This Red Earth Read online

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I know it is so.’ She nods. ‘This is why I tell you to write about love, while you are waiting. Always think about love. And you didn’t tell me yet, what did you write to the Wonder people? What happened?’

  And that’s what we’re talking about, Mrs Zoc exclaiming: ‘Oh but you must finish it! You must finish this while you are waiting for Gordon to come home,’ when Mrs Lockhart comes back for me.

  ‘Finish what?’ she barrels in, battered straw hat over her pearls and her Molyneux.

  ‘Her book!’ Mrs Zoc announces to the stratosphere. ‘Bernadetta is writing a molto romantico novel.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mrs Lockhart just about squeals. ‘A romance? Oh, I do love a good serial. Tell me you are not writing a romance! Is it any good?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Mrs Zoc declares, hands on her hips, as pleased with herself as she is with me. ‘The publisher wants her to finish it.’

  ‘Oh? Well, dear, you must,’ Mrs Lockhart decides, because she is as mad as Mrs Zoc: they’ve swapped biscuit recipes. ‘You simply must. And so there, I see you are as clever as I’ve heard, aren’t you. A novelist? Well, isn’t that something. Now, back to business for a minute. Come and meet Anna Werner and her boys …’

  ‘Mum, are you sure you’ll be all right?’ I ask her and I want her to say no, to tell me to come home straightaway and not help Mrs Lockhart with the Christmas party for the children next week. Not come back in January to teach the Werner boys their lessons in English, a language their mother speaks more competently than I do. Two adorable little boys who I’ll bet know their tables better than I do, the littlest lisping Mith Cooper every day. Stay here in Hay at Mrs Lockhart’s Riverbend, and finish my romance, and Hughie knows what else. Mental. Not in a good way.

  But Mum says: ‘Of course I’ll be all right. It cheers me no end to know you’re helping those poor little mites. I’m proud of you, very proud of you, Bernadette.’ Her voice wobbles with it, so that it takes me a moment to say: ‘See you Christmas Eve, then.’

  ‘See you then, love.’

  I put the phone down, a strange emptiness in my belly, gnawing, and Mrs Lockhart asks me: ‘Is your mother all right with your staying?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and I look away, swallowing the threat of tears. Tell myself I’m just baulking at the idea of being away from home, that’s all; baulking at leaving Mum, as if I wouldn’t have left home this very weekend anyway. Ask Mrs Lockhart: ‘Do you mind if I walk down to the river for a paddle?’ I want to be alone with these thoughts for a little while, get myself straight.

  ‘Now, that is a good idea, go and cool off,’ Mrs Lockhart says. For all her steam-rolling redoubtability, she’s as sharp as a tack, and I think she knows how I might feel: spun-wrung bamboozled and not used to this withering heat. She smiles, and the low sun through the bay window is making her grey hair golden as she adds: ‘I’d come too, but it’s cook’s night off. Now, why don’t you put your bathers on and have a proper dip. You can swim, can’t you? Of course you can, and you’ll see a little beach on the bend just over the other side of the stable. That’s the best spot, and don’t swim past the pump. You did bring some bathers, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did.’ So I do, and I’ve already started on the romance again before I’ve got past the tin shed I presume is a stable. The river is a mauvish colour against the willows, reflecting this late afternoon light. A mauve sea for Eugenia to fly across, searching for Will. It’s around about chapter six and he’s lost in the jungle. She’s determined to find him, and she will, across this wide, mauve sea. She’s interminably lonely, flying and flying across this vast sea, but she is as brave as her mum, as Mrs Zoc, as Mrs Lockhart too. Steely.

  ‘Miss Cooper,’ the gentle voice of authority interrupts my wandering. Mitchell. Leading a great big white horse out of the shed.

  Nerves clang at the sight. I’m a bit frightened of horses, up close. I say: ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ll see you later, I suppose,’ he says.

  I say: ‘Oh, hmm,’ pulling my towel over my cossie. I thought he’d already left for his return to Hell – in the ute. But he’s getting up on the horse. He touches the brim of his hat and I see him smirk: at my feet. I look at my feet. What’s wrong with my sandals? A girl’s supposed to walk barefoot through bindies out here?

  He says: ‘Don’t know how you stay upright in those high-heeled things.’

