Tide (20 page)

These holidaying city slickers usually arrive after Christmas, rarely before, and with their sissy ways and city posing, it's fun to pull them down a peg or two. Strangely, it's almost always boys. Girls rarely get sent out that far, cousins or no cousins, and if they do, they are chaperoned and rarely let out to mix with the feral locals. It did happen once, and Tender Terry screwed the posh bitch on the dust of the sports oval while all the boys watched on, as well as a few of the rougher local girls, and she ended up
up the duff.
Tender Terry had been hauled up by the cops because the girl was fourteen and he was sixteen. Not much came of it, and Tender Terry is now working on the gold mine and screwing prostitutes every weekend over at Kal. He's part of the story of every kid of my generation in our godforsaken town.

As much as we all hate it here, most of us stay on. Even the girls. They get pregnant young and stick around. You need your mum's support, they say. The mines are constantly looking for good workers.

I've always been fairly popular, but there was a holiday-time there when I was about fifteen when things were grim. I was the scapegoat for that summer, as if my ball had come up and I was conscripted as victim to keep things bearable. The victim role usually went to one of the visiting kids from the city – lured in at first with warmth and friendship, eventually to become the rejected, pariahed imbecile. But it didn't work that way that year. And it was a grisly experience with more twists than a barbed-wire fence.

At first I thought we had our gimp for the summer. A pathetic, long, thin streak of a fifteen-year-old wearing glasses, who carried a poetry book around with him. He even read out a poem about daffodils (honestly) to one of the hottest girls in town, one not even Tender Terry had been able to nail. And what's worse, she listened. I said to myself, He's dead meat. We're gonna have fun this summer. It was 110 degrees on the old scale (we weren't that many years into metric then), and lethargy had set in, but this was going to get things rolling, like a spark or a cooling system or whatever. I was excited by the prospect.

And it started off fine. Tender Terry pushed Four Eyes around and warned him off, some of the younger boys in the gang threw rocks and spat at him, and the rest of the girls, the ones we fondly called ‘the sluts' because they occasionally roamed the town with us, said he was a poof. He stood up to it for a while, but eventually scurried off into one of the schoolteachers' houses. He was her nephew. We could imagine what the teacher – a new one, so not to be worried about – might have to say to us when school started again.

But then something went really wrong. I had to head down to the city for a few days to visit my Nan, and by the time I got back, Four Eyes was Tender Terry's best mate.

You should've seen 'em, said one of the young boys. They were goin' at Jessie like dogs. Right there in the dirt. First Four Eyes, then Tender Terry, then they both did it again.

And just to make matters worse, I heard: And you should see the length of his cock! It's longer than Terry's!

Tender Terry made it clear to me that I was on the out. I hadn't been there when it counted, seen the Fall of the Hot Chick. It was a glorious moment. And Four Eyes had been the key. He opened her up with his poems, Tender Terry gloated. I'm gonna write poems too, he said confidently.

I noticed Four Eyes leering at me behind his coke bottles as Terry disposed of me: And what's more, you're a boring know-all who doesn't know anything. That was Tender Terry philos-o-phis-ing.

And though they knew I'd sort them out during the next school term, the little bastards of the gang started throwing rocks and spitting at me. Me! The ‘ideas man' of their dry little world.

I retreated to the tailings pile by the old mine on the edge of town. I sat there, in the sun, cooking. I found some old corrugated iron, excavated some of the tailings, and put a roof over the hollow. Kept the sun off, though it was like an oven inside. Sat there with bottles of water and moped. In the evenings it wasn't so bad.

My excommunication was absolute, and the triumph of Four Eyes supreme. I heard all the kids had been around to the new teacher's house and had cool drinks and played pool on a table better than the ones in the pub. You've heard of teacher's pets. Well, this was a case of teacher's flock. There was even a rumour that Tender Terry had jumped her while Four Eyes looked on. But I never believed that one.

I kept to myself. I actually made a pretty good place up there on the tailings heap. I insulated it with hessian sacks, I burrowed deep into cooler places. I must confess, I thought if I made it special some of the gang would be curious and come over to my side. But they never did. Not that summer, anyway.

Yet someone did eventually turn up. And we spent a lot of time talking. And, as you know, we're intimately connected these days, but that day we just talked and talked. It was good. She'd be pissed off if she knew I was telling you all this, but it is dry and boring, and long days on the mine do your head in, as you know. Got to let off steam over a few drinks, eh! Got to tell someone your thoughts.

Jessie was no longer the hot girl, or hot chick, but a ‘filthy slut'. She wasn't even one of the sluts, who were kind of honoured amongst us boys. She was worse, because she'd been had by
two guys
at once. There were degrees. She was hated by the boys and the girls. Miners twice her age would turn up outside her house pissed and holler for her to come out. Her parents would call the police, who laughed. She was sent to the city for a couple of weeks for counselling and shit. Anyway, one afternoon with the sun peeling skin faster than usual, she found me in my HQ, ‘The Hut', out there on the tailings, and we got talking and kept talking. It was boiling in the Hut, but we sweated and drank water and sweated and talked. It was the first real conversation I'd had with a girl. I mean, about serious stuff. Stuff that matters even now, married with kids and a crook back.

