The Golden Soak (24 page)

‘Golden Soak didn't collapse of its own accord.' The words came out before I had really thought about them. Maybe it was the whisky, or just that I was too tired to think what I was saying.

He stared at me, the room suddenly deathly silent. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, gleaming in the light. Far away I could hear the hum of the generator. He was staring at me a long time without saying a word. Finally he nodded. ‘No, you're right. It didn't collapse of its own accord.' Another long silence, and then he said, ‘But you saw it, the edge of the reef just showing. How else was I to discover there was any depth to it? I took a chance.'

And he'd killed two men. No wonder he was drinking now. He pushed his hand up over his eyes, the fingers slowly clenching, the fist coming down and hitting the desk. ‘I was desperate.' He said it softly, tight-lipped, his eyes with that blank stare.

‘Then why didn't you let me do a proper survey for you?'

He looked at me slowly. ‘Why should I? Why should I trust you? You may be a mining consultant, but you didn't come to Australia because of the nickel boom. You came here to escape.'

I didn't deny it. The man was saying what he thought, and he was right. ‘How did you guess?'

‘Australia's always been a bolt-hole for men like you. You've no money, y'see. Hitching rides, clutching at straws …' He nodded, his bright blue eyes staring at me, not accusingly, more in sympathy. ‘I won't ask you what you're escaping from. But we understand each other. Right?'

Was that a threat? I wondered.

Then he said, ‘I have to think of Jan now.' A sudden smile illumined his face. ‘Don't worry, my boy. I like you. We don't see many people here. I liked you the moment I saw you sitting there reading that old Shakespeare. Reminded me of Henry. Something of the same temperament, too.' He looked down at the plan of the mine again, then folded it carefully and put it away in a drawer. ‘Well, that's that. That's the end of Golden Soak. All these years and now it's finished.' He saw my empty glass and without a word poured me another drink and then refilled his own, the silence dragging. Finally he said, ‘How did you know Westrop was McIlroy's nephew?'

‘The
Kalgoorlie Miner
. His wife's maiden name was given as Westrop.'

‘You read the reports. I see.' He leaned back, sipping at his whisky, looking me straight in the face as he said, ‘He was crooked as a rattle-snake, but my father admired him. Don't you think that's strange? He actually admired him. Said he had guts, coming here, brazening it out, and then going off into the desert like that, convinced he'd make a fortune. A cocky little bastard. That's what my father called him. He wasn't a great talker himself. But Pat McIlroy …' He paused, staring past me at the wall, at an old sepia photograph of a man with drooping moustaches and a battered hat standing posed beside a team of horses hitched to a wagon. ‘Well, not much difference between a mountebank and a remittance man – talkers, actors both. I didn't see much of McIlroy and I was only a kid at the time, but I can remember his voice, the extraordinary magnetism of the man. He liked people, y'see. A flash, brash, cocky, bouncy little bastard, but he rode the outback here with a golden tongue and a rainbow in his eyes and within a year that bank of Father's was bursting at the seams with money.'

‘What happened to him in the end?' I asked.

He stared at me blankly. ‘In the end? I thought you said you'd read the newspaper reports.'

‘They never found his body.'

‘The Gibson's a big desert.'

‘The police had native trackers.'

‘God in heaven!' he breathed. ‘After thirty years, still the same rumours.' The bottle, more than half empty now, rattled against the glass. He put his head down, his hands to his face. ‘After all this time it's like a dream. Trouble is, sometimes I don't seem to know what's real and what isn't. I was down at Meekatharra that day, y'see. Drove back through the night and when I got here he was gone. Nobody'd seen him. It was dark when he arrived and still dark when he left. And he was drunk, my father said. Drunk on whisky and visions of a great copper mine that would feed British industry in the war that was coming – a fortune waiting for him in the desert. That golden tongue of his …' He sipped at his drink, and then his mind switched to Golden Soak and he asked me what the chance were of the reef extending along the line of the gully up towards the gap.

