Hammond Innes: Golden Soak

I was thinking back now, tired and trying to convince myself it would be all right. It had seemed all right at the time, a way out. There’d even been a sort of inevitability about it. And at 14,000 miles’ remove Jarra Jarra had appeared a sort of oasis, a place where I could find myself again, a springboard from the security of which I could make the plunge into a new life. But now that it was only 60 miles away the prospect of it was quite different. It wasn’t only Janet who would be full of questions. There was her father, too. What would Ed Garrety think of a stranger arrived out of the blue, almost penniless and wanting a job? She had talked of drought and an iron ore company moving in on them, but with all that acreage and 3,000 head of cattle they were still rich enough to scare me.

I reached into my hip pocket, to the slender wad of notes, counting them by starlight. But I knew the score — one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. That’s all I had, all that was left after I had got myself to Naples, paid my passage out and all the incidentals. And naturally they had been expecting me to arrive by car. The letter I had found waiting for me when I got off the boat at Freemantle made that clear, and she’d given me detailed instructions — where to turn off the Great Northern Highway, how to find the start of the backtrack leading to the station. But instead of a car I’d wired her to meet me. How was I going to explain that? And no job, nothing to go back to?

The dingoes sounded again, but very far away. I dozed, my head fallen forward, and when I woke again it was to a different sound, a soft-toned bellow and the rumble of an ore train going north. The stars were paling now, the leaves of the eucalyptus tree under which I lay visible against the growing light of the sky. Something moved behind the patch of scrub to my right, a tall grey shadow. I watched, suddenly wide awake, my nerves tense. It was bending down, screened from my view, and then with three quick leaps, it was within yards of me, standing erect and balanced by its tail, its short front legs hanging limp, its head lifted, alert and listening, the muzzle twitching like a rabbit’s.

In the half light the kangaroo looked big as a man. Instinctively I scrambled to my feet. Its head turned in a flash. I had a glimpse of soft eyes, and then it was bounding away at a gallop. And all around me grey shadows were moving at speed, heads thrust forward to balance the powerful strokes of the back legs as they covered the ground in great leaps. One moment they were there, the whole bush around me erupting in lolloping forms, then they were gone. No sound. It was like a dream.

I sat down again and lit a cigarette, my back against the gum, watching the sky pale to eggshell green, the dawn coming fast. And as the light increased, the shapes of trees and scrub emerged from shadow to become hard outlines. All gums. Nothing I knew or recognized, the earth red like dried blood, everything cruel and harsh, baked in the oven of yesterday’s heat. I tried to recall the sound of her voice, familiarly English, yet oddly different — not harsh, not metallic like the men on the boat, but different all the same: ‘Come in the spring,’ she had said, driving to the station that morning. ‘It’s lovely then with the wild flowers out.’ And she’d gone on to talk about the country, speaking of it as something beautiful, something to be loved as well as feared.

There’d been Australians on the boat. But like the man from Batemans Bay I’d shared a cabin with, most of them were bound for Sydney. They didn’t know the West. Only Wade, who’d boarded the ship at Capetown, had ever been in the Pilbara. He’d worked with a construction gang on the iron ore railway, and the way he described it up here, he and the girl might have been talking about two different countries. I could hear the sound of his voice grating, see the fringe of gingery hair above the long face, the pile of beer cans in the cabin base. He’d hated it.

That had been the night before we’d docked, the Italian immi grants lining the rails, staring out across the heat-still sea, the moon’s path like spilled milk. I stood there with them for a time, all of us staring towards the future that lay veiled in the hot moon-haze. And when finally I had gone below, I had found the cabin packed with drunks, half awash with beer, and Wade perched on my bunk, his long legs dangling, sweat gleaming on his face, his hand trembling as he sucked at a cigarette. ‘You’re there, brother. Back in good old Aussie land. The Big Country.’ His cackling laugh, that grating voice — ‘So you’re headed for the Never Never, up into the Pilbara — the Iron Cauldron, Christ! You’ll fry. You’ll wish you’d never seen the blasted country.’ His drunken words merging with her clear vibrant voice. ‘Come in the spring. It’s lovely with the wild flowers out.’ And Kadek, long ago on that terrace in Spain, talking of the Golden Mile, envying me my degree: ‘If I’d had your education, I’d have been a millionaire by now.’ Dozing, I chased a wisp of molten gold through miles of desert blooms in a flat red waste, the only sound the rattle of the truck and Wade’s cackling laugh, his hatred of the Never Never.

I woke with a jerk, the fallen cigarette burning a hole in my old khaki trousers. I stubbed it out and got to my feet, moving down towards the track. Would she have set out in darkness for the sake of a cooler ride? There was no sound, just the stillness, and the light increasing all the time.

Feeling stiff and in need of exercise I walked down to the junction with the dirt road. The sky was already flaring in the east, the shape of Mt Whaleback showing black on the horizon. It did look rather like a whale, and above it hung a haze as though it had just vented. But it wasn’t moisture; it was iron ore dust, and as I stood there it began to redden with the rising sun. Something moved to my left and I turned my head. But it was already gone, a shadow, insubstantial.

The sun came up and I retired to the shade, a prey to the fear that something might have been discovered in the long weeks I had been travelling out here. The police might accept the evidence of their eyes, but the insurance assessors would almost certainly probe deeper before they agreed to payment, and they’d find no body, no trace of human remains. All through the voyage I had been able to push this thought to the back of my mind. But now that I was thrusting myself on people who knew who I was, I could no longer ignore it.

Everything I had done that night was clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by knowledge of the risk I was taking. In spite of all I had had to drink, I could remember every detail, and going over it again step by step, remembering the emptiness of the house, my own numbness, the appalling sense of finality as I had lit that candle, I was sure I hadn’t slipped up. It had all been so carefully planned — everything except the sudden decision to involve myself in the destruction of the house. Again and again my mind came back to that and to the absence of the human remains. Not even the fact that I had been allowed to enter Australia without any questions asked could dispel the nagging fear that in time they would catch up with me. Flies crawled with the sun, the smooth bark of the gum I was propped against hard under my shoulders.

About eight o’clock two vehicles passed along the dirt road, but from where I was sitting all I saw of them was a cloud of dust. After that nothing stirred as the heat built up and the sky turned from blue to a blinding white. I was trying to visualize Jarra Jarra recalling vaguely the girl’s young face, the things she had told me. But it was all blurred by time and nothing she had said had prepared me for the wild red desolation of this country, the sense of geological age I had felt on the long oven-lid drive north from Perth. If I hadn’t written to her I could have lost myself in the immensity of it, changed my name. There was Kadek, too. He’d been away, in Kalgoorlie they said, when I had visited his office in Perth, and I had left a note for him, giving Jarra Jarra as my address. If Rosa talked and they started making enquiries in Australia. … I closed my eyes against the blinding glare, hoping to God they wouldn’t think of that.