An Outback Chance-Love Story

An Outback Chance

There are whispers in your ear at night, trying to comfort you, save you, or guide you. But you don’t notice them.

Not until you have reached the end. When you look up and suddenly see what you’ve missed all that time.

It is only then we realise we are never really alone at all.

I remember being really young here – at the edge of this dam. I can still feel the cool, slick mud between my toes, the sun stinging my back and the calls of the crows as I stood in the brown water beside my brother Jeff.

The dog would wait for us on the earth embankment; he didn’t like the way the crayfish made interested nibbles on his paws.

Our clothes hung on an old fence whose posts walked down into the centre of the dam. My brother and I were strictly forbidden to jump from the splintered timber uprights into the water. Our parents had a legion of stories about children who got stuck in the thick mud with no-one to rescue them. It didn’t stop us from swimming but it made us careful about keeping our clothes dry and never venturing too far from the edge.

I liked to walk into the water until my eyes were level with its surface, where the wind rippled the brown liquid like a small ocean, the waves breaking across my face.

Once underwater my eardrums hummed with the noises of the dam -- the buzzing of small creatures, echoing gong of the deep water and click of small claws hurrying through the mud. Getting out I tried to avoid the boggy holes created by the cattle when they came down to drink, but was still sucked into the mud right up to my ankles. A small vessel in the deep thrumming heart, which kept people and animals alive in the middle of its dry body of Queensland countryside. Every element of the water and mud teemed with life and I felt like part of it.

I wonder now was my childhood really that idyllic? I’m always reading some ex-pert who says small children have worries, concerns and stresses which dominate their days and nights. But I can’t recall my stresses. Instead all I can remember is Jeff and me roaming the farm, in charge of our domain. I had even decided our leadership roles in this kingdom. It was a simple political process, I was older than Jeff, so in charge of him. He was bigger than the cattle dogs, so he was in charge of them. 

Jeff used to fight the process sometimes, but mostly we just wandered together, adventurers taking on the great unknown, running barefoot on the hot red dirt until it got too much and we had to stand on a clump of grass to relieve our feet. Building up speed in our downhill races through the wheat stubble near the house, then spending the next half an hour digging the fine golden splinters out of our skin.

Yes, I remember being young here. For me the dam’s edge marks the beginning. So, I’m back where I started, back on the farm, on the water’s edge. You see, odd things are happening lately and I need some answers. I think the people who can help are back here. What sort of things? Well, for example, exactly one month and one week ago I woke up with my heart hammering. 

Waking suddenly from a deep sleep, my subconscious kicked me. “Not alone anymore” it warned. So I stayed desperately still, trying to peer into the darkness of my London flat, wondering who is there with me? 

Panic subsiding, I can finally hear over the thudding of my heart and realise what’s woken me, but it isn’t footsteps or someone breathing. It’s music and I know the tune, it is familiar as my childhood. My grandmother’s music box is slowly picking out Auld Lang Syne. This usually is a comforting noise, but lying here in the dark I know that the music box won’t play without winding, its heavy wooden lid propped up, and an encouraging thump. And I’m wondering just who did that for me?

Two days later I follow a rattling noise to the top of the cupboard in the lounge room and find a mini earthquake erupting underneath the books. Then a photo I’d hidden from my past drops off the shelf and lands at my feet. Picking it up I recognise the young girl with the long dark hair, I knew her once and I’m sure I knew the man beside her. Idly I wonder what ever happened to them both?

The final straw is the bathroom. Coming home cold and tired from another sad, foggy day of job hunting I think a hot shower might be some form of cure for my misery. Turning on the taps, I let the water run to warm while I undress and it’s only swinging back the door to step in that I see the steam reveals something written on the glass shower door. Just the one word, “home”.

Of course I can’t tell anyone about all of this, because they’d think I’m com-pletely crazy – that the stress of the past six months had finally gotten to me. In fact the only people who would have understood are dead – and I have my suspicions they are behind all of this anyway.

I didn’t want to go back to Australia, to my childhood home in the middle of the bush. Any dreams I had of returning involved triumphant short visits, me a wild success setting the world ablaze and people wanting to get my autograph. I also have a couple of fantasies about snubbing people who previously wronged me – but, you know, I think that’s everyone’s favourite revenge dream. I never expected to be this alone. To feel so separate from the rest of the world. To come back hurting the way I do, with my chest tight with sadness and loud noises bringing tears to my eyes. I wasn’t ever coming back such a failure at 40, full of resentment, betrayal and carrying an extra 15 kilos in misery quieted by chocolate. But there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. The past and the pre-sent worked in conspiracy, and between my lack of money, sudden lack of friends and the constant hints from the other plane, I figured I would just give in.

