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  He took a long drag on the cigarette. The sun crested the bleak horizon of One Tree Plain. The outback spread out as far as he could see, most of it red and desolate, like the surface of Mars. The Lachlan River ran through the station, encouraging a little greenery near its fast-flowing waters.

  Milton reflected that you only really got a sense of the scale of Australia when you were deep in the middle of it. He knew it was big, of course. He knew that if the country was overlaid atop North America, it would stretch from Manitoba in the north to Florida in the south, and from San Francisco to New York. But being here, deep in the wilderness—that was when you got a true sense of its vastness.

  Milton had visited the country before. The last time had been a babysitting assignment with an analyst from the Firm who was conducting business in Canberra. The capital was as bland and dull as Washington, D.C., a grid of clean streets, a place that emptied as soon as the legislative business was done. There had been no opportunity for him to visit the interior. Today, as he watched the sun rise, he was a thousand kilometres from the capital. He was deep in the outback.

  Harry Douglas walked over to him. Douglas was the foreman. He was gruff and coarse, and Milton had known him for years. They had served in the SAS together. Milton was not in the business of having friends, and, since relationships were impractical for Group Fifteen agents, he had denuded himself of most of his attachments when he had been recruited.

  Douglas had been medically discharged from the Regiment after he had broken both legs when his parachute had failed to deploy properly during a training jump. The two of them had been close, and they had commiserated about Douglas’s discharge over a long night of drinking in Hereford. He had explained to Milton that he was going to go back home to Australia and work on his father’s sheep station. They had emailed a couple of times while Milton was working in Florida, and when Douglas had suggested he come over for a visit, he had agreed. Miami had been pleasant enough, but it was a town that was full of distractions and temptations. He had been contemplating another cross-country trek to put those dangerous impulses behind him, but the promise of something completely different had been difficult to resist.

  “All right, John?” Harry said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You look done in.”

  “Don’t look so good yourself.”

  Harry grinned. They were both competitive, and each had made no secret of the fact that he was a better man than the other. The score was most easily kept with the number of sheep that they were able to shear in the course of a day. Douglas was impeded by the limp he still suffered after his accident. Milton was more agile. But Douglas was big and strong, able to wrestle the sheep, and he had the benefit of years of experience. His best day saw him add 124 sheep to his tally. Milton lagged somewhere behind him with a best of 89. He kept trying, though. He was too committed to give up.

  “Long day ahead. We’ll grab a couple of hours of kip, get some breakfast and then go at it. You okay with that?”

  “Of course.”

  They were at Booligal Sheep Station, a shearing shed on the outskirts of the town of Booligal. It was in deepest New South Wales, the last town on the road between Hay and Wilcannia. Milton had come to assess the size of a station by the number of shearing stands in the shearing shed. The station they had worked at for the last week had six stands. That wasn’t unusual. Booligal had ten stands. It was a big station, and it promised an awful lot of sheep that were going to need to be sheared.

  Milton reached back into the Jeep for his pack and followed Douglas and the others as they walked into the rickety building. Their accommodation was in a room adjacent to the mess. They each had a camp bed and a locker to store their things. Milton walked along the room to the single bathroom. There was a shower, a toilet and a sink. It had been given a cursory clean, but it was still dirty.

  He didn’t care.

  Milton went back to the dormitory, dropped his bag on the bed and took out his dungarees and flannels. They had been new when he had been given them, but they had taken an almighty battering during the season so that they were almost rigid with the dust and dried sweat and blood. He sat down on the edge of the bed and prised off his boots. They had been new, too, redolent with the tang of fresh leather. They were cracked and beaten now, baked in the sun for six weeks. They looked ancient.

  He undressed, took a quick shower, and then took out his copy of the Big Book and opened it at random. Milton read two pages, stopping to reread the sentence that he had already underlined on two previous occasions.

  “The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.”

  He thought about that for a moment and then put the book back into his pack. He had no intention that any of the others should see that he had it. They would just have questions and he had no interest in discussing his illness.

  He lay down to rest. He was asleep within minutes of his head touching the pillow.

  Chapter Six

  TWO HOURS’ sleep wasn’t enough, but it was all he was going to get. He got up, washed his face and pulled on his dirty clothes once again.

  Harry and the others were waiting for him outside. The other men in the crew were Eric, a brash Queenslander, and Mervyn, a Tasmanian who had lived up here for the last decade.

  “It’s Sleeping Beauty!” Harry announced as Milton emerged.

  Milton raised a middle finger in acknowledgement.

  They had cheese rolls and coffee for breakfast and then, when they were done, Harry drew lots for the shearing pens. He drew the first pen, the favoured one for this particular shed. Eric drew the second pen, Milton the third and Mervyn the fourth. They walked across to the shed.

  The sun was already brutally hot. Milton put his hat on his head and tipped the brim to keep the sun out of his eyes. His gear was heavy and trapped the heat, and he was dripping with sweat within moments.

