Headhunters by Mark Dawson Read Free Book Online Page A

knew—and Mervyn knew it, too—that Matilda was more than capable of rebuffing those comments herself, but it never failed to get a rise out of her brother.
    They reached the door. Harry barred the way ahead with his arm. “If you think Matilda is going to look at you twice, you’re crazy. You’ll have more luck pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day. And if you annoy her, you’ll have me to deal with.”
    “That’ll be the least of his problems,” Eric said. “She’d eat him for lunch.”

Chapter Seven
    THEY TOOK the Jeep into Booligal. The village was tiny, with a general store and post office, a cricket oval for the occasional social game, shaded eating areas and a playground. The Booligal Hotel offered food and drink. It was a tired, dusty business that survived on the back of the tourist trade. Townsfolk made the trek out to Booligal for an “authentic” cattle drive, moving stock through the outback. A drover’s life would normally have been hard and uncomfortable, but the tourists were treated to floored tents with mattresses, hot showers and luxury food. A party was waiting to start their trek as they walked into the bar that evening. Eric and Mervyn made no attempt to hide their disdain, looking over at their table and making loud remarks about how they found the whole thing distasteful. Milton said nothing. He bought a packet of cigarettes from the bar and smoked them quietly by himself, happy to sit there and take it all in.
    There were three other men in the bar. They were in their late middle age, broken-down old shearers bearing the scars of their profession like badges of honour. The fridge was on the blink, so the bottled beers were lined up on the bar and served warm. Harry went up and corralled three and a plastic bottle of water. Milton had explained to him that he had stopped drinking and, after a period spent trying to work out why he would do such a fool thing, he had eventually accepted it. The others had not been so forthcoming, and, as he took his glass of warm water, they made the usual suggestions as to his masculinity and then his sexuality. Milton was not bothered by any of it. He knew they were joking and, in any event, their ribbing was nothing compared to the continued serenity he found in abstinence. He would usually have felt uncomfortable in a bar—the AA line was that if you went into a barbershop, eventually you would get a haircut—but he didn’t feel vulnerable here. He was in good company, with friends, and he felt satisfied after a hard day of work. And he knew for certain that the alternative was not appealing. He had woken up in enough gutters with no memory of how he arrived there to last a lifetime. He was not tempted.
    They ordered plates of food and drank several more bottles of beer. Eric, whom Milton had quickly diagnosed as a man who could not hold his beer, quickly became drunk. His sense of humour, coarse at the best of times, became even more so. He kept glancing over at the table where the tourists were sitting. There were eight of them, five men and three women. It looked as if three of the men and the three women were couples. The remaining men, both slightly effeminate, looked like a couple, too. Milton could easily diagnose how well that was going to go down. They were all middle aged and, he guessed, they had paid a handsome price for the experience that they were about to have.
    Milton’s attention was drawn to the two guides who were sitting with them. They were authentic-looking blokes, dressed in khaki pants and shirts with the logo of the tour company stitched into the lapels. So far, so corporate, but it was the small details that Milton noticed that betrayed them: their hands were calloused, their arms and faces discoloured with small red blotches from the sun, their faces tanned a deep nutty brown apart from their foreheads where their hats would sit. They had the same complexions as Eric, Merv, Harry and Milton did. They worked