Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

‘You want a cup of tea?’ I ask, getting up off the floor.

‘This is our problem, right, I’ve worked it out,’ she says, not listening. I put the kettle on the stove anyway. ‘We shouldn’t be here, we shouldn’t have come to Australia to start with. Look at us — crusted with skin cancers. The sea wants to kill us, the bush wants to kill us. You know there’s a shell in the north — you pick it up on a beach, thinking you’ve found something pretty to hang round your neck, the fucker shoots out a poison arrow that’ll disintegrate your kidneys? It’s fucked, and we shouldn’t be here.’ Karen points the dying end of her cigarette at me again. ‘You — you are not supposed to go into the sea — it’s like a nest of snakes in there.’ She lets her head loll back and says quietly, ‘Fuck it, even the dry bits are a nest of snakes.’

‘You want mint tea or regular?’

Karen sighs, flings up her arms without looking at me. ‘I want flaming English Breakfast Tea! And a scone!’

‘Well, we’re out of milk.’

‘For god’s SAKE!’

I like it when she gets like this, it’s better than watching TV. She leans up to accept her black tea. ‘I wish I had some mull,’ she says dejectedly. I pour hot water over a regular tea bag. She blows into her mug and then takes a sip, grimaces, sighs again and sets the mug on the floor, where it spills over a little. She looks at the burnt-out end of her cigarette and puts it back in the empty packet. I try not to worry about the thing still being alight.

‘In England,’ she goes on, ‘they take teatime seriously. Know what a Devon cream tea is?’

I shake my head and let the steam from my drink work over my face. It’s hard to take my eyes off the cigarette packet, to not think about what is going on inside, what tiny spark might be left.

She leans forward and cups her hand like she’s holding something. ‘They take a scone, some jam and some cream, and they make little scone sandwiches out of them.’

‘Doesn’t sound all that exciting to me.’

‘But that’s the point!’ she says, showing me the palms of her hands. ‘They make eating a boring little cake a real event. With parasol umbrellas and silverware. You can do a Devon cream tea on a boat, going down the river, or you do it on a lawn.’

‘I’d rather be fishing if I’m on a boat,’ I say just to rile her, and also to distract from the fact that I’ve stood up to take her cigarette packet. I empty out the burnt stub and run it under the tap in the sink.

She flaps her hands. ‘But that’s my point, exactly.’ She gets wet-eyed and earnest. ‘You take the time to do things, gentle things, you make the act of having teatime a beautiful thing. Here’ — she smiles, picks up a box of crackers from the side table that we’ve reserved for dinner — ‘here, we’ve got fuckin’ Chicken Crimpies .’

Usually the Hedland is baking dry, but out of nowhere one evening there’s a cyclone, which lasts a week. It’s pelting rain outside, and so if a bloke doesn’t want to do it in their car, me and Karen have to use the room or else hire one out at the pizza parlour, which is a waste of money. We only have two sets of sheets, so it’s a question of being careful, putting down a towel and leaving the place as you’d expect to find it . Karen takes down her poster of a unicorn, because she says men don’t find that sort of thing sexy. Above the bed is a depressing picture made out of wood shavings. It’s a cattle station, or it’s supposed to be. Just looks like wood shavings to me, but because it was there when we moved in and because it is in a frame, and because behind the picture there’s a gash in the wall where someone’s thrown something heavy, we keep it there. I have a sneaking suspicion that Karen likes it and thinks it adds to the ombionce .

It’s still stinking hot, even with the rain pouring down, and we’re both busier than we would normally be — I suppose people get bored when they can’t go out, I suppose they get thinking about other things, and then they want to have sex with a girl. We get in a muddle because, firstly, once you get into the room and the two of you are soaked, it’s rude not to give them a towel, and by the time you’ve both dried off enough to get down to it, part of the time is ticking away, but you can’t tell them that, they won’t have it. As far as they are concerned the hour they buy is an hour of sex, and if it happens to be raining hard enough to soak you to your undies, then that’s your bad luck. A couple of times I walk in on Karen and she walks in on me, so we take to hanging a bead necklace on the door handle if we are in and working. Sometimes it means waiting around in the hall and making conversation with the bloke, while you can both hear the squeakings and the gruntings that are going on inside the room. Sometimes it puts a bloke off, but all in all it is better than having someone walk in on you, because now and then he’ll turn nasty if that happens. Like his mum’s walked in on him or something.

I’m there with a man who calls himself Simon, though I can see he’s written his name on the inside of his work boots when he takes them off and in his boots he calls himself The Rock — written in curly letters, like he thinks he’s a super-hero or something. I reckon from the way he goes on about how great he is, he might have given himself that nickname. Me and the Rock get up on the bed and it’s all pretty usual with me on top.

‘Keep yer bra on.’ The Rock has a thing for tits in a bra. He grabs on them while he’s bucking away underneath me, and he keeps his eyes firmly on the cleavage he’s made himself by squashing them together. His tongue pokes out of his mouth, like a kid colouring in. His concentration gives me the chance to have a quick look at my watch — I graze it past my face and then pretend to be all about the sex and grab my hair and put my finger in my mouth. It’s getting late, Karen’ll be back in ten, and this guy’s not going to get very far with my boobs. If I concentrate I think I can hear her outside, and it’s embarrassing when that happens.

Just then he says, ‘Tell me you want me to come on your tits.’ And just the idea of me saying this makes him do an extra big thrust, which punches me in the gut so that I want to smack him right in the face. The thrust is so large that it bangs the bedhead against the wall, and the crappy wood-chip picture bumps a little, and all of a sudden out from the crack in the wall behind it come dozens of baby huntsmen. It takes me a second to react and in that second the Rock does another super-thrust, and when it bangs the wall a spider falls right into his face and he screams, and I scream and jump off him, and he leaps for the floor, scrubbing his face with his hands, dancing about and shouting, ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ like he’s burning. There’s a pounding on the door, and it smashes open and it’s Karen wide-eyed after hearing the commotion, she’s taken her shoe off and is holding it ready to beat the eyes out of whoever is murdering me, and she sees the spiders and yells, and I see a man behind her pelting his way down the stairs and out of the building. The Rock is standing at our sink washing his face over and over and the spiders are still spewing out and spreading all over the wall. Me and Karen yell and yell, and we start laughing, and the Rock turns around with tears in his eyes and spits, ‘Fucking whores!’ like we bred the spiders especially, and then he shakes his trousers and gets into them, jumping about like he has them all over, when the only place they are, apart from the one that fell on his face, is all over the wall. ‘You can forget about the money, you fuckin’ witch!’ he spits and pegs out of the room with his boots in his hand and I shout after him, ‘Bye, the Rock!’ and me and Karen fall on each other laughing, and screaming, because our room is covered in tiny spiders.