Page 2 of Down the Track
She finished the biscuit and made her mind up. If not now, when? Probably never, given that the big eight zero was headed her way, and Dot’s way, as unstoppably as the slow-moving floodwater that would head their way whenever monsoonal rain fell up in the Gulf Country.
While the idea brewed in her mind like fresh tea and her sister snored softly beside her, Ethel picked up the handset of their ancient Bakelite telephone and spun each number in the order it was written on the card. A dull tone rang … and rang … and rang … and then: ‘This is Jedda,’ said a recorded voice. ‘I’m not available right now so please leave a message.’
Ethel felt a little funny talking into a recording, but she didn’t let that deter her. If Dot was feeling nostalgic about the scrapbook and unfinished things, then she was of a mind to do something about it.
‘It’s Ethel Cracknell speaking,’ she said. ‘You knew me when I was on Corley Station. Remember that promise you made us to come back to Yindi Creek? It’s time to make good on it, Jedda.’
CHAPTER
1
The town of Yindi Creek, out in the red dusty plains of Western Queensland, hadn’t changed a scrap in the fourteen years since Jo had last driven down the main street.
She’d been a uni student back then—a graduate in zoology, at the end of her honours year at the University of Queensland. Her one goal in life had been to be accepted into the PhD program to study dinosaurs, so her plan was to volunteer at every dig site she could find until some uni, somewhere, said, yes, Joanne Tan: we want you.
Her last visit here had been a break day from the paddock where she’d been spending the summer. She’d come to town with a few of the other dinosaur dig volunteers to attend the local ag show. Cows, sheep, goats and jars of jam under frilly red-and-white checked fabric hadn’t been the lure that had brought them into town, though; when you’d been living under canvas for weeks, eating tinned food and playing cards by the light of a kerosene lamp, an agricultural show in an actual town with flushing loos, and the prospect of dagwood dogs and a whip-cracking display and live music, was as good a day out as you could wish for. She’d bought lunch from a stall in a paddock, had drinks at the pub whose backyard formed part of the showgrounds, browsed the one and only clothing shop …
She’d flirted, too. With the other lure: the hottie local competing in the sheep-shearing exhibition; the one she’d met a few weeks earlier at the dig site down past Winton and been flirting with ever since. More than flirted, in fact—
Well. Pointless lettingthatthought run its course.
Hopefully this trip to Yindi Creek would just be a one-day visit, too—without the country show and the clothes shopping and flirting, of course. It was too hot in December to be standing around checking out animal and jam exhibits, and new clothes were not in her budget since the contract job she had at the museum in Brisbane was about to come to an end and no-one—not her boss, not the board, not her colleagues—had hinted there was a new contract headed her way.
And the flirting? Yeah, right … Just thinking the word felt like a trigger for everything that had spiralled out of control in her life since she was last here.
She drove past a bronze sculpture of a sheep, a WELCOME TOYINDICREEKsign, an old chain-link fence with rusted machinery parts dangling from it like a giant’s wind chime, none of which she had the time (or energy) to focus on. She was here in the region to camp out in a paddock again, but this visit was about a different paddock. The other whacking great difference between this visit and last was that this time, instead of being part of a well-funded team with a tent village and an outdoor shower setup and the optimism of youth making every day a cabaret regardless of the heat or the hard work or the flies, she was on her own.
The whispers of disapproval, dormant for a few years but weirdly back with a sort of joyous vengeance now her life trajectory had totally tanked, started up:This would never have happened if you hadn’t thrown away every opportunity we gave you, Joanne.
Damn it, enough already. She was here to rehash the past, but notherpast: she’d buried that at about the same time she’d buried every emotion that had ever threatened to … to …
Well. Some things were best left undescribed.
Hopefully the two local women she was here to meet, who’d invited themselves along on the exploratory dig she had planned despite her tactful (and then blunt) suggestions that it wasn’t necessary, weren’t the chatty sort of women who wanted to know everyone’s business. Chatting about herself was the last thing Jo wanted to do.
Are you married, Jo?Not anymore.
Kids?One. He hates me. It’s my fault—I’m a crap mother, apparently. You can read all about it in the affidavits my husband wrote to the Child Support Agency.
Why don’t you have a team to help you dig?Museum workers stagger from contract to contract and guess what? My contract’s just about up. Imminent redundancy. Budget cuts. My career’s in the toilet … Take your pick.
Yeah. A question-and-answer sesh in her current frame of mind was not likely to end well.
Did she need an audience while she was desperately trying to dig up a future (and some self-esteem) from a hole in the ground? Nope.
If this was all a bust, she’d rather fall apart without anyone there to utter platitudes and say nice things. Nice things made her cry, and she had told herself (in the shower, in the car, in lifts and shopping aisles and the ancient basement loo at the museum in Brisbane where she was still—fingers crossed—employed) that she was not someone who cried.
Problem was, the paddock she needed to visit was on the Dirt Girls’ property and an almost-out-of-work palaeontologist, who really,really, needed to dig something truly awesome out of the ground so the museum’s benefactors would be so impressed they’d fund a new project for her to lead, was in no position to quibble about the small print of their arrangement.
‘You’re a scientist,’ she reminded herself, shooting a glance at her notebooks, her lists, her trusty little world of order and sense on the passenger seat of the four-wheel drive she’d rented at Longreach Airport; the things that she understood. Scientists solved problems by collecting data and interpreting it dispassionately, not bycrying.
Jo peeked at the scrap of mirror in the visor to check her eyes weren’t red. ‘How do scientists resolve problems?’ she demanded of her reflection.
Easy. They thought up an aim, they hypothesised about what might happen and then they experimented. For a scientist, trying and failing was okay. Trying and failing was part of the process towards trying and succeeding.
‘You hear that, girlfriend? Trying and failing isokay.’ No matter what your parents used to say when you were busy being their disappointing little daughter. (No matter what your ex-husband and your son thought of you.)
Hmm. The brown eyes in the tiny mirror looked back at her sceptically and it was hard not to agree; all this positive self-talk would be so much easier to believe if her tried-and-failed list wasn’t so much longer than her tried-and-succeeded list. If she didn’t feel guilty for not trying harder at the things that mattered most.
