Tracy got up from where she’d been sitting holding the torch half on her and half on him, and took the piece of metal.
She held it out, shone the torch on it, and studied it seriously.
Oh no, thought Keith, she doesn’t like it. I’m stuck down a mine with an angry critic.
She gave a big grin.
‘Ripper,’ she said. ‘It’s even better than the cane toad. Thanks.’
Keith glowed.
‘When we get out,’ he said, ‘I’ll frame it for you.’
‘If we get out,’ she said.
‘OK,’ said Keith quickly, ‘now it’s my turn.’
He took the piece of metal and turned it over. The other side was mottled with rust stains and mineral deposits that had leached out of the rock.
If he painted his face on it he really would look like a cane toad.
His shoulders slumped.
Tracy shone the torch over the ground and around the walls.
‘How about that?’ she said.
Keith peered into the ring of the torch beam.
Against the side wall of the tunnel was a sheet of corrugated iron about half as tall as him.
He tried to pull it away but it was fixed to the rock.
‘Must be to stop subsidence,’ said Keith. ‘Doesn’t matter, it’s OK where it is.’
He crouched down, dusted it off with one of his T-shirts and got to work.
It wasn’t easy, he discovered, painting yourself from memory, specially if you’d never painted yourself before even with a mirror.
It took ages, with a lot of thinking and trying to remember what he looked like in the photo on the shelf in the living room at home.
He hoped Tracy wasn’t getting bored.
He could hear her behind him, scraping rocks.
‘Don’t hurt your hands tunnelling,’ he said, ‘it’s a waste of time. Wait for them to come to us.’
‘I’m not tunnelling,’ she said, ‘I’m writing.’
Keith turned and saw that she’d scratched a word onto the end wall of the tunnel with a rock.
Peru.
‘Peru?’ said Keith.
‘It’s a reminder,’ she said quietly. ‘For later on. When we get weak. So we don’t give up too easily.’
Keith stared at it.
Then he finished his painting.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Tracy looked at it thoughtfully.
‘Looks better than the Corolla,’ she said, and gave him a little grin. ‘It’s great. It’s got that expression you get when you’re thinking. The one that makes you look like that guy on telly.’
Keith didn’t ask which guy in case she meant Bugs Bunny.
‘There is just one thing, though,’ she went on. ‘You look about seven.’
Keith stared at the painting.
She was right.
The face, the hair, the expression in the eyes.
It was a little kid.
Why had he done that?
He thumped the corner of the corrugated iron with his fist in frustration. Dust fell away from around the edges. And suddenly Keith felt something he hadn’t felt before.
A draft.
Coming from behind the sheet of iron.
He grabbed the piece of metal with Tracy’s portrait on it, wedged it behind the sheet of iron, and twisted as hard as he could.
‘Hey,’ said Tracy, ‘don’t do that, it doesn’t matter about you looking young, it’s good. And you’re scratching mine.’
Rusty screws snapped and popped out and the iron sheet tore away from the rock.
Keith and Tracy stared at what was behind it.
A tunnel.
It was narrow but it was big enough to crawl along.
‘Come on,’ said Keith.
He went first with the torch.
The rock floor of the tunnel was murder on their knees, but it didn’t matter because after they went round a curve they could see grey light up ahead.
A few minutes later they crawled out into the bottom of a shaft.
A wire ladder with bits of plastic pipe for rungs hung down from the top. They flung themselves up it without stopping for breath and suddenly they were out in the open air, lying on a mullock heap, gasping and laughing, the sky above them streaked with dawn light.
Keith heard a generator chug into life over on the next heap and looked across and saw a crowd of people standing around the shaft to Curly’s mine. They were silhouetted against the rising sun, but he could make out Mum and Dad.
‘Let’s go and surprise them,’ he said, getting
‘Wait,’ said Tracy. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
Keith saw that she was clutching the piece of metal with her portrait on it to her chest.
Even as he was trying to find a way of telling her how good that made him feel without sounding mushy, Tracy put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a dirty rock the size of a medium flathead fillet, battered.
‘It’s the one I was writing with,’ she said. ‘Didn’t know what it was till the end broke off.’
As she held it out to him, the first weak rays of the sun hit it and colours flashed out of it just like they had out of the opal in Curly’s store.
