The Golden Soak (11 page)

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, watched 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 is 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 words 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?'

‘Arrhh.' 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 your fortune?' The cackling ended in a smoker's cough. ‘No, yuh wouldn't, would yuh? They don't call me Prophecy for nuthin'. 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.'

Talking to Prophecy was like panning for gold in the muddy waters of a creek in spate. Her real name was Felicity Clark. She had been born in Leytonstone, north-east London, and had come out to Australia with her husband in 1946. He had been badly shot up in the battle for the Falaise Gap and doctors advised him to move to a drier climate. ‘So we picked on the Bar and Christ that was dry enough. The air was so thin Nobby couldn't hardly breathe in the dry with half his lung shot away.' He had died five years ago leaving her with a Land-Rover and a caravan and not much else. ‘A fella don't make his fortune working on the roads, an' all the dust – it's a wonder he lasted as long as he did.'

From Marble Bar they had moved to Nullagine and when he wasn't driving his grader he had spent his time fossicking around old prospects. ‘Always reckoned he'd strike it lucky one day. Might've done, too, if he'd lived. Knew a lot Nobby did, and when he kicked the bucket I just sort of carried on, living bush and pegging the odd claim.' She had a small pension and when Wolli had gone into trouble, stealing tools from a mining outfit up near Bonnie Creek, she had taken his sister Martha to live with her in the caravan. ‘Reck'n it was the best thing I ever done. She knew things about this country I'd never've nutted out for myself –'bout plants an' animals an' how to live bush. Never knew a girl with such sharp eyes, and then by Jesus if she doesn't spot the glitter on a claim of mine. I'd never've seen it meself, not in a million years. But she spotted it. That's when I began calling her Little Brighteyes. Wouldn't take any money, not a penny, but she's got a bangle I bet no other gin's got from Darwin right down to Esperance.'

All this was mixed up with a spate of gossip about local people and their affairs. She forgot about the cards. She even forgot about her drink. I was somebody new to whom she could tell her story all over again. And I was fresh out from England. I think that was important to her. She wasn't homesick. She had been out here too long. But there was an undercurrent of nostalgia. And I sat there and let her words wash over me, remembering what I thought was relevant as I drank another beer and had some food. Then, when I had finished my steak and chips, she said, ‘Okay, we'll go and see if Little Brighteyes is home. She's shacked up with a man from Grafton Downs, so weekdays she don't know what to do with herself.' And she added, ‘Martha can tell you a thing or two about Golden Soak. But she won't go near the place, not her – not even for Wolli.'

‘How did you know I was interested in Golden Soak?' I asked her.

She had got to her feet and she stood looking down at me, a big, tough woman, her eyes bright as beads. ‘Emilio was delivering stuff here coupla days back. Wasn't it you that wired Ed Garrety's girl to meet you?' She was smiling, the creases in her dark face deepening. ‘There ain't much to talk about here in Nullagine, an' yuh being a mining man – bush telegraph you might say. Well, yuh gonna sit on your arse there all day?' And she turned and strode out into the sunlight, moving with a gipsy swing to her skirt and light on her feet despite her bulk.

Looking back on it, I am reminded of Big Bill Garrety's postscript to the discovery of Golden Soak –
the beginning of all my troubles
. That day was the beginning of my troubles, and it was the gipsy woman Prophecy who was the cause of it. Whether she had the gift of second sight or not I don't know, but she was like a witch, and within twenty-four hours, riding the broomstick of her curiosity, I had become so caught up in the past of Jarra Jarra that nothing else has seemed to matter very much since then.

‘Your name's Alec Falls, right?'

I nodded, the sun beating down on my bare head, the dry air breathless.

‘Then we'll go to the post office first.' She turned to the left, towards the petrol pump which was backed by a general store. ‘There's a telegram for you. Don't reckon it'll have gone out yet.'

The telegram was from Kadek and had been despatched from Kalgoorlie:
NEED YOUR ADVICE MINING DEAL. FEE AND EXPENSES BUT ESSENTIAL YOU ARRIVE HERE MONDAY MORNING. CONTACT CHRIS CULPIN PALACE BAR
. I Stood there for a moment, considering it. ‘Well?' Prophecy asked. ‘You heading straight for Kalgoorlie or you wanta see Wolli's sister first?'

It was now Thursday. ‘I'll hitch a ride in the morning,' I said. ‘But it's Wolli I want to see.'

She nodded and crossed the road to a track that led up behind the wash-house. We found the black woman stretched out on a bed on the verandah of a dilapidated corrugated iron house halfway up the hill. She was small and bony, jet black, with strong hands and very thin wrists and breasts that sagged under the bright cotton shift that was all she seemed to be wearing. In repose her face was ugly, the nose broad over a wide, big-lipped mouth, the brow so low that she looked as though she had been dropped on her head as a child. She got up from her chair on the verandah, a broad smile of welcome, and with the smile her whole face seemed to light up, the quickness of her movements suggesting extraordinary vitality, her whole body instantly and intensely alive. And those big dark eyes of hers bright with pleasure.

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.