The Swagman

Urban sprawl is an incredible event to witness. Human settlement is not unlike a seething mass of ants, growing ever stronger and larger each week.

'God, it's just so ugly isn't it?' Caroline asked.

The development she was staring at from the passenger seat of my car was the epicentre of my new job. The average lot was five hundred square metres and with oversized houses perched on top and separated from each other by six foot timber fences, the effect was that of a Monopoly player going overkill building on Mediterranean Avenue.

'I don't understand, Saul,' my wife continued, her face creased with confusion as her green eyes scanned the vista. Surrounding the estate was vast tracts of farmland. 'All of this land around here, and people choose to buy a tiny plot with an ugly, new house on it. Why? For the same price they could get something beautiful.'

It was an argument she'd made more than once before. I didn't understand it any more than she did, but for different reasons; these new build houses rarely appreciated in value and were often poorly built. But I'd made a career out of people's desire for bright, shiny, new things; I was a finance broker, employed by a property developer, and urban sprawl was the reason for my pay check. It was ugly, it was environmentally disastrous, and yet it kept us fed and clothed.

'I don't know,' I replied. 'All I can say is that I'm glad people like it.'

'True,' Caro agreed. She turned to me and gave me her trademark toothy smile as she tucked a hank of curled blonde hair behind her ear. Her hair is wild; something to get lost within. 'If everyone had my taste, we'd never have got our new house.'

Our new house was an elderly worker's cottage on twenty acres of land, nineteen of which were uncleared. To our left and right were vacant land, and to the rear was National Forest. At the back of our property was a creek and this was used as the unofficial boundary line between ours and government land. Caro and I had checked it out when we inspected the house but we'd only moved in two days ago and were yet to go down there again.

Frankly, I could have done without the stress of maintaining acreage, and the irritation of living in a decaying house, but the moment my wife had laid eyes on the property I'd known argument was futile. She loved the house, and I had too great a sin to atone for to have an opinion worth anything. We hadn't moved out here for shits and giggles. As I'd signed the lease I'd consoled myself with the knowledge that it was only a rental.

'We should get back to that house and put our feet up for a bit,' I suggested.

'Sounds good.'

I started the car. For the first time in over twenty years we were living in a house without children in it. Annette was twenty-two, James was twenty, and neither had had any urge to join us out West. They had instead asked to stay in our family home, and as Annette was still studying and James was working locally, Caro and I had agreed.

As we approached our property, my wife reached over and rubbed my leg. Slowly but with a goal in mind, her hand worked it's way higher, nearer and nearer my crotch, and my prick hardened in anticipation. A small dick, to my regret, but the rest of my body is in good shape. I go to the gym almost religiously, I swim, I cycle to and from work, and I feel a not insignificant amount of pride at having a thirty-four inch waist and almost a full head of brown hair at forty-seven.

My wife's hand was massaging my hard on through my chinos when we turned off the road and into our driveway. I stopped the car. Attached to the closed gate at the entrance of our property was an ancient sign imploring visitors to shut it behind them, reminding them there were cows inside. The land was no longer used for grazing but the sign remained either as a testament to the past, or because no one had bothered to remove it.

Caro casually stroked my prick. 'I need to open the gate,' she stated. 'Unless you want me to wank you out here?'

'It's not like anybody's around,' I justified. Our house was one of only three on a long, quiet, country road. Most of the land was vacant and uncleared.

'Lean back, and I'll pull your cock out.'

I reclined my seat as far as it would go to give my wife maximum access. She eased my balls free of my trunks and fondled them in one hand while using the other to work my shaft. Then, with excruciating slowness, she began to lick the head of my prick. Her tongue traced a lazy path around the head, down the shaft, and then back up again.

After she'd teased me for a sufficient amount of time, she began to suck and wank me in my preferred style. I could feel her spit trickling down to my balls, and I reached around her head to rub it into them.

I awkwardly pulled at her shirt, trying to yank it upwards. Caro used one hand to help me, and when her shirt was bunched up above her breasts, she pulled her tits out of the cups of her bra. Unlike me, she hasn't kept her weight under control, but the flipside is that being a size fourteen has given her big tits.

