Mike was still sweaty from his workout and it suited him. He looked like the kind of man who should always be walking around sweaty, especially as his t-shirt clung to him, locked onto his brawny body by moisture. He wore linen coloured shorts and brown joggers. Regardless of the sweat trickling down his arms, he didn’t smell bad. In fact, he smelt kind of good. I wanted to take whiffs without him noticing, but I couldn’t get close enough without being obvious. His smell was becoming intoxicating, as if I wasn’t going to be able to breathe without it.
The last of the afternoon light was flittering away as we walked through the rear gate of the only pub in town and into the beer garden. I felt uncomfortable making an entrance with a man as sexy as Mike, but I remembered what Dad used to say when I was feeling uncomfortable: “No one cares but you, love.” I held my head high and sent Dad a kiss, hoping it would find him through the clouds. The usual suspects were there, all men, gathered at their local watering hole to swap shearing and harvesting stories after a long, hot day.
“Roger, I’m telling you, it chased me!” Old Mr. Manning was in his customary seat.
“Bullshit, Rob. Goannas don’t attack people,” Des said.
“Well, this one did. I had to run back to my ute, but it bit me on the leg before I made it, the lousy bastard.” Mr. Manning lifted his grease-covered farm pants and showed the bandage that covered the lower part of his leg. A small spot of blood was seeping through, which he proudly pointed out to Des.
“Aw, you probably cut it with one of your tools, you silly old galah.”
Mr. Manning put his bandaged leg down and returned to his beer, muttering an insult as he took a swig.
It had taken Mike and me a long time to get to the stage of having a beer together. If I dared to really think about it, the delay was because his radio show was more popular than mine, and also, possibly more so, because I was a bitch. My radio show would totally be number one if it weren’t for Mike. Mike was all ego with a sense of self that in no way reflects his actual image: pompous and arrogant. I had been happy with my quiet existence that only solitude can offer. My own company had always been more enjoyable than any other person I had ever met…except maybe Mum and Dad, and definitely more than my kid sister. Or so I had believed.
These hermit tendencies came to a head when Dad died. Mike had been trying to break into my self-made world of seclusion since the moment we met. It started when he said “Hi” and went downhill from there. He was really annoying. Always happy, neat and tidy Mike, nothing out of place, nothing on his body that shouldn’t be there and nothing to show. Clinical. Like I said, annoying.
Yet today, despite myself, had been really enjoyable. It still was enjoyable.
I tied Snip to a small tree in the grassed area of the garden, trying not to laugh at the conversation I overheard. Shooing some toddlers away, I found the dog bowl, half buried in the wood chips, but still containing some water. A lot of farmers came for a drink after a day of isolation in the paddocks and brought their work dogs with them. This time of year, it was too hot to leave the dogs in the back of their utes, so the pub always made sure there was a dog bowl available. Snip was glad for the refreshment, greedily lapping at the coolish water.
“What can I get you to drink, flower petal?” Mike asked. The question made me struggle, I was feeling totally discombobulated. I reminded myself I didn’t actually like this man, with the radio show before mine, the show that I disliked, like I disliked the host, although it was getting harder to remember precisely why I disliked him.
His breakfast show, called One Less Bushman was a cover, a way for him to stroke his own ego rather than discuss anything of worth or play music that didn’t make people want to kill themselves. He’s not a normal radio host but perhaps, like me, he took the job because there weren’t a lot of them in town. What exactly he was doing in my small, rural Australian town was a mystery, and one I wasn’t exactly sure I could be bothered to solve.
He obviously had a solid fan base though, or he would have lost the coveted breakfast spot. I didn’t want the popular spot, exactly. It meant getting up at five a.m. to research and prepare. There were no coffee shops open at that hour, so no, I didn’t want the spot, but I would have liked the notoriety that goes with it though.
Hosting this most popular time slot had given Mike a somewhat rockstar attitude. Okay, so he didn’t really show it very often, or at all, but I was pretty sure it was there, hidden under his weirdly clean joggers and perfectly ironed t-shirts. He probably paid to have his ironing done for him, probably thought he was too important to iron his own shirts. But shit, he looked super-hot in his ironed t-shirts.
