Rebecca shook her head, knowing her friend was right. What had happened to her life? She used to be so sure of her place in the world. She never went to women’s gatherings, preferring to be out in the pub or the paddocks. Sure she’d had to debate every decision every inch of the way in a three-way tussle between herself, her father and Charlie, but they had started out with what she thought was a shared dream. Then the babies had come. And life had changed. She found herself driving off to play group and doctors’ appointments and ladies’ fundraising lunches while the men punched sheep through yards, their world obscured to her by dust.
She would glance in the mirror at the two little boys in their car seats, Ben with his dark hair and sincere brown eyes and Archie with his wayward blond locks and dimpled cheeks and smiling eyes of blue. She loved them with every cell of her body, but the daily grind of domestics that they created was eroding her very being. Then there was Charlie. Rebecca pulled her thoughts up so they slid to a stop like a reined-in horse. Her thoughts drifted hopefully, involuntarily, to Andrew. But again she put on the brakes. She just couldn’t go there. He’s just a friend, she told herself.
Keep it shallow. Shallow, like her breathing had become. Shallow like her life.
‘Don’t just sit there,’ Gabs said as she applied a thick layer of blue glitter eye shadow to her heavy lids in the rear-vision mirror, then tried to pluck a solo chin hair out with her thick thumb and forefinger. ‘You’ve got tarting up to do.’
‘And what about you?’ asked Bec as she began to reluctantly kick off her boots and pull her socks from her hot puffy feet. ‘I don’t see you wearing a costume.’
Gabs glanced over to her slyly, then with a daredevil grin ripped off her oversized T-shirt.
‘Ta-da!’ she said again, revealing a black-and-red bustier, her white bosoms spilling up over the top of the lacy cups. Her farmer’s singlet tan lines made her look a lot like a paint horse of white and brown.
‘Frank goes nuts for me when I dress up. The other night we got pissed on Beam and he told me to get naked except for my cowgirl boots. And I did —’
‘Too much information!’ Bec said, holding up her hand and smiling. But internally she grimaced. How many years had it been since she and Charlie had mucked around like that? Since Ben was born six years back? Since before then? She couldn’t remember. She could only recall the cold wall of his back and the passionless way he grappled at her in the early hours of the morning, when her body was leaden with exhaustion. He entered her with primal thrusts that were absent of care or love. There was an air of aggression within him that had started to cloud his contact with her. Bec could even feel it in his touch. She rubbed at her shoulder that felt bruised from their clash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d shoved her in a rage.
As she pulled on the fishnets, she felt the shame of leading such a disappointing life hidden within her apparently functional marriage. On the neighbouring farm, there was Gabs, who must be pushing eighty kilos, naked in cowboy boots doing the wild thing with an even beefier Frank after ten years together. Frank and Gabs seemed madly crazy about each other still, apart from telling each other to fuck off every now and then. They had met at Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding. Gabs, her best mate from Ag College, was one of the bridesmaids and Frank had been invited along as he was one of the local farmers. A relationship had sparked between Gabs and Frank over a post-wedding-day carton of beer that they shared on the back of a ute by a dam. Soon Rebecca had found her good college buddy moving into her very own district and marrying her neighbour. At the time, both girls had thought they’d each stumbled upon a match made in heaven. Not so now, Rebecca thought. Only one of them had got it right. Here she was, practically a born-again virgin in wedlock. As Rebecca jammed on the red shoes, she noticed the way her lily-white sock marks were still evident through the fishnet stockings, drawing a line on her ankles that ran to summer-brown legs, a bit on the hairy side. Like Gabs, since motherhood, she too had put on weight and with the fishnets hoicked up to her hips, she imagined her thighs might look a bit like Christmas hams.
By the time she dragged on the makeshift sequined skirt and put on the boob tube so her slightly flubbery stomach rolled out, Gabs was doubled over laughing, falling about in her cork-wedge shoes on the lawn, trying, with her weak post-baby bladder, not to wet her G-string.
‘You look hot, Bec! Hot. Hot, hot, hot damn!’
Bec sucked in her stomach, stood up straight and held her middle finger up at her friend, then went to the back of the four-wheel drive to collect the platter of dips and biscuits that had been inelegantly thrown in a silver takeaway container and covered with cling wrap.
‘I’ll have you know I could make a lot of money dressed like this down at the Fur Trapper Hotel. A lot of money.’
After winding each window down a little for the dogs and finding a water container for them, Gabs came to stand near her. ‘You do look hot, seriously. Maybe we both could lose a bit of chunk round the middle, but check out the guns on us!’ She flexed her arm muscles. ‘Frank loves my guns — they’re particularly good since bale carting. We did six hundred little squares for the new racing stables. Said they’d double their order next summer, until they got their own paddocks set up.’
At the mention of Frank loving Gabs’s body again, Bec’s face fell. Did Charlie even notice her looks any more?
Gabs picked up the plummet in her mate’s mood. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, moving to give her a rough sort of hug. Bec felt tears well in her eyes. She wanted to see Charlie as a good husband. When she thought about it, he did put up with a lot. But then again, she put up with more! Was it normal to feel this way?
‘Hey,’ Bec said, extracting herself too soon from the hug, ‘people will think we do a lezzo double act with you groping me like that. Now let’s get inside and get this so-called Tupperware party over.’
She marched to the gate in her strappy eBay shoes, nearly doing her ankle in the process. Gnomes grinned at her from nests of white pebbles as she walked along a brown-painted concrete path, flanked with solar lights and identical plastic versions of Jamie Durie designer flax. The spiked dark-leafed plants were spaced as evenly and as exactly as soldiers on parade. Gabs and Bec came to stand on a porch enclosed with corrugated green Laserlite, adorned with hanging baskets overflowing with dangling plants of bulbous juice-filled leaves and infrequent drooping purple flowers.
Before Gabs even knocked, Doreen reefed the door open. She was wearing a very short nun’s costume, her legs like cottage cheese in her black fishnets and her feet like pig’s trotters shoved into black patent leather pumps. So big was her bosom, it looked as though she had an inflatable raft stuffed down the front of her nun’s habit. The fringe of her eighties-style bob had extra product in it and looked much like echidna spines as it protruded out from her black-and-white habit.
‘Hi, Sister Doreen! Say your prayers, baby! The goddesses are here!’ Gabs said.
‘Hello, strumpets,’ Doreen said. ‘How are you?’
‘Great, Dors. You look hot!’
‘Yeah, fifty going on fifteen,’ Doreen said.
‘I like your new garden. Those fake plants are pretty cool,’ Gabs said.
‘Least the fucken possums and wallabies won’t eat ’em,’ Doreen said proudly. ‘And they’ll only melt in a bushfire. Come in, come in. We’re about to start.’
‘Where’s Dennis?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Hiding in the shed,’ Doreen said over her shoulder. ‘He’s set the telly up in there with a couch. He’s got a box of beer and a DVD of cricket highlights so he’s happy. A bit terrified, but happy.’
They entered the kitchen, where they found Amanda Arnott, wife of the local publican, at the bench, carving a carrot into the shape of a penis. ‘Hello, slutties!’ she sang. ‘Just exhibiting my extensive creative talents!’ There was a glint of the knife and her large diamond rings shining beneath the kitchen lights as she waved a carrot at