The Golden Soak (3 page)

I reached into my hip pocket, to the slender wad of notes, counting them by starlight. But I knew the score – one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. That's all I had, all that was left after I had got myself to Naples, paid my passage out and all the incidentals. And naturally they had been expecting me to arrive by car. The letter I had found waiting for me when I got off the boat at Fremantle made that clear, and she'd given me detailed instructions – where to turn off the Great Northern Highway, how to find the start of the backtrack leading to the station. But instead of a car I'd wired her to meet me. How was I going to explain that? And no job, nothing to go back to?

The dingoes sounded again, but very far away. I dozed, my head fallen forward, and when I woke again it was to a different sound, a soft-toned bellow and the rumble of an ore train going north. The stars were paling now, the leaves of the eucalyptus tree under which I lay visible against the growing light of the sky. Something moved behind the patch of scrub to my right, a tall grey shadow. I watched, suddenly wide awake, my nerves tense. It was bending down, screened from my view, and then, with three quick leaps, it was within yards of me, standing erect and balanced by its tail, its short front legs hanging limp, its head lifted, alert and listening, the' muzzle twitching like a rabbit's.

In the half light the kangaroo looked big as a man. Instinctively I scrambled to my feet. Its head turned in a flash. I had a glimpse of soft eyes, and then it was bounding away at a gallop. And all around me grey shadows were moving at speed, heads thrust forward to balance the powerful strokes of the back legs as they covered the ground in great leaps. One moment they were there, the whole bush around me erupting in lolloping forms, then they were gone. No sound. It was like a dream.

I sat down again and lit a cigarette, my back against the gum, watching the sky pale to eggshell green, the dawn coming fast. And as the light increased, the shapes of trees and scrub emerged from shadow to become hard outlines. All gums. Nothing I knew or recognized, the earth red like dried blood, everything cruel and harsh, baked in the oven of yesterday's heat. I tried to recall the sound of her voice, familiarly English, yet oddly different – not harsh, not metallic like the men on the boat, but different all the same: ‘Come in the spring,' she had said, driving to the station that morning. ‘It's lovely then with the wild flowers out.' And she'd gone on to talk about the country, speaking of it as something beautiful, something to be loved as well as feared.

There'd been Australians on the boat. But like the man from Batemans Bay I'd shared a cabin with, most of them were bound for Sydney. They didn't know the West. Only Wade, who'd boarded the ship at Capetown, had ever been in the Pilbara. He'd worked with a construction gang on the iron ore railway, and the way he'd described it up here, he and the girl might have been talking about two different countries. I could hear the sound of his voice grating, see the fringe of gingery hair above the long face, the pile of beer cans in the cabin base. He'd hated it.

That had been the night before we'd docked, the Italian immigrants lining the rails, staring out across the heat-still sea, the moon's path like spilled milk. I had stood there with them for a time, all of us staring towards the future that lay veiled in the hot moon-haze. And when finally I had gone below, I had found the cabin packed with drunks, half awash with beer, and Wade perched on my bunk, his long legs dangling, sweat gleaming on his face, his hands trembling as he sucked at a cigarette. ‘You're there, brother. Back in good old Aussie land. The Big Country.' His cackling laugh, that grating voice – ‘So you're headed for the Never Never, up into the Pilbara – the Iron Cauldron. Christ! You'll fry. You'll wish you'd never seen the blasted country.' His drunken words merging with her clear, vibrant voice. ‘Come in the spring. It's lovely with the wild flowers out'. And Kadek, long ago on that terrace in Spain, talking of the Golden Mile, envying me my degree: ‘If I'd had your education, I'd have been a millionaire by now.' Dozing, I chased a wisp of molten gold through miles of desert blooms in a flat red waste, the only sound the rattle of the truck and Wade's cackling laugh, his hatred of the Never Never.

I woke with a jerk, the fallen cigarette burning a hole in my old khaki trousers. I stubbed it out and got to my feet, moving down towards the track. Would she have set out in darkness for the sake of a cooler ride? There was no sound, just the stillness, and the light increasing all the time.

