Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘Dad –’

  ‘I have failed my own son, above all.’ Mercy has to avert her face. She listens with heightened concentration to the rhythmic pillowy thumping of a small covey of wallabies. She sees the syncopated arcs, shadowy, against the acacias. She counts fourteen of them. She can feel the drumming of their powerful hind legs in the boards beneath her feet.

  ‘I leave things too late, Mercy,’ he sighs. ‘I’m slow to see evil. I believe in original goodness, I suppose. It’s a heresy.’

  They watch a possum, beady-eyed, on the verandah rail. It stops, stock still, aware of them, then vanishes into the dark.

  ‘Just the same, I had a premonition at the Dempseys’. I tried to phone Brisbane. I dialled police headquarters, and got through.’

  She turns towards him, astonished.

  ‘The person who answered thought I was a crank. And of course the line was fuzzy, you could hardly hear, but I did explain. West of Quilpie and Eromanga, I said. And then the line went dead.’

  ‘Yes. Everyone’s.’

  ‘It is a judgment on me,’ her father says. ‘This helplessness.’

  ‘Dad, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he says wearily, and goes into the house.

  ‘Goodnight, Dad.’

  And now Mercy is someone whose skin and whose thoughts are blacker. They still scald her. They blister. They begin to fester and weep. She is someone who sees herself in the dull sheen of Ma Beresford’s cash register, embroidered savagely with pointillist sores.

  She is someone who dreamed of touching and kissing Donny Becker, whose freckles were like shadows on the sun, and who once gave her a lizard, and who may or may not have tried to kill her even though he did not want her dead.

  Mercy is someone who killed Donny Becker.

  Mercy is someone who wants to sob till the end of time.

  Mercy is someone who understands less and less, the more she learns.

  Mercy would love to speak to Ma Beresford, who is back again, or to Ma’s Bill of this, but Ma and Bill have rules that are infinitely elastic and infinitely strict. Nothing shocks them. You have to roll with the punches, they say, and moping is utterly out of bounds.

  ‘Now, Mercy,’ Ma says, motherly but with a warning frown when Mercy strokes her burning and Seurat-stippled arms, when Donny Becker swims in her mournful eye. ‘Now, Mercy,’ she says, ‘accidents happen, and there are plenty more fish in the sea. Take your woebegone face out of here for a while, and sit out the back.’

  Mercy takes her woebegone face and waits at the back door of Bernie’s. She is looking for Jess. She peers in cautiously at the door of the back room where Bernie sits by his precise and delicate scales, weighing stones, holding them up to the light, assessing colour and pattern and fire. Already, at the grinding and polishing wheels, someone new has taken Tim Doolan’s place.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Bernie asks, looking up suddenly.

  I’ve got two opals, Mercy thinks of telling him, that a girl from the Reef gave me a long time ago, over a year ago. But then she remembers that she never accepted Amy’s opals, though they weigh like blood weights in her mind.

  ‘If you’re looking for Old Silence,’ Bernie says, ‘she’s out in the shed boiling sheets.’ His eyes rest on Mercy’s body-swirls and on the bruise-blue smudges, the purple clouds of tattoo. ‘Can’t you cover yourself up?’ he asks crossly. ‘You look like a bloody Maori.’ He speaks as though Mercy is guilty of something obscene, gross bodily carelessness, perhaps, or self-abuse. ‘If I might give you a bit of advice, young lady, I’d take a leaf out of Jess’s book. Silence is golden.’ He shakes his head at her in irritation. ‘You look like you’re dolled up for a corroboree. Don’t go anywhere near the bar, or you’re gonna give the blokes heartburn, you’re giving me heartburn just looking at you.’

  Mercy stares at him. She remembers Miss Rover on the verandah of his pub, the last day before she was transferred.

  Who is Bernie? she wonders. Where did he come from? What would disturb him?

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he asks.

  Nobody knows where the money comes from, she thinks. And nobody knows where it goes.

  ‘Scoot!’ Bernie says, and he jerks his thumb over his shoulder towards the shed.

