North of Nowhere, South of Loss
Page 25
But now the power has gone.
The power went hours ago.
Gladys has strung up the hurricane lanterns, and volunteers have been working in shifts to see the beer safely stowed in iceboxes on the wide upper verandahs. It’s party time. No worries, mate. As for the sandbags and sandbaggers, the train was last seen, glugging at the windows, going slowly under somewhere west of Muckadilla. No question, this is the safest place to be. The beer is safe, and high time too, with the years spilling over the Warrego embankment, the years welling up and over like the zeros in an old Holden odometer, the century shifting, the party in full swing.
Oh when the saints … plays the motley band (one trumpet, one bass, three guitars, four harmonicas tuned to four different pitches, one Jew’s harp, real drums, saucepan drums, about twenty people playing the spoons) … go marchin’ in … The cymbals, two rub-bish-bin lids, are banged with gusto by Noah O’Rourke himself.
“Marching? We’re gonna float across the New South Wales border,” sings Mike. “We’re gonna float to kingdom come. We’re gonna float into the next century, mates.”
Oh when the saints, booms the bar-room chorus, go floating in …
“Amen,” says Flutie. He watches Gladys coming downstairs with more beer. “Put that bloody tray down,” he calls. “It’s every man for himself now, let ’em nick up and get it for themselves.” He can feel a sort of bright madness in his voice, he can see it dancing above the heads of every last one of them, tongues of fire, disaster excitement. He takes the stairs two at a time, whisks the tray from Gladys, puts it on the landing, and grabs Gladys round the waist. “Come a-waltzing with me, Gladdie darling.”
He knows there’s no way in the world she can resist him. He can feel the revving like a dynamo, the cyclone of final possibilities gallumphing down from the Gulf of Carpentaria, an irresistible force that sweeps her down the last steps, past the bar, into the swampy space around the musicians. For just a half-second he feels her body stiffen, then she moves against him and with him. They’re both barefoot, everyone’s barefoot, and they stomp and splash like children at a wading-pool party. Big Bill, the Maori shearer playing guitar, leans from the dais and booms the words in their ears. Oh when the saints …
Go barging in, Gladys sings back, and Flutie hears again that edge of wild and dangerous pleasure.
In the mirror, he sees musicians turning into dancers, dancers leaping on stage to have a go on drums or at the spoons. If the water doesn’t weaken the foundations, he thinks, the stomping and clapping will. Any minute, the hotel could slip its moorings.
Oh when the saints … Flutie sing-shouts into the hollow in Gladys’s shoulderblade.
“How come,” she gasps, breathless, slapping up a fan of water with the balls of her feet, “they call you Flutie?”
“It’s my baritone, my incredible bloody beautiful voice.”
“Come off it.”
“Hey” he says aggrieved. “Listen. You’re talking to a winner of a Bundaberg eisteddfod. The nuns made me perform as a boy soprano, a fate worse than death. When me voice was breaking, I swung a punch at every kid who called me Flutie, but I never managed to beat off the name.” He puts his tongue into the dip of her shoulder. “You’ve been here five months. Six maybe? You run away from a husband, or what?”
In the mirror, he sees her throw back her head and laugh. Her bun has come loose and all her faded red hair flies free. She cannot stop laughing. Flutie thinks they might all drown in her laughter.
Now the ground floor has been surrendered, the revelry transposed up several notches. Although it’s far too hot and humid for sleeping, couples are disappearing into the rooms off the verandah. Flutie’s looking for Gladys. Pacing the old verandah boards, he can hear the fizz and spit of concentrated life, it’s like walking the deck beside a row of pressure cookers just before they blow. It’s sensible, he thinks, telling death to fuck off. Where’s Gladys?
At the verandah railing, interest in the swooping flotsam is intense. Will the milk can pass the bucking sheet of corrugated roof-iron? Will that green thing (is it the top of someone’s ute?) beat the fencepost down to Corones? Will the black water kiss the verandah in one hour, two, three, tonight, tomorrow night, or never? Bets are formally laid.
“Vultures!” Mike shouts, and yes, the whirlybirds are back but what are they dangling? Not cameramen. No. It’s a fat sausage-string of rubber dinghies.
