'If you ask me, Don was simply jealous,' Maral said. Jealous of something he could not feel and would never be able to feel. Even though he kept on growing for four hundred years. 'He had a bloodhound's smell for a man's weakness.'
Makertich once compared him to one of those willy-willies he had seen in the desert; a meandering whirlwind that gathered up tins and rattled them together, gathered up dust and paper and ribbons and chicken coops and roof tops, and from which there was no escape when it tilted towards you, no escape at all.
'Your eyes are the two largest nerves in your body,' Makertich would tell Maral.
The night he lost his eye was April 24, 1959. He and Flexmore were in a bar, drinking. He had come into town to light a candle in St Andrew's Church and afterwards to meet a girl. He had mentioned where he was going to Flexmore and Flexmore had showed up, but not the girl.
'Let's get out of here,' Makertich said.
They went to a restaurant across the street to get something to eat and Flexmore talked about a girl he had loved and left who had gone to live on the Huon.
'She's in a bit of a dilemma. She wishes she was back with me, but I'll never change.'
'What was wrong with her?'
Flexmore shrugged. 'She's a bit dizzy or whatever. Don't know about you, I can't stand dizzy women.'
They left. Makertich did not have to pay the bill, because Mike the owner of the restaurant owed him for some crayfish. They walked down the street to the Fovant Hotel and Makertich ordered a Scotch. It was not a drinking binge, but he had been drinking. Two beers and a Scotch. On the anniversary of his grandmother's death, and a lot else besides.
'Are we celebrating something?' Flexmore's lips outlined a sly smile. 'Not once in three weeks have I seen you touch alcohol.'
'Maybe it's my birthday,' with an unstable look.
Flexmore finished his drink and ordered another from the waiter - 'and this time make it bigger, mate. Last one was so small it had to be helped out of the glass.' He winked at Makertich and burped. 'Happy birthday, roomie. I'm going to the toilet.'
But Makertich had nothing to celebrate, and when Flexmore returned he told him about the letter received that morning from the insurance company.
Flexmore's jaunty smile left his face. He gave a depthless laugh.
'What do you mean "invalid", mate?' His mouth called him 'mate' while his eyes spoke the truth. They had the expression of a wild dog.
'They say the fire was an Act of God. They're not paying up.'
His words caused an odd facial movement in Flexmore. His eyes turned hard and directionless at once. He ran his hand down from the corner of his mouth and said in a voice of such loathing that Makertich was brought up short: 'I don't give three slaps for any insurance company.' Whoever invented insurance companies could go to Hell hard. They should be drawn and quartered. The point was, this completely screwed his agreement. He had signed himself up on Makertich's pledge.
Makertich kept as wordless as he had on the back porch when the dejected slump of his father's shoulders betrayed his losses at the tote.
Damn you , he said, but to himself.
'You've conned me, Chris,' and Makertich heard his father's contemptuous laugh, full of impotent knowingness. 'You've fucking conned me.'
This Makertich could not let pass. He went as red as when his mother slapped him in the face after he refused to fetch his father his slippers. 'What about me? What about my business? How do you imagine I feel?'
But Flexmore paid no more attention to what he had said than if it came from the overhead lightbulb. He pushed himself up from the table with the ease of an angry man, and when he failed to come back Makertich realised that he must have left. He paid for their drinks and walked outside to where Flexmore stood arguing with a girl. The waiter came out with some other guys and gave Flexmore a push. Flexmore had been drinking more than Makertich, and started making a scene.
Any other evening, Makertich would have walked to the ferry. But with Flexmore getting rowdy, he flagged down a cab and Flexmore jumped in. Makertich gave directions and the cabby drove over the bridge, but Flexmore was singing loudly 'When I think of a million dollars . . . tears come to my eyes.' The cabby had had enough and pulled over.
Makertich paid and they climbed out.
A foggy night. No leaves on the trees, and all the branches and grass covered in a light skiff of rain. Makertich started to walk down the bank and Flexmore elbowed past. The grass was slippery and they both started to slide, and Flexmore grabbed Makertich by the shoulder to keep himself up. Makertich took two strides, but with Flexmore grabbing his shoulder he fell. He put his hand out and the branch of an apple tree that was pruned at an angle went straight into his eye.
