The Steam Mole (5 page)

Hidden behind bedding rolls, Clara heard the conductor
demanding, “Where yer all goin'?” The men sang out various numbers, then the clanking started as the carriage rattled and rolled away into the darkness toward the hot red center of Australia.

“Orright, Missy. Yer can probably come out now,” said someone.

So Clara crawled out from under the bench into the dimly lit, swaying, low-roofed carriage and the stares of the men there. She felt rather like telling them it was rude to stare so, but they had helped her, after all.

“Um. Good morning. So, er, where are you all going?” It was, in a way, rather like the submarine in the carriage.

She could see teeth in the answering grins. “G'day to you, too. North, I reckon. Nowhere else the clanker goes,” said one of them. “So where are you from, Missy? Never heard of no nice girls catching the clanking white ant.” He seemed to be implying she was a “nice girl,” so that was all right.

“Um.” There seemed no real point in pretending she was a local girl. Her accent betrayed her. “Ireland.”

“Me da came from Ireland,” said the sandy-haired one, smiling and nodding. “Best thing he coulda' done, he said to me.”

“Me mam, too. You came in with the submarine?” asked a fellow with a handlebar moustache. “The one they blockaded the harbor with half the Royal Navy to stop? I heard there was some women on her.”

That simplified things nicely. “Yes. My mother and I came on the
Cuttlefish
.”

“Aye. Wish they'd bring more girls. It's a good country for men is Westralia. But even in Ceduna there's two men for every woman. Up north, it'll be about two hundred to one, I reckon. I'm gunna earn some money and go back to Dominion I reckon. It's crook there, but there's girls. What's it like in Ireland, Missy?”

So she told them. From there it was a short step to telling them of her adventures leaving Ireland…and basking in their adulation because her father was in jail for fighting against the British Empire. That was a new experience. She stopped short, though, of
telling them about the message. About the fact that, for some reason, the British Empire had sent her father to Queensland. In the meantime she talked to them about places they'd never see and heard about the hot, bleak interior, and of why the coaches were painted white. “They can be, see. No coal smuts. And it reflects heat best in the couple of bits the clanker comes out.”

“But where is the engine?” She was puzzled by the lack of coal smuts. Soot and smuts were a way of life in a world that ran on coal.

“Oh, the clankers don't have 'em. Can't burn coal down here. The carriages have clamps on them that snag on the belt, see.”

Clara didn't, but they were happy to explain, if a little surprised that she didn't know. There were power stations along the route, outside the tunnels, that wound huge drums of continuous cables. Ten miles was the practical limit, so every twenty miles there was a power station, providing a cable to haul the trains along ten miles to either side of them. It meant, of course, that the segments were mostly straight. They could do curves, but that started to get more complicated than Clara was following, or wanted to. Submarines and navigation interested her. Cable cars in tunnels, not so much. But the carriages were so flat because for every one running north, there was another coming south. The tunnels were round, and they had to fit.

“Why not just make them bigger?” she asked. “The tunnels I mean.”

“Cause the drill heads on the steam moles are round. So the tunnels are round.”

He hauled out his pocket watch. “We're crossing the gap soon. You'll get to see it.”

“She's a lovely sight. Never get tired of it,” said one of the other, older men, with a smile. “There's a few other aerial sections, but the gap's the biggest. Mind you, it can get hot out there.”

“Yeah, but Power Seven is just the other side of her. She blows good cool air into the tunnels.”

They came out into late-afternoon daylight, the shadows long across the landscape of reds, browns, and ochre below the cable-train,
as she hung on a silver rail above the rocky valley below. The rail was suspended between enormous pylons, coming up from the dry valley. Looking carefully Clara could see there was some sparse vegetation. “It's so beautiful. But I thought it was all desert.”

“My word, I seen her in flood once,” said one of the older northbound workers. “Was nothing but water as far as the eye could see. It runs into Lake Eyre. That's not been full for a while, but when we get a wet, here, Missy, we get a real wet.” He looked at the entry to the tunnel on the valley wall ahead. “Better tuck you under the seats again. The conductor comes around to check no one's drunk and starting fights, and the food-sellers on the platform might rat on you.”

And so Clara's journey into the red heart of Australia continued. She ate with them—they wouldn't take her money—and talked, and eventually dosed, learning more about the miners and rail workers heading into the north, a part the British Empire considered virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. And they were even running cattle up there.

The one thing that was even stranger was how many of these young men had come from the Dominion of Australia, and how many were planning to head back there, with good Westralian gold in their pockets. If
they
could go to-and-fro, surely she could?

Linda had just picked up a message from Nicky—hidden in the hedge in their secret spot—when she heard her stepmother scream.

