North of Nowhere, South of Loss

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “At least you’re here. At least you’re still with us. It’s all that matters.”

  “How can you say that? It’s not all that matters. My research is the only thing that matters. But I’m picking up speed again, thank God. The thing about being at the edge of a breakthrough, Philippa, is you wake with an idea and it’s pure adrenalin. It’s like the scent of fox to a hound. You’re off after it come hell or high water.”

  Philippa gropes for the sound coming out of the dark. Where is she? The sound is too bright, too hurtling. She is on a night train, that much is clear, there is rush and a grapeshot of rain against the windows. The speed at which she is travelling is so great that her body has come unfastened and slipped off her shoulders like a loose jacket caught in a slipstream. She clutches at it convulsively.

  I’ve got it, Brian says. It’s okay, don’t panic, I’ve got it.

  I can’t breathe, she gasps. Where are we rushing?

  Into the tunnel, he says. There’s no way out.

  Philippa sits bolt upright in the dark, her hands frantic to shut off the sound. Brian! she calls, panicked.

  I’m sorry, he says. I couldn’t stop.

  “Brian?” she says. “Brian? What? Who is this?”

  “Philippa,” a voice says. “My name’s Yvonne. We met once, years and years ago. I’m Brian’s wife. Well, his former wife. His former second wife.”

  “What’s happened?” Philippa asks faintly.

  “It’s bad news, I’m afraid.” The voice reverberates, unclear, like announcements at airports. Philippa is floundering. She catches only the peaks of words. Coma … barricaded himself in his own study at home a week before he was found . miracle . touch and go, but a very slim chance he may pull through. “I’m at his bedside in intensive care now,” Yvonne says. “He wants to talk to you. He can’t speak, but he’s conscious, and he knows I’ve got you on the line. Will you talk to him?”

  Philippa nods.

  What she hears: exertion; a rush of noisy breathing like a broken bicycle swooping down a hill. What she sees: the funnelweb spider’s eye.

  Philippa can’t speak. Brian, she pleads, but she is sobbing. Don’t go. Please don’t go.

  She can hear Brian’s voice straining to escape from its leash, frothing like a tied-up hound at the scent of fox.

  “Brian,” she says tenderly. “It’s okay. I’ve got everything. I will cherish it. I’ll try to make it make sense. Safe voyage, mate.”

  She waits until his train pulls out of the station and slips into dark.

  Sometimes, when it is after midnight there, Philippa dials the number of Brian’s lab at the University of Melbourne. No one ever answers. They’ve retired your number, she tells him.

  She says: I can’t write your death. Not yet. The details are too terrible. But I keep your life in a jewel-box lined with silk.

  It’s a mess, he says. Always has been.

  A rampant luxuriant mess, she counters. I don’t want to tidy it up. It’s dear to me the way it is. But I’m working on gaps in the mourning chain. You were right about that.

  I was right about everything, he says. Always. Before anyone else.

  You were always impossible, she sighs. And extreme. Your death was extremely untidy.

  I’m sorry about that, he says. The brakes failed. That’s all I remember. I remember going into the tunnel, and after that …

  Sometimes – quite often, in fact – Philippa wakes in the middle of the night. She hears a telephone but when she answers the caller has already hung up. She lies awake, waiting.

  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 fran-gipani 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’erhanging 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 boondocks 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 passing 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.”

  “I’m not allowed.” The girl with the telescope recognised the boy. She knew him from school. He was utterly disreputable, he was caned every single day, but he doesn’t feel a thing ran the playground legend, because the boy always grinned, jaunty, when he came back from the headmaster’s office. It was said that he tamed flying foxes and kept them as pets, it was said that he could fly, it was said that he could travel underground and pass through walls and that he had a magic protector, a guardian angel maybe, or maybe a devil, who held an invisible shield between his backside and the cane. He was bad. All the teachers and all the girls said he was bad. His name was Paddy McGee.

  Paddy-with-his-head-between-the-palings laughed. It was a low, wicked, irresistible sound. His glittering eyes pulled at the girl. “What’s yer name?” he demanded.

  The girl searched for a name. “Stella,” she said at last, because she had the stars at her fingertips and she had been studying maps of the sky and she was someone else now, not the girl she had been in Ballarat where her grandfather had pointed out the planets and named them, and not the girl she had been in Melbourne, and she certainly didn’t want to be the girl she was at her new Brisbane school. She was reinventing herself.

  “No it’s not,” the boy said. “You’re new. Where’re ya from?”

  “I’m Stella,” she said stubbornly. “I’m from the moon. You wanna look?”

  The boy smiled his dangerous smile and she smiled back (she knew she had crossed a line), and he wriggled through the fence and joined her under the frangipani tree and she held the telescope for him. He was filthy, he gave off a musky bush smell, and where his hand touched her arm it burned her in a damp feverish way.

  “Can’t see anything,” he said.

  She turned the focusing ring with trembling fingers. “You will,” she promised. “You have to get it focused right. Tell me when.”

  “Holy Jeez!” he said. “Struth!” Every word could attract a bolt of lightning from God, yet he lived, he breathed, he laughed his wicked and jaunty laugh, he was a miracle of fearlessness.

  “What can you see?” she asked.

  “Craters and stuff, holy Jeez!” He laughed in a breathless excited way and turned on her his glittering burning eyes. “Hey,” he said. “You’re okay for a sheila. You got guts.”

  At school, he meant. The taunting, he meant, and the other stuff, the bullying. She didn’t think she had guts at all, she was terrified.

