The Drowner Page 18

  A clear tenor rings out from the casuarinas.

  Bright’s eyes slide around to find the voice. But his chin remains upturned to the west. He starts to blow.

  Another deeper, richer voice joins the first. The bass and tenor harmonise. They are singing ‘Write Me a Letter from Home’.

  At the bottom of the hill, men begin to stir and mutter. The cornet falters on ‘Sweet Marie’. New voices start to join the sentimental harmony. ‘Write Me a Letter from Home’ swells over the stumbling cornet notes.

  ‘Machine men!’ yells one of the caulkers.

  Men are already snatching up their wrenches and hammers, swinging buckets of lead and charging clumsily up and down the incline. It’s an hour before Will and the police get there from Merredin and break up the fight. The old hand-caulkers versus the new machine-caulkers brought in by an impatient O’Connor.

  Will’s telegraph message is terse. To avoid disruption to schedule please inform of any change in caulking procedures.

  The Chief’s message comes back. In future we will use the new Couston Electric Caulking Machine instead of hand labour. A revolutionary machine invented by one James Couston. Another marriage of minds between engineer and inventor. At other sunsets in other places the fights between hand-caulkers and machine-caulkers will continue for weeks. On the pipetrack and even in parliament. But the machine does the work five times faster.

  Dudley Bright misses the next week’s sunset performances. The old hand-caulkers—plain pipetrack navvies now, labourers nursing their bruises and scabbed knuckles—want him to play his cornet again of an evening. Even the machine-caulkers don’t really mind.

  ‘Forget the singers, Dudley. Just a joke. “Sweet Marie”. Solo.’

  The seventh evening he carries his leather case up a nearby slope. His face is stern as usual. His chosen hill this time is the side of an old gravel quarry, a steep, crumbly rise. The hand-caulkers follow him uphill through the pink dust motes. On the gravelly crest he looks across into the sunset, raises the cornet and plays ‘The Last Post’. The notes as cold and pure as ice. Then he swings his arm back and throws the cornet into the gorge below.

  Down the incline the hand-caulkers rush, skidding and sliding through the gravel, breaking into a slithering jog, then all joining in a shambling run, their momentum carrying them down to their navvies’ picks and mattocks, the inevitable sledgehammers, and to the new Couston Electric Caulking Machine straddling the pipetrack.

  As the goldfields prosper so does Axel Boehm. Like others he can thank O’Connor’s railway for his good fortune. Aside from his successful commissions and field photography and his portrait and newspaper and magazine work, a modest speculation in mining scrip has, with the railway’s booming effect on shares, brought him enough capital to establish a new photographic studio next to the Windsor Castle Hotel in the centre of town.

  The studio is also doing well. The reason is simple. Boehm has shrewdly applied to his commercial portraits his fascination in the changing effects of climate, fortune and occupation on human features.

  He knows his clients—even the roughest miners—have no great wish for their features to be sharpened, levelled and aged. So he ensures a visit to his studio will take at least ten years off them. He employs retouchers, women with a sensitive hand, to remove the ravages and blemishes of time and place and labour—and illness—from his portraits. (But he forbids them to retouch his customers’ ‘character lines’.) He keeps a wide selection of wigs and cosmetics on hand, including jars of the popular Pascall’s red gloss. As he jokes to Inez: ‘The cheek paint is more for the barmaids’ entertainment than aesthetic purposes.’ His monochromatic photographic film is, of course, insensitive to red.

  Anyway, his clients are charmed by it all. They are flattered at the lively curiosity he brings to photographing their weddings and balls and other social rituals. To attract miners drawn to town for their evening roistering he even keeps the studio open until nine o’clock. The studio boasts a skylight and a glass wall to allow in the daylight for indoor work, and dressing rooms where his customers can change into their costumes of choice. He provides many props and subtle disguises and elaborate backdrops.

