Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Lucy pushed the call button for the stewardess. “The late passenger,” she asked a little frantically. “Did he get off in Frankfurt?”

  “The late passenger?”

  “You know, the man who was sitting next to me.”

  The stewardess raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I don’t remember anyone sitting next to you,” she said. “Would you like more champagne?”

  Here and Now

  As it happened, Alison was wearing black when the phone call came; black velvet, cut low in front, with a thin silver chain at her throat. Only minutes before, she had been under the shower. Before that, she had been shovelling snow from the driveway. She had got the car out before the surface slicked over again, and before the city ploughs came through to toss a fresh barricade across the top of the drive. She had showered and put on the black dress. Car keys in hand, she was just pulling the front door shut behind her.

  Damn, she thought. Will I answer it or not?

  Afterwards it seemed to her that she had known from the first microsecond of the first ring. Four o’clock on a winter’s Sunday afternoon. Lake Ontario veined with early ice, darkness already closing in: this is when such phone calls come. In Brisbane it was tomorrow already, it was dawn on Monday morning. Such phone calls are made at dawn.

  At the Faculty Club, Alison’s car slewed a little on the ice, nudged a parked Toyota, hesitated, then slid obediently into the neighbouring space. She sat trembling slightly, her hands on the wheel, the engine still running, and stared through the windshield at the Brisbane River. Here, on the lip of the campus, a membrane of ice already stretched across the water for as far as she could see. The membrane was thinner than a fingernail, milky white.

  (High in the mango tree, hidden from the other children, frightened, she sucks comfort from the milk iceblocks her mother makes.)

  “Metro Toronto engineers,” the car radio announced, “are mystified by this morning’s explosions in the city’s sewer system. Throughout the streets in the downtown core, sewer caps have been popping like champagne corks, an extraordinary sight on a quiet Sunday morning in Toronto.”

  It is still Sunday here, Alison thought. It is not Monday yet.

  It is still now, she thinks.

  She turns off radio and ignition and gets out of the car, stepping with infinite care so as not to fracture the thin membranes of ice and time. The air, several degrees below zero, turns into crystal splinters in her lashes and nostrils. Something hurts. It is important to breathe very carefully.

  Inside the Faculty Club, champagne corks are popping like pistol shots; a Christmas party, a retirement celebration for a distinguished colleague, two sabbatical farewells, all rolled into one elegant festive affair. Soon Alison will play her public part, make her speech. Then the small talk that rises like wisps of fog will engulf her and drift up river with her, past Kenmore, past the westernmost suburbs of Brisbane, up into the Great Dividing Range. She will be able to make her escape. She is desperate for solitude and rainforest.

  “Wonderfully done,” someone enthuses, handing her another drink. “A fitting tribute.”

  She has skated through it then, on thin ice and champagne. Soon it will be possible to leave. She smiles and talks and laughs and talks and smiles. In her glass, the ice in the champagne punch twists and dwindles. She holds the glass up to the light. The icecubes are as thin as the wafers of capiz shell that wash up on Queensland beaches.

  “Alison,” someone says. “Congratulations. I just heard the news.”

  Alison holds herself very still. “Yes?” she says faintly. She will not be able to speak of it yet. They will have to excuse her.

  “Your invitation to Sydney, I mean, for next year. You must be thrilled. When do you go?”

  “Ah,” she says. Her voice comes from a long way off. “Nothing can be done on a Sunday. I’ll have to make arrangements in the morning.”

  Her colleague raises a quizzical eyebrow as she slides away, nodding, nodding, smiling. Discreetly heading for the cloakroom, head lowered, she collides with Walter who has propped himself against a shadowy window niche. She mumbles an apology and lurches on.

  “Alison,” he calls in his frail and elderly voice.

  “Walter. Oh Walter, I’m sorry.” She turns back and hugs him.

  “Please join me,” he begs.

  “Oh Walter, I’m not fit company.”

