Cleanskin Cowgirls Read online

  Dedication

  For Claire ‘Wooks’ Headlam, my tribe

  Epigraph

  Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

  After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

  Zen proverb, attributed to Hsin Hsin Ming

  It is only a thought.

  And thoughts can be changed.

  Louise Hay

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Part Two

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Part Three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  Download a Free Song

  The Farmer's Wife

  Fifty Bales of Hay

  Don't Fence Me In

  About the Author

  Also by Rachael Treasure

  Copyright

  Part One

  Prologue

  Elsie Jones felt like Alice in Wonderland in a rodeo. She was broncriding her way out of life in a crazy brutal rush, getting bucked senseless and not finding any solid spot on the earth to land. Her being was thrown into stardust space, a place that swirled with nothingness. Far off she felt the hard smacks of the paramedics and from outside her body she saw them shining lights in her blank button-like eyes, searching her thin arms for track marks, pinching her cheeks with harsh gloved fingers and exploring her nose for powder. She hardly felt anything, yet she could hear and see everything. Not just in the world of now, but everything since time began. It was blissful, then terrifying, then blissful again, depending on where she cast her focus.

  ‘EJ. EJ? What have you taken?’ the medico demanded. ‘EJ, stay with us.’

  Her music manager, Jacinta Tylermore, was standing in her black minxy dress, looking down at EJ’s lifeless body.

  ‘Wake up for Christ’s sake, EJ, wake up!’ screamed Jacinta, her kohl-lined eyes wide with panic. ‘You stupid bitch!’

  She turned to the paramedic. ‘Is she gonna die? We can’t afford for her to die!’ Her mouth opened in an Edvard Munch scream as she pressed her palms to her gaunt cheeks. Jacinta jabbed a tantrumous kick to the sole of Elsie’s hand-tooled, turquoise-and-tan embellished cowgirl boot. EJ, watching from above, thought they were nice boots, those ones. Texan. Rawhide. In fact everything she saw about herself looked better than good, in her ragged Daisy Duke shorts and the gorgeous emerald-and-silver bustier, so perfectly fitted it plumped her breasts upwards, even lying down. She had never realised just how beautiful she was in physical form, barely able to see the teeny make-up-covered scar above her lip. She had also never realised how little Jacinta respected her, until now. Now, when it was too late.

  ‘In the name of God, do something!’ Jacinta wailed.

  ‘You’re not helping, ma’am,’ the paramedic barked. ‘What’s she on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly everything,’ Jacinta snapped. ‘Silly bitch seemed to be into everything, no matter what I said.’

  Elsie knew Jacinta was right. She had been into and on everything. Every drug every US city had on the menu, along with every hard-dicked urban showbiz cowboy. All the designer clothes and every extravagance, from the purchase of the Nashville property she didn’t want to the stupid soft-top pale pink sports car that made her feel like frigging Barbie sitting in a sorbet. Elsie had really wanted a red pick-up truck with an RM Williams sticker on the back declaring she was still an Aussie, but she knew she’d stopped listening to herself years ago. Elsie felt relief wash over her. Now the media and the public couldn’t reach her; their savage judgements couldn’t hurt her any more.

  But just as she had these thoughts, EJ saw her own blackness: it was within her, and it had been the very thing that had attracted all the dark events that had led to this moment. It had consumed her whole being. She saw what the industry had turned her into over the past decade. It hadn’t all been Jacinta’s fault. She had played along. Elsie tried to reach for that place of knowingness and serenity again as she drifted above her body. She wanted to find, in her last moments of life, a positive stream of thought, so she shut her mind down and felt the energetic swirl gently lift her again.

  It was a stream that took her to memories of her childhood pony, Jasper, and her intense love for him. There he was in the gnarled old orchard, the trees wearing the bare bones of winter, the chilled wheat-belt wind losing its power on her as she pressed herself against her pony’s warmth and inhaled his baked-bread smell. As she hugged him, she regathered the feeling of him. The gift of him. The spark of him. She thought of how life had been then, when she was a kid, in the purity of just her and Jasper. Of what life had become. And of life, now, when it was no longer life. Elsie Jones was drifting away.

  ‘She looks too perfect to die,’ came a voice in the chasm.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by perfection round these parts,’ the paramedic said blandly to the alchy-thin roadie who’d made the comment. ‘Too often dolls in this game end up like this. Ain’t no stuffin’ in the middle of most of ’em. Just all looks on the outside. They never learn it’s in the heart that it counts. Until it’s too late. A person’s stuffin’s in her heart. EJ? Can you hear me, sweetheart?’

  Elsie tried to grasp the paramedic’s words with her calloused fingertips, still reddened from three hours of onstage strumming.

  Stuffing? she wondered. She felt like saying to him, did he know what it was like to live under such pressure? People wanting to either be her or to tear her down. She’d had enough of people’s judgements. It was time to go. Now as Elsie floated further away from the chaos, she noticed how her own pain and the pain of humanity eased. She began to feel pure love. Without form, without body, unconditional love was everywhere. It was blissful and magnificent. At last in that drift she detected a faint glow in the blackness: a pulsing green light that began to throb, with red hues on its outer circle, the light’s verdant green inner belly growing steadily more pure and more white in its light.

