Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  I was praying Patrick Murphy wouldn’t see me.

  From my very reluctant spot in the circle, I could see that his eyes were wholly on his girl’s cleavage. I moved slightly, so that my back was to the footpath, but so that I could still see him from out of the corner of my eye. Our circle, which took up two parking spaces, was bisected by the curb outside the Commonwealth Bank. There were perhaps fifteen of us ranged around a woman who sat on a folding chair and hugged a piano accordion. We all had a certain look, which was as identifiable in its own way as the look of Patrick Murphy’s sheila. My dress was … well, ladylike, I wore flat heels, I might as well have been branded. I hoped only that my face (unspoiled, as our pastor would have said, by the devil’s paintbox) might blend indistinguishably with the colourless air.

  At the moment of Patrick Murphy’s appearance, my father had the megaphone in his hand and was offering the peace that passeth understanding to all the lost who rushed hither and thither before us, not knowing where they were going.

  The theatregoers, their sense of direction thus set at nought, appeared to me incandescent with goodwill, the light of weekend in their eyes. I (for whom Friday night was the most dreaded night of a circumscribed week) watched them as a starving waif might peer through a restaurant window.

  “I speak not of the pleasures of this world, which are fleeting,” my father said through the megaphone. “Not, as the world giveth, give I unto you …”

  Patrick Murphy and his sheila had drawn level with the Commonwealth Bank. Dear God, I prayed, let the gutter swallow me up. Let the heavens open. Let not Patrick Murphy see me.

  Patrick Murphy stopped dead in his tracks and a slow grin of recognition lit his face. I squirmed with mortal shame, I could feel the heat rash on my cheeks.

  “Jesus,” laughed his sheila, snapping her gum. “Will ya look at those Holy Rollers.”

  “They got guts,” said Patrick Murphy. “I always did go for guts,” and he gave me the thumbs-up sign with a wink and a grin.

  At Wallace Bishop’s Diamond Arcade, he turned back to blow me a kiss.

  It was the last time I saw him before he hitched his motorcycle to the tailgate of a truck and got tossed under its sixteen double tyres. This happened on the Sandgate Road, near Nudgee College, and the piece in the Courier-Mail ran a comment by one of the priests. A bit foolhardy, perhaps, Father O’Shaughnessy said, a bit of a daredevil. Yet a brave lad, just the same, and a good one at heart. Father O’Shaughnessy could vouch for this, although he had not had the privilege, etcetera. But the lad was wearing a scapular around his neck.

  Rest in peace, Patrick Murphy, I murmur, making a cross in the dust with a mango twig.

  “What are you doing?” my mother asks, smelling liturgical errors.

  “Doodling. Just doodling.” But certain statues in churches – the Saint Peters, the faulty impetuous saints – have always had Patrick Murphy’s eyes.

  A few minutes later, my mother is back. “We’ve had a call from Miss Martin’s niece in Melbourne. You remember Miss Martin? Her niece is worried. Miss Martin isn’t answering her phone so we’re going over.” They call out from the car: “She still lives in Red Hill, we won’t be long.”

  Miss Martin was old when I was a child. She’s ninety-eight now, part of the adopted family, a network of the elderly, the lonely, the infirm, the derelict. My parents collect them. It has always been like this, and I’ve lost count of how many there are: people they check in on, they visit, they sit with, they take meals to. My mother writes letters for ladies with crippled arthritic hands and mails them to distant relatives who never visit. She has a long inventory of birthdays to be celebrated, she takes little gifts and cakes with candles.

  By mid-afternoon she calls. “We’re at the hospital. We got to her just in time. Do you mind getting your own dinner? I think we should stay with her, she’ll be frightened when she regains consciousness.”

  They keep vigil throughout the night.

  At dawn the phone wakes me. “She’s gone,” my mother says. “The Lord called her to be with Himself. Such a peaceful going home.”

  The day after the funeral, my father and I drive out to the university.

  “It’s not easy,” he says, “trying to get a B.A. at my age.”

