Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  My beloved parents:

  I have such sad news to impart, which I cannot do without weeping again so that it is scarcely possible to see what I write. We have been safely arrived these six weeks, but I have been ill of a fever and grief, and am even now scarcely able…

  Poor little Alfred died when we were ten weeks at sea. It is crossing the equator, the ship’s doctor says.

  We sang Abide with Me and the Reverend Watson read Suffer the little children from scripture, but I cannot speak of the feelings which overwhelmed me when the waters closed over my little Alfred’s body …

  The Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth, Thomas says. In the eleventh week, my pains came upon me early and I was safely delivered of a second son by the ship’s doctor. We have called him Seaborn. The sea taketh and giveth. The sea is God’s handmaid, Thomas says. At the christening, which the Reverend Watson was obliged to conduct at my bedside, I placed in Seaborn’s hand the coin that you gave to little Alfred, which much displeased Thomas. He says render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and to God the things which are God’s.

  Clem holds the coin against his ear and hears the surf; or it could be the tides of his grandmother’s weeping. She sits with his mother on the rocks and both of them stare at the sea. For where your treasure is, they murmur, there shall your heart be also.

  Clem rubs the worn edge of the coin and Uncle Seaborn billows forth with a vapour of words in his mouth. What is your wish? he whispers.

  I want to dream your dreams, Clem says.

  Ahh … Words crest and foam on Seaborn’s breath. Every night I went back, I went home.

  Seaborn waited every night for that moment when the moon slipped between the Mt Morgan minehead and the stringy-barks, that moment when his room filled with water. If he lay propped on one elbow he could watch it coming, a tidal welling that moved back up through the Fitzroy delta, lapped Mt Archer, drowned the valley in between, washed the Mt Morgan scarp, and filled his room with green light; Seaborn, Seaborn, a voice would call as creatures of the deep call each other. It was a low and maddening sound, unbearably plaintive. Seaborn’s arms would lift themselves and sway in the thick green light, he would dreamswim into the lonely desiring of his brother Alfred. Every night they embraced. They played together. Water was their natural element; even as a child Seaborn knew it. At night, his gills fluttered and sucked, the webbing appeared between his toes. When he spread his fingers, there were skeins of skin thinner than silk that reached to the second knuckle.

  Awake, he could not be kept from pools, from creeks, from rivers. He swam like a fish, though his mother was afflicted with nightmares in which staghorn coral gutted him and angelfish darted through his hair. Seaborn’s father sweated over ingots and furnace, but once a year the family made the daylong horse-and- dray journey down the mountain to Rockhampton, an odyssey of twenty-four miles. They spent two days in the city and then travelled by train another thirty miles to the beach. Seaborn’s mother never let him out of her sight, though her son took to the ocean as if he had flippers and gills. When they had to leave, he threw tantrums.

  Grace was born with her mother’s fear of the water in her blood. She arrived at the century’s tide-turn, late in 1899, on a night of cyclonic rains, a night when the Fitzroy lost track of its banks. Chaos. Delirium. Water, water, Grace’s mother gasped, but then refused to drink and recoiled from fluids in terror. Water swallows my babies, she wept.

  For the lying-in, the family had come down to Rockhampton, but even so the doctor who rowed and rowed from concussions to birthings was not there to tend the dehydrated fever, not in time for the coming of Grace. Seaborn and Alfred, awash in the flooding night, felt the shock of birth-cries like sonic pain on the underside of their fins. Their mother bent over her contractions, moaning, as a diver jackknifes with the bends. It is a judgment, their father said. His voice reached them like the thunder of a great whale and they clung to each other. But by morning a girl child was bom. By the grace of God, their father said.

  Seaborn and Alfred, who were six and seven years old, adored her. Every night they brought treasures: shells, coral, driftwood, seaweed as fine as mermaid’s hair. They placed them at her feet where she waited, fearful, above the high water line.

