Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Once, my mother, drunk, stinking, her clothing torn and unseemly, showed up at the convent in Roma, and then I knew shame. I also knew I would scream at any nun who looked at her with pity or with reproach. My mother was quite silent. She just stood there on the verandah, weeping, and I stared in horror at the puddle which appeared on the boards between her legs. It seemed to get bigger and bigger, it kept flowing, silently, leaking away between the boards. I thought I would drown.

  After she left, I ran away for a day, and hid myself, solitary, in a culvert under the railway lines. Sometimes, just after a train had gone by, I would lie on my back between the rails, my hands folded across my breast.

  Motion sickness could cripple me.

  I dreamed always of trains without brakes.

  I felt like someone on a ganger’s trolley between one galaxy and another, always alien, my trolley tracks roller-coastering themselves into knots. There were always two of me, on parallel tracks, going in opposite directions, speaking two different languages, thinking incompatible thoughts out of different sides of my head.

  I think that was when I first felt the lure of nowhere as of some irresistible force, as the end of the line where my life was rushing, the ultimate terminus sucking at me, waiting for me to jump all the tracks.

  And then it happened, as suddenly and stupidly as it had happened to my dad, in the dark alley outside a pub in Roma. One summer night, there was a man with a knife, a man on my own surveying team, a man I fancied, a man I knew had the hots for me. He could have got what he wanted by asking, but he didn’t want to ask.

  ‘You want me, Jess, don’t you,’ he said, a statement, his voice slick with booze.

  ‘Three guesses.’

  ‘Yeah, you want me. Just what you been needing, Boss Lady’ – low drunken laughter, the knife at my throat – ‘what you been longing for.’

  It was the laughter, I think, that triggered things; and the knife; and the fact that he was right. The Furies visited me, there was more blood than seemed possible, and the knife was in my own shocked hand. The blood puzzled me. I skated on it, slipped, lay beside him on the wet red road. I held his head in my arms. ‘I just wanted to fuck you,’ I whispered, ‘you stupid beautiful oaf.’

  Not even his eyelids moved, but the bloodied mouths in his chest made a sucking sound, they spoke, and after that I didn’t want to speak at all. There was too much that I didn’t want to say. At that precise moment, I stopped being Jess Somebody Else, Jess who was heckled and jekylled by the bad joke of life. I pulled on the baggy costume of Jess Hyde and I fled. It was months before I read in a newspaper that he wasn’t dead at all. Surface wounds, the papers said. Women can’t do anything right, he joked, which is why they shouldn’t be boss ladies on surveying teams.

  Fuck you, I thought.

  And here I am at the terminus, beyond the end of the line, with the town of Outer Maroo and its dirty little secrets in the palm of my fizzing mind.

  ‘Make a fist,’ my dad used to say, shadow-boxing. ‘You gotta get them before they get you, only way to go.’

  ‘Life is a bugger and then you die,’ he told me. He swooped me up like a bird. He danced me round, breathless with laughter. ‘So pump the trolley, me ganger boys, and let ’er rip! On with the show while the going’s good.’

  ‘You’re a wild thing,’ Major Miner says. ‘What are you laughing for now?’

  Because the going’s so good, I would say if I could just catch my breath.

  The going’s so good I could mend the world. I could put it back together again like a jigsaw puzzle. Whore of Babylon, I could say, making a fist. Abracadabra.

  And Major Miner’s mouth is on mine, and I am lost, and have found myself again.

  LAST WEEK

  Tuesday

  You can tell when people are dreaming, Mercy thinks, standing silent as a cat on the verandah, watching Sarah through the film of lace curtains and mosquito net. Sarah is sleeping late, as though drugged. It is fear, Mercy thinks: the fear of answers. She wants to know and she doesn’t want to know. Mercy understands avoidance. She does not want to see the photograph of Sarah’s daughter.

  Sarah moves restlessly through a dream. Sometimes she speaks. On Sarah’s eyelids, Mercy sees a flutter of shadow and harsh gold, where the sun, which lacks all delicacy by this hour, pushes its burning finger through lace and net, and sears what it touches. But there is also a counter-play, a counter-movement, from the underside of Sarah’s eyelids: a dream pecking at the shell of her sleep, working its way into the world.

