Shearers' Motel Read Online Free PDF Page A

fruit, vegetables, eggs, margarine — had already been stacked in the fridges by Mrs Holgate.
    â€˜And if there’s anything else you need,’ she said, wiping her hands on a turps-soaked rag, ‘just ask.’
    â€˜I will. Don’t worry.’
    Through into the kitchen, then, for a look around. The smell of dry dust, ashes, cold fat. The stillness of cobwebs. The crunch of mouse dirt.
    There was a rickety table, also lime-green, a washing-up sink under a side window, a four-burner gas stove, a big old-fashioned cast-iron range (inoperable), a larger gas stove with all its parts missing, and an ancient flywired cupboard full of broken and stained utensils. Light came from small, square, dusty windows at either end of the room. There was no lighting generator at Leopardwood Downs shed — ceiling-mounted gas mantles served instead. Below the kitchen window, out on the dirt, was the hot water system, a sealed two-hundred-litre steel drum with a fireplace underneath and plumbing leading in several directions in the open air. The fire was out, but when he turned on a tap scalding water disgorged into the sink, spitting steam and coughing like a bullock. The sun alone had heated it to boiling point.
    So this was his first kitchen. He folded his arms and surveyed it. He could feel the job choosing him with its imagery of wreckage. As he opened the flywired cupboard a flutter of rust sailed to the floor. The cupboard was a jumble of broken mincer parts, egg slicers without handles, duplicate potato mashers, ineffective can openers, buckled colanders, coffee mugs without handles.
    Mentally he started making a list of cook’s complaints. If it was true that cooks were notorious whingers, then already he was one.
    â€˜Better to chuck this old junk out than have a door painted, Mrs Holgate — are you there?’ (She was gone.)
    He was alone with himself. Strapping on an apron for the first time in his life, he investigated the pantry. A gust of stale air came back at him when he opened the door. Old yellow newspapers rustled. The shelves were jammed with blackened utensils. Making an eyeball inventory of scaly dishes and pans, he backed off. It was the black hole of kitchenware. A generation of cooks had used the pantry as a dump since VJ Day or earlier. An impression of maniacal frustration overcame him — a vision of tubby, red-faced, trembling and disappointedly drunken cooks hurling buckled baking pans and handleless saucepans, worn mops and holed steel buckets at the walls andleaving them there where they fell. He was at the beginning of a process of frustration. If he started cleaning the pantry there would be no time for anything else. So he closed the door and hooked it shut. Then he just kept moving from one task to another, jerkily, numbly, thinking that this erratic attack on the work he was making would soon settle down, when the job started properly.
    But it was the job, he found.

THE GRISTLE
    It was five in the afternoon. A ten-ton truck pulling a long, lurching, mud-spattered and dented caravan emerged from the heat-haze behind the shearing shed and surged towards a clump of trees opposite the kitchen. Its roaring progress was slow, probing. He watched through window glass while doing a wash-up of dusty enamel plates and grit-covered crockery. The truck was a bulky twin cab, a six- or eight-seater of the kind used to carry electricity workers out to high-tension powerlines. Two figures were visible up front, a man and a woman. The truck ground slowly past, but he didn’t go to the door. He got on with what he was doing.
    On the stove behind him potatoes were on the boil. On a tin plate in the fridge were two kilos of sausages pricked and ready. He had carried these and some mince all the way from the Braidwood Butchery, keeping the packages chilled in an Esky. He’d been told to expect station meat ready killed, but forgot to ask Maurice Holgate about it. An oiled frying pan