Makertich felt the impact like a knife going in. The tree limb was captured in the socket. He recoiled, and the limb pulled out, splitting the globe and tearing the retina.
He was on the ground, clutching his head.
Flexmore freaked out. 'Holy fuck! Your eye's hanging out on your chest! I'll take you to the houseboat.'
'No!' Makertich said in a lashing voice. 'Flag down a car,' and tried to look around for Flexmore, to see where he was in the dark, but all he saw was blackness.
There was something unfathomably cruel and absolute about an eye gouged out. Whenever Makertich heard that someone had been tortured in this way, he would cover his face with both hands.
Although, once he had his glass eye put in people did not always notice.
'Which one is it?' Maral had asked. This after six days in his service.
'My left,' and took off his dark glasses and for the first time she saw: a large, brown handsome eye, but unmoving; and a sharper, smaller, quicker one. Cloudier, too - and never without a ring of tiredness. As though it had been pressed up hard against a telescope.
At the hospital, they frocked him up and sedated him. He felt the needle going in and was worried about moving his head. But they could not save his eye. The cells failed and died out and the cornea filled with water.
Out of his good eye, everything appeared to him in a blurred vision, and then the freezing wore off and a purplish light shone through and he started to see again in focus.
There was no grey-pink bird to greet him on the morning he came home. At the scullery door, he smelled something sweet drifting up from below deck.
He opened the door to his cabin and saw Flexmore lying on his bed, blond hair slicked down with lubricant, and half-naked beside him the girl Makertich had arranged to meet in the bar. She was lying with her bare legs up and through a garland of smoke Flexmore was quoting from some handwritten pages.
'Hey, Chris. Didn't hear you come in,' and tossed aside what he was reading. His cigarette had gone out and he struck a match and relit it. His fascination with the flame seemed unnatural. He went on in a contemplative voice. 'I was just saying it's a good point, about love and justice both being blind.'
Makertich stared at him. 'What are you reading?'
Flexmore picked it up. 'I found it on your bed. The Boundaries of Love . By Cheryl Pyke.' And winked.
'I think it's time,' Makertich said, with a sense of almost liking him better by admitting how much he hated him, 'for you to leave.'
Flexmore took another drag. He raised his blue gaze to the face of the blonde girl tacked to the ceiling: 'I'll fucking well leave when I please.' A day later, he was gone. When Makertich woke up and went into the scullery, he found a half-drunk mug of Milo still warm, but Flexmore was gone. He owed five weeks' rent.
Two days later, a policeman stepped on board. It was then that Makertich learned about his lodger's doctrine of scavenging and deceit. Before absconding, Flexmore had taken possession of a small shop in Richmond, renting storage spaces, as a front for his fraudulent business, and employing a strand of copper wire that he earthed into the public telephone box - 'into the button for your money back' - to make unlimited free long-distance calls. He would keep the money from the 'shares' that he sold in his phantom eucaly
pt plantations and investors would wind up with nothing.
'He's nothing but a big prick in a small brothel,' said the policeman, who had heard that Flexmore had been expelled from two schools for violence towards other pupils. 'Just as well you didn't lend him money.'
6
F OR THE NEXT TWO years, Makertich wore an eyepatch that he acquired from a costume store in Richmond. He felt unattractive and self-conscious. He felt like a clown in China, where a clown is a symbol of death. He felt that no woman would look at him again and he would never know what it was to have a child.
He told Maral: 'With one eye, your depth of perception is destroyed. You lose thirty per cent peripheral vision and you're further away from things than you think you are. But what you see means so much more to you. Now, when I look at things I really drink them in. Whether with two good eyes I would have noticed what I saw out of that plane - well, that's an open question.'
He lasted another five months on the houseboat. He was ugly and skint. Ostracism came in small steps. The bank seized his camera shop, he could not find work. In September, the houseboat's owner served notice and Makertich left the Hawkesbury.
