‘Missed.’ Miss Rover studied the steaming gob of spittle on the weathered board and touched it with the toe of one sandal. She drew the liquid line of the Queensland coast with her foot. ‘The object of maps hereabouts,’ she charged, ‘is to mislead. Even on the maps of the Government Surveyor,’ she said, ‘Outer Maroo is nowhere to be found.’
Is that such a terrible thing? Pete might have asked her. The seduction of nowhere is hard to resist, he might have said, if his feelings knew how to fit themselves inside words. Most of us, he might have said, drifted into Outer Maroo (population 87) for precisely that reason; though when he thought ‘population 87’ he was not of course including the Murri camps or Oyster’s Reef. He felt that went without saying, and merely listened as everyone else did, uneasily. He sensed she’d been building up to this. He knew the secrecy and the rumours had been getting to her.
A storm was coming, everyone could smell it. Apart from Susannah’s cold and foreign eye, her observing eye, apart from her sharp tongue (and they both made everyone edgy), apart from these, there was everything else: the drought, the stench, the carcasses, the dead cattle, the dead sheep, the Reef, the Old Fuckatoo, and the silences, the silences which Susannah kept refusing to respect. The town had been feeling eerie changes in pressure (barometric and social) for months.
The air pressed down, as it usually does, like a blanket; or, more accurately, like thick scorched sandpaper. We felt stifled. Heat rashes mottled and pricked us. Dust that was the colour of powdered blood slithered between the weatherboards and curled around the blades of the ceiling fans. Tormented wraiths of it danced through Bernie’s, tapping this one on the shoulder, nuzzling that one’s cheek, whispering black thoughts in our ears.
No one could breathe.
Susannah Rover leaned against the verandah rail. Not a man would have prevented her from entering the bar if she had chosen to; not physically. But the air would have changed, the mood would have changed. It would have changed radically. Susannah Rover knew this only too well. She had crossed those lines before. She had fronted up in her fair share of outback pubs; she had accepted as some sort of dangerous two-edged tribute the sudden crowding at the bar when she entered, knowing that the CB word would have passed like bushfire from road-train to truckie:
There’s a sheila in a jeep heading west . . .
Yeah. Spotted her. She’s a redhead. Well, sort of. Faded redhead, I reckon you could say . . .
That’s strawberry blonde, you dickhead. She’s got bedroom eyes, but. She left Cunnamulla twenty minutes ago . . .
Seen her, mate. Jeez, get a load of the T-shirt. Great tits, eh? She’s reached Bingara . . .
She’s pulling up, mates. She’s parked the jeep outside the Queen’s Arse . . .
She was familiar enough with all that: the boisterous warmth, the rough gallantry, the jokey sexual come-ons and their silky undercurrent of threat. She also knew what she lost once they let her in, once she got herself accepted as one of the boys: she lost that hair-fine line of fleeting deference to what she might say. In Outer Maroo, she had always hung on to her otherness. When the men were wary, jostling each other like cows at a molasses lick, they listened; at least for a minute or two.
‘It’s taken me a while to figure things out,’ she said in her throaty voice. (Pete always associated the sound of it with the school bell, he told me; because of the way it carried, clear, and ripe, but with soft edges. She drove the most unlikely blokes to poetry, Susannah did. If Pete were translating sounds into taste, he reckoned hers would have been, by texture, the kind of viscous acacia honey that blooms in thick beads on the combs under the wattles, but with lemon juice added.) ‘A lot of thought and effort has gone into keeping this town off maps,’ she said.
More than she knew, in fact. Even more than she knew.
‘If I were you,’ Pete warned her, ‘I would stop before I went any further, darling. I would go while the going is good.’
Miss Rover, you’re done for, the children laughed, high-pitched, reading moods in the air, turning somersaults, chasing each other around the she-oaks and the tortured gidgee trees in a frenzy of the coming tumult they could smell.