  The Irish and Americans and Germans and English favour a casual stance in front of a craggy background: rocks and gnarled gum trees—with a stuffed wedgetail eagle and goanna, if they wish—to show off an image of hard-won prosperity. The Italians and Greeks and Spaniards prefer to puff up their chests before a mine’s thrusting poppet head. The current vogue among the Japanese laundrymen, on the other hand, is to pose formally with their bicycles against a soft rural backcloth. Better still, with a nonchalant kid glove on the handlebars of one of the three showroom-shiny black Raleighs, with their unworn Dunlop tyres, supplied by special arrangement (Boehm provides the photographs for the firm’s annual calendar) with EX. Corr and Sons, Supreme Bicycle Dealers to the Goldfields, around the corner.

  Today he poses three laundrymen—chins proudly raised, hair parted and brilliantined back, each brow and mouth a grim line—in the black three-piece suits and watch chains of cold-climate diplomats. Bicycle-clips crisply subdue their trouser cuffs. Their chosen background is a winding stream, ploughed fields, a green wood, and a cobbled lane meandering off behind them towards a steepled church. Occasionally he wonders what impression their relatives in Tokyo and Osaka have of their lives in the Western Australian desert. (Are they aware these stalwarts live chiefly off the earnings of three other photographic subjects of his—Sono, Yoko and little Oyoni?)

  With subterfuge, light and chemicals Boehm can turn a dusty dryblower into a mining magnate, a laundryman–pimp into a cycling statesman.

  It’s with the same careful attention to detail that he presents himself.

  Inez didn’t know how to take him at first. His habits and presentation. His courtship routine. This was back in the exhausting days of the water famine when, off-duty, she would flee from the heat and the rantings of the poor typhoids into the relative cool and peace of his old studio.

  ‘This is new to me,’ she’d said, of what was happening to her. She tasted the thin bile of his champagne in the back of her throat.

  ‘It’s my way of doing things,’ he murmured. ‘It pays you a great tribute, remember that.’

  ‘It seems as if I’m open while you are closed.’

  He blinked at that. He cleared his throat. ‘Doesn’t it please you to be so appreciated?’

  The heat was mounting in her cheeks and mottling her neck. She nodded and closed her eyes. He was certainly gentle.

  The slow, relentless rhythm. His strange whispering voice. The rustle of his cream trouser legs when he subtly changed position. The odour of his pomade.

  His stroking, his gentle probing, had begun at her temples and forehead and eyelids and was now at her waist. Considering their outdoor work, the chemicals and equipment, his fingertips were smooth and cool and made her shiver. Their smell, of course, was sweet.

  Buttons, clasps, hooks, melted under his hands. He was no thick-fingered fumbler. Fabric dropped away. With him she was always on a divan, bed, chair, chaise longue. His proficient fingers moving slowly over her body. Her clothes pooling around her on the floor.

  After the first day or so she’d allowed a languid wrist to accidentally brush his flies. He jumped. Coughed. A hard mound there behind the cream trousers.

  Quickly edging his pelvis away, regaining control. Those hands, his sleek head bending over her.

  Waking to see his trouser legs and tripod standing back a few paces. A narrow space of air between them. The black hood looming. Her next overwhelming thought the memory of the Unknown Woman from the Seine.

  The face of a young woman about twenty. She has a plain hairstyle. You can’t see her eyes, and her eyes can’t see, for she is dead. Suddenly Inez would like to think that the girl did not go into the Seine gladly. The emotion which followed her initial despair and the brief horror of drowning now so evident on her face.


  Shivering at the memory of her cool drowned inner smile. Inez drawing her own bare limbs together with a cry.

  His flushed face appearing from the folds of the hood.

  ‘Inez, it’s only your Axel. Who adores you.’

  Felix Locke, in provocative mood, drains his beer glass and declares that the most memorable event in the past five years was the arrival of fish.

  ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he says. That first consignment of snapper, jewfish, kingfish, whiting and oysters all packed in ice, pulling up in a four-horse spring van outside the Prince of Wales. Two hundredweight of fish carried three hundred and fifty miles overland and all sold in ten minutes.

  From the balcony of the Prince of Wales they are watching the town’s latest procession, in honour of the first Goldfields Mining and Industrial Exhibition. Thousands have travelled from all over the country—and from London—to attend. A special train has brought dignitaries from Perth. At the station the Afghans presented the Premier with an albino racing camel.