They know something we don’t, Flutie thinks. The water’s still rising. In slow astonishment, because he has always, deep down, believed himself immortal, he says to no one: “You know, we just mightn’t make it.”
“Hey, Flutie!” It’s Big Bill, the Maori shearer, strumming his guitar at the railing. Flutie has traded punches with Big Bill on the issue of wide combs or narrow combs for shearing. He can’t believe his own life. “This is it, Flutie,” the Maori says.
“We gonna make it, d’you think?”
“Dunno, Flutie. This is it, the Big Water.” He plucks at the strings of his guitar. Oh when the saints … “Hey, Flutie,” he grins. “You remember that fight at Reardon’s shed?”
A funnel of laughter descends on Flutie like a willy-willy and sucks him inside. “The combs …” he tries to say. “We bet you Kiwis would never …” But his voice goes spiralling upwards, round and round, faster, faster, beyond the reach of his breath and into the high whooping grace-notes of absurdity. And Big Bill enters the funnel with him, they are dizzy with glee.
“Jesus,” Big Bill bleats, in pain with mirth. “You silly fuckers bet us … You fuckers claimed that New Zealand wool … You dumb fuckers lost your fucking pants”
Through the fog of vertigo and laughter, Flutie sees Gladys fishing for dinghies with a pole. He sets his compass and strikes out for her shore.
Gladys thinks that at last has come a day with real juice to it, a day she can sink her teeth into. God, how come the bloody water’s so cold when they’re all sweating like pigs from the heat? She’s got it now, she’s hooked one of the dinghies. She’ll have to share, damn it.
What she’d really like to do is stand in the dinghy and spread her arms and descend on New South Wales like one of the Furies, singing at the top of her lungs. Dimly she senses there’d be a letdown somewhere. There always is.
“Gladys,” Flutie says, encircling her from behind with his arms. “Tell me why you came here. Because there’s no time left, you know. You confess and I’ll confess. I wanna know the lot.”
“Jesus, Flutie.” She can’t believe men, she really can’t. Boss cocky to the very last second.
“Where’d you come from?” he persists. “Brisbane? Sydney?”
Because he can smell a city girl, yes, that’s partly what’s been grabbing him, that dazed state of the city slicker in the bush, that Where am I? What am I doing here? bemusement, he’s a sucker for that.
“Brisbane,” she says. “If you must know.”
What will she tell him? She ticks off items in her mind: married twenty-seven years, three kids all grown up and married, Mum dying of cancer in Toowoomba; and while she sits at Mum’s bedside, her old man buggers off with the neighbour’s daughter. End of story.
How boring, how embarrassing a life is, once it slides down inside the tacky skin of words. Cheap skin, sharkskin, vulgar. Who could bear to say them? They had to be shoved away somewhere, in a suitcase under a bed. Goodbye words, good riddance; because what you felt afterwards, after the disorientation, when your clumsy tongue got free of dead explanations, was an immense and intoxicating freedom. You felt like singing your new self without any words at all.
You felt like a snake discarding the skins of past lives, sleek, unimpeded.
“When Mum died,” she says absently, smiling, “I hopped on a train and bought a ticket for the end of the line.”
“Amen,” says Flutie.
“I didn’t bring any luggage,” she says. “No luggage at all.”
“Amen,” he says again. It doesn’t matter if
she tells him anything or not, they’re both end-of-the-liners. Compatible histories is something he can taste, and he moves his tongue into the warm currents of her mouth.
When there’s a space, she says mildly: “I don’t mind fucking you, Flutie, but I’m never going back.”
To a man, she means. To routine. To luggage. To intolerable ordinary life.
Then he realises, of course, it’s her sheer indifference, her unreachability, that’s been driving him crazy.
“Hey” he says sharply. “Hey, your dinghy!” – because floating rubble, like a tank on the move, is ramming the rubber boat against the railing, ramming the lattice, ramming the shipwrecked verandah, oh Jesus, are they in the water or swamped on the deck? Chaos. He swallows an ocean. Verandah posts approach, an anchor holds, he is wrapped around something vertical and he can see her scudding out of reach, body-riding the dinghy like a surf-board queen.
“Gladysssss …!” He dingo-howls across the water.
She waves, or so he wishes to believe. Yes, she waves.
