Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  A red light glared and he braked sharply, feeling querulous. What was the point, so late at night, with scarcely any cars on the road? Really, it was ridiculous, and his fingers tapped out a tattoo of irritation on the wheel. Anger, that serpentine virus, went slinking down from his head and along his arms and out to his fingertips which beat time like kettledrums on the … his fingers beat time … oh no, not again.

  By the ghastly light, neon, of the street lamps, he saw his purple hands, his purple wrists, his purple arms. His whole body was a bruise.

  In the early stages his condition was manageable. It was like having an eccentric tic. The colours came and went quite swiftly, as though someone were changing channels or playing with a switch or directing a movie projector at the surface of his skin.

  But then days came when a tint would settle in like a stationary weather system. Blue, for instance. Not the peacock blue of passion, but the other one, a glum slate blue.

  “It’s rare,” his doctor told him, “but not unknown.” His doctor, it must be ruefully confessed, was rather pleased. All too infrequently did a general practitioner have a chance with the medical journals. “I’ve had to read up on your condition. Biofeedback research and so on, a whole new area.” The medical hands, with their long white fingers, were tented reverently; the medical throat was thoughtfully cleared. “What you are experiencing is a sort of mind-body anxiety loop, more a psychiatric problem actually.” The doctor looked tactfully out the window and coughed. “It – ah – arises when the subject has no – ah – appreciable sense of self. When he measures himself by reflected opinion. He becomes as it were, that reflection. As he perceives it, that is.”

  The doctor rose and crossed to the window. “Astonishing thing, the mind.” He coughed again, very politely. “Research indicates,” he said, looking out at the city, “that subjects are afraid to speak in their own voice. That is to say, they find it necessary to quote an endorser, sometimes even for quite trivial –”

  “But …” Adam objected fretfully, “my wife used to be a nurse and she says it’s just tension, extreme tension, because there was this, ah, awkward situation … So she feels, my wife that is, that you should be treating me for stress. She feels you are not taking full account … She thinks I should get a second opinion.”

  “Yes,” his doctor said. “I see.”

  Adam became used to himself as blue. Depression Blue, that is; not the other, not the cobalt of passion. This was a greyish blue, a little bleak perhaps, but inoffensive. People accepted him. Word got about, as word will, that he had a rare blood disease, a sort of late life twist on the “blue baby” syndrome (slowly fatal, alas) and a wise man disdains to interfere with the ship of rumour. Perhaps he placed a judicious hand on the tiller from time to time: to avoid unwarranted sensationalism, any thought of the newest diseases, for example. No, no, it was nothing like that. A hereditary matter, obscure, with a lineage that ran to princelings and czars.

  Young women – students – looked at him with eyes full of shock and tears and offered the consolation of their bodies. He’s so chromatic, they would sigh. And then the blue would go through sea changes, fleeting intensities, turn tinted somersaults. Perhaps the colours themselves would cause the phone to ring in the middle of a pyrotechnic night.

  Then the Phases of the Bruise would set in again.

  “I don’t think I can go on living like this,” his wife told him.

  “Like what?” he asked with innocent eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  You know, replied the fragile silent back of his wife.

  “Like what?” he demanded, aggrieved, his belligerence rising. “Like what?”

  “I’m taking the children,” she said, and all colour drained from him in an instant, though his bleached voice babbled on and on. “I promise, I promise, I promise, I swear to you that I won’t …” (He crossed his heart. He kneeled and hugged her legs. He was always obedient. When he was a child he always coloured inside the lines.) “They throw themselves at me,” he sobbed. “They compromise me. I’m just being kind and they misinterpret …”

  The tears ran and ran, a Yangtse of remorse, a yellow river. Yellow settled in for days and moved in him with a slow malarial swell. Everyone thought he had jaundice. He took valium, librium, xanax, and saw white lights with an undershadowing of Depression Blue. Not a happy combination, blue and yellow. He was obliged to wear gloves and sweaters and a cloth hat pulled low over his face.

