Corroboree by Graham Masterton Page A

to the back of the house, and shown him the wooden-paled enclosure where John Hardesty had been buried, over two years ago.
    Eyre had stood by the grave for five or ten minutes, then returned to the farmhouse. ‘Had he been ill?’ he had asked.
    The farmer had shrugged. ‘You could say that.’
    Eyre had replaced his hat. The farmer had stared at him for a while, and then said, ‘Did away with himself. Hung himself with wire in his own barn. Nobody knows why.’
    â€˜I see,’ Eyre had said; and then, ‘Thank you for showing me.’
    He had decided to stay on at Mrs Dedham’s; and so that he could pay her rent of 2s 0½d the week, he had found himself a job in the tea department of M. & S. Marks’ Grocery Stores, on Hindley Street, scooping out fragrant Formosas and Assams, and also brewing up tea in barrels, since some customers still preferred to buy their tea the old-fashioned way, ready infused, for warming up at home. Just after the New Year, however, he had met Christopher Willis at a party given by Marks’ for all of their suppliers; and Christopher had arranged for him to take up a clerical post with the South Australian Company, for 1s 3d more per week. ‘And far more future, old man, than tea.’
    His first sweetheart in Adelaide had been a saucy young Wiltshire girl called Clara, daughter of one of the aides to the Governor and Commissioner, Colonel George Gawler. Clara was green-eyed and chubbily pretty and Eyre had courted her with the frustrated enthusiasm that only asingle man living at Mrs Dedham’s could have mustered. He had bought his bicycle solely to impress her, even though it had cost him two weeks’ wages; and he had taken her for a wobbling ride on the handlebars from one end of King William Street to the other, with Clara shrieking and kicking her ankles.
    On his return to Mrs Dedham’s that evening, he had found a note waiting for him, to the effect that Clara’s father had complained that Eyre had made ‘an unforgivable public exhibition of his daughter’s virtue’. Mrs Dedham herself had told him the following morning, over veal pudding, that she considered it best if he sought alternative accommodation.
    â€˜I don’t expect my gentlemen to be bishops,’ she said, bulging out her neck, and lacing her fingers tightly together under her bosoms. ‘But I don’t expect them to be hooligans, or peculiars, either.’
    That was how he had found himself staying with Mrs McConnell, on Hindley Street; and from the beginning Mrs McConnell had taken a special shine to him, and pampered him so much that in three weeks he had put on all the weight he had lost on the voyage from Portsmouth. She cooked marvellous pies, with glazed and decorated crusts, and washed his shirts and starched them until they creaked. All he had to do in return was call her ‘Mother’, and accompany her once or twice a month to the Methodist chapel by Adelaide barracks. She did so like to go to chapel in company; and Dogger wouldn’t go for anything. Dogger said that he had carried on quite enough conversations with the Lord in the outback; and that if he went to chapel, the Lord would only say, ‘Christ, Dogger, not you again.’
    â€˜You have to understand that a fellow needed God, in the outback,’ Dogger had frequently explained. ‘You didn’t have anybody else, after all. The kowaris didn’t talk to you; the dingoes didn’t talk to you; and the damned skinks and shinglebacks, they’d either puff themselves up or yawn at you something terrible.’
    Eyre had nodded sagely, although it was not until laterthat he had learned that kowaris were desert rats, which preyed ferociously on insects and lizards and smaller rodents; and that skinks and shinglebacks were both prehistoric-looking species of lizard.
    Mrs McConnell came back with the jug and the basin and the pale green jar of Keatings