Except, thought Keith as he gazed at it, the colours in Curly’s opal were watercolours and these are oils.
Cobalt, vermilion, magenta, that sort of stuff.
He looked at Tracy holding the painting and the opal, and suddenly he knew what he had to do.
He grabbed the torch and ran to the shaft and started climbing down the ladder.
‘No!’ shouted Tracy. ‘Don’t be a dill! Come back!’
The tunnel was as hard on his knees as it had been before, and when Keith staggered back into the cavity they’d just escaped from he heard the roar of drills and saw that the roof was trembling and dust was falling all around him.
He didn’t care.
There, on the ground in front of him, was what he’d come for.
As he picked it up, the torchlight and the sweat in his eyes made it flash momentarily with a million points of coloured light.
Even at that instant, when it looked like a dazzling sheet of opal instead of a piece of corrugated iron, he could still see, clearly, himself.
15
From the moment Keith climbed out of the shaft, it was chaos.
There were faces all around him, and lights, and voices all speaking at once.
Mum and Dad were hugging him and crying all over him.
He tried to tell them to be careful of his painting because corrugated iron rusted easily, but they weren’t listening.
He saw the Corolla parked nearby, headlights aimed at the shaft, so he went and put the painting in the boot.
Then two men in white overalls led him over to a bright yellow tent sitting next to a red helicopter.
Tracy came out of the tent and saw him and broke into a huge relieved grin.
‘Jeez, you’re a prawn,’ she said and hugged him so tight Keith could feel his face going as red as the helicopter, partly from embarrassment and partly because she was squeezing all his blood up into his head.
He was glad when he got into the tent and discovered that the two men in overalls were doctors. At least doctors were used to that sort of physical contact.
While the doctors checked him over they explained they were from a nearby coal mine, only four hundred kilometres away, and that they often came over to patch people up and to do a bit of fossicking.
Then he found himself back outside with a blanket round his shoulders and a hot drink in his hands and all sorts of people he’d seen on the diggings crowding round him.
The ultraviolet man touched his blanket for luck.
A middle-aged woman in a cardigan and gumboots who Keith didn’t recognise until he saw that she was wearing a fluffy dressing gown underneath, took his photo.
The ex-Department of Main Roads post painter offered him a beer until the woman in the fluffy dressing gown tol
d him to stop it.
Then Curly, bald head and wrinkled face looking strangely off-white even in the yellow rays of the morning sun, gripped his arm and took him to one side.
‘Sorry I damaged your mine,’ said Keith.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Curly, ‘and anything you found is yours, no questions.’
He leant closer with an anxious glance around to make sure no one was listening and Keith could see that he was going to ask at least one question.
‘That tunnel you escaped through,’ muttered Curly, ‘the one that runs from my claim into the, um, claim next to mine, has anyone asked you about it?’
Keith was just about to say no when they were interrupted by the roar of a motorbike. The man with the beard and the European accent got off and came over to Curly and handed him a wooden sign daubed with faded red lettering.
It said Trespassers Witt Be Stabbed.
Curly went even more off-white.
The man took the sign back and handed Curly some Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets.
Then Mum and Dad appeared with Tracy.
Keith saw that Mum and Dad were holding hands.
‘Come on love,’ said Mum to Keith, ‘let’s all go for a little walk.’
The sun was above the horizon as they walked slowly between the mullock heaps.
Keith tried to concentrate on the warmth on his face so he’d forget the knot in his guts.
It was no good.
Every time he glanced at Mum and Dad holding hands it got tighter.
Then Tracy spoke.
‘Shall I go first, Mr and Mrs Shipley?’ she asked.
‘Alright love,’ said Mum, ‘you go first.’
‘Keith,’ said Tracy, giving him a big grin, ‘this is for you.’
She held out the opal.
‘I know I found it,’ she went on, ‘but we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you nicking off, and we wouldn’t have been down that mine if it wasn’t for you painting the store, and I wouldn’t have been writing stuff on the wall if it wasn’t for you keeping my spirits up, so it’s really yours.’
She put it into his hand.
Keith looked at it for a long time because he wanted to choose exactly the right words for what he was going to say.
