Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

Alan is the bloke I’ve tracked down who has advertised for a new roustabout. It’s the only sheep job that doesn’t say, ‘Skill Level: Experienced’ next to it; instead it says ‘Skill Level: Intermediate’, but Alan’s interview is pretty much: ‘You scared of bloody sheep at all?’ and when I say no and he has a look at my arms, it seems a done deal, and he doesn’t even glance at the side-of-paper CV I printed off in the internet café which is made up.

When the first day in Alan’s team comes, it has me feeling sick, like there’s a test I don’t know how to pass, but no one looks surprised to see a woman in the woolshed where the tin roof keeps the heat in, and pushes it down on our heads. It smells like piss and burnt hair, but I’ve smelled worse things.

‘I’m Jake,’ I say to the men. I hold up my hand, and they look back, six of them all the same, the same hats and jeans, the same sun-dark skin and hair that pokes out just a little bit at the sides. Someone says, ‘G’day mate,’ and two of them lift their hands back at me. One of them pushes his hat to the back of his head to look at me and smiles. He’s got a wide face, deep-set blue eyes.

‘You the cook, mate?’ asks a man with a red moustache and someone answers for me, telling me, ‘Nah, Sid’s cook. Sid Hargreve.’ And I breathe out, thinking of feeding all those men burnt chops and eggs.

‘She’s bloody roustabout for now,’ Alan says from behind me, ‘an’ we’ll see how she goes from there.’ He claps me on the back. ‘She’s got a pair of shoulders on her,’ and there’s a nod from most of the men — they have seen stranger things — and they all turn back to their gear, checking blades and blowing dust and sheep skin out from behind the teeth. At the side of the shed I can hear a mechanical grinder at work. One of the men stands still, holding his shears and just looking, with no expression I can understand. A sweat breaks out on my upper lip. I’d like a smoke, but not in front of everyone.

Alan shows me where I’ll sleep.

‘We get a woman now and again working with us — no one that’s stayed on too long. I’m not bloody prejudice,’ he says, ‘but sleeping is the tricky bloody thing. If I get caught not offering you a separate room, I’m in the bloody poo.’ He shows me into the shed where there are two utes parked and a dirt bike. There’s a cot-bed set up in a corner of the shed, which is a work area — the bench has been cleared of tools and petrol and given a wipe down. There’s a green plastic washing-up basin there and a bar of soap. ‘Also, I’m supposed to provide a separate bloody washing facility. There’s a tap round the back.’

He turns and looks me up and down. ‘How are ya with spiders?’

Ben is the roustabout I’ll be taking over from and for the first two days, he shows me the ropes. ‘It’s a hard job,’ he says, and he eyes my shoulders, ‘but I reckon you’d do all right.’ He grabs a ewe by the front legs, flips her over and drags her backwards towards one of the men who is on his final strokes. As he picks up the finished fleece, a swarm of blue bottles tumbles off it, more crawl than fly. Ben shows me how to fling it onto the table. I try and look like it’s harder than it is.

‘What’ll you do next?’ I ask.

‘Going to uni to do agriculture, they’ve got a course at the Hedland I’ve got a place on,’ he says. My jaw sets at the mention of the Hedland. One of the men overhears our conversation.

‘Little fucker’s got ideas — reckons we’ll be working for him in a few years.’

Everyone laughs as if this is the most tragic delusion a person could be under.

Ben rolls his eyes and gives the man the finger. The man smiles and goes back to his sheep. ‘Part of the job,’ he says, hoicking another sheep up by the legs, ‘is copping shit from this lot.’

I’m good at the job, I can feel it, better already maybe than Ben is, but I don’t want him to dislike me, so I hold back, let him bark at me a few times so that it’s understood that I’m the new one, the arsehole without a clue. The sheep are thicker than the ones at Otto’s and they have more fight in them, but we get along fine. It’s good to feel the fat on their bones, the grease from their wool on my palms, like they’ve got it to spare. I learn the names of the men as we go along, listening in on conversations, and the stuff they shout at each other over the buzz of the clippers. There’s the tall one with a heavy-looking skull, who seems quiet until one of the others starts to tell a joke. I miss the first part because I’m watching the way the one telling the joke breezes through the wool, right at the root. He takes ages with his joke, because he has to breathe in that way with the sheep round him, and when the fleece falls to the ground and I take him a new sheep, he shaves her soft underbelly and stops telling his joke, and I hold my breath with him, as he palpates her around the groin, getting the skin there taut. On the joke goes, something with monkeys and cannons and dicks. When he’s finished with the sheep he straightens up and says the punchline: ‘And she says, “That’s just what my husband said, Reverend.”’

The tall one is working on the long blow of a ewe and he hugs her to him while he’s laughing, holding the shears away from her, and he says, ‘Shit, Clare, you’re an arsehole.’ And he gives his sheep a pat on the head like she is in on the joke too, before carrying on with the shear; a chuckle comes now and again from him, small shakes of his head. His name is Greg.

Sid the cook feeds us stew with some bread he’s baked. The bread is like wet cement inside and it sticks to the bottom of my stomach and sets. The stew is brown mutton. I can’t take the taste of it, which coats my tongue and smells of death.

‘Watchin’ yer weight?’ asks the one called Clare when he looks at my plate, and so I smile and shovel a forkful in just to show it doesn’t bother me. My stomach contracts and sweat pricks out on the back of my neck. I smile wider.

No one complains or compliments Sid, who doesn’t seem to expect it. We get the same for tea, but with a steamed jam and sponge pudding out of tins, and Alan sets up a bar. You write down the drinks you take in a ledger and it comes out of your wages. I take a six pack and offer one to Ben as a friendly thing. Ben is pleased, says he’s spent most of his wages buying drinks he owes the shearers.

‘Fuckin’ bastards, had me today,’ he says, but he says it smiling and someone walks past and tweaks his tit.

In the shed there’s no door to close, and so I can see the night sky from where I lie. I get up and root around in a drawer until I find a hammer, and then I put it under my bed, just as a comforter. The sky is big and thrown with stars. The shed smells of diesel, which is not a bad smell, and once I spot the huntsmen up on the ceiling like fat grey stars themselves, I’m happy as long as they’re still. I fall asleep and dream nothing, nothing touches me in the dark.

In the morning I wash at my basin on the workbench, with an old singlet for a sponge. There are kookaburras and miner birds racketing about, and I wonder that I never heard them at Otto’s, just the morning buzz of blowflies.

Once the sheep have been mustered and are secured in their runs, my job is to keep the pens full and to get the sheep to the shearers so they don’t have more than a couple of breaths before starting on the next one. Then I fling the fleeces up on the wool table, where an old bloke called Denis skirts them and all the dags and maggoty bits fall through the slats in the table, because people don’t want shit in their jumpers, or even in their carpets. I can see a couple of the men hang back a little, and expect me to take my time, to be slow. There’s that solid heat that gets bounced down on us from the tin roof, and the flies in here are fat and damp — when they land around your mouth you feel like you’ve been kissed by something dead.