Still, I suspected people were turning their radios off when they heard his squawking excuses for opinions. And if people were tuning out, there was a big chance they weren’t tuning in again for my show. Hence, number two, not number one. Of course, there was no proof that Mike was ruining my life but I was almost certain I was on the right track. Growing up, it had been my kid sister who systematically ruined everything about my once perfect existence, so it would make sense that my life was in a weird state because of Mike. I always took pride in admitting when I was wrong, but I was never wrong, so it was kind of a moot point.
He pulled a chair out for me, next to the water feature in the corner, as he offered to buy me a drink. The unexpected display of chivalry made me happy and his arm muscles flexed slightly as he dragged the heavy chair across the decking. I thought maybe he was expressing an affection towards me, showing me I was too important to pull back my own chair, but more likely, he was just showing good manners.
The cascading water of the fountain was relaxing and it threw off a mist, which was better than air-conditioning this time of year. My skin was slightly moist and I wiped it off my arm with a finger.
“I’ll take a VB, and my name is Rosie.” I leant back into my chair, watching Mike walk towards the bar.
“I’ll call you Rosie, but you are a flower,” he said over his shoulder. Des and Mr. Manning turned to stare at me and I felt my face redden.
If I’d known I would be ending my work day by going for a random and impromptu beer with “perfectly ironed t-shirts Mike,” I would have worn better clothes. One of the joys of working in radio was you could wear whatever you want, and this was one of the perks I always took advantage of. I was wearing denim overalls, which I noticed when I squeezed into them this morning, were starting to be a little tight across the hips. And they had holes in them. I paid a fortune for them and the holes had been carefully crafted to look like they had appeared on their own. But after years of wear, the holes had increased to an unfashionable size. My thighs now escaped through some of the loose stitching, I really should have gotten rid of them but they were comfortable, at least before they became too tight.
“You know, goannas have been known to attack people, especially the really big ones,” Mike said, returning with the beers and settling into his chair across the table from me. It was unlikely that he chose that seat because the light caught his beautiful face in just the right way. He looked like a painting. Or a cover of a Mills and Boon book; I couldn’t quite decide which one. I pinched the part of my thigh that was seeping through the hole. Get a grip, stupid!
“The big ones? As in big people or big goannas?” I asked.
“Very funny.” I looked over at Mr. Manning, wondering if Mike should go and tell Des that it’s possible there was truth in Mr. Manning’s story. But the two men had been joined by a couple of other farmers and their bickering was long forgotten, traded for shearing shed stories. I heard the term “ball and chain” tossed around and it annoyed me, the old colloquialism that men used to refer to their wives. But my lack of self-confidence—I think due to my super tight overalls—stopped me from pulling the farmers up on this term. I would do a piece on it on my show tomorrow, ballsy and brave from my chair in a locked studio.
Looking at Mike as he sipped his light, low-carb beer, I wanted to know about his dead wife. What sort of woman could capture Mike’s attention long enough for him to want to spend the rest of his life with her. I wanted to understand the pain I sometimes saw etched into the lines on his face…a pain that reflected into his irises, and see how it compared to the loss of my own father. Upon hearing about Mike’s dead wife from Jan, one of the many town gossips, I discovered Mike had layers, coatings over his real self. I wanted to peel back each layer to understand them, because to understand them would help me understand him. I had room for a single friend in my life, so Mike was as good as any. He seemed to be a patient man and really, he was pretty much the only person who spoke to me on more than one occasion and wasn’t put off by my personality. If I was looking for a key factor in a future friend, that would be it. And I had discovered, only recently, that I wanted to have sex with him. I really, really wanted to have sex with him.
I wished I too had ordered low-carb beer.
