‘Jeez,’ Eli said, seeking consolation in the bottle.
‘Nothing to worry ‘bout there, my son,’ said Silas. ‘A fighter throwing kisses … Take un on meself, I would, only twould be too one-sided, I reckon.’
Jason had seen the muscles in Fernandez’s arms and shoulders and was not so sure.
They would soon find out.
He waited while Silas Tregloam, well to the fore as always, made the announcement in a stentorian voice blurred only slightly by drink.
‘Ladies and gentlemen …’
Wild cheers.
‘For the championship of the world …’
Even wilder cheers.
‘From Chile in South America …’
Boos.
‘Silvio Fernandez!’
‘Silvio,’ someone yelled.
From the carriage Fernandez bowed, beaming and waving.
Silas cared nothing for such niceties. ‘And from South Australia …’
‘Van Diemen’s Land!’
‘Our very own Jason Hallam!’
The square erupted, the band, well liquored by now, attempted to play the national anthem.
‘Go and kill him,’ Eli said.
They toed the line. A bell clanged. The fight was on.
After all the jocularity it was a grim business. The muleteer might throw kisses but he threw punches, too, and a number of them landed. Some of Jason’s landed, as well, but it was hard to tell what effect they were having. He swung, missed, swung, connected, sweat ran into his eyes, a violent blow made him stagger and he felt an eyebrow split. Now it was more than sweat in his eyes, the target blurred with red. Twenty minutes into the fight he was knocked down for the first time.
Ears ringing, eye swollen shut, he mumbled through a mouth gaping for breath, ‘Too long in the office.’
‘What?’ Eli worked furiously on the eye.
‘Got soft, see? You should have used one of the miners.’
‘Weren’t none of ’em fool enough to try it,’ Eli said.
The bell clanged. The fight resumed.
Five minutes more, Jason caught Fernandez on the side of his head, sent him flying. The jar ran all the way up Jason’s arm into his shoulder. He stood there, flexing his knuckles, while the other side battled to revive their man.
Fernandez toed the line, swaying and staggering, and Jason heard the tortured breath whistling in his throat.
No kisses for the ladies now, he thought and hit him again, savagely, and again felt the satisfying jar as the Chilean’s feet left the ground.
He relaxed, knowing it was impossible for Fernandez to come up to the mark a second time, but he did, swaying but still dangerous, and unleashed a powerhouse swing that would have taken Jason’s head off had he not seen it in time.
He ducked under it, felt it whistle through his hair, unleashed a cracking reply of his own and it was over. Great consternation and activity from the Chilean’s corner but there was no response from the fallen man and when the bell rang for the last time Jason toed the line alone.
Silas raised his arm amid a mixture of cheers and boos, Eli flung his arms first in the air and next around Jason’s sweating shoulders, a bottle was thrust into his hand and over in a corner of the square Jason made out the figure of Mura, hovering uncertainly.
After his victory Jason was filled with energy. If he’d wanted he could have pushed the whole world over. Now was not the time for shyness, hanging back. He shouted to Mura, gesturing hugely.
‘Come over here! Join the party!’
Cautiously Mura approached. One of the onlookers grabbed his arm.
‘Piss off, you black bastard!’
Jason was there in a second. He took the man by the nose, twisting.
‘You were saying?’
He backed him through the crowd, the man whimpering and pawing ineffectually at the hand gripping his nose, his mates hovering. Black looks but no-one with the guts to have a go. There was a horse trough. Jason backed the man into it; the back of his knees caught the edge of the trough; he fell in an explosion of scummy water.
Spluttering and shaking himself, black oaths choked by slime, the man staggered to his feet. Jason gestured to Mura to join him. Smiling, all teeth, he said, ‘Let me introduce you to my mate. Shake his hand, why don’t you?’
Stood over him until he had done so.
‘Made an enemy there,’ Eli said.
‘I wouldn’t want him as a friend.’
‘Watch out for him. Regular troublemaker, John Davey,’ Eli told him. ‘Got the ear of management, see? Some nice wife, mind. Beautiful wife. Young, too.’
‘Lucky for him.’ He slapped Mura on the shoulder and said, ‘What do you think? Reckon I’ll make a champion?’
Mura said, ‘A friend of mine is come. Walpannina. You remember him?’
‘Of course I remember. What’s he doing here?’
‘Like me. Come here to work. The old life all gone now. People must work if they want food. Or drink, eh,’ gesturing at the bottle in Eli’s hand. He giggled foolishly, staring about him with bloodshot, wandering eyes.
‘Dunno what I’m going to do about you,’ Jason said. ‘Carry on the way you are you’ll kill yourself.’
‘Walpannina bring messages,’ Mura said.
‘Yeah? How they all doing?’
‘I told you. Everything is changed. The clan is broken up.’
Jason stared at him. ‘Where have they gone?’
Mura shrugged. ‘Some here, some there. Walpannina come here. Others go to Port Wakefield, work the barges.’
‘Nantariltarra?’
Mura shook his head, scowling.
‘Don’t tell me something happened to him.’
‘There is no-one of that name.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘His name,’ Mura said, ‘may not be spoken.’
Meaning he, too, was dead.
‘How?’
‘A fight.’
‘With a white?’
Mura shook his head. ‘A man of the Warree clan. My people tried to move on to land that was not theirs, to get away from the white men. The man of the Warree killed him.’ Mura shrugged. ‘If the Warree people had come on to our land, we would have done the same.’
White men had killed him as surely as if they had directed the spear or club that slew him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jason said and was, unprepared for the intensity of the pang that twisted him. At one time, after his brother’s death, he had wanted to kill him. Now all that was forgotten. It was not simply his personal loss; Nantariltarra had seemed the only member of the clan who had come close to understanding what the white arrival meant. Even with his guidance there had been a good chance that the clan was doomed; without it, there was no hope. It saddened him. They had taken him in, he had lived with them. Their ways had not been his but had suited them, enabled them to live at one with their world. Now it was all over, as he had known it would be. He remembered how Nantariltarra—no, he corrected himself, how He Whose Name Could Not Be Spoken—had asked him despairingly what he should do, how at the time he had come so close to telling him that there was nothing he could do, that the clan and its age-old ways were doomed. He had lacked the courage to say it but that had not prevented it from happening.
‘There was more news,’ Mura said.
‘Yes?’
‘Ian Matlock.’
‘What about him?’
‘Got kicked in the head by his wife’s horse.’
‘Is he badly hurt?’
Mura shrugged. ‘He is dead.’
So both the Matlock men were gone. Such vital men. It was hard to believe.
‘Who is running Bungaree?’
‘Blake Gallagher.’
He supposed it made sense but did not like to hear it.
‘There is more news,’ Mura said, troubled.
‘You’re not telling me he’s dead, too?’
Mura did not smile. ‘He is well. But he and Aliso
n … There is news about them, also.’
IMPOSSIBLE.
The thought hammered inside his head, over and over. The thought, the rejection, the utter and absolute incredulity. It was not true. It must not be true. It could not be true.
It was.
As soon as he had heard it he had known with a sickening sense of certainty that it was so.
Why? Why?
She had hated Blake and feared him. Not only that: she was Jason’s, they belonged to each other. How could she have married anyone else, least of all Blake Gallagher?
I shall go there, he thought. I shall take her away from him.
He knew it was impossible. She had made her choice. She—and he—would have to live with it.
A day to remember, indeed.
There had been other days, arising from the first. Drifting days, while he came to terms with a life suddenly, achingly, without future.
It had advantages. He could drink, if he chose: who cared, so long as he was at work the next morning? He could hate his work: who cared? He still had the evenings, still had Sundays.
For those who did not work below ground Sundays were sometimes special.
