The Good Daughter by Honey Brown Page A

hardens. ‘Or maybe you want us all to take you home, Rebecca?’
    ‘You know,’ she says, ‘it’s Teddy’s number I’ve got to call if anything happens while my father is away – I suppose I should screw that up now?’
    ‘You’re the one cracking the shits.’
    ‘Arsehole,’ she mutters as she passes him.
    He walks with her across the lawn and around the side of the property. Rebecca hardly sees for her tunnel vision, she hardly hears for the ringing in her ears. When they get to the car he opens the door for her. Something over in the car park draws his attention and Rebecca takes the opportunity to get in and shut the door behind her.
    He stands a moment beside the window. He taps on it. When she turns and looks, he holds his middle finger up against the glass.
    It’s hot in the car but Rebecca breathes in, fights the tears, feels an affinity with Joanne Kincaid, wherever she is. A town mobilised and without a clue. She decides there and then she’ll go home and sleep for two weeks solid, lock herself in the house and wait this out. She can’t help but feel her mother is somewhere watching, waving her cigarette up there in heaven and telling everyone within earshot that her damn daughter hasn’t listened to one goddamn thing she said.
    Luke Redman still hasn’t got into the car. The stifling conditions get too much and Rebecca looks for the window winder. There isn’t one. It’s all electric. She looks around, noting the opulence, the grey leather … the smell – it’s familiar … She looks in the centre console – there are docket books with rubber bands around them and pens attached, some unopened mail.
    Rebecca pushes the envelopes with her fingers. She flicks one forward and reads the name – Mr Ben Kincaid .
    The car door opens and Mr Kincaid climbs in.
    Rebecca snatches her hand back from the mail. She reaches for the door handle. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t —’ she begins.
    He leans over and puts his hand on her knee. It seems her days now are going to be punctuated with Kincaid men touching her.
    ‘It’s on my way past,’ he says. ‘It’s no trouble.’

14
    A strange thing to have to do – walk from shed to shed, climbing over the baler, opening the door to look in the cab of the tractor, on hands and knees beside the trailers, lifting sheets of tin, looking for your mother: a warped version of hide-and-seek.
    Zach walks across to the caravan in the corner of the hayshed. He feels for the spare key on the roof and unlocks the door. He finds some of her artwork wrapped in sheets. Big canvases: bleak grey and yellow blocks of colour, bright, garish, thickly painted checkerboard patterns. There’s a crudely sketched black figure on a purple background, some unfinished pieces, a disturbing slur of pinks and reds and blues that he kneels in front of, touches with his fingertips. In the cupboard beneath the sink are her paints and brushes. At the back he finds a stash of marijuana in a plastic bag, a packet of tobacco, some Tally-Ho papers and a pale, smoke-stained cigarette holder. Zach lays the cigarette holder across his palm and tries to imagine his mother using such a thing. The plastic is brittle. Zach snaps the device in two and tosses it beneath the table. In the drawer there’s a notebook with a sketch in it, and under the drawing are the words By menaces of Amethyst, And Moats of Mystery , and, in tight block print, different handwriting to his mother’s, is written Aden 755 504.
    Zach locks the van again, hides the key in a different spot. He walks through the yards and over to the old shearing quarters. He goes room to room, squinting into each dim corner, opening wardrobes, calling, ‘Mum?’ He stands listening for more than the whistle of wind through the gaps in the walls.
    He goes across to the shearing shed, breathes in the greasy wool smells, looks down at the sheep-shit stains on the boards, squats to see under the long classing tables, and again calls her