Golden Soak

ONE

I was lucky. The first vehicle into Lynn Peak that morning was a Holden driven by a lone prospector from Leonora. He had driven through the night, heading for the Comet Mine at Marble Bar, and he was only too glad to give me a lift provided I took the wheel and let him get some sleep. He was a lean, taciturn man, dressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt turned ochre by the dust, his eyes red-rimmed below the peaked cap and his thin face grey with stubble. He was fast asleep before I had driven half a dozen miles.

We were heading north, the sun behind us and flat-topped hills of red rock moving in from the right. Even if he’d been awake conversation would have been impossible. The car was an old one and the noise of its rattling, the machine-gun clatter of wheelspun gravel, was incessant. It isolated me, and once I got the feel of riding the dirt at speed, I began to think over what Andie had told me about the two men in the Toyota. Both of them were from Nullagine. Phil Westrop was a newcomer who’d been driving a bulldozer at the Grafton Downs Tin Mine for a couple of months. The other was a black by the name of Wolli. And he had spelt it out for me in that thick Glaswegian accent of his, explaining that the man was supposed to have been born at Jarra Jarra, in the black quarters there, and named after Weedi Wolli Creek. ‘He’s a drunk. But he wasna drunk when they pulled in here for petrol yesterday morning. The shakes, yes, but he was just plain scared in my opeenion.’

Was this the black man Kadek had referred to in his letter as Wally? I was wondering about that when I hit a dry creek bed, my head bumping the roof. And why was Westrop so interested in Golden Soak? Stopping for petrol at Lynn Peak, when he could have filled up before leaving Nullagine, was just an excuse to pump Andie for information about the mine. ‘Ah dinna ken much aboot him, just met him a few times over a drink at the Conglomerate. An ex-army sergeant invalided out after being blown up by a Viet-Cong mine.’ The harsh voice had gone rambling on as I ploughed my way through a plateful of bacon and eggs for which he had charged me an exorbitant two dollars fifty. Six years in Australia hadn’t softened the accent. ‘There’s some say it was a bomb planted in a brothel in Saigon, but they wouldna say that to his face. He’s tough, that laddie.’

I was still thinking about Westrop when I ran into my first stretch of bulldust and almost lost control, no feel to the steering, the back tyres spinning and the car lurching wildly. Ahead, round the red shoulder of a hill, loomed a cloud of dust like an explosion, and in the straight beyond, the dust cloud hung in the sky for more than a mile, a glint of glass reflected at its snout. It was the first of the day’s traffic, a big refrigerated container truck throwing gravel at me as it thundered past. And then I was into the red cloud that followed in its wake, a sepia opaqueness of nil visibility with dust pouring into the car, filling my mouth, clogging my nostrils.

‘Wind the window up for chrissakes!’ And by the time I’d done that he was fast asleep again.

The dust cleared and we were into country that was like a miniature Arizona, all small red buttes and dry as a desert. I was driving fast on gravel again and wondering how Westrop had known about me. According to Andie, he’d not only known my name, but what I did. And he had asked a lot of questions: Why had a mining consultant been called in? Was Golden Soak for sale and had I inspected it yet? Had anybody been down there since the disaster? ‘What he was after I have no idea, but he was after something, that’s for sure, and I told Ed to watch it when he came in for the stores yesterday. He’d never heard of Westrop. Wolli he’d known all his life, of course.’

And yet, when Janet had asked her father who the men were, he hadn’t answered her. I was remembering the look on his face as he’d stood there at the entrance to the adit, the axe gripped in his hands. Another truck thundered by, stones clattering on the windscreen and dust seeping in even though I’d closed the window. Christ! it was hot. I’d left the red butte country now and after I’d crossed the dry bed of the Shaw River, I was into a world of small hills like tumuli, the road dipping and rising endlessly, the rattle of the Holden on the ridged surface permeating my whole-body.