She barely had time to tuck the note up her sleeve before her stepmother bustled in. “Do say you know where Clara is. Her bed…her bed had a pillow in it. I thought she must still be asleep,” she said, her speech fast and voice a little shrill. “I thought with her mother being so unwell it was best to leave her…”

“No, Mother,” said Linda, feeling sure her face must betray her as an absolute liar. But fortunately her stepmother was neither observant,
at the best of times, nor looking at her. She rushed out, calling, “Clara! Clara? Where are you, Clara?”

Linda was fairly sure she was not going to get a reply.

One thing was certain. It would be a rotten time, for the next few days, to meet Nicky at night as he suggested. If Clara had run away, police would investigate every young woman they could find out on the street.

“Gunna have to change at Mooree,” said Sandy. “I'm on the Tjarri Power Station, that's sixty miles from Dajarra, but we're pushing north. Dajarra is the last power station pushing south from Sheba. So you'll haveta change tonight at Mooree. That's where the Alice Line splits off. You go on to Alice, across to Sheba, and then down to Dajarra. That's the last part of the back-cut towards us. They've got maybe thirty miles to go, and one more power station, before the line opens all the way to Ceduna. They're pushing hard, but it's hard rock country.”

He tapped the fellow with the handlebar moustache on the shoulder. “Mick's going to Sheba. He'll see you through and onto the supply clanker to Dajarra. Not many going that way on this trip, I reckon. They got some real crook bastards workin' the shifts up there. My shift-captain worked there for a while, but he don't like some of that crew. The station boss, he's all right, though, I reckon. Feller called McGurk. Talk straight to him, I reckon. No use pretending you're not there.”

The big difference, Tim decided, between the exhausting work on the steam mole and the submarine—where work could be exhausting, too—was the power stations. The steam mole would do thirty-six hours at the bore-face and then be pulled back to the
power station, and the next mole would be cantilevered in. The crew would get some proper sleep, then re-tip the drill heads, then have some more time off in the cavernous power station. You didn't have to live with the crew in the confined space of the mole, which was like the submarine in that sense, for months on end. His cubby on the steam mole was smaller, and the noise and vibration were such that it was hard to sleep well—but for thirty-six hours you could get by on exhausted catnaps. It made, however, for even more bad-tempered companions.

“What you writing, Blackfeller? I didn't know you blacks could write. I thought it was too much for your brains,” said the burly steam-biscuit foreman, staring at Tim, huddled in his cubby-bunk, trying to gather his thoughts with a precious piece of paper and an indelible pencil. Writing to Clara wasn't easy. He didn't want to moan. And he didn't want to say anything about needing to break his contract and get back to the
Cuttlefish
. Heaven alone knew what that girl might do. The thought made him smile. Capable of taking on a wildfire with a thimble full of water, was Clara.

It wasn't what the steam-biscuit foreman wanted. “I said, what you writing, Blackfeller? You answer me when I talk to you.”

As far as they were concerned he was one of the aboriginals, and that, it seemed, was enough to make some of the steam-mole crew nasty. And a fight with this big bruiser wouldn't help.

“A letter,” Tim answered.

“Oooh…a letter now. Black boy's writing a letter. I didn't think you boongs could write your own name. Lemme see.” And he snatched it from Tim's hand.

“Give that back!” yelled Tim, stretching for it. He didn't have any more paper and he'd gone to such effort to clean his hands before touching it. Now this oaf with coal-black thumbs was smearing it.

The foreman held it out of reach. “Dear Clara,” he read. “Ooh, black boy's got hisself a woman. I didn't know you wrote to them. I thought you blackfellers just pulled their skirts off.” And as he
turned to the rest of the watching audience in their cubbies, he ripped the letter in two.

Something in Tim just snapped. The foreman was much bigger and older than he was. He was looking for a fight. Looking for a soft target to bully. Tim knew that. What the man wasn't expecting was a furious volcano of rage. Tim dropped his head and charged with wildly flailing fists—not exactly fighting science. His head caught the bigger man in the wobbly belly, and he went over and down with Tim on top of him, yelling, and punching everything he could hit.

The others pulled him off, and Tim, sanity returning, was horrified at himself. His heart still thumped furiously, as his tormentor got up off the floor, helped by several of the crew. His nose was bleeding and one eye was already swelling shut. Tim saw the initial shocked fear in the foreman's eyes turn into a publicly humiliated rage. Tim knew that, short of a miracle, he was going to be killed. The foreman grabbed him by the shirt-front and swung a massive fist at his head. Tim managed to duck sideways and most of the force of the blow slid off his cheek and temple. Tim's yell was outdone by a bellow from his attacker, who hit the steel stanchion so hard it vibrated. “My bloody hand! You little black…”

“
What
is going on here?” demanded a chilly voice.

Tim really disliked Shift-captain Vister. But right now he was glad to see him. Warm wetness trickled down Tim's cheek, and the pain started.