Page 7 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Nope.’
‘Athletic sexual exploits?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Nope.’
‘Rock climbing the escarpment? Mountain biking the trails? Boating at high speed on the lake?’
‘Could you knife me a little deeper in the chest, doc? The most exciting thing I’ve done in weeks is quit putting sugar in my coffee.’
‘Sarcasm still sitting at five over five, I see.’
He watched her write another note on his chart. ‘You have a column for that?’
She made a noise that might have been a laugh and her mask puffed out again. ‘Let’s get that scan done, shall we? I don’t like the progression I’m seeing. We’ll send the results to your specialist in Wollongong and then we may have to make some decisions.’
‘Finally.’ He’d just about had jack of the steel shard of ship’s hull currently tucked up tight next to his spinal canal between muscles whose names he’d never heard of six months ago, but which he could now, unfortunately, spell: his psoas major and his erector spinae.
Any decision the surgeon had to make had to be better than this wait-and-see palaver.
Tom rested a hand on the wall as he felt his lunge begin to give way and the doctor—despite being five foot nothing and grasshopper thin—had to help him before he fell over. ‘Useless, effing le—’
‘Hey,’ she said, and her voice was suspiciously gentle, like she could see he was a bee’s dick away from losing it. ‘You’ve got to trust the process, all right? I know sitting around doesn’t come easy to someone who’s spent their life leaping off boats into hostile oceans with knives strapped to their ankles, or whatever it is you Navy Seals do.’
‘Australia doesn’t have Navy Seals.’ He’d said the words so often he could say them on autopilot, but that was good, because he needed a minute.
‘Whatever. My point is this: maybe you’re depressed, in which case we need to think about a sensible treatment plan, or maybe you’re a little lost amidst all this change and lack of a normal work routine, and something simple like an action plan might help you. Come up with some things youcando and stop thinking about what you can’t do.’
‘I’m not depressed.’ Oh god, he totally sounded depressed.
‘Uh-huh? Really? Then prove it. Start a project, Tom.Dosomething.’
The drive home from Cooma to Ironbark Station was a bit over ninety minutes, but that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough time for Tom to jam his current mood back in its box. He couldn’t face another round with Bruno just yet.
This station and the stockhorses we breed here are my life’s work. You could have had it all, but you chucked it in for some bullshit career in the Navy, and how did that work out for you, son?
Tom slewed the car through an s-bend and listened to the gravel spit out from under the tyres. Pride, that was Bruno’s problem. And stubbornness. And a decades-long obsession with the stud book of the Australian Stockhorse Association, which must have encouraged him to think if he fed and watered and broke his son to bridle, he’d get a carbon copy of himself.
When Tom reached the centre of Hanrahan, he snagged one of the town’s beloved reverse angle parks by the foreshore. If any of the locals noticed him take an extra-long time to get out of the driver’s seat, well, he could blame that on the view. Lake Bogong was dark and moody under the patchwork sky, and a scrappy-looking pelican had found a perch on one of the pier’s old wooden pylons. He felt some of his frustration ease as he pulled a long breath of air into his lungs. Smoke clung to the hill on the far side of the lake where a burn-off must be in progress and a ripple of fins, rainbow trout, perhaps, disturbed the shallows.
‘You’re a long way from the sea,’ he said to the pelican.
The bird only had eyes for the fish, so Tom walked over to the building on the corner, where an ornate timber door was propped open by a fat brown labrador.
‘Top of the morning to you, Major Tom. Just step over Jane Doe; she’s nicked off from the vet clinic again and is refusing to move until she’s been rewarded with a poached egg. Now, don’t tell me: you want the corner table and a long black.’
So much for sliding unnoticed into The Billy Button Café. The manager, Graeme, liked to greet arrivals like he was the ringmaster at a circus and sure enough, half the café patrons had looked up to see who the newcomer was.
Tom gave them a general wave, plastered his I’m-kinda-busy face on and headed for his usual table. Because Graeme was right: he wanted the quiet corner, tucked behind the chimney, partly screened from the chatterboxes of Hanrahan by a verdant green fern.
‘You know major is an army term, right?’ he said, as Graeme led him past the serving counter—another of the standard responses he’d acquired over the years. ‘I was in the Navy, so I was never a major.’ He was certainly never addressed as Major Tom. Sounded like a tin of cat food, which, now he thought about it, would be about as helpful in the naval defence of Australia as he currently was. ‘Besides, I’ve been a civilian a while now.’
Graeme whisked the comment away with a wave of his hand. ‘Once I’ve seen a man in uniform, I can never unsee it.’
Tom laughed. ‘You’ve never seen me in uniform.’
The manager winked. ‘I have an excellent imagination. Now, food? We have naughty and nourishing today as always, and a batch of date scones just came out of the oven.’
‘Just coffee for me, and is there a newspaper about? I better grab a bag of those butterscotch donuts too, if you have any. Mrs L has a soft spot for them.’
