The river is Down (24 page)

`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 takeover '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!

If 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 stake 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.

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, 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 ironstone 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.

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 spreads 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,

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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 waterhole 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.

Sometime in the midafternoon 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—

Then she gave up.

Flan's shoulder was too low because he was too small. It had to be Nick's shoulder. Her head drooped towards it, then touched it: then lay on it.

Cindie was asleep.

Nick put his 'arm round her to save her from jolting when they struck potholes, or here and there a dried-out creek-bed.

Only once did Flan take his eyes from the road and glance their way.

Wonder what Miss Erica would think of that? he muttered, with some caustic amusement, to himself. His humour was not quite so dry this time. And the overseer from Baanya, too!

It was late night, not so long before the dingoes howled their first midnight warnings across the empty land, when they neared journey's end. They had entered the circle of low mountains, now black on the skyline, that scattered around Mulga Gorges.

The pub, the only two-storey building in a town of one store, one post office, stood in a grave silhouette against the night sky. Absolute silence reigned. Nothing moved. Not even a breath of air.

Nick had deadened the engine. He swung open the drive door and came round to help Cindie slip out while Flan rooted in the back for the hand luggage. Cindie was so stiff she could hardly stand up. She was thankful for Nick's steadying hand.

`Ouch! Thank you!'

`You've had fifteen hours on the road, Cindie,' he said almost gently. 'Tough going, even for veterans. Can you climb that fire-escape at the back?'

'Oh, yes! Easily. I'm not a bit fragile by nature. It's just my legs.' She was so tired she could hardly hold herself up. She had yet to discover that physical exhaustion was to be part of her way of life before she went home.

`Then up you go. It's the back way in, I'm afraid. The door on the top landing is always open for late-corners.'

Cindie thought she was tired, but she didn't realise how much till she tried climbing that nearly-perpendicular stairway. She could hardly lift one foot above the other. Dust was in her eyes, her nose and even in her mouth. In fact she was layered in a fine red dry powder from head to foot. Her back ached, her legs ached, and her head was wuzzy.

She had to admit it—she was not a veteran at crossing hundreds of miles of outback country in one span. Nick and Flan seemed still to have life in them.

Nick opened the door leading from the landing into a long corridor. He switched on a light, then walked a few yards down the passage and turned on another in the cross passage leading to the bathrooms.

Cindie leaned against the wall and waited. All those closed doors! How were they to know where they were to sleep?

Nick was now walking down the passage quietly opening one door after another, and just as quietly closing them. At the fourth, after one quick glance, he threw open the door and switched on the light.

`Yours, Cindie,' he said with a grin. 'The first unoccupied! Quite a nice one, too.'

Flan was proceeding down the passage, quietly opening doors and closing them again, as Nick had done. Cindie supposed, with some faith in hotel management, that somewhere he would come upon vacant rooms for himself and

Nick. She must remember not to he alarmed if her bedroom door was opened in the night, and an inquiring head appeared round its edge.

Her rest against the wall had done her more harm than good. She stooped to pick up her bag and almost pitched forward. Nick caught her by the shoulders just in time.

`You need a great deal of experience of this country, and for these long trips, Cindie,' he said gravely. She thought—but then her hearing was blurry too—that there was something—a grave pity—in his voice: born of kindness.

Too, too tired!' she admitted. The unexpected gentleness in Nick's voice had gone straight to her heart like a winged message.

She didn't have to behave like a tried veteran in this outback, after all.

Her eyes stared blearily at Nick. There were times when one needed someone.

`Then sleep well,' he was saying, still holding her steady. `There's tea in the corridor at six in the morning. Can you make it? Breakfast is at seven-fifteen.'

She nodded.

Nick picked up her bag and led her into her room. She sat with relief on the edge of her bed, staring at him, mesmerised by uncertainty, and fixed by her own exhaustion.