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‘A blackbutt,’ she called desperately and deceitfully, for there was not a blackbutt in sight, ‘now that could be a sign of nickel.’ Before he could comment she was hurrying into the scrub.

She heard the water splash as he dived in, and pretended deep intrigue in something in the ground.

‘It’s fine,’ he called out. ‘Change your mind, Brown.’

‘Next time,’ she answered, finding a necessity to peer further and closer to the ground. She wondered how long he would swim.

She stayed there until she felt that to stay there any longer would invite a comment. She straightened slowly and turned round.

He was out and dressed up to his waist. He had very big, very brown shoulders, she saw. He had draped his towel over the jeep bonnet to dry, and now he strolled across to her.

‘What school did you go to, Brown?’ he asked.

For an hysterical moment Georgina wondered what would happen if she answered: ‘St Hilda’s.’

‘I ... well, mostly I had correspondence lessons,’ she evaded.

‘I gathered so.’ His tone was dry. ‘Like the nickel you were pretending to look for, there are signs.’

‘Signs of what, sir?’

Forget it,’ he said brusquely. ‘I mean forget it now. But later on I think we’ll have to do something about you, Brown.’

‘Something, sir?
^?
Uneasiness gripped her.

‘Did you bring your magnet with you?’ He ignored her question. Then look for some outcrops and see if you can feel a pull. Watch for the light brown silica, it’s a possible trap.’

‘I know all that.’ Georgina said it indignantly.

‘Well, the way you were behaving while I took my swim would have fooled me,’ he said acidly, ‘you had the magnet the wrong way round. Anyway, we’ll forget it all now and eat instead—that dip made me hungry. Get a fire going.’

‘Yes, sir.’ This at least was something she could do, and after she had gathered tinder and lit it, added some telling chunks of wood and had the satisfaction of seeing a good fire catch on, she said happily, happy that she had succeeded at least with this: ‘I should have thought you would have been a flask man, Mr Roper, I shouldn’t have thought you would waste your time on a fire.’

‘Wasted?’ he said, and he inhaled a deep breath. Georgina did, too, and took in that unforgettable tang of smouldering bark, redolent wood and herby twigs.

He tossed her a bag of flour. ‘Can you make a damper?’

‘Of course.’

He watched her do it. ‘Actually,’ he told her, ‘you should use ash for rising, but you seem to know what you’re about. In fact, Brown, you have quite the light touch, the kind of touch you mostly see in female cooks.’ He grinned, and Georgina supposed she had better grin back. She hoped the grin did not look as sickly as she felt, but the damper was a success.

They separated after lunch, both with their magnets and their markers.

Georgina found an intrusive and was examining it with absorption when she heard him shout.

‘Over here, Brown, I have a little job for you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It was some time before Georgina met Roper. In the emptiness of the desert the voice seemed to lose direction, and he had to call twice. She wondered what he wanted; he had not sounded excited, as a find would make you excited.

She reached him at last. Perhaps he had noticed some semi-precious stuff like topaz or jasper, of no great value but of interest, and he wanted to show her.

But the mighty Roper did not want to show anything like that.

‘Look,’ he said, and Georgina looked. Her stomach heaved.

There was a waterhole with a carcase half in it, half out. ‘The poor beast,’ said Roper, ‘must have got bogged there in the mud following the Wet.’

‘Y-yes,’ gulped Georgina.

‘It’s a hazard,’ Roper said. ‘What water will still remain in the hole when the Dry finally comes will be badly polluted. A human life could be lost.’

Something more was coming; Georgina sensed it, and did not like what she sensed.

‘But no one,’ she said faintly, ‘would drink such water.’

‘Ah,’ he came back, and with it he shot out an accusing finger, ‘I expected that. But we don’t do things that way, Brown, not at Roper’s. You may have at Windmill Junction, I don’t know.’

‘At Windmill there were no beasts—I mean no bogged beasts,’ she defended.

‘Then good for you, for as you see there are here.’

‘No one would drink from it,’ Georgina insisted.

‘If they were parched?’ His voice probed.

