Rachael Treasure - The Farmer’s Wife

When he opened the photo up on his phone, he smiled and chuckled. There, on the small screen, was the image of Janine Turner in some rare kind of silky purple number with what looked like a black salami thrusting up from her ample cleavage. Come get me later, cowboy! came the message.

Charlie Lewis drained the last of his stubby. He paused for a moment. Knowing he shouldn’t, but with the blandness of his life pushing him on, he reached for his belt buckle with a wicked grin on his face. What was wrong with a little bit of play? Janine was always up for it. She was about to get a nice shot of his gear stick. That would fix her.

Doreen and Dennis Groggan’s farmhouse was set in an over-grazed paddock in a narrow valley. Etched along that valley was a jagged, eroded tributary that, in times of rain, fed the larger Rebecca River to the east, the river after which Rebecca was named. The Groggans’ was a small, poor dirt farm surrounded by a swathe of bushland that swept up and over rocky gullies and ridges. The land and the isolation of the farm made it not so profitable, so as a result, on weekdays Dennis drove the school bus and Doreen worked at the school as the cleaner and groundsman. Judging from the state of the house, Doreen was good at keeping things in order at home too, Rebecca thought.

On their silver wedding anniversary, Dennis had painted the weatherboards yellow-green for Doreen after being inspired by the colours of their budgie. Rebecca looked at the meticulous yet overdone house and garden. The colour reminded her not so much of a budgie as of a pus-filled cheesy gland on a sheep.

‘What would have been so wrong with cream or white? That’s just downright tacky,’ she said, gazing long-faced at the neat-as-a-pin budgie-coloured house. They rounded Doreen’s turning circle of conifers, strategically placed bush rocks, wagon wheels and concrete creatures.

‘Get over yourself, cranky pants,’ Gabs said, this time sternly.

Rebecca almost hung her head in shame. Where had this dark mood descended from? And was it actually a mood? These days it felt more like a way of being . As if she had been like it for years.

The notion scared her. She looked out the window again, not wanting to socialise here with these women. Not wanting to be anywhere.

She could see most of the guests had arrived so the brittle yellow front lawn was already filled with a selection of battered dust-buffed country cars and utes. Rebecca rolled her eyes when she saw dark-haired Janine Turner totter forth aboard tarty ‘follow-me-home-and-fuck-me’ shoes of shining gold. Janine tugged down a purple negligee over ample Nigella-style hips while balancing a bowl of corn chips, her handbag and a purple horse-lunging whip in the other hand. She waved gaily to them as they parked.

‘Oh geez! Look at her get-up!’ Rebecca grimaced. ‘You never told me it was fancy dress !’

‘You never would’ve come.’ Gabs unclipped her seat belt, swung round to the back and dragged out a Woolies green bag. ‘Ta-da!’ she said, emptying the contents of the bag onto Bec’s lap. Rebecca pulled a face as she held up the items one by one: a sequined silver skirt trimmed with feathers, an orange boob tube, red high heels and a packet of red fishnets.

‘So? Do you like your kinky costume? I made the skirt out of one of Kylie’s princess dresses from the costume box. Don’t tell her. She’ll get the shits up. And I got the shoes on eBay. I think they had a bit of Baby Oil or something on them, but I cleaned them.’

‘You are joking, right?’

‘Shut up and get changed.’ Gabs grinned. ‘Or you’ll be the odd one out.’

‘What’s new?’

‘You could just thank me,’ Gabs fired back. ‘Where’s your attitude of gratitude?’

Rebecca shook her head, knowing her friend was right. What had happened to her life? She used to be so sure of her place in the world. She never went to women’s gatherings, preferring to be out in the pub or the paddocks. Sure she’d had to debate every decision every inch of the way in a three-way tussle between herself, her father and Charlie, but they had started out with what she thought was a shared dream. Then the babies had come. And life had changed. She found herself driving off to play group and doctors’ appointments and ladies’ fundraising lunches while the men punched sheep through yards, their world obscured to her by dust.

She would glance in the mirror at the two little boys in their car seats, Ben with his dark hair and sincere brown eyes and Archie with his wayward blond locks and dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes of blue. She loved them with every cell of her body, but the daily grind of domestics that they created was eroding her very being. Then there was Charlie. Rebecca pulled her thoughts up so they slid to a stop like a reined-in horse. Her thoughts drifted hopefully, involuntarily, to Andrew. But again she put on the brakes. She just couldn’t go there. He’s just a friend, she told herself.

Keep it shallow. Shallow, like her breathing had become. Shallow like her life.

‘Don’t just sit there,’ Gabs said as she applied a thick layer of blue glitter eye shadow to her heavy lids in the rear-vision mirror, then tried to pluck a solo chin hair out with her thick thumb and forefinger. ‘You’ve got tarting up to do.’

‘And what about you?’ asked Bec as she began to reluctantly kick off her boots and pull her socks from her hot puffy feet. ‘I don’t see you wearing a costume.’

Gabs glanced over to her slyly, then with a daredevil grin ripped off her oversized T-shirt.

‘Ta-da!’ she said again, revealing a black-and-red bustier, her white bosoms spilling up over the top of the lacy cups. Her farmer’s singlet tan lines made her look a lot like a paint horse of white and brown.

‘Frank goes nuts for me when I dress up. The other night we got pissed on Beam and he told me to get naked except for my cowgirl boots. And I did —’

‘Too much information!’ Bec said, holding up her hand and smiling. But internally she grimaced. How many years had it been since she and Charlie had mucked around like that? Since Ben was born six years back? Since before then? She couldn’t remember. She could only recall the cold wall of his back and the passionless way he grappled at her in the early hours of the morning, when her body was leaden with exhaustion. He entered her with primal thrusts that were absent of care or love. There was an air of aggression within him that had started to cloud his contact with her. Bec could even feel it in his touch. She rubbed at her shoulder that felt bruised from their clash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d shoved her in a rage.

As she pulled on the fishnets, she felt the shame of leading such a disappointing life hidden within her apparently functional marriage. On the neighbouring farm, there was Gabs, who must be pushing eighty kilos, naked in cowboy boots doing the wild thing with an even beefier Frank after ten years together. Frank and Gabs seemed madly crazy about each other still, apart from telling each other to fuck off every now and then. They had met at Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding. Gabs, her best mate from Ag College, was one of the bridesmaids and Frank had been invited along as he was one of the local farmers. A relationship had sparked between Gabs and Frank over a post-wedding-day carton of beer that they shared on the back of a ute by a dam. Soon Rebecca had found her good college buddy moving into her very own district and marrying her neighbour. At the time, both girls had thought they’d each stumbled upon a match made in heaven. Not so now, Rebecca thought. Only one of them had got it right. Here she was, practically a born-again virgin in wedlock. As Rebecca jammed on the red shoes, she noticed the way her lily-white sock marks were still evident through the fishnet stockings, drawing a line on her ankles that ran to summer-brown legs, a bit on the hairy side. Like Gabs, since motherhood, she too had put on weight and with the fishnets hoicked up to her hips, she imagined her thighs might look a bit like Christmas hams.