The salt pan shimmered at noon as whirly-winds danced like Jinn’s in the distance. The geography was geometry, a white plain with the life sucked out of it. Four half-naked young men in 52C heat, wearing wrap-around sunglasses, broad-rimed hats soaked in water and not much else, stand by a Toyota truck staring at each other. Thinking is fragmented, confused, jangled. Long silences. No breeze; just the sun, the salt pan and explosive charges.

We roll out 100 metres of seismic cable, attach the sensors and then let off an explosive charge two metres down and record the depth and shape of the rock strata below us. A monkey could do what we do. We do it because the company – the people who pay our inflated wages – is looking for diagonal shale structures, because, once upon a time, this part of northern Western Australia used to be forest and deep down, below the shale, the powers that be in London reckon there’s oil. Their motivation and ours is the same: money.

Dave takes a swig of ice water when in the far distance, he sees a black dot appear and disappear. There and not there. Like an atomic particle. Dave’s 27 and boss geologist, just married with a two year old girl and a beautiful wife, waiting for him in the rainforest hacienda he’s built in Uki, north of Byron Bay.

Me and Tony carefully lower the detonator and explosive in to the hole. Tony shovels the dirt and salt over it and gently tamps it down while shooing away flies. Perspiration pours down his face. Fucking flies, he says, tamp, tamp, fucking flies. A big friendly New Zealander from Mount Taranaki who owes me a slab of beer. He has two days before he flies home for a ten day break.

We walk the detonator leads back to the truck and attach them to the firing station as Dave stares in to nothingness.

“You see that?” Dave says, pointing east south east.

“Could be cattle,” Tony says.

“Could be a camel,” I says.

“Could be Omar Sharif,” Tim says, who’s lying under the truck, trying to chill with his Lawrence of Arabia fantasy.

We call Tim ‘The Parrott’ because once he’s got a few drinks in to him, he doesn’t shut up. He’s got an Honours degree in Psychology and when he needs to take a shit, he says, “I need to go plops”. Tim’s smart, droll and erudite. I wonder why a well-educated kid from the Adelaide’s leafy eastern suburbs, is working on a seismic crew in hell.

Dave gets in the back of the Toyota, turns Neil Young and his Cinnamon Girl off and starts the seismograph. We put our hard hats on and crouch behind the truck.

“Five, four, three, two, one”

There’s the kerwump of the explosive and dirt flies 30 metres in to the air. In my mind I see the pressure waves travelling down in to the earth and hitting the strata and then bouncing back to the seismograph sensors strung out behind the truck. It takes us two hours to do a set-up, fire the shot, record, pack up the gear, move three kilometres down the line and do it again. Dave gives the thumbs up. Recording made.

Dave trains the binoculars on the black dot, moving in an out of focus.

“It’s a man” he says.

“Bullshit,” Tony says.

“Bullshit, it’s bullshit. Have a look for yourself. Full blood Aborigine,” Dave says and hands Tony the binoculars.

“Coming right for us.”

Tim dons a Hawaiian shirt and opens a small, yellow parasol, he uses to block the sun while laying the cable. Says it’s important to looks ones best when meeting the traditional owners of the land. We’re lined up like school boys expecting the headmaster.

“This guy ain’t from the local mob,” Dave says quietly. “Ain’t Nyigina. Ain’t Mangala.”

The man stops in front of us. He’s holding a spear and a woomera and is naked except for a small loin cloth. He’s as black as onyx, not a shred of fat. Three initiation scars are carved on his chest.

“What should we say? Tony says.

“What do you say to a man who has everything?” Tim says.

“How about, ‘we come from the Planet Earth?’” I say.

Dave pours a cup of cold water from the esky and offers it to him. He knocks the cup from his hand.

“Why you here?” the man says and spits on the ground.

“We’re a seismic crew looking for oil. I’m Dave, this is Tony, Tim and Callum.”

We smile and wave and say ‘G’day’ and Tim wants to know if he can take his picture.

“You mob blow up the land?”

“Well, yes,” says Dave, “but we’ve got permission from local Indigenous groups and the Western Australian government. I can show you the authorisation. We’ll be gone soon.”

The man picks up a handful of salt earth and blows it our faces. As he does so, he mumbles something, then walks away and disappears in to the heat haze.

“How very odd,” Tim says folding up his parasol. “I was hoping for a cultural exchange of ideas. An ethnographic two-step.”

“Didn’t seem happy to see us,” Tony says, “and I could have done without the nasal salt injection.”

