Worry Warts (7 page)

What was the point of going down a mine, finding opals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and then spending most of it having shotgun pellets surgically removed?

‘You won't find big stuff like this in the mullocks,' said Curly, thumping a big dirty rock onto the counter, ‘but you might pick up some of these.' He rattled a jam jar half full of tiny dirty rocks.

Keith stared at the dirty rocks to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

Yes, they were definitely dirty rocks.

So that's why Curly was called Curly. It wasn't his arm hairs, it was his brain.

‘Thanks for the advice,' said Keith, backing towards the door, ‘and they're great-looking rocks, but I've only got room in my bag for opals.'

Curly grinned for the first time since Keith had met him.

Oh no, thought Keith, here's where he grabs his shotgun and runs amok.

But instead Curly rubbed some of the dirt off the big rock and held it up in front of a window. Colours flashed out of it.

‘Never looks much till it's cut and polished,' said Curly.

Keith went over and took the rock from him and ran his fingers over the rough sandstone and the smooth ribbons of flashing opal running through it.

Suddenly he didn't feel exhausted any more.

He couldn't wait to get out on the mullock dumps and start sifting through the dirty rocks and sorting out which ones were opals.

‘Thanks very much,' he said to Curly, handing him the rock. ‘You've made a troubled family very happy.'

He headed for the door.

‘Just a sec,' said Curly. ‘Talking about families, where's yours?'

Keith froze.

He forced his mouth open to tell Curly the story he'd made up earlier that morning, the one about Mum and Dad being kidnapped by Taiwanese pirates who were demanding a ransom of opals and potato scallops, but suddenly it didn't seem like such a good story.

He tried to make up another one, but his brain had turned to dust.

Helplessly he pointed in what he thought was the direction of Orchid Cove.

‘Good-o,' said Curly, ‘they're in the caravan park. Just checking they're not camped on my claim.'

Keith looked at his watch and sighed.

Two thirty-three.

He'd been squatting on this mullock heap with the scorching wind blowing dust into his eyes and mouth for over an hour and a half.

He must have sifted tonnes of dirt through Mum's plastic strainer.

He'd smashed hundreds of dirty rocks with Dad's hammer.

Nothing.

He looked across at the next heap where an Aboriginal family were systematically sifting the dirt and chatting and laughing.

‘How ya goin?' one of the women called across to him.

‘Not very well,' Keith shouted back.

‘Don't give up,' yelled the woman, ‘we found heaps in there last week.'

Keith looked at his watch and coughed.

Twenty past four.

This second dump was no better. He must have sifted just about the whole thing, most of it in the plastic strainer and the rest in his mouth, and he hadn't found a single opal.

Plus there was the whine.

The opal fields were noisy enough with generators and drills clattering away, but coming from behind the next dump was a high-pitched whine that made concentrating on finding opals impossible.

Keith couldn't stand it any longer.

He threw down his trowel and strainer and stormed over the next dump towards the whine.

As soon as he got over the top he saw what it was.

A small generator strapped to a tent on legs.

Keith went over and tapped the tent on the shoulder.

A flap opened and a man's face, eerily lit by a purple light, peered out.

‘Excuse me, but do you have to make so much noise?' said Keith.

‘Sorry,' said the man. ‘Ultraviolet light. Shows up the opal.'

‘Have you found any?' asked Keith.

‘Absolutely,' said the man. ‘Last week.'

‘Well it's nice to know there's some around,' said Keith. ‘I'd just about given up on that heap over there.'

‘You won't find any over there,' said the man.

‘Why not?' asked Keith.

‘Because,' said the man, ‘I did that yesterday.'

Keith dropped his school bag and wiped the sweat off his face.

At last he'd found one.

A mullock heap that hadn't been noodled in the last week.

In fact this one had wisps of dry grass growing on it so perhaps it had never been noodled at all.

Fat chance.

But he had to keep trying.

There was an old caravan by the dump so Keith banged on the door and called out to see if anyone was home.