Casually, as though she had just swung her bare brown legs out from under the mosquito net, as though she were still stretching and languidly pushing back the skein of sleep, Susannah Rover lifted some stray curls from her neck and twisted them up into her loose French knot. She kept her eyes on Pete, who kept his on the fluid lift of her dress. She baffled Pete, and excited him, and scared him, and she knew it. She smiled at him.
Mercy, who was Miss Rover’s quietest and most diligent student, watched nervously from the lectern of the Living Word Gospel Hall across the street.
(Mercy is my little fire opal, Miss Rover wrote to a friend when she first arrived, which was only a year before she was transferred away. As it turned out, the letter never left Outer Maroo, and it was Mercy herself who showed it to me long after Susannah had gone.
Takes the breath away, Miss Rover wrote, but only reveals her dazzle in certain lights and then you cannot imagine where her colours are coming from. Thirteen years old, going on a hundred, looks about ten because she’s small or undernourished or something, innocent as a newborn in most ways, older than you or me in others. She’s not allowed to listen to the radio or watch TV, and she’s not supposed to read anything but the Bible, so she is positively ravenous for anything in print. After school, very furtively, she listens to my radio and watches my TV as though these acts were the most exotic sins. She constantly expects retribution of a fearful but unspecified sort.)
While Susannah Rover tugged at Pete Burnett’s arm, Mercy’s surveillance was intense but surreptitious, filling the margins of her book. She was reading aloud from the Scriptures. She had to stand on tiptoe to see the onionskin pages – it is a gift, people said, the way that child reads – and from her elevated position, balancing her weight against the crosspiece of the lectern, she could just see the verandah of the pub. Between verses she would pause and raise her eyes, seeming to glance at the over-excited children in the street. She strained to hear the conversation, to hear Susannah and Pete, but always and at once, into the valleys of her silence, sluiced the devout bubbling hubbub of the faithful. Amen, amen, the worshippers would jubilate (it was the daily prayer meeting, late afternoon, and ‘jubilate’ was one of Mercy’s private verbs). The jubilators insisted that the tumble of their loud hosannas – hallelujah and glory to His name and praise the Lord – should bounce in the red dust and ricochet and mingle and compete with worldly sound.
(Mercy leaps at new information of any sort like a famished dog for a bone, Miss Rover wrote, but she already has a headful of more weird knowledge than an alchemist. How many angels danced up and down Jacob’s Ladder? She will know the answer, and will cite you chapter and verse.)
‘For Chrissake, Susannah,’ Pete said, as Miss Rover ran an index finger along his arm. ‘Half the town’s watching.’
‘Outer Maroo is here,’ Miss Rover said, pointing at her spittle map with her toe. ‘Somewhere vaguely east of the Channel Country, and sealed off from the rest of the world.’
‘The rest of the world can go to hell,’ Andrew Godwin said affably, joining Pete at the window. ‘As far as we are concerned.’ He had to hold his Akubra at a rakish angle to keep from being blinded by the light. He did not have it on, but he doffed it anyway, and with a stylish flourish that brought it back to the shielding of his eyes. ‘If you’ll forgive me for being blunt, Susannah,’ he said in a considered and gentlemanly way, ‘you are even loonier than my klepto wife.’
‘And here,’ Susannah said, pointing again to Outer Maroo, ‘right here at Bernie’s Last Chance, in a little back room which is off limits to almost everyone, the king sits in his counting house counting out his money.’
‘You’ve been drinking,’ Pete said in a low voice.
‘You are stark staring bonkers,’ Andrew said.
‘Counting out his
money and his opals, and no doubt fingering his balls. And nobody knows where the money comes from, and nobody knows where it goes.’
For whole seconds, no one breathed. Sometimes, once a decade or so, a cyclone barrelling down from the Gulf of Carpentaria reaches Outer Maroo. For a day before, there is an unnerving stillness. All the air is sucked out of the town. And then chaos and flash floods are unleashed. Those are the seasons out here: drought or floods; with an eerily calm day of foreboding in between.
