Читать книгу: «The Farmer’s Wife»

Four

When Rebecca and Gabs entered Doreen’s lounge room, it was like walking into a teenager’s bedroom overflowing with excited hormonal girls. The giggling, chatting women from the surrounding districts were all dressed like hookers, trannies or tarts with feather boas, lace or sequins. Many of them weighed on the large side, to the point where some might even warrant a spot on The Biggest Loser.

Together they huddled around Doreen’s dining table as if it was half-time at the footy. Doreen’s demure lace cloth was covered with glistening folds of black velour, on which sat an array of naughty novelties, romantic remedies and (more disturbingly for Rebecca, who had been expecting lettuce containers and drink bottles) items such as vibrators, ‘bullets’ and egg-shaped ‘marital aids’. There were clear-faced boxes containing fetish and fantasy costumes. Rebecca noticed that Speedo, the Groggans’ budgie, whose cage sat beside the dining table, was discreetly covered with a sheet as if the items on the table would upset his avian sensibilities.

‘No Tupperware in sight,’ said Bec. ‘Don’t reckon I’ll be fixing my lunch-box deficit here.’

‘Nah,’ Gabs said, ‘but you might fix your box deficit problem.’

‘Hah! You dirty girl!’

‘You have to admit some of those things do look like kitchen appliances. You could mix a cake with that one,’ she said, pointing to a giant red vibrator.

Bec grinned at Gabs as the women turned to greet them warmly.

Candice Brown from the Bendoorin general store, two hours’ drive away, stepped out of the huddle to give Rebecca a quick hug.

‘Good to see you, Beccy. It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘You should come in and get your groceries personally, instead of getting them delivered on the school bus! I miss seeing your lovely smile.’

Nicknamed by the locals ‘Candy Shop’, Candice Brown was anything but the brown her married name suggested. She was as bright and colourful as a licorice allsort in both looks and personality. She had vividly dyed curly crimson hair that tonight was pinned up so that ringlets fell prettily about her friendly round face. At the store, she could always be easily found in the rows of groceries, wearing her vibrant pinks, reds and yellows teamed with black leggings. Tonight she’d opted for an electric blue taffeta number and six-inch heels, topped off with a hot pink boa and a plastic six-shooter held in place by a frilly garter belt on her bare thigh.

‘You look great!’ Bec said. ‘Like a Western gal who hangs out in the rooms above saloons.’

‘Brian almost wouldn’t let me out the door.’ She laughed. ‘Dirty old coot! He loves his Westerns.’

‘Here’s to whiskey and wild women!’ Gabs said, passing another Cowboy shooter to Bec and Candice. ‘You look good enough to eat, Candy Shop!’

Bec smiled as she thought of Candice’s husband, Brian, who also ran the store-cum-post office. He was the opposite of his near namesake, the lean, chiselled actor Bryan Brown. Instead he was tiny, skinny, rarely spoke and always wore beige. Bec couldn’t even imagine Brian getting randy. How was it that he and Candy were so different, yet after running the same store together for thirty years and raising a family of three, they seemed so happy together? Bec decided there and then, she really must make more of an effort with Charlie. Focus on his good points, instead of chewing through his bad.

She was about to search for a chair to sit on when she was distracted by the disturbing sight of Ursula Morgan on the lounge. Ursula was testing the seams of her white Lycra kinky nurse’s outfit with her giant Jim Beam gut, the indent of her belly button creating a crater like the moon’s. She was yelping with seal-like laughter as she took a photo on an iPhone of Janine Turner. Janine was lying back on the couch, stuffing a gigantic black dildo between the long line of her cleavage and pouting in her pose. Once the image was captured, Ursula began frantically texting.

‘I’ll tell him the blokes have finished fundraising for the moustache-growing month of Mo-vember and now it’s our turn. Us girls are now fundraising for Fan-uary! Growing your pubes for a good cause!’

‘Fan-uary!’ screeched Janine. ‘He’ll like that! Can I be in charge of Pubic Relations?’ Her crow-call laughter filled up the room.

