Riverslake Read online

  It was draped untidily over the brow of a low hill overlooking the valley, as though spewed from a crater above until the individual huts and buildings came to rest against rocks and trees and rubble in their descent to the road that wound past the base of the hill. The rows and circles of trees did a little to hide the drabness of the unpainted wooden huts.

  They seemed to be in no ordered lay-out, though perhaps the trees rendered that invisible. They clustered loosely round the central clot of buildings like so many huge, shadowy animals come to drink in the dawn at a waterhole. From experience Randolph knew that they would be the kitchen, the mess, and the recreation room. Gravel paths wound between and amongst them, criss-crossing the hillside like veins, and where no paths had been provided pads had been worn through the tall grass to the mess and the lavatories.

  The main road through the camp wound up amongst the huts and along the slope to the office, which stood isolated in a large square of lawn surrounded by a wire fence, drab now with the winter cold and studded with bare flower-beds that showed like wounds against the dark grass. The small building close to the office, he concluded, must be the manager’s cottage. He turned from the view of the camp and resumed his way to the kitchen.

  Few men were abroad amongst the huts, and those who were were thickly muffled against the cold, mostly in old military greatcoats. It seemed to endow them with some of the brutal strangeness of the hostel. They were men without faces, somehow repellent, just as this was as yet a place without a character, and forbidding because it was unknown. In the next few days, Randolph realized, he had to get to know them, the men and the place—to storm through this brittle shell of anonymity and indifference as he had done before in half-a-dozen camps. The prospect of the effort filled him with something like fear.

  As often as he did it, he knew he would never get used to doing it. He had seen men walk into a camp in the morning and be almost fixtures of the place by lunch-time, knowing their way round and calling the cooks and the store-men and the yard-men, always useful men to know, by their Christian names. But try as he might, Randolph never could—perhaps because he did try. Amongst the shifting populations of the hostels there was seldom any effort to cultivate acquaintance. Friendships and hatreds were almost instantaneous.

  Randolph had seen it time and time again, had recognized the pattern and tried to conform, but never had been able to merge quickly and easily into the broad, careless stream of relationships that, good and bad, flowed round him. What held him back he did not know, or perhaps only vaguely understood; he had seen terrible things happen between men in every hostel he had lived in, theft and violence and treachery and worse, and perhaps it had made him over-cautious. Whatever his reluctance was, it was evident in a slightly cynical manner, and was instantly reflected from the hard surfaces of the men amongst whom he worked and travelled—until they got to know him. He made few abiding friendships, and those with difficulty, but men who did not instantly hate him usually came to like him well enough after a while.

  Whichever way he turned on his way to the kitchen, walking between the huts and the trees, he had an almost uninterrupted view of hills and paddocks and plantations. In front of the hostel and below it the wide green valley spread, with its river shrouded in naked willows; to the north the far view of the misty Alps, and nearer, the pattern of the bald hills and dark swathes of pine plantations. Only here and there groups of white buildings showed up, lonely amongst the open paddocks and the crowding armies of trees, with clusters of red-roofed houses and the tapering spires of two churches. Of a city, such as he had known, there was little sign, and yet it was there somewhere, the city of Canberra.

  He remembered what someone in Sydney had said to him just before he left. “Cripes, mate, what a joint! All over the place like a mad woman’s knitting—bits of it here and bits of it there, and you go crackers looking for it. Stay here—at least there’s trams!”

  Randolph shook his head gently, as though trying to dislodge the memory, his brows drawn down. Shouldn’t have come, he thought, and then, instantly, Oh hell, wake up to yourself—every place’s like this at the start!

  Inside the kitchen it was warm. He stood just inside the door, looking round the big place for someone who might be the chef. It was a barn-like structure, long ago painted white but now hung with sooty cobwebs and darkened by smoke from the thousands of steaks that had been grilled on the great range, island in the centre of a sea of greasy concrete floor. All around the walls were ranged the cutting benches and sinks and deep fryers, the mincers and the steamers and pastry ovens that daily converted an avalanche of raw foodstuffs into food for the hundreds of guests. Alongside the range was the meat-house, a small structure of wire-gauze that imprisoned as many blowflies as batted for entry on the outside.

