Swimming on Dry Land (6 page)

The women are marching across the scrub like a troop of sorry-arsed soldiers. It makes me sick, it really does. Georgie's out there; of course she is, but whether we find her or not is another question. When I first imagined this street, there were lamp posts down the centre, a green square in the middle, flags and bunting, the whole works. A cinema and dancehall were going to be where the service station is now. It's not a million miles from all that. Ok, it's just a street. The houses aren't as big, the patches of grass aren't as green as I would like, but it looks pretty good, considering.

I wave over at the women. They're still a fair way off – probably can't even see me. To do a search in this heat is no joke. These
Sheilas,
as they call them out here, are tough: elephant skinned, nothing gets through. At least it seems like that, until you get to know them.

Take the first search – we didn't think about going down the shafts for two days. It was Maddie – a good friend of Caroline's, Jake Brenton's wife – who figured out a system, two women holding the rope at the mouth of the shaft, another to climb down. That's heavy work. They painted a yellow x on each cap when they were done. I have to hand it to them; they were the last to give up. And when Shena Walker disappeared, they did it all over again, while the men carried on at the mine.

I stuff the envelopes in my shorts pocket and yank off my boot to shake out a stone: a red one the size of a tooth. Turning away from the women, I pull my boot back on. One day I'll have this road tarmaced as far as Wattle Creek.
The Akarula Highway
. It's not impossible.

It doesn't do to think too much about Georgie. Besides, the whole thing could be over in an hour or two. I might be regretting these cheques. But any longer than that and the risk of people leaving rises significantly. Empty houses mean repossession – that's the rule. There's no talking to the banks on that one, not anymore. No, this town needs people. The slightest whiff of more trouble is bound to send some of them awol, even though this is different. Monica saw Georgie. The child fell. She has not disappeared. I keep coming back to that one crucial fact.

Akarula and the rest of what you see is flat land. There are no hills to hide behind. But the ground is a bottomless pit. It all depends on how deep you're prepared to dig. The other two, the two who went missing, are out there somewhere; I'd stake my life on it.

Nine envelopes lighter, I cross to the other side of the street. No use rushing; we won't find her any quicker if I do. The squawking birds on the telegraph wire fill my head with noise, drowning out the rest. Maybe it's the shape they cut against the empty sky, or their constant chatter: either way, I get to thinking about those other buildings: the dome-fronted cinema, the high windows of the train station, the web of tarmac roads. One day this town will spread wide, the outskirts an hour's drive away, the scrubland pushed so far back that it touches the horizon. I can already see it.

Beyond the empty trailers and mobile homes on the left, two people, Mike and Caroline at a guess, are heading off down the mine track. They've been out since, what, five, six o'clock, wandering aimlessly; it's a blind man's game. I get the jitters just watching them. I can't help feeling that it's all too late.

Nevertheless, I kick on. I should have told Mike, course I should. I wanted too. Just couldn't seem to find the right moment. Once Georgie is found, there'll be no reason for people to leave. Even if she's dead. I can't think, I can't imagine, but still, even if she doesn't survive, it won't be anyone's fault. Accidents happen. Everyone understands that. I'm not one for praying, but if there is a God, he should bring her back alive, or else just bring her back. This town won't survive another mystery.

Of course, it won't be forgotten. You can't sweep something like this under the floorboards. Still, a sweetener should help. I slip an envelope into the general store. Ellie Warton outshines them all with her flower tubs. The bank took away the house next door, drove off with it on the back of an articulated lorry; a bit like pulling a tooth from the top set – the gap looks odd.

The whole street threatened to leave last year, and those living in the portacabins. People get unnerved when someone disappears. They think they might be next. I've thought about it myself, doing the disappearing trick, but then I get a flash of what this town could be – I see my model, or that damn tree – and, true as day, I can't let go. Mike needs this town as much as me. I promised him a decent place to live, and that's what he'll get. Whatever it takes.

The bar stands between two empty lots, its veranda marked with spit and ash, and the spill of last night's drink. I never drank much until I moved here; I mean I drank, but not like this. There's something sacred about the way the men, even the women, sit and study their drinks before knocking them back as if it were communion wine. I do it too, although probably not in the same way. The door is open, so I head inside and take a seat at the empty counter. Despite the hour, despite the fact, or because of the fact that my niece is six feet under or over or, God knows, somewhere sky high, I need a drink. I reach over to pull a beer from the hidden shelf on the other side. And then a head shoots up. I bolt backwards, almost losing my balance as I stretch out one foot to meet the floor.

‘Did I frighten you?' Vera says, not quite smiling as she looks past me at the wall behind.

‘Thought you'd be out with the rest,' I say.

Vera, ash-eyed thin-lipped Vera. She stuffs the flowery tea-towel she is holding into her back pocket and fetches up a bottle of beer, flipping the bronze top off like a pro. One thing I can say about Vera, she's the best barmaid in Western Australia. Face like the back end of a beer keg, but how and ever. We can't have everything.

‘Any word?' She scrutinises the envelope I slip between the glass salt and pepper pots. ‘What's this?'

‘Bit of tax relief.' I start to unwind as the cold beer hits the back of my throat.

‘I suppose those two detectives are on their way?' She slides a beer mat underneath my bottle. ‘Bit early isn't it? How's Monica?'

‘Fine.'

‘What are they going to do?' She whips her tea-towel out again and bends down to retrieve one of the glasses she is drying off. Her skin is lined, marked with those brown spots old people have. She's not old, twenty, thirty something; only the way she moves her weight around and acts like everyone's grandmother puts years on her. Still, she can wet the mouths of fifty miners as quick as I can blink.

I peel back the corner of the label on the bottle.

