The River is Down

by Lucy Walker

  ‘Yep. But very occasional and for no more’n two weeks at a time. Those gals up in D’D row right now could be lucky. The river might keep ’em here longer.’

  The haze had deepened to a pall. Over to the right Cindie could see the enormous machines moving relentlessly forward into the sea of spinifex.

  ‘Is that the road over there?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the new bit they’re breaking forward. If it wasn’t for the dust you’d see the white survey pegs the paymaster scraper is following as he goes south. The real doings are a bit back along here. I’ll turn in in a minute. The big feller is the Euclid.’

  True to his word, a minute later Dicey slowed the car, changing into second gear as he moved off the track into the spinifex. He pulled up alongside a row of rust-coloured ironmongery that had to be seen to be believed. Everything was an inch deep in the dust. The wheels of the Euclid ‒ out in front ‒ were as high as Dicey was tall. The enormous tyres could not be seen around. The cabin, with one man leaning out of it, was up in celestial realms that cricked Cindie’s neck looking up at it.

  ‘Forty quid a week, that bloke gets for driving that thing on this particular site!’ Dicey said. ‘He has to have arms of an ox, judgment of an Einstein, and the guess work of a pools-winner.’

  ‘Is that where you have to mend the radio?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Dicey opened the car door. With one foot out he turned back to Cindie. ‘You go and make friends with the fellers sitting in the shade of that grader farther along. They’re having lunch-break early, and now’s the hour for them to see angels dropping out of the sky. Least-wise, one angel hefting herself out of a Holden.’

  ‘Supposing they ‒?’

  ‘Supposing nothing. First they’ll be scared, then they’ll be shy. Finally they’ll all but turn into Raleighs, with carpets to spread over the dust and under your feet. You go and try ’em, Cindie.’

  ‘I feel diffident ‒’

  ‘Don’t.’ Dicey leaned his inside elbow on the steering wheel and gave Cindie a prize-winning smile. ‘You have freshness and frankness and a few other disarming features about you, Nice One. They’ll know in two ups you’re not going to talk down to men who work out here in the blazing wilderness building the biggest thing in Australia ‒ bar the Snowy River set-up ‒ just because they have dirty hands, and red dust all over their faces. Not to mention layers of it on their clothes. That’s all that’ll bother them ‒ that you’re not uppity.’

  Cindie opened the door and began to slide out on to the track.

  ‘I really would like to ask them what they do, and how they do it.’

  ‘You can spare the reverence. They don’t want it. They just want you, or anybody else who happens along, to know that life up here is no picnic, but they take it and live it. So long as people understand that.’

  ‘I very much do that ‒’ She broke off. She had looked back along the track they had covered and could see a dust-cloud rolling towards them. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she finished.

  ‘Let him!’ Dicey was indifferent. ‘They come and go all the time. I’ve work to do on this raking radio up above; and you’ve work to do learning about how to live in the north from the blokes laying-off over there. Smile, and they’ll give you some tea from their billies. Real bush tea too. Better than anything you’ll get down south out of a teapot.’

  Dicey shut the car door and moved over to the Euclid. He still had to crick back his neck to talk to the man leaning out of the window in the cabin.

  Cindie began to walk along the line of broken earth, then at a tangent across a stretch of trampled grass to where the men sat in the shade of their vehicles watching her with the kind of dead-pan expression customary in the north. They were waiting to see what sort of person she was.

  When she was near enough to smile at them, she knew it had to be the kind of smile that tempered pleasure with wisdom. These men working in this place, and this way, didn’t want any flibbertigibbet girl charming them. They wanted common sense!

  Cindie did smile. It was an honest smile, a little reticent, and not contrived.

  ‘You goin’ far, miss?’ one asked. The others laughed.

  ‘Well,’ said Cindie consideringly, meeting this irony with a mild version of her own, ‘if I went up that road, and kept going, I could come to the Kimberleys, then across to the Territory. After that it would be the Border, then Queensland cattle country ‒’

  They knew at once she understood them.

  ‘You like a cup of tea, miss?’ one asked getting up from his seat on the ground. ‘There’s carton cups somewhere around. You like drinking tea out of cardboard? No china here.’

