It was easy to put all the blame on Pat, for she was the one she had to spend all the time with, and Dulcie knew nothing about men anyway. But by the end of the second week, Dulcie had made observations about the whole group, and by listening to their conversations at mealtimes, and asking one or other of them the occasional carefully worded question, she had begun to see a bigger picture.
She gathered that the two red-headed men, Bert and Ted, were Bill’s cousins and were in the throes of claiming the adjoining lot of land to his. While for now they were helping Bill clear his land, the long-term intention was to work the two parcels of land as one, machinery, labour and profits shared.
The Masters’ land had once been owned by a veteran of the First World War. He had built the homestead, cleared a small portion of the land, then the Depression in the thirties came and like so many other farmers at that time, he just gave up and went back to the city to find work to feed his family. It had lain idle right up until 1952 when Bill had bought it on a conditional purchase at 1s 6d an acre because he was an ex-serviceman. From what Dulcie could gather from overheard conversations, money was very tight now, for Bill had borrowed the money for sheep, machinery, water tanks, and seed and fertilizer for the autumn planting. He was banking on the sheep producing many lambs this year, and a good harvest in the spring, but if there was little rain during the winter, the sheep would starve, the wheat and barley wouldn’t grow and he would be bankrupt.
On the land Bert and Ted were after there was another homestead, though by all accounts it was in a worse condition than this one. They slept there, doing a little work on it from time to time, but they had all their meals with Bill and Pat, and brought their laundry to the house to be washed. Jake lived somewhere else again, Dulcie got the idea he had some family around here and went back to them at night. She also thought his lowly status in the group was the result of his owning no land of his own.
There was no doubt that Bill Masters was a brute. He treated his wife with utter contempt – it seemed to Dulcie that he’d only married her to have an unpaid housekeeper, and a whipping boy when things went wrong. After his evening meal he drove off with the men to the hotel at Salmon Gums, or to Bert and Ted’s place where they played cards. When he came home late at night, drunk, Dulcie often heard him shouting at Pat, and the sound of slaps. Yet worst of all was hearing him raping her.
The first time she heard the loud squeaking noise and Pat sobbing, she hadn’t understood what was going on. She had strained her ears in the darkness of the lean-to, wondering what Bill was doing to his wife. But just a couple of days later she had been turning the mattress on the couple’s old iron bed and she had heard the same squeaking noise again, and like a bolt of lightning it came to her.
Even in her ignorance of married love and all that entailed, she knew all too well that Pat was being taken by force, for the heart-rending sobs continued long after the squeaking ended. She began to notice the bruising on Pat more and more, sometimes livid red marks on her throat the next day, or a swollen eye. She wondered why Pat didn’t run away and leave him.
It wasn’t as if there was any comfort in the house. When Dulcie had got to see the rest of it on her first morning she was shocked by the starkness of it. Pat and Bill’s bedroom held the bed, a large chest of drawers and a wardrobe, nothing more, not a rug on the bare boards, a bedside light, a picture or any feminine fripperies like she remembered her mother and granny having. Even the blankets on the bed were the harsh grey army kind, with no counterpane to cover them. The other bedroom was empty but for another iron bedstead.
The main room was large, taking up most of the front of the house, and the coolest room of all as the veranda kept it in deep shade and the screen door stood open all day to catch any breeze. There were two couches and three armchairs, all of them extremely shabby and she suspected left by the previous owners, a table and chairs which didn’t match, a bookcase containing nothing but farming books, and a desk littered with papers. A wood-burning stove stood in one corner, a small rug before it, and a box for wood. Not a photograph, an ornament, or even a clock, and as in all the rooms the wood walls were whitewashed, but so long ago that they had turned yellow, sprinkled with the crushed bodies of insects.
Between the kitchen, and the outside wall where Dulcie’s lean-to was, was what passed for a bathroom. Like the kitchen, it was filthy until she cleaned it, and held nothing but a primitive cold-water shower set above an old china sink. The procedure for showering was to take a basin of water warmed on the stove, wash all over, then shower it off with cold. While this was no hardship while it was so hot, Dulcie wondered what it would be like in the winter. All the waste water from here ran through a pipe into another tank outside, where it was reused for washing clothes.
