Despite the flagrant abuse of health regulations, the coffee wasn’t bad—Helmut ground his own—and the conversation was a cut above what you got at the White Dog. The town’s intelligentsia, teachers and nurses, tended to hang out there on a Friday afternoon and soak up the ambience. Much of which, if the wind was blowing the wrong way, came from the aforementioned tank.
Today the café was full of tourists and Charles stood out like a poodle in a pack of camp dogs. Lawyers with a social conscience inevitably have a haggard, hangdog look about them, and Charles was as hangdog as I’d seen. He was in his mid-thirties, wearing crisp jeans and a blue checked shirt. He had a receding hairline, a receding chin and, by the look of the creases in his jeans, a receding personality. The only thing that wasn’t receding was his nose, an immense proboscis of a hue that suggested it had sat through too many outdoor land-claim hearings.
‘I haven’t eaten,’ he said when the introductions were out of the way. ‘What do you recommend?’
I studied the blackboard menu. Marinated buffalo steaks. Crocodile skewers. Wild boar sausages. Helmut was going all gourmet.
‘A cup of tea. Weak black is probably your safest option.’
‘I prefer it white.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
To his credit he didn’t, when, minutes later, he poured his milk from its cute little silver jug and watched in dismay as it came tumbling out in yellow chunks.
‘Helmut!’ I yelled.
The owner came shuffling wearily over, a tea-towel on his shoulder, hair sprouting from every possible orifice. He’d had a long day. A long life, if it came to that, as had the milk.
‘Helmut, look at our bloody milk!’
He peered, sniffed, winced, then shuffled to the kitchen and back without a word of apology, without a word of any description except for a complaint about the waitress. ‘She must haf used last week’s supply by mistake,’ he grumbled as he placed a fresh jug on the table. ‘Dese girls! Do you haf any idea vot it’s like trying to get staff out here?’
‘You could try selecting them by some criteria other that the size of their breasts.’
I’d only been coming here for a few weeks, but that was long enough to observe that Helmut’s employees tended to be Swedish backpackers who aroused memories of his Bavarian youth and lasted about as long as the first failed seduction.
‘Perhaps the first thing I should do,’ said Charles, after a restorative sip of his Earl Grey, ‘is thank you for bringing the matter to our attention. It does appear that Mr Marsh is engaging in behaviour which could only be described as egregious, and possibly illegal.’
‘Like murder?’
Charles blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing.’ I knew I was going to have to go it alone on that one; the Land Council Legal Department’s brief went a long way, but not as far as homicide. ‘You’ve looked at the lease?’
‘I don’t know that I would dignify it with that name, and in point of fact, no, we haven’t. Which is, in itself I might add, sufficient reason for it to be regarded as lacking in any legal standing whatsoever.’
‘Que?’
‘Article 7.6 of the title deed states that for any agreement on the land use to be legitimate it needs to be confirmed by both a two-thirds majority of the owners and their legal representatives. To whit, ourselves.’
‘So you’ll go out there and tell him to piss off?’
‘Quite. Or we will.’
I was raising the cup to my lips, but the last comment made me pause, mid-air. ‘I dunno that I like the sound of that “we”.’
‘I held a meeting yesterday with the traditional owners.’
‘You managed to round them up?’
‘We found sufficient numbers to make a quorum here, in the Bluebush Town Camp.’
‘Including Freddy Ah Fong?’
‘Freddy was there, but his contribution to the discussion was… minimal.’
‘You mean he was pissed?’
‘Possibly. He does seem to have been struck by a certain… amnesia…’
‘That’d be guilt.’
‘…over his negotiations with Mr Marsh. Be that as it may, the owners have authorised the Lands Council to demand Mr Marsh remove his stock forthwith or face the consequences. We’ve sent a field officer out to investigate and, as you said, there are upwards of a thousand head of cattle contentedly grazing upon Moonlight pasture.’
‘So where do I come into it?’
‘When I suggested that it would be usual practice for a representative of the community to accompany us when such a demand is presented, what might best be described as a rather profound silence settled over the group…’
‘Ah. The breach into which Kuminjayi would normally step.’