  ‘I’d love some tea, thank you. Is this almost frightening stretch of red earth the road? Or is it over on that track where the Euclid is standing?’

  ‘This is the road in the making,’ a young Englishman said from his resting place against the wheel of a bulldozer. ‘The Euclid shifts the dirt from the find-holes at the side on to the track, and fills it in. That’s for foundation. You got to back-up north about ten miles before you see the next layer of foundation they put on the old girl.’

  The man who had first offered her tea brought Cindie a mug of steaming brown fluid with a tiny leaf floating in it.

  ‘Don’t mind the vegetation,’ he said, meaning the leaf. ‘Takes the smoky taste out of it. Sit down there in the shade. I guess Dicey won’t be long blowing dust out of Jorgan’s mike. How a feller can drive and service and manage a thing like that and not know when his mike’s only plain clogged up with dust I’ll never guess.’

  ‘Well, guess who’s coming, instead,’ another man said. His voice was lazy, yet somehow, in a hidden kind of way, conveyed meaning.

  Everyone, including Cindie, turned and looked towards the dust-ball she had seen earlier and which had now materialised into a Land-Rover.

  She couldn’t see the driver because of the reflection of light on the wind-screen, but evidently the men knew who, and who only, would be driving that particular Land-Rover.

  A minute later it came to a stop and Nick Brent jumped out of it. As his hand swung the drive door to, Cindie nearly put her fingers in her ears. She blinked her eyes in advance of the slam she felt coming. Oh, no! she thought crossly. Not Nick again ‒

  ‘Why does Nick Brent slam car doors?’ she asked slowly.

  ‘He has to. So does everyone else,’ someone said, not looking at her but at the boss. ‘The roads knock the bodywork of the cars about. After a while, you kinda gotta slam a door to make it shut. Everything’s loose.’

  ‘Not mine?’ asked Cindie anxiously. Her imagination flew to the number of times Flan might have slammed her Holden’s door while it was on leave yesterday.

  ‘You stay up here long enough, miss, and maybe you’ll have to double-slam. Just to make sure.’

  Nobody seemed perturbed, or on edge, because the boss had arrived. Nobody moved and no one changed the expression on his face, except perhaps to allow it to become a shade more dead-pan.

  They are funny ones, Cindie thought mystified. Nick Brent was so very much the boss. Why didn’t they all spring to? She all but felt a horrid compulsion to do so herself.

  A silence fell on the group as they went on sipping boiling tea, or rolling cigarettes leisurely.

  Nick crossed the few yards to the Euclid and stood talking to its driver, who was now on the ground. Dicey was out of sight in the cabin doing something to the radio works.

  Cindie noticed how easily and leisurely the two men, Nick and the driver, stood talking. These men were equals. The men sitting on the ground were equals with those others by the Euclid too. The very concept of the road, let alone its achievement, was so vast that human beings each playing a vital part in its construction had stature.

  Nick Brent held a long desultory conversation with the driver, then he turned and walked across the grass, down the edge of the turned red earth of the new part of the road, to where Cindie and the men sat.


  Cindie watched him come with a curious, though still half-angry, interest. She could not forget those iron-stone ridges of his personality. She had already stubbed herself against them. He didn’t walk quietly, or even as if he had a purpose, yet there was something about the way he did come ‒ something about his long lean wiry frame and the suggestion of tension deliberately tamed, that made her know everything Nick Brent was doing did have a purpose. She wished she didn’t wonder so much about him.

  He pulled up short in front of the group, pushed his jungle hat back on his head, then took out the makings of a cigarette and began to roll one.

  ‘You chaps put the clock on this morning, or something?’ he asked almost too lazily.

  ‘Half an hour. That’s all, boss,’ one man replied with equal lack of feeling. ‘Foreman said okay, so okay it was. We take only a half-hour for lunch-break and no tea-break; an’ we can draw lots for the utilities to go across and look at the river later. You know how it is, boss. The river hasn’t been down for years and any-come-how we haven’t seen water on this stretch of road since we came through the Gibber Ranges.’