“Let’s get call it a day,” Dave says. “I want to check this guy out.”

xxxxxx

That night we conference in the pub over beers with Jacky-One-Eye, head of the local mob. In his time, a rodeo rider par excellence. Lost an eye on the horn of a steer. Says the steer came off worst. Broke its neck.

“What you white cunts doing out there in the midday sun?” Jacky says. “Even us Abos seek air conditioning. What you saw wasn’t one of us,” he says knocking off his beer. “You seen ‘The Doctor’ but he ain’t no doctor. He’s the spirit of dead blacks killed by your mob. He vigilante spirit and if I was you, I’d consider taking out some serious fucking life insurance.”

“Sounds like bullshit,” Tony says but he’s worried.

“Could be, bro,” Jack says. “No one knows. For all I know, the curse might mean you win the lottery and split $20 million four ways. Then greed starts stewing and you turn on each other like a pack of dogs. You white pricks don’t need no curse to do that, do ya?”

Jacky winks and wanders over to the pool table. He slides a dollar in the juke box and The Pretender’s, “Brass in the Pocket” fills the room.

Tim’s got a double Jack Daniels and coke in front of him.

“Personally, there might be some credence to the idea of a curse,” he says in a posh academic accent. “I remember reading that the mere suggestion that a curse had been placed on an individual, was enough to fuck them up. It lodges in the brain and they can’t stop thinking about it, much like you three wankers can’t stop thinking about it now. But as a child of the Enlightenment, I don’t place much faith in hocus pocus, especially not in a soulless and deterministic universe but if you want my honest opinion …”

“Shut up, Tim” says Dave.

“All I was going to say before I go back to the bar,” Tim says, “is that it might not be a bad idea to avoid black cats and broken mirrors. Avoid the freaky fluky.”

xxxxxxx

I had my 50^th birthday with the same old faces in a small restaurant in Paddington. They bored the bejesus out of me. Even so, they’d stuck with me after my wife left, so there’s that. But listening to them rave on about soft cock lefty politics, the latest novelists, the best restaurants, makes me puke. Most are academics I used to work with before I quit the English department. Actually, I was fired for sleeping with a Chinese student. I’ve got to sell the house as part of the settlement. Shit happens. When I look in the bathroom mirror, my eyes are puffy and I’ve got jowls. I’m starting to look like Churchill. I spend much of the night pissing in to a potty by my bed. Real class. Real romantic.

I can still vaguely make out the face of the man who was the shot-firer on Crew 124. A pentimento. He’s in there somewhere. When some men hit 50, they Google old girlfriends. If they’re not hitched, it’s a possible freebie, which I know from experience, is a tragic cluster fuck. I looked up those guys I worked with all those years ago. Back when I felt free.

Tony wasn’t hard to track down. He still lived in Mount Taranaki. I drove the hire car from Wellington and parked it outside a modest art deco house, with an old Mercedes Benz in the drive. The place looks shabby but chic. I wanted to make a surprise visit. A tall man, stooped over with grey hair and a face like a scuffed football, opens the door. It’s Tony. My old offsider who still owes me a slab of beer.

“What do you want?”

“Tony, it’s me, Callum. I was doing absolutely nothing with my life when I thought I’d drop in and pay you a visit.”

“Never seen you before”

“Cal, Seismic Crew 124, in the WA desert?”

He looks at me like we did, all those years ago, watching that Aborigine walk out of the mirage. Parting the cobwebs of memory.

“Oh, Jesus, sorry mate, it’s just been so long, you know. A lot of water under the bridge. Come in, come in,” Tony says.

We talk over a few beers and I tell him my story. That if Tim ‘the Parrot’ can get a university degree, so can I. I just went too far, got three of ‘em and stayed and stayed and became an associate professor, which is just another name for a brown-nosing wanker looking for a full professorship. He wants to know about Tim. I dodge the question. I’d seen Tim a long time ago and a lot of water had gone under the bridge there too.

Tony sat at the kitchen table and spoke slowly, like he’d repeated his story so many times, the battery was running down. After he left Crew 124, he came home, got married and started a successful landscaping business with his best friend. It was so successful, they expanded across the north island, opened up three offices and hired 60 staff. He peels the label off his stubby of beer and stares out of the kitchen window. His voice drops a register and I have to shuffle my chair closer to hear him.

“Seven years in and we’re livin’ like royalty and then the shit hits the fan. My wife tells me one night at a family BBQ, when I’m half cut on bourbon and weed, that’s she’s fallen in love with my so-called best mate, she’s three months pregnant and wants a divorce. That was 20 years ago, bro. I walked away from the business but kept this shit hole.”

