Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  He’s like a goblin, Miss Davenport wrote to Ida. So is the mother. And only alchemy could keep that car functioning. The drive takes an hour, and the forest starts smothering everything once you’re fifteen minutes north ofMossman. It’s like moving inside green yeast.

  There were no minarets.

  There are two storeys, Lucia wrote to Ida. But it’s rather like a dollhouse, or a farmhouse in the Black Forest, and very beautifully made out of cabinet timbers. Mr Weiss built it himself, and the mother weaves tapestries on a loom. They take carvings and weavings to Kuranda and Cairns to sell. Poor as church-mice, I’d say. Hardly any furniture, but everything handmade and wonderful to touch. And everywhere, floor to ceiling, there are piles and piles of books. I’ve never seen so many books.

  At table, there were candles, and place settings for five.

  “Rebecca,” Mr Weiss said in his heavily accented voice. “Ask Leo if he will please come down and join us with our guest for shabbas.”

  Rebecca, expressionless, looked first at her mother, but her mother was ladling vegetable stew. She looked at her father. She twisted the hem of her skirt in her hands.

  “Rebecca?” her father asked, his eyebrows raised. Rebecca climbed the silky-oak staircase, trailing a hand up the banister. She disappeared for a full two minutes. Miss Davenport spoke warmly of Rebecca’s writing.

  “Yes, yes,” Mr Weiss said, nodding. “In the beginning, God spoke. There was a word and it contained everything. Everything.” He nodded and nodded, beaming at her. “The word,” he said. “The word. We are grateful to you.”

  Rebecca came slowly downstairs. “Leo is unable to join us. Father,” she said.

  “Ah.” Mr Weiss sighed and bowed his head. “But perhaps only to be expected, yes?”

  Candles were lit, bread broken, wine drunk. Mr Weiss spoke of music and books, of Mendelssohn and Isaac Babel … Would Miss Davenport, perhaps, be teaching Babel’s stories in the English class?

  “Actually,” Miss Davenport confessed, embarrassed, “to tell you the truth. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with … I haven’t actually had the pleasure …”

  “Yes, yes. Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa, ah there was – as Babel called himself – the master of the genre of silence.” Mr Weiss spoke of things not lost because the silence preserved them. He spoke of the words of silence and the silence of words. He talked with manic excitement and speed, as though he were some necessary counterpoint to the masters of silence.

  Mrs Weiss did not speak at all.

  “Rebecca,” Mr Weiss said when the plates had been cleared, “will you ask Leo if he will play for us now? For our guest? The Mendelssohn, tell him, he cannot refuse us.”

  Rebecca did not look at Miss Davenport, but Miss Davenport watched Rebecca’s face, in profile, floating upstairs at the top of her shoulders. It was like a mask, like a waxwork image of Rebecca.

  They waited. Mr Weiss spoke of Mendelssohn, of silence, of darkness, of how all that mattered could be preserved if one got far enough from distracting noise and light. “Getting far enough away, that is the secret,” he said, nodding, nodding. “Silence and darkness. Although such problems for the violin, poor Leo, ach! You have no idea of the problems, the rainforest, the heat, the moisture, oi vay.”

  “Father,” Rebecca said in a low voice, descending. “Leo says he will play, but he will not come downstairs.”

  “Ah, ah!” Mr Weiss raised his wineglass to the stairs. “He will play.”

  Mrs Weiss folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. Rebecca twisted her skirt in her fingers and studied the tablecloth. Mr Weiss began rocking gently backwards and forwards, eyes closed, a smile on his face. “Ah,” he sighed blissfully. “Mendelssohn.”

  Miss Davenport heard the usual forest noises, the calls of nightbirds, the cicadas.

  And then, she wrote to Ida, I don’t know how to explain this, but I heard it too. I definitely began to hear a violin. At first it was so faint that I thought I was hearing the echo of Mr Weiss’s hope, but then it was Mendelssohn, unmistakably. The first movement of the violin concerto. When it ended, Mr Weiss was crying.

  Lucia did not mail this letter to Ida.

  “Rebecca,” Miss Davenport said, as they walked west, late the next Wednesday afternoon, on the road that led to the Mossman Gorge. Dust rose in little mushroom clouds around their sandals. “Who is Leo?”