Caroline kept sucking and wanking me, and I stared out the window and tried to imagine what might happen if we were caught. What if someone drove by and saw our car on the side of the road? What if they thought we were in trouble and stopped to see if we needed assistance? Were out in the country. Everything was different to back home.

I leant back against the car seat. My climax was building. My cock was wet with her spit and the risk of being caught was taking me from go to woah in record time. I also knew what sort of reaction I was going to get when I came in her mouth, and that aroused me all the more.

And then, there it was. I let out a moan as I began to unleash. As the first of my cum hit her throat she began to gag. Seconds later she was retching, and that was when she pulled away, keeping one hand on my cock as she tried to cope with a mouthful of viscous jizz. One of my hands moved over hers as I shuddered through the last of my orgasm, loving the noises she'd made and the sight of my jizz on her chin.

My orgasm faded away.

Caro got out of the car and opened the gate. I drove in. In front of us stood our house, complete with peeling paint and a veranda with dubious floorboards. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, none of it beautiful or shiny or new.

We had a six month lease. Six months to make it or break it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Caroline and I met when we were fresh-faced nineteen year old students working part time in the Valley at a twenty-four hour convenience store. We both worked the same seven am to four pm Saturday and Sunday shifts. Caroline would arrive by public transport, a somewhat hairy exercise at times given the Valley was a mecca for outcasts and rebels, while I drove in.

Caro would often get there early and have a coffee with the transvestites that gathered at the picnic tables that had been installed for customers. When I say 'transvestite' you might mentally conjure up the image of a beautiful shemale, but the reality was more a group of bedraggled men in dresses and smeared make-up who walked and talked like women. They joked with Caroline about doing her make-up and of going clubbing with her.

Caro would smile and laugh, deflecting any seriousness from the talk, because it was preposterous to anyone watching that this gorgeous nineteen year old girl would go out on the town with them. What would she do when they hiked up their dresses in a dark corner to accommodate the hard prick of a horny man? She was too innocent. But they remained friends for the duration of her job at the store.

I expect her friendship lent some legitimacy to them as women, and perhaps she was also their fantasy, because she was young and female and beautiful, something they would never be. And they were kind to her, I can't deny that. I still remember arriving to find two cross dressers engulfing her green eyes in cheap make-up, and nor can I forget the conjunctivitis that that little escapade gave her.

Me? I wasn't friends with them. Even when the trannies discovered Caroline and I were a couple, and tried to draw me into their fold, I resisted. I wasn't interested in being their friend. Rightly or wrongly, I prefer to stick to my own kind. That's where I'm comfortable; with the middle classes.

Caroline has always been different. Even at nineteen she could approach an Aboriginal woman who was barefoot and without any visible means to pay for the coffee she'd poured herself, and ask her to leave the store without seeming at all uncomfortable, and nor would she get annoyed when the indigenous thief would shrug and leave, taking her unpaid-for hot drink with her. She'd let the ravers hug her when they came in at eight am, still high from whatever they'd taken the night before. She'd comfort the dealer's boys when we didn't have their sugar daddy's favourite brand of cigarettes in stock.

In this extreme melting pot, where to be straight and white and middle class made you the odd man out, and left me feeling exposed to possible accusations of racism, homophobia or sexism, Caroline found her feet and made friends with middle aged crossdressers. I went and found a new job.

We continued to date. I was mesmerised her, even though her politics grated me, and we married two weeks after graduating university. A year later we did something that makes every Brisbanite jealous; we bought a large house on a large block in Tarragindi before the property boom. Children followed shortly thereafter, and we lived a comfortable middle class life.

We should still have been living this comfortable, middle class life, back in our leafy home in a blue chip suburb. We should have been waking to the noise of neighbours. Instead, we woke the following morning to the sounds of birds and insects. At least the bed leant some familiarity to me. An overpriced mattress topper, bamboo sheets and thick quilt, all purchased from some godawful linen party my wife attended, made our bed feel unlike anyone else's.

Caroline stirred from beneath the quilt. It was spring and the weather was temperamental; warm one day and cold the next. We were currently experiencing a happy medium, a state I didn't anticipate would continue much longer.

