Love Is Blind (3 page)

Anthea crossed her legs primly in the back of his dusty cab and pursed her mouth in disgust. What on earth had her irresponsible, erratic sister got herself into
this
time?

The driver gunned the taxi past what he called the ‘starting stalls’. These turned out to be a row of corrugated tin cubicles in which women sat, half-naked and in provocative poses, awaiting
customers.
It was like a rustic, rusty, rundown Aussie version of Amsterdam’s red light district. Her driver unwound his window. He slowed down and called out to the girls, ‘Show us yer pink bits.’

Anthea was horrified. ‘My goodness, I just can’t imagine why there’s a shortage of eligible women here,’ she said sarcastically.

‘It’s a nightmare,’ her driver confirmed, missing her joke. ‘The whole town’s full of horny miners and farmers, bustin’ for the company of a decent sheila.’

‘So, what are you looking for in a female companion?’ Anthea probed.

‘You just gotta be breathing,’ came his romantic reply.

Anthea was seriously regretting her decision to come to the Outback. Things had not got off to a good start. Jane had rung her mobile and left a message to say that two of her music students had been late. Could Anthea get a taxi into town? She was to wait at a pub called, rather disturbingly, The Lucky Shag. In a bar there called, even more ominously, Skimpy’s. Jane and her fiancé Jacko would meet her.

The driver dropped Anthea beneath the neon
‘Lucky
Shag’ sign. It fizzed pointlessly beneath the searing sun. As she fished around in her purse, the driver promised her a free t-shirt if she had a drink in all of the town’s forty bars. She supposed there were also matching underpants to go with the t-shirts, as a reward for quenching one’s sexual thirst at every brothel. But she knew better than to make any comment which might lead him on. Even without encouragement, he was being persistent. He leant out of the taxi window to tuck his card into her bra strap. ‘The bar you want’s in that door. Though you’re a bit overdressed for Skimpy’s!’ he laughed. ‘Call me any time on this number, sugar tits.’ He leered at her, before revving away.

‘And you wonder why you’re single?’ she seethed under her breath, in a fug of exhaust fumes.

The relentless blue sky screeched down at her. The whole town seemed to bray like a drunken bloke laughing too loudly at a party. Spending time in such a bar was second on Anthea’s List of Least Favourite Things to do … right after chopping off her own leg with nail scissors.

Anthea walked into the saloon as though she already wanted to leave. It was the kind
of
bar where even the water is watered down. The clamour of male voices which greeted her sounded like a hippo giving birth. Anthea balanced on the edge of a sticky stool. Oh, how she wished she had mastered the art of levitation. Or else knew how to turn herself into a human hovercraft. She checked her watch and jiggled her foot with irritation.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she understood the bar’s name. The barmaids at Skimpy’s were wearing the skimpiest underwear imaginable. They were the opposite of icebergs – ninety per cent of them was visible. The customer on Anthea’s right flipped a two-dollar coin, slapped it down on the bar and called ‘heads’.

‘I won!’ he exclaimed to the nearest barmaid. Since he’d won the toss, the bored girl then lifted her bra and casually flashed her bare breasts at him. Another man who was wearing a shirt which read ‘I got crabs at Big Dick’s’ had lost his toss. So the barmaid got to keep his coin and what remained of her modesty. Anthea’s spirits fell even further. It was clear that the only support a woman got in this town was from her Wonderbra.

She ordered a mineral water, checking the glass for grime before putting it to her lips. Despair filled her heart. What on earth was her sister doing in this Godforsaken cesspit?

The answer to that question arrived on cue. Dear God, don’t let that be him, Anthea thought as he gangled in the doorway, all legs and elbows. She turned back to the bar but soon felt the man’s gaze like hot breath on the nape of her neck. The sound of his boots rang out on the bare wooden floorboards as he strode towards her.

In long, sliding, unhurried vowels, the object of her sister’s affections said, ‘You must be Anne.’

‘…
thea
…’ She squeezed as much emphasis into the correction as was humanly possible. ‘Anthea.’

He took off his cowboy hat to reveal straggly black hair. ‘I’m Jacko.’

Narrowing her eyes with keen interest, Anthea surveyed her potential brother-in-law. Bill Jackman was the opposite of what was usually required of a romantic hero. Mid-forties, in weathered riding boots and faded jeans, he was too tall, at about six foot four. His shirt stuck to him like a khaki skin, revealing a powerfully
built
body. But the muscular, mahogany-tanned flesh was matted with thick hair. Tufts of it sprouted from the open V of his shirt.

