Tourmaline (11 page)

‘He’s okay, is he?’ he asked. ‘The young bloke? Ah, sure, he always is. Wish I’d had his sense when I was his age.’

‘You enjoyed yourself,’ I consoled him.

‘You reckon?’ He gave his sudden sharp drunken laugh.

‘I hear you do well out there, at that show of yours.’

‘We do okay,’ he said, ‘Jimmy and me. It’s a healthy life.’

And I had a sudden vision of his camp; the old stock route well in its platform of stones, the antique winch and bucket, the humpy (supposing they had one) of dead grey brushwood. And the flat bare blood-red country radiating out to the horizons, aglare with broken quartz.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ I brought myself to say. But what did they eat, I wondered? Tea and damper, probably, and the odd tin of meat as a luxury. He was as much a native as Jimmy Bogada, and had learned the same tolerance of deprivation.

‘Better go to Tom’s,’ he said. ‘See about some stores. And I almost laughed to think what fare they were going to carry back that day, to their larder ten miles away. ‘See you later.’

He turned and went; and old Jimmy, who had been squatting by the roadside, fell in behind him without a word. I could not help smiling as I watched them, they had such curious and contrasting ways of walking; Dave rolling like a sailor, and Jimmy (very straight for an old man) stalking behind with all the stealthy purpose of a black hunter. And they had come in to go shopping. It sounded almost suburban.

When they came to the store Jimmy broke ranks, as it were, and went to sit under the veranda, while Dave went in to see Tom. And he was so featureless, old Jimmy, so much a part of any landscape whatsoever, that I doubt whether anyone (supposing anyone had passed) would have remarked to himself: ‘Jimmy Bogada’, or looked about for Dave. He simply was; a dark human shape, wriggling its toes in the velvety dust.

In the store, Tom came out of his usual trance, or open-eyed sleep, and smiled. ‘You, Dave.’

‘How’s the man?’ said Dave. ‘Looking fit.’

‘So are you. Out of tucker?’

‘Yair, sort of. Give us the usual, when you get time, and dump it by the door there. We’ll pick it up in the morning.’

‘Stay the night with us?’

‘Ah, she’s right,’ Dave said. ‘Thanks all the same. I’ll be going up the mine. Reckon it won’t hurt the young bloke to do his old man a favour.’

‘Still getting rich?’

‘To hell with that,’ said Dave. ‘It’s a hobby.’

‘You’re right,’ Tom said. ‘You can’t spend it. Give it to Jack.’

‘What’s he going to do with it? He’s no booze artist—or is he?’

‘Not much.’

‘Which way do you mean “not much”?’

‘He doesn’t drink much. Relax.’

‘Ah,’ said Dave. ‘Well, fair enough. Because I’d kick his arse for him if he did, big as he is.’

‘Old Puritan you turned out to be,’ Tom said.

Dave gave his drunken laugh. Then he laid himself out on the counter, propped at one elbow, and looked amicably at Tom.

‘Well, what’s the news?’ he wanted to know. ‘Young Deborah still with Kes?’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘That’s no good. Jack should have got her. Anything out of the camp’d do for Kes.’

‘Kes might say the same for Jack,’ said Tom.

‘Ah, he’s a gin-jockey too, is he? Young bastard.’

‘Man’s an animal,’ said Tom. ‘Don’t get too virtuous.’

‘You get worked,’ said Dave in a friendly tone. And he went on, pondering: ‘Funny thing. Old Jim tells me there’s hardly been a kid born in the camp for years. What do you make of that?’

‘Despair,’ said Tom, moving his thin shoulders. ‘I heard somewhere about how they were dying out in the old days, just the same. It was the change, the white men coming. The blokes reckoned they couldn’t find the spirits of the children. So they stopped breeding.’

‘Ah,’ said Dave, ‘not enough jigjig.’

‘That’s what some missionary told them. And did they laugh. No, it’s one of those mind over matter things—you know?’

‘She’s a weird old world,’ Dave decided, after giving the matter due thought. ‘I can’t make her out at all.’

‘Keep trying,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve got a lot of faith in your opinions, Dave.’ He grinned at him, defended in irony. ‘I reckon you must get some thinking done out there.’

‘Don’t come that on me,’ said Dave. ‘It’s not the time, it’s having the stuff to think with.’ He shifted his knobbly hip on the hard counter, grunting. ‘You’ve told me bugger-all so far. What’s been happening?’