‘These days everyone knows the law of survival.’ Georgina knew she was babbling but she knew, too, that she had to. She had to stop—or at least defer—something that seemed very likely to happen, and happen to her.

‘You always carry a sheet of plastic,’ she cried, and it was very like a cry for help.

‘Go on,’ he advised.

‘You dig in the soil, and you ... Oh, everyone knows.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘even you. But I still think a pure pool of water would be more satisfactory.’

‘Of course it would be if you needed it, but you wouldn’t need it here. You could go to the anabranch of the river.’

‘In a fever for water you could miss the river. Indeed, it has been done. Anyway in the Dry the anabranch could be reduced to a few feet, or it might not even be there at all. Only a pool of water could stand between you and death, only it still would be death, a worse death if it’s left like this. So, Brown, we do what human decency demands. We remove the danger. Attend to this carcase at once.’ His face was grim.

‘Me?’ she asked faintly.

‘I’m not looking at anyone else.'

‘W-what do you want done with it?’

‘Well, I can tell you I don’t want it stuffed for dinner.' Again Georgina’s stomach heaved.

‘No, I want it removed and buried.’

‘I have no spade,’ she pointed out.

‘You can bury it in a cleft and place some shrubs and roots on top. Now get to it, man.’

‘It’s very large,’ Georgina said faintly.

'‘But not much weight any more,’ Roper replied cheerfully.

Georgina swallowed. ‘Can I come back later? With precision work like mine I have to preserve my hands. I’d need to wear gloves.'

‘I have gloves,’ he offered.

‘They’d be too large.’

‘You can tie them on with some of the marker ribbons if you like, but what
I
would like is some action, Brown. While you’re considering it you could have got it done. Now, get to it.'

‘Yes,’ Georgina said.

She took a step forward. If only, she thought miserably, the poor beast had bogged himself some months before he had. It wouldn’t have been so bad just handling bones; bad enough, but—but this!

Another step. Another revulsion.

Another step ... then a heave she simply could not stop. She ran into the bush, and there she stood until the attack was over. She would try again, she told herself. There simply couldn’t be anything left inside her.

She went wretchedly back until she reached the water-hole, then she stopped. It was empty.

‘Yes, I’ve done it.’ Roper came and stood beside her. ‘If anyone poisons himself where I’ve put it, then he deserves his bad luck.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘It wasn’t a pleasant job, and I don’t blame you for throwing up, but good lord, boy, you have to think of others. Keep that in mind next time.’

Next time! Georgina vowed she would be away from this place by then.

‘We’ll get back now. I could do with a hot scour after that and then a long, strong tot of rum. How about you?’

‘I think I'll stay at home, sir.’

‘I rather think so, too. You haven’t done so well today, have you, so why should I waste a rum on you or your cold? Or is it nausea now? Are you prone to illness?’ He looked hard at her. ‘Even if you are, you can still drive back, Brown. I’ll sit behind, I don’t want to start you heaving again with any odour I have accumulated.’

‘No, sir,’ she said tonelessly.

They did not speak on the return journey. Several times Roper indicated the direction, but that was all.

When they got to the hut and Georgina climbed out of the jeep and Roper took her place, Roper asked: ‘Brown, just why did you come out here?’

‘To—to Roper’s?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Brown.’

‘I answered your advertisement.’

‘Yes, but why?’ he insisted.

‘I knew I’d like it—I liked where I was, so I knew I would like this place more.’

‘And now?’ Roper asked.

‘Now I still do, sir. I mean—Well, we can’t all be the same, sir.’

‘I agree. But you know, Brown, I have a feeling that you’re a great deal different from me.’

‘You mean because I get nauseated?’

‘That—among other things,’ he said enigmatically.

‘I’m sorry, sir.'

‘Well, we’ll see about it later, I think.’ Roper was at the controls now and he drove off so quickly that Georgina was left standing there.

But not for long. Going into the hut, she shut and then locked it, then she draped the windows with anything she could find, and filled the bath dish to the brim. She, too, intended to wash off the smell of the poor bogged beast. She emerged at last, well soaped, well scrubbed but still greenish, yet with her mind made up.

I can’t go through with it, she thought. I’ll leave tonight.

