The Steam Mole

by Dave Freer

  Well, it might. But still she swung herself into the nearest carriage. The men sitting on the wooden benches with their swags gaped at her as if she’d crawled out of a piece of green cheese.

  “Here, Missy,” said one finally. “You can’t get on this clanker. She’s going up north.”

  “So am I. I am going to find my brother. He’s at Power Station 1786, Dajarra,” she said airily. “I have to talk to him about our father, and seeing as he’s on a contract, he can’t come to Ceduna. Or that’s what he said in his letter.”

  The audience stared at her. Finally one said, “Are you sure he’s your brother, Missy?”

  Clara surprised herself by starting to cry, having her carefully constructed story come apart before she’d really even started on it. She put it down to being dog-tired and over-worried. “My mother is unconscious in hospital. And my father’s a prisoner in Queensland. I need to get to Tim.”

  It took a few seconds for the sandy-haired fellow—the one who’d asked if she was sure if Tim was her brother—to react. “Eh. Simmo. Davo. Gimme your swags. We’d better tuck you under the bench, Missy. Conductor will be here in a few minutes and he’ll chuck you off if he sees you.”

  Hidden behind bedding rolls, Clara heard the conductor demanding, “Where yer all goin’?” The men sang out various numbers, then the clanking started as the carriage rattled and rolled away into the darkness toward the hot red center of Australia.

  “Orright, Missy. Yer can probably come out now,” said someone.

  So Clara crawled out from under the bench into the dimly lit, swaying, low-roofed carriage and the stares of the men there. She felt rather like telling them it was rude to stare so, but they had helped her, after all.

  “Um. Good morning. So, er, where are you all going?” It was, in a way, rather like the submarine in the carriage.

  She could see teeth in the answering grins. “G’day to you, too. North, I reckon. Nowhere else the clanker goes,” said one of them. “So where are you from, Missy? Never heard of no nice girls catching the clanking white ant.” He seemed to be implying she was a “nice girl,” so that was all right.

  “Um.” There seemed no real point in pretending she was a local girl. Her accent betrayed her. “Ireland.”

  “Me da came from Ireland,” said the sandy-haired one, smiling and nodding. “Best thing he coulda’ done, he said to me.”

  “Me mam, too. You came in with the submarine?” asked a fellow with a handlebar moustache. “The one they blockaded the harbor with half the Royal Navy to stop? I heard there was some women on her.”

  That simplified things nicely. “Yes. My mother and I came on the Cuttlefish.”

  “Aye. Wish they’d bring more girls. It’s a good country for men is Westralia. But even in Ceduna there’s two men for every woman. Up north, it’ll be about two hundred to one, I reckon. I’m gunna earn some money and go back to Dominion I reckon. It’s crook there, but there’s girls. What’s it like in Ireland, Missy?”

  So she told them. From there it was a short step to telling them of her adventures leaving Ireland…and basking in their adulation because her father was in jail for fighting against the British Empire. That was a new experience. She stopped short, though, of telling them about the message. About the fact that, for some reason, the British Empire had sent her father to Queensland. In the meantime she talked to them about places they’d never see and heard about the hot, bleak interior, and of why the coaches were painted white. “They can be, see. No coal smuts. And it reflects heat best in the couple of bits the clanker comes out.”

  “But where is the engine?” She was puzzled by the lack of coal smuts. Soot and smuts were a way of life in a world that ran on coal.

  “Oh, the clankers don’t have ’em. Can’t burn coal down here. The carriages have clamps on them that snag on the belt, see.”

  Clara didn’t, but they were happy to explain, if a little surprised that she didn’t know. There were power stations along the route, outside the tunnels, that wound huge drums of continuous cables. Ten miles was the practical limit, so every twenty miles there was a power station, providing a cable to haul the trains along ten miles to either side of them. It meant, of course, that the segments were mostly straight. They could do curves, but that started to get more complicated than Clara was following, or wanted to. Submarines and navigation interested her. Cable cars in tunnels, not so much. But the carriages were so flat because for every one running north, there was another coming south. The tunnels were round, and they had to fit.