‘I’ll need a whipper snipper for mine when I’m done!’ Ursula muttered as she texted. Janine waved the dildo about in the air as she grabbed another slurp of her drink, a satisfied smile on her fake-tanned face. Rebecca smiled wanly at the sight of them, wondering which poor bastard they were tormenting tonight with their text messages and dirty photos. What was it about women who lost all shyness and sensibility when they were on the drink?

The normally ultra reserved and often bitter Ursula was the daughter of a local logging contractor. She had, at the age of twenty-seven, already managed to help keep the tiny school at Bendoorin open with her brood — not to mention the gene pool nicely mixed for such an isolated region. She had four kids to four different fellas, causing confusion at school craft-making classes in the lead-up to Father’s Day.

Ursula still lived at home with her parents and treated them like crap daily because she could. Her Centrelink payments meant life ticked over and was OK, if a little boring. Bec often found it oddly creepy that Ursula’s portly father sometimes still referred to her long lustrous black hair, which she could sit on, as his daughter’s ‘crowning glory’. Because it was the only bit of praise from her father she’d ever received, the woman had never cut her hair. Sadly it was now greying slightly on her high forehead, but still fell way below her backside, which in recent years had expanded to the size of a large beanbag.

Her friend, or more accurately occasional drinking buddy, Janine, was the complete opposite to Ursula. She was one of the few ‘graziers’ wives’ from the larger properties in the district who tried ever-so-hard to be landed gentry. She walked for miles and miles along country roads to keep her body lean. She adorned said body in all the chunky jewellery she could order from the Country Style magazine classified section. Janine was great at dressing richly conservative and tossing her highlighted auburn locks with immense snobbery as she walked into sheep shows on the arm of her excessively quiet, red-faced Merino-man husband. But on nights like this, Ursula and her constant flow of Jim Beam were Janine’s undoing and all her airs and graces slid down to her ankles.

‘Oh, hello, Rebecca!’ Ursula said, her tone a little tainted with drunken sarcasm. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

Janine gave her a wave of the dildo and a wry smile.

In response, Rebecca picked up what she’d read was a Gliterous-G and waved its pink jelly-like eight inches back at the two terrors. ‘Hello, girls,’ she said, then turned to Gabs. ‘I really need another drink.’ Before they could make their way back to the kitchen to mix a Bundy, though, Doreen was clapping her hands, shoving two fingers in her mouth and whistling loudly like she’d just called a Kelpie off the stock. The women instantly fell silent.

‘Ladies! It’s time to start! Welcome to the Horny Little Devils night,’ Doreen said in a drawling, twanging voice that made the word ‘horny’ sound like a motorbike passing. ‘This is Tracey and she’s our Horny Rep.’ Beside her stood a demure girl, dressed all in black, with heavy eye makeup and jet-black hair pulled tightly back in a pony tail.

‘Geez, check out the woman-child,’ muttered Gabs as she surveyed the sex-toy consultant. ‘As if she’d know how to use this stuff. She looks like she’s still in grade six.’

Bec stifled a giggle. Tracey stepped forwards. ‘Evening, ladies. I’ll walk you through the catalogue. We’ll start with our lingerie and finish with the boys’ toys.’

Rebecca flicked to the first page, where a fake-tanned, breast-enhanced, air-brushed bottle blonde was slipping off the strap of her hot pink, sheer Yvette Babydoll with matching G-string. Bec’s eyes meandered over a few more pages of ‘flog-me’-style black lace corsets with suspenders for the larger ladies. For the more demure there was the Courtney Gown in elegant duck-egg blue with ‘sexy thigh-high splits’. She wondered what Charlie might do if she turned up dressed in some of the clothing. Maybe as the raunchy police officer, complete with gun, baton and hat, whispering to him, ‘Frisk me?’ He’d probably laugh at her.

As Tracey passed a few samples around, the women began to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at the potential the outfits could bring to their marriages and partnerships.

