Sal sniffed. ‘It’s my hormones. They’re totally shot.’
Hux had stayed until the kids were asleep and Possum hadn’t hated story time with his two-legged cousins, but despite stringing the story out for close to an hour, and making Sal a pot of tea and washing up the remains of a pasta bake, Charlie still hadn’t been home by the time Hux left.
And now, if Hux ever managed to track him down, the two of them would have even more to talk about; Charlie needed to be prepared for the gossip currently circulating. Left someone behind out Woop Woop? That had to have been the Cracknell sisters’ paraphrasing; theWestern Echomight just be a dozen stapled pages of A4 put together by whatever local was responsible for the paper—Bernard someone, from memory—but it still had to steer clear of those pesky legal limitations like defamation. Like outright bloody bullshit.
Whatever was up with Charlie and this supposedly missing guy, he wasn’t going to be finding out until this charter flight was done and dusted. Hux tuned back into the cabin noise and tried to remember what he was up to. Oh yeah, disaster. ‘In case of emergency, there are hand grips in the cabin, and remember the brace position. Sit upright with your head lowered, and cross your arms with your hands up on the opposite shoulder. Everyone give it a go now.’
‘Um, pet,’ said a breathless voice in his ear. Dot, he reckoned. ‘That made no sense.’
He chuckled. ‘Hug yourself, in other words.’ He turned in his seat, skipping right over the part of the chopper where Jo was seated, and gave Dot, who’d worked it out now, a thumbs up. ‘Now, remember, we can all hear everything that anyone says, so if you spot something you want to take a closer look at, just let me know.’
‘Roger that,’ said Ethel, her voice like gravel in his ear.
Jo said nothing, but he could see her fingers worrying at the hem of the khaki shorts she was wearing.
‘I’ve loaded up an aeronautical chart that we can follow overland to Corley homestead,’ he said, tapping his finger on the iPad clipped to the dash. ‘Cruising altitude two thousand feet.’ This was a charter job, nothing more. A to B, then back to A, as simple as that. At least, hopefully. Dot and Ethel had told him on the down-low, before Jo arrived, that they couldn’t remember exactly where the location was. ‘From there, we’ll fly low so you can see the buildings and farm tracks, and you can direct me.’
He gave it a second in case anyone else had anything to say.
Anyone, for instance, whose name was Joanne.
Words like:I’m sorry I dumped you.
Or, even better:Hux, letting you get away was the dumbest mistake I ever made.
But no, nothing. Just static. Probably a wise choice. If she was feeling even half what he was feeling, nobody else in this tiny helicopter cabin needed to hear anything they had to say to each other.
Although, who was he kidding? He was the one who’d had his heart crushed, not her. Married.Anddivorced. She’d ditched him cold for a sleeping bag in a tent and some long-dead bones in Mongolia or Timbuktu or Uzbekistan or wherever the hell it had been, but then been happy to hang aroundsomewherelong enough to marrysomeone. Just not him.
She got her happy ending, while he had moped about after getting dumped and—
TYSON: Just a hint: you might be overdoing it with the pity party, Hux.
He blinked.
Tyson had a point. The last fourteen years hadn’t actually been a suck fest of blighted hopes and dreams. He had a book-a-year contract, he had no mortgage, he had an email account chockers with invites to writers’ festivals and …
And …
Shit, there had to be something else he had that made his life totally awesome and enviable.
TYSON (whispering comfortingly into the big, blank gap of Hux’s life): You’ve got me and Possum.
Hux had to smile. Yeah, he did have Possum.
Feeling marginally better now he’d given himself a talking to, he concentrated on the collective and the cyclic and the pedals until the helicopter was light on the skids, then sent Charlie’s expensive new bird in a vertical leap upwards. The morning charter would be over in a few hours’ time, and then he could pack his old-news heartbreak away again and focus on what was actually important: figuring out how to convince Charlie that everything was going to be okay.
Corley Station was about eighty kilometres west of Yindi Creek if you travelled in a direct line—like a chopper or the good old crow could—a thirty-minute flight over gidgee country. Close to Yindi Creek, channels of mud-brown water hadn’t totally dried off from the early December rain even now, despite the furnace-hot temperatures each day brought, and the tenacious bulbs of wildflowers and scrub grass that lurked in the soil had sprung into life along the banks. From two thousand feet above ground level, the channels running down-country reminded Hux of giant hands: their palms out of sight up north, over the Gulf Country, their long fingers gleaming below them as morning sun caught the shimmer of water.
As they travelled further west, however, the land grew drier and redder and more sparse. Still beautiful, but in a spare way. Forgetting that he’d promised himself not to ogle Jo in the seat beside him, he caught her scribbling away in the notebook on her lap instead of taking the chance to see the western plains in bloom. One of her bloody lists no doubt, he thought, remembering her obsession with them in the past.There’s grass down there, Jo, he wanted to say. Wildflowers. Things actually alive. Things that didn’t need a chisel and hammer to be discovered.
Things like people.
Or, more accurately, he supposed, given the vast scale of the properties they were flying over, things like sheep. This was sheep country, after all. Cattle further up north, of course, where the rain was more frequent, and cattle to the east from Longreach through to Rockhampton, but Yindi Creek, McKinlay, Hughendon, Julia Creek, Boulia—these towns had all been built off the back of the sheep industry. Fleece, not meat.
He turned so he could see Dot and Ethel. ‘Are you girls involved in the Yakka this year?’
‘We’re running Jams and Relish,’ said Dot. ‘Maggie tried to rope us in for Craft and Woodwork again, but we fancied a change. What about you? Must be your turn for a win against that sister of yours in the shearing.’
