TYSON: [wincing] Cliché alert.
Too bad. It was his heart and he was the one feeling the cold band, and that was exactly what it felt like, cliché alert be damned.
The road into the homestead where he’d grown up rose and fell like sand ripples. He had his window down because he loved the smell of home. Wood smoke. Dust. Sheep and, since Number One took over the property, cattle and goats. The trees on either side of the drive were sparse despite the efforts the family had made to pretty the place up over the years, but the paddocks looked like they had a good cover of grass and the stock milling about a water trough in the distance looked well fed. Regina was doing a good job out here.
A good job at the house, too, he noted as he drew up to the side of a lean-to where the ride-on mower lived. More grass, well greened by bore water, surrounded the old timber house and the garden beds either side of the front stairs were flourishing. Once they’d been just barren bits of dirt where he and the Numbers closest to him in age—Sal and Laura and Fiona—might have chucked their bikes when they roared indoors for a meal.
He kicked off his boots then let himself in through the swinging mesh door that kept out most of the flies and deterred all but the most tenacious of snakes. ‘Mum?’ he called. ‘Dad?’
‘In the kitchen,’ Malvina called back.
Hux looked down at Possum, who had his nose pressed to the scrape mat, no doubt breathing in the wonders of sheep poo that dated back three generations. ‘You’d better come with me, mate. You know the kelpies make fun of you.’
He walked down the central corridor to the old-fashioned kitchen that stuck out the back of the house, Possum trotting beside him. The design dated back to colonial settler days when kitchen stoves used wood and had a tendency to burst into flame. The room had been given the odd refurb over the years, but probably not since the 1960s.
Ronnie Huxtable wore a striped apron tied neatly around his scrawny hips and was fussing over a batch of scones that, by the smell, had just come out of the oven. ‘Consistency in appearance my arse,’ he muttered, apparently to himself, because Malvina was seated at the far end of the scarred wooden table with her reading glasses perched on her nose and an ancient leatherbound book in front of her. On the floor beside her, piled higher than the table, were old cardboard boxes labelled messily and in varying handwriting styles:Goat entries 2016; Sausage Purchase Orders 1973; Children’s Cooking Prize Nomination Forms 1994.The ledger on the table was the Yakka bible, holding the addresses and contact details of anyone who’d supplied hire tables or gas bottles or delivered sheep to the exhibition or repainted the showground loos since the dawn of time. The ledger was the property of the committee, but no-one, apparently, had been brave enough to wrestle it from his mother’s steely grip since she was deposed from the throne.
That she was poring over it with intense scrutiny wasn’t a surprise. The show was only a few months away and if he knew his mum (which he did) she was involved in everything despite having no official role. But the stack of archive boxes was a worrisome development. His mum was burying herself with work.
‘Have a scone, son,’ said his dad.
Hux didn’t feel much like smiling, but his dad’s innocuous invitation did the trick. In the lead-up to the annual show,have a sconedidn’t have the same meaning in the Huxtable kitchen that it did in any old kitchen at any old time.Have a sconein this context was more of an order. And it came with conditions, such as the eater of the scone committing to a robust thirty-minute discussion on aroma, soda ‘tang’, crumb, lift, crust, browning and flavour.
He had time. Sal and Charlie and Laura weren’t due to arrive for another hour. Fiona had the shortest distance to travel from the sheep station she was living on east of Yindi Creek so would probably be the last to arrive. And on the plus side, it’d be harder for his mother to run him off the property at the end of a pitchfork if his dad hadn’t finished dissecting Hux’s taste buds’ reaction to his latest batch.
‘Sure.’ With faint hope of an affirmative answer, he risked a question. ‘Can I have butter and jam?’
‘We’ll see.’ This was his father’s way of sayingdon’t be daft. Butter and jam, in Ronnie’s opinion, were what inferior bakers used to mask the deficiencies of their scones.
Hux took one and split it (because slicing a scone in two in this kitchen was a major no-no), then held it to his nose so he could take a good whiff.
‘Plate, Gavin,’ said his mother without looking up from her ledger.
He rolled his eyes at his dad, who reached behind him to the old dresser and snagged a floral plate, then slid it across the table like a little porcelain frisbee.
Hux took a bite. The scone was good—it was great, even—but he’d have been surprised if it wasn’t. His father had been the reigning scone champion of the district for years. The plain scone was his passion, but he’d dabbled with date and pumpkin over the years. Not in the same batch, obviously.
‘Delicious,’ he said thickly.
‘A tad overdone, perhaps?’
‘Nope.’
‘Too much crust?’
‘Just enough crust.’
‘The sides. There’s a bit of a tilt to them, isn’t there?’
‘They look vertical to me, Dad.’
‘But the height, mate. Look at this.’ Ronnie whipped out a small metal ruler with a sliding gauge and began measuring the remaining scones on the rack. He made notes with a pencil on a notebook beside him. ‘Sixty-four millimetres, fifty-eight millimetres, seventy-one millimetres …’ he mumbled under his breath while his pencil scratched at the notepaper. ‘That’s a median height of sixty-four point three millimetres and a range of thirteen millimetres. I may as well just not even bother entering this year.’
Hux ignored this comment; his dad could get dramatic in scone season. He wolfed down the rest of the first scone before reaching for another. ‘In that case, can I have butter and jam on my next one?’
His dad waved a hand in a defeated gesture and slumped back in his chair.
‘Get a grip, Ronnie,’ said Malvina. ‘They’re fine. They’re always fine. Why don’t you pop the kettle on, love, and Gavin can tell us why he’s here. How’s Charlie holding up?’
