His Brand of Beautiful (12 page)

Tate tugged at Bond’s girth and shook his head. “You’ve been watching too much
Crocodile Dundee
.”

Bond huffed as the girth tightened, sighed when it released.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know how to—”

“Look. I know you want to prove you’re a modern day Annie Oakley, Christina, but leave the gun alone, okay? Hunt and gather in the backpacks. There’s no need to play Rambo, I’ll settle for baked beans. You
can
boil water can’t you?” His voice spat like a rock kicked out by spinning lawnmower blades.

The saddle in her arms hit the ground. She’d been about to explain that she knew guns, that she’d shot targets for years. Now her mouth snapped closed. Tears stung her eyes and she swiped them angrily with the back of her hand. She rubbed damp marks from Sunshine’s coat with the saddle blanket then laid the blanket over a bush to dry. Tate strung a picket line between two of the sturdier trees, secured the horses to it and with nosebags in place, they began to munch.

Christina’s hunt through the remaining packs uncovered baked beans swimming in a pouch of cheesy tomato sauce—her stomach rebelled just looking at it—sliced bread, even a small knob of runny yellow butter inside a greasy plastic wrap. Coffee sachets. Teabags.

Sugar. The flat shelf of rock outcrop began to resemble a bush supermarket. She found cutlery, identical tin mugs and a flat frying pan to add to the pile.

“I’ll get us some firewood,” Tate said, avoiding her eyes. “There’s a billy clipped to my saddle. You could get some water before it gets any darker. And hey, do me a favour?”

“What?”

“Don’t fall in.”

She spun on her heel. Snatching up the billy she swung it by its metal handle, making it squeak as it bumped her thigh. Hoofprints led to the river and she followed them, slipping in the loose sand, stumbling more than once until her boot sent a rock crashing down a shallow gully and sky‐diving off the river bank.

Its splash brought her up short.

The river wasn’t wide here—she could have kicked the rock to the other side if she’d tried—but the banks carved deep, hued in marble‐cake layers of rich red‐brown through which tree roots stroked the earth. No wind marred the water, only birds stirred the trees.

Some branches dipped low, others skimmed the river’s surface. The highest canopies were painted gold by sun but the river and its banks were shaded, tree trunks yellow‐white in the soft light.

It was like standing before a Heysen painting, only she smelled eucalyptus and ancient earth instead of red wine and blue cheese, and the hum in the air was that of insect wings, not air‐conditioning in an art gallery.

Upriver, on the opposite bank, a grey mother kangaroo let her joey clamber from her pouch. Black‐tipped ears flicked back and forth. Its pointed nose twitched. The joey crept a few metres from its mother in that awkward half‐crawl, half‐hop. At a pocket of grass near the base of a tree it hunched, nibbled; sat to scratch an itch.

The mother’s attention didn’t waver.

Christina’s hand floated to her abdomen.

Horse hair prickled through her jodhpurs and it was as if she could feel every tiny needle. And then she was on her knees, a lump in her throat. The billy landed near her heel and rolled in the sand.

I want to be a mother.

A flotilla of ducks torpedoed into the water. Joey leapt for mother. Mother leapt for joey. The joey’s tail chased its hindquarters into her pouch and when it was safely tucked inside, the doe patted her fur with a small grey paw, as if to satisfy herself the contents were all in place.

The ducks cruised around a bend in the river and ripples were the only sign they’d passed.

I could have a baby with Tate.

“Christina?”

She whipped around, grabbed for the billy but only knocked it further away. When she tried to regain her feet, pins and needles shot through her legs and her knees buckled, pitching her back to the sand. Everything ached. Gooseflesh puckered the skin of her forearms.

“Coming,” she yelled toward where she’d heard Tate’s voice. It was hard to judge distance in the bush, sound travelled. He didn’t call again.

How long had she knelt there? Long enough for the kangaroos to vanish, and for her legs to stiffen up. She crawled the last few metres to the riverbank and knelt in the sand, stretching until she could scoop water into the billy. It slopped in her shaking hands.

By the time she made it back to the clearing, a small dome tent thrust upward from the sand and Tate was on his haunches poking the flames of a thirsty fire. Two saddles stood facing the heat, making rustic backrests. He didn’t look up as she approached although she was certain he heard her. She nestled the billy into a flat spot in the coals beside a pan bubbling with orange beans and held her hands out to the heat.