To hell with Ed Garrety, I thought. Jarra Jarra was behind me now and no concern of mine. The road stretching ahead led to Nullagine and the prospect of something that might be more rewarding. But thinking of McIlroy, dreaming of his Monster in the heat, my mind came back inevitably to Golden Soak and what Andie had told me of the disaster that had happened there in 1939. I had been questioning him about the disappearance of Big Bill Garrety’s partner, but all he had been able to tell me was what I already knew, that the closing of the bank’s doors had coincided with the collapse of a speculative boom in West Australian mining shares and that McIlroy was supposed to have been speculating with money deposited by the bank’s customers. It was all hearsay, of course, and the people who really knew about it were the people who’d got their fingers burnt, and they weren’t the ones to gossip. But he was sure about the disaster. Big Bill Garrety had hired a bunch of out-of-work miners to drive a crosscut into a badly faulted area of high grade ore. ‘No doot the man was desperate but it was bluidy murder from what they tell me.’ Several men had been killed, a lot more injured. ‘I dinna ken how many.’ And he didn’t know whether the mine had been flooded then or later. But he was quite certain that the disaster had happened after the crash. ‘Sure it had been closed, but when a man’s that desperate for money — ‘ He had shrugged. ‘Ed’s a fool not to sell. I told him so. That mine’s got a jinx on it.’

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, watching 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 it 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 word 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?’

‘Arrrhh.’ 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 yuh fortune?’ The cackling ended in a smoker’s cough. ‘No, you wouldn’t would yuh?’ They don’t call me Prophecy for nothin’. 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 home-sick. She had been out here too long. But there was an under-current 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 couple 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 mat 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 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 about 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 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.

All this Prophecy got out of her in her own tongue. The mine had been closed again and after that it had remained closed ever since. ‘And what happened to her father?’

‘He was given a job on the station.’

‘And the other miners — were they given jobs, too?’

But the woman either didn’t know or wouldn’t say.

‘Ask her when it was her father joined up with McIlroy.’ That nervous flicker of her eyes again. She shook her head. ‘He was with McIlroy, wasn’t he?’ But she shied away from that, offering us more beer, turning quickly to the big fridge standing pale in the cavern of the bedroom. ‘When did he die? He is dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he’s dead,’ Prophecy said. ‘Died about two years after Nobby and I came here. But he never talked, not about McIlroy.’

The black woman had come back and I turned and faced her. ‘Your brother was at the mine last night. What was he looking for?’

She shook her head, her whole body suddenly very tense as though poised for flight.

‘Was he looking for gold?’

Again that shake of the head. ‘Him no find. Not stop there find ‘im gold.’

‘Are you sure it was gold they were looking for?’

God! I was so near to it then, her eyes rolling and that deep husky voice of hers saying, ‘Wolli not know nuthin’. You talk ‘im Phil. Mebbe Phil tell ‘im. Not Wolli.’

Prophecy cackled. ‘Yuh want me to translate for yuh? Wot she’s saying is Wolli’d beat the hell out of her if she gave you info for free. Yuh go an’ see Wolli. Cross his palm with a few dollars an’ mebbe yuh find out whatever it is yuh’re after.’

But I was looking at the black woman. ‘Who’s Phil?’ I asked her.

She shook her head, the eyes wide and scared-looking.

‘It’s a white man, isn’t it — name of Westrop?’ The eyes told me I was right and I turned to Prophecy. ‘Do you know Phil Westrop?’

She nodded.

‘Where will I find him?’

‘Grafton Downs.’

‘How far’s that?’

”Bout twenty miles.’ And she added, ‘Odds are he’ll be in the bar tonight. The Grafton Downs boys are in for beer most nights. Why?’

‘He and Wolli were down at the mine last night.’ I hesitated, looking at the black woman. But she had turned back to the fridge. I looked across at Prophecy. ‘You know everything that goes on here. Where was Wolli’s father when McIlroy died?’ Was he with him out there in the desert?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’ She was frowning. ‘Yuh’re not interested in Golden Soak, are yuh? It’s McIlroy’s Monster that’s brought yuh here.’ There was a harder note in her voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Ed’s a good bloke. As good as they come, even if he is a bit of a solitary. And that girl of his, Janet, she’s had a poor go of it one way and another. I thought you was having a dekko at that mine of his with a view to finding him a buyer.’ She heaved her bulk out of the canvas chair. ‘For that I was going to try and persuade Little Brighteyes to go along with yuh. But the Monster — ‘ She shook her head. ‘That’s a load of horseshit. If you believe that…. Well, I got other things to do.’ And she stepped down into the dust, calling to Brighteyes her thanks for the beer as she headed back to the Conglomerate.