  The shed is of corrugated iron, it breathes out and breathes in, exhaling heat and steam from the copper, inhaling Mercy. She bats at the hot fog with her hands until she sees Jess folding sheets. ‘Jess,’ she says, ‘oh, Jess,’ and gets folded into Jess’s arms and the fitted corners of a double sheet. Jess folds and folds and for the first time Mercy weeps and Jess rocks her and strokes her damp hair. ‘He gave me a lizard,’ Mercy sobs. Jess puts a finger against Mercy’s lips. She does not try to stop Mercy’s tears, but croons something deep in her throat. Weep into the washing water, her crooning says. Weep on to the sheets, wrap them around Donny in your mind, and then you can brush his skin with your eyelashes while he sleeps. She sets Mercy to stirring the wet sheets in the copper with a wooden pole until she is sweat and tears and steam.

  Mercy thumps at the sodden mass of bedding with her stirring stick and turns and turns until there is a small funnel in the middle of her cauldron. Jess adds a potion of washing blue, and together they watch it bleeding into the water, inking the rippled dip of the hollow, climbing its whirlpool sides, turning the sheets mysteriously white, then whiter than white. Jess bends the considerable weight of her shoulders behind a second pole and turns and turns. This is the magic trick, Jess’s body says. This is the secret. You keep stirring until all the painful questions go up in motion and fog.

  Double, double, toil and trouble, Mercy thinks, seeing Donny Becker’s face folded into white and washing blue, seeing his eyes and his lips, seeing Jess’s reflection and her own in the spinning galaxies of sheet.

  When shall we three meet again? the water asks.

  When will Donny Becker and Tim Doolan and Mercy Given meet again at the end of a driveway?

  ‘Jess,’ she falters in anguish. ‘How could Donny . . . ? How could anyone make someone like Donny . . . ?’

  Hush, Jess’s body says, stirring.

  ‘But to me, Jess? To me.’ Ultimately it is this, perhaps, that has so shaken Mercy: that Death has had the effrontery to breathe on her, that he has walked up to her and looked her in the eye and smirked. It must be a mistake. It must be a misunderstanding. Mercy has had sufficient intimations, before this, of the feral stench of hate. Hate is a hot beast, a mad dingo, a feral pig, the Old Fuckatoo, she knows that, she has smelt them all skulking around Outer Maroo for years now, especially for the last two since Miss Rover left, and especially, especially since the Reef disappeared; but it has never truly entered her head before that the beast might mark out Mercy Given as prey. ‘To me, Jess,’ she says, dumbfounded. ‘To me.’ To Mercy Given, sixteen years old, with so many books not yet read, so many lips not kissed, so many arms that have not brushed against hers.

  Jess puts a steamy hand gently over Mercy’s mouth. Hush, her hand says. You are alive, your parents are alive, both the foreigners are still alive, it could be worse.

  The living float around Mercy like points of light, and so do the dead. She and Jess wrap them in the sheets.

  Thursday

  In Beresford’s, people come and go. Junior Godwin comes bearing gifts in a brown paper bag. He sets his Akubra on the counter and stares at Mercy. ‘My God,’ he says, appalled. ‘What happened?’

  Mercy shrugs. ‘There was a car crash, and someone’s petrol tank blew up.’

  Junior rakes his fingers through his hair, agitated. Mercy notes that he does not ask whose car was involved. She knows he is afraid to find out. ‘Oh my God,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t heard. I’ve got a new bull out at Kootha Downs, Mercy, got him at the Roma sales, a real beauty, a Santa–Hereford cross, Hannibull, we call him, sweet-tempered as a lamb. And all my best breeders are coming on heat at once.’ He speaks breathlessly, like a schoolboy on the head
master’s mat. ‘I’ve been working till I’m ready to drop.’

  ‘It wasn’t any of the cars from Dirran-Dirran,’ Mercy says. ‘None of your father’s men.’

  Junior Godwin swallows. He wipes beads of sweat from above his lip with the back of one hand. ‘Thank God,’ he says. He seems winded, and fans himself with his Akubra, crushing the brim in his hand. He pushes the paper bag across the counter. ‘I think everything Mum took last week is here, Mercy, but if anything’s missing –’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry about it. Is Alice OK?’

  ‘Oh Mercy,’ he sighs. He strokes his Akubra in a frantic kind of way, as though this might soothe his young sister. ‘Poor Alice. She’s staying with us, with me and Delia. We had to get her away from Dirran-Dirran, from Mum, you know. I’m taking her out mustering with me, it’s the only way to keep her mind off – She’s a different kid on her horse.’ He spins the Akubra on one finger, energised by a new idea. ‘She’d love to see you, Mercy. You could come back to Kootha Downs with me now if you like.’