  But there is pride, just the same, in this mad scheme I have talked him into. I have always thought of him as an intellectual manqúe whose life was interfered with by the Depression and the Gospel – (His aunts in Adelaide never recovered from the distress. “Oh your father,” they said to me sadly, shaking their heads. “He was led astray.” By my mother’s family, they meant. “We do wish he hadn’t been taken in by such a … We do wish he would come back to a respectable religion.”) – and whose retirement is now interfered with by all the lives that must be succoured and sustained. “It’s hard to find time to study,” he confesses ruefully.

  People will keep on dying, or otherwise needing him.

  In the university library, he leafs through books like an acolyte who has at last – after a lifetime of longing – been permitted to touch the holy objects. He strokes them with work-knotted fingers. But we are simply passing through the library today, we are on our way to meet friends of mine for lunch at the staff club. I am privately apprehensive about this, though my father is delighted, curious, secretly flattered. He has never been in a staff club lounge.

  At the table reserved for us the waiter is asking, “Red or white, sir?” and my heart sinks. The air is full of greeting and reminiscence, but I am waiting for my father’s inevitable gesture, the equivalent of the megaphone outside the Commonwealth Bank. I am bracing myself to stay calm, knowing I will be as angered by the small patronising smiles of my old friends as by my father’s compulsion to “bear witness”. He will turn his wineglass upside down at the very least; possibly he will make some mild moral comment on drink; he may offer the peace that passeth understanding to the staff club at large.

  He does none of these things.

  To my astonishment, he permits the waiter to fill his glass with white wine. He is bemused, I decide, by his surroundings. And yet twice during the course of the meal, he takes polite sips from his glass.

  The magnitude of this gesture overwhelms me. I have to excuse myself from the table for ten minutes.

  For a week I have cunningly avoided being home with my parents for dinner, but the moment of reckoning has come. We are all here, brothers and sisters-in-law and nieces and nephews, an exuberantly affectionate bunch.

  The table has been cleared now, and my father has reached for the Bible. A pause. I feel like a gladiator waiting for the lions, all the expectant faces turned towards me. It is time. The visitor always chooses the Bible reading, the visitor reads; and then my father leads family prayer.

  It should be a small thing. In anyone else’s home I would endure it with docile politeness.

  It cannot be a concession anywhere near as great as my father’s two sips of wine – a costly self-damning act.

  It should be a small thing for me to open the Bible and read. There is no moral principle at stake.

  Yet I cannot do it.

  “I am sorry,” I say quietly, hating myself.

  Outside I hug the mango tree and weep for the kind of holy innocence that can inflict appalling damage; and because it is clear that they, the theologically rigid, are more forgiving than I am.

  But I also move out of the shaft of light that falls from the house, knowing, with a rush of annoyance, that if they see me weeping they will discern the Holy Spirit who hovers always with his bright demanding wings.

  I lean against the dark side of the mango tree and wait. A flying fox screeches in the banana dump. Gloating, the Holy Spirit whispers: Behold the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. One by one, the savaged bananas fall, thumping softly on the grass. From the window the sweet evening voices drift out in a hymn.
The flying fox, above me, arches his black gargoyle wings.

  Isobars

  Isobars

  A Fugue on Memory

  Where does a circle start? Wherever one decides. All these circles begin and end in Melbourne.

  And what is an isobar? An isobar is an imaginary line connecting places of equal pressure on a map. All lines on a map, we must acknowledge, are imaginary; they are ideas of order imposed on the sloshing flood of time and space. Lines on a map are talismanic and represent the magical thinking of quantitative and rational people.

  These particular isobars connect points where the pressure of memory exerts an equivalent force.

  And how is a storm front plotted? The detection of warm fronts, cold fronts, rainstorms, cyclones, and other such assorted cataclysms and disasters requires the intuition of the scientist. If the meteorologist has received sufficient advance training in oceanography, statistical mathematics, Jungian archetypes and dreams, he or she will be able to read the signs correctly. Such a meteorologist will watch for the figure in the surface disturbance of water (though to what purpose, discerning the gust in a shoal of lake breezes, no one is ever certain).

