“You can sit down, you know.” Izzy gestured to the fuzzy lumps, who were happy to act as pillows.
“What’s all this anyway?” Tea said, slowly easing down. “What would Mr MacGregor say if he found out?”
“I’m on duty tonight. Sometimes when the boys have been in their cups a bit on Saturday night, they get it into their heads to rustle a sheep or two. They’d get a pretty penny in town for lamb.”
The remnants of Tea’s own roast dinner congealed near her heart. Would the boys try it on tonight? They were just two girls in the dark! Tea glanced at Izzy’s long profile painted with the fire’s red glow. No, with Izzy around an odd quietness stole into the pit of her stomach. Her shoulders softened a little. Like the times when Mum went out to play cards and she had the house to herself for a couple hours.
Dogs huffed and sighed, wetting Tea’s hands with licks. The creek whispered on its never-ending journey to the sea. The stillness allowed her to poke around the memories of her first hard week. The shearing boys’ laughter stung bitterly, but a cool, deep well had opened inside her, swallowed the sting, and left her with the satisfaction of a job done in messy fits, but done well.
The silence became too much. Tea grabbed at the first piece of conversation that sprung to mind.
“What is Grant’s story? Why is he still here and not over there?”
Izzy turned the damper. “It’s not something he’s fond of talking about.”
Tea ducked her head. “Oh, sorry.”
“No, it’s alright. He gets asked it a lot, but we’re different to those nosy-pies in town.” Tea couldn’t read Izzy’s face in the twisting light. “He had rickets as a kid. The dry summers out here in Northern Otago are good for his joints. But it stops him from being drafted.”
Another sick one. The memory of Grandad coughing and twisting in his bed during the damp cold of winter rushed back at her. She’d tried to keep the fireplace stoked as high as Mum’s widow pension allowed.
“What is it?” Izzy leaned forward, and the simmering coals widened her face like some demon. “You’re not worried, are you? Lord, last thing we need is another girl mooning about the place. Grant can take care of himself, don’t you mind.”
“No, no!” Tea warded Izzy off with a spread of her hands. “I mean, Mum would think … I mean, I have to eventually … but … the war will end and … Oh, now I’ve torn it.”
Izzy laughed and sat back. “It’s alright, I’m only teasing. Grant has other things to keep his mind occupied.”
“Another girl?” Her relief went to war with frustration. She hadn’t really been considering him in that vein, but he’d been a suitable topic of conversation in her letters to Mum.
“Something like that. Don’t be so surprised. He’s tougher than he looks.”
“Sorry. I mean, is it you? Would you like to court him? Once the war is over?”
“No, Tea. I don’t.”
The way Izzy said her name – really said her name, not like the way Mum barked at her – made Tea tense up. Izzy had already dismissed the conversation, bending over the fire to stir tea leaves into the steaming billy. There was something odd about her expression that the fire did not paint on, something keen and focused. Tea remembered the way girls smiled at school, the way they made friendships like war strategies, and … this was not it. Something shadowed and animal-like flickered in the angles of her cheekbones and jaw, but when Tea blinked it was gone. Must be just the fire.
The dog under her arm shifted and sighed. They danced and huffed their dewy breath each sunrise, folding and expanding at her commands. How strange to be so easily adored.
“The dogs like you.” Could Izzy read minds too? “I’ve never seen them take so quickly to a new farmhand other than Robbie.”
How did it always come back to Robbie?
Frustration warred with relief in Tea as the conversation turned to the individual personalities of the dogs, but as Tea sipped the strongest tea she’d enjoyed in many a month, she conjured up the last memory of her brother sitting on the garden shed roof, staring down the hill into the blacked-out town.
They’d shared tea then, too. He had spoken about how the Japs could fly over at any moment, but then, like now, all she wanted to hear was the hissing kek-kek-kek of a possum in the bush, a snuffling hedgehog, the whisper of the creek. His words of dances, girls, and watered-down beer had slithered like the sandstorm he was heading into. But she could read between the lines, hear the tremor of fear on his breath. He was going wherever Rommel was making his stand, a sapper going to build bridges and tunnels. That hadn’t sounded right. Soldiers didn’t go to build.
The creek ached against her senses, pulling her back to this night, this moment. Was there water where he had gone? Why did this thought tickle her so? She chewed her jam-slathered damper with eyes at half-mast as Izzy blathered on about farm animals like some schoolteacher. Underneath it all, a hiss, strong, rough-smooth. Tea’s tingling skin kept her poised on the edge of leaping up and facing the hissing wall of night.
The hiss took on a scraping aspect, and she rubbed at the prickles running up and down her right arm. Water, on rocks. The creek. The eels. Eels boiling around an interloper in their territory. Eels slithering and grating, their dark, oily bodies sliding sensuously against each other, tails rubbing and flicking, barbed mouths and astonished lips gulping at the surface then arching down for more.
Tea tried to shake the waking dream away, but the slither felt so right against her skin, warm and wet and hungry. She’d never felt this … no, that was a lie. In those quiet moments when the house had slept, when Grandad had found some peace for a few hours from the yellowness that ate him from the inside out, when Tea sat and watched the dying fire, she’d reached out to this scrape. More than once Robbie had found her dozing over these noises, her fingers twitching, reaching for something that wasn’t there.
“Tea? Are you alright?”
Izzy. Izzy’s hand on her arm. Izzy, bright as the fire, warm as the stars. Izzy’s warm-sweet scent encasing her.
Izzy’s face loomed too close. Tea shrieked. The parted lips, the question in Izzy’s face. The darkness. Izzy caught her in a grip tighter than her fear for the gun in her brother’s hands. There was the whisper – who had told her such a salacious thing? – that a look and a touch like this had killed her father. But he’d been lost to the chemical beasts of the Great War, hadn’t he?
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Izzy looked hurt.
“I thought I heard something,” Tea said, thick and slow.
Izzy had retreated, but her hand was right there. Wrong there. On her arm. Was Izzy that weird wolf Robbie warned her about? Not a real wolf, but a predator the girls whispered about in Physical Education class at school.