  “Why not just make them bigger?” she asked. “The tunnels I mean.”

  “Cause the drill heads on the steam moles are round. So the tunnels are round.”

  He hauled out his pocket watch. “We’re crossing the gap soon. You’ll get to see it.”

  “She’s a lovely sight. Never get tired of it,” said one of the other, older men, with a smile. “There’s a few other aerial sections, but the gap’s the biggest. Mind you, it can get hot out there.”

  “Yeah, but Power Seven is just the other side of her. She blows good cool air into the tunnels.”

  They came out into late-afternoon daylight, the shadows long across the landscape of reds, browns, and ochre below the cable-train, as she hung on a silver rail above the rocky valley below. The rail was suspended between enormous pylons, coming up from the dry valley. Looking carefully Clara could see there was some sparse vegetation. “It’s so beautiful. But I thought it was all desert.”

  “My word, I seen her in flood once,” said one of the older northbound workers. “Was nothing but water as far as the eye could see. It runs into Lake Eyre. That’s not been full for a while, but when we get a wet, here, Missy, we get a real wet.” He looked at the entry to the tunnel on the valley wall ahead. “Better tuck you under the seats again. The conductor comes around to check no one’s drunk and starting fights, and the food-sellers on the platform might rat on you.”

  And so Clara’s journey into the red heart of Australia continued. She ate with them—they wouldn’t take her money—and talked, and eventually dosed, learning more about the miners and rail workers heading into the north, a part the British Empire considered virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. And they were even running cattle up there.

  The one thing that was even stranger was how many of these young men had come from the Dominion of Australia, and how many were planning to head back there, with good Westralian gold in their pockets. If they could go to-and-fro, surely she could?

  Linda had just picked up a message from Nicky—hidden in the hedge in their secret spot—when she heard her stepmother scream.

  She barely had time to tuck the note up her sleeve before her stepmother bustled in. “Do say you know where Clara is. Her bed…her bed had a pillow in it. I thought she must still be asleep,” she said, her speech fast and voice a little shrill. “I thought with her mother being so unwell it was best to leave her…”

  “No, Mother,” said Linda, feeling sure her face must betray her as an absolute liar. But fortunately her stepmother was neither observant, at the best of times, nor looking at her. She rushed out, calling, “Clara! Clara? Where are you, Clara?”

  Linda was fairly sure she was not going to get a reply.

  One thing was certain. It would be a rotten time, for the next few days, to meet Nicky at night as he suggested. If Clara had run away, police would investigate every young woman they could find out on the street.

  “Gunna have to change at Mooree,” said Sandy. “I’m on the Tjarri Power Station, that’s sixty miles from Dajarra, but we’re pushing north. Dajarra is the last power station pushing south from Sheba. So you’ll haveta change tonight at Mooree. That’s where the Alice Line splits off. You go on to Alice, across to Sheba, and then down to Dajarra. That’s the last part of the back-cut towards us. They’ve got maybe thirty miles to go, and one more power station, before the line opens all the way to Ceduna. They’re pushing hard, but it’s hard rock countr
y.”

  He tapped the fellow with the handlebar moustache on the shoulder. “Mick’s going to Sheba. He’ll see you through and onto the supply clanker to Dajarra. Not many going that way on this trip, I reckon. They got some real crook bastards workin’ the shifts up there. My shift-captain worked there for a while, but he don’t like some of that crew. The station boss, he’s all right, though, I reckon. Feller called McGurk. Talk straight to him, I reckon. No use pretending you’re not there.”

  The big difference, Tim decided, between the exhausting work on the steam mole and the submarine—where work could be exhausting, too—was the power stations. The steam mole would do thirty-six hours at the bore-face and then be pulled back to the power station, and the next mole would be cantilevered in. The crew would get some proper sleep, then re-tip the drill heads, then have some more time off in the cavernous power station. You didn’t have to live with the crew in the confined space of the mole, which was like the submarine in that sense, for months on end. His cubby on the steam mole was smaller, and the noise and vibration were such that it was hard to sleep well—but for thirty-six hours you could get by on exhausted catnaps. It made, however, for even more bad-tempered companions.