  Looking round, Randolph could see three other doors from the kitchen. One, it was obvious, led up a shallow ramp into the mess-hall; one, from the sound of a potato machine that thudded through it, into a vegetable room, and the third, which was closed, most likely led to the freezer and to the butcher’s shop. See one, you see the lot, Randolph mused. He returned his glance to the range.

  It glowed in front of him, hot and comforting, the heat pulsing out of it in almost visible waves; it was covered with an infinite variety of pots and pans and trays and urns, and a ponderous, iron-grey man stood with his back to the door stirring slowly with a wooden bat at a mess of stewed meat in one of them. Two others, facing each other across a wooden bench, were cutting up meat, swiftly, with practised strokes, and heaping it into trays beside them. They looked up briefly, and ran their eyes over him. They nodded, distantly, but made no move towards him.

  Randolph stifled a grin. Pity we aren’t dogs, he thought. We’d be sniffing away now quite happily. We’d be all mates in no time!

  This was what he hated most, this cagy entry into a new kitchen, the calculating glances and uninterested attitude that the men already in possession always adopted—until someone broke the ice. There was always someone who would walk over, say hullo, and ease the new-comer in. Randolph stood at the door and waited for him.

  Kitchens were the same the world over, and the men in them. In a few days, he would know all these men by name, know if they had wives or children, cars, bank balances, principles, more than one suit. He would be on terms of friendly profanity with most of them, and would feel that he had known them all his life. He knew all that, and reminded himself of it as he stood in the doorway, with the cold day at his back. And, as always, it had no effect. He knew that, behind their bland glances, they were saying to themselves, “Who’s this gig?” He had done it himself.

  At one end of the kitchen there was a row of big steamers, and behind them a row of stock-pots, shrouded in thin steam. He could see no one there, and was about to turn his glance elsewhere, when there was a sudden cry of dismay from behind them. A thin and dishevelled figure darted out and across to the range, swearing vilely and yet somehow humorously as he went. He kicked open the doors of one of the ovens and reared backwards, coughing in the cloud of acrid black smoke that enveloped him.

  By now everyone in the kitchen was watching him, and work was at a standstill. Lively interest and amusement showed in every face except one. The elderly man who had been stirring the stew when Randolph entered the kitchen laid the bat carefully across the top of the pot and walked ponderously round the end of the stove to view the damage.

  He was dressed, Randolph noticed, picking him for the chef, in almost spotless white, with a clean apron stretched tightly across an enormous stomach that seemed to start just under his chin and to sweep in a magnificent curve to a point opposite to and well out from his loins. There it came to an abrupt end, so suddenly that his snowy apron hung down like the awning of a veranda. His face, large and bland, was curiously dark-skinned, and had caved in round his long thin mouth; he had no teeth, and if he had a denture must have worn it only on official oc
casions, for none of the kitchen staff ever saw him with it in. His lips worked unceasingly over and about his gums, as if he never stopped chewing.

  Now his eyes, small and startlingly blue in his dark face, fastened on the charred and smoking ruin of a pie that emerged from the oven.

  “What the hell have you done, Slim?” he demanded. His voice was thin and harsh and self-satisfied. God almighty, can’t you do a damned thing without gumming up the works?”

  “Don’t panic, Ziggy,” the boy replied easily. He tossed his head to fling back the ridiculously long, heavily-oiled wave of hair that hung down over his forehead, almost obscuring one eye. “It was only one of the dog’s-eyes. It was made of slops, so there wasn’t any loss on it. Saves carting it up to the flaming mess and back again, because no bastard would eat it.”

