Free Shearers' Motel by Roger McDonald Page B

beanmix, tipped the beans into a bowl, shook pepper over them, and spooned the onion in. Then he added a handful of finely chopped green capsicum and, with sly inspiration, a dusting of chilli powder. It looked good. Tasted good. (If you liked three bean mix.)
    Another boast floated up:
    â€˜I’m turning into a proper cook. Maybe I’ll buy checked trousers, get a white cap, have my hair cut short — hygienic. I’ll develop a pernickety, critical manner, cultivate the indoor complexion of a pro, eyes like swollen tea bags. (See me already.) I’ll open a business. Marie and Ella serving tables, stating the facts the way they can. You doing the books, working the front of house. Wouldn’t be hard. Long stained tables with bench seats — guests carve their initials while they wait — no menus because you eat what you get. But a few smart improvements — like fridges to keep beer cold, for example. (Start with that.) And an offsider like Davo here to fling anyone giving the finger against a force like Bertram Junior who rattles malcontents’ heads like coconuts and whips them out into the open, into the dirt yards, where scores are settled.
    â€˜Spread a bucket of red dust on the floors, with star-shaped bindiis to wedge under guests’ thongs. Rough-up a stack of People, Australasian Post , and Rugby League Week . Dump them on the end of the table for mealtime reading. Buy mattresses from St Vincent de Paul. Call it home.’
    His mind raced, his biro plunged across a dozen pages of imagining.
    â€˜Bertram Junior keeps mentioning the shearers’ quarters at the Arid Zone Experimental Station, Red Rock Gorge, where I might, or might not, be cook next time. Depends , he says, looking away into the distance. He is always agonising about something. So I leave him to the privacy of his thoughts and imagine myself doing laps of the Red Rock pool while the lunchtime roast sizzles in the fan-forced oven, or I sprawl under a beach umbrella reading Call Me When the Cross Turns Over while dishesrumble in the dishwasher, and my assistant cook, who Bertram Junior understands comes with the place and will certainly lend a hand, peels potatoes and quarters pumpkins ready for the night’s grub-up.’
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    Between smoko and lunch one day, he drove down the track to Leopardwood Downs homestead and rang home. Sharon would have his letter by now. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, but he waited. The phone always took a long time answering because Sharon was mostly outside, across at their own two-stand shed hammering over gaps in the iron, or laying stones in the garden, or up a ladder hauling lumber from the roofspace where she planned to build a loft with her own bare hands if finance wasn’t forthcoming from somewhere. Or she would be sitting in the grass with the reins of her pony looped over her wrist, planning paddock rotations. Or maybe in town dropping the girls at school. What day was it there anyway? It was still early. Where was the place, he asked himself, that he couldn’t even call home in his own mind — because of this impulse that was on him to travel, to shed parts of himself without thinking.
    Sharon would certainly hear the phone if she was there. There was an outside bell. An electrically mounted arm with a lead ball at the end of a spring struck a dish-shaped iron ringer on the back verandah wall. It was deafening. The neighbours three kilometres away heard it when the air was still. Sharon never missed it. She’d fly from the saddle and come crashing in.
    Like now.
    â€˜I knew it would be you. Hang on. Let me get my breath. We got your letter, what an amazing life, isn’t it chaotic? All that stuff about restaurants, are you serious? Wait a second.’
    He heard the phone being put down, a cigarette being shaken out of a packet — heard the click of Sharon’s lighter and the rapid intake of smoke as she gathered her thoughts.