Australian Love Stories (17 page)

When she was ten and he was eighteen he told her about the racehorse goanna. She and Penny were riding and Penny was way ahead on the firebreak along the railway line. Even though they were going flat-out, it was so comfortable in the Western style saddle it was like being on a rocking horse. Susan relaxed, looking at the silvery rails glinting on her right and the dove-grey fuzz of the bush on her left. And then she saw it, a long-legged thing darting through the scrub, keeping pace with her.

Bill was there when they got back to the yard. He helped pull the saddles off and made the girls laugh by squirting water into the horses' mouths with the hose. They lifted their top lips so the girls could see the pink undersides and their yellow teeth and grinned as the water splashed up.

‘A big lizard ran beside me,' she said. ‘He was so fast!'

‘That's a racehorse goanna,' he said. ‘A
karda
. Good eating.'

‘Yuck!' said Penny.

‘Roast it over the fire. Good,' he said.

Susan beamed like one of the horses. She'd thought it was her imagination. Her parents were always telling her she had too much of it.

When she was thirteen and he was twenty-one he steered the ute slow across a paddock and the four kids walked behind, picking mallee roots. He drove at their pace, listening to country and western songs on the radio, his arm on the open window. They fanned out behind and chucked a root onto the tray if they saw one. The ground had been gone over scores of times since Mr Clark's father's day but still it yielded the knotty burls that made a hot fire in the lounge of a night.

They worked for a couple of hours and got a few dozen roots. There was enough room for them all to sit in the tray together and Susan loved the relief of sitting down again, of being bounced quite fast across the furrows they'd walked so slowly. The air was spritzy with the smell of eucalypts and sheep.

Bill drove back to the main house and they unloaded the roots onto the wood pile.

‘You've done a cracker job, all of you,' Mr Clark said.

‘Why does he talk like that?' Penny said to Susan under her breath.

‘It's a cracker word,' Susan said.

‘Biscuits, do you feel like taking them up to the cave?' Mr Clark said. ‘They'll be bored in five minutes otherwise. I'd ban school holidays if I had my way.'

‘Sure, Boss.'

They piled into the tray of the ute again and Bill turned the radio right up because he liked Johnny Cash.

Bill sang along, his voice floating back to the four kids: ‘
…a ring of fire, a ring of fire.'

They all joined in, so loudly that sheep lifted their heads from their grazing to see what the noise was.

Bill headed up a track Susan had never been on. It was always Penny who opened and closed the gates for the vehicles that crisscrossed the farm. She was the oldest of the Clark sisters and the place would be hers one day. This gate led not to another paddock but to a tussocky hill too rocky and steep for crops. It looked like it had never been cleared.

‘We can't drive any further,' Bill said after a while, stopping the engine. ‘Even a four wheel drive couldn't take this country. So we'll walk, okay?'

The kids groaned but jumped off the ute eagerly all the same and followed Bill upwards, still singing out phrases from the song.

They came to a place where lichen-streaked rocks jutted out of the ground. From up here, the farm looked insignificant but the lake winked in the sun like a sheet of corrugated iron.

‘Just behind this boulder, look,' Bill said.

Susan saw a shadowy gap in the rocks. Not much bigger than a fox hole.

‘Black fellas lived here a long time ago,' he said. ‘Go in and look round if you like. You have to crawl at first but then you can stand.'

‘I've been in lots of times,' Penny said. ‘It's boring.'

‘Yeah,' said Judy.

‘I'll go in,' said Susan's brother.

‘Me too,' said Susan.

She followed him into the squeezy opening. It quickly widened to a space that Susan guessed was about the size of a bathroom but it was too dark to see much. The air was cold inside the cave but she could imagine people sitting around a fire, singing maybe, the flames reflecting on the high walls and making a dancing light in the opening. Other groups of Noongars all around, in the bush that was just a few mallee roots now, would see the light above them, would see lots of campfires flickering all around.

‘It's good in there,' she said to Bill when she crawled out. He was having a smoke, sitting on one of the flat rocks with a view for miles. Penny and Judy were in the ute, listening to more Johnny Cash.

‘Do you really like it?' he said.

‘Yeah.'

When she was fourteen and he was twenty-two she saw him swimming.

They'd gone to the lake that was bordered on one side by the Clarks' farm. Ewlymartup. Susan hoped to see the black swans that had been there last time but there were none, only groups of people splashing in the salty water and a few being towed behind motorboats on old doors and even an ironing board.