  He weaved round the other’s ponderous bulk with the pie balanced on a bag across one arm. He was followed by a plume of black smoke. “Give us a go, you blokes, for Gawd’s sake!” he appealed to the watchers. “Start fanning that smoke out, someone—I want to get rid of this crap before Verity comes in. He’d tramp me like a shot if he got a slew at it.”

  If Verity comes in, Randolph mused. So the fat bloke can’t be the chef. Must be the second—he throws his weight around enough.

  The boy called Slim was stooped over the slop-tins, shovelling the burned mess into them. Over it he strewed some egg-shells from an adjoining pail. Then he stood back with a laugh, a short, hard guffaw packed with reckless enjoyment of life, that neither rose nor fell and ended abruptly on the same note as it had started on. Randolph found himself smiling broadly, and looking round the kitchen, encountered the grins of all the others. In the next few months, he was to learn to know Slim Charlesworth’s laugh; it was as personal as his signature.

  “If Verity was going to tramp you for burning the tucker, Slim,” one of the cooks at the bench observed with good-humoured irony, “he would have rubbished you long before this.”

  “Pull your head in,” Charlesworth advised him, “or get it knocked off.”

  “Save that for the chef, when he sees the pie!”

  “Pull his head in, too!”

  “You bring that cold mutton out of the freezer and put it through the mincer, Slim,” the elderly cook interrupted them. His voice carried the hint of a threat, and Randolph got the impression that if he were able to he would delight in turning on the heat. “Make another pie, and make it damned quick, and if you spoil this one I damn well will shelf you. Go on, get going!”

  Charlesworth apparently knew when to tread warily, perhaps from long experience. He picked up a tray from a rack against one wall, winked at the two men at the bench, and with long and curiously fluid strides crossed the concrete floor. Everyone in the kitchen had returned to various jobs; only the grey-headed man by the stove stood looking after him, his long lips working softly and his eyes narrowed. He could see, as Randolph could see, the insolence in the boy’s walk and in the swing of his thin shoulders, but he did nothing.

  His bark’s worse than his bite, Randolph thought, watching him. A real chef would have knocked that bloke sideways.

  It looked as if he would stand by the door all day before anyone took any notice of him, so he took a few strides that brought him alongside the range. He tapped the grey-headed man on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, mate,” he said, when the other swung round. “Is the chef in the kitchen?”

  “Who wants him?”

  The cold directness of the question jolted Randolph. “Well, I do,’ he answered. “I’m starting here today, on the stove. Didn’t the manager tell you?”

  “No, he never,” the other answered shortly. “I’m Zigfeld, the second. I’d be the last in the flaming place to be told about anything like that—the bloody Balts’d know before me.”

  “Carmichael told me he had told the chef.”

  “The Bastard? Well, telling the chef’s not telling me. What’s your name, again?”

  “Randolph—for the first time.” The man’s discourtesy was beginning to nettle Randolph.

  “Randolph? Randolph what?”

  “Randolph nothing,” Randolph replied coldly, aware that the two men at the bench had stopped working and were frankly listening in, faint grins of amusement on their faces. “Bob Randolph. Now, if you don’t know where the chef is, would you mind telling me where I can go to look for him?”

  “In the crib-room,” one of the men at the bench volunteered eagerly. He was a small, thin, and sandy man, his narrow face seeming to slant in from the cheeks, up from the chin and down from the forehead to a thin, pointed nose that jutted out over his colourless mouth like a sign over a shop door. “I seen him there a while ago, Ziggy.”

  Randolph, watching him as he spoke, got the impression that he tendered the information not so much to help a new-comer as to ingratiate himself with the fat cook. And yet he was not servile—there was a mean and vindictive slant to his thin mouth.

  “All right, Con,” Zigfeld said indifferently. If he appreciated the other man’s attitude he did not show it. He raised his voice to a hoarse, unnecessarily loud shout. “Kerry! C’m ’ere!”

  Randolph, looking away from him, encountered the glance of a tall, dark man who had looked up from a deep sink full of pots and trays; he winked, patted his ears with a grimace of pain and thumbed the air at Zigfeld’s back. Randolph grinned back at him, mirthlessly, and he bent again over the sink.

