The Real Thing Read online

  They reached the entrance to the largest cave, took the torches from their belts and stepped inside into the gloom. The cave had the air of an abandoned camp. The floor was level, scattered with boulders of differing sizes. The walls rose up to form a cathedral-like ceiling ten metres above their heads. Here and there on one section of the walls were hand prints, done in ochre colours.

  The cold was setting in as the two men set up lights, unpacked gear and got out the emergency rations. As Lawson worked at this he couldn’t help wondering at the change in Stanborough. For weeks he’d hardly given Lawson the time of day; now he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with him, he behaved like a kid at a birthday party.

  “Look!” he exclaimed, holding up the last item for Lawson’s inspection. “Brandy.”

  It was, too. A whole bottle of it.

  “Is that so we won’t notice we’re freezing to death?”

  “Come on, Charles. It never goes below minus five.”

  But Lawson had a horror of the cold. He’d been born on the coldest day in Sydney for fifty years; he regarded cold as one would a sworn enemy. His house in Sydney was air-conditioned at a time when airconditioning in Australian homes was rare. He had a fireplace in his living room and laid a fire every night through the winter. He and Stanborough sat side by side (Lawson shivering in front of the battery-operated air heater), eating emergency rations and socking down the brandy.

  “Come on, drink up!” James refilled his mug. “Here’s to fame and money—lots of money!”

  Lawson barely answered. Something was bothering him. It stalked the back lanes of his mind like an assassin in a fog. He sat on a rolled-up sleeping bag and drank thoughtfully. Even inside the cave, with the air heater and their sleeping bags and the brandy, he was in for an uncomfortable night. The heater gave one desperate splutter and died.

  Lawson turned to Stanborough. “Has anyone ever survived this?”

  “Kingston and Boyle got caught out three months ago,” James said brightly. His hair had taken on a silver tint under the emergency lights.

  Well, Lawson thought, Kingston was still breathing. He’d never heard of anyone called Boyle. Maybe Boyle had seen the light and caught the next stage out of towen.

  “I don’t suppose their heater died.”

  “Actually, it did,” James replied. “But they put their sleeping bags together.”

  They were out of brandy. Suddenly they seemed to be out of talk as well. James looked at Lawson, then he zipped the two sleeping bags together and they crawled into them.

  “Goodnight,” Lawson said and turned his back to the younger man.

  The walls loomed eerily in the half-dimmed battery lights. The hand prints of people long gone added to the sense of desolation. Lawson felt very alone and a long way from home.

  And then a strange thing happened: James kissed him on the nape of the neck as Lawson lay with his back turned to him.

  “Go to sleep,” Lawson told him. “You’re drunk. You’ll regret it in the morning.” He was determined he wouldn’t touch James; he had a bad feeling about the boy.

  For what felt like hours, he lay like a stone while Stanborough stroked his hair and covered his neck with soft kisses. If he’d made even one crass move, Lawson might’ve saved himself, but he didn’t. Eventually Lawson’s caution so long held deserted him. He allowed James to undress him.

  Stanborough took Lawson in his arms. “There, there.” It felt to the older man like coming home. When they touched, they seemed to blend and blend. For once in his life Lawson trusted. He found the timeless ocean and drowned without regrets.

  At first light next day a rescue team, alerted by their absence at the morning mustering point, came out and took them back to base. Lawson spent the drive trying to figure out who’d sabotaged his vehicle.

  Someone had.

  In such a small community news travelled fast.

  “Congratulations on the second find,” Hall said when he meet Lawson in the dining hall that evening. “But do be careful, Charlie, won’t you?”

  Even Anson Blake came up and shook Lawson’s hand with a weird smile—an experience Lawson could well have done without.

  There followed one of the happiest periods of Lawson’s life: by day he worked in his laboratory while James supervised the dig, and at night they spent the evenings together in his room.

  In every relationship, even the failed ones, there are things remembered, tapes replayed. Until the day he dies, Lawson could close his eyes and be back there.

