The Golden Soak (10 page)

Was this what I really wanted – this sudden dismissal? And Janet standing there, saying, ‘So that's that. You're going, and you've hardly even arrived.' I could just see her eyes, the whites brilliant and the stars shining pale behind the loose halo of her hair. In that moment she looked almost beautiful. Abruptly, she turned and went into the cool house, sitting herself down at the table and staring straight in front of her. ‘Can I have a cigarette please?'

I offered her the crumpled packet from my pocket. She grabbed one quickly, and as I lit it for her I saw she was on the verge of tears, the cigarette trembling in her mouth. ‘You've no idea what it's meant to me – having you here.' She paused, looking away and blinking her eyes. ‘For months now I seem to have had the whole place on my back. The times I've wished Henry were alive.'

And then she was looking up at me, the tears ignored: ‘I suppose you thought I was tough. Well, I am. I've had to be. Just as my grandmother had to be. But underneath …' She shook her head, the sadness showing through, all her selfconfidence ebbed away. ‘The fact is, I can't cope – not any longer.' She suddenly put her head down and started to sob uncontrollably.

I touched her shoulder, but that was all. ‘We'd better leave about dawn,' I said.

She nodded. ‘Hell of a way to start the New Year.' She smiled at me through her tears, and then suddenly she was her normal practical self again as she got quickly to her feet, her voice firmly under control. ‘We'll have to take the Landy. Daddy told me our track's all right, but on the Highway the bulldust's bad all the four miles to Lynn Peak. Driving through bulldust's like riding on water; you need a four-wheel drive.'

I didn't see her father again that night. He'd shut himself away in his den and it was she who filled the tank of the Land-Rover and got the spare wheel for me to strap on to the bonnet. The night was very clear, the sky full of stars, and somewhere above us on the Windbreaks a dingo howled. We were standing together on the patio then, a breath of air before going to bed, and she said, ‘I enjoyed that trip to England. It was a change and I met a lot of people. But this is where I belong.' And then, so quietly it was like a sigh: ‘I hate the thought that we might have to leave.'

‘Where would you go?' I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I don't know. I couldn't live in a city. Not after this. All my life I've had this glorious sense of freedom. I don't think I'd feel at home anywhere else. It's part of me, this place.'

The whisper of her words was still with me when I went to bed, her voice, it seemed, the voice of all the countless women who had led solitary, difficult, uncomfortable lives, pioneering the outback of Australia. And lying in her brother's bed, lumpy now with disuse, I couldn't help wondering what he had been like, whether he would have managed any better. Would he have succeeded in holding the place together if he had still been alive?

We were up at five, tea and boiled eggs, and with the dawn we drove out across the cattle grid and took the track that skirted the paddock fencing, heading north-east. It was almost cool and in the flat beyond the northern shoulder of the Windbreaks we saw camels grazing. Ahead, more hills stood black against the newly risen sun. Soon we were crawling through the dry gully courses that feed Weedi Wolli Creek and by the damp earth of a dried-up spring Janet seized my arm – ‘Look!' She was pointing. ‘Did you see it? A dingo.' But I hadn't seen it and she said, breathless, ‘Just a flash of cinnamon. Beaut!'

She was like a child on that drive, excited by something one minute, relapsing into moodiness the next. Mostly she drove in silence, radiating an atmosphere of constraint – not hostile, but not friendly either. And then, when the gullies ran out into open country again and the going was easier, she turned to me suddenly: ‘Why are you leaving – like this?' Her voice was tense, and when I didn't reply she said, ‘Is it because you thought I was throwing myself at you last night?'

I didn't know what to say and she went on awkwardly, ‘You're afraid I'll do it again, is that it?'

I looked at her then and she was grinning at me. ‘I might at that.' And she added, still with that impish grin on her face, ‘If you're worrying about my virginity – then thanks. But I'm quite capable of looking after that myself.'

She put her foot down then and I had to hold on to the bar-grip in front of me as we drove flat out across a plain that was near-desert country, the track running out ahead of us, half-obliterated by windblown dust. Driving fast like that, I felt she also wanted to be shot of me, to end the awkwardness of our close proximity.

