The Golden Soak (20 page)

I read it as I walked towards the centre of the town. It was a long, unhappy explanation of his relations with his father, and finished up:
I realize what you told me was in confidence, but he's capable of anything when he's got a load on. I must get away from here now, so if you're going north again, please let me come with you
. He gave the address of the friend he was staying with and I wondered whether it was the same friend who had the old Land-Rover for hire.

The local stockbroker's office was a travel and insurance agency in the brick section of the Palace building. I arranged for the purchase of 3,000 Lone Minerals as soon as the market opened in Perth and then I went across to the
Kalgoorlie Miner
in Hannan Street. It was an odd place, a shop selling stationery, books and postcards, the newspaper produced from poky little offices in the rear. A girl eventually produced the file copies for 1939, and when I told her I wanted to look up their report of McIlroy's disappearance, she found it for me immediately. ‘Funny thing, you're the second person to ask for it. There was a man in here about a week ago.' She even remembered his name – Kadek. ‘I never heard a name like that before.' She was a big girl, about twenty-five, and she hovered over me while I read the accounts, which covered about three weeks. ‘All the time I've been here, nobody's asked me for the 1939 file, and now two of you inside a week.'

I turned the pages, reading quickly. It gave the name of the aborigine who had found the empty abandoned vehicle and I wrote it down, also the name of the constable who had examined the truck and organized the search for McIlroy's body. He had had a well-known native tracker with him on the job, but he had found nothing. The empty truck had been discovered on June 2 and McIlroy had last been seen alive at Nullagine five months before, on January 5. He had then announced that he would be heading out into the blue on an outback track that branched off the line of the telegraph at Ethel Creek, but the people at the Ethel Creek homestead said he had not called there and they had not seen his vehicle or any sign of tracks. And then this paragraph:

Inevitably the mystery surrounding his disappearance has given birth to a number of rumours. The most persistent of these is that, instead of heading east from Ethel Creek, he went first to the Jarra Jarra homestead of his partner. Big Bill Garrety, and that it was from there that he finally set out on his ill-fated attempt to locate his fabulous monster. There is no evidence to support this and in view of the relationship between the two men following upon Pat McIlroy's misuse of the bank's money this seems most unlikely. Indeed, the police have a statement from Mr Garrety categorically denying it
.

‘I've got some notes, if you'd like to see them.' I could feel the warmth of her body leaning over me. ‘I read up on everything we'd printed on McIlroy the other day. It's such an odd story I thought maybe I could sell it to a magazine.'

Her notes were typewritten and very comprehensive. Not only had she included details of his association with Bill Garrety and his investment of the bank's deposits, but his background as well. And it was there, in the information about his private life before he'd come to Kalgoorlie, that I was brought up with a jolt, the name Westrop staring at me from the typescript.

McIlroy had been born in the King's Cross district of Sydney in 1901, the eldest of seven children. Both his parents had been Irish and his father had been a bookie's tout. He had grown up on racecourses. In 1926 he had become a stockbroker's clerk and the following year he had married Elspeth Julia Westrop, daughter of a wool buyer for an English company. They had had two children, both boys, and it was after the birth of the second that he had left Sydney and gone to make his fortune in Kalgoorlie.

‘What happened to the family?' I asked.

She shrugged. ‘They never came out to West Australia. The two sons died in the war, the wife in 1954.'

‘Do you know anything about the wife's family? Had she any brothers, for instance?'

But she didn't know. ‘There's only one person here who was at all close to Pat McIlroy – I would guess she was probably his mistress for a time. She is a bit of a hag and too fond of the bottle, but she might be able to tell you.'

She gave me the woman's address and I got a taxi and went there right away. It was a small, rusty-coloured shack at the bend of a dirt road with a view across the workings of the old Iron Duke. She was frail and none too clean, her head wobbling as she spoke, words slipping out in little gasps. Yes, she remembered Pat McIlroy, but she sounded unsure of herself and I guessed he had only been one of many. His wife? She shook her head. ‘Pat didn't like her. Nor her family. Called them a lot of bleedin' sheep stealers.' She fixed me with a thirsty, calculating eye. ‘You pop round to the 'otel, dearie, and ask them for a bottle of Gladdy's usual. Mebbe I'll remember some more then.'