  “I go for guts,” Paddy McGee announced, placing the telescope down in the thick unmowed grass. “I came lookin’ for ya. I followed ya home.”

  She knew this meant she was marked, just as he was. She knew this meant he recognised the mark on her, and that it was somehow visible to everyone at school.

  Through the open neck of his shirt, she could see the dirty silk cord around his neck and the gold chain and the delicate little gold cross. “What’s that?” she asked, touching the cord with an index finger.

  “It’s me scapular.” He took hold of her wrist and licked her finger with his tongue. “Come into the paddock,” he said. “There’s some good trees to climb. You wanna catch tadpoles with me at Breakfast Creek?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I reckon.” And recklessly, heedlessly, she went. She climbed through the fence with the boy who was half-wild and only half-tamed, and crossed into no-man’s-land, and that was where she sensed she belonged.

  Something there is that doesn’t love a boundary line. In the medieval Books of Hours, people step out of goldleaf miniatures and into the margins and sometimes right off the page. Falcons and hounds and pheasants and antlered deer, marginal to the Holy Offices for the day, outside the pale of theology, persist in nosing their way in from the white edges of the page to the text. And in response, as though lured by the exuberant outsiders, words put forth glowing tendrils, curlicues of Dominus, fronds of P and W and T which finger their way past the borders, past the rapture of martyred saints, into the white parchment margins where they swell and turn into gryphons, dragons, creatures of glowing crimson and lapis lazuli that are neither fish nor fowl, text nor subtext, not fully on this page and not quite on the next.

  These are my kin. They are always beckoning me to the mysterious space behind the word, between the pages, beyond the pale and the fence palings and the text and the sanctioned structures. Their eyes glitter. Listen, they murmur seductively: rules are for transgressing, borders for crossing. They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa. Censors and critics alike overlook the margins. In the margins one is ignored, but one is free.

  That is where homeland is.

  In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

  Down by Breakfast Creek where the warm water sucks at mangrove roots, Paddy McGee shows the houseboat where he lives. It doesn’t look like a house, and it doesn’t look like a boat. Stella is round-eyed with disbelief and an excitement she cannot quite name. To live in a creek, to live in something that can move away, to live, in a sense, nowhere, it suggests that seemingly immutable laws can be called into question.

  “But you can’t live in a creek,” she says, tugged at by the rules, by what is known and what is allowed.

  “Why not?”

  And she looks down a mirrored corridor of why nots? infinitely multiplying themselves and leading to who knew what possibilities.

  “Because.” She says it lamely, not really resisting, more than willing to be swept into a world where houses swim. “What’s your address, then?”

  “Breakfast Creek.”

  Paddy McGee, Breakfast Creek, Brisbane. Stella Maris, Crater Lane, The Moon. She smiles to herself, and Paddy McGee laughs, com-plicit.

  Sometimes (so he says) his Mum and Dad are there (though Stella never sees them), sometimes not. His Dad is mostly at the pub or the races, he says; his Mum is a barmaid at the Newmarket Pub. Most days he comes to school, but often not. On the days when he doesn’t go to school, she knows he will be waiting for her at the back fence, beckoning, and she will wriggle out between the palings into the forbidden world of bush and creek.

  “Oh,” she says vaguely when asked, “I was up in the mango tree reading a book.” She is famous, both at home and at school, for disappearing and for reading books.

  Paddy McGee never reads books, but he knows more than anyone she has ever met. He knows the saps of trees and their differing uses, he knows where tadpoles breed, he knows which ants bite and which don’t, he knows how to read the telltale flying-fox tracks in banana clumps.

  At school, he knows nothing.

  At school, Paddy McGee and the girl live on different planets and it would be quite impossible for them to speak or to
acknowledge each other in any way. They are absolute strangers at school, they never even look at each other. Nevertheless she is always conscious of him. Once, in the playground melee (she does not hear or feel these things any more, she goes away to another place inside her head, and it is said of her, as it is said of Paddy McGee, that she is made of wood, that you can kick her and she won’t feel a thing, and in fact this has become true; there’s a trick she has learned), during one of these times when things are happening and she is somewhere else, inattentive, she does become aware of Paddy tossing punches around and screaming Leave her alone, you bloody bullies, leave her alone!

  He is caned for this violent behaviour.

  On another occasion, for reasons unclear, one of the teachers, a rough giant of a man named Mr Brady, thrashes Paddy McGee to within an inch of his life, and the hushed class watches in fascinated terror as blood oozes from the purple welts on Paddy’s legs. The classroom building is high up, on stilts above the cool under-the-school where the children eat lunch, and Mr Brady, convulsed by some inner cyclone of rage, finally throws the cane across the room (its cuts inadequate to his fury), and picks Paddy McGee up by the shoulders . Paddy McGee being small and wiry, though tough as bootleather, teachers say. Mr Brady shakes Paddy McGee as though he were a stray tomcat and he holds him out the casement window.

  “I’ll teach you, you insolent filthy little mick,” thunders Mr Brady.

  A number of the girls in the class are crying with fright. Stella herself has moved right into Paddy McGee’s body, she can feel Mr Brady’s claws eating into his flesh, she can feel the sickening air below his dangling feet, she can feel the warm trickle when he wets his pants. Perhaps the still eye of his own storm reaches Mr Brady, or perhaps he hears the nervous shuffling of feet and the murmurs and the crying of girls. Quite suddenly he stops. He goes slack, as though the storm has exhausted him. He drags Paddy McGee back through the window and dumps him on the floor like a sack of sugarcane cuttings and orders gruffly, “Get back to your seat.”