Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  The woman weeps and weeps. She’s a difficult woman, the doctors and experts say. Probably overprotective, stifling, the usual thing. Probably caused it, in a way; more or less programmed the child for death. A difficult woman.

  CBC, Canada, the national news, May 6, 1988: A recent survey of attitudes of high school students toward rape indicates that most boys think girls who are raped were asking for it.

  Air. And circles within circles

  Curses fly through the air, and sometimes fists, and sometimes broken bottles. Emily stands in a circle on a street corner somewhere in the heart of Melbourne or in the vortex of Brisbane (they are one circle now: rampart, the ring of accusers, prison wall, ghetto, all the same circle). There are drunks and traffic in all directions. In the air above Emily’s head, catcalls collide with Biblical codes. Come unto me all ye who are weary … leaps out of the megaphone.Aaah, shut yer fucking mouths! comes winging back into the circle. Emily watches the words eddying together, twisting, full of cyclone danger.

  This particular evening (Jurassic Era again, the Japanese defeated but black paint still being scraped from the windows of Melbourne), this particular evening of Circle Time, which is every evening, a ragged mother and a dirty little boy stop to watch, leaning against a shop window. The boy licks an ice-cream and watches Emily who stares back hungrily. It is his safety she wants; being part of that crowd, the circle outside the circle, one of the watchers. Whatever happens, the boy can stay or go. The boy is safe.

  Emily wonders when the lots were drawn, when the circles were allotted, and by whom. The kind of thought that comes from beyond the margins, from who can say where? from outside the lines that form the edges of maps, the kind of question that can change worlds asks itself inside Emily’s five-year-old mind: Is anyone allowed to change places? Is it against the rules? What happens if the rules or the circles are broken?

  The boy licks his ice-cream and watches her. What is he thinking? She sees him suddenly suck in his breath, sees his eyes widen, sees the man with the knife. A cry with no sound to it flies from Emily’s mouth.

  The boy disappears behind scuffling bystanders, police, circle people. The police are angry. Holy Rollers, they mutter. Asking for trouble.

  Nobody sees what happens, nobody hears.

  Nobody saw, nobody heard, nothing we can do, the police tell Emily (Brisbane now, the seedy West End, 1965).

  But everyone must have heard the screams, she says.

  Tell us exactly … (The police are elaborately patient.)

  Emily tries to reconstruct: a scream in the air, screams, it is night and she is alone in the house but she rushes out to the street. (This happens much too quickly for fear or thought to intrude.) She sees the white man with the knife, the black woman screaming, the pregnant black woman screaming.

  And then? the police ask.

  And then, and then? Emily pounds at the blank that retroactive fear creates. The knife, the blood, the blur.

  I must have run between them, she says, amazed, her hands shaking.

  Emily is inside her house, bandaging the slash on the woman’s arm, when the police say: Not a thing we can do. I’m afraid.

  Listen, they explain to Emily (kindly, fatherly). A woman like you shouldn’t get mixed up … etcetera … bloody lucky you didn’t get yourself stabbed.

  About the Abo whore, they say. (Excuse our language.) Just asking for trouble. Best to turn a deaf ear. Nobody sees, nobody hears, that’s the ticket.

  That’s the ticket: the same old one that Kitty Genovese held when her number came up in New York, when the knife flashed, when a porridge of her screams filled the air and reached dozens of ears, but nobody saw.

  Glittering, curving through air, the knife slices through a life in Boston, March 1987. The blade rests against Emily’s throat, whispers to her larynx: I am steel, I am real. You may scream all you want but no one will see or hear. You’ve been asking for this, you deserve me.

  Air! Emily gasps. Air! she pleads. Air! Fresh air! Personally, someone (an Australian) tells Emily at a writers’ conference, I think writing about violence is in bad taste.

  You see? the knife chortles, triumphant. What did I tell you?

  I’ll be back, the blade whispers (a sleazy sound, cold as steel against pliant skin). In dream after dream. I’ll be back.

  The Last of the Hapsburgs

  This is all you can see: the young woman, the Pacific, the stands of sugarcane beyond the dune grasses, and four miles of sand so firm that when Cabrisi’s horse (the one that went wild, the brumby), when Cabrisi’s horse gallops there, you can barely see hoofprints.

