The Golden Soak Read online

  She gave us beer, cold from the icebox, and Prophecy talked to her in her own tongue, which was deep from the throat. Abruptly the happiness vanished from her face and her eyes became wary as she stole furtive glances in my direction. The conversation between the two of them went on for a long time. In the end Prophecy turned to me and said, ‘You know she was born at Jarra Jarra? Wolli, too. They were both of them born there and worked on the station. Wolli left, of course, but she stayed on.’ She paused – as though that had some special significance. ‘Ed’s wife had gone by then, see.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Nobody told you?’ Her quick brown eyes gleamed. ‘No, ’course not. Ed wouldn’t want to be reminded of that. He married just after the war began – had to, they say – and then, when he came home on embarkation leave, there was this feller from the Ivanhoe station. He took a stock whip to him and rode him off the place. Should have larruped her instead, if you ask me.’

  ‘When was Janet born then?’

  ‘After the war. After Ed came back. Big Bill Garrety was still alive, see, and she was scared of him by all accounts. But then this fella Harrison turns up again – caught a packet in Normandy ’bout the same time Nobby got his – and now they’re living down in Perth and Ed’s never been quite the same since.’

  So Janet had hardly known her mother and, since Henry’s death, she and her father had been on their own. I looked at the black woman, seeing the nervous flicker of her eyes. It wasn’t easy to guess her age, but I thought she was still only in her middle thirties. ‘What’s her brother do for a living?’ I asked.

  ‘Nuthin’. I told you, Wolli’s a bum.’

  What does he do for money then?’

  ‘That’s a question, that is.’ She looked at the black woman. ‘Yuh gonner tell Mr Falls what Wolli does for money?’

  The eyes rolled in the black face. ‘No get’im money now. All finished.’

  Prophecy looked at me over her beer. ‘Ed pensioned him off. But they’re so broke down at Jarra Jarra now that the source has dried up.’ She was smiling, enjoying the sight of me working it out. It all added up and I was thinking of the terrible loneliness of a man in the outback with his wife gone, the problem he’d had to face with a young daughter growing up. It never occurred to me that the gipsy woman had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, which was a pity, because if I’d asked the right questions there on that verandah, I might have come at the truth. But probably not. Blackmail isn’t something you admit to a stranger and the woman knew enough about the white man’s laws to keep her mouth shut. Instead I let it go at that, asking her about her father and whether it was true he’d been with McIlroy on that expedition into the interior.

  ‘Me no remember.’ And when I pressed her, she laughed. ‘Me liddle small girl, only baby.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been more than four or five then,’ Prophecy said.

  ‘But she must have heard whether her father was with McIlroy.’

  ‘I thought it was Golden Soak you were interested in.’ She was staring at me curiously.

  ‘Well, that too,’ I said. ‘Does she know anything about the mine – anything I don’t know already?’

  ‘Her father worked there.’

  ‘As a miner?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Ask her about the cave-in. Does she know when it happened?’

  She knew all the details, but not the date. ‘Long time now. Me liddle girl.’ Five men had lost their lives – three whites and two blacks. Seven others had been injured. It had occurred late in the afternoon, during the wet after heavy rains. They were in a drift at the bad end of the mine, men still clearing fallen rock from the morning’s blasting and a team drilling into the face, which was badly faulted and running with water. Suddenly the flow of water had increased. Rock had begun to fall from the roof, and then the whole face had crumbled, water pouring out in a great flood and the miners running before it down the drift to the main gallery and the shaft. Her father had been one of the first up the ladders.

  All this Prophecy got out of her in her own tongue. The mine had been closed again after that and it had remained closed ever since. ‘And what happened to her father?’

  ‘He was given a job on the station.’

  ‘And the other miners – were they given jobs, too?’

  But the woman either didn’t know or wouldn’t say.

