After opening my suitcase in the waiting room, I take out the clothes I’ll need for the next few days, stuff them into a smaller bag and store them in the ute with my vet gear and other supplies. Anna’s lasagne, sitting in a box on the back seat, stares back accusingly. Within an hour of making it clear I wanted nothing to do with Cameron, his sister was asking him to do me a favour. I couldn’t hear what he said when she told him I’d need the cabin for a week, but it must have been a monosyllabic response, possibly a curse, as the call ended abruptly. I stop at the general store, larger than I remember, and buy a lettuce, carrots and capsicum. There are ten varieties of leaf tea, but I buy Bushell’s teabags. At the register, I add a bar of chocolate.
Dinner sorted.
As Keith Urban and I pass the caravan park that probably, like the motel, kicked my family out because we owed them money, I look straight ahead and accelerate. From here, it’s two kilometres, only one bus stop, to Mr Farley’s farm, and the five acres of land we lived on for almost five years. The dusty paddock turned into a mud bath every time it rained, and the portable toilet was only emptied once a month, but the timber shed with a cracked concrete floor and corrugated iron roof wasmostlywaterproof. A curtain divided my room from my parents’. The kitchen, such as it was, had a gas burner, an icebox and a plastic tub sink. We never used detergents or other chemicals, so I filled the chickens’ bowl with dish water. Electricity was generated by a solar panel that Dad had rigged up, so we only had power at night if the sun had shone all day. I once sneaked a torch into my room and read under the covers, but my father caught me red-handed.
‘Your mother and I are very disappointed,’ Dad said quietly as he sat on the end of my camp bed, took out the AA batteries and lectured me about the dangers of lithium, acids, copper and other battery components. By then I would have been ten or eleven and knew better than to argue. I simply reassured myself that, when I was a few years older, I’d get to go to Nana and Pa’s house in the suburbs where I’d finish school and start university. In this I was lucky, because even though my parents eschewed electricity and vaccinations and medical advice, they liked to read scholarly papers about the dangers of batteries, threats to the water table by fracking, and other things that supported their causes. They’d been told I was gifted in science and hoped I’d use that gift to be a geologist or a physicist or climatologist or another kind of ‘ist’ that would have an impact on bettering the world. In this way, the debt they’d incurred by adding to the world’s population would be paid by their child’s contribution to saving the planet.
I didn’t study veterinary science to spite them, but I didn’t tell them what I was up to until second year.
‘Why did you do this?’ my father asked.
‘I liked the animals in Summerfield. I wanted to make a difference to their lives.’
I couldn’t get near Atticus, the horse that lived on the farm and that nobody seemed to want, for months. When I finally caught him, he bit my arm, but I persevered and soon enough, he’d hang his head over the barbed wire fence and nicker when he saw me. Our ducks and hens would flap in excitement at the sight of last night’s scraps, grains and the discarded outer lettuce leaves I smuggled out of the general store. Rex, Mr Farley’s ancient border collie, dug a hole under the fence to get to us when Mr Farley went fishing and left him home alone. I’d wash blood from his fly-bitten ears, wipe on fly repellent and pretend he was my dog.
Pulling over opposite the paddock and shed we called home is a risk after the shitty day I’ve had, but it’d be churlish to drive past without acknowledging the role of the farm in my formative years. I learned a lot, and there was good in the things my parents fought to change, including the fact that Summerfield no longer has an open-cut mine. I look through the side window. And then I wind it down. The five-acre lot is now ringed by post and rail fences. A gravel driveway leads to a handsome painted house with a pale grey roof. There are four paddocks, all with loose boxes. An outdoor dressage arena, a round yard. Atticus would have been around eleven when my family abandoned him, so it’s unlikely he’d still be alive, but I search anyway. A handsome black warmblood hangs his head over a railing; another warmblood, a rich liver chestnut, stands next to him. There’s also a bright bay quarter horse and a pretty palomino pony. Dressage and show horses every one. When Keith Urban looks up, I ruffle his fur.
‘How about that?’ My eyes sting but I’m smiling. ‘They love horses too.’
Nothing was done to rehabilitate the land used for mining until government funding came through. The land to the left of the highway was ‘the nice side’ of Summerfield, thousands of acres of farms and unspoilt bushland. Cameron’s property is on ‘the mine side’ of the highway, where land was less valuable because of the trucks, dust, noise and proximity to the barren craters and mountains of dirt. Now that the Summers River is flowing again and the landscape has been reimagined by teams of engineers, ‘the mine side’ is increasingly productive. The land is being reshaped and thousands of shrubs and trees have been planted.
The turn-off to the gravel driveway of Cameron’s property, Three Cow Farm, is marked by a cattle grate and a stand of handsome gums. Fifty metres on, there’s a towering conifer, a spruce, with a single trunk and in front of that, a timber signpost to Three Cow Cabin. As I take the turn-off, I remind myself for the thousandth time that Keith Urban and I were short on options. Anyway, this will only be temporary, and I can pay rent.