But I didn't think she knew much more and I was just on the point of leaving when she wobbled her head at me and said, ‘Her brother come here once raising hell. I remember that now. He was a tall, mean man and I was young then.' She smiled, nodding. ‘More ways of fixing a man …' The smile became a snigger. ‘I got a dose of clap at the time, see.'

Had she given it to McIlroy, too? Or perhaps it was the other way round. I couldn't bring myself to ask her that. It's a nasty business, trying to glimpse the nature of a man who's been dead more than thirty years through the eyes of an aged tart. But walking back into the centre of Boulder I couldn't help thinking that venereal disease might account for the recklessness he had shown at the end in gambling with his own life.

I got a taxi, still feeling unclean, as though I had been in contact with the woman myself, and drove to the Culpin home to pick up my suitcase. Edith Culpin looked as though she had been crying again, her face very pale and the eyes red-rimmed. ‘If you see Kennie, tell him to come home. It'll be all right.' And she added, ‘He's all I got really.' The sadness in her voice was the sadness of loneliness.

Driving back into Kalgoorlie I tried to concentrate on Golden Soak and what I would say to Ed Garrety when I reached Jarra Jarra. But the memory of those two women seemed to dominate my thoughts – so different, yet both of them facing lives that were empty, a dead end. And Westrop. If he was really McIlroy's nephew, then his presence in Nullagine only made sense if he knew something nobody else seemed to know.

It was almost midday and I stopped off at the broker's to find he had had to pay 32 cents a share. ‘You're lucky,' he said. ‘They're quoted at 34 on the Sydney Exchange.' He gave me a contract and I paid him cash, and I arranged for him to wire me the money when I instructed him to sell.

That contract, a little piece of paper – it's difficult to explain what it meant to me. But I walked out of there a new man. Twenty-four hours ago I had been just about broke. Now I had cash in my pocket and a stake in the country. I was part of the Australian mineral boom, sharing the excitement of other market gamblers. It gave me a feeling of extraordinary confidence as I got back into the taxi and was driven to the address Kennie had given me. It was at the corner of Cassidy and Cheetham, a green-painted verandahed house overlooking the recreation ground, and there was a dusty, battered-looking Land-Rover standing outside.

Looking back on it now, I cannot blame Kennie for deciding to come north with me. He wasn't hard-hearted or any more inconsiderate than other young men of his age. And he was deeply attached to his mother. But he had his own life to live and he refused absolutely to go back and face his father again. ‘It wouldn't work. It never has, it never will.' His lips were trembling as he said that and his eyes looked scared. ‘I got to get away. Please …' He looked so like his mother I couldn't help thinking that the two of them, so close all those years, had been a factor in Culpin's desperate urge to strike it rich, the need to prove himself.

The young man he was staying with had been a fellow student at the School of Mines. His father was Jim Norris, a lapidary with a shop in Hannan Street where he sold semiprecious jewellery he made himself. The business was now established so that other enthusiasts were bringing the stones to him. He and his son no longer had to go out and fossick for them, hence the availability of the Land-Rover. That and Kennie's enthusiasm decided me.

The rest of the day passed quickly as we checked the vehicle and shopped around for the stores and equipment we needed. Mrs Norris gave us an early meal, and as the sunset flared to a lurid purple, I drove out of Kalgoorlie, taking the road north to Leonora, Kennie sitting beside me, tight-lipped and silent.

Five

ED GARRETY

ONE

We drove through the night, tarmac at first, a single track with verges of red gravel, then dirt. And the country, in the clear cloudless dawn, flat as a pan. We were into the northern part of the Yilgarn Block, metamorphosed rock, all gibber, the gravel eroded
in situ
, hardly any watercourses, but a great salt lake before we ran into Wiluna. Kennie was driving then and I was dozing, my eyeballs pricking with tiredness, the heat already building. I had nearly hit a kangaroo in the grey hour before the dawn, but there weren't many of them here on the edge of the Gibson.