That is how it was in Bernie’s that day, inside, and on the verandah, and across the street. Everyone was stunned into stillness, waiting.
You must understand two things about small outback towns: that gossip about almost everyone and everything is ceaseless and rife; and that certain things are never mentioned at all. There is a great gulf fixed between what may be verbally kicked around and what is absolutely taboo.
For example: everyone knew that Andrew Godwin, local grazier, husband of the eccentric and not-much-liked Dorothy, owner of Dirran-Dirran, whose hundred thousand acres stretched from Outer Maroo to beyond the Northern Territory border, was regularly casting his seed across the land: with various blonde and long-legged backpackers who all ended up at Oyster’s Reef; with pretty little Josie O’Leary, his stockman’s kid, who was the age of his own teenage daughter; and with Ethel, the Murri woman the Godwins kept on in the house when the rest of the Murris pulled up stakes and moved off to Bourke. And that is to name just a few. The sowing of the seed took place, as a rule, rather noisily, in a small room at one end of the shearing shed, and the sowing thereof could be heard by the shearers, a motley crew if ever there was one. They reckoned old man Godwin pumped faster than the click of electric shears. There were endless discussions on this theme in the pub, endless jokes.
Everyone also knew that Andrew Godwin’s teenage son shot himself through the head (Ross, that is, his middle child; the one between young Alice and Junior, the same Junior who manages Kootha Downs for his dad, and who keeps returning what his klepto mother steals). Everyone knew Ross shot himself, and everyone had a fair idea of why, particularly since the poor boy was known to be crazy about Josie, whom his father was regularly racing. Not a word of this passed anyone’s lips. Ever. That would have been crossing a line.
Susannah Rover herself crossed a line on Bernie’s verandah that day. She spoke of something the whole town knew about, but she breached a taboo. Everyone knew that vast amounts of cash were changing hands, but nobody knew what went to whom. Everyone harboured suspicions. Everyone secretly believed that his neighbour received an unfair share. Everyone’s hands were in the till, everyone was involved one way or another with Oyster’s Reef, but no one wished to see it like that. They all felt soiled. They would all have hotly denied feeling any such thing.
Everyone also feared that the rush would spread, that more adventurers and seekers would arrive, that more division of the spoils would thus occur. This had to be stopped. More foreigners had to be kept out. The ranks of the chosen were complete, Mr Prophet urged; the one hundred and forty-four thousand, figured symbolically, were already within the fold, and the gates of the city should now be closed. The one hundred and forty-four thousand, Oyster demurred, as the Book of Revelation made quite clear, were chosen by a Will beyond man’s reach and would gather themselves toward the Reef as that Will decreed. The finer points of theology eluded most, but no one wanted to give the opal traffic up. No one wanted to antagonise Oyster. Everyone constantly feared that a tax man, or a government surveyor, or someone from Mineral Resources, might show up. From the very first day, there were people who wondered under their beers about just what sort of government agent a schoolteacher might turn out to be.
Knowing nothing and being untraceable was everybody’s goal, though no one mentioned such matters aloud; at least, not until Susannah put her foot in her mouth.
There was, naturally, a shocked silence.
Then there was hubbub.
Pete had been joined at the window by a goodly number of drinkers at varying stages of drunk. From her lectern, Mercy could see others muddling at the door, jostling for a view, spilling out on to the verandah and beyond, crowding the steps, shuffling their boots in the desiccated red earth. She could see Bernie himself, frowning, leaning against the etched glass panels that filtered sunlight to the murky inside. She could read possible retribution in the set of Bernie’s shoulders. She fancied she could see Jess, Old Silence herself, but that was the child’s overheated fancy because Jess was well back in the shadows behind the bar. She could see Susannah Rover, slight and defenceless, with all those pushing and shoving yobbos around her, a woman at risk. Nevertheless. How interesting, Mercy thought, that the men even stop drinking to watch her.