My life was confusing. Mike was making my life confusing, he was changing everything. Sitting in front of me was a man I secretly referred to as ego on air. He had too much of it and it resonated through the airwaves and into my soul, ripping shreds into it like any song sung by Kasey Chambers, which was why I only listened to Sinatra. But he was sexy. Very sexy. Dark hair with flecks of silver, a stubbled jaw, and eyes such a light brown they appeared yellow under the fluorescent lights of the studio. I would have preferred not to have noticed what a sexy man he was, but I’m not blind, so it was impossible not to see it, no matter how hard I tried.
“Tell me about your wife,” I asked after the non-low-carb beer gave me the courage. As much as I was able, I tried to be gentle. Mike started wiping the condensation off his glass with his thumb, no longer present in the moment, no longer aware of his surroundings. His brown eyes had taken on the yellow hue and he seemed to be enveloped in sadness.
“Her name was Lee.” He sighed. “She was always busy, always rushing off somewhere. I used to hate that, but now I would give anything to see her racing off to her next meeting, or tennis match, anywhere really.” His pain was palpable and was morphing into me, I could feel it crawling under my skin. I didn’t like it at all.
“We met at a mutual friend’s BBQ, and as soon as I saw her, I knew she was the woman for me. It’s cliché I know, but it’s true. She was confident and tall and obviously intelligent. At twenty-five she was already an officer in the army. And she was recruited straight out of Uni, she was doing an Arts degree. I joined the army for her.”
I took his hand in mine, the contact making me feel awkward and exhilarated at the same moment. There had been a lot of new feelings today. “How did she die? Do you mind me asking?”
He sighed again, deeper, longer, taking in more oxygen to help him answer the question. “No, I guess not. I never talk about her and it’s kind of making her fade away. I thought I wanted to stop talking about her but now that I have, I miss the conversations. She was shot in Afghanistan and died a day later in a military hospital in Perth. She was filming a PR piece with a camera crew when she was shot in the back.” He was rubbing her dog tags again.
“I didn’t get to her in time, I was stationed in Syria. She died when I was trying to get back to her. But I missed the first plane. I was in shock, I couldn’t move. I don’t know how long I sat on the bed in my quarters. Maybe three or four hours.” He buried his face in his hands and my heart broke into a million pieces. “My commanding officer came in and he had to physically put me on the next plane. I wanted to get to her, they told me she didn’t have long, but my bravery was destroyed by the ocean that separated us.”
“There was no honour in the way she died. She just…died. And there was no honour in me missing that first plane.” A tear rolled into his beer and lost itself in its own ocean.
“So, I moved here, to a small town, far away from everything that connects me to my old life. I had to move far away, I couldn’t stand seeing the look in people’s eyes when they heard about Lee.”
“I’ll never forgive the army, this world for taking Lee from me. She was in Public Relations, for god’s sake. How does a PR manager for the army get shot? I loved her—I love her—more than anything. So many people come back from war, why didn’t she?” Mike’s question wasn’t directed at me and it hung over us, mixing with the mist from the water feature.
“We’d only been married a year. There was no time for us to have a real life. Just enough time for us to be ripped apart.”
He shook his head and stretched his arms, breaking the mood. It was dark now and I didn’t remember the sun going down. Mr. Manning and Des were long gone, along with the other farmers. It was just Mike and me and Snip, sleeping peacefully under the tree.
I felt drained, I couldn’t remember ever being this tired. The beer was congealing in my stomach. I pushed the glass away.
“Are you aware that you are very beautiful?” he asked me, catching me off guard.
“Must be the lighting in here. But thanks.” I mumbled like a teenager, I’d never been called beautiful before, especially in overalls with holes in them.
This man was not at all what I thought he was, almost everything he had said to me at the pub was raw, tender, and unexpected. I had misjudged him from the moment I saw him. He was thoughtful and generous and had a world of pain hidden behind the yellow in his eyes. He deserved a break, from me, from the whole world. He made me more aware of my own attitudes and I wanted to be a better person, for him and for me.
“I’ll finish my beer and we’ll get out of here,” Mike said. “I’ve had enough deep and meaningful for a long time. I’ll walk you home, where do you live?” I collected Snip.
“Just around the corner.” I wished I lived further away so we had a longer walk together.