by Lucy Walker
Chapter Thirteen
On Monday morning the world of the camp went into another minor convulsion. Not a canteen party, this time.
Nothing is ever boring in this place, Cindie thought, bewildered, when at lunch time Mary told her the latest news.
Nick had had a radio call from Baanya. The Overtons wanted Jim Vernon back at once: river up, or not. To make sure of it, they were sending a couple of men out to rig up a flying-fox.
‘Just in case that old log has rotted in the sun,’ Mary added in her usual off-beat way. ‘A flying-fox it is this time! With all mod cons!’
The manager at Baanya had told Nick the sheep-stealers were around on the north-west boundary. The Baanya stockmen had found tyre marks: and some fences were down. Jim Vernon’s presence was a must.
Ever since Mary had given her the news Cindie had watched the canteen door, and kept only one eye on her work. She knew Jim would come to say good-bye, but she seemed a long time waiting.
At last his tall lean shadow was thrown across the doorway and he came in, his long sure strides taking him straight to Cindie’s table. Mary was away at the moment, as Nick had called her to the office again. The children had finished their work and gone home.
‘This will be a temporary separation only, Cindie love,’ Jim reassured her, leaning over the table and smiling down at her with his brilliant blue eyes.
How she wished there weren’t half a dozen men in the canteen waiting for attention! Just her luck!
‘Oh, yes,’ she said earnestly. ‘I couldn’t bear ‒’
‘I’ll be talking to you over that air, and I’ll see you when the river water goes down too. No fear of that. Baanya’s not so very far away; by nor’-west distances.’
‘Do you really think we’ll be able to talk station matters on the air, Jim? With the rest of the world listening in?’
‘Like I said before, girl ‒ it’s easy. We’ll use that code. Remember? Holden stands for Bindaroo. We’ve got that one. Here’s another ‒ we’ll use the name Robinson for Neil Stevens. This Robinson will be a cousin of yours, just to make it real. How’s that?’ His face was crinkled with amusement.
Cindie, hiding her disappointment at his departure, reached for her diary and was jotting it down. Jim leaned forward, and with his finger gently tossed her fallen lock of hair back into place. ‘Guess that’ll be mine one day,’ he said. ‘Ever heard of a man wearing a fancy thing like a charm in a locket?’
She lifted her head, her eyes a little misty.
‘No. Men carry those things in the back of their watches. Lockets are for girls.’
‘Thanks for the idea. If you don’t come through Baanya soon, I’ll come back here and claim that keepsake.’
There were too many other people around, staring curiously at them. Cindie needed to hide her feelings.
‘Please, what other code words, Jim?’
‘For Nick we could use “the kangaroo in the bush”. How’s that?’
Cindie laughed, and the rainbow shone through in her eyes.
‘How mad he’d be if he knew!’ she said. ‘What name shall we give Erica?’
Jim looked surprised. ‘You don’t give her any name, except she happens to be Enemy Number One anyway. But she’s coming over the flying-fox with me. Haven’t you heard? She’s grabbing this chance to go through to the coast. Says she has important business to attend to ‒’
‘Could it be business to do with solicitors, and station brokers? Even the Government leasing agency?’ Cindie asked, full of apprehension. Her smile had faded right out of sight.
Jim shrugged, then shook his head. ‘She could have just plain ordinary business, Cindie. Like anyone else. Look, child, nothing can be signed up without the Stevenses signing too. That pair are water-logged up there at Bindaroo. There’s no river to cross even if someone could rig up a flying-fox. It’s just one vast mud-bath.’ He paused, looking down at her. ‘Don’t worry unnecessarily,’ he advised.
‘All right, Jim. I’ll be good.’ Her smile was a little bleak.
Jim kissed the tip of his finger, then wound it for one half-minute round that vagrant lock of hair. Cindie glanced round the room. With sudden unabashed courage she stood up, leaned across the table, and kissed his forehead.
‘So long, Cindie Brown!’ he said gently.