Feeling stiff and in need of exercise, I walked down to the junction with the dirt road. The sky was already flaring in the east, the shape of Mt Whalebeck showing black on the horizon. It did look rather like a whale, and above it hung a haze as though it had just vented. But it wasn't moisture; it was iron ore dust, and as I stood there it began to redden with the rising sun. Something moved to my left and I turned my head. But it was already gone, a shadow, insubstantial.

The sun came up and I retired to the shade, a prey to the fear that something might have been discovered in the long weeks I had been travelling out here. The police might accept the evidence of their eyes, but the insurance assessors would almost certainly probe deeper before they agreed to payment, and they'd find no body, no trace of human remains. All through the voyage I had been able to push this thought to the back of my mind. But now that I was thrusting myself on people who knew who I was, I could no longer ignore it.

Everything I had done that night was clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by knowledge of the risk I was taking. In spite of all I had had to drink, I could remember every detail, and going over it again step by step, remembering the emptiness of the house, my own numbness, the appalling sense of finality as I had lit that candle, I was sure I hadn't slipped up. It had all been so carefully planned – everything except the sudden decision to involve myself in the destruction of the house. Again and again my mind came back to that, and to the absence of human remains. Not even the fact that I had been allowed to enter Australia without any questions asked could dispel the nagging fear that in time they would catch up with me. Flies crawled with the sun, the smooth bark of the gum I was propped against hard under my shoulders.

About eight o'clock two vehicles passed along the dirt road, but from where I was sitting all I saw of them was a cloud of dust. After that nothing stirred as the heat built up and the sky turned from blue to a blinding white. I was trying to visualize Jarra Jarra, recalling vaguely the girl's young face, the things she had told me. But it was all blurred by time and nothing she had said had prepared me for the wild red desolation of this country, the sense of geological age I had felt on the long oven-lid drive north from Perth. If I hadn't written to her I could have lost myself in the immensity of it, changed my name. There was Kadek, too. He'd been away, in Kalgoorlie they said, when I had visited his office in Perth, and I had left a note for him, giving Jarra Jarra as my address. If Rosa talked and they started making enquiries in Australia.… I closed my eyes against the blinding glare, hoping to God they wouldn't think of that.

I was dozing again, my hand brushing automatically at the flies, when I heard the murmur of a truck's engine, an insect drone in the bush behind me. I was on my feet in an instant, listening tensely to the sound of it coming steadily nearer. Then I caught a glimpse of it through the gum trees, an elderly Land-Rover driven at speed. By the time it was round the last bend I was out on the track, waiting. It slowed at the sight of me, a bare arm waving to me out of the driver's window, and then it had stopped and Janet Garrety climbed out.

‘Sorry – we should have been here two hours ago, but we've no spare and we had a puncture.'

She was smiling, coming towards me, a stocky, practical girl in a faded blue shirt and khaki slacks. The shirt clung to her, dark patches of sweat under the armpits and in the vee of her trousers, her face caked with dust, streaked with runnels of perspiration. But the smile of her greeting had the youthful, exuberant freshness I remembered. ‘Have you been waiting long?' She shook my hand, a hard, dusty handshake that still managed to convey a sense of excitement. ‘I couldn't believe it when we got your message. What are you doing in Australia?' She laughed, a flash of white teeth, freckles showing through the dust. ‘I suppose you're out here looking for a new Poseidon.' Laughter bubbled on her eyes, the whites brilliant in the hard sunlight. ‘I'm full of questions, but we can talk as we drive.'

A shadow moved behind her and she turned, ‘Oh, Tom – come and meet Mr Falls.'

He was an aborigine. I had seen pictures of them, of course, but I hadn't expected anything quite so black, so primitive looking – the face broad-nosed with a low brow and ridges of heavy bone above the eyes. ‘Tom is as much a part of Jarra Jarra as we are.' He came forward and shook my hand, a soft, limp touching of the palms, his thick lips spread in a yellow-toothed grin. The eyes were dark brown, the whites yellow against the wrinkled black of his skin. He was short and broad, and the only part of him that wasn't black was his hair; his woolly hair, that sat like a skull cap over the low brow, was grizzled, almost white. The thick lips moved below the broad spread of the nose, soft words, guttural in a strange tongue.

