Underground (22 page)

But she led us onwards, to where the gully ended in a half-formed kind of cave. Several swags were spread there, a table, some chairs, a gas barbecue, petrol drums, even a television set that was linked to a small satellite dish, a power cord running off towards the generator. All the comforts of home. The old woman, meanwhile, was scratching around on the table. She found a box of matches, lit the gas ring on the barbecue, and set a kettle down on the flame.

‘Right,’ she said finally. ‘Who wants a cuppa?’

The tea was hot, sweet and an utter godsend. We sprawled about on the swags, exhausted, and drank. Our host made herself comfortable in a chair, stuffed a pipe with tobacco and began to smoke it. Her name, she said, was Frieda.

‘You’re a local?’ Harry wanted to know.

‘’Course I bloody am.’

‘Is this your property?’

‘The station? Nah. It’s my
country
, though. And the owner knows we’re here.’ She glanced pointedly at the crop. ‘He gets his cut, fair and square.’ Then she gave Harry a look. ‘Whose fool idea was it coming out here anyway?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘It’d wanna be.’

‘Right now, we’re just trying to get south.’

‘To where?’

‘The Murray, for a start.’

The old woman gave a pitying laugh.

‘Why? Aren’t we even close? Where are we, exactly?’

‘You’re nowhere much. The Murray’s a good fifty miles yet, straight south.’

‘Oh,’ said Harry, crestfallen. He took a breath. ‘The thing is, we’ve been walking all night, we haven’t slept. We need a place to lie low for the day.’

‘What—now you wanna stay here all day?!’

‘There’s nowhere else. And tonight we need to cross the border.’

She scowled around the pipe. ‘I’m not in your bloody Underground.’

‘But are you against us?’ And Harry sounded raw, pushing hard. ‘Are you on the government’s side?’

‘I’m not on anyone’s side.’

‘So is there a way we can get to the river from here without being seen?’

‘Depends how hard they’re looking for you.’

‘But could
you
help us?’

She puffed smoke doubtfully. ‘Why do they want you so bad in the first place?’

‘It’s because of Leo and Aisha here—they know something that can damage the government. We don’t know what that is yet, but it’s gotta be something big. And something that big can maybe help bring this government down.’

Her eyes were mocking. ‘The whole government, eh?’

‘In the long term, that’s our aim.’

‘It’s not my bloody aim.’

‘Why not? You can’t be happy right now—things are worse for your people than ever under this government. None of them give a shit about Aboriginal problems, not when they’ve got their precious war on terror to fight. Christ, they even closed down Uluru because they say it’s a terrorist target.’

The old woman shuddered with laughter. ‘Yeah. I heard about that. They put up a big fence, right around the Rock.’

‘You think it’s funny?’

‘Hell, the blackfellas up there still get in. No fence is gonna stop ’em. And at least it keeps all the damn tourists away. But that fence has got nothing to do with terrorists. It’s because the army built some kind of satellite base on top of the Rock, some spy thing they need and don’t want anyone to see.’

‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

She glanced at me benignly. ‘Nope. Doesn’t matter, though. Aborigines burnt it down. The poor old army can’t work out how it happened.’

‘Exactly,’ said Harry. ‘You see—you have to fight these things.’

She shrugged. ‘The Rock’s not my country. None of my business. And the government pretty much leaves us alone, this part of the world.’

‘But the rest of the country . . .’

‘Bad times, I know. But it’ll all pass one day.’

Harry reared up. ‘It’ll
pass
?’

She fixed him with a stare. ‘Listen, Underground man. You walk out the end of this gully and what do you see? That old lake bed. You would’ve been twenty feet underwater here once, before it dried up. There’s dry lakes all around here, they’ve been dead for thousands of years. Lake Mungo—you’ve heard of that, the one where all the tourists go to look at the fossils? That’s twenty-odd miles west of here. But even this little lake that no one’s heard of—I can take you along this shoreline and show you campsites that my people were using forty thousand years ago. We’ve always been right here, my lot. We survived everything—the lakes drying up, the desert coming, even you white folk trying to wipe us out. And as long as we don’t go and do something stupid in the meantime, like getting ourselves arrested and shot, then we’ll still be here in
another
forty thousand too. And by then, not a damn soul is gonna remember any of this stuff you’re talking about.’

