Free Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller Page B

membrane.
    Bo said, ‘We’ll be able to keep track of you now, old mate, with that GPS thing of Susan’s.’
    They laughed.
    Annabelle came in through the flywire and they turned and watched her approach.
    She came up to the table and with both hands she laid the stone on the crumpled newspapers in front of Dougald, a sense of ceremony in her action, as if the stone were her offering to him, the price, perhaps, of her admittance to his trust.
    He glanced at it uneasily and looked away.
    The tapered cylinder of stone lay on the table before them.
    They waited.
    Annabelle said, ‘We recorded its position and took a photo.’
    Susan and Bo watching Dougald.
    Annabelle looked at Susan. ‘Susan thought we’d better take it, in case it got damaged when the contractors came through . . . Or maybe got lost,’ she added.
    Dougald looked up at her, a slow ironic smile turning the corners of his thick lips, the whites of his eyes yellow, richly shot with purple veins. ‘Lost?’ he enquired of her, and chuckled throatily. ‘Well I think it’s been lost.’
    She sensed an antagonism and suspected him of wishing to ridicule her. ‘In the subsidence, I mean, when the longwall goes under that area,’ she explained and touched the stone with her fingers encouragingly, easing it closer to Dougald. Needing to defend herself. To display a little of her knowledge. To show him she was not simply a boorish academic from the south who knew nothing of the arrangements of his old people. ‘It was on its own. There was no associated material. What do you think? It didn’t come out of a campsite.’ Her resolve, however, was wavering and she decided she must ask him the question boldly or submit to defeat in the face of his silence. ‘What is it, do you suppose?’
    Dougald glanced up at Bo. ‘I probably shouldn’t even be looking at it,’ he said. He hauled himself up out of his chair and turned to Bo, turning his back on the stone. ‘Get us a couple of potato cakes, will you mate.’
    Annabelle stared at the stone lying on the table where she had set it down among Dougald Gnapun’s domestic litter. She saw suddenly how it must be a private thing, unnaturally exposed and naked, an embarrassment that could not decently be talked about. She longed to snatch it up and hide it from them. She knew she had made a dreadful mistake. She looked at Susan. Susan shrugged and made a face that was impossible to decipher.
    ‘You want fish too?’ Bo asked.
    ‘Two pieces of flake.’ Dougald reached for his back pocket. ‘You need money?’
    ‘We got money.’
    Dougald took his hand away from his back pocket and stepped across the room to the bathroom. He turned at the door and stood looking back at them. ‘All that sweet boxforest country poisoned, eh?’ He seemed to be struggling to imagine the country so changed.
    ‘She’s killed, old mate.’
    Dougald went into the bathroom and closed the door.
    Bo said, ‘We’ll go down the shop.’
    Susan said, ‘Get me a piece of flake and a serve of chips. I’d better have a talk to Dougald about this Ranna Dam business.’
    Bo said, ‘They will dam it sooner or later. They gotta have the water for Bowen and Mackay.’ He turned to go, gesturing at the stone. ‘Maybe we should take it along with us.’
    Annabelle picked up the stone. Once again she was impressed by its unexpected weight, as if it called attention to itself. She thought of the Italian adjective pesante , and the French verb, appesantir . There was an English word too, but she could not think of it. The stone was not simply heavy. There was, she decided, a gravitas in the weight of it. So it was the Latin. The English word gravity, she decided, would not quite do. Perhaps the poets had been too free with it in the past. A significance beyond mere weight. The unusual heaviness of the stone, she decided, was a counterbalance to its form. There was a satisfaction in the thought that the form and weight of the stone were related in