Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

I wonder how those sheep are still alive, how long they’ve been trapped there next to their slaughterhouse. Since Carole left? I don’t know how long that has been.

The pen is made up of flimsy metal barriers that can be linked or separated and moved one at a time. The sections are not heavy and the sheep, if they had a mind to, could probably break out, but they don’t do a lot of anything much, just shift their weight from their hips to their shoulders and stare out at the horizon while the flies eat their backsides.

The earth in their enclosure is coated in shit and just a few feet to the left of their pen is a dusting, at least, of grass. I start to shift the pen, panel by panel, expanding it slightly, edging the sheep over towards the grass. When they get in my way, I herd and shoo them, waving my arms. They are not bothered enough to be scared, but they more or less go where I tell them. They move with the weight of ghosts and I notice a few are resting on the front joints of their legs, like they haven’t got the strength to stand. It takes me two hours, during which time Otto and Kelly drive up to see why I’ve been gone so long.

Otto frowns at first, but then he shrugs. ‘Might get some meat on them I suppose,’ and he drives back to the house while Kelly watches out of the back of the ute.

The flies drink out of the corners of my eyes, and crawl all over my shoulders, and I let them crawl. I’m not sure what I was expecting, to see the sheep dance gratefully around in the puny grass I’ve found them, but they just stand there, a silent little group. I try to move them about, but they’re not scared of me. Resigned is what they are, and I tell them, ‘You can move around if you want to,’ waving my arms and jumping about, but they just sway a little in the hot fly air. I look at the woolshed and see the meat hook and I shift onto my other foot. ‘Fair enough,’ I say and cycle back to the house, and put the sheep far in the back crevice of my mind, with those other things that only come out in the dark when my guard is down and I stare at the night behind my window cage.

There’s a black and white photograph on the wall in the telly room and Otto sees me looking at it. It’s him with dark hair and a trim waist, and he’s holding some kind of trophy.

‘Golden Shears, 1962,’ he says. He’s standing with a woman who wears high-waisted trousers and an old-fashioned hairdo and who is presenting him with the trophy, a pair of scissors soldered onto a plinth. ‘That’s Candy Mulligan — she was the weather girl from ABC. She had a thing for me.’

I look at the man in the picture with the sun-crinkled face and the straight back. Dark hair feathering out from under his hat.

He turns up the volume on the TV. ‘Ah — it’s me programme,’ he says.

Otto gives me a lesson in driving. He takes me out where there’s nothing to smash into and lets me turn slow doughnuts in the dust. When we stall and when I make the truck rattle with going too slow, he laughs at me, but I’ve never felt so capable, and I think about when the other truck is fixed and when I can take off down the dirt road and out onto the bitumen. If you have wheels, I realise, you are free.

After the lesson, Otto shows me what he’s doing to the other truck. The bonnet is up and inside is another language of tubes and cables.

‘See this?’ he says, slapping a black box with the flat of his hand. ‘Couple of loose connections in there I reckon, nothing major.’ He blushes a little and looks away. ‘I wanted to have her ready for when you arrived, but me flamin’ hands went crook.’ I put my hand on Otto’s shoulder and smile at him.

Late in the day, I’m standing out on the veranda smoking a Holiday and Kelly is standing on all fours barking at me like she really wants to go for me. Otto comes out looking uncomfortable.

‘No smoking here, pet, upsets the dog. Reminds her of Carole — she and Carole didn’t get along,’ he says and I exhale and look at the tip of my cigarette. I feel awkward and embarrassed, like a kid again.

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘last one.’ It’s fine, I think, I’ll just have to do it when I’m on my own, but he comes and takes the cigarette out of my fingers and drops it cherry first into his mug of tea. Then he holds out his hand.

‘And the rest.’

‘That was my last,’ I say, counting up the packets I have left from the duty-free Karen gave me. I think there are two and a half-finished pack, but as long as I can find fifty cents here and there, I’ll be able to sneak a packet now and again, it’s not such a hardship.

‘Hm,’ says Otto, frowning. ‘Bad for a person’s health.’

Otto has a beer early and falls asleep in front of the afternoon soaps — he can watch them again in the evening runs, so it’s not a drama. Because the house is so hot, I leave a note and climb on my bike. Kelly lifts her head at me as I cycle off up the track to the sheep, but she doesn’t bark and wake Otto.

I fill their trough with fresh water and scatter some pellets around the place. They aren’t that interested and who could blame them. There’s almost no shade, and the ones with the paler faces must be blistering with skin cancers. Mostly, they crowd along the wall of the shed where the roof shelters them a little from the sun. The flies are swarming again, clouds of them, they muscle in at the sheep’s eyes and arseholes. I try spraying the sheep with the hose, but I can’t tell if it helps or if they like it, they just hang there on their feet. If I could get hold of a couple of lengths of wood, I could hang over a tarpaulin and give them a little shade. The man with the black hair in the photo on Otto’s wall wouldn’t object to that. Maybe it was just his crook hands that stopped him from looking after the sheep, maybe he just needs the extra help. I get on my bike and ride back to the house, slowly, thinking.

Inside, my last packets of Holidays are laid out on the front table.

‘Now, I’m not cross,’ says Otto, ‘because I know this is an addiction. But what we’re doing here today is we’re taking a stand against it.’

I stop myself just short of raising my voice when I say, ‘You went through my things?’

‘Your things, young lady, are in my house.’ He says it with an edge of hardness like he thinks he’s my dad, and it makes my heart beat fast. I think I will cry.

‘Come and stand next to me, pet,’ he says.

Kelly is sitting bolt upright in the dirt, waiting for something. Otto picks up the first packet and lobs it off the veranda to her. The dog pounces on it like it’s alive, snarling and growling, the flesh of the inside of her mouth showing, saliva greasing all over the cardboard.

She wrecks them, shaking the packet, slinging cigarettes everywhere, rolling on them once they’re out. And Otto throws the next packet. Kelly does not lose focus.

‘Now,’ says Otto, once it is all done and I am standing in silence next to him, gripping the wood of the veranda. He hands me a dustpan and brush. ‘You go and clean all that mess up and put it in the bin and we’ll say no more about it.’

Kelly does not growl at me while I sweep it up but she watches me and I’d like to kick her hard in the ribs.

I go to my room and sit on the edge of the bed with a feeling I can’t be exact about spinning round in my stomach. I look at my bag, which I hadn’t thought to unpack since I arrived.

Otto is bright and chirpy, and we have a busy day because it’s time to teach me to shear.

‘Bin thinking,’ he says, ‘about what you done with the pen, and giving the sheep a bit more space — p’raps it’s good for ’em — don’t seem so maggoty any more. If we could get those girls in a more acceptable state, might be a few we could mate, and we could get things going again. Arse has dropped out of wool, but maybe if we could get the meat sellable,’ he says, full of himself, chirruping away. I am tired and he looks hurt.