Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  While the young men stood listening to the thunderclap ricochet among the complex of soundingboards, repeatedly leaping alive, a patch of mist floated across and blotted out the whole panorama. All sense of prominence lost, the explorers were stranded on the bluff, and for the first time took note of the soil itself. There was no sign of any track. The space about them splintered into raucous squeals: a flock of black cockatoos swept past, alighting in a patch of trees, ripping at the branches with strong beaks, dropping chunks of bark as they tore them off. Back they rushed in a flurry of argumentative discontent, storm birds with long bodies, yellow patched wings and faces and fan tails, sounding like so many creaking doors among the trees, a township of dead prospectors opening their decrepit dwellings to show what they had in common.

  The rain peppered down, sharp drops knocking a passage between the leaves. Behind them the forest reared smooth trunks washed dark green by rain streaming down them to form puffs of white foam at the bottom. The six young men were too self-absorbed to feel uncomfortable, though their shoulders and the backs of their legs got soaked. Boots silenced by rubbery lichen. The route they chose towards the south peak led through low scrub and airstreams of scent, now acrid, now floury, now cloying, now clean eucalyptus, now nostalgic mimosa, and finally the neutral perfume of seeding grasses. So they climbed, lungs heaving, blood thudding at the base of the skull, feet slipping. Below them the well of space lay filled with cloud, so that a cold insecurity tugged at the ground underfoot and set damp wings trembling in their hair. They plugged on, socks squeaking in their boots, dribblets inside their clothing meandering down over the swell of chest and belly, the raindrops ticking resonantly against their sodden gear, woollens giving off a whiff of sheep oil as a reminder of the spirit. The rain pelted so solid it appeared not to be falling at all, but to be myriad wires by which the mountain was lifted up, cloud-shaped and giving voice to thunder of its own.

  They had impertinently treated the mountain of gold as an obstacle, so the rain beat the cheerful talk out of them; then even their complaints fell mute. They plodded ahead, not looking around nor thinking of why they had come.

  Six

  The rain stopped. Pure citron sunlight filled the space around them as the mist finally rose and dispersed, trailing ragged ends and leaving threads snagged on the trees. The eastern and southern slopes spread faint and watery beneath them. Collectively they were God dividing the waters from the dry land and the waters above the earth from the firmament. Shutters slid apart, Australia blazed with light. They stood stiffly, gazing at the new land; deep steaming gullies choked with burrawang palms, pink-tipped crowns of great eucalypts crowded with shifting shadows, hints of watching faces, the spirits of those who’d gone before. Across there at the second level of ridges they spotted two clearings, then a third: mines. This was what they’d come for. And lower down something else, more formal but less distinct, disturbing and exciting, almost the ground-plan of a settlement, a village. They smiled at each other from under plastered hair, swung their packs lightly on their shoulders and stepped out with fresh enthusiasm to find a way down.

  Once there, you saw the rotting grey windlasses sprawled on the ground, bolts rusted in their joints, limbs splayed out of kilter. The naked pits humbler and more squalid than expected, rough holes of greed.

  – They must have been bloody desperate, Lance protested with a hint of fear. It was so. The forest rustled indifferently.

  The lip of the first shaft lay sticky and bright ochre in that end-of-storm light. Easy to imagine men, carefree with familiarity, losing their balance and slipping, falling into such a shaft. Accidents all over the goldfields. Bill already lay on his belly working his way backward, legs first, his face imprinting a quarter of its shape in the soft clay, feet waving like a beetle’s feelers till they knocked against the top rung of a ladder let into the shaft. Unsafe, no doubt, rotten. Cautiously he eased his weight on it while Dave went to get a rope for him and the others watched, glad to be spectators, occasionally offering the reassurance of humorous suggestions. He was testing the next rung, and the one below. Four or five more. His head lower than ground level, so when he thought of something to say to Tony he had to crane his neck.

  – Tony, he ordered. Don’t for christsake stand on this till I’m all the way down, it’s shaky as buggery.

  – Give us a hoy, Tony replied placidly.

