AS I DROVE I felt something nagging away at my consciousness. A warning light came on inside my head. Something significant had just happened back there, but I was buggered if I could figure out what it was. Something I’d seen? Whatever it was, it refused to come out of hiding. I shrugged it off.
By the time we reached the old Gunshot Diggings it was light. I slowed down. This was where the Rabble scratched out their miserable existence. There were maybe fifty people, prospectors, drifters and other desperadoes, living out here. Many of them would recognise me. No point in drawing attention to ourselves.
I did spot a couple of blokes up among the cluster of caravans and demountable hovels the Rabble called home: a thin man stretching and staring into the gaping hole of the day, a fat one trying to kick an excavator to death. Neither of them paid me any attention.
The riskiest spot would be at the bore, where we rejoined the Gunshot Road. A lot of the gougers came down to top up their water and chew the fat—what little there was to be chewed in a world where the main activities were swinging a pick and staring at a mountain of rocks for specks of gold.
I approached the stand-pipe cautiously: sure enough, there was an old Mack parked there. I knew that truck. Like a lot of other vehicles round here, it had slowly decomposed into an image of its owner: it was rusted and dusty, worn around the edges, with bits hanging off or welded on, stripped down to the bare essentials. As was the bloke on top of the tray.
He looked up and gave me a wave.
Damn! Geordie Formwood: eye like a hawk, mouth like a front-end loader. We’d be all over the goldfields in minutes if I didn’t shut him up.
I pulled over, backed up.
‘Geordie.’
‘Emily Tempest! Up at first crow call!’ The chirpy Aberdonian burr, not what I wanted to hear right now. ‘What brings you out the Gunshot, this time of the day?’
‘Slight—er—complication in town, Geordie.’
‘Complication?’ He squinted at me.
‘Haven’t seen anything resembling a cop round here, have you?’
The squint grew squintier. ‘Only you.’
‘I seem to have gone across to the other side.’
‘Oh. That sort of complication…’
He nodded sympathetically: this was something he could relate to. Most of these characters have spent their lives skating along the outer limits of the law: claims were made to be jumped, unwatched fuel siphoned, miscellaneous objects liberated from owners careless enough to leave them unattended for a split second.
He climbed down from the tray, scratched his baggy britches and his baggier behind, looked up and down the track. He lit up a ciggie and gave vent to the Formwood dawn chorus: a horrible array of snorts, hacks and general crepitation. Christ, if the smokes didn’t kill him, I might have to.
‘No, Em, haven’t seen a soul.’
‘Good on you, Geordie—and you haven’t seen me either, have you?’
He shook his head, grinned: he knew the routine. ‘Hide nor hair.’ He peered in the window, saw Danny.
‘Hellooo.’
The boy said nothing, but the way he curled into the corner was answer enough for Geordie. He turned back to me. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Danny.’
‘What’s his story?’
‘You heard what happened to Wireless?’
The blisters on his lips bristled. ‘Aye—fuckin jacks. No offence intended.’
‘None taken Geordie—like I said, I’m not with em any more.’
‘What’s he done?’
‘Nothing—but then neither had Wireless.’
His mouth grew granite-edged. ‘Never was convinced it was him who done Doc.’
‘Me neither.’
I put the car into gear.
‘Where you taking him, Em?’
‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you, mate.’
He recoiled. ‘We wouldn’t want that.’ He slid a hand down the greasy shorts, gave a farewell rattle of the cavities. ‘Good luck, Em. Danny.’
The boy said nothing.
*
I pushed on, out to where the corrugations were enough to rattle your wheel nuts off. Twenty minutes of that and we were on the western extremities of the original fields, where the road crawled round the foot of the abandoned Gunshot Mine. I pulled over, took a look around. Couldn’t see much past the encroaching hills and the turpentine scrub. Felt uneasy. I needed a vantage point.
‘Why we stopping?’ asked Danny.