‘’Bye now, Jim,’ she answered. ‘I’ll be seeing you ‒ some day, some time ‒’
‘Soon,’ Jim finished for her. His eyes held hers a minute. ‘Don’t fall in love with Nick while you’re on that skate up the road, will you?’ he warned, his eyebrows dancing. ‘It’s easy to do, but Miss E. from Marana has a kind of lasso and hitch-lock of her own around him.’
Cindie shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t cross Erica’s lines willingly, even if I knew how!’
‘Good for you!’
He smiled deep into her eyes, once again, then turned on his heel and walked abruptly down the length of the canteen, and out through the door, without looking back once.
Cindie watched him go. She was in a vacuum which she must climb out of quickly. The men were waiting ‒
She hoped Jim would say good-bye to Mary over at Nick’s office. Mary would be terribly hurt, for all her indifferent manner, if he neglected to do that.
That night, as Cindie helped Mary get the tea, her thoughts switched to Nick. What, she wondered, would the boss do without Erica? Feel the sudden void in his life that she herself felt right now?
‘You’re mighty silent, Cindie,’ Mary commented dryly. ‘Your sweetheart gone home so you’re in the doldrums? Is that it?’
Cindie did not have time to reply, because Nick Brent was standing in the doorway.
‘I did knock, Mary,’ he apologised. ‘I’m afraid you were clattering saucepans.’ His eyes were dead-pan, and he looked tired. Hiding his feelings?
‘Come in, Nick, and have a drink with us. Did you ever before know two people leaving camp could make the place seem so empty? Did they get over the fox all right?’ Mary was wiping her hands on her apron before taking down some glasses.
‘Everything went with precision. You know the Baanya people, Mary. They do nothing by halves.’
‘Almost as perfectionist as the Alexanders ‒’ The unexpected sarcasm in Mary’s voice made Cindie look at her, startled.
Nick showed no sign of even having heard. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay for a drink, Mary, much as I’d like to. I’ve a lot to do in the office.’
Mary stopped reaching for glasses, and wiped her hands on her apron again.
‘I expect you came to advise Cindie about the arrangements we mapped out this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I left the telling to you, Nick. I figured out it’s your business so you’d better be the one to tell her about the next exodus.’
They were all three standing, fixed figures in the small space of a collapsible house in a construction camp; hundreds of miles from the nearest road, or neighbour.
Yet suddenly, in that sundown hour, the quaint room was a world of its own.
Each one’s future was strangely bound to the other two by some mystery that had come in with Nick. Was that mystery Erica? Jim Vernon? Or all of them?
Nick took out a cigarette and lit it. As he did so the atmosphere came back to normal.
‘Well, sit down and tell her while I go and round up those children of mine,’ Mary said in a brighter voice. ‘You know what, Nick? I can’t stop them building barbecues and concert halls in that ten-by-ten cubby-house of theirs ‒ ever since last Saturday night.’
‘Good for them,’ Nick said. ‘Shows they have imagination.’
‘Too much, sometimes,’ Mary replied, back to her old blunt self. She went through the rear door as she spoke. Nick remained standing.
‘I won’t keep you a minute, Cindie,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave for Mulga Gorges in the next forty-eight hours. Can you pack a bag? I’d suggest simple things mostly ‒ for comfort. It’s hotter up there than here. We’ll be staying in the one and only pub. You
might need something for dinner at night. The other men coming to the conference are bound to bring staff with them ‒’
His face creased unexpectedly into a wry smile.
‘I can’t have their staff out-do mine. I’m taking Flan as chauffeur.’
‘Flan?’ Cindie was surprised. The little dusty wizened rouseabout now a chauffeur!
‘In a Land-Rover! Not as glamorous as first-class passage in a chartered plane, I grant you. That’s the way the others will come. I assure you the only clothes I’d ever get Flan into are those old khaki drills. And he’ll never go near the main dining-room ‒ as a point of honour.’
‘You will let it be known you have your chauffeur somewhere around, though?’
‘Certainly. And my secretary too. But you will be in sight, Cindie. I’ll find plenty of typing for you to do: even if I have to make it up.’ The smile flickered in his eyes again.
‘Is business always like this, Nick?’
‘If you haven’t a Jaguar car, yes.’ Cindie somehow found Nick’s smile catching on. She found herself catching on to the game Nick was playing, too.
