‘Does it?’ Mercy is immediately interested. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, I just mean everything’s so different. I’m not very good at managing so many differences at once.’
Managing so many differences at once, Mercy thinks, with an inner stir of excitement. So Sarah suffers from the same disease. A bond exists, and it must be that Mercy has sensed it from the first moment when the foreigners shimmered into view. Perhaps it was telegraphed from nerve to nerve. Perhaps Mercy is blood relative to all who are strange, and alien only to the people she knows.
Mercy studies the wraiths of the words that float above the tablecloth, that skirmish with the knives and forks, that ribbon their way between the chairs. She watches them drift up into the sticky spirals of the fly papers. It seems so strange to eat hot food in this heat. It seems so strange that anyone should find this strange. Mercy can feel pins and needles of excitement along her arms. How obvious, and yet how electrifying to find that there are vantage points from which she, Mercy, is foreign. She wants to look at the dining room, to look at her parents, to look at herself from Sarah’s eyes.
‘Climate seems to me a much bigger difference than language,’ Sarah says. ‘I find myself amazed, really, that we speak the same language . . . that we seem to speak the same language . . . I find myself wondering if we do. It must make you think quite differently, to live like this. To me this feels like living in an oven. Amy wrote that the nights are sudden and cold, but they aren’t, they’re burning, and I can’t seem to, I can’t seem to . . .’
‘That’s only in winter,’ Mercy’s father says, ‘that the nights are cold. From December to March, they are just as hot as the days. In July, they go below freezing.’
‘How . . . how awful. That’s even more . . . I can’t imagine such extreme changes in twenty-four hours. I can’t follow the logic of climate here, the rules all seem haywire. I can’t seem to . . .’
Mercy watches her closely. She is not only speaking of climate. I can’t seem to get it right, her eyes say, and I can’t afford to make mistakes. You have information. I sense that there are things you know. I sense that you have answers to questions I can’t bring myself to ask. Not yet. Not before dinner. Not before I have time to adjust to the heat. Not before I have time to prepare myself; in case, after all, you know nothing; in case, after all, you do.
And what of the other man on Jake’s truck? Mercy asks her silently.
She imagines she sees the impact of her thought in the flicker of Sarah’s eyelids. She sees the image of the man rise into Sarah’s mind.
‘There was someone else,’ Sarah says drowsily. ‘Someone else waiting in Quilpie, and on the truck.’
Mercy feels dizzy. Perhaps she thinks up the world. Perhaps she really does. Perhaps she could think it up. Perhaps she could make it come out right, if she concentrated, if she worked out the story ahead of time, if she could get to the ending before anyone else did, before it happened, if she could change it. She would only have happy endings.
‘The heat didn’t seem to bother him,’ Sarah says.
Mercy closes her eyes and sees him in the shadowy pub. What questions is he trying to ask at this moment? She sees him filling up space in Sarah’s mind, she is sure that Sarah can smell the sharp sweet odour of his skin, that when she runs her tongue across her lips, just as Mercy herself is doing at this moment, she can taste the man on the truck, she can taste him again as she tasted him fleetingly on the road, two hours west of Eromanga, say, when Jake swerved over saltbush clumps and the two passengers were thrown against each other. There is an earth smell to the man with the sensuous lips, and his sweat is slightly sweet, and his weight, so unexpected and violent, makes her (makes Sarah, makes Mercy) feel faint. Mercy presses the back of her hand against her lips. Her hand trembles.
She thinks, with a sudden intense hunger, of Donny Becker: of the time he put a lizard down the front of her dress; of the time, in prayer meeting, when he touched her leg, when he ran his hand, as though by accident, along her calf. Mercy can feel a flush of heat from ankle to knee. She knows Donny Becker can scarcely read, but he climbs in through the window of her dreams and she teaches him. She teaches him to lean in close across the pages until their tongues touch, and she feeds him words that way, like a mother bird to her chicks. I’ll give you everything I know, she tells him. You don’t know anything, Mercy, he tells her; you need looking after.
She knows that Donny Becker always wants to touch her. She knows she wants him to. She knows he knows that.
