A Bloody Good Man

'Don't cry,' Brett muttered whenever he saw my red eyes. 'There's nothing to cry about.'

Still, I cried. And I slept with him at every opportunity. I wanted the intimacy, the love, the affection. I wanted reassurance that he still loved me.

It might've been easier if I drank or smoked or took drugs, because I'd have a crutch to lean on, but I had nothing.

Brett and I had a farmhand who helped us out four days a week, Gunther, and every day before he started work he'd have a breakfast bong. Now, 'breakfast bong' is not a phrase I would have ever thought would creep into my vocabulary, but twenty-two year old Gunther was a good worker, and he had no aspirations in life beyond getting stoned, so I politely ignored the billy in his car, and let him live life as he saw fit. That is, until Brett asked me to sleep with a backpacker so we could have a baby. All of a sudden, I started thinking about how I might ask Gunther to a) supply me some marijuana and b) teach me how to inhale.

I didn't approach Gunther. God, he would have thought I was a lunatic. He already looked at me at times like I was from some other planet, even though his love of the billy and my growing of organic produce made us the closest thing to hippies this town had ever seen.

I just cried and cried and wondered what my husband thought of me if he genuinely believed I wanted to fuck a man for his semen.

~~~~~~~

Perhaps four weeks after Brett had made his suggestion, he took me out to lunch.

'Going out for lunch' means different things to different people. For us, it meant that he took me to a pub in a neighbouring town where it was two-for-one schnitzel day.

Our meals arrived, each served with a side of pepper gravy. Pepper gravy doesn't normally come with schnitzels; you have to order it separately. I'm the one that likes gravy with my schnitty, not Brett, but I like to drown my chicken in it, so that it's swimming in gelatinous brown liquid, and to save me from having to ask for two serves of gravy, Brett always orders two and pretends one is for him. Perhaps that is real romance, real love. Someone remembering your idiosyncrasies, and not judging you, but instead indulging you without comment or complaint.

'I love you,' I said suddenly.

Brett chuckled. 'Because of the gravy?

'Because of everything.'

The drought broke, so to speak.

We talked about work for a while. Weeds. Fertiliser. The old tractor that worked without complaint, and the newer one that was cantankerous on a good day and next to impossible on a bad one. It was still under warranty, but that didn't help us much when it was out of action.

As we ate, a couple of backpackers came in. They were tourists, in town to do agricultural work to extend their visas. I never had much to do with them as Dad would have died before paying a foreigner to work for him, and most foreigners would have rather starved than work for my father.

I barely noticed the backpackers, but they seemed to spur Brett back into 'let's have a baby' mode.

'What do you think of them?' Brett asked.

'The backpackers?' I asked.

'The male ones. The one in the white singlet looks okay. He's a bit long in the torso, but you're long-legged, so you'd balance each other out.'

'Are you suggested I breed with some random backpacker so we can have a perfectly proportioned baby?' I asked incredulously.

Brett shrugged. 'I thought you might find him easy on the eye.'

I carefully inspected the backpacker in question. French, probably, all of nineteen or twenty, and remarkably good-looking.

'No,' I replied simply. 'Even if I were interested in your hare-brained scheme, he wouldn't sleep with me. I'm thirty-seven years old, Brett. Nearly thirty-eight. Men like that don't sleep with women like me.'

'You're an attractive woman.'

'To you! Not to some bloody wet-behind-the-ears frog who's probably screwing his way around the country. Look at him! Does he look like he struggles to get laid?'

'Plenty of men find you well worth looking at,' Brett argued.

'That one wouldn't. Trust me.'

'How about his friend?'

I didn't dignify that with an answer. Instead, I unleashed a torrent of pepper gravy on my schnitzel and cut into it with the level of force normally reserved for badly cooked steak.

'If you want to have a baby,' I said crankily. 'We should get a sperm donor.'

'No.'

'No?' I put my knife and fork down. 'That's what normal people do, Brett. They don't go encouraging their wives to sleep with teenaged farm labourers.'

Brett didn't respond. He obviously harboured some distrust or dislike of going through more conventional channels, but I knew him well enough to know he wasn't going to elaborate, least of all in a pub. I chopped my food up into tiny little portions and shoved them around my plate angrily, but I didn't eat much. Instead, I drank my rum and Coke, then went to the bar and got myself a second.

Brett still didn't speak. He watched me drink, a lost expression on his face, as if I didn't quite understand.

A young couple entered the bistro with a baby in a pram and a toddler in the father's arms. They walked quite near to us and both Brett and I saw that the infant in the pram was a newborn, still impossibly tiny with a downy coating of soft black hair on it's head.

After the young family had passed us, Brett finally spoke.

'I'd want it to think it was mine,' he explained. 'I don't want records. I don't want openness. I'm human, Hailey. I want the child to be mine. Millions of men have happily raised children who weren't theirs, and millions of children have been blissfully ignorant of who their real father is. The only difference between me and those other blokes is that I'd know. It wouldn't be a betrayal. It wouldn't be adultery. It would just be a means to an end.'

'But a sperm clinic would be so much easier.'

'I don't like their rules as they change, and they change a lot. In Victoria, sperm donors can seek out the adult children who were conceived using their sperm, even if the children don't know that they were conceived via donor sperm. That's fucked, Hailey. Fucked.'

I don't know how, I don't know why, but it was at that moment that I finally conceded. I told my husband that if it was somehow possible, and I could find a man willing to have sex with me, I'd do it.