  “You’re my favourite company,” he says. “These things, these things …” He waves vaguely at the room with his knobbed walking stick. “I find these things difficult. I only come because I’m perverse.” Walter’s own retirement party is twenty-five years behind him, though he has just recently published yet another scholarly book. “I’m the loneliest man in the world,” he says. “Do you know how old I am?”

  She knows of course, everyone knows, that he’s ninety. The acuity of his mind and speech is a local wonder. Only time gets muddled for him. He gets the First and the Second World Wars confused; he fought in both.

  “I’m as old as Methuselah,” he says, “and as fond of Australians as ever. Have I told you why?”

  He has of course. Many times. He has spoken of the Australian and New Zealand regiments stationed near his in Italy. That was during the Second World War. Or was it the first? In one of those wars, an Australian saved his life, dragging his wounded body through enemy fire.

  “That was partly why,” he says. “That was the beginning. But even more than that it’s the whales.”

  “The whales?” she asks, politely. She has not heard about the whales.

  “Dying on the beaches. All the way from Tasmania to Queensland, a shocking thing.”

  “When was this, Walter?”

  “Now,” he says, agitated, a little annoyed with her. “Here and now!” He is tapping on his forehead with his walking stick, a semaphore of distress. “Beached and gasping and dying by the hundreds.”

  “Walter, I hadn’t …” She is confused. She is guilty of something. “I’ve heard nothing. Was this on the news?”

  “Yes,” he says. “And in the National Geographic. Stranded high and dry, out of their element, the loneliest, most awful …” There are tears in his eyes. “But the people of the coast are forming water lines, passing buckets, keeping them wet and alive. One by one, they are being dragged back to the water and towed out to sea. Wonderful people, the Australians. I walk along the beaches, you know, and watch. You hear a lot of rough talk out there, and some people think Australians are crude, but I know what I see.”

  He hunches into the window seat and stares out at the freezing lake. “It was because of the whales that I sent my son out there, after the war. He never came back.”

  “I didn’t know you had a son in Australia, Walter.”

  “School was never the place for him. It happens often, doesn’t it, with the children of scholars? And after that trouble, after the penitentiary. I couldn’t think of a better place to give him a fresh start. I thought: Australians will make a man of him. Look at the way they fight and the way they are with whales.”

  “Walter,” she murmurs, leaning her forehead momentarily against his. She is afraid of this confluence of griefs. She is afraid the sewer caps will not hold.

  “What I’m sorry about,” Walter says, “is that I never told him … I mean, I should have said to him: I am proud of your racing car driving. There have been all these other things, all these … We go on and on, you know, fathers do, about the disappointments. But I should have told him: I do admire your courage and speed behind that wheel!”

  In the window seat, he seems to fold himself up into nothing.

  “I visited the place. I visit. I go there often, more and more often now. It’s a very steep and winding road, you can see how dangerous. From Cairns up to the Atherton Tableland, do you know it?”

  She nods, unable to speak. The roads of Queensland, north
and south, are imprinted in her veins. She stares at the map of her forearm and sees the hairpin turns on the way from Cairns to Kuranda.

  “You can see it was an accident, can’t you?” he says. “He had everything to live for, a young wife and a little boy. We stay in touch. My grandson still sends me Christmas cards from Australia.”

  “Sometimes,” he says, “I think I may have told him I was proud of the driving. Sometimes I think I remember saying it.”

  “Walter,” she says shakily, embracing him. “Merry Christmas, dear Walter. Forgive me. I have to go.”

  She manages, somehow, to get out to her car. She sits in the darkness, holding herself very still. She turns on the car radio in time for the hourly news bulletin. “Sewer caps popping like corks,” she hears. She turns it off and leans on the wheel and begins to shiver. She shivers violently, her teeth chattering, her body possessed by the shakes. Her bones clatter, even her skin is noisy, the din of her thoughts drowns out the tapping at her window. It is not until Walter leans across the front of her car and signals through the windshield that she can make him out, dimly, through the thin tough cataract of Sunday. She blinks several times. He taps on the window again.