The sun was striking her face now, the sweat forming in beads as she fought the bucking of the Land-Rover, holding it through the dust drifts, the freckles showing and her hair limp, her eyes fixed on the track. My God, I thought, she'd make a good wife for some lout of a grazier – earthy, practical, and with the sort of boundless vitality that could stand up to the harshness of this outback country. In that moment she reminded me of the picture of her grandmother, the femininity of her overlaid by an indomitable strength of character. And remembering the features in that oil painting, I was no longer puzzled by her inconsistencies, the way she could appear mature one minute, naïve the next, the odd mixture of old-fashioned Victorianism and down-to-earth frankness.

I was still thinking about this and the strange effect it had on me when we reached the Highway. It was a red gravel road and it hadn't had a grader over it for a long time so that it was badly ribbed. We hit the bulldust in less than a mile, the Land-Rover sliding and slithering on the fine-ground surface, bucking across the truck ruts like a boat in a lumpy sea.

It was like that most of the four miles to Lynn Peak, the turn-off to the homestead marked by a sign that read:

SHORT OF PETROL
?

THIRSTY
?
HUNGRY
?

The Andersons welcome you to Lynn Peak Homestead

→
ONLY
400
YARDS
. →

It was just after seven, and as we drove down the track she said, ‘Andie's a bit of a mystery. They say he jumped ship at Fremantle, but it's just a story – nobody knows really. His wife's from Port Hedland. She's half Italian. They've a couple of kids now, and when she isn't looking after them, she's dishing out pasta to the drivers who pull in here for a break. It's a funny thing …' She was talking quickly as though to cover our parting. ‘Ten years ago you wouldn't have got any self-respecting Aussie eating pasta. Steak 'n chips and half a dozen stubbies – that was the staple diet for the roustabouts and jackaroos, all the odds and sods who bummed their way through the North West. Now you'd think they were half Italian themselves the way they roll in here. Pasta – they love it!' She suddenly laughed. ‘Mebbe it's Maria they love.'

We were swinging into the yard then and she blew the horn as she braked to a stop beside the house. It was a poor place, built almost entirely of tin with a flyscreened verandah and chickens scuffing in the dust beside the petrol pump. A small, energetic man appeared, about forty with baldish head, and she introduced me. She didn't get out. She just stayed there behind the wheel talking to him till I had got my suitcase out of the back. ‘I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for.' She said it brightly, a quick smile and that was all. She didn't stop to say goodbye; just waved her hand, her face set in that bright artificial smile as she turned the Land-Rover and went roaring off in a cloud of dust.

I stood and watched the dust settle behind her, sorry to see her go. I felt suddenly alone, knowing I'd lost the only person who cared a damn what happened to me.

‘So you're wanting a ride up to Nullagine?'

I turned to find Andie staring at me curiously, his eyes crinkled against the sun's glare.

‘What are the chances?' I asked him.

‘Och, somebody'll be through. In time. It's early yet.' He turned towards the house. ‘Janet said to feed you, so come on in and we can breakfast together.'

Three

GOLDEN SOAK

ONE

I was lucky. The first vehicle into Lynn Peak that morning was a Holden driven by a lone prospector from Leonora. He had driven through the night, heading for the Comet Mine at Marble Bar, and he was only too glad to give me a lift provided I took the wheel and let him get some sleep. He was a lean, taciturn man, dressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt turned ochre by the dust, his eyes red-rimmed below the peaked cap and his thin face grey with stubble. He was fast asleep before I had driven half a dozen miles.

We were heading north, the sun behind us and flat-topped hills of red rock moving in from the right. Even if he'd been awake conversation would have been impossible. The car was an old one and the noise of its rattling, the machine-gun clatter of wheelspun gravel, was incessant. It isolated me, and once I got the feel of riding the dirt at speed, I began to think over what Andie had told me about the two men in the Toyota. Both of them were from Nullagine. Phil Westrop was a newcomer who'd been driving a bulldozer at the Grafton Downs Tin Mine for a couple of months. The other was a black by the name of Wolli. And he had spelt it out for me in that thick Glaswegian accent of his, explaining that the man was supposed to have been born at Jarra Jarra, in the black quarters there, and named after Weedi Wolli Creek. ‘He's a drunk. But he wasna drunk when, they pulled in here for petrol yesterday morning. The shakes, yes, but he was just plain scared in my opeenion.'