  “What you writing, Blackfeller? I didn’t know you blacks could write. I thought it was too much for your brains,” said the burly steam-biscuit foreman, staring at Tim, huddled in his cubby-bunk, trying to gather his thoughts with a precious piece of paper and an indelible pencil. Writing to Clara wasn’t easy. He didn’t want to moan. And he didn’t want to say anything about needing to break his contract and get back to the Cuttlefish. Heaven alone knew what that girl might do. The thought made him smile. Capable of taking on a wildfire with a thimble full of water, was Clara.

  It wasn’t what the steam-biscuit foreman wanted. “I said, what you writing, Blackfeller? You answer me when I talk to you.”

  As far as they were concerned he was one of the aboriginals, and that, it seemed, was enough to make some of the steam-mole crew nasty. And a fight with this big bruiser wouldn’t help.

  “A letter,” Tim answered.

  “Oooh…a letter now. Black boy’s writing a letter. I didn’t think you boongs could write your own name. Lemme see.” And he snatched it from Tim’s hand.

  “Give that back!” yelled Tim, stretching for it. He didn’t have any more paper and he’d gone to such effort to clean his hands before touching it. Now this oaf with coal-black thumbs was smearing it.

  The foreman held it out of reach. “Dear Clara,” he read. “Ooh, black boy’s got hisself a woman. I didn’t know you wrote to them. I thought you blackfellers just pulled their skirts off.” And as he turned to the rest of the watching audience in their cubbies, he ripped the letter in two.

  Something in Tim just snapped. The foreman was much bigger and older than he was. He was looking for a fight. Looking for a soft target to bully. Tim knew that. What the man wasn’t expecting was a furious volcano of rage. Tim dropped his head and charged with wildly flailing fists—not exactly fighting science. His head caught the bigger man in the wobbly belly, and he went over and down with Tim on top of him, yelling, and punching everything he could hit.

  The others pulled him off, and Tim, sanity returning, was horrified at himself. His heart still thumped furiously, as his tormentor got up off the floor, helped by several of the crew. His nose was bleeding and one eye was already swelling shut. Tim saw the initial shocked fear in the foreman’s eyes turn into a publicly humiliated rage. Tim knew that, short of a miracle, he was going to be killed. The foreman grabbed him by the shirt-front and swung a massive fist at his head. Tim managed to duck sideways and most of the force of the blow slid off his cheek and temple. Tim’s yell was outdone by a bellow from his attacker, who hit the steel stanchion so hard it vibrated. “My bloody hand! You little black…”

  “What is going on here?” demanded a chilly voice.

  Tim really disliked Shift-captain Vister. But right now he was glad to see him. Warm wetness trickled down Tim’s cheek, and the pain started.

  “This boong attacked me, sir. Attacked me without reason or provocation. I think he’s mad,” said the foreman.

  And it just went downhill from there. It was obvious that the shift-captain was not going to let Tim speak or defend himself.

  “I can’t demote you, because you’re already as low as an employee can go, but I’m going to dock you three weeks pay. Next step is to fire you. And unless you fancy walking back to Sheba, don’t make me do that,” said the shift-captain.

  “Go ahead,” said Tim, sullen.

  That finally got Shift-captain Vister to stop his rant. He shut his mouth like a steel trap. Finally he snarled, “I can’t. But I’m going to lock you up until we get back to the power station, you insolent pup. And the report I’m going to write on you will make sure you never get another job in Westralia. That sort of reputation gets around.”

  Tim looked around at the watchers. Almost the entire shift was there, as the steam mole made its way back to the power station after their thirty-six hour shift. Not one soul had said a word in his defense.

  “Go ahead, throw me off,” he said again. Anything had to be better than being in here with this lot.

  The shift-captain looked like a trapped rat, eyes darting around. Obviously he’d threatened something a bit beyond his power.

  And then someone sniggered.