  Grace hoarded their gifts. As she grew older, every windowsill, every shelf, the surface of her dresser, her drawers, all were crowded with shells and starfish and branches of coral. She had a fetish for things from the sea, but she never set foot in the water. Of docks, jetties, boats, and beaches, she had an unnatural dread. Each year, when the family made its annual trip down the mountain, Grace sat with her mother on the rocks at a very considerable distance from the scalloped line of foam. Grace and her mother kept their eyes fixed on Seaborn’s dolphin body as though even so much as a blink in their constant attention might spell disaster. Sometimes – such is the trickster effect of sun on water – they seemed to see two of him. Seaborn and a mirage swimmer, a doppelgänger. Then Seaborn’s mother would put her head in her hands and weep.

  When Seaborn enlisted in 1914, the family moved down the mountain and into the city. Grace kept Seaborn’s photograph beside her bed. She adored him. She kept his gold half-sovereign (he had given it to her for safekeeping) under her pillow. When she held it against her ear, she could hear his troopship pushing through the Dardanelles. She believed that when she held it against her heart, he was safe. Seaborn’s mother trusted to ceaseless prayer, his father said that all was as God disposed.

  Torpedoes, submarines, Turkish shells, they all courted Seaborn, but he led a charmed life, people said. The war came to an end, as all things do. There was a party. There were banners and flags in Rockhampton, there was movement at the station (a festive riot, to be more precise), and there was Seaborn, along with five other Rockhampton boys, rolling in on their sea-legs, brass buttons flashing, something strong and fermented on their breaths. Grace remembered. She remembered the music, the laughter, the loud talk. She remembered Seaborn’s whiskery kiss, and she remembered the moment when she put the gold half-sovereign back in his hand. He lifted her up then, hugging her, swinging her round until she was giddy, laughing something into her ear: “I saw him out there, behind the ship.” “Saw who?” she asked. But he only laughed harder.

  There was something disturbing in his laughter, something … ? She could not find a word for it. She could only think of a king tide coming in, the way nothing can stop it.

  And later, when he was very drunk, she heard him say something to their mother in the kitchen. “I saw Alfred, Mum, when we were crossing the equator.”

  Clem has this memory: he is seven; he and his father are slick with water and salt; they run along the sand at Yeppoon. Beyond the sand, under the pine tree, his mother Grace and his sisters spread the picnic cloth, set out the thermos, the cups, the egg sandwiches.

  “Why won’t Mum ever go in the water?” Clem asks.

  “She’s afraid of it, she always has been. Because of Uncle Seaborn, I reckon. He drowned before you were born.”

  “How’d he drown, Dad?”

  “A riptide, the current from Ross Creek. You can see it.” Clem’s father points to the ribbon of pale water within the blue. “It was strange though, he was such a strong swimmer. Your mother thought he was waving, and waved back. He’d only been home from the war a few months.”

  Clem has another memory: he is eight now? nine? His mother sits by the rocks that are higher than the high tide line. Clem runs from the water, gleaming, and sits beside her. “What are you staring at, Mum?”

  She startles. She has her hand in the pocket of her skirt, her fingers are always playing with something hidden. “What’s in your pocket, Mum?”

  She smiles at him, but strangely, as though she is smiling in her sleep. She takes the gold coin out and holds it against Clem’s ear. “What do you hear?” she asks him.

  The shell game. “I
can hear the sea,” Clem says.

  “What else?” She puts her cheek against his. “Can’t you hear anything else?”

  Clem thinks. The gulls wheel and screech above him. “I hear shrieks,” he says.

  He cannot forget the way she flinches, the look in her eyes. “No,” she says, shivering. “No. Not shrieks. It’s the way they call to each other.”

  Clem has always lived by water.

  Alone on the beach in Central Queensland, chill July and chiller mid-life, he strokes the pine tree where his mother used to spread the picnic cloth, he climbs the rocks that he and his father climbed, he walks the cliff path where his sisters loved to walk. He stands on the headland and looks out at the islands, every one of which he can name. He wishes his wife and children were with him. He rubs the coin in his pocket.

  Between the headland and Pelican Island, something moves in the water. A shape. Two shapes. Small fishing boats? Sharks perhaps? Dolphins?