  These aren’t high heels; they’re wedges. But I say: ‘Got to be good at something, don’t you.’

  ‘Yep,’ he says, touch to the brim again. ‘See you.’ And he rides off.

  I watch him, watch him till he jumps the far fence, on his great white horse, into the sunset. That’s exactly how Rock would look on a horse. I know he can ride a horse, but I’ve never seen him on one. And it crashes over me like a six-foot breaker now: imagining him is all I have of him. UFN. Just as that’s all Mum has of Dad. Mum looking so small on the platform, waving me away. That pained look on her face: pay no attention to me.

  And that’s it. I can’t stay in Hay. I’ll help Mrs Lockhart with the party for the children but I’m not going to come back after Christmas. I’m going to stay at home. Where I belong.

  GORDON

  ‘She’s where ?’ I can’t believe she’s not there. I could kick the wall.

  ‘Hay, Gordon; she’s in Hay,’ Mrs Cooper repeats. ‘It’s out past Wagga Wagga somewhere, love.’

  I know exactly where Hay is, on the Paddock, but: ‘What’s she doing there?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Geez.

  ‘Well, that’s very odd. You’ve not got a letter from her?’

  ‘No.’ And it is more than odd. It’s March. I’ve had nothing at all from her for months, not since Rico brought me a letter back from town last November, the one about the beach feeling sad.

  ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ Mrs Cooper says. ‘I know she must have written you a dozen letters since she left – and I know for a fact she sent you a telegram about finding Mrs Zoccoli, because I was with her when she sent it, before she got on the train.’

  ‘You’ve found Mrs Zoc?’ Christ. I hate this distance.

  ‘Oh yes, love – in Hay!’

  ‘So Bernie’s in Hay with Mrs Zoc?’

  ‘Yes, but well, no, not exactly, she’s teaching some of the children English at the internment camp, and–’

  ‘What?’ Static knifes through the line, just about taking my ear off as another aftershock hits, a big one. Glass smashes somewhere and Mrs Chittaway goes running. We’ve been having these rolling quakes all morning, since a massive one hit about seven o’clock last night. Not coming from the volcano, but from somewhere to the south. Goorias, the natives call them, a reminder of who’s in charge around here. ‘Mrs Cooper? Are you there? Mrs Cooper?’

  I stare at the phone and tell it: ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘We’ll have none of that here, thank you, Mr Brock.’ Mrs Chittaway comes back with a broom in hand, and ready to use it in case I threaten to go psychotic with a gun in the front bar again.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I–’

  ‘It’s hard, pet, I know. But don’t lose your head over it. The things we worry about, storms in teacups most of the time.’ Her guest book falls off the counter behind her and she doesn’t blink. She might be troppo herself, but her lipstick is always perfectly drawn on, not a hair out of place, even though she must be worried the next quake will bring the club down.

  In the interests of not losing my head, I decide to go for a walk. I’ll go and find Ernie Turner first, the new assistant vulcanologist, who I met in the bar when I got in last night. He’s fun. He can’t believe his luck, arriving in Rabaul two weeks before a major seismic event. As a geologist, I should be a little more than interested too. But Ernie’s not about when I look in at his office on Park Street: he’s already gone for a walk, up Mount Matupi, the most active vent, because he beats every bloke on this island for cracked.


  And I can’t get my mind off Bernie. I’m not that surprised I didn’t get her telegram: there was a lot disruption to the telegram service just before Christmas, with all the wireless operators being seconded into the military and replaced by twelve year olds; the message is probably still working its way back from Timbuktu. But her letters? Why wouldn’t I get her letters?

  Because she hasn’t written, has she. She hasn’t written to me because she’s met someone in Hay. She doesn’t love me any more, if she ever did. It was the hair comb, wasn’t it. She didn’t like it. Don’t be a halfwit: there is no one to meet in Hay. Graziers and shearers, and that bloke I quilted at Yarranbulla – wasn’t he from Hay? Somewhere down there. Bernie’s in Hay? That is cracked. How can I not lose my head?

  The sky answers with some rain. More rain. It’s March, the season should be over. But it’s decided not to be. I keep walking, down to the beach, through this rain I have come to hate. I never thought I would see a day where I would actually hate the rain. I hate it now. I am shaking with hatred.

