The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance) Read online

  She had crossed a river! The very act had made her into a different person. She was someone else. She wasn’t even angry any more. The weight on her heart, the muffling in her ears? They were gone: all because she had crossed water, and there was no way back.

  Looking around her she knew she was in a new world. A wide, wild, untamed, hot spinifex-plain of a world. And there was no road back because the river was down!

  She was Cindie Brown. Not Cynthia Davenport any more. She was born again!

  Nick Brent had been speaking with Flan from the window. He turned to Cindie. She looked back at him, meeting his eyes straight as the level plain that stretched away before them to a line that was the only definition between the earth and the sky. Funny, but it didn’t matter so much that he didn’t like her. A miracle had happened. Like the snap of a tow-rope.

  ‘Have you a job for a cook, or an unprofessional nurse? A typist? Something? Anything?’ she asked.

  Her eyes did not waver under his immensely sceptical stare.

  ‘Are you as versatile as all that? Have you three qualifications for providing for the comfort of man?’ He was only one decimal point away from being sarcastic now.

  ‘No,’ she said gravely. ‘I can cook for two; also for a party. I can nurse about as well as a nursery maid. That is ‒ I know how to bandage and put on a poultice. Also to mix a throat gargle. I can read well enough to understand a standard pharmacopoeia. Typing is my best. That’s how I earn my living. I’m a typist.’

  Their eyes held. Cindie’s were violet ‒ true. His were a cold grey, but not altogether empty this time.

  ‘What are you running away from? Or to?’ he asked at length ‒ a sort of deadly question.

  She did not reply.

  ‘No answer?’ His eyebrows went up. Cindie realised how good-looking he was under his underlay of sunburn, and beneath the watchful manner that said there was a whole book of personality hidden behind his unappeasable attitude towards herself.

  He’d thrown out a tow-rope to rescue her car. She had really needed a tow-rope for herself ‒ as a person. This was her own moment of truth. She had thought she was going to Bindaroo for her mother’s sake. It had really been for her own sake too. She’d been looking for an escape route. Or was it a tow-rope?

  ‘I can work hard,’ she said. ‘I’m a good worker.’

  He turned back to the steering wheel, and started up.

  He narrowed his eyes to see through the unsettled dust of his own earlier arrival. As he drove he watched for his car’s tracks on the red-brown earth, and between the spinifex humps.

  ‘I’ll take you up to the camp temporarily,’ he said after a long silence. ‘You could give a hand up there, in preference to sitting around waiting, if you wish. Unfortunately they don’t have helicopters up here to take you off. We’re rather stuck with one another, till we see what the river is likely to do in the next few weeks. No one but the river knows. It flows underground, and the mud can stay feet down when the surface has dried out.’

  Cindie shook her head without knowing she did it. This was her luck, good or bad. She didn’t yet know which.

  Of one thing she was certain. She wasn’t welcome but he was not being so very unpleasant about it now. He was stuck with her, as he had said, so he probably was being philosophic too. A little late about it, but that was the way the cookie always crumbled, anyway. With those eyes, that quiet manner that was more silencing than revealing, he could have been crushing. She was, after all, the uninvited guest.

  Besides, she was unenlightening about who she was, or where she was going.

  Yes ‒ she could see there was a case against her.

  To be a girl unidentified and lost, was unforgivable!

  They drove in silence a long way. Cindie thought it must be five miles at least before they spoke again. The Land-Rover seemed to ricochet from one spinifex bush to another, yet all the time the land remained flat. It went on and on for ever, now turning a wonderful rosella red because the sun was westering. The sky was layered with the thin streams of amethyst and purple sundown clouds. The light shining through them put a strange rose-coloured dew over the earth as far as the eye could see. Earlier it had been dusty and arid, now it was lovely.

  ‘Why is the ground in the north red?’ Cindie asked, breaking the silence. ‘It’s all red; not just when the sun makes it shine as it does now.’

  ‘The iron in it,’ Nick Brent replied. ‘Oxidised iron.’

  ‘Blinding me with science!’ She was not able to hide the little bitterness in this remark.

