Outback Sunset (16 page)

‘Nova’s going to set up several targets on the other side of the creek, about fifteen metres away,’ Bren said.

Vanessa watched Nova clamber down the bank and head for the other side of the narrow creek. ‘Perhaps I should aim at a tree. I might be able to hit something that big.’

‘You might, but the tree wouldn’t appreciate it.’ He passed her a box of bullets. ‘Load the chamber, as I showed you to.’

In her nervousness, Vanessa fumbled and two shiny bullets fell onto the ground. Eventually she had all of them in place.

Bren came around behind her and showed her where to place the butt of the rifle, against the inside hollow of her shoulder. He put a folded piece of cloth behind the butt, explaining as he did, ‘To protect you from being bruised. The rifle weighs less than eight kilos but it has a strong kickback for a woman.’

‘Thanks.’ She tried to quell her nerves. Her legs felt shaky and her mouth had gone dry. The feelings were as bad as the first on-stage entry of a new performance.

‘Okay, Nova and the dogs are back. Sight one of the targets, close your left eye, like I told you. Now, squeeze the trigger, do it slowly …’

Bang! Vanessa didn’t know which was worse — the noise the rifle’s discharge made or how it kicked against her shoulder.

A previously silent flock of little corellas squawked with fright and outrage then took to the sky. Sandy, sitting next to the bike, began to howl. A lone kangaroo napping in the shade scrambled to its feet and, indignant at having its rest disturbed, bounded into the scrub.

‘Did I hit anything?’

‘Which target were you aiming at?’ Nova teased, holding back the urge to snigger at Vanessa’s ineptitude. She was getting very good at pretending to be her best buddy.

‘The biggest, of course, the drum.’

‘Nope,’ Nova’s reply was dry, ‘it didn’t move.’

‘Patience, hon, you’ve got to “get your eye in”. Prime the rifle then empty the chamber at the target. It’s going to take a while for you to hit what you aim at.’

‘I might still be trying when the wet comes.’

Bren grinned at her frustration. ‘It takes patience. Nova can supervise you with an hour’s practice on a regular basis till you’re competent.’

‘Gee, thanks, Bren,’ Nova muttered softly, her expression saying as clearly as words what she thought of that idea. ‘I was planning to “get out of Dodge” so to speak before the wet arrives, to visit friends in Sydney and Melbourne.’

‘That’s okay. I’ll do it,’ Bren said. He glanced towards the ranges, his gaze narrowed against the fading light. ‘Pack your bags soon. The wet’ll be here in days, if not hours.’

‘How do you know that?’ Vanessa was curious as to how he could predict the wet’s arrival so accurately.

‘A feeling. After enough years watching and waiting, you, umm, kind of sense when it’s on its way.’ He took the rifle off Vanessa and blew on the chamber to cool the mechanism. ‘Reload it, hon.’

Vanessa was on her third reload when the dogs started to bark at someone coming down the creek bed. It was Curtis riding hell for leather on his horse. He was waving his hat in the air as if he had something important to tell them. Reining in hard made his horse neigh and snort in protest. He and the horse were soaked — his sandy coloured hair was plastered to his head, his T-shirt to his body.

Nova gave a low whistle. ‘Hey, what’s this, wet T-shirt time? Darn, we didn’t bring any grog.’

‘The wet!’ Curtis grinned at them. ‘It’s raining in the foothills, bloody lovely. Buckets and buckets of it.’

‘Which means you’ll be taking off to see Regan,’ Bren remarked astutely.

‘Too right. My bag’s already packed.’

Vanessa’s gaze settled on Nova who was giving Curtis a brief, hungry look. She supposed her brother-in-law was attractive in a lean, wiry way, but his features weren’t as strongly pronounced as Bren’s. Poor woman. Nova had it bad and it was sad that Curtis had no idea how she felt, no idea at all.

‘Can I cadge a ride to Darwin with you?’ Nova asked.

‘Sure, if you can be ready to leave when I am.’

Nova smiled at him, ‘Oh, I’ll be ready.’ She was more than ready for a change. After playing ‘little miss nice’ to Vanessa, of going out of her way to be friendly and informative, she was somewhat weary of the play-acting. How and why Vanessa did it for a living, she couldn’t understand. The Englishwoman was okay, in her own way, and she had gleaned a good deal of interesting information about acting, agents and famous people, but she needed to be somewhere where she could be herself and hang out with her friends, not just Bren’s wife.