Then she came to with a jolt.
But this is how the Bindaroo take-over is being worked!
Nick half-turned to the door, then stopped.
‘Think of it as an adventure in the higher realms of industry,’ he advised, looking back at her. ‘Better still, think of it as one more throw in the game of opening up the biggest stretch of country in the world: bar Siberia.’
Cindie stood silent, for she had no idea whether this was Nick’s humour, or Nick’s creed. He was amused at the dilemma so apparent in her face. There was a touch of mockery in his next words.
‘Think that every time you put a dash between two words on your typewriter, Cindie, it is your own small contribution to the business of encircling a continent. How does your imagination rate alongside Jinx and Myrtle out there building barbecues under the gum trees?’
There was hidden truth in his words, for all the irony. Her stake in the building of a nation: a continent encircled by a mighty road!
It was absurd, of course.
And yet!
Nick, gone now ‒ lonely footsteps across the gravel once again ‒ had struck a chord in her. Did he do it on purpose? Had he known she would respond, even if to mock was his choice of bait? She felt he had.
It didn’t matter. It was the magic of a vision that mattered.
I am two people, she decided. Like a married man is two people. A man is one person at work, and another person at home. Well, that’s me. Cindie Brown is secretary to Nicholas Brent. She will not even think of other things like wrong names, her mother’s state in Bindaroo, nor even darling Jim Vernon. When this job is all finished, I will come back to being the other person. Not till then.
She felt, for a wonderful moment, like a chrysalis that had become a butterfly. Inside her, mysteriously hidden, she had wonderful coloured wings with stripes and spots and glories that would rival an Australian sunset.
I am the girl who is someone else! she thought. I have a stake, a little stake, in that great highway. Gold, silver, copper, opal, manganese, bauxite, iron, oil; even people, will travel my part of the road ‒ the little bit where I put a dash between two words on my typewriter.
She felt airborne, even though, in plain fact, she was to travel those hundreds of miles in a dust-coated Land-Rover.
It was Nick’s mocking smile that had gone with his words, that had done that to her!
Two days later, at six in the morning, they left for Mulga Gorges. Jinx and Myrtle bewailed Cindie’s luck and their own lack of it.
‘Bring us something back? Promise?’ They cried in unison.
‘Two frilled lizards,’ Cindie called as the Land-Rover moved off.
‘Not on your life,’ Flan muttered. He was a mere shrimp of a man between Cindie and Nick, who was driving. ‘As if that darn reptile out by the rocks hasn’t given me enough trouble without adding to the numbers! You better watch your words, Miss Cindie.’
Mary came to the door to wave them off. The last Cindie saw of Mary was the white wing in her black hair, and the wiping of those restless hands on the skirt of an apron.
I must bring something back for Mary too, she thought. Something nice. And different. It won’t be an apron, that’s for sure.
For many miles, through the heat of the morning, and over the endless red dusty plain, the way was rough going, though Nick was an expert driver. This was the latest part of the road where the stubborn iron-stone ground had been churned loose by the bulldozers. Then on to these tracks vast acres of clay-earth had been moved by the enormous scrapers and graders ‒ bigger than the Euclid. They passed a number of these monstrous work-vehicles on the way. Once they took to the spinifex track to by-pass something Cindie would never have believed if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.
‘What …’ she began, in astonishment, as they edged off the track to give way. Hereabouts there was not a tree in sight: nothing but spinifex ‒ and the road.
‘It’s a Paymaster Articulated Scraper,’ Nick said with a hint of a grin. ‘How many letters in that name? Ten seconds to answer.’
Cindie began furiously to count.
‘Save yourself the trouble,’ Flan suggested. ‘I’ll tell you. Twenty-seven. The articulated part is that whopper arm. It shovels as well as scrapes. The next hunk of steel and iron coming up is a shovel pure and simple. It has two engines, each of ’em moving a hundred tons of earth and iron-stone at one go. You heard me, Cindie. A hundred tons!’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘No one ever does.’
Cindie bent forward and looked across Flan at Nick. His smile assured her this was the truth.
