The Golden Soak (36 page)

But man isn't made like that. Given the faintest spark of energy there's always that need to reach for something, regardless of physical discomfort, regardless even of the fear of death. I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, conscious all the time of Ed Garrety there beside me. Logic. A sensible decision. But my brain seemed incapable of that, and the man beside me – nothing logical there. A gamble, a last desperate gamble. But if it was that, why had he immobilized, our vehicle? A dozen miles and on his own – why? Why, when he had a mining consultant at hand to confirm the nature of the deposit?

I sucked at the last drop of tea, spitting out the leaves and that dead ant, the flies buzzing. My eyes were open now, staring into the sun-glare at the red-scabbed rock, a petrified sediment of tiny fragments welded into a conglomerate and bared by the wind, worn by the blowing sand into a gentle undulation, a low swell frozen with sudden knoll-like outcrops carved in strange shapes. ‘There's no copper here,' I said.

‘No.'

‘A conglomerate – of no value at all.' I looked at him, a thought taking slow shape in my mind. ‘Then why in God's name –' But something in his face stopped me. He was slumped there, his eyes closed, the muscle at the corner of his mouth twitching and an expression of extreme agony on his face. Behind his head a complicated pattern of concentric circles had been painted on the rock wall, the pigments faded now, but still showing faintly. White and ochre and some sort of blue – indigo perhaps. It was like an old frescoe, a primitive halo framing the parchment face, the saint-like effect emphasized by the lidded eyes, the suggestion of a death mask.

The lids flicked suddenly open and he was looking at me again with that wide-eyed unblinking stare, and I saw he was deep in some private hell of his own. Christ! I thought. He's over the edge now. He's mad like his father. ‘What is this place?' I heard myself ask, my voice a whisper.

‘The blacks call it a
rira
. It's a conglomerate, as you say.' His words were slow, like a man talking in his sleep. ‘And this soak here – not many in the Gibson. It's called the Kurrajong Soak. See that tree there?' He nodded vaguely towards a brilliantly green tree. ‘That's a kurrajong. It's always like that. Not many of them, but even in a drought like this it stays green. The greenest thing in the desert.'

I waited, not saying anything. And then, very quietly, very matter-of-factly, he said, ‘The last time I was here this soak had water in it. We only had to dig down about a foot and we got all the water we wanted – good water, too. Not brackish.' And he added, ‘There was a lot of game here then. But last night nothing. No emu. No wallaby.' His eyes were closed again so that he was like a man talking in his sleep. ‘If I hadn't come on this soak I'd have lost my camels. They'd just about reached the limit. I'd never have got out alive. I was crazed with thirst myself. And like you, on the verge of panic. But with more reason.' He was living something that had happened a long time ago, silent once again. I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would come of its own accord or not at all.

A shadow moved and Tom stooped in under the overhang, took the mug from me and disappeared, back to some separate burrow of his own. And then his voice again, quiet in the silence: ‘He'd never have made it this far without Weepy. Weepy Weeli knew all the soaks. This was the second they'd camped at, so you might say he owed his life to my father.'

I don't know whether he was conscious of me or not at that moment. He seemed to be talking to himself rather than me, talking for the sake of talking, perhaps the way people do in a confessional. I think he had to get it off his chest and it was just that I happened to be there. There was more to it, of course, but I only realized that later, when it was too late – after the wind had died.

There was a long silence, and while I was considering the implications of what he had said, I think I dozed off, for the next thing I heard was him saying: ‘When I woke I was sitting about where you're sitting now, right here in this hollow in the rock. And what woke me was the sound of a shot. I stumbled out and there he was with a gun in his hand and one of my three camels lying drumming with her legs on the
rira
. I can remember the smoke was still curling from the muzzle of the gun as he raised it to his shoulder again. I shouted at him and he wheeled round, the gun pointing at me. But I just didn't care. The camel was the best I had. I'd broken her myself. I went straight at him and he was in such a state when he fired that he missed. The shot went just over my head. And then I was on him, my hands wrenching at the guns, tearing it out of his grasp. He wasn't a big man and I was young. He hadn't a hope after he'd missed me. And when I got hold of the gun I was in such a rage I shot him. I shot him through his forehead and I can still see the look on his face, the staring, horror-struck eyes as he realized what I was going to do. It's haunted me all my life. For I did it in cold blood. I killed him quite deliberately.' He paused then, his eyes wide, a distant look as he saw every detail of the scene he had lived with all these years. ‘He didn't even twitch. He just folded up with a glazed, surprised look, and then lay out there in some thin grass, pitched forward on his face. I put the camel out of her misery, wishing I had been awake in time to stop him. The sun was just setting, everything blood-red, and when I moved that little bastard the wisps of spinifex he'd fallen on were red, too – the blood that had drained out of the hole in the back of his head.'