'Is it morning?' she asked.

'Sure is. It's just past six.'

'Past six? God, what are we doing awake?'

'Crappy curtains,' I reminded her.

A smile danced upon her lips. 'Net curtains,' she said. 'They looked so romantic when we inspected the place.'

Caroline rolled out of bed and walked over to the casement windows. It took a bit of shoving to coax them open, but they surrendered with a creak and allowed a cold gust of wind to enter the house.

'Jeez, that's a bit fresh,' she remarked, scurrying over to bed and hopping under the covers. 'Want to warm me up?'

She offered me more sex than I'd ever been offered before. Other men had to ask. Not me. For the past three months, ever since she learned of my indiscretion, it had been served up on a plate. Anal, oral, vaginal, manual, you name it, if I wanted it, I could have it and it was always delivered with a smile. I wished she wouldn't. I felt pressured, cornered. Refusing her offers made me feel like less of a man, and the fun of teasing, of waiting, of anticipation and hope were gone, because it was now a twenty-four seven buffet of sexual activity.

'How about we go for a jog?' I asked.

'You can go by yourself,' she offered. 'I'm two children past jogging, Saul.'

'You always say that.'

'You don't live with my pelvic floor. I'll go for a walk.' She paused. 'I can smell smoke. Can you smell that?'

I sniffed the air.

'I can,' I agreed. 'I've been able to smell it on and off since we moved in.'

'Really? I never noticed it until now.'

'Maybe the stench of cleaning chemicals has overwhelmed you,' I suggested. The house had been vacant for six months before we moved in. The owners had organised for the gutters to be cleaned and house yard to be slashed, but the interior had been a disgrace.

'Probably.' She rolled over and kissed me. 'Go for your jog. I might get up and go for a walk down the back of our property.'

'How about I go for a jog and we go down together? I wouldn't mind taking another look at the creek.'

'Sure, I'll make myself a coffee while you're out running.'

Spring is the perfect time for jogging. The air is crisp and cool, but not so cold that your hands and feet go numb, and it often seems as if the world is waking up from a sort of slumber. The effect was magnified in the country. I wasn't breathing in traffic fumes, or dodging pedestrians, or having to wait at traffic lights. I could just run and run and run.

I found my way home forty minutes after I set off. There is a certain feeling of adrenalin you feel after a run. Runner's high they call it, and I've always found it apt. Tell a runner they will miss a day treading the pavement and just look at the dread on their face. Their drug of choice may not be yours, but it's addictive to them all the same.

Caroline was waiting for me in leggings, joggers and a hoody. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, downed it, then refilled it so I could drink it on the trip to the creek.

'Let's go,' I said.

Caro inspected my attire; running shorts, joggers and an old white Bridge to Brisbane shirt which was plastered to my back with sweat.

'Do you want to bring a jumper with you?' she asked.

'No, I'll be fine. I need to cool down.'

We started the trek along the beaten path down to the creek. The land was heavily forested and the block was long, narrow and undulating. The result of this was that we couldn't ever see more than a couple of hundred metres in front of us at any point on the one kilometre long track.

We can't have been more than a minute or two into our walk when I realised the smell of smoke was growing stronger. That made no sense, because the properties to either side of us were vacant and the back was National Park.

'Do you think there's a bushfire?' Caroline asked.

'I don't know,' I replied.

We both instinctively picked up our pace. God knows what we were expecting to find, because there were no flames lighting the cold morning air, and no smoke clouding the sky, but I know that neither of us were expecting to stumble upon the scene we did.

There, at the rear of our property, were modern day squatters. They had an old single cab blue Toyota LandCruiser ute, with a slide on camper and a heavy canvas shade shelter that offered an outdoor seating area. Underneath the shade shelter was a collapsible table and chairs, an ashtray, and a middle aged man in blue jeans and a short sleeved shirt with a roll your own cigarette in his hand.