  “Dad’s oldest son. He used to play in an orchestra.” Rebecca looked at Miss Davenport and then away. “Second marriages. They both had other children but there was no one left. I was born out here. After … all that.”

  It was a three-mile walk through tunnels of cane in a swooning heat that dripped across the forehead and down the neck and gathered wetly in bodily creases. Then they would climb into the shadow of the Divide, where the gorge was full of deep green pools and falls and ferns.

  Rebecca had been alarmed by the invitation. “What if someone sees?” she’d asked nervously. She was afraid of being called teacher’s pet; she feared open spaces and long exposures. Lucia had had to wait for her half a mile along the road.

  Lucia imagined what Rebecca might write in her diary: She watches me all the time, and today she asked me to go swimming at the gorge. Help! Some of the girls think she’s queer.

  Rebecca said: “I suppose you think we’re crazy?”

  “No, Rebecca, I don’t.”

  Heat, cane, dust, steamfoghaze. It was like walking through dreams. Miss Davenport’s voice came sleepily, drugged. “You’ll win scholarships, Rebecca. To university. You’ll escape from here.”

  Rebecca stopped then, turning, swaying a little in the haze. “But this is where we’ve escaped to,” she said.

  They walked. At the end of the road, just before the wet mouth of forest licked up unpaved grit and dust, the Reserve slouched against the mountain, a sorry place. Some Mister Government Man, well intentioned perhaps, had hacked clear a crater between forest and canefields, a pitiless saucer of red dust in which he had planted twenty fibro huts on low stumps. Men sat on the wooden steps, children chased each other in the compound.

  “There’s Hazel,” Rebecca said.

  “Where? Oh!” Miss Davenport waved and called. A hush and a stillness fell abruptly on the children playing tag. Thirty or more faces, the faces of men, women, and children, stared silently.

  Hazel, barefoot but still wearing her school uniform, did not move.

  “Hazel?” Miss Davenport called again, less certainly.

  Hazel came forward slowly, her bare feet sending up dust signals, her eyes down.

  “Hazel,” Miss Davenport said. “Rebecca and I are going to swim at the gorge. Would you like to come with us?”

  Hazel rubbed one bare foot against the other leg and studied the busy columns of bull-ants emerging from pockmarks in the earth near her feet. She touched the black juicy bulbs of an ant body with her big toe, and the three women watched a file break rank and follow its leader across the mound of Hazel’s foot. Fifty ants later. Hazel looked from Miss Davenport to Rebecca and back to Miss Davenport. Since the invitation was not withdrawn, she bit her lip and giggled a little and put a hand over her mouth to cover her shyness. “Okay,” she said, from under her hand. She giggled again, and blushed. She called something back over her shoulder and flicked her hand in a curious way. It was as though she had pulled a switch: noise began, the men looked away, the children went back to play.

  Miss Davenport the school teacher and her two pupils left the bare saucer of the reserve and crossed the shade line.

  The change was abrupt. The light turned green, the temperature dropped, webs of lawyer cane lay in wait. Below the falls (they were only ten feet high, but aggressive) the pool was as green as the matted canopy above. Hazel tossed her tunic and blouse over a rock and dived in, a shallow arc, from the bank. She was not wearing underwear. Rebecca and Miss
Davenport registered this with mild shock.

  The Methodist minister’s wife, Lucia mentally wrote to Ida, donated the uniform and shoes. Hazel, no doubt, would have been too shy to specify further needs, and it would not have occurred to the minister’s wife, or any of us, for that matter …

  Rebecca took off her uniform and folded it neatly.

  Ribs like corrugations on mother’s old wooden washboard, Miss Davenport saw herself writing. So painfully thin, I couldn’t bear to look. For a moment, Rebecca seemed to be assessing the disadvantages of walking back into town with wet underwear, but then she entered the water with tentative steps until only her head was visible. Perhaps she could not quite subject herself to open comparison with voluptuous Hazel.