  Something barrels into Clem, a wave of excitement. He races crazily down to the beach, rips off his clothes, drops them into a quick neat heap on the sand, tucks Uncle Seaborn’s half-sovereign carefully into the toe of one shoe, and rushes into the water. After the first wintery shock of the cold, a manic pleasure comes. He swims strongly, stroke after stroke, his old Australian crawl, toward the twin shapes. He laughs as he swims, he is flooded with a pure intense joy.

  I have come home, he thinks. I am where I belong.

  The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance

  In the sixty-fourth month of the tribulation, just five weeks before the drought finally broke, people began driving out from Townsville and Ayr and Home Hill, from Charters Towers and Collinsville, and from any number of smaller salt-of-North-Queensland towns: Thalanga, Mungunburra, Millaroo, Mingela. The Hinders Highway was thick with four-wheel drives, the air with dust. Afterwards, newspapers remembered that there had been a curious sense of festivity about, a sort of overwrought camaraderie, the kind that comes in the wake of cyclones, earthquakes, bush fires. Post-traumatic hysteria, the articles said. Old men had visions, revenants appeared in the pubs, crackpots wrote to newspapers, children concocted secret ways of sucking juice from rocks and of finding the underground channels where the rivers had fled.

  All this was mere prelude. It was Tom Kelly and Davy Cobb, unlikely angels of the apocalypse, who ushered in what the Brisbane papers dubbed a “Flight into Egypt” and the Sydney Morning Herald, predictably supercilious, headlined as “Latter Day Madness in Queensland”. (Perhaps it is unnecessary, from this retrospective distance, and after so much analysis of the psychological effects of the drought, to note that those who live in the cities of the coastal plain, while not unaffected by years of water restrictions, are unlikely to be aware of the intensity of the inland thirst for something, for anything, to happen.) In any case, in the beginning it was just a trickle. Perhaps, that first weekend, only sixty people drove out to the dwindling Burdekin Dam to watch the reappearance of Come-by-Chance, for the tip of the Anglican steeple had been sighted by the two boys fishing in their homemade boat.

  Sighted? Bumped into would be more accurate. Young Tom Kelly had laced a worm around his hook and cast his line. At the oars, Davy Cobb felt a jolt. What Tom hooked was the copper cross, green as verdigris, sticking out of the water like the index finger of God, potent, invisible (at least until the moment of reckoning). The faster Tom reeled in his catch, the swifter the little boat skimmed toward its ramming. Both boys went into the water like steeplejacks on the toss. This was a week before Christmas, and the momentum of Tom Kelly’s unpremeditated dive was later likened by the Bishop of North Queensland to the downward swoop of the Incarnation. Tom claimed he looked through the rose window and saw a phosphorescent glow, then kept plummeting to the soft Gothic arch. The nave was full of green radiance.

  “It was like there was sump’n pullin’ me,” he said. “I couldn’t turn, I thought me lungs were gonna bust. Then I saw this kinda light, this kinda I dunno, like a million green parakeets’ wings or sump’n, and then this blaze like a double-bunger star, it bloody well bursts inside me head. And next thing I know, Davy’s thumpin’ water outta me on the bank.”

  “An epiphany,” the Bishop of North Queensland said. (It was the last Sunday in Advent.) But the pastor of the Gospel Hall in Mingela, the closest town to Come-by-Chance, thundered darkly: “And in those days there shall be signs and portents, for He shall come as a fire descending …”

  It is reasonably safe to assume that the Sydney Morning Herald would not have mentioned this spiritual event had it not been for the impending election and the clear correlation between water levels in the Burdekin Dam and political chaos in Queensland. The drought, it will be recalled, at first confined to that arid crescent between Townsville and Mt Isa, had spread like a virus. By the time of Tom Kelly’s appearance on the front page of the tabloids, there were bush fires all the way to the Dandenongs and the Adelaide Hills. This “Queensland drift” seemed ominous, even to secular minds.

