“The book of the movie? I saw it on TV one afternoon. A golden oldie with Joan Fontaine, about some orphan girl who married her boss. Kind of sentimental.”
“I wouldn’t say so,” Silvana said. “It’s a rather aggressive Cinderella story. Jane starts out as a poor governess who falls in love with her rich employer, but by the end of the book he is blind and utterly dependent on her. No other woman can make a play for him, because he can’t see anyone, so Jane is in total control of the situation.” Power without responsibility, she thought. Arthur would say that was every woman’s dream.
Suzy watched Carey wading into the water, fully dressed in pale blue shirt and pants plus snorkel mask. Annie was dozing. What a dreary sight she looked in that bilious green shirt and the baggy dark green slacks! Patty was holding her head in her hands. Jeez, what a bunch of fun people, Suzy thought. She decided she’d go and look for shells.
She wandered along the beach, amusing herself with a mental image of Arthur shuffling around like a bear, with his eyes bandaged, but it was unlikely that Arthur would go blind, they’d graft on some new corneas or something. It was more likely that Arthur’s tragedy would be to fall for some young girl. He was the right age to make a fool of himself, and Suzy had seen it happen before. After the divorce from Silvana, Arthur marries the young girl, but she doesn’t want to stay at home, she wants to party. So there’s the old guy, working all day at the office, whooping it up in the evening and fucking his brains out all night, until he has a heart attack in some nightclub at three in the morning, and at the funeral the young girl looks wonderful, in black with crimson touches at the collar, like Elizabeth Taylor stealing the scene at Richard Burton’s memorial service. So this young girl ends up with all the old guy’s money and lives happily ever after. That’s the stuff that modern Cinderella stories are made of …
Suzy tugged at her left foot, but her sneaker sank in the gritty sand. Her right sneaker started to squelch, and her left foot sank completely beneath the surface. It was boggy here, she thought, not sandy like the rest of the beach. The ground was slushy, with tufts of coarse grass.
Again Suzy tried to pull her left foot free. The shoe made a sucking, squelchy noise, but she couldn’t heave her foot out.
This was ridiculous! Exasperated, she jerked her knees, trying to release her feet, then crossly bent down to untie her shoelaces.
Behind her, Suzy heard someone yelling. She turned her head. The skipper, followed by Winston, was running along the beach. He called, “You’re in the quicksand, lady. Don’t move.”
It didn’t occur to Suzy to be frightened. So she’d stepped in the quicksand. So they were coming to get her out. She’d forgotten, was all. Sure, she’d splashed through that little rivulet in the sand between the waterfall and the sea, even though she’d been warned. No big deal. It wasn’t a crime. They were supposed to be looking after her, weren’t they? Why hadn’t anyone called out earlier?
The skipper panted up to the edge of the coarse grass. He was about fifteen feet from Suzy, and he kept moving around, because the sludge was sucking at the soles of his sneakers. Winston scuttled to the back of the beach, where he pulled dead branches from the debris beneath the trees. He dragged the branches back to the skipper, who had taken off his shirt and torn it into strips. The skipper knotted bits of cotton and used them to lash two branches together, to form one longer branch. Winston, who weighed far less than the man, lay on his stomach at the edge of the quicksand; slowly, he pushed the elongated branch toward Suzy, whose ankles were now submerged.
Suzy now realized that she was in danger. Her whole body was rigid and trembling.
The branch didn’t reach her, short by about six feet.
The scene seemed sharp but unreal to Suzy, like a surrealist painting. It looked exactly the same as it had before lunch—the little waves still hit the beach with a friendly slurp, the sun still shone on the azure sea. But as she felt herself sinking deeper into the bog, she started to whimper. Soon, it would still look exactly the same, except that Suzy would be gone.
“Crouch down, Suzy,” the skipper called. “Now, very slowly, try to crawl on your hands towards me. Don’t try to move your feet, you’ll only sink further. Throw yourself forward with your arms spread out. I want you horizontal.”
White-faced, Suzy did so, but still she couldn’t reach the branch. Covered in muck, sand in her mouth, she lay with her arms outstretched, but the branch was still two feet beyond her reach.