  The Jimmy Swaggart of academe, he overheard one colleague murmur to another, wearing his true coat of many colours.

  Adam shut his office door and swallowed a couple of emerald capsules (green peace, the doctor had joked) and pulled a bottle of Scotch from a drawer. The room was full of shifting light. When his head sank onto the desk, he watched his cheeks bleed colour into the blotting pad. He slept and dreamed.

  He was outside in the cold, looking into a candlelit room where three women played bridge. The chair of the fourth player was empty, the absentee’s cards neatly ranked in their suits on the table. He could not see the women clearly, though they all wore black and seemed pale and delicate as though recently bereaved, and yet they gave off that golden aura that beautiful women give off. They touched one another frequently, they leaned toward one another and smiled, they were animated, they listened to one another gravely and with an air of gentle solicitude. He wished he could hear what they were saying. Perhaps they were sisters. Certainly such a palpable bond of tenderness linked them that he felt envious. He felt intensely excluded.

  The candles – there were scores upon scores of them – burned brightly. A fire crackled in the grate. Everything spoke of warmth and welcome, and he wanted to be invited in. He wanted to play. He wanted to sit in the empty chair. He rapped on the window and the women glanced up momentarily but were too absorbed in the cards to notice him.

  He rapped on the glass again, more loudly. He wanted to know who the missing fourth player was. “Who’s the dummy?” he shouted.

  The women raised their heads and looked toward the window, puzzled. He realised then that he knew them: his first wife, his second wife, and Eve; but they gave no sign of hearing or seeing anyone. He was rapping, rapping, rapping on the glass, his knuckles frantic. “I want to play with you,” he called.

  His wives were still as a tableau, waiting. Eve touched their sleeves gently and pushed back her chair and walked across the room to the window. She opened it and leaned into the moonless night and the trees.

  “Eve,” he said gratefully, humbly. “Please let me in.”

  Eve looked carefully this way, that way. “Is anybody there?” she asked.

  “Eve,” he said, frightened. Their eyes were only inches apart. “Eve! It’s me.” He felt feverish, he detonated peacock blue, he sweated cobalt.

  Eve blinked and rubbed the back of one hand across her eyes. “There must be a prism in someone’s window,” she said over her shoulder. “It must be turning somewhere.”

  She closed the casement and went back to the table. “There’s nobody there,” she said. He saw her kiss both of his wives lightly on the forehead, and then the women picked up their cards and leaned towards each other smiling, a closed circle.

  Dear Amnesty

  All the letters – they would have made a snowstorm – began with Your Excellency … Sarah always wrote them by hand, with a fountain pen, taking particular care with the flourishes: the sensuous f’s, the loopy l’s, the trailing lace flounces on the y’s. Your Excellency: It has come to my attention that contrary to Article XXIII, Clause 6, subsection iv of your own Constitution … Her lips were bitten to a bruised purple as she wrote. Also – and this was beginning to be a problem – she had to sit on her bed with the goosedown quilt pulled up to her armpits.

  Her son and daughter used to joke about the quilt – that was when the children still found it a laughing matter. “First sign of art
erio-antarcticosis,” Richard used to say. “Commonly referred to as icicles in the bloodstream.” Richard was a second-year Med student; his head was crammed with biology; he liked to draw short straight lines between cause and effect. That was before things got out of hand, before Rosita moved in and the children moved out again. “You’ll progress on to frozen mucus,” Richard promised, “stalactites in the abdomen, and then Ice Age catatonia. That’s when the shivering stops and they wrap you up in a white blanket.”

  Sarah did not laugh. She was deeply embarrassed. She hadn’t realised she shivered as she wrote. She put on a sweatshirt and finished her letter.

  “Mother!” Katy fumed. “Your sense of humour’s iced over already. Completely on the blink. What’s happening to you?”

  Richard asked: “Is all this because of Dad?”

  Sarah blinked. When she closed her eyes, she saw blinding asterisks and zigzags: a random geometry of directions changed, fault lines, lifelines, scars, prison bars, the furrows and welts of old wrongs. Some of the lines intersected (there were sparks, the soft pour of explosions) and some never met.

