Hollow air, p.7
Hollow Air, page 7
Stupid to let herself get drunk like that, let her guard down. Should’ve known better. And Joe saying, I got you, don’t worry, and that he was sorry she was sad. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d been sober.
‘Know you seen it.’ Joe coughed and took another deep pull.
‘She’s alright.’
‘Can tell you’re not thinking with your head, mate.’
There was no reply.
‘Pretty funny she’s boss now . . . used to be under, like two or three blokes, haha, sorry, I mean she was further down the hierarchy, you know. Probably kept her ’cause they don’t have to pay her as much as those guys.’
‘Probably should though.’
‘Maybe. Not a fair world, eh?’
Had he always talked about her like this? She hated the thought of it. The men sniggering and swapping stories. Who was she kidding? They all knew. Joe must’ve told them. Didn’t matter that Joe had a wife and three kids back home. The men didn’t care what he did.
She backtracked to the office door and shut it hard. ‘You boys know what Norm’s cooking?’ she called to them.
‘Oh . . . hey Sarah, yeah, stir-fry. Fancy, making his own sauce, not KanTong.’ She wondered if Joe knew she’d heard him.
Inside the kitchen, steam from the boiling rice had fogged up all the windows and Norm’s glasses too. He was bent over a wok, reciting ingredients to Ian as though they were an incantation.
‘Shallots, chop ’em fine, they go in first, then you’ve got your chilli, your ginger, let it fry a couple of minutes, garlic, smell that, beautiful, isn’t it? It’s about getting the right balance: salty, sweet and sour.’
Ian nodded, furiously taking notes. ‘Norm’s teaching me how to make a stir-fry. I’m going to make it for my partner when I get home.’
‘Partner? Makes it sound like you’re in business together.’ Norm laughed.
‘Well . . . it’s a business of sorts.’ Ian grinned when this made Norm laugh even harder.
Sarah made herself a cup of tea and sat at the table listening to their banter. She knew this was how camp was supposed to be. People. Not the empty, haunted place she had come to call home. And yet, with people came problems, and this feeling like she was getting it all wrong. Joe’s eyes following her as she moved around the camp. Cole’s body stirring in the bed on the other side of the wall.
Sometimes it was easier to be alone.
CHAPTER NINE
1910
It was no short hike out to the mine. Samuel and Tom walked in silence as the track wound through thick bush, the harsh forms of ironbarks making the pre-dawn light seem darker than it should. Kangaroo grass shivered at the side of the path, some nocturnal marsupial startled by their footsteps hurrying home to its burrow.
The first rays of sunlight breached the horizon and caught in hundreds of tiny dew-laden spider webs, so they lost their invisibility and sparkled gold. Samuel had always liked the walk out to the mine—it let him leave his cares behind and focus on the small things: the burble from the throat of a frog not yet to bed, the scent of eucalyptus crushed underfoot, the way the monsoonal air was thick to breathe, like a warm broth. He liked the feel of his strong legs as he walked, the solidity of feet meeting ground. He could almost forget for a time that he was a husband, a father, a grieving one at that—that he was a man talked about in town, and that the talk was that he was unlucky, that a different man born under different stars might have held claim to the fortune he had found.
He liked to forget, and he liked to walk in silence, and Tom knew this, had been told many a time to hush a while. Samuel was content enough to listen to his prattle when they were in the depths and the sound of Tom saying this and saying that was a welcome distraction from the sweat running and Samuel’s aching back and the hot closeness of the mine. But if anything was sacred to Samuel, it was the silent walk.
Today was different. He could almost feel Tom’s unspoken thoughts radiating through the bush, so Samuel allowed him this.
‘Speak up, young Thomas. You are all but bursting at the seams.’
‘I am just . . . I . . . all will be well, won’t it?’
Would it? There was much that could go wrong. ‘Yes, of course it will be well.’
‘The mine cannot close. Elsie’s father will never let us marry. I cannot bear to lose her, Sam.’
‘Settle yourself down now. Nobody is losing anything.’
Nothing that hadn’t already been lost.
