I should have been warned by that, but he was already asking me what other prospects I had been instructed to examine, and I was thinking of Golden Soak. ‘You find something good, then let me know. Lone Minerals is a new flotation. We’ve got the cash and you won’t be the loser. Okay? And he gave me his card with the Company’s address in Sydney.
Kadek rejoined us, smiling and ordering drinks. ‘Well, Les. here’s to Blackridge being a bonanza.’ And he raised his glass He knew the deal was as good as settled. ‘And I meant it about doing a piece on Lone Minerals.’
We had more drinks, then he told Culpin to leave Freeman and himself to sort the details out. ‘Come back about eight. We should be through by then.’ He looked at me, ‘See you in the morning maybe. We’ll be catching the seven-fifty flight back to Perth.’ Then he turned to Freeman and suggested they had some food, dismissing both of us from his mind.
Culpin drove me back to his home in silence. All down the Golden Mile he never said a word and it wasn’t until we were through Boulder that I realized what was on his mind. ‘Ferdie said you’d be moving into the Pal. Gonna act as his scout, eh?’
‘Something like that,’ I murmured.
‘An’ what about me? Where do I come in?’ He was glowering at me. ‘Two thousand he gave you, right? Jesus! I don’t make much more’n that out of the deal and it was me wot found Blackridge for him.’ He was working himself up into a rage, afraid I was muscling in on the partnership. ‘Well, I’m warning you. Ferdie’s a ruthless, bloody bastard. And I’m not being edged out just because you’ve got a better education, see. You’ll get your ruddy neck broken one dark night if you try that sort of thing out here.’
You don’t have to worry,’ I told him. But I don’t think he believed me. He was a mean bugger and nursing a grievance was like a drug; it deadened the pain of failure.
‘Now if you’d got a line on that fellow McIlroy.’ He was eyeing me shiftily, an ingratiating smile on his coarse face. ‘You told me you were in Nullagine an’ you saw that abo.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he told you nothing?’
‘Nothing that meant anything. The man you want is Phil Westrop and you won’t get anything out of him.’
‘A prospector, eh?’ He peered at me, then slammed the gear lever into second as we turned on to the loose grit track. He didn’t say anything more, nursing his grievance in silence. That sense of grievance would have been difficult to stomach all evening if his son had not been home. He was sitting on the verandah steps and he looked up as we drove in, the face a little thinner than the face in the photograph, and peeling from the sun, the hair longer, but still the likeness to his mother clearly stamped.
‘You just got in?’ his father asked.
”Bout an hour ago.’
That was their greeting, and neither in their faces nor in the tone of their voices was there any sign of affection. ‘You’ll have to bed down on the sofa. Alec here’s got your room.’
The boy nodded, staring at me very directly out of pale greenish eyes. ‘So I gathered.’ He smiled and held out his hand. ‘I’m Kennie.’ The smile stretched the scab of a sore at the corner of his mouth, his eyes crinkling, a depth of interest in them that was very personal.
‘Have you had your tucker yet?’
‘No. Mum said to wait for our guest.’
Culpin grunted and pushed open the fly screen, calling to his wife. Then he turned back to his son. ‘See anything interesting up there? Any likely prospects?’
‘We were doing an aerial magnetic. You don’t see prospects from a whirly bird, not when you’re watching the instruments all the time.’ His mouth twisted in an impish little grin. ‘Saw a lot of roos though. Reds mainly.’
‘Chrissakes! You bin having a dekko at the nickel country north of Leonora and all you can talk about…’ Culpin checked himself, eyeing his son suspiciously. ‘Well, when you weren’t observing the wild life,’ he said sarcastically, ‘mebbe you found time to have a drink with some of the Poseidon boys.’
‘Sure.’ The boy nodded, standing there, not volunteering anything.
‘Well, what did they tell you?’
‘Nothing. They were drillers, that’s all.’
The hostility between them was obvious, and it wasn’t a generation gap — this was a conflict of personalities. Culpin hitched at his trousers. His back was towards me, the dark leathery skin of his neck a network of creases ingrained with red dust. The anger that had been building up in him all the way from the Palace would have broken out then if his wife hadn’t appeared at the flyscreen door to say that supper was ready ‘What happened today?’ she asked. ‘Did that man Mr Kadek brought with him buy Blackridge?’
Culpin nodded. ‘They’re sorting out the details now.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ she said tartly, and I glimpsed how tight things had become in this dilapidated house.
We went into the kitchen then and all through the meal Culpin hardly spoke a word. It was Kennie who did the talking, his mother listening, the two of them obviously very close. It had been the first aerial survey and he was very full of it. After the meal, when his father had gone back to the Palace, he came out and sat with me on the verandah in the fading light and for a while he talked about his survey, not as he’d talked about it over the meal, but as one geologist to another. They had been searching for nickel and copper over a lease area of nearly 300 square miles, and when I asked him whether they had found anything, he shrugged:
‘One area that’s possibly anomalous. That’s all. But we won’t be pegging. Not yet. There’s a strong rumour the government intends to clamp down on all new claims. If that happens the Company will have more time to complete the survey. They’ll be starting geochemical work as soon as the magnetometer results we got on this trip have been analysed.’
He picked up a stick and began drawing an emu in the black grit. He wanted to get a job up in the North West next. He’d heard a lot about it from his father and now geologists were Baying it would be the next area to attract the attention of prospectors. ‘You’ve just come down from there, haven’t you?’ And because he was the sort of boy he was, bubbling over with theory that he now desperately wanted to put into practice, I told him a little about the Garretys and how Golden Soak had been discovered.
That’s the mine my father was making enquiries about.’ He looked up from his drawing. ‘You trying to buy it? Is that why you were up there?’ And when I asked him why he thought it was for sale, he said, ‘Just something I heard last night. We were at the Hotel in Leonora, celebrating the end of our survey, and this bloke I was talking to — he was from Marble Bar, some sort of property dealer, I think — he was talking about it. I don’t remember all he said, I’d had a lot to drink by then, you see, but it’s antimony, isn’t it?’
I suppose I should have realized that people up in the Pilbara would know all about the mine, but it still came as a shock to hear him refer to the antimony content so casually. He knew about the price of antimony, too, even knew the reason for the sharp rise in the mineral’s value: ‘The main source is China and they’ve cut off supplies to the West, stockpiling against the possibility of war with Russia.’ And then he asked me again whether the people I was acting for were going to buy it.
‘I’m not acting for anybody,’ I said. ‘And anyway it isn’t for sale.’
He began tracing the outline of a kangaroo, his head bent in concentration. ‘You’ll be going up there again.’
I didn’t answer for a moment, thinking of Jarra Jarra and what it could mean to them. ‘That depends on the analysis.’
He looked up, a quick movement of the head that tossed his fair hair back. ‘You’ve got samples then?’ His voice was eager, his eyes shining with genuine interest. In the end I took him into his room and showed him a piece of the Golden Soak reef quartz. He had a cheap students’ microscope and he took it out on to the verandah, where the reflector could catch the last rays of the setting sun. His excitement when the specks of gold showed as minute chunks of metal embedded in the quartz crystals was infectious. But even under the microscope the grey smudges of the antimony still showed only as smudges. ‘If the analysis is good and you do go up there again, can I come with you?’