Hammond Innes - Golden Soak

The dust cleared and we were into country that was like a miniature Arizona, all small red buttes and dry as a desert. I was driving fast on gravel again and wondering how Westrop had known about me. According to Andie, he’d not only known my name, but what I did. And he had asked a lot of questions: Why had a mining consultant been called in? Was Golden Soak for sale and had I inspected it yet? Had anybody been down there since the disaster? ‘What he was after I have no idea, but he was after something, that’s for sure, and I told Ed to watch it when he came in for the stores yesterday. He’d never heard of Westrop. Wolli he’d known all his life, of course.’

And yet, when Janet had asked her father who the men were, he hadn’t answered her. I was remembering the look on his face as he’d stood there at the entrance to the adit, the axe gripped in his hands. Another truck thundered by, stones clattering on the windscreen and dust seeping in even though I’d closed the window. Christ! it was hot. I’d left the red butte country now and after I’d crossed the dry bed of the Shaw River, I was into a world of small hills like tumuli, the road dipping and rising endlessly, the rattle of the Holden on the ridged surface permeating my whole-body.

To hell with Ed Garrety, I thought. Jarra Jarra was behind me now and no concern of mine. The road stretching ahead led to Nullagine and the prospect of something that might be more rewarding. But thinking of McIlroy, dreaming of his Monster in the heat, my mind came back inevitably to Golden Soak and what Andie had told me of the disaster that had happened there in 1939. I had been questioning him about the disappearance of Big Bill Garrety’s partner, but all he had been able to tell me was what I already knew, that the closing of the bank’s doors had coincided with the collapse of a speculative boom in West Australian mining shares and that McIlroy was supposed to have been speculating with money deposited by the bank’s customers. It was all hearsay, of course, and the people who really knew about it were the people who’d got their fingers burnt, and they weren’t the ones to gossip. But he was sure about the disaster. Big Bill Garrety had hired a bunch of out-of-work miners to drive a crosscut into a badly faulted area of high grade ore. ‘No doot the man was desperate but it was bluidy murder from what they tell me.’ Several men had been killed, a lot more injured. ‘I dinna ken how many.’ And he didn’t know whether the mine had been flooded then or later. But he was quite certain that the disaster had happened after the crash. ‘Sure it had been closed, but when a man’s that desperate for money — ‘ He had shrugged. ‘Ed’s a fool not to sell. I told him so. That mine’s got a jinx on it.’

I was trying to remember what exactly the Journal had said about the cave-in, but the sweat was caking salt on my forehead, the glare blinding and I found it difficult to concentrate, heat exhaustion building up and the rush of air through the open window oven-hot. Everywhere along that road there were anthills so big they looked like primitive adobe dwellings. And the hills throbbing in the heat, my eyes tired. Soon all I could think of was the dryness in my mouth, my need of a cold beer. And then at last we were on tarmac, coming down into Nullagine, and my companion woke.

It wasn’t much of a place, a huddle of houses roasting on the slope of a hill and the verandahed hotel at the corner where the road turned to the right. I stopped by the petrol pump. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ I asked him as I got stiffly out. But he shook his head, rubbing his eyes and stretching. ‘No, I got to get on.’ He moved over into the driving seat, watching me till I’d got my case out of the boot, and then, with a nod and a slight lift of the hand, he drove on.

I went into the bar and it was comfortingly dark after the glare outside. I hesitated a moment, accustoming my eyes to the change of light. There were only three men there, two locals and an aborigine. They turned their heads to stare at me, their movements economical of effort and no word spoken. A youngster appeared behind the bar counter that ran the length of the room. He was fair-haired and had an English accent. I ordered a beer and drank it fast, feeling dehydrated, dirty, sweaty, utterly drained. ‘Anywhere I can get a wash?’ I asked him.

‘The wash-house is across the road.’

I turned and saw a small building like a dilapidated public lavatory beyond the sun-glare of the tarmac. I ordered another beer and drank it slowly, brushing away the flies and taking stock of the aborigine. He wore a blue shirt and blue jeans and his wide-nostrilled features were black as jet under the broad-brimmed hat. ‘Your name Wolli, by any chance?’ I asked him.

He stared at me, the whites of his eyes yellow, the pupils dark brown, his face expressionless.

‘ Yuh give him a beer, mate, an’ he’ll talk,’ one of the locals said, a small man with a ferrety face and narrow eyes. ‘But his name ain’t Wolli. It’s Macpherson. That right, innit?’

‘Arrrhh.’ The big lips spread in a tentative grin.

‘You know where Wolli is, Mac?’

The black shook his head vaguely, his eyes on me, hopeful of that beer.

‘Yuh want Wolli,’ the little man said to me, ‘yuh better ask Prophecy. She’s in there playing cards.’ He nodded to the open hatch at the end of the bar. ‘She got nothing to do all day now but play cards an’ get drunk.’

Through the hatch I could see there was a sort of saloon bar with rickety tables and a dart board. The drivers of the two trucks I’d seen parked at the side of the hotel were sitting there, wolfing down steak and chips, and at another table was a big gipsy-looking woman with greying hair and a hard, tough, lively face lined with wrinkles. She was alone, drinking whisky and playing patience, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

‘If a fly craps, Prophecy knows about it. She knows everything goes on here.’ The little man leaned towards the hatch. ‘Don’t yuh, Prophecy?’

‘Yuh shut yer bleedin’ face, Alfie.’ She moved a card, slowly and with deliberation, without looking up. After that there was silence as though the expenditure of that amount of energy was enough for the day.

I finished my beer and went across the road to the wash-house. The men’s section had a wash-basin, lavatory and shower. Flies crawled on the bare concrete. But it was quite clean, and though the water from the tank on the roof was almost too hot to stand under, I felt a lot fresher when I returned to the hotel. The woman called Prophecy was still sitting with the cards laid out and the whisky beside her. ‘Mind if I join you?’ I asked.

‘Please yerself.’ The beady eyes in the sun-wrinkled face watched me curiously as I pulled up a chair and sat down facing her. ‘Fresh out from the Old Country, arntyuh?’ And when I nodded, she said, ‘Thought so. And you’re looking for Wolli — yuh a mining man?’ ‘Yes.’

She turned up a red ten, placed it slowly on the jack of spades and moved across four cards headed by the nine of clubs. ‘Yuh brought me luck that time. Yuh reckon you’re a lucky man?’

‘I hadn’t noticed it,’ I said.

She looked at me sharply. ‘Golden Soak never had no luck — not since I come to live in this dump.’ I stared at her and she gave her cackling laugh. ‘Yuh like me to tell yuh fortune?’ The cackling ended in a smoker’s cough. ‘No, you wouldn’t would yuh?’ They don’t call me Prophecy for nothin’. I might be too right, eh?’ Her eyes watched me, sharp as a bird’s. ‘Yuh don’t want Wolli. Wolli’s a bum. It’s that gin sister of his you want. She got second sight where gold’s concerned.’ And then she was telling me how this aborigine girl had found gold on a claim she’d pegged over towards Bamboo Springs. ‘Set me up for life, she did. Better’n a dowser any day. Yuh go and see Little Brighteyes. Yuh won’t get any sense out of Wolli.’