  “After the moment of intersection,” she said, “the lives diverge.” Further and further. Already their father (had she really been married to him for twenty-five years?) was remote as an asteroid; but she and Rosita lived parallel lives and could not hold hands.

  Her son and daughter looked at each other, and the look struck her in passing, a glancing blow. Later, the bruise would form.

  “It’s odd,” she said, “how people only comment when the private and the public … when outer politics and inner politics, I suppose I should say … at those brief interludes, you know, when they become congruent.”

  “Mother,” Katy murmured, cajoling. “Some people can handle this and some can’t. I think you should just give money and leave the letters to someone else.”

  “What you need right now,” Richard said, “until you feel more … I mean, until you sort out, you know, about Dad … You really need to be doing something upbeat rather than …”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Otherwise,” Katy said (she was a first-year Arts student), “I’ll have to give up my flat and live here permanently again, so I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Oh no, really. I’ll stop,” Sarah promised. She wanted to stop. But she couldn’t. She would huddle under the quilt, pretending to read, her shivering muffled in goose-down. Your Excellency … She kept her fountain pen tucked under the mattress.

  In the late afternoons, they sat by the bay window that looked out on the horsechestnut tree. Katy sat cross-legged on the box- seat, the curved part, so that she had a skyful of horsechestnut candles (milky as twists of whipped cream) and the undersides of leaves; Sarah sat on a cushion on the floor, her back against the window box, her head against her daughter’s knees.

  Katy unpinned her mother’s hair and brushed it, languidly, deliberately, a hundred strokes, a thousand strokes.

  “Ahh,” Sarah purred, “that feels good, so comforting. Do you remember … ?”

  Did Katy remember? When Katy was a little girl, Sarah would brush out her black ringlets (she had her father’s colouring, her father’s curls), would brush them out one by one, wrapping each around her index finger like a tendril, stroking it with the bristles.

  And did Richard remember how she used to stroke his hair while she told him bedtime stories, how she couldn’t bring herself to clip his one-year-old curls? his two-year-old … ? Until his father, outraged, whisked him off to the barber’s.

  And did her husband remember … ?

  But the past was a Dead Letter Office, a great storehouse of messages never delivered.

  Your Excellency, Sarah composed, drafting the next letter in her mind. It is not the past history, but the future of your …

  She began again: When you yourself were a child, Your Excellency …

  Or maybe: Perhaps Your Excellency has not realised that the inflicting of pain will destroy your own … Present suffering, Your Excellency, can gobble up the entire past, indeed, can swallow time itself…

  There it was, the answer to all the riddles, clear as the kernel of a flame: The past did not count; there was no past.

  “There is no past,” she says. “There is only the present tense.”

  Katy pauses in her brushing, a handful of her mother’s hair lifted up to the light, and looks at Richard. Richard presses his lips together, folds his book over his index finger, and blinks rapidly. “I’ll make you some tea, Mother,” he says. Katy holds the hair and runs her brush upwards from the nape of her mother’s neck.

  Sarah thinks of Rosita’s long dark hair, snarled and matted from months in prison. She imagines herself combing it, untangling the wrongs, smoothing out the day’s cruelties. She thinks of Rosita’s children. Rosita is almost a decade younger than Sarah, but she has ten children. The oldest is nineteen – Katy’s age; Sarah sees Rosita’s daughter against the light, against the horsechestnut candles, the little ones clinging to her skirt; she is brushing their hair and singing to them.

  “It was something I always wanted,” Sarah muses, “when I was a child myself … To have a little girl with curly hair.” She twists her head backwards and up to look at her daughter. She smiles “You’re so unharmed,” she sighs. “So beautiful.”

  But Katy has not yet discovered this fact. Katy does not believe it. (There is a certain fellow student, male, who never calls; there is her father who finds it “awkward” to call; “for the time being,” he has explained, until the young woman he is now living with has time to …) Katy insists she is ugly; she says this often with an angry sort of pride.