The black woman had come out of the bedroom, a can of beer in her hand. We were alone together on the verandah. ‘Where’s your brother?’ I asked her.

She stared at me, her eyes wide so that I thought for a moment she hadn’t understood. Then her thick lips moved. ‘Wolli?’

‘Yes. Where is he?’

She didn’t answer, but her eyes moved, evasive, uneasy. I pushed past her into the bedroom. He was sprawled on the big double bed, a thin spider of a man in ragged khaki shorts, his big horny feet with their splayed toes bare. He didn’t move, only his eyes, wide in the heavy black face, staring at me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything.

‘You speak English?’

‘Liddle bit.’ His voice was thick and slow. There was a can of beer beside him, but he wasn’t drunk. His eyes were alert, the whites showing in the shaded gloom of the room. The brown ridges were very marked, the face heavier and coarser than his sister’s, only the faintest similarity in the features.

‘You were at the Golden Soak mine last night — why?’

He shook his head, but it was an evasion of the directness of my gaze rather than a denial.

‘What reason had you for breaking into the mine?’ I spoke slowly and distinctly, his sister hovering in the background.

‘Go longa Phil.’

‘Why?’

Again the evasive shake of the head, the face impassive, the eyes shifty and his big hands hitching nervously at his shorts. ‘You speak ‘im Phil.’

‘All right, I will. But I’m speaking to you now. You told a prospector from Kalgoorlie your father was with McIlroy when he died.’

He grunted and swung his legs off the bed, coming to his feet in one easy controlled movement. ‘Who you?’ And when I told him I was a mining consultant from England, he repeated, You speak ‘im Phil.’

And that’s all I could get out of him. He admitted his father had been with McIlroy at the end, but where they had been, what they had found or what McIlroy had told him before he died — to all these questions he just shook his head. It wasn’t that he was stupid or that he didn’t understand. He understood all right. At one point he turned to his sister and the two of them went at it so fast they were speaking on the intake of their breathing as well as the exhalation, both of them talking together, a guttural rolling sound. And when finally he turned to me and said, ‘Bad spirits all longa that mine,’ I thought he was referring to the miners who had been trapped there in the cave-in.

He was scared, but whether it was really the ghosts of dead miners he was scared of or something else I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know enough about the aborigine mind, and when he repeated yet again — ‘you speak ‘im Phil,’ I thought it was more likely Westrop he was scared of. I was wrong there, of course. Westrop was tough, but he was a decent enough man at heart — just an ordinary, hard-drinking, hard-driving, mind-your-own-bloody-business Australian.

He came into the bar that night in a singlet and shorts, a pair of flip-flop sandals on his feet, limping slightly, but with a swagger, his lean body very erect and reminding me vaguely of something, some picture perhaps. He was a very striking man, handsome even in a hard-bitten way. Prophecy wasn’t there. It was the English boy behind the bar who tipped me the wink when the truck drove up, half a dozen of the Grafton Downs men piling out of it and moving in on the bar with the determination of men for whom beer is the only solace in the world of torrid heat and dust.

I was having a drink with the Shire Clerk and the man who now drove the grader on the Nullagine section of the Highway. The Clerk, a baldish man in a clean blue shirt who had come originally from Wittenoom, had given me a whole list of contacts, older men who might have known McIlroy back in ‘38. Most of them were on outback stations and quite inaccessible to me without my own transport. ‘Why don’t you go down to Port Hedland then and see the Administrator?’ But Port Hedland was almost 200 miles away.