On buses, people were wary of his eyepatch and refused to sit beside him. Running out of money, he resorted to hitchhiking. Mid-October saw him hiking west in a loose southward curve. He thumbed his way to Canberra, down through Melbourne and Adelaide, and up from Albany to Perth. At some point on the journey, he fastened on Cheryl's father as his improbable saviour and his path straightened. When he reached Perth, his plan was to fly to Marble Bar and ask Henry Pyke for his job back.
One clear November morning, he took off from Jandakot airfield in a single-engined Auster. The pilot was a gossipy Finn who remembered flying him back from Marble Bar at the end of one holiday season, together with Mr Pyke. Today, he carried an important package for the old fella. The murmur in Perth was that the Federal Government might be about to overturn the ban on exporting iron ore.
Makertich was his only passenger. He sat reflecting on what the pilot had said as they rose above the tin rooves.
How quickly the houses receded into wheat-farming land and then into scrubby sheep stations, becoming less and less fertile, until Makertich was looking down on red dirt, and in the red expanse white pock marks around the collar of some old mine shaft.
The plane flew north, following the Great Northern Highway, over deep narrow gorges and conical hills and salt pans, then over country that was rugged and flat. Afterwards, he came to feel that the landscape had moulded him in its shape, making him intractable, impenetrable, contradictory.
There was no indication that they were heading into a thunderstorm until they passed Tuckanarra. The sky ahead was dotted with cumulus, a mob of grey clouds that filled the horizon from one limit to the other. The pilot was keen on reaching Marble Bar and decided to take the risk. He flew on, expecting the cloud level to lift, but every minute it grew thicker and darker and lower, until the peaks of the mountains disappeared into it.
One moment they were flying on the edge of cloud and then they were inside it and coming to realise that they were caught in a Charlie Bravo: a thunderstorm. What they had been looking at was all that year's rain gathering itself to be dumped on that sun-baked wasteland in the space of ten hours.
All of a sudden, the little plane was bumping about.
The pilot looked at his artificial horizon, watching his speed. His face still relatively calm. They should not really be in here, but here they were and he needed to do a one-eighty to get out pronto.
He tried to turn the plane around, but it resisted violently. Straight-middle one second, the next thrashing to one side.
'This is bad news,' he shouted, fighting to gain altitude. He tapped his trembling gauge. The Charlie Bravo was moving and the wind was blowing them west through the Hamersley Ranges, and he could not see a thing.
'What about climbing above it?' Makertich yelled.
'In this Auster? Not a chance.'
'Can you go through it?'
The pilot peered ahead. 'Too thick.' And too wide to fly around. 'We have to get down or we're dead meat.'
He gripped the stick to stop it vibrating and forced the plane lower. The rain hitting the windshield in stair rods.
'Shit!' he exclaimed, when they burst out of the cloud. He was hoping for a claypan free of scrub, a station track, any place to land that was flat. But they were flying over gorge country.
They dipped lower, following an ever-narrowing ravine. The pilot too busy concentrating on avoiding the river gums to see what Makertich noticed out of his single photographer's eye. Left and right, not far from the wing tips, sheer sides of mountain glistened red in the rain.
Makertich knew immediately what he was looking at. He tapped the pilot's shoulder: 'Where are we?'
At the mine, all Pyke's men were axle-deep in mud. No one able to go anywhere and rivers of fox-brown water running down into the pit. All day, Pyke had tried to deflect the water by grading a barrier and organising loaders to dump dirt. The rain had stopped by the time he strode back into his office, where there sat a young man wearing an eyepatch.
'This is for you,' and handed over the envelope that the pilot had given him.
Pyke's greeting was strained. His hard green eyes responding coldly. But he relaxed when Makertich explained his mission. Out of guilt, he overruled his foreman and hired Makertich as a haul-pack driver. A one-eyed, impoverished Armenian posed little threat to Cheryl. On the sole occasion when Makertich enquired after her, Pyke said that she was good and was engaged to be married next January.
'He's a Pom. But we're not holding it against him.'
Pyke had less than a year to run before his retirement. Once he had finished paying for his daughter's wedding, he planned to invest the rest of his superannuation in a forty-eight-foot crayfishboat called the Daphne .
