Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  She was twenty then, sixty now, but twenty was as close as her skin.

  It is the doing nothing that is intolerable, she thought. The fact that there is nothing to be done.

  From her brown garden on the south side of Townsville, she watched the trekkers herding down the highway and out to the dam. A hot wind blew. Her bougainvillea made a dead parchment sound against the fence. Like a sleepwalker, she got into her car and followed the columns of dust.

  A settlement – a tent city – had sprung up: trailers, kombi vans, canvas of all shapes and sizes, camp fires, styrofoam iceboxes full of beer. People told jokes and sang songs. There was raucous laughter, catcalls as Adeline Capper moved among them. Was she twenty or sixty? Night was such a dangerous time. Hey, grandma! someone called. Wanna cuppa?

  “Hey, didn’t mean to give you such a scare,” a young man said, apologetic. “Here. Have a cuppa tea.”

  She took it, shivering in the dry evening heat. Her teeth chattered.

  “You all right?” the young man’s wife asked, concerned.

  They always asked that, but no one wanted to know the true answer. No one ever wanted to know that. She couldn’t remember how far the reserve was from here, how far she had walked.

  “See?” the young wife asked. She held out a wooden plaque, bleached colourless, soft to the touch. But you could still make out the carved indentation: XXXX.

  “Four-X, the Queensland beer,” the young man laughed. “A true-blue bit’v history. She was a bugger to rip off the wall, but.”

  “Brian dived,” his wife said proudly. “You wouldn’t believe what people are bringing up.”

  Oh, Adeline could well believe. And how soon would someone surface with her first teaching year? Who would wave it aloft? It was written in stone down there somewhere. Everywhere.

  It was, it is, loud in the air.

  “Where’ve you been, Adeline?” Sergeant Hobson had crooned, croons, pulling up beside her in the car. (Big Bob is what everyone calls him. She teaches his daughter in the one-teacher school.) He leans out and sings in her ear: “Oh where have you been, Adeleen?”

  And she laughs, and Constable Terry Wilkes in the passenger seat laughs too. And they stand there in the moonlight on the dirt road winding into town from the reserve. “I’ve been visiting some of my school kids,” she says. “The ones that live out … uh, the Chillagong ones.”

  “The boongs, you mean?”

  Boongs. Abos. Everyone says it. It strikes her as terribly rude, but she doesn’t want to offend, doesn’t want to appear stuck-up, doesn’t want to sound like the smart-alec who just arrived from Brisbane. “Yeah,” she says.

  “Bit late, innit?” Big Bob asks. “To be walking back into town.”

  “Yeah, I reckon.” She laughs nervously. (She’d been terrified, as a matter of fact; and so relieved when the police car pulled up.) She’d thrown them into total confusion back there. Hazel, Evangeline, Joshua, their mothers and fathers, walking the three miles out after school. It isn’t what anyone does, goes to Chillagong, she can see that now. “I got invited to stay for dinner.” (Though she thinks they hadn’t known what else to do, and nor had she; and the minute she’d accepted, she’d realised they hadn’t expected her to. Perhaps hadn’t wanted her to.)

  “For dinner, well, stone the crows!” Big Bob and Constable Terry roar with laughter. “Kangaroo rat and witchetty grubs, ya like them, do ya?”

  “Oh no,” she shudders. In fact, she doesn’t know what it was she ate. Some kind of stew.

  “Well, get in then.” Big Bob lumbers out and puts an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll drive you back home.” He presses his big fat lips against her neck and his beery breath hits her like a fist. “Can’t have the little lady-teacher from Brisbane on her own in the bush at night.” He strokes her hair protectively, and the front of her dress, accidentally pressing her breasts. She’s a bit embarrassed, but they are the police, after all. She’s between the two men on the Holden’s bench-seat and feels safe.

  “Adeline’s been having a little night life with the boongs,” Big Bob tells Constable Terry. “She likes those big fat witchetty grubs.”

  “Big fat witchetty grubs,” Terry sings. “Oh Adeleen, our village queen, she loves those big fat witchetty grubs.”