I waited till Westrop had downed his first beer, watching him and trying to work out in my mind how I was going to handle it. He looked as tough as Andie had suggested, lean and fit, with a dour face and sandy hair bleached pale by the sun. I saw the English boy lean across the bar to speak to him and then he was looking directly at me, his eyes narrowed, his mouth a hard line below the beaked nose. One of his mates flipped a coin and he did the same, laughing without humour when he found himself odd man out. He went to the hatch to order a round, his left leg almost stiff as though the knee joint was locked. The Clerk’s hand was on my arm, some story about a station owner who’d corraled a bunch of pogies belonging to a man called Stansted. It was a long, involved story and I had to bend close to hear what he was saying. There was a good deal of noise in the room, about twenty people there, some of them women, their faces sweating in the harsh glare of the naked light bulbs. ‘What are pogies?’ I asked.

‘Calves that haven’t been branded.’ His voice was high against the hubbub. ‘ Yuh keep’em starved of water for a few days an’ when yuh give ‘em a drink they’re so bloody grateful they stay put. Well this fellow Stansted, he doesn’t bother with his own bunch, just goes in an’ rustles twice as many — ‘ ‘

‘Yuh Alec Falls?’

I looked round to find Westrop standing at my elbow.

‘Kid behind the bar there says yuh want to speak to me.’

‘Yes,’ I said and we moved away, each of us trying to size the other up. ‘You were at Golden Soak last night.’

‘What’s that to do with yuh?’

‘I was staying with the Garretys at Jarra Jarra.’ He didn’t say anything, standing there with his beer in his hand, the stubble on his chin catching the light and glistening with sweat.

‘That mine’s been closed for years.’

‘Okay, it’s been closed for years. So what’s it to do with yuh?’

‘I saw Wolli this afternoon.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘What did Wolli tell yuh?’

‘Nothing. Only that I’d better speak with you.’

‘About what?’

‘Your reason for going there.’

‘Did Ed Garrety send you?’

‘Not exactly. I’m naturally interested — ‘

‘So you think I know something about that mine Garrety don’t?’ He gave a quick laugh, and with that laugh I was conscious of tension in him. ‘Well, mebbe I do, but I’m not telling a goddammed Pommie.’ He took a gulp at his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Yuh go back to Jarra Jarra and tell the old bugger next time I come I’ll be armed, an’ if he pulls a gun on me again … Christ! I wasn’t ten years in the Army for nothing. Yuh tell him that.’

‘He owns the mine,’ I said. ‘You were trespassing and he’d every right …’

‘Okay, he owns it. But it won’t be long now and I can wait.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re broke, aren’t they? That’s what they tell me here, that it won’t be long before the mine, the station, the whole lot will be up for sale.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Is that why yuh’re here — to value the mine for them?’ He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Yuh bin down there?’

I shook my head and he seemed relived. ‘I’m not interested in gold,’ I said.

‘Then what are you interested in?’

‘Copper.’

He looked at me as though he’d never heard of the stuff. ‘There’s no copper at Golden Soak.’ He said it quietly, a thin smile and his eyes cold. ‘What the hell are yuh after?’

And when I told him it was the location of Mcllroy’s Monster that bought me to Nullagine, he burst out laughing. ‘Yuh must be joking.’ He turned to his mates. ‘Here, fellers. Here’s a chap says he’s come all the way out from the Old Country to find McIlroys Monster.’ They crowded round me, laughing, joking, asking questions, too happy in their drink to play it any way but the way he wanted it. ‘ Yuh believe that one, you’ll believe anything.’

‘That’s Wolli’s story …. Yep, trots it out pat soon as he’s short of the ready …’ And then an older man with no teeth and the face of a dried-up mummy: ‘Funny thing though, finding his truck like that, empty, with no body, not even his skeleton.’

‘Well, wot d’yuh expect, out there between the Great Sandy and the Gibson?’

‘That’s right — it’d be covered by sand in no time.’

‘It’s gibber country.’

‘No, it ain’t. It’s sand — like it is all the way to the Alice.’

‘It’s gibber, I tell yuh. All red gravel.’

‘How d’yuh know? Yuh ain’t never been there.’

‘Its wot they say.’

‘Who says — Wolli I s’pose?’