  “Walter,” she says, shocked, opening the door. “God, Walter, get in the car. You mustn’t stand out in this cold, you’ll catch your …”

  “I would like to think so,” he says quietly. “It’s been a terribly long and lonely wait. Alison, you can tell an old man anything. What is it, dear child?”

  “My mother,” she begins to say. She puts her head against Walter’s weathered shoulder and sobs. Orphaned at fifty: it sounds faintly embarrassing and comic, it’s not supposed to be a major shock, it’s not even listed in the register of traumas. “My mother,” she begins again, quietly, “died in Brisbane at 4.40 a.m. this Monday morning.”

  She looks out at the frozen loop of a Queensland river. “My mother,” she says, frowning a little, “died in the early hours of tomorrow morning.”

  Walter feels the car come plummeting off the Kuranda road, turning cartwheels through ferns and bougainvillea. It twists and twists and goes on falling through the gaping hole that opens somewhere behind his ribs. He hears the explosion that is now and always taking place.

  “There is such gentleness,” he says, stroking Alison’s cheek, “in the most unexpected people, the roughest people. The way those men pass the buckets of water from hand to hand, the way they stroke the whales with wet cloths. I have never forgotten it.”

  Tomorrow, Alison thinks, I will fly all the way back to the beginning.

  North of Nowhere

  The Ocean of Brisbane

  His voice came out of the black space between the two projectors. When a slide slipped off the wall, dropping into nowhere, the tiered funnel of the lecture theatre was so dark that the darkness seemed to rub itself against her, furry, like the legs of spiders. She shivered. Then a bubble of light would come, a coloured diagram or a photograph would appear on the screen straight ahead but below her, and words would unfold themselves on the other screen, the one that was angled across a corner of the room, high up, and therefore eye-level with the tier where she sat. She would see him then for a moment, shadowy, a juggler of ideas, images, impenetrable words, remote control buttons, a magician waving his arms in the twilight cast by the screens.

  I watched her watching him.

  She was trying to explain him to herself.

  I watched how she held onto her own body, arms hugged tightly, and how she kept shivering (it looked like shivering) in the sweltering airless room.

  Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper to her. I wanted to put my hand on her arm, soothing, but it would have alarmed her. Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper. He’s just as much a mystery to himself.

  He spoke, and his words settled lightly onto the cantilevered screen in black block capitals, crowding, jostling like branches full of crows, she had always been frightened of crows, the way they swooped at you, dive-bombed, that time on the farm at Camp Mountain, long before Brisbane, she was still a child at Camp Mountain, the beaks slashing at her head (or maybe magpies, was it? had they been magpies?), they go for the eyes. Always wear a hat, teachers warned, and if attacked, cover the eyes.

  electron microscopy, the screen said.

  of crystals.

  And then in a fluttering rush: of an alpha-helical coiled-coil protein extracted from the ootheca of the praying mantis.

  The black letters swooped at her and instinctively she covered her eyes. I watched the way her hands shook slightly (how would she speak to him? how had they ever really? and yet after all these years she had been hoping … but what language could they possibly use?) and all the time, through her fingers, she was watching for crevices of hope, for something to grab onto, and there was something, crystals, yes, she recognised that, he used to have a set, those heavy headphones, telling them he could hear Indonesia, England, the cricket scores, winding the world into his room, swallowing it, he had this terrible hunger, this unnatural … this kind of greed, she could never predict what … and it was never big enough for him even then, his room, their house, their lives, Brisbane, the country, the world, he was like one of those alien children on the late late movies, growing into strangeness, his mind butting against the ceiling, webbed toes, a third eye, foreign to her from the beginning. She pressed a hand against her stomach and stared at it. Where had he come from?

