Muck by Craig Sherborne

Author:Craig Sherborne [Sherborne, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, book
ISBN: 9781921870286
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2011-05-31T12:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS ONE.

I have kept her as a secret until now. I must collect more secrets because secrets are mine, a thing I own.

But how could she, that skinny Bettina, think I would bother with her ilk? Her father’s holding is only a third the size of ours. It is close enough to Tudor Park for him to be classed a neighbour, and he was neighbourly in his offer to help make this year’s hay. But in return for what? For nothing? He could think of no favour The Duke and I might do in return?

“This is my daughter,” he said to us. “She brings good sandwiches. She can also drive a truck. She has plenty of grunt for lifting any bale size.”

The audacity to think she would ever catch my eye, her oily brown hair parted on the side like a man’s. Man-tall, surely six foot if an inch and her shoulders slumped forward to try and hide it, which made her chest mounds sag beneath her T-shirt.

She left school at fifteen—what had she done the year since? Cooking and cleaning around the house like another wife for her father.

She ran beside the truck, matching me lifted bale for lifted bale. She threw bales around without gloves or any hay-wad padding between the twine and her fingers. She barely spoke, just smiled.

When we broke for lunch at midday, she served me salad sandwiches, served them with a little speech: “I made them myself. Hope you like them.” The gap between her front teeth showed pink gum and grey fillings.

Next day she served biscuits she called Dutch Bakes. The lemonade was also hers—her aunty’s recipe, her mother’s lemons. I squeezed prickles from my knuckle skin. She offered to cycle home for tweezers to extract them properly.

Then in one shy sentence she said my shoulders were the widest she’d ever seen. She made a mixture—castor oil and vinegar—for rubbing to stop them sun-burning.

She asked to be my pen-pal. I almost gave her my Sydney address. “I’ve never written to Australia before,” she said.

To think I would want to read a sentence of hers! Fifteen and left school. She would hardly know five verbs. I would feel duty bound to correct her spelling; send her mail back with many red cross-outs. I could give her marks from one to ten and say, “Stick to making sandwiches. Write back when you get an education.”

I deliberately told her the wrong number for my street—it was the safe thing to do.

But then I told the correct one. Why? Because she flattered me, she complimented my singing. I am so weak I give way to one flattering remark.

Singing is easy. It is exaggerated talking. I try to do it under my breath which keeps the melody vibrating in my throat, around my teeth, cheek-bones, gums, rather than be emptied straight out of me by singing loudly. It used to be my secret, this singing, but the very act of singing lets the secret out. Someone overhears you.

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