Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster

Author:Jem Poster [Poster, Jem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC014000
ISBN: 9781468306095
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

17

I was, to tell the truth, glad to be rid of Bullen for a while, and I sensed that Preece felt much the same. His manner became more confiding, his matter more directly personal, and I, for my part, was sufficiently intrigued to encourage his disclosures. I don’t mean to imply that there was anything culpably indiscreet about his conversation, but it seemed to me that I was being offered privileged access to his life, and I was flattered by the thought. His childhood, I gathered, had been a happy one, and he had been considered something of a scholar in the small-town school he had attended, but he had chosen to follow his father into the mines, moving westward in his early twenties as the industry expanded.

‘It wasn’t what my parents had wanted for me, but I was doing well for myself, earning good wages. My lodgings were cheap and I’d no family to support, nor any vices to speak of, so I was able to put something by. I’d had it in mind from the time I started at the mine that I should work there until I was thirty and then get out and buy myself some property – a few acres, a small herd of cattle. I’d even chosen the spot. There’s a stretch of land along the Hawkesbury river, a little beyond Wise-man’s Ferry, that I used to visit with my parents when I was a child – meadows so fresh and green they seemed to glow with their own light. That was where I thought I’d fetch up, though as you see …’ He leaned back in his chair and spread his calloused hands palm upward.

‘It seems to me, Preece, that you’re very well placed here.’

‘Oh, don’t mistake me. I’m where I belong, and glad of it. But in those days I thought a man – any strong-willed man – could choose his path through life, and I had to learn through suffering that that’s not so. I had a notion that by bending my body to my will I could bend the world, and the closer I drew to my thirtieth birthday, the harder I drove myself. In the end I was working all the hours I could keep myself upright, sometimes two shifts back to back. I won’t say no one questioned it, but no one stopped me. There was an understanding: they needed the labour – and when I was whole there wasn’t a man in the company could match me load for load – and I wanted the money. And though I’d begun by imagining a small-holding, I came to think – well, it was a kind of madness, Mr Redbourne, dreaming of myself as a big landowner in a fancy house. Thoroughbred, servants, society wife, the lot. I’d got it all mapped out in my head, that other life, so different from the one I was leading. And though I knew it for a dream, I couldn’t rid myself of it.

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