CHAPTER
39
A couple of hours later, as Joey took the bridge over Clarence River on his way home to the farm, the river was doused in afternoon sunlight. Gold shimmered from the ripples across the water, and a young kookaburra atop the crooked flood marker called a greeting to him as he passed.
Too bad he didn’t give a stuff about rivers. Or kookaburras. Or gold bloody shimmer.
Maybe there was some wood he could chop up when he got home—with his bare hands. Or he could bog the tractor in a ditch and spend the rest of the daylight shovelling a ton of mud.
He needed to do something, anything, to get this awful—thing—out of his chest.
When he trundled over the cattle grid, a white courier van was parked on his front lawn. A bored-looking guy was leaning up against it having a smoke, and a crate the size of a wrecking ball was shuddering beside him.
What the hell?
He pulled over and climbed out of his ute.
‘Didn’t want to just leave him,’ said the man, flicking the stub of his smoke into Joey’s freshly mown grass. For a moment he wished he had Amy there: she’d have cocked her head, planted her hands on her hips, and announced, ‘That could kill an innocent chicken! Gross, mister!’
‘Leave who?’ he said.
A deep and desperate woof sounded. What, he thought with a blaze of wrath almost as painful as the—thing—weighing down his chest, was Gus doingin a box?
He squatted down beside the wooden crate and peered into a peephole no bigger than a marble. Gus’s pale nose made a hoovering noise at him. ‘How do we get this thing open?’ he said.
‘Dunno, mate. But you sign this clipboard of mine, and you can get him out anyway you like. Nearly barked my ear off between Kempsey and Ballina.’
‘He’s come all the way from Sydney in this box?’
‘Yep. Paid in full, so no need to worry.’
He couldn’t keep the growl out of his voice. ‘It’s not the frigging fee I’m worried about. Has he got water? Has he been out for a pee?’
‘Um …’ The guy ducked the question and waved the clipboard about, along with a pen. ‘Just sign on the dotted line, mate, and I’ll be on my way.’
Joey scribbled a wavy line on the paper and turned his attention to the box. He found the catch on the fourth side, slipped two fingers in and scrabbled for purchase. A heft on the lid and the box’s side fell away to reveal a very tired, very anxious dog.
‘Gus,’ he said, his throat raw. ‘Mate.’
The dog gave his hand a quick lick then made a beeline for the bucket under the old water-tank tap, where the steady drip-drip-dripfrom the washer Joey hadn’t got around to replacing ensured the bucket was always full.
Every desperate slurp was a knife to his heart.
He heard the courier van skid in loose gravel on the turn back to the main road while he was hauling out his phone. He keyed in Kim’s number while the dog trotted over to an azalea bush, cocked his leg and began to pee. And pee. And pee.
‘Oh, hi, Joey,’ his ex-girlfriend said in that fake, easy breezy tone she used when she knew she’d behaved like a selfish cow but wasn’t prepared to own it.
‘You want to explain to me why Gus has turned up in a fucking box?’
‘Now, Joey, I employed a pet courier. I’m sure they took very good care of him.’
‘It’s not their job to take care of him. It’s yours, when he’s in your care. As per the seven-page agreement thatyouwrote.’
‘Well, I know how much you missed him, and we’d finished our little holiday, so I thought I’d send him back.’
Yeah, right. ‘What’s the real reason,’ he said flatly.
She huffed into the phone. ‘Well, it may also be the case that the residents of my apartment complex are being totally unreasonable. Two barking complaints this week, Joey. Two.’