The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall

Author:Kate Mildenhall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

There have been more visits to the park, and once, thrillingly, to the freezer room after work. It isn’t quite the grand romance Peggy always imagined for herself; less polish, more excitement. It catches her unannounced, in her throat, and down low between her legs, the thought of him, and it’s never flowers and hat tipping she thinks of before she drifts off to sleep in her new room at Lil’s house, it is flesh and teeth and sweat. She wolfs down two serves of breakfast before work. Sometimes imagines biting down on the shining slabs of the stuff she watches rattling into the chillroom as she heads on tea break. The other girls know there is something going on with her and Jack King, but whether it is jealousy or something else, they don’t rib her like she thought they would.

Tuesday he came past at the end of the shift, Beth made a sad face at him and said she was sorry he didn’t come to call on them like he used to, and Jack just laughed and flicked his head at her. Peggy nodded and met him on the corner near the local kill floor when the whistle went. There he crushed her up against the wall to kiss her, ignoring the men walking by after clock-off who whistled low as they passed.

That was the afternoon of the chill room. When she’d pushed his hand from where it had crawled under her skirt and laughed at him and said, Not here, Jack, he’d told her that he needed to cool off then, and he knew a place.

She knew. She wanted. She followed.

Tonight, at least, he has said he will take her to the pictures, but to be honest she isn’t sure if she’s up to it. The meatworks today has a stink about it that is curling her toes. But it’s still hours till her shift ends and there are forty bags to get done before then.

‘Billy reckons there’s trouble brewing with the slaughtermen.’ Norma is a tight beanpole of a woman who likes to drop news like stones in a pond, watching while the gossip ripples out across the works.

‘Hardly unusual,’ says Nell. ‘Think they’re so high and mighty up there.’

‘Too right, only ones not to take a cut last year.’

‘And the year before!’

‘And rightly so,’ says Jean. ‘None of us’d be here at all if they didn’t work their scrawny arses off.’

‘You’d know!’

‘Well scrawny arse doesn’t mean scrawny anywhere else…’ Jean grins, and they whoop around the table, hands never stilling over the cotton and threads.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Peggy asks, thinking that if she’s going to keep carrying on with a slaughterman, she should know. He hasn’t talked work to her really, but there hasn’t been that much talking at all to be honest. And she doesn’t mind it, how obsessed it has made her, thinking of him and his hands, and that arse – but still, what she wants in a man is more than that, she wants long conversations and dreams and plans.

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