The Following by Roger McDonald

moment when the pressure needle started creeping back. That way the boiler had a reserve of pressure, a long-held breath that could be expelled in a surge of drive. On the next downslope he started shovelling. It was money in the bank. How it was spent was up to the driver. Every misjudgement Kristiansen made registered as a pressure gauge not meeting its mark, a tardiness with the driving wheels, and Marcus noted it.
    At the rear of the train were two men – Kenneth Tarbett, train drover, and Gregory Acorn, guard. Why Acorn chose a driver for his loathing was a commonplace gripe. The railways service was an aristocracy, what came behind the front and down to the rear must be lesser. To balance, Acorn took what he could from the freight van when it offered – a trussed turkey into a sack at Christmas, and when they went down to Sydney, every brazen time, a sack of oysters, upwards of 200 pounds, trolleyed across from the Perishable Goods siding at Central and along the station concourse then up the platform and into the goods van leaving for the West.
    Kenneth Tarbett’s was another sort of gripe altogether. He belonged somewhere better. Thanks to Bert Shepherd of Harden, he was putting himself right. He’d fallen in love. Calling with armfuls of flowers, paying court to Aileen Harris, the one name he never mentioned was Marcus’s but never forgot that he came after Marcus in Aileen’s heart.
    On they went slowly. The line branched from the Main Southern Line, then branched again. They reached Stockinbingal on dark. After sending off passengers and turning out livestock into holding paddocks, the mixed goods was a ghost train manned by the men left to it. They slept by the side of the track, each with his own campfire and a shovelful of stars overhead.
    They were brought together imperishably in the morning when they reached the long, shallow incline where the ballast trucks waited. Smoke came from the fettlers’ tent kitchens, where the Deases and Milburns cooked bread, cakes and mutton stews in their cast-iron ovens.
    In the subsequent enquiry it was ruled that the mixed goods had been reported cancelled. So there was no reason why the navvies should not have released their empty wagons to run back down the slope towards the gravel pits when they did, rolling stock to the power of gravity given over.
    The cockatoo Fiver climbed up on the clothesline screaming, ‘Maaarcus!’
    Pearl and Luana bounced, as they had as children, in excited display, hop-stepped, piano-key-tapped along the ironbark sleepers towards the oncoming, slowing, huffing engine bringing Marcus and Ron Kristiansen forward.
    Pearl and Luana did not see the shadow of the loosed wagon heaping behind them, cresting, building speed. At the last second Luana did see and, with her instinct for shadows, jumped.
    Pearl went running forward, happy as sunshine, as Ron Kristiansen leapt from the footplate and dived to save Pearl at the moment they both lost sight of the sky, as a dark weight came down on them, the heavy, almost silent weeping creaking empty weight of the ballast wagon being the last of anything they knew.
    I T WAS A DESOLATE CAMP . Paper daisies lay scythed along the trackside. Men held Marcus back from the rails. He drove his hands into a cinder heap, rubbed ashes in his face, tore at his thinning hair, tore at his shirt, tore at the cotton threads, tore at the buttons, kicked his boots against angle iron until his toecaps broke, and bruised his knuckles against a water tank.
    There came the groan of Pearl’s father, Bob Dease, and her mother’s shrieks that were for ever horrified now, and Luana’s father, Kedron, drumming his ribcage, and Luana’s mother, too – that Englishwoman who married the man from the Inverarity Swampland Block – crying out to the Lord of green pastures to show pity.
    At the door of the Milburns’ tent Luana sat pale as a bone, still as a bittern in the marshes, watching from a three-legged stool and holding