Riverslake

  T.A.G. HUNGERFORD

  RIVERSLAKE

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  Chapter One

  Randolph stood aside in the narrow corridor that ran the length of the hut and watched the manager as he deftly inserted a key in the door and flung it inwards to the tiny room. Everything about Carmichael was sure and swift, every move considered; there was no fumbling and no apparent haste. Carmichael the Bastard, whose name was legend in every construction camp he had been in. He’s an efficient baby, I bet, Randolph thought.

  “There you are, Mr Randolph,” Carmichael said, flicking on the light. His tone was neither curt nor friendly. “It’s not a flaming palace, but you can make it comfortable, if you want. Some of the blokes do.”

  Outside, it was already dark, and cold. Randolph had caught the afternoon flight from Sydney, and as his plane circled over Canberra preparatory to landing the crescents and circles and avenues of the scattered city were already picked out with blobs of light. In between them, the unbuilt sites and the plantations of trees were wells of darkness.

  “I’ll see if I can get you a better globe,” Carmichael offered. The light in the room was a pale yellow and the corners were in shadow. They stood side by side and looked round the cubicle, at the bare, unpainted walls of fibro and Caneite, at the worn malthoid covering on the floor and at the encrustation of dust and bird-droppings and mummified flies that shrouded the small, high window. A smear of grease ran along one wall behind the iron bed where, apparently, the previous tenant had leaned back to rest his head. The cut-out figure of a scantily-clad charmer smirked at them from another wall. It was pinned on the Caneite at the foot of the bed, so that he might lie back and study it. That, and the grease on the wall, and a Randwick race-book that lay on the pine floor, were all the impression that the last occupant of the room had left on it.

  “Didn’t leave much behind him,” Randolph observed.

  “At least he left the light,” Carmichael said, raising his glance to the uncovered globe that hung from the centre of the low ceiling. “And the meter. That’s something.”

  “The meter?” Randolph echoed in surprise. “They take the meters when they go?”

  Carmichael nodded. “Tear ’em off the walls, sometimes.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “You tell me, and we’ll both know. Sheer cussedness.” Carmichael stared at Randolph for a moment, weighing up this dark man, thin and wiry, with green eyes, black hair and a high, thin nose. Maybe thirty odd, looked reasonably intelligent, but a bit reserved, or wary. And clean. “You been much in hostels, Randolph?” he inquired shortly.

  “A bit.” Randolph’s reply was guarded—he had been around hostels, and he had heard about Carmichael the Bastard. Before coming to Canberra he had been working up on the Snowy River scheme, and now, standing with Carmichael in this musty little room at Riverslake Hostel, he remembered what the chef at the Snowy had said.

  “What, Riverslake you say you’re going to, Randy?”

  “Yeah—why?”

  “You know any of the blokes there?”

  “No, never been Canberra way before.”

  “You know the Bastard’s managing there now?”

  “Hell, no—a bloke from Bogong was telling me about him. He was there after I left.”

  “What a flaming animal! You know what I seen him do once—hell, you can’t tell me nothing about the Bastard!”

  You can’t tell me nothing about the Bastard. No man could tell any other anything worse than he already knew, or had heard about Carmichael. They chewed it over at their jobs, at dances, in hotel bars and over bottles of wine in the seclusion of their rooms. They even acknowledged a perverted sort of pride in the sheer virtuosity of his bastardry, telling each other tales about things they had seen him do and things they had been told about him by men who had heard them from others.

  “I’ve been around a fair bit,” Randolph said, “but not this dump before. Canberra’s new territory to me.”

  “Then you know what to expect,” Carmichael remarked succinctly. “Expect it here, only more so, for some reason or other. Urgers, touts, bludgers, bash-artists and straight-out crooks. You know.”

  “Some good blokes, I suppose?” Randolph suggested mildly, and the other shot him a quizzical glance.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” he agreed readily. “Most of them are good blokes, if it comes to that. But one bastard in a hundred’s enough—too many, in fact.” He paused again, looking fixedly at the smile that had begun to crinkle the corners of Randolph’s mobile mouth. “I’m known as the Bastard in a few places, myself,” he went on. “I suppose you’ve got onto it, if you’ve been travelling around hostels and camps for a while?”

  “You hear.”

  “I bet you do,” Carmichael commented with brief humour.

  They were interrupted by the pounding of footsteps in the corridor outside. Carmichael turned quickly and looked through the door. He came face to face with a small dark man who stopped abruptly and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Ah—mister! Come quick, my hut!”

  “What’s the matter?” Carmichael, after his momentary start of interest, had calmed down. He regarded the new-comer inscrutably. “Someone dead?”

  “Not dead,” the man panted. “Is cut—here!” he held out his hand, the fingers clasped around the wrist. “Blut—much!”

  “Oh, God!” Carmichael turned again to Randolph, shrugging. “Never a dull moment! You’d better come along, Randolph. If you stay here, you’ll see plenty of this kind of thing. Wait a mo, though. I’d better get some bandages.”