  ‘No, I don’t – I can’t. I don’t think I can leave right now. More foreigners have come, did you know?’ It is actually possible, Mercy thinks, that Junior does not know, that he is unaware, though for anyone else in Outer Maroo, the question would be ridiculous. It is amazing, however, what Junior manages not to know. He lives in another dimension, with only cattle, horses, bulls. ‘One of them, the woman, is staying with us,’ Mercy says, ‘so I can’t – And our dogs. Something happened to our dogs, so I have to –’

  ‘No, no. Yes, I knew there were visitors, that’s why Alice had another bad turn.’ He puts his elbows on the counter and buries his head in his hands. ‘She’s having terrible nightmares again, Mercy.’

  Is there anyone in Outer Maroo who does not? Mercy wonders.

  ‘And all the phone lines are down again,’ he says, as though this has a bearing on Alice’s nights.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to your dogs?’

  Mercy shrugs. ‘Dead.’

  ‘Shit,’ Junior says. ‘Oh shit. Shit, Mercy.’ He punches the crown of his Akubra. ‘Cows and bulls are the only sane people I know.’

  ‘Yeah. Give Alice my love.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighs. ‘Yeah, I will.’ Absent-mindedly, he picks up the brown paper bag that is stuffed with Dorothy Godwin’s purloined items of haberdashery, and leaves. Halfway to the door, he turns back and sets it on the counter again. ‘I’m glad you’re all right, Mercy,’ he says. ‘I’m glad no one from Dad’s –’ He swallows. ‘It’s the drought, you know. It’s the drought that’s done this to people. The bloody Old Fuckatoo. Anyway, thank God you weren’t . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says.

  Voices come and go through the screen door at Beresford’s. From across the road, Mercy hears the hallelujahs of the Living Word, she hears the prayers of supplication and jubilation, she hears the thunder of Mr Prophet’s voice. It is the time of the afternoon prayer meeting, which Mercy no longer attends.

  ‘There were, in the days of the Israelites,’ Mr Prophet thunders, has so often thundered, both before and after Oyster, before and after Miss Rover, before and during and after so many prayer meetings that Mercy cannot be sure if she is hearing him now from across the street, or hearing him with her inner ear, and she cannot therefore tell if the text refers to anything present and particular or not, ‘there were those who did not as the Lord commanded. We read,’ he says, ‘in the Book of Leviticus, chapter 10, that there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. And their remnants were shown to the people as a warning of the wrath of God.

  ‘Let us remember,’ Mr Dukke Prophet warns, has so often warned, ‘let us remember the fiery power of the Lord God of Hosts, lest we offend against Him in thought or deed.’

  And their remnants were shown to the people, Mercy thinks, and pieces of Donny Becker fall as brimstone, as burning rain.

  Somewhere in Aladdin’s Rush, she remembers (though how can she be sure what she is remembering and what she is making up, given that what she thinks she is remembering is so much more fantastic than what she thinks she has made up), somewhere there still exists, or has been imagined, a box of Miss Rover’s notebooks and journals. Remnants, an essay by Susannah Rover, she remembers; ‘the sort of thing I want you to do with the set topics,’ Miss Rover says.

  ‘A taste for subversion,’ she says, ‘is a useful skill. It’s important to turn ideas inside out, Mercy: to look at the linings, the underpinnings, the hidden seams. Unpick them with satire,’ she says. ‘See what happens.

  ‘Take Remnants for instance,’ she says, ‘a typically meaningless “set topic” dreamed up by some curriculum consultant in Brisbane. Very likely the curriculum consultant has just spent her lunch hour at a remnants sale in David Jones’. She wants a perky little essay about tables crowded with coloured squares, something impeccably written, mannered, shot through with verbal silk. But we have more leeway in the private schools, Mercy, especially a private school like this one, so well endowed.’ She pauses to laugh and cannot stop laughing. ‘So very dubiously endowed, and so very exclusive,’ she says at last. ‘That’s our advantage,’ she says. ‘We can be disreputable. Spread your wild wings. Invent. You can tell the entire bizarre truth if you set your mind to it.’