~~~~~~~

The backpackers came and went. I'd tried to figure out how to seduce one, but I was stumped as to how. It had been troublesome enough in my past to try and find a lover. Now I had to find one who was not only willing to have sex with a married woman, but was capable of being discreet. The last thing I needed was for the word to get out that the married, lunatic left-winger was having it off with strangers.

I did try to awkwardly flirt with one that I thought might be a likely prospect, but all I managed to do was terrify him. Then he'd laughingly asked a few people if I was a known cougar. Thankfully nobody had witnessed my feeble attempts at seduction, and they thought the backpacker was just embellishing a normal interaction with a local in order to have a story to tell, but I was humbled, embarrassed and terrified all at once.

After the last of the foreigners had left town, Gunther my farmhand jokingly asked me if I'd miss the sight of them. The little smart arse had heard the rumours that I'd tried to seduce the Frenchman.

'Not you, too,' I scolded.

He laughed. He was a good-looking kid; tall, lanky, blonde haired and blue eyed, and without an aggressive bone in his body. 'Nah, not me, Hailey. I just find it funny. If you'd really been flirting with him, he wouldn't have been running away scared, he would have been pulling his pants down before you had a chance to change your mind.'

Gunther's words embarrassed me, which might well have been what he was intending.

'Get back to work, you,' I ordered.

He laughed and walked over to the bad-tempered tractor. 'If I see any blokes walking out of here with a stupid grin on their face, I'll know there's more to you than people suspect.'

I was completely mortified by this point. Rather than spend any more time with my employee, I went to find my husband so I could get a hug and remember that there was at least one person in this world who found me attractive.

Brett was inside, talking on the phone, with his laptop open in front of him. He was making notes on a notepad as he spoke.

Figuring he was busy, and that Gunther would now be out in the fields spraying, I went back outside. I'd no sooner made it out the door than Brett called out to me to stop. He had something he wanted to say to me.

I was terrified it might be about the backpacker I'd tried to seduce, and cringed as I walked back towards the kitchen table where he was sitting.

'What is it?' I asked.

'Can you remember when I did that quote with West's, and that bloke from Kyle's place, about working on that golf course?'

I remembered. It was at some convention that the three men were introduced by a mutual contact, and they got to talking about a new golf course that was being planned North of Brisbane. The course had been designed but there was a tender out for someone to come and build it. The three men figured that together, they and their employers/employees could undertake the job.

It was beyond any of their experiences, and despite working hard on at tender submission, I don't think any of them were surprised they didn't win the contract. They simply weren't experienced enough.

'Yes,' I agreed warily. 'What about it?'

'The company that won the contract is now in Administration. The Administrators are trying to trade out of the current problems, but the irrigation team they'd employed is now refusing to work with them as they're on sixty day payment. I've been offered the work.'

I took a deep breath. 'Just you? Or you and the others?'

