The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Dollars were the only things that mattered to men like that; appeals to decency would fall on stony ground.

  Yet she waited, hoping in spite of herself that she was wrong, until Arthur came back. She went down the steps to the front lawn to meet him. She observed the wounded eyes, the mouth drawn into a lipless line, and knew that her worst fears had been realised.

  ‘How’d it go?’

  He shook his head; she saw that he did not trust himself to speak. They went indoors together. She fetched him a drink and one for herself, then settled down to wait. Eventually he told her what had happened. Or not happened.

  ‘They were both there waiting for me. I explained how important places like the Cloud Forest are, not only to people alive now but to future generations. How we mustn’t desecrate them or develop them but leave them in their natural state. They hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about. They certainly weren’t interested. “We’ve been down to Brisbane,” Warren said. “Permission’s already been approved in principle.” As though that was all that mattered. As though we didn’t all know how they got it, the sweeteners they paid to greedy men. I lost my temper with them, then. I said all of us had an ethical responsibility to the future. You know what Harley did? He laughed. He told me to stop wasting their time.’ Arthur tipped the last of his whisky down his throat and she sensed the anger and pain burning in him. ‘I am a fool,’ he said.

  Judy felt his hurt in her own breast. More than that; she felt anger, not merely at Warren and Harley but at Arthur, too, for permitting himself to be humiliated by these worthless men. He should have known that words would never be enough when dealing with people like that. As for talk of ethical responsibility … No wonder Harley had laughed.

  With decent men, gentleness evoked gentleness. It was not fashionable, of course. In this country of harsh landscapes, of arid and unforgiving climate, a man was supposed to be handy with his fists. But there was more than one way to fight. A gentle man was precious, not only because he was rare but because he was a constant reminder, to a world too ready to forget, of what true worth was.

  Arthur was that rare and precious man, she thought, but he was otherworldly too. Warren and Harley were not decent men. They were impervious to appeals to the better nature they did not have. For Warren and Harley you needed not a rare and precious man but a street fighter.

  Someone like me, she thought. Someone who believes in getting things done.

  What could she do?

  She had talked of drumming up support in the town, mounting a petition … It wouldn’t be hard to get a few signatures, the locals growing increasingly proprietorial over their mountain, but what good would it do?

  The answer was stark. It would do no good. She wasn’t keen to do it, in any case. Old resentments died hard. She had not forgotten her reception when she first came to this town. What had to be done she would do alone.

  She went deep into herself and her memories. Of Brisbane and all the things that had happened in Brisbane. It was a time she would prefer to forget — she had forgotten, she told herself fiercely, the past meant nothing to her now — but there was no help for it. Like Arthur, she had to do what she could to stop Warren and Harley.

  When Arthur retreated to the service station to hide his self-contempt in the grease of engines, inarticulate and comforting, Judy summoned her courage and made a phone call.

  ‘Ministry for Lands Development …’

  ‘David Hobbs, please.’

  JUDY

  The Assyrian came down like the wolf on

  the fold.

  Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib

  JUDY SPEAKING …

  Making that call was one of the hardest things I had ever done.

  Brisbane had been part of my past but I had buried it deep. Now, it seemed, I had to resurrect it. It wasn’t easy. David Hobbs and I had been an item. I would have said I’d slit my throat before I contacted a man who, too late, I had discovered thought of me as simply the latest in a string of women, an object with breasts, thighs, availability. Even after I’d found out the truth I hadn’t been able to face it, or not for a long time. Because I’d cared, you see. I’d thought I loved him. Believe me, it had done my ego no good at all.

  Yet now I found the courage to phone him. Because of Arthur. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? To contact one lover because of another … Yet it was true. David was a senior officer in the Planning Department of the Ministry for Lands Development. If anyone could stop this business, he was the man.

  I was determined to talk him into it. He owed me that much, at least.

  I remembered how, after David, I stood naked and stared at myself in the long mirror on the wardrobe door. The unlined neck. The firm breasts. The thighs and belly still taut. I had thought: Why?

  I had envisaged days, months, years of being alone. At that time and for long afterwards I had thought it inconceivable that life could ever return, that blood could flow once more beneath the scar tissue of David’s rejection.

  I concealed my loneliness behind a bright flag of clothes, of assertive jollity — oh yes, I was always a fighter, am one still, thank God — but it was there. For long months it agonised me.

  From this Arthur had saved me. Now it was my turn.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  1

  Josh Richards was an Aboriginal activist, a walking reminder of the conflict that had existed between the races since white men had first come to this part of Queensland a hundred and fifty years before. Josh had made a name for himself all along the tropical coast. He called himself a freedom fighter and there were plenty who agreed with him. To others, he was a monumental pain in the neck. In Goorapilly most people never thought about him at all, but those who did were evenly divided between the two points of view.

  His twin specialities were publicity and land claims, and while there were plenty who favoured giving the Aborigines a fair go, or at least a fairer go than they’d had in the past, not many liked the idea of handing over large tracts of land to them. In particular, not land that for a hundred years or more they had regarded — and still regarded — as their own.

