The Golden Soak Read Online Free Page A

myself in the destruction of the house. Again and again my mind came back to that, and to the absence of human remains. Not even the fact that I had been allowed to enter Australia without any questions asked could dispel the nagging fear that in time they would catch up with me. Flies crawled with the sun, the smooth bark of the gum I was propped against hard under my shoulders.
    About eight o’clock two vehicles passed along the dirt road, but from where I was sitting all I saw of them was a cloud of dust. After that nothing stirred as the heat built up and the sky turned from blue to a blinding white. I was trying to visualize Jarra Jarra, recalling vaguely the girl’s young face, the things she had told me. But it was all blurred by time and nothing she had said had prepared me for the wild red desolation of this country, the sense of geological age I had felt on the long oven-lid drive north from Perth. If I hadn’t written to her I could have lost myself in the immensity of it, changed my name. There was Kadek, too. He’d been away, in Kalgoorlie they said, when I had visited his office in Perth, and I had left a note for him, giving Jarra Jarra as my address. If Rosa talked and they started making enquiries in Australia.… I closed my eyes against the blinding glare, hoping to God they wouldn’t think of that.
    I was dozing again, my hand brushing automatically at the flies, when I heard the murmur of a truck’s engine, an insect drone in the bush behind me. I was on my feet in an instant, listening tensely to the sound of it coming steadily nearer. Then I caught a glimpse of it through the gum trees, an elderly Land-Rover driven at speed. By the time it was round the last bend I was out on the track, waiting. It slowed at the sight of me, a bare arm waving to me out of the driver’s window, and then it had stopped and Janet Garrety climbed out.
    â€˜Sorry – we should have been here two hours ago, but we’ve no spare and we had a puncture.’
    She was smiling, coming towards me, a stocky, practical girl in a faded blue shirt and khaki slacks. The shirt clung to her, dark patches of sweat under the armpits and in the vee of her trousers, her face caked with dust, streaked with runnels of perspiration. But the smile of her greeting had the youthful, exuberant freshness I remembered. ‘Have you been waiting long?’ She shook my hand, a hard, dusty handshake that still managed to convey a sense of excitement. ‘I couldn’t believe it when we got your message. What are you doing in Australia?’ She laughed, a flash of white teeth, freckles showing through the dust. ‘I suppose you’re out here looking for a new Poseidon.’ Laughter bubbled on her eyes, the whites brilliant in the hard sunlight. ‘I’m full of questions, but we can talk as we drive.’
    A shadow moved behind her and she turned, ‘Oh, Tom – come and meet Mr Falls.’
    He was an aborigine. I had seen pictures of them, of course, but I hadn’t expected anything quite so black, so primitive looking – the face broad-nosed with a low brow and ridges of heavy bone above the eyes. ‘Tom is as much a part of Jarra Jarra as we are.’ He came forward and shook my hand, a soft, limp touching of the palms, his thick lips spread in a yellow-toothed grin. The eyes were dark brown, the whites yellow against the wrinkled black of his skin. He was short and broad, and the only part of him that wasn’t black was his hair; his woolly hair, that sat like a skull cap over the low brow, was grizzled, almost white. The thick lips moved below the broad spread of the nose, soft words, guttural in a strange tongue.
    â€˜He’s bidding you welcome,’ she said. Her quick eyes had found the tree where I had sat waiting. ‘Is that all your gear?’ She nodded to the aborigine and he went to get my suitcase. ‘Gosh! This is marvellous – to see