The man he had put in the horse trough: John Davey, the miner with Gwyneth, the lovely wife. With the lovely and, as it turned out, restless wife. John Davey worked for tribute. The more ore he raised, the more he earned. John Davey spent hours below ground. Days. There were times when it seemed he must live there, weeks when he came up to grass only to eat, drink, sleep briefly and go back down again. A lovely wife going to waste: in her own estimation, too.
Jason, foot-loose and resentful of the world, had focused on her very quickly.
A Sunday afternoon tea, sponsored by the Methodists, attended by a miscellany of adults and children: chapelgoers, parents, teachers, a handful of others.
‘Your husband not here?’
A shake of the cartwheel hat as she turned towards him, a Welsh accent to cut bread. ‘On shift, he is.’
‘Pity.’
Eyes slanted, sparkling. ‘Lucky for you, you mean.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Got it in for you, no error. No wonder, after what happened.’
‘He should learn not to mess around with my friends.’ Jason very confident; he was the champion, after all.
A pause as she sized him up. Jason returned the compliment. Eli had been right, she was a lovely creature.
‘Is it true what they say?’ she asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘That you lived with the cannibals?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t know about cannibals. I lived with the blacks when I was a kid: that much is true.’
‘Don’t they eat people?’
‘Not that I saw.’
‘My husband says they do.’
‘Your husband talks rubbish.’
Later:
‘You ever go strolling along the creek?’
Eyes watching from beneath her hat brim. ‘Why?’
‘Very pretty up there. In the ranges.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I go up there often.’
‘It’s one thing for a man to go wandering. Wouldn’t be right for a married woman, though, would it now?’
‘Married,’ he said. ‘You could have fooled me.’
‘I am, though. And a husband who thinks so, too.’
‘It’s a pleasant walk,’ he said, ‘with a friend. Very quiet. If you know where to go.’
Their eyes watched each other.
‘I often go up there on a Sunday afternoon,’ he said.
And slipped away before anyone could note them talking together.
The timber had been stripped from the hillsides to fuel the smelter’s furnaces but along the creek, beyond the line of dugout homes, it still grew thick. There were waterfalls and deep pools with grassy banks overhung by the green branches of trees. Magpies and currawongs burbled and there was an occasional glimpse of a wallaby staring startled from the undergrowth. As Jason had said, it was beautiful and very quiet if you knew where to go.
The next Sunday he was up the hill early, well away, he hoped, from prying eyes, wagging tongues. It wasn’t easy. There were children as well as sun-dappled leaves, men off-duty chancing their luck with a line thrown into isolated pools, no way of knowing when a watchful eye was not spying on you from the shadows.
Jason risked it, strolled nonchalantly in a green-gladed world, met no-one who counted, returned out of sorts with himself and everyone. Not a sign of the wretched woman.
To hell with this.
Instead went looking along the creek bank, found Gwyneth at home in the dugout, as he had hoped. He knocked on the door that led into a home like a rabbit hole in the creek bank, one of more than a hundred. Everywhere noise, children, pigs, rubbish along the banks, floating in the polluted creek. Rubbish you could see, more you could imagine.
‘How do you live like this?’
‘We can’t all afford three bob a week for rent,’ she told him. Her eyes were frightened, imagining scandal. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Husband home?’
She shook her head. ‘Down below.’
‘Is he ever anywhere else?’
‘Not often.’
‘Next week,’ he told her under his breath, as mindful of gossip as she was. He left, shouting for the benefit of neighbours, ‘When you see him tell him I called.’
Knowing that the husband was sure to hear of his visit, whatever he said. There was never any shortage of malicious tongues willing to hurt a friend. He wondered if John Davey would come looking for him, if only to find out what Jason had wanted, but he did not.
