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CHAPTER
38
Kirsty sat on a stack of worn tyres in the workshop of Clarence Mechanics while Hogey peered under the bonnet of her ute.
There was no putting it off any longer. Her ute couldn’t break down again (and nor could she!). Fortunately, fixing her ute was going to be easy.
She was passing the time scrolling through missed messages. Two from Joe. One from the reception desk of Helen Best asking her to schedule an appointment. Nothing from Terri, which wasn’t necessarily good news.
‘This thing looks about a hundred years old,’ he said.
‘You talking about my ute or my battery?’
‘Both.’
She grinned. ‘Well, you’re right on both counts. I bought the ute with my first month’s pay when I was jillarooing on a cattle station out near Tennant Creek. The station owner’s son had won a bull-riding competition, and he’d figured this old girl was too busted upfor his rodeo image. Sold her to me for five hundred dollars and a case of beer.’
‘Fair call,’ said Hogey, pulling a spanner out of his back pocket like he was a Hollywood gunslinger and fitting it onto a locknut. ‘You can tell a lot about a bloke from his vehicle.’
‘Is that right?’
He looked up and gave her a wink. ‘Oh yeah. For instance, my ute tells the ladies I’m a real good deal. Smart, handsome and plump enough in the pocket to buy them a T-bone steak at the pub.’
She chuckled. ‘Is it the roo-bar telling them that, Hogey? Or the rack of pig-hunting lights you’ve welded onto the tray?’
‘How often do you see me on my ownsome down there at the pub?’
Well. Never, if she was honest. ‘So … if manly wheels are the sign of a good bloke, you mustn’t think much of that aqua moped Joe Miles zooms around town on.’
He snorted. ‘Aqua? Is that what you call it? Piss-green, I’d say. There’s an accident in a ditch waiting to happen.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, starting to chuckle … then she remembered who else in Clarence had had an accident in a ditch. Her father.
‘You weren’t the mechanic in town back in the late eighties, were you, Hogey?’
‘No, love. I was working my arse off in Moree back then. Bought this place on the cheap after a flood took out half the street and gave the old owner the willies. About 1995 if I recall. Place was quieter then, of course. Most of the dairy families had gone bust, and the tourists hadn’t worked out the Northern Rivers district was paradise.’
‘Must have been lovely,’ she said. ‘A perfect place to grow up.’ Something she might have experienced, if young Trevor Bluetthadn’t ridden a defective motorbike to his death, and if her mum hadn’t hightailed it out of town.
Maybe she’d have been as cheeky and cute as Amy. As happy.
The fingers of her right hand found the nobble of bone on her forearm. Maybethatwouldn’t have happened.
Hogey had hauled the old battery out and was frowning down into her ute’s engine like it had insulted him. ‘No-one locked their houses back then,’ he said. ‘No-one had fences, even. Labradors roamed the streets on bin nights and the local kids were always calling in to get the tyres pumped on their bikes.’
It sounded idyllic.
‘Take young Joey, for instance. That kid used to prang his bike more than any other kid in town. Couldn’t tell you the number of times I had to set his front wheel in my vice grip and straighten it out. Me and him struck up a bond, but it wasn’t enough.’
Kirsty tugged herself out of a little daydream of what Joe Miles must have looked like as a tousle-haired kid on a BMX, all scabby knees and laughing hazel eyes and bony elbows. ‘Wasn’t enough for what?’
‘You know. After. He couldn’t talk to me about it, he was so cut up. Choofed off to Sydney like he had a brown snake in his back pocket.’
‘After Natalie,’ she murmured.
Hogey spat on a locknut and gave it a rub on the feral rag hanging from his shirt pocket. ‘Told you about that, did he?’
‘Sort of. Not really.’
