The river is Down (3 page)

Her mother's apron strings?

Mother without a penny, and not the nerve to find out from those Bindaroo relatives why they had none of her dead father's investment left!

They were ready to move now.

The monkey man clambered back into the Land-Rover and eased it forward to tauten the tow-line.

`Right!' he called, leaning his brown head and brown-clad shoulders out of the window. 'Who drives, boss? You or me?'

The boss, out of Cindie's car now, had been standing with his legs slightly apart again; his hands tucked in his belt.

`I do, Flan. You get up on the back bumper of the girl's car and keep it balanced against a cross-drift in the channel.'

The
re were no pleases or thank-you
in this dialogue. The monkey man jumped out of the Land-Rover again. The boss turned to her.

`Now, if you'll get up in the passenger seat, I'll take you—and your car—across the river. Time is beginning to matter. That water's risen another inch while we've been hitching-up here.'

`Thank you.'

Cindie wished she didn't sound diffident. She was letting herself down. Stalling the car, and that dreadful blush, had done it. The sort of thing David had always held against her. She couldn't understand advanced physics, or why the speed of light had to be so much faster than the speed of sound. Or why someone should land on the moon before . To David she was kissable—when he had time—but scientifically speaking, ignorant. She was tired of that category. The boss glanced at her curiously as he opened the door for her.

`Want a hand up? The step is a bit high.'

`No thank you.' She gathered her remnants of pride together. 'I don't understand about universal constants or the speed of sound, but I can run and jump and play tennis. Besides I'm five feet six inches high. Not really a little person

They stood by the step and he looked straight into her eyes.

'My name's Nick Brent,' he said. 'I'm in charge of the construction camp on the thousand-miler. That's a road in the making

Cindie nodded. 'Yes, I thought so. I heard about the road back at the coast. I also heard about the river coming down.'

He raised his eyebrows. 'Oh? You heard about the river coming down? Yet you came on? Alone?'

`Yes. But I didn't know it would be down before I crossed it,' she said gravely. 'That, you see, is the difference. Information, but inadequate information.'

`Do you always talk like this, Miss—er, Miss Cindie?'

`Miss Cindie Something. It's an interesting name, isn't it? Cindie is short for Cynthia and the Something was bestowed on me, over the air probably. It makes me into a person

travelling incognito. Brown, because I'm brown-all-over, would be nearer the mark.'

`Very common in the outback,' he said dryly. 'Now, Miss Brown, if you don't mind getting in this Rover, we'll take off before the river takes the lot of us.'

'Yes, of course.' Cindie put her foot on the step. 'Are we going to Marana Station? It's not far off, is it?' she asked.

`We are not. Marana, and every other station from here to the coast, and from here to the desert on the east, will now be cut off by the river. It curves a lot—if you happened to look at your map at all; and has a dozen creek tributaries

`Oh!' Cindie felt deservedly deflated.

Then where were they going?

She slipped into the passenger seat and Nick Brent clambered in on the far side. He slammed the door after him. He started up; did strange things with the gears, then leaned out of the window and called to Flan, who was now balancing on the elevated bumpers of Cindie's car.

`Right, Flan? Then hang on while I give the first pull.'

The Land-Rover began to ease its way cautiously down the river bank. Suddenly it speeded up to make a dash into the water. Nick Brent kept his eyes on the rear-vision mirror.

`Sorry for the splash,' he said to Cindie. 'You may not understand universal constants but you will know that the short sprint was from necessity. I had to keep the pace of this Land-Rover faster than the estimated pace of your car when it began to roll downhill. Otherwise we would have had a rear-end to rear-end collision, Flan nicely minced between.'

`Yes .. . I see,' Cindie said, surprised at her nervousness of this man.

There was silence as the Land-Rover churned its way, both front and rear drives of the car in action, over the sucking mud and through the red-brown water which washed and splashed to the floor level.

`Your car is nose-deep in water, Miss Brown, because your tow-bar was at the back,' Nick Brent said looking in the mirror again as he began to climb the far bank. The electrical system will be wet, and until dried out, may not function. Flan will know.'

`I see. Well, as long as I'm safely over the river, it won't matter. I can camp. I have gear and stores. I was prepared for an occasional night in the bush if I didn't make a town or motel on my way up the NorthWest Highway.'

`If the river doesn't go down, you think you can keep right on camping on this side?'

There was a catch somewhere hidden in this question. Something in his voice suggested it. He was still watching the muddy bank as they came up through the buff el grass towards dry land.

'Well certainly,' she began. 'Camping here would be no different from camping on the other side, or anywhere on the track up north. . . .' She broke off, glancing at his profile uneasily.

`Exactly,' he said dryly. He waited for a few minutes, then added quietly, 'Then why try to cross the river at all? A camp's a camp, so long as there's food and water.'

Cindie's heart seemed to drop with a clang. Here was another person in her life equipped with deadly logic. David in a different guise?

If she was going to camp here, she might as well have camped on the high ground between the billabong and the main bed of the river.

`I didn't know how long the billabong would be a bog,' she protested.

His voice became almost gentle, but not quite.

`But you should have known, Miss . . . er . . . Brown did you say?'

`Brown-all-over, but you could use just Brown for short.'

He was silent some minutes, then said, `Cindie, appears to be the name you are known by over Baanya's radio, so I suggest we settle for that. Right?'

She nodded. 'You don't care for Brown?'

`I don't mind either way, but everyone north of Twenty-Six goes by his or her Christian name. Settled?'

They had come up the bank, and were rolling along the flat land at the top. Cindie, without looking back through her window, knew by the feel of the engine that her own car had been towed clear of the water.