  When she wakes, Mercy thinks, I could take her to Aladdin’s Rush. When Sarah sees the books, she will understand, she will know that whatever could have been done was done.

  Ah, but was it?

  Perhaps, at Aladdin’s Rush, Mercy will be able to answer her own questions as well as those, both asked and unasked, of Sarah. Perhaps she will be able to tell Sarah, not everything . . . no, not everything, that would not be possible . . . but what Sarah most needs to know.

  Spirals of superheated air twist out through the verandah railings and rise toward the sun. Mercy feels herself swaying in the lift of them, being floated towards the Rush. She feels lighter than air. She can hear a sort of merriment in the dust motes, scudding around her. She touches her lips with her tongue and thinks of Jess watching over Nick, who makes her think for some reason of Gideon, no, no he does not, she refuses to think of Gideon, but she can safely think of Donny Becker who got her away from the Reef, and who pressed himself against her in prayer meeting once. She asks herself why so often lately it is as though her body runs away with her thoughts. She will see lips that move in a particular way, or eyes of a certain colour, and it is as though they were the lips and eyes of all the imaginary young men she has ever dreamed about, it is as though they turn on fizzing currents that run from her head to her breasts to the damp hot place between her legs. She is flushed and excited, she wants to take the whole world into herself greedily, she wants to embrace trees, cows, sheep, the sun, Donny Becker, she could dance, she could fly, but then just as suddenly she is tormented with shame because that must have been what Oyster saw, what he knew about her, this greediness, this wet heat, and if that . . . if that is what . . . and then she feels ill and confused. She fears she may be one of the whores of Babylon, much spoken of from the pulpit of the Gospel Hall, those painted women who think lascivious thoughts and whose fate, like that of Jezebel in the Old Testament, is to be cast from windows into outer darkness and eaten by dogs; and yet even so, she resists believing that the bright spinning thing that skips in the air when Donny Becker looks at her in that way . . . she will not believe it is evil.

  From time to time, she can feel on her skin a possibility of change in the weather.

  ‘Mercy,’ her mother calls sadly, wearily, from a verandah chair.

  Mercy shivers. The rising currents of warm air drop her suddenly. ‘I’m coming, Mum.’

  ‘It’s lovely to have you home for lunch,’ her mother says, but she says it with that air of disproportionate gratitude that Mercy finds so burdensome of late. Her mother has changed the scale of things, so that minute details will billow out like spinnakers and threaten everyone’s balance. ‘Is Ma Beresford back?’ her mother asks nervously. She believes that a return to right order in any one particular might help in some incalculable way to level out again the pitch and toss of their lives.

  ‘No. This afternoon, I think.’ Mercy sits in the chair beside her mother. ‘There was only me this morning. But no one came in, so I closed the shop.’

  ‘No one came?’

  ‘No,’ Mercy says.

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother reaches out a hand that trembles slightly. ‘That means . . .’

  What does it mean? Mercy wonders. She strokes her mother’s fingers gently, as though they were bruised. Perhaps it means that Mr Prophet’s miners and stockmen and jackaroos, or else Andrew Godwin’s, or possibly Bernie’s stonecutters and grinders and polishers, are huddling somewhere,
out at the new shafts or at the pub. Perhaps decisions are already being made, lots drawn. Perhaps the accidents that seem to happen so mysteriously, so speedily, whenever foreigners arrive . . . perhaps such new accidents are already on their way? Or perhaps it means nothing at all. Perhaps it means that since everyone fears that decisions are being made, out there somewhere, by someone unknown, then everyone stays out of sight. Perhaps accidents happen because everyone, tense as tripwire, stumbles into them.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything, Mum,’ Mercy says lightly, or she attempts to say lightly, though she fears her mother can read anxiety merely from the surface of her skin.

  ‘It’s hard to breathe,’ her mother says.

  And yes, the Old Fuckatoo is roosting again, closer and more fetid than ever. The look in its eye is not basilisk, any more, Mercy thinks; not neutral. Since the Reef disappeared, it has not been possible to predict what the Old Fuckatoo might do. There is a mad, evil glitter in its eye.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything, Mum,’ she says again. ‘There are just days when no one comes in, that’s all. Usually I stay there anyway. I stay and talk to Ma or Ma’s Bill. Or I just stay by myself and think. I like the shop when it’s empty. Or else I go and talk to Jess.’

