Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [87]
‘Wait. I want to take your photo.’
Nez was holding the disposable camera in her hand. She walked towards Gwen, stopped about a metre in front of her, lifted the camera to her eye and looked through the lens.
‘Smile.’
Gwen could never resist a photo opportunity. She draped the bag over her shoulder with one hand, rested the other on her hip and pouted her lips. She held her pose until Nez had taken the picture.
Before I knew what she was doing Gwen had grabbed hold of me and wrapped an arm tightly around my waist. ‘Take this one, Nezzie, with my toy boy.’
Nez took the picture before I had wriggled free by elbowing Gwen in the ribs.
‘Take it easy, Jesse, take it easy,’ she yelled at me before posing again. ‘Come on, love, another one of me.’
Nez examined the camera. ‘No. There’s only two pictures left—I’m saving them.’
Gwen appeared a little insulted. ‘Suit yourself then. See you two later.’ She dropped the bag to her side, turned around and walked off.
I strolled onto the road and watched as the red triangle of Gwen’s dress grew smaller and smaller. It stopped for a moment and drifted in a haze coming off the hot tar on the road. While I could not make out her face I imagined that Gwen might be looking back at us and thinking about what she might do next.
The dress then moved forward and vanished.
I told Nez to stay with the car while I took a look around the yard, but I’d taken only a few steps when I heard the car door creak open, followed by Nez’s footsteps scraping behind me in the gravel.
After circling the yard a couple of times I headed for a tin shed on one side of the wheat silo. When I opened the shed door I could hardly believe my luck: there was a toilet in one corner.
Nez waited in the doorway as I walked over to the toilet. What looked like the remains of a dead rat sat in the bowl. I would have to get rid of it before Nez saw it and started screaming. I pressed the button. Luckily the water was connected. After a few flushes the rat was gone and the bowl was clean enough.
I collected the toilet roll from the boot, then I wiped down the toilet seat with a few sheets of the roll before handing it to Nez.
She looked up at a cobweb in the corner of the corrugated-iron roof above the toilet seat and begged me to stay with her while she went.
‘No, Nez. Jesus. I’m not going to wait here while you go to the toilet.’
Maybe it was because she was frightened, or just tired and hungry—I’m not sure—but she started to bawl and wouldn’t stop until I promised I would stay with her while she sat on the toilet and that I would look out for any spiders that might come down from the roof.
After she’d finished I got her to scrub her hands as best she could in the murky water that came out of a tap on the wall across from the toilet.
We then left the shed and started to explore the paddocks beyond the silo.
We found a lot of junk lying around, bits and pieces of machinery mostly, and beer cans with what looked like bullet holes through them. Next to the hollow of a shallow dam in a paddock below the silo, we saw the flyblown carcass of a dead sheep. It reminded me of a story I’d seen on TV about the drought, and the pictures of dead sheep and cattle being pushed into a ditch by machines and then buried.
Shotgun shells lay on the ground near the sheep, so I guessed it had most likely been blasted to death rather than died of starvation. Nez eventually got bored of trailing behind me. She complained that her feet were sore, that she was getting blisters, that she was hot, and she was thirsty. She sat down on the ground and wouldn’t move.
I left her where she was and headed back to the car for a bottle of water. I closed the boot, opened the bottle and took a long drink as I looked across the yard to the railway siding. I could see a dirt road led away from the siding. It narrowed before disappearing into bushes.
I took another drink, put the top back on the bottle and walked across the yard to the track. I followed it into