  No one doubted that lots of Aboriginals were genuine blokes whose only concern was to put right the wrongs of the past but there were doubts aplenty about Josh Richards. To the local population, it didn’t help that he knew how to play the media like a violin. Sometimes it seemed they couldn’t turn on the television without seeing his face. He had stirred up trouble in Cardwell, threatened to make a claim on the whole of the Whitsundays region; anywhere prosperous and Josh Richards was in like Flynn, yelling his head off. Or so some said.

  Even Arthur, in general sympathetic to the Aboriginal cause, had doubts about him. ‘There are times when he seems to me more interested in his own image than the people he claims to represent …’

  Not that it had ever made much odds in Goorapilly. Josh Richards prowled the coast like a cyclone but Goorapilly had never interested him. As far as anyone knew, the district had no place in Aboriginal history; certainly, no one had ever come up with any artifacts to support a convincing land claim and the area, while prosperous, was not rich enough to attract the avaricious. There were many more promising trees in the orchard than Goorapilly and until now the town had been left to itself.

  No longer. With the word out about the tourist potential of Mount Gang Gang, all that had changed: the advent of eco-tourism could mean money by the bucket. There had still been the problem of previous occupancy but the discovery of the paintings had changed that, too.

  While professors of this and that were booking their air tickets to fly to the district to check out what had been discovered, Josh Richards appeared in the Goorapilly high street with his entourage and a full media contingent in tow.

  Josh had made sure there was ample notice of his arrival so there was a reception committee waiting when he stood in front of the town war memorial and a howitzer-park of media cameras and announced to the world his in
tention of registering a formal claim for the entire Mount Gang Gang region.

  In two twos the battle was on. People who’d never thought about the mountain in their lives were ropeable at the idea that anyone should be planning to pinch it from under their noses. Five minutes of rabble-rousing by Josh and there was a proper barney, with blokes on both sides of the argument — if that was what you could call it — getting stuck in.

  Some of Josh’s mates were thugs who liked nothing better than a punch-up. A few of the locals were the same. Between them, with Josh stirring the pot for all he was worth, they caused a riot. There was stone-throwing, windows were broken up and down the street, and two blokes ended up in hospital. Judy, doing her weekly shop in town, got out with inches to spare.

  The cameras filmed the lot and that night, when the pictures spewed across the nation, the name of Goorapilly was being trashed in every politically correct household in the south-eastern States.

  2

  ‘Brick short of a load, that’s what you are.’ Warren had really spat the dummy this time. ‘What’s the point bringing the roof down now, when half the world already knows what’s up there?’

  Warren had entertained serious doubts about his brother from the first. It was all very well standing up for family but this bloke was an accident waiting to happen and Warren certainly wasn’t in the market for any more accidents.

  ‘Mate, I reckon you’ve reached your use-by date.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Luke all over: one word and he was as toey as hell. Lazy bastard, too, or so reports from the mill said. Warren was sick of it.

  ‘It means it’s time you pissed off some place else.’

  ‘Why? Not my fault those kids spilled the beans about them paintings!’

  ‘If you hadn’t opened up that old shaft, they’d never have found them in the first place. Next thing, the media’s going to be over us like a rash. I want you out of here before that happens.’

  Luke fancied the idea of being interviewed by the media. ‘I was the one found them, after all …’

  Exactly what Warren had been afraid of. ‘All I need, you shooting off your mouth to some bloke with a television camera.’

  Luke tried to argue but Warren had decided the time had come to get tough. ‘I got you the job at the mill and I can get you the chop, just as easily. What I been hearing, you’d have been out of there a month ago if it hadn’t been for me. I reckon it’s time you moved on.’

  Luke was outraged. ‘Ya dipstick! Fine bloody brother you turned out to be!’

  Warren was shouting, too. ‘I want you out of here in a week! You hear me?’

  Luke went at a run, furious with a world that had never given him a fair go. While Warren, with the problem of Luke finally out of the way, turned his mind to other things.

  That Josh Richards … Regular three-ring circus, that one. Never mind; with a bit of luck, he knew what he had to do about Josh Richards.

  3

  ‘Not that flash.’ Josh Richards shone a white grin in Warren’s direction. ‘The best we could find in this dump, can you believe? We’re used to a good deal better, I can tell you.’

  He did not say he was lucky to get it; they both knew that ten years ago he wouldn’t have got through the door. As he said, the Imperial Hotel — like its normal patrons — was not in the least flash. The rooms were small, too: a steel-frame bed, a rickety wardrobe of stained plywood and three big men took up most of the floor space. With Warren’s arrival, four big men. It was a squeeze; the walls enclosed them like a fist.

  ‘To what do we owe this pleasure?’ Josh Richards asked. ‘A visit from the Goorapilly king, in person?’

  ‘We need to talk,’ Warren said.

  ‘Mebbe you need to talk. What makes you think I do?’

  ‘Because you’re not a bloke turns his back on a business opportunity without finding out what it is.’