  They’d been lying in bed together, fooling around. Suddenly James jumped off the bed and pretended to run away from him.

  “You’ll get tired of me,” he protested. “I know you, Charles Lawson—you’re fickle.”

  Fickle. Ah yes, Lawson thought, that was him. With his TV guide and Angela-and-the-kids, his oh so predictable life that was choking him.

  He pursued James and pinned him against the wall near the antique mirror.

  “I’m not fickle,” he said. “Well, not anymore anyway.”

  “Truly?” James looked up into his face like a child.

  Lawson pushed the platinum hair out of the younger man’s eyes. “Truly.” A rush of something he’d never felt before came over him. He wanted to say I love you, for the first time in his life. Instead he touched James’s hair.

  After that, they didn’t speak at all.

  Had Lawson been working fifty years later a whole range of new technologies would have been available to him—lead isotope analysis, X-ray fluorescence ... In 1960, analysing metal finds from archeological digs was a time-consuming process involving chemical analyses of minute peices of the coin itself. Lawson didn’t mind; he’d always excelled in this area that other people found boring. He liked having a concrete problem with a concrete solution. The benches, the apparatus, the routine—even the problem itself—was solid and real. He liked that.

  And yet ...

  Why did he feel so uneasy? There was no doubt that he and James were in line for the Watson Award, and if Lawson could give James the proof of authenticity to support his find, they’d both be famous. And rich. Lawson didn’t care about the fame, he already had a certain degree of that, but the money would mean no more crawling to academic boards for funding. That was very attractive.

  He worked his way through the tests using minute pieces of the coin each time, going on to the next test, and the next, with nothing coming out clearly one way or the other. It was like finding that second coin when the metal detector grids had registered negative.

  Nothing checked out.

  Finally he approached the only test he had left. He mixed up the necessary reagents with scrapings from the first coin, placed the Erlenmeyer flask on the asbestos mat and lit the Bunsen burner. Such a primitive process for so much to hinge on, he thought. It was like being back in the Middle Ages.

  After the solution came to the boil, he’d have twenty minutes to wait for his result, and this one would be conclusive. If the solution turned green, the coin was of recent origin. If it turned red, it was authentic. The problem of its place of origin would still remain. Lawson would cross that bridge when he came to it. If he came to it: he was betting on green.

  He sat down to wait on one of the tall laboratory stools; he felt restless and almost wished he were back on the site, though by now he was convinced there was nothing to find and that this last test would prove the coins to be a brilliant attempt at fraud.

  After five minutes the solution came to the boil, and Lawson lowered the flame of the Bunsen burner. He couldn’t handle his feelings any longer, just sitting there, so he locked his laboratory, dropped the key into the pocket of his lab coat and went for a stroll on Level 3. He had a quarter of an hour to kill.

  The door to the Personnel Records room was open, so he ambled in, thinking to pass the time with the office workers. but the place was empty. Morning tea.

  Lawson walked over to the four-drawer filing cabinet and searched for the folder
marked STANBOROUGH, JAMES—just why, he didn’t know. Maybe he doubted James’s story; he wouldn’t have been the first person in history to have embroidered a little on the truth. But it was all there, just the way he’d told it: the drunken father, the poverty, the abuse, the scholarship that saved him from the streets.

  On an impulse Lawson looked up BLAKE, ANSON but there was nothing there of any note. Only his qualifications were unusual: first botanist Lawson had ever met who began his career in engineering, then switched over to the soft science of botany later on.

  He was about to search through the folders for LAWSON, CHARLES—which would’ve made interesting reading, he didn’t think—when he heard the Personnel workers coming back along the corridor. He didn’t stay to talk; the time for the conclusion of his experiment was almost up. He returned to his laboratory to find Blake standing just outside his door, looking shifty.