  “Coiled-coil,” he was saying, from the dark space between the projectors. On the lower screen were intricate diagrams that looked like tangled chain-necklaces, or twisted ropes of sausages perhaps. “Solving the structures,” he said. “Electron diffraction … especially certain membrane-embedded protein strings resistant to X-ray imaging.” A ghostly pointer picked out the braided strings, and she turned to look at me suddenly, so specifically, that I heard her thoughts, heard the click of association, or saw it, and felt for my plaits against my shoulders. It was like groping for an amputated limb, the coiled coils of childhood.

  It seems only yesterday … her look said.

  The coiled coils of language, I thought, and knotted myself into the puzzle. I saw diagrams of shared and divergent lives braiding and unbraiding themselves. Alpha-helical, alphabetical, we both rode in an Alfa Romeo once, it belonged to someone his older brother knew, I think, someone from Sydney, the wind whipping through the coiled coils of our hair and we two thinking we were Christmas, swimming through Brisbane like fish. There was nothing to it in those days. We could walk on water. We thought we were the beginning and the end, the ant’s pants, the ootheca of the praying mantis, no less.

  O-ith-ee-ka,

  oh I thee thir,

  thaid the blind man

  though he couldn’t thee at all.

  What the hell did ootheca mean?

  Bet you don’t know, bet I do, don’t, do, don’t too, do so, don’t, do. Those two, our mothers used to say, will argue till the cows come home. Fish out of water, other kids’ mothers said, but we weren’t, we were in our own element, we porpoised through books, we dived into argument, we rode our bikes into endless discussion and rainforest trails where we disappeared and swam in private time, no time, timeless rainforest rockpool debate time. We cavorted in the ocean of Brisbane, our own little pond.

  I computed the odds against solving the structure of memory which dissolves and devolves and solves nothing.

  Afterwards, waiting for him under the jacarandas, we fanned ourselves with the lecture handouts. From time to time, she smoothed hers out against her skirt and studied it with intense concentration, as though memorisation of the print might yield up a meaning. When she saw me looking, a kind of rash flared across her cheeks and she scrunched the handout into a fan again and whipped it back and forth. She said nervously, apologetically: “Me and his dad …” Then she panicked about her grammar and bit her lip and began again. “His father and me …
I, I should say, I and his Dad … the Depression and the war and everything … You know, Philippa, I’m sure Brian’s told you, we only got to Grade 6.”

  “Oh heck,” I said, “Brian’s stuff is double-dutch to me too. To nearly everyone. To 99.9 per cent of the people in the world, I would say.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh God, yes. Brian lives in the stratosphere. He’s really – oh, please don’t, Mrs Leckie.”

  “I thought …” She was fumbling in her handbag, sniffling. “I’m not very … I thought it was just me. I don’t want to embarrass him.”

  “You won’t, you won’t’. How could you even think such a …” There were people jostling us, and we had to step back, step aside, adjust ourselves. We eased our way to the outside edge of the crowd, beyond the cloisters, away from the hot blanket of bodies. “He’s proud as punch that you’re here. Look, he’s just coming out now, he’s looking around for you, see?” I waved madly and Brian made a sign of acknowledgment with his hand and went on talking to some colleague.

  “You can’t blame him,” she said meekly. “It’s just, sometimes we wished … his Dad wished …” She mopped at her face with the Kleenex she had fished from her bag.

  “It’s dreadfully sticky, isn’t it?” I could feel runnels of sweat making a slow tickling descent across my ribcage.

  “I wished for his Dad’s sake.” She studied her much creased fan again, its print smudging from sweat and oil. Electron microscopy of crystals of an alpha-helical … “Me, actually, to tell you the truth, Philippa, I got to Grade 8 but I never let on. Not while his Dad was alive.” A little smile passed between us, woman to woman – Well, that’s what we do, isn’t it? – and then she said wistfully, “His Dad used to talk to him about the crystal set, he understood all that, they used them in the war, I think.”