‘At which point someone suggested you.’
‘I’m not a traditional owner. My mob come from up the Gulf country.’
‘They do seem to regard you as a member of the community.’
‘I’m touched.’
‘It was you who drew the matter to our attention. And it was you who, from all reports, was not afraid to…beard the lion, so to speak. All in all, it would seem that you’d be an appropriate representative.’
‘Does Marsh know you’re coming?’
‘Well, not as such, no. If he knew the reason for our trip I doubt whether he’d sit around waiting for us. But I’m pretty sure he’s there. I put in a call to the homestead and spoke to someone I presume was his wife. She said he’d be back today.’
‘Today?’ I checked my watch. Two-thirty. Charles leaned forward, looked a little wary. Here comes the crunch, I thought.
‘I’ve got a plane waiting out at the airstrip,’ he explained. ‘We could be out there and back before sunset…’
I sipped my tea, my mind busily weighing up the pros and cons of Charles’ suggestion. The main con, the prospect of Marsh slaughtering me on the spot, would presumably be reduced by the fact that I was packing a lawyer. A real one, this time.
What were the pros? A chance to sink the elastic-sided slipper into Marsh, see a bit of new country from the air and, most important of all, carry out a bit of extra-curricular sniffing. Maybe shed some light onto the circumstances of Lincoln’s death.
‘So you’ll come?’ Charles asked.
I smiled darkly. ‘Lemme at im.’
The plane was a single-engine Piper Warrior, the pilot a gangly farm boy named Jason who looked like he would have been more at home at the handlebars of a BMX than the controls of an aeroplane. I studied him warily: he had the shades and the cap, the flak jacket and the gum, but did he have the flying skills to get us there in one piece? My doubts diminished when I observed the supple ease with which he handled the take-off and the hour’s flight to Carbine Creek, but they came rushing back with the landing.
We were still some distance from the station runway when our engine spluttered and fell silent. Our boy-pilot yelled, ‘Oh my God!’ and jerked the throttle back and forth. No response. ‘Have to bring her in downwind!’
Christ, I thought, is this how I’m going to end up? As a pile of avgas-scented ashes on Marsh’s doorstep?
I was sitting in the front seat, and watched in heart-thumping horror as the wind gathered momentum and the earth flew up at us. I closed my eyes and a string of images appeared: my father, for one, then Hazel, and finally, ever so fleetingly, my poor dear mother.
I opened my eyes to see the runway rushing into view. ‘Not gonna make it!’ Jason screamed. We thumped down in rough pasture a hundred metres short of the runway, hit a rock, jerked skywards, bucked about by some killer wave, levelled out and made another touchdown.
The plane shuddered to a halt. The three of us sat there, motionless, stunned. Jason’s fingernails had embedded themselves in the yoke. Charles looked like he’d swallowed his brief case.
‘Nice piece of work, Jason,’ I said, my voice quavering. ‘If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll drive next time.
’
Jason climbed out, stretched his back and made a dubious inspection of the undercarriage.
‘Wheel’s gonna need replacing,’ he gasped.
‘Thought we were, too, for a moment there. Got a spare one, have you Jason?’
‘No way I’ll be able to fix that out here.’ He kicked the battered strut, massaged his forearms. ‘What a fucking mess.’
‘Quite,’ commented Charles, adjusting his Adam’s apple. ‘And it’s about to get a lot messier.’
He nodded at a shed adjoining the homestead, maybe a kilometre away, from which a familiar red F100 was emerging, slow and ominous.
Carbine Creek
WE STOOD there watching the big utility home in on us.
As it pulled up we were all relieved to see that the driver was not Marsh, but an old timer who chose to remain nameless, and looked like a sun-dried Fidel Castro. He studied us for a time and then asked, ‘Youse’d be the lawyers?’
Charles and I glanced at each other. Had there been a breach of security? It was possible. The station owners were little emperors out here, with tentacles stretching in every direction. Somebody— the charter company, air traffic control—must have tipped Marsh off that the Lands Council was on the way.