  In the green pool the two heads floated with their dark hair fanned about them: waterlilies on lily pads. A languid steamy contentment suffused Miss Davenport. Back on the hockey field, in the sticky heat, she had thought only of coolness, water, the gorge. Rebecca had been an afterthought, an impulse: Hazel another impulse. But sometimes … All manner of thing shall be well. She saw the words in black floreate script on parchment. She smiled.

  Green coolness, she had been thinking on the hockey field. The gorge, the falls, the pool.

  She had not thought of the matter of clothes at all, how it complicated things. And now, after all, it was irrelevant again, for all manner of thing would be well.

  Miss Davenport, with a careless rapture, took off all her clothes and walked into the water.

  The pool, from dark subterranean places, was chilly, a shock to the body for whole minutes. Time must have passed, though the three women were not conscious of it. They did not speak, but they were aware of each other. Birds piped and flashed their colours, the falls kept up their subdued chatter.

  This is where we have escaped to. Miss Davenport thought. One is safe in water.

  One is helpless in water.

  Afterwards, she could never understand how there was no warning, no transition. Just peace, and then chaos, the jarring laughter and catcalls, the five boys standing on boulders.

  Joanna Goanna’s tits? they whooped. Cop those black tits! Plain- jane hasn’t got any tits, she’s flat as a bat. Oh struth, cop that! You can see old Dried-up Davenport’s pussy!

  The boys. Miss Davenport noted, were in an intense and spiritual state, a kind of sacrilegious ecstasy, leaping from boulder to boulder around the pool. Like kings of the wild, they stood high on the great black rock and pissed into the water. Then one of them, Ross O’Hagan, eldest son of the local policeman, an ordinary boy who sat at an ordinary desk in Miss Davenport’s English class, that boy turned his back and pulled down his shorts and squatted. A turd emerged slowly and hung suspended from his hairy anus. It was long, amazingly long, making its celebrity appearance to a chanted count. One! the boys chanted. Two, three, four, five …

  Miss Davenport, Rebecca, and Hazel watched, mesmerised. The turd had attained the count of ten, a plumbline reaching for water. Eleven, twelve, thirteen … It detached itself at last and fell into the pool with a soft splash. Cheers went up, and more whoops of laughter, and then the boys were off like possums, flying from rock to rock. They scooped up the bundle of female clothing, and ran off.

  Miss Davenport was able, for a moment, to think of the value her nylon panty would have as trophy: a relic almost, handed from boy to high-school boy until it passed into legend.

  Water lapped at their shoulders. Polluted water. Hazel, inured to indignity perhaps, was the first to move. She clambered onto the boulder below the falls and let the water hammer her. Once she slipped, and fell back into the pool, and climbed out again; she submitted her body to the punitive shower.

  But what comfort could Miss Davenport give to Rebecca whose face had put on its whitewax look-alike mask? How could she unsay the sentence that had been spoken, become an Anti-Circe? In her teacherly mind, she rehearsed possible spells: This says more about the boys than it does about us.

  But it would not serve, she knew it. It might be true, but it would not serve. That steaming fact, dropping stolidly into the pool, spoke a thick and dirty language. The acts of men, even when They are boys, Miss Davenport thought, are shouts that rip open the signs that try to contain them. We have no access to a language of such noisiness. Our voices are micemutter, silly whispers.

  We will have to stay here in the pool forever, she thought. We are dead ends, the last of a line, masters of the genre of silence. We will have to invent a new alphabet of moss and water.

  Hazel, wet and comfortably naked, walked out of the pool. Miss Davenport shook herself as a terrier does. We’ll have to cover ourselves with something, she thought briskly. We’ll have to walk back before it gets dark.

  Uncle Seaborn

  In all the photographs. Uncle Seaborn has his long strange hair tied back in a queue. It is soft as water, crinkly (one thinks of wavelets rippling back over sand), the colour of seaweed. In one daguerreotype, bending over the ingot sluice at the Mt Morgan mine, he is caught between his elements: gold, and the ocean which pulled at him. He is half-enveloped by steam – it comes off the bullion bricks as they hit the water – and the filaments of his seaweed hair lift and sway against the moist aurora of the furnace. A gleaming creature, barebacked and slick with sweat, he reaches in with wood-handled pincers, lifts, stacks the gold. Behind him (though the photograph does not, of course, show this), the Great Divide falls away to the coastal plain, and the wet tendrils of hair drip down ravines of muscle and bone, of eucalypt scrub, of Fitzroy River silt, making their way to the Pacific. It sucked at him ceaselessly, the ocean.