  ‘Ask her when it was her father joined up with McIlroy.’ That nervous flicker of her eyes again. She shook her head. ‘He was with McIlroy, wasn’t he?’ But she shied away from that, offering us more beer, turning quickly to the big fridge standing pale in the cavern of the bedroom. ‘When did he die? He is dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he’s dead,’ Prophecy said. ‘Died about two years after Nobby and I came here. But he never talked, not about McIlroy.’

  The black woman had come back and I turned and faced her. ‘Your brother was at the mine last night. What was he looking for?’

  She shook her head, her whole body suddenly very tense as though poised for flight.

  ‘Was he looking for gold?’

  Again that slight shake of the head. ‘Him no find. Not stop there find’im gold.’

  ‘Are you sure it was gold they were looking for?’

  God! I was so near to it then, her eyes rolling and that deep husky voice of hers saying, ‘Wolli not know nuthin’. You talk’im Phil. Mebbe Phil tell’im. Not Wolli.’

  Prophecy cackled. ‘Yuh want me to translate for yuh? Wot she’s saying is Wolli’d beat the hell out of her if she gave you info for free. Yuh go an’ see Wolli. Cross his palm with a few dollars an’ mebbe yuh find out whatever it is yuh’re after.’

  But I was looking at the black woman. ‘Who’s Phil?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head, the eyes wide and scared-looking.

  ‘It’s a white man, isn’t it – name of Westrop?’ The eyes told me I was right and I turned to Prophecy. ‘Do you know Phil Westrop?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Where will I find him?’

  ‘Grafton Downs.’

  ‘How far’s that?’

  ‘’Bout twenty miles.’ And she added, ‘Odds are he’ll be in the bar tonight. The Grafton Downs boys are in for beer most nights. Why?’

  ‘He and Wolli were down at the mine last night.’ I hesitated, looking at the black woman. But she had turned back to the fridge. I looked across at Prophecy. ‘You know everything that goes on here. Where was Wolli’s father when McIlroy died? Was he with him out there in the desert?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’ She was frowning. ‘Yuh’re not interested in Golden Soak, are yuh? It’s McIlroy’s Monster that’s brought yuh here.’ There was a harder note in her voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Ed’s a good bloke. As good as they come, even if he is a bit of a solitary. And that girl of his, Janet, she’s had a poor go of it one way and another. I thought you was having a dekko at that mine of his with a view to finding him a buyer.’ She heaved her bulk out of the canvas chair. ‘For that I was going to try and persuade Little Brighteyes to go along with yuh. But the Monster –’ She shook her head. ‘That’s a load of horseshit. If yuh believe that.… Well, I got other things to do.’ And she stepped down into the dust, calling to Brighteyes her thanks for the beer as she headed back to the Conglomerate.

  The black woman had come out of the bedroom, a can of beer in her hand. We were alone together on the verandah. ‘Where’s your brother?’ I asked her.

  She stared at me, her eyes wide so that I thought for a moment she hadn’t understood. Then her thick lips moved. ‘Wolli?’

  ‘Yes. Where is he?’

  She didn’t answer, but her eyes moved, evasive, uneasy. I pushed past her into the bedroom. He was sprawled on the big double bed, a thin spider of a man in ragged khaki shorts, his big horny feet with their splayed toes bare. He didn’t move, only his eyes, wide in the heavy black face, stari
ng at me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you,’ I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Liddle bit.’ His voice was thick and slow. There was a can of beer beside him, but he wasn’t drunk. His eyes were alert, the whites showing in the shaded gloom of the room. The brow ridges were very marked, the face heavier and coarser than his sisters, only the faintest similarity in the features.

  ‘You were at the Golden Soak mine last night – why?’

  He shook his head, but it was an evasion of the directness of my gaze rather than a denial.

  ‘What reason had you for breaking into the mine?’ I spoke slowly and distinctly, his sister hovering in the background.

  ‘Go longa Phil.’

  ‘Why?’

  Again the evasive shake of the head, the face impassive, the eyes shifty and his big hands hitching nervously at his shorts. ‘You speak’im Phil.’