  “I have!” The man in the doorway, who had been watching them agitatedly and listening to their conversation, held out his hand impulsively. It was crammed with bandages and a small bottle of iodine. “At office, this man give me, say you are here.”

  “O.K. Let’s go.”

  Carmichael led the way out of the room. Before long, threading their way amongst the huts of the camp, they came to a darkened block at the far end. The foreigner entered, and stopped at a door half-way along the corridor.

  A guttural voice answered his knock. When the door was not opened immediately Carmichael gave it a shove with his foot and stalked in. The man who had brought them disappeared down the darkened passage.

  “For God’s sake!”

  Randolph, peering over Carmichael’s shoulder, was confronted with a scene of confusion and unutterable squalor. The room was crammed with furniture, the or
dinary hostel issue with which he was familiar, and two or three cupboards made out of old boxes roughly painted; a tattered curtain masked the window, and a small mat, foul with grime and red mud, covered part of the floor. Filthy clothing hung from a number of nails driven into the timber supports behind the fibro walls, and the air was heavy with the stench of sweat and stale drink.

  One man lay sprawled on the floor against a wall; blood masked his face, but a glance showed that the injuries were superficial. A second stood rigid by the wardrobe, every muscle tensed for instant movement, staring at a third who sat on the edge of the bed.

  He was a brutish, thick-shouldered Slav, with a heavy face and a shock of black hair. His huge boots were caked with red mud and his clothing, thick with grime, was no dirtier than that which hung from the walls.

  One elbow rested on his knee, the arm stiffly in front of him, the hand clutching a shattered wine-glass. The fingers of the other hand were clasped round the wrist, and Randolph’s eyes, glued on it, saw the thick blood well glutinously between them. There was a congealing pool on the floor between the man’s feet, and a spray of dully gleaming circlets like a festoon of cherries across the wall at the head of the bed where they had spurted from a severed artery.

  “What the hell happened here?” Carmichael turned savagely on the man by the wardrobe. “Were you here?”

  The foreigner pressed against the wardrobe. He licked his lips and his glance flickered nervously between Carmichael and the man on the bed.

  “We are here,” he explained. “We have some drink—some wine, some gin, maybe.” He indicated the man on the bed. “He is drunk—for fight want.”

  “Looks like he got it, too,” Carmichael commented grimly.

  “Please?”

  “Forget it.” Carmichael nodded at the man on the floor. He had ceased to groan and could have been dead but for an occasional twitching of his shoulders. “What happened there?”

  “Looks as if his pal poked him in the puss with the glass,” Randolph ventured, “and got cut himself in the process. Nice old trick, that.”

  “Huh.”

  The man on the bed muttered thickly. He made a convulsive movement with his wounded hand, and shot a malignant glance at the man by the wardrobe.

  “All right, shut your guts, you slob!” Carmichael had begun to walk quietly across the littered floor, towards the bed. The man’s small, inflamed eyes followed his every move; he obviously didn’t understand Carmichael’s quick, slangy speech, or was taken in by the deceptive gentleness with which he said the rough words.

  “No!” The man by the wardrobe shot out his hand impulsively. “You must not. He will …” he sought for the word for a moment, and then pantomimed a vicious lunge with the broken glass.

  “Like hell, he will!” Carmichael said grimly. “If he does, it’ll be the last bit of meat he’ll ever try to carve!”

  Without pausing, and showing no concern whatever, he continued his slow advance towards the bed. He moved easily, smoothly but tensely, like a spring uncoiling. Although his arms hung loosely at his sides, Randolph could tell instinctively that he was prepared for anything the man on the bed might do.

  Easily and without haste Carmichael put out his hand, without hesitation right on the jagged glass. As easily and unconcernedly he withdrew it from the man’s unresisting fingers. As he did so, both Randolph and the man by the wardrobe exhaled a breath that had been held seemingly beyond endurance.

  “Get me some hot water, Randolph,” Carmichael said. “There’s a shower at the end of the hut—use anything you can find in this brothel, but for God’s sake wash it out first!”

  Unconcernedly he loosened the clamped fingers, and as Randolph walked through the door, he saw the thick blood ooze again and begin to drip to the floor.

  Working swiftly and surely, Carmichael swabbed away the dried blood and washed the wound clean. The foreigner by the door watched his every move; when the manager up-ended the bottle and poured iodine directly into the jagged cuts he winced and drew in his breath sharply. Randolph had been watching the man on the bed. His eyes narrowed and his lips were compressed into a thin line, but he made no sound. The wrist that Carmichael held was steady as a rock.

  “Touched you up a bit, didn’t it, you bloody oaf?” Carmichael inquired with mock solicitude. “That’ll teach you to act the nanny!”

  He wound a bandage expertly round the wrist, tied it tightly and stood up. Without another word to the man on the bed, who was staring dazedly at the bandage, he turned savagely on the man by the wardrobe.

  “Whose room is this?”

  The man, his eyes glued on Carmichael’s face, nodded his head and laid his hand against his chest.

  “Me.”

