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CHAPTER
2
‘Uncle Joey,’ said Joey Miles’s eight-year-old niece in the singsong voice she used to tell him he was getting stuff wrong. Again.
‘Yes, Amy?’
‘If you don’t turn the fuel switch on, the whipper-snipper is never going to work.’
‘I’ve turned it on. I’ve turned it off. I’ve podged this little black button and I’ve pulled the start cord zillionty-seven times.’
Amy giggled. ‘Andyou said a bad word.’
‘I did not.’
‘Did too.’
‘I muttered it. Real low, under my breath, like a whisper. How was I to know you have superhero hearing?’
‘It was more like a yell, but whatever. You need me to get Mum to start the whipper-snipper for you?’
He winced. ‘Your mum’s got the memory of a magpie, Amy. She’ll be telling jokes for years about the day her big brother was too useless to start a power tool.’ And if he was honest, he was feelinga little ticked off with being called useless. He was the responsible one. The overachiever who got stuff done. At least, he had been.
‘You want these weeds gone, or don’t you?’
‘Fine,’ he said, recognising defeat when it was standing in front of him, with its arms crossed and a sassy look on its face. At least the cattle truck that had unloaded the twenty weaner steers he was going to fatten in the flat paddock had cleared off. He didn’t need an audience while getting emasculated by an eight-year-old. ‘Get your mum.’
‘Is there a problem here?’
He looked over his shoulder to see the youngest of his many, many siblings standing on the side verandah. Daisy had cobwebs stuck in her hair, a stripe of paint down the front of her tie-dyed sarong, and in her hand was a bottle of water that reminded him he was overheated, overtired, and very much in need of a sit-down.
‘Mum!’ said Amy. ‘Uncle Joey can’t even start a whipper-snipper.’
His sister smirked. ‘Behold! The big city investment guru comes back to the country and discovers he’s not invincible.’
Invincible? What a joke. He was broke, disillusioned, and pissed off with himself and the world, but he was the oldest of the six Miles siblings, so admission of anything wasn’t an option.
‘I’ll hold your water for you while you start it,’ he said. If he was going to be unmanned by his sister and his bossy-as niece, he was going to do it hydrated.
‘It’s for you.’ She tossed him the bottle. ‘Amy, we’re packing up inside so go have a piddle and find your backpack. And Grandpa’s got a carrot cake cooling in the kitchen. You want to be in charge of the taste-testing?’
‘With lemon icing?’ said Amy.
‘Is there any other way to eat carrot cake?’ said Daisy.
‘I’m on it.’
‘But only one slice, all right? I don’t want you to spoil your dinner. Promise me.’
‘I promise, Mum,’ Amy said, scampering off. An apricot blur leapt up from the mud patch below the water tank’s dripping tap and scampered after her. Gus, the naughty, ten-month-old groodle Joey co-parented with his ex-girlfriend, hadn’t yet adjusted to the delights of finding himself on an actual farm, with actual grass and weathered old fence posts to pee on and chicken poop to roll in, but he knew the word cake when he heard it.
‘Watch out for snakes!’ yelled Daisy after her.
Joey held the blissfully chilled bottle against his face for a moment before uncapping it and downing the contents. For mid-August, the weather was sauna hot, and he’d been digging trenches and working on the house yard since dawn. ‘I haven’t seen any snakes,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been stomping around for a few weeks now.’
‘Pity you didn’t stomp around in the kitchen some more.’
‘There was a snakeinside?’