  Water

  The Ringwood Lake and the Ballarat Lake were separate bodies of water in the Jurassic Period, early 1940s, when M (for Made in Melbourne, maid in Melbourne, for memory itself, for meteorologist-in-training, for …). But perhaps we should be more conventional and call her Em? Or even, more decorously, more appropriately, buttoning our gloves and keeping our knees together in the approved Melbourne manner, Emily. Yes, Emily will do very nicely …

  The Ringwood Lake and the Ballarat Lake were separate bodies of water when Emily floated the leaves of childhood on them, when she threw breadcrusts to swans now several generations gone. But those two ponds, infinite as oceans in a bygone era, are one puddle now. Statues clutter the walks that surround them. Sometimes the English grandfather comments on the statues, sometimes the Welsh grandfather. The Ringwood town hall and the Ballarat cathedral and the Ringwood railway station push through bullrushes.

  The English grandfather’s hand is soft and pale, a schoolmaster’s hand; the Welshman’s is callused. With a grandfather at each side like charms at her wrists, Emily flexes her toes, she sinks her bare feet into gurgling mud. Already she is learning that the property of water is sameness, Ringwood shimmering, Ballarat dreaming, the future sighing at its own reflection.

  Once, the English grandfather says, there was a picnic by the lake and afterwards you vomited chocolate in the back seat of the Bishop of Ballarat’s car. Your mother was mortified.

  The Welsh grandfather says: Don’t lean so far out from the edge of the jetty, the swans will snap at your fingers. Once there was a picnic – don’t you remember? – where a little boy fell in and drowned. His mother sobbed and sobbed, she could not be comforted, she had to be taken away.

  The English grandfather scoops up lakewater and pours it into Emily’s palm. One little drop of memory, he says, can hold everything at once, and forever. It’s like having a thousand eyes.

  Grandpa, she says. Why is that lady crying? And what is that man doing?

  What lady? both the grandfathers say. What man? Where?

  There, she says. There. Over there by the gum tree. Is she the little boy’s mother?

  Oh, they say, maybe. Or maybe she’s someone else. In any case, it’s nothing, it’s nothing that little girls need to worry their pretty heads about.

  But Grandpa, Emily persists, why is she crying?

  No, no, she’s not crying, they say. (Their voices are fearful, embarrassed, harsh.) She’s laughing. Trust us, they say. Don’t look.

  And they take her hands, playful, and lift and swing, this is fun, they swing her to kingdom come, out out over the water, over the Pacific, over the Atlantic, over the Arabian Sea

  where, briefly, the fisherman offers his hand as she steps into his boat. She is in South India, Pleistocene era, 1970s, the coconut palms throwing spidery shadows on Kovalam beach. When she takes the fisherman’s hand, brown flesh white flesh interlaced, he giggles with embarrassment, waits for her to settle herself between the lashed logs, pushes off with his bamboo paddle.

  Blood warm water bathes her from the waist down. The boat is stable and buoyant, not watertight; she and the fisherman ride just below the water’s surface, passing through the sides of waves as a knife through butter, as spirits through walls, as memory through time. She sees Ringwood swans and a row of little fishes suspended like bubbles in a green flank of the Arabian Sea. The Bishop of Ballarat, concerned, leans forward with his bamboo paddle. You won’t be sick, will you? he asks in some unknown tongue. The ways of God are inscrutable, he says; it is not our place to question why. Don’t lean so far, he says. Someone was drowned doing that.

  Why is that woman screaming? she calls, her mouth full of water. And what is the man doing with the knife?

  What knife? the fisherman shouts back. (Bubbles and tiny fish stream from his lips like ribbons.) Where? he calls.

  There, she points. There. On the beach.

  No, no, you are not understanding, the fisherman says. Man is cleaning fish and woman is laughing, isn’t it?