“It’s amazing down there. There isn’t a breath of wind,” she said.

His expression reminded her of a high school English teacher trying to decide whether to believe her excuse for handing in late homework.
The dog ate it
. Yeah right.

“What?” she said. “It
is
beautiful down there.”

“I believe you.” He gave the fire a vicious poke. Sparks whirled high, winked out.

Lily Malone

Clearly, you don’t.

She found a fleecy padded shirt in her backpack for extra warmth. It swam on her.

She had to turn up the sleeves to see her fingers.

“You’re in charge of toast,” Tate said. “Don’t burn it.”

She skewered a slice of bread on a forked stick and concentrated on not turning either to charcoal. The billy hissed. Tate lifted it clear of the coals and they chased baked beans on buttered slices of campfire toast—perfectly charred—with a tin mug of steaming tea.

“It’s powdered milk,” Tate said, eyes on her face as she took that first sip. “It can take some getting used to.”

“You’re telling me.” She threw the rest of the cup to the sand. The metal handle ripped at her blisters. “
Yowza
. Even my teeth hurt.”

“I’m out of practice too.”

He poured hot water into the baked bean pan, swirled it, scoured spoons and plates with sand, rinsed, propped the plates against a rock to dry and sat back down against the saddle. He raised his left knee over his right and every now and then he tapped his boot with a stick.

Christina tried to find a piece of her bottom that didn’t ache. For a while they were quiet, staring at the stars. A frog orchestra struck up harmony to the hypnotic crackle of fire and flame.

“Shasta and Bree don’t have kids?”

The stick gouged a line in the sand near his boot. “Shasta has a son. Ben. He’s sixteen and lives with his mother in Sydney. Shasta doesn’t see him much. Alicia got sole custody.”

“And Bree?”

“She has her dogs. She breeds kelpies. People travel hundreds of miles when Bangor and Belfast have a litter.”

“Did you ever think maybe she can’t have children?”

“Maybe. I’ve never asked.”

Christina wrapped her knees in her arms and let her head fall back. It was a kaleidoscope of stars above, so different to the city’s night‐time canvas. Tate could probably navigate his way to Sydney by the stars; she’d always struggled to find the Southern Cross.

A sideways glanced showed her the play of muscles in his hand and wrist, fingers loose on the stick. Firelight danced on his skin, flecked his hair gold.
He’s a great‐looking
guy
. Then she stopped herself. Half‐an‐hour after her epiphany and she was scoring Tate for genetics.

Guess any kid of mine could always use some height.

“A penny for them,” Tate said, the softest tone he’d used all day.

Whoa no. They’re x‐rated.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask.” His tone implied he didn’t have to answer.

“Why do you feel guilty about Jolie’s death?”

The stick‐tapping stopped. Beyond his shoulder, Sunshine’s tail swished; a white flag in the firelight. Tate took so long to speak, she wasn’t sure he would.

“Jolie always nagged my father to let her come camping with us; she said it shouldn’t be just the boys who had all the fun. We never saw Jols in a dress. If anyone gave her a doll for Christmas or her birthday, she let our dogs trash it.

“Dad caved on her ninth birthday and let her come camping out—we used to do all the mustering on horseback, back then. Jolie wanted to catch a rabbit for dinner. She had this book and the girl in it caught a white dove with a fish hook in its claw and she did it by pretending to be a tree. In the story the little girl crept up on the dove when it wasn’t looking and froze like a tree any time it turned around. So Jolie got it in her head she could catch a rabbit the same way. She tried for two hours to sneak up on one near this big mound of warrens where we camped.”

Christina chuckled.

“Lucky they were too quick for her. Imagine if she’d actually caught Bugs Bunny and my old man stretched his neck and skinned him and put him in the pot? There would have been tears for sure.” In the firelight, his eyes were dark as ink. “I didn’t mean to snap your head off before. When you asked about shooting a rabbit for dinner—it reminded me of Jolie. You do that a lot.”

She batted the apology with a flick of her hand, wanting him to continue.