  Oh dear god, no, Sarah disputes; you’re striking, you’re one of a kind, you’re very beautiful.

  And Richard says: You’re okay, kid. Really, you’re okay.

  Katy wrinkles up her nose and purses her lips. “Sure,” she says.

  She brushes her mother’s hair and fixes her eyes on the creamy candles in the horsechestnut tree.

  As soon as Sarah heard the mailman’s step on the porch, she would begin to shiver; though this would pass quickly if none of the letters bore the Amnesty logo: a candle in a cage of barbed wire. Today, Sarah would think – and the shadow of a memory of an echo of hope would flit into the morning, would pass like a swiftly flying bird – today there was no one who … there was not one single act of … not one instance anywhere in the world …

  But once or twice a week, she was required to write letters. She had to huddle under the quilt and pretend to read.

  Katy was upset when letters fluttered out from a pillow on washday. “Mum,” she pleaded. “I think you need help, you know? I mean, this is out of control, it’s obsessive.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. She knew it was out of control. She hung her head and sat there meekly, hugging herself for the cold.

  “Look,” Richard said. “I’ve been reading up about this, about … well, you know, traumatic change, the stress scale, stuff like that. It’s called displacement, what you’re doing. Well, to some extent we’re all … I mean here we all are, back home, practically huddling together … It’s not unusual, it’s even healthy for a while, depending on what you pick as your substitute for …”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “but the thing is …” The thing was, she was one of them now: no outer casing, naked, exposed, waiting for blows. “I know how she feels, so I have to help.”

  “Know how who feels?”

  “Rosita Romero. Well, all of them.” Though, regardless of country, they had all come to look like Rosita.

  “Mother.” Richard was disturbed. “I agree that somebody … But I don’t think, right now, this is the kind of thing that you …”

  “If you read the Urgent Action Bulletins,” Sarah said helplessly, “you would understand. In fact, maybe you two –”

  “Mum.
” Katy was pacing, Katy was folding the letters into pellets. “There’s such a thing as knowing your own limits. And you and Dad … this is not without repercussions for us, you know. I don’t see … these people you write letters for … I don’t see where they get the right to swallow up our lives.”

  Sarah watched anxiety pluming around them like a cloud shot through with orange and red. She studied it, fascinated, and realised: There’s nothing they can do about it; it’s like my shivering.

  When she came home from work the next day, Katy’s things were gone and there was a note beside the telephone:

  Dear Mum: I’m moving back into the flat with Sandra and Jill. If you need me, call me. Or maybe write, since you’re so good at that. I could do with a few letters of support myself. And so could you, of course. But I know my limits. Love, Katy.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Richard worried. “There’s this biology project I’m supposed to be working on; it involves a field trip. But how can I leave you when you’re –”

  “Oh Richard, don’t be silly. It’s high time we stopped – what did you call it? – huddling … I think you should move back into residence. And there’s nothing the matter with me. I’m fine.”

  “But you’re not. You’re behaving in this … it scares me, it’s obsessive.”

  “I’ll stop,” she promised, as Richard packed his things – although she knew it was not within her power to stop.

  Rosita has long dark hair and a tiny mole low on the left cheek. Sarah’s hair is fair-tuming-silver, and still hangs below her shoulders when she unpins it; her mole is near the right corner of her lips. Each month when Rosita begins to bleed, Sarah wakes with the sensation of a leaden ball low in her belly; she reaches down with her finger, slides it into warm fluids, tastes her own salty menses.

  The night she staggers next door to Mrs Donovan and is rushed off in an ambulance, Mrs Donovan holds her hand in the back of the van. “It’s a miscarriage,” she says. “Had four myself, in between the six children, so I know those cramps. Perhaps it’s all for the best,” she says, kindly, wiping Sarah’s sweating forehead with a cloth, putting a soothing hand on her jack-knifing stomach. “So late after the other two. And since he’s left, you know.”