Shearers' Motel by Roger McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

Rid, stood on his boots so he wouldn’t get burrs on his feet, and threw himself back on his sleeping bag cover.
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    He imagined a conversation:
    â€˜We haven’t had a cook like him before,’ says the owner, confiding to Bertram Junior. ‘I almost collected his bedroll on my bullbar.’
    â€˜If you like I’ll have a word to him about it,’ says Bertram Junior.
    â€˜He might go dark on you,’ warns the owner. ‘Do you know him that well?’
    Owners wanted everything smooth and easy. It was never what they got.
    Bertram Junior had seen all the cooks he needed to see in a lifetime: filthy, screeching, meticulous, argumentative, old, sick, pains in the arse, plotting, horny, hot for it,too smart by half, homos. He’d seen fellas running from their missuses, and women running from their men, and ones hiding from the law. The cook they’d had at their last shed had had a stroke, and kept reordering stores that were on the shelves already, and asking Bertram Junior to repeat what he’d just told her because she’d forgotten it while he said the next thing.
    â€˜And I know this other shearers’ cook, she’s a skinny little thing, she’s always got a fag hanging out of her mouth and snot hanging from her nose. A rousie went over early for a smoko and caught her pissing in the scrap bucket. She said, “Oh, the toilet’s full”. So the next shed he walked into the kitchen and they had a flip-top bucket. He walked up and he pressed it, and said, “Maggie’s got a flush toilet”.’ And then there was the one whose roasts were too dry, and when they asked him to put oil on them he used motor oil. And the one who used to terrorise the fellas for sex, real ugly, she was. There were a few good ones in amongst the pack, excellent people, although they all had their faults — even the gourmet cooks and chef-style ones, who seemed to want to make it party food every night of the week, when good plain tucker was the requirement, especially for Kiwis. If cooks didn’t appear to have a fault, then that could reveal a fault for sure, and if you couldn’t put your finger on it you had to become inventive, not just for the interest of putting it up them, but in order to exercise authority and show who was the boss as you would with any member of the team.
    â€˜So what’s your secret, Cookie? Pork someone else’s missus? Yours do a bunk on you? Tickle the till somewhere? You ain’t queer? Did you have a mental breakdown? I don’t think you ever done time. Were you no good at what they reckon you were — a writer?’
    Bertram Junior didn’t ask these questions out loud. But he stroked his chin, eyed him sideways, and he wondered the queries to life.
    Maybe Bertram Junior thought he was a connection of Alastair’s. A boss’s favourite. At first he trod carefully on that point, which meant that the time they talked onthe phone they had talked about nothing except melons, trying to get each other to say what they really wanted, but being overpolite about it. Later when he said Alastair had given him the job because he had his own transport it made sense to Bertram Junior and anyone else who’d ever worked in the industry. ‘Hang on to the fella with the car.’ A contractor would give a job to a blind man if he had wheels.
    He was more like a grower than a worker — clean workworn clothes and a different accent, and he owned a farm, he said, that his wife worked. They had seven hundred merino wethers. ‘Yeah?’ Bertram Junior was interested. ‘Me and Willie-boy could knock them over in two days for you.’
    â€˜We’ve already got a local bloke. He’s excellent,’ he said.
    â€˜Oh, that’s too bad,’ said Bertram Junior.
    Bertram Junior remembered a teacher he’d had at school. He was like him, and he said he had in fact been a teacher years ago,