  The young woman leaves no footprints at all. She stands with her feet and ankles in the erratic line of froth, at that point where ocean and shore eat each other, and reads the Port Douglas beach. Cabrisi’s horse, nostrils flaring with the smell of her, rears: a salute of sorts.

  “Caedmon,” she says – here, the naming of creatures is all hers – “you beautiful show-off!” Of course he knows it. So bloody beautiful that a cry catches in her throat. Caedmon whinnies again, a high and jubilant note, and brushes air with his delicate forelegs. Another sign. The beach is thick with them, but who has time enough for the decoding, the translating, the recording?

  Surf rises from her ankles to her knees. Sing me North Queensland, it lisps with its slickering tongues.

  I can’t, she laments, hoisting up her skirt. I can’t.

  She would need a different sort of alphabet, a chlorophyll one, a solar one. The place will not fit into words.

  Surf rushes between her thighs. Sing me North Queensland, it commands.

  The young woman lifts her arms high above her head and faces the ocean. She begins to dance. She sings. When the sun slides behind Double Point, she climbs the hill at the end of the beach, still singing. She finds the track, and eventually the road, and walks until a Holden utility brakes in a skirl of dust. “Stone the crows, Miss Davenport,” the driver says. “You all right ?”

  She looks at him, dazed. Her sodden clothes give off steam. She says vaguely: “Yes, oh yes, perfectly all right, thank you.”

  Driving on, the man shakes his head and mumbles to himself, not without affection: “Strange bloody old chook. A looker once, probably. Quite a looker, lay you a quid, back in her prime.”

  Miss Davenport, the woman thinks, blinking, as though she has just stumbled across something she had misplaced. Miss Davenport the schoolteacher. And not young at all, how odd.

  Before the avocadoes and kiwi fruit and mangoes, back in the time of the sugarcane, Wednesday afternoons used to roll in with a dreadful humid regularity. They would float up from Cairns, cumulus, wet, fuzzy, drift past Yorkey’s Knob and Port Douglas, and settle onto Mossman. Wednesdays come several times a week, Miss Davenport wrote to her sister in Brisbane. I do think sport is very much overrated by the Department of Education. Why can’t we have a compulsory afternoon of thinking instead? Or of daydreaming?

  Technically supervising the girls, Miss Davenport wilted under a parasol. Deliquescence, she thought. (She had a habit of fondling words.) We are all gone into the world of fog, she thought. Deliquescence: it had a damp sound, soft on the tongue. Miss Davenport mopped at her face with a lace-edged linen handkerchief. Flies molested her. She kept a fascinated eye on Rebecca. Already she had misplaced Hazel.

  Rebecca and Hazel, she wrote to her sister, have the gift. They are consummate artists. Houdini pales in comparison.

  Ida, her sister, lived in a flat in Toowong. Two years earlier, Ida had retired from one of Brisbane’s more exclusive schools, and since then heraldry had engulfed her, the branches and twigs and creepers of the family tree curling through her sleep, gryphons rampant and fields azure blooming in her waking thoughts. She wrote to vicars in Sussex villages and mapped her way, vine by vine and knothole by knothole, into the past. Not that this meant she neglected
the scrapbooks. Far from it. At Christmas, both she and Lucia still worked on the travel book, refurbishing a June day in an Italian village here, resetting a sentence there. Emendations were also constantly made to the archival records of the more remarkable students.

  You never know, Ida wrote back on the subject of the present specimens. You just never know. Can any good thing come out of Mossman? As always, the answer is: who can possibly say? For you and me, Lucia, life is what we can catch in our scrapbook nets. That and only that, my dear. So pin your Rebecca and your Hazel right through their pretty wings with your fountain pen.

  Catch as catch can, thought Miss Davenport, dissolving beneath her parasol. There was a coded reproach in Ida’s letter, but Ida had earned a permanent right to the little slinging privileges and arrows of sisterhood. Ida had hushed things up and smoothed things down the time Lucia’s life had quite shockingly spilled out of handwritten page into messy event. Afterwards, of course, the private girls’ schools were out of the question. Afterwards, Lucia had to be grateful for appointments in such places as Childers and Mt Isa and Mossman.

