Love and Muddy Puddles (8 page)

 Over the next few weeks I perfected the look that I called The Half Roll, where I opened my eyes as wide as I could, looked from side to side and did a slight downward roll of my eyeballs. It wasn’t enough to get me into trouble with Mum who had a thing about rolling your eyes—it usually merited a toilet clean—but it was just enough for me to say, 
Really? Are you kidding me? Is this the way it’s going to be? I’m definitely better than this
.

I did the half roll when I saw the shed that was going to be our new house. 
Seriously? This is disgusting.
 Gravel on the floors, no proper walls—just corrugated iron—with a ‘kitchen’ that was nothing more than a portable stove and a camping fridge attached to a noisy little generator. I did the biggest half roll I could do when Dad set up my ‘bedroom’, which was basically a bed behind a shower curtain. I didn’t even have enough room to put my suitcase out permanently. Every time I wanted to get dressed I had to hoick it on to my bed, choose my clothes and then put the thing away again.

The only thing I didn’t make a half roll face for was the pit toilet. Yes, it smelt, but there was no mud, stinging nettles or leeches, and I guess I had to be grateful for something. I still made sure I checked for brown snakes (actually, for snakes of any colour—it’s just that the brown ones can kill you) every time I went though. It would have been earth-shatteringly embarrassing to have ended up in hospital with a snake bite on my bottom.

Plus, I was trying to minimise the risk of dying in a place where I would probably have the most unfashionable funeral ever. Knowing Dad as I now did, it would be quite likely that he would bury me in a field somewhere and forget all about me. There would be no headstone with an elegant quote, no quietly sobbing people in black hats, no flowers and no yearly visits from my grief-stricken friends coming to lay memorial bottles of nail polish and rolls of sushi on my grave. No. If I was going to die I would have to wait at least 12 months until I got back to the city where I could do it properly.

Josh and Charlie took to the new life like they had been living it forever. They chopped firewood, helped Dad clear space for the house and explored the property with the kind of energy that you get when you put a brand new set of batteries in a set of slot cars. Vrooooom.

I was left with the run-down, mismatched dodgy batteries. The bargain bin, no-name ones with rust and grit on the ends. I hardly had enough energy to get out of bed.

“Come on, Coco,” Charlie said to me every morning. “Let’s go check out the creek/back paddock/olive grove,” or whatever it was that day that was taking her interest. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t really feel like it,” I said. “I’ll just stay here.”

She looked at me concerned. “Are you sure? Do you want me to stay with you?” I shrugged and smiled at her, but it was a weak smile. “I’m okay here.”

She stayed for three minutes but then her curiosity got the better of her and she was off. “I’ll be back later. Promise.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

It was mostly true. Everything was an effort. With no electricity in the shed, I couldn’t believe how much work it was to do even a simple thing like take a hot shower. You had to pump the water from the tank into a drum, build a fire underneath it to heat it up, wait three hours while it heated and then fill the camp shower with buckets of hot water. After that, if you got three minutes you were lucky.

Dad showed me how to do it in the first week. I gave him the half roll and even went to a full roll (out of sight of Mum of course) when he told me that he expected me to do it myself after that. But I couldn’t imagine living without a shower at least once a day so I went through the whole rigmarole every day for a week before finally giving it up as a joke. There are limits to how much work I will do—even if it’s to keep clean and maintain standards. I admitted defeat (but only to myself) and stuck to a simple face and hands routine with a bowl of warm water in the morning and a weekly shower and hair wash.

Life was ridiculous, difficult and grubby. I mean, this is the 21
st
 century, right? As I told Charlie almost every day, people invented electricity and toasters and hairdryers for a reason—because life is better with them. But there was no convincing Dad. He was hopping around every morning like an excited bunny, talking to builders and making plans and marking and measuring and sticking rods in the ground and reading books and talking to Josh about farming and other stupidly boring things that made my head spin. At night he was holding his hands out in front of the fire, sighing and saying, “Oh, now this is living. This is how it’s supposed to be.” Half roll. 
Please.
Charlie was talking about horses, and 
could she get one eventually,
 wearing muddy gumboots, jodhpurs and cowboy hats and sitting on fences like she’d never seen a city in her life. Even Mum, who I thought for sure would have cracked once she realised she’d either have to wash the clothes by hand or take huge loads to the Laundromat a half hour’s drive away (and that’s after she’d made it up the driveway from hell) seemed to be enjoying it.

The days sorted themselves into a routine of food, chores, schoolwork, more chores, more food and more schoolwork. I did the half roll when Mum first pulled out books and pens and things. “Why even bother?” I muttered under my breath. “If we’re going to live in Middle Earth, I don’t think we need algebra. I’m sure that hobbits didn’t learn biology.”

As it turned out, there was a benefit to doing school at the farm. For one thing, it didn’t take so long. I spent three hours doing stuff we took six to get through at school, so I was definitely saving time. The question was, though, for what? There was no TV, no internet, no electricity, nowhere to go and nothing to do. There was also no one to talk to.

Or so I thought.

When we first arrived I’d assumed we were living out here all alone, kind of like in the stories when someone gets marooned on an island in the middle of the ocean and there’s no one around for miles and no way of contacting the mainland.

But apparently that wasn’t so. Other people actually lived here in Budgong. By choice. And they liked it. 
Who knew?

We’d only been living in the shed for three weeks or so when I’d had yet another argument with Josh during my afternoon maths time (Him: 
No, stupid, you have to carry the one. Didn’t they even teach you addition at school? How did I get such a dumb sister?
 Me, lunging forward and pulling his hair: 
Get out of my face you idiot!) 
and had been sent out of the shed by Mum to cool down.