  ‘Did you see Jess today?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mercy says. And then, because it is really another question that her mother is too fearful to ask, she says: ‘Nothing’s happened. Jess is keeping her eye on him. She has some jobs lined up for him, she reckons he’s safe as long as she keeps him busy where she can see him, in Bernie’s shed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, oh yes, that’s safer. Otherwise . . . yes, heatstroke, and who knows . . . ? They have to stay inside, Sarah too.’ Vi puts her hands over her face. ‘Of course, you were right, Mercy, it was the right thing, to bring her here . . . you couldn’t leave her, but I wish . . . I just wish . . .’ She looks around vaguely for something mislaid. ‘She told us his name, I think, but I can’t –’

  ‘Nick. He’ll be all right, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’s safe with Jess. Nobody would dare.’ Her mother looks along the verandah to Sarah’s room. ‘She’s slept all morning.’ She clasps and unclasps her hands. ‘I wish Charles hadn’t had to go out,’ she says. ‘I wish he’d stayed home today.’

  ‘He couldn’t, Mum, not with old Mrs Dempsey dying, he had to go. He’ll be all right.’

  ‘That Telecom man,’ her mother says fearfully, and begins to cry. ‘That one who wasn’t Bernie’s cousin . . . the time he came.’

  ‘That was an accident. That was an accident pure and simple with the telephone cables.’

  ‘Where are the dogs?’ her mother says, sitting forward. She calls to them. ‘Where are they? Why don’t they come?’

  ‘Mum, you know they go off after rabbits. They’ll be back.’

  ‘I have this feeling,’ her mother says, ‘I just have this feeling that Brian will telephone today.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Mercy presses her fingertips and thumbs together. She closes her eyes. Miss Rover, come over.

  ‘Don’t you often get that feeling?’ her mother asks. ‘That he is trying to phone?’

  Mercy often gets the feeling that she is trying to phone Miss Rover. She dreams that she dials a Brisbane number, and Miss Rover answers and says Hello? . . . hello? . . . hello?, and Mercy shouts, but the line always goes dead, and the operator always says We regret that your call cannot go through at this time, we regret that your call, we regret that your call, we regret certain difficulties, we apologise for any inconvenience and we suggest that you send a letter instead. Mercy tries to write a letter instead.

  ‘It could be from anywhere,’ her mother says. ‘From Mount Isa, or Darwin, wherever he managed to hitch a ride. You know how Brian daydreams, Mercy. You know how he loses track.’

  Mercy always makes Miss Rover watch her when she begins to write something in her head.

  ‘We know he was already gone before the end,’ her mother says in a low earnest voice. She is speaking to herself. She is engaged in passionate debate. ‘We know he wasn’t there then.’

  Mercy is always sitting in the classroom after school when she writes her letters. She is setting all the details down.

  ‘Two foreigners came,’ she begins, ‘and the weather began to change.’

  ‘That is excellent work, Mercy,’ she makes Miss Rover say.

  ‘Two more foreigners have come,’ she writes. ‘There is something different about them. I do not think it will be so easy to get rid of them. I think the weather will change.’

  When she opens her eyes, Sarah can feel the dream slipping away like a silk cloak from bare shoulders. She clutches at it, or tries to, but a hopeless languor afflicts her fingers, and the dream slithers just beyond reach. For a second she sees Amy’s face undulating in its folds, and she can feel Stephen’s hand again, just for an instant, on the nape of her neck. She can see Amy watching them, singing a little song of incantations under her breath, holding her fingers over her eyes in a magic pattern, or perhaps weeping, her face pale, her nose bleeding, and there seem to be postcards, a waterfall of them spilling from Amy’s mouth, spinning towards Sarah’s hand, fluttering away between Sarah’s fingers which perversely refuse to hold anything in spite of the fact that there is something crucial written on the cards, and Sarah did have one in her hand not long ago, she is sure of this, because she can see fleetingly and intermittently backwards into the folds of the dream to where she knew what was written on the card, yes, she can see herself standing there smitten with a sudden radiant understanding of everything, and it is extremely urgent that she catch hold of the silken edge of that moment and pull it back, that she merge again with the Sarah-self in the dream, who is no longer quite in focus, who is getting fuzzier and softer, but who reaches out helpfully with the postcard, offering it, and perhaps it is not too late, because Sarah-outside-the-dream can almost touch her own outstretched hand, she may be able to catch hold of the card, she may be able to read it again, it brushes her fingers, but no, it’s too late, it’s too late, the card and the entire dream have gone, drifting over the shadow line, falling away into the neverwhere between her slack index finger and thumb.

