The Farmer’s Wife. Rachael Treasure

that outfit,’ Rebecca said, nodding at Amanda’s skimpy French-maid costume.

      They heard a collective shrill of laughter rise up from the gathering of women in the room next door.

      ‘Go through, but take a Cock-sucking Cowboy with you!’ Doreen said, handing them each a shot glass full of cream liqueur. Then she went back to putting bright red sausages onto a platter that had every kind of phallic-shaped food imaginable, including battered savs, gherkins and crabsticks.

      ‘Care for a cocktail before you go?’ Doreen asked, offering up a bowl of ‘little boys’ and larger saveloys, her grinning teeth framed by patchy bright red lipstick. ‘You’ve got a choice of big ones, or little ones. The little ones I call “disappointments”,’ she said as she picked up a small cocktail sausage and bit hard through it with her crooked teeth.

      ‘Oh. My. God,’ Rebecca breathed as she took up a little boy and dipped it in tomato sauce. ‘Tupperware indeed. I can see tonight is going to get messy. Very, very messy!’

       Four

      When Rebecca and Gabs entered Doreen’s lounge room, it was like walking into a teenager’s bedroom overflowing with excited hormonal girls. The giggling, chatting women from the surrounding districts were all dressed like hookers, trannies or tarts with feather boas, lace or sequins. Many of them weighed on the large side, to the point where some might even warrant a spot on The Biggest Loser.

      Together they huddled around Doreen’s dining table as if it was half-time at the footy. Doreen’s demure lace cloth was covered with glistening folds of black velour, on which sat an array of naughty novelties, romantic remedies and (more disturbingly for Rebecca, who had been expecting lettuce containers and drink bottles) items such as vibrators, ‘bullets’ and egg-shaped ‘marital aids’. There were clear-faced boxes containing fetish and fantasy costumes. Rebecca noticed that Speedo, the Groggans’ budgie, whose cage sat beside the dining table, was discreetly covered with a sheet as if the items on the table would upset his avian sensibilities.

      ‘No Tupperware in sight,’ said Bec. ‘Don’t reckon I’ll be fixing my lunch-box deficit here.’

      ‘Nah,’ Gabs said, ‘but you might fix your box deficit problem.’

      ‘Hah! You dirty girl!’

      ‘You have to admit some of those things do look like kitchen appliances. You could mix a cake with that one,’ she said, pointing to a giant red vibrator.

      Bec grinned at Gabs as the women turned to greet them warmly.

      Candice Brown from the Bendoorin general store, two hours’ drive away, stepped out of the huddle to give Rebecca a quick hug.

      ‘Good to see you, Beccy. It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘You should come in and get your groceries personally, instead of getting them delivered on the school bus! I miss seeing your lovely smile.’

      Nicknamed by the locals ‘Candy Shop’, Candice Brown was anything but the brown her married name suggested. She was as bright and colourful as a licorice allsort in both looks and personality. She had vividly dyed curly crimson hair that tonight was pinned up so that ringlets fell prettily about her friendly round face. At the store, she could always be easily found in the rows of groceries, wearing her vibrant pinks, reds and yellows teamed with black leggings. Tonight she’d opted for an electric blue taffeta number and six-inch heels, topped off with a hot pink boa and a plastic six-shooter held in place by a frilly garter belt on her bare thigh.

      ‘You look great!’ Bec said. ‘Like a Western gal who hangs out in the rooms above saloons.’

      ‘Brian almost wouldn’t let me out the door.’ She laughed. ‘Dirty old coot! He loves his Westerns.’

      ‘Here’s to whiskey and wild women!’ Gabs said, passing another Cowboy shooter to Bec and Candice. ‘You look good enough to eat, Candy Shop!’

      Bec smiled as she thought of Candice’s husband, Brian, who also ran the store-cum-post office. He was the opposite of his near namesake, the lean, chiselled actor Bryan Brown. Instead he was tiny, skinny, rarely spoke and always wore beige. Bec couldn’t even imagine Brian getting randy. How was it that he and Candy were so different, yet after running the same store together for thirty years and raising a family of three, they seemed so happy together? Bec decided there and then, she really must make more of an effort with Charlie. Focus on his good points, instead of chewing through his bad.

      She was about to search for a chair to sit on when she was distracted by the disturbing sight of Ursula Morgan on the lounge. Ursula was testing the seams of her white Lycra kinky nurse’s outfit with her giant Jim Beam gut, the indent of her belly button creating a crater like the moon’s. She was yelping with seal-like laughter as she took a photo on an iPhone of Janine Turner. Janine was lying back on the couch, stuffing a gigantic black dildo between the long line of her cleavage and pouting in her pose. Once the image was captured, Ursula began frantically texting.

      ‘I’ll tell him the blokes have finished fundraising for the moustache-growing month of Mo-vember and now it’s our turn. Us girls are now fundraising for Fan-uary! Growing your pubes for a good cause!’

      ‘Fan-uary!’ screeched Janine. ‘He’ll like that! Can I be in charge of Pubic Relations?’ Her crow-call laughter filled up the room.

      ‘I’ll need a whipper snipper for mine when I’m done!’ Ursula muttered as she texted. Janine waved the dildo about in the air as she grabbed another slurp of her drink, a satisfied smile on her fake-tanned face. Rebecca smiled wanly at the sight of them, wondering which poor bastard they were tormenting tonight with their text messages and dirty photos. What was it about women who lost all shyness and sensibility when they were on the drink?

      The normally ultra reserved and often bitter Ursula was the daughter of a local logging contractor. She had, at the age of twenty-seven, already managed to help keep the tiny school at Bendoorin open with her brood — not to mention the gene pool nicely mixed for such an isolated region. She had four kids to four different fellas, causing confusion at school craft-making classes in the lead-up to Father’s Day.

      Ursula still lived at home with her parents and treated them like crap daily because she could. Her Centrelink payments meant life ticked over and was OK, if a little boring. Bec often found it oddly creepy that Ursula’s portly father sometimes still referred to her long lustrous black hair, which she could sit on, as his daughter’s ‘crowning glory’. Because it was the only bit of praise from her father she’d ever received, the woman had never cut her hair. Sadly it was now greying slightly on her high forehead, but still fell way below her backside, which in recent years had expanded to the size of a large beanbag.

      Her friend, or more accurately occasional drinking buddy, Janine, was the complete opposite to Ursula. She was one of the few ‘graziers’ wives’ from the larger properties in the district who tried ever-so-hard to be landed gentry. She walked for miles and miles along country roads to keep her body lean. She adorned said body in all the chunky jewellery she could order from the Country Style magazine classified section. Janine was great at dressing richly conservative and tossing her highlighted auburn locks with immense snobbery as she walked into sheep shows on the arm of her excessively quiet, red-faced Merino-man husband. But on nights like this, Ursula and her constant flow of Jim Beam were Janine’s undoing and all her airs and graces slid down to her ankles.

      ‘Oh, hello, Rebecca!’ Ursula said, her tone a little tainted with drunken sarcasm. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

      Janine gave her a wave of the dildo and a wry smile.

      In response, Rebecca picked up what she’d read was a Gliterous-G and waved its pink jelly-like eight inches back at the two terrors. ‘Hello, girls,’ she said, then turned to Gabs. ‘I really need another drink.’ Before they could make their way back to the kitchen to mix a Bundy,