Dirt Music by Tim Winton Page A

the shed he was in her path.
    There’s shade over there, he said, pointing to the trees across the yard.
    I’m fine, she said, pulling on the straw hat which suddenly felt a bit Laura Ashley. Wouldn’t have an aspirin, would you?
    Better come over to the house, he said reluctantly.
    A few hens bustled out from beneath the verandah as they 69 approached. He paused at an aluminium bin by the step and threw them a handful of pellets.
    The kitchen was cool and dim after the blinding yard. It smelled of cooking oil, fried fish. Everything orderly and simple, a woman’s kitchen if ever she saw it.
    From the old Arcus fridge he pulled out a bottle of water and poured two glasses. Opened a drawer. Shook out two pills. Georgie thanked him and looked at the label and then at the tablets themselves. Paracetamol. What she felt like was codeine phos. And a tall glass of Margaret River semillon. She drank the pills down with the water, whose metallic chill caused her headache to flare horribly for a moment.
    Rainwater, she murmured.
    Shit-free, he said.
    He led her down the hall a few doors to a big room lined with books.
    Cooler here, he said. Just be a few minutes.
    Yes. And thank you.
    Georgie didn’t move until she heard the screen door clap shut at the other end of the house. The room was walled with jarrah shelves that looked to her like recycled floorboards. And they were real books up there, serious books. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Forster, Waugh, Twain. She saw a fancy collected edition of Joseph Conrad, big quarto volumes of natural history art books, atlases. On a small table lay a heavy scrapbook of pressed botanical specimens, each leaf and blossom annotated in mauve ink with a calligrapher’s nib. On a sea trunk under the window, beside a sunbleached upright piano, was a stack of yellowing sheet music.
    The only wall without books was taken up by a brick fireplace on whose mantelpiece were some old black-and-white photos in cheap frames. A formal wedding shot from, say the 70 fifties, and two studio portraits of the same pair. Handsome people. The man shorter and more intense. Stacked beside these images was a wad of fading colour snaps of kids swinging in a tyre across a muddy river, babies with chocolate-smeared faces.
    The shamateur with a kid in the seat of a tractor.
    Georgie flicked through till she came upon a shot of a woman in her twenties with ropy blonde plaits which fell across her halter top. She had a glossy complexion and a thick mouth. The way she leaned like that in a doorway, hands in the pockets of her jeans, gave Georgie a jolt. Such lazy native confidence. Like girls she’d seen on the train on her way to school. Honeys in hybrid uniforms blowing gum and sunning their legs in an effortless sexual arrogance Georgie once associated with state schools. As a teenager she’d grown a crust and tried to be fearsome, but how she envied those girls their slutty self-possession. It stirred men and boys like the smell of food.
    The outboards went silent. Georgie lifted the book from the rocking chair and sat down. Keats. Yeah, right. Though she never did read him. Jesus, when was the last time she’d read anything?
    The family bookworm, her father called her. She tried to read a poem. It went on for pages, dense as her headache. No use.
    The back door whacked again. Georgie put the book down, heard another door slam, a tap running. This wasn’t a good idea. Being here. Alone with this bloke so far from the highway. God, she knew better than to get into a situation like this.
    Christ, if only she had her own car. After a few tax-free years in Saudi it wasn’t as though she couldn’t afford one. It was just laziness. For the entire Jeddah posting she’d been 71 forbidden even to drive a bloody car and now here she was still dependent. What kind of passive fog had she subsided into? What a triumph for the mullahs she was, what a rattled scatty thing she’d become.
    She went through the kitchen and eased the