Chapter 42
HIGHER STANDARD
Colorful musicians and vendors descended on the Lionheart market grounds and main street the weekend of the Tablelands Folk Festival.
The weekend in late October had long been Ronnie’s bandmates’ favorite.
It was the only weekend a respectable person could buy three-dollar margaritas from noon to midnight from a food truck parked outside the Opal Museum.
Ronnie wore the jackaroo boots Nev had given her, and her mother’s Outback hat completed her metamorphosis into a bogan.
Whitebeards outside the pub, senior bogans, wore kangaroo-leather and faded jeans.
She tucked a black shirt into bootcut jeans.
Owning land made her a forever kind of local.
Wearing all black was an homage to New Zealand’s national rugby team.
Once in a while, a fellow musician or pedestrian in the street below complimented her drumming with the Wild Drovers. No one complimented her guitar strumming, except Nev.
All the barstools in the pub at the Lionheart Hotel were taken, standing room only.
Ronnie stood next to Reg’s elbow at the bar.
He nursed an amber schooner of Carlton Mid as he watched the game.
Mattie was on. It was hard to spot him until the camera zoomed in on him in his black uniform with his number on the back.
He had gotten a trendy haircut since she saw him on the television two weeks ago. He looked good.
She wondered if it would always be like this.
She could see him but he couldn’t see her.
He would never move back to Lionheart now that he had kiwi citizenship.
He had confided in her that he felt safer in Auckland as a bisexual man than he did here.
She teared up every time his team performed the haka on the field. She didn’t want him to move back.
No one had been surprised that the All Blacks made it to the semi-final match against South Africa of the Rugby Union World Cup. Mattie’s team were arguably the best starting lineup of the best team in the history of rugby union. They had won the previous two World Cup finals.
If they won another, they would set a world record.
“Go Wallabies!” her dad’s friends shouted, taking the piss out of Reg. Everyone in town was rooting for Mattie to bring home the $100,000 bonus that he would earn if his team won the Final.
Reg glanced at her between plays. “Where’d you get that drover hat? Your mum had one like that.”
Ronnie tossed a handful of bar nuts into her mouth. “What would you say if I became the new drover at Upsend Downs when Kazi retires?”
“I’d be disappointed,” he said, eyes glued to the telly behind the bar.
She chuckled, assuming he was kidding. She put her arm around his shoulder.
He gave her a disapproving look. “Real talk. Now that you’re adulting, I’ll hold you to a higher standard. Raise the bar. You leveled up in life. You’ve got responsibilities now, a mortgage to pay. You’re my princess, but that’s not a real job.”
“What? Droving?”
“Kazi’s not a drover, he’s a bum who lives in a barn.
You need money to build your house for you and Rainbow.
Don’t limit yourself. You’re smart. Smarter than you pretend to be.
It’s time to stop playing the dropout card.
You’re past the age when you can use that as an excuse.
You are as capable as anyone else at anything you set your mind to.
Keep your options open. You’re all Nev’s projects there.
She’s farming you more than she’s farming the animals.
She’s posh and bored. She doesn’t even like sheep.
It’s a lark to her. She’s a nihilist. Don’t ask me how I know.
Someday you’ll step out of her shadow and strike out on your own.
If you stay there, you’ll turn into Nev. ”
“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” Why was he going off about her job now?
Ronnie bristled. She couldn’t believe he had insulted the farm.
She thought he liked Upsend Downs. He had never said anything dismissive about it before.
What was making him a critic all of a sudden?
Was it the fact that Mattie’s team was ahead in the World Cup semi-final?
If Mattie won this match, Reg would go home and buy tickets to London.
Mattie scored a try. Everyone cheered and thumped the bar. Soon they would be jumping up and down hugging each other. “My shout,” she said, reaching for her wallet. Her dad shook his head and slid a hundred-dollar bill across the bar towards the bartender, paying for the next round.
“Da.” She took off the hat. “I don’t want a lecture from you.”
Reg glanced at her and back to the game, contrite.
She turned the hat over in her hands. It wasn’t like they spent all day braiding each other’s hair and singing kumbaya around a campfire.
Was he making fun of the fact that they had a folk band?
Or was he making fun of the fact that they were single and didn’t have traditional families? Either way, it hurt.
It had never crossed her mind that people looked down at her for working there.
Those people would look down at her for working on any farm.
If she continued working at Upsend, this was the price she would pay.
This was what Nev had been so agitated about—people in the community not seeing her as a serious person with a real job.
“I’m not Mattie.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Stop comparing me to him.”
“I never have.”
Debbie Collins set an overflowing frothy pint on the varnished mahogany.
“My version of success looks different. I can take care of myself.”
Reg studied her during a commercial break. Can you really? his eyes seemed to ask.
“I don’t need a degree for my career.”
“Is it a career?” Reg asked.
She gave him a look.
“Fine,” he said. “Do your thing, if it pays the mortgage. Are you going to Brisbane to try out for the Lions? That’s coming up soon.”
She had been thinking about it. Tickets were more expensive the longer she waited. If she was going, she should have bought them by now. She was doing that thing she did where she made a decision by not making a decision—a bad habit that she needed to break.
“No,” she said. “I’m too busy, my game’s off, and everything I need is here.”
Reg nodded. “That makes sense.”
“There is something you could help me with.” Figuring out how to build a barn. She had already milled enough lumber. “Who do we know who can organize a barn-raising party?”
She returned to her new campsite down on the far side of Lazy Creek to the welcome sight of a Lumholtz tree kangaroo curled up in a furry ball in a high fork in a blackbean tree, long tail dangling, and an email from TAFE.
She brushed her teeth, then curled up in her sleeping bag to read it. The director of the program tersely informed her that she was failing all of her classes and advised her to come in for a meeting.
She skimmed an email from her English instructor explaining what a five-paragraph essay was.
The small words on the screen blurred together.
Maybe she needed glasses. She hoped not.
They wanted her to rewrite her personal essay comparing and contrasting her childhood to the childhoods of the Aboriginal Australian man and the Asian immigrant family in the readings.
“The strongest part of your essay was the sentence about collecting cans and trading them for candy bars, but your essay was only ninety-six words, when the assignment was four hundred.”
The Marie Kondo book Blaise had given her was still in her truck. If it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it. She Marie Kondo’ed the emails from the school, then logged into the website and Marie Kondo’ed the course.
It felt like the right thing to do.
Life was too short to beat a round peg into a square hole. She was ready to focus on things she was good at, to lean into things that made her feel like a badass. Work that made her sing.