  He hadn’t seen much of Blake in the past few weeks, since he and James had gotten together, in fact. He’d heard Blake worked strange hours at night in his room as if he were The Invisible Man or something, but as long as Lawson didn’t have to see him, that was all right by him.

  Seeing him standing there outside the locked door of the laboratory, fishing about in his pockets and looking useless, Lawson realised with a shock how much he hated him.

  “Have you got any spare Caustic Soda?” Blake asked in his wishy-washy way, explaining that he had run out. Lawson made him stand outside while he fetched it, and Blake went off thanking him too profusely.

  Lawson locked the door when Blake had gone. He tried to shake off the feeling Blake always evoked in him. To hell with Blake, he thought. What if the coins are a fraud, so bloody what? For once in his life, he had something that mattered more.

  He hurried on down between the laboratory benches to where the Erlenmeyer flask sat simmering gently on the tripod. To his utter amazement the solution was red—not green, as he had expected, but red.

  The coin was genuine.

  Within hours, it was all over the base that the coins were genuine. Hall doubled the strength of the team working on the dig, and Lawson and Stanborough sat down to write the paper that would win them the Watson Award for Significat Finds in Archeology.

  Still Lawson remained uneasy. Why were there no other artefacts of any kind? He was uneasy, all right. He repeated the critical test, using scrapings from the second coin, but the results tallied with what he’d obtained before.

  Yet his unease persisted. It was still there on the night before his return to Sydney; he was leaving by light plane early in the morning, but Jamie was to remain until the site search was finished.

  The night before he left for Sydney, Lawson went back to his room early while the celebrations over the find were still in progress. He didn’t go straight to Jamie’s room; he didn’t even want to. He felt alone somehow and terribly exposed. Success had always had that effect on him.

  He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out where the technology that had produced the coins could’ve come from. And all the while his sense of unease continued.

  Eventually he got up and went around the corridor to James’s room. Blake’s lights were on, his door was open, and Lawson realised then that Blake’s bedroom was next to Jamie’s, something that hadn’t registered with him before.

  As he draw level he stopped and look in through the open door. It was a strange sight: Blake had the radio on, he was doing a little jig between the bed and the writing desk, stopping every now and then to refill his champagne glass from the bottle in the ice bucket and to swallow a few more gulps.

  “Well thanks,” Lawson said. “I didn’t know you cared.” And, without being invited, he stepped inside.

  Then he realised Blake was

  watching

  a film of some kind.

  The image Lawson now saw was projected onto the opposite wall of Blake’s bedroom, the wall not visible from the corridor.

  Blake moved quickly to switch off the reel, but it was too late. Even in that split second Lawson knew that platinum hair.

  He pushed Blake as he moved towards the projector. Blake stumbled. His finger hit the Pause button instead of Off, and there was James before Lawson on the bed, hair glowing like molten metal, the night Lawson almost said I love you.

  Lawson’s knees went from under hm. He dropped into a chair between Blake and the door and said in a voice that didn’t belong to him, “How did you get this?”

  Blake pointed to the wall of his bedroom, the wall that adjoined Stanborough’s. “You always did admire Jamie’s antique mirror. Quite taken with it, you were.” He walked over to the desk and poured himself another glass of champagne. “Would you like a drink? It’s a very fine vintage, I had it flown out weeks ago for the occasion.”

  The Pause button on the projector was faulty. It lifted off and the reel continued to play. The picture changed and there was James on Blake’s bed in the same pose, hair falling across his face like molten silver.

  Only this time Blake was ...

  with him.

  “Would you like the soundtrack?” Blake hissed jubilantly. He seemed like a different person. “I’ll turn off the radio so you can hear better. Ah, don’t you just adore it when he’s vulgar?”

  Lawson grabbed Blake and shoved him hard against the wall. Blake was a weed, and Lawson was still strong. The chores on his father’s dairy farm had given him a good start.