The following Sunday was not like the previous one. It was a close day, too close for the time of year, with a humidity that promised rain, the clouds bruised and heavy, darkening above the livid hills. At intervals a drum-roll of thunder growled, drawing steadily nearer. Lines of sudden lightning drew cracks in an indigo sky. Between the thunder claps, the hills held their breath.
The creek cascaded noisily. Gusts of wind rattled the uneasy leaves, raised flurries on the surface of the pools. No sign of birds, of animals. Only Gwyneth, edging nervously through the afternoon, eyes fearful of watchers.
‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘There’s no-one to see us,’ Jason reckless, buoyed by her presence, at that moment not giving a damn whether anyone saw them or not. ‘All we’re doing is taking a stroll.’
‘It’s enough.’
It was more than enough and both of them knew it.
Apart from the rushing creek there was no sound, no birds. Even the burble of the magpies was still.
‘If he finds out I’ve met you …’
‘Anyone can take a walk.’
They walked further but it was not safe and they knew that, too. He embraced her quickly, both of them gasping and eager, terrified of what was overwhelming them but unwilling, unable to stop. Shuddering, gasping, skin pale as chalk in the darkening air.
‘Oh God …’
Kissing breasts like alabaster, body writhing beneath him. Feverishly she snatched at him, guiding. There. There. The thunder roared, drowning her cries. He felt release, little pleasure, above all a sense of corrosive anger at Gwyneth, at himself, for cheapening what he had lost.
Afterwards, a sprinkle of raindrops as heavy as stone, she dragging clothes together, combing leaves and twigs from her hair, searching frantically for her boots.
‘He’ll kill me …’
More than a figure of speech if he heard about it, but who was here to tell him?
‘It’ll be fine.’
Jason tried to embrace her again but she, panicking, avoided him.
‘Don’t you follow me!’
And was gone.
Obediently, he strolled on up the hill, the rain heavier now, came back to the town another way in what had become a drenching downpour.
Silas said, ‘We needs to put up a deputation, see.�
�
Jason wanted nothing to do with it but Jason worked in the office, Jason could write.
‘You don’ ’ave to say you agree. All you got to do is write to the management on be’alf o’ we and say we wants another assay of copper values. We needs somen to do it for us, tes all.’
‘They won’t like it. Could cost me my job.’
But did it, nonetheless.
Challoner summoned him, face white, hands trembling. He held the offending petition.
‘Who wrote this?’
Jason looked him in the eye. ‘Who knows?’
‘It is your hand!’
‘Copperplate’s copperplate. Could be anyone.’ Greatly daring, decided to gamble. ‘Could even be yours, Mr Challoner.’
The turkey neck swelled red. ‘Mine?’
‘Not saying it was,’ Jason assured him. ‘That would be ridiculous, we all know that. I’m just saying it could have been you or anyone. By the writing, I mean.’
‘Are you saying you had nothing to do with this … petition?’ Holding it between fastidious fingers like so much dung.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Jason lied cheerfully.
‘I shall report it to Mr Ayers,’ Challoner threatened but Jason was deputy accountant now and thought he was safe.
It rained for a week, heavier and heavier, without let-up. Cakes of yellow foam carpeted the surface of the water. Eddies swirled, sucked, bringing down tree trunks, drowning pigs, breaking away clumps of earth that fell with a lurch and roar into the gushing torrent as banks caved in under the relentless pressure of the water. The creek level rose: an inch, a foot, three feet. It lapped the footpath, already inundated beneath the weight of the rain, slopped into dugout doorways, threatening the inhabitants with tongues of moisture that probed and ran and spread.
Men and women banded together to build earth barriers against the water, using baulks of wood, large pieces of rock, barriers of earth and branches and leaves to hold back the rising flood.
Still the rain fell. Still the creek levels rose.
In the office, rain thundering on the roof, Jason said, ‘Shouldn’t the mine give them a hand?’
Challoner was astounded by the suggestion. ‘Mr Ayers would never countenance such a thing.’
A Far Country Page 29