  Nick finished rolling his cigarette. He lit it, then blew a spiral of smoke thoughtfully into the air.

  ‘If the foreman said ‒ then okay by me.’ Nick sounded only partially interested. Yet Cindie, watching him, knew that there was far, far more to this question and answer than anyone showed.

  As Dicey had warned. There was more behind that mask of face and quiet manner than his words ever conveyed. She could see the men understood that too. It was something about his eyes. Expressionless, even a little tired, but the brain behind them registered everything: every smallest detail, including Cindie sitting on the ground, a mug of tea in her hand and only men, lots and lots of them, around her.

  He was thinking what?

  ‘I’m going farther up the track, Cindie. I’ll take you along.’

  He didn’t ask if she would like to come. This was, in effect, an order.

  She knew what was the mystery about him now. He seemed quiet, almost gentle; but he was implacable. Adamant. It didn’t show, that was all.

  She emptied the dregs of her tea and put the mug in the large carton box where the men too had thrown theirs as they had finished. No litter on their wonderful road ‒ for these men!

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, not sounding too formal. ‘I’d love to see the finished part of the thousand-miler.’

  ‘The finished road is about a hundred miles north, I’m afraid,’ Nick said with a wry twist to his mouth. ‘Down on this section we’re surveying and making the base foundation. There’s another gang back-up fifty miles. They’re sealing as the graders and levellers go through. I want a word with the foreman ten miles up. Then I’ll take you back to the camp.’

  ‘But my car ‒’

  ‘Dicey will bring it back. He brought it out.’ His eyes swung round to the girl and met hers. ‘Didn’t he?’

  Well really!

  Yet she had no good answer. She had let Dicey drive the car out. How could she insist on driving it back herself?

  She thought of those slammed doors the men had spoken of. She looked sorrowfully at her Holden as she passed it to climb into Nick’s Land-Rover. She wondered if she ought to be as mutely obedient as this. Of course, she had been stranded. And he had rescued her. He was giving her food, roof and a modicum of kindness in the camp. She had to remember all that. It was good manners to be co-operative.

  Besides, she did want to see the road ‘back-up’, as Nick had said.

  The ten-mile drive along the track to the next stretch, where a team of men were working with graders, was much the same as the one along which Dicey had driven here. It was all spinifex plain: in the near distance the red-carpeted, mesa-like ranges stretched on and on, their formations changing a little as the miles went by like some strange but fascinating exercise in geometry. Sometimes their flanks seemed totally covered with green grass. About this last, Nick disillusioned her.

  ‘It’s spinifex, the same as around here. The water seeping down the sides of the iron-stone gives it more surface moisture. That’s why it’s greener. The spiked leaves are a little more tender, that’s all.’

  Sometimes the grass on the sides of the ranges seemed to grow in bands between wider bands of exposed red rock.

  ‘It’s weird, yet in a strange way, fascinating,’ Cindie said after a long silence. Her wonder at this country that had no margins to its world had made her temporarily forget her anger with Nick. She was mesmerised.

  ‘You like it?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Yes. Yet it’s terrible! Which is a puzzle. All deserts, or semi-deserts, are terrible, aren’t they? Yet they can be beautiful too. I remember when my parents brought me out from England ‒ I was very small then. It was sunset as we came through the desert part of the Suez Canal. I’ve never forgotten how wonderful that was. The sunset over the desert ‒’

  There was a silence.

  ‘It would be frightening if one was lost in it,’ Cindie went on thoughtfully. ‘It goes on for ever. There are no landmarks.’

  ‘This country gets into you,’ Nick said, ignoring this last. ‘There are some who come, and go back out of it never to return. But if they stay long enough it gets into them like a vice. They come back because it’s caught them.’

  He had forgotten the barrier of antagonism between them perhaps? The land haunted, yet healed, where it touched the heart. Cindie felt this instinctively. Endless miles of spinifex: lonely, white-trunked, motionless ‒ sometimes grotesque ‒ trees. Blood-coloured red rock mountains in the distance. And so empty.

  ‘You speak almost as if you know that feeling,’ she said.

