Louise Marshall, 24, blonde, petite and moon-faced, regretted giving up a lucrative side hustle as a call girl, after graduating with a journalism degree. The trade of the keystroke queens quickly lost its lustre after 12-hour days writing stories. She earned more as an escort in a month than on the social affairs round in a year.

Louise intuited to get ahead, she had to rip from her womb all trace of feminine sensibility and embrace male aggression and rat cunning. The male reporters avoided her and the females loathed her. What she wanted, she got, except respect and a readership. What she got one night at a work function, was a table spoon of finely crushed Ratsack in her Black Russian, which sent her howling and vomiting through the Melbourne night in an ambulance. The real money she realised, as she lay in Recovery, was in public relations. On her bedside table a patient had left a book on spirituality by Deepak Chopra. She stole it, signed her self out and went shopping for suits.

Simone Acland was in her mid 30s and also thinking of a career change. The searing Barossa Valley sun and smoking a pack of Holiday a day, had aged her. As a Phlebotomist, she’d sucked enough blood out of people to fill a swimming pool. Like Louise, she was alone in the world. Simone had ambition and a native spirituality born from her great grandmother, who Ancestry.com said was an Indigenous woman from western Victoria.

While digging a hypodermic syringe around in the arms of old men and women, she envisioned owning a wellness centre for people who were unwell or who wanted to get weller. She would call it Eagle Dreaming Therapies. All she needed was $370,000 for a small two storey property just out of Nuriootpa. She’d live upstairs. A fair sum for a woman with $4350 in the bank, who cleared $800 a week, minus $300 in rent and $100 in smokes. If ambition is the invisible hand behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Simone was, as CV writer’s say, ‘highly motivated’.

Louise or Louse as some called her behind her back, rose to the rank of Director, which meant she was an unspectacular PR midfielder who could place a client’s story in a newspaper or online forum no one read. Her real skill was manipulating the metrics, which showed her media release on lawn seed, had garnered 567,000 eyeballs. No one in Commercial Corporate Relations (CCR) bothered checking the client’s lawn seed sales. Simply getting the story placed was considered a General Patton-style victory. Louise conducted herself much like Patton too, which was unfortunate as the softly-spoken Managing Director was a Buddhist. There were shrines next to the waterfall in the lobby, the client meeting rooms and by the coffee machine. He believed in mindfulness, compassion and money.

Louise’s fall – or ‘negatively impacted result’ in PR-speak – happened by accident. The client was the wife of a famous pop star who was big in the 1970s but had fallen on hard times. He’d killed himself in a dingy hotel room in Spencer Street a couple of years ago. The media covered the story as just another fucked-up, ageing drug addict, who topped himself. His wife, mindful of his legacy and her reputation, wanted to change the story. He hadn’t killed himself but had a heart attack. It was Louise’s job to change the facts.

Truth changes as time passes. Memories become foggy. Evidence is lost or misplaced. The Coroner’s report had gone missing. Social media ran with Louise’s media release first. He was a great singer who had done so much to help poor kids in the western suburbs. Radio started playing his old hits again. He had a weak ticker but a big heart. The managing director of CCR bought her a bottle of Krug. She was the toast of the agency. Then she did something silly.

Early Monday morning, she sent out another media release with comments by the great singer’s wife. She was so grateful to the Australian public for remembering her husband. The Heart Foundation was setting up a charity arm in his name. Unfortunately – and accidents do happen before the first coffee of the morning  – she attached the Coroner’s report complete with photos of the dead singer, hanging naked by his neck, dead as a Dodo from the bathroom door. Erotic asphyxiation. His blood by volume was at amphetamine and cocaine high tide and in a desperate attempt to get an erection – which he hadn’t had for years – he’d hung himself. Louise was sacked.