Charles replied that yes, we were the lawyers, or he was, and introduced me as ‘Ms Tempest, my associate’. Fidel said nothing, but took a plug of tobacco out of his mouth and put it behind his ear, scratching his skinny arse as he looked me up and down.
I looked him up and down right back, wondering as I did so whether his curiosity was motivated by my gender or my ethnicity. Or by his lively and enquiring mind.
While we were standing around swapping silences with the Cuban lookalike, Jason got on the radio, raised air traffic control and told them we were stranded. Charles and I glanced ruefully at each other when Bluebush eventually said they’d get a rescue party out there by mid-morning.
‘Tomorrow!’ muttered Charles. ‘We’ll be lucky to survive that long, once Marsh finds out why we’re here.’
We piled aboard the F100 and headed for the station. ‘So Mr Marsh is expecting us?’ Charles asked.
Our driver’s response was incomprehensible, but the cigarette on his upper lip wobbled in a way that seemed to suggest the affirmative.
Fidel wasn’t offering much in the way of a commentary. He didn’t need to. The station spoke for itself: manicured lawns, gravelled walkways, wide verandas, wicker chairs. A classic outback homestead. Marsh was doing all right for himself. The Big House was constructed of mottled sandstone and nestled among a small forest of poinciana and casuarinas. To the east was an orchard of oranges and lemons, figs, paw paws, mangoes. To the west was a collection of outbuildings, including workshops, a meat house and the single men’s quarters.
If our driver was a master of taciturnity, the woman waiting for us at the front gate was his polar opposite.
‘Good afternoon,’ she enunciated, all gushes and smiles. ‘Welcome to Carbine Creek. So lovely to meet you. I’m Nancy Marsh. You must be the lawyers?’
Jesus, I was thinking, this is Marsh’s wife?
She was tall, dark-haired, somewhere out in the no-man’s land between buxom and fat, dressed in a red floral dress and a pink straw hat. I put her in her late thirties, maybe ten years younger than her brute of a husband. And she was a Pom: the accent was north-of-England riff-raff, with an overcoat of aspirational squire’s lady. Judging by the colour of her skin, she must have a chronic antipathy to sunshine, particularly given the size of the portions in which it came out here.
If I’d been asked to imagine a Mrs Marsh, I’d have pictured something scrawny and put upon, with skin cancers the size of cockroaches and a mouth full of fencing nails. Maybe dressed in footy shorts and steel-capped boots. What on earth was this displaced English rose doing out here with Cro-Magnon man? She didn’t look like she’d been kidnapped.
‘Indeed,’ responded Charles, automatically ratcheting up into legal mode. ‘Charles Harmes, and my associate, Ms Tempest. Emily. And our pilot, Jason…er, Jason.’
‘I’m sorry, Earl isn’t here just now,’ she smiled. ‘He’s been held up, in the South Paddock. Water problems…’
‘Nothing serious, I hope.’
‘Or personal,’ I couldn’t help but put in.
She looked at me, momentarily perplexed, then explained, ‘Par for the course round here, I’m afraid. Water table’s getting lower every year. I didn’t think he was expecting you this early. Come in and make yourselves comfy. I’ll get Alyssia to put the kettle on.’
Ten minutes later we were ensconced in the lounge room and Mrs Marsh and a teenage girl introduced as ‘Alyssia, the governess’ were busily stuffing into us a sumptuous afternoon tea—scones with jam and cream, lamingtons, home-made biscuits, sponge cakes, the works. I’d assumed Earl Marsh’s generous gut came from the all-the-beef-you-can-eat deal that was the basis of every station menu. By the time I’d fought off Mrs Marsh—Nance, she insisted— and her third slab of chocolate sponge, I was thinking about it in a new light.
During the course of the conversation I picked up a little of her personal history: she’d come from the English mill town of Preston ten years before, somehow ending up as a governess on a property in Queensland. It was there that she’d met and fallen for the irresistible Earl. They’d been on Carbine for five years now.
Nance looked aghast when we told her about our hazardous landing, cooed sympathetically, confirmed that we didn’t have any broken bones and shuffled us off to the guest-house—a comfortable, two-roomed bungalow with a wide veranda and green-striped awnings, spotlessly clean, with polished wooden floors and lancewood railings—for ‘a nice lie down’.