“Big brothers are supposed to look after little sisters. It’s in our DNA. We’re supposed to vet the boyfriends, tell her none of them are good enough. Ian Callinan slipped past us both. Shasta and Bree were renovating the homestead—they’d just taken over Binara. My folks were a month into their retirement holiday around Australia in the campervan. Outback Brands was gaining real traction. We were all busy. The year Jolie met Callinan, I’d been to Singapore; Sydney for two conferences and Perth, twice.

“Ah fuck it. Listen to me.” He scratched the stubble of whiskers at his jaw. “Nearly six years later and I’m still making excuses.”

“What happened?” Christina prompted.

“She met an asshole. That’s what happened.” He sat forward, stabbed the coals, threw his stick on the flames and watched it burn.

“Ian Callinan was a cop—a rogue cop—only I didn’t know that till later. He almost killed a university kid over a stolen packet of biscuits on the Sunshine Coast in 2003. Jolie met him at a school in Hawker. He’d been transferred from Queensland to Alice Springs while the smoke from the university kid’s bashing died down. He was doing a Stranger Danger talk at Hawker on the same day Jolie held an immunisation clinic there—that’s what she studied. The teachers told me Ian and Jolie hit it off real fast. He could be a charming prick when he wanted to be, apparently,” he gave a thin smile. “That’s how he hid the beast.”

“Not long after they met, Jolie rang me out of the blue to say she and Callinan were at Adelaide airport. They’d each taken unpaid leave and were about to fly to Africa for an overland safari. She wanted me to come out to the airport to meet Ian before they flew out, and I told her I couldn’t get there. I had to go see the real estate agent and sign the contract to buy my house.”

Tate picked up a thick branch from the stockpile near the fire, tossed it a couple of times in his hand as if testing the weight. The remaining logs in the pile shuffled then stilled.

“I sometimes think: what if I’d gone to the airport? Would I have seen through him?

Could I have stopped her going?”

“I don’t know, Tate,” Christina said, because she sensed he needed an answer. “No one could know that.”

He threw the log on the flames. Sparks flew. There was no wind, they arrowed straight up, five, maybe six metres on the hot air.

“Jolie and Ian quit the safari in Uganda. She said he fell‐out with the tour guide over a change in the itinerary. Later, I learned he’d punched the guide hard enough to break his jaw. Ian liked using his fists.”

Lily Malone

“He beat her? Jolie?” Christina asked, horrified.

“I can’t prove it, but I think so.” He took a deep breath. “Jolie wanted to stay in Uganda. She volunteered for an international program that helped women diagnosed with HIV and AIDS become more independent—set‐up home businesses, develop their business skills—that sort of thing. Last time I heard from her, she was upbeat, she felt like she was making a difference. Then the funding for the program dried up,” his voice hardened. “Its sponsor decided there was more publicity in directing money to a campaign to provide Sudanese children with shoes.”

“Jolie went to Kampala to sort out a flight home. On her way back to Bengala, the bus she was traveling in was hit by a truck.”

“I’m so sorry,” Christina whispered.

“That blue shirt with the daisies was the only thing of hers that came back to us. That and her diary. Everything else was gone.”

“This Callinan guy kept her stuff for you?” Christina said.

Tate shook his head, an angry jerk. “He wasn’t even there. He hadn’t been with her for months by then. The Australian Consulate representative told us she died at the scene, that it was quick. Shasta and I had to go over there and bring her body back. She’d always been so full of life and when we saw her in the morgue...” He couldn’t finish. “One of the women in the centre where she worked passed the diary and the shirt to the Consulate rep when he came.”

Christina felt a prickle of tears, wiped at the one that spilled.

“The day after we got back from Uganda, Callinan rang me from London.” Tate looked up and the expression in his eyes made Christina shudder. “He knew about the accident. He knew before we did. The Consulate had his number too. He was the emergency contact on Jolie’s visa.

“He told me he needed money to get back to Australia for her funeral. So I bought his plane ticket. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask him how he could—” He stopped abruptly.

“The prick didn’t even make it. He said he forgot the name of the funeral home.

Funny how he remembered the wake was at The Stag. He drank our beers for hours.” Tate turned toward her, leaning against the backrest of the saddle and opened his arm to his side. “You know how an off‐duty cop looks? Like they’re hanging out for some thug to steal a purse or shoplift a pack of cigarettes or something right before their eyes, just so they can bust him? That was Callinan to a T. Guy had a neck like a bull. When you really looked hard at him, he had these Rottweiler eyes.