THE FARM WAS CALLED Tooloombilla. The people who owned it were the Hills.
Noel and Annie. They’d been friends of Mummy. (Annie had been Mummy’s flatmate when she first started dating Pa.) Marko helped me find them, and somehow persuaded them to let me be their unpaid summer jackaroo.
The Hills had three children. Nikki, Eustie, and George. The eldest, George, was exactly my age, though he looked much older, perhaps due to years and years of toil under the boiling Australian sun. Upon arriving I learned that George would be my mentor, my boss—my headmaster, in a way. Though Tooloombilla was nothing like Eton.
In fact it was like no place I’d ever been.
I came from a green place. The Hills’ farm was an ode to brown. I came from a place where every move was monitored, catalogued, and subjected to judgment.
The Hills’ farm was so vast and remote that no one would see me for most of each day but George. And the odd wallaby.
Above all, I came from a place that was temperate, rainy, cool. The Hills’ farm was hot.
I wasn’t sure I could endure this kind of hot. The Australian Outback had a climate I didn’t understand and which my body couldn’t seem to accept. Like Pa, I wilted at the mere mention of heat: how was I supposed to put up with an oven inside a blast furnace inside a nuclear reactor set on top of an active volcano?
Bad spot for me, but worse for my bodyguards. Those poor lads—of all the assignments. Plus, their lodging was extra spartan, an outbuilding on the edge of the farm. I rarely saw them and often imagined them out there, sitting in their briefs before a noisy electric fan, grumpily polishing their CVs.
The Hills let me bunk with them in the main house, a sweet little bungalow with white clapboard, wooden steps leading to a wide porch, a front door that gave out a kittenish squeak every time you pulled it open and a loud bang every time you let it fly shut. The door had a tight screen, to keep out mosquitoes, which were big as birds. That first night, sitting over dinner, I couldn’t hear anything but the rhythmic slap of bloodsuckers against mesh.
There wasn’t much else to hear. We were all a bit awkward, trying to pretend that I was a jackaroo, not a prince, trying to pretend that we weren’t thinking about Mummy, who’d loved Annie, and whom Annie had loved in turn. Annie clearly wanted to talk about Mummy, but as with Willy, I just couldn’t. So I shoveled in the food, and praised it, and asked for seconds, and searched my brain for anodyne topics of conversation. But I couldn’t think of any. The heat had already impaired my cognitive skills.
Falling asleep those first nights in the outback, I’d conjure up the image of Marko and worriedly ask him: Did we really think this through, mate?
