The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  “My name’s John Marchmont,” the stranger said, unaffected, coming so close that Paul could smell his aftershave, which was probably lethal. “What’s yours?”

  Paul had recognised the name immediately. In the sloppy shirt and trousers the man could be an imposter. He expected that the merchant prince who owned Mirabilly would be dressed in a white suit with a collar and tie, so he went on the offensive. “Edward Silveras,” he said, giving Marchmont one of his aliases. He went on clipping while Marchmont followed, exuding his flowery poison.

  “Where do you live?”

  “With a family in the Village.”

  “Not your family?”

  Paul went on clipping but gave the stranger a cover story. “My mother died last year from radiation sickness and left me with the family. My father was a scientist and he died earlier from the same radiation. They were in the Monte Bello Islands.”

  Marchmont pondered and then said, “I’m very sorry to hear that. Would you like to have a look at the radio shack?”

  This was the one offer that could deflect Paul from his plans, an opportunity to penetrate the enemy command centre. If he could get inside he could microfilm and memorise priceless data for his intelligence report. He put the clippers down and followed Marchmont across the lawn. As they went past the back door, Marchmont said to Dinka, “I’m taking Master Edward Silveras to see the radio room, Dinka. He can finish his work later.”

  Dinka squealed, “That aint no Silveras you got there! That’s Paul Travis, more tricky than a box of brown snakes!”

  Paul signalled to Dinka behind Marchmont’s back with this hands and facial expression: the fate in store for her was death by strangulation.

  Marchmont didn’t seem to mind. He chuckled, “I thought you might be pulling my leg. So you’re Ellen Travis’s son, are you?”

  Paul felt uncomfortable but it had to be endured for the opportunity. When they moved into a room like an office, Marchmont’s eyes were consuming Paul. “You certainly are your mother’s son,” Marchmont said, nodding as though Paul would understand this idiotic point. Paul knew he had the classification right: dangerous.

  In the radio room there was a young operator whom Paul knew as Terry. Terry addressed him as if they were old friends. Paul returned a blast of gamma and concentrated on absorbing all the secret information he could. There was a bank of radios along one wall faced by chairs and headsets. The dials and switches were complicated and there were masses of wires. You could switch on a speaker and hear pilots talking. Marchmont attempted to explain, but he didn’t really understand and Terry took over. Paul learned that you could not only talk to aircraft flying around the Northern Territory and Queensland but reach out to houses anywhere in the world. The enemy was certainly formidable.

  Terry seemed to think that Paul would find it interesting to know how his school lessons were transmitted. At this point, Paul said he had to go. He was glad to get out because Marchmont kept staring at him but didn’t say much.

  Paul finished the hedge and decided he had gathered enough intelligence and there was no need to check the airport. When he got home Ellen subjected him to the usual interrogation but despite her experienced probing he did not yield. However, he thought that since Ellen had actually been mentioned, he might be able to turn the tables on her and obtain some of her secrets. He explained that he had been arrested by a suspicious stranger that afternoon who had taken him to HQ at the Big House, but he had managed to escape. The stranger’s name was Marchmont.

  His mother’s reaction was odd. She didn’t cross-examine him at all. Not one question. She stopped talking and went off into space. It confirmed what he thought. The man was dangerous. His mother told him to go and wash for dinner. Nothing much happened that evening except that Ellen was quiet. When his father asked her why, she said she wasn’t quiet. When Paul went to his room later to go to bed, she came in.

  “Paul, I’ve decided I don’t want you working at the Big House any more.” She spoke in a low ‘I-mean-what-I-say’ voice. “If you want a job, get something on the Hill or in the Village. Don’t go to the Big House again. I’ll speak to Goffy Jones in the morning.”

  Paul said, “I need to know the reason for this embargo. My gold reserves are going to suffer.”

  She smiled weakly and said he would have to do as he was told. Ellen, like many Category A people, threw an immediate security screen round all her proposals. That was why she was dangerous. All her operations had to be questioned and ultimately penetrated and understood. Not a clever way to work. On the contrary, his father was one of the few people who didn’t need to be classified.

