skip as they lapped the showring. Knackers followed with a call of ‘Great balls of fire!’. The whooping rose up to the rafters and startled the sleeping sparrows. Some of the tiny birds fluttered about, confused by the smoke, the bright lights and the noise, then the birds again settled on the rafters, their feathers ruffled. Below, the paper extinguished in fine blackened drifts and the boys fell about laughing, still lit up with excitement, the smell of smoke permeating the large building. Katie clapped and whooped from the stand as did Dave and Ben, smiles cast broadly on their faces.