There was a long silence and I drifted back into the lethargy of half-consciousness, not sleeping, not waking, just lying there in a state of exhausted oblivion. The next thing I knew I was being shaken and a black hand was thrusting a mug of tea at me. It was strong and sweet and very hot, and it did the trick. It woke me up and put a little energy into me.
‘Better?’
‘Yes.’ I took another gulp at the hot strong tea. ‘Yes, better, thanks. It was the loneliness. I bloody near panicked.’
He smiled. ‘I guessed it was that.’
He was looking at me, a very direct stare, his blue eyes wide. I dropped my own gaze down to the mug, looking down at the tea leaves floating and a dead ant, flies clinging with threadlike legs to the rim, realizing suddenly that I hadn’t bothered to conceal my fear. Somehow this sick, worn-out man, with a face so parched of blood it was like a lizard’s, had the knack of holding me to the truth. Something in his personality, or perhaps it was the wretchedness of his situation. Or was it the country? Was it the starkness of the red centre of this country that brought a man face-to-face with reality?
I stared at the rotor arm in my hand, the golden gleam of the brass bright in the strong light, the brown of the bakelite. Was that really what I had come for? If I made it back to our own Land-Rover in tomorrow’s dawn it meant release from the torture of this red desert. The engine would go again and we could get the hell out. I leaned back against the rough curve of the rock, flicking the flies off, sipping at the hot sweet contents of the enamel mug. All this way just to turn back. It didn’t make sense, though something at the back of my mind screamed at me to go — to go while the going was good, while I still had some reserves of energy left.
But man isn’t made like that. Given the faintest spark of energy there’s always that need to reach for something, regardless of physical discomfort, regardless even of the fear of death. I closed my eyes trying to concentrate, conscious all the time of Ed Garrety there beside me. Logic. A sensible decision. But my brain seemed incapable of that, and the man beside me — nothing logical there. A gamble, a last desperate gamble. But if it was that, why had he immobilized our vehicle? A dozen miles and on his own — why? Why, when he had a mining consultant at hand to confirm the nature of the deposit?
I sucked at the last bit of tea, spitting out the leaves and that dead ant, the flies buzzing. My eyes were open now, staring into the sun-glare at the red-scabbed rock, a petrified sediment of tiny fragments welded into a conglomerate and bared by the wind, worn by the blowing sand into a gentle undulation, a low swell frozen with sudden knoll-like outcrops carved in strange shapes. ‘There’s no copper here,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘A conglomerate — of no value at all.’ I looked at him, a thought taking slow shape in my mind. ‘Then why in God’s name — ‘ But something in his face stopped me. He was slumped there, his eyes closed, the muscle at the corner of his mouth twitching and an expression of extreme agony on his face. Behind his head a complicated pattern of concentric circles had been painted on the rock wall, the pigments faded now, but still showing faintly. White and ochre and some sort of blue — indigo perhaps. It was like an old frescoe, a primitive halo framing the parchment face, the saint-like effect emphasized by the lidded eyes, the suggestion of a death mask.
The lids flicked suddenly open and he was looking at me again with that wide-eyed unblinking stare, and I saw he was deep in some private hell of his own. Christ! I thought. He’s over the edge now. He’s mad like his father. ‘What is this place?’ I heard myself ask, my voice a whisper.
‘The blacks call it a rira. It’s a comglomerate, as you say.’ His words were slow, like a man talking in his sleep. ‘And this soak here — not many in the Gibson. It’s called the Kurrajong Soak. See that tree there?’ He nodded vaguely towards a brilliantly green tree. ‘That’s a kurrajong. It’s always like that. Not many of them, but even in a drought like this it stays green. The greenest thing in the desert.’
I waited, not saying anything. And then, very quietly, very matter-of-factly, he said, ‘The last time I was here this soak had water in it. We only had to dig down about a foot and we got all the water we wanted — good water, too. Not brackish.’ And he added, ‘There was a lot of game here then. But last night nothing. No emu. No wallaby.’ His eyes were closed again so that he was like a man talking in his sleep. ‘If I hadn’t come on this soak I’d have lost my camels. They’d just about reached the limit. I’d never have got out alive. I was crazed with thirst myself. And like you, on the verge of panic. But with more reason.’ He was living something that had happened a long time ago, silent once again. I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would come of its own accord or not at all.
A shadow moved and Tom stooped in under the overhang, took the mug from me and disappeared, back to some separate burrow of his own. And then the voice again, quiet in the silence: ‘He’d never have made it this far without Weepy. Weepy Weeli knew all the soaks. This was the second they’d camped at, so you might say he owed his life to my father.’
I don’t know whether he was conscious of me or not at that moment. He seemed to be talking to himself rather than me, talking for the sake of talking, perhaps the way people do in a confessional. I think he had to get it off his chest and it was just that I happened to be there. There was more to it of course, but I only realized that later, when it was too late — after the wind had died.
There was a long silence, and while I was considering the implications of what he had said, I think I dozed off, for the next thing I heard was him saying: ‘When I woke I was sitting about where you’re sitting now, right here in this hollow in the rock. And what woke me was the sound of a shot. I stumbled out and there he was with a gun in his hand and one of my three camels lying drumming with her legs on the lira. I can remember the smoke was still curling from the muzzle of the gun as he raised it to his shoulder again. I shouted at him and he wheeled round, the gun pointing at me. But I just didn’t care. The camel was the best I had. I’d broken her myself. I went straight at him and he was in such a state when he fired that he missed. The shot went just over my head. And then I was on him, my hands wrenching at the gun, tearing it out of his grasp. He wasn’t a big man and I was young. He hadn’t a hope after he’d missed me. And when I got hold of the gun I was in such a rage I shot him. I shot him through his forehead and I can still see the look on his face, the staring, horror-struck eyes as he realized what I was going to do. It’s haunted me all my life. For I did it in cold blood. I killed him quite deliberately.’ He paused then, his eyes wide, a distant look as he saw every detail of the scene he had lived with all these years. ‘He didn’t even twitch. He just folded up with a glazed, surprised look, and then lay out there in some thin grass, pitched forward on his face. I put the camel out of her misery, wishing I had been awake in time to stop him. The sun was just setting, everything blood-red, and when I moved that little bastard the wisps of spinifex he’d fallen on were red, too — the blood that had drained out of the hole in the back of his head.’
There was another long silence, his eyes closed, his breathing in quick pants. ‘Well, now you know. Funny that I should want to tell you when you’re on the run for something yourself. Or perhaps that’s why. But I still wanted to be on my own when I got here. You understand?’
I nodded. To make peace, he had said. I remembered that now. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘Well, d’you think I did wrong?’ He waited. And then he said, ‘All right. I killed a man. But what would you have done? In the circumstances. Jarra Jarra ruined. Everything I’d dreamed of gone. And all the fault of that grasping little crook. And then slaughtering my camel for meat. Would you have stood for it? That camel had carried me for six days. She’d have carried me to her last gasp. She deserved better than that. And McIlroy — did he deserve anything better than I gave him?’ Another pause, and then he said slowly, ‘No. The camel was just an excuse, the spark that triggered my hate of the man.’ He was silent then and I didn’t know what to say. What would I have done?