‘There’s only one bit of news you’re likely to hear anywhere,’ Tom said. ‘About the diviner.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Dave. He was slightly deaf. ‘Not the Law,’ he supposed (and Tom told me later), ‘gone and made himself archbishop?’

‘Diviner,’ Tom said. ‘Dowser. He says he’s going to find water for us.’ And he went on to give Dave a short history of our new citizen, from the time that the driver stepped out of the truck and announced his unprecedented find.

Dave listened poker-faced. When Tom had done, he breathed out a sort of sigh.

‘It’s the end,’ he said.

‘You’re a queer coot. Everyone else says it’s the beginning.’

‘You too?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I do too. We like water, don’t we?’

‘Sure we like it,’ Dave said. ‘But do we like strangers blowing in and sending the word round they got special powers to change the place?’

‘He never said that. We wouldn’t know he was a diviner if the Law hadn’t dragged it out of him while he was sick.’

‘He’s a fake,’ Dave said.

‘I don’t think he is,’ said Tom. ‘Or if he is, he doesn’t know it.’

‘What’s he like? Big talker?’

‘Not a bit of it. Quiet. But not,’ Tom added after a moment, ‘not still. Know what I mean?’

‘Sounds like Kes.’

‘You’re right,’ Tom said. ‘Funny. Hadn’t thought of it.’

‘Kes in favour of him?’

‘No. He’s the only one.’

‘It’s the end,’ Dave said again.

‘You want us all to go native,’ Tom said. ‘That’s what you’ve got against him. Just enough food and water to keep us alive and no distractions. Dave Speed’s Utopia.’

‘And what’s wrong with it?’ Dave demanded. ‘I know what I’m talking about. All the years I spent when I was the town drunk, wanting to be a tree.’

‘Seems to me you’ve got there.’

‘So now I want to be a stone. And I’ll get there too.’

‘Won’t we all?’ Tom said. ‘It’s death you mean.’

‘Maybe,’ said Dave. ‘Well, you can’t get much quieter than that.’

He swung his legs to the floor and stood up. ‘Better go and see young Jack. Be back in the morning.’

‘Good to see you again,’ Tom said, meaning it. ‘I’ll tell Mary to have some breakfast for you.’

‘I can see Jack’s going to bash my ear about this divining.’

‘Sure to. It’s the talk of the town. And you might come round.’

‘I might,’ said Dave, standing there with his hands in his pockets, and his one good eye, of a light clear grey, on Tom. ‘There’s no getting away from it, the idea of water is pretty strong. You and me can remember when that pub veranda was covered all round with passion-vines, and bloody good it was, too, to sit out there at this time of day, with a schooner, in the cool. And what the Law remembers I wouldn’t like to ask him, because I’d never get away if he started to tell. But the place is better now than it ever was then. We’ve got to the bare bones of the country, and I reckon we’re getting to the bones of ourselves. If the water comes, it’ll be when we’ve stopped needing it. We’re coming true, mate.’

‘You’re a blackfellow,’ Tom said; ‘or one of these desert saints.’

‘I’m a drongo,’ said Dave. ‘I’m a kid. I don’t know anything. They say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Well, when I was in the grass I liked the look of the desert. And now I’m in the desert I like it even better.’

‘And not a flower around,’ said Tom. ‘Not a roo, not a cocky, not a bee.’

‘The human race is the toughest thing going,’ Dave said. ‘And the greediest, and the dumbest. Maybe I don’t understand this joker. But we wouldn’t want an emperor of Tourmaline.’

He stooped as he spoke, picking up his bag from the floor, and went out with a wooden face to rouse Jimmy Bogada.

That night, at the mine, in the small yellow circle of a hurricane lantern islanded in the obscurity of Jack’s tall room, Dave put forward his views once again; to the annoyance of his son, and the polite disbelief of Rock, their visitor. He was a hopeless case, Jack suggested; a born pessimist, a true old-timer who wanted to keep even the worst things exactly as he was used to knowing them. And anyway, did he think Tourmaline had always been like this? He was raving, said Jack.

He knew what he was talking about, said Dave. He had lived a bit longer than either of them, as they bloody well knew, and he didn’t need any young fella of twenty-five to straighten his ideas out for him. The trouble with Tourmaline was that too many people listened to the Law, whose memory wasn’t worth
that
much (snapping, naturally, his fingers) nowadays, and who had always been given to queer notions, as anyone of Dave’s age could confirm.

