The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance)

by Lucy Walker

  Cindie grew suddenly calm. She had to be careful and logical and convincing now. She had business with Bindaroo ‒ but that was her private affair. Erica, Nick and Bindaroo! Mrs. Overton had linked them all together!

  ‘There’s a track right through to Alice Springs in the Territory,’ she said with a new confidence. ‘The oil prospectors have gone through there. Then the R.A.C. reported on it. Finally, only a few weeks ago a group of journalists went through for the Daily News ‒’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘You think that what they can do is not possible for a girl?’ Cindie lifted her chin.

  Her eyes were fearless again. ‘Do you know that a girl holds a commercial licence for flying helicopters in South Australia? My two cousins, girls, went across the Nullabor in an old jalopy. Eleven hundred miles of it. Two English girls came right across the north ‒ alone. The longest stretch of houseless road in the world ‒’

  Nick’s voice became subtly different. It was patient: sardonic.

  ‘Alone is not quite the right word, Cindie. Two cousins crossed the Nullabor. Two English girls crossed the north. The word alone applies to one person. Yourself.’

  ‘You sound like my uncles trying to advise me about what I can or cannot do.’ She was angrier still.

  ‘Forgive my mentioning it, Cindie, but probably those particular relatives would have been concerned and responsible enough to have told you you could not cross a north-west river when it is down. Or the miles of flooded land below the ranges.’

  She knew what he said was just. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, deflating. ‘That was mean of me. You are the boss. I realise that. I just felt ‒ well, kind of desperate. Sometimes a girl has to face things. Situations. I’m sorry that I can’t explain, but please believe I was going up that track to the tableland because I had to.’

  ‘To Bindaroo? Or beyond?’

  She did not answer.

  Again his expression changed subtly. A momentary weariness, exasperation perhaps, crossed his face like a shadow.

  He looked away from Cindie towards the window.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You were going on business of your own for reasons of your own. None of those affairs are mine, except that it is my duty ‒ general instructions from police headquarters ‒ to report any lost persons found, or not found. I am required to inform them of having taken in charge any stranded traveller, giving that traveller’s identity, postal address and destination. This is no more than a safety regulation for the individual’s own benefit. I am not by nature in the least curious, I can assure you of that.’

  Identity? Postal address, and destination? All over the air?

  Cindie’s heart sank. She had to keep silent. She had to find out if and why the Stevens brothers were selling out at Bindaroo: and why no information or money had been sent to her mother, who had no other private means of support than her share in that property. Nick would send the information about her identity over the air. Up at Bindaroo they would hear of her coming.

  The silence between them had become strained.

  With an effort Cindie smiled as if this speech of his could be no more than a joke to an honest law-abiding citizen.

  ‘There’s no need to be concerned with regulations, Nick,’ she said quietly. ‘You see, I’ve talked to Jim Vernon. My mother will know I’m safe and in good hands. I’m not lost any more, am I? Not now that you’ve found me, and I’m here! I planned to let my mother know exactly where I was at certain stated intervals. She wouldn’t expect to hear from me for some time anyway. There’s no need to send messages to the police if that is only a safety measure. Mother would be alarmed at that. But thank you for thinking you had to go to the trouble.’

  ‘Jim Vernon will let your people know your whereabouts?’

  She glanced at the transceiver set. ‘After that medium for conversation,’ she said with some irony, ‘everyone will know. They’ll have received that intelligence at the Carnarvon or Meekatharra Outposts, won’t they? Cindie Brown is high and dry at the thousand-miler construction camp! They’ll know all about it. She is under the overall charge of Nick Brent, and therefore very safe!’

  ‘And that Jim Vernon, the overseer from Baanya ‒ in due course and when the river subsides somewhat ‒ is coming across on a flying-fox to see her?’ He watched her curiously as he said that.

  ‘Yes.’ Cindie met his eyes again.

  He turned away to the set, and turned it up to ‘Loud’.

  ‘Come in Marana! Nick Brent here,’ he spoke into the receiver. He turned back to Cindie with a manner that said he meant her to mark well what he was about to say.

  ‘Jim Vernon happens to be a good guy. One of the most trusted men in the north. He is not a man to be trifled with easily. If you say so ‒ and he agrees ‒ I’ll leave you to his responsibility in this matter.’ He was silent. So was Cindie. He went on ‒ ‘Let me know if you have any other problems while you’re here on site. You do understand you might be here for weeks? No one but the river knows what the river will do next. And it doesn’t talk.’

  Cindie nodded. Had he meant something obscure, which she could not quite interpret, by that description of Jim ‒ ‘not to be trifled with easily’? He couldn’t possibly think ‒ ? Well, how dare he, anyway!

  Now was not the time, she realised, to ask him again if she could be useful. She wanted badly to offer her services helping Mary Deacon. Typing, anything ‒ specially if she might be here for weeks as he had said. No, now was definitely not the moment. She could tell by his expression. She was out of grace.

  ‘I’d be glad,’ Nick was saying, ‘if you’d make inquiries or requests direct to me, and not to one of my officers.’ He paused, then added sardonically, ‘In spite of your remarks to Jim Vernon, Cindie, there happens to be a river, and mud banks, between him and us for the time being. I have more than two hundred men on this site. I have to have explicit obedience in certain matters. You do understand me?’

  ‘I know what you mean. You needn’t say any more.’ She tilted her head proudly. ‘Don’t be hard on Dicey, please. I asked him if ‒’

  ‘Dicey?’ His eyes were sharp and questioning again. He was asking had she made her air-call by playing on Dicey’s natural chivalry towards that rare creature in this silent north, a member of the opposite sex.

  She was too indignant to speak. She turned away to the door.

  Nick did not appear to notice her departure, for he was speaking to Marana as she went out.

  ‘Is Erica there, Mrs. Alex?’ he was asking.

  Erica!

  Cindie felt that sting of anger and anxiety again, as she went through the door.

  Erica, Nick Brent, and Bindaroo! It was like a warning refrain: a signature tune to impending events.

  What had Erica ‒ whoever she might be ‒ and Nick, to do with Bindaroo?

  Mrs. Alexander’s voice came clearly, speaking only to Nick in the otherwise empty radio unit.

  ‘Erica went to the outcamp at day-break, Nick. She intended to call you from there. She thought she just might get through to the road ‒ across the neck between the claypans. If so ‒’

  Cindie closed the wire door behind her.

  Dicey George was waiting, leaning against a caravan opposite the radio unit.

  ‘Cast your eyes to the left, Cindie,’ he said without moving, ‘and see a sight that is a wonder to behold. One clean Holden car.’

  Cindie swung round. There was her car, beautiful, washed and polished, as if straight out of a town garage. It shone like mirrors in the burning morning sun.

  ‘Mine!’ she cried with relief. ‘And clean! Last time I saw it, it was red mud all over. It must have been Flan. Where is he, Dicey? I want to thank him.’

  Dicey shook his head slowly from side to side.

  ‘Not Flan,’ he said solemnly. ‘Nick Brent. The boss himself. Who’d have thought it? Not me, for one.’

  Cindie stood looking first at the car then at Dicey. She couldn’t quite believe what he sai
d. That man inside ‒ his horrid suspicions ‒ cleaned her car himself?

  ‘You mean Nick washed and polished my car? With all those men he employs?’

  ‘All those men are building a road across the Never Never almost from the equator to the Southern Ocean, Cindie. I guess Nick thought they had other things to do.’

  ‘But he could have left it the way it was ‒’

  ‘He could have. But he didn’t.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You ask him, Cindie. Maybe because he let Flan use the car yesterday. We’re short on utilities and Land-Rovers most of the time. But you ask him yourself. Nick always knows the answers and the rest of us never do. We only guess.’

  ‘But ‒’

  Dicey lifted his shoulders from the wall. ‘Talking about being short on utilities and Land-Rovers, Cindie, how about you letting me drive you in that gleaming extravagance of a car out to the thousand-miler? Want to see it?’

  Cindie’s eyes shone. ‘The road? Do I? Please Dicey just get in behind that steering wheel and drive as fast as you can.’ To herself she added ‒ Away from here, and blow what Nick thinks!

  ‘Right!’ Dicey drawled. ‘And we won’t be home for lunch.’ He grinned at her, mischief in his eyes. ‘That’ll be one more problem for Mary Deacon to handle when we come back ‒ Who went with who, and why? The second “please-explain” for the day.’

  Cindie laughed as she ran towards her car.

  ‘I’ve a job of work fixing the two-way radio on the Euclid,’ Dicey said, following her. ‘You ever seen a Euclid out of a geometry book, Cindie? Well, this one’s a vast earth-moving monster from England. The driver can only talk with the man at the rear-end through a two-way. It’s that big.’

  They had reached the car and he stood holding the passenger door open for her.

  His young handsome face was laughing her scruples ‒ if any ‒ away.

  ‘If I don’t go out and do some fixing, that forty-thousand-pounds’-worth of Euclid is going to back over a drop. Driver, off-sider, rear man and all. You lending me your car to save a few lives?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Cindie answered quickly. ‘Of course. And I’m coming too. After all, it is my car ‒’

  ‘On loan to me.’ He shut the door gently and went round to the drive side.

  ‘Don’t worry about what Nick’ll say or think, Cindie,’ he said as he thrust his legs under the steering wheel. ‘He’s in a crunch already about other things, and you and I are very small fry indeed, by Nick’s list of IP on the site.’

  ‘IP?’

  ‘Important people.’

  Dicey pulled the starter and the engine leapt into life.

  ‘The thousand-miler? The road comes first?’

  ‘That, and a million-acre stretch of pastoral country he’s interested in. Add to that a fine lady called Erica.’

  His eyes slid round to Cindie, and he grinned again.

  ‘A very, very fine lady,’ he said slowly. ‘Full of know-how, too.’

  ‘Please, Dicey, I’d rather go and see the road than anything else.’

  ‘Than talk about Erica?’

  She nodded. ‘I don’t even know her.’

  ‘Then don’t willingly go near those wives up in D’D. They’ve nothing else to do but talk about her. She’s the Queen of the Spinifex Plain ‒’

  ‘And Nick?’

  ‘Well, he’s the boss. Guess we’ll leave it at that. Now hold your hair on, Cindie, because I have never been known to drive slowly.’

  ‘But safely, please ‒’

  ‘I have a charmed life. Sitting beside me you can’t help sharing it, can you?’

  I would rather it was Jim Vernon, Cindie thought ruefully. Dicey’s nice. The nicest ever. But Jim would be safe. And kind too. In spite of what Nick said. What was it Jim had called her? Blue Eyes! That was ‒

  Cindie’s thoughts came down, temporarily, to earth.

  What had Dicey said about Nick being interested in the road and a million-acre stretch of pastoral country? Also a fine lady who had know-how? Mrs. Overton had linked the three names together ‒ Bindaroo, Nick, and Erica. That refrain again!

  She had to be careful. She was Cindie Brown. A girl with a name like Brown wouldn’t know anything about pastoral acres, would she?

  Being someone called Brown instead of Davenport made her feel different.

  Cindie’s heart lifted again. She was somebody new, and this gave her spirit. Excitement too!

  It was strange ‒ what a renewed feeling she was beginning to have again: as if she had changed identity with her name ‒ and been reborn.

  Jim Vernon, so shortly known, was her friend!

  Perhaps ‒

  Cindie’s spirits rose even more. This feeling was like knowing hope, even adventure.

  The incident with Nick, in the radio unit, was forgotten. So was someone called Erica ‒ a disembodied voice from Marana who now had gone to Marana’s outcamp to see if she could come to Nick via a hazardous route along a neck between the claypans.

  Chapter Five

  Cindie thrilled to the thousand-miler. Dicey told her the name was a local one given to the road by the men who worked on this section of it.

  ‘Actually,’ he explained, ‘the governments, State and Commonwealth, through contractors, are building a continuous road right across the north, then southwards. Finally the road will link up with the Great Eastern Highway and so across the Nullabor back to the Pacific coast ‒ circumnavigating an entire continent.’

