Free Dark Horse by Honey Brown Page B

from the door of the colonial-style toilet block. After glancing around the toilet’s timber walls and at the concrete floor, peering into the quaint corrugated iron showers, seeing the new fittings designed to look old, the exposed pipes and freestanding basins, they still found nothing. Sarah and Heath remained without the most basic of tools. A hammer would have been useful. A wrench. Wire. A box of nails. A wheelbarrow would have been a godsend. Saws, pliers, all those things they had to make do without. What they did have, and appreciated all the more because of the lack of other tools, were the crowbar and the shovels.
    In Hangman’s Hut, Heath separated the scaffolding into different piles, in order of size, and set aside those poles with couplings or with joiners already attached. Sarah moved the planks of timber. To save on floor space she leaned the beams and boards up against the stone walls. It was uncomfortable work. Fog clung to them like cold sweat. It made everything wet. They talked now and then, sometimes it was Sarah who broke the silence, other times it was Heath, incidental conversation, practical exchanges –
    ‘Do you think we’ll need these smaller pieces of timber?’
    ‘Probably not, but stack them anyway.’
    Finished sorting the materials, and while in front of the shed marking out with stones where they’d dig the post holes, Heath said –
    ‘Righty-o, favourite album.’
    ‘Nina Simone. Live at Carnegie Hall.’
    ‘Jeez,’ he laughed.
    ‘You know the recording?’
    ‘Kinda. Not what I was expecting.’
    ‘What are you saying – that I look like —?’
    ‘A country music girl.’
    She gagged.
    ‘Hey, I’m into country.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    Sarah reappraised him. Perhaps that was what the shine was, the almost evangelistic zeal for life some country people had. Glass half-full folk. She supposed with a hat on and long pants he might start to look a bit rural. It was hard to judge when they were both dressed like a couple of Deliverance rejects. They were in their matching baggy shorts, bare legs and boots. They’d rugged up as best they could, pulled on socks, Sarah had her raincoat over her shirt and Heath had on a second shirt.
    ‘What sort of car do you drive?’
    All she had wanted to know was whether or not his car completed the country boy picture: a ute with the R. M. Williams horns sticker in the back window. But the question caused him to turn his back to her in the fog.
    ‘Nothing fancy.’
    ‘It’s a four-wheel-drive though?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Whereabouts on the plateau is it?’
    ‘I’d actually crossed over the plateau.’ He still had his back to her. ‘And got a bit lost on the tracks the other side of it.’
    ‘If it’s on a track it’s going to be harder to see from the air, right?’
    ‘Like you said, they’re going to fly over the camping site and see us up here anyway. Finding my car isn’t going to make much difference, I don’t reckon.’
    The mist was so dense that when Sarah was on one end of a bundled length of scaffolding poles and Heath was on the other end she lost sight of him. It was as though a ghost were holding up the other end of the load. They carried the poles and the timber boards out the back door of the hut, up the incline, past Tansy’s new tethering point – a star picket sunk deep into the earth – and to the shed. Sarah could feel Heath during these trips, hear his footsteps, his breathing, when he spoke his voice came clear out of the mist, but he was invisible. They talked about the weather, the storm, recalling the cloud colour and way the thunder hadn’t stopped rumbling, and the strength of the rain, the volume. Their conversation flowed easily. Sarah told him about the bridge. He came close and listened. She could see him now and saw that he reacted to her tale in the way she’d expected him to react the night before: lips parted, eyes tightened with disbelief – she wasn’t exaggerating, was she?
    ‘The tree