The straw that breaks the camel’s back

Coolgardie — 1999-11-10

When I pay him the rent like every months, Tom is suddenly no longer satisfied with it.
Therefore, and because of many other unspeakable incidents, his exceptional miserliness, greed and unreliability, we finally make up our minds to leave the camelfarm. It is only now that we learn from his former friends that he has lost them all. “We were quite surprised how you could hold out there so long”, we were told. “It’s a good thing that you’re leaving, otherwise you might have never set out for the expedition”, others said. We hear about incidents that are so hair-raising that they are better left untold and we will keep them to ourselves for the rest of our lives.
The tension on the farm is meanwhile so high that we fear it won’t take long for it to unload in one mighty explosion. As we do not want to add fuel to the fire by letting them know that we decided to leave the farm, we consider it wiser to tell neither of them about it. Intuition warns me that Diana, if she found out, might set our cottage with all our equipment on fire out of pure rage. That’s why we secretly pack all our things together and wait until Ron, the friendly farmer, comes to the farm with a big delivery of hay, to take our entire equipment with him on the way back.