‘Now if Doreen here sells over fifteen hundred dollars’ worth, she’s in for tonnes of free product.’

‘Not used, I hope!’ Doreen snorted.

Tracey smiled patiently. ‘Which brings us on to cleaning. On page twenty-two, there’s a range of play wipes and safe sterilisers for your vibrators.’

‘So you don’t just wash ’em and hang ’em on the line?’ Janine chortled.

‘No,’ said Tracey, straight-faced.

‘Not in the dishwasher?’ Janine added.

Tracey gave her an ‘I’ve heard it all before’ look and soldiered on, holding up a six-inch iridescent blue Wallbanger complete with ‘additional dolphin’, flicking the on switch so the thing contorted like Flipper having a seizure. She passed it to Doreen, who shrieked and almost threw it to her daughter-in-law, Bonnie.

‘Oh my god,’ Bonnie said, blinking from behind her glasses, ‘I can’t believe my mother-in-law just passed me a vibrator! I’m going to need therapy!’

Rebecca reached for a crabstick, smiling as the other women laughed. Soon the buzzing Wallbanger got to her. ‘Here, Gabs, test it on your schnoz,’ she said, buzzing the vibrator to Gabs’s long, red-from-rum nose.

‘Oh my god!’ squeaked her friend. ‘I think my nose just went off! It’s not dripping, is it?’

Laughter erupted from within Rebecca. ‘That is most disturbing,’ she said.

‘I’d be gone before I’d even put the batteries in that thing,’ Gabs said, taking it from her. ‘That’s just too much!’

Next Tracey was holding up what looked like a fancy seat belt for a racing-car harness. ‘This is part of our Fetish Fantasy range and is the Door Swing. So you attach it to the door frame like this …’

‘Looks like a baby’s jolly jumper,’ Gabs muttered. ‘Ted would love a go in that, then once he’s in bed, I could let Frank have a crack at it with me in it!’

‘That is utterly gross,’ Bec said.

From the back row of women, Ursula called out, ‘Would it hold me? Reckon I’d bring the supports of the roof down if I got going in it!’ Some of the women struggled to stifle their giggles.

‘It takes up to one-twenty kilos,’ Tracey said.

‘That means I’d need a bloody small bloke,’ Ursula said.

‘You could grab one of those new jockeys from up the road to give it a go,’ Gabs suggested. ‘Come to think of it, if you weren’t in it, you could fit three jockeys in there. They’re only about forty kilos each, aren’t they?’

The women all laughed. Jockeys had been the focus of jokes lately since the sale of Rivermont. It was the district’s second largest farm after Rebecca’s Waters Meeting and a bit more sizeable than Janine’s husband’s Elvern Estate, and had in the past twelve months sold for three million. The new owners, who wanted to expand their racing operation from Scone, had dived in and proceeded to give the entire property and homestead a facelift and transformation that was beyond belief. Within months it had been cultivated into a premier racing training and breeding facility that would rival the Packers’ polo place.

It wasn’t the only change the locals were dealing with. The previous summer the road from Bendoorin had been sealed right up through the valley so that rich sightseers wanting an easy glimpse of the summertime snow country could now drive their BMWs and Mercedes Benzes through the valley comfortably. There were also mutterings that the mining companies were sniffing about for new leases.

In short, Bendoorin was experiencing a renaissance. So much so that Candice’s daughter Larissa had opened a coffee shop that served flat whites and chai lattes to the Rivermont staff, new tourist trade and mining men.

Transition and change were in the air and, even though there were employment benefits (and sexy visiting tradesmen for the women to ogle), most of the locals didn’t like it. Particularly Rebecca. Her quiet backwater farm of peace and solitude had now become a thoroughfare for ski-bunnies, bushwalkers and weekend tourists looking to escape the city during holiday periods, along with four-wheel drives packed with workwear-clad men carting geo-equipment and core sample drilling rigs. And the conversion of Rivermont to a place frequented by pukka big-money corporates and the best racehorses on the planet was just another pain in her arse.