But the man was irrelevant. It was the woman, aged in her early twenties, that caught me eye. She was beautiful in the way that only lower class women are. The middle and upper classes might breed attractive children, but rarely do their offspring have that stunning, naturally incandescent quality of the progeny of two people who have rutted and bred for no reason other than mutual physical attraction.

Her skin was golden brown, her teeth straight and white, and her thick, brown mane of hair was pulled into a ponytail. She wore boots, jeans, a long sleeved shirt and a puffer vest, but even the heavy clothing did nothing to hide her figure. She must've stood five seven or thereabouts, slim, but with large breasts and well shaped hips, arse and legs. She knocked my socks off, and Caroline didn't not notice.

My wife's face hardened momentarily, but her jealousy was quickly replaced with a need for my support. She had as little idea as to what these people might be doing on our property as I had, and she knew that we had to find out who they were and what their intentions were.

'I think we're going to need to say something,' I muttered under my breath.

'But what?' Caro asked.

'I don't know. Pretend they're one of the coons in that Valley store. You used to be able to tell them to fuck off without any problems.'

My wife shot me a reprimanding glare over my use of language. I didn't apologise.

While we stood, dithering, the male squatter got up from his chair and with his cigarette dangling from his mouth, approached us.

'Hi,' he greeted.

'Hi,' Caroline said. 'Good morning.'

'And to you,' he said.

He looked to be in his late forties, but he was a working man so he was probably five or ten years younger than his face suggested. He didn't cut an intimidating figure. He was perhaps five ten or five eleven, and too thick around his middle. His skin was tanned a mahogany colour and creased from the sun, but his eyes were a clear hazel and his muscular arms were coated in thick, blond hair. He wasn't handsome, but there was something about him that harked to a bygone era, back when men were men and hard work wasn't a bad word.

I glanced at my wife. If I had been caught staring just a wee bit too long at the woman, then Caroline was now being caught out doing the same to the man.

Then he smiled at her, showing a gap where his top left tooth should be, and the attraction was immediately tempered. Missing teeth were also a relic of the past, but one that most were quick to forget about.

'We'll just be here for a few weeks,' he assured us. 'We'll leave the place as we found it.'

I guessed him to be some sort of itinerant farm worker, a modern day swaggie, but what was country etiquette with regards to such men? There was no way we would have allowed someone to camp in our backyard in suburbia, but with twenty acres to our property, was it unjustified to ask them to leave? And if so, how would Caroline -- because I surely couldn't conjure up the ability to move them on -- phrase her request?

I stole another glance at my wife and found that while I was uncomfortable, Caro could only be described as curious.

'Do you have everything you need?' she asked the squatter.

He nodded. There was an expression on his weather worn face as he held my wife's eye, something that seemed to me a sign of respect, but when I spoke and his gaze turned to me the expression fled and I saw that he didn't feel similarly towards me.

'Does your daughter have everything she needs?' I asked.

'She's my wife,' he clarified. 'And she does, thank-you for your concern.'

That beautiful young creature was his wife? I stared at her, then at him, then back to her, incredulous that this beaten down wreck of a man had secured the affections of a girl young enough to be his daughter. I wondered what promise of wealth and riches he'd told her. I stared down at my body, lean and fit, and then at Caroline. I was in good shape, and earned well over six figures, and yet I had an overweight, forty-six year old wife whereas this itinerant, with a back that a layman could tell you was on it's way out, had a young goddess by his side. Does that sound brutal? Maybe. But I challenge you to find a man who would have thought otherwise.

The swagman knew what I was thinking. His eyes turned cold and hard and any aspirations I might have held -- and for the record, I had none - about earning his respect died then and there.

My attention turned to his wife and I saw she was staring at me with wide, soulful blue eyes that said nothing of what she was thinking. A saucepan was in her left hand; she'd been preparing to make them breakfast when we arrived. She was beautiful, so very beautiful. I could have stared at her a lifetime and not have figured out what had caused her to marry such a horror.

'We'll leave you in peace,' Caro told the swaggie, breaking me out of my reverie. 'My name's Caroline, my husband's Saul.'

'Riley,' he replied. 'The wife is Mackenzie.'

Riley shook Caroline's hand but not mine. Mackenzie gave us each a shy wave.