We were through the rabbit fencing, heading west for Meekatharra, the sun behind us, everything very sharp in the clarity of the early light, the dirt of the road running like a red ribbon through an infinity of spinifex and bare sun-scorched rocks. ‘What about a brew-up?' Kennie's thin little beard was thick with dust, his long hair blowing in the wind from the open window. His teeth were even and very white as he smiled at me through the dust. ‘I could use a good brew right now, eh?'

I nodded and he drew into the shade of the next patch of mulga. It was a kind of acacia, but thin stuff, half dead and full of ants, the air breathless. The flies came at us in a cloud as soon as we had stopped.

Without Kennie it would have taken me three days to get back to the Pilbara. It wasn't only the shared driving, it was the fact that he knew how to live bush – something at least he owed his father. Within minutes he had a fire going, the billy on and bacon sizzling in the pan. Except for the flies, it was the finest breakfast I had had in Australia – the quiet and the huge sense of space, the close feeling of companionship. I was relaxed then, thinking how lucky I was, what a wonderful world. We didn't talk much after we had fed, just sat there smoking and drinking thick Indian tea.
It's old – old geologically
. That was what Petersen and Carter had said.
It's unique
. And now I was out there, looking at it, remembering their words, the country as old as time and my mind involuntarily going back to Genesis and ancient, primitive gods. ‘Do you know much about the aborigine?' I asked him.

But he shook his head. ‘Only what a Native Affairs Officer told us in a lecture he gave at the School. He made them seem a remarkable people, every day in their lives filled by the excitement of survival. Christ, look at it! I'd get a great kick if I could survive out here on my own, no tinned food, no cans of petrol, no gun, nothing but what I'd found and made. Reck'n that fellow was one of the really good ones, for he talked about living for a period with a family in the Gibson. To survive, like that –' He shook his dusty head, an almost dreamy look in those greenish eyes, now sun-crinkled at the corners. ‘And living like that, from hand-to-mouth – subsisting, no more – and yet the Dreamtime, all their myths, the complicated sacred side of their lives. After I'd heard that man speak I found myself looking at all the poor bastards in Kalgoorlie in a different light. They're a very strange people – but I respect them now. Imagine it – out there …' He jerked his head towards the east. ‘Nothing but your wits, the knowledge handed down to you by your elders, and your bare hands. I wouldn't survive twenty-four hours.'

Later I was to remember that conversation, but at the time, replete and plagued with ants, the flies thick, I was too hot and tired to care a damn about the aborigines, accepting his words as part of the companionship developing between us, nothing more. A small wind rose, drifting red dust like a river across the road, and at Meekatharra we stopped for petrol and a long cold drink of beer. And then we were heading north, the tarmac running out into dirt after about fifty miles and the sun dimmed by a brown cloud of wind-blown sand that coated the Land-Rover and ourselves. It was a hell of a drive, until shortly after noon the wind suddenly dropped, the air clear again and the sun burning. Cheese and tomatoes, a long siesta among the ghost gums of a dry watercourse, then on again with the sun setting into the Gibson, the dark shape of hills standing like islands in a red-brown sea. Somewhere near Mundiwindi we lit a fire, cooked ourselves a meal. ‘What happens when we get to Jarra Jarra?'

‘I don't know.' I was too tired, too battered with the jolting to think about that. Janet I knew would be glad about the analysis, but I wasn't so sure about her father. We had our swags unrolled on the hard ground, and lying there, gazing up at the stars, I wished I knew him better.

‘This man Garrety, what's he like?'

‘All right.'

‘Yes, but those samples – he don't know about them. That's right, isn't it? You said last night –'

‘Aren't you tired?'

‘Yes, of course I'm tired.'

‘Then go to sleep.'

‘I can't. I'm too excited.' His cigarette glowed in the darkness. ‘Everybody I talked to – the old-timers, I mean – they seemed to know all about the Garretys and this station of theirs, the mine. It's part of the history of the North West.' But I had closed my eyes and in a moment the murmur of his young voice was lost in sleep.