  “Kerry’ll take you round to the crib-room,” Zigfeld announced, without looking at Randolph. He was already moving away from the range towards a low ramp that Randolph could see led to the mess-hall. “Look after ’im, Ron.”

  The second of the two men at the bench put down his knife, wiped his gory hands on the cloth hanging at his belt and walked round to Randolph.

  “Warner’s my name,” he announced, extending his hand. “Ron Warner. I’m third here—I heard you tell Ziggy you’d be starting on the stove. Thank God, too, we’ve been short to blazes.”

  Randolph took the proffered hand.

  “Nice animal,” he commented, nodding his head at where Zigfeld’s gross back had disappeared up the ramp to the mess. “Overwhelmed with his welcome.”

  “Oh, Ziggy?” Warner laughed. “He’s not that bad—you take him like you take the weather. Can’t do much about it, can’t change it.”

  “He might change if he was jobbed occasionally,” Randolph said shortly, still smarting under Zigfeld’s discourtesy. “They get away with it a while, they think they’ll get away with it for ever.”

  Warner ignored Randolph’s outburst.

  “Here’s Kerry,” he said, nodding to the far end of the kitchen. Another man had just appeared through a door leading into a small dark-looking room. “He’ll take you around to the crib-room.”

  Randolph turned and surveyed him as he approached. He wore faded green army shirt and trousers, and a sugar-bag hung from his narrow waist almost to the black rubber boots on his feet. His face wore what might be a perpetual grin of good humour, unstrained and natural; he was fair, so fair that the light behind him laid a shimmering edge to his unruly hair.

  As he came close he studied Randolph frankly from brown eyes set wide apart in his pleasant face. Randolph quickly took in his army clothing and his big, well-knit frame. Might be twenty-one or -two, he thought. Must’ve got those duds from Disposals. A bit too young to be in it.

  “This’s Bob Randolph, Kerry,” Warner introduced them. “Starting on the stove today. Kerry Murdoch, Bob.”

  He said the name a little hesitantly, a little too deliberately. Randolph, himself sensitive to anything of the kind, felt the other’s effort to be friendly and winced inwardly.

  “Glad to know you,” Murdoch said easily, and extended his hand. The grin on his face spread slightly. Randolph took his hand, felt the steady, warm pressure, looked into the s
lightly quizzical grin and thought, This is the bloke, the one who’ll show me the ropes.

  “H’ya,” he said, casually. “Glad, too.”

  Murdoch turned to Warner.

  “Where do I come in?” he demanded. “On the welcoming committee for new babblers, or something? You didn’t drag me out of the vegy room for nothing.”

  “That’s right,” Warner told him. “Ziggy wants you to take Bob round to the crib-room.”

  “Randy,” Randolph said, with half a grin.

  “Sorry … Randy.” Warner apologized, flushing slightly.

  “That’s O.K.,” Randolph shrugged. “But I’m so used to it that I most likely wouldn’t answer to anything else.”

  “That’s what my old sheila used to call me, sometimes!”

  Randolph turned round to see who had spoken. Charlesworth was just behind him, cutting meat from several joints of mutton and listening to their conversation.

  “Used to call you what?” Murdoch demanded.

  “Randy,” Charlesworth said. “I don’t know why—my name’s Mildred!” He simpered at them and minced down to the other end of the bench, a hand on one skinny hip.

  “You flaming hock!” Murdoch scoffed. “Come on, Randy—I’ll show you the crib-room.”

  “Dip your eye!” Charlesworth called after them as they walked away.

  They were half-way across the kitchen to the door when a drunk lurched through it with a scuffle and a burst of tattered profanity. He leaned against the wall just inside and surveyed the kitchen through bloodshot and bleary eyes. His face was puffed and red, and smudged with two or three days’ growth of whiskers. He wore no coat; his crumpled shirt, ripped across the chest, bared a mat of hair and part of a torn and soiled singlet.