As Louise ate her lunch by herself in her one bedroom flat in Hawthorn, she had an epiphany, a glimpse of the core dynamic of human nature: people wanted to be bullshitted. The truth was ugly, confronting and confounding. In most cases, it could be ignored or at least watered down by relativism, unless it carried a knife and wanted anal sex in an alley at 3.00 in the morning. But that was rare. The confluence of prostitution, journalism and PR had led her to this point. She opened up an old atlas of Australia, closed her eyes and dropped her index finger on the page. She’d move to the Barossa Valley and become a rental property manager. She’d add a side hustle. Something to do with Deepak Chopra, Buddhism, cosmic consciousness and all that stuff.

Simone was shocked when the manager said the bank would stump up the finance on Eagle Dreaming Therapies. All she had to do was sign some forms about changing interest rates, the effects of international currency rates on loans and in the highly unlikely event she defaulted, how her organs would be harvested. Simone went straight to Bunnings and got to work on the delapidated, termite-infested property. At night she read about crystal healing, clairvoyance, Reiki, Wicca, dream interpretation, chakra alignment and all forms of ‘woo woo’ therapies, which didn’t require accreditation. Eagle Dreaming Therapies was about to soar.

Simone and Louise met by accident. Louise got a job as the rentals manager at Hound & Hound, a local real estate agency in Nuriootpa, when Simone walked in and asked if she could put a small sign on the front window advertising her services. Louise said ‘no’ but would she like to have a coffee or a soy chai latte? The stars aligned because the women got on like a fully insured house on fire. Louise was worried because her new friend knew much more about alternative therapies than she did. She was a threat. She asked Simone to mentor her and the deal was sealed over a vegan apple crumble and a gentle handshake.

Louise took to rental property management, like Gengis Khan took much of Asia and Eastern Europe. She wore tight black skirts, heels and a white blouse. She put her hair in a pony tail and wore blood red lipstick. She felt powerful. She was powerful and she wasn’t going to lose this job. Her Instagram account – ‘Killer Business Queens’ – had 2000 followers. She knocked back all manner of rental applicants: single men, young couples unless both worked and Muslim families. She wasn’t keen on Jews or Asians either. Her tenants paid rent on time. Few complained. They wouldn’t dare. She’d conjure a rental bidding war between applicants and the landlords were overjoyed.

The only fly in her sauvignon blanc was Eagle Dreaming Therapies had cornered the market. Her Instagram fame had failed to convert in to clients. Every now and then a woman would make an appointment and be led to the black crepe-lined garage for a séance with a much-loved dead pet but they were few and far between.

Simone and Louise discussed marketing strategies and how to implement colonic irrigation and marriage counselling in to their suite of therapies. Louise felt inferior. The seeds of envy germinated. For her part, Simone didn’t initially care that her friend had worked as a prostitute but then a small splinter lodged in her mind. Someone practicing spiritual healing had to be pure of spirit. She wanted to tell Louise that if she practiced karmic cleansing ($750 for a one month treatment), her aura would brighten and clients would come flocking. But she kept the thought to herself. A change was stirring deep inside her; something moon-drawn, feminine and divine.

No man could ever correctly decipher the subtle change when Louise decided Simone, her best and only friend in the Barossa Valley; her mentor on all things anti-empirical, was now her enemy and must be destroyed. To a man, it would have looked like two women, one dressed in a red power suit with black four centimetre heels, the other in a white t-shirt, cut off blue jeans and thongs, were mates, sharing garlic bread, pizza and a bottle of red wine at Paul’s Bar and Grill at 7.15pm on a Friday. They smiled, laughed and looked like they were having a good time. But beneath the smiles, the joie de verve, the second bottle of red and a shared serve of tiramisu, the conversation had an edge: a faint sarcastic remark there, a hint of incredulity there. Simone gave Louise an air kiss as she left but knew as she drove home, she would have to watch her back. Louise stayed for one more drink. She ordered a Black Russian, changed her mind and ordered another bottle of red. She opened her Instagram page and began to sow the seeds of Simone’s demise.