The skipper pulled back the spread-eagled Winston by his ankles—it wasn’t fair to push the boy farther—then, swearing softly, he spread his arms and legs. He started to snake his hips toward Suzy, pushing the branch before him.
Lying in the muck, and whimpering, Suzy desperately twitched her fingers, trying to reach the branch as he shoved it toward her. Eventually, her fingertips touched it, but she could only grasp the weak ends of the palm fronds.
The skipper dared go no farther, but he shoved the bound branches as far as he could, beyond his reach. Suzy was able to get a good grip on it, but now the skipper couldn’t reach it.
“Hang on, Suzy.” If he could go that far, then Winston could go a bit farther. He snaked backward until he was clear. He told Winston to crawl onto the bog again and get a grip on the branch. Winston knew the danger, but without a word he lay down and edged onto the slush, until he was about two feet inside the quicksand area. The skipper crawled behind him. “Okay, Winston, when I say one, two, three, pull, you and Suzy hang on to the branch, and I’ll pull you out. Stop sniveling, girl, and concentrate!
“One, two … three!”
Nothing happened. Winston felt as if he were being torn in two.
“Again,” said the skipper. “One, two, three … pull!” As he wriggled backward off the quicksand, he pulled Winston toward him. Winston hung on firmly to the branch.
“My arms! Oh, my arms!” gasped Suzy through a mouthful of sand. “I can’t hold on anymore.”
“Suzy, you’re moving! You’re coming out! Hang on, girl!” The sinews on the skipper’s arms trembled with the effort, but he was now clear of the treacherous sand and Suzy’s muddy bare feet were clear of the ground. The sneakers would never be seen again.
Inch by inch, Winston was pulled clear, heaving the palm branch with him.
Finally, Suzy was dragged from the swampy sand.
“You can stand up, Suzy, you’re clear now.”
But Suzy couldn’t. She was shaking and whimpering with fright; the skipper had to help her to her feet. It was no longer possible to see that she wore a pink halter top and shorts. Except for the blond crown of her head, every bit of her was caked in khaki mud.
As they staggered toward the sea to clean themselves, the rest of the party could be seen half a mile up the beach; Carey was still snorkeling, Silvana was still reading, Annie was still dozing and Patty was sitting cross-legged with her head bowed; she was meditating.
* * *
White is a status symbol in mining. Mine supervisors always wear white hard hats, and the Queen of England is always zipped into a white jumpsuit before her occasional trip down a mine. As soon as they arrived at the Mount Ida mine, the visitors from Pittsburgh were all issued white hard hats and white jumpsuits. At the top of the grimy mineshaft, looking like soap powder ads, they were greeted by an enthusiastic cheer from a crowd of grinning mineworkers. The beige shirts and shorts of the workers were stained with sweat, their heavy boots flopped, with laces undone, and their yellow hard hats were pushed to the back of the head. Charley noticed that some of the hard hats had been painted with face designs that resembled the mask in his beach hut.
As always, Charley hated that very fast elevator and the bone-shaking crash landing at the bottom, after forty people had been lowered down the vast shaft in as many seconds. Most copper mines are open cast; suddenly, Charley wished that this Mount Ida mine was not underground.
The bottom of the mine was well lit, like a subway, and forced air sent a st
eady draft through it. Trucks and other vehicles were clustered around the base of the shaft; everything visible had been cleaned or polished, while all dirty machinery had been shoved out of the way for this important visit. The little party in dazzling white climbed into the battery powered jeep and drove a mile along the twenty-foot-wide tunnel to the mine face.
Charley felt now as he always felt when he was down a mine. Scared. All the time you’re in a mine, you’re conscious of that mass of earth poised above your head, and you can’t help wondering what’s to stop it falling on you. Charley turned his head away whenever the jeep passed old sections of the mine where the earth had caved in and the floor had heaved up.
As they approached the mine face, the dust increased and the noise became intolerable; the compressed-air drills made more noise than pneumatic drills used in road repair. The deafening roar reverberated in the confined space.
At the end of the tunnel, the demonstration team was waiting to start a drill for blasting at the face.