  One more failure to snatch Amy out of her blank spaces. Sarah can hear the bell that tolls missed connections, an endless clang, measuring off bad timing, wrong turns, ineptitude. This latest blunder is catastrophic, although fortunately the catastrophe seems to be following the trajectory of the dream, dwindling in magnitude at high speed like a falling star until there is nothing left but a pinpoint of regret. It is possible after all that Amy has simply gone backpacking onwards to Darwin, or rolling westward like a wave on her inner sea, her knapsack stuffed with postcards and nowhere to mail them since Quilpie. So she mails them instead from sleep to sleep, knowing Sarah will stay attuned. Perhaps in Sarah’s next dream the postcard will be delivered.

  Or it is possible, after all, that the postcard was not even intended for Sarah. It is entirely probable that the card was addressed to someone else, to Stephen, for example; or to the man with the unnerving blue eyes whom Amy had met somewhere between Brisbane and her fate; or to the other one, Gideon, who had become Amy’s friend.

  He calls himself Oyster, and Gideon is his right-hand man. They have leased the mining rights to an opal seam from some cattle farmer (graziers, they call them here). There’s a strange system in Australia, I don’t understand it. People don’t really own their own land, they only own the surface of it, the top eighteen inches, or something. The federal government owns any minerals under the surface. So if oil or opals are found on your land, you do not have the right to stop someone mining them. They have to pay you royalties for going through the surface of your land, but that is all. It’s very strange. As you can imagine, it has led to a lot of friction with Aboriginal people (in Queensland, they call themselves Murris) who do not want mining companies on their land, but have no power to prevent them. As for Oyster, he has come to some private arrangement with
the grazier.

  I met Gideon by chance on the beach at Noosa, on the Queensland coast. No, not by chance. I don’t believe in chance any more. I believe all these connections are meant to be: you and me, Sarah. You and Dad. Me and the guru at the ashram in Pondicherry, the one who sent me here. We were walking on the beach in India one day, about ten of us, looking out at the Bay of Bengal, and suddenly the guru turned round and touched me on the shoulder and pointed out over the sea. The reef is calling you, he said. Go.

  I was upset. I was happy in his ashram. I didn’t want to leave. But now I understand why. I thought he must mean the Great Barrier Reef, so that is why I came to Queensland, and that is where I met Gideon, who took me to meet Oyster. But this is the amazing thing: Oyster’s opal mine – and he runs the mine as a commune, everyone shares the work, and the commune uses the money to spread the gospel of peace – his opal mine is almost as far inland as you can go, but he calls it his Reef. I almost fainted when he told me.

  Can you imagine how I felt, Sarah? It was like a bolt of lightning. It was the same way I felt years ago, when I was a little girl, and I took you to meet Dad. I just knew, somehow, that this was meant to be. I believe every detail of our lives has a purpose. I believe we are interlinked with every other soul on earth. We have to listen to the sighing of the earth, Oyster says, and to the message of the sea. God is everywhere, and we are in the Last Days. A thousand years are as a day in the sight of God, and the Day of the Earth has reached the evening of its last thousand years. I believe that, Sarah. You can hear it in the message of the sea. You can hear everything when you meditate. I often hear you, Sarah. I keep you and Dad in my thoughts. You don’t need to tell me what he did, and when, because I already know. He has already given himself back to the universe, I know that. Oyster explained to me that I haven’t lost him. He is already part of the New Heaven and the New Earth.

  We will all be part of it soon. At the dawning of the year 2000, Oyster says, all that we know shall pass away, and the New Age will begin. Oyster has intense eyes of the most unnerving blue, and when he looks at you, you feel as though he can see your thoughts. Gideon is his partner. It is Gideon who goes out into the highways and byways to recruit workers for ‘the vineyard of the Kingdom of Heaven’ as Oyster calls it. It isn’t just a cooperative opal mine at Oyster’s Reef; we will be living in a new way. We will be preparing for a new heaven and a new earth.