‘A possibility, no more.' His guess was as good as mine. ‘If you'd let me do a proper survey –'

‘And have you kill yourself when I didn't even believe the poor half-wit had seen the reef. I can remember my father recruiting those out-of-work miners, driving them to blast their way into the faulted area, knowing he was taking a hell of a risk. The day it happened I was riding the fences up beyond the Robinson Gap and I came down past Golden Soak at sunset just as the first bodies were being brought up.' He lifted his glass, his hand shaking, staring at nothing. And I could see what he was seeing, remembering that drift off-shooting north from the main gallery and the atmosphere that had clung to the third level. ‘Father never went down the mine again, and when I came back after the war I'd seen too many men die to try and reopen it.'

‘You were telling me about McIlroy,' I reminded him. I didn't like the glazed look in his eyes, the way his hands trembled. The death of two more men seemed to be affecting him the way the death of those miners had affected his father.

He nodded slowly. ‘A pity my father didn't go with him instead of pinning his faith to Golden Soak.' He pushed his hand up over his eyes again. ‘McIlroy's Monster.' He laughed a little unsteadily. ‘Pat McIlroy died and my father went mad. Two sides of the same coin, and a whole era went when the Garrety empire crashed.' He looked at me then, his head lifted, pride mixed with sadness as he said quietly, ‘It was an empire, y'know, by Australian standards. Father was the North West – the biggest man of a tough hard bunch. A piece of history you might almost say, like the Duracks further north.' He smiled, sadly and with pity. ‘But nobody was sorry for him. He wasn't that sort of man. It was McIlroy they were sorry for. Something about him, and the mystery of his death – going out like that into the desert, chasing a dream.' He turned his head to the picture on his desk, a full-length photograph of Big Bill Garrety in knickerbockers and a stiff collar. ‘So who won in the end?' His voice was soft and slightly slurred. ‘My father slowly dying, a drunk, and that Irishman going out with a flourish that had everybody in the Pilbara talking about him, endless speculation.'

‘And nobody knows what happened to him?' I asked.

He looked at me, a quick twist of the head, smiling a little crookedly. ‘Can I trust you? I can't be sure, can I?'

‘No.' By God we were being frank, and the whisky deadening tiredness, making it easy for us.

He nodded. ‘Well, it doesn't matter now.' He picked up his drink again. ‘McIlroy was a sick man. He had syphilis, y'know – suffered from blackouts, hallucinations. He should never have attempted an expedition like that. He knew it, and my father knew it. But he wouldn't go with him. He wasn't a gambler and anyway his mind was set on Golden Soak, not some mythical copper deposit. But when McIlroy left here he had with him the best of our native boys. I know that because, when I wanted Weepy Weeli to ride with me to check the fences beyond Yandicoogina, Father told me he'd gone walkabout. That was nonsense. Weepy – we called him that because he had an eye infection – would never have gone walkabout. He'd been on the station ever since I could remember.'

And then he was telling me how, about two weeks before the cave-in, Weepy had walked in to Jarra Jarra alone. The man had been little more than skin and bone, so weak he could hardly stand. ‘I found him out there by the old forge and then –' He hesitated, his hand gripped tight on his glass as though to prevent it shaking. ‘Then my father took him straight off to the sacred place of his people – Father knew all the ritual, he was blood brother to one of the elders of Weepy's tribe. What happened there I don't know, but afterwards Weepy wouldn't even admit he was with McIlroy in the Gibson.'

‘He told his son,' I said.

‘Yes, he told Wolli – when he was dying.'

‘So Wolli knows what happened.'

He shook his head. ‘No. No, I don't think so.' He sounded a little vague. ‘Old Weepy knew the sort of man his son was. He told him just enough to ensure the bastard would keep his job here in Jarra Jarra.' And then so softly I could barely hear him: ‘The sins of the father,' he breathed, ‘All my hopes, my plans, all my dreams for this place.…' He took a quick gulp at his drink, spilling some of it down his chin, wiping the liquor clear with his hand. ‘I was a kid then. Just a kid.' He said it as though it cleared him of all responsibility. ‘There was a war coming, thank God, and after that I was in the army.' His eyes stared at me with an appalling blankness. ‘I was in the army within a month and I didn't see this place or my father again for six years.' He picked up the bottle, holding it to the light, then shared out the rest of it between us. ‘Well, what are the chances?' he asked abruptly. ‘I have to think of Jan now, and you're a mining man.'