It took Makertich a fortnight to gather his gear. He borrowed a sextant from a Polish surveyor whose distributor he had fixed, and spent a weekend learning to use it. The garage hand in Marble Bar lent him the Land Rover. He would have all his security on board, including the tarpaulin from the top of Pyke's piano under which to cower from the sun. He hoped to get as close as he could in the vehicle, even if it was unlikely that he would get all the way.
At first opportunity, he packed a compass, a map, a pick, a measuring chain, a bundle of star-posts, four coir mats to put under the tyres, and a fortnight's food and water, and drove out along an old exploration track. The sun beat down through the windscreen and the washed-out track stretched before him like a rib of the earth's bones.
He slept that evening on the roof of the Land Rover, a night of stillness and moon, and was on his way before the sun came up.
It was past midday when he came to a homestead: compressed earth walls because of the white ants, a big veranda, a few tame goats. Fed from an elevated tank, a hose dripped water onto the ripple-iron roof.
The foreman was away and an Aboriginal girl boiled him a mug of tea.
He drank it, watching the water splash from the roof onto the veranda.
The girl did not ask where he was going, nor did he tell her. He knew that he should not be on his own, but he was not risking another betrayal. He left her with a time estimate, enabling a rescue if he was late.
He drove north-west on the old station road across a plateau. The tyres scrunched over mulga and porcupine grass, and a wavery heat distorted the horizon. When he ran out of trails he followed the flat country. Progress was slow, rocks everywhere, and he worried about breaking the axle. After two hours, he almost got bogged in a wide river bed. He stepped out to test the ground and knew that if he drove on the Land Rover risked sinking up to its steering-wheel in mud.
To orient himself, he climbed the highest scree slope, several times losing his footing. He thought that he could see it from the top, but was not sure. There were different outcrops, and they did not have the same shape from the ground as from the air. H
e made his calculations. His best guess - he was less than twenty-five miles away.
He returned to the Land Rover, culling into a pack all that he needed to carry - water, tarpaulin, food for seven days. He marked on his map the spot where he had parked. Then he slid the ribbed key from the ignition, popped a dried apricot into his mouth and started walking.
A snake undulated into a crack. It was stiflingly hot. The view barren and eye-aching. Bushes with glossy leaves like small beetles. Mountains red and dusty with the texture of dirty suede.
In himself, a similar desiccation was going on. But if ever he considered giving up, he had only to think of his grandmother, stumbling on pebble-hardened feet beside a donkey.
For a day, he watched his shadow shrink towards him and disappear behind him. On the second morning, he turned south. And on the next, found his mountain.
He kept the location a secret until he had blanket-pegged the area. Exactly as Pyke had taught him, he marked out his claim in 300-acre lots, each the shape of a parallelogram and indicated at the boundary edge by a three-cornered datum post, which he photographed, and - when he had run out of star posts - by a cairn of stones four feet high and a shallow trench six feet long. He wrote down the coordinates using his sextant, knowing that when he made an application for the lease with the local registrar he would have to define where it was.
'When you go up against the big companies, they'll find any loophole,' Pyke had told him.
His rights of occupancy established, he requested a meeting with Pyke's geologist, a Berliner called Zeigler.
Zeigler was a grey-eyed cynic and one of those Marble Bar characters who were always there 'for just one more year'. He was not swayed by this young man, whose heart so evidently was in his story, and tried to fob him off with geological reports.
True, the samples of hematite and magnetite that Makertich produced from his specimen bag yielded a grade higher by 2 per cent than the ore fed into the Kaiser Steel furnaces in Fontana and the Buss Nissho-Iwai Company in Japan. Even so, what the fellow asserted was not credible. But Ziegler's scepticism turned to excitement and next into marvelling when, at Pyke's intervention, he flew with Makertich to the mountain that Makertich had decided to call Ararat. Makertich stood back and watched him weld a piece of iron to the rock. Following an extensive survey and percussive drilling, Zeigler was able to confirm that the lease pegged out by Makertich constituted one of the largest deposits of iron ore in the continent's history.
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