Riverslake Read online

  “I’m interested to learn,” Randolph said. “God, it must break Calwell’s heart, when he sees what’s happening to his scheme!”

  “It’d be bad enough if that was all that it did,” Carmichael commented grimly. “But it’s likely to break something a damned sight bigger than any politician’s heart. And you know how big they are!”

  “Huh. Well, we’ll see.”

  “You’ll see, all right, if you stay here a while. Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Staying here for a while? There’s quite a turn-over in the kitchen, and I wondered if you might be just passing through?”

  Staying here? Will I ever stay anywhere, again? Randolph stared past the manager at the blind eye of the little window. It’ll have to be a damned soft soil before I put down taproots again!

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ll be here for a while.”

  “Where d’you come from?” Carmichael asked abruptly.

  “Oh, around. The Snowy, Bogong, Yallourn …” Randolph enumerated a few of the big construction jobs where he had worked as cook or kitchenman in the last few years.

  “No, I mean at the beginning.”

  “Western Australia.”

  “Mighty big place to come from.”

  Randolph grinned. Carmichael had cornered him. “A little one-eyed joint you wouldn’t have heard of,” he said. “Busselton.”

  “Nice river, the Vasse. Pretty. And I’ve caught many a good feed of herring off the jetty.”

  “Hell—you’ve been around!”

  “You hear,” Carmichael said slyly, using the same words as Randolph had, a while ago. “Anyway, you’ll want to settle in, I guess. There’s the key. If you want anything, look me up. In the morning, ankle over to the kitchen—I’ve told Verity you’ll be in. He’s the chef, and he’ll show you the ropes.”

  “Thanks,” Randolph said. “I’ll make out.”

  “Of course.” Carmichael walked to the door. “See you later.”

  Randolph stood still while the manager’s footsteps faded down the passage. Busselton. He stared down at the dirty malthoid on the floor. Beneath it and the floor of the hut was the soil of this place, red and hard as he had seen it under the lights when he walked across with the manager from the office. And yet it was joined in some inexplicable way with the soil of Busselton, though a continent lay between them, rivers and plains and deserts and mountains, towns and farms and factories. Joined to the quiet, tree-lined roads and to the gentle curve of the white beach where he had swum and frolicked and made love with a girl called Eileen, a thousand years ago.

  He shook his head with short, savage movements, raised it and stared round him. It was cold in the little bare room, and unconsciously he shivered inside his greatcoat, wrinkling his nostrils against the thin, stale air. Christ, another room in another hostel, another man’s mess to clean out, his grease to rub off the walls, his stink to get out of the air. A cold panic of uncertainty plucked at him, and he had to fight down the urge to turn round and walk out of the room—out of the camp, out of this cold and remote place. But where to? To another room in another hostel, in another town?

  He shrugged. As he did so, a bell rang stridently from the direction of the kitchen, which Carmichael had pointed out to him on the way across from the office. He recognized it for what it was—the warning bell on a boiler. As he turned involuntarily to the still opened door, a strange figure scurried past it, a thin form, cruelly hunched, that hurried along the passage with a crablike gait. For a moment, as the man passed the door, their eyes met, and Randolph caught the fleeting picture of a thin, twisted face with a hideous strawberry birth-mark that ringed the mouth like a smear of red jam.

  The bell stopped suddenly as it had begun. As though it were a signal for which he had been waiting, Randolph shook his shoulders and dragged his case over to the bed. He lifted it up and opened it.

  The wardrobe, so recently emptied of the last occupant’s clothes, waited to take his own, and the familiar routine of handling familiar things comforted Randolph like a warm blanket thrown round his shoulders. He hung his clothes and made up his bed. Before long he was fast asleep.

  Carmichael returned to his office. While he had been showing Randolph his room an envelope had been shoved beneath his door, and as he entered it stared up at him from the dark linoleum. He stooped and picked it up, turned it over with a curious grin. He dropped it on the baize top of his desk. It could wait.