There are other things that she somehow knows. Perhaps Oyster was right about the fruit. Perhaps it was from the Tree of Knowledge, when he made her eat, though already by then she never believed anything Oyster said. The delicious forbidden fruit, he said, and made her eat, and made her eat, and you will be as God, he said, and you will know all things, forbidden things, and secret things, and the secret desires inside the minds of others, just like me, Oyster said, just as I can see the hungers inside your mind, little Mercy, and inside your body, I can see your thirst for the Living Water that I can give, and your hunger for the fruit of my Tree of Knowledge that you long to eat, and she said no, you are wrong, no, I don’t, but she had to eat and drink, Oyster made her, and perhaps after all he told the truth, though it made her vomit so much at the time. Perhaps she has truly eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and now knows all secret things and the hidden thoughts and desires of other minds. Perhaps now she will never be able to unknow forbidden things.
Perhaps she will die from the weight of them.
She closes her eyes. She can see the foreign man and Sarah in the train before it leaves Brisbane. The train waits in the station, they are in the same compartment but at opposite windows. She sees the way they ignore each other, the way they are so aware of each other’s presence that Sarah can feel the kiss of his shirt, pure cotton, like a brush of lips against her forearm, and he can smell the talcum powder between her breasts and can taste the skin of her shoulders. It is interesting the way they both know that they are stalking the same answers, the steel wheels on the railway lines chanting the questions, past Roma, past Charleville, pushing west to the end of the line. Quilpie. They both carry letters postmarked Quilpie. They both reread these letters privately, they both see wraiths on the street, they both ask questions, apparently innocuous, at the post office. They are conscious of each other’s letters and questions on Jake’s truck, though they rarely look at each other, rarely speak. Sarah is aware of the man throughout the journey, and even before she boards the train in Brisbane, just as Mercy would have been.
Mercy has a new theory: that people who wake suddenly, breathless, from terrible freefalls into black space, these people give off signals like radio towers, they give off a certain aura, a force-field perhaps. Their force-fields collide. In dreams they swim in pools of dark water, bottomless, and they meet one another down there. They know one another.
Mercy lowers her eyes to the hem of the tablecloth and presses the tips of her middle fingers against her thumbs. Now I am Sarah, she says, concentrating, and here she is looking out of the corners of her eyes at Mercy, a strange child, and here she is thinking of the man’s hands – what is the man’s name? she really has to know his name – but if she is Sarah now, and she is, she wills herself to be Sarah, then she must certainly already know the man’s name, though she has forgotten it, and she must concentrate, even if all she can see at the moment are his hands, she is thinking of his hands, of a certain quirky gesture he is given to, a gesture he made on the verandah at Beresford’s and on the road as he strode down to the pub. The gesture is not infrequent. He will bring the tips of his index fingers together, just for a second, then point them outwards, then touch them again, then point them outwards and shift them, up, down, east, west, juggling them slightly, weighing directions. He is completely unaware of his movements, she is certain of that. He is assessing directions, but he is not lost, not floundering. He will take all possible directions by
the throat, Mercy sees that.
All the way from Brisbane, she – Sarah, that is – has wanted to place her cool hands against his wrists, and Mercy too wants to close her fingers lightly around them (or are they Donny Becker’s wrists? They shift and change) and she has wanted to let his compressed energy buffet her. She runs the tip of her tongue around her lips.
‘Donny,’ she says.
Her mother looks at her, and then at Sarah. ‘I hope it will be all right,’ her mother says, suddenly frightened. ‘Charles? I hope they won’t –’
‘Nothing can happen,’ he says soothingly. ‘The dogs –’
‘Yes, of course,’ Mercy’s mother says, relieved. ‘The dogs. Of course.’
‘He’s a strange person,’ Sarah says. ‘Intense. Moody. He seemed indifferent to everything. The heat, the flies, the dust, Jake, me. Everything. His name’s Nick.’
Nick. Mercy holds the name gently between her palms, out of sight, beneath the tablecloth. At certain angles, it reminds her of –
No. She will not think of Gideon.
She sees that something in Sarah sends up protective barriers against the name. She sees that Sarah does not trust a man like that, a man who sends out powerful messages to your body before he has so much as spoken to you. She has a radical distrust of men like that. She does not like him. She does not want to speak to him. She has avoided him. She can taste him on her lips.