  “Then get it cleared up, you dirty swine!” There was no jocularity now in Carmichael’s voice, and his eyes were bright with sudden rage. “The floor—scrub. Understand, scrub? All right. And the walls, too.” He savagely ripped the dirty clothing from the nails and hurled it into a corner. “And wash them, or burn them—God only knows what sort of brothel you came from, but you’re damned well not going to make this the same!”

  He knelt by the man on the floor and looked at his eyes, carefully, one after the other. They were undamaged. He stood up and walked to the door, from where Randolph had been watching everything he did. So this was Riverslake, and this was Carmichael the Bastard. He had learned a lot about both, and they lived up to what he had heard—the one rough, tough and dirty, the other hard enough to control it. Nice introduction to a future home. Home!

  “Get this man back to his room and wash those cuts.” Carmichael interrupted the train of his thought, speaking curtly to the man by the wardrobe. “Wash them clean, and put plenty of iodine on them.” He pointed to the iodine bottle on the box by the bed. “And have this joint cleaned out by the morning—scrubbed and cleaned out.”

  The man shrugged. “Is late … perhaps tomorrow …”

  “Perhaps nothing. I said tonight. I’ll have a look at it before breakfast, and if it’s not cleaned up as I like it, you’ll be on your way before seven o’clock, make no mistake!” Carmichael turned again to Randolph. “Come on, Randolph—let’s get out of this damned pigsty. God, what a stink!”

  Randolph glanced round the room before he turned to follow the manager. The man on the bed was still looking fixedly at his wrist; the one on the floor groaned softly and rolled on his back, breathing stertorously. The third stood unmoving by the wardrobe, his eyes roving around the wrecked room, a helpless frown on his dark face.

  Carmichael was silent as they walked back to Randolph’s room, but at the door he stopped and snorted in disgust.

  “God almighty, what a bunch!”

  “This sort of thing happen often?” Randolph inquired.

  “Often enough to be part of the day’s work. They never die, though, the bastards!”

  “What are they?” Randolph opened his door and stepped into his room. “What nationality?”

  “God knows—Balts of some sort.”

  “Bit of a problem, eh?”

  “No more than the blasted Australians, and they should know better.” Carmichael laughed shortly. “At least, you’d expect them to know better.”

  “A lot of those blokes here, they tell me?”

  “At Riverslake? Yes, the majority, I’d say. Some Pommies, some Aussies, some Maltese—but the majority Balts of all kinds.”

  “What, straight off the ship?”

  “Hell, no!” Carmichael shook his head. “Greta or Bonegilla or Bathurst, first. A lot of ’em go into hospital when they get here—had a pretty thorough going over in Europe by the bloody Russians, most of them.”

  “Yeah. I guess so, the poor bastards.”

  “They stay there until they get their bearings,” Carmichael explained. “Until they learn a bit about the country and the hab
its of the people—and to ask for the usual things …”

  “Tucker and direction and love?” Randolph interrupted him with a grin. “That’s the usual, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve been overseas, I can see,” Carmichael said. “When they can more or less look after themselves they shoot ’em up here—droves of them.”

  “Why here, especially?”

  “Works of national importance!” Carmichael said with short sarcasm. He waved his hand round the room, indicating the camp and the city outside. “Tables to wash in the mess, lawns to be cut, all the Civil Servants’ hedges to be trimmed—hell, you’ve no idea what goes on!”

  “Like that, eh?” Randolph muttered. It was the same tale everywhere—of men frittering away their time working out their contracts on piddling jobs when they could be doing some real work for themselves and for the country. If only the blasted unions would let them, his mind added bitterly. “The big plan bogging down, eh?”

  Carmichael shrugged. “What do you expect?” he demanded. “Although it’s not so much bogged down as broken down, I suppose.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look at it this way.” Carmichael held up one finger. “In the first place, in one man’s mind, it’s a bottler of a plan. Say it’s Calwell—he’s the baby that works it all out. He goes into it in a big way—and that’s the only way it’ll work. He races round the world, drumming up the source of supply, spends millions hiring ocean liners to bring them out here, setting up camps for them to live in, appointing blokes to teach them and to look after them and administer them from their toe-nails to their dandruff. And he does a mighty job, too. But he can’t do it all. Once it’s out of his hands, the rot sets in. A whole horde of tin-pot czars takes over—they don’t know what the hell it’s all about, but they do know that they’ve got a mob of poor beggars to shove around and miles of papers to sign and orders to give, and for any shiny-tail in a department here that adds up to heaven. So they shove and sign and give to their hearts’ content. And that’s why the whole damn thing’s going haywire; what started with Calwell as a master-plan ends up in places like this as a schmozzle. Every hostel manager, every assistant manager, the blokes in the offices, the chefs and the stove cooks and even the blasted kitchenmen have a hand in it. It’s only one in a hundred who knows how to do the right thing, and only one in a thousand who does it. God knows where it’s all going to end up.” He looked rather sheepishly at Randolph. “You can take the cotton-wool out of your ears, now,” he said, grinning. “I run on when I get talking about it to someone who might understand.”