Headhunters

Chapter Twelve

They worked hard the following day. It was just the same: hot, uncomfortable and filthy. Milton and Harry contested each other once again, and the result was the same. Milton narrowed the difference to five sheep, but Harry said that he was holding back plenty in reserve and Milton knew that he was right.

They finished in the early evening. Milton wiped the sweat from his eyes and followed Harry towards the buildings. The sky was on the cusp between daytime and dusk, and they stopped at a broken fence to gaze up into the sunset. The sky was enormous here, a vastness that was cast about with little fragments of cloud. The dying light refracted through them, painting the clouds in burnt ochre.

“Beautiful, right?” Harry said.

Milton nodded.

“I’ll never get tired of it.” He leaned his elbows against the rail. “You remember the sunsets in the desert? In Iraq?”

Milton nodded. The two of them had served together in the SAS during the Second Gulf War. They had been dropped behind Iraqi lines and tasked with directing air strikes against Saddam’s materiel. Harry had been with Milton when the botched strike against a Scud launcher had flattened a madrassa. Just thinking about that day was dangerous for Milton. It brought back memories that he had tried to obliterate with booze and, he knew, if he mused on them for too long, he would start to think about drinking again. It was a rabbit hole he had no interest in going down.

Harry looked over at Milton and realised that he didn’t want to talk about it. “Sorry.”

“Forget it.”

Harry changed the subject. “We’ve got another day here before we’ve finished the last of them.”

“After that?”

“We’ll go north. There’s about the same number of animals to shear up there.”

Milton was happy to go along with him, and said so. They stayed there for a moment, resting against the broken rail as the sun dipped beneath the line of the horizon, its orange corona fading and then winking out.

The dirt track to the station was as straight as a die, and Milton saw a plume of dust just at the far reaches of his vision. It bloomed above the road, masking the dot within the cloud that must have been the approaching vehicle.

“Hello,” Harry said.

“Matilda?”

“Probably.”

“Want to go and tell Mervyn?”

Harry chuckled. “You know she’d kick the shit out of him, don’t you?”

Milton nodded. “With one arm tied behind her back.”

They waited. The vehicle was still ten miles away, and it took another five minutes before it was close enough for Milton to see that it was a Jeep, and another two for him to confirm that it was the dirty white Wrangler Renegade that Harry’s sister drove. It was bouncing over the potholed road at a fair speed, dust and dirt streaking out from beneath the wheels. The Jeep barely slowed as it swung off the road and onto the track that led toward the station’s outbuildings. It raced ahead for the final half mile, then braked with a suddenness that locked the wheels and sent a spray of grit in their direction.

Matilda Douglas was wearing the same old battered Aviators that Milton remembered from the last time that she had visited them. She had blonde hair, a little unkempt, all the way down to her shoulders. She opened the door of the Jeep and stepped out. She was wearing a pair of dirty dungarees; they were double lined around the knees because that was where the cloth took the most punishment from the burr on the sheep. She had a white T-shirt beneath the denim and a pair of heavy leather boots. She was twenty-five, full of sass and the kind of no-nonsense attitude that you could only get from being brought up on a sheep station, surrounded by ranchers and shearers in the arse end of nowhere. She did not stand on ceremony. She swore like a navvy. Everything that her brother did, she did, too, and said that she did it better.

“Hello, boys. Finished for the day?”

“Yep,” Harry said.

“How many you do?”

“Hundred and three,” he said.

“John?”

“Ninety-eight.”

She sucked her teeth. “Getting better. He’s gonna catch you up, Harry.”

Douglas snorted. “Not a chance.”

“You know a hundred wouldn’t be enough to keep pace with me, though — right?”

“Want to put that to the test?”

She grinned at her brother. “You working tomorrow?”

“Thought I might. Where you going?”

“Up to Boolanga.”

“When?”

“Driving up there tonight. We’ll start work first thing in the morning.”

“You got a pen for me?”

“You’re full of it, Matty.”

“We’ll see if you’re saying the same thing tomorrow.”