This pining of Tom’s, it was not something Samuel could understand. Samuel’s mind had been so fixed on the world beneath the ground that it took Mabel near knocking him over the head with her intentions for him to even notice her. It made him smile to think of it. Once she had decided on Samuel, she would not take no for an answer, not from her Papa and certainly not from Samuel. Which was well enough with him. They got along as best they could, and she made him laugh. At least, she used to.
He did sometimes wonder what had made her so keen to hitch herself to a wagon such as him. He had noticed the way the mothers of Crossley Downs kept their daughters from his path. Perhaps they had heard the stories of his old life in Cairns, when he was brimful of rage and bloody in the knuckles, or maybe they only had to look at his scarred face to know he was not a good sort for their precious girls. But there had been nobody to warn Mabel: her mother only sat in a chair and stared out the window since her turn, and her father was a weak man.
Tom was still nattering on. ‘It’s basically your mine after all. It’s named for your daughters! Should that not count for something?’ Tom caught himself at the way Samuel flinched. ‘I am sorry, Sam. Daughter.’
‘Daughters. I still have two, though one may be in the ground.’
What Tom said was true. In a different world the profits from the mine would have poured into Samuel’s own pockets and not those of another man. He could curse his luck again and again that he did not have the resources to mine it himself. Oh, he had gone as deep as he could, burrowing away from the sunlight, deeper still, until the mine could scarce hold up under its own weight. After the second cave-in had almost sent him to meet his maker, Samuel was finally forced to accept that a man on his own could only shift so much dirt before he must bow to those richer men with machinery and the backs of many men in their employ.
McNeill had paid him for the claim, and it had been enough that he could set his family up in the hut and even pay off some of his old debts from a time when he was young and stupid and money meant less. He had been paid for the claim, but the money had gone into the world like water sucked into the soil after a rain, leaving nothing but dry.
Then he had watched as they opened up his ground and brought bucketloads of black to the surface.
McNeill had been generous enough to give Samuel work, at Samuel’s own mine, named after his own children. McNeill sending him day after day into the hole for the backbreaking work of bringing up the tin. God alone knew how it rankled that this, the best work of Samuel’s life, had gone into making someone else a wealthy man. But he had to eat, he had to provide for his family, and so, he had to work for McNeill, even though the bile of it bit at his insides with each chunk of tin brought to the surface that should have been his.
McNeill who was rich even before all of this, in his big house in Crossley Downs, up on stumps above the muck and mire, with its wraparound verandah and freshly cut lawns that never stopped being green, even when the ground parched and cracked in the surrounding farms and the farmers had to shoot their bag-of-bone cows to put them out of their misery.
Mrs McNeill could still sit on her wicker chair and drink ginger ale and fan herself whilst dust blew across the land and green things withered and men sweated in the heat, waiting for the rain to come.
CHAPTER TEN
Sarah wandered the suburb where she now lived. A stone’s throw from the city and full of NIMBYs. She wouldn’t have chosen it, but this was where she was. Sarah had been up and down these streets too many times before. She knew each tree intimately. The jacarandas had begun to drop their petals: they carpeted the ground, bruising to brown where Sarah walked. A pair of white sneakers hung from the electrical lines above, twisting in the breeze.
Sarah headed down to the train station and stood on the bridge above the tracks, watching the trains go back and forth to the city. The Harbour Bridge curved an arc through the sky, not so far from her, but the bustle of the city felt distant. Scott would be there in his office, sitting behind his desk, fingers to keyboard, eyes squinting as he peered at the screen. His pose would be mirrored by the office mate in the cubicle beside him, hunched in their ergonomic chairs until they remembered that they were supposed to sit up straight and they pulled their spines taut and sat like that for a few minutes before drifting back down to vultured forms. And they too would be mirrored by the person in the next cubicle, shoulders slumped, and mirrored and mirrored; the same person extending fractally through the office and into the next building and the next, and the whole city was filled with this person with tired eyes from bright screens and mouth tasting of stale coffee, and a cubicle decorated with cut-out Dilbert cartoons, pictures of kids they never saw enough of, and Gantt charts displaying targets that would never be met.