  Miss Lucia Davenport could not see Hazel, but she could still see Rebecca working her way into invisibility. At each cheer or catcall, as though the noise itself offered camouflage, Rebecca would move a foot or two closer to the cane.

  Between Miss Davenport and the cane was a paddock full of brown stubble and dust and hockey sticks where ignorant armies clashed by … well, where eleven local girls vied with eleven from Cairns High in the regional semi-finals. Boys wolf-whistled from the sidelines. Boys leaned on their bikes and laid bets on the outcome of the game. Boys lay on the grass for the very best view of Dellis’s panties.

  Miss Davenport saw Rebecca reach the cane. For a few seconds, Rebecca’s hair was a black swatch against the purple tassels of the ripening stalks, then the girl disappeared.

  Hazel had disappeared during the first ten minutes of the match, but that was different. The methods were different. Hazel had the spooky powers of a gecko lizard. You could stumble across Hazel in the middle of an empty paddock, sitting cross-legged on the ground, as unobtrusive as grass. “Hazel!” you might say, dumbfounded. “How long have you … ?” But because of something in Hazel’s eyes, you never quite finished your question. And Hazel never answered you. She hardly ever spoke at all. She had another name which nobody could pronounce, though sometimes you heard it when one of her younger siblings came for the lunch. (In Hazel’s family, the kids had to take turns; Hazel was the one who carried the much-creased brown bag and made the decisions.) Joanna Goanna, the boys called her, taunting.

  Miss Davenport squinted and surveyed the entire paddock from the cane to the school buildings. It was quite possible that Hazel was there somewhere, watching the hockey game, willing them all to believe she was the magpie in the poinciana tree.

  Rebecca had vanished.

  Miss Davenport kept her eye on the magpie which looked right back and commanded: Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep …

  “The last of the Hapsburgs,” Charlie said. “That’s what people call them.”

  “Who?” Miss Davenport asked.

  “Her parents. That girl’s. The one you go on about.”

  “Rebecca Weiss?”

  “Yeah. Her mum and her old man, one hundred percent bonkers. Joe Hawkins at the Commonwealth Bank started it. He sees them once a month, they’re rich as Midas, got most of it stashed somewhere in their place up the Daintree, Joe reckons. Not in their bank account, that’s for bloody certain. They got investments in Sydney and Brisbane, that’s what Joe reckons. They bring Joe their piddling deposits once a month, a bloody joke, typical Ikey. The last of the Hapsburgs, Joe says, and it caught on. Whoever the hell the Hapsburgs were.”

  “Austro-Hungarian emperors,” Miss Davenport said. “Rulers in Europe from the thirteenth century to the First World War.”

  “Yeah?” Charlie laughed. “Well, there you are. Bloody peculiar, that’s all I know. Mind you, anything you want to dream up, you can find up the Daintree. It’s a zoo up there.” Charlie ticked off the fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right: “Crocs in the Daintree itself, and in the rainforest, you name it: Japs who’ve been lost since New Guinea, boat people, hippies, paddocks of mary-j that stretch all the way up to Torres Strait, greenies, Jesus freaks, Martians, dinosaurs, and the last of the Hapsburgs in their castle.”

  “Castle?”

  “Yeah. Well, good as.” Charlie O’Hagan drained his beer and signalled for another. “And I should know, I been there once.” He leaned back on the stuffed leather banquette and laced his fingers behind his head. Lucia Davenport noted the strain in the fabric of his trousers when he did this: the creases, the protuberance, the welt of muscle along the thigh. Charlie closed his eyes and breathed deeply, and from off the top of his fresh-tapped beer he blew the froth of that up-the-Daintree circus.

  “Two storeys high,” Charlie said. “And I don’t mean it’s got an under-the-house. I mean, two floors all inside, the way they have in England. And the roof has pointy things, castle things, whad’ya call em?”

  “Spires?” she asked. “Minarets?”

  “Minarets, yeah.” Charlie opened his eyes and smiled a slow smile. He drank a golden mouthful and let the golden word and the liquid slip pleasurably together, making a tour of his veins. “Minarets,” he repeated, in love with the sound of them, the idea of them. “Yeah, minarets. That’s what it’s got. Twenty or thirty sprouting out of the roof like bloody pawpaw shoots.”