‘I don't know what I'd do if it were my child,' she says, holding up the glass to the dingy light. She spits on it and rubs a second time.

‘She'll be alright. We found the cardigan.'

‘I heard.'

‘Any luck with that stone?'

Vera's face looks like it might slide off, but she says nothing. Her husband, Bill, lost a twelve pound opal last week. Reckons it fell out of his pocket on the way back from the mine, or else someone pilfered it. They've combed the track, searched the truck; no doubt Vera has scoured every inch of this bar. Cause everyone is saying it was an omen, Bill losing that stone. It could have set the pair of them up for life. Careless, if you ask me.

I take my time finishing the beer.

Vera turns to the back shelves and stacks the glasses. ‘I wish Bill hadn't told me,' she says. ‘Can't stop thinking about the damn thing.'

I chuck some money on the beer mat, throwing my bottle into the crate on the way out. At least Vera seems to be staying put. There's a good chance I'm overreacting. That said, I don't bother giving cheques to the mobile homes. There aren't many occupied, in any case. Most were vacated when Shena disappeared. I couldn't afford to pay everyone.

By the time the plane arrives – an eight-seater the same as last time – I'm almost at the service station. The airstrip, which peters out into a stretch of bush beyond the road's end, only becomes visible when there's a plane; the rest of the time it lies submerged in the scrub. As I watch the dust fly up and the wheels scream to a halt, I think of Monica and that hot-air balloon. There's a lot to be said for floating off into the blue.

Let me take you back, give you the whole picture. I moved to Australia close to six years ago, the end of 1979, not long after Dad died. Opportunities were ripe, and things in England weren't going too well. Mike was pretty low at the time, and what with Margaret Thatcher and the recession… I'd made a few contacts, an investment company that dealt mainly with overseas holiday lets. Wrote an impressive bio for myself as a property tycoon. It's amazing what people can swallow. Words on paper: that's what I tell Mike, and he's the wordsmith. I get this call from a mining company: Lansdowne Mining Corporation. All I had to do was reel them in.

I'll never forget that drive – the blinding heat, the red-chalk roads, those damn sticky flies. People say Akarula is like parts of Queensland, but it's not. Half of the cracks in the earth are wide enough to be craters. A moonscape is how my business partner, Willie Johnson, described it.

Our map took us as far as Wattle Creek. We stopped at a roadhouse, one of those wooden-walled establishments that remind me of the Wild West, stuffed animal heads staring out of the corners. Willie and I got steaks and talked to the local cowboys, who told us about a mine that had closed six months before. ‘Nothing east of here,' one fella said. By the length of his hair and grey-brown beard, he might have been leaning up against that bar his whole life. ‘This is the end of the road.'

He was right. From Wattle Creek the bitumen disappeared into dirt tracks. We followed the scant instructions Lansdowne Mining Corporation had sent us. Those tracks were rife with potholes. Where the tracks forked, we guessed at which one to take. Some of them petered out into impassable gullies. The further down those beaten tracks we went, the more geared up I got. I knew, even before we saw the place, that this was something big, the kind of opportunity that comes to you once in a lifetime.

Willie didn't share my enthusiasm. All he could see was no-man's land. Two miles or so before we reached the designated site, the Falcon overheated, blowing a gasket, and we were forced to walk, following a dried-out riverbed, one of the few features listed in our sparse directions.

It was as if the land had been blown apart and then scrambled back together. The whole place had a prehistoric feel. As we neared the site, we came across remnants of the old mine those cowboys had talked about – a few wooden shelters and derelict shacks, the odd burnt-out car – but nothing that suggested the makings of a town; just miles and miles of uninhabited bush, broken up by monolithic termite mounds, and one wide-armed tree. Willie reckoned the place had been abandoned in a hurry; none of the mineshafts were capped. We walked around the site, taking note of any geographical features that might hinder construction work. Lansdowne Corporation had already tested for water. It struck me as the perfect site.

Willie couldn't see it. I can hear him now.
Get the feeling we're in the forbidden zone?
He had this theory that anywhere more than fifty miles from civilisation was beyond the point of no return.
There are some places we're not meant to live. This looks like one of them.
I ignored him, totting up the countless advantages of establishing a town beyond the contours of the map. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been running water, yet there were gullies all over the place, and the riverbed, cracked and hardened by years of relentless sunshine, was fairly deep.

My brain was racing; I had a rush of ideas. Willie led the way up the side of a large red rock – the rock my nieces have christened Red Rock Mountain. The view from the top gave me the grand sweep of the place; in one blinding flash, I saw it all. My very own town.
Something Dad would have been proud of.

‘What shall we call it?' I asked Willie.

I knew he was assessing the potential, though he said nothing. What we needed were selling points, features that would attract miners. And Lansdowne Corporation had all that; the results of their initial explorations were impressive.

‘There's my street, right there,' I said, pointing towards the riverbed. ‘Two rows of houses to start with. Use the riverbed as the main road – plenty of room for expansion.'

Willie just shook his head. He didn't realise that what I had in mind was practically a city, a place that would be talked about, recognised on every map in years to come. I caught a glimpse of the infinite possibilities: a railway, a casino, a cinema. Right from the start I planned an eighty-seater cinema, for Mike. Once that was up and running, he wouldn't have to bother with his writing, which, as far as I could see, was making him pretty miserable.

I walked the whole site, checked out the old mine; it was perfect. On the way back, I found this boulder with the word
Akarula
scratched on it like some kind of stone-age graffiti. I wrote it down, even tried to find it in an Australian dictionary. It had a ring about it. That was good enough for me. (I never did find that boulder again.) By the time I got back to the car, Willie had managed to get it started.