  He sat down and took up again the typed list he had been studying when interrupted by Randolph’s arrival. Gummow, Novikowsky, Murdoch, Vodavitch—all kitchenmen; an hour’s overtime for Novikowsky last Tuesday when the black-out came on. The Pole had been working the plate machine on relief for the regular plate man who was having a sickie. He couldn’t start the dishes until the power came on again, and so had to work late to get them finished.

  Nearly seven hundred men, soup, entrée and sweets for all of them, and a back-up or two for most. It all added up to about three thousand pieces of crockery to be washed, and if Murdoch had not stayed behind to give him a hand, Novikowsky would have been going until midnight. So an hour’s overtime for Murdoch, too—not that he was hungry for it. He was a curious chap, easy-going with a streak of stubbornness, or maybe hardness. He did his work and caused no bother, and he got on well with the Balts. One of the few, Carmichael reflected with a grim smile. He got on well with all of them, even the great slob Vodavitch, and he had learned a number of phrases of foul abuse in Polish and Russian and Yugoslav and German which he handed round indiscriminately. He seemed to be as happy with them as he was with the other Australians in the kitchen. Novikowsky, a Pole, was his particular mate.

  Carmichael’s eyes flickered to the next pile of sheets, while still behind his consciousness hovered the picture of the white envelope that lay on his desk. Verity, the chef, at the top of the list, Zigfeld and Warner, the second and third cooks; Slim Charlesworth with his damned silly hair-do, Paramor and Condamine, the stove cooks, and at the bottom of the list Mancin, the sweets cook.

  That made seven of them, and with the new bloke starting in the morning, eight. The name was pencilled in lightly—when he had stayed a few days and looked as if he might be around for a while, Carmichael would ink it in. If they lasted over the first few days, they usually stayed for a month or so. Randolph. Bob Randolph. To be hoped that he knew at least the rudiments of cooking.

  Eight cooks, and on an average, two a day would be drunk enough to be more a nuisance around the kitchen than anything else. A couple more would start the day sober, but would get drunk during the afternoon break when they all went up to the Kingston Hotel. Now and then there would be one or more off on a sickie—they changed their jobs so frequently that they never let their sick leave accumulate. Regularly, as the time off mounted to a full day, they took it and spent it brazenly at the Kingston, or pottered round the camp doing their washing. And no one dared kick. Least of all me, Carmichael thought, with a shrug.

  Through their hands passed the thousands of meals that crossed the press each day, the goulash and spaghetti and tripe and potato pie; the roast and boiled and corned meats and the mountains of vegetables prepared each day by Murdoch and Novikowsky in the little vegetable room off the kitchen. It was an abiding mystery to Carmichael that they accomplished it all—not a day passed but he expected some sort of a breakdown, but it never came.

  Each morning, at six fifteen, there was the breakfast, with the kitchenmen and the cooks yawning and cursing on one side of the press and the guests yawning and cursing on the other. Lunch was at twelve, when the builders and labourers, the carpenters and gardeners and painters and mechanics trooped in dishevelled and covered with lime and cement and red dust—or mud, in the winter. At five o’clock, tea, with two or three of the cooks and twenty per cent of the guests, who had spent an hour or so in the hotel before ret
urning to the camp, drunk and willing to play.

  Verity, the chef, lank and dark, stood at one end of the servery by the sweets rack to stop the guests from taking more than one sweet at a time. He had a thin, harsh voice that seemed to fly like an arrow straight at the man it was intended for. He swore viciously and everyone prophesied the day when he would strike a snag and be knocked for a loop. He didn’t care—rather, he seemed to invite trouble. When he was really roused, which was not very often since he seemed to enjoy taunting the men into retaliation and then laughing with them, his dark eyes snapped and his Adam’s apple jerked swiftly up and down the four or five inches of his thin throat. He seemed to be rarely in the kitchen, spending most of his time in the store or wandering round the camp, but he held control firmly and knew everything that went on.