  ‘All right, I will. But I’m speaking to you now. You told a prospector from Kalgoorlie your father was with McIlroy when he died.’

  He grunted and swung his legs off the bed, coming to his feet in one easy controlled movement. ‘Who you?’ And when I told him I was a mining consultant from England, he repeated, ‘You speak’im Phil.’

  And that’s all I could get out of him. He admitted his father had been with McIlroy at the end, but where they had been, what they had found or what McIlroy had told him before he died – to all these questions he just shook his head. It wasn’t that he was stupid or that he didn’t understand. He understood all right. At one point he turned to his sister and the two of them went at it so fast they were speaking on the intake of their breathing as well as the exhalation, both of them talking together, a guttural rolling sound. And when finally he turned to me and said, ‘Bad spirits all longa that mine,’ I thought he was referring to the miners who had been trapped there in the cave-in.

  He was scared, but whether it was really the ghosts of dead miners he was scared of or something else I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know enough about the aborigine mind, and when he repeated yet again – ‘you speak’im Phil,’ I thought it was more likely Westrop he was scared of. I was wrong there, of course. Westrop was tough, but he was a decent enough man at heart – just an ordinary, hard-drinking, hard-driving, mind-your-own-bloody-business Australian.

  He came into the bar that night in a singlet and shorts, a pair of flip-flop sandals on his feet, limping slightly, but with a swagger, his lean body very erect and reminding me vaguely of something, some picture perhaps. He was a very striking man, handsome even in a hard-bitten way. Prophecy wasn’t there. It was the English boy behind the bar who tipped me the wink when the truck drove up, half a dozen of the Grafton Downs men piling out of it and moving in on the bar with the determination of men for whom beer is the one solace in a world of torrid heat and dust.

  I was having a drink with the Shire Clerk and the man who now drove the grader on the Nullagine section of the Highway. The Clerk, a baldish man in a clean blue shirt who had come originally from Wittenoom, had given me a whole list of contacts, older men who might have known McIlroy back in ’38. Most of them were on outback stations and quite inaccessible to me without my own transport. ‘Why don’t you go down to Port Hedland then and see the Administrator?’ But Port Hedland was almost 200 miles away.

  I waited till Westrop had downed his first beer, watching him and trying to work out in my mind how I was going to handle it. He looked as tough as Andie had suggested, lean and fit, with a dour face and sandy hair bleached pale by the sun. I saw the English boy lean across the bar to speak to him and then he was looking directly at me, his eyes narrowed, his mouth a hard line below the beaked nose. One of his mates flipped a coin and he did the same, laughing without humour when he found himself odd man out. He went to the hatch to order another round, his left leg almost stiff as though the knee joint was locked. The Clerk’s hand was on my arm, some story about a station owner who’d corralled a bunch of pogies belonging to a man called Stansted. It was a long, involved story and I had to bend close to hear what he was saying. There was a good deal of noise in the room, about twenty people there, some of them women, their faces sweating in the harsh glare of the naked light bulbs. ‘What are pogies?’ I asked.

  ‘Calves that haven’t been branded.’ His voice was high against the hubbub. ‘Yuh keep’em starved of water for a few days an’ when yuh do give ’em a drink they’re so bloody grateful they stay put. Well, this fellow Stansted, he doesn’t bother with his own bunch, just goes in an’ rustles twice as many –’

  ‘Yuh Alec Falls?’

  I looked round to find Westrop standing at my elbow.

  ‘Kid behind the bar there says yuh want to speak to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and we moved away, each of us trying to size the other up. ‘You were at Golden Soak last night.’

  ‘What’s that to do with yuh?’

  ‘I was staying with the Garretys at Jarra Jarra.’

  He didn’t say anything, standing there with his beer in his hand, the sandy stubble on his chin catching the light and glistening with sweat.

  ‘That mine’s been closed for years.’

