The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  Nick and Paul, in their everyday uniform of t-shirts and jeans stood in the front office with Melda one Saturday morning. Melda always wore a smart dress and had her dark hair back-combed to stand high on her head. Nick threw Melda a coin.

  “You do it, luv,” he said. “We don’t want any mistakes. Heads, I’m grounded; tails it’s Paul.”

  Melda squeezed her bulky figure out from behind the desk, the coin in one of her beringed hands. “I’m not used to this,” she said, as she balanced the twenty cent piece on her thumb awkwardly.

  Paul watched her movements as if they were in slow motion. “This is the big moment,” he said, trying to be flippant.

  Nick and Paul had hired two more planes and pilots in a year and now had their own part-time engineer to supervise the servicing. They had a sprawling business, a huge overdraft, lots of bills to pay, and almost no money of their own – but the accountants said they were doing fine. It was simply a matter of flying further and faster and running faster and faster in their office.

  The pair weren’t always the best at communicating and perhaps that was because they were apart during most of their working hours. But they had both independently arrived at the thought that one of them should be grounded to manage the business, a task that couldn’t be passed to anybody they could afford to employ. The only way that came naturally to them to resolve the problem was to toss a coin.

  Paul would not have admitted it openly but he was becoming bored with flying. Looking after the business on the ground wasn’t attractive, but it would be a change. He hoped almost desperately to for the coin to ground him. He assumed Nick felt the same.

  Melda giggled and threw rather than tossed the coin into the air; it turned over lazily a few times but both men declared it a valid toss. The coin bounced on the linoleum floor and rolled under a desk; they all had to crowd around to see it lying in its resting place. Paul looked past Melda’s bundle of hair at the disc with the over-pretty bas-relief of Queen Elizabeth II in profile. The disappointment was like being winded.

  Nick straightened up and put his sallow face close to Paul’s. “A head. Agreed? Fair enough?” he said, holding out his hand. “I gotta push paper!”

  Paul determined not to show his real feelings. “Yeah!” he said, shaking the proffered hand.

  Nick chucked the coin idly in his palm and slumped into a chair, frowning. “Well, fuck it, somebody had to get the short straw! Sorry, Melda. Shit!”

  Paul was staring stiff-faced out of the open window, the images of passing cars unseen, the smell of frying unsmelt.

  “What’s the matter with you, misery-guts?” Nick asked him, “You’re flying, man. You’re fuckin’ free!”

  Paul started hesitantly. “Hey, Nick. I think we’ve got a cock-up here. You’re not happy. I thought you wanted to be grounded. You got a head and you are grounded.”

  “Balls,” Nick said, “I may as well tell you. I wanted to fly and I’m not, but OK. We have to move on.”

  “But I wanted to be grounded and I’ve got to fly!” Paul protested.

  Nick was bemused. “No kidding? You don’t want to fly?”

  “Flying’s OK but I’d like a change. I thought you felt like that too, Nick. I thought we were both bidding for the job as manager of this outfit.”

  “No way! Hell, I don’t want a change! You crazy guy! My wonderful partner,” Nick said, leaping up, spinning around and letting out a yell. He jigged to the office fridge and pulled out a six-pack of Fosters, throwing cans to Melda and Paul. “Drinks all round. To our new office manager, accountant, managing director and chief toilet-roll buyer. I give you Paul Travis! A long and successful career to you, mate!”

  Paul let a big pull on the beer hit his throat and detonate. He was flooded with relief. “Hell, I got it arse about.”

  “Jeez, yes,” Nick said, putting an arm around Paul’s shoulders. “You sit here and smell the fry-ups while I’m out there in the big blue. Yes, please!”

  *

  When Paul was installed in the Darwin office he had a chance to do, or try to do, all the things he had thought about in the air. The company was beginning to become well-known; they were young, informal and enthusiastic. The only requirements were to deliver on schedule, safeguard the plane and sweet-talk the customers. Paul could sense after another year that they had achieved a critical mass. The business was starting to grow as though it was alive and at a rate that seemed to be independent of his and Nick’s personal efforts.