(Mercy thinks I am the Keeper of the Tree of All Other Knowledge, Miss Rover wrote in one of the letters that never left Outer Maroo. I offer the delectable forbidden fruit. I’m the smuggler of under-the-counter ideas, the seducer, the sorcerer herself, I suppose. Heady stuff for a teacher, but dangerous. Can I magic my little apprentice out of this outhouse before I get us both in deep shit? That is the question. There’s some pretty strange stuff that’s passing for normal out here. I don’t know if I’ll be able to believe it myself once I get out, if I ever get out, so what good will it do to blow whistles? Who’ll believe me?
As for the rest, the pay is not bad, coming as it does from the pockets of the three local warlords who hired me: two graziers, one of whom is also a terrible wowser (everyone calls him ‘Mr Prophet’, though I call him – privately, of course – Mr Brimstone, or Old Blood-and-Thunderguts); the third is the owner of the pub.
It’s a weird combination. Why would a teetotaller team up with a publican, you ask? Good question. Why would two graziers appear to be involved in a private arms race? This town is one big riddle to me.
And the men are what you’d expect, but I make do.)
‘Susannah,’ Pete said huskily, opting for a different tone. He ran his tongue around his upper lip and fortified himself with more beer. ‘Listen, sweetheart, you’ve got a touch of sunstroke, I think. Let’s go for a spin.’
‘On the other hand,’ Susannah said, ‘everyone knows where the opals come from, but does anybody know exactly what is going on at Oyster’s Reef? Or how much cash is changing hands and where the cash comes from? Or what happens after the opals leave Bernie’s back room?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Susannah,’ Pete said, urgently. ‘That’s none of your bloody business, love.’
‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah,’ Mercy read, ‘brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities . . .’
Please, Miss Rover, she prayed silently, pressing her fingertips and thumbs together. She could not tell exactly what she was frightened of. She prayed that Miss Rover would not look back at the cities of the plain, or at Oyster’s Reef, because the hot shimmering air of trouble came off them like the air off a compost heap.
‘Escape for thy life,’ she read aloud, ‘look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.’
Nevertheless there was a spirit of rebellion in Mercy which Mr Prophet had detected while under the strobe light of the Holy Spirit. ‘Mercy,’ he had said after prayer meeting one day, ‘your mind is full of vain questions.’ The palms of his hands were turned out toward Mercy and tilted up. ‘They are spreading like a cancer in your soul.’
Mercy stared at the chemical stains and blotches on his upturned cattleman’s palms, the cattle-dip and fodder-spraying burns, the incipient melanoma sores. She was full of confusion.
‘Cast your questions upon the Lord,’ Mr Prophet urged.
Mercy studied her own hands.
‘I am praying for you, Mercy.’ He said this in a kindly way. He was a man who wanted to be kind, she saw that. He was a man sandpapered by his own intransigent and passionate beliefs.
A little bell with a clear and glorious sound pealed victory notes inside Mercy’s head. I will jubilate, she said to herself. I will lift up mine eyes to Miss Rover . . . but then the thoughts shut themselves down abruptly in panic lest she had sinned against the Holy Ghost by blasphemy, the one sin that could never be forgiven, world without end.
‘The existence of a town,’ Miss Rover was saying, ‘can be camouflaged by a map, but there are things you can’t keep a lid on for ever. Sooner or later, they are going to leach their way out through this frangible soil and leave their mark.’
‘For God’s sake, Susannah,’ Pete said angrily. ‘We’re not schoolboys.’
‘There are letters and postcards being written and mailed,’ Miss Rover said. ‘You think you’ve stopped them getting out – oh, I know all about that; it took me a while, but I know. I could get very angry myself, Pete. About the letters, I mean. Only there’s something I think you’ve all forgotten.’
‘Is that so?’ Bernie asked.
‘Yes,’ Susannah said, ‘it is. Because the people waiting for the letters that never arrive get a message, don’t they? They get a very loud message.’
The men made a collective sound and swayed a little, all together, like a bee swarm, spoiling for trouble.
Oyster Page 5