  “No, no,” she protests laughing, but Big Bob joins in, and they sing and sway and laugh in the dark, and after a while she sings along: “I love those big fat witchetty grubs.”

  “She loves those big black witchetty grubs,” sings Constable Terry.

  Both men laugh so much that the car slews onto the shoulder and back, then off the road again. She’s nervous now. She thinks they are both quite drunk.

  “You think they’re better?” Big Bob demands. “The big black juicy ones?”

  She doesn’t know what to answer. “Where are we going?” she asks, alarmed.

  There’s a blur, both car doors opening, a blank.

  What she remembers: spiky grass and ants against her skin, and words marching in ranks through her head. I don’t believe this, I don’t believe it, it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t happening. And then the next day (she must have slept, or been unconscious, whatever), the next day: blood, bruises, and no clothes. No sign of her clothes. And diarrhoea, the worst, the most humiliating thing.

  But she can remember only grass and ants and the shapes of words. The words themselves are jagged, they hurt her skin. Fog comes and goes. A search party shouts, she hunches herself up, ashamed, ashamed. She doesn’t want to be found. The pain from moving is so great that she blacks out.

  “Christ!” Big Bob has tears in his eyes. He covers her with a blanket. The picture in the newspaper shows him cradling her in his arms. “We found her clothes on the reserve,” Big Bob tells the reporter. “The animals won’t get away with it, I can promise you that.”

  Days come and go. She’s teaching again, it seems. The children stare and whisper, the reserve kids don’t come any more. She cannot look at Margaret, Big Bob’s daughter. When she walks into the general store, people fall silent. “Poor Addie,” they murmur, as though she has a terminal disease. “At least the bastards are in gaol,” someone says. She stares, puzzled; there is something just out of reach, but only words rattle in her head like small change in an empty tin can. She has a nightmare, and in the morning she forces herself to read the papers that have stacked themselves up, unopened. She sees Joshua’s father, Evangeline’s father, in handcuffs. We didn’t do it, boss. We dunno how her clothes …

  A fever descends.

  “Benevolent reasons” is what the transfer slip from the Education Department says. She lies awake all the last night, afraid. Wouldn’t it be better, she begs herself, more sensible, to say nothing? Reasons for saying nothing marshal themselves in ranks, they file through her head all night. Please, her body begs. I have no choice, she tells it. I have to.

  Morning. Two blocks to the police station, bodily panic, retreat. It takes her until the third attempt, and then Sergeant Big Bob Hobson and Constable Terry Wilkes greet her effusively. They take her into their office, they give her tea and a biscuit. “We’re glad to see you up and about again,” they say. “Glad to see you looking so well.”

  Her hands are sweating, her knees are weak, her throat dry.

  “I am going to tell,” she says. The noise each word makes as it falls on the floor is deafening.

  They look at her blandly, innocent-eyed. “Tell what?” they ask.

  Tell what? She feels dizzy, there is no bottom to this fall. She thinks: I will never know for sure again if night is night or day is day, what is dream or not-dream.

  It would help, they told her at the hospital, to be a thousand miles away for a while. It would help, they said, to be somewhere where not a soul knew her. She took a year’s leave, and went to Melbourne.

  People were kind. At dinner parties in
terrace houses they said to her, Of course Queensland gets the kind of government it deserves do you like the linguini? the salmon? in Brisbane we thought the food perfectly ghastly we do congratulate you on leaving, oh the Queensland police, the Aboriginal problem, no awareness at all, and Namatjira’s tonal effects are exquisite, there was a black tie opening and we were simply overwhelmed overwhelmed, Aboriginal art’s the going thing now a fantastic investment and I myself have a poem of social protest, a very meaningful people were kind enough a very socially aware in the Age will you have more champagne? you’ve come out of the wilderness, they said.

  She was mute. The same hollow alphabet. No. Hollower. She could not acquire the knack of words that floated so weightlessly. She fled back to Queensland. She dreamed of alphabets that sent down deep webbing roots.

