to the scheme for a few thousand, the ex-drunk surprisingly said yes. I can taste the bloody water now, he mumbled—when we ran out of rainwater, the well water tasted pretty bad, didn’t it, boy?
—Yes, Dad.
His dad stared at his boots and then added, Nothing wrong with it, though—just that my taste buds are shot, like my liver.
Darl spent a lot of time at the old lead mine. Sometimes the boy would come over on his trail bike. He’d dismount and they’d squat near each other without saying a word. It smelt strong, even heady up there in the heat . . . assaying the lead tailings, listening to the pasture crackle with the dryness, watching oddly colored sunsets. Sometimes Darl would ask after the boy’s dad. Oh, he’s okay, the boy would say. He keeps saying his liver’s shot and that’s why he got sick. When one of his mates rings and tries to get Dad to go out on the piss, he just says, can’t mate, doc says my liver’s shot.
After a while, Darl and the boy would hear Pet calling up from the new house—or the “mansion,” as the boy called it: Hey, boys, come down and have something to eat and drink.
It was as if they were the only people in the world. It would always be like that.
There’s a right and a wrong way of doing things, Harold said.
Jenny thought, The right way is usually the wrong way. And if it weren’t for the kids . . . She bit her lip, as always.
But Dad, Jim said, those caves are amazing. You should come up and see them. Kangaroos shelter in there during the heat of the day. They are full of white sand that’s crumbled from the limestone walls. On top, it’s all iron-rock and gravel, with heaps of quartz chips. And the scrub up there is impenetrable. It’s all needle tree and dead-finish bushes. And in front of the caves there are great zamia palms. You can see right out across the sandplain paddocks to the ocean.
Harold cut him off, his pained expression saying he’d already been too patient. That’s not the point, Jim, it’s not our land. Even this isn’t our land. Three months we’ve got, before we have to move back to town. Without the cheap rent, I’d be lucky to cover the renovations at home.
Jim ruminated. His mother held her tongue, as she was expected to do. Eventually she said, It will be interesting catching the school bus into Geraldton, Jim. I guess you’ll know a few of the kids.
Not really, said Jim. Most of the upper-school students from out here board at the hostel. But he sparked up, ignoring his father’s impatience, and said, There’s also a canyon where water runs fast when it rains. Must be some springs down there, because there are clusters of red river-gums. I’ll examine it closer tomorrow and take my field notebook.
You’ll do no such thing, Jim, said Harold, banging the table ineffectually with the flat of his hand. You stay around this house and go no further.
Jim glanced up at his father with disdain. Old dickhead, he thought. He smiled at his mother and went on eating dinner with exaggerated manners, annoying and pleasing his father at once, who hoped he’d controlled his son.
Susan, Jim’s sister, sat opposite, eating slowly and deliberately. She feared the bus, and didn’t like this old asbestos, tin-roofed house that was their temporary home. She would be starting high school with the new term, and thought it pretty shoddy that this extra stress was added to her life. Her father didn’t bother her too much; she barely thought him worth registering. And she didn’t do much that could annoy him. She was a polite young lady. That was all that mattered.
The household’s main problem was Harold being home most of the time. He’d taken his long-service leave and spent his days sitting in the front room listening to light classics and reading. Always ready with an opinion, he shouted orders from his seat below the old air-conditioning unit. Hopefully he’ll get Legionnaire’s disease, said Jim to his mum, and she couldn’t help laughing, telling herself Jim didn’t mean it.
Jim did try to get through to his father. On a particularly hot day, he went and sat near him in the front room. Waiting until Harold looked up from his page, he spoke quietly so as not to drown out the Ravel gurgling in the background. Dad, there’s some zebra finches just outside, you should come and have a look and a listen. They’re so chirpy. They live in the needle trees this side of the barbed wire fence. So they’re not “out of bounds.” Jim even avoided the sarcasm the final comment might carry.
Harold, impervious, said, It’s hot out there, son. You’ll get filthy traipsing about among the bushes. You should do some of that holiday reading you’re supposed to do. Get the jump on your courses.
Already have, Dad. Hey, do you know, there’s an echidna that shelters under the house during the heat of the day. Curled up in a ball. It feeds on all those termite mounds down the hill around the melaleuca thickets and York gums.
That’s interesting, Jim, said Harold, returning to his book, Ravel louder in his head.
Going out, Jim said to his mother, who was online shopping, muttering at the slow dial-up connection. Going up to the caves, he said. He’d almost given up waiting for a reply when she said, That’s fine, darling, wear your hat and take some water.
Jim found Susan sitting on the back step in the shade and asked if she’d like to climb with him. She ignored him and returned to her room to sulk and wait for her turn on “dire-up” so she could get on Facebook. She missed her friends.
Jim loved the cool of the caves.
It’s 45 degrees out there and the caves are cool-as, he said to himself. He sketched the vista in his notebook and eyed off the canyon. This island of bushland in a sea of sand, the great stripped areas where the wheat is grown, the sea that joins a deep blue Indian Ocean. He had occasionally gone surfing out there at Flat Rocks with some mates, but surfing wasn’t really his thing. He did it because Harold hated it.
He smelt it first. Weird, he thought—like cigarette smoke. Another thing he’d tried but not liked. He was one with Harold on that one.
He hoisted himself up from the sand and the roo-shit and went to the mouth of the cave. Great zamia palm fronds, ancient residues in a place that books told Jim was the most ancient on earth, wavered in the stiffening easterly. It was a searing hot wind rolling off the roof of the outcrops and rushing down into the canyon, and over down towards the house, the sandplains, the sea. He wondered what it would do to the surf when it met that immensity.
He climbed out and onto the top of the cave. A band of smoke rose and capillaried into the wide blue sky a few hills away. It could be mistaken for a dying willy-willy, but the driving easterly, and the continuous feeding of the grey blur against the blue, and the increasingly acrid taste and smell in the air said otherwise.
Jim leapt down through the rocks and crashed into the scrub, scratching and bruising himself as he tumbled towards home. He passed a stand of three primeval-looking trees he’d never seen the like of in nature or a book before, and knew it must be a species verging on extinction. In the rush for home he saw things he’d not seen looking closely, when he’d had an eye to finding. Other than the sound of his exodus, all was silent. The birds had vanished. He tore his flesh plunging through the barbed-wire fence.
Reaching the back steps, he called, Fire! Fire!
He found his mother in the kitchen and said, We
