This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  I ask him: ‘Do you know what sort of projects they want people for at the moment?’ Apart from their usual of how to make sheep breed in triplicate without entirely eradicating the topsoil.

  But he says, raising an eyebrow at the halfwit: ‘Defence projects, I would imagine.’ He hands me back my form to dispose of. Thanks for that. ‘If you want to serve your country as a scientist, I’d hop to it if I were you.’

  All right then, the CSIR I suppose it is. Can’t think what they’d want geologists for in defence, but I may as well find out.

  I go back out into the street, back up Flinders Street, towards the foreshore where the Qantas terminal is. I’ve got eight hundred and seventy-four pounds in my account, established with my identity yesterday. I’m a wealthy man. Southern Star did pay this idiot well. Why not go by plane? There’s plenty here. The whole of Townsville is an air base now. You can’t get into a pub, which is good. I don’t want a drink. I do want a drink, actually, a lot of drink, but I’m not going to have one. I don’t know what I might do if I had a drink in me. All the same, I have to pass Ramages on the way to the wharves, and the anger that overtakes me as I do has no name. This is where I met Johno. What do I do with this anger? Write to Johno’s father is what I should do. I know he works for Union Steamships, and there’d be an office here I could drop a letter into. But I can’t do that. Not yet. A fight spills out of the front bar into the street, between the RAAF and the Yanks, and I could join them, on either side. I can’t believe Johno’s gone. I don’t know what to do with this – chaos. The violence wanting to rip out of me.

  Keep walking, to the terminal, to the booking agent. Get a ticket. Townsville to Sydney on the seaplane this arvo at three, then change at Mascot 7.15 tomorrow morning, for Canberra. Too easy.

  I walk back round the corner towards the hospital, back to the outfitters across the road from it and kit myself up with a new swag. I need new everything. Jacket, tie, look like I’m applying for a job. I’m unemployed. Flaming hell. Probably not for long, but five minutes is embarrassing enough. This borrowed shirt I’ve walked in with is embarrassing enough. I think I should go and thank that Lieutenant Ackerman, for looking after me. Nice bloke; from Lithgow originally. But I don’t go and find him. He’s that good-looking and sure of himself I can’t look at him directly without thinking Bernie married him. Someone like him. I walk back to the foreshore, go and sit on the wharf, and wait for the plane.

  On board, I spend the afternoon watching the cloudless sky for Jap Zeroes. Then, after Brisbane, as Queensland becomes New South Wales, I watch the sunset over the Divide, over the drought of the northwest. That’s not my concern. Not my country any more. Not a lot of colours going on out the window. Nothing for me down there any more. Just as there’s nothing for me in Sydney either. When we hit the water at Rose Bay, I consider going to Coogee. It’s only three miles from here, and I stand on the jetty for a minute, in two minds about it.

  Mrs Cooper would be thrilled to see me. Maybe Mrs Zoc, too, if she’s home, from that internment bullshit in Hay. Surely she would be by now. It’s almost seven. They’d be finishing their tea. But I can’t imagine knocking on the door. I can’t imagine having a conversation with them. I can’t imagine saying hello. What I might do when I find out who Bernie’s with. Seeing her.

  That makes me break out in a sweat. Not in any good way. A cold sweat, here where I last saw her. Saying goodbye, here. We were so happy then. But that was then. She doesn’t want to see me now. I’m long forgotten. And to see that written on her face, in her eyes, that’s a rejection I couldn’t take. It would finish me. It’s hard enough getting my breath back over it, right now. This pain in my lungs that’s not pneumonia any more.

  But somehow I do breathe. Somehow I’m in the cab, going out to Mascot, and then I’m in the hotel, the Lakes by the aerodrome. Where I can’t get to sleep. I’m not thinking about Bernie. I’m listening to the planes going all night long, waiting for the sirens to start up. Somewhere, inside the long dark tunnel of this anger, I pass out. I don’t wake up properly until we’re nearly landing again, flying over the Goulburn district. It looks like it’s had its grass removed. This is prime grazing country; the drought is bad. I look out the window for Lake George, but it’s disappeared too. There is some suffering going on down there. That’s not my concern. Not now.

  ‘Where to?’ says the cabbie on the lonely paddock that’s Canberra Airport.