  ‘Tara,’ Elsie heard herself think. Or say aloud? She couldn’t be sure. Tara. That was the name that kept coming. The name that came with a tidal feeling of compassion and love. Tara.

  Tara? Elsie wondered. Not primary-school-tubby Tara? Tara Green, who went muste
ring cleanskin cattle with her in the scrub of outback Queensland when Elsie’d bailed on school? The girl she had wounded so deeply so long ago? The one she had hurt so awfully?

  Despite her confusion, Elsie wanted to drift towards the light that pulsed with the energy of Tara. It was a spaceless, space-filled, timeless universe of unconditional love. And so she let go. Elsie Jones, current number-one female country-rock music star of the world, simply let go.

  When she did, she thought she would drift straight to the light. Onwards to heaven. At that moment of surrender, she never dreamed she would end up back in her hometown of Culvert, New South Wales, Australia.

  Jesus, thought Elsie, surely not there? Surely not bloody Culvert? The world’s biggest shithole.

  One

  ‘One day, I’m going to be famous,’ Elsie Jones said to Tara, plucking at brittle wool on a pink moist skin that was slung over the killing-shed rail. It barely had a trace of blood on it, save for where the head used to be. An inside-out sheep, Elsie thought as she watched the last steam clouds of warm life evaporate in the air.

  Tara Green dragged a thick chunk of bobbed red-brown hair behind her ear and raised her pasty balloon-shaped face to Elsie. Scraping a gum-tree stick through a river of blood that drained from under the corro wall of the killing shed, Tara began drawing pictures of stick men with giant bellies on the rough concrete. ‘Famous? For what?’ Tara asked, biting her bottom lip and scrunching her tiny freckled nose. She reminded Elsie of Tara’s dumpy shaggy guinea pig, Trev, who was kept under the clothesline at the back of the abattoir house. The creature often shared Tara’s diet of Barbecue Shapes, Allen’s lollies, plastic-wrapped cheese slices and eighty-cent loaves of white bread, which were usually the only things on offer in the house at mealtimes.

  Elsie shrugged her bony shoulders, then let them drop. ‘I don’t know. Just famous.’

  Tara trundled on short legs to an old plasterer’s bucket filled to the brim with offal, marking a zig-zaggy trail with her bloodied stick as she went. The offal too was still warm and glistened in the early-morning sun, steam skimming from it.

  ‘If you are going to be famous, then I am going to be fart-most.’

  ‘Fart-most? What’s that?’

  Tara giggled. ‘The most famous farter in the world! A champion baked-beans eaterer and queen of doing magic poo tricks . . . and just magic in general, and that.’

  ‘Poo tricks?’

  ‘Wanna see my best magic poo trick?’

  Elsie nodded, the blunt-cut ends of her white-blonde fringe dipping over her eyes.

  Tara dived her hand into the bucket and sloshed around, searching. The guts were heavy and made sucking and puckering noises as trapped air escaped into the coolness of the day.

  Fascinated, Elsie tiptoed in her ballet shoes, leaping lightly over the bloodied drain towards the bucket. She bent over, the bluebell dress clinging to her foal legs in the breeze. The secret inside-out bits that had just spilled from the sheep’s carcass were gross and exciting all at once. Clutching her cardigan, Elsie swirled from the smell of the guts. The back of her throat gripped.

  At home her parents rarely let her near the sheep yards when the men were working. It wasn’t a place for women, according to Elsie’s father. The occasional broken-necked wether that smashed against a fence or wobbly-legged pregnant ewe about to slump and die from toxaemia were not things Kelvin Jones believed his little girl should see. Nor should she hear the men’s razor-rough words.

  ‘Your father says workmen, stockyards and shearing sheds are not for young ladies,’ her mother, Sarah Jones, had tutted with regularity every time Elsie, sitting pony-club-tall in her English riding saddle, had begun to steer Jasper down towards the action again.

  ‘But . . .’ Elsie would begin, knowing her battle was already lost. There would be no helping at shearing, no stock saddle for Christmas or her birthday (which annoyingly fell on the same day), and no learning to camp draft or play polocrosse. Mixing with the locals in the town of Culvert was a no-no for Elsie, according to her mother. It was pony club, made up of the graziers’ children, or nothing. As her mother frequently reminded her, her father held the esteemed dual position of Culvert councillor-mayor, so it was up to Elsie (or rather Eleanor — her Christened name — as her mother constantly reminded her) to behave in a way befitting the daughter of such a dignitary.

  The elegant sandstone gateway to their property, Grassmore, was only five kilometres out of town, but aside from the weekdays spent at the Culvert State Primary School, Elsie wasn’t ever allowed to visit her one friend, Tara. It felt to Elsie as if her mother was keeping her in prison until it was time for her to go to boarding school, seven hours’ drive away in Sydney. In the meantime her mother barely tolerated Culvert Primary and the mothers who gathered for gossip at the gate.