With carefully appreciative faces, the Pittsburgh party watched the demonstration. Because this was the umpteenth time Arthur had seen this operation, his attention wandered back to that morning’s interview with the President of Paui. Everything had happened more or less according to Ed’s briefing, except that after he’d handed over the report (which Ed had redrafted to include uranium, but with no mention of cobalt or chromite), the President had looked him straight in the eye and said, “Are there cobalt expectations?”
So much for secrecy. Let’s hope the red herring works, thought Arthur as, blank-faced, he had replied, “No, sir.” He had added, “The President is, of course, aware that even if cobalt were to be found, the price fell abruptly in 1980 due to the world oversupply. Demand is now starting to rise again and prices are expected to level out at around twenty dollars a kilo by 1985, but we have no reason to hope for a cobalt find, Mr. President.”
The President had chuckled, “Oh, but which of us can know the future, sir?”
“Whatever we find, Mr. President, Paui will receive a considerable share of it.”
Arthur’s reverie was cut short by an abrupt change in the yowling of the drills. The white-clad group at the mine face was suddenly enveloped in swirling dust. There was a roar of high pressure air escaping. One of the bright orange air lines whipped dangerously above the visitors, moving so fast that it seemed to be a fan of orange, as in an action photograph.
An air-line coupling had come apart, Arthur realized immediately. Nobody had time to move. Thick as a man’s wrist, the air line twisted and flayed the roof of the shaft, smashing the flameproof overhead electric light. They were plunged into claustrophobic darkness. In that second, every man present was not only conscious of the shrieking, whipping air line, but also of the pressure of the thousands of tons of black earth above them.
Upstream of the air line, the spring-loaded pressure sensor had immediately snapped shut and closed the valve that led to the air line. As soon as the air pressure dropped, the writhing metal snake fell to the ground. With a final hiss, it lay still in the darkness. But the panicking men in the dark at the mine face did not know this.
Charley could hear screaming, close at hand. He had been standing by the emergency telephone that dangled from the wall at the face and connected directly to the shift safety crew. Coughing and choking, Charley felt along the wall for the phone but couldn’t locate it.
The lights on their white hard hats cut dim, erratic beams through the dust as the party of distinguished visitors gasped for breath but inhaled dust. Dust clogged their nostrils and stung their eyes. They choked and could not escape it.
Farther along the tunnel was a faint circle of light. The little group realized that by following the undamaged string of overhead lights, they would be led back to the elevator, then up to the safety of the surface.
They scrambled back toward that faint halo of light, and away from the dust, the darkness and the terror of what might happen next.
But one man didn’t run. Ed yelled, “There’s an injured man back here! Call the safety team to come with a stretcher!” But nobody heard him, and he groped his way in the dark toward the moans.
The choking dust was thicker than a Newfoundland fog, but as it settled, Ed could see by the beam from his hard hat that a pale, bearded man—the man who had been drilling—was writhing on the ground and screaming. His hat and glasses had disappeared, and his right leg was bleeding badly. The loosened coupling at the end of the air hose had pulverized his knee joint.
At the top of the shaft, the three-man safety crew had been playing poker when the alarm sounded. Wordlessly they had thrown down their cards and scrambled into the medical jeep that waited, permanently, outside their hut. Within twenty-five seconds of the alarm, they were moving down the shaft.
Normally, the driver of the medical jeep would have driven faster, but, without realizing it, he slowed down. He didn’t want to run over all those important executives. So the jeep moved at not much more than a running pace down the mile-long tunnel.
Activated by the pressure differential valve, an alarm had also rung in the control office. The on-shift supervisor had immediately leaped into his jeep and followed the medical vehicle, hoping that the problem was only a broken air line, as had been indicated on the alarm panel. He nearly shunted the medical jeep when it stopped abruptly near the mine face.
The spotlight and headlights of the medical jeep homed on a crowd of filthy, gasping, choking men, trying to recover under the first overhead light they had reached. Beyond these spluttering men, someone was groaning and someone else was yelling for help.
The paramedic driver jumped out of his seat and threaded his way through the group. He headed down the tunnel toward the point where Ed’s hat light shone a faint beam onto the wounded operator, who was still crying; it was a gurgling, low moan.