  He ignored it. ‘You’ll see the iron in the cuttings through the Mulga Gorges. Red-black as sun-up through a storm cloud,’ he went on, as if he had not heard her, or recognised a hidden history provoking her words.

  Cindie eased. She liked the way he had said this last. He had a feeling for the land, then, barren and empty though it was. He wasn’t all construction boss and unwilling rescuer of stranded females.

  Then he deflated this hopeful thought.

  ‘It’s no place for women,’ he said with finality. ‘It’s a man’s world.’

  That was exactly what David had said about the research laboratory. He couldn’t stand women scientists. He thought their place was bed, kitchen and nursery. She hadn’t been able to explain to David that modern girls had to go to work at something. Pocket money or a dress allowance weren’t forthcoming in her fatherless home. Girls had to go out into the world to be something. David was not convinced. What did they need pocket money for, anyway, he had asked. Money was a man’s responsibility.

  But he had wanted her when the laboratory hours were over. He had wanted her to be there, waiting, whether he came or not. That eternal empty waiting! Thus on and on for four years. Four years of her life waiting.

  So Cindie had jumped in her car and driven away. To here, into a seat beside this man who now, in his turn, said ‒ It’s a man’s world!

  Did it always have to be a man’s world? She wondered angrily. Even in the year 2,000, when it came?

  Someone had driven this way some time earlier because now they drove through a veil of dust for several miles. Cindie was glad of the veil. Not that Nick Brent was looking at her at all, but somehow she liked the privacy of having her anger hidden from his all-seeing eyes.

  A little later Nick stopped the Land-Rover, then unhooked the receiver of his two-way radio and flicked on a switch. Voices were talking in that light outback drawl. Cindie didn’t listen to this talk at the moment, and neither apparently did Nick Brent. He watched his dashboard clock instead. Five minutes later he flicked another switch.

  ‘Coming in,’ he said. ‘Nick Brent, Northern Road Development Construction Camp, calling Marana and Baanya. Answer if you’re getting me. Give and receive, both remaining open.’

  A voice came through at once. ‘Alexander, Marana Station here. Any word of that girl coming up on the south side of the river, Nick? We had a watch-it call from Jim Vernon at Baanya. I only collected it when I came in half an hour ago. My wife said you’d picked it up on your circuit.’

  ‘I have the girl, Lex. She was stranded between the billabong and the river. Guess you know by now the river’s down.’

  ‘Great news, man! There’s hat-throwing up here. I’ve ordered the stockmen out to syphon some of it off to bolster the southern bore-troughs. The water there’s coming up hot and saline after this raking drought. Any idea of the river’s pace and banker?’

  Cindie really knew her place now. Alexander of Marana had had to check on a lone girl travelling, but his only interest was in water.

  ‘River’s doing nine and rising fast, Lex. Would say she’ll be up four feet by the morning. Should say she’ll reach Baanya by midnight.’

  Nick Brent’s only interest was in water too!

  He and Marana Station talked about it for quite five minutes. It was Mr. Alexander, coming out of his water-happy trance, who finally asked about Cindie again.

  ‘If you fished that girl off
the hump over the river, Nick, you’re likely to have her quite a while. Last radio call said there’s no sign of the rain abating back in the ranges on the upper tableland. Looks like real floods this time. That’ll throw a mud blanket round the area for a couple of hundred miles. River up north is down too, cutting off Bindaroo and, the tracks north and north-west.’

  ‘I figured that out myself, Lex. We’re about five miles east of the camp right now.’

  Cindie, a reluctant listener, heard something come through from the other end that sounded like a feminine voice interrupting.

  ‘Out now, Lex, if you don’t mind,’ Nick Brent said, not hearing it, apparently. ‘I’ll see if Baanya’s listening. The overseer down there’s interested in the girl. I’d better let him know she’s okay.’

  ‘Right, Nick. Might give you a call at the camp tomorrow. Out now.’

  Cindie had felt like a chattel, no more, throughout this conversation. The girl indeed!

  ‘You coming in, Baanya?’ Nick Brent was asking.