Harry sank back, disappointed.

The old woman shrugged again. ‘We got enough enemies of our own. We don’t need to take on yours as well.’

I said, ‘But you can’t just send us back out there.’

‘I didn’t say I’d do that either. Just let me think, damn it.’

We sat in silence for a time. Beneath me, the musty old swag felt like the most comfortable bed I’d ever imagined, and sleep beckoned irresistibly.

Frieda was staring at Aisha. ‘You don’t say much, girl.’

Aisha looked almost too tired to glare back. ‘I’m not a girl.’

‘Oh no?’ Her smile showed broken teeth. ‘And it’s not true what they say? You aren’t a terrorist?’

‘I’m not a terrorist. I’m fighting in a war.’

‘One of them jihads, eh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you kill for that, right?’

‘If it’s necessary.’

The old woman thought. ‘’Course, Aborigines could have gone that way too. We still got a few hotheads wanting to blow up white people, to get our land back.’

‘You should. It would be a way to stand up for yourselves.’

‘Ha! It would be a way to get ourselves killed, that’s all. No, we do our standing up on the
inside
, girl. We might not look like much, us lot out here, but we could teach mad buggers like you a thing or two about it.’

From above and far-off, came a shout that sounded like a warning. Frieda was up in an instant, head cocked alertly.

‘What?’ Harry asked.

‘My boys,’ she said, holding out a hand for quiet. There came another shout, then, surprisingly lithe, she clambered up the side of the gully to the underside of the roof. A patch of the shade cloth was detached there. She flipped it back to the open sky and lifted herself out to look. A long moment passed in silence . . . Or could I hear, just on the fringe of audibility, a
hum of some kind? Finally, the old woman indicated that we should climb up and join her.

Above the roof, the morning was well advanced now, the sky empty and blue. But Frieda pointed away to the west, and there, in the distance, a tiny black shape seemed to hang in the air. Not a helicopter, but a spindly thing, half plane, half insect, moving slowly south.

‘Predator drone,’ the old woman said.

Harry was impressed. ‘You’ve seen one before?’

‘The army’s got bases out here. Australian Army. American Army. They test things. Those drones come over once in a while. Never spotted us here, though.’

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘They’ve got to be close.’

Frieda shook her head at me. ‘That drone’s good news. They wouldn’t be using it if they were anywhere near, or if they were on to your tracks yet. But it’s no time to be walking out in the open, with those little devils about.’ She ushered us all back under the roof, and pulled the flap over. ‘Okay. You stay here for the day, and get some sleep. Only thing to do—otherwise they’ll find you out there, and you people are so dumb you’d probably tell them all about
me.
’

‘And tonight?’ Harry asked.

‘Tonight, we’ll get you to the river.’ Her faded eyes glinted wide a moment, sad and stern. ‘You can fight all you like after that. Just don’t do it here.’

When I woke, groggy and thick, it was late afternoon. Nearby, Harry and Aisha still slept on their respective swags. There was no sign of Frieda, or her boys.

The heat was stupendous, and my bladder was full to bursting. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a toilet, so I rose and shuffled blearily through the marijuana crop, until I emerged from under the roof. A dozen yards along the foot of the ridge, I unzipped, and let loose—noticing, belatedly, that my stream was washing away the thin sand, and that something white and broken was emerging from just under the soil. It was a calcified fragment of bone. A fossil.