  At dawn on the Burdekin banks (is she sixty or twenty?) she watches the foraging parties. Swimmers, dinghies, fights, whoops of delight. She huddles, not wanting to be found. Whole doors are coming up, chairs, verandah spindles, stovepipes, crosses, bits of clapboard, signs, signposts, there’s a black market trade in souvenirs. At a trestle table, t-shirts are selling like hot cakes: I was there for the Second Coming of Come-by-Chance.

  Adeline sits hugging herself, shivering in the fierce morning heat. Two gangs are fighting over the clock face from the Post Office tower, and a reporter in a frenzy of picture-taking swears irritably as he runs out of film. Rewind, unload, rip (the velcro carry-case), rip (the Kodak pack), rip (the foil covering). “Shit!” He tosses packet and foil over his shoulder. He is not an ordinary reporter. He has literary sensibilities and does these things, these projects, as a cultural enterprise, a refined monitoring of the pulse of the nation. He shakes his head at Adeline in disbelief. “I don’t believe this. Bloody animals, a pack of hooligan looters.” He gives off a kind of jubilation of disgust. “No one’s going to believe this in Melbourne.”

  “No. No one ever believes.” Nevertheless, that does not absolve … She takes a deep breath. “I would like to set the record straight.”

  “Yeah, who wouldn’t?” He’s got the clock face and a bloodied forehead in focus, he’s shooting like crazy.

  “Capper is not my real name, I was never married, I am Adeline Crick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to tell you what really happened.”

  Christ, not another one. Any direction you point your lens. And she’s got the DTs, the old soak, she’s only worth one shot.

  Adeline’s words are heavy, their roots go down below the Burdekin, her clumsy tongue trips on them, she has to speak with the care of those who have had a stroke. She says: “I have the blood of innocent men on my hands.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Right.”

  “At times one has to ask oneself,” he wrote in a photo-essay that was given prominent space in the Age, “if Queensland is our own Gothic invention, a kind of morality play, the Bosch canvas of the Australian psyche, a sort of perpetual memento mori that points to the frailty of the skein of civilisation reaching out so tentatively from our southern cities.

  “To return to Sydney or Melbourne and write of the primitive violence, the yobbo mentality, the mystics, the pathetic old women generating lurid and gratuitous confessions, the general sense of mass hallucination … to speak of this is to risk charges of sensationalism. And indeed, after mere days back in the real world, one has the sense of emerging from a drugged and aberrant condition.

  “One has to ask oneself: Does Queensland actually exist?

  “And one has to conclude: I think not.

  “Queensland is a primitive state of mind from which the great majority of us, mercifully, have long since evolved. And Come-by-Chance is a dream within a nightmare, the hysteric’s utopia, the city of Robespierre, Stalin, Jim Jones, the vision of purity from which history recoils.

  “Come-by-Chance, we who are sane dilute you.”

  Yes, he’d done that rather well. Seen the essence of things, touched the depths, but kept the tone right. Words were his business, and if he often caught himself being plangent and acute, well, it was a forgivable sin. He was tempted to add a rider explaining how his work should be read, how his words should be picked up one by one like stones from the bank of an enchanted creek. But he would save that for another time.

  When the drought broke with the series of maverick cyclones we all remember, there was flash flooding throughout central and southern Queensland. At the tent city on the Burdekin Dam, winds hurling themselves down from the Gulf at unprecedented inland speeds caused death and mayhem. Police estimated as many as forty people drowned. Cars were marooned on the Flinders Highway for days, army ducks were still rescuing stranded survivors weeks later. In both coastal and inland cities, powerline disasters, the uprooting of trees, and the collapse of buildings in the gale-force winds brought the region’s death toll to over one hundred.

  In Melbourne and Sydney, where water restrictions were at last lifted to everyone’s immense relief, people read of the Queensland floods and shook their heads. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, they said.

  I Saw Three Ships

  Three ships came up out of the Pacific onto Collaroy Beach. Not ships exactly, though he had watched them sail out of the haze where North Head was, and past Long Reef. When he saw them turn shoreward and bear down on his fishing post – a folding chair in a pocket of cold winter sand – he thought he had finally (so many years after the event) gone mad; then he thought that the three pilots had.