Bren took the rifle off Vanessa. ‘Guess that’s it for today.’ He glanced towards Curtis and Nova. ‘They have other plans.’

Vanessa wasn’t sorry the shooting lesson was over and she felt slightly more at ease with the weapon now. She hopped back on the bike, started it, then motioned for Sandy to jump up into her lap. As she rode back to the homestead distant claps of thunder and flashes of forked and sheet lightning in a
darkening, northern sky, provided a wonderful sound and light show of what was to come.

Experiencing the wet for the first time gave Vanessa a new perspective on where she lived. Being English, and used to it raining, she marvelled that any piece of land could absorb as much water as Amaroo land did. The tennis court — she, Fran and Nova had scrupulously weeded the court, applied white paint to show the correct lines, and repaired the wire fencing where it had rusted through — lay submerged be neath several centimetres of water and would be unplayable for months.

She shook her head, remembering that two weeks ago they had held a late in the afternoon to evening tennis day. Lauren, Marc and the boys had flown in from Cadogan’s Run. The Johns had come from Linford Downs, with Fay and Barry Whitcombe, and it was nice to see them again. It had been a marvellous afternoon and evening culminating in a barbecue and a sing-a-long around a communal camp fire. Nova had been the star performer, accompanying herself on guitar, and even the quiet, laconic Reg had performed a solo on his harmonica.

The depression where the swimming pool was supposed to be had turned into a lake, to the appreciation of local waterfowl and a few wild ducks. Vanessa had read and been told that people in the outback went troppo, slightly mad, during the build-up to and after several weeks of being confined by isolation due to flooding. She soon found out who and how people were affected on Amaroo.

Reg didn’t find it hard to relax — he caught up on his reading and listening to his much-prized record collection. Fran coped by working her way through a basket of mending and sewing that built up throughout the year, by reorganising the pantry and doing advance food orders, cooking and freezing. Bren was like a caged animal. Inactivity was anathema to him — he hated it, and with Curtis and Nova away from Amaroo there were too few distractions to occupy him.

Bren’s restlessness caused Vanessa to recall what Nova had said on her first day at Amaroo — ‘the trick to not getting bored is to keep busy’. She found plenty of tasks to keep herself occupied, including reading and memorising her lines for the forthcoming movie. Having Bren read the other parts helped her to learn her own and to immerse herself in the character of Annie Brompton, the English woman befriended by jillaroo, Sara Jones, and the adventures they had in the movie. ‘Annie’ wasn’t the leading role, but hers was a solid character part and she found herself able to draw from her experiences at Amaroo to give her character depth and individuality. She hoped the director would appreciate her efforts to get into the character’s head and indeed to become Annie.

‘Don’t know how you do it,’ Bren complimented after they’d worked the final scene through. ‘You’ve got Annie’s part down perfectly, hon.’

‘A good grounding at Amaroo has helped that.’ She scooped Sandy up into her lap and the dog responded by resting his front paws on her chest and licking her neck. After a while, giggling because his
tongue tickled, she said, ‘Enough, boy’, and ruffled his fur and patted him till he settled.

‘You know, if you could get a movie part every year in Australia, you wouldn’t have to work in England, Europe or America.’

‘True, but actresses have to go where the parts are. Unfortunately, movie roles don’t come up often here — the Australian film industry is small. Even so, Kerri — she has many contacts in live theatre, and films — will find work for me in Australia.’ She smiled at him. He was getting restless again. ‘I’m registered with the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance — the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s Actors Equity and get their quarterly magazine,
Equity
, which details future stage and film projects. Evidently, major cities on the east coast produce quite a few dramatic projects during the course of a year.’

Bren rubbed his thumb and second finger on his left hand together, to imply money, ‘Wouldn’t pay as well though.’

‘No,’ she agreed, ‘the trade-off would be that I’d be closer to home.’

‘I’d like that.’

With the script out of the way, Vanessa watched as he continued to fidget. He got up, walked to the living-room window and looked out. Rain still beat down steadily, if not torrentially, as it had for the last two weeks. Inside the air was musty from the dampness, and the furniture when touched had a sticky feel, and while the air wasn’t as steamy as it had been before the wet, a good night’s sleep was still hard to come by. No one was working at their
usual pace and, therefore, not as tired when they went to bed. Thinking about that — the lack of exercise— gave Vanessa an idea!