  8

  On his visits to Mirabilly since Ted’s death, Paul’s instinct had been to keep away from the Big House except for necessary business, although the fact that Mather continued to see Ellen brought him in touch with them. He heard from Terry Dunn in the radio shack that Katherine, Marchmont’s wife, reputedly an alchoholic, had been killed in a car wreck in New York. Terry also provided him with information about Marchmont’s latest girlfriend, Linda Ryland and her daughter. Paul wondered what had happened to Emma. And he felt a cold curiosity about Marchmont.

  The new mistress’s daughter’s name was Sophie; Paul met her in the radio shack with Terry Dunn on a weekend when he had come to see Ellen. She was sixteen, four years younger than him, tall, full-bosomed with thick golden hair, clear, white, babyish skin and candid gray eyes. She wasn’t in the least like the wild and wilful Emma. She was calm, mature for a sixteen-year-old and sisterly rather than flirtatious. She talked freely about her life and questioned Paul about his. Her manner was very direct and when she said she’d never flown in a light plane before, Paul offered to take her up some time.

  “How about tomorrow morning?” she replied instantly and it was arranged.

  What had been no more than a macho gesture toward a pretty girl that would come to nothing, became a date.

  Paul slept in the tiny box room at Ellen’s cabin. In the morning, he borrowed one of the station’s utes and drove to the Big House at eleven. Sophie was outside, in trainers and denims with a thin t-shirt and her hair tied back, looking very young.

  As she climbed into the ute, John Marchmont, whom Paul hadn’t seen since the garden party four years before, came out of the house. He was frowning. He had thickened a little with the indulgence of affluence, but Paul discerned the same vigorous and calculating character.

  He searched for something of himself in Marchmont’s appearance, something in the shape of the forehead, the nose, the chin, a mannerism. Possibly it was there… no. The colourings were all wrong. Marchmont was fine-featured and smoothly contoured, while Paul was inches taller, bony and swarthy.

  “Where are you going, Sophie?” Marchmont asked.

  “I already told you last night, flying with Mr Travis,” she said with a sweet smile.

  Marchmont didn’t respond. He strolled up to the ute and bent down at the passenger window, addressing Paul. “Travis, I hear you’re working for us now. How’s business?” He extended his hand through the window.

  “Tough,” Paul said, taking the clean, manicured, white hand.

  “I’d like Sophie to take a flip with her mother and me this afternoon.”

  The pale eyes searched Paul and his blood quickened at the silky voice that was effectively giving him an order.

  “Hey, wait a minute, boss-man,” Sophie said. “The arrangements are mine. I met Mr Travis yesterday with Terry Dunn. I asked him. I’ve gotta go.” She was coolly emphatic, with the simplicity of a child.

  Marchmont ignored her and stared straight at Paul. “Well, Travis?”

  Paul hit the starter and eased the ute forward. Sophie turned her head towards Paul and opened her eyes wide; it was an ‘I don’t care’ gesture.

  “You look a bit white around the gills, Paul,” she said as they moved down the slope, “Are you scared or something?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m mad!”

  *

  The engine noise from the Cessna 350 filled the cabin as they lifted off the dusty field. Paul talked to Mirabilly flight control, Terry Dunn, as th
ey climbed, explaining their route.

  “I’m going up to seven or eight thousand feet,” he said to Sophie through the headset, “and you can see how big Mirabilly is, well over two million acres.”

  The perfectly blue and cloudless sky was only touched by the occasional wisps of smoke from small bushfires below. The land was covered with a haze of dust. To the north was the green smudge of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Paul took the aircraft down in a dive. He flew low, down valleys, over dry river beds, along miles of low cliffs and ridges; it was a huge wild floor of brown and green. At times they were so low the cattle-beasts were startled and started to run. “This is how we check stock around here. Flying cowboys!” he laughed.