‘A possibility, that's all,' I said. His mind had switched and I thought it best to take advantage of it. McIlroy's death was none of my business. That's what I thought then, sitting there in that hot little room full of rock samples and old photographs. ‘Are you willing to let me do a survey up the top of the gully?'

‘Was that why you came back with this young student fellow?'

‘Yes. I was hoping to persuade you to let me do a geophysical, then perhaps drill. And no cost to you. I have some money now, a job I did for a mining company down in Kalgoorlie. The same people might be interested in the development of Golden Soak, provided, of course, my survey results –'

‘Not the mine,' he said. ‘You keep clear of the mine. I don't want anybody else –' His voice trailed off and for a moment he sat there hunched over the desk, lost in thought, his eyes blinking so that I thought for a moment he was going to burst into tears. But then he seemed to pull himself together. ‘The rock samples here – they're all labelled. Go through them if you like. But they're most of them from the flat land to the east. I never took samples from above the entrance. The faulting – it didn't seem right, and the depth so much greater.'

‘The faulting doesn't matter,' I said. ‘With modern techniques –'

‘Yes, of course. I'm only an amateur, ye'see.' He leaned back in his chair, pushing his hand wearily up through his hair. ‘Well, that's settled then.' His voice sounded very tired.

‘I can go ahead?'

‘That's what you wanted, isn't it? And if the reef continues … then maybe Jarra Jarra will be safe for another generation. Jan loves the place, y'know. She didn't like Perth. She was down there for a while, at school. But she wouldn't be happy …' He was staring down at his glass. ‘Nor would I,' he murmured. Then he drained the rest of his drink and got carefully to his feet. ‘Good luck!' He held out his hand as though saying goodbye to me for good, and he had to brace himself against the desk.

That was all the agreement we ever had – a handshake. And he was so full of whisky I wondered if he knew what he was doing. There were other things, too. But I only worried about them later, when the men from Grafton Downs and Mt Newman had given up and gone, and Kennie and I were collecting samples from the steep slope of Coondewanna.

The sides of the gully were bare outcrops of red rock – part of what Kennie called a banded iron formation. The sides rose to a rim, and beyond the rim Mt Coondewanna leaned a shoulder gently down towards the Gap. No outcrops here, the surface of the ground coarse-grained silica with a sparse covering of spinifex, occasional patches of mallee. This shoulder was roughly on the line of the faulting I had seen below ground and it was from here that we collected the most promising samples. The – flies were bad and it was very hot. We camped at the head of the gully where the air was cooler, a slight breeze funnelling through the Gap, and as the sun set the land to the west took on the colour of dried blood.

That night we slept under the stars, the sky burnt to a diamond clarity and not a sound anywhere until a dingo started calling from the gully below us. I was tired, but sleep did not come easily, my mind on Golden Soak, and the lost, lonely cry of that dingo reminding me of the lives it had cost. I was thinking of Westrop, his body buried now under tops of rock, wondering about McIlroy. Had Westrop been right? Was McIlroy's body down there, too? Was that why Ed Garrety had fired that charge?
I was desperate
, he had said. Desperate for money, or because Golden Soak held a secret that must be kept at all costs?

It was the beat. The night was very hot and my mind in a world of fantasy and reality. God knows, Big Bill Garrety had had reason enough to kill the man. But to tell his doctor and not his son.… Whatever the truth of it, Ed Garrety must have known. I was thinking of Drym then, the reek of that room and the candle flame burning – the picture in that newspaper, the blackened beams a skeletal cap to the gutted house. We all have our secrets.…

‘You awake, Alec?' Kennie rolled over on his swag, his eyes open. ‘I thought I heard something – a cry.'

‘A dingo,' I said.

He lifted his head, listening. ‘Yes – of course. This place gives me the creeps.' He gave a nervous laugh. ‘D'you believe in Quinkans?'

‘Quinkans?'

‘Mythical abo beings. Ghosts, if you like – Quinkans is the Queensland name. I read a book about them, by an Ansett pilot. I don't know the name for them here, but they'll be the same breed. They come out at night, and if they're bad, they're killers. All abos believe that.' He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘What time do you reckon we ought to leave tomorrow?'