There was another long silence, his eyes closed, his breathing in quick pants. ‘Well, now you know. Funny that I should want to tell you when you're on the run for something yourself. Or perhaps that's why. But I still wanted to be on my own when I got here. You understand?'

I nodded. To make his peace, he had said. I remembered that now. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘I understand.'

‘Well, d'you think I did wrong?' He waited. And then he said, ‘All right. I killed a man. But what would you have done? In the circumstances. Jarra Jarra ruined. Everything I'd dreamed of gone. And all the fault of that grasping little crook. And then slaughtering my camel for meat. Would you have stood for it? That camel had carried me for six days. She'd have carried me to her last gasp. She deserved better than that. And McIlroy – did he deserve anything better than I gave him?' Another pause, and then he said slowly, ‘No. The camel was just an excuse, the spark that triggered my hate of the man.' He was silent then and I didn't know what to say. What
would
I have done?

‘I think,' I said slowly, that I might have killed him the moment I came up with him.'

I don't know whether he heard that or not. As I have said, he was living his own private hell and I doubt whether it made any difference what I said. I was merely his confessor, and only because I happened to be there and had problems of my own.

‘It was 'bout six in the morning when I went down to the blacks' quarters to get Weeli. I was running a new fenceline and I wanted Weeli and two of the boys. But he wasn't there. Father had come for him 'bout two hours back. I found the old man in his den, a bottle of whisky in front of him and his eyes bleary with drink and lack of sleep.' He paused for breath, licking his lips, his tongue coming out but no moisture there. ‘He lied to me,' he went on slowly. ‘That's what got my dander up right at the outset. I knew very well Weelie hadn't gone walkabout.' He found some saliva, licked his lips again, speaking fast now: ‘It took me the better part of an hour to get the truth out of him and by then I was so darned mad I'd have killed McIlroy with my bare hands – if he'd still been around. It took me six days – six days on a camel to catch up with him. It's a long ride from Jarra Jarra here, the days burning hot, the nights beginning to cool. Autumn, y'see. It was March. All that time to think what I'd do if ever I caught up with him. Lucky for me it rained, the tracks of that old Austin truck of his showing quite clearly wherever the sand was soft.'

He stopped there, staring in space. ‘At the end of six days' riding camel the desire to kill the man was overlaid by a lot of other things – the loneliness, the feeling of being lost at times, like travelling in a vacuum. And when it came to the moment … when I was standing here, confronting him … all I could think of was water. I hadn't had any water for more than twenty-four hours; all the way from the Stock Route I hadn't found a single soak. I was down there in the sand, lapping it up, the camels bellowing. And the blarney of the man, that damned tongue of his pouring out excuses, explanations, encouraging me to believe that it would all turn out for the best. He and I, we'd go on together. No need for the camels now. And we'd return rich. His Monster would solve every thing.'

He gave the ghost of a laugh, half amused, half cynical. ‘Instead of killing him I went to sleep in the middle of his monologue, too damned tired even to give him the hiding that would have got some of the hate out of my system.'

He paused again there, and then after a moment he said quietly, in a flat, even voice: ‘It was still there, y'see – the hate I mean – all ready to explode inside me the moment that shot woke me.'

‘You buried the body?'