  Relieved, she smiles through the fluid green belly of the wave as the fisherman casts his net. His eyes and hers are both amber as cats’-eyes in the water, salt crusts their lashes, branches of their seaweed hair float into the mouths of crabs. Bubbles of laughter fizz from her throat, it’s a champagne baptism, euphoric, surf foaming through her lips, and the woman on the beach is laughing too, thank God (yet it is odd the way a laugh or a scream seems defined by the ears of the hearer). Still. The fisherman knows the local language, he must be right

  though people do tell lies, Thoreau warns. Especially the avoiders, especially those fearful of being held accountable for what they have failed to do, especially those ashamed of their own fear.

  Thoreau is sitting at the edge of the water, his hut behind him, nine beanrows and a hive for the honeybee to one side, Walden Pond flashing sunlight in his eyes.

  The man over there under the trees, she says. The one talking to the woman who is crying …

  Thoreau looks and looks away. They say she has lost a child, he says. They say she has never been quite right since. And the man is offering comfort, he’s promising extravagant things. Thoreau shakes his head and warns: But men rarely mean what they say. Still, he adds, the woman wants to believe him. Can’t you hear her laughter?

  It’s such a strange laugh, Emily says. It doesn’t sound like a laugh at all, it sounds more like a –

  Thoreau puts a finger to his lips. If you hear a different drum, he says, you have a choice. You can march to it, though this will certainly get you into difficulties with the authorities. Or you can pretend you didn’t hear it, like everyone else. You have to weigh the consequences, you have to choose, you have to balance costs,

  balance is essential. Left foot on one ice cake, right foot on another, no one should be too far from shore when playing this game. Five minutes, so they say, at these temperatures, and the body shuts down.

  But warmth is on the way, April is here, the Ice Age is over, spring has come to the frozen St Lawrence, a rubble of ice with a Great Lakes postmark is floating past Emily’s dock and should reach Montreal by the middle of May. A puzzled loon, the first of the season, touches down, disappears, surfaces, watches the mad balancing act.

  Don’t lean so far when you throw him a crust, the Welsh grandfather says. A boy was drowned doing that.

  Do I hear a woman scream, Emily asks herself, puzzled. Or is it simply one fractious chunk of ice shrieking up against another?

  Newspapers

  The Melbourne Age, the Sun, the Argus all have pictures: of the little boy who drowned, of the mother weeping, of the murdered woman. Was this all the same event? Emily, remembering a picnic by the lake and much pa
nic, is confused. Her parents and grandparents press their lips together and shake their heads. Her mother says: Don’t ever lean out from the dock, don’t ever ever go in the water unless someone is with you.

  A man on the Ringwood railway station tells Emily’s grandfather: I expect she asked for it. (The mother? Emily wonders. Or the woman with the knifestripes on her stomach?) Newspapers flutter from carriage windows and shout from their stands beside the ticket grille. These are the facts, the newspapers say. Women and children are always asking for trouble. They get it.

  Brisbane Courier-Mail, circa 1953. BETTY SHANKS MURDERED. This happened just an eyeblink away from Wilston State School. In the playground, rumours fly. She had boyfriends, she talked to strange men. From the school gates, the children can see the police, the reporters, the chalk outline on the footpath.

  It seems, the teacher tells the frightened (yet strangely excited) children, that Betty Shanks rode home on the tram late at night. She was all alone. She spoke to a strange man. This was madness on the part of Betty Shanks.

  Don’t ever speak to strange men, the teacher warns. Don’t ever go out alone at night.

  If you do, the nice constable tells the class, you’re asking for trouble.

  The TLS (May 5, 1988) has reviews and scholarly reminders that the victim is always to blame. “Tuberculosis attacks failures,” declares medical expert of 1912 (TLS, page 463, a review of a book by F.B. Smith, the Australian medical historian). “It is just the ignorance of millions like yourself that causes the miseries of mankind,” Smith reports that a grieving mother was told over the body of her dead tubercular child.