The Golden Soak Read online

  I laughed. ‘I can’t afford an assistant.’

  But he didn’t want to be paid. He just wanted to learn. ‘It wouldn’t cost you anything and I could organize things for you. There’s a friend of mine got an old Land-Rover he’d let me hire, and if you’re camping out …’ He gave a self-conscious little laugh, knowing he had let his enthusiasm run away with him. ‘I’ve never done a practical survey under the direction of somebody with your sort of experience.’

  ‘We’ll see how the analysis works out,’ I said. And after that we talked of mining generally. He’d worked on an IP survey at St Ives – ‘That’s the other side of the causeway that crosses the salt lake called Lefroy, south of Kambalda.’ He had done a geomagnetic on a prospect near Mt Yindarlgooda to the east of Kalgoorlie, another in the Laverton area. He talked of microprobe analyses and how they indicated the cobalt content of pentlandite and the nickel content of pyrrhotite. This was laboratory stuff, all very technical, and soon we were deep in the nature and origins of sulphides and ultrabasics. There was a little breeze out there on the verandah and we stayed there talking until his mother called us in for coffee and home-made cakes.

  I went to bed almost immediately afterwards, but the room seemed airless and I didn’t get to sleep for a long time. I was woken about midnight by the slam of the flyscreen door, the murmur of voices. They rose and fell, half inaudible; then suddenly Culpin’s voice loud and slurred with drink: ‘You say that again, boy …’

  Silence and the hot breeze rattling at the pale square of the window. Then the hoarse voice started again, wheedling at first, then rising quickly in anger: ‘I work my guts out, risking my neck to give you things I never had, and you throw it in my face. You silly little fool, you don’t know what life’s about. Now, come on –’ There was the sound of a scuffle, followed by a blow and the crash of something falling.

  I was out of bed then, but though I moved fast, Edith Culpin was ahead of me, the parlour door open and her figure framed in the light of a torch. Beyond her, I could see the tumbled bedclothes on the couch and Culpin standing over his son, his big hands gripping his shoulders, shaking him. A small table lay on its side, a china vase in pieces on the floor. And Kennie, his lip cut and blood oozing, speaking in a whisper.

  Edith Culpin screamed at her husband, and he turned and stared at her, his bull of a head thrust forward. ‘Go back to bed, woman.’ His voice, still heavy and slurred, had a hard core of authority in it, and when she flew at him, he flung her back. She fell on to the couch, a breast flopping white above the pink nightdress, her hair dishevelled, sudden hate flaring in her eyes.

  And then he saw me. ‘Thought to keep it to yourself, did you?’ He was swaying, his face glistening with sweat, the small eyes greedy. He’d had a lot to drink. ‘Think I don’t know the price of antimony?’ He let go of Kennie and took a step towards me, his lips pursed in a little smile. ‘You come between me and my son, an’ I’ll break your neck for you.’ His eyes were mean now, anger feeding on the alcohol in him. He was suddenly dangerous. I stood there in the doorway bracing myself to meet him.

  Kennie was looking at me, the cut lip swelling and his eyes scared. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he mumbled.

  I started to say something and then I turned away and went back to my room. I knew it was no good. He was afraid of his father and there was nothing I could do to stop him talking. No point now, anyway.

  I heard Edith Culpin go back to bed, the sound of her crying audible through the partition. Shortly afterwards her husband’s footsteps passed my door. No words between them, only the sound of his movements as he undressed and got into bed beside her. Then silence, the house gripped in stillness. Even the breeze outside seemed to have died.

  The sun was up when I woke, shining hot on my face, and the kettle whistled in the kitchen, footsteps padding in the passage outside my door. Culpin was halfway through his breakfast when I went into the kitchen. Small and bloodshot, his eyes glanced at me quickly, then back to his bacon and eggs. He ate with concentration, and his wife at the stove didn’t look at me, didn’t speak. She was clammed up tight as though desperately trying to keep a hold on her emotions. There was no sign of Kennie.

  The smell of coffee, and the bacon frying, were the only good things about the kitchen that morning and I ate in a silence that was tense with unspoken words. Edith Culpin was in her dressing gown, a shapeless cotton print, and sitting there, drinking her coffee, her large greenish eyes fixed on her husband, she suddenly banged her cup down. ‘Kennie’s gone.’ Her voice trembled.

  He finished his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Time that boy grew up.’ And then he looked at her. ‘If you hadn’t dropped your second, you wouldn’t have spoilt him the way you have.’

  They stared at each other a moment, hostile and without understanding. Then Edith Culpin began to cry, the tears dripping from her tired eyes, soundless.

  We left for the Palace almost immediately, Culpin driving in silence. After he had parked the ute, he didn’t get out, but turned to me and said, ‘I bin thinking, about this Golden Soak. You gonna mention it to Ferdie?’

  ‘No point till I know what the analysis is.’

  ‘But if it’s good and the mine comes up for sale –’ There was a crafty, eager look in his bloodshot eyes. ‘I remember the old Comet. That was a de Bernalese mine, one of the few good ones he ever had. Up the track from Marble Bar, just beyond Chinaman’s Pool. I was a youngster at the time. Went up there to make my fortune and ended up serving behind the bar at the Ironclad.’ He was smiling to himself, the eagerness still there so that for a moment he looked a younger man. ‘That’s how I know about de Bernales and his Commonwealth Finance.’ He gripped my arm, suddenly urgent. ‘My cut of the Blackridge deal will be through in a week or two, and this Golden Soak mine’s unsafe, Kennie says. I always wanted to go back to the Pilbara an’ if we could get it cheap –’ He left it at that, apparently content that he’d made his position clear. ‘You think about it, eh?’ And he climbed out and went into the hotel.

  Ten minutes later we were all four of us at the airfield. And the last thing Kadek said to me before he boarded the plane was, ‘You put half of that two thousand in Lone Minerals. But don’t wait. Do it today.’ He was relaxed, almost jaunty. ‘I’ll tell you when to sell. And keep in touch.’ He handed me a card. ‘There’s my phone number. Ring me in Perth if there’s anything urgent. Otherwise a weekly report by letter.’

  We drove back by a different route, past a big caravan park, washing listless on the line and the heat already heavy. ‘I’ll be in the Pal midday,’ Culpin said as he dropped me off at Petersen Geophysics. ‘We can talk about it then over a beer.’ The hide of the man was almost unbelievable.

  Petersen was already in his office. ‘Is all right, your analysis.’ He gave me a toothy grin and a heavy slap on the back. ‘Gold 5¾ ounces average. Is about what I t’ink. The antimony is not so good, more variable – 2.1 per cent, 3.4, and on the third sample 0.2 per cent. Okay?’ He handed me the analyst’s typed report, together with my samples, and I paid him his fee from the wad of notes Kadek had given me. ‘Now you go t’ink about what you do next, eh?’ He seemed genuinely pleased that the results were good. ‘Also, I haf a letter for you – is delivered by Chris’s son Kennie this morning.’

  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 cl
ear 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.