Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

Weeks of storm weather had prevailed, weeks of walking on eggshells.

  And then God had spoken.

  And then Jug had pulled in his horns.

  “She’s all right,” he’d say gruffly of Liz. For a boong: you could hear him refuse to think the thought. “Red and yellow, black and white. All are precious in His sight,” he’d say. In fact, Liz got on better with the born-again Jug than his son or his daughter did. It’s my Mission School background, she’d say. I know that country.

  “How long’s he been like this again?” Maggie asks.

  “Didn’t Mum tell you?”

  “No. She never said a word in letters till the chooks got her down. So how long has it been?”

  “Since the new road from Jabiru,” Ben says.

  “Mum says nobody knows what happened.”

  Ben says nothing.

  “Well?” she says, watching him closely. “Is that true?”

  “Yes and no,” he says. “I don’t want to comment. I can’t comment.”

  “I can,” Liz says. “He’s been sung.”

  “What?” Maggie blinks at her. “By who?”

  “By my mob,” Liz says. “By the elders of the tribe.”

  “Why?”

  “The road,” Ben says. “The mining company. The new road through Kakadu. It runs through sacred sites.”

  “He knew that,” Liz says. “We made depositions. The press refused to cover it, per usual, but everyone knew. I faced him one day, with the demonstrators. Nose to nose.”

  “So that’s it,” Ben says. “You never told me.”

  “No.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “We just stood there staring at each other. And he said: ‘What can I do, Liz? I’m a working man, I build roads, what else can I do?’ And I said: ‘You can cross the line. Jug.’ And he said: ‘Easy to say, Liz. Easy for you.’ And I said: ‘Don’t do this. Jug, please. It’s our land, it’s our Dreaming, it’s our old people, you’re tearing us up, it’s our country.’ And we just kept standing there, looking at each other, eye to eye, people pushing and shoving, but it was just us two, him and me.”

  She is staring at the backs of her hands.

  “Yes?” Ben prompts.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I felt he was standing right on the line, I felt he was thinking about it, I thought maybe he just might step over and join me, he just wanted a nudge, so I said …”

  Maggie pictures the scene: the graders, the steamrollers, the tiptrucks of crushed stone, the sharp smell of tar, the demonstrators, the workmen in their heavy boots and singlets, the heat. She watches Liz remember it. She watches Ben watching Liz. This is a taboo subject with them, she hears her mother say.

  “What happened?” Ben nudges.

  “I said something …”

  They wait. Liz studies her hands. “What?” Ben says. “What did you say?”

  Liz sighs heavily. “I said the wrong thing, I reckon.”

  “What was it?”

  But she’s back at that line, nose to nose with Jug, her mob and his mob, stalemate.

  “What, dammit! What did you say?”

  “I said: ‘You’ve got a grandchild coming, Jug. It’s his Dreaming you’re messing up. It’s his place, it’s his country, your own grandchild’s. You’re desecrating his birthright. Jug.’”

  Maggie watches Liz breathing, she knows the way of it, how the ragged tempo takes you over, it’s like a weather pattern that you enter when you get too close to Jug. “What did he say?” she asks.

  “He said: ‘You fucking manipulative boong.’ ”

  Ben puts a hand over his face.

  “And I told him, I hissed it at him. I said, ‘You’re being sung, Jug Wilkins. You’d better make arrangements, because you’re gonna be sung.’” She starts collecting dishes with extraordinary vehemence and banging them into the sink. “Fucking boong-hater,” she keeps saying. “Fucking boong-haters, all of you, deep down.”

  When she passes by him, Ben lifts a hand to touch her, but drops it again. Maggie has a sudden lurch of panic: they’ll fight, she thinks; they’ll say things they can’t take back; he’ll turn into Dad. Maggie wants a lightning bolt, she wants to point the bone somewhere, she wants someone to unsing the country, she wants to stop all of this. She gets up and puts her arms around Liz, but Liz pushes her away, furious. “Don’t you bloody touch me!” Liz yells, but the words puncture her rage which leaves her in a sudden rush, half sob. She looks deflated and unutterably weary. “Oh shit,” she says helplessly to Ben: “I’m sorry, mate. I really thought, you know, he was going to cross the line. I was so fucking disappointed.”

