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Marty Ford is born at home in the Broncs of West Wangaratta, 12th June 1962, three weeks overdue. His father refused to allow Marty’s mother to give birth in hospital, so that when Marty came out back to front and with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck he lost 4 minutes of oxygen to his brain.

His father comes from a long line of farmers. True country, riding horses on cattle farms for a living and who were real men. The decline of the agriculture sector meant that his father had to move off the land into the Broncs housing commissions, a failure of a cowboy and a failure of a man.

When Marty starts to speak he stutters and his father blames his mother for this and beats her with his boot. The spurs on the boot heel cut and ribbon her skin and her blood snakes through the cracks in the kitchen tiles. Everybody gets told she tripped into a bush of roses. Roses thorns don’t cut that deep but it’s nobody else’s business.

Marty never regained the colour in his face from the 4 minutes oxygen deprivation, he is short with sallow skin. He wheezes when he runs and the doctor tells his parents he has asthma. Both his parents hesitate before telling anybody they meet that he is their son. Marty notices this.

In spite of the deprivation his arms grow long and sinewy. Marty decides it must be from all the elbow grease he needs cleaning his mother’s blood off the kitchen floor every Thursday night. Thursday night is snooker night at the pub and beer is on the house.

In first form Marty punches Georgia Reynolds for laughing at his stutter. Marty is made to write lines for an hour, but when he gets home his father tells him he’s proud of his son for sticking up for himself.

When Marty is eighteen he quits school, leaves home and takes a job at Brux textile mill. Marty hates the job but stays because there’s nothing else for him. Every day after work he goes down to the pub with Phar Lap. Phar Lap’s real name is John Heather, he’s older than Marty and weighs 286 pounds. When Marty asks him why everybody calls him Phar Lap he says, “It’s because I’m quick as anything and big as a horse”. Nobody in the pub will look Phar Lap in the eye and Marty decides it must be because of his weight.

Phar Lap drives Marty home from the pub every night. One night he pulled over to the side of Williams road, locked the car doors and grabbed Marty’s crotch. Phar lap told him that he owed him this because he was always wasting money on gas driving him home. Phar Lap dropped him home 20 minutes later than usual. Marty can’t stop seeing Phar Lap when he closes his eyes and he wakes up wet. He doesn’t speak about it or to Phar Lap again but he knows there is talk. It’s not very loud talk however because it’s not anybody’s place to make a fuss about and nobody asks why Marty’s sheets and night clothes are hanging up on the hills hoist.

On the 12th of June 1981, the same day he was born, Marty married Beatrice Parker in the Tavern street church because the cathedral was booked out for a funeral. Marty rents out a stale beige suit that is too small for his arms and wears boots with spurs of the back despite Beatrice protest. Beatrice wears her mother’s wedding dress that bunches up at the shoulders and comes up high against her neck into a lace collar. She didn’t look beautiful. Nobody tells her. It's nobody’s place.

The ring was too small and Beatrice’s skin bunched and broke when Marty pushed it on. Everybody clapped as they walked down the aisle and pretended not to notice the blood seeping out through the cracks in the couple's clasped hands.

Early on a Friday morning Marty gets a call to come to the hospital. His mother is dead and the doctor says it was from bleeding in the brain. The doctor also comments on the nasty bruise she had blossoming over her left eye and looks Marty’s father in the eyes when he says it must have been a very nasty fall down the stairs. Marty is uneasy and takes a shower as soon as he gets home. Beatrice can’t come to the funeral because she is sick and neither can Marty’s father so he sits alone in the front row. On the way back home he went through the side door of his old house to look in the kitchen without seeing his father. The cracks between the floor tiles were still stained red even a week later. He drove home

Beatrice find out she is 10 weeks pregnant and Marty starts driving trucks to earn more money. Marty suggests Beatrice stays with his father to give them both some company. The trip from Melbourne to Brisbane takes him 18 hours each way with a rest stop. Marty drives for Chalmers trucks and transports everything from timber to home goods but cattle is his favorite. He likes running his hand over the branding marks that raised and puckered the skin on the beasts’ rump.

Marty always stopped at an independent truck stop 30 miles out of Dubbo called Dixies Lie Down Travel Plaza. Marty met a woman named Lucie who during the day worked behind the counter at the service station near the stop and was called David. Once the sun went down Lucie kept him company in the bed behind the seat of his truck. Her clumsily painted, acid pink lips were soft like a woman’s but everything else about her was hard and Marty would reach around her square hips in the darkness to feel her firmness. After she had hollowed him out he would smoke, not looking her in the eye and letting the ash from the cigarette fall, catching in the hairs on his chest. He hated the way she was too tall for the truck bed and had to bunch up her knees so they were touching his. He always left the stop angry. Yet for all his anger Xavier would came back to the plaza every trip almost free of guilt, because after the 70’s he learnt that gender and genitals weren’t the same thing and it wasn’t his fault if Beatrice didn’t understand what he wanted. Marty swore he wasn’t a queer because as Lucie always told him, in a voice too deep, she was really a woman inside.

Marty started asking for more trips out to Brisbane. Chalmers obliged and they don’t ask why because it’s restricted in the new employee confidentiality contract.

Marty was at Dixies Lie Down Travel Plaza when Beatrice called to tell him that she had left. Marty didn’t even know she was unhappy. He told Lucie about his wife leaving him and Lucie said she was sorry to hear it.

Marty father told him that Beatrice left in a black Miata with a man he didn’t know the name of but recognised from working at the fish and chip shop. Her leaving was the talk of the town and eventually the gossip came back to Marty that she had settled 5 hours away in Horsham and that their child was named Jack. He never heard from her of his son again and he never tried to contact them either. He never asked why she left because he never thought it was any of his business to ask. He missed her.

Two years after Beatrice’s’ had left Marty is working at Marts grocery store on the main street. He hasn’t spoken to his father for over a year. Phar Lap often comes into the store and winks at him as he buys the paper. Marty is quite good at scanning groceries and likes the sound the new machine makes as he waves the items under the scanner. Beside the small talk that comes with the job, nobody bothers him anymore and he likes it this way. He always thought it was best if other people minded their own business.