  Mercy is startled. ‘But inventing isn’t telling the truth,’ she objects, ‘and that’s a sin.’

  ‘Ah, sins,’ Miss Rover says. ‘There are some very inventive sinners in Outer Maroo. To write about them, you’d have to be as fabulous as the Bible, don’t you think? You’d have to invent a secret code like the whale who swallowed Jonah for the Oyster who swallowed a town. Of course no one would believe you, but the record would be there. I think you could do it, Mercy, if you let your imagination take off.’

  But what is the relationship, Mercy wonders, if the Pointillists are right, between the intrinsic colour of a certain event and the colour it takes on when what you remember is all muddled up, or when thinking about it makes you frightened? If we invent things and write them down, is it like killing a goanna in one of the outer paddocks where the bulls are kept? The dead goanna brings the ants and the ants bring a snake and the snake bites the jackaroo’s leg and the jackaroo dies and then the bulls snort and get restive and spook the cattle and the cattle are never mustered because the jackaroo is dead so they stampede and break the fence and head for the Red Centre and turn feral.

  If an essay lies in a box somewhere, in an abandoned opal mine, does it ferment?

  Mercy sees herself sorting through boxes and finding a battered carton crammed with blue-covered foolscap sheets. She leafs through them for ‘Remnants: a brief history of the relationship between the outback and the automobile’, by Susannah Rover. She turns pages in the Aladdin’s Rush of her mind.

  REMNANTS

  by Susannah Rover

  1. Breakdown

  When a car breaks down in the outback, the place where it stalls is its tomb. It will never be towed to anywhere else. The outback is littered with metal skeletons which blister in the sun and corrode and rust and slump into the earth. If the hulks are beside a major tourist route, where fleets of King’s and Australian Pacific coaches bring the comfort-loving air-conditioned intrepid tourists, they will eventually receive a dignified burial sponsored by the Shire Council and the State Government. From time to time, the candidates for burial are the tourist coaches themselves.

  2. Burial

  At irregular intervals, either mystically or electorally determined, the local and state governments, mindful that outback tourists are romantics, send forth convoys of bulldozers and earth-moving equipment. These roll along the Mitchell and the Capricorn and the Warrego Highways, ploughing under the charred frames of former automobiles. The tourists, who come with preconceptions of space kept pure and untouched by human muddle, pay handsomely to have their preconceptions kept intact. What archaeologists of the next millennium may surmi
se, uncovering so many steel ribs and chrome tibia and fibula, we can only guess at.

  3. Beyond the Black Stump

  Of course, beyond the range of the Mitchell and Warrego Highways, anything goes. It is beyond all economic sense for any petrol station to tow. It is outside the bounds of viable economy to own a tow truck. As the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland makes quite clear, minor spare parts should be carried with the motorist at all times. If a problem arises for which a motorist is not equipped, he can radio for help on his CB. If he cannot radio for help, he has been extremely foolish, and will have to pray, or die of dehydration, or both. If he has radioed for help, eventually (though no one can promise how many hours or days he may have to wait), someone will come out to collect him and drive him back to the nearest town. If the motorist thinks his mechanical problems are relatively minor, he may arrange to take the requisite spare parts and a qualified mechanic out to his vehicle, though this is costly. Qualified mechanics are not easy to find; unqualified ones are available, but charge higher.

  4. Remnants

  When the motorist gets to his car, he will find it charred because the heat of the sun on the metal frame will have ignited the petrol tank. It is important to remember that midday temperatures are often around 50 degrees Celsius. If the motorist has been lucky enough to have his petrol siphoned off by a scavenger before the midday heat, he will find that his car has been stripped to the axles by the same, or by other, recyclers. This is always neatly done, both inside and out. Tyres, hubcaps, wheels, mirrors, numberplates, aerials, all engine parts, radio (naturally), steering wheel, seating and springs will be taken. The metal frame will be left in good condition, generally unmolested, but as the cost of towing will be higher than any possible reimbursement from a wrecking company or scrap-metal firm, the motorist should pronounce a blessing on the remnant and leave.

  ‘Let your words fashion shapes unpredictably, Mercy,’ Miss Rover advises, ‘as mirages do.’