  ‘Baanya here.’ It was a middle-aged woman’s voice. ‘I’ve been listening in to you and Lex, Nick. You’ve been out rescuing, have you? Jim Vernon, the overseer, was up at the homestead earlier, putting on a proper show about that girl. She’d only gone through about an hour when we had the radio signal that the river was down faster and deeper than given in the earlier calls. Isn’t it wonderful news, Nick?’ This voice didn’t pause for breath either. ‘Everyone here’s crazy happy,’ it went on. ‘The boys have taken out the rods on the jeep and hope to smack up a good haul of fish when the water really banks up. The children are all down by the outlet stream having a picnic; waiting to see it come down …’

  Cindie leaned back in her seat. She had settled for the fact now that nobody would ask how she was, whether she had been rescued wet or dry, unharmed or a casualty. Nobody thought of anything but the river.

  A little warm stream of hope unexpectedly wandered uninvited through her heart just as the white lace of water had wandered sweetly and gently over the first loop of the river ‒ the billabong. Perhaps they all knew Nick Brent so well, they’d know he would look after her. Perhaps that was it!

  Would he?

  She stole a glance at his face as he went on talking to the woman at Baanya.

  Cindie imagined Nick knew she had looked at him. Somewhere inside her there was another tiny stream, a warm, welcome one this time. The shadow of a smile had crossed his face. Had the voice at Baanya said anything amusing? Well, not really.

  Cindie blinked her eyes, not because of the dust.

  Then she heard the other voice again.

  ‘Jim Vernon’s come up to the homestead inquiring, Nick. I’ve told him the girl is all right. He’d like to speak, but time’s short and Erica wants to come in from Marana again. She needs a word with you and there’s only two minutes to go. Out for me now.’

  ‘Come in Erica,’ Nick Brent said.

  ‘Nick darling! Where have you been? I’m absolutely furious. Listen, my pet …’

  Cindie turned the door handle and slipped out of the Land-Rover. She walked a few yards away into the dusty redness that was real sundown now.

  The second voice had not been a middle-aged one. It belonged to a younger person. Sophisticated, southern-educated, and aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years: perhaps even more. It belonged to someone who called Nick Brent ‘darling’, and who was entitled to be furious about his absences. So she had a very tangible claim on him. Cindie thought he might need privacy for this talk.

  Why not? she asked herself. He would be at least thirty, himself. Single, too, or someone called Erica from Marana would not be calling him ‘darling’ on the air where everyone for hundreds and hundreds of miles around would hear.

  Cindie kicked the dust with one foot while she stood ten yards away from that private conversation. She stared at the dying sundown world. The wall of the western sky was a great weal of blood-red stain. It hurt the eyes with its splendour.

  She was glad Jim Vernon had cared, and wanted to speak to her. She cared too, and would have given anything to speak to him.

  Over there at Baanya Station someone wanted to hear news of a girl called Cindie ‒ not about water and a river coming down.

  The thought made her happier than she’d been for a long, long time.

  She had indeed crossed a Rubicon.

  Cindie Brown. That was her name for now!

  She watched the purple gold-lined shadows creep across the blaze of sunset. ‘I’m not me any more. I’m someone else. Perhaps this new me might ‒’

  Nick Brent put his head out of the Land-Rover’s window.

  ‘Cindie!’ he said. Here came a command again.

  ‘Coming!’ she replied. Hers to obey, but she was sorry to end her day-dream just as soon as the sky and land would lose their glorious closing colours.

  ‘Jim Vernon wanted to speak to you, but I’m sorry, we’re out of time,’ Nick Brent said as she climbed back into the Land-Rover. ‘I’ve had to close out the radio. Do you mind?’

  Her eyes met his. ‘Yes,’ she said regretfully. ‘But it’s too late, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Baanya’s off the air now. It’s the Flying Doctor’s hour. We don’t encroach on that.’

  He started up the engine, went into a jig-saw puzzle with the gears as the Land-Rover surged forward through the spinifex.

  In those few minutes the sun went down; the rose colour in the spinifex faded to a dying haze of blue.

  Perhaps she had been a little silly ‒ wanting to hear Jim Vernon’s voice! Or was it because he, and only he, had wanted to speak to her? Not about the river being down, either!