  ‘The CSIR.’

  ‘Black Mountain?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I don’t know Canberra well. Only been here twice, to play tennis against Grammar at school. No other reason why you’d come.

  ‘Busy out there lately – you working there too?’ the cabbie asks, wanting to chat.

  ‘Maybe.’ I don’t want to chat. I look out the window, at the bush. At Canberra. It’s not called Bush City for nothing. The centre of town, where the shops are, is not more than two miles wide. Who else has a national capital like this one? What am I doing here? No one in the streets, all shut up in their offices napping for their country, round an artificial lake that famously hasn’t been built yet because of this flaming war. Out the other side, we’re into the bush again. Then out of the bush, this big concrete bunker appears. Two of them. Like an extra-galactic alien laboratory for the study of life on Earth. One that landed shy of its target.

  ‘Here y’are,’ says the cabbie.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Pick up my swag and find a signpost. I find two: Insectarium or Administration & Soils Department. This was a pointless exercise. I am cracked. But I head in through the Admin revolving door anyway. May as well find out how pointless and cracked, since I’m here.

  The foyer’s surprisingly busy. The sound of footsteps and conversation reminds me of rushing between lectures at uni. It’s almost comforting, to be somewhere, for the first time in so long, that seems familiar. In a good way.

  I go up to the counter and wait at the inquiries sign till one of the ladies behind it comes over and says: ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Am I in the right place to inquire after war effort work? I’m a geologist,’ I say.

  She smiles: ‘You are indeed. All the positions currently open are pinned to the noticeboard on the left, over there. The priority positions are marked with a red dot. If you see anything you’re interested in, come back with the position number and we’ll make you an appointment.’

  All right. I go over to the noticeboard, where there’s dozens of jobs, lots with red dots. Metallurgists wanted for aeronautics in Melbourne. Chemists for experiments with rubber plants at Queensland Uni. A junior biology technician wanted for dehydrating vegetables in Sydney. Not many jobs in Canberra itself, unless you want to study moths for the Wool Board. And nothing for me, that I can see. Except for one small notice for a surveyor to go out to Port Hedland for haematite exploration in the Pilbara, in Western Australia. I nearly laugh. Someone doesn’t think the idea is too wild of accepted wisdom any more. But then I suppose now would be the time to get someone to go and have a proper look, wouldn’t it. Not me, though. I’m not doing survey work. Not now.

  Still, I look at the notice again. Haematite. My honours paper. That seems like a long time ago. But it’s not five years since I was looking at this sample of high grade ore that had just come to Professor Richardson from a gold exploration site north of Alice Springs, from the Centre. The red bands of iron oxide through the black looked like arteries. Maybe I should –

  ‘Brock? Is that Gordon Brock?’

  I turn to see a familiar face. It’s one of the physics lecturers from Sydney. What’s his name? Sherbel, but Professor or Doctor, I can’t remember which. I didn’t have him as a teacher and I don’t really know him for anything other than that he is a small, tight-sprung bloke, fit from riding a bicycle everywhere. He’s got one of those faces that always looks surprised and a bit excited – cracked in that way most physicists are.

  He’s holding out his hand to me now. ‘Brock, good to se
e you again.’

  Again? I’ve said two words to this bloke my whole life, but he knows who I am. I extend my hand: ‘Prof, um, Doctor Sherbel, isn’t it?’

  ‘One and the same. Call me Charlie. Ha.’ He’s excited all right. ‘Heard you were in New Guinea. Richardson will be glad to know you’ve got back to us in good shape. Looking for a job, eh?’ No chance to answer that before he’s giving me the worst handshake. If he is not a world champion arm-wrestler, he should be. I’m seeing stars as he says: ‘U-235.’

  ‘U-235?’ Please let go of my hand now.

  ‘That’s the one,’ he says, finally releasing it but no less excited. ‘U-235.’

  ‘Um …’ I’m not following him. He has a doctorate in cracked. I know what U-235 is of course, the isotope of uranium which might be able to sustain a chain reaction of fission, the release of molecular energy on splitting an atom. It’s all anyone talked about at the beginning of ’39, the discovery of U-235’s instability and how its intense radioactivity will be used to make death-ray guns to fight off the red Lizard Men of Ergamon when someone works out how to extract enough of it to test the theory. But all I manage for Doctor Sherbel is: ‘Ah, yeah, 235, as in uranium?’

