something about the flat country that affects their brains. I’ve seen Dad standing at the bottom of a hill having no idea what to do with it, except drive round it. It’s like it doesn’t quite make sense. Like the earth is playing some weird trick on him. My grandad went on a trip to the high country once and he said: “I had to get back home because my eyes kept running into mountains.” You put a man like that in the city, they can’t see far enough into the distance and it kills ’em in the end. Too many corners in the city.’
‘Maybe you could take a city boy to the country then,’ Nina persisted.
‘Nah. It would be like putting a ferret in a round cage.’
‘A ferret in a round cage?’ The analogy was completely lost on Meredith.
‘No corners to hide in, so they run around and around until they drop dead. City blokes don’t do well in the country either.’ Meredith found herself stopped in her tracks by Annie’s argument.
‘But what does that say about you?’ Nina continued. ‘You’re from the flat country too.’
‘Women are more flexible. I’ve been in the city a long time now. Plenty of possums live quite happily in the city. I’ve learned to adapt.’
As she said this, Annie reflected that when she had first gone to Melbourne—the fabled Big Smoke—at the age of nineteen, everything about it said ‘freedom’. In those early years she’d found it—living in a shared household in Collingwood with an ever-changing roster of arty types, making lentil salads in the Whole Earth Café, singing with Sanctified Soul, travelling to festivals across the state. Then she’d met Cameron. He was working as a barman in Clifton Hill. They were both from the country and negotiating their way around city life. They’d fallen in love, married.
Annie had found them an old house in Brunswick. She had discovered a purpose in stripping the wallpaper and sanding the floorboards and a new job managing a vegetarian restaurant down the road. Meanwhile, Cameron had found himself ‘a new gender identity’ at a gay bar in St Kilda. When that life fell apart, Annie started again in real estate. She bought herself a smart apartment, designer clothes and snappy cars. At thirty-five Annie lifted her head from her desk, ready to find herself another husband. Only it seemed that all the ‘good men’ had been taken. Apparently they’d been won in some matrimonial ballot and she hadn’t bought a ticket. For the past five years—apart from a few doomed short-term relationships—she’d remained depressingly single. Annie felt like she had been placed in a ‘career woman’ showcase, as if money in the bank and home ownership classified her as a luxury item few men could afford.
What sort of man did Annie want? Not one of those performers or musicians she’d flirted with in her early twenties—wimpy egomaniacs who couldn’t even help her change the tyre on her pushbike. Not a city business type—spivs and spruikers. Poseurs who wore their sunglasses on their heads, their pullovers tied around their shoulders and, she wouldn’t have been surprised, their socks tied around their ankles. Not a bloke from up home—farm boys whose flat-earth view of the world came from the back of a tractor. And definitely not a man with an ‘alternative gender identity’.
With each passing year Annie couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was like a marsupial with its paw caught in a steel trap—she couldn’t go back, yet she was frightened to go forwards and experience even more pain. Annie didn’t say any of this to Nina and Meredith. She was sick of herself and her predicament, and no amount of talking about it was going to help. Instead she sat and listened, finished the bottle of wine as Meredith and Nina talked recipes and home furnishings, and then she showed them the correct way to extinguish the fire. In the way only a farmer’s daughter who’d been a volunteer for the district Country Fire Authority knew how.
That night a powerful owl kept watch over the RoadMaster as it glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. At various times each of the women woke in their bed to hear a deep and resonant ‘hoot-hoot’ and wondered where on earth she could possibly be. How far had she travelled? How had she ended up here?
Annie pushed away her plate of scrambled eggs and duck-and-orange sausage speckled with fragments of carbonised bark. ‘Blagghh! I feel like crap,’ she