Keepers by Cheryl Burman

Author:Cheryl Burman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holborn House Ltd
Published: 2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty Three

Teddy has always been partial to hills. He’s overawed by these ones. Mountains actually, their peaks stark white against the deep blue Australian sky. They aren’t friendly, these mountains. Teddy sits on a camp stool outside the tent, a mug of hot tea warming his stiff fingers, a cigarette glowing between lips dry as raisins from the cold. He squints at the surrounding slopes of straggly, drab-leaved snow gums, their feet deep in patches of muddy white.

‘No bleeding way.’ Teddy remembers his birthday party in the camp’s Nissen hut nearly two years ago. ‘You’d have to be absolutely desperate.’ That’s how he’d scoffed at his mates’ plans to take themselves off to the icy drudgery of the Snowy Mountains scheme. ‘Not worth it. It’s a joke.’

Yet, here he is. A spur of the moment decision. Teddy’s harsh opinions have strengthened with familiarity. It’s rough. It’s cold, outside and inside. And dangerous – Teddy’s pretty sure the mountains are forever on the alert for any opportunity to exact their revenge on the busy little people carving ruddy great tunnels through their innards. He’s staying only because the rugged remoteness is the perfect hiding place. He’s one of thousands of workers, anonymous, another faceless Pommy migrant cast in with men from all corners of the globe. Same as the camp, on a gargantuan scale. If such a place doesn’t give Teddy the space to clear his head, where on earth will?

Arthur and Sep are here somewhere in this vast construction scheme. Teddy is banking on not bumping into them. He’s chosen this southern site – where a group of Norwegians will start to build a power station later in the year and which a dam will one day inundate – because he knows from Arthur’s letters to Maggie that he and Sep and Sep’s cousins are in the north, at a place called Adaminaby. Guthega, where Teddy has put himself, is miles from Adaminaby across sizable alps. Teddy’s anonymity is safe.

Teddy doesn’t have much chance to think during the hectic days, working with other carpenters to build rickety bridges over streams, or to clear bush for tracks so the supplies and men needed to build a power station and a dam can make their way here more easily than he and his fellow labourers did. He falls into a rhythm of breakfast, work, a brief and chilly stop for a noon bite and a cigarette – perched on a damp felled log with his boots squelching in the mud – back to the camp to clean up as best he can, a hot dinner and bed.

Sometimes he plays cards with the other blokes, or listens to men who hail from ancient, rustic villages in Europe sing songs whose cheeriness or sadness has to be implied from the soulful tone or bouncing jigs of the singers, given no one else can understand a word.

Most nights he lies on his camp bed, fully clothed, swaddled in blankets like a baby Jesus, and listens to the eerie quiet of this alien landscape.

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