  The shift-captain slammed his hand down on the central reservoir, echoing, silencing everyone. “Stop the train,” he said.

  No one moved. “You heard me,” he shouted. “Stop the mole. This boong gets off now. He can walk back to the power station.”

  “You can’t do that, sir,” said someone.

  “Watch me, Samuels. And don’t you give me any of your lip or I’ll dock you three weeks pay, too. And any of the rest of you!”

  The mole came to a shuddering halt.

  “It’ll kill him out there, sir. He can’t breathe in the tunnels.”

  “See if I care. Only good one of these blackfellers is a dead one.”

  “At least let him out at the emergency exit.”

  “A weeks pay, Samuels. But yes. He can hold his breath, or breathe his own stink that long, and then walk back to the power station. All he has to do is follow the termite run for six miles.”

  Tim found himself hauled off by the shift-captain and the foreman and hustled along to the lock.

  And pushed out into the darkness.

  Tim fell off the high step, down and out into the dark. He managed to catch himself on his hands, landing against the wall of the termite run, half the breath knocked out of him by the fall. He had little choice but to breathe the smoky stuff out there. Fortunately, they were a long way from the cutting edge, and the air pumped from the power station to here was not quite unbreathable…not for a breath or so.

  The lock clanged shut. And with a dragon hiss and a shower of sparks, the huge steam mole began to move away. Tim had to flatten himself against the wall to avoid being crushed by drill bits sticking out of the drill head.

  In a sudden panic Tim ran after the steam mole, falling over the sleepers they laid for the mole rails. Gasping. Trying to yell.

  He couldn’t run very far in this air. Panting, he leaned against the wall, trying to think, trying not to panic. Surely they couldn’t just abandon him here.

  The sparks of the mole and its clack-clack sounds grew farther away.

  The air in here would surely kill him before he could walk out. He felt nauseous and weak already, but tried to think calmly, which was just so difficult. There were breather holes and emergency exits every half a mile. The question was, was he near one, or just past one? He stood still trying to decide, swaying on his feet. Then he moved forward, feeling the wall. It was totally dark, and the steam mole’s sounds grew ever more distant.

  He was just getting to think he might try crawling when his hand hit wood instead of cast concrete…and then the heavy wheel of a door screw.<
br />
  It took all he could offer of his strength to haul the screw open and pull himself into the shaft. The air there was stale, but better. Still, climbing the metal staples to the upper hatch was incredibly hard work—not because it was, but because of how Tim was feeling. At the top, he hauled at the latch, nearly falling from the ladder as it suddenly opened.

  To a blast of heat…and air.

  Hot out there or not, Tim clambered out on hands and knees. The sun beating down on him was hot…but joyous. He crawled away from the hole. There wasn’t much logic in doing that, he just didn’t want to be near it.

  Jack Calland was unceremoniously turfed out of bed. “Move. Yer back on the work squads.”

  “I thought I had to be looked after. I think I’m dying,” said Jack, groaning for all he was worth.

  “Go ahead and die,” said the warder, kicking him in the ribs. Jack rolled away, weighing his chances. They didn’t seem too good. There was another warder in earshot. “Orders from the commandant. He must have had word from on high that we don’t need yer anymore. So I can get the dogs, or yer can get moving.”

  Jack cursed to himself and staggered to his feet. It had to be today. Just when things were finally so close. He’d planned to become a corpse tonight. Well, a living one. But he’d found out where the morgue was, and that he could get into it. And the corpses of the prisoners were dumped into the river for the crocodiles. Only Jack had seen the river from the camp perimeter. It was more dry mud than water this time of year. There were crocodiles, but they took the first few corpses and took their time to come back for the rest. Jack planned…well, hoped, to either get away before that, or be at the back of the pile.

  He’d actually been getting better, not sicker. Fluids, rest, and some food…and he was no longer walking on the edge of death. He’d taken care not to let the “hospital” know that. But now…they didn’t seem to care anymore. Something had changed, and it had to be something to do with Mary. He wished desperately he knew what it was.