  She says to Maggie: “Anyway, they did. Sing him, I mean. They did it. He’s been sung, and he knows it.”

  * * *

  Maggie is standing at the very back edge of their lot. It’s night, still stiflingly hot and humid, but there’s a full moon and just the suggestion of a breeze beginning to snuffle in off the sea. Around her rise the burial mounds of old cars. What would an archaeologist make of this? she wonders, this humpy terrain of rusted frames and compost heaps, all smothered and choked with jasmine, allamander, bougainvillea, and the ever rapacious morning glory, all of it sliding back into bush. Who knows where the boundary lies? What mad surveyor ever tried to mark such a thing?

  “So wha’d’ya reckon, Maggie?” His voice is slurred, rising from somewhere in the smothered heaps of junk.

  “Oh god. Jug, don’t do that, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Where are you?”

  “Where you gonna place your bet, Maggie?” He knocks on a creeper-clothed mound, and it gives back a hollow note, faintly metallic. “The Earth our Mum? Or the cars? Wha’d’ya reckon?”

  She’s still too angry with him for patience, she wants to hurt. “I’ve been to Ben and Liz’s,” she says. “You shouldn’t’ve worked on the road. I know why you’ve gone loco, you’ve been sung.”

  “On the road to Ka-ka-du-uu,” he sings drunkenly, “where the crocs and the jabiru play –”

  She will make him bleed. She will. “They’ve turned you into the fruit and vegie man,” she says.

  But he’s not listening to her. He’s not paying attention. He comes crawling out of the undergrowth on all fours, his head cocked to one side. He’s listening for something else. She thinks of the cats watching invisible birds in the bush, that fixed intensity, his concentration focused at the point where the car humps merge into impenetrable wetland scrub. She peers into the moon-washed darkness, curious. “What are you looking for?”

  He gives no reaction, no sign, she might as well have ceased to exist.

  “Jug,” she says, irritable. She wades through ground cover, creepers, rotting matter, she crunches sticks and eggs as she goes. “What are you looking at?” And when he ignores her, she pummels his shoulders with her fists. He yelps, and throws her a brief startled glance, but whirls back again as though he dare not waver in his attentiveness. She has the creepy sensation that they are both being watched.

  “What are you looking at, for god’s sake?”

  “Them,” he says.

  “Who?” She batters him with her fists, years of rage, anxiety, helpless compassion all shouting through her white tight knuckles. “Wha’d’ya mean, them, you bloody loony?”

  He catches hold of her wrists. She can see he’s snapped out of it now. He’s with her again. He’s just Jug. “You see, Maggie,” he says quietly, “that’s why I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone. You’ll say drunk, loony, the DTs. It’s too big for that. It’s too –” He can’t even find a word.

  But she knows suddenly, intuitively, what he’s talking about. She has a sharp vision of a Melbourne dinner party, the usual little terrace house, cast-iron lace balconies. North Carlton, candlelit table, a whole roomful of elegance, brittle wit, and glibness. Maggie’s in mid-fl
ight, and all eyes are upon her, waiting. They are waiting for the laugh. And as for Jug … ? someone prompts, but Maggie has fallen silent. There’s a line she won’t cross. She has bumped into sacrilege and recognised it in time. I forget, she says politely. I forget what I was going to say.

  “Except maybe Liz,” Jug says. “I could tell Liz, but I won’t give her the satisfaction, me pride won’t let me. And I can’t tell anyone else.”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Maggie says. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  He puts out a hand to steady himself. “I got vertigo,” he says. “Comes and goes. Ever stood over a crack into nothing?”

  “Yeah,” she sighs.