Harry smiled at her. Despite all his gruffness and the sibling rivalry, Milton knew that he was devoted to the girl. He was fifteen years older than she was, and often more like a father than a brother. Their father, Harry senior, had drunk himself to death when Matilda was five years old. Their mother had remarried another man with indecent haste and left them to fend for themselves. Harry had brought her up more than the woman had.

Matilda knew how to press all of Harry’s buttons, but it was obvious that the ribbing and the mild abuse were all part of their relationship. For her part, while she pretended that Harry’s paternalism was something that irritated her, she was just as devoted to him. They had an extraordinarily close relationship. They were bound together by their shared experience, the bonds forged in the fire of bereavement and then tested through early hardship. What was left was unbreakable. Milton envied it. He had nothing, and no one, like that.

She cocked her head in Milton’s direction. “Want to join in tomorrow?”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“I know. I meant maybe you want to put a little wager on the result?”

“Why not.” He pushed away from the fence. “I’m going inside.”

Matty winked at him and, just like the last time and all the times before that, Milton felt the little knot tighten in his stomach. He turned away, feeling the blood rise in his cheeks, and made his way to the dormitory. He took off his dirty clothes, wrapped himself in a towel and went through into the dingy shower. He cranked the faucet all the way around, waited for the hot water to run, and then stepped into the cubicle. The water sluiced across his body, rinsing the dirt and blood away, and soon the stream that was running into the drain was as black as tar.

Matilda was a very attractive woman, and he knew that she found him attractive, too. There had been an evening a month ago when she had been out to a station to shear with them. She had gotten drunk with the others, trying to tempt Milton to join them until Harry had chided her to leave him alone. She had been drunk, he knew that, but, in his experience, drink only made you do the things that you wanted to do. It loosened inhibitions, lubricated things, made them easier. They had been in a town whose name Milton had forgotten, in a tumbledown bar that reminded him of a Wild West saloon. He had gone outside onto the veranda to smoke and she had come with him on the pretence of cadging one for herself. She had flirted with him and then, before he could think about the consequences, she had kissed him.

He had let her do it, and kissed her back, before he realised that that was something that he could not do. Matilda was Harry’s sister. Might as well have been his daughter. Milton had no idea how he would react, but it wasn’t something he was willing to test. Harry was Milton’s friend, and he didn’t have so many of those that he was willing to risk the chance that he would see it as a betrayal.

But she had not given up. If anything, his reticence had made her try even harder. There had been several occasions after that kiss when she had found him on his own. After he had demurred for the third time, she had asked him what the problem was. He had explained: Harry was the problem, and what he might say. She had smouldered with anger, telling him that she was old enough to make her own decisions. He had explained that he didn’t want to risk losing her brother’s friendship, and her smoulder had caught light: she told him he was being pathetic, that she knew he felt the same way about her, and that he should be a man about it.

Still he said no.

She swore at him and left the station the next morning.

He hadn’t seen her since.

But he had thought about what she had said.

And she was right. He did feel the same way. He found her attractive — very attractive — and he would have liked to spend time with her. But Milton was not one for prolonged relationships. He didn’t value himself enough to think that he was worth the time of anyone that he admired and, more than that, he was a dangerous man to know. The idea of a real relationship with anyone while he had been working with Group Fifteen was so foolish as to be laughable. Being with him had not become a safer proposition since he had left the government’s employment, either. He thought of what had happened to him from London to Juarez to San Francisco and then New Orleans. He’d left a trail of destruction behind him. People had died because of the mistakes he had made. He was trying to be better, but that didn’t change the facts. He wouldn’t risk the same consequences for her.

There had been a lot of reflection since he had put the bottle aside, and his conclusion had been reinforced. He was damaged goods. He remembered one of his favourite quotes from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. “It will take time to clear away the wreck. Though old buildings will eventually be replaced by finer ones, the new structures will take years to complete.” It would have been selfish to think otherwise. He had heard a hundred drunks in meetings say the same thing. He had a lot of work to do.

And, if all that was true, all that he would be able to offer Matilda was something transient. If she wanted more, she would be the one who was hurt.

Harry wouldn’t forgive him for that.