  ‘I do. I was born and reared a nor’-wester. My company won this contract for this part of the road because, being the engineer, I know the country and its conditions.’

  ‘You came back gladly?’

  ‘I was coming back anyway.’

  Cindie was silent. The magic was gone. Coming back? She heard that signature tune again ‒ Bindaroo, Erica and Nick.

  She glanced sideways at his face. It was a closed book now. He wasn’t thinking about the wonders of the ironstone ranges, the alternate bands of red rock and green spinifex, nor even about the road. He was thinking about something far, far away from her. With the utterance of those words, he had forgotten she existed.

  The speedometer read eight miles from where they had left Dicey at work on the Euclid. Cindie guessed there would be roughly another two miles to go before they reached their destination.

  Nick broke the silence. He too had come back to the present ‒ a bumpy ride in a dusty Land-Rover.

  ‘I forgot to tell you this morning that the wives up in D’D row had heard about your arrival in the camp last night. They’ve decided to give you an afternoon tea-party by way of welcome. Mary Deacon told me about it before I came out. That’s why I said I’d take you back to the camp. They can’t be disappointed, you know. Havoc in D’D row won’t do at all.’ He said this last in a voice tinged with amusement.

  Cindie found it an effort not to turn her head and look at him. He was so different.

  Had he really forgotten the message? Or just not wanted to tell her at the radio unit, or in front of the men on the site?

  ‘Why is it called D-apostrophe-D row?’ she asked.

  ‘The apostrophe stands for T. From politeness, we usually write it with the apostrophe.’

  Was he amused? Or was he not? It was hard to tell.

  ‘D-T-D,’ she spelled it out slowly, puzzled.

  ‘Detergent, Tea Cups, and Dynamite,’ Nick said.

  Cindie turned her head this time. He smiled: a wonderful flashing smile, then it was gone. Unexpectedly Cindie was drawn to him. Had she dreamed it, or had she glimpsed magic for a moment?

  ‘The men labelled the row,’ Nick said. ‘Sometimes you have to let them have their kind of humour. I thought it might be more diplomatic to cut the name down to init
ials only.’ He glanced at her, one eyebrow raised. ‘For the sake of peace; and good relationships.’

  Cindie suddenly laughed. Jim Vernon would have called that her rainbow smile, illuminating her face like fire flame that made colour and light but did not burn. It only beguiled with its warmth and promise.

  A second later she realised Nick had wanted her to laugh. He had made her do it. He had forgiven her her misdemeanours.

  From then on to where the men were grading the track, the atmosphere between herself and Nick was easier in a subtle kind of way. So surprised was Cindie at this new relationship, and the certainty that Nick had manipulated it, that she forgot the worry about his possible connection with Bindaroo. She had been won over by him. Well, temporarily, anyway!

  What an enigmatic, yet bafflingly human, person he was turning out to be!

  Nick, when he had finished talking with the foreman, said he’d drive her to one of the uplands leading by a series of dips and climbs to the broken foothills of the ranges.

  ‘I’m not taking up valuable time?’ she asked.

  ‘Not my time. Yours. There’s that tea-party remember.’ Again that glimpse of a smile, a little alarming now because Cindie felt herself succumbing to something she did not understand, but feared it was the pressure of another person’s will over her own. If so ‒ and she must think this out ‒ it was something urgently to be resisted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I shouldn’t be late for that ‒’

  ‘It’s early. Look at the clock.’

  Cindie glanced at the dashboard. ‘Not yet noon?’ she exclaimed astonished. ‘But the men back there were having their lunch. Everything is so timeless one doesn’t notice Time.’

  ‘Or dates. You’re north of Twenty-Six now, Cindie. Working hours, on site, begin at seven in the morning. On this particular day the men put the clock on half an hour, before breakfast anyway, and cut their tea-break. To-day they’ll have finished a day’s work by three. An hour to get back to camp and shower-up, and the rest of the time’s their own. Those who are lucky in the draw will take the utilities, and will make the river before sundown. They’ll fish, eat what they catch by the bank, and go without canteen dinner ‒’