There’s paint peeling from the ceiling and some rising salt damp but I’ve seen worse.

“New kitchen, lick of pain, just needs a woman’s touch and you’ll be back in the saddle again,” I said. “You seeing anyone?”

Tony looked at me like I’d just crossed his wet concrete driveway. His mouth dropped open and thought better of it. We spent a couple of hours chucking the crap around about our hard drinking days in Broome and Derby, laying explosive charges half-pissed from the night before.

I’ve got the car keys in my hand and we’re walking to the front door. I bullshit him that I’m expected for dinner at an old girlfriend’s house.

“You remember that Abo on the salt pan that day?” Tony says. “You don’t reckon there was anything in that, do ya?”

There’s a quick summing up in my head about me and my wife, the lost job and what little I know about Tony and how his heart has bled for the last 20 years. I don’t say anything about Tim.

“No mate, I reckon it’s just withering bad luck. Ain’t no voodoo shit here. Keep in touch. You ever in Sydney, you’ve got a place to stay.”

I was glad to go. As I drove away, I waved but didn’t look in the rear-vision mirror. I kept driving.

xxxxxx

I take the back roads from Tweed Heads to Uki, through thick Queensland tropical rainforest. Before I signed on to Crew 124, I lived on the beach near here and surfed from sunrise to sunset. Roadside stalls still sell macadamias, avocados and bananas, fresh from the tree. It’s January and hot. The humid air is rich in frangipani. I veer off the road and go down a small lane before I pull up to a large two storey hacienda. I’m half expecting someone in Spanish to tell me to get off the property.

I knock on a large wooden front door and knock again. I give a couple of ‘you-hoos’ as Dave’s expecting me. I walk up the back stairs to a verandah and look out at 50 acres of Eden. Envy stirs then recedes. Dave spent another 20 years working in the desert after me, Tim and Tony left. This is his reward. His glittering prize. The floors are polished blackbutt wood and the ceiling fans turn slowly. Cobwebs hang in the corners. Framed prints of Miro and Matisse line the white hallway. Pictures of his wife, who is part Spanish, and their daughter as a teenager, are scattered throughout the house. Mother and daughter are gorgeous. I look at them laughing in bikinis on a beach with a black puppy. I’ve never seen such beautiful women.

Dave is wearing headphones and is asleep in a massage chair in the lounge. I can just make out the rolling drums of The Beach Boy’s ‘God only Knows’. I gently touch his shoulder and his eyes fly open in shock, then a smile.

“Christ almighty, if it isn’t Quasimodo himself,” Dave says and shakes my hand.

He grabs a walking stick and takes me on a tour of the house. Every room is ‘House and Garden’. The design features are exquisite, with cedar trim on the door frames. Morning light pours in to the kitchen and entertainment area, which are bigger than my house in Sydney,

“Tessa – that’s my wife – did the interior design while I was in the desert,” Dave said. “I’d come back and she’d have completed another wing of the house. We were planning on having a large family, that’s why there are so many bedrooms.”

We sit at a large kitchen table made from Tasmanian Oak. He puts the kettle on and makes tea. A coin falls from my pocket to the wooden floor and a hollow echo fills the house. Dave still looks good but he hobbles and his handshakes when he gets the cups from the cupboard.

“Got diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years ago,” Dave says. “I quit lookin for oil and came back here. Tessa looked after me real good. We had three of the best years together.”

“Three?”

“Yeah, she got breast cancer. Wasn’t picked up early. Evil fucker. Dead within 12 months.”

I stared in to my cup of tea and wished it was scotch. My pet theory – and maybe my curse – was I sailed through life with only squalls to contend with. I got more life but didn’t live it deeply.

“How about your daughter?”

A kookaburra laughed in the forest and I could hear a ride-on mower start up in the distance.

“Maya was at a party about 15 years ago. She was 17,” Dave says. “It was late at night and there was some fog. She decided to hitch hike back here. It was only a couple of kilometres. A woman in a black BMW doing 100 clicks dropped her phone and when she looked up again, Maya was flying over the windscreen. She died at the scene. That’s why we didn’t have any more kids. I’d built a five bedroom house for two people.”