  The shed left something to be desired. It was an old building, falling down in places. It was also built on stilts. There was no storage for the sheep at the back of the shed, as was the case in the best arranged facilities, so the animals were housed directly under the catching pens. That was bad planning. Milton knew from experience that sheep tended to excrete while they were being sheared. That meant that the sheep in the top pens would soil the sheep beneath them, and then Milton and the others would be covered in it when the time came for those sheep to be sheared.

  “Ready?” Harry called out.

  Milton laced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “You’re in trouble today. I can tell just by looking at you. You’re exhausted.”

  “What? You’re not?”

  “Feeling all right.”

  “Fighting talk, John.”

  “Ten bucks says I do more than you today.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You taking the bet?”

  “Of course I am. You’re on.”

  They started. The sheep were fully grown merino wethers, heavy and antsy animals who had no interest whatsoever in making the process easy. Milton got his first sheep and dragged it onto the board. He wrestled with it until he had leaned it back enough to shear a circle around its hindquarters; that way, if it defecated, the excrement didn’t stay on the wool and attract flies. Most of the animals were infested with maggots and other insects. Milton was on the third animal when he noticed that he had sickly green pus that looked like a baby’s vomit all over his hands and arms. He had sheared through a boil. He ignored it. No point in getting wound up about it. He knew that was just the start. There would be more to come.

  And he had been right about the shitting and pissing. When he dragged a new animal onto the board, it dropped its guts onto the animal below. Within five minutes he had their waste over his clothes and his hands. Within ten minutes, he was covered in a sheen of sweat and sheep urine and pungent shit, the smell of it enough to make him gag even when he forced himself to breathe through h
is mouth.

  He ignored it, working steadily, occasionally looking over at Harry in the next pen across. The big Aussie didn’t have his agility, but he muscled the sheep with power and determination. He kept up a stream of colourful invective as he worked, as if their reluctance to do what he wanted was a personal affront to him. “Come on, you little bitch. Get over here. Don’t… don’t you fuckin’ dare… don’t you fuckin’ shit on me, you little bitch…”

  “What you got?” Milton called out as the sun was at its apogee.

  “Ten,” Harry shouted out. “What you got?”

  “One behind.”

  His tone was surprised. “Really?”

  “Nervous?”

  He laughed. “You’ll fade away. You always do. You don’t have the stamina.”

  “Got plenty.”

  Harry shook his head. “No way, mate.”

  Milton had improved his technique day by day, and now he was able to shear a sheep in ten minutes from start to finish. You had to be careful not to cut the animal, for the manager would complain if his animals were sent back to him with too many nicks and scrapes on their freshly shorn flanks. It wasn’t always easy to avoid, though. Some of the animals were old and wrinkled and the folds of skin were easy to catch with the blades.

  They worked on, took half an hour to rest, and then worked through until dusk. The crickets were chirping as Milton finally pushed the last sheep down the chute, wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his arm, and leaned back against the wall of the pen. He was done in. Maggots writhed in the cuffs of his trousers and he had a mixture of blood and pus and lanolin on his bare arms and clothes.

  He had wrapped tape around two of his fingers where he had sliced into the flesh with the blades. His wrist and elbow were taped for extra support. His legs were weak and he was light-headed from the heat. He needed a drink of water, a cigarette and a shower, in that order.

  Harry was in no better shape. His arm was wrapped where he had an unpleasant purple boil. It had worsened during the day. He said, with no effort to conceal his distaste, that it was an infection that he had picked up from the sheep they had sheared at Red River Station last week.

  “Well?” Harry asked as he walked over to Milton, Eric and Mervyn.

  “Hundred and five,” Milton said.

  He grinned at him. “No way.”

  “Straight up.” He had been marking each sheep with a stroke of his knife against the wood. The board was covered in notches.

  “Good work, pommie,” Eric said.

  Milton looked at Harry with sudden trepidation. He realised, with an awareness of how foolish it was, that this actually mattered. “You?”

  Harry grinned wider. “Hundred and ten.”

  Milton shook his head. “You’re kidding.”

  “I told you you’ll never beat me.”

  “He’s not bad, though, gaffer,” Mervyn opined.

  Eric chipped in. “First time I saw you, I said to myself, ten minutes, I said, ten minutes is as long as you’d last. I said you’d be as useless as tits on a bull, ain’t that right, Merv?”

  “S’right.”

  “New at this, and a pommie to boot.”

  Milton’s nationality was the main standing joke between them. Mervyn and Eric, tough and gnarled Aussies, returned to it again and again. They were fiercely nationalistic, proud of their country, and it was a source of great amusement to them that he was a foreigner in a foreign land. They didn’t spare Harry, either. Their foreman might have been born in Australia, but he had been in the United Kingdom for long enough to have ceded at least a little of his heritage. He was, they suggested, infected with Englishness. He was a half-pommie.

  “I’m glad I have your approval,” Milton said.

  “Don’t get too comfortable. You’ve still got a face like a kicked-in shitcan.”