I was suddenly fully awake, eyes wide. I looked at the sky. It was bleached colourless by the day’s heat, dry and empty, as if it had never known rain. I looked at the ridge, a beaten, crumbled arc of abandoned shoreline. I looked at the lake floor, white and stark and dead, like the skin of the planet had
blistered and peeled away. And just for an instant, all alone out there with my dick hanging in space, the
age
of the place hit me. The silence of it. The stillness. Twenty feet of water, burnt away by the sun so long ago that even the memory of it was gone. Except for that fossil in the sand . . . Animals had thrived there once, and forests, and grass. Fish had swum by their thousands in the water, and birds had hunted them from the air. And humans were there too, camped on the lake shore, waves lapping at their feet. Their eyes staring out across a landscape teeming with life—year by year, decade by decade, century by century, age by age—watching as the weather changed and the desert came.

And now only the humans were left.

It makes you think, dear interrogators.

I mean, how much of this mess that we’re in right now stems from the old hatreds in the Middle East, and the ancient claims of Arabs and Jews and Christians? And yet all those disputes only go back a few thousand years. Most of us came in even later, and only because of the oil. How does any of that compare to forty thousand years, and those people at the lake? We’d have to keep this up for another thirty-five millennia! What the old woman said was right. Does anyone really believe that after so long we’re still going to be fighting and dying over the same old arguments? Or that by then anyone will even remember that oil and Islam and Israel and Christianity ever existed? We humans might still be around, but all that we value now or think worthy of belief—all that will be long gone.

It’s obvious enough, I know, but the bigger perspective really catches you occasionally. A momentary thought at a dead lake in the middle of nowhere. Or a longer thought—let me tell you—sitting in a giant prison cell, while you’re waiting for either the next round of torture, or for execution.

The rank, short-sighted
stupidity
of it all.

Anyway, I zipped up, and headed back. And as I did so, I saw a figure out on the lake bed, a shadow against the sun, heading towards me. I caught a burst of language, and a low laugh. And indeed, as if I’d called her up with my thoughts, it was Frieda, the descendant of all that unimaginable length of history, hobbling across the sand in her ridiculous beanie, white hair a mess, talking rapidly into the mobile phone jammed against her ear.

I waited. Her conversation finished as she came up.

‘You get reception on a mobile out here?’ I asked.

She gave me one of her eye rolls. ‘’Course not. It’s a satellite phone. Even then, you have to go out in the middle of the lake to get a good signal.’

‘Who were you talking to?’

‘What—you think I turned you in or something?’

Actually, that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘Have you?’

‘Nope. I was just callin’ home.’

‘Home? This isn’t home out here?’

‘You crazy? I got a house in Menindee. Me and the rest of the family.’ She nodded towards the marijuana plants. ‘This is just part time.’

‘Pretty lucrative, for part time.’

‘Ah, the money gets spread around. And there’s no other work out here these days. But this stuff—you can never grow too much. It’s all these armies in the country. Ours. The Americans. Those soldiers just buy and buy. I tell you, all the bloody wars around the world must run on marijuana.’

We were walking back through the plants now.

‘Have you seen any more drones?’ I asked.

‘A couple. Long way off, though. And the boys are keepin’ an eye out. No one’s comin’ this way yet.’

‘So we go tonight?’

She pondered, studying the phone. ‘I been talkin’ to people all over on this thing—and the word is out about you lot. Army.
Air force. Police. They know you’re round here somewhere, and they know you’re trying to head south, so they got every bridge over the Murray locked down. And not just south, either. East, west, north. Every main road, every back road.’

‘Shit.’

She didn’t seem too alarmed. ‘Ah well . . . We’ll see what night brings.’

Night brought darkness, and—thanks to some friendly weather spirit—it also brought a sheet of high cloud that flowed in from the west, blotting out the stars and the narrow moon. Frieda was pleased, even more so when her sons checked in to report that all was quiet in the immediate vicinity.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We go. There’s a bit of the river south of Robinvale. Long empty stretch there, no bridges, no locks, no houses.’