  When Carmichael went into the kitchen first thing in the morning and saw the tall, stooped shoulders of the chef bent over one of the steamers, or heard his rasp voice handing out abuse to one of the Balts, he felt that apart from fire or pestilence or earthquake there would be no riot in the kitchen that day.

  Carmichael pushed the papers away from him, and reached for the envelope that gleamed dully on the baize outside the circle of light thrown by his desk lamp. His grin widened as he looked at it. He slit it slowly and took up a dirty piece of note-paper.

  “To Carmichael, the Riverslake Bastard,” it ran, in scrawling, misshapen print. “You better get out while the going’s good, you dirty skunk. We’ve had you, you dirty bastard. You get out or take what’s coming to you.”

  It was unsigned. Carmichael read it over once or twice, his grin congealing into mocking derision as he did so. Then he pulled open a drawer in his desk and took out a black note-book. He opened it carefully and pasted the note in amongst a score or so of the same kind, all threatening, and all more or less obscene. He read a couple of them idly, replaced the book, and stepped out of his office into the darkness, turning off the light as he went.

  In a moment, but only for a moment, the camp engulfed him amongst its shadows until his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Gradually the rows of huts took shape, crouched in pools of their own shade and separated by the pale ribbons of the gravel paths. The trees stood out singly and in groups, and a bar of light, the only one to be seen, spilled from the half-opened door of the recreation hut and slanted across the night.

  Carmichael made towards it, walking along the moonlit paths casually, his hands deep in his pockets, trailing his coat for whoever had written the note and in scorn for whatever violence they thought to use to frighten him into leaving Riverslake.

  The recreation hut was a long, low building, dirty outside and drab inside. Any semblance of comfort had long since been kicked and looted out of it—now it contained only a table-tennis board, littered with cheap comics but with no sign of bats or net, and a pinewood book-case that held a few paper backed novels. At one end there was a raised dais, partly concealed by a torn and stained curtain, and half-way along one of the walls a black fire-place where half a dozen men sat round a smoky fire noisily playing cards. They looked up as the manager entered, stared at him in silence, and went on with their game.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, with smooth mockery. “I thought I’d find you here.” He nodded around the circle, and walked across the uncovered floor to stand behind one of the players. “Good night, Bellairs.”

  “Hit me for ten bob.” The man he addressed as Bellairs ignored him, talking to the banker. “And nothing over a blasted five, either!”

  The banker turned up a king.

  “You bastard!” Bellairs grunted viciously. He threw a crumpled ten-shilling note across the table with a curse. He was a big, heavily built man with sandy red hair and pale-blue eyes. The lips of his flaccid mouth were dark and chapped with exposure, and his cheeks, nose and ears flamed red. The short and ugly hand that rested on the table in front of him was speckled and covered with a down almost crimson in the electric light, the nails big and masculine and uncared for. He looked up and let his glance slide over Carmichael again, his blue eyes swivelling in their bloody whites. He spat deliberately into the fire-place.

  “Your writing doesn’t improve, Red,” Carmichael observed with grim pleasantry. The other men round the table continued to ignore him, and the cards flickered round for a fresh hand. “That’s the fifth from you, and it’s just as hard to read as the first was.”

  The big log in the fire-place cracked with a sharp report, scattering glowing chips on the floor in front of it. One of the men at the table started, flushed, and settled back into his chair again.

  “You should deal another hand and cut your bloody throat,” Bellairs snarled at the dealer, his eyes on his cards. “Anyway, a man can’t play, what with all the interruptions.” He threw two shillings on the table. “Twist me for two.”

  “You got it,” the dealer replied impassively. “A bit big for a twist.” He reached out his hand and dragged in the two-shilling piece and the cards before he went onto the next man.

  “You should forget about your writing career and concentrate on your cards, Red,” Carmichael suggested mildly. “You seem to be dropping a bit—not up to your old Snowy form!”

