Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

‘Lloyd,’ I said, but not loud enough. It entered the dark bank of the woods and was gone. I blinked and wondered if I had seen anything at all.

At the shed I filled up the water and feed troughs. The daylight had started to go already and Dog lay down and moaned because he hadn’t eaten yet. It was warm in the shed, and rain on the tin roof mingled with the bustle of the ewes finding their comfort in the straw. It smelled good. Lloyd touched the nose of a ewe I thought would have triplets. She snorted his hand away, but he didn’t flinch. These ones at least were safe for now. I shifted the feed barrel to get to a new box of gloves behind it, and on the floor was a dainty hoof. I stared at it a moment before I understood what it was.

‘Lloyd,’ I said and he came and stood next to me. We both looked at the foot, the bone crunched through at the ankle, the cleft toenails curled. ‘I’m going to sleep in here tonight.’

‘Whisky,’ was all he said.

In Darwin, a man with deep pockmarks on his chin and a smell about him like he’s been infused with some kind of pickling vinegar offers me forty-five bucks, but not just for a blowie.

‘The real thing,’ he says. Forty-five dollars does not seem like all that much, when that first one had given me thirty just to use my face.

‘Fifty-five dollars?’ I ask and he smiles at me like he is my indulgent father.

‘We’ll see how you go. You’d better be pretty good for fifty-five.’

I don’t know what to do. With the blowies it is fairly straightforward — I kneel, they unzip. But we stand opposite each other a little while, me shifting from foot to foot.

‘Where’ll we do it?’ I ask, finding that I am blushing.

‘Got a tarp stretched over the back of the ute,’ he says and turns towards the road. His ute is a rusted thing with Queensland plates and a crack in the windscreen that has been reinforced with packing tape. A bright blue tarp is tented in the back tray like a kid’s clubhouse. I stand on the step and go to get in.

‘Not here, girl!’ he snaps. ‘If I’m paying through the nose I want to make noise.’ And he climbs into the cab. I pull myself up on the other side and get in too. As we drive out of town, I feel nervous.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

‘Not your business.’

There’s a pause.

‘My name’s Jake.’

‘I don’t want to talk.’

‘I come from over west, near Brisket.’

‘Never heard of it — Jesus, do I have to pay you to shut up as well?’

I decide his name is Ken, short for Kenneth. He probably works on a prawn trawler. He is the sort of character who is grouchy but ultimately friendly.

The rest of the ride is silent, and we pull into a car park at the beach, and he draws up under some fir trees.

‘Git in the back,’ says Ken.

As I climb in under the tarpaulin, Ken pushes his hands against my bum and squeezes. It seems a strangely affectionate thing to do after being such a ratbag in the cab. Underneath the tarp everything is light blue and glowing. Ken and his skin and me and my skin all look illuminated, and his teeth look very white against his green face. It’s warm in there with the sun making it smell of hot plastic. I smile at Ken and he holds my ankles and turns me over, not that gently, so that I can’t see his face.

‘Take em off,’ he says and I feel down to unbutton my shorts. It’s embarrassing, the idea of getting your bum out at some man you don’t even know. But I manage it, and he tugs them down and all of a sudden he is hot and damp and all over me, pushing and squeezing parts of him into me and swearing all the time he does it.

‘Up,’ he says and pulls on my hips, so that I am on all fours, and he grunts into me. ‘Make some fuckin’ noise,’ he says, and so I bang on the floor of the ute with my fists. ‘Not that sort of noise, you retard,’ he shouts, before I understand what he means. It’s a strange thing making the noises he’s after. There is an eyelet in the tarp which shows how white it is outside and I watch that and make the noises he wants, pleased that my back is turned to him so that I don’t also have to make the faces as well.

Grunting away and saying encouraging things like ‘Yeah, like that,’ Ken strokes my midriff in a way that could almost be friendly. He reaches up and feels my boobs under my T-shirt, and then back down the sides of me to where he is working away. He is starting to gasp and between us there is a racket of moans and shouts while I look at the white circle of sky. He presses his thumbs into the dips of my haunches, and then screams and falls backwards off me.

‘What the fuck’ve you got!’ he shouts with the air that’s left in his throat. I turn around to look at him. He looks so angry with his trousers round his ankles and his dick cuddling up to him that I nearly laugh, and he kicks at me with his tethered legs.

‘What is it, girl? Fuck I didn’t even wear a rubber.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I try to say, and he almost throws me out of the back tray into the white, with my shorts around my knees and his wetness all on me. He charges out of the truck a moment later, as I am pulling my clothes back on and I think he’s going to hit me, he comes so close to my face.

‘What the fuck is that on your back?’

‘Just scars,’ I say.

‘Scars? From what?’ He looks suspicious but his fists have relaxed. I shrug.

‘An accident.’

‘What kind of accident ?’

I don’t know how to answer so I stand there, scratching my arm for a bit.

‘An accident at sea,’ I say finally, because the words feel good to say and that is where the worst things happen.

He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. ‘Fuck,’ he whistles quietly, ‘thought it was some sort of AIDS.’ And he spits on the ground next to me. ‘You should tell people you got that. It’s not fair to make people pay for damaged goods.’

Kenneth turns without giving me any money and gets into his truck. He drives away without a glance in my direction and just as I realise I’ve left all my stuff in the cab, I see my bag sail out of the window to land in the road. I collect up my things and stuff them back in, check to see if maybe he’s put my thongs in too, but he hasn’t. I walk back into town barefoot with bits of melted bitumen sticking to my heels. I haven’t thought about my back like that before, that other people will see it and ask what it is. It was my first go at having lie-down sex, how was I supposed to know which bits have to be unscarred, which bits you can get away with.

The crows roosted in the treetops. Their blackness against the darkening sky made me want to get the gun and scatter them. From the house, I took a gas lamp so we wouldn’t have to keep the fluorescent on, the last of the bread, which was stale, and some butter and honey. I put the coffee pot on the stove to fill up the thermos. Out the window, the light faded in waves, the tree branches became longer, hanging on to their shadows. I found two of my thickest jumpers and wrapped a half-bottle of whisky in one before I put it into my bag. I pulled out the box of cartridges I kept at the back of the kitchen cupboard. I took one out and weighed it in my hand. Dad trying to teach me to shoot cans out the back when I was small. He’d given me a cushion to hold against my shoulder so the recoil didn’t leave a mark and Mum wouldn’t throw a drama. ‘Remember,’ he’d said close to my ear, the soft gust of beer on his breath, ‘the human eye senses movement before all else.’

The triplets had run out into the garden then, like a pack of baboons and Dad and I had pretended to pick them off one by one until Iris had leant out the window and shouted at us, ‘Stop it, you fucking derelicts!’