Gladys waves. But what she is seeing is the swooping green of the mango tree in Brisbane. The leaf canopy parts for her and she keeps flying. She is on that wild delicious arc of the swing, soaring up, up, and out from the broken rope. A sound barrier breaks. There are shouts, but they reach her only faintly through the pure rush of bliss, they are a distant and wordy murmuring of bees in mangoes.
We begged you not to swing so high … We told you the rope was frayed, we warned, we warned, we promised we’d fix it but you just can’t wait, you can’t ever wait, you foolish stubborn little girl … you wilful impetuous … Buzz buzz to reckless ears.
“I don’t care! I don’t care!” she shouts. She has flown beyond the farthest branch of the mango tree, she is higher than the clothes line, euphoria bears her upward, she is free as a bird. Any second now the broken legs waiting on the lawn will come rushing to meet her, but she doesn’t care. This is worth it.
She waves. But all that comes back to Flutie is her laughter, the wild clear rapturous sound of a child on the last Big Dipper.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Seven of these fourteen stories appeared in Collected Stories: 1970–1995 (University of Queensland Press, 1995), which includes Hospital’s first two collections (Dislocations and Isobars) plus the seven stories marked below with an asterisk.
Details of original publication of stories (sometimes in slightly different form):
✻ “The Ocean of Brisbane” in Outrider, vol. X, 1993, no. 1 (Australia)
✻ “North of Nowhere” in Nimrod, 1993 (USA)
– Also included in Best Short Stories in English, 1994, edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1994; NY: Norton, 1994)
– Also in France as “Au Nord de Nulle Part”, trans. by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in Revue Le Serpent à Plumes, #28, été 1995
✻ “For Mr Voss or Occupant” in More Crimes for a Summer Christmas, edited by Stephen Knight (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991)
✻ “Unperformed Experiments Have No Results” in Eureka Street, vol. 3, no. 10, 1992 (Australia)
– Also included in Best Short Stories in English, 1992, edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1992; NY: Norton, 1993)
– Also included in The Best of Best Short Stories 1986-1995, edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1995)
– Also in France as “Ces Expériences qu’on n’a jamais faites”, trans. Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in Revue Le Serpent à Plumes, #23, printemps 1994
✻ “Our Own Little Kakadu” in Ormond Papers, 1994 (Melbourne, Australia)
“Cape Tribulation” in Westerly, vol. 42, no. 4, 1997, pp. 16-25 (Australia)
“Flight” published in French, as a novella, under title of “L’envolée” trans. by Mimi Perrin. [Commissioned for a select literary series called “Le Miroir Etoilé”] (Paris: Editions Solal, 1995)
Subsequently published in English in Cheatin’ Heart: Women’s Secret Stories, edited by Kim Longinotto and Joanna Rosenthall (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998)
“Frames and Wonders” in Literary Review (USA), fall 2001 (Nominated for a Pushcart Prize)
“Nativity” in Nimrod, vol. 44, no. 2, summer 2001, pp. 155-71 (a finalist for the Katherine Ann Porter prize in fiction)
“Credit Repair” in Hecate, vol. 28, no. 1, July 2002
“Night Train” in Antipodes, summer 2000 (U of Texas, Austin)
✻ “Litany for the Homeland” in Homeland, edited by G. Papaellinas (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991)
✻ “The End-of-the-Line End-of-the-World Disco” in Millennium, edited by Helen Daniel (Penguin, 1992)
– Also included in Best Short Stories in English, 1992, edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1992, NY: Norton, 1994)
– Also in France as “Club Terminus au Bout du Monde” trans. by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in Revue Le Serpent à Plumes, #30, printemps 1996
First published 2003 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.uq.edu.au
© Janette Turner Hospital
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Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942– .
[Short stories!
Collected Stories
New ed.
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 9780702256004 (ePub)
OTHER FICTION BY
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
CHARADES
This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland’s Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital’s characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning Scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-held secrets of her family origins.
“A journey of strange and beautiful complexity through some of the finest prose being written anywhere today.”
Toronto Star
“Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength – ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story – and in Charades throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism.
I loved it!”
Fay Weldon
ISBN: 0 7022 3388 9
THE LAