Gemma's Bluff

Karly Lane

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781760290412
• eBook ISBN: 9781925575866
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Smart and reliable, Gemma Northcote has always done what's expected of her. So it's not surprising that after university she defers to her father's wish that she join the family business. Gemma's best friend, Jasmine, is a different personality altogether. She thrives on spontaneity, is unpredictable and has generally pursued her own path. When Gemma and Jasmine decide to spend a working holiday on a large rural property, their friends and family are surprised. Neither has any experience of country life (unless you count Jasmine's love of McLeod's Daughters) and they're not exactly farming types. Away from her family, Gemma feels liberated. The longer she's away the more she questions what she really wants to do with her future. Ultimately, she realises she needs to choose between duty and what's right for her in life - and love.

Part 1

One

‘Look out!’

A grey blur streaked past the front of the car and Gemma Northcote swerved, fighting the impulse to shut her eyes to block out the horror unfolding before her. Everything slowed down as the car spun out of control, then slammed to a sudden halt. Closing her eyes, Gemma heard the airbags detonate, and the impact slammed her back into her seat and knocked the breath from her chest. Then all she could hear was her own laboured breathing.

At a faint moan beside her, she snapped her eyes open. ‘Jazz? Are you okay?’

‘Oh my God. Are we dead?’ Jazz asked, turning her head from side to side tentatively before undoing her seatbelt.

‘I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I’m still a size twelve.’ Gemma shakily followed Jazz’s lead and fumbled for her seatbelt release. ‘Are you alright? Can you move your arms and legs?’

‘I think so. What about you?’

‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ Gemma said uncertainly.

‘We should get out of the car. What if it blows up or something?’

‘Don’t you have to smell petrol before that happens?’ Gemma asked, sniffing the air anxiously.

‘Do you really want to wait and find out?’

Deciding not to argue the point, Gemma hunted around for the door handle beneath the now deflated airbag. The door stuck slightly and she had to use both hands to push it open. Looking down, she noticed that her hands had started to shake. She slowly eased herself out of the driver’s seat and stepped from the car. Holding onto the doorframe, she looked around, trying to get her bearings. Jazz swore under her breath as she staggered up from the ditch her side of the car had ended up straddling.

Gemma’s gaze fell on a lump in the middle of the bitumen. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered.

‘You killed Skippy!’ Jazz said reproachfully.

‘You think it’s dead?’ asked Gemma, staring at the limp form of the big kangaroo.

‘Pretty sure they don’t normally lie that still. We should move it off the road. We can’t just leave it there.’

Gemma edged towards the animal, her heart thudding. She’d never been so close to one before. Standing above it, she looked down and saw the soft, thick fur of the animal’s underbelly. ‘Aren’t we supposed to check for babies in the pouch or something?’

‘Don’t look at me. I’m not sticking my hand inside a dead roo.’ Jazz stood well back on the side of the road.

‘We have to check,’ Gemma insisted.

‘Then may I suggest establishing if it’s male or female before you go poking around looking for a pouch?’

‘And how the hell do you tell that?’

‘Um—lift up its tail?’

‘I’m not lifting its tail! You do it.’

‘You killed it,’ Jazz pointed out.

Grimacing, Gemma crouched down behind the big animal and reached for the tail. ‘How do I know what I’m looking for?’

‘If it’s male I can guarantee you’ll work it out.’

Gemma put her hand gingerly around the tail and went to lift it, then tried with both hands. ‘Man, this thing is heavy,’ she panted.

‘Gem, drop the tail.’

‘You’ll have to look,’ said Gemma, craning her neck. ‘I can’t hold this thing up and bend down at the same time.’

‘Gemma,’ Jazz said more loudly. ‘Drop the tail now!’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, this was your id—’ Gemma stopped mid-sentence as she looked up into two big brown eyes that seemed to be trying to focus on her face. Dropping the tail, she staggered back, just as the animal began kicking and clawing its way onto its feet.

The girls screamed, trying to scamper out of its path, but the enormous animal was obviously still stunned and lurched towards them, tripping and sliding. They ran for the car, then jumped into the back seat and slammed the doors behind them.

‘You said it was dead!’ Gemma yelled.

‘Well, it didn’t look too healthy.’

‘It could have mauled me to death!’

‘You did hit it with a car,’ said Jazz. ‘It probably had good reason to be pissed off at you.’

After the kangaroo had loped off unsteadily into the bush, Gemma pushed open the door and went around to look at the front of the car. As she stared at the cracked bumper and the steam billowing out from beneath the crumpled bonnet, her shoulders slumped. They were stranded on the side of the road in the middle of who knew where, heading to a tiny blip on the map called Bingorra. They’d set off at some ungodly hour this morning, leaving behind their comfortable Sydney life to undertake this six-week ‘adventure’, working as jillaroos on a station in northwest New South Wales. It was now close to four o’clock, and they still hadn’t made their destination. This was the very last thing they needed.

Jazz came to stand beside her. ‘Look on the bright side,’ she said, wrapping an arm around Gemma’s waist.

‘And that would be?’

‘At least you’re not a roo murderer anymore. That’s good news, right?’

Gemma stared at her best friend and shook her head in disbelief. Usually she found Jazz’s Pollyannaish ways endearing, but right now she could have cheerfully strangled her. ‘Look at the car, Jazz. It’s totalled.’

‘Well, that’s what you paid an arm and a leg in insurance for. It’s a car. It’s replaceable. We’re not, and luckily we’re both okay.’ Jazz shrugged. ‘That’s a win in my book.’

‘I don’t know what lame-arse book you’re reading, but in mine, having a car we can’t drive is not a win. It’s a disaster!’

This was their worst idea ever, Gemma decided, and together she and Jazz had had—and acted on—their fair share of bad ideas. She should have known by now that nothing they planned would ever work out the way it was supposed to. She looked across at Jazz again and her frown deepened. Of course something like this wouldn’t bother her; Jazz never had a plan for anything. She’d changed her major three times in the last four years and still didn’t have a single degree to her name. She didn’t even seem fazed that she had no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life. Apparently after four years, Jazz had had enough of university and was going to venture forth without a degree of any sort, which she had decided ‘were a waste of time having anyway’.

What had prompted Gemma to agree to Jazz’s crazy plan had been more of a knee jerk reaction to discovering she could no longer shrug off the realisation that her entire life now stretched out before her in a predictable shade of blandness. While everyone around her was talking excitedly about what they would do next—big, bright, beautiful dreams of amazing career opportunities, of travel and endless possibilities—it had dawned on Gemma that her entire future had been meticulously planned out for her.

Not that this had ever been any great secret. But for some reason, at that particular instant, it had been like a light bulb going on inside her brain, illuminating her life, and she suddenly saw it as if she was looking through someone else’s eyes. And it looked . . . monotonous.

There had never been any other option for Gemma. Every member of the family had always gone into the business. Her great-grandfather had started Northcote & Sons, and from then on it had been assumed that each generation would naturally follow in their parents’ footsteps. Everyone else in the family seemed to have found their own place within the company. Her father’s expertise lay in architecture, while his elder brothers had specialised in law and finance, as had Gemma’s cousins. She in turn had also been expected to align her study to some branch of the family firm. She’d chosen business as her major, for no other reason than she couldn’t draw and had no interest in finance, law or accounting. For the most part, she’d enjoyed it—she found business interesting—but she didn’t love it. Not the way her father loved architecture, or her cousins loved finance. They lived and breathed it, while she just . . . did it, obediently following the path that had been set out for her. She just wished she loved it as much as her father wanted her to.

So, late one afternoon over coffee in the student cafe, Gemma had found herself agreeing to Jazz’s harebrained scheme for a working holiday in the back of beyond.

‘It’ll be just like McLeod’s Daughters, with handsome cowboys on horseback, everywhere we turn,’ Jazz had sighed wistfully.

The only experience Gemma had with horses had been when her parents had supplied pony rides at her fifth birthday party. She still sported the scar on her leg where one of the ponies had bitten her. Gemma was sure she also carried a little bit of emotional trauma around to this very day from that experience. She wouldn’t be getting too close to any cowboys on horseback. Give her the bright city lights any day; she was a born and bred city girl. And now here they were on day one and everything had gone to hell.

‘Well, at least we’re off the road,’ said Jazz. ‘We should be safe here.’

‘We need to call someone. Where’s my phone?’ Gemma opened the driver’s side door and dug through her handbag, then realised that half its contents had spilled over into the passenger-seat footwell.

‘I’m sure things can’t get any worse than they are right now,’ Jazz added comfortingly.

‘I hate when people say that in movies, because you just know things are about to get a hell of a lot worse. Like now.’ Gemma held up her phone grimly. ‘There’s no reception.’

‘Ah.’ Jazz’s face fell.

Gemma swore long and hard inside her head. ‘Okay, then we’ll just wait here till a car comes along,’ she said at last, trying to sound calm.

‘How long since we saw another car, do you think?’ Jazz asked nervously.

Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t quite remember when the last one had been and she saw that Jazz was beginning to pace a little anxiously. ‘Don’t freak out on me, we need to stay calm. Someone will have to come along eventually,’ Gemma said, hoping she didn’t sound as scared as she was beginning to feel.

‘Will they? Will they, Gem?’ Jazz demanded, her tone bordering on frantic. ‘We need to go and look for help.’

Gemma shook her head firmly. ‘We stay with the car. In all the documentaries they always say to stay with the vehicle.’

‘Oh, great idea! They’ll find two skeletons inside the car. Besides, name one time leaving the car wasn’t a good idea? I bet you can’t! Because you always hear the survival stories of people staggering into campsites and saving themselves.’

Gemma folded her arms. ‘Burke and Wills? That one didn’t end too well, did it?’

Jazz set her mouth in a thin line. ‘At least they had camels to eat,’ she said, looking morosely in the direction the kangaroo had departed. ‘Pity that roo wasn’t dead.’

‘Don’t you think you’re being just a tad melodramatic here? We’re not lost in the Simpson Desert.’

‘Melodramatic? Hello? We’re in the middle of nowhere in a car we can’t drive and it’s almost dark.’

‘Well, we have each other and we have shelter. Someone will come past.’

‘I still say we should go looking for a house so we can call a tow truck.’

‘Have you seen any houses?’ Gemma asked, sighing impatiently as she began to lose her patience. On the other side of the road where the kangaroo had disappeared was thick, dense bushland, part of a national park, but behind them beyond the fence line were endless acres of . . . nothingness. A few scattered trees dotted the plains and straggled along the roadside, but they were mostly thin, shaggy saplings, with the occasional large gum.

‘So they don’t build close to the road,’ said Jazz. ‘It doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look, it’ll be dark soon and people will start putting their lights on. That’ll make it easier to find one.’

‘And we’re going to walk across paddocks in the dark with no torch? I don’t think so. What if we tread on a snake? I don’t have a snakebite kit in my handbag. Do you?’ Gemma snapped.

‘Why are you being so negative? I’m trying to get us out of here.’

‘I’m not being negative,’ Gemma said, exasperated.

‘Stop getting angry at me. I’m trying to be practical about this. Going for help is better than standing around doing nothing.’

‘Practical!’ Gemma turned away from her friend to stare out at the empty road before her. ‘Practical would have been us realising we weren’t cut out for this trip before we took it.’

Jazz snorted. ‘Wow, that didn’t take long.’

‘What didn’t take long?’

‘The time it took you to start playing the “this was all your idea” blame game.’

‘This was all your idea!’ Gemma sa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PART 1
• PART 2
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS