She’d been so focused on her own footsteps that she only now noticed she had drawn parallel to the young woman— Phoebe, wasn’t it?—who puffed and cursed under her breath, and moved in such a cumbersome way it seemed as if she would tumble over. Margaret could see that their pacing was now completely in sync. Unless one of them changed their stride, they would be walking side by side the entire time. There was no choice but to make small talk.
‘Where are you from?’
‘San Francisco.’
‘Oh, on the San Andreas fault line.’
‘Yeah. I guess.’
‘I’m from Perth—Western Australia. Even Perth isn’t that safe. There was an earthquake in the sixties in a country town called Meckering. I remember we even felt the shock waves all the way in Cannington—we had this enormous crack in our driveway.’
How stupid she was sounding. Stupid, stupid! She had done the same thing on their leg to New Zealand. At The Living Maori Village in Rotorua, as her husband took photos of the Maori woman lifting up the basket of sweet potato cooked in the steaming springs, she told the tour guide standing next to her that being in Rotorua made her feel on edge. Like she was living on the top of a kettle.
‘I’m Margaret,’ she offered now, but the young woman pretended not to hear.
The humiliation was burning on her cheeks so she tried to edge away from Phoebe, but not so fast as to give away her true feelings. She watched the blackness twist at her feet—crow-coloured, and mangled, like train tracks from a wreck—knowing that each and every footfall mattered, and if she stopped to look ahead or behind, Phoebe would catch up.
The light was fading from the sky, and she couldn’t help but lift her head and see that she was now nearing the cliffs, and gaining ground on the three dark figures in the distance. And then she realised that they hadn’t stopped to wait for their partners, but because they had reached their final destination. She turned to Phoebe. ‘Almost there,’ she called out.
Margaret felt the tension build to a heaviness in her legs and a pain beginning to radiate from her kneecap. And then, all of a sudden, there was a shocking cracking sound, and she looked to her knee, to her foot, to the ground, to see that the tip of her stick had snapped. Now her stick was a useless twig that she wanted to throw away but had to keep, so she could explain the loss to John. Not knowing what else to do, she lifted it up and used it to keep her balance, as a tightrope walker does.
As she inched closer to the men, they began yelling instructions at her. It frightened Margaret not knowing what they were saying. She stopped to listen and felt a heat pounding beneath her shoes, but when she examined the ground it looked no different to the land she had already crossed.
Des walked towards her, and now she could make out his words, ‘Can you feel it? We’re right on top of the flow.’ How strange. She never expected this: the lava hidden beneath her feet. ‘How are your knees holding up?’
‘Perfectly fine,’ she answered coolly.
Phoebe caught up to them and then walked past, muttering and stumbling and fighting with her backpack, and Des said, ‘God, what’s up with her?’
They followed Phoebe, and soon all of them were reunited on the edge of the cliff.
‘Not long to go now, and you’ll see the full force of Pele,’ said John.
‘Isn’t the volcano called Kīlauea?’ Margaret asked.
‘Pele—the goddess of fire and wind. And the creator of all the islands.’
‘Cool,’ said Tyler, rubbing Phoebe’s neck.
‘It’s her energy that attracts people here in the first place. If she doesn’t want you to stay, you’ll soon know about it.’
‘How long have you been living here?’ Margaret asked John.
‘Since 2007,’ he answered.
She wanted to ask, ‘But why did she leave?’ when Tyler called out, ‘Awesome!’ They looked to where he was pointing and saw trails of glowing red coming from the volcano in the distance. Now that it was dark enough, they could see what had always been there.
‘Take a look at the water,’ John said, and they looked down at the ocean, where the waves smashed against the rocks, and great sparks of fire cascaded over the cliff. And, as if a switch had been turned on, three boats suddenly appeared around the island’s bend, a helicopter swooped in like a dragonfly above them, and teams of sightseers, led by their guides, crossed the lava fields from the opposite direction.
‘So much for the private tour,’ muttered Des, lowering his camera.
It didn’t bother her, not to be alone. She looked down at the lava pouring into the ocean and the coconut palms growing at jaunty angles along the emerging coastline, and thought, this is how the world begins.
For minutes no-one spoke. They were all taking in this spectacle of heat and fire and hissing ocean, letting the red rivers of lava glow on their retinas. A camera lens could never capture it; the retelling of it in an email to your adult children would never do it justice.
‘Can we get to see the lava close up?’ asked Tyler.
John nodded and indicated they switch on their torches and follow him. The group walked further inland until John held up his hand. Coming through a tube in the ground was a lava flow, moving like a slow, fat slug.
‘Awesome!’ And Tyler plunged his hand into his backpack, whipping out a bag of marshmallows and a long toasting fork.
‘You won’t be able to bear the heat,’ warned John.
‘I saw this on YouTube.’
Tyler put on a silver-foiled glove and bent over the fat finger of lava, a marshmallow on each fork prong. After a few seconds, he checked to see if they had caramelised enough, and offered one to Phoebe.
‘You know I don’t eat sugar,’ she snapped.
‘Sorry, babe. Anyone else want one?’
‘Sure.’ Des stepped forward and took the marshmallow, then popped it in his mouth.
‘You should try one,’ he said to Margaret.
‘I was going to,’ she hissed at him.
‘How was I supposed to know? I’m not a bloody mind-reader.’
Margaret flinched and moved towards John. ‘I didn’t realise it moved so slowly. You’d have plenty of warning to leave, if it came too close.’
‘During the last close shave, we had enough time to load our stuff in the car and throw a party on the front deck. It’s all out of our hands though. It’s up to Pele, whether we stay or go.’
She couldn’t see John’s face in the dark, but his voice gave away an insincerity, as if he had given up on Pele some time ago.
‘We’ll have to head back,’ John said, checking his watch. ‘It takes longer in the dark.’
Margaret no longer cared if she slowed them down. They had seen what they needed to, and John had already been paid a tremendous amount of money. What did an extra hour mean to anyone?
On the way back, Des stayed closer to her, just as Tyler did with Phoebe. The dark seemed to bring out the protective quality in the men. And walking back was, surprisingly, easier. Her eyes were made to home in on the small prick of light emanating from her torch, a circle of trust that seemed to give her more assurance than daylight ever could. The kind of comfort given to their ancestors as they huddled around a campfire while the mountains and valleys crashed and moved all around them.
Margaret could sense a change in her husband now, and she knew that when they got back to the hotel he would go to the bathroom and use the mouth gargle, always the sure sign he would be expecting sex that night. She would have to muster up a vestige of desire, something which was becoming harder and harder these days. She thought about the cheap room they were staying in, decked out in the dated décor: the pine panelling on the walls and the bedspread with the pastel pink seashells. There were no fluffy his and hers matching bathrobes, the kind that Bob Hawke and Blanche were photographed in on the cover of the Woman’s Day all those years ago. There was no bath-tub, just a shower with an unsatisfying nozzle that dribbled water out from the sides. Still, she wou
ld take her time in the bathroom and make Des wait. And if he was still awake when she finally emerged, steaming and all clean, she would make him slow down and take his time, so that when she felt the prickle of heat in her groin building to an unbearable crescendo, it would be allowed to build and build until it had nowhere else to go.
WARM BODIES
Hugh knew within minutes of meeting the young British engineer at the airport that he would have to shake him off. Even a little shared experience was enough to bind you to someone unnaturally. The two men had arrived in Guinea at the same time and were now making their way with their driver through Conakry’s littered streets and seeing the detritus of the shanty towns: layers of rotting cardboard and rusted corrugated sheets under which humans cooked, urinated, slept. Then driving into open countryside and being amazed by the yawning blue African skies—more of a revelation to Matt, for Hugh was used to the Western Australian outback. But what was really surprising were the villages: the rows of mud huts and orderly pens for livestock, the plentiful supply of chickens, cattle, clean air, and no filth clogging the ruts in the roads or stuck like papier-mâché on city kerbsides.