  ‘Okay, it’s been closed for years. So what’s it to do with yuh?’

  ‘I saw Wolli this afternoon.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘What did Wolli tell yuh?’

  ‘Nothing. Only that I’d better speak with you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your reason for going there.’

  ‘Did Ed Garrety send you?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m naturally interested –’

  ‘So you think I know something about that mine Garrety don’t?’ He gave a quick laugh, and with that laugh I was conscious of tension in him. ‘Well, mebbe I do, but I’m not telling a goddammed Pommie.’ He took a gulp at his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Yuh go back to Jarra Jarra and tell the old bugger next time I come I’ll be armed, an’ if he pulls a gun on me again.… Christ! I wasn’t ten years in the Army for nothing. Yuh tell him that.’

  ‘He owns the mine,’ I said. ‘You were trespassing and he’d every right …’

  ‘Okay, he owns it. But it won’t be long now and I can wait.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re broke, aren’t they? That’s what they tell me here, that it won’t be long before the mine, the station, the whole lot will be up for sale.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Is that why yuh’re here – to value the mine for them?’ He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Yuh bin down there?’

  I shook my head and he seemed relieved. ‘I’m not interested in gold,’ I said.

  ‘Then what are you interested in?’

  ‘Copper.’

  He looked at me as though he’d never heard of the stuff. ‘There’s no copper at Golden Soak.’ He said it quietly, a thin smile and his eyes cold. ‘What the hell are yuh after?’

  And when I told him it was the location of McIlroy’s Monster that had brought me to Nullagine, he burst out laughing. ‘Yuh must be joking.’ He turned to his mates. ‘Here, fellers. Here’s a chap says he’s come all the way out from the Old Country to find McIlroy’s Monster.’ They crowded round me, laughing, joking, asking questions, too happy in their drink to play it any way but the way he wanted it. ‘Yuh believe that one, yuh’ll believe anything.’

  That’s Wolli’s story.… Yep, trots it out pat soon as he’s short of the ready …’ And then an older man with no teeth and the face of a dried-up mummy: ‘Funny thing though, finding his truck like that, the rad empty, with no body, not even his skeleton.’

  ‘Well, wot d’yuh expect, out there between the Great Sandy and the Gibson?’

  ‘That’s right – it’d be covered by sand in no time.’

  ‘It’s gibber country.’

  ‘No, it ain’t. It’s sand – like it is all the way to the Alice.’

  ‘It’s gibber, I tell yuh. All red gravel.’r />
  ‘How d’yuh know? Yuh ain’t never been there.’

  ‘It’s wot they say.’

  ‘Who says – Wolli I s’pose?’

  ‘No, his father.’

  ‘Yuh weren’t around these parts when Wolli’s father was alive.’

  ‘It’s wot I heard,’ the fellow added lamely and they all laughed.

  ‘Funny thing,’ the little mummy-faced man said again, ‘but Wolli’s father never talked about it – never mentioned the Monster once as far as I know.’

  ‘Why should he, Lenny? I tell yuh, it’s just a load of crap dreamed up by that black bastard to get himself a few beers.’

  But the little man shook his head. ‘Oh no, it weren’t. I was in Kalgoorlie at the time an’ it was all in The Miner, ’bout how McIlroy heard of this mountain of copper from some abo who’d walked into the bank at Port Hedland asking for a loan in return for the location. McIlroy was a gambler, everybody knows that. Now wot was the feller’s name?’ He scratched his bullet head. ‘Buggered if I can remember it now. But he got his loan and when the bank went bust on the de Bernales shares … I remember now. Warrampi. That was the abo’s name. Well, then Pat McIlroy took off into the blue – his last big gamble – an’ that didn’t come off either. I remember the pitchers in the papers, too – one of him leaving Port Hedland. Another as he drove through Marble Bar an’ him standing in the back of his truck making speeches. Yuh’d’ve thought they’d’ve stoned him for losing their money like that. Instead, they lined the streets and cheered him.’