  ‘How far really?’

  ‘No one on this site has worked the mileage right out,’ Dicey answered. ‘Nick’d probably know, but it’s difficult to assess. Different parts of it are let out to different contractors. Nick has this section ‒ the thousand-miler. Some parts of it branch off west to the coast to carry the iron ore from the Pilbarra to the new ports. It’s across the greatest stretch of empty land, bar Siberia. Maybe not bar Siberia, by the time it’s finished.’

  ‘But it’s a Colossus,’ Cindie said with awe. In her mind she drew a map of the vast barren north of a great continent, and the road with its tributaries going on and on and out.

  ‘You’ve said it,’ said Dicey. ‘Boggles the imagination, eh?’

  They were running over the loose gravel track through the spinifex, past a group of men here, then another group there. These were youngish men, their cotton jungle hats pulled well down on their foreheads. They were surveying the next stretch to be bulldozed.

  ‘Watch now,’ said Dicey. ‘You’ll see the dust haze in a minute, then you’ll know we’re nearing the road.’

  The sky was almost white with the heat. The car was running parallel with a broken range of strange mesa-shaped mountains, red striated blocks of rock peaks at the top, then banked with the yellow-green of spinifex growth. Here and there in this vast desolate area stood a clump or two of the white-trunked gum trees that Mary had said had black hearts under the white bark. Where there was a broken limb Cindie could see the jet black of the under trunk.

  ‘So white, yet so black,’ she said musingly as they passed between two clumps of these trees. ‘How strange ‒’

  ‘Like everything’s strange in this country. Look at the plain, Cindie. See any life? See any living thing? Yet where do the kangaroos come from at night time? And the emus? You can understand the goannas and frilled lizards and such-like hiding in that darned spinifex; but how kangaroos? Hundreds of them. The stuffs not more’n a foot high, most of the time.’

  ‘There’s the haze!’ Cindie said excitedly.

  ‘It’s there, all right. Ten minutes from now you’ll be brown and red all over, girl. There’s no beating the dust where the bulldozers, graders and earthmovers are working. It rises like the finest powder ever made, spreads a quarter of a mile on all sides and doesn’t settle for a week if there’s no breeze.’

  A Land-Rover came lurching down the gravel track towards them, coming from the work site.

  ‘Wind up the windows your side as he pa
sses, or you’ll get us a nice dust-bath in this car. The kind that’ll set Nick Brent washing and polishing all over again.’

  Cindie laughed as she vigorously wound up the window. Dicey did the same with the window on his side.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t see Nick obliging twice. Once was enough to surprise me.’

  ‘You have plenty more surprises in front of you where Nick is concerned, Cindie my girl. You have to know him, and know him well, before you even begin to guess what goes on behind that mask of his. Then more’n likely you’ll guess wrong.’

  The Land-Rover seemed to ricochet past them as each car had to run the side wheels off the road into the fragmented iron-stone beside it, in order to pass the other.

  The dust lifted like a smoking ball rolling away across the plain on either side of them.

  Cindie looked back through the rear window and was awed to find that they too, in the Holden, raised the same dust behind them as they went.

  ‘Funny, when you’re driving,’ she said. ‘It always seems to be the other car ‒’

  ‘It’s always the other car.’ Dicey wound down his window again. Cindie did so with hers. ‘Specially when there’s a smash-up.’ He turned and looked at the girl beside him with a knowing grin. ‘Haven’t you noticed it’s always the other fellow’s fault, Cindie? If no one’s mentioned it before ‒ that’s Life. The chaps use that expression up here all the time. Same way as in some of those Asian countries they say “It’s the Will of Allah”. You understand me?’

  Cindie nodded. ‘Living like this, out in the Never, they have to be philosophic. That’s Life?’

  ‘You’ve said it. Stay here long enough and you’ll get that way too. There’s nothing you can do about the heat, the dust, the emptiness, the loneliness, or the fact there’s five hundred miles, and no spare Rovers or utilities, to take a trip to a coastal town. To have a drink or two: meet a woman …’