But Scott liked his office job.
At this time of day, the trains were almost empty, only a few people standing on the platform below. The train driver noticed her on the bridge above him, smiled and waved at her as if Sarah were a child. Not knowing what else to do, she waved back. The train screeched on the tracks as it took off towards the city. That sound was ubiquitous in this suburb.
Each time she thought she was far from the railway, she’d hear the shriek of metal on metal, the tracks snaking through every part of the suburb, and there was never a truly quiet place—even down in the small valley below the station, where there was a stand of undisturbed bush. Sarah went there now, and every few minutes a train would roar by above, hidden by the gum trees and ferns, the sound a disembodied monster.
Down in the valley, there were moments of peace between the noise of the trains. Better to pass the time here than sit in Scott’s apartment and wait for the day to be done. Up in the North, the bustle of site was continuing without Sarah, and that felt strange, as though she had become such a part of it that it ceased to exist when she was away. But the men would be there, bodies working in the hot sun, eyes squinted against the white light of it, drinking down litres of water that would be lost almost as quickly to the sky.
Here the sun’s light grew wan through the canopy; it was cooler and there was the sound of water trickling and dripping, but it wasn’t where she most wanted to be. Was it that she also ceased to exist when she was not there? Sometimes it felt that way.
Sarah stayed a long time, following the creek down to where the rocks were covered in moss and tree ferns feathered above her. She watched dragonflies with black beaded eyes and iridescent wings flitting above the water’s surface. She stayed until the sun no longer reached the valley, and it began to grow chill in the twilight and mosquitoes whined around her.
Looking at her watch, Sarah realised she’d lost track of time. She would be late for Scott.
Scott had chosen a trendy new place, one in the speakeasy model, without a sign at the front—small bars like this were popping up everywhere. Sarah walked up and down several blocks of York Street until she finally had to call him. He emerged from a narrow alleyway, looking the wrong way down the street. There in the lamplight, in his grey wool suit with his hair slicked back, he looked like someone from a movie, not like a real person at all. But then he saw her and waved, and things fell back into place. When he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, it felt real, and she tried to hold on to that warmth.
‘Seriously, what time is it?’ Scott said with a grin, hurrying her through the door to the bar. ‘Don’t worry, I made the booking for later than I said. I know you. Already had a cocktail, hope you don’t mind.’
‘Got some catching up to do then.’
They ordered drinks, beer for her and an old fashioned for Scott. He clinked his glass against hers. ‘TGI Friday!’
Thank God. It didn’t feel as blurred on the weekends with him. The rest of the time stretched and warped, so it was the same day over and over, whether Sarah was back in Sydney or up at the site where there were no weekends. Scott always knew if it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Scott never lost track of days or the time.
He reached out and took one of her hands. ‘I’ve a confession to make. I brought you here with an ulterior motive. What do you think of this place for the engagement party?’
‘Oh.’ Her stomach churned. She pretended to look around. ‘Nice enough, I guess.’
‘A work colleague knows the boss. We could probably get a good deal.’
‘I hadn’t really thought about it—’
‘I know you’re not a party person, but it would be nice to share this with our friends and family. It could be like a practice run.’
She knew he meant his friends and family. Would her mother come if Sarah invited her? Dad had always been the buffer between them, and the space where he should have sat would be filled by one of Scott’s many friends. Or Scott’s mother asking whether they were going to get straight to the business of grandchildren after the wedding—Sarah wasn’t getting any younger after all. And her friends? Who could she invite? In the years since she’d started FIFO, all her Sydney friends had fallen away. There was nobody she was close to from her days when she worked the Wayfarer open pit. And before that, there had been so many other places, friendships made fast in the strangeness of those remote camps and as quickly forgotten when everyone moved on and took with them names she now couldn’t quite recall. What about Terry? Or Jess? She didn’t think ‘friend’ was a word they’d use to describe her. Not Joe, though there had been a time he’d felt like a friend.