‘Gonna drive up to the summit; check out the lie of the land.’
I worked the truck up to the top of the rise, climbed onto the tray and examined the Gunshot Road: no sign of pursuit, no telltale clouds of dust, no movement other than a kestrel floating on distant thermals.
I looked over at the pit, shuddered. I’d never liked this place. I’d come here once as a kid, heard the story from my father. It started as a conventional underground mine, and was dramatically converted into open cut when the shaft caved in on top of the dozen poor bastards working it at the time.
The operation had closed down years ago, but a massive crater remained—along with a bullet-riddled sign saying the company was engaging in ‘world-class rehabilitation’ of the site.
The only rehab visible thus far was the sign itself, a drooping fence and a clutch of tough little samphire shrubs that clung to the slopes.
On impulse, I clambered onto the roof, peered into the pit. An intimidating chasm stared back at me: stern-faced ironstone walls, deeply incised, gullied and tunnelled. A dizzying, crumbling maw, eighty metres deep, five hundred across. It reminded me of the Drunks’ Camp back in Bluebush: dark, scarred. An abandoned mess we’d all rather not think about.
I thought about Andulka’s warning that all this blasting and digging was stirring up old ghosts. Had a sense of what he was getting at.
Way down on the mine floor, a murder of crows picked at something, maybe a wallaby that had gone too close to the edge.
I turned around, studied the plains ahead. There was a handful of abandoned buildings up there: the old Gunshot headworks, a dilapidated office, a workshop, the rock-crushing battery, silent these thirty years now.
Beyond that, scrubby desert.
Once again, all seemed clear.
I made to jump back down, then paused. Was that a flash of light from a mulga copse beyond the buildings? I squinted, shielded my eyes. Wished I’d brought the binoculars. There it was again: a glimmer among the green-grey leaves.
A windscreen, reflecting the morning sun? Somebody with their own binoculars waiting in ambush? Maybe just a bit of scrap metal from the old days, some long-abandoned dolly pot or donkey, a collapsed headframe, a broken bottle.
No option. I had to go and check it out; west was the only road open to us. They’d be coming from the east, and sooner rather than later. I climbed down and spoke to Danny.
‘I’m going to scout up ahead.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Probably nothing, but I want to be sure. Best if you wait here.’
He wasn’t happy with that, but I didn’t give him a choice. I’d lose any chance of stealth if I went out there with the boy stumbling along beside me, jumping at shadows.
There was a honeysuckle grevillea alongside the car. I dragged off a long orange bloom, handed it over to him.
‘Try this.’
He put it to his mouth, seemed to find a fleeting relief in the trickle of nectar that ran across his lower lip and onto his chin.
‘You be careful,’ he whispered, raking my heart with a long, silent plea.
I ruffled his hair and set off.
Crouching low, using whatever cover was available, I worked my way around to the south side of the track. I moved through thick scrub, tall grass, past the abandoned mine works I’d seen from the rise.
The tallest of the buildings was the ore-crushing battery, a corrugated iron tower stretching eighty feet into the air. Even from a hundred yards away, I could hear a patter of eerie creaking sounds emanating from its upper reaches, metal sheets and beams expanding in the morning sun.
I paused. The battery looked bloody dangerous, like it was ready to collapse. Somebody ought to demolish it.
South of the mulga was a rocky rise which offered the prospect of both vantage and concealment. I cut across, climbed its southern slope, wormed my way between two sandstone boulders at the summit, looked down onto the copse.
‘Oh Christ,’ I muttered to myself. There was a car in there, all right—a cop car.
They’d given up on roadblocks in favour of a more subtle approach.
‘Morning Emily.’ The voice was smug, familiar—and right in my ear. I whirled round, dropped my face into the dirt, cursing myself for an incompetent idiot.
He was leaning against the boulder to my right, his arms crossed, his blue eyes coldly triumphant.
Bruce Cockburn.