She put Sandy on the floor, got up and went to the hi-fi system where she chose a CD and pushed the play button. Classical Spanish guitar music, accompanied by castanets and tambourines, flooded every corner of the room. She pushed the coffee table out of the way, moved one of the leather chairs back to make more space and, barefoot, began to dance a traditional Spanish dance, one her mother had taught her. Hearing the music, Bren turned back to her, grinned with delight and sat on the arm of the sofa to watch. When the music’s beat changed to a cha-cha, she sidled over to Bren.

‘Time for you to learn how to dance, husband of mine.’

‘I’m hopeless,’ he tried to get out of it, ‘no sense of rhythm.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Shaking her head made her blond hair sway this way and that as she moved in front of him to the music’s beat.

‘You know I have two left feet,’ he protested.

She ignored him and pulled him upright into the space she had created. ‘Practice will change that.’

‘You reckon?’ His expression was doubtful.

Vanessa smiled confidently. ‘I am a very good teacher.’ She put his right hand on her shoulder, his other hand on her hip. ‘It’s easy, just follow me, one two three, stamp, cha cha cha. See, like this.’

After several minutes of stumbling, treading on her feet and becoming increasingly frustrated, Bren growled deep in his throat and muttered, ‘I can’t do it.’

‘Bren, you’re not hearing the beat.
Listen.’
She grabbed both his hips and began to rock them from side to side with the beat. ‘Yes, yes, that’s it.’

Her patience paid off. Two minutes later he wasn’t stumbling. Another two minutes and he was getting right into it and then … As his expression relaxed, his gaze ran appreciatively over her gyrating form. He stopped dancing to pull her into his arms, and kissed her long and hard and deep.

‘We can find something more interesting to do than dancing …’ he whispered in her ear. Her responsive tinkling laugh sent a ripple of arousal through him. His grip on her tightened.

‘And I was beginning to think you’d never cotton on to where this might be leading,’ she teased, batting her eyelids coquettishly.

He laughed as he picked her up in his arms and carried her into their bedroom …

Nova Morrison sat on a bench that afforded her a good view of the Archibald Fountain in Sydney’s Hyde Park. She was waiting for someone. More correctly for two someones — Curtis and Regan Selby. At her suggestion they were going to spend the day together. In truth, she would rather have been alone with Curtis but that wasn’t possible because of his daughter, so she accepted the alternative knowing she would only receive a percentage of Curtis’s attention, not all of it.

She squinted behind her sunglasses as she studied the scene, and waited. Hmmm, just how long had she been waiting for Curtis to notice her as a woman? Her cheeks warmed as she recalled the
teenage crush she had had on him. At fourteen, and home on holidays, she had noticed for the first time that he was gorgeous, and masculine, and … unattainable. By the time she went back to school in Clermond she was in love … Then he had met Georgia and theirs had been a whirlwind romance. Curtis had married before she’d grown up and she had told herself that was it, that he was out of reach.

But, wonder of wonders, the marriage hadn’t lasted. Curtis had fallen out of love with his wife and now he was free again. But … was he really free, she asked herself? She knew him as well as anyone at Amaroo, enough to be aware of his continuing hostility towards his ex. Rightly so. Georgia was a conniving bitch and she had taken him for a massive emotional and financial ride, after which he had developed — though he kept it hidden under a mantle of diffidence — a chip on his shoulder when it came to women. Look how he felt about Vanessa! She crossed her legs and pulled her short skirt down when an older man in a three piece suit, probably a lawyer or a doctor because he’d come from Macquarie Street, walked by leering at her. Perv!

From the moment Curtis laid eyes on Vanessa, he’d done nothing but find fault with everything she did. She was too beautiful. She was too soft. She’d get bored with Bren and Amaroo. She was role-playing. According to him the list of her shortcomings was endless. Curiously though, his prophecy that the marriage would sour, that Vanessa’d get bored and want to return to England, hadn’t come to pass, at least not yet. Who the hell cared? Deep down she didn’t. Long ago she had
decided to milk Vanessa for all the information the woman was worth and, the funny thing was, Vanessa — who tended to look for the good rather than the bad in people — was being calculatedly cultivated by a woman several years her junior and she didn’t know it.