‘He's bidding you welcome,' she said. Her quick eyes had found the tree where I had sat waiting. ‘Is that all your gear?' She nodded to the aborigine and he went to get my suitcase. ‘Gosh! This is marvellous – to see you here. When that message came through – the news that you were in Perth and coming up to see us – you've no idea – it's what I dreamed, that some day you'd come out here.' It came out in a rush of words and then she added, ‘You're the only mining man I ever met I'd trust a yard.' She was laughing, bubbling over with excitement, as though my arrival was some great event in her life. ‘How did you come out? Did you fly?'

‘No, I came by ship.'

‘Yes, of course. You wrote me from Capetown. I thought perhaps you'd been having a look at the South African gold mines. But I suppose it's the nickel boom. Was it the
Botany Bay
you came on?'

I remembered then that she'd got herself to England working her passage as stewardess on a passenger ship out of Fremantle. ‘No, it was an Italian boat,' I said.

‘And you hitched a ride up from Perth. You certainly believe in doing things the hard way. That's real Australian.' She turned back to the Land-Rover. ‘Come on. It's hot enough now, but if we stand here talking you'll be fried before I get you home. You can tell me all about it as we drive.'

My gear was already in the back with Tom. I climbed into the cab beside her and she drove down the dirt road, turned at the junction and headed back up the track, talking all the time as she twisted between the gums, her foot hard down. The track wasn't really a track at all, it was just a way through the bush that followed in the treadmarks of the first vehicle that had passed that way. It wandered in and out of the scrub, twisting endlessly in a flat plain with glimpses of Mt Newman. I wasn't really listening to what she was saying. She seemed oddly nervous, talking for the sake of talking – about the dry being worse than usual, a drought and cattle dying. It was as though she were trying to prepare me for something. ‘For near on a month now we've been mustering, driving them in bunches through the Robinson Gap, down into the Watersnake.' She changed down for a stretch of dust. ‘Coming to pick you up is a real break. Tom and the other two boys have hardly been out of the saddle for weeks.'

‘And you?'

‘Me? I'm sore.' She grinned, wriggling her bottom on the seat. ‘Riding Cleo every day – I must have ridden that damned camel a thousand miles this last month. Feels like it anyway. And Daddy out in the Land-Rover every day. We're just about all in, both of us.'

The country was more broken now. We were climbing imperceptibly, Mt Newman close and lower hills to our left, a gap opening up ahead. ‘The Ophthalmia Range,' she said. ‘It's all iron country here. Dry as a desert.' And then, abruptly – I'm sorry, I haven't asked after Rosalind. How is she?'

‘All right.'

‘You haven't brought her with you?'

‘No.'

She didn't pursue that line. She hadn't exactly hit it off with Rosa. ‘So it's a business trip.'

‘An exploratory look at Australia, shall we say?'

‘And that includes Jarra Jarra.' She laughed, a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘The only thing we have to show you is an old abandoned mine. Not much for you there, I'm afraid.' And then she looked at me, a quick, searching glance. ‘What really brought you out here? Or shouldn't I ask?'

This was the moment. I should tell her now if I was going to tell her at all. And I would have done if she'd still been staring at me with those perceptive, rather prominent eyes. But her gaze was back on the track as it snaked through an area of larger gums. ‘Rosa,' I said. ‘We've separated.'

‘I'm sorry.' She didn't sound it and there was no surprise in her voice. ‘So you've come out here – to forget her?'

It made sense, and that way I didn't have to tell her anything more. Not yet, anyway. ‘I suppose so,' I said.

‘And what about Balavedra?' she asked.

‘Oh, I expect it'll get along all right without me.' I glanced at her, my mouth dry, wondering whether she'd guessed I was telling her only half the truth. My damned pride, of course, but what else could I say? What the hell else? If I told her the mine was bankrupt, that I was in debt and that was why Rosa had left me, then I'd have to tell her the rest. And I couldn't do that. Not now, before I'd even seen Jarra Jarra or met her father.

But all she said was, ‘I remember that morning – you showed me where it was, the engine house standing above the cliffs and the Atlantic beyond. You've chosen a damn silly time to exchange Cornwall for the Pilbara. Oh, well …' She laughed. ‘Hitching a ride up the Great Northern at the beginning of summer sure is one way of getting it out of your system. What was it you rode up in – one of the iron ore company cars?'