Texas by Sarah Hay Page B

insignificant, the far-off engine, the footsteps of the woman across the veranda, her own shuffle that followed. It felt as though she’d dived into the gap between what she’d imagined a station in Australia to be like and the reality, and it was a bottomless drop. Susannah stopped in the doorway in front of Laura, glanced over her shoulder and then back at John who was still standing by the door.
    â€˜Shouldn’t she go with the others?’ she said to him.
    John stepped into the kitchen.
    â€˜She can’t go with the blokes. Cook’s out bush. She can have that room that was the governess’s.’
    He dragged out a chair for himself and sat down.
    â€˜Pull up a pew,’ he nodded towards Laura. ‘You want a cup of tea?’
    They sat in silence while Susannah poured water into a pot. Her back was blank, unreadable, and the sleeveless top she wore revealed arms that were slight yet muscular. There was a smell of cooked meat in the room and dishes lay neatly stacked on the sink. Although the place was clean, it looked old and shabby, more like a workers’ cottage. Laura tried to catch the woman’s eye when she turned around. Susannah seemed to relent a little, adjusting her features into a small tight smile.
    John was talking.
    â€˜I’ll get you to give us a bit of a hand around the place. The other blokes’ll head out to camp tomorrow. They’re behind with the mustering.’
    Laura nodded, having no idea what he meant by that.
    She took a sip of tea. She should have looked for a job in town or waited until she got to Darwin, worked in a café or a dress shop. But she’d been determined to work on a station in Australia. It started when she read The Thorn Birds years ago. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t remember the story, it was the feeling of anticipation she was left with when she finished it. She glanced at Susannah again but her eyes were elsewhere and her expression inscrutable. Laura hoped they might become friends.
    Laura had arrived at the small Kimberley town from Perth five days earlier on a Greyhound bus. Pressing her face to the tinted windows and watching the landscape slide sideways, she felt as though she was trapped in a metal capsule for forty-eight hours. She was impatient to breathe the warm dry air.
    Her mind’s eye was able to see her travels as a spidery trajectory across the continent, the shape of which she had long ago memorised. When she thought of how much blue lay between where she was now and the green-shaded island of another hemisphere, she leant back in her seat and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the outback sun was surfacing, an aberration in size and colour, breaking through strips of cloud wrinkling the sky. Tree shadows striped the pale dirt and she became breathless at the thought of her own courage. The bus followed the road as it carved through rock and grass and hills that bled red into the distance. Grass grew in thin yellow spears clinging to the contours of the land and the silver trunks of the boabs glowed like fat-bellied sentinels. The bus drove over a steel-framed bridge and beneath was water that curved into a lake on the side she was sitting. The driver turned off onto a gravel road, away from the lake, to where bungalows sat squarely on large blocks of land; eventually he slowed and stopped outside a flat-roofed, brown-brick building with a sign above it advertising Four X. Her pack was taken out from underneath the bus and placed on the side of the road by the driver.
    The dirt was fine like flour and it leaked rusty colour onto her flip-flops and between her toes. The door of the bus swung shut and she was left standing alone. She glanced at her watch. It was seven in the morning. There were people she’d met in Perth who could have told her where the youth hostel was but she hadn’t thought to ask and she hadn’t expected to be the only person getting off at that