‘No, his father.’

‘Yuh weren’t around these parts when Wolli’s Father was alive.’

‘Its wot I heard,’ the fellow added lamely and they all laughed.

‘Funny thing,’ the little mummy-faced man said again, ‘but Wolli’s father never talked about it — never mentioned the Monster once as far as I know.’

‘Why should he, Lenny? I tell yuh, it’s just a load of crap dreamed up by that black bastard to get himself a few beers.’

But the little man shook his head. ‘Oh no, it weren’t. I was in Kalgoorlie at the time an’ it was all in The Miner, ‘bout how McIlroy heard of this mountain of copper from some abo who’d walked into the bank at Port Hedland asking for a loan in return for the location. McIlroy was a gambler, everybody knows that. Now wot was the feller’s name?’ He scratched his bullet head. ‘Buggered if I can remember it now. But he got his loan and went bust on the de Bernales shares … I remember now. Warrampi. That was the abo’s name. Well, then Pat McIlroy took off into the blue — his last big gamble — an’ that didn’t come off either. I remember the pitchers in the papers, too — one of him leaving Port Hedland. Another as he drove through Marble Bar an’ him standing in the back of his truck making speeches. Yuh’d’ve thought they’d’ve stoned him for losing their money like that. Instead they cheered him.’

‘Yuh’re joking,’ a voice said, and Lenny laughed and shook his head. ‘I ain’t, yuh know. I can see the pitchers now. He was a small man, neatly dressed, and he stood there in the back of the truck an’ he didn’t call it a mountain of copper — he called it his Monster. That’s wot got him the headlines — Mcllroy’s Monster.’

‘He must’ve had the gift of the gab.’

‘Sure he did. He was Irish.’

Somebody had bought another round and I found myself with a full glass in my hand again.

‘Did you ever meet McIlroy?’ I asked. ‘I was told he came from Kalgoorlie.’

But Lenny shook his head. ‘I was just a kid at the time. My father knew him ‘cos he worked at the Great Boulder. I remember him saying he always reckoned McIlroy would come to a sticky end — either that or he’d finish up a millionaire. A clerk, I think, he said, but a boss’s man with a tongue that could turn iron pyrites into gold. Come to think of it, I did see him once — it was up at the mine and my Dad pointed him out to me getting into a flash English car. There’s a man, he said, makes more money in a day playing the market than I make working my guts out underground in a whole year. But it was the car I was interested in — an MG sports it was, all white with a long bonnet and big headlights. Bloody silly, a car like that in Kal, but no doubt it served its purpose. He was a show-off and clever as a monkey.’

I had a picture to show the sort of man McIlroy was, but nothing about the copper deposit that had sent him to his death. AH Lenny could tell me was what he’d read in the Kalgoorlie Miner, and that was pretty vague, for he was only twelve years old at the time. ‘It was the abos found the truck. They’d been walkabout — some corroboree — and by the time the police got wind of it the tracks were all obliterated. Nothing to show where he’d been or whether he’d found his Monster.’

I asked him if there’d been anything in the papers about McIlroy having an aborigine with him on the expedition, but he didn’t know. ‘All I remember for sure is that the truck’s back axle was broken, and that’s only because I was getting interested in cars then. I don’t recall anything about an abo.’

‘Then what’s Walli talking about?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘yuh’re new out here, ain’t yuh, same as Phil. Well, put yourself in Walli’s place, half Australia fossicking around for minerals and this old story every bit as good as Lasseter’s Reef. It’s worth a few beers every time a stranger comes into the bar here and that’s all he cares. He’s short of money and he likes his booze, see. Nothing else to it. That’s what I keep telling Phil — but there you are — ‘ He shrugged and downed the rest of his beer.

I looked around for Westrop, but he was no longer beside me, and when I went to order another round, I saw him in the main bar with Walli.

Drinking there with the Grafton boys, I was able to confirm what Andie had told me, that Westrop had only been at the tin mine a matter of two months and he’d come down from Darwin, straight out of hospital after his discharge, looking for a job. He knew nothing about mining, but he’d been a sapper and could drive bulldozers. ‘It’s open cast mining, see.’