While Charles and Jason were revelling in the good life on the deck chairs I took the opportunity to have a look around. I thought I might try to talk to some of the station hands and see what I could pick up about relations between Carbine and Moonlight. I poked my nose into a few sheds, but the only hand I came across was the withered revolutionary who’d driven us in from the plane. He was in the workshop, where he was crankily cannibalising a clapped-out grader.
I tried the perennial opening gambits—cattle prices, roads, rodeos and rain—but his responses were little more than grunts, until I mentioned that my father had been a mechanic on Moonlight Downs. He muttered something like ‘more dogs than cattle’—his comment, I presumed, on the fact that it was now in the hands of the blacks.
I gave up and returned to the bungalow, where Charles and Jason were sipping at their drinks and marvelling at our reception. Nance had been and gone, leaving iced water, towels, even toothbrushes and combs.
‘Still can’t work it out,’ said Jason, gazing at his toothbrush in wonder. ‘Normally when I bring you Lands Council mob out to the stations, they set the dogs onto us.’
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ I warned. ‘The boss isn’t home yet. Probably got the dogs on the ute.’
‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ said Charles. ‘There may be a case of mistaken identity happening here.’
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ said the pilot, taking a long draught of beer and settling deeper into his chair. ‘Nance said dinner’s at six. If it’s anything like afternoon tea I can’t wait.’
At the appointed hour the three of us came in the back door of the homestead. Nance looked up from the stove, an apron over her dress, flour on her hands. She ushered us in, sat us down in the lounge room, plied us with drinks, passed round the nuts and olives. Alyssia was setting the table in the adjoining dining room.
‘Earl’s back,’ said Nance. ‘He’s in his office. Maybe you could let him know dinner’s ready, Emily? It’s just down the corridor there, on your right.’
This’ll be interesting, I thought as I followed her directions and came to a spacious, wood-panelled room looking out onto the poincianas.
The room contained all the accoutrements and paraphernalia of your modern station office: paper-str
ewn desk, computer workstation, filing cabinets, bookshelves, gold-framed photos of sour-faced, hefty beasts and one sour-faced, hefty owner.
Marsh looked like he was just out of the shower: barefooted and freshly scrubbed, skin glowing, dressed in a singlet and shorts, relaxing in an armchair, grinning and gazing in rapt attention at a television. I was almost embarrassed to see that I’d sprung the poor bastard watching a Wiggles video. It took me a second or two to notice the small girl, about two or three years of age, perched upon his knee.
The girl turned around and gazed at me with the most angelic expression I’d ever seen, an intriguing amalgam of surprise, curiosity and delight. Indeed, everything about the child was angelic: the aureole of dark ringlets around her alabaster face, the full lips, the perfect teeth and the wide blue eyes.
Amazing, I thought. How could Earl and Nance have produced something like this? God must have taken every skerrick of potential beauty their genes possessed and refined it into this single exquisite creation.
The spell couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Earl noticed the girl looking away from the box, followed her gaze, and the grin faded. If the girl did have anything of the angel in her she needed it now, as Marsh leapt to his feet, a look of disbelief sweeping across his face. This was the first time I’d seen him without shades: his eyes were the same bright, puzzled blue as his daughter’s.
The girl hit the floor, but the angel stood her in good stead: she rolled with the fall, rolled again, then looked up at me, still smiling. ‘More?’
‘Sure,’ I answered.
She did another roll, then grinned.
‘Deadly!’ I said. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Marsh.’
It was taking the station owner a second or two to get his thoroughly smacked gob working. Finally he pointed a fat finger at me and spluttered, ‘You!’
‘Me…’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nance sent me to tell you dinner was ready.’
He continued to gape, his mouth full of silent questions and his eyes swivelling around the room as if he expected the answers to come in through the window. He started to march past me, paused, went back and scooped the child off the floor, then headed for the kitchen. She gave a little wave as she jogged past.
Moonlight Downs Page 16