Nick Brent ran the Land-Rover a good fifty yards across the flat land before he braked to a stop.

"Cindie" it is,' she agreed. 'It's spelled with an "ie", not a "y".'

His grey expressionless eyes looked at her.

`Right,' was all he said.

`So where do I go from here?' she asked quietly, meeting his glance.

`I have no choice but to take you up to the construction camp.'

The uninvited guest?'

She regretted that, but could not take it back. It was ungracious of her, but then he made his own feelings so clear.

He nodded.

`I'm afraid so. It's not the Palace Hotel, nor even an outback motel. It's the headquarters of a large gang of road-building men. In such a camp women are limited to the necessary few.'

`Then I could camp here. I would prefer—'

`That would be even more responsibility for us, I'm afraid. If you were snake-bitten, or caught in a williwilli—and we have enough of them here—you would be more of a liability than if you were up at the construction camp.'

He had spoken very quietly; a man of hour-to-hour problems all day, every day. This was just one more. Suddenly Cindie felt dreadful. Unwanted. Also angry. No one likes to be called a liability.

The little monkey man was off the bumper of her car and at the rear of the Land-Rover. He was releasing the tow-rope. Then, by winding the winch, he swung the crane into place under the canvas cover of the Land-Rover.

Nick Brent leaned out of the drive window.

`How's the wiring under the girl's car, Flan? Is it dry?' `It'll go, boss. I wiped around a bit and tried the engine. She purrs!'

Cindie made a movement to open the door. 'I'll take it over . . .' she began.

Nick Brent leaned his arms on the steering wheel. 'Leave it to Flan, Cindie,' he said, still in that steady voice. 'He'll bring it up. Besides, he has a call to make at the gang on the number-four grader. He can go in your car. It'll be useful.'

Well really!

Cindie leaned back in exasperation. Everything, even her car, was taken out of her hands. They had rescued her. That was wonderfully good of them. Now they carried on as if the rest of her life and belongings were theirs.

The rest of her life!

Cindie was startled at herself.

What a strange expression to have thought up! It had come into her head, like that. Not meaning that at all, either. Yet the effect of it made her feel she had crossed not any river, but the Rubicon.

She had crossed a river! The very act had made her into

a different person. She was someone else. She wasn't even angry any more. The weight on her heart, the muffling in her ears? They were gone: all because she had crossed water, and there was no way back.

Looking around her she knew she was in a new world. A wide, wild, untamed, hot spinifex plain of a world. And

there was no road back because the river was down!

She was Cindie Brown. Not Cynthia Davenport any more. She was born again!

Nick Brent had been speaking with Flan from the window. He turned to Cindie. She looked back at him, meeting his eyes straight as the level plain that stretched away between them to a line that was the only definition between the earth and the sky. Funny, but it didn't matter so much that he didn't like her. A miracle had happened. Like the snap of a tow-rope.

`Have you a job for a cook, or an unprofessional nurse? A typist? Something? Anything?' she asked.

Her eyes did not waver under his immensely sceptical stare.

`Are you as versatile as all that? Have you three qualifications for providing for the comfort of man?' He was only one decimal point away from being sarcastic now.

`No,' she said gravely. 'I can cook for two; also for a party. I can nurse about as well as a nurserymaid. That is—I know how to bandage and put on a poultice. Also to mix a throat gargle. I can read well enough to understand a standard pharmacopoeia. Typing is my best. That's how I earn my living. I'm a typist.'

Their eyes held. Cindie's were violet—true. His were a cold grey, but not altogether empty this time.

`What are you running away from? Or to?' he asked at length—a sort of deadly question.

She did not reply.

`No answer?' His eyebrows went up. Cindie realised how good-looking he was under his overlay of sunburn, and beneath the watchful manner that said there was a whole book of personality hidden behind his unappeasable attitude towards herself.

He'd thrown out a tow-rope to rescue her car. She had really needed a tow-rope for herself—as a person. This was her own moment of truth. She had thought she was going to Bindaroo for her mother's sake. It had really been for

her own sake too. She'd been looking for an escape route. Or was it a tow-rope?

'I can work hard,' she said. 'I'm a good worker.'

He turned back to the steering wheel, and started up.

He narrowed his eyes to see through the unsettled dust of his own earlier arrival. As he drove he watched for his car's tracks on the red-brown earth, and between the spinifex humps.

'I'll take you up to the camp temporarily,' he said after a long silence. 'You could give a hand up there, in preference to sitting around waiting, if you wish. Unfortunately they don't have helicopters up here to take you off. We're rather stuck with one another, till we see what the river is likely to do in the next few weeks. No one but the river knows. It flows underground, and the mud can stay feet deep when the surface has dried out.'

Cindie shook her head without knowing she did it. This was her luck, good or bad. She didn't yet know which.

Of one thing she was certain. She wasn't welcome but he was not being so very unpleasant about it now. He was stuck with her, as he had said, so he probably was being philosophic too. A little late about it, but that was the way the cookie always crumbled, anyway. With those eyes, that quiet manner that was more silencing than revealing, he could have been crushing. She was, after all, the uninvited guest.

Besides, she was unenlightening about who she was, or where she was going.

Yes—she could see there was a case against her.

To be a girl unidentified and lost, was unforgivable!

They drove in silence a long way. Cindie thought it must be five miles at least before they spoke again. The Land-Rover seemed to ricochet from one spinifex bush to another, yet all the time the land remained fiat. It went on and on
forever
, now turning a wonderful rosella red because the sun was westering. The sky was layered with the thin streams of amethyst and purple sundown clouds. The light shining through them put a strange rose-coloured dew over the earth as far as the eye could see. Earlier it had been dusty and arid, now it was lovely.