  Paul retired to the security shelter under his bed sheets with a flashlight, special ink mixed from ochres found on the eroded banks of the Juduba, and a pen and paper; he compiled his report. He checked with his commander on his high frequency transmitter and it was confirmed that he should disregard Parental Order 6/3902 as necessary.

  5

  It wasn’t until 1971 when Paul was sixteen that Marchmont came into his life again.

  A party was to be held under a marquee on the lawn of the Big House to celebrate the arrival from New York of Mr and Mrs Marchmont. Mrs Marchmont was a new acquisition. She had two children of her own who were not much younger than Paul and they were to be at the party too.

  Ellen seemed to have had a change of heart and the long-standing prohibition on Paul’s presence at the Big House was in abeyance.

  The marquee for the party had been sent from Brisbane. Paul helped his father and the gang set it up. It was like a fairy castle with a pale blue and white lining. Cold air was pumped into the space between the canvas and the lining. When the system worked properly, the interior was chilly and uncomfortable; when it didn’t work the air was stiflingly hot. The portable air-conditioning plant made an unpleasant vibration even parked as far away as the length of the hoses carrying the air would allow. “Ours is not to reason why,” Ted said to Paul. His father had a way of accepting wacky things like that.

  At this time Paul was working and saving to fulfill Ellen’s ambition that he should go to Sydney University. She had had her mind set on this ever since Paul could remember; it had become an accepted fact of life. He would finish his secondary schooling mostly at Mirabilly by correspondence from Darwin, supplemented by radio lessons and short courses in Darwin; and some classes with the Hill and Village kids. Ellen said he was lucky to be having a private education, like those posh Bloomsbury kids in the early twentieth century who were even smarter than their professors.

  Paul was over six feet tall, strongly built and looked more like nineteen or twenty. To earn money he was helping build a road on Mirabilly, working with a gang forty miles from the Hill, where a cliff a hundred feet high in places marked off the highlands from the lowlands. The high ground, part of the Barkly Tableland, was the best cattle-raising country on the station. The lowland to the south teetered out into desert. Paul had to crinkle up his eyes if he wanted to look toward the shimmering boundaries of their land, millions of acres away.

  On Mirabilly there were jobs where you could earn twice as much for half the effort of building roads. A worker in the fellmongery scrubbed cattle carcasses with a water brush as they came past him on the line. The man next to him trimmed the fat. They worked in the cool, scrubbing and slicing and talking all day. Ted knew Paul needed the money and he could have muscled Paul into a job on the killing line, but Ted didn’t operate that way.

  In the week before the Marchmonts were due to arrive, Paul was part of a gang of six men and earning almost as much as they were. He disliked the work. The men were alien to him, harsh, monosyllabic. He was doing it because Ted said that if he wanted to work on Mirabilly he had to start at the bottom. No privileges. He intended to qualify as a pilot as soon as he could. He had already mastered the technical manuals for the station’s light aircraft and flown sometimes as a stock observer.

  At eight o’clock in the morning on the day when Joh
n Marchmont was going to inspect progress on the road, Paul and the gang were breaking boulders with pickaxes and spreading the fragments on the road near the top of the cliff.

  Their task wasn’t a simple matter of excavating a track. They had to safeguard their work against rains in the summer which could destroy it in a few days. The road had to be compacted, paved with stone and drained. They didn’t have an engineer or any drawings for this work; they did it according to common sense and their knowledge of the climate. Two weeks before, Ted had described what he wanted, pointing to a possible line up the rock face and then driven off leaving them with the grader, bulldozer and dynamite. He noted progress each day when he came in the truck to pick them up after their shift, usually with the serious joke that it seemed to be taking a hell of a long time.

  The gang had bulldozed, dynamited and hewn out a road to enable cattle driven from the lowland plain to take a twenty mile shortcut to high ground and the slaughterhouse. Ted said you could work out the value of the road by calculating the weight a cattle-beast would lose on a twenty mile drive in the high eighties. Now it was June and they were starting to get those temperatures. They worked an early morning shift of four hours and a late afternoon shift of four hours. At noon, only lizards could move against the face of the rock.