So! No wonder Nick lived, in his mind, in the wonderland of his road. It wasn’t only the miles ‒ a thousand of them for this part of it ‒ it was how those miles were covered, in this wildest of all wild countries.
By the time Nick stopped for a break, hours later, they had come to a stretch where base foundations were being laid on the tumbled track. They had seen nothing but red and brown, and yellow spinifex plain, in all those hours. The sheer nothingness of it staggered Cindie.
‘Easier going from here,’ Nick said. He looked at the sun, then at the Rover’s shadow on the ground to check his watch and the car’s speedometer.
‘Half-way!’ Flan declared. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, would you? Two hundred miles is mightily little in six hours, but when you reckon up what we’ve come over, it’s pretty good going. Even if you did have to keep dropping to ten m.p.h. You must be playing safe, boss.’
‘Thank you, Flan,’ Nick said. ‘I take it you’re paying me a compliment?’
‘Well, come to think of it, it might be that way. I guess if I take over here I’ll get you near enough to Mulga Gorges long before midnight.’
Nick narrowed his eyes to look at the made road that now stretched to the horizon, a place at which Cindie never expected to arrive. It was something that hour by hour came no nearer, and which was never reached. She glimpsed a look of amused speculation in Nick’s eye.
‘I guess you’ll about do it, Flan,’ he was saying. ‘If you drive carefully. It’s made road all the way from here.’
Cindie knew the two men were having their jokes at one another’s expense. It was their dry humour at work.
‘You’d better let Cindie know the peck-order for washing, Flan,’ Nick went on as he moved to the back of the Rover. ‘I’ll get the petrol cans out for a refill.’
‘Shall do, boss. Miss Cindie ‒ see that little clump of brush way over to the right? The one with the red-flowered creeper sprawled on the ground? That’s Sturt Pea, and only grows in the desert. Keep walking thataways, and you’ll get a surprise. You can tell us about it when you come back ‒ if you have the right kind of words in your brain-box.’
Cindie picked her way between huge humps of prickly spinifex, and the miniature red claypans: runnels and spre
ads of dry red clay where water had run freely in the Wet.
There, behind the clumps of down-drooping black-butts, was a pool of water lying serenely still, its heart laid bare to the white sky and blazing sun above. The fantastic red pea-flower struck a note like fire in the yellow grass. Beyond the pool was the endless nothing of the plain again: right to the rim of the world.
When she came back Flan looked at her slyly.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘You’re right, Flan. I haven’t any words. But how did the pool get there?’
Nick answered for him. ‘Out of the ground, Cindie. It’s a natural waterhole, with water coming up from an underground stream.’
‘Now you know some more about the boss,’ Flan said wickedly, setting out the packages of lunch and tins of chilled drinks that the chef had packed. ‘He’s always right! Bang on the hour, bang on the speedometer, bang on the place! Not a minute or a mile out of timing. He hits the waterhole square on: not a yard wrong either way.’
‘Yes, of course!’ Cindie blinked at this piece of judgment. From time to time she too had watched the speedometer, and except for the many bad patches on the road the needle had stayed steady.
‘Never misses!’ went on Flan. ‘He’s always right, like I said. The only water-hole from there to here and he hits it to the second. Midday.’
Nick, half-smiling at Flan’s eulogy, went on recapping the petrol cans he had emptied into the Land-Rover’s storage tank, and said not a word.
After a picnic lunch, Flan now took over his role of ‘chauffeur’ and drove the car. It was Cindie’s turn to sit between the two men.
Nothing changed in the landscape: except perhaps that the line of red and black ranges drew a little nearer.
Some time in the mid-afternoon the awful lethargy of heat-raddled day began, like a miasma, to creep over Cindie. She fought this off, but, try as she would, she could not overcome the compulsion to sleep. The high temperature, the long straight track, the quiet thrumming of the engine, worked on her like hypnosis. Her head kept drooping first to one side, then the other. She straightened up and tried to watch the road, or the plain ‒ or count the occasional bush turkeys and emus that now began to come out from their hiding places. Sleep crept on her unwitting self again. She slid gradually down in her seat. It was so much easier this way ‒