  – Something running across the wall here. Rat maybe, Billy’s voice came up damp and hollow. They could hear him breathing, also his shoes and the curious stone-on-stone noise they made. He spoke muffled words, but they did not answer, understanding that he was simply giving himself courage.

  – Okay Tony it’s only about thirty feet deep, came his blurred report. I’m here.

  And down in the dark Bill Swan stood back waiting for Tony to join him. The walls were very roughly gouged and none too safe. Pebbles rattled against them, a moment later pattering round him. Most of the light blocked out. The space where he waited seemed confined but evidently led off in several directions. The uneven rock floor was slippery with mud. He listened, anxious that the ladder should not give way, annoyed that his friend should be so large.

  It was better when they both stood at the bottom together, shuffling about to explore how wide the pit might be. Hands stretched in front, they groped their way into separate chambers. In two lobes of a lung they stopped, blind, making no noise. Each turned his invisible head, nose detecting the unseeable, the untouchable approaching.

  Utter dark clasped Billy in a suffocating mass. Something small moved through his hair. Sweating, he breathed the air of loss, the blackness with its forgotten odour. Gaps in the ladder to safety preyed on his imagination: even the rust of the rungs smelled forlorn. He had to break out, move, back into the dim spotlight of the shaft. Once there, raindrops baptised him. He opened his mouth to let out his fear, closed his eyes and welcomed the good moisture trickling on his tongue. He would confess none of what he had felt.

  Tony remained among the warm black feather-shapes. He wished for nothing more. The place surprised him as a homecoming, earth gathered him into itself, the mountain had something to share with him, he picked it as a beating sensation in the air, the slow regular vibration he dreamily accepted. Yes he opened his mouth. Tipping back his head so the shaft of darkness plunged right inside him, he was a shell of skin suspended in darkness. The dark lay soft and glossy inside him. I have not been like this for a long time, his body said to him.

  Next moment. Torches clattering down, tied to a cord, clapping against the shaft walls. Bill was there to unite them and call thanks. He was there to switch them on, dissolve the black chambers with watery light. Tony accepted a torch resentfully, watched his mate so glibly showing this to be a couple of squalid holes dug in shale.

  – See the seams of quartz, said Billy.

  – I felt them, Tony co-operated curtly.

  – Not much left.

  – Pretty worked out, Tony agreed feeling a little ashamed of his surliness.

  – I’ve got a few samples to take up. Let’s get out of here.

  – In a minute mate.

  They heard a sound they had never heard before, a large body of air hooting down the shaft into their cave. Afterwards a soft heavy flop and their eardrums cricking. By torchlight they discovered the exit to the shaft blocked with a heap of slushy clay. They were shut off. Tony nodded his acceptance, curiously unable to feel any panic. Here he was with Bill on equal terms. He stuck his foot in the soggy clay as it advanced into the chamber oozing over the rock floor.

  Billy’s body was a flock of birds in a net. He edged back, knocking his skull on the ceiling. He breathed the knowledge that air was limited. For a second he swore he could hear voices. His knees trembled. People don’t die like this on our mountain, he protested. His father coughed irritably in the dark. Billy considered the advancing clay. His courage being marshalled, he knew how to behave.

  – We’re the ones who decided
to stay on the mountain, he joked.

  This maddened Tony, who couldn’t stick the conventional bravado. The darkness was his death and he wasn’t going to have it stolen by Bill Swan who had stolen so much else from him. All the years of loss, the little concessions of pride, of giving in so perpetually he couldn’t put a shape to his own character. This at last was an insult, this he cared about. Tossing aside his torch, Tony lunged at the clay, lying on it, swimming on it, surprised to find it quite warm.

  – Shift the fucking stuff, he ordered. His powerful arms scooped it into the chamber round his feet. Gradually he sank into the muck by his own weight. Billy’s torch wavered on the scene. Wrong, crazy, a waste of precious strength; but it was something to be done. You couldn’t stand by. He tucked the torch in his pocket, then also threw himself bodily on the enemy and felt the earth clutch him. Panic took over. He exhausted himself in wild threshing that resembled an effort to escape, breathing as shallowly as he could. Anyhow the air was nothing but a clot of hisses, sucks and slaps; sounds of drowning men.