He had the kind of face you wouldn’t wish on a bull terrier – the kind you associate with crime scene programmes. It was as if his face had been carved by a trainee sculptor. Individually, the features were attractive, but together they didn’t work. Acne scars pitted his cheeks. Stubble worked through the cratered surface around his flattened nostrils. Anthea wondered whether his crushed nose was the original edition or had been broken – and how many men he’d hospitalised in the fight.

‘Where’s my sister?’ she asked, with alarm. Murdered, no doubt, and being minced up for dog food meat right this very minute … Hideous visions crowded her muddled brain.

‘Janey’s running late. What with her teaching, the wedding plans and preparing your welcome feast … the poor girl’s run off her pretty little feet. My property’s a good hour out of town. Knowing my Janey, she probably secretly thought it would be a good way for us to spend some time together. So we can really get to know each other.’

Anthea already had a good idea who Bill Jackman was – the kind of misfit Jerry Springer would base an entire show around. She gave a shiver of horror at the thought of being alone with him and made a hasty phone call to her sister’s mobile.

‘Anthea! How exciting that you’re actually here.’ Her little sister’s vowels had already flattened slightly, with her voice taking on an Australian twang. Anthea heard this, with disapproval. ‘Where are you now?’

‘Oh, obviously at my Joy And Rapture Seminar,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve flown half way around the world to see you. Yet you couldn’t be bothered to pick me up?’

‘Calm down. It’ll be good for Jacko to drive you out to the homestead. It will give you a chance to bond.’

‘If I don’t kill him first. Why do women always make the mistake of thinking that if they marry an awful man, they can change him? The only time you can ever change a male of the species, Jane, is out of a nappy as a baby.’

Jane sighed. The initial excitement of hearing her sister drained out of her voice. ‘Make an effort for once in your life, will you? After all,
he
will be your brother-in-law in a month’s time.’

‘Not if I can help it,’ Anthea said to her beer mat as she rang off.

She pocketed her phone then turned to study her sister’s beau. ‘So, apparently you’ve decided to
marry …’
Anthea said the word with utter contempt ‘… my beloved sister, after only knowing her for three or so weeks. I’m sure you can understand why this makes me uneasy. I mean, we know nothing about you.’ She selected ‘patronising’ from her range of facial expressions. ‘Do you have any convictions?’

Jacko gave a playful smirk. ‘Nope … but you obviously do. That all men are bastards for one.’

‘No,’ she said crossly. ‘I mean
prior
convictions.’

‘Yeah, that all the blokes you met
prior
to your fiancé are bastards too. He’s a lawyer, right? Your fiancé?’ Jacko picked up her suitcase. ‘Must be such a fun bloke.’ He winked at her. ‘Does he send his shirts out to be stuffed?’

Anthea looked at her future brother-in-law with the kind of expression you’d give an incontinent nudist who had just relieved himself on your bridal dress.

‘Shall we go?’ He extended one hand to help her down from the bar stool.

She was reluctant to take it, not having had a rabies shot. She clambered down from the bar stool unaided and flounced outside. What she saw next stopped her dead in her tracks.

Chapter Four

Eye Sore

DEAR GOD, SHE
thought. Don’t let that be his car. But sure enough, Jacko was opening the door of the battered utility truck before her. Actually Anthea wasn’t sure if it was a truck or the
Starship Enterprise
, as it sported enough antennae to get it to Jupiter and back. ‘Mr Jackman, you don’t expect me to get into
that
, do you?’

‘Sorry, ma’am. Not the limousine you’re used to, I know. But a four-wheel-drive is safer out here.’

‘Mr Jackman, you understand my reluctance, I take it. And why I need to ask you a few things first. I hope you don’t mind …’ she eyed his rusty vehicle with disdain ‘… but what exactly are your prospects?’

Jacko let out a snort of laughter. ‘I’m a miner, love. I have prospects all over the bloody place!’
He
swung her small leopardskin suitcase into the back of the utility truck. It looked completely out of place alongside tools, tarpaulins and a tethered motorbike. As out of place as she did. ‘But I do an honest day’s work. Not like those desk-jockey knobs and total tossbags in town.’