  It was a school of eighty kids, where most of the students were home-grown future good-for-nothing generational dole bludgers. There was a scattering of kids, like the Nicholsons, from families with little ambition beyond their town but a hefty dose of community martyrdom. They were the types who would take over the footy, bowls and cricket clubs, running them like their mums and dads had. Then there were the few kids like Elsie. Farm kids marking time until their squatter families shipped them off to boarding school to better themselves with a good education and a suitably classed marriage. For Elsie, Culvert Primary was hell, save for her friendship with Tara.

  That’s why that morning she had been inwardly so excited when her mother had said she was taking Elsie with her to collect the meat from Morton’s Abattoir and Butchery. It had meant she might at least see Tara there.

  Elsie thought of the sight of her father’s ute the week before, the mesh crate on the back filled with six lambs, two-tooths, destined for their farm freezer. She had watched her father drive from the yards, past the back of the double-storey timber homestead with the bluestone extension that her mother called ‘the conservatory’, and through the black-soil plains sprouting tender green shoots of the coming summer’s cereal crops.

  ‘Don’t you ride your bugger of a pony on my wheat crop,’ Kelvin Jones had said hoitily to his daughter from the open window of his ute before revving away in a waft of diesel.

  Elsie had felt suddenly sorry for the lambs and the way they jostled about and cast their noses to the now-moving floor of their confines. But she reasoned that chops were her favourite meal, and that was just how it was on the farm. You ate what you grew. Though not the tonnes of wheat that her dad trucked off in giant bins to the railway grain silos every summer. She could never understand why they bought bread from the local IGA. Elsie had clicked Jasper into a trot and smiled as she watched his winter-feathery hooves indenting trails through the fluffed-up soil that Grassmore’s giant tractors had left bare. So what if she got another tongue-lashing? She’d be in trouble anyway. She always was.

  Her father, Kelvin Jones, was known for his ‘look down your nose’ approach to people — even his own wife and kids. He was as hard on his men and dogs as he was on his soil and family. British habits still ingrained four generations on remained evident in him in the form of combed-over hair, moleskin slacks hoisted under a ballooning stomach, polished boots and an air of pomp, despite his sliding fortunes (his council salary was all that had kept the family afloat for years). Kelvin Jones wielded his position and power not just on the farm, but also around the entire community.

  Some days Elsie wished he wasn’t her father, but most of the time it didn’t matter. He was there, but not there. He ignored her unless he was bossing her around. He was always in at the council, leaving instructions for the last remaining farmhands on notepaper lodged under an old branding iron on the machinery-shed bench. And on the nights he was at meetings he left Sarah and Elsie lists of things he wanted seen to in the house. Her father’s presence made her cold and confused.

  Today Elsie’d left her older brother, Simon, a clone of his father, in his too-short pyjamas on the couch, watching Sat
urday-morning TV, absently picking his hooked-over nose and scratching the crusty lids off his pimples, to trail her mother to the car.

  ‘Stay,’ growled her mother at Marbles. Elsie stroked the old dog’s ears as she passed. Because the Morgans from Stradford Estate, the next farm out along the Eastern Highway, had got a Golden Retriever house dog years back, so too had her mother. And because the Morgans had got their daughter, Tilly, a pony and joined the Culvert Pony Club, so too had Elsie’s mother.

  Elsie sniggered to herself as she clambered into the back seat of the boxy Volvo. The Morgans had a Pajero. It wouldn’t be long before they’d have one too.

  At the sandstone pillars holding the gates, her mother took a right turn onto the bitumen and it wasn’t long until they were passing the old faded signs advertising pies and coffee at the truck stop and servo.

  ‘A new family’s bought the roadhouse and the farm from Mr Reid,’ Elsie’s mother said absently.

  Elsie nodded, but Sarah didn’t look in the mirror to see if she’d responded.

  ‘You’ll have some new children at the school next term. I hope they’re nice, but I doubt it.’

  The roadhouse and service station lay just before the visitor welcome sign to the town, as if the place wasn’t included in the bosom of Culvert’s country hospitality. When Davey ‘Chopper’ Reid owned it, the servo had an air of ‘Wild West’ about it. It was yet to get a multi-national facelift from the corporate fuel giants, so Chopper, the mechanic cum deep-fryer/pie-warmer operator, had retained its rusty sheds, worn-out bowsers and oil slicks on bare dirt. Elsie’d heard her father saying the new people were mad buying such a dump, but that they’d got it for a song after Chopper Reid’s heart had at last given out. Sarah had scoffed that he was a man who dipped into the bain-marie far too often, washing copious cheese-and-garlic deep-fried balls and wingdings down with mid-strength beer at midday, despite Dr Patak’s warnings.

  Because the Jones family had their own fuel bowsers on Grassmore and a mechanic at the ag machinery dealers at Rington, Elsie’s parents had rarely gone to the place. Once or twice on days when the temperature topped forty degrees, Elsie’s father had pulled in briefly for lemonade ice blocks to stopper their whingeing on the way home. (Ice creams were deemed ‘too dear’ by Councillor-Mayor Jones.)