  I just wanted to hear her voice, just for two flaming minutes. It’s the only thing that’s been holding my head on.

  There’s some sort of native sing-sing going on down along beside Mr Komazaki’s slipways. The duk-duks are there, magic men that dress up in palm leaves so that they look like giant Christmas trees; there’s about ten of them blessing canoes or some crocodile spirit bullshit, calling everyone to stop work and join in a few tunes. I hate the natives too. When’s my next three-month smoko due? The earth groans again. I feel the slide beneath my feet, only a small one, and I hate it too. I look behind me at Mount Matupi. It’s smoking quietly. Smoking in the rain. I tell it: go on then, blow up.

  It doesn’t.

  The rocks have something else in mind, for me. On my way back to the rig in the morning, Johno meets me at the base of the track at Kabakada, his emu frown informing me: ‘Mate, I’ve pulled up the drill.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask him, knowing it must be bad news. There’s been an accident, the derrick’s come down with a quake, or …

  He takes a hunk of core from the mud-soaked sack at his feet and puts it in my hands. ‘Tell me that’s not granite.’

  It’s granite. No. It can’t be. That’s not possible. But it is. The earth says it is. The size and colours of the grains. Pink and black and white. Pretty bloody granite. Telling me that the whole of the past year has highly likely been a complete waste of time. There is no granite in any of the data I’ve been given. None. We have been drilling in the wrong place.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Johno says. ‘Come back into town with me.’ We get back into the jeep. ‘I’ll need you to stop me from going a bit chaotic and flattening the mongrels.’

  Taylor and Roycox. Yes, that’s what they are, and I’m not sure I’ll be capable of providing much in the way of equilibrium.

  But when Taylor meets us alone on the verandah, he wrong-foots the pair of us, meeting the news with a long, slow drag on his cigar. ‘What, there weren’t any discrepancies in the data to alert you earlier than this, Brock?’ He doesn’t seem angry but he’s irritated, as if we’ve interrupted him at a crucial point in a game of chess, he seems … inconvenienced.

  I’m suddenly very uncertain of myself as I say: ‘I did tell you, Mr Taylor, several times, of my concerns. The dacite, I – I asked, several times, to check the previous Anglo-Eastern data for an error in our situation.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t speak up loud enough, did you, boy,’ he dismisses me, and says to Johno: ‘Move the rig, Johnstone. One and a half miles, west southwest.’ As if this is a simple thing to do, something to be knocked off this afternoon.

  Johno replies, as uncertain here as me: ‘Can’t be done for a few weeks yet, the wet having gone on, sir. It’s–’

  ‘Can’t be done?’ Taylor looks angry now. ‘Can’t be done? Tell that to our boys in Bardia.’ The AIF, in North Africa, he’s referring to, fighting the Italians in Libya. Where Mr Cooper probably is right now. I have a brief but forceful vision of the Empire’s oil reserves being captured in the East, Near and Far, causing the Allies to lose the war because Brock and Johnstone didn’t move the rig.

  I catch Johno’s eye: All right, we’ll flaming move it. Somehow. But I have to ask Taylor, again, before he slams the door in our faces: ‘Can I check the data for this new drill site then, please?’ And possibly ask for more specific coordinates than a mile and a half west southwest?

  ‘Not likely,’ Taylor snorts down at me, smoke spitting out of his mouth. ‘You clearly can’t be trusted to interpret the data.’ Then he pauses, before erupting fully: ‘You are not the one who answers to the board of directors of Southern Star, to our investors, and ultimately the people of Australia who would, in the event of being cut off from British petroleum, appreciate a supply of their own oil at the very least for the manufacture of our munitions, for our troops, who are presently engaged in protecting our liberty, including your freedom to inflict us all with your incompetence. And don’t think I’ve forgotten your impudence when last you graced us with your presence. You, Brock, will do as you are damned well told, or I will terminate your employ and personally see to it that you never work as a geologist again.’

  Righto. There’s the best whack of clarity I’ve had for a while. We’ll move the rig to the moon if that’s what’s necessary. I look across at Johno again. But he’s looking away now, that way the natives do when they get yelled at. Blank. You might think it means Yes, boss but it says Stuff you. When there’s nothing else you can do. The door slams shut and Johno turns to me: ‘Well, I don’t know about you, Brockie, but I’m off to get slaughtered before we do anything.’

