Talk to Me Tenderly, Tell Me Lies. John Davis Gordon
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brandy. The mess of snake had been cleared up, the floor mopped, and Helen had put on fresh jeans and shirt. Oscar lay on the verandah, covered in a blanket, awaiting burial in the morning. She was over the immediate grief of it now: the brandy was doing its work and she just felt numb.
‘Sorry, what’s your surname again?’ she said.
‘Sunninghill,’ Ben said. He had taken off his crash-helmet and gauntlets.
‘And how come …? I mean, what brought you here, like a guardian angel?’
Ben smiled. ‘I came to borrow a spanner,’ he said. ‘For my motorbike. I was having trouble and when I passed your gate, I thought maybe you had the spanner I needed. I did have one, but I lost it somewhere.’
‘Spanner,’ Helen said. ‘Yes, of course, all kinds of spanners in the barn.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But can it wait till tomorrow? I mean, it’s dark now.’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, I’ve got a bed for you. Plenty of beds here.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you,’ Ben said uncertainly. ‘As long as it’s no trouble?’
‘No, no, plenty of beds …’ She rubbed her forehead, then went on: ‘“Sunninghill”? Never heard that name before.’
Ben smiled. He was a funny-looking fellow with a ferrety sort of face, but when he smiled his cheeks puckered and all his teeth showed in a way that was both mysterious and charming. Mischievous. He was small, only about five foot eight inches in his high-heeled bikers’ boots. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘my real name is Sonnenberg, but my father changed it by deed-poll to Sunninghill. The English translation of Sonnenberg.’
‘Oh,’ Helen said.
‘He wanted to create the impression we weren’t Jewish.’
‘Oh.’
That smile. ‘Trouble is, he looks even more Jewish than I do.’
‘Oh.’ She was going to say ‘Really?’ but changed it in her mouth. She added hastily: ‘Sunninghill’s a nice name. A cheerful name. You look a cheerful type of person.’
‘Sure, I’m a laugh a minute. Remember, that was only my first snake, I’ll probably improve. Does this happen very often?’
She smiled wanly. ‘First time I’ve seen one in the house. Oscar chased it in.’ She dabbed the corner of her eye. ‘Seen enough in the bush, though, over the years.’
‘How many years have you lived here?’
‘Since I got married. Twenty years. Or nineteen.’
‘And where’s your husband now?’
She waved a hand to the south. ‘South Australia. Broken Hill, working on the mines.’
‘Oh.’ He was about to say ‘Why?’, then stopped himself. Helen volunteered the reason, as if reading his thoughts:
‘The kids’ boarding-school fees. With the drought we couldn’t make ends meet. So he had to go back to his old job.’
‘Oh. How long ago?’
‘Two years.’ She added: ‘He comes home at Christmas, when the kids get their summer holidays.’
‘I see. So you run the ranch all by yourself?’
For a moment she wondered what he saw. ‘No. We had to get rid of our foreman last year when we sold most of the cattle, but we’ve still got one Abbo stockman and his wife. They live about five miles away. So you really were a guardian angel, showing up like that, otherwise I’d have stayed on this table all night.’ She smiled wanly. ‘So, what brings you to Australia on a motorbike?’
‘Just seeing the world. I saw on your gate the farm’s called Whoop-Whoop. Does that mean anything special?’
‘The real name is Edenvale Station, because we’ve got a few wells that are usually quite good, but because it’s so remote we’ve nicknamed it Whoop-Whoop. That’s a mythical Australian place. It means to Hell and gone. In the middle of nowhere.’
‘Beyond the black stump?’
‘Right.’ She poured more brandy into his glass. She didn’t feel so shaky any more. Just grief for Oscar. Oh Oscar … ‘So, Mr Sunninghill, from New York. What do you do in New York?’
‘Used to do. Jeweller.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, a gemologist. Buying and selling stones, setting them, creating jewellery pieces.’
‘“Used to”? Have you quit?’
‘Sure have.’
‘Why? Don’t you like it?’
He said: ‘I like jewels. They’re beautiful. And I like making pieces of jewellery, that’s artistic. But buying and selling? The hassle? The cut-throat competition? And spending the rest of my life in that little shop? In New York?’ He shook his head. ‘There’s more to life than that. There’s a whole beautiful world out there.’
She looked at him enviously. ‘So you’ve sold up entirely?’
‘Not mine to sell. Family business. But my father’s cut me out entirely for leaving him in the lurch.’ He smiled then clasped his breast: ‘How can you do this to your Papa, my boy, my life? And you a gemologist – three years your Mama and I starved to send you to Technical School and now all you want is a Harley-Davidson to kill yourself with already, this is gratitude?’ He smiled. ‘He forgets I’ve worked for him since I was sixteen.’
Helen held out her hand, to show him her engagement ring, then slipped it off her finger. The diamond in the centre was missing. ‘It fell out somewhere,’ she said. ‘How much would it cost to replace?’
Ben examined it. The bed for the gem was substantial.
‘About a thousand dollars,’ he said regretfully. ‘Counting cutting, and so forth.’
Helen sighed. ‘Forget it …’ She looked at the empty ring sadly, then put it back on her finger. She went on: ‘So – how long have you been in Australia, Ben?’
‘A couple of months. Landed in Perth. Covered the west coast, then crossed the Nullarbor Plain. Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, et cetera. Then up here into Queensland.’
‘Landed in Perth? Where from?’
‘Africa. Came across on a freighter, with my bike.’
‘Africa?’ Helen sounded envious. ‘Where were you in Africa?’
‘I sailed from South Africa, but I was all over the place. Crossed from Gibraltar into Morocco, then made my way down along the western bulge to Nigeria, Ghana, et cetera. To the Congo. Got on a steamer up the Congo River into Zaire and crossed over to Uganda and Kenya. Then down through Tanzania and Zambia and Zimbabwe, et cetera, into South Africa.’
Helen smiled. ‘“Et cetera”, huh? And, before Africa?’
‘Well,’ Ben said, ‘I went round South America, then crossed to the Far East. Japan, Hong Kong, then got a freighter to Thailand. Did a side trip by air to the Philippines and Indonesia, then rode the bike over to India.’ He smiled. ‘Decided against trying to ride across the Middle East – not the healthiest place for a Jew. So from Bombay I got a freighter through Suez to Greece.’ He shrugged. ‘Went around Europe for a while, then crossed over into north Africa.’
Helen was fascinated. ‘Wow. How wonderful! And where’re you going from here?’
‘Brisbane. Then up through northern Queensland to Darwin, see that Northern Territory.’
‘And