  He holds his two hands up against the moon and brings them slowly together. He matches them carefully, palm to palm, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. “There’s two worlds,” he says, trying to explain something to himself. “They’re both as real as can be. They match exactly, so you can only see one at a time.” They both study his hands against the moon, a single dark silhouette. He could be someone praying, Maggie thinks. He sighs heavily. “They match exactly,” he says, “but they don’t fit.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

  He looks at her warily and she gestures with her hands, palms up. Who has answers? her shrug implies.

  He is assessing something. He reads her gestures and her eyes. He makes a decision. “I saw something,” he says.

  She nods.

  “But I can’t tell you. It’s too –”

  “I know,” she says. “It’s okay.”

  They watch each other for a long time in silence. Then she raises her hands, palms facing him, and he brings his up to meet hers. They sit there like two children, fingertip to fingertip, palm pushing lightly against palm, an imperfect fit.

  “If I told you …” he says gruffly.

  “You don’t have to tell me. It’s okay.”

  “If I tell you, you gotta promise –”

  “Cross my heart.” She licks an index finger and gestures over her breast.

  “It was before they sung me anyway,” he says. “It was just after me and Liz – well, I blew me top.”

  “Yeah, she told us.”

  “Didn’t mean to. And then afterwards, I just wanted to smash something. I climbed up on the steamroller. We had the first bed of gravel down, I wanted to crush it meself, I wanted to mash it in, flatten it. I saw Liz leave with her mob. Good riddance, I thought, and I moved ’er up to full throttle. You could hear the road crunching into dirt, it’s a good sound that. I was up there behind the wheel, and I suddenly had this giddy feeling I was on the spine of a razorback. Each side of me there was nothing. Nothing. I mean, if I moved, I could’ve fallen right off the world. And then I got this funny feeling on the back of me neck, this prickle, like when you know someone’s watching you.”

  He opens his eyes very wide, the pupils dilated. The moon, bright orange, sits behind his head like a plate. Maggie sees herself, twice over, in his eyes.

  “I turned around,” he says, whispering now, “and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, thousands maybe, just standing there with their spears in their hands, watching me. They didn’t make a sound. They were naked except for those little things they wear, and white bodypaint.”

  He clutches at his heart, a sharp pain grabbing him again. “It spooked me,” he whispers. “The way they just stood there watching. They never made a sound, but I knew what they were waiting for.”

  He looks at Maggie intently. “They are with us,” he said. “I never realised before, but they’re with us.”

  Maggie swallows.

  “I climbed down off the steamroller,” he says. “And I walked away. I never went back.”

  “Dad,” Maggie says gently. “Let’s go back to the house.”

  But he doesn’t want to. He stands there staring into the wetlands. “Alpha and Omega,” he murmurs. He seems to be sifting through clutter in his mind. “The first and the last,” he says. “The First Ones. The last shall be first.”

  Maggie tugs at his hand. “Dad,” she says.

  “Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,” he says, pulling at a creeper from the scrub of his Gospel Hall decade. He thinks he’s got hold of something. “And in those days, the last shall be the First Ones, and they shall be with us in the land.”

  “Dad, you’re mixing things up.”

  “Nothing fits,” he says, turning to offer his puzzled benediction. “That’s the problem, Maggie. Nothing fits. But I know what’s real and what’s not, and they are with us.”

  Litany for the Homeland

  A supernova is on its way, it is even now shopping through the galaxies of which there are millions upon millions, its arrival in our neighbourhood – so astronomers tell us – is long overdue, it is casually browsing in the Milky Way, entirely neutral, without malice or forethought of any kind, and it could drop in on us.

  On earth, our homeland.

  On Terra Australis, on Queensland, on Brisbane, on Newmarket Road, Newmarket, on the wooden house with its high ant-capped stilts and on the mango tree and on the spot below the frangipanis where I first made intimate contact with the heavenly hosts. This was a miracle. I was looking through my father’s telescope and gobbling light years like water.