  Milton shook his head and laughed. He took off his hat as they walked together to the outbuilding with the mess and their dorm. Harry was alongside him, unable to wipe the grin from his face. Milton had always been competitive. He hated to lose. He and Harry had spent hours in the range together when they were in the Regiment, each of them determined to demonstrate that he was more accurate than the other. Milton had won most of those head-to-head duels and, indeed, he had beaten him two nights ago when they had set cans and bottles as targets and shot them with the antique .310 rifle they kept in the Jeep. But the sheep were something else. He knew that he had picked a difficult challenge, and that, in all good faith, he was never going to be able to best him. But it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t give it a damned good go.

  “Don’t know about you fellas,” Harry said, “but I could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck. What you say we get cleaned up and drive into town? We can get something to eat.”

  “You paying, skipper?”

  “I’m paying.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  Eric was kidding. Harry always paid for their food and drink after a hard day in the pens.

  Mervyn looked over at him with a coy smile. “Matilda still coming?”

  Harry answered with staged wariness. “As far as I know.”

  The grizzled shearer chuckled. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”

  Harry was protective of his kid sister. Mervyn knew that one of the best ways to wind him up was to make suggestive comments about her. Milton knew—and Mervyn knew it, too—that Matilda was more than capable of rebuffing those comments herself, but it never failed to get a rise out of her brother.

  They reached the door. Harry barred the way ahead with his arm. “If you think Matilda is going to look at you twice, you’re crazy. You’ll have more luck pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day. And if you annoy her, you’ll have me to deal with.”

  “That’ll be the least of his problems,” Eric said. “She’d eat him for lunch.”

  Chapter Seven

  THEY TOOK the Jeep into Booligal. The village was tiny, with a general store and post office, a cricket oval for the occasional social game, shaded eating areas and a playground. The Booligal Hotel offered food and drink. It was a tired, dusty business that survived on the back of the tourist trade. Townsfolk made the trek out to Booligal for an “authentic” cattle drive, moving stock through the outback. A drover’s life would normally have been hard and uncomfortable, but the tourists were treated to floored tents with mattresses, hot showers and luxury food. A party was waiting to start their trek as they walked into the bar that evening. Eric and Mervyn made no attempt to hide their disdain, looking over at their table and making loud remarks about how they found the whole thing distasteful. Milton said nothing. He bought a packet of cigarettes from the bar and smoked them quietly by himself, happy to sit there and take it all in.

  There were three other men in the bar. They were in their late middle age, broken-down old shearers bearing the scars of their profession like badges of honour. The fridge was on the blink, so the bottled beers were lined up on the bar and served warm. Harry went up and corralled three and a plastic bottle of water. Milton had explained to him that he had stopped drinking and, after a period spent trying to work out why he would do such a fool thing, he had eventually accepted it. The others had not been so forthcoming, and, as he took his glass of warm water, they made the usual suggestions as to his masculinity and then his sexuality. Milton was not bothered by any of it. He knew they were joking and, in any event, their ribbing was nothing compared to the continued serenity he found in abstinence. He would usually have felt uncomfortable in a bar—the AA line was that if you went into a barbershop, eventually you would get a haircut—but he didn’t feel vulnerable here. He was in good company, with friends, and he felt satisfied after a hard day of work. And he knew for certain that the alternative was not appealing. He had woken up in enough gutters with no memory of how he arrived there to last a lifetime. He was not tempted.

  They ordered plates of food and drank several more bottles of beer. Eric, whom Milton had quickly dia
gnosed as a man who could not hold his beer, quickly became drunk. His sense of humour, coarse at the best of times, became even more so. He kept glancing over at the table where the tourists were sitting. There were eight of them, five men and three women. It looked as if three of the men and the three women were couples. The remaining men, both slightly effeminate, looked like a couple, too. Milton could easily diagnose how well that was going to go down. They were all middle aged and, he guessed, they had paid a handsome price for the experience that they were about to have.

  Milton’s attention was drawn to the two guides who were sitting with them. They were authentic-looking blokes, dressed in khaki pants and shirts with the logo of the tour company stitched into the lapels. So far, so corporate, but it was the small details that Milton noticed that betrayed them: their hands were calloused, their arms and faces discoloured with small red blotches from the sun, their faces tanned a deep nutty brown apart from their foreheads where their hats would sit. They had the same complexions as Eric, Merv, Harry and Milton did. They worked outdoors. They looked tough.

  Milton could see that Eric was getting worked up to start something. Harry could see it, too, and tried to redirect the conversation when Eric started making comments about how rich townsfolk would never be able to understand what it was really like to live and work in the outback.

  It wasn’t a question of being able to overhear what he was saying. He was making no effort to speak quietly. The sensible thing would have been for the tourists to ignore him. Eventually, he would have become bored of his sport and allowed the subject to be changed. But one of the men took offence to Eric’s remarks, swivelled in his chair and told him to be quiet.

  The mood changed.

  “You what, sport?” Eric said.

  “I said you ought to keep your opinions to yourself. You don’t know the first thing about us.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, see?” he said. “I know plenty.”

  One of the guides stood. “Leave it out, fella. Just enjoy your beer and mind your business.”