  Tony’s voice occasionally grunted get in get in … to the mud itself.

  That was the logic of it. Bill clung to the idea, the direction. Thicker than the forest, deafening as an explosion.

  They felt the body of soil living and sliding under them. Hard as they fought forward they floated gradually, relentlessly, back. Billy sobbed with rage, he battled against the unknown quantity of clay. Maybe the whole shaft had filled in. He saw visions of second tunnels, backways out by other means. Fantasies, he knew it, having already touched the dead end stone wall of the cave sculpted a century ago by miners who thought themselves lucky. He could hear Tony working methodically, rhythmically, victim of prehistoric instincts. His own broken nails scooped at the rubbish he knew so well, his elbows banged on a memory of drunken years ago when his father and Uncle punched each other in the hope of murder. The slocking scoop of mud brought him face to face with Mrs Ping fingering her globe of the world when she sucked at her teeth with disappointment. He tasted the earth, he felt it, he breathed it. He was being shot at by a dead man and shovelled under.

  At the end of his life his eyes opened, cracking the clay lids itself apart and he saw a blob of light, white, blank, completely alien to the dark, a mysterious ovoid shape of light, stretching, widening with power. Billy wriggled, flailing like a yabbie, something catching at his hair and jerking his face up. Then his eyes seeing the miraculous crystal plumage of a rainshower, hands tugging him and busy under his arms, a shocking tightness around his chest and his whole body lifted agonisingly free of the sucking mud.

  Lance and the twins yanked him up on the rope and heaved his boneless, sleepy body over the rim to safety. They untied him and lowered the rope again for the Maggot down there to rescue Tony.

  – Christ O Christ, were Bill’s first words as his oyster mouth gaped. He wept and trembled. And even when he lay beside the creek half an hour later, washed and changed into the dry clothes they found for him, he couldn’t suppress the trembling. His old man’s hands fumbled with the mud-sealed pockets of his discarded trousers, extracting lumps of quartz he had collected before the cave-in, samples strangely more interesting than they’d looked in the torchlit mine. One knob bore definite flecks of gold. Then he retrieved the torch itself still palely glimmering, and his watch.

  – It can’t be only nine o’clock! he shook the watch in disbelief, in anger. Up above, a King Parrot made progress among the branches, stepping with rigid dignity, moving his scarlet thighs as if earth could not resist him.

  – Three hours till food! Somebody wailed to cheer them up.

  Bill Swan, the runt, turned to look at Tony who sat nearby, and found himself wondering, is that my cousin? Of course their mothers were sisters so in the usual sense the question was rhetorical, but it disturbed him because he was aware that, unless more closely related, everybody was everybody else’s cousin. This kinship with his friend seldom came to mind. In the general course of events his main discomfort was that he kept meaning to acknowledge Tony’s loyalty but somehow it came out as sarcasm or indifference. Now he watched the big man haul himself upright, stretching, and he knew something had happened for Tony that hadn’t happened for himself. A new knowledge sharpened his critical observation. Tony had not been afraid as he had. A break had taken place. Like a perfectly strange friend Tony asked – Are you going down the next one mate? His high voice coming strongly and (Billy couldn’t tell how) independently. That’s it, the runt noted, he has got something going for himself.

  – A man would have to be a mug. Like those guys up in satellites.

  – You reckon? Tony pursued his disbelief. This had nothing in common with his own feeling. Billy felt the burden of awkwardness, the constriction he had carried with him for two years or more, begin to lift. When he had least expected it and had done nothing for it, the burden of Tony forever wanting something from him began to evaporate, painlessly, like mist dispersing though you cannot feel the slightest breeze. While their companions discussed the advisability of trying out other mines, Bill reached across and put his hand on Tony’s boot as if about to ask a favour. Tony, who had longed for such a gesture an hour ago, scarcely noticed. Instead he smiled the way experience smiles at ignorance. I’m free, I’m free, the runt sang inwardly.

  – Are you laughing? Tony inquired, his privacy enhanced.

  – Did you hear me? he threw back his head shakily and guffawed in the open.