  Under the frangipani tree at the age of seven, lost, homesick for Melbourne which had so recently been mislaid, bemused by the fact that I could clearly see the craters on the moon but not the beloved grandparents left behind, homesick under the frangipani and the Queensland sky, I collided with immensity, outer and inner, and with the great riddle of our foothold on the whirligig of space.

  A supernova is on its way and it could drop in on us.

  We take it personally.

  Among the galaxies, we are not city folk. Earth itself, this goodly frame … this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’er- hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it has been demoted since Copernicus and Kepler to the outer bush-league suburbs of the cosmos, our sun itself just a boon- docks firecracker, our whole solar system some 30,000 light years from the core of the universe. We are galactic hillbillies. Beyond the black stump is our address. The refulgent snuffing out of our entire planet, homeland of billions, would be nothing more than a third-rate piss-ordinary common little matchflare of a nova just one galaxy over, and we know it. Yet we place ourselves front and centre. Still the galaxies wheel around the hub of our own buzzing heads. This is home, we presume to say with touching and ridiculous hubris, sticking a pin into a spinning ball in the margin of the margins of the void.

  In margins and in longings: this is where all homelands begin.

  Once upon a time a mapmaker doodled in the edges of his maps, and wished a place into being and dreamed up “The Arguments for the Existence of Terra Australis, 1764”: Having shewn that there is a seeming necessity for a Southern Continent to maintain a conformity in the two hemispheres, it rests to shew, from the nature of the winds in the South Pacifick Ocean, that there must be a Continent on the South.

  And so there was.

  Captain Cook, with sextant and compass, bumped into it and traced its bumps onto paper.

  Yet homeland exists before and after maps. The Great Unknown South Land, wished onto the blank spaces of cartographers’ knowledge, was already home to Sam Woolagoodjah’s people:

  The first ones, those days,

  shifted from place to place,

  In dreamtime before the floods came.

  We, the visitors, all of us, those who came in 1788 and those who came later and those who came last year, we the visitors acknowledge the presence of the first ones brooding over and under and before and after all our maps, those first ones who are still with us in the land, all of us together in the margins of the Milky Way, all of us passin
g through, both latecomers and first ones, those Wandjinas, bird Wandjinas, crab Wandjinas … She the rock python. He the kangaroo, all those ancient ones on whose flesh and river-veins we latecomers have so recently presumed to tread, to set up camp, to speak of home.

  Have mercy upon us for we have been crude and arrogant guests and have given much offence.

  Have mercy upon us.

  Now you see nothing is made up,

  Each father has been told what happened:

  How Wandjina Namaaraalee made it all

  How he sent the flood

  How he said no.

  First ones and visitors, we shift from place to place, we build homes, we construct a homeland, we deconstruct it, we make and unmake, we wander from past to future for here we have no continuing city but we seek one to come, we wait together for the bush fires, the floods, the wars, the supernova, the millennium, the Second Coming, for Wandjina Namaaraalee to send again the great deluge that will sweep us back to the Dreaming where the first ones are, world without end, amen.

  And it came to pass in those days, the days of childhood under the mango and the frangipani trees, that a wild boy beckoned from the back fence to the girl with the telescope. The fence was soft and rotten and choked with passionfruit and crucifix orchids, and the boy pushed his head and shoulders between the palings and crooked his index finger. He had glittering eyes.

  Beyond the fence was paddock. In the middle, where footballers trampled Saturdays and Sundays into dust, the paddock clung to its legal but provisional state; its thick margins had already slid back under bush. Unnameable acts, thrilling, dangerous, illicit, were said to take place under cover of tea-tree scrub, even during daytime, even during soccer games, even Sundays. Secrets bred there like rabbits. When the girl with the telescope put her ear against the fence palings, she could sometimes hear a murmur of voices and low throaty laughter, and the rustle of all that was forbidden. The bush pressed up against the fence, forever threatening to cross the line, forever sucking the backyard out between the palings.

  “Come into the paddocks,” the boy enticed. “Come and play with me.”