How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers Read Free Book Online Page A

stayed. It seemed to be a taboo topic. Was he just as unable to leave as me? I knew that Palmenter rigged the accounts he had me collate, adjusting the price of beer and other charges so that none of us were ever much in credit but, unlike me, Spanner didn’t speak of getting away. Maybe he knew that it was an unobtainable dream.
    In that shady spot, reading his out-of-date magazines and talking about nothing became an afternoon ritual for us. The closest we ever came to discussing Spanner and his life was when he told me once, out of the blue, that he dreamed of working on a fishing camp up the Gulf.
    He showed me an ad for a wilderness fishing camp that was for sale. Fishing? Over this? I guess I was just not into fishing and being stuck at some remote camp on the coast would be for me the sameas how I felt now, imprisoned here on the station.
    I had no doubt he could run a tourist lodge, but I wanted to laugh and tell him one prison was the same as another. Then I wanted to tell him he would never be able to buy it if he was thinking he was saving the money working for Palmenter. And I wanted to cry for my own unobtainable dreams, though I did not even know what they were. But instead, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, we planned and talked of his fishing lodge and a grand free life up the coast.
    But now he was reflective. He paused between filling forms.
    â€˜You just start out, and, y’know, little by little, things, y’know, and suddenly you are caught up in all sorts of shit, can’t see how to get out, then another day goes by, and so on.’
    I wanted to ask if he meant now or in the past, but I didn’t. I thought it better if I kept quiet and he might just open up, tell me things about himself. We worked in silence for a while and soon he was making his little noises like he did when he was working on an engine part.
    â€˜When I first got here you told me you didn’t do paperwork,’ I said.
    He laughed.
    â€˜Car parts make more sense,’ he said, then continued hunched over the desk, muttering sentences as he wrote. When we finished the paperwork he swivelled in the chair and sat gazing out the window. Normally at this time of day he would have opened a beer, but now he sat thoughtfully by the window without talking.
    I went to the filing cabinet and began looking through files. They were full of stuff for the running of the station. Catalogues, windmill service schedules, weather maps, flyers from trucking companies, stuff like that. I knew most of the company names because I had been doing the accounts in that small room off the back verandah. That was my first promotion. No phone or computer or anything, just a small room with a desk and chair and an adding machine. Palmenter called it my office.
    â€˜There’s no accounts or personnel files.’
    â€˜They’ll be in the safe.’ Spanner pointed to the picture on thewall. It was an aerial photograph of the station taken during the wet. Everything was lush and green and ribbons of blue traced the water courses through the burnt red ochre where the stone country was too steep for things to grow. The roads and tracks were a thin lacework unseen until you looked closely. It looked beautiful and incredibly fertile, not the dusty dry barren it could be for half the year, the half year that we knew it in. Travel was too difficult for us to ever see it in the wet like that but I thought it would have been nice to just once fly over in the chopper and see the station from the air. I didn’t see why we couldn’t do that after muster one time. Later, we did just that. Rob the pilot flew us down to the waterhole, two trips and a bit of a tour on the way. Cookie brought a picnic and some beers. By then there were eleven of us, including Ingrid and Sally the two English language teachers, and Jill who we called a governess. She looked after the children if ever there were any. You’ve got to have a