Was this the black man Kadek had referred to in his letter as Wally? I was wondering about that when I hit a dry creek bed, my head bumping the roof. And why was Westrop so interested in Golden Soak? Stopping for petrol at Lynn Peak, when he could have filled up before leaving Nullagine, was just an excuse to pump Andie for information about the mine. ‘Ah dinna ken much aboot him, just met him a few times over a drink at the Conglomerate. An ex-army sergeant invalided out after being blown up by a Viet-Cong mine.' The harsh voice had gone rambling on as I ploughed my way through a plateful of bacon and eggs for which he had charged me an exorbitant two dollars fifty. Six years in Australia hadn't softened the accent. ‘There's some say it was a bomb planted in a brothel in Saigon, but they wouldna say that to his face. He's tough, that laddie.'

I was still thinking about Westrop when I ran into my first stretch of bulldust and almost lost control, no feel to the steering, the back tyres spinning and the car lurching wildly. Ahead, round the red shoulder of a hill, loomed a cloud of dust like an explosion, and in the straight beyond, the dust cloud hung in the sky for more than a mile, a glint of glass reflected at its snout. It was the first of the day's traffic a big refrigerated container truck throwing gravel at me as it thundered past. And then I was into the red cloud that folin its wake, a sepia opaqueness of nil visibility with dust pouring into the car, filling my mouth, clogging my nostrils.

‘Wind the window up for chrissakes!' And by the time I'd done that he was fast asleep again.

The dust cleared and we were into country that was like a miniature Arizona, all small red buttes and dry as a desert. I was driving fast on gravel again and wondering how Westrop had known about me. According to Andie, he'd not only known my name, but what I did. And he had asked a lot of questions: Why had a mining consultant been called in? Was Golden Soak for sale and had I inspected it yet? Had anybody been down there since the disaster? ‘What he was after I have no idea, but he was after something, that's for sure, and I told Ed to watch it when he came in for the stores yesterday. He'd never heard of Westrop. Wolli he'd known all his life, of course.'

And yet, when Janet had asked her father who the men were, he hadn't answered her. I was remembering the look on his face as he'd stood there at the entrance to the adit, the axe gripped in his hands. Another truck thundered by, stones clattering on the windscreen and dust seeping in even though I'd closed the window. Christ! it was hot. I'd left the red butte country now, and after I'd crossed the dry bed of the Shaw River, I was into a world of small hills like tumuli, the road dipping and rising endlessly, the rattle of the Holden on the ridged surface permeating my whole body.

To hell with Ed Garrety, I thought. Jarra Jarra was behind me now and no concern of mine. The road stretching ahead led to Nullagine and the prospect of something that might be more rewarding. But thinking of McIlroy, dreaming of his Monster in the heat, my mind came back inevitably to Golden Soak and what Andie had told me of the disaster that had happened there in 1939. I had been questioning him about the disappearance of Big Bill Garrety's partner, but all he had been able to tell me was what I already knew, that the closing of the bank's doors had coincided with the collapse of a speculative boom in West Australian mining shares and that McIlroy was supposed to have been speculating with money deposited by the bank's customers. It was all hearsay, of course, and the people who really knew about it were the people who'd got their fingers burnt, and they weren't the ones to gossip. But he was sure about the disaster. Big Bill. Garrety had hired a bunch of out-of-work miners to drive a cross-cut into a badly faulted area of high grade ore. ‘No doot the man was desperate, but it was plain bluidy murder from what they tell me.' Several men had been killed, a lot more injured. ‘I dinna ken how many.' And he didn't know whether the mine had been flooded then or later. But he was quite certain that the disaster had happened after the crash. ‘Sure it had been closed, but when a man's that desperate for money –' He had shrugged. ‘Ed's a fool not to sell. I told him so. That mine's got a jinx on it.'