I was fully awake then. ‘So you think it exists?’
He nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ And after that he wouldn’t say any more. He seemed exhausted, leaning back, his eyes closed. I didn’t examine the contents of the wallet. Not then. I just put it in my pocket, wondering whether he was sane or not thinking about his words, the strange prophetic sense he had intended them to convey. And shortly afterwards Tom came to tell us there was a storm brewing. He had blankets with him and he wrapped one of them around Ed Garrety, tucking it carefully as though he were nursing a sick child.
The wind came quickly, sand driving past our shelter, at first a river of small grains close to the surface of the rock, then a brown cloud engulfing everything, uprooted bushes whirling past, the air thickening until it was hardly possible to breathe, the sun-hot desert sand-blasted to hell. I buried my head in the blanket and sank into a mental oblivion, unable to think, scarcely able to breathe, yet not unconscious — not entirely.
The storm lasted right into the night. I was dimly conscious of movement, a body crawling past, but I was wrapped in a cocoon of misery and hardly noticed, lying there thankful for the shelter of the rock which protected my body from the full blast of the wind, the sand flood pouring over me and nothing to do but huddle close within the insufferable heat of the blanket.
It died at last, the howling of the wind subsiding slowly to a moan, the sand-filled air thinning till there was only the whisper of a breeze and the soft abrasive rasp of grains on rock. That was when I first realized I was alone.
It took time for it to sink in, and even when it did, I didn’t do anything. I was dazed and too exhausted. It was dark and the wind had gone, everything very still. My voice croaked his name. No answer, and when I reached out there was only the blanket half-buried in sand.
I got up then in a sudden panic. My limbs were cramped, my eyes and mouth all scummed, and as I staggered out a meteor, blazing a snuffed-out trail across the sky, showed me the Land-Rover still there. I stood for a moment, trembling with relief, and then, thinking perhaps he had been caught short and gone for a squat, I walked over to the Land-Rover and got myself a drink of water. I sipped it slowly, flexing my limbs and shaking the sand out of my clothes. The minutes passed and no sign of him. I started calling, but there was no answer. Tom had appeared like a dark shadow out of the ground, and after a while, with no response to our calls, we began searching.
We must have searched for an hour before giving up, and by then I knew it wasn’t an accident. He’d walked out into that sandstorm deliberately. Tom knew it, too. ‘Him sickfella golonga tingari.’ Tingari I guessed correctly were Dreamtime spirits. The old black didn’t talk much. He accepted it, may even have expected it, but he was deeply affected. He went off by himself and I didn’t see him again till dawn broke. Then we searched the whole of the rira and beyond it, out into the sand, until heat exhaustion drove me to seek shelter. Tom was all day searching, but without finding a trace of him. It was as though that storm had lifted him up and spirited him away.
Night fell again and we had a meal. Then we collected the things we needed from the Land-Rover and began walking. There was no point in staying there. No point in continuing the search. The sand had done what perhaps he had intended; it had buried him under a clean new drift. But why? Why had he gone like that, walking out into a sandstorm? I was thinking about it all night, feeling there was something I had missed. And then, as tiredness made me stumble and I began to fall, I developed a strange feeling that he and I had changed places; one moment I felt that all the problems that had sent him stumbling out into the storm had devolved upon me, the next it was I who was stumbling out into the desert to die.
I wouldn’t have made it without Tom. He stayed with me, and sometimes he talked to himself in his own tongue, not bothering with pidgin. In the end, all I could think about was the compass, which I clutched so tightly for fear I lost it in a fall that my fingers eventually had to be prised loose from it, the bone all bruised by the metal case. We kept to the reverse of the bearing I had followed two nights before, but when dawn broke and I flung myself down exhausted on the highest sandridge I could find, Tom said he didn’t think we had gone far enough yet, not more than nine miles, and so we went on, out into a wide plain between that ridge and the next with the heat increasing and the sky flaring to the moment of sunrise. And he was right. When the sun came up behind us the black of Kennie’s smoke signal was no more than a wisp far out on the horizon. It took us almost two hours — two hours before Kennie came stumbling towards us, shouting hysterically.
Another long day waiting out the heat, and then, the sun just dipping below the sand-sea horizon, we started driving, heading straight into the last of the daylight. There were new drifts of sand now, the going bad in places and frequent stops to cool the engine. We had two punctures that night and we only made 432 miles, a lot of it in four-wheel drive.
‘You in a more reasonable frame of mind?’
‘What do you mean?’
Tom had rigged us a shelter of sorts and Kennie was propped up on one elbow, staring at me, his sun-blistered body chequered with the light beams coming through the furze.
‘You were pretty crazed when I found you yesterday morning.’
‘You didn’t find us. We found you.’
‘Have it your own way.’
My hands gripped hard on the mug I was holding. ‘All right,’ I said, my mouth, my whole throat hurting. ‘You lit a fire so we knew where you were.’ The mug was hot, the tea too scalding to drink, and I was sweating, a feeling of nausea creeping up from my guts.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘All you said was he walked out into that sandstorm.’
‘That’s right.’ My throat was sore and I found it difficult to formulate my words.
‘Christ, man. You can’t just leave it at that. There must be something more.’
I shook my head and then he was leaning forward, gripping my arm. ‘For God’s sake, Alec — a man doesn’t just walk out — into a sandstorm — for no reason. That’s what you said. That he just walked out. While you were huddled in a blanket.’
There was a long silence. Finally he let go of my arm. ‘You don’t want to talk about it.’
‘No.’ How the hell could I explain to him the complicated motives of a man who had reached the point of no return. Even if I understood them myself.
He sucked noisily at his tea. ‘Okay, I’m your pal and you won’t talk to me. So what are you going to tell the police? And there’s Janet. What are you going to tell Janet?’
Oh Christ! I thought. Couldn’t he leave it alone? Just accept the truth of it. ‘God damn you,’ I muttered. ‘Shut up, can’t you.’ That strange feeling was there still, the feeling that Ed Garrety and I had changed places, that with his death I had somehow stepped into his shoes. ‘It’s crazy.’ I heard my voice, a hoarse whisper, and he had heard it too.
‘Did you find the Monster? Was it there, where he died?’ He was staring at me intently.
‘No. No, of course it wasn’t.’
‘Then why did Garrety stop there — a rira Tom said. That’s a geological formation.’
‘There was no copper,’ I said. ‘Now shut up, can’t you.’
‘But you know where it is?’
‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake,’ I screamed at nun.
His hand was on my arm again, shaking me. ‘He told you, didn’t he? You got it out of him — the location of Mcllroy’s Monster?’
Something in the way he said it made me hold my breath, staring at him. ‘What the hell are you getting at?’ In that moment I hated him.
He saw that, for he hesitated, licking his lips. And then he blurted out, ‘Only that you got the rotor arm out of him, and I thought …’