  Locke has to make himself heard over the retreating stridor of brass bands and the fainter moan of bagpipes turning the corner ahead. Red dust raised by the squads of passing feet floats up and settles on their skin and clothes.

  ‘It was the whole marine shock of it,’ he says, recalling the streets suddenly emptying. The town steeped in the stinging aroma of frying fish.

  Axel Boehm says, ‘It hardly compares with the arrival of the telegraph and the railway.’

  For forty minutes they have watched the clumps of marchers and dignitaries and standard bearers streaming past the hotel. Despite their jugs of beer they are feeling hot and bored. Boehm’s tripod is set up in the corner of the balcony he uses to photograph parades, and every ten minutes or so he disappears under the hood to photograph the procession.

  ‘Anyway the oysters didn’t make it,’ he recalls.

  They have already seen and heard the Kilted Bagpipers, the Original Pioneers, the Town Band, the Bavarian Band, the Brown Hill Banjo Band, the Fire Brigade, the Governor’s carriage, with escort, the Premier’s carriage, also with escort, the Engineer-in-Chief and Staff, and the Mayor and Councillors and their Invited Guests. Pedalling past at this minute, tinkling handlebar bells in unison, is the sixteen-man Cycle Corps. Looming up behind them are the sturdy members of the Miners’ Trades Association. Still to pass are the marchers, each with their two standard bearers, from the Art, Athletic, Benevolent, Billiards, Caledonian, Cambrian, Catholic Benefit, Christian, Cricket, Dramatic, Debating, Football, Gymnastic, Hibernian, Liedertafel and Literary societies. Bringing up the rear are the people themselves: the Citizens’ Carriages, the Working Miners, the Children’s Corps, the Afghan cameleers—on sixty camels, riding four abreast—and, in the very back, a Selection of Aborigines of the Region in new art muslin loincloths.

  Boehm pours more beer from a jug into his glass. ‘And the fish all had cloudy eyes.’

  ‘Listen, it was compelling, that sudden smell of the sea right here in the desert,’ says Locke. ‘I wrote a poem about it.’

  ‘Many of the customers were compelled to come and see me the next day,’ Dr Malebranche recalls.

  ‘I ate a perfectly good snapper,’ says Locke. ‘Axel missed the photograph, that’s why he’s denying the importance of the fish.’

  True, the arrival and dispersal of the fish had happened so quickly that Boehm had had no time to fetch his equipment. The coming of the telegraph, on the other hand, the mile-long string of camels passing through town, had given him plenty of time to set up his tripod. A hundred and sixty camels, tassels and beads swaying, bells tinkling, carrying telegraph poles and wire spools, pulling houses on rollers, laden with water tanks and machinery, had taken an hour to pass the hotel’s verandah.

  ‘The coming of the telegraph,’ he says.

  ‘No, the arrival of the railway,’ says Malebranche. ‘Then electricity.’

  ‘The fish,’ says Locke.

  ‘The railway didn’t make much of a picture,’ Boehm recalls. ‘Smoke. Officials. Ladies in hats. Everyone has seen a train pulling into a station. Not so many have seen a mile of camels end-to-end.’

  ‘The arrival of the fish would have been a wonderful photograph.’ Locke shakes his head sorrowfully. ‘Great human interest.’

  ‘You are an authority on human interest?’ Boehm says.

  ‘You should have been at the New Year soiree of Madame Rioux,’ says Malebranche.

  ‘As usual we’ll take your word for it,’ says Boehm.

  ‘She put on champagne and hired the Bavarian Band. When they played ‘The Gay Parisienne’ all the French girls started a wild cancan and the Japanese girls began a sort of Hawaiian hula.’ Malebranche thoughtfully sips his beer. ‘That was human interest.’

  Locke looks up from the out-of-step ranks of the Dramatic Society—strolling thespians in dusty pantaloons self-consciously declaiming Hamlet, holding Yorrick at arm’s length. A sun-burned Ophelia marching sturdily riverwards.

  ‘Notice no one has mentioned gold,’ he says. ‘Not a single discovery.’

  ‘Gold,’ Boehm says in a flat tone.