  Addressing himself primarily to the political issues, a Sydney pundit commented, in passing, on the fishing story. Where else but in Queensland? he asked. Pressed by his interviewer to respond to a tabloid headline (“Christmas vision saves boy’s life”), he spoke of the effects of shock and water-pressure and diminution of oxygen and concomitant hallucinatory indications such as the kind of aura that accompanies migraine or near-drowning, but no one in central or north Queensland watched this show. Indeed, even in Sydney and Melbourne, those infallible Geiger-counters of truth, many chose to ignore common sense. For what raconteur in the pub, what politician, what preacher, could resist Tom Kelly’s aurora and the resurrection of Come-by-Chance?

  “And there shall be famines,” bishops and gospel firebrands read as with one voice. “And pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places. For then shall be great tribulation …” On exegesis, however, the divines parted ways, and quite contradictory moral and political interpretations – not to mention voting admonitions – were brought to bear. It was only in the actual scriptural words of warning that they spoke as one again: “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”

  A swelling group of the elect began to gather for vigil and prayer and competitive political pamphleteering at the ever-lower waterline of the dam. A week after the fishing incident, the whole cross of St Stephen Martyr was visible and a foot of steeple tiles below; in the second week, the belltower of the Catholic church appeared; in the third, the Post Office clock. Word spread along the stock routes and talk-show arteries, and via the pages that come round fish and chips. The elect were joined by the curious, the bored, the Sydney and Melbourne reporters, the television cameras, the signs-and-portents groupies. A camp was set up.

  “What come ye out for to see?” the Mingela pastor, distributing tracts, asked through a megaphone. Ahh, knock it off, people said, but not too savagely. Long droughts of continental proportions induce nervous piety in many breasts – though not in all. Around the country, bookies also set up shop and punters laid bets on the next building to resurrect itself. Daily the odds were published on the likelihood of there still being skeletons anchored to the stools in the bar, because many people now recalled tales of Come-by-Chancers who had refused to leave town.

  The “flight into Egypt” became a veritable exodus, and the Sydney Morning Herald ran a full weekend feature in which the word “mirage” was frequently mentioned. In Melbourne, the Age went as far as a reference to “collective hysteria”. This was due to the curious fact that while everyone at the site, including visiting reporters, could clearly see the re-emergent town, no trace of it showed up in photographs. The Logos Foundation issued a statement to the press: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Only the pure in heart, it was implied, can witness the unblemished city of God. Come-by-Chance became
symbol and rallying cry for a lost way of life, a simpler cleaner time, which each political party vowed to restore.

  In the capital cities, editors were deluged with letters. No one could have predicted the number of people still living who had visited, or had relatives in, or had themselves inhabited the town of Come-by-Chance before it went under the dam. By one newspaper’s count, the population had been a quarter of a million just prior to inundation, though the town had boasted only three churches, a post office, seven pubs, a one-teacher school, a police station (with two constables assigned) and a handful of shops and houses. There was considerable divergence of opinion on the erstwhile economic base. Sheep, most claimed. Opal prospecting, others contended. Tall stories, suggested the literary editor of the Australian, a man noted for his scepticism and wit. He alluded to Ern Malley and the whole issue of the literary hoax. He quoted Banjo Paterson, and left readers to draw their own conclusions:

  But my languid mood forsook me, when I found a name that took me;

  Quite by chance I came across it – “Come-by-Chance” was what I read;

  No location was assigned it, not a thing to help one find it,

  Just an N which stood for northward, and the rest was all unsaid …

  But 1 fear, and more’s the pity, that there’s really no such city,

  For there’s not a man can find it of the shrewdest folk I know;

  “Come-by-Chance”, be sure it never means a land of fierce endeavour –

  It is just the careless country where the dreamers only go.

  Or where the victims of nightmares are trapped, thought Mrs Adeline Capper. And they can never leave.

  Adeline Capper dreaded the newspapers and read them with a compulsive doomed fascination. She had always known there was no way of expunging the past. One could flee it, drown it, bury it, tear up the newsprint record, but it went on skulking around today. It was always there. Inside one. Here.