CHAPTER
28
Joey stared at the chores listed on the whiteboard in the stable and decided that he didn’t give a shit about any of them.
Turns out finding out his family didn’t trust him with bad news sucked. Hangovers also sucked. Coming home from hospital, drinking umpteen beers, and laying his heart bare to a woman who wasn’t interested in even being friends with him—let alone something more—sucked even worse.
And where the heck was his dog?
No doubt Gus had been as unimpressed as Kirsty by Joey drinking himself stupid, because even the rattle of dog food in a tin bowl hadn’t brought him round.
Traitor.
He’d heard water running in the Station Cottage bathroom, earlier, when he’d gone over to apologise for whatever drunken ramblings he might have made. Lurking beneath the window would have made him even more pathetic, so he’d headed to the stable to procrastinate until Kirsty appeared.
He restocked the workbench biscuit tin with the batch of Anzacs he’d stress-baked at dawn, he brushed Dobbin’s mane, he even refilled the ice trays in the battered old fridge.
Still no sign of his rouseabout and her new apricot bestie.
Fine. Whatever. He was totally okay being alone and hungover and untrusted, he convinced himself while he ate two biscuits and drank a very black and bitter cup of coffee.
He could leave her a message, perhaps, before he got stuck into the day’s jobs. But what?
He wrote the wordsMorning Kirsty! See you later?in a speech bubble on the whiteboard, then drew a stick figure of himself in a cowboy hat with a smiley face, but decided it was too dishonest and jokey. If he smiled again any time soon, it would be a miracle. So he rubbed out the smiley and drew a sad face, but that was too close to the truth.
‘Fuck,’ he said, rubbing the whole lot out. Dobbin gave a deep sigh and went and stood with his head in the corner.
He chucked the eraser onto the workbench and the boomerang scar on his hand caught his eye. ‘Yeah all right, Natalie,’ he told it. ‘I never freaking learn, do I?’
Turning his back on his chore list, which was reminding him he should be marking out which of the struggling macadamia trees needed a prune, he straddled his moped, gave it a kickstart, and roared out of the stable and away from the farm.
Kirsty wasn’t turning up to be apologised to, but—apparently—he had no shortage of people in his life who needed to hear him say sorry, so he may as well get started with the others. As he reached the turn-off from the main road to Bangadoon, a thunderhead rolling in from the Nightcap Ranges decided to dump itself over him. No doubt he deserved it.
He slowed to a snail’s pace to navigate the potholed road into the community, and gave a wave to Angelo, one of his father’s cronies who’d helped create the land-sharing cooperative. The guy had to be pushing seventy, but there he was, trundling a wheelbarrow through a neat field, a battered old drizabone covering him from neck to knee.
Joey pulled into the shade of a tarpaulin that covered his mother’s potting wheel from the elements, then headed for the house and prised off his muddy boots. His parents may be alternative, but they still had strong feelings about people tracking farm dirt over their clean kitchen floor.
Having let himself in through the front, he made his way down the central corridor to the kitchen out back where everybody always hung out. ‘Mum?’ he called. ‘Dad? It’s Joey.’
No answer.
From the kitchen window he could see that the van was in its usual place, tucked into the ramshackle old carport. So where could they be?
He found his mum in the veggie patch, a tattered umbrella in one hand and a clump of soggy basil in the other.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said, stripping off her old gloves. She must have seen from his expression that the time for prevarication was over. ‘Squidge under the brolly with me.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s resting. Let’s leave him be for the moment, and you and I can have a talk.’
She didn’t say much until they reached the creek that separated Bangadoon from the cultivated farmland to the west. The water was running fast, leaves and berries winking in its ripples. ‘This is where we named you, Joey,’ she said. ‘Your father and I, some ofour friends. Somebody had made strawberry wine and it had quite a kick as I recall.’
Joey’d bucketed plenty of water from that creek in his day. When the pump wasn’t working, or if the electricity had failed. To throw over his younger siblings in some elaborate prank.
‘They were the happiest of days, when you kids were little. We thought we had the answer to everything then: love, good food and kind thoughts. We thought that was enough.’
‘I know, Mum. You gave me—us—a wonderful childhood.’ An odd childhood by the standard of pretty much everyone else he’d ever met but wonderful nonetheless. ‘I’m grateful for that.’