Mercy’s mother returns to the table with a casserole, cradling it in her hands and using her apron of thick soft towelling as shield against the burning pot. You would think it was a baby being carried with such tenderness, or perhaps this occurs to Mercy because of the swaddling bands of white cloth. Did her mother carry Brian that way once, did she cradle Mercy in the hollow of her apron, tied to her body, to herself? Yes. Probably. With the same voluptuous absorption in the task. Her mother, committed to denial of the flesh, earnestly deaf to all private desire, nevertheless knows the language of the senses instinctively. Everywhere Mercy directs her eye or her ear there are contradictions so great that she cannot understand how the fabric of the world contains them. If she were to hear the air turn boisterous with the sound of ripping, the sound of life tearing itself apart at the seams, she would not be surprised.
Mrs Given lowers the pot on to a trivet. With one apron-wrapped hand, she lifts the lid and a fragrant curl of steam rises like a will-o’-the-wisp and floats across the table. ‘Sarah?’ she murmurs.
‘Yes. Thank you, Mrs Given. It smells wonderful.’
‘Vi. Please call me Vi. Everyone calls me Vi, though it’s not my real name. It’s short for Vivian, but that’s not my real name either. That’s funny, isn’t it? It’s just a name a teacher kept calling me at school by mistake, she mixed me up with someone she remembered from somewhere else, and the other children thought it was a great joke and so they called me Vi to tease me and then everyone else did for the rest of my life, isn’t it strange? We’re so pleased to have you with us, Sarah. It’s lovely to have visitors again, isn’t it, Charles?’
Mercy’s father smiles, but the smile does not reach his eyes.
Vi dips her ladle into the casserole and gives herself over to the absorbing blend of colours and textures: the chunks of beef, the dear little carrots that Ma Beresford brings back, bulk frozen, from Brisbane, the translucent pearl onions, the green splinters of freeze-dried parsley. It is puzzling to Vi how sorrow and evil slip through such a dense net of goodness. She does not understand where they fit, or how there is room for them in the world.
‘It’s very hot,’ she warns Sarah, apologetic, proffering the steaming plate. ‘I’m sorry I can’t make you a salad but we can’t get fresh vegetables out here, you see, otherwise I’d . . .’ She pauses, the plate wavering in the air between them. ‘Maybe if I used the tinned beetroot? Yes, I could do that, and the tinned beans, would you rather? Since you don’t like hot meals?’
‘Oh no, no, really . . . I mean, I do,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s just, where I’m from, Boston, we associate hot dinners with winter nights, snow outside, that sort of thing, so it’s just unusual for me . . . but everything’s unusual, isn’t it, when you move from one culture to another –’
‘Snow.’ Vi repeats the word with wonder, her ladle poised in mid-air. ‘Is it like the frost in the refrigerator?’
Sarah laughs, startled. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Well, not exactly. It’s softer. More like . . .’ She frowns, concentrating, lifting her hand as though snow were drifting from the ceiling where the dark spiders watch quietly. The spiders distract her.
‘I can’t imagine.’ Vi shakes her head, her eyes dreamy. ‘And falling out of the sky. It’s so strange to think of it. Sometimes when the dust storms are very bad, or when I’m defrosting, I open the freezer and put my cheek against the ice. It prickles. It’s a lovely feeling.’
‘Vi,’ her husband says gently. ‘The casserole.’
She looks at him vacantly, smiling. ‘Did you say something, Charles dear?’
A terrible mournfulness shadows his eyes and draws down the edges of his mouth. He has to struggle against the pull of it to speak. His lips smile. ‘The casserole,’ he says again, patiently.
Vi studies the dish, focuses, lifts another plate, dips her ladle. ‘Boston,’ she says, as though the word were an exotic vegetable that must be tasted slowly and meditatively. She is caught again, suspended in mid-action, waiting for the flavour of the word to seep into the casserole steam. ‘Boston. It’s in America, it’s near New York, isn’t it? Imagine someone from Boston in our house. Isn’t it strange? And what could have brought you all this way to western Queensland?’
‘Well, actually,’ Sarah says, and blood rushes to her cheeks, ‘my daughter did. My stepdaughter.’ She clasps her hands and presses them together. Mercy sees the wrists of the man on the bus, feels his volcanic questions, which are also Sarah’s, pressing up against Sarah’s larynx. ‘She was backpacking around Australia and she sent me a letter from Quilpie. But since then –’
‘Mum,’ Mercy stands, knocking the edge of the table . . .