  Paul could just about keep up on the labour side. He had been doing heavy manual tasks on and off for months. He hated cracking rocks and hanging on the end of a shovel because it seemed mindless. After each day’s work he fell on his bed with hardly the energy to eat, let alone think.

  The experience gave him a different perspective on the gang; they were all in their thirties or older; it was as though their bodies were made of wood and steel; they didn’t bleed or hurt; their heads were lumps on their shoulders which registered what to do next: lift, shove, punch, drink. For them, life was hard yacker and drinking and eating.

  He couldn’t imagine the sexual lives of the gang. All except one were unmarried; they were the dregs of Mirabilly in the sense that they weren’t reliable or skilled enough for any task, except the hardest and least rewarding labour. Paul feared to be like them because what rock-breaking had done was to turn them into bullocks with jellied brains.

  The gang took a ten minute break after every hour and on the nine o’clock spell, Paul found a shady place in a crack in the cliff and sat down. He was too tired to go up the road to recover a bottle of orange drink he had stowed under a bush. He’d have a quick gulp after he’d rested and before he started work again. He lay back against the stone with the usual feeling of light-headedness. His heart was thumping at first and the effort had driven away thoughts. He began to feel drowsy. He was in the cool of a cave where there were Aboriginal paintings. His imaginings were interrupted by what he thought at first, absurdly, was rain. A fine spray fell from above, breaking on the outcrops of rock as it fell. He put his face up into the spray and caught its pungent smell.

  He moved out from the rock face to get a clearer view upward. About twenty feet above, Shorty Molins was standing with the toes of his boots over the edge, drinking orange juice from a bottle. At the same time, he had opened his flies and was urinating.

  “How y’ doin’ down there, mate?” Molins yelled when he saw Paul. “Coolin’ off?”

  Paul heard the laughter of men he couldn’t see. A black temper exploded in his head. He sprinted to the top of the escarpment, stumbling painfully on the rocks. Molins had cast aside the bottle and Paul could see it was the one he had left under a bush. Molins’s pug face was creased with amusement.

  “Bastard!” Paul shouted and launched a fist at the small-eyed head.

  Molins, a foot shorter than Paul and twice the thickness, had remarkable speed. He squared to Paul, knocking his arm aside and crashed his fist into the side of Paul’s head. Paul fell in the dust.

  “Pissing on you from a great height, Professor!” Molins said, dancing from foot to foot.

  Paul was foolishly down only for a few seconds. He thrust himself at Molins again, his fists uncoordinated. Molins caught him quickly with two blows. One scrunched his nose and cheek, the other hit his chin.

  Paul was on the ground again, his mouth gulping the dirt. He couldn’t get up. He could hear laughter. And then another voice cutting through the hilarity: “What the hell are you doing with the boy?”

  Blue Murphy, the boss of the gang, put a hand under Paul’s arm and dragged him to his feet. He said quietly, “There you go, mate. I’d keep y’ paws to y’self if I were you.”

  “Yeah,” Shorty Molins snorted, jigging and shadow-boxing at the audience. “Y’ might get hurt!”

  “Are you OK, son? What happened?” Marchmont demanded, his face glowing under a digger’s hat.

  Paul’s cheek ached. His nose felt as big as a balloon. His left eye was closing. He wanted to say that Molins was a bloody animal who stole his drink and pissed on him. Instead he choked the words back. “I’m all right. It was just a bit of fun.”

  The men were suddenly silent. Paul scooped up his hat, turned his back on Marchmont and hurried back to his place down the hill.

  *

  At the end of their day, Ted Travis arrived in the truck to inspect the work and drive them back to the station. His eyes didn’t dwell on Paul’s face for more than a second. He never asked a question or made a remark.

  When the gang climbed into the back of the truck, Molins was next to Paul and elbowed him in the ribs. “Why don’t you tell Pappy, Professor?” he snorted.

  Paul didn’t answer. Ted stopped at the Village and the men got out. Ted said to Paul, “You better come into the club and wash up. Your Ma’ll go mad if she sees you like that.” Ted didn’t ask what happened.