  Bellairs threw down his cards and stood up. He was tall, two or three inches taller than Carmichael, who was not a small man, and his legs bulged inside his dirty trousers like young trees. His huge boots were foul with dried mud, caked in lumps, and as he got up he displaced a stench of sweat and beer and unwashed clothing.

  “Good night,” he said to the men at the table, his voice thin with anger. “I don’t like the company.” He stared at Carmichael, his pale-blue eyes protruding slightly. “I’d rather be in the same room with a damned Afghan.”

  Carmichael nodded sagely. “You bet you would,” he said.

  One hand was still in his pocket and his face was still twisted in a mocking smile, but his weight was evenly distributed between his feet, his thick shoulders seeming to sway slightly, first to the right, forward, and then to the left. “But don’t go,” he added, raising his hand, palm out, and keeping his gaze on Bellairs. “I didn’t want to break up your party. I just wanted you to know that I got your note, Bellairs.”

  He raised his eyebrows, looking at each of the men in turn. They stared back at him, their eyes void even of contempt. They were a sullen lot, all unshaven, all dirty, all strong in a rough, unkempt way. They did hard work and made good money, played just as hard and lost it. They were the pattern for the thousands who had gathered to build this city, and who lived in camps and hostels all around their work.

  When none of them spoke, Carmichael nodded, turned around, and stood stroking his chin as if considering something. His broad back was presented to them like the side of a tent. There was no sound in the hut but the crackling of the fire and the sharp contraction of the iron roof in the cold. A black cat, heavy with kittens, crept in and stepped daintily across to the fire-place where it settled and presently began to purr loudly. Carmichael walked to the door, stopped for a moment and then stepped out into the night.

  “That bastard,” Bellairs muttered.

  He sat down again at the table, and the black cat leapt into his lap. His big hand dropped automatically to its shining fur; like so many of his kind, hating the world and ignored by it, he could find some solace in the no-axe-to-grind friendship of a hostel cat, an outcast like himself.

  “Hullo, Millie, you old harlot,” he said absently, stroking her distended flanks. “Come on, send the broads around again!”

  Carmichael walked slowly back to his office. Although he had been in many camps like Riverslake, up and down the length and breadth of Australia, the atmosphere of a camp asleep never failed to send a sharp tingle down his spine.

  It was a still, cold night, and the tussocky grass on Riverslake hillside stood slightly stiffened and palely luminous in its thin armour of frost.
It crackled minutely and rustled though there was no wind. The huts of the camp, or most of them, were asleep on the gravelly rise. Below them the wide valley, dotted with twinkling lights, slumbered in a world asleep, dark and strange. Trees had been planted all amongst the huts to soften and hide the squalid outline of the camp in this city of white buildings and gardens, but now only the gums could be seen, blobs of shadow amongst the ghosts of poplars and birches and elms. In the summer these too would be dense in leaf, but now only the thin traceries of their brittle twigs and branches were palely silvered by the frost and the moonlight.

  To nearly a thousand men the camp was home, however temporary. They came from all over Australia and from a dozen different countries besides to lie asleep as they now were, in their cluttered rooms on Riverslake hillside. Threats and actual violence could never move Carmichael, but always, as he stood looking over this camp at night, the almost tangible sensation of dreams tangling with dreams and of circumstance laying its inexorable hand on plans and hopes amongst the dark huts pimpled his arms. Nearly a thousand men lay asleep, and as each man’s chest rose and fell beneath his five blankets, it seemed that the hillside breathed, and the valley breathed, and the whole dark world breathed with them, in sleep and in peace.

  Chapter Two

  Through the thin light of early morning, Randolph walked from his room towards the kitchen. On the previous night he had been unable to see many details of the camp except the blank façades of the stores and laundries and lavatories that lined the bitumen road along which he had walked with the manager. Now, in the grey light, the whole place lay spread before him.