Anthea’s eyebrows shot up her forehead. Ignoring his helpful hand once more, she hauled herself into the passenger seat and arranged the hem of her linen dress around her knees. In the heat, her clothes and hair had wilted like week-old lettuce. But both were positively buoyant compared to her spirits. Jacko vaulted into the driver’s seat and thrust the key into the ignition.

‘It’s only natural that I feel protective towards my little sister,’ Anthea explained, her expression pinched. ‘As you no doubt know, we lost our parents two years ago in a horrific boating accident. Since then I’ve tried to take care of Jane. But she is extremely impulsive …’

‘Don’t you ever act on impulse, Anne-
thea
?’ Jacko laughed. He laced his fingers behind his neck and flexed his massive arm muscles in a casual stretch before pulling away from the pavement. ‘Thinking’s overrated, if yer ask me,’ he said.

‘Human beings are not just a mass of impulses, Mr Jackman. It’s only natural that I should ask exactly what your
intentions
are towards my sister,’ she said, even though she realized she was sounding just like a starchy old aunt in a Victorian novel.

‘I intend to make your sister very happy.’ Jacko gave her another cheeky wink. He then drove at a leisurely pace down the wide red dirt road, waving to passersby and occasionally hooting his horn in greeting. ‘Very, very happy.’

‘Oh, yes? And how exactly do you plan to do that?’ Anthea’s voice was clipped. ‘You’re taking her away from her friends, her job, her home, her hemisphere. And for what? To make her live
here
?’ She gestured at the ramshackle town huddled around the gaping mine. ‘In this racist, sexist hellhole.’

Jacko cast an amused glance over Anthea and then, to her surprise, laughed right out loud. ‘Sure, the blokes around here are rough. But at least what you see is what you get. Those city blokes only call themselves “male feminists” in the hope of getting a more intelligent bonk.’

The streets thinned out fast. They were churning out of town now through scorched
countryside.
A recent bush fire had left the black skeletons of trees dotted across the landscape. The utility truck lurched into gravelled hollows, its wheels noisily throwing up dirt and gravel.

‘What else can I make of a town which calls the seam of gold you mine “The Body”? What kind of image does that conjure up? A geological Elle Macpherson, crawling with men,’ Anthea protested.

‘But in a town with one female to every fifty blokes, it’s surely the women who are “sitting on a goldmine”.’ Jacko gave a rich chuckle at his own joke.

Anthea shot him a disapproving look. ‘Yes, your mayor has made that perfectly clear,’ she replied. ‘But if you ask me, it’s obscene – luring plain, vulnerable women out here to Broken Ridge on the pretext of offering them love. When in reality you men just can’t be bothered to pay for a prostitute.’

Jacko gave her a polite but sullen look. ‘Steady on, old girl. We’re not that bad. Contrary to the stereotype, we country blokes don’t have sex with just anything with a hole and a heartbeat … and then count the legs afterwards. Company, that’s what we crave … No, it’s the city fellas
you’ve
got to worry about. They’ve got you women starving yourselves and cutting your faces to stay young and beautiful. Jane reckons if your boyfriend … what’s that city slicker’s name again?’

‘Rupert. If you must know. Rupert Cavendish.’

‘Well, she reckons that if your Rupert told you to eat only pedicure shavings for a more lively complexion, you’d damn’ well do it. Skin has only one function, yer know, Anthea. To stop your insides from slopping out all over the place … But it’ll no doubt take you two thousand diets and twenty-eight surgical procedures to realise that you’d be much more beautiful if you read a book now and then. Besides a legal textbook that is. Jane … now,
there’s
a reader for you,’ he concluded, fondly.

This unexpected speech left Anthea shaking all over, like a dog swarmed by bees. Okay, the miner had better communication skills than she’d anticipated, but how dare he talk to her that way? Stalling for time, she extracted her lipstick from the pocket of her dress and reapplied a crimson layer. She forced a smile, but it was sharp as a razor.

‘The truth is, Mr Jackman, I don’t need to be
informed
of my sister’s many and wonderful qualities. Those I know about already. It’s just totally beyond me what she sees in
you
. Although I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with you that an exorcism couldn’t fix,’ she said, cruelly.

‘Is that right?’ Jacko dodged a lump of rotting road kill. ‘But really, am I that unattractive?’ he joked. ‘At the mine, you can see in at the window of my shower from the women’s changing rooms. I’ve been meaning to get a blind but, hey, why spoil their view?’ He laughed encouragingly.