Rock said quietly that he thought the Law, for all his faults, had a fair recollection of things as they had been; but that was not the argument. The point was whether they wanted water or not; and could there be any doubt that they did? In which case the diviner, if anyone, was the man to find it.

Dave repeated his arguments, in a louder voice, and with a new and (as it were) religious conviction. He seemed to preach complete passivity to the drought, to the desert, to the sun. This view Jack rejected with scorn. Dave then demanded to know where the diviner lived, and said he would set out instantly to interview him and make a reliable assessment of the man. But he was talked out of this, on the grounds of the darkness outside and the many abandoned shafts between the mine and the diviner’s hut. At last Rock went home, and father and son went to bed, still arguing. And as things happened, Dave had lost interest by the time he woke in the morning. So he did not meet the diviner, and was not able to give us his reliable and informed opinion of that most controversial figure in Tourmaline’s history.

At the same time as this debate was going on, Tom and Mary were sitting in their kitchen, where they had a habit of passing the evenings, when Deborah suddenly appeared in the doorway, panting, and looking wild.

Mary got up and went to her, without a word. She put her arms about her. And the tall girl bent her head to Mary’s soft neck and wept a little.

‘I hate him,’ she announced, when this was over.

Mary patted her shoulder, murmuring something.

‘Come home, Deb,’ Tom said. He pulled up a chair for her at the kitchen table, to which Mary led her. And they sat down together, the three of them, and looked at each other, their chins on their hands.

‘There’s no need for you to stay with him,’ Mary said, after a time.

‘No,’ said Deborah. ‘I won’t. I won’t. I think he hates me.’

‘He’s got a bitter tongue,’ Tom said. ‘But he doesn’t mean all he says, maybe.’

‘He’s cruel to me,’ she raged, still reliving whatever quarrel it was that had driven her out of the hotel. ‘He’s so insulting. And he hates Michael. He says I love Michael. He must be mad.’

Perfectly mild in the contemplation of her fury, Tom asked whether she would stay the night.

‘I’ll stay for always,’ she swore.

‘You know you won’t. You’ll go back to him in the morning.’

‘No, Pa! Not ever.’ She appealed to Mary. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mary said. ‘You’re always changing your mind about him.’

‘He’s always changing,’ she said. ‘Not me. Sometimes he’s so—— Sometimes I love him, I do really. And then he gets like he is tonight. He wants to own me, like a dog. The way he owns poor Byrnie. I can’t stay with him.’

‘And you want to own him, too,’ Tom pointed out. ‘And he won’t stand for that. The trouble is, you’re both in love. It’s not comfortable.’

She lifted her dark hand to her forehead, and sat staring at the tabletop, quite wretched.

‘Will you go to bed now?’ Mary asked, soothingly.

‘I’m so tired,’ Deborah said. ‘He makes me so tired.’ And she did look it, with her neck wearily bent, and the lamplight on the crests of the waves in her brown hair.

‘I’ll never go back,’ she promised again. But Tom was right to look at Mary with a faint smile. Because she was gone in the morning, she was in the hotel again, moodily cooking breakfast for her man; with one of those flourbag handkerchiefs she sometimes dabbed at her scowling brow.

So now I come to what may be the most important of the events I did not actually see; and again I must imagine and invent, I must place in a framework the bare narratives given me by Byrne and the diviner.

The diviner had told me at the church that he would turn to prospecting before long, that he would work in with Byrne or Jack Speed; but I had not paid much attention. I thought that water was his first object. After that, of course, I assumed, with all the others, that the whole town would return to the gold, and that everyone, the diviner included, would grow rich. But he thought otherwise. He meant, as it turned out, to grow, or to make us, rich first.

And one day, with this in mind, he called for Byrne and suggested that they walk out to Byrne’s claim; a paltry affair on a hillock four miles from Tourmaline. I saw them go, glancing out of my door by chance. The diviner carried his rod in one swinging hand. Byrne trailed behind him with a waterbag, looking very much like old Jimmy Bogada.

They walked for a little over an hour through the hard red stony desert (it is a desert now, I may call it that) with Byrne’s hillock like a mountain in front of them, visible all the way, rising out of a flatness so absolute that one can see the curve of the world at the horizons. And when they got there, sweating rather heavily even in that bone-dry air, the diviner was ill again, racked with one of his recurring headaches. So he wet his hair from the waterbag and lay down in the shade of a small open cave where Byrne kept his tools; for he camped there occasionally. And Byrne occupied himself in the meantime by knapping and dollying what he picked out as a ‘kindly stone’.