The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance) Page 9

  Jim Vernon!

  Cindie clung to her idea of Jim much as she had clung to her steering wheel when stalled between the billabong and a river ‒ When the river was down!

  That night as Cindie helped Mary prepare dinner, the two children showed a readiness to talk, now they were used to the visitor.

  ‘You’re very pretty. Why are you pretty, Cindie?’ Myrtle asked, staring at the newcomer.

  Cindie was setting the table; she looked at the child with surprise.

  ‘Am I? That’s a nice thing to say to me, Myrtle. Thank you. I don’t feel pretty. I feel as if my skin’s dried out and the sun has burnt me brown-all-over.’

  Oh, dear! How guilty that phrase made her feel.

  ‘Brown. That’s your other name, isn’t it?’ Myrtle persisted.

  ‘Why ‒ er ‒ yes,’ Cindie muddled the knives and forks at the place before Jinx’s chair. She had to change them about. ‘You’re right-handed, not left-handed, aren’t you, Jinx? How silly of me!’

  The children had a single line of thought and were not to be deployed by a knife and fork being placed left to right.

  ‘Miss Erica came down the road in the bulldozer with Ted Hawkes from back-up towards the Gibber Gorges. Nick said that’s fifty miles out,’ Jinx put in. ‘She was the one that ought to have been brown-all-over, only she wasn’t. She’s all clean and beautiful, like last time she was here. She’d changed her clothes before she went up to Nick’s place. They were having a drink ‒’

  ‘Jinx!’ Mary said crossly. ‘You talk too much. Up now, and help Cindie set the table. You know where the pepper and salt are kept.’

  Jinx began slowly to sidle from his chair and move towards a cupboard by the wall. It was Myrtle who took up the tale.

  ‘All the same this one’s pretty too,’ Myrtle said, after consideration, meaning Cindie. ‘She doesn’t laugh the same way as Miss Erica does, but Nick smiles when Miss Erica talks to him. Up at his place they’re sitting down in those chairs that rock, Mummy. You know the ones Nick lets us sit in sometimes. And they’re having a drink with ice in it. The ice tinkles on the glasses. Nick gave me and Jinx some Coke, but he forgot to put any ice in it. He didn’t forget for Miss Erica.’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ Mary said with exasperation to Cindie. ‘There’s nothing for anybody to do in this place but talk about every little thing that goes on in one house or another. Even the kids catch the talk-epidemic ‒’

  ‘Miss Erica was the one doing the talking,’ Myrtle objected, tossing her head a little. ‘That’s the wrong pepper and salt, Jinx. That’s the Sunday set. We have the blue pots on week-days. Mummy, Miss Erica was asking Nick why Cindie Brown was here, and I don’t think she liked Cindie Brown being here. She said she hadn’t heard of anyone called Cindie Brown coming through from the coast. Most times she hears, on the radio, about everyone coming.’

  ‘She heard all right,’ Mary said succinctly, forgetting the children in her irritation. ‘She’d have heard the radio call from Jim Vernon over at Baanya like we all did.’

  ‘She must have known,’ Cindie said gently. ‘Because after Nick rescued me he spoke to her on the radio from the utility. Perhaps she thought I was someone else, or something ‒’

  ‘Yes,’ said Myrtle. ‘I heard that talk over at the canteen. Nick just said it was a girl called Cindie Something, like you said, Cindie. But your name is Brown, not Something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Names don’t matter much, Myrtle,’ Cindie parried. ‘It’s what people are that matters.’

  ‘What are you Cindie?’

  ‘Well, she’s not Miss Erica Alexander, that’s for sure,’ their mother put in impatiently as she lifted potatoes from a saucepan on to the array of plates set out on the table.

  ‘She doesn’t look like her either,’ Jinx added, now putting the blue pepper and salt pots on the table. ‘If Miss Erica hadn’t been there, Nick wouldn’t have forgotten to put ice in our Coke. You know what, Cindie? Nick never lets us drink Coke out of a bottle, like everyone else does. He’s a bit funny in some ways ‒’

  ‘Funny be blowed!’ Mary said flatly. ‘He’s teaching you manners, that’s what. How to sit up and drink nicely out of a glass, for instance.’

  ‘Did he teach Miss Erica?’