'Just me. The job's nearly complete. It's just the irrigation and turfing and some other stuff that needs to be done. Apparently the mainlines are already in.'

Brett continued to talk about laterals and sprinkler heads and joiners, but most of what he was saying flew over my head. He'd spent a lifetime in irrigation, and having moved around a bit, understood it from rural and residential points of view. He knew dams and town water and recycled water, which pumps worked best, and which hydrologists were worth the money, and which were worth avoiding. I, on the other hand, knew that water was wet.

'But if you took the job, you'd need to stay in town,' I said. 'It's almost three hours away.'

'It's more than three hours' away.'

I bit my thumb. 'For how long?'

'I'd be working six days' a week, Monday through Saturday. I'd come home Saturday night and leave Sunday evening. They asked me to block out two months, but my guess is that it'll be more like three. Contractors will be moving a lot more slowly now they know they won't be getting paid quickly.'

'What if you hired someone to help you?'

He shook his head. 'There is no one around. There's a skills shortage. The Administrators have already tried to find someone.'

'So it would just be you. Six days' a week for two months.'

Brett nodded. 'The money would be good.'

'We don't need money.'

'You don't need money,' he corrected.

'We share bank accounts, Brett.'

'But the money is yours. This farm is mostly yours. You have property in Sydney. And what am I, but some useless bastard, who always feels like he's bumming off you?'

'The only reason I have money is because I was lucky. I got the right job at the right time. I got half-good advice but was stubborn because I wanted to buy investment properties with big backyards. The money doesn't mean anything to me, Brett.'

'It does to me.'

We stared at each other. I hoped I'd win. I didn't.

My husband held my gaze. 'I'll speak to Gunther and see if he can work an extra day. Five days a week shouldn't kill the little stoner. I'll also find you another farmhand.'

'I can find my own staff,' I argued, even though I knew Brett was just trying to help me, not patronise me.

'I'm not offering because I don't think you can't,' he said. 'I'm offering because you shouldn't have to. If I'm leaving you in the lurch, I can fill the gap.'