  So are seven hundred soldiers of the 2/22nd Battalion. We watch them piling onto the docks from the front bar. The lower ranks head for the Pacific rum palace, and the mid-ranking officers head across the lawn up to us. They turn the dance floor into a two-up game tonight, with Sid at the centre of it, ensuring that at least one deed of our fathers will be repeated. And probably exceeded.

  ‘Frigging hell,’ Johno says to me before we’re too far gone, ‘this all they’re giving us to fight off the Japs with?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ I say. ‘But at least they brought their own band.’ A Salvo band. They’re striking up ‘Gundagai’ on the tennis lawn to distract the ladies.

  ‘And six nurses,’ says Ernie Turner, enthusiastic for them.

  And proof if ever there was that the Japs aren’t coming. That they’ll never breach Singapore. This is just a token force, a lookout, here on the off-chance. It has to be. There’s not enough of them to defend this island, never mind Australia. Never mind New Guinea.

  So we can keep drinking. Tonight, there’s only one thing going on around here: proving that Victorians can drink more than New South Welshmen and Queenslanders combined. Fact.

  Sometime later, I wake up on the floor of our room, with no recollection of how I got here or why I have twenty-three pounds in my pocket that wasn’t there before. And it’s five to twelve. I’ve missed the phone line.

  Six weeks of sobriety and moving an oil rig a mile and a half through thick banyan forest sorts me out. Or I’ve just gone past it, so that when I come into town in May and Mrs Chittaway shakes her head before I even ask about the mail, I don’t lose my head at all. I accept it, sort of. The way you have to accept that your chest has been ripped open, your heart thrown on the road and run over by a lorry. Six months without a letter. There’s no mistaking it now. She’s called it off. We were always on shaky ground from the start, weren’t we. Now it’s finished. And I’m not going to book a call to have that confirmed for me by her mother. I don’t need a kick to the head as well.

  So I don’t go to the bar at all this time. I go hiking up Matupi with Ernie instead. We spend the day talking about the doctoral thesis he’s planning, on the possibility of measuring the sonic energy released by volcanoes. Listening to rocks, actually. We’re scrambling up the pumice scree as we near t
he rim when he tells me: ‘So I reckon there is a connection between the quakes and the vents. There’s been a substantial increase in emissions over the past few weeks as well as these low tremors – the ones you can hardly feel. There’s something going on down there – if only you could measure it. My money’s on there being another significant eruption at any moment.’

  I laugh: ‘As in right now?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Ernie couldn’t think of anything better. He’s happy to have someone to share this with, too. The chief vulcanologist thinks he really might be insane and, not that surprisingly, so do the nurses of the 2/22nd. ‘Next time, I’ll bring you up at night. The lava lake really is something to see in the dark.’

  I reckon I will want to do that, I think, as we find the lava lake in the light. Boiling liquid cement is what it looks like. The earth is alive and has sulphuric breath. One slip on the edge of this rim and I could fall into it, becoming the rock itself. Dacitic Brock. I say to Ernie: ‘Oh yeah.’

  And I reckon Ernie might be a bit of a genius, too. It’s only a few weeks later that me and Johno are scrambling up to the top of the rig to watch Matupi belch up the first massive plume of ash. ‘Ahhhh,’ Johno is in his own awe, ‘she’s going to blow again, Brockie. Twice in a lifetime I’ll have seen it then. I’m a lucky man.’

  It doesn’t take us two seconds to decide that we’ll pull up the drill and go into town, and stuff whatever Taylor or Roycox have to say about it. They can sack us. It will be worth it to see the lava flow. To-An shakes his head at us when we get to Kabakada. ‘You crazy fellas, crazy,’ his favourite new whitefella word. And it’s just as well we don’t need his guidance to get in or out these days: none of the To boys will move from the village while Matupi is going off, especially not To-An: he’s just become a father, grinning with that chipped tooth of his as he calls after us again: ‘Crazy.’

  But the lava isn’t flowing when we get there, not yet. Matupi is only throwing out more and more ash as we drive in, covering everything in grey powder several inches thick. The air is yellow, stinking, and the town is deserted.