Water, or the lack of it, was the real enemy here, Dulcie soon found, and she was impressed by Bill’s devices to save every drop of rain that fell. The house, barns, sheds and even the dunny roof had tanks attached to guttering and downpipes. His ‘dams’, as Jake had described them, were effective, for Bill worked out how much would evaporate a year and adjusted the catchment area to compensate. That water was used for animals and crops, but the rainwater from the roof of the house went through a filtering system for drinking.
However impressed Dulcie might be that people had the stamina and the tenacity to take on a huge area of bush and turn it into farmland, she could find absolutely nothing to like about these people. They had hearts as stony as the ground, they ate and lived like animals, without one speck of tenderness for anything or anyone. The men had only one topic of conversation between them and that was farming, their tractors, sheep and the work in progress on the land to put in crops. In all the time she’d been here she hadn’t heard one of them tell a joke, pass on a bit of gossip, or once turn to Pat and compliment her on her cooking.
There was no doubt Pat’s life was grim – she couldn’t drive, she appeared to have no friends or family, and all the provisions, kerosene for the lamps and refrigerator, mail and other essentials were mostly picked up by one of the men, usually Jake. That was the only sympathy Dulcie had for her though, because Pat seemed every bit as marooned here as herself.
Yet she did admire Pat’s cooking skills, for even though all that was available was mutton, killed by the men, and the occasional rabbit they’d shot or snared, and even more infrequently, a chicken, Pat had a knack of making it seem more varied. Fresh vegetables were rare, mostly it was tinned peas, beans or carrots. Pat made all the bread, the yeast kept on a shelf above the stove where it would stay warm. Her pastry was rich and crumbly, she could make delicious dumplings, and she used dried vegetables in tasty stews. But because Dulcie still only got the leftovers, she refused to compliment Pat either. Sometimes she wondered whether if she was forced to stay here for a full three years she might end up as sullen and uncommunicative as the rest of them.
But she had no intention of staying here. While she was terrified of the prospect of being picked up by the police and taken back to the reformatory to work in the laundry, she was sure this was worse. So she did all that was asked of her and more, without complaint. When Pat gave her a ten-shilling note on Saturdays for her wages, she tucked it away in the little bag Sister Ruth had given her, and reminded herself that every week she stayed she’d have another to add to it.
On the eighth Monday, Dulcie woke in a sweat as usual, for the early morning sun came straight on to her lean-to and turned it into an oven. Pat hadn’t rung the bell yet, but she guessed it wouldn’t be long as the rooster was crowing. After a trip along to the dunny, which always filled her with foreboding about spiders, she washed in the sink outside on the veranda. She was only allowed into the inside bathroom twice a week to take a shower, and she got the impression Pat thought once was enough.
The washing had to be done on Monday mornings, in the sink outside. It was a formidable job as the men’s clothes were always caked in dirt and needed a great deal of scrubbing to get them clean. Pat only ever used cold water, and to Dulcie who had been given endless lessons in laundry by the Sisters, this was crazy, so she adapted what she had learned at St Vincent’s to make the job quicker and easier. On Sunday nights she collected up all the dirty washing and put it to soak overnight in cold water, then gave it a bit of a swill through the next morning before emptying out the water.
While the men were having breakfast she heated up a couple of pans of hot water, then once they had gone she carried it round to the side of the house and refilled the sink. She didn’t know whether Pat had ever noticed what she did, she certainly didn’t remark that Dulcie seemed to be getting the job done quicker than she had, or that the washing looked cleaner. But Dulcie had come to accept that she only spoke out to complain – praise was beyond her.
Early mornings were the best time of the day for Dulcie. She might ache from the previous one, she might be dreading the day ahead, but for just five or ten minutes before she was summoned to the kitchen, she felt something that approached happiness. She would sit on the steps of the veranda, the sun was just warm, the sound of birdsong all around her. There were always kangaroos hopping around amongst the bushes and gums. It made her smile when the little joeys jumped out of their mother’s pouch, took a few hops about, then dived back in headfirst. She always hoped they would clear off before Bill got up because he would shoot them immediately as he got two pounds for every kangaroo scalp and saw them as a valuable source of pocket money.