Bill was with them because it was too hot for work. Over many days, he'd driven all the newly harvested wheat and oats to the silo at the siding in the big red Bedford and Mr Clark said he'd done a great job.

It was so hot that even Mrs Clark went swimming with her bathing cap that had rubber flowers all over it. She waded carefully into the water in case there was a cobbler that would
bite her toes and then did breaststroke, keeping her head and neck well out of the water. Mr Clark was the funniest, with his wobbly tummy that hung over his swim shorts. He had a bluewhite torso, upper arms and thighs, but in the places that copped the sun, his skin was the colour of Susan's parents' mahogany coffee table. His feet and ankles were white too. Penny, Judy, Susan's brother and Susan were tanned even though summer had only just started. They were already training for next year's swimming carnival in the Katanning town pool. Only when they were all in the water did Bill toss off his shirt and step out of his khaki work shorts. He had green boxers underneath. He was the same warm brown colour all over and his body was tall and slim and strong as a eucalypt. He swam off to a group of young women and Susan saw him lift one of them out of the water and launch her into the air. From way up, she dived down amongst the waterweeds and pulled up a handful to drape over his longish curly hair. They were laughing.

Susan wished she was older and that she was the woman he tossed so easily into the water. She'd have liked to feel his cool arms around her and to put the palm of her hand flat on his chest to feel his heart beating under his ribs.

Mrs Clark had made sandwiches from the tomatoes and white round cucumbers she grew near the rainwater tank. They were warm from the sun when she sliced them thinly and dusted them with salt and pepper. She always made a few loaves of sandwiches for their trips to the lake as the icy water made everyone hungry, she said. There was a bag of apples too, the stubby ones that grew in what was left of the orchard. And a knife and breadboard if anyone wanted to cut the worm riddled bits off.

They all came out shivering and lay on the warm rocks that gave off a blood-like tang in the sun. Mrs Clark handed round the food, which was delicious after swimming when there was already a pleasant earthy taste in Susan's mouth from the lake water.

Bill left the girl he'd thrown to the sky and walked on bare feet across the rocks and the prickles to fetch the canvas waterbag that hung from the front of the Clarks' Jeep. Susan could see the muscles in his legs pumping as he moved, the water glistening on him. He came back and they drank from it, all of them, not bothering to wipe the opening when it was their turn, but Bill only ate one quarter of a sandwich. He was sitting next to Susan and she bisected an apple and held it out for him, cut side up, so he could see the perfect star shape in the middle. He smiled.

When she was sixteen and he was twenty-four she fell off Penny's horse on the path where the donkey orchids and rare hammer orchids grew under the sheoaks. The horse went back to the yard without her and Mr Clark and Penny took the Jeep to go looking and Bill took the ute. He knew she liked that track because she'd told him just that morning the sheoaks made her laugh because they were so, so sad, sighing melodramatically for nothing. Penny had her period and hadn't gone riding that day but she thought Susan must have come off on the abandoned racetrack. So the vehicles had gone in different directions to find her. The others stayed at the farmhouse in case she limped back.

She was conscious again when she looked into Bill's eyes.

‘You okay?' he said.

‘Hm, hm,' she said. Her head hurt a bit.

‘Can you walk to the ute?'

‘I think so.'

But she was too dizzy, so he scooped her up when she wobbled and she smelt the bushy whiff of him and buried her nose in the soft skin under his ear. She liked the feel of his ironstrong arms around her, his big chest with its heart pounding against her ribs. He put her in the passenger seat and took off the cap of the waterbag. She gulped some down and thought she'd be sick but he steadied her by putting a hand on her shoulder.

‘Take it slow,' he said. ‘You'll be right.'

As he drove her back to the house she looked at him, knowing he was concentrating on the road. The gravel was slidey and cockatoos whooshed through the sky in drifts of white and sulphur. He'd hate to hit one, she knew. She admired his profile, his heavy brow and jutting jaw. His cowboy belt with its silver buckle hung loose around his hips. His Levis strained over his muscular thighs and her eyes were drawn to the shape below the buckle.

‘Don't look at me, kid,' he said.

When she was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine she heard he'd got a girl pregnant. She'd wanted to invite him to her twenty-first but her parents said it would be inappropriate. Not because he was to be a father but because he was a black.

She went to see him in the weatherboard cottage Mr Clark let him live in. It was sometimes used for the shearers' cook but mostly it was free. Penny, Judy and her brother were playing tennis on the old court near the main house but she'd hurt her ankle dancing in high heels and said she wanted to pick some figs.