LITMIR.BIZ

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and out along Three Mile Road.

      Both Ma and Gemma lived a few miles out of Lightning Ridge, on the opposite side to the cemetery, near a spot called Frog Hollow. It wasn’t much different from most places around the Ridge. The dry, rocky lunar landscape was pretty much the same wherever the ground had been decimated by mine shaft after mine shaft. Picturesque it was not. Nor green. The predominant colour was greyish-white.

      Ma’s caravan was parked under a fairly large old iron-bark tree, but the lack of rainfall meant a meagre leafage which didn’t provide much shade from the searing summer sun. Gemma’s dugout, by comparison, was cool.

      ‘Come and sit in my place for a while,’ Gemma offered as they approached Ma’s caravan. ‘We’ll have a cool drink together.’

      ‘That’s kind of you, love. Yes, I’d like that.’

      Gemma drove on past the caravan, quickly covering the short distance between it and her father’s claim. She began to frown when Blue didn’t come charging down the dirt road towards her as he always did. Scrunching up her eyes against the glare of the sun, she peered ahead and thought she made out a dark shape lying in the dust in front of the dugout. It looked ominously still.

      ‘Oh, no,’ she cried, and, slamming on the brakes, she dived out of the utility practically before it was stopped. ‘Blue!’ she shouted, and ran, falling to her knees in the dirt before him and scooping his motionless form into her lap. His head lolled to one side, a dried froth around his lips.

      ‘He’s dead!’ she gasped, and lifted horrified eyes to Ma, who was looking down at the sorry sight with pity in her big red face.

      ‘Yes, love. It seems so.’

      ‘But how?’ she moaned. ‘Why?’

      ‘Poisoned, by the look of it.’

      ‘Poisoned! But who would poison my Blue?’

      ‘He wasn’t a well-loved dog around here,’ Ma reminded gently. ‘There, there...’ She laid a kind hand on Gemma’s shaking shoulder. ‘Perhaps it’s all for the best. You couldn’t have taken him to Sydney with you, you know. With everyone but you he used to bite first and ask questions afterwards.’

      ‘But he was my friend,’ Gemma wailed, her eyes flooding with tears. ‘I loved him!’

      ‘Yes...yes, I know you did. I’m so sorry, love.’

      The dam began to break, the one she’d been holding on to since the police came and told her that her father had fallen down an abandoned mine shaft and broken his stupid damned drunken neck.

      ‘Oh, Blue,’ she sobbed, and buried her head in the dog’s dusty coat. ‘Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. I’ll be all alone...’

      ‘We’re all alone, Gemma,’ was Ma’s weary advice.

      Gemma’s head shot up, brown eyes bright with tears, her tear-stained face showing a depth of emotion she hadn’t inherited from her father. ‘Don’t say that, Ma. That’s terrible. Not everyone is like my father was. Most people need other people. I know I do. And you do too. One day, I’m going to find some really nice man and marry him and have a whole lot of children. Not one or two, but half a dozen, and I’m going to teach them that the most joyous wonderful thing in this world is loving one another and caring for one another, openly, with hugs and kisses and lots of laughter. Because I’m tired of loneliness and misery and meanness. I’ve had a gutful of hateful people who would poison my dog and...and...’

      She couldn’t go on, everything inside her chest shaking and shaking. Once again, she buried her face in her pet’s already dulling coat and cried and cried.

      Ma plonked down in the dirt beside her and kept patting her on the shoulder. ‘You’re right, love. You’re right. Have a good cry, there’s a good girl. You deserve it.’

      When Gemma was done crying, she stood up, found a shovel and dug Blue a grave. Wrapping him in an old sheet, she placed him in the bottom of the dusty trench and filled it in, patting the dirt down with an odd feeling of finality. A chapter had closed in her life. Another was about to begin. She would not look back. She would go forward. These two deaths had set her free of the past, a past that had not always been happy. The future was hers to create. And by God, she hoped to make a better job of it than her father had of the last eighteen years.

      ‘Well, Ma,’ she said when she returned to the cool of the dugout, ‘that’s done.’

      ‘Yes, love.’

      ‘Time to make plans,’ she said, and pulled up a chair opposite Ma at the wooden slab that served as a table.

      ‘Plans?’

      ‘Yes, plans. How would you like to buy my ute and live here while I’m away?’

      ‘Well, I—er— How long are you going for?’

      ‘I’m not sure. A while. Maybe forever. I’ll keep you posted.’

      ‘I’ll miss you,’ Ma sighed. ‘But I understand. What must be must be. Besides...’ She grinned her old toothless grin. ‘I always had a hankerin’ to live here, especially in the summer.’

      ‘You could have your caravan moved here as well. Give you the best of both worlds. I won’t sell you Dad’s claim but you’re welcome to anything you can find while I’m gone.’

      ‘Sounds good to me.’

      ‘Let’s have a beer to celebrate our deal.’

      ‘Sounds very good to me.’

      Gemma spoke and acted with positive confidence in Ma’s presence, but once she was gone, Gemma slumped across the table, her face buried in her hands. But she’d cried all the tears she was going to cry, it seemed, and soon her mind was ticking away on what money she could scrape together for her big adventure of going to Sydney.

      Though a country girl of limited experience, Gemma was far from dumb or ignorant. Television at school and her classmates’ more regular homes in town had given her a pretty good idea of the world outside of Lightning Ridge. She might be a slightly rough product of the outback of Australia, living all her life with a bunch of misfits and dreamers, but she had a sharp mind and a lot of common sense. Money meant safety. She would need as much as she could get her hands on if she wanted to go to Sydney.

      There were nearly three hundred dollars in her bank account, saved from her casual waitressing job, the only employment she’d been able to get since leaving school three months ago. She’d been lucky to get even that. Times were very bad around the Ridge, despite several miners reportedly having struck it rich at some new rushes out around Coocoran Lake.

      Then there was Ma’s agreed five hundred dollars for the ute. That made just on eight hundred. But Gemma needed more to embark on such a journey. There would be her bus and train fare to pay for, then accommodation and food till she could find work. And she’d need some clothes. Eight hundred wasn’t enough.

      Gemma’s head inevitably turned towards her father’s bed against the far wall. She’d long known about the battered old biscuit tin, hidden in a hole in the dirty wall behind the headboard, but had never dared take it out to see what was in it. She’d always suspected it contained a small hoard of opals, the ones her father cashed in whenever he wanted to go on a drinking binge. It took Gemma a few moments to accept that nothing and no one could stop her now from seeing what the failed miner had coveted so secretly.

      Her heart began to pound as she drew the tin from its hiding place and brought it back to the table. Pulling up her rickety chair once more, she sat down and simply stared at it for a few moments. Logic told Gemma there couldn’t be anything of great value lying within, yet her hands were trembling slightly as they forced the metal lid upwards.

      What she saw in the bottom of the tin stopped her heart for a few seconds. Could it really be what it looked like? Or was it just a worthless piece of potch?

      But

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