Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

I got up and poured away my coffee, rinsed my mug and filled it with water. I drank and listened as the water collected in my belly.

‘I went down and outside, and I ran out with Midge going berserk alongside me, and I chased to the spot I’d seen her, saw something go into the woods and I just stood there calling for her. But she never came back. I thought about burning the place down then. Couldn’t sleep for the fear she’d come back. Or wouldn’t come back.’

Don exhaled, rested his old head in his hand. ‘When Samson came out the borstal he didn’t come and see me. I ran into him in town a few times, took him for a drink, said sorry. But there’s things no amount of saying sorry’ll fix. He’s a gentle soul, really.’ He looked up at me. ‘He’d not do that to your sheep, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m sorry he gave you a scare, but if your sheep are being slaughtered, it’s an animal, it’s not my son, I promise you that.’

I gripped onto my mug and nodded. ‘I know it’s not him,’ I said. Don’s eyes were watery. ‘I’ve heard he sometimes camps in the woods, and I wanted to ask him if he’s seen anything.’

Don smiled. ‘He will have seen lots of things, though you have to pick your way between choosing what ones are real. I haven’t got the hang of that, and I don’t think I’ve got the time left in me to sort the real from the daydreams.’

‘He wants to see you — he was asking after you. That’s why he came to the cottage — he didn’t know you’d moved.’

‘He does know,’ Don said with a little shake of his head, ‘he just forgets things. Must be off his pills.’

I thought about the look on Samson’s face as he turned and walked into the dark.

‘Yep, afraid I turned my son loopy,’ Don said and clasped his old hands around his mug.

I stood up to leave, felt my fists clenching at my sides. Without warning one of my hands rested itself on Don’s shoulder, and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s your fault,’ and we stayed like that for an awkward moment. Don wiped an old wrist under his nose.

‘Come and I’ll give you this flounder this bloody woman gave me,’ he said, and got up to go to the fridge. ‘Me, I’ll be having a Lean Cuisine.’

The Aboriginal girl gets herself killed. Karen is smoking a Holiday and her hand is shaking. ‘I fucking told you, didn’t I?’ she says and she pours out a sloppy measure of Bi-Lo vodka into her mug of tea. There are rings of soot around her eyes. She gets this way sometimes. ‘Didn’t I fucking tell you they do it for anything?’

I take the bottle from her and pour some into my can of Coke.

‘Just makes it dangerous for the rest of us — giving these arseholes the idea in the first place, I mean fuck. No respect, no thought about the future. They don’t try to educate themselves, they don’t care where they’re livin’.’ She sucks hard on her Holiday. ‘Fuck, they don’t even care if they wake up in the morning. Well, that’s where it gets you’ — she slaps her thigh, hard — ‘throttled and fucked and stuffed in the back of a car.’ She drains her tea and starts to unscrew the bottle again, but midway through her face loses its hardness and crumples, her mouth bowing out at the sides like a child. ‘Christ,’ she says, though no tears come; she catches her breath and holds her palm to her chest. ‘She’s just a kid.’ A high-pitched sound escapes from somewhere deep in her throat and I take the bottle out of her hand, put my hand in its place and sit there until she can breathe again. She pulls it together with a long sniff and looks in silence at the space over my shoulder. ‘We’re not like that,’ she says. ‘We’ve got options — we’re smart. Right? RIGHT?’ She shouts a little and I nod. She swallows. ‘We’re not dependent on this. It’s a life choice.’ I nod after every statement. She looks at me. ‘You get the chance and you go,’ she says. ‘Opportunity is waiting around every corner.’ So is death, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

I’m sitting in the Macquarie Lanes Diner as usual with one of my regulars, Otto. Otto is good because he’s twice a month, a fair price, and there’s never any fighting about it. He doesn’t want to do those games the others like to do, he doesn’t want to pretend he’s getting something from me for free, and he doesn’t offer to pay me double if he can hit me in the face while we’re doing it. Sometimes, with no reason to it, the pre-stuffed envelope of ten-dollar notes is more than the price we agreed at the start six months ago. All he wants to do is talk for a couple of hours and then he wants one bit of sex, either a blowie or a normal. He pays me enough that I don’t have to work the rest of the night, which is the real prize. Afterwards he buys me my tea in the diner and he eats too, not like the bleeding hearts who take me for food and order for me, way too much, and then sit there watching, making me feel like a disgusting pig while they sip at a beer, or a black coffee if they’re the Christian type. I’ve got thin at the Hedland. It makes me feel neater, easier to pack away.

Otto’s wife left him, he tells me, ‘like a pig prancing out of a pen’.

He owns a sheep station close to Marble Bar, a few hours’ drive from the Hedland. ‘It’s a beaut spot,’ he says. ‘Green in the winter, good watering hole to swim in in the summer. Course, I try and be self-sufficient, as much as possible — a bit of grow-your-own — heck, there’s enough space!’ he says, and chuckles. I imagine it, the fat woolly sheep, the rows of carrots and strawberries sprouting out of the ground. The fruit trees. I think up a tyre-swing and hang it over the watering hole, imagine ducks landing there on their way over. The sound of frogs at night. ‘Just me an’ the missus out there,’ he laughs. ‘That’s Kelly, me dog — she’s like a sister to me.’ He takes out his wallet and shows me a picture of her, she’s got beady eyes and sharp ears. ‘Not one of those sheep’d put a foot wrong while she’s in charge, wouldn’t no bastard fox take a go either. She’d rip the skin off ’em.’ Otto dips four chips in sauce and puts them all in at once. He enjoys the food at the diner because, he says, ‘Can’t cook for buggery. Carole used to do all that, eggs, snags, chops — the whole piece. I’m more of a corned beef and beans cook. Fuckin’ awful.’

With Otto I always order the calamari with a salad. The salad is the type with grated carrot and beetroot, not the type you see in the picture on the menu with the prickly-looking green leaves and tiny tomatoes and cucumber, but it’s all the same to me. Important, I know, to have a salad, it’s what me and Karen have when we eat together on off-nights.

When other people order for me, like they either worry I’d be too shy or too greedy, they always get me the beefburger and chips. They don’t think for a moment I might be a vegetarian, as if I’d be allowed to have those choices.

Tonight I have the fruit for afters, which is tinned, but it’s still good for you. Good for your skin, I think to myself every time, as if the welts on my back might heal over if I only have enough vitamins.

Because of the issue of space in Otto’s cab, and also because of the dark, he’s never seen my back. Because he never tells me Turn over , it has never been an issue. Sometimes we feel like friends. Today was blowie day, but not one of those punch-down-the-throat ones people are so fond of. I appreciate this because it can make the next one a real piece of hard work, it can bring tears to your eyes just swallowing.

I finish my calamari and my plate is beet-stained and greasy, and I have a beer, because you want something to cut through the feeling in your throat, even if it’s from a nice bloke like Otto. And then he fixes me with a beady eye, and he says, ‘Listen, pet, I’ve got a proposition.’