  The ships had a bead on him.

  He was reeling in his past, what a catch. It figures, he thought. The whole wheeling world comes back to where it started, there’s no help for it. He always knew he’d have to pay before the end.

  At least this would lure the girl, and yes here she was coming down out of her concrete sky again. “Tenth floor,” she’d answered yesterday. “I can see the seminary tower at Manly.” He thought that was probably a lie, with all of Dee Why in between, but he knew about needing to believe in nice fictions. She’d have her reasons. Interloper, he’d thought irritably, just a week ago – he should have been able, in July, to count on the beach being his – but as day after day she had ignored him so completely, he’d felt challenged.

  “You must be from down south,” he’d said.

  She’d looked surprised. “Well … yes, originally. I was born in Melbourne.”

  “I mean, from down south in Sydney.” She’d laughed, startled, her eyebrows darting upwards like birds. He said: “It’s only hardy locals and a few city weirdos who come to the beach in July.”

  “Oh.” She had not bothered to stop and be social. She had just gone on walking towards the rocks.

  You had to wonder about a young woman alone. Now she was letting the wavelets curl around her ankles, shading her eyes, staring out at the kamikaze ships.

  “I don’t believe in them either,” he joked into the wind, but as usual she failed to respond.

  When the ships splashed into the shallows they sprouted wheels and clambered out of the water, rasping, snorting, noisier than a bevy of beached whales. Jesus, he thought. What you reel in if you live too long! The same fucking army ducks he’d seen parading out of New Guinea and into the sea. The shivers hit him. He was too bloody old for this, too bloody old to fish in July, sitting still till he caught his death. His reel jammed, he had to throw down the rod half tangled. While he folded his chair, all thumbs, the army ducks wheeled and roared, a mating game of rhinoceros.

  “Catch anything, grandpa?” called a kid – a mere boy – in khaki. You would have been sushi by now, mate, the old man muttered. Men were dropping over the tailgates like gravel on the spill, some sort of manoeuvre, what a farce, what a blooming picnic, a game with museum pieces. He could just imagine: hunt the nuclear missile, race you to the fallout shelter. The men wore yellow oilskins, for god’s sake, over their uniforms. There was probably a wa
terproof fridge stuffed tight with beers in the cabin.

  A young officer dropped to the sand like a god; and landed face to face with the girl.

  Some things at least never changed.

  The old man’s shivers were bad. The chair, resisting his attempts to fold it, took a savage bite out of one hand. Jesus, he swore, extricating his fingers and sucking them. As he stumbled up the beach with his gear, he could see the young officer making his moves: an accidental lurching in the wet sand, collision with a thigh, a necessary clutch to steady himself. But the girl tossed her head and the long single braid that hung down her back twitched free like the tail of a haughty filly.

  The old man laughed through his shivers: You’ll never get anywhere with that one. A nun in the making. I can smell them.

  It was too early for the pub.

  At the bottle shop, a girl with green streaks in her hair eyed him sharply. “You got the DTs, mate?”

  He frowned, giving her his look of offended dignity. “Aren’t you Old Gabe from down at the rooming house?” She was watching him cautiously. “I’m not allowed to sell if you’re already …”

  The mere possibility of not being able to calm his nerves made the shivers worse. His breath rattled through his teeth, asthmatic. “Been sitting fishing,” he gasped. “Too cold … pneumonia, maybe, if I can’t … the doctor said spirits …”

  Then the kid couldn’t let him have the rum fast enough, tried to call a doctor, the works. But he got away.

  The girl on the beach never wore anything but canvas shoes, jeans, and a sweater three times too large. Sometimes her long black hair blew loose in the wind, sometimes she wore it in a single prim braid that hung almost to her waist.

  When she wasn’t there, the long stretch of sand was empty. Desolate. He would watch the tenth floor windows and wait. He angled his chair so that he could keep his eye on her building while he fished. He wanted to know if anything had happened with the young officer. He was willing to lay bets …