Sarah had prepared herself to weather the wedding. Had almost felt she could agree on a date; Scott had been asking when for so long, and she couldn’t keep putting it off. But she hadn’t been expecting this.
Scott stroked her hand. ‘You’re not wearing your ring again.’ She heard the accusation in his voice.
She slipped her hand out of his grasp. ‘I forgot to put it back on.’
A muscle twitched in his jaw. ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’
She swallowed. Her mouth was very dry.
He was looking at her so intently, his eyes gleaming in the candlelight, down here in this basement below the street, with the rumble of traffic above, and she suddenly thought of Cole and the warmth of his skin when her fingers accidentally met his in the dark of the adit.
Stop it. Your life is here.
‘You know I’m not really one for fanfare.’ Sarah gave a chuckle that stuck in her throat. She took a big swig of beer. ‘Could probably give the whole party thing a miss.’
She watched the way his face changed. Like a light went out. Ryan’s words echoed in her head. You can’t keep stringing him along. She hated that he was right. Sarah took a deep breath and gave in. ‘But you want it and I don’t mind so much. Yeah, sure, let’s have it here.’
‘Really?’ He reached out and took her hand again. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’
‘I know.’ Scott was in limbo most of the time because of her. Sarah knew that. Scott wasn’t like her. He couldn’t just forget and live his life while she was away.
It wasn’t a normal life: three weeks of being alone, followed by a week spent trying to slot the pieces of their relationship back into place. Each time it felt harder.
She knew he hated being on his own. He wanted all of her.
It meant if there were other compromises to be made, Sarah felt she had to make them; it was the only way their relationship could approach anything like equilibrium.
Still, it never seemed like it was enough. Sarah didn’t know how to make it be enough.
It turned out there was more to give. There always was. Their last night together. Scott’s murmur, close at her ear, hot breath, his hands roaming her body, Let’s just do it now. She tried to ignore him, swallow his words with her mouth on his, but he was persistent, We might miss our chance, we don’t have to wait till after. After. Her attempts at distraction didn’t work and finally she said the word, so softly she was surprised she had given form to it. Yes. A shiver went through his body and the look on his face was something like relief. When he plunged into her there was a harshness to it. A claiming, a possessiveness she hadn’t felt from him before.
In that moment, Sarah knew she’d gone too far, but how to say that when he was already inside her. She was surprised he didn’t notice the rigidity of her body. The way she couldn’t climax.
After he finished, he slid his arms around her and reached a hand down to stroke her belly. The surge of repulsion Sarah felt at his touch there was so strong she had to suppress a shudder.
His voice at her ear, It felt different for me, did it feel different for you too?
Yes. Yes. It had felt different.
Site day. This was how it always went. Alarm set early. Roll out of bed. Shower. Bags packed. Scott’s half-asleep I love you. Uncomfortable small talk with taxi driver. Check-in, security. Coffee. Sit and watch the planes. Last call. Boarding pass. Find seat. Taxi down runway, up into air, ears pop, look out window, Sydney coastline below. Breakfast service, sloppy eggs, sausage, lukewarm tomato, dry muffin, more coffee. Laptop open, put away electronics, laptop closed. Flight descends, ears pop, mangroves rush into view, hit the ground, bump. Retrieve backpack, wait, wait, down the staircase. Humidity, hot on tarmac. Terminal, baggage carousel, wait, wait, grab bag. Long-stay car park, car, drive out of airport, and then finally . . .
. . . the road. It was a relief to be out in the open, like she could outrun herself and what she and Scott might have created together. She wouldn’t think about that. The road hit the foot of the Tablelands and trees began to cluster thickly at the roadside. Winding up and up, into the dark of the vine-strangled rainforest. Emerald-green canopy arching above, the highway becoming a tunnel. The ute rushing through dappled sunlight. Heavy trucks groaning up the hillside, shriek of compression brakes. Road cuttings roped together by tangled root systems. Flashes of yellow and black: signs warning of rockfalls. And then, through a break in the leaves, the coastline appearing below, brown sediment at the water’s edge and deep azure of the sea pinned by the cloud-shadowed peninsula.