  – You want to take it easy mate, this could be serious! Tony tapped his forehead in the traditional joke which at the same time was a dismissal, watching a moment, distastefully, the roof of his cousin’s mouth, almost transparent, the cleanest thing in the world. Bill laughed his laugh of the motorcyclist swaying free and feckless round the mountain, lay back in the wet grass and laughed all the blackness out, laughed out suffocation, the cloying earth, the taste of clay, the stench. Tony wandered away, nursing the power he had earned, refusing to be diminished by irritation.

  The party visited six other mines, approaching them with caution and not staying down long, more to fulfil an obligation than enthusiasm. They took turns, being lowered on ropes, landing thigh-deep in water, ankle-deep in mud, with bruised shoulders, grazed knees, they chipped at the rock and filled bags with worthless samples. All in all they found the day challenging beyond anticipation and enjoyable. Towards evening they set out to find a campsite. A curious mood seized them so that they made their way independently, straggling, no two together. If you were close enough to observe fine points, you’d find all their eyes had some expression in common, guarded, closed, warding off interruption. Reliving the day in their diverse ways they found communication impossible. Tony McTaggart, leading for the first time, made his statement walking into the evening, leaving behind him the diagonal sunlight as it broke through the day’s cloud to stand in silence between the treetrunks, so intensely had the experience of being buried in the mine worked on him. You began to suspect there were things to achieve. Nobody could have explained to Tony what he experienced at this time. The dependencies of the past were finished yet he was without fear. He put it this way: I feel good. So he walked ahead into the bush, the others watching him stride among the trees, for a moment blotted up by the shadow of a giant woollybutt. He did not look back. Had he done so, he’d have wondered at what he saw: Maggot the mocker, Maggot who so often told him what to do next, Maggot his own age and yet his uncle, his mother’s youngest brother following his lead, not even peering into the remaining mineshafts to assess the chances of easy wealth, bypassing opportunities to scavenge what their forbears had left behind in disgust or panic. Each in turn the friends followed; Lance the rower, the new heavyweight champion of Whitey’s Fall; Peter who had chosen to become an aircraft pilot; Dave lost in a fight with loneliness; and Bill Swan who refused to go down another gold mine after the first. So they shambled past the windlass stumps, the inviting holes in the mountain, each gold mine a monument to suffering,
appropriately a monument of nothing, a column of lightless air stuck in the dirt. Tony was leading.

  They tramped into the forest, away from the evening sun, dark green shadows again wrapping round them. They were dotted among the trees like a drama of statues; to be glimpsed and gone, to reappear elsewhere for another momentary tableau. The sun went down, drawing warmth out of them, leaving them shivering till they grew used to it. Unseen water gurgled. Cold air cut at them. Separate, each with the space of his own body insulated from contact, not speaking. Soon enough it would be too dark to press ahead any further. The thirst for privacy possessed them, thirst for the power to understand. The abstract forest swept around them, moving up the mountain, hustling and chuckling as it went.

  The town no longer existed. Daytime noises fell into extinction. Flies stopped worrying at the window. Light itself had no source. Back at the house Bill Swan lay in a globe of luminescence, not even aware of the edges of the bed, the air still and heavy as tepid water, his leg cocked across Vivien’s body, his arm on the pillows of her breast, his mouth smiling on her smiling mouth, his head filled with her sweet intimate breath, ears hearing his own blood as rain on a tin roof.

  Then she slipped out from under him to go to the bathroom. Instantly he drowned in sheets. Swam to the brink. He hung over the side of the mattress watching her white feet delicate and fresh without the protective shells of shoes, edible feet on the bare lino, watched their swift silent placement, feet so eloquent he wanted to cry out with joy.

  – Ah feet! he groaned, surprised at himself.

  – What, love?

  – I want to eat your feet.

  She ran off laughing, kicking up her heels in a lovable parody of alarm.

  As he hung out of the bed savouring memories of the past few hours, putting the clamour of his pleasure into some order of priority, Bill Swan noticed the lino scattered with garments of various kinds and colours, Vivien’s skirts, underwear, shorts, jeans, blouses, more underwear. To his distaste they were all dirty.