  Paul had intended to give Sophie twenty minutes in the air and then return, but the row with Marchmont made him want to hang on to her a bit longer and he decided to land the plane. He throttled off over a cluster of deserted tin sheds and a stockyard. “Believe it or not, this is a landing strip,” he said, as the plane settled over the level stretch in front of them, bumping and bouncing to a stop.

  Paul turned the plane and taxied it to the sheds, telling control their position and saying they were going to take a look around. It was three o’clock and still blisteringly hot. He fished out two broad-brimmed felt hats and nets from behind the seats and passed one to Sophie.

  “Hope it fits,” he said.

  “Is there anything here to see?” she asked, sounding slightly suspicious, adjusting the hat over her plentiful hair.

  “I’ll take you up to the east ridge.” He slipped a flashlight into his pocket.

  “What’s that for?” she asked. “I’ve never been to such a well-lit place.”

  “It’s a secret.”

  Although she kept questioning, he good-naturedly fended her off. He didn’t know why he had decided to share something with a person he hardly knew and little more than a child at that, unless it was an intimacy that excluded Marchmont. Despite Sophie’s willingness to resist Marchmont, he understood that she respected him.

  The heat didn’t seem to bother her and they walked through arid scrub and climbed to the edge of a cliff. In the distance they could see Brahman cattle grazing. Paul pointed to the dry river course a hundred feet below. “This becomes a roaring torrent in the rains. Over there, on the other side, is the Aborigine Reserve.”

  “Where’s the boundary?” Sophie asked.

  “It’s supposed to be the water-course but it’s shifted over the years. The Aborigines say this is their land. It’s a sacred burial ground.”

  “Are they claiming it or something?”

  “Not at the moment. They’re in no hurry,” Paul said, beginning to move down the face of the cliff. “You get like that when you’ve been around for tens of thousands of years.”

  “Can we go across there, to the caves?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t seem sure.”

  “I’d prefer permission from the tribe.”

  “They don’t have an enquiry office here?” she smiled.

  “Sure, there’s a little green kiosk down the hill with a man in it, selling tickets.”

  “Maybe there isn’t another person for a hundred miles, maybe…” she said, uncertainly.

  “Right. More than a hundred miles.”

  They made their way down a trail in the steep face and crossed the water-course. The light was so bright that they had to keep their hat brims well pulled down and the occasional fly created mayhem by getting under their nets.

  “Is it bad luck to be here?”

  “It’s not bad luck,” Paul said, trying for the right words to express ideas he’d never talked about with any white person except Ted Travis. “This is where they believe the spirits are.”

  “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “My father once asked me that. It’s like going into somebody else’s church or graveyard or temple.”

  “Sure. Respect,” Sophie said.

  He helped Sophie over boulders and they climbed up a cleft in the escarpment for about fifty feet, stopping frequently to get their breath. Patches of wet showed on their shirts. They came to a cave and he beckoned Sophie inside. After a few moments their sight adjusted. As they went down deeper the cave became more spacious. At last they reached an amphitheatre and their sweaty shirts felt chilly. The space was quite cool and lit by a shaft of sunlight coming through a fissure in the roof. At their feet was a noisy stream.

  Paul took the flashlight and moved the beam around the walls which were covered by brilliantly coloured paintings in blue, red, yellow and brown. “I don’t know how far this goes back historically. But thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years. Tribes have worshipped here and sheltered.”

  “It’s very moving,” Sophie whispered.

  Paul searched the walls with his torch until he came to a place where a piece of rock about six feet high and a yard wide had been removed. “I’ve never been in the Big House, but isn’t there a stone in the lounge?”

  “Oh, my God, yes!” Sophie said. “A lovely panel with figures. So somebody broke it off from here? Stole it, I guess.”

  “Yeah. I’ve known this place since I was a child and I’ve never come here without feeling I was trespassing. These are ancestral paintings. The Aboriginals believe they can assume the character of these figures. They sometimes paint the outlines on themselves.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Believe isn’t the right word. It suggests that there is something practical and provable. The spirits are part of the mythic history of this place. The sacred stones that tell the history of the tribes are said to be buried near here.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “You get a lot of marks for enthusiasm and nerve, but no. We better go back to the east ridge now.”