I asked her why she did it, and she said, I wanted to fly. To fly out of here. Like on the Royal Flying Doctor when you're sick or smashed up in the mines. I
hate
it here. And Four Eyes's words seemed like they were from somewhere else. Somewhere cool and fresh and full of daffodils. Not scummy plants that live without water and huddle under the sun. But plants that love the sun and reach to the sun because it is comforting. We don't understand what ‘warm' is here. It's just hot and less hot. And then he was crawling on top of me and pulling at my clothes and I was falling, falling, and the pain seemed just as it should be, and the dust swallowed me and I suffocated and died.

I said to her, I'll tell you a secret. Don't tell the gang because they'll use it against me. I write poems. I do! Honestly. I just keep them to myself. And they're all in my head. And all about me. I write poems about the dry and the heat and the dust and the tailings and the stunted trees and the hot chick I can't have. But keep that to yourself!

I'd exhausted myself and stared at her. I leant across and pulled a long strand of hair from her eye, wet with perspiration. She moved my hand gently away and said, We are all falling to death. All of us. Even Four Eyes and Tender Terry. They are falling as well, and it's terrible.

EXTREMITIES

Apart from the people, the country is dominated by breakaways, saltbush, mulga, emu bush, heaps of tailings, and active mine sites. In between, there are emus, kangaroos, cattle, sheep, goats, foxes and rabbits. And there are eagles, cockatoos, racehorse goannas, songbirds, termites and echidnas. And much more if you look. Deadly dry or in flood, summer is a cauldron. But the red dirt makes life. You don't have to look hard, though after a while some stop looking. Anything not claimed by mining companies is taken up by cattle stations. It isn't wildflower season. It is mid-summer at the extremities. Tourists stay south.

But it is gold that brings the men to this outback prick on the map, once described by a prime minister's wife as the ‘arsehole of the earth'. It is a town of shacks and dongas. The single men's quarters are lined with pick-ups that crunch the dirt, and stone roads branch out to the mines surrounding the town.

The outback is a space of temporary ‘fly-in fly-out' homes. Shifting populations go with the mines. Towns don't get a chance. But by local standards this is a very old town and, being on a major highway, it's a stop-off point for truckies, and tourists, in the season. It has its life-thread, though its existence still centres on the mines.

Kepler and Pete were in town on a three-month contract. It was better than being outside town, way off the highway, but it was still six hundred k's from the city, in the heat, and it still meant living in a donga. This time round they were trying to save money to return to Thailand and get stuck into Phuket pussy. They talked about it constantly. Their first visit, also funded by work on the mines, had been a non-stop orgy. Kepler had enjoyed showing the young dog a few tricks, and the young dog's drive kept the old dog on his toes. Kepler was forty and Pete twenty-two, but when it came to pussy, age didn't matter. Except the age of the pussy, of course.

They both worked long shifts, and wanted as little free time as possible. Being there was about earning. On Friday and Saturday nights they drank in the pub, tipping the skimpies, but otherwise they worked, watched pornos on their laptops, and slept. There was a bestiality DVD that did the rounds for a while. Pete and Kepler both watched it (on their own) twice over, and discussed it in detail. Generally, they preferred Asian bondage and black anal. There was a brisk black market for these DVDs among the workers. Helped pass the time.

But when the mine had an emergency shutdown for a couple of days they were at a loss. They started drinking early. Sitting outside the cramped dongas, feet up and hats pulled low, they downed beer after beer, frying in the morning sun. By lunch they were too pissed to care about eating, both enervated and stirred up by the heat.

Pete suggested they go out to the breakaways behind the new mine site. Let's take some beers out there. Kepler agreed, though it wouldn't be any better drinking out there than in camp. But then Pete said, They're full of caves. It'd be cooler in there than out here. Not really deep caves, just hollows in the rock. But they'll be like a fridge. I've been in one when I was a kid.

Driving out, haunted by the stillness, the mines in shutdown, they spotted a goat. Kepler always carried a .243 rifle behind the seat of whichever company vehicle he had. Fuck, Pete, he called, grab the wheel, I'm going to pop that little bastard's clogs.

They tussled between steering wheel and wresting the rifle from its bed. The vehicle skewed across the road, though Kepler had taken his foot off the accelerator. It was still rolling along, vaguely following the goat, which went at a slow trot, looking back over its shoulder. Keep the bloody wheel straight, yelled Kepler. Pete was laughing, near hysterical. Get the little fucker, Kep!

Kepler loved his bolt-action Ruger. He got the barrel out the window and managed to stroke it, load it and fire it with one drunken movement. He winged the goat, which half dropped, stunned, then stood upright and bolted into the scrub.

Got the fucker, Pete yelled. Good shot, mate.

Pulling the rifle in and handing it to Pete, Kepler took the wheel and accelerated. Watch what you do with that, you little bastard. Click the fucking safety on. Which Pete did, because he loved guns.

They pulled over at the base of a breakaway. They could hear the hot wind crackling through the fluted rock. Grabbing beers, they started lurching up the rock face. As they went higher, they heard voices.

Hear that? said Pete, struggling to grip a rock and hold a sixpack.

Of course I fucking heard it, said Kepler. I wanna see what's going on. He glanced back down. There's a fucking vehicle down there.

He handed his sixpack to Pete and motioned for him to be quiet. He climbed a little higher, peered up, then returned to Pete.