Georgina
packed the few things she would need at the Brydens’ until Craig could pick her up and take her south with him, then the rest she bundled neatly and placed behind the door to be called for later. She would have to travel to Craig’s old home by cycle, and it could be up to a hundred kilometres away, perhaps more, so there Was no question of any large luggage; there must be strictly only essentials, and they would have to fit on the back of the bike.

After packing and unpacking several exasperating times she made the bundle small enough to stow into a haversack to be shoved behind the seat, but even then it looked conspicuous, and all she could hope was that she met no one, or if she did, that in the dark—it must get dark sometime— they would not notice her.

Whom she meant by ‘they’, Georgina shrank from analysing.

Good manners obliged her to leave a note. Since there was no need to try to live a lie now, she simply penned, not typed it.

‘Dear Mr Roper, I am sorry if I have inconvenienced you, but I feel I cannot stay here any longer. If the things I have left behind are a hindrance, or if you need the hut, please put them outside. I will remove them at my first opportunity. Regarding the cycle, it will be returned in good order and refuelled. Thank you. G. Brown.’

She decided not to elaborate on that ‘G’. He could come to any conclusion he liked.

Everything was done at last, and she went and sat at the door. She wished the sun would stop balancing on the horizon. She always loved this poised moment before curtains, as it were, the rising climax to night, but this evening she could have pushed the sun over the edge in her impatience to be gone.

At last, in its usual over-abundance of colour it sank, and at once the blue of evening came in. She would allow a few minutes more to let the blue deepen, then she would push off.

She looked around her at the hut she had occupied so briefly. It was absurd, but already it had come to mean something to her. Her tenseness after her stepfather’s death had left her here, and she had begun to come to terms with herself. Until he, Roper, had come she had known a relaxation she had not known for weeks. Yes, she had been well on the way to loving this little brown strictly masculine room. She saw that she had left the jam jar of Salvation Jane still there, so she emptied it and put the jar away.

It was getting darker now. Ordinarily she would have lit the lamp by this and soaked up the comer shadows, but as she would be leaving quite soon it wasn’t worth while.

Yes—looking around again—she’d been happy here, that is until the arrival of the mighty Roper. It was his right to come, for after all he owned it, but just as he had spoiled Craig’s life and Elva’s life, he had spoiled this period of her life. Some people were like that, they spoiled things. Mighty Roper, the spoiler ! she said to the quickening dusk, and, deciding it was time now, she got up and went out, shut the door behind her on her stacked belongings, then crossed to where she always propped the cycle against the tank stand. She mounted and kicked off, but once the engine sparked she accelerated very cautiously. She only intended to ride until she saw the lights of the homestead, then she would push quietly past the property until she had left Roper’s safely behind, and could afford to mount again, make more noise and speed away.

When the glow of the colonial house greeted her, and she stopped the engine, got off and began to push, she found the going dismayingly hard. The ground was not suitable for the manual manipulation of a bike; the motorcycle proved far heavier than she had thought. Riding the thing had been uncomfortable, but pushing, she found, was torture. She could feel beads of sweat on her brow, and knew that if
he
were here he would suggest a rum, since it appeared after all that she did have that cold.

But for all the backbreaking work that the shoving entailed, Georgina pushed on, silently she trusted, peering blindly into the darkness ahead of her and yearning for the moment she could leap on the bike again and open up.

But the time did not come, for instead a man came—or at least a male figure rose up before her, just as she was parallel to the house.

‘Our young Mr Brown, no less,' called Larry Roper. ‘Now this is an unexpected pleasure. Mrs Willmott was very disappointed when I told her you’d declined the dinner invitation. “That boy needs feeding up,” she said, “I don’t think he bothers about himself.” I came outside just now, toying with the idea of going down and trying to persuade you to change your mind, and here you are of your own accord, and visiting us just as we asked.’ He smiled at Georgina.

‘Yes, sir,’ Georgina said. What else could she say? ‘I rode up in case ’ She stopped. She had been about to say: ‘I rode up in case you felt obliged to escort me back afterwards and I didn’t want you to have that trouble.’ But she remembered in time that she was George, and the Georges don’t get escorted home, only Georginas.