  There were far more photographs than Clem had expected: his mother had hoarded them, his father had catalogued and labelled. Clem sifted the past, overcome. In every drawer: Mt Morgan, Rockhampton, Emu Park, Yeppoon, his own life and those of his forebears mapped and milestoned; his father smiling in the Post Office, his father tapping out morse code; his parents’ sepia wedding. And from further back: his mother with Seaborn at the old mine, beside a dray, on the headland at Emu Park, on the beach, two strangelings, two children in Edwardian clothes, waiting hand-in-hand for disaster.

  And here were frail letters of condolence from England; along the creases, they fell apart like ash. Here was a bundle … ah, compunction … here was every letter Clem had sent home for thirty-five years, numbered, dated, indexed in his father’s neat hand: a slim packet, reproachfully slim. There were other things too: lace collars, cuff links, pearl studs, gloves that buttoned from wrist to elbow, linen handkerchiefs with crocheted edges. Not to mention the shells, starfish, sand dollars, cuttlefish, conches. His mother had had a fetish for shells. His father had kept everything, everything, and had gone on adding, believing that the past conferred meaning.

  But what had they meant, these unobserved working-class lives?

  When Clem found the little copy of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (its vellum cover and tissue pages as vulnerable, as gentle, as his mother), loss hit him with the thump of a rogue breaker. He could hear his father reading Ruskin aloud: the rough Australian voice, the yearning for graciousness, for significance, for the Imprima- teur of the Mother Country where civilisation happened. Without warning, a sobbing distress visited Clem, as a sudden storm at sea swamps a boat.

  Connect, connect. Urgently, he fumbled his way through multiple digits and international operators to speak to his wife and children in Canada. They offered comfort, they spoke soothing words, but it seemed to him the entire intervening ocean was on the line, he could hear the constant shush of interference. This was how my mother felt, he grieved, and my grandmother before her.

  But no. In sober honesty, no. This was a pale shadow of their terrible isolation.

  “Where are you?” his wife asked. Her voice was faint as the tide going out.

  “Rockhampton,” he said. “The old house. I’m still sorting through their things.�
� He wanted to say: It’s like combing the sand at Emu Park for leftover mines. The past is blowing up in my face. “You know what hoarders they were.”

  “We miss you,” his wife and children said. “We love you.”

  “I can’t hear you,” he panicked. The surf of static again, the whispering, hissing, wave-washing, word-washing, the line going dead. The tyranny of distance, he thought. The ocean wins every time.

  In the next drawer he found Uncle Seaborn’s gold half-sovereign and felt elation, then fear, then elation.

  Clem sits where the Tropic of Capricorn slices through Queensland sand, and studies the coin. Queen Victoria stares at his thumb, not amused. She intones historical facts: good currency of the realm, minted 1884 in the thirty-seventh year of our reign, and not originally intended for dubious use as a bon voyage charm to the underside of the world when, in February 1893, at Tilbury Docks, said coin was placed in the hand of an infant in its mother’s arms.

  For good luck, it is reported that Clem’s great-grandparents said at the time. Gold finds gold, they hinted. It draws itself to itself.

  And Clem’s grandfather, stem Methodist, informed his wife’s parents that it was no earthly treasure the emigrants sought in Australia. “We lay up for ourselves,” he said – and frowned as his infant son’s fingers curled around Mammon – “we lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. For where your treasure is there shall your heart be also.”

  The Lord bless thee and keep thee, Clem’s great-grandparents said, subdued.

  They kept the letter that their daughter mailed from Rockhampton to Birmingham in July 1893. They and their non- nomadic children and their children’s children kept it. Half a century later, a second cousin twice removed sent it back to Queensland. Historical curio, he wrote. Found it in a box after dad died. Thought it would mean more to you than to us. The letter’s original voyage to England took four months; its return trip took eight days. In Clem’s father’s cataloguing hand, the letter is indexed and labelled: Birth of Seaborn.