  Frankly gold is losing its novelty for him as a subject. He sees gold every day. People pay for their portraits, like everything else, in gold. And while his most lucrative business is mining company commissions from managers eager to record progress for their company directors in London, it is also the most boring. Of course the mine managers totally lack imagination. Their favourite subjects are the installation of new machinery or visits to the mine by VIPs, where they line up everyone from the visiting Lord Suchandsuch to the mullock-raker’s fox terrier in solemn hierarchical rows.

  To capture vistas of the goldmines he still has to cart his cameras and tripod and cases of glass plates around mine shafts and over tailing dumps. His chafed thighs! Those … straps forever cutting into him! Despite technical advances everywhere else, field photography here is just as uncomfortable an undertaking as ever. And as risky.

  The system of magnesium flares he devised to enable him to take photographs down the mines is proving an … unpredictable … light source. Stories of these flares of his, every seventh one of which is—a ridiculous exaggeration—rumoured to explode with disastrous consequences, are beginning to give his wide-eyed underground subjects—pictured as the rocky womb of the earth envelops them—the wary, stunned look of newcomers to hell.

  He drains his glass, belches and says to Locke and Malebranche: ‘Gold has been done to death. The arrival of water will be the celebration to see.’

  ‘Water,’ sighs Malebranche.

  ‘If we live that long,’ says Locke.

  The sun and beer are starting to give Malebranche a headache. In the street below, gymnasts tumble and cartwheel in the hot dust. He thinks of the poverty-stricken typhoid hospitals and the thousands of pounds wasted on endless official self-congratulation.

  ‘Senseless jubilations,’ he says.

  Axel Boehm had, in fact, already begun recording water’s gradual arrival. He’d made several forays west to the pipetrack and photographed it inching closer. Each time he was surprised to find the workmen so intense and surly, on the edge of madness or mutiny. Fights seemed about to break out.

  It made it hard to slip into his usual role of anonymous eyewitness. The foremen, too, were full of silent umbrage. Even the young English engineer in charge was vague and curt.

  The responsibility of taking the pipeline uphill into the desert seemed to be affecting them strangely. The engineer and his men appeared to be fighting against entropy. Against their own disorder as much as water’s natural lazy tendency to flow downwards.

  On the pipetrack he saw and heard odd things. Labourers flicked hot lead on his hat and suit and stared at him with the wolfish, knowing eyes of convicts. As if daring him to take the picture, they flexed and flashed and pissed and squatted in front of him, and one smirking fellow masturbated openly at noon in the trench in the pipeline’s shadow.


  Regarding photography: the ignorant don’t realise the extent to which the photographer is in command. Not for the first time Axel Boehm assumed control by withdrawing from the proffered subject. By calmly ignoring the potential photograph. Dusting himself off and focussing instead on pleasing static juxtapositions of machinery and skyline, camels and clouds. Whistling a bit of Mozart. Retreating under the hood. Placidly choosing his moment.

  You don’t exist unless I say so.

  It was when they had forgotten the five-legged, hooded intrusion that he quietly photographed the red-eyed men with scabbed faces coming in from the desert. Hugging the pipeline, putting their ears and cheeks and lips to the steel surface as if it were a woman.

  To judge the goldfields purely from the stamp of those citizens and organisations parading past, visiting dignitaries would never guess this was a place of great mortality. And great drinking and fornication, for that matter. None of the optimistic marchers celebrating the wealth and fame of the town’s telluride ore and the industry of its citizens carried banners for the three main female professions of nursing, bartending and prostitution.

  Of course by late evening when the fifty pubs were roaring with customers and the British prostitutes were staggering and shouting in the streets and the French women sauntered outside their brothels and sat in the doorframes in their high-heeled shoes of red satin and bright stockings and loose chemisettes that exposed their breasts and shoulders—and made clicking sounds with their tongues at every passing man—even the most blinkered visitor to the Mining and Industrial Exhibition would be aware of the last two professions. (The Japanese prostitutes, by contrast, were quiet and discreet. They hid from passersby and did not openly advertise their wares. Of course this had the effect of enhancing their popularity.) At no stage would rosy spots and raving delirium and haemorrhaging intestines come to mind. Not many would realise they were in the middle of a typhoid epidemic.