  “Why nerve?”

  “Crocs.”

  He led her back across the water-course and as they were climbing, they came to another cave. He beckoned her inside. “There’s a whole cave system under the ridge, leeched out by the river torrents over years.”

  This time there were no paintings, only natural shapes and colours of yellowish rock. “Look at this.” He pointed to a white vein feeding through the yellow mass.

  “What is it?” Sophie asked.

  “Gold. A reef of gold.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m serious, but of course it’s been examined and found to be so trivial that it isn’t worth mining.”

  “Does John know?”

  “He must have been hearing about gold finds on Mirabilly all his life. This place is known to the odd prospector, a few kids on Mirabilly and the indigenous people.”

  They drank water from the underground stream but had no food. They were hungry. When they came out of the cave the sun was low. Sophie’s natural buoyancy had given way to quiet thoughtfulness. They walked slowly back to the Cessna and as they strapped themselves into the seats, Sophie said, “I’m sorry it’s over.”

  Paul checked the switches and turned the motor over, but it showed no sign of firing. He checked the gauges. The battery was weak. He gunned the motor again and again and again, until the battery lost the power to turn the propeller.

  At Paul’s suggestion, Sophie climbed out of her seat and sat in the shade of the hut. Paul tried to turn the propeller by hand but the motor refused to fire. He was steaming, annoyed and feeling a fool. He climbed into the cockpit and tried the starter once more and then put his head out of the cabin window and said, “I can’t get her to start, Sophie. I’m going to call Mirabilly and let them know.”

  When he contacted Mirabilly the approaching night had filled the clefts and water-courses with gentle grey-green shadows, like a rising tide of water and the high points of the ridges were tinted red. He talked to Terry Dunn; they agreed that even if there was a spare pilot, it would be too late to attempt a landing unless it was an emergency. Paul told him they were OK and Terry said he would get a plane
to them in the morning.

  Paul had the depressing feeling that it would be awkward telling Sophie and Marchmont would be furious.

  “We’re going to be stranded here for the night, Sophie,” he said, carrying a pair of blankets and a tin box from the plane. “We should have something to eat and drink in the huts here. Emergency supplies.”

  Sophie looked amused before she was annoyed and critical, but those thoughts soon came. “How do we get back, walk?”

  “You’ll be home for breakfast, I promise.”

  After a while Sophie sensed his embarrassment: the flying ace who couldn’t start his machine! Her attitude softened. They walked around the musterer’s huts.

  “There should be emergency bedding and supplies in one of these.” He searched until he found a large, but not locked cupboard in one of the bunkrooms. Inside were bottles of chlorinated water and a sealed tin of dry biscuits. “Nothing keeps very long out here,” he said. In the Cessna box there was more variety; tinned corned beef and more biscuits. In the medical kit he found a flask of brandy.

  Paul pulled a small table and two hard-backed chairs into the doorway of a hut. They ate lumps of corned beef on biscuits, washed down with brandy and water; it was an oddly tasty meal. While they ate, the sky became a diamond-studded vault and the chill began to bite.

  They talked about their lives. Sophie was natural and uninhibited. Her mother had walked out on her father, a TV electrician who was a violent drinker, taking Sophie who was six. They had a bad time in a leaky, rat-infested apartment in New York while her mother worked in a small clothing factory. Linda Ryland sometimes acted as an escort at business dinners. There was always an executive from out of town who needed a partner. At a showbiz function she met a television actor and eventually became his girlfriend.

  “John was a stroke of luck for mom and me. She met him at one of the dinners her boyfriend used to take her to, a TV award ceremony, I think. John sat next to Mom and they all had quite a lot to drink and he got her telephone number. He called her up, they began to meet and when she was sure enough of him she changed horses. I hope John will marry mom, but she’s got the next best thing. He’s looking after us.”