The Party Line by Sue Orr Page A

nostrils and mouth. Its eyes were closed.
    ‘Get out of the way.’ Jack was standing behind Ian.
    Ian stood up and stepped backwards.
    ‘Further. Get out of the fucking way.’
    Ian thought Jack was going to put the calf on the tray. It was stillalive. He thought they’d take it to the vet. Gabrielle could rear it by hand. She’d love that.
    Jack lifted the fencing post high above his head, then brought it down onto the calf’s head. The calf didn’t move. Again, he lifted the post. Ian felt bile rise in his throat. He turned away.
    The wall of black cloud had moved across the acres of land. The rain was only two or three paddocks away now. Ian imagined being caught in a vice — the vertical plane of the coming deluge forcing him backwards, jamming him up against the mountains behind him.
    Ian heard the wooden post come down hard again. How many times had it been? The calf had been dead after the first blow, he was sure about that.
    When Ian finally turned around, Jack was walking away from the mash of bone, blood and black hair.
     
    After Gabrielle and Ian finished their tea that night, Ian started the washing. Two sets of clothes lay in the corner of the bathroom — his thick woollen singlets and pants and shirts, smelling of shit and silage, and Gabrielle’s smaller pile.
    He thought back to the first few days after Bridie’s death. He couldn’t remember how the ordinary household jobs had been achieved. The washing, food, cleaning — had there been cleaning?
    It must have been the women, Bridie’s friends. The ones who had slipped in and out of the shadows, quiet figures who touched his shoulder as they brushed passed him, set to heating meals and folding clothes.
    He gathered the clothes and took them to the wooden shed near the back door. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, its cord hanging next to it, cobwebs draping to the corners of the room.
    There was a short red hose attached to the single tap over the concrete tub. He flicked the end of it into the white agitator drum and turned the water on.
    As he threw his clothes into the washer, the death of the animals came back to him. The sleeve of his shirt was covered in rusty, clotted blood and shit. The stench of it turned his stomach. The water clouded immediately to a rose pink.
    He was about to put Gabrielle’s clothes in too, but stopped just in time. Unthinkable, her pretty, frilly things soaking in the residue of two violent, ugly deaths. She would never know what had happened in the back paddock.
    He finished the washing of his clothes and put them through the wringer before starting over with Gabrielle’s. Except they weren’t her clothes. They were Bridie’s.
    He was less shocked by his daughter wearing her dead mother’s clothes than by the fact that he hadn’t noticed it. He strained to remember the familiar fabrics against Gabrielle’s small body but couldn’t. And now, now that they were just garments laying lifeless on the floor, they were so painfully Bridie’s that they may as well have been lifted off her warm, living body just seconds earlier.
    He bent down and lifted the top item from the pile. It was a blouse made of seersucker, white and blue: the blue of a policeman’s uniform. He held the blouse to his face, breathed in as deeply as he could.
    It was still there. Through the sweet, fresh scent of Gabrielle’s shampoo, he could smell the duskiness of Bridie.
    He waited for sadness; he wanted it badly. Instead a hunger grabbed him. He reached up and pulled the cord to the light. In the darkness, he again held the blouse to his face and breathed in deeply, frantically. He draped the blouse over the concrete lip of the sink, careful not to let it get wet, and groped again at his feet, at the pile of clothes. Working by touch, he found a silky fabric. Bridie’s scent was there, too — the cream she had rubbed onto her face at night before going to bed. He calmed himself, made his breathing shallow. Rubbing the silk