A soldier, straight out of Vietnam with no knowledge of mining; it seemed odd that he should be so interested in Wolli. And that night visit to Golden Soak. ‘Are you sure he wasn’t a prospector before he joined the Army?’

They laughed at that. ‘I tell yer, he don’t know a dam’ thing about mining.’

‘But he’s got books. He’s learning.’

‘Yuh don’t learn about mining from books.’

‘But you can learn how to recognize a mountain of copper when you see one.’ I said.

‘Mcllroy’s Monster!’

They were all laughing, their faces glistening in the lights. Somebody thrust another can of beer into my hand.

‘When did he become interested in McIlroy?’ I asked.

They didn’t know. It was just a joke to them. And then Lenny said quietly, ‘Funny thing, yuh asking that. He was interested in McIlroy right from the word go. Come to think of it, he knew about Wolli, too.’

‘And he came here immediately he was discharged?’

‘Yep.’ The brown eyes in the mummified face were suddenly full of curiosity. ‘Straight out of hospital.’

‘Where’s he from originally, d’you know?’

‘Sydney, so he says. Got his family there.’

‘He’s married then?’

‘Wife an’ two kids. The brown eyes staring at me and both of us thinking the same thing. ‘Says he’s come to work here so as he can grab himself enough to buy a house and a small business.’ But I can see Lenny didn’t believe that any more than I did. ‘He’s a rum’un, Phil is.’

‘D’you believe this story of Wolli’s?’ I asked him.

”Bout his father being with McIlroy?’ He shook his head. ‘I dunno. Makes sense to take an abo along if you’re headed beyond Disappointment. It’s all desert there, or as near as makes no odds.’

‘And what about Golden Soak?’ I asked. ‘Did you know he and Wolli broke into the mine last night?’

‘He was off sick yesterday. How would he get down to the Garrety place?’

‘He was driving a Toyota.’

‘The only person that owns a Toyota around here is Prophecy.’ He glanced quickly round the room, then shook his head. ‘Bloody fool!’ he muttered. ‘That mine’s dangerous.’

‘What was he after?’

He gave me a toothless grin. ‘What’s any bloke after having a look at a derelict mine?’

‘Has he got enough money to buy it?’

”Course not. All he’s got is his pension and whatever they give ‘im for his leg when he got his discharge. Even a dud mine like Golden Soak’s worth more’n that these days.’

‘Then what was he doing there?’

A hand gripped me by the shoulder and I spun round to find Westrop there, the sweat damp on his face and his eyes blazing. ‘ Yuh want to ask questions about me, ask them to my face. Got it?’ He’d had a lot of beer by then. So had I. We all had.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What was it you were looking for last night?’

‘Yuh really wanter know?’ His voice was loud and truculent.

I was looking for McIlroy.’ He laughed and the others laughed with him. But facing him as I was, I knew he wasn’t being funny. He was deadly serious. ‘Yuh go back to your pal Garrety — tell ‘im wot I said. He’ll laugh.’ His face was close to mine, his eyes reflecting an emotion I didn’t understand and his body trembling so that I could feel it through the hand still gripping my shoulder. ‘He’ll laugh himself sick.’ The pressure of the hand increased and suddenly he was shaking me. ‘Yuh go back there and tell’ im. See wot he says.‘And he was shouting at me, ‘Yuh Pommies — yuh’ve got a nerve you bastards have. Yuh don’t give a bugger for this country, but soon as we start striking it rich, then yuh’re out here like a swarm of locusts.’ His fist was bunched, the sweat on his face shining, and I stood there, waiting, feeling isolated. And then suddenly his mood changed and he let go of me. ‘Yuh mind your business, I’ll mind mine.’ He was relaxed now, smiling and clapping me on the shoulder, and then he turned and ordered another round.

They left shortly afterwards, and I went with them, glad of the chance of a lift to Lynn Peak. They were going there for a meal. At least that’s what they said, and I was sucker enough to believe them, anxious now to be on my way to Kalgoorlie.