Because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s giving in, or giving up. My family, of course, are one part happy, two parts confused about my return. You see I made a fairly impressive exit when I left this small country town, our farm and the past behind. Then I spent a long time sending postcards bragging about exotic fabulous locations and fabulous adventures, spent ages choosing unique and interesting souvenirs for them (which I know they took one look at and then threw in the back of the cupboard). A hint – unless you want to question your taste forever, never go looking for spare blankets in your sibling’s cupboards because, believe me, hidden there is every gift you ever spent hours bartering for in a hot Thai marketplace.

Any return visits to home were always fleeting, a week or two and then gone. But now I’m back permanently and, frankly, I’m not sure it’s going to work out. It’s one thing to be the family’s exotic 20-year-old sister, who owns nothing which can’t fit in her backpack and changes jobs and countries at the blink of an eye, but when you come back, miserable and damaged at 40 it feels nothing but a failure.

So here I am. Sally Bailey, five foot six, dark brown hair, blue eyes, former Lon-don career girl, now living in outback Queensland, wearing a series of too-tight blue jeans, stained and stretched tee shirts and scuffed riding boots. My clothes alone are enough to make me weep, but there is no use in crying over lost clothes…or jobs…or re-lationships. 

I’d done all the crying I ever want to do and it hasn’t changed the facts.

Fact one - the London me is gone, maybe forever. 

Fact two – I am officially middle aged and single.

Fact three – I am broke. 

And horrible as it is – fact four – I am no longer defined by my career, because I don’t have one. 

Leading to fact five – I am now working as a badly qualified jillaroo (kind of like a cowgirl - minus the cool rope throwing tricks and yodeling) on the family farm…for my Dad.

I really should have planned better.

I’m looking out at the surface of the dam, pondering this lack of planning, when my father leans in the car door to get a look at my laptop.

“Job application?” He points at the screen as he throws a toolbag into the back of the farm utility – known as the Ute by one and all in our family – as in: “Dad, can I bor-row the Ute to go to movies?” and “Go get the feed in the Ute” or “Don’t drive the Ute so fast!” and famously “Which one of you kids drove the Ute into the petrol drums!!!”. (That would have been me actually.)

“Hmmm,” is my succinct reply as I close the screen and hunt for the carry case.

“Well, better get a move on and save it, or send it, or whatever you do because we need to fix that fence around the creek before the cattle get there,” Dad says decisively, walking around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, swinging his lean frame into the car.

I sigh and put the laptop down on the seat between us, which Dad promptly cov-ers with his hat.

Now there’s a metaphor for you, I think. 

“We’ll meet Jeff there,” Dad finishes his sentence while starting the car.

My brother Jeff, after a few years at agricultural college, a couple more years working on the oil rigs (and a failed live-in relationship with some girl he met at the Gympie Country Music Muster) has spent the past ten years back home working the farm with Dad. He’s excited to have his sister home, but also rightly concerned that I may make the world’s worst farm hand. After all, I can’t drive a tractor, fix fences and – ad-mitting it in a shamed manner now – I’m scared of sheep. 

I mean it’s all that wool and the way they all run towards you at once. They don’t call it a mob for nothing you know. And the way people wear sheep patterns on their flannel pajamas – urgh! Makes my skin crawl.

Even worse, there is no word for a fear of sheep, because, after one particularly drunken family discussion, I looked up Wikipedia and found out that you can be scared of fish -- Ichthyophobiaif you must know – but no-one else is scared of sheep.

It’s a thought to ponder as I hang on to the handle above the car door (and the edge of my seat) as we speed along the dirt tracks which crisscross the farm.

For a quiet man, my father drives like a lunatic! I look out the window as the car bumps and squeaks and all I can see is the heat haze lying over the paddocks, disguising the grazing cattle and kangaroos in a shimmering veneer. As a kid I used to love that, it made me feel like I was in one of the Westerns Dad was so addicted to watching on TV every Saturday. Now it seems isolating, empty, and I have to wonder yet again, what am I doing coming back here?

“Oh yeah,” Dad says as he pulls the car up at the creek in a cloud of dust and I make a sudden grab for the dash. “I might have forgotten to tell you,” he turns off the en-gine and jumps out the car door, “Connor will be here too. Seems like the boundary fence got washed down as well.”

“What? Dad? Connor? What?” But it’s too late, my father makes a rapid exit from the scene, leaving me spluttering and blushing at the same time.

Damn it! Someone should have given me some warning. It’s not every day you get to go fencing with the man you haven’t seen since you dumped him three months be-fore you were meant to marry him.