  Josh’s eyes ran over him like a measuring tape. ‘Business is different.’ He nodded at his two colleagues. ‘Nip down to the bar, see if you can rustle up some cold beers. Room service ain’t the best,’ he explained to Warren.

  They went, closing the door behind them.

  ‘Talk,’ Josh Richards said.

  ‘These pictures my brother discovered —’

  ‘The way I heard it, it was a couple of kids. One of ’em an Aborigine.’

  Warren wasn’t getting into a who-did-what argument. ‘I just wanted to say you’ll have no problems from us about title to that part of the mountain.’

  ‘Big of you. Given the fact that the paintings exist, you think you could stop me if you tried?’

  ‘You got rid of your blokes. There’s no one here from the media, unless they’re hiding under the bed. That leaves the pair of us. What I think is we’ll get along a lot quicker if you cut out the bullshit.’

  ‘That right?’ Josh grinned crookedly. ‘So what’s your offer?’

  ‘I’ll make sure there’s no opposition to you guys having the gallery. And access, of course.’

  ‘And what do you want in return?’

  ‘Your approval of the resort we want to put on top of the mountain.’

  Josh Richards stared at him, shaven head shining in the light, arms bulging from his white singlet. When he laughed, gold glinted somewhere in his teeth. He laughed now.

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Warren sat on the end of the bed, feeling the mattress sag beneath his weight. He smiled at Josh cheerfully.

  ‘Damn right I would.’

  ‘Well, you can forget it, okay? Forget it altogether. That clear enough for you?’

  ‘A man of principle,’ Warren said. ‘I like it.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Josh looked wary, principle not part of his brief.

  ‘I naturally don’t expect you to give us open slather. You’d have responsibilities to make sure things were done right. We accept you would need to be a director. It’s a funny thing,’ Warren said, ‘but investors always seem more comfortable if the directors have a financial interest themselves. They think it motivates them.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘What financial interest are we talking about?’

  ‘Five percent is usual. But a man with a position to keep up … Shall we say seven?’

  ‘And a half.’

  Warren smiled. ‘And of course you’d be willing to say on television that you welcome the resort.’

  ‘It would be in the national interest, after all. One thing, though. That Harley Woodcock … I hear he’s got an interest too. What’s he going to say about our new arrangements?’

  Warren smiled, at peace with himself and the world. ‘What can he say?’

  The two men came back, carrying bottles beaded with sweat.

  ‘Damn right,’ Josh agreed. ‘Fancy a cold beer?’

  4

  ‘Well, hi there!’ David Hobbs spoke with the complacency of a man who knew that the world in general, and Judy in particular, loved him almost as much as he loved himself. ‘How y’going?’

  His intonation was amused, overly familiar, hinting at the existence of shared secrets. She resented it but knew she would have to play along.

  ‘You in town?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Goorapilly.’

  An indulgent laugh. ‘Wherever that might be.’

  ‘Davey …’ Honey could not have flowed more sweetly. ‘I want a favour.’

  ‘Ah …’

  She could hear the shutters, not yet raised but prepared.

  She ploughed on quickly.

  ‘It’s a question of planning permission for a development project.’

  She could almost hear his frown. ‘You want to obtain permission? There are procedures —’

  ‘I want to stop it.’

  ‘I see …’ Caution was no longer a shutter; it had become a sword poised to amputate folly. ‘And where is this development?’

  ‘A place called Mount G
ang Gang.’

  Silence on the other end of the phone; screams could have been no louder.

  ‘I thought, since you have the ear of the minister —’

  A deprecatory laugh. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  Clearly David had forgotten, or chose now to forget, how he had boasted about it interminably at one time. Ministers changed, he had said, but influence, like the public service itself, was eternal.

  Even now it was hard for Judy to believe he was prepared to do nothing for her.

  ‘It is a political matter, you see.’ Regret oozed. ‘Outside my province.’

  She had always known how self-focused he was; it was humiliating to have spelt out what she should have understood without telling: that dead passions deserve no favours.

  ‘There are appeal procedures,’ he said kindly, yet with finality.

  A waste of time …

  Both of them heard what had not been said.

  ‘Any time you’re in Brisbane …’

  Yeah. Right.

  5

  Judy heard Arthur trying to explain the situation to Jacqui. By the sound of it, he wasn’t doing very well.

  ‘Ecological vandalism,’ she told him ferociously.

  A phrase she had obviously picked up at school, which did not make it any the less true.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s an irreversible trend,’ Arthur told her. ‘We’re just going to have to live with it.’

  ‘And that’s it, is it?’ Jacqui was spitting.

  Again Arthur trotted out the tired excuse. ‘They’re doing nothing illegal.’

  ‘So that makes it right? We just let it happen? Even though we know it’s wrong?’

  ‘Things aren’t that easy,’ he said apologetically.

  She was clearly having none of it. ‘They look easy enough to me.’

  Judy listened no more. She got to her feet and went out onto the verandah. She shaded her eyes from the westerly slanting sun and looked up at the mountain’s dark mass. Along the summit ridge, the tops of the Cloud Forest were etched black against the apricot brilliance of the sky.