  Paul went into the shed which served as a club; it was a bar for workers on the station, a billiard room with one-armed bandits and a refreshment counter with chilled sandwiches and ham rolls. He went to the washroom and cleaned his hands and face with a paper towel. He examined his head in the mirror; it wasn’t as bad as it felt. One eye was puffy. His lip was split. His nose was red and looked bigger.

  When he came out of the washroom and passed through to the bar, Ted was talking to a circle of his mates and he nodded to Paul to join them. One of the men saw the marks and asked what happened. Paul said a camel backed into him and they all laughed and forgot it.

  Ted led him out of the bar after an hour; he was light-headed with the beer. “Your Ma ain’t goin’ to like this,” Ted said. He drove to the house and halted outside the gate. They made their way unsteadily up the path to the door. Ellen came out on to the verandah. She had been waiting and watching, trim and severe. This was the critical time when Ted could arrive somewhat tipsy. When she saw Paul’s face her manner changed.

  “Oh, my God, you’ve had an accident!”

  “It’s nothing, Mum.”

  “The boy’s OK,” Ted said calmly.

  Ted could hold a lot of booze, but the effect showed quickly. He smiled more easily. He relaxed. His hands weaved around ineffectually. Ellen knew the signs.

  “So you’ve got the boy into your ways at last, have you?” she hissed, “I’ve told you often enough that I’m not one of those Village tarts that you can come home to like this!”

  Ted met Ellen’s onslaught with smiling silence, as he usually did. He didn’t really understand her standards of refinement. As Ellen was fond of telling him, Ted didn’t know anything before they were married except a bar room and the back of a horse. It was said that Ted could half kill a man like Shorty Molins with his fists, but he would never even contradict Ellen.

  Ellen took Paul inside, bathed his face, put iodine and plasters on the cuts and anxiously satisfied herself that nothing was broken. He didn’t mention that his nose was painful and floppy. He told her he’d fallen off a horse and she said riding was dangerous and he should stay off horses. Ellen herself rode occasionally. If she knew what had really happened she’d have stopped him working with the gang and probably banned him from t
he Marchmont celebration.

  *

  The Marchmont party had arrived by plane from Darwin a few days before Paul’s fight. They were seen about the Big House and gardens as preparations were being made, interested, but trying to keep out of the way so that they could make a grand entrance as guests of honour later.

  John Marchmont acknowledged Paul from a distance, as he cut across the lawn of the Big House on an errand for his mother. “Mr Alvarez!” he shouted with a salute. Paul waved back, but scuttled on. In a way it was flattering to be remembered by this man whom everybody on Mirabilly held in awe, even if he did get the alias wrong. There was a caution in what people on the station said about Marchmont. They felt they lived by his grace and he had access to worlds beyond their comprehension.

  Paul soon spotted the wife, Katherine, behind the glassed-in terrace, trying not to look curious as she looked out. She was long and fair, graceful and tanned and she wore transparent flowing clothes. Then there was her son, Alexander, said to have been adopted by Marchmont, about Paul’s age, slinking around outside, watching haughtily, pale, with blond hair and light eyes like his mother and, oddly, like his stepfather. And the girl, she was fourteen, but you’d honestly think twenty. She paraded herself around the patio, rolling her eyes and her bum, inviting everybody to get a load of her. She had, Paul thought, the most superb knockers and she knew it and put them about. She had dark red hair and an unfreckled, creamy skin. She noticed Paul and she knew he noticed her. He felt it would only be a short time before they were friends and the thought made him hot.

  He figured that to get to Emma (Dinka had given him the lowdown on the names as well as a potted history) he needed to be matey with the weedy Alex. He resolved to speak to Alex as soon as possible.

  Paul’s girlfriend from the Village wouldn’t be at the party. He was free and his girlfriend wasn’t for publication anyway. She was the daughter of one of the workers in the hide store. She had five brothers and sisters and no mother. Her mother ran off with another man. Ellen would have killed Paul if she knew about Charlene. To Ellen, Charlene was trash, but Paul liked Charlene a lot.