I could understand Tony’s pain. Woman takes off with your best mate. That’s a kick in the guts. For some, maybe it’s payback with a shotgun and a headline on the nightly news. Mostly, it’s pick up the pieces and move on. But Dave’s story was something else. Big, smiling Dave sitting in the back of the Tojo, running the seismic machine. Making sure we drank enough water. Always listening to our stories when we got homesick. Teaching us bushcraft. Telling us about Uki, his wife and kid. This place.

Dave isn’t fucked up, not like Tony. His one regret was spending so long in the desert. He hobbles around his Taj Mahal with the memory of it all. He’s cutting up cheese and celery for a snack. He’s telling jokes about how when he goes to the toilet, he pisses everywhere but in the basin. He wants to know about me and teaching at university. Says he’s real proud of me. Says I made a success of my life. But I don’t tell him that at 2.05 every night, with the darkness squatting on my chest like a goblin, I’ve been an utter failure. That I’ve hurt my wife by sleeping with other women, that my daughters don’t respect me and that if I could live my life again, I would have stayed in the desert with him. That all the books, the degrees, the seminars, the teaching and research papers, were a waste of time. That Dave has something I’ve lacked.

But I don’t tell him that. I tell him about Tim.

I got a call from Tim seven years after I’d left Crew 124. Says he’s in trouble. He’s living with his folks. We meet up and he says he’s been busted for dealing smack. The cops find 50 grams. Enough to do jail time. He’s a lecturer in psychology at a university and the heroin is a little side earner. He’s got himself a small heroin habit but everything’s under control. No problem, he says. He wants me to go to court and be a character reference.

“A character reference?” Dave holds his belly and laughs. “For the Parrot? Jesus wept, what did you say?”

“So I’m standing in the dock and there’s about 30 people in the court. Tim’s Mum and Dad are in the second row. They’re real nervous. Tim’s sitting next to his lawyer. Nice suit, short hair, looks nervous too.”

“No Hawaiian shirt? No yellow parasol?”

“None. So I face the judge with hand on the Bible. I say Tim worked hard in Crew 124 over long hours and treated the Aboriginal community with dignity and respect. That me, Tony and you, looked up to Tim because he was always quick with a joke or a limerick.”

“You’re shitting me…”

“But wait for it. The judge is an expert on limericks. He wants to hear one.

Dave’s mouth falls open, “oh no”

“So I’m standing there wracking my brain for one of Tim’s limericks – there were hundreds of them – but I can only remember this:

“Here lies the body
of dear old Dick
who went through life
with a twisted prick.

All his life
was a lifelong hunt
looking for a girl
with a twisted cunt.

When he found one
he dropped down dead,
for the one he found
had a left-hand thread.”

“There’s a moment’s silence and then the whole court erupts in laughter. The judge is ho-ho-hoing in his chair and even the police prosecutor is chuckling away. Anyway, the upshot is the judge fines him $1500 and suspends a six month jail sentence. No conviction.”

Dave is crying with laughter. He throws his head back and beats the table with his fists.

“Oh, man, that’s glorious. I wish I was there,” he says. “What’s Tim up to now?”

I pause, knock back the wine and pour another glass.

“About ten years ago I got an email from his sister. Tim took an overdose of smack on a Thai beach. The details were sketchy. He’d been drinking, it was sunset and he wanted to get that little bit higher.”

“Oh Christ”

“His Mum took it hard. She had to fly to Bangkok to identify the body”

We spent the next couple of hours chucking the crap around about Tim and Tony and working in the desert all of those years ago. I stayed the night and dreamt that Tim was walking down the seismic line with me, carrying a yellow parasol. He had a detonator in his mouth. I awoke at 2.05 and I could hear Dave shuffling around his bedroom.

xxxxxxx

I stayed at Dave’s for three days and didn’t want to leave. But I got an email from May, the Chinese student I had the affair with. She wants me to stay with her in Beijing. Her father’s a high ranking party member and she’s got a big apartment, not far from the Summer Palace. I can’t see her Dad being wrapped that his 24-year old daughter is shacking up with an old foreigner. Dave says when I get back from China, I’m welcome to help him run the place.

I’m sitting in the business lounge of Malaysian Airlines in Kuala Lumpur about to catch a flight to Beijing. It’s late and I’m tired. Dave and me didn’t talk about the Aboriginal curse. It was so long ago. Didn’t seem appropriate to bring the supernatural in to what was a cluster fuck of heart break and grief. Fate opens some doors and closes others. They’re calling my flight now: MH 370. Lots of Chinese people heading home carrying bags of shopping. I’m going to keep the past in the past and live in the moment. That’s a philosophy Tim would have approved of.