Sometimes she’d see an echidna feasting at an ants’ nest and they reminded her of hedgehogs back in England. She remembered that someone had once brought one to school in a box, wanting to put it on the nature table, and her teacher had explained that even if it was all tightly curled up like a ball now, the minute the children left the class it would take off to look for slugs, so she thought it was kinder to take it and put it in someone’s garden where it could find some.
There were always so many birds too at this time of day, and the pink and grey galahs were her favourite. When a whole flock of them took off together they looked like pink candy-floss. Emus would scuttle by, making her think of gormless ballerinas in their tutus, rushing late to a rehearsal. They too were in danger from Bill as they were worth five shillings a beak dead. Bob-tailed goannas came out from under rocks to sun themselves, and just occasionally she’d see a snake.
But all too soon Pat would ring the bell and she’d have to go in and face another gruelling day. Within twenty minutes the men would be here for their breakfast, bringing with them the stink of their unwashed bodies and their beery and tobacco-tainted breath. She always went and made Pat and Bill’s bed now while they were eating, for seeing all that food going round in open mouths was too disgusting for words.
Dulcie was carrying one of the pans of hot water round to do the washing when Sly, the black dog, came rushing round the corner of the house. Dulcie thought he was going to jump up at her, as he often did because she petted him a great deal, so she swerved, afraid both of them would be scalded by the hot water.
But she stepped on a sharp stone, lost her balance and the water tipped out on to the ground. Sly was unhurt, he’d gone straight past her chasing something. She wasn’t scalded either, but she’d lost the hot water.
‘You stupid little bitch!’ Pat yelled from the kitchen door. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Dulcie turned to see Pat standing there, hands on hips, glowering at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dulcie said. ‘Sly startled me. I thought he was going to jump up at me.’
She went back towards Pat, intending to fill the pan again and leave it to boil. But as she came up the steps of the veranda and reached Pat, the woman slapped her hard across the face, making her reel back and drop the pan.
‘That’s right, blame the dog, you bloody drongo! Where were you going with hot water anyway?’
‘To do the washing of course,’ Dulcie said, putting her hand up to her stinging cheek.
‘What’s wrong with cold water?’
‘Hot water gets it cleaner,’ Dulcie said harshly.
Clearly Pat didn’t miss the tone for her face went red with anger. ‘You think you’re so smart, don’t you?’ she hissed at Dulcie. Her face was almost reptilian with spite. ‘I bet you think you could run this place better than me?’
Dulcie’s only thoughts about this place were what a blessing it would be if a bush fire burned it and its occupants down. She couldn’t say that, but she did let forth another version.
‘The only running I’d like to do is running away from here. And you’re the drongo if you don’t know hot water washes better than cold.’
Pat leaped at her, fingers outstretched like claws to scratch her. Dulcie moved smartly to one side and Pat bumped into the veranda balustrade.
Dulcie was no fighter, she hated any kind of violence. But in the brief second before Pat sprang at her again, she knew this was an occasion when she must assert herself, or she’d be a victim for evermore. As the woman’s hands caught her shoulders, Dulcie pulled her knee up sharply and kneed her hard in the stomach.
Pat reeled back, winded, hitting the balustrade with such force that it shook. ‘How dare you!’ she gasped, clutching her stomach. ‘I’ll get Bill to whip you tonight.’
‘You struck me first,’ Dulcie said, suddenly so angry she felt like kicking the woman again. ‘You treat me like a slave, you make me sleep in a shed, feed me leftovers, then you wonder why I hit you back? You’re a brick short of a full load.’
‘No one gets away with speaking to me like that,’ Pat yelled at her.
Dulcie was beyond fear now. If she had to walk all the twenty miles to Salmon Gums, she would. ‘Oh really?’ she said with sarcasm, walking away from her. ‘What about Bill? He says far worse things than that to you almost every night.’