  ‘One and the same, Brock, one and the same.’ Doctor Sherbel nods, his vice-hand taking me by the elbow now. ‘Uranium. The destructive potentialities of uranium.’

  I can’t imagine them. But Doctor Sherbel is imagining them, and probably not as science fiction.

  He says, already pulling me down a long corridor: ‘Interested?’

  Uranium. It’s a miracle mineral. It can cure cancer, at least radium bromide can. The radioactivity somehow shrinks the bad cells and makes them disappear. Mix it with a fluorescing agent and it makes clock faces and expensive champagne glasses glow in the dark. But don’t lick the paintbrush or it might give you cancer. Uranium. It’s a very heavy metal. What would those U-235 atoms really do, splitting, ping-ponging against each other with a force … I can’t imagine it, that chaos, but I want to. An energy, a destructive potential, more powerful than anything I can put sense to. I’m interested.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell Doctor Sherbel, ‘I’m very interested.’

  PART FIVE

  MAY 1942–FEBRUARY 1944

  BERNIE

  ‘He’s home – Bernadette love. He’s home!’

  I could drop the telephone. Mrs Quinn is so overjoyed she’s let herself in to Arcadia to phone me. Can’t blame her: Colin’s been missing in action for almost a year. I haven’t given him a thought for ages; I’d given him up for dead. And now he’s home?

  ‘He turned up on the doorstep, crack of dawn this morning, nearly killed us with the fright of it. Telegram didn’t get through, all them Americans clogging up the lines at Easter. He got himself to Egypt, our Col did – hiding in Greece all that time, he was, having a holiday. There’s an Irishman for you. They’re going to give him a medal. Can you believe it?’

  Yes. I believe everyone’s going to come home but Gordon. And my mum and dad. Come back from the dead, evade capture. Come on, Missy, nerves of steel, tell Mrs Quinn: ‘That is the most marvellous thing I’ve heard in so long, I could cry.’ And I could: this hurt is excruciating.

  ‘They’ve given him two weeks with us. I thought I’d see if you might like to come home and celebrate, at our place, this Saturday – only a small party, but it will be a happy occasion, I can promise you that. We need a happy occasion, don’t we, love?’

  We do. But I don’t want to celebrate with you. I have to, though. I have to start accepting; facing Arcadia might well be the place to do it. Tell Mrs Quinn and quickly: ‘Of course I’ll come, thank you so much for thinking of me.’ Giving me a telephone account I can ill afford, too; I should have cancelled the subscription. ‘I’d better go now, though. See you Saturday.’

  ‘See you, love, I’ll be so looking forward to–’

  Press my finger down on the cradle so it doesn’t clunk on her.

  ‘What was that about, dear?’ Mrs Lockhart puts her head around the sitting-room door.

  I say: ‘Mrs Quinn, their Colin, he’s turned up, in Coogee.’

  Mrs Lockhart’s smile is full of sympathy as I wipe away the evidence with my cardi cuff. There’s nothing to say about it, apart from: ‘So you’ll be going off to Sydney to welcome him home?’ Because she has telescopic ears to go with the eyes in the back of her head.

  I say: ‘Yes, I suppose I will.’ Unless you can find a compelling reason for me not to make the nine-hundred mile round trip into the heart of my sorrow and back.

  ‘Oh, it’ll do you good, dear,’ she says. ‘I am glad, I must say, and I have an ulterior reason to go with it. Now, we need a dele­gate from Hay branch to attend the national conference on the fifteenth. They’re holding it in the Grace’s Ballroom – you’ll have a great time with the girls, I know you will. Mina Carlton’ll look after you down there, you know, from Dee Why? Of course you do. Someone’s got to go for us, don’t they – you know how important it is that we have as many from the far west as we can get, so our needs are heard out here. And as well, I’ve put you in to model the proposed uniform – you’ve done that sort of thing before, haven’t you, dear?’

