Page 8 of Reckless

He squeezed my shoulder again, smiled, then turned and walked back towards the church, that smile and his touch leaving lightning crackling in my veins and thunder in my skull and nowhere to shelter from it.

Storm was here alright.

It was pissing down rain the next morning when I went to get the milking done. Distant thunder still growled through the clouds, and the wind was cold. Wet weather was the worst. The whole milking shed stank of mud and shit by the time I was done, and I still had to go and make deliveries to Mavis’s shop. I was soaked to the bone by the time I got home again and unhitched Gerty the horse from the cart. I darted over to the house and wiped down as best I could with the towel we kept on a hook at the back door. Took my boots off so I didn’t track mud all over the floor, and then stepped inside the kitchen.

I eyed Buzzy Pete, who was sitting at our kitchen table. The chair scraped against the floor as he stood up, and he winced as he knocked his knee on the underside of the table.

“I’ll be gettin’ on then,” he said, gaze darting between me and Kat, who was cracking eggs into a bowl. “Good to see you. You too, Robbie.”

We waited until he’d cleared the house before we started laughing.

“Don’t!” Kat said, setting her bowl down. “Don’t be mean.”

“You’re laughing too!” I checked the kettle was on. “Whole island knows he’s crazy for you. When’s he going to ask you out?”

“He’s getting there,” she said, then snorted. “Very bloody slowly.”

Kat and Buzzy Pete had been dancing around each other for a while now, and Kat was uncharacteristically closed-mouth on the subject. Pete was a good guy though, so I figured that one day soon Kat would tell him to hurry up and make his move, and maybe one day after that they’d make it official. Well, as official as things ever got on Dauntless, since it was none of the government’s business who anyone married. I thought of Dr. Jones and his insistence I get a Medicare card—he had a lot to learn about how things were done here.

“What are you smiling about?” Kat asked.

“What? Nothing.”

She shook her head. “Did you put the order in for the feed store yet?”

The soil on Dauntless was dark and rich, at least up on the plateau away from the beaches, but we supplemented our animals’ grazing and foraging with stock feed and hay bales. We didn’t have a lot of land here, so we needed to look after it and make sure it wasn’t picked clean.

“Yeah. Four bags of layer mash, like you wanted.” There was a place on the mainland that delivered whatever we needed to the ferry terminal if I called the order through. The owner let me go in every few months and settle up with cash. I reckoned he was writing the sales off as stock loss and pocketing the money. Getting one over on the taxman wasn’t just for Dauntless Islanders.

“Find out if they’ve got any point-of-lay hens.” Kat began to whisk the eggs.

“How many you after?”

“Five.”

“I’ll call them up and check tomorrow.” We had mobile phone coverage now on Dauntless Island, but I didn’t have a phone yet. Didn’t see the point of one, when I could go into the village and ask to use the one at Mavis’s shop. She’d had a satellite phone for years, seeing as she ran the village post office, but she’d also got herself a new mobile phone when the tower went up. It was cheaper than the sat phone, and didn’t have any delays where you started talking over the other person because you thought they were finished.

“While you’re down there, see if the new doctor wants eggs delivered.” Kat tipped the beaten eggs into the pan on the stove; it hissed.

“Okay.” My gut lurched at the thought of seeing Dr. Jones again, though not in an unpleasant way. Made no sense to me, because he wasn’t my usual type at all.

Well, how’s the usual type been working out for you, dickhead?

Dr. Jones was quiet. Made you work to listen to him, and I guess I’d always liked it when guys made me work for something. I’d never been able to figure out why my brain—or my dick—was wired the way it was. It was easier not to think about it and just go with whatever I wanted at the time, however stupid I knew it was, and however much it’d hurt. But I liked it when they fucked me up for getting it wrong too, so I’d always gone for guys who were bigger than me. Dr. Jones was tall but thin. Looked like you could snap him in half if you wanted. There was something about him that snagged in the tangle of thoughts at the base of my skull. If a guy like that told me what to do, and he didn’t have the size to back his words up, I wouldn’t be fighting him to obey, I’d be fighting me. The idea was dizzying. Tasted sour too. I liked to pretend I didn’t have a choice. Wasn’t sure I could pretend something like that if the other guy was a stringbean. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and it tasted less and less sour every time I came back to it. By the time Kat set my omelette down in front of me, the image of Dr. Jones quietly telling me what to do, and me doing it, made my dick twitch and my skin prickle in anticipation.

I ate my lunch in silence, trying not to dwell on these weird thoughts of Dr. Jones, and what they might mean.

The rain eased off over the afternoon, but the clouds still lingered, low and heavy, and we got a few more showers overnight before the dawn poked holes in the clouds and the wind started to shift them away. It was cooler this morning; there was a sharpness in the air that warned the colder weather was coming.

I did the milking, hooking the cows to the machine easily enough. Sometimes the girls liked to play silly buggers, but there was none of that this morning. We had ten cows and two milking machines: It took a couple of minutes to get each cow cleaned for the machine, then stripped to encourage milk flow and pass any dirt or bacteria from their milk ducts, then I attached the suction cups and the machine did the rest. Each cow took about ten minutes—my mum taught me how to milk by hand when I was a kid, and it took half the morning—so the whole process only took a little over an hour. Then I changed the cups for the goats and did the same with them. We only had four milkers in the goats. We kept the herd mostly for meat and fleece, but Yellow Sarah made goats’ milk cheese and soap.

I loaded up the milk churns onto the cart for delivery to Mavis’s shop, then went back to the house to clean up and grab a quick breakfast. Kat was already out. By this time of morning she’d be halfway around the island delivering eggs in the billy cart pulled by Sam the wall-eyed goat.

I felt a twinge of something that was a little like embarrassment when I remembered Kat rolling her eyes last summer because some old guy with a camera had stopped her for photos. When the tourists came to Dauntless, they thought we were charming and old-fashioned, or that we were somehow idealistic for rejecting modern things like cars. It wasn’t idealistic at all; it was purely practical. The island didn’t have any roads. What was the point of cars when we barely had halfway decent tracks? So what if we didn’t have street lights, or EFTPOS machines, or Wi-Fi? Hell, we hadn’t had reliable electricity up until about fifteen years ago, but the second we did? You can bet we got those milking machines sent over on the next bloody barge.

But knowing that, it never made me feel any better when I stepped off Young Harry Barnes’s boat at Newcastle and onto what still felt like an alien planet. Seemed like every month there was some new rule I didn’t know, some new thing I couldn’t do. A guy once laughed at me when I didn’t know how to order a cheeseburger on the screens at McDonald’s—and then laughed even harder because I didn’t have a credit card to pay at the end when he’d walked me through it. Just little stuff like that, stuff that shouldn’t matter, but there was so much of it that it became a lot. Too much to laugh off.

Did Dr. Jones think we were backwards like that?