Why would you ever leave your villages, Hugh wondered, watching the children, free-range and delirious, become black-limbed hieroglyphics—jerky in the distance, as their truck drove further inland and away from the coast. To leave this for what? The silent pull of a collapsible city, piling onto the existing stratum layers of rubbish, metal sheets and humans; hand to tin, soiled cardboard to limb, with what manner of diseases incubating in that slag heap. Gonorrhoea, dysentery, cholera... all utterly curable; however, here in Guinea the rules of living were so different.
And then, driving into the dusky mauve nightfall, where the bruised sky merged almost indiscernibly into the shadowy mountain ranges, and there at the base campsite, a legoland of small rectangles in a cleared space.
‘Holy shit,’ said Matt. Hugh wondered if he was referring to the orange dongas that were really old sea containers, or the six black guards standing at the boom gate nursing their rifles.
They were relieved to find they were staying not in the sea containers but in the newer part of the compound, in dongas built by the company’s Chinese co-venture partners, though a deceptive gift. Made by the Origami Masters in China, the other men joked, walls so paper thin you could hear every bowel movement, every cough in the building next door, and each time you showered, the plastic floors of the shower cubicles cracked and split so that small rivulets of effluent seeped over your toes.
Matt’s room was next to Hugh’s, so if you removed the thin partition their beds would lie side by side like they were having a permanent sleepover. Sometimes Matt would knock on the wall and try to talk, and Hugh would lie still, pretending to be fast asleep. Hugh could see the younger man was desperate to build on the friendship. Each meal break he brought his tray to Hugh’s table, and shadowed him in the downtimes. He was a young man in his late twenties, with a healthy flush to his face, a surface flow of capillary blood in his cheeks that made him come across as immature and without any substance. An eagerness to please like a puppy, something which bothered Hugh and he felt mean in thinking so. On the fourth morning, when Matt walked over to the table, laden with a tray full of food, Hugh quickly hunched over his smartphone, shut him down with that one closed-off gesture, so that Matt blushed then joined the Australians laughing at the other table.
Hugh settled for the South Africans instead. Afrikaners. He had worked with Afrikaners all through the Pilbara and preferred their looming, almost taciturn presence, and solid proletariat hands that had so easily shifted from farming to mining over several generations. An unspoken yet implied arrogance—the knowledge that they were Afrikaner seemed to be enough—which suited Hugh because that was how he saw himself. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good around people; he could be personable if he wanted. Hugh’s self-containment came from knowing that he had already found his place in the world, a tight nucleus that was the certainty of family—his wife Kate and their three children. Ever since he met his wife at university, she had become his best friend, and whether he orchestrated it or she did, their need for others slowly diminished. Over the years their world had grown smaller, probably the legacy of living in a succession of mining towns and moving on before any real attachments formed, any roots grew. That didn’t mean Kate wasn’t good with others either. He marvelled at the way she could fast-track intimacies each time they moved from town to town, becoming an indispensable friend to some poor woman who couldn’t cope with the searing heat or not having a Westfield shopping centre up the road. Dropping off lasagnes, organising play dates for the kids, and then the minute the Centurion van pulled up and the boxes were packed and stacked Kate would forget them. Sincerely insincere or insincerely sincere? It didn’t matter because each night there she was, her body warm beside his and a child between them with a leg or arm flung out, treating both parents as a silent mooring.
* * *
He had broken their marriage vow to come to West Africa. A promise to Kate that no matter what, he would never do fly in, fly out work and leave the family behind. But he hadn’t factored in being seduced by the story of the mountain, or Carston’s retelling of it—and, really, it all came to the same thing.
Hugh had met the retired exploration geologist months ago in the Perth office, and he sensed straightaway that ‘old school’ knowledge, the breadth of experience that spanned more than one continent, more than one lifetime. Carston was grey and stooped, yet with a flinty focus that sharpened him, taking years off him, though his quavering voice was the giveaway. He stood in front of the tenth-storey window, and the light glittered and refracted from the other skyscrapers and the cranes which crisscrossed the skyline, illuminating this life of uncharted estuaries and unmapped riverbeds, lighting the wiry body from within the pale checked shirt, and Hugh realised this was exactly the life he wanted.
‘We first heard about the legend of the iron mountain from the French,’ Carston explained, sounding more like a storyteller than a geologist, and clearly relishing the opportunity to hold centre stage. ‘The French discovered the mountain during an earlier expedition through West Africa—estimated it to be about a billion tonnes of continuous mineral. So when we explored the area in the seventies, we took a team of pack bearers and headed out there ourselves. I’ll never forget that moment when we arrived at the mountain...’ Carston paused, as if for effect, his penetrating eyes, brilliant beacons of light. ‘The mountain was completely veiled by thick, dense cloud, and as we walked through it, the mist suddenly lifted and there it was: miles and miles of blue haematite, breaking through the alluvial layers. The French had got their estimates completely wrong—more iron than we ever could have dreamed of!’
Everyone in the office had a good laugh over that one: laughed at the bloody French; had a chuckle over the fact that no other company had sought to mine the mountain of iron ever since.
And now as Hugh tried retelling this story to the Afrikaner superintendent driving the truck as they travelled towards the forest-covered ranges, it came across with the flatness of an anecdote. Hugh could not channel the essence of Carston, and Gerhard had already seen the mountain. The punchline was a given. Matt sat behind Hugh, and he could feel the young man’s hot breath as an irritant on his neck.
‘Why the hell didn’t the French mine it years ago?’ asked Matt.
‘Sovereign risk. That’s why we have the Chinese on board. The Guinean government wouldn’t dare fuck with the Chinese.’
Hugh sat in silence. He couldn’t be bothered talking any more, his eyes now set on the mountain ahead. He could see what Carston had meant. Even from this distance you could see the intense blue where there were patches of missing vegetation from landslides, like the colour of arteries on an anatomy chart when the skin is peeled away. The truck churned into a lower gear where the road became steep and narrow, and then Gerhard stopped the vehicle saying, ‘From now on, we walk.’ A ute pu
lled up behind them, and three armed guards jumped off the back.
‘Bit of overkill,’ muttered Matt.
‘Not when a leopard’s ripping off your face,’ answered Gerhard.
The small group walked slowly up the mountain, with Gerhard explaining the future mining plans to Matt who took photos as they walked on ahead, and Hugh stopping every few metres or so to gather some soil samples. The African guards lingered behind, watching him with interest as he picked up the sand and let it run like mini waterfalls through his hands. Hugh looked around. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, the scale of the mountain and what it potentially was worth to the company. He had only been involved with projects at the middle or end of their life. Like Mount Tom Price, a small mining town in the Pilbara, though by the time he had arrived it was known only as Tom Price. The whole mountain had already been carted away in the ore trains that snaked their way to the coast.
Hugh noticed that the others had stopped abruptly, and were focused on the shadows thrown from the giant trees twisting up from a gully. The trail had been an easy walk through light scrub, making it obvious to see what lay metres ahead. But down in the undulations of valley and ravine—as if a giant had pressed its thumbs into primordial dough— there grew a dense, impassable forest. It was strangely quiet, no bird or animal life could be heard, but Hugh’s eyes were drawn to the movement on the ground.
Matt whispered, ‘Can you see it?’
Hugh strained his eyes, not quite getting what he was seeing. He could make out the chimpanzee hunched over watching them, but it was the thing on its back that confused him. It was flat and insubstantial, like a dried-out husk, with two long dangly legs unnaturally stretched out like a spider’s.
‘Poor bugger doesn’t know it’s dead,’ said Matt.
Shit. A mummified infant. Hugh watched as the mother chimp turned to move away, and then he could make sense of the baby, how it was really just black wizened skin, with those elongated limbs stuck to the length of its mother’s back. One of the guards lifted his gun as if to shoot the poor creature, and Gerhard shouted out something hard and guttural, and the chimp took fright, limbering into the forest and away from sight.
Fabulous Lives Page 14