  But Nick Brent had wanted to speak to someone with a carefully cultivated aristocratic voice, called Erica.

  So there hadn’t been time!

  Cindie glanced at Nick’s face again. It was a closed book, remote. His thoughts were miles away, and certainly not with his passenger: nor with her need to have talked to Jim Vernon.

  Perhaps this girl called Erica had minded him rescuing a nobody going by the name of Cindie Brown from the river.

  So what! Cindie thought. I minded not talking to Jim Vernon, too. We can’t all win!

  Chapter Three

  The sun set.

  It was a grey twilight world in which Cindie first saw the construction camp. It was a town of caravans, which stood in grid-iron rows round the four sides of a square.

  At the top end of this square stood the daddy of all caravans. It was king-size. The canteen, surely? Men were sitting on its steps; or on the ground leaning against the wheels or down-drop sides. Some were lounging easily in circles nearby. Cindie didn’t have to be told, even if Nick Brent had been communicative, that the men were all showered and washed up ready for dinner. They were burnt as the earth ‒ their faces and arms a dark-brown ‒ but so wonderfully scrubbed and clean.

  Everywhere there were men. Dozens and dozens of them. There weren’t any women in sight, and Cindie, unexpectedly, felt like a brown hen caught in a herd of bush turkeys. An oddity because she was female.

  No one sitting about hailed the Land-Rover, or Nick Brent. They seemed to have a veiled interest only. Perhaps they were used to seeing the boss bring in strange things, and persons, from the wilds of the spinifex plains. Their expressions said that anything could happen out here on the thousand-miler. Nothing surprised anyone any more.

  Nick Brent glanced at her, perhaps to see her reaction to this scene. Then he looked straight ahead as he ran the Land-Rover round one corner between two rows of caravans, coming to a dust-cloud stop at the steps of a small white prefabricated house set apart from the others under a clump of white-trunked gum trees. This house was not a caravan, and did not have wheels. It was planted firmly on the earth. Yet it was as impermanent-looking as its more mobile brothers lining the square.

  The trees hung their leaves, tired after the long hot day. Nothing stirred, even though the door of the little
house was wide open.

  So enormous was the silence and stillness ‒ so space-like ‒ thatCindie wondered why anyone went off the earth in a capsule if they merely wanted space. If they wanted silence and foreverness, here it was in the heart of Australia.

  The honking of Nick’s horn seemed a blasphemy. It made Cindie start.

  ‘Mary!’ Nick Brent called in a voice not loud, but which carried in the stillness. It was a good clear voice and Cindie, as she heard it, experienced an unexpected comfort from its authority ‒ and yes, security.

  A woman came to the door of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. She was not yet middle-aged and the grey streak on one side of her hair seemed out of place. Her face was strong-featured in a fine-drawn way. She had dark eyes, and a wide flashing smile for Nick Brent.

  ‘Great kangaroos!’ she said, turning her glance to Cindie, then back again to the man. ‘What have you brought in this time, Nick? Last time it was a lame brumby with twin foals.’

  Nick Brent’s face remained expressionless. ‘This is Miss Cindie …’ He glanced at the girl beside him for elucidation.

  ‘Miss Cindie Brown,’ she said lamely. She nearly added ‘all-over’, but thought this might be deemed a joke out of place.

  Nick straightened his back, pushed his hat to the back of his head.

  ‘There you have it, Mary!’ His face did not move a muscle. ‘Miss Cindie Brown. This is Mary Deacon, Cindie.’

  The girl beside him ventured a cautious smile at the woman in the doorway. She wasn’t sure of her reception.

  The conversation, staccato though it was, had sounded as if Nick Brent was always bringing something in. A drowned rat, a dead wallaby, a bob-tailed lizard, twin foals, and now a girl called Cindie Brown.

  Brown? Me! The new me. Another identity!

  Again her spirits rose. Found in the river, but still breathing! She could imagine the wording on Nick Brent’s dossier. One more piece of bric-a-brac brought in from the wilderness of spinifex.

  ‘Well, you’d better get down and come in,’ Mary was saying, giving her hands another wipe on that apron. She turned to the man again. ‘How long’s she staying, Nick?’