What Louise wanted, she got. She accused her best friend of stealing her clients, of illegally accessing Hound & Hound’s data base and sending its commercial and residential tenants, emails flogging her services. Initially the response was cool. Simone was a local and well liked. Her Mum (God bless her) had been Vice President of the CWA in South Australia before a stroke sent her knocking on heaven’s door. Then one night, over a glass or five of Cabernet Merlot, Louise broadcast on a range of social media platforms, that Simone was seen dancing naked amongst the grape vines, making incantations to the Lord of Darkness. This was in the fourth year of the drought and money in the valley was tight. In better times, in more enlightened times, in a less Lutheran shire, this sort of defamatory bullshit might have been ignored. But when the story came out in the Angaston Monitor, the faecal matter hit the fan.

Simone wore a simple white dress and a red cardigan, which made her look like a nurse. She addressed the church meeting in a calm, low and reasonable voice. Pastor Ames, his wife, Bruce Ames, the Managing Director of Hound & Hound – who was Pastor Ames’ brother – and sundry members of the community, sat around a plain wooden table. Simone said if she communed with spirits, it was the Holy Ghost. All of those years she had worked as a blood nurse, she had drawn blood for Christ. She was doing God’s work. Remember all of the good work her mother had done for the community and especially the Church? She knew of Louise’s libellous accusations and had chosen not to reply, because who without sin casts the first crystal? This set the Pastor and attendees back. They sat on their hard wooden benches and were moved. Besides, this Louise woman was not a local and they were far from convinced she had the council’s authority to conduct a business from her garage.

Pastor Ames noticed something about Simone, who sat demurely with her hands folded in her lap, as the morning sun rose in a plain glass window behind her. She looked 10 years younger and radiated love. He’d heard of her work at Eagle Dreaming Therapies and thought it apostasy but now, looking at her, listening to her speak, awoke to the fact that the Barossa Valley and Nuriootpa in particular, had someone special in their midst. Someone blessed. Before they left, Simone asked them to join hands as she led them in the Lord’s Prayer. Then she turned her eyes to heaven and asked God to forgive Louise Marshall because she wasn’t a local and if God had time, could he send a little rain to help the farmers.

She knew it was a lucky escape. She had been dancing around the fire at midnight outside Eagle Dreaming Therapies. She’d drunk a bottle of red wine, had a joint, put on Carole King’s Tapestry and danced hippy-style with her arms in the air. She waved at the stars and felt earth worms churn the soil; smelt the sea 60 kilometres away. Then she stomped the earth American Indian-style and threw her clothes off. With a waii la way leee, she cried to the half moon, waii la way leee as her heart beat in her chest and her Great Grandmother’s spirit rose out of the fire and filled Simone with white, blinding joy and she fell to the ground exhausted and slept until she woke bursting for a piss around three in the morning. As she squatted with a slight headache, she felt changed; changed on a molecular level; rearranged, reconfigured, transcended.

Word got out amongst the young women in the Barossa that a real Earth Mother was practising healing therapies. They flocked to make an appointment. Louise was astounded that her smear campaign had failed. The Council barred her from running a business from her garage and Bruce Ames said her devious conduct was unbecoming a rental property manager and sacked her. Simone had no where to go. Although not a woman given to searching her conscience, she searched her conscience. She parted the cobwebs. She had behaved abominably to her best friend and mentor. An apology was forthcoming. She’d never apologised in her life. It was going to be a new, humbling experience. As she drove towards Eagle Dancing Therapies, she practiced the speech in her head. She’d do the apology quick and then hit her with a proposition. ‘Lets form a partnership. I’ll do the marketing and books and you do the therapy’. She practiced various faces in the rear vision mirror while honing the pitch. It had to be just right. As she pulled in to Eagle Dancing Therapies dusty drive and reached for her handbag, she heard a light tapping on the roof. She opened the door, stepped out and smelt it first. Rain.