  ‘Oh!’ Mary cried, almost in exasperation. ‘Will you stop talking about Miss Erica! She came over the neck between the claypans from the outcamp by the lower ranges. She came down the road in a bulldozer. She’s had a shower and changed her clothes, and right now is visiting Nick ‒ drinking out of a glass that tinkles with ice, and sitting in the rocking-chair. Now we’ve had the lot! The total bulletin! Let’s get on with dinner.’

  The dinner now being served on to the plates looked good and smelled good. The children gazed at it longingly, waiting for their mother and Cindie to sit down and begin. Plainly, hunger had made them forget Miss Erica, rocking-chair, and ice that tinkled in a glass.

  Later, after helping Mary wash up and tidy away, Cindie pleaded that she had had quite a day for a newcomer to the thousand-miler. Would Mary mind if she went to bed early again?

  ‘That’s the right place for you,’ Mary said. ‘You look flagged, Cindie. If you stay here long we’ll have to toughen you up. It’s a rugged life up here in the north. The climate’s mostly to blame.’

  ‘I’ll begin toughening to-morrow,’ Cindie promised with as much of a willing air as she could muster. ‘I don’t think it’s the climate so much as the strangeness. I feel I’ve made mistakes early ‒ like getting Dicey to let me talk over the radio at the forbidden time. Then going out to the site when perhaps I should have waited ‒’

  ‘You didn’t get Dicey to let you use the radio,’ Mary said flatly. ‘Dicey wanted to let you. He’s that way. He falls in and out with Nick on that point from time to time. But we’re short of radio technicians. You can’t get them up here north of Twenty-Six easily. So Nick has to keep him in hand on a loose rein, if you know what that means. Nick would know Dicey was the willing one ‒ leading Cindie off to please himself as much as to please her.’

  ‘Nick would know?’ Cindie asked.

  ‘He’d know all right. He knows everything that matters round this strip of the plain.’

  What the wives in D’D think and say? Cindie wondered. How clever of the men to call that row by that name! How doubly clever of Nick to smile when he had told her about it. Detergent, Tea Cups, and Dynamite!

  Yet it wasn’t really the wives’ fault. They had only been talking because they had to have something to think about and something to talk about in this lonely place. People were always interested in other people. They wouldn’t be human, otherwise.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Mary.

  Cindie hadn’t realised she had fallen into a musing silence standing in the living-room looking past Mary as if Mary wasn’t even there.

  ‘Only that I’m tired, and I wish I was as energetic as you are.’

  ‘I’ll give you two more days here and you’ll be acclimatised. Then we’ll see who’s the energetic one.’

  ‘I’ll need something to use up that energy,’ Cindie said a little wistfully. ‘I wish I could help.’

  ‘We’ll find something for you. Idle hands and mischief always add up. So we’ll keep you out of mischief, Cindie. I’ll see Nick about it in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t ask for any favours.’ Cindie was suddenly too emphatic. ‘I don’t want any favours from Nick Brent. Any at all. I’d rather be independent ‒’

  ‘Which you can’t be, at this camp or on this road-site,’ Mary said flatly. ‘It all belongs to Nick Brent, and no one’s really free. It’s his kingdom till the road’s finished. Tired and all though you are you’d better get that one straight.’

  ‘Straight from the shoulder, Mary? To-day Nick himself said this was not a concentration camp. I remember the rest of his words too. Take a man’s freedom from him, and you take his immortal soul.’

  ‘That’s the differen
ce.’ Mary was more than blunt this time. ‘You’re a girl. Not a man. So you have to be taken care of ‒’

  ‘You’re the care-all. Not Nick Brent.’

  Mary Deacon put the backs of her hands on her hips and stared at the girl impatiently.

  ‘Some bee’s buzzing in your head, Cindie. Else you’re even more tired than you look. Here, I’ll make you a last cup of tea while you go off and get ready for bed. Shower-up again and you’ll feel fresher. There’ll be an east wind rising to-night if I know the feel in my bones. That means a blister of a day to-morrow. Eight hours’ sleep and you’ll feel different.’

  Cindie was contrite, but only for Mary’s sake. Certainly not for Nick Brent’s sake.

  ‘I’m sorry. I am tired. I’ll do as you say. I think the shower was God’s most wonderful invention.’

  As she turned away towards the door Mary called after her.