I was wandering around the bottom of the paddock, kicking morosely at stumps of grass when I heard a low booming kind of noise. 
A storm? Thunder?
 I thought idly, but thunder is over quickly and this was getting louder. 
Traffic?
 
Oh. D’oh. 
I smacked my forehead
.
 There was a definite rhythm to it, a beating and drumming and then a kind of whooping and yelling. And then I could feel vibrations in the ground. 
Earthquake? Just my luck
.

But then I saw them. Two enormous horses, one white and one brown, exploding out of the bush and racing across our paddock towards me. I’d never seen a horse gallop before and the two of them together looked ferocious. I thought horses were supposed to be nice, sweet things with ribbons in their manes and ridden by little girls, but let me tell you, that’s a complete myth invented by the publishing industry who just want to sell pony stories. These horses looked crazy. One had its mouth open with scary teeth and the other was actually foaming and frothing.

I was confused for a second but then the panic hit.

They’re coming right for me
, I thought. I couldn’t control the squeal that came out of my mouth and my legs took themselves, as fast as they could run, to hide me behind a tree stump. I squatted down, shivering with fright and hid my face in my hands.

Through my fingers I could see the horses pass me at what sounded like super-sonic speed but then I heard a yell and I saw the people riding wheel around and walk back towards me.

They stopped.

It was awkward.

There were two of them, on impressive looking horses, and only one of me, hiding behind a ridiculously tiny tree stump. Plus they’d just seen me squealing like a squashed guinea pig, my paws over my face. It wasn’t what I’d call a good beginning.

“Hey, person behind the stump,” said the boy. He was riding the brown horse, which turned out to be even bigger than it looked now that it was standing five metres from my face. It didn’t stay still like the other one and kept dancing around slightly. The boy had to work hard to keep it under control. It was sweating too, which I could smell, and had big wet, foamy patches on its body under the saddle and down its back legs. I screwed up my nose. 
Ew.

“Hey, are you okay?” said the boy again, looking at me like he was concerned. I got up stiffly from my squat and tilted my chin at him, like there was nothing more normal than hiding behind a small wooden stump in a paddock in the middle of nowhere.

“What do you want?” I said, looking hard at him. He was about 15, I was guessing and wearing jeans, a blue flannelette shirt, a riding helmet and the most stupid looking pair of Cuban heeled cowboy boots you’ve ever seen. The sort of thing the extras wear in the old westerns that they play at midday in non-rating periods to fill up the TV schedules. 
Do people really wear these things for real? 
I looked up at the sky. 
If this is where you’ve put me, take me now. I’m ready to die.

The girl on the white horse stared at me. She was also in jeans, with (thankfully) normal riding boots, but her red t-shirt was clearly from the $4 table at K-mart and was, sadly, completely the wrong shape for her rather large chest.

“What are you doing here?” she said, and suddenly I could see the family likeness in them. Unfortunately for them, their family likeness wasn’t a very good one. They both had sharp noses and the kind of blond hair that just looks dirty rather than beachy. They did have one good feature—their bright blue eyes. 
Eyes are crucial
, I always think. But when everything else needs work, sometimes even perfect eyes are not enough.

Brother and sister, definitely
, I thought. And Miss Wrong Shirt was probably just a bit younger than Mr Cuban Heels. 
Maybe thirteen or fourteen
?

The girl spoke again from up high on her horse. “Where are you from?”

“Yeah, who are you?” said her brother. He was still trying to make his horse stand still. It obviously didn’t like him.

I suddenly felt small. Maybe it was the fact that both of them were perched metres above me on huge enormous animals that could have eaten me for breakfast. (Okay, I know horses are herbivores, but seriously, the teeth... ) Maybe it was the fact that I’d been caught out squealing and quaking with fear in the middle of a paddock. I don’t know. But when I feel small, I get defensive.

“Who are 
you
?” I snapped back. And then I got protective. “And what are you doing 
here
?”

It was ironic, I know. I hated this paddock and all the rest of it—the creek, the shed, the property, the whole place, in fact—but at least it was my place to hate. Now these two style-deprived twits were trespassing and I was going to have something to say about it.

“Sorry?” said the girl. She looked quizzically at her brother. “We always ride here.”

He nodded, looking straight at me. “Yup. This is where we ride. Since, like, for years.” His face was earnest but I was angry.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You’re on my land. I live here.”

“Really? There’s no house,” said the boy, blinking. His voice was direct and his face seemed honest. And for some reason I didn’t like that. At all. I’d been annoyed with him up until now. It was at this point that I started to actually hate him.

“There will be a house. We’re building one.” I said, making my eyes hard. “Ever heard of real estate deals? That’s where you buy and sell property. My family bought this property. That makes me the owner and you the person who doesn’t get to ride here, 
since, like, for years
.”

I took a breath. “So you can take your cheap flannelette shirt and your sweaty horse and your whole Royal Easter Show thing,” I waved my hand in the air towards him, “and you can ride away into the sunset. Bye bye.”

The girl looked shocked and turned to her brother but he shrugged his shoulders at her. “Let’s go,” he said. “Anyway, look,” he said, gesturing to his horse which was still dancing and snorting. “She’s completely ready to go.” As he turned his horse around he looked back at me and tried to smile. “Maybe see you later.”

I tossed my head and put my hands on my hips and watched them ride away. It felt so good to have some power that I couldn’t help it. I yelled after him.

“Oh, and your boots? Seriously. No-one actually wears those things except on Australiana-tourist ‘throw another shrimp on the barbie’ TV ads they make for Japanese visitors. They’re a complete cliché.”