No one was.

He went over to the shaft and yelled down it.

No one answered.

Then he noticed the sign.

Keep Out. Private Claim. By Order Of C. Kovacs, General Store.

Blimey, thought Keith, this must be Curly 's mine.

Then another thought came to him. With Curly back at the store, this was his chance to check out an opal mine without getting shot.

He shone his torch down the shaft, but couldn't even see the bottom.

Keith knew he had to go down.

Just for a look.

Above the shaft was a winch with a coil of thick wire. Keith uncoiled the wire and it slithered down into the darkness.

When it went slack he knew it had touched the bottom. He put the torch in his mouth, gripped the wire with both hands, planted the soles of his feet against the sides of the shaft and half climbed, half slid down in a shower of dirt and rock fragments.

The bottom of the shaft was cool and dark.

He shone the torch around. There was a tunnel running off to one side, high enough to walk along.

Keith didn't.

He gazed for a while at the walls of the tunnel, at the bands and seams of rock running along it. Some looked hard, some looked crumbly, and any one of them could have been stuffed with opal.

But he didn't touch.

He didn't want to be a thief.

He wanted to be a miner.

Curly stared at Keith, the lump of meatloaf and the slice of bread in his hands forgotten.

‘Paint my store?'

‘That's right,' said Keith. ‘I'll paint your store in return for a day down your mine. As long as I can keep everything I find down there.'

Curly thought about this for a long time.

‘There's not much down there,' he said. ‘I've given up on it.'

Oh yeah, thought Keith, so why have you got a big Keep Out sign plastered all over it?

‘I'll pay for the paint,' said Keith.

He'd already seen a paintbox for eleven fifty on the stationery shelf and a big drawing pad for three dollars. That was nearly all the money he had left but it was worth it.

‘Are you any good?' asked Curly.

‘I did a truck on the way here and the owner was delighted,' said Keith.

Curly thought some more.

‘OK', he said, ‘it's a deal. Paint this place and you can have full use of my claim for twenty-four hours.'

They shook hands.

‘I'll do it tomorrow,' said Keith.

‘You'd better buy the paint now,' said Curly, ‘because I'm away on business most of tomorrow.'

Keith went to the stationery shelf and grabbed the paintbox and pad.

When he got back to the counter he saw that Curly was over the other side of the store doing a sum on his fingers.

‘I reckon,' said Curly, ‘you'll need about twenty litres to do the outside of this place. That'll be a hundred and eighty-five dollars please.'

The first half-litre was the hardest.

Keith knocked on the door of the first caravan and a man in off-white underpants appeared. He looked like he'd just woken up.

‘Sorry to disturb you so early,' said Keith, ‘but have you got any old paint to spare? I'm painting Curly's store.'

The man stared at him.

‘Not a picture,' Keith added, ‘the store itself.' He thought he'd better get that straight as it could be a bit confusing.

‘Why doesn't Curly supply the paint?' growled the man.

‘He's supplying the stepladder and the drip sheets,' said Keith, ‘and I'm supplying the paint.'

‘Why?' growled the man.

‘It's a long story,' said Keith, ‘but it involves raising money for a very worthy cause.'

‘What worthy cause?' growled the man.

‘Well,' said Keith, ‘my Mum and Dad have got this fish-and-chip shop way over on the coast and the hotel has just started up a snack bar and the new resort round on the headland has got three restaurants and . . .'

‘Hang on,' grunted the man.

He went inside the van and Keith heard him clattering about. He came back with a litre tin of paint, handed it to Keith and closed the door.

‘Thanks,' Keith called out.

He opened the tin with the claw end of Dad's hammer. The tin was half full of dull red antirust paint.

Nice one, thought Keith. Only nineteen and a half litres to go.

The door of the second caravan swung open and the middle-aged woman in the fluffy dressing gown smiled at Keith.

‘It's OK, love,' she said, ‘we found it. I superglued it back in and he's eaten steak on it and everything.'