  ‘I’ll let that teapot stand, which is more than those gas-bags up at D’D did. Then when you’re in bed and under cover I’ll bring you the best cup made in the north ‒ outside what comes out of a billy-can with a gum leaf floating in it.’

  Two friends! Cindie thought, with some relief, half an hour later as she finished swallowing the cup of tea that Mary brought her. One I’ve known for half an hour by a petrol pump; the other for twenty-four hours plus. I’m not alone.

  She put her empty tea cup on the floor under her bed as Mary had told her to do and switched off the light. She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  I’m not alone. Down south, worrying endlessly about Mother, wanted one minute by David and rejected by him the next, I was alone; yet here in this wilderness ‒

  Cindie fell asleep.

  Some time in the night she tossed about in her bed, harassed by a dream that had something to do with trying to reach Jim Vernon across a river that ran sheep instead of water, and over which there graciously stepped a tall, beautiful woman carrying in her hand ‒ of all things ‒ a bouquet of spinifex, the spikes tinted with red-gold like the colour of sunset.

  Somewhere behind Cindie, in that dream, a voice seemed to say ‒ ‘Erica could do it. Why couldn’t you?’ It was something to do with getting past that river of sheep.

  The voice had been Nick Brent’s, and suddenly Jim Vernon wasn’t there any more. Only Nick ‒ tall and frightening because he was angry about something she could not understand. She couldn’t reach him to explain some urgent need she had of him.

  In the morning Cindie remembered crying in her sleep, with all the sorrow of one who was alone in a strange world. But why she cried, she could not think. Awake, she didn’t mind being alone in this world of a great road-building project. Secretly, she liked being Cindie Brown: someone new.

  Then she did remember something as she dressed. When Mary had given her that cup of tea she had said ‒

  ‘Cindie Brown, you sure do look crying tired.’

  It must have been that! Mary had given her the idea that she needed a good cry to relieve her feelings. That was the explanation of the midnight tears. The dream was too muddled; too ephemeral for her to remember much, let alone wonder as to its meaning.

  Cindie was alone in the little house, getting her own breakfast in the spotless kitchen, as she had done the morning before, when Myrtle came running across the hardened red earth from the canteen.

  ‘Cindie!’ she cried, bursting in. ‘Mummy said hurry up and have your breakfast and come across quick. She asked Nick to give you a job, and what do you think? He said yes.’

  Myrtle paused for breath. Cindie stopped in the act of whipping up powdered milk for her cereal to stare at the child, half in wonder, half in delight.

  ‘You do really look pretty, Cindie.’ The little girl put her head on one side as she stared at the visitor. ‘I said you did, and you do. Your hair looks nicest when it’s a bit damp. But come on quick. Miss Erica’s over there with Nick, looking at the new freezer in the canteen. You can see her! She’s beautiful too, but I like you best. I’m going to tell Nick, next time he puts ice in her drink and forgets to put it in for Jinx and me ‒’

  ‘Oh, no, Myrtle, no,’ Cindie pleaded quickly. ‘Don’t say anything like that to Nick ever. Promise me. You don’t want to hurt his feelings, do you?’

  Myrtle drew in a long breath, and thought.

  ‘Well, maybe not,’ she said at last. ‘But you come and see Miss Erica for yourself. Then you’ll know what I mean ‒’ She broke off.

  ‘Even if Nick doesn’t know what you mean?’ Cindie finished for her.

  ‘Well ‒ well ‒ maybe he mightn’t. He does like her a lot, I suppose.’

  Cindie thought of only one thing: Now I’m about to see the Queen of the Spinifex!

  She didn’t allow herself to finish the thought: I wonder what Miss Erica will think of me?

  Chapter Seven

  Cindie swallowed the minimum of breakfast quickly. She washed up her cup, saucer and cereal bowl at top speed, then made a last quick inspection of the house in case to-day was Nick’s day for his rounds. He hadn’t ‘policed’, as Mary called it, yesterday.

  Myrtle, having delivered her ultimatum to Cindie to ‘come at once!’ fled back to the canteen. The School of the Air was not due for tuning in yet, but Myrtle and Jinx liked their usual undercover listening-in to the news of the day that came on earlier.

  Nick, having caught them at this once, had called this education that was caught, as different from education that was taught. He had placated Mary with that half-amused peace-making remark; so sometimes she turned a deaf ear to what Myrtle and Jinx were about.