  Would it matter if I hadn’t? I laugh, with that sort of sweet hysteria that rolls over tears. ‘Of course,’ I snortle, and I do know how important it is. The Women’s Land Army is at last about to become a reality, a national organisation, with a proper wage, ranks and an official pin, as well as a uniform, instead of the ad hoc way things’ve been done to date, and always short of hands out here. City girls want to go and pick pears in Leeton for a trip away with friends, just like on the peachy posters, or work in the cannery and go to dances with the boys from Narrandera aerodrome. They don’t want to pick boring beans at the end of the line or muck out stinky stables and spend Sundays being grateful for it. As I have, and I’m a bit chuffed now to be asked to go to the conference. I’ve never done anything like that before, represented anything or anyone.

  ‘Oh, I knew you would.’ Mrs Lockhart squeezes me round the shoulders. ‘Have I ever told you how indispensable you are, Bernadette darling? You’re like a daughter to me, and I’d so very much like to come along to Sydney with you – I need a trip, I do, my word are we going shopping one day – but with things the way they are with Mitch, I can’t get away. You know how it is, don’t you, dear.’

  I do; things are grim with Mitch. But she’s never called me indispensable before, or darling. Like a daughter to her. That is a blast of sunshine into the dark depths of me. While Mitch would like a little less sunshine. He’s in Canberra, probably on his way back now, from a meeting at the Agricultural Council yesterday, making his own submissions of need, and extending his overdraft while he’s there. What’s left of his mob out on the Paddock is going to have to be handfed now, and if he can’t extend the overdraft, he won’t be able to pay for the shearing of them either, not to mention how much it’s costing him to keep his best breeding stock in Yass. It’s a dreadful business for him, for all the graziers, and since what they lack in pasture they make up for in pride, there’ll be no women’s land anything allowed near a sheep station round here. Not even me: before he left I asked him if I could help with the fences that needed mending up at Hell and in the silence that followed we all decided to ignore that I’d opened my mouth at all.

  Mrs Lockhart’s hands are still on my shoulders, here on the velveteen teal, as I notice a great big cloud forming over the tops of the river gums. A blustery wind through the leaves and a hulking, brownish thundery-looking cloud that has me grasping her hands with the thrill of a prayer about to be answered in bucket loads. ‘Oh look! Look, that’s rain! An almighty lot of rain!’

  ‘Oh no, dear.’ Mrs Lockhart has ungrasped me and is already running down the hall and out the back. ‘The washing, Bernadette. Bring in the washing!’

  I follow but I don’t see the need to panic; we’ve only got spare sheets on the line, a tablecloth and a few napk
ins. ‘A bit of rain won’t matter, will it?’

  ‘That’s not rain, Bernadette – that’s dust, coming in from the Centre. We’ve got five minutes,’ she warns, and a plum pudding cyclone has never moved at greater speed, getting me to unpeg and throw the linen at her before she says: ‘I’ll go in with these and shut the windows. Start bringing everything not nailed down into the house, dear, the cane chairs, the planters, everything. Hurry! Hurry!’

  I have no trouble hurrying as the cloud quickly changes from brown to red, rolling towards the house with terrifying speed. A great, howling, angry red cloud is billowing out of the belly of the devil, and it’s going to crash right over us. It will surely kill us. I scream: ‘Oh Hughie help me!’

  Hurling the cane chairs and cushions off the back verandah and in through the kitchen door, I remember Odd Socks: oh no, she’s not nailed down. ‘Oh my God!’

  Forget lugging in the planters, I run across the yard for her; she’ll be under the willows at the bend, where she usually spends the afternoon, just up from the pump. I’ve got to get her in the shed. She can’t stay out in this, surely. We’ll shelter in the shed. Oh, but as I’m running past it I see the tin panels lifting at the side with the force of the gathering gale.

  And now can’t see anything at all. The whole world has gone a deep shade of apricot. Screaming apricot air that is stinging my skin. Everywhere. It’s going to tear my cardigan off. It’s going to tear my skin off.

  I crouch down on the ground, cover my head with my arms, make myself as small as I can. I am so frightened I can’t even blaspheme. I cower there for what seems forever until I realise the wind has stopped screaming. Slowly, I dare to look up.

  And through the apricot haze I see the shape of Odd Socks, over by the willows, she’s all apricot but otherwise apparently unscathed, and then I see the ute, Mitchell’s ute, apricot too, rolling down the drive, home from Canberra, rolling off the drive and across the yard towards me, pulling up a few feet away.