Keith explained that he hadn't come about the filling, he'd come about paint.

‘Merv,' she called into the van, ‘dig out that aquamarine gloss.' She turned back to Keith. ‘We got it to do the van but it was too bright. Good for a shop but. Excuse me asking, but what are those lines on your face?'

For a moment Keith didn't know what she was talking about. Then he realised.

‘It was the sheet,' he explained. ‘When I was asleep last night. It got scrunched up under my face.'

He didn't explain that it had been a drip sheet. Or that it had got scrunched up because he'd been tense all night in case Curly had come by and sprung him sleeping on the store verandah and called the cops.

The woman's husband appeared with a four-litre paint can and the woman insisted on opening his mouth and showing Keith the filling. Keith didn't mind because the can was two-thirds full.

The next four vans didn't have any paint, but then Keith hit the jackpot.

A youngish bloke with tattoos stuck his head out of his caravan window and grinned when he heard what Keith was doing.

‘Your lucky day, mate,' he said.

He told Keith how he'd been employed by the Department of Main Roads to paint the white posts by the side of the highway and how he'd painted them all the way to the opal fields and then had got bored and chucked it in.

‘Do you need any brushes or turps?' he asked as he pulled the tarpaulin off the back of his ute.

‘No thanks,' said Keith, wishing he hadn't spent all his money except eleven cents buying brushes and turps from Curly.

The bloke swung a ten-litre drum off the back of the ute.

‘It's white,' he said, ‘with reflective particles.'

Keith couldn't believe his luck.

He thanked the bloke and said he hoped the bloke found enough opals to pay someone else to paint the white posts. Then he started rolling the drum towards the store.

After a bit he stopped.

A news bulletin was just beginning on a radio in one of the vans.

Keith listened carefully, but there was no mention of any nationwide searches.

Keith wondered why not.

Perhaps Mum and Dad hadn't gone to the police.

Perhaps they didn't want to find him.

Perhaps they were glad he'd gone.

He pushed the thoughts out of his mind.

He was much too busy to be a worry wart.

By the time Keith was halfway round the diggings, word had spread that he was doing up Curly's place and people gave him paint without even being asked.

Two kids from the Aboriginal family Keith had met the day before ran up and gave him a half tin of Royal Purple and a full tin of Mandarin Orange, which they explained were unwanted Christmas presents.

The ultraviolet man popped out of his corrugated-iron hut and handed over a quarter-litre of matt black left over from painting the metal detector he'd been using before he got his ultraviolet machine.

A man with a beard and a European accent rode up on a motorbike and tossed Keith nearly two litres of Signal Red. He said he'd been using it to paint signs around his shaft saying
Trespassers Will Be Stabbed
but he didn't need it now because he'd become a Jehovah's Witness.

Even as Keith was thanking the man for the paint and the pamphlets, he saw the sun glinting off yet more tins as people carried them towards him across the mullock heaps.

Keith crouched in front of the store and picked up Dad's hammer and levered the lids off the twenty-seven tins of paint and gave them all a good stir except the four that had gone solid.

By his calculation he had eighteen and a half litres.

It'll be enough, he told himself. When Curly said twenty he probably thought I'd be slapping it on like an amateur. He didn't know I already had a fish-and-chip shop and a Toyota Corolla under my belt.

Keith poured the Royal Purple into the Department of Main Roads Reflective White and stirred until he had a pastel violet that was just like the Autumn Crocus on the golf buggies at the Orchid Cove Resort.

He looked at his watch.

Nine forty-three.

The woman in the pub had said that Curly usually got back from his card game on Sundays at about six.

Eight hours and seventeen minutes left.

Time to start painting.

Keith didn't look at his watch.

His neck and back and arms were aching too much to make the effort, plus there was no point as his watch was covered with a big dollop of Mongolian Beige.

He needed all his strength to keep painting and not fall off the stepladder.

He finished the Celery Green section of the guttering and grinned wearily as the applause broke out again.