  Cindie, crossing the area between the house under the grove of white gums to the canteen building, reproached herself for sleeping in.

  Not again! she made up her mind. Just how tired could I have been?

  She had forgotten all about her dream of the night.

  There were half a dozen men sitting on the chairs near Mary’s table, all waiting for attention. Cindie noticed them; and the children with their heads down at work on the opposite side of the room. All in one glance. What riveted her attention, however, was a young woman leaning back in her chair in a relaxed way, skin-tight slacks covering legs that were crossed, one foot resting on an upturned carton at the side of her. Somehow this posture was striking, though faintly arrogant. Very like models pictured in the fashion papers ‒ making their hit.

  Yet this wasn’t any model. Not out here, a thousand miles from the north coast and several hundred from the west coast.

  Those skin-tight slacks and that smooth polished shirt-blouse of bronze brown had the weird effect of looking internationally smart yet exactly appropriate for this semi-desert construction site.

  Very clever, Cindie thought. She regretted her own part-worn check slacks. Her blouse, though fresh white and clean, was beginning to feel elderly in her own opinion. She was certain it would look that way in Erica’s eyes ‒ for this was surely Erica.

  Cindie could not help a tiny pang of envy. How, she wondered sorely, do some people come to look so svelte, in such a place, in so effortless a way?

  Erica’s hair was a lovely chestnut brown, not blonde, as Cindie had imagined. It was brushed sleekly back to one side of her head. Her face was tanned a smooth outback brown, and her eyes were dark ‒ Cindie was too far away to see their exact colour. Black or brown? All she knew at the moment was that though Erica had not moved her head or altered her lazy yet elegant posture, the dark eyes had looked at Cindie with that summing-up expression that can so often be disconcerting.

  Well, why not? Cindie thought. After all, I’m just the waif washed up by the river when it was down. She is somebody. She’s called the Queen of the Spinifex.

  Cindie came down the length of the floor towards Mary. As she neared Erica she glanced sideways and smiled diffidently. She felt taken aback when Erica made no attempt to return the smile. The other girl simply went on watching Cindie, the dark eyes moving as Cindie moved: one smoothly tanned hand lifting a
cigarette to her lips, and one long spiral of curly smoke rising above her head like a delicate film of cloud.

  ‘Oh, there you are!’ Mary exclaimed, looking up. All the men sitting in the row of chairs looked up too. When they saw that Erica, at the end of the hall, had not returned Cindie’s smile, they grinned broadly at the newcomer to cheer her up. Their welcome was meant to make up for Erica’s lack of it. Cindie knew this at once. She smiled back at them gladly. It was almost like a conspiracy of friendship ‒ against odds. Miss Alexander of Marana being the odds.

  ‘I’m flat-out busy, Cindie,’ Mary said. ‘For the time being there’s a job you can do me right now. More later.’ She pushed a sheaf of foolscap ledger-ruled papers across the table towards the girl, then pointed with the end of her pencil to the doorway that led to the back of the hall. ‘Take those through there and you’ll meet someone called Mike Matthews. He’s the canteen manager. He’s taking stock for the next call-out. The food’ll come in by freezer-truck if and when it can get through that river.’ Mary was in such haste to be done with talking, she was almost breathless. This was about to be her busy day, and she was in that kind of mood already. Short and to the point. Cindie lifted the paper from the table. ‘Mike’ll tell you what to do,’ Mary went on. ‘He’ll call the orders, and you make the lists. After that you can come back and sort the orders into categories. He’ll show you which and what. You don’t list fruit with medical stores; or soap with a truck driver’s uniform. Okay?’

  ‘Shall do,’ Cindie said eagerly, thrilled that she really did have a job. It hadn’t been a mistake on Myrtle’s part.

  ‘When you come back you can type out the home letters for that gang at the end of the row. They can speak English but can’t write it. All four of ’em are from Central Europe.’

  ‘Hey Cindie?’ the man sitting nearest Mary asked. ‘You a dab at writing love-letters? I’m plain English but I don’t know how to tell my girl …’

  ‘That’ll do, Smithy,’ Mary Deacon interrupted. ‘You let Cindie get along with her work. She has other things to do than write your love-letters ‒’