And, I thought darkly, you also want to find the best looking labourer you can get your hands on. It won't matter what he can do on a farm, so long as he wants to fuck your wife.

~~~~~~~~~~

Sure enough, Brett hired the most attractive farmhand in a two hundred mile radius. Dutchie was handsome, arrogant and a known womaniser, and my husband made it abundantly clear to me that he wouldn't hold it against me if I wanted to immediately start seducing the thirty year old.

'You're leaving tomorrow afternoon and you want me to start fucking the new guy on Monday?' I asked as I sat on the bed, watching him pack.

'Maybe you could start laying the groundwork,' Brett said, either missing or ignoring the sarcasm.

'Please tell me he's mechanically minded. The new tractor's playing up again and it's now out of warranty.'

'I doubt it.'

I flopped onto my back. 'So what's he good at?'

'Well,' Brett said. 'From all reports, women tend to like him quite a lot.'

Jesus fucking Christ.

While I was staring at the ceiling and thinking about how I might seduce an employee without ending up with a sexual harassment suit being filed against me, Brett stopped packing and approached me. His hands moved to the waistband of my faded black work pants and he was about to unclip the buckle of my belt when I stopped him.

'Period,' I reminded him.

I had a twenty-two day cycle and it sucked as much as you might imagine it did. It didn't used to be this short; it had sped up over time. Perhaps nature was as desperate as Brett was to see me pregnant, and it was giving me extra chances.

'Can I have a cuddle?' he asked.

It was his way of asking for me to wank or blow him, even though he wouldn't be doing anything to get me off.

'Sure.'

We laid on the bed and kissed. It had been three days since we'd last had any sexual interaction, which was a long time for us. We were normally at 'every two days' like clockwork. We called it 'like cock work' because there was always Brett's penis involved.

He pushed my top up and tried to get to my breasts. I was wearing a racer back sports bra, my pretty lacy little numbers having long been relegated to date nights only, so I wriggled out of his grasp and removed my shirt, then squirmed out of the crop top.

'Ah, boobies,' he said with the obvious delight of someone who hasn't stopped being interested by them.

I wished he wouldn't get me going at the wrong time of the month. If I had to fault my husband, it would be that he was ridiculously squeamish about periods. He could put his hand into a stagnant, murky pool of water at work and not blink twice, but any whiff of blood and he went white. I'd cut myself not longer after we married and had sucked the blood from my finger. Brett had run outside to vomit. If the blood was his, it was fine. If it was anyone else's, he was a complete sook.

He told me I was beautiful and I knew that to him, I was. There's something sweet about the sort of man who thinks his wife is more special, more pretty, more intelligent than any other woman, who is proud to have married her and always backs her up. A lot of small town shit stopped the second he and I got together. It's not so easy to engage in mean-spirited gossip about a woman when her partner is around, and her partner is the type of man who could stare down Godzilla, and who also has a habit of hocking and spitting on the ground, managing to land his phlegm just centimetres from a man's boot, when thinks someone is talking shit.

We rolled around the bed, both of us now top-half naked, kissing and cuddling. We eased him out of his jeans and briefs. He was quite hard already; the benefit of a few days of no sexual contact, and he took my hand and wrapped it around his erection.

We'd been married long enough for me know what he wanted. We got into position without either of us having to say a word. He sat up against the bedhead, and I sat on my knees in between his legs and began to wank him. He kissed me and played with my chest, his rough hands squeezing and caressing the soft flesh, while I kept working him.

Brett took over when he was close to coming. He had a boob in one hand and his prick in the other, while I held his face in my hands and kissed him. Everything was exactly as I knew it to be. I understood his cues and routines, felt comfort in the familiar taste of sarsaparilla cordial in his mouth and I could tell when he was a split second from orgasm because his eyes squeezed shut.

'Holy fuck, Hailey,' he groaned as he came.

I was horny as all hell. It wouldn't have taken much to get me off, but I knew from experience that he wasn't willing to go there, so instead I helped him clean up, while ruing my body's lack of occasion. I always get horny at stupidly inconvenient times.

Brett hugged and kissed me. 'I love you, munchkin. I love you so much.'

'I love you, too.'

'Dutchie won't know what hit him.'

I hugged him tighter. I didn't want to sleep with a stranger. I was too old for casual sex. But I was going to try it, I was going to try and sleep with a farmhand so my husband and I could have a baby.

'Do you want to know how it goes?' I asked.

'No. No, that's your business.' Brett disentangled himself. 'I should get going.'

He was going to be staying with a mate of his. He had an odd collection of friends, colleagues and relatives scattered across Australia. Sometimes when we unexpectedly ran into them he introduced me, sometimes he hurriedly pulled me away. I thought it was because they knew secrets of his, but Brett said no, it was nothing sinister, it was just that there were some men in the world who weren't fit for introducing to one's wife.

An unmistakable sense of incredible loneliness settled over me when he drove out the front gate. Getting married so late in life had bought about a number of challenges - both Brett and I were stubborn, set in our ways, and at times quite intolerant - but at the same time, I'd chosen as a husband a man whose company soothed me, and whose bad habits were tolerable.

I probably wasn't in the best frame of mind when my sister called and asked if Mum and Dad's farm had been sold yet.

'It's been on the market six weeks,' I reminded her.

'You're a real estate agent. I thought you were supposed to be a specialist in these things.'

'I was a real estate who specialised in suburban Sydney,' I pointed out. 'The urban market is quite different, and moves a lot faster. The farm is a specialist property in a rural location. I can't just snap my fingers and find a buyer.'

'But how are you going to be looking after it? I saw on Brett's Facebook page he's going away for work.'

Of course she'd looked on Brett's Facebook page. She was more up to date with what he posted than I was.

'We've employed someone to help,' I explained.

There was stony silence.

'Well,' Monica said eventually. 'How nice of you to tell us. I suppose you think the estate will be paying his wages?'

'Yep,' I replied, starting to lose my temper. 'I'm not sure why you think Brett and I should be managing it for free, anyway. It's not exactly a five hour a week job.'

There was another silence.

'Because,' Monica said icily. 'You're responsible for their deaths.'

With shaking hands I pressed the 'end call' button.

I wasn't responsible for my parent's deaths, my parents were. Wholly and solely. They had options; they just didn't want to take them, and that ultimately didn't end so well for them.