  “Oh Charlie.” She laughed, pushing a puddle of beer across the table with one finger, accidentally brushing his hand. “You and the blarney stone.”

  “They got more rooms than you could shake a stick at.”

  “How many rooms?”

  “And servants,” he said, rising to a warm and beery eloquence, “with velvet bloomers like your grandma used to wear.”

  None of this, alas, could be put in the letters to Ida. It would never do, it would be sheer lunacy, to submit Charlie to a reading by Ida. Charlie, alas, had a reading audience of one. But there, he was without fixed form or narrative limit; in secret genre, he flourished as extravagantly as climbing pandanus up the Daintree.

  “And in a room smack in the middle of the mansion,” Charlie elaborated, “in a bloody wardrobe, no windows, that old codger Weiss turns Daintree fungus into gold.”

  Charlie O’Hagan, Mossman cop, married man, father of a good Catholic brood (several of whom learned their English- FrenchHistoryGeography from Miss Davenport, high school arts teacher) met with Lucia as often as possible. Not in Mossman, needless to say. And not in Cairns, which would not have been any safer, bars having at least a thousand ears, especially where school teachers and policemen were concerned. No. Luckily Charlie had connections and they met offshore in the floating tourist hotel. They drifted as whim took them: Green Island, the outer reef, the Whitsunday Passage, wherever. They left no wake.

  Miss Davenport leaned across the table in the dimly lit bar. “Do you mean he’s an alchemist?” she asked. “Rebecca’s father?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “That’s the word, I reckon. Makes this dynamite dope out of fungus, pure gold in Sydney. Got his private fleet of hippie runners, that’s what we reckon. We turn a blind eye. But we’ll bust things up quick as a wink if we ever have to.”

  “But you wouldn’t, Charlie, oh you wouldn’t, would you? You can’t believe a word of all that, it’s just talk. And they’re so shy, they’re so harmless, and Rebecca’s so … Anyway, you’re not that kind of policeman.”

  Charlie O’Hagan put down his beer and coughed. “Yeah, well. Don’t spread the word. Do me in, if they find out what a softie …” He grabbed her hands, slopping beer on the table. Policeman and school teacher slid into collision on slick leather. Ignoring the waitress, Charlie O’Hagan sent his rough cop’s tongue on a voyage inside Miss Dave
nport’s mouth. “I gotta get you into bed,” he said. “In the next five minutes, or else.”

  Without coming up for air from the kiss, Charlie O’Hagan snapped his fingers, and the manager pulled up anchor. Four stars streaming, the hotel tacked into the wind, making for the steamy place where the Daintree spills into the sea.

  The boys thought Rebecca was ugly, plainjane, a real dog, a praying mantis, a barbwire tangle of sticklimbs and sharp points, so of course Rebecca believed them. Miss Davenport thought she was striking in the manner of Virginia Woolf, the kind of girl whose gaunt cheekbones and deep eye sockets will become memorable – though perhaps not ever in Mossman.

  On a certain Friday in the not-quite-so-wet part of the year, gangly Rebecca, who wrote unsettling English compositions modelled on Dostoevsky, hung about Miss Davenport’s desk.

  “My, uh, father and mother,” she said in her oddly formal, oddly desperate way, “wish to, uh, invite you …” Shyness scrunched Rebecca’s eyes tightly shut. “They, uh, told me I had to invite you for shabbas.”

  Miss Davenport, not entirely precisely clear on the subject of shabbas, answered carefully. “When is that, Rebecca? Shabbas?”

  “It’s, uh, tonight,” Rebecca said. “For tea.”

  Miss Davenport raised surprised eyebrows. She was touched. Rebecca, however, twisting the damp edge of her school uniform in her hands, gave every sign of hoping that her invitation would be turned down. Miss Davenport bit her lip, compassionate. The last of the Hapsburgs, Charlie whispered in her ear. She saw minarets. Curiosity, alas, overcame her.

  “That would be lovely, absolutely lovely, Rebecca. I’d love to come.” Rebecca’s lashes fluttered across despairing eyes. “But how will we … ?” Miss Davenport began to ask.

  “On Fridays, uh … they, um, my parents drive down.” During the week, Rebecca boarded at the Methodist parsonage next door to the school. “We have to, uh, be back by sundown. They’ll be waiting for us, uh, at the Post Office.”