A Town like Alice

well-developed girl of sixteen whom she came to know as Annie indicated a separate small table laid for one. "Roast beef, roast lamb, roast pork, roast turkey," she said. "Tea or coffee?"
    It was swelteringly hot still. Flies were everywhere in the dining-room; they lighted on Jean's face, her lips, her hands. "Roast turkey," she said; time enough to try for a light meal tomorrow, when she knew the form. "Tea."
    A plate was brought to her heaped high with meat and vegetables, hot and greasy and already an attraction for the flies. Tea came, with milk out of a tin; the potatoes seemed to be fresh, but the carrots and the turnips were evidently tinned. She thought philosophically that the flies would probably result in dysentery but she knew what to do about that; she had plenty of sulphatriad to see her through the week. She ate about a quarter of the huge plate of food and drank two cups of tea; then she was defeated.
    She got outside into the open air as soon as possible, escaping from the flies. On the downstairs veranda three feet above the level of the ground there were two or three deckchairs, a little distance from the entrance to the bar. She had seen nowhere else in the hotel where she could sit and she already knew enough about Australian conventions not to go near the bar, she went and sat down in one of these chairs wondering if by doing so she was offending against local manners.
    She lit a cigarette and sat there smoking, looking at the scene. It was evening but the sun was still strong; the dusty great expanse that served as a street was flooded with a golden light. On the opposite side of the road, more than a hundred yards away, there was a fairly extensive single-storey building that had been built on to from time to time; this was labelled-Wm Duncan, General Merchant. There was no sign of any other shop in the town. Outside Mr Duncan's establishment three coloured Abo stockmen were gossiping together; one held the bridle of a horse. They were big, well-set-up young men, very like Negroes in appearance and, like Negroes, they seemed to have plenty to laugh about.
    Further along the other side of the great street a six-inch pipe rose vertically from the ground to a height of about eight feet. A fountain of water gushed up from the top of this pipe and the water seemed to be boiling hot, because a cloud of steam surrounded the fountain, and the stream running away into the background was steaming along its length. A quarter of a mile away a small hut was built across the course of the stream so that the stream ran into the hut and out the other side, but Jean had yet to discover the purpose of this edifice.
    A low murmur of voices reached her from the bar; from time to time a man passed her and went in through the open door. She saw no women in the place.
    Presently a young man, passing by upon the road, smiled at her and said, "Good evening." She smiled back at him, and said, "Good evening."
    He checked immediately, and she knew that she had started something. He said, "I saw you come in with Sam Small this afternoon. Came in the aeroplane, didn't you?"
    He was a clean-looking young yokel; he walked with the typical swaying gait of the ringer, and he wore the green jodhpurs and the elastic-sided boots that marked his calling. It was no good trying to be standoffish. "That's right," she said. "I came up from Cloncurry. Tell me, is that water natural?"
    He looked where she was pointing. "Natural? That's a bore. Never seen one before?"
    She shook her head. "I've only just come out from England."
    "From England? Oh my word." He spoke in the slow manner of the outback. "What's it like in England? Do you get enough to eat?" She said her piece again.
    "My Dad came from England," he said. "From a place called Wolverhampton. Is that near where you live?"
    "About two hundred miles," she replied.
    "Oh, quite close. You'll know the family then. Fletcher is the name. I'm Pete Fletcher."
    She explained to Pete that there were quite a lot of people in England, and reverted to the subject of the bore. "Does all the water that you get from bores come up hot like that?"
    "Too right," he said. "It's mineral, too-you couldn't drink that water. There's gas comes up with it as well. I'll light it for you if you'd like to see." He explained that it would make a flame five or six feet high. "Wait till it gets a bit darker, and I'll light it for you then." She said that was terribly kind of him, and he looked embarrassed.
    Al