The cabin, weathered grey timber with a black door and shutters, is the size of a two-storey caravan. Decking, broad boards of ironbark, wrap all the way around it. I follow the gravel to the side of the house and park my ute. Then, lasagne in one hand and groceries in the other, Keith Urban and I follow the path and climb the two steps to the deck. Juggling bags, I open the door.
The kitchen, which takes up one side of the living area, has an oven and stove, a sink and a fridge, and they all look brand new. There’s a two-seater sofa, a small table and two chairs. All the furnishings, including cushions and a throw, are a stylish palette of greys, neutrals and blues. A transparent glass sphere, a tennis ball–sized Christmas ornament, hangs from a sparkling silver string. I take a closer look at its etchings. The snowflakes are the same shape as the snowflakes I sketched in physics classes when I was bored.
‘What do you think, Keith Urban?’
The kelpie wags his tail.
‘I like it too.’
I climb a timber ladder to reach the loft. Two white cotton sheets, pillowcases and a white cotton banket are folded neatly on one end of a queen-sized mattress. Four pillows, one in front of the other, line up at the side. I sit on the edge of the bed, bounce and then lie down.
There are two long, narrow windows either side of the loft, both with blinds. When I open the first, a green expanse of national park stretches out into the distance. I’m on the other side of the bed and shoving a pillow into a pillowcase when I pull up the second blind. Anna told me Cameron’s house isn’t yet finished, but he moved out of the cabin months ago. The new house, five pavilions with steeply pitched roofs, faces thickly wooded hills to the south and gently sloping grazing lands to the north. There are three water tanks behind the house, a large shed and what look to be horse paddocks and loose boxes.
As if they’re aware I’m wondering where they are, a tall black horse, probably a thoroughbred, walks from the stables and into a paddock. A smaller grey horse follows the black and stands next to him. The land behind the stables is mostly cleared and, far into the distance, there’s a herd of cattle. Two dams and, judging by the dark green strips of vegetation forming a spine at the base of the valley, also a creek.
Why did Cameron McLeod, competitive in the classroom and on the sports field, the boy most likely to be a doctor like his mother or an accountant like his father, stay in Summerfield? Why did he become a farmer?
Why do I care?
I wasn’t stung by the wasps, but my neck is suddenly tender. When Cameron offered his help, I refused. When he said there were things I should know about Dr Brown, I was dismissive. I didn’t always hate Cameron. When he’d pick me up after I tripped (or was tripped) in the playground, I felt humiliation, not hatred. When I’d sneak out of the classroom after one of the many girls who liked him sidled up close, that was envy, not hatred. When I didn’t want him to see me at Julia’s surgery, or in the shed at the farm and later in the caravan park, that was embarrassment, not hatred.
Julia visited our family once, after I fell from the roundabout. I was shocked to see her standing under the caravan’s annex when I finally came home. Mum was telling her I’d be at the library and was often late for dinner, but when Julia saw me, she left Mum behind and half walked, half ran towards me. She’d always kept a respectful distance when she’d peered into my eyes at the surgery but that day, she grasped my arm. She frowned at the blood on my school dress.
‘Amelie!’ Dr McLeod being anything other than cool and composed was a shock. ‘Are you all right? Where have you been?’
‘I went for a walk.’ It wasn’t a lie, because after I was spun around and around and around on the roundabout until I couldn’t hold on anymore and was thrown to the ground, I walked to the library and, very carefully so as not to get blood on the covers, I slid the library’s books into the shute. Only I didn’t do that straight away, because I was dizzy and nauseous and disoriented, and everything was even more blurry than usual. I stood up, fell, stood up, fell. After a while, I gave up. And, when the laughs and shouts quietened and I heard the boys running away, I started to cry. Huge wrenching sobs that hurt my chest. I’m not sure how much time passed before I saw Cameron. Two minutes? Twenty? He was blurry, but the sun glinted off the lenses of the glasses in his hand. He put both hands firmly on my arms as the world spun around me. He was taller than other boys his age, broader across the shoulders, more mature. It didn’t matter that the other boys had been cruel because they always were. When Cameron was cruel, when he said what he did, it felt like a knife to the heart.
‘I hate Cameron as much as I hate all the others,’ I told Dr McLeod.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say to his mother.’ Mum had joined us by then. ‘Take it back, Amelie. Say sorry.’
‘There’s no need.’ Julia’s eyes were especially bright. At the time, I would never have thought she might want to cry. Now, thinking back on it, given I was usually so polite and obliging, she might have guessed how hurt I must have been to yell like that. ‘Cam can explain what happened another time.’
‘Amelie usually gets on with everyone.’ Courtesy was important to Mum, but she was being particularly apologetic. Were we in debt to the surgery as well?