‘Janet was worried,’ I said again.
‘And that was all? No other motive?’
‘I was curious, of course.’
He nodded. ‘Of course. You want to know what happened.’
He was silent then, staring into the desert. The colour was fading now, the washed-out look of dusk creeping over the sand. And then abruptly he said, ‘D’you love her?’
I stared at him.
‘My daughter — d’you love her?’ He was looking at me very intently, his eyes searching my face.
‘I’m fond of her,’ I muttered, my eyes shifting from the directness of his stare, uncertain of myself and what he expected of me.
‘Fond?’ He leaned a little forward. ‘You’ve never been in an Australian desert and you risk your life for an old man because you’re fond of his daughter?’
‘There’s Kennie,’ I said, nettled by his words. ‘He’s here, too. Why don’t you ask him if he loves her?’
‘That boy.’ He shook his head, the dulled blue eyes still staring at me out of the drawn, tired face. ‘I wonder if you realize how attractive you are to people. It’s a quality that’s rare. But you have it. That boy, the drillers, Janet — even myself, and I’ve had a lot of experience of men.’ He lowered his head, staring down at the sand. ‘And you want to know what happened.’
‘Not if you don’t wish to tell me,’ I said.
I saw him smile. ‘That’s the trouble. I do. All these years …’ He didn’t finish, but continued staring down at the sand. There was sweat on his forehead and he suddenly looked very old and alone. Then Kennie called to me that the union to the carburettor was threaded. The moment was gone and he murmured, ‘Later. We’ll talk about it again later.’
‘You’re a sick man,’ I said.
He didn’t answer and in the end I got up and went to help Kennie repair the union, while Tom brewed a billy of tea over the fire. We got the engine going in the end and backed the Land-Rover down the ridge, parking it on the flat beside our own.
We fed in the last of the light and then drove on, following in the wake of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover. Tom was driving it and the bearing varied between 100° and 105°. We were held up only once by sand and that only briefly. Otherwise we made steady progress, all in four-wheel drive with two pauses to let the engines cool. Shortly after midnight we stopped. We were just short of the pencil mark on the chart. Ed Garrety’s face appeared at my window, lit faintly by the light from my torch shining on the chart. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘From the wall of your den.’
‘You searched the place then.’ His voice was strangely detached, no resentment in it.
‘I was looking for the rest of the Journal.’
‘You knew, did you — that it was incomplete?’
‘I guessed.’
‘Does Janet know about that map?’
‘No.’
He seemed relieved.
Kennie leaned forward. ‘He stopped here, Mr Garrety?’
‘Yes. We’ll camp here.’ His gaze returned to the chart. ‘I should have brought that with me.’
‘I only found it by chance,’ I said. ‘It was under the Hamersley Range chart.’
He nodded. ‘I forgot all about it.’ He leaned his head in at the window, looking down at it. ‘The mark’s still visible.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’d have come straight here.’ And he added, smiling, ‘Well, perhaps it’s for the best. I’m not a mining man myself.’
‘This is the position then?’
He gave me a long slow look, then nodded and turned away. ‘We’ll have a look round in the morning, eh?’
I got out and followed him as he moved slowly back to his own vehicle. ‘How did you know?’ I asked.
We were alone then, midway between the two Land-Rovers. He stopped, a shadow in the gloom.
‘Did McIlroy get as far as this?’
I saw him nod his head, slowly, almost reluctantly.
‘How do you know?’
He didn’t say anything, his eyes glinting in the starlight, the outline of his body sagging.
‘And that chart left there on the wall. You didn’t need a map to find your way here.’
‘I brought a quarter mil map along.’
‘But you didn’t need it.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I knew the way.’
The truth was staring me in the face, but I didn’t recognize it. Instead, I thought it was the Journal. ‘The missing pages,’ I said. ‘Your father gave the position in his Journal.’
He stared at me and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer that. But then he said, ‘No, he didn’t know that. But everything else. He wrote it all down, everything, just as … as it was told to him. He was a great one for keeping records. He should have been a diarist.’
‘Where is it then?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the rest of his Journal? Have you got it with you?’
He shook his head. ‘I burned it. When the old man died I burned all the last part.’
‘Why?’
‘Still curious, eh?’ He patted me gently on the shoulder. ‘All in good time. Don’t rush me.’ He stood for a moment in complete silence. ‘Ever been in a desert before?’
‘No.’
‘Then you wouldn’t understand.’ And then so softly I could barely hear him, ‘But Christ did. He understood … the peace, the solitude, the immense impersonal hostility that cleanses the soul. I was a young man, hot-blooded, and full of the certainty that justice …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Now I’m old before my time, my body worn out by a twist of fate that was equally unjust. In Burma I had a lot of time to think, and death all round me. Since then it’s been a long hard struggle, and no time to think. But now … now I want to make my peace.’ His hand was on my arm again. ‘We’ll talk again — later. I’m a sick man, as you say. Only one lung left and that’s going now. Janet doesn’t know. She only suspects. I’ve never told her.’
‘And the copper deposit?’ I asked.
‘A chance, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Like you drilling at Golden Soak. We’re all of us gamblers, y’know.’
‘You’re not certain then?’
‘About what?’
‘That it’s here.’
‘How could I be?’
‘So McIlroy never saw it.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘All he ever had was the rough position given him by a black feller.’ And when I asked him how an abo could possibly have known what copper looked like in the ground, he said the man had been employed at one of the mines near Nullagine. And he went on to repeat the story of how the aborigine had been walkabout in the Gibson and had come back into the bank to trade the information for cash. And after that he closed right up on me, wouldn’t say another word and went off to give Tom a hand.
That night we had bully beef and damper and thick sweet Indian tea. And afterwards the four of us sat for a while by the glowing ashes of the cook fire. Ed Garrety slumped in a camp chair and Kennie questioning Tom about the desert people and their spirits. But Tom was a Pukara. His parents had lived and died in the Turee Creek area halfway between Jarra Jarra and what is now the iron mining township of Tom Price. He had only met the desert people — the Ngatatjara he called them when he had been walkabout, crossing the Gibson Desert to the Clutterbucks. He had done this twice as a young man, the second time to attend a corroboree at Ayers Rock. ‘Before me talk’im desert people. Forget’im plenty.’ And his broad black face cracked in a grin that showed his broken front teeth. But he knew the names for the ghosts of their dead that haunt the desert at night. ‘Call’im mamu.’ He cocked his head on one side, affecting to listen, bugging himself with laughter. ‘Plenty mamu, but keep’im far going, no trouble us.’ And then he was telling a long story about a mamu that had taken the shape of a watersnake. It was I think a story from the Dreamtime of his own people, but it was complicated and I was too tired to follow his uncertain English. The last of the firelight flickered and died, my head nodding.
The back of our Land-Rover was fusty with the smell of sand and our own sweat. We slept in the open that night, a small breeze blowing hot from the north-west, no flies and the stars shedding a ghostly light on the desert around us. It was very quiet. I had a last cigarette, wondering what we’d find in the morning, and then I fell into a deep sleep. Something woke me shortly after two, but I was too tired to lift my head, glancing at the gold hunter tied to my handkerchief and falling asleep again in the same moment, vaguely conscious of a sound fading. And then the sunrise hit me, heat again and flies crawling on my face, seeking the moisture of eyes and nostrils.