He looked at Tracy and his guts tingled so much that they almost unknotted.
‘Jeez you’re a daft bugger,’ he said, grinning. ‘And if you don’t send me a postcard from Peru I’ll come over there and boot you up the bum.’
He put the opal back into her hand.
Dad cleared his throat.
‘Keith,’ he said, ‘before you react hastily, wait till you understand why Tracy’s making such a generous offer.’
He cleared his throat again.
Oh no, thought Keith, Dad’s got to have his tonsils out and it’s to pay for the operation.
But he knew that wasn’t the real reason.
‘Keith,’ said Dad, ‘Mum and me have talked about it for most of the night, and we’ve decided not to split up.’
‘We’ve decided to stay together,’ said Mum. ‘For your sake. We’ve talked about it and we’re determined to make it work.’
‘And the opal is to help with the financial problems,’ said Tracy.
Keith stared out across the mullock heaps, which were glowing in the morning sun and looked like mounds of gold.
He took a deep breath of cool, clear morning air.
This was the moment he’d come halfway across Queensland for, halfway around the world really, and he’d never dreamed it would be like this.
But it was, and he knew exactly what he was going to do.
He took another deep breath and even though he felt sadder than he ever had before, the knot in his guts was suddenly gone.
He turned back to Mum and Dad. They were both smiling as hard as they could, but Mum’s forehead was still furrowed and Dad’s mouth was still droopy.
‘That is what you want, isn’t it love?’ asked Mum in a shaky voice.
Keith looked at them both and slowly shook his head.
16
Keith peered across Trafalgar Square into the late morning fog.
Everything was grey. Grey buildings. Grey shops. Grey cars.
Nelson’s Column was grey, looming up into the grey London sky.
Keith grinned.
What a great day.
He pulled Tracy’s letter from his pocket and read it for the nineteenth time since it had arrived at Dad’s place that morning.
Dear Keith,
Ripper, eh? Only another ten days and I’ll be there. It’s great you’ve got two bedrooms now cause that means I won’t have to pay camping-ground fees and I’ll have more opal money left for checking out London.
My folks have said I might be able to stay for a seventh week! They’re really rapt cause the new roof is on now and their bedroom doesn’t leak any more.
I had a lend of a book on Peru. It still looks pretty interesting, but not as interesting as the London Underground. What happens if a train breaks down? Do they have dunnies down there? Mrs Newman reckons underground trains make your feet swell. Can’t wait.
Say g’day to your folks from me. It must be exciting, having a Mum who’s a parking inspector.
See you soon.
Love Tracy.
PS. Mr Gerlach put your cane toad painting on the front of the school magazine.
PPS. When you said you painted your Dad’s new shop 14 colours, was that inside as well or just outside?
Keith put the letter back in his pocket and looked at his watch. It had been running a bit slow ever since he’d put it in the turps to get rid of the Mongolian Beige.
Eleven thirty-eight.
Or thereabouts.
Heaps of time.
He’d got four days to finish off painting his bedrooms before Tracy arrived. His room at Mum’s place was just about finished except for the rainforest mural on the ceiling. And all he had to do to finish off his room at Dad’s place was put a second coat of Tropical Parrot on the wardrobe and add the Hot Sunflower speed stripes.
Keith climbed the steps of the National Gallery and went inside.
He walked slowly through the rooms, lingering in front of his favourite paintings.
As usual he didn’t spend long looking at the one called Giovanni Amolfini And His Wife because the man and woman reminded him of Mum and Dad before they cheered up.
Still, he thought, it’s interesting that people married the wrong people even five hundred and sixty years ago.
He noticed that the walls in one of the Early Italian rooms had been repainted.
Satin Finish Eggshell Enamel.
Not bad.
Keith wandered on through the gallery smiling as he thought about bringing Tracy here.
After she’d checked out all the paintings, specially the Rembrandt Self Portrait which looked a bit like a cane toad, and he’d shown her the Flemish rooms, which desperately needed some Celery Green around the windows, he’d tell her his secret ambition.
That one day his work would be on these walls.
‘Inside the picture frames or around them,’ she’d ask with a grin.
He’d grin back and give a shrug.
Didn’t matter.
He was a painter, not a worry wart.
Worry Warts Page 8