‘Vi, dear, the dinner’s getting cold.’
‘. . . you’re dripping gravy on the tablecloth, Mum.’
‘Oh dear,’ Vi says. She rests the ladle in the dish and licks one corner of her apron. She dabs at the dark splash that is bleeding in filaments along the gingham threads. ‘Isn’t that curious,’ she says, pausing, ‘the way it’s spreading.’
‘Let me serve, Mum.’
‘It is faintly ridiculous, hot meals in this climate,’ Charles acknowledges. ‘But we’re still so hopelessly British in our habits, that’s the reason, Mrs, ah . . .’ He smiles fleetingly and nods at Sarah to compensate for his inability to address her by her first name, the only one he has been given, but the use of which is unthinkable for him. ‘We don’t even notice that it’s inappropriate. Thank you, Mercy, that’s plenty. You can sit down again. I think your mother would prefer to do the serving herself.’
A small tic kinks a muscle in Mercy’s cheek. She presses her lips together and concentrates on the ladle and counts silently. One, two, three, the ladle is an old one, white enamelled, six, seven, and the chips in the enamel have interesting shapes, nine, ten, especially with the eyes half closed, thirteen, fourteen, small black silhouettes of animals, a camel, a book, Miss Rover, Donny Becker’s hands, the beautiful foreign eyes of Nick at the window of Ma Beresford’s shop. At the count of thirty, she lowers the ladle into the dish again and pushes it slightly towards her mother, who continues to observe the slow-spreading stain with fascination.
‘Why does it spread like that, in straight lines?’ Vi asks. ‘It’s like spokes coming out of a square wheel.’
‘It’s a phenomenon called bleeding,’ Charles says. ‘Mercy, sit down, please. It adheres to the principle of conduction. All fluids are conducted along the available structural channels of distribution. Thank you, Mercy.’
Mercy glances at Sarah. Sarah’s eyes rest on Charles momenta
rily, startled, curious, translating, then she lowers them politely. She is absorbed by the tendons in her hands, the way they push through the skin like ramparts. Her hands ache. She unlocks them and flexes her fingers. She puts the tip of one index finger in her mouth.
Mercy continues to watch her covertly, ready to bridle at any intimation of mockery, ready to leap to parental defence. Her father’s fingers drum themselves on the table, a tattoo of tamped-down anguish and irritation, habitual. Mercy thinks of picking up her plate and pressing it on the drumming fingers, pressing, pressing, she is almost crushed by the energy of her desire to do this, she can feel the force of it, pressing until the fingers are pushed right through the table, silenced. She imagines the splintered hole in the table, the smashed plate. She can actually feel the shards in her hands.
She is awash in a familiar exhaustion. She experiences it as a terrible lassitude of the body, but the sensation also presents itself visually: there are two currents of rushing water, black cold floodwater, sweeping down dry tributary arms of the Barcoo, hurtling towards a confluence at Cooper’s Creek. Mercy is flotsam. She is split in two. She is swept along both watercourses simultaneously. The speed of the rushing water is incredible. At the confluence, at the moment of collision, a great column of black water throws itself up like a tidal wall. Mercy’s two flood-swept selves smack into the wall as though hitting concrete. There is nothing but darkness. All the water of the Barcoo flood plain explodes and annihilates itself in mist.
Mercy hangs on to the edge of the dining-room table. She cannot breathe, but the secret of surviving is doing nothing, feeling nothing, hanging on. If she counts slowly backwards at this point, she can reverse the flow of the flood, and now she has found something to hang on to, a spar, the loving stitches in the tablecloth, each one perfect, each one a promise that will save her from drowning. The tidal wave recedes, recedes, has receded, the flood flows backwards towards the quiet source of the Barcoo.
Storm warnings: yes, she must be more attentive. She has to train herself better, be more absent, immerse herself more completely in details as her mother does, anchor herself beyond the highwater line of flash floods, one of whose unstoppable watercourses is the racy pace of Mercy’s blood when her father speaks to her in that particular way, in that tone of voice, or when he parcels out the world by the Laws of the Medes and the Persians, an immutable system, beyond challenge, received by direct private pipeline from God.
Oyster Page 11