  “You were inventive, Lawson,” Blake was saying, “I’ll give you that.” The images thrown by the projector continued to play over both of them. “There were a couple of things you missed. Personal taste, I suppose. Do you know what he likes most of all?” He leered into Lawson’s face, no glasses now. “He likes being beaten first—but I notice that’s not your style.”

  Lawson released Blake and turned to go. He was afraid if he hit him just once, he’d never stop.

  “Hey!” Blake called after him. “What are you doing tonight, Lawson? How about we make a threesome of it?”

  Lawson strode back into the room and punched Blake. The botanist sprawled backwards against a chest of drawers and lay still. For a moment, Lawson thought he’d broken Blake’s neck, but he was unconscious. Which probably saved his life.

  Lawson stepped out into the corridor and went to James’s room. James was wearing green silk pyjamas that showed up his eyes. He put his arms around Lawson when he opened the door.

  “Hi, Sweetie.”

  Lawson shoved him away. “I’ve just been to see Blake,” he said in the voice that didn’t belong to him. “Why did you do it—why?”

  “Listen Charlie,” James said urgently, “the paper’s written. You’ll be ruined if you go back on it now. Think for a moment. We can all be rich!”

  Lawson couldn’t follow him. He just stood there. All he could see in his mind was that picture of James with Blake.

  “The results,” he heard himself saying. “People depend on us.”

  “Oh, stop talking like the White Knight of the academic world, Charles Lawson,” James said. “What does any of this matter? I mean to say, who cares?”

  Then Lawson got it. “Give me the duplicate key Anson made to my laboratory,” he said.

  Anson Blake, Batchelor of Engineering & Metalurgy.

  James handed it to him without a word.

  “You stole my key and gave it to him to copy so he could fix my results.” And now the rage was mounting in Lawson. “You planted those coins. Does money mean that much to you?” He hit James.

  James fell to the floor without a sound and crawled across the carpet to where Lawson stood in his horror. What happened after that—or, rather, what almost happened—Lawson would never reveal to anyone.

  He lifted the younger man to his feet and looked into his eyes at the scars that would never go away. “Oh, little one,” he said.

  James didn’t speak.

  Lawson tightened his arms around him. “You can leave him. You can come with me.�
��

  James shook his head. Then he put his arms around Lawson in that childlike way he had and kissed him.

  Lawson closed his eyes and felt it one last time, that feeling of belonging; gone forever. Then he put James away from him.

  “Don’t do it, Charlie. You’ll be ruined if you do!” James shouted as Lawson left the room, banging the door behind him.

  Lawson walked through the corridors for a long time. He knew the damage to his reputation would be immense if he spoke up. On the TV in the main rec room they were showing shots of Maralinga and the coins. A female newsreader in a bad wig was expounding on the immense significance of the find. Have I got news for you, sweetheart, Lawson thought.

  He walked. He clawed for the wisdom to be grateful for what he had—his marriage, his children, his little life with the cats. Perhaps he should change direction; he was a good chemist. He’d gotten away from the dairy farm. Maybe, just maybe, he could get away from this.

  He walked for a very long time. The wind was dropping, and the base was stirring when he knocked on Adrian Hall’s door.

  END

  About the author

  Until the publication of her novel MagnifiCat at the end of 2013, Danielle de Valera was best known for her short stories, which won a number of awards in Australia and appeared in such diverse publications as Penthouse, Aurealis, and the Australian Women’s Weekly. Many of her short stories are set on the far north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where she has lived since 1977.

  More O’Neill and Lawson (aka God) stories

  “The Real Thing” is the 5th story in the O’Neill, Star and Lawson series.

  The 1st, “Busting God,” is available at:

  [Undercover narcotics agents Michael O’Neill and Baby Johnson are sent to the northern rivers of New South Wales to bust a heroin dealer so big everyone up there calls him God.]

  [Michael O’Neill and Baby Johnson, still suffering from PTSD, quit the Australian Narcotics Bureau and move to the far north coast of NSW. Each hopes love will save them.]