Absolute tossers could now be found at Candy’s store, asking for organic sourdough bread and low-fat soy milk for their coffees. And there was often a rowdy queue at the counter when the playful Rivermont staff zoomed into town in their sign-painted work vehicles and bought up all the sausages and steak from the meat section for their pissy barbecues, leaving none for the locals.

‘Bugger the Rivermont jockeys and the snobby bastards there,’ Ursula said. ‘I’m sick of their bloody helicopter flying over and upsetting me pigs!’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Rebecca, raising her empty glass.

Just as the other women joined them in a toast, in walked a stunning woman, dressed in skinny jeans and knee-high leather boots. A classy blonde pony tail pulled back from her clear vibrant face meant it was difficult to tell her age. She could have been in her late twenties or early thirties. Or she could have been a well-preserved forty. Rebecca looked at her with a tinge of regret. It was how she wanted to look. How she suspected she had looked before life had got in her way.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ the woman said to Doreen, glancing around the room.

‘No problems, duck. We’ve only just started. Everyone, this here’s Yasmine Stanton. From Rivermont.’

The ladies eyed her more thoroughly.

‘Yazzie, for short,’ she said with a big perfect-toothed princess smile. ‘Everyone calls me Yazzie.’

‘Jazzie Yazzie,’ Bec heard Ursula mutter, knowing news of the presence of the leggy blonde in the area had already spread like wildfire among the Bendoorin men. ‘More like fucken Barbie.’

If the woman had heard Ursula’s comments, she didn’t react. She just beamed a smile and graciously accepted a shooter from Doreen, downing it and eagerly grabbing up a second.

An hour later Doreen had Tom Jones blaring from the stereo. Some of the women were gyrating on the specially bought red shag-pile rug. Gabs’s terriers, who had now been allowed into the house, were up for some fun too, trying in vain to hump the rug and the leg of anyone who would stand still for long enough. Amanda Arnott was attempting to slide down the half-metre banister on the small stairs that led to the bedrooms and bathroom, getting her bum-crack wedged on the turned wooden knob each and every time before pivoting onto the floor onto her back, snorting laughter. Candice was peeking through Speedo’s cage, trying to feed the disgruntled budgie her hand-made ‘cheese dicks’.

Bec, who sat at the smorgasbord of sex toys, tried again to focus on her order form and ignore the chaos about her. What on earth should I get? she wondered, flicking through the catalogue, muddled by the rum. She decided to switch to water for the rest of the evening. What would Charlie like? He never even talked to her much about sex these days. It was as if he had shut down from it. It shocked her to realise she no longer knew what her husband liked. As her pen hovered over the order form, she heard a voice beside her. ‘Hi, I’m Yazzie.’

Rebecca looked up. ‘Rebecca.’

‘From Waters Meeting?’

‘Yep, the one and the same.’

‘I had so hoped to meet you!’ Yazzie said brightly. ‘My father isn’t so good at getting out to meet the neighbours. He’s never here, and I fear we’ve made a terrible racket getting the place built.’

‘It has been a bit of a whirlwind,’ Bec said a little coldly, thinking back to the times when she and Charlie had been furious at the way the workmen drove huge trucks around the middle of the blind corners of the tight-turned mountain roads, and about the chopper unsettling the calving cows and lambing ewes as the rich Stanton man from the city built his Taj Mahal of racing in their once quiet valley.

But Yazzie seemed not to notice Rebecca’s coolness towards her, or, if she did, she was ignoring it. ‘What are you getting?’ she asked with the same pretty smile as before.

‘I really don’t know. Not sure if I need any of this stuff; plus what if my boys found my stash of sex toys?’

‘Just tell them they’re part of Mummy’s lightsaber collection,’ Yazzie said.

Bec laughed. ‘You’re right.’

‘Here, allow me,’ Yazzie said, taking the pen and the order form from her. ‘I’ll choose and I’ll pay. Think of it as an apology gift. I know what a balls-up my father creates in people’s lives. Trust me.’