A Speck of Gold
While she’s been sleeping, and he’s been panning, I’ve spent hours searching for coins. Like him, I want gold. Long distance is costly, silver coins cumbersome.
I’ve checked every pocket of every pair of shorts we own, the glove box, of course, our backpacks, under our musky mattress, and every corner of our tired van. I’ve also spent the afternoon sprawled on that same mattress staring at the rusty ceiling, nauseous and nervous and bored and bloody hot. There’s no breeze. And if there was, it would only warm my clammy skin.
The day has finally dragged itself to dusk. I leave him still crouching by the vanishing creek and meander across the long stretch of eerily deserted highway to the lone phone booth, peculiar and oddly strategic for my purpose. I’m holding my straw hat with the collection of coins to my chest, like a newborn.
The shabby booth lacks door and light, the metallic box has rusted in parts, but I know it works—checked this morning. With a flutter of excitement and a conflicting lump in my throat, my arm hesitates, lifting the receiver. A click. A dial-tone.
I have to do this.
I want to.
And I don’t.
There’s a small shelf under the phone. I take my time transferring the coins from my hat and piling them up according to value in neat stacks, making it easy for me to reach. Then I pull the hat down over my dishevelled hair, rub it back and forth over my itchy scalp. Not that she’ll know the difference, but I wish I could have had a shower. I pick up the receiver again, put a fifty-cent piece through the slot. A long row of numbers is needed to send me out of Australia, past the oceans, into Sweden, to the right town, to the right house.
It rings at her place. I want to hang up. There’s a click. I hold my breath. She answers, declaring her full name how she always does. On cue, my eyes tear up. I need to put more coins in and move the receiver to my left hand. My right hand fumbles and I drop two gold ones on the ground.
The concrete floor is covered in layers of dirt. The coins are lost. I want to crouch and search, but need to feed the telephone more silver. While scanning the ground and moving my worn sneakers in tiny circles, I tell her where I am. The subtle reluctance to admit surprise, the feigned nonchalant ‘Oh’, gives away her disapproval of me being here. I haven’t spoken Swedish for five months and the words taste both awkward and comforting in my mouth. Mum’s voice sounds as if she’s in a rock crevice fifty feet below me.
Still with my head down hoping, I tell her about Alectown, what it was like during Australia’s gold rush as a thriving pulsating mini-metropolis, what it’s like now. We’re camping just north of the village, opposite a deserted pub, in the middle of all the gullies—a left over from the original diggers. Close to us is a decrepit farmhouse, occupied by decrepit Mr and Mrs Jones. They persistently invite us over for friendly poker. He keeps his hands on his cards. She prefers hers on my man. I want to make Mum laugh, but she only mutters something.
We’ve spent a month here, been following the drying creek bed to dig around the tree roots exposed in the layered sediments, and fill our pans with soil. Both of us have spent hours squatting. We dip water in, roll back and forth, allowing the heavier dirt to sink to the bottom. Washing. Rolling. Staring. Squinting. Repeat. Hoping to find that elusive speck of gold. Our skin is tanned from hours in the sun, chalky from layers of dust. I try to explain the thrill, when finally, among the dull grey dregs, a glitter announces itself. Minute and promising. Pure joy! Another mutter. Mum’s not imagining it.
I spot a glimmer at my feet and quickly reach for the dollar coin. It will buy me another half of a minute. I insert it and then I tell her about pink galahs against the blue sky swarming between the tall gum trees around us, their chirp and chatter. By the afternoon they’ve usually moved on, only to come back the next morning. I want to give her a picture of the vast landscape, the dry wind and why on earth I’m here. I don’t tell her how I’m sick of the dust and the heat, how I don’t bother with the panning anymore, how I lay in the van staring out through the open back doors, hungry and nauseous and weak, how I watch his broad back that glints with sweat while he’s concentrating by the small puddle of muck, how I’m thankful it’ll all dry up within the week, that our gold digging days are numbered.
The sun is dipping past the horizon; the mauve giving in to the darkening sky, the crickets and cicadas. While she tells me about home, making me long for the food, the dry air, the cold, I push the remaining loose silver change into the slot. I look down at my feet, but I cannot see the second gold coin I dropped. I’m running out of time.
‘Mum,’ I interrupt. ‘I’m pregnant’.
Silence. Maybe she sighs. Then she congratulates. It’s short and formal, as if we are mere colleagues from a distant life, as if it has nothing to do with her, this little nugget of new life. She’s cut off mid-sentence.
I stand for the longest moment with the phone in my hand picturing her by the kitchen table with her morning coffee and the paper, gazing out the frosted window. I hear her words during our last weekend together, before I flew out. ‘Why travel to the other side of the world for a man? I’d laughed childishly. Now, I glimpse her fear, the ambiguous future—me and him and her grandchild like glittering specks in a sun scorched far away place.