He nodded. ‘In soft sand at the edge of the
rira
here. A sort of natural grave between two exposed edges of rock. Then Weeli and I started back. I got the Austin almost to Lake Disappointment. But the axle bust. There wasn't much petrol left anyway. I dumped the old bus there and we made it back to Jarra Jarra by camel, travelling at night so nobody would see us. Father dealt with Weeli – made him swear never to tell a soul what had happened. Did it at the sacred place of his ancestors down in the Watersnake country. And then the cave-in – the last hope gone. After that the old man started drinking in earnest. McIlroy had broken him anyway. I got the hell out into the army. There was talk, of course. But nothing more. Four months had passed, the tracks covered by the time the police found that vehicle. And then the war, and we were overseas – boys from the outstations getting killed and captured. McIlroy's death wasn't important any more.' His voice faded, his eyes staring blankly. ‘Sometimes I wish I'd killed him the moment I saw him strutting towards me. Other times I try to make-believe I never rode into the desert after him. The first would have been more honest. The second is what I've tried to live. Then Westrop, those rumours … after thirty years. I had to come.'

‘Why?'

He looked at me with a puzzled frown. ‘To see if it was true, of course. I didn't know. After all those years I couldn't be sure I really had killed him. Burma. Hospital the old man's death. It was in the Journal, of course. It was all there, just as I had told it to him. But once I'd burned those pages … And then Janet's mother, the years of trying to rebuild and make something of the station. It faded, y'see. It wasn't real. Just something I'd read.' And then haltingly: ‘The old man, y'see – out of his mind. You can't live with a thought like that.' There was perspiration on his brow, his face twitching and the effort of trying to put it all into words too much for him, his whole frame shivering.

‘And now?'

‘Now I know.' His voice was back to a whisper. ‘Now I can't fool myself any more. What I did – it finished him, broke him completely.'

‘The body, I mean – you found it?'

‘Not the body.' He shook his head. ‘Not even the skeleton. He was just carrion as soon as the sand had blown off him, and the wedge-tails and the ants, they picked him clean. All that was left was a heap of bones, but lying exactly where I remembered, and of course it all came back to me then. No room for doubt or self-deception any more.'

Silence and my head dropping on to my chest, my eyes closing; the rustle of sand grains moving, the heat winds stirring the desert. I should have said it didn't matter any more. I should have encouraged him, given him the support he needed. But I was too tired, too bone-weary to care. What the hell did it matter after all these years? I was drifting into sleep, but not yet losing consciousness, the silence nagging. ‘And now,' I muttered. ‘Now you've found him, what are you going to do?'

He didn't answer, the silence heavy between us so that I was forced back to consciousness, my eyes open. He hadn't moved, his head still framed by that strange motif on the rock wall behind him, his eyes open and staring vacantly, his breathing shallow. He looked like death. It should have warned me. But I hadn't come all this way to worry about a man who had died thirty years ago. I was thinking of Janet and Jarra Jarra and what a real big strike could do to get them out of the mess they were in. I thought, God help me, it was the future, not the past, that mattered, and so I said, ‘Well, what about McIlroy's Monster? Does it exist or doesn't it?' I thought it would help to concentrate his mind on something practical.

Silence still and I had to repeat the question before he turned his head and looked at me, his eyes still vacant as though fixed on some far distant horizon. Slowly he shifted his position, groping in the hip pocket of his trousers. ‘That's something I shall never know.' And he handed me a worn leather wallet. ‘I took that from McIlroy's body.' And then he said something I didn't understand till much later: ‘If it exists, and if you find it, pray to God for guidance. This poor country has been raped too often by greedy whites and that – that Monster – belongs to them, to the aborigine of the desert.' And he added softly, ‘I would like to think that my boyhood dream could be made a reality. Yes, I would like to think that, very much. I had it all planned – Jarra Jarra a nature reserve, the goodness of the land gradually restored and the blacks free to live their natural, self-sufficient lives. His breath came in a sigh: ‘It was just a dream, and dreams fade y'know – with age and the passage of time. But you're young. You can still make it a reality.' And then, looking at me very directly with those startling blue eyes: ‘Any man who uses that for his own ends will suffer a violent death. Or else he'll end up with blood on his hands. I don't know why I know that, but I do.'