The paramedic knelt down, and shone his lamp on the mangled leg. “Amputation, poor bugger,” he muttered, and yelled for the rest of his team.
They hurried up. One man held an oxygen mask to the wounded man’s face, while the other jabbed morphine into his arm, after which they loaded him onto the stretcher and hurried him to the medical jeep. The medical party was now alone, except for Ed. The inspection party had been ferried back to the elevator by the on-shift supervisor.
While the paramedics were tending the wounded man, Ed jumped onto the jeep and maneuvered the spotlight around the dusty scene, to make sure that nobody else had been injured.
The pale beam picked up a crumpled, white-clad figure lying in the shadow of the big excavator.
Ed yelled, “Stretcher needed over to the left.” He climbed down from the jeep, dashed over to the figure that lay against the wall and pulled him on his back.
“Oh, my God! It’s Brett,” Ed said.
When everyone had stampeded in the dark, Brett had probably run into the heavy excavator—or maybe he’d been accidentally pushed into it.
Ed yelled, “Stretcher! Oxygen! Fast!”
Two paramedics hurried over. The first one knelt, shoved a tube down into Brett’s trachea, then attached it to the oxygen cylinder. But there was no response. It is very difficult to force air down blocked bronchial tubes.
When the second paramedic lifted Brett’s wrist to feel his pulse, the blue aerosol spray fell from his limp fingers. The paramedic lifted the spray and shook it. “This thing’s empty!” he said.
In the dim light of the mineshaft, the paramedic gave Brett an intravenous injection of steroids. There was no response from the patient.
It had taken twenty-five seconds for the medical team to get into the jeep, six minutes to get down the mile-long tunnel, another three minutes to ascertain that the choking executives were not at risk, and two minutes to attend the injured drilling operator. About twelve minutes had elapsed since the alarm bell rang. The medics looked at each other in the artificial twilight. One shrugged his shoulders. They both knew that this man was dead.
Neither of them could have known that if the hotel maid hadn’t picked Brett’s empty spray from the bathroom floor and put it carefully back on the shelf, next to the new one, so that he took it by mistake, Brett might have been able to save his life, instead of desperately pressing the button while he choked to death …
6
“Sit well down in the boat, please, ladies.”
The skipper maneuvered the Louise through the gap in the coral reef, heading straight into the waves and riding out on the swell. On either side of the gap an incessant boom could be heard as the sea hurled itself against the submerged banks of coral and flung spray into the air.
The Louise, on a northwesterly course, headed back to Paradise Bay. The sun lost its fierce intensity, and a light breeze started to blow.
The skipper hoped the women would soon perk up a bit. Suzy sat hunched in the airless cabin, still weepy after her quicksand ordeal; Annie, the quiet one, was pouring another vodka and tonic.
The other women on the beach had looked up in alarm when Suzy, Winston and the skipper, all covered in mud and sand, had staggered back to the picnic site. Annie and the big woman, Carey, had helped the trembling Suzy to the water’s edge, where they had pulled off her filthy clothes, washed her and dressed her in a clean blue fishing shirt. The plump one, Silvana, had wanted to get back to the hotel, but the boyish blonde had objected. Why the hell spoil their day, Patty had said, when Suzy had been warned not to go near the quicksand?
The skipper watched Carey fish from the stern. They were all wearing fishing shirts, like he’d told ’em. Most tourists never listened, they always thought they knew best. He always told them to take the sun carefully at the start of the holiday—to swim in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and not to sunbathe—but they always wanted to prance around in the fancy new swimsuits they’d brought. They forgot they were in the tropics. He’d found out, after two seasons at the Paradise Bay Hotel, that it was no use insisting, because the tourists always thought him interfering, if not insolent. Too late, they realized what the skipper meant, when the pain and swelling immobilized them for the next three days and they lay sobbing as the hotel nurse delicately applied calamine lotion to their scorched skin. Then, when the burned skin fell away, like a snakeskin being sloughed off, they worried whether the raw pink flesh beneath was going to stay that color for the rest of their lives.
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