Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

In the woolshed, he hands me some shears which don’t look far different from the ones Mum used to use on the triplets’ hair. He shows me how to work them, and Kelly sniffs round the place, in particular at the black stains underneath the meat hook.

‘Get yerself a sheep then.’ I look at him a bit blankly. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘you’re not shearing me!’ which he thinks is a hilarious joke and he doubles over laughing. I go and get hold of a sheep around the hips. She doesn’t struggle, but isn’t wanting to move, and it’s difficult persuading her up the ramp to the shed. She might be wondering which bit of her is getting cut, but I get her up there, and Otto shows me how to position her to start. When he has her pinned on the boards, a strange gentleness comes over him, I can see it in his face. It’s like how he looks at me when we screw.

‘You don’t want her to be sitting on her tail,’ he says, ‘cause that’s not comfortable,’ and he demonstrates on half of her how to go — when he does the throat cut I can see her wild eye and I want to tell her, It’s just the wool . He hands the shears over to me. ‘Some places they have you hanging on a strap,’ he says, ‘save using your back too much. But if you don’t use it it’ll never get strong, so you’ll just have to get used to that ache.’ And I do ache when the sheep starts struggling and whipping about and I have to hold her steady; I think I’m going to die from the ache afterwards. Because it is important, because if she is not still I will cut her skin, and she is eyeballing me like I’m going to slit her throat, and I want her to end this thinking, Wasn’t so bad . I manage with a bit of help from Otto, who inspects my work afterwards.

‘You’ve got to go deeper, girl — you’re not close enough to the skin, leaving all that good stuff behind, stuff that binds it together. You need to peel her like an orange — pith and everythin’.’ And so on my second go the sheep gets cut, and it’s horrible. When I see the blood I let her go, I can’t believe I’ve held her down and hurt her and that she couldn’t tell me. It is awful, it is awful, I never want to try it again, I can’t, and Otto looks surprised when I cry but then he laughs good-naturedly. ‘Jesus Christ, girl, you might look like a man but you’re sure not one, ay?’ I haven’t hated him before, but I do when he passes me the shears again and says, ‘C’mon, this is what you’re here for,’ as if that were true, and he makes me catch the same one and I have to finish the job on that scared and bleeding sheep. ‘Here,’ he says, coming up behind and putting his arms around me to hold the sheep, ‘feel her wrapped around you,’ and I make the sheep fit in the hollow between my breasts and my hips, somehow, and she feels safe there, locked in. ‘Now,’ he says, holding up his hand, ‘breathe.’

Twice more I make them bleed and then I get the angle, I get the understanding of it, and it is like taking the skin off an orange, or more accurately like peeling a mandarin, when the skin is thick and the pith attached and there is something satisfying about it, and when I do it right the sheep doesn’t struggle or cry, it just lies there and lets me get on.

I spray the hose in my face to wash off the flies and they come back quickly to suck up the beads of water on my skin. I lean on the fence for a while, looking away from Otto’s, watching the mirage, and I let myself believe it is the sea, and that the desert ends in a gentle slope down to the water’s edge, which hides my house, with my people who are living in it. A rabbit shifts on the mirage and it’s gone. A whistler circles above it.

I’m sweeping up, which is important with all the blue bottles. The amount of shit and maggots I’ve taken off the ewes is disgusting, and sweeping the great hunks of black wormy wool out the door is satisfying. Afterwards, I give myself another hose down. I put my thumb over the nozzle to try and get a stronger spray, and run the water over the dark stain under the meat hook. The pressure is not great and it doesn’t have much of an effect. Water starts to run over the boards and into the corner of the shed, where the feed is kept in a large plastic barrel. I’m checking that there’s nothing behind the barrel that shouldn’t get wet and I find an earring. It’s a small gold heart with a teardrop of opal hanging from it. It sits in my palm like a dead beetle. I put it back where I found it and cycle back to the house to make Otto his lunch. My hair dries before I’m back, and in the bathroom mirror I see the sun has worked me over, left me pink and brown, picked out the new bulges of muscle on my arms.

Later, back at the woolshed I roll up the fleeces, and I find some string to bind them all up neatly. When Otto comes out with the truck and I show him, he laughs.

‘Pretty impressive, pet,’ he says, ‘but no one wants shit an’ maggots in their carpets. Maybe on the next shear there’ll be something better.’

We load it up anyway and when we’ve driven back to the house, I help throw it all into the paddock. ‘All good fertiliser,’ he says, but I’m not sure I believe him. Kelly sits on her behind and when we’ve finished chucking them in, she goes to investigate, comes back with fleece sticking to her muzzle and a hacking cough from eating hair.

I think about the earring that night when Otto comes to me and bends me over the bed. I think about how he took my little penknife, that really couldn’t do much damage to anyone, and how he never mentioned it to me.

While we are lying there in the aftermath and he is collecting himself, he tests one of my biceps, pinches it between his fingers.

‘Getting some guns on you, girl. I like a useful body. Just don’t go getting too manly.’ He laughs as if he has told a joke.

I can hear his guts churning in him because he had a late supper. I ask, ‘How long ago did Carole leave?’

He looks at me and there’s something nettley in his eyes. ‘How come you want to know about that?’

I skate a hand over his windy chest and roll over, try to look cute, which is not easy for me. ‘I just wondered how long you had to cope all on your own out here. Must’ve been lonely?’ And he softens, and closes his eyes, lets his head fall back, and relaxes after his exertions.

‘She left probably a year before you came.’

I want to ask more questions but I can’t figure how to get away with it. I want to know what she looked like, how tall; the kind of woman to wear earrings on a sheep farm — what kind of woman is that?

‘You don’t need to worry about Carole,’ he says and wheezes out of his nostrils loudly, because there is detritus up there. ‘She was a slut. Not like you. You’re a little girl in a slut’s skin. She was the other way.’

There’s a small stereo in the telly room, and the CDs are mainly things like Slim Dusty and Tales from the Mallee , which I don’t think much of, but among them are INXS and Cole Porter, and I know both those names. I put Cole Porter on and Otto comes in the house. ‘Course Carole always liked a dance,’ he says. I think that will mean I have to turn the music off, but he does a neat little four-step and takes my hand in his fingertips, turns me twice and then finishes with a little flourish, leaning me back like he’s a gentleman. Kelly is barking at the door in fury, and out the fly-screen I catch her eye as he dips me. I win this round, mother superior .

I think of when I first arrived in Port Hedland with the pizza parlour bed-and-breakfast you could pay ten dollars to work out of, how the owner called us jobless sluts, giving her restaurant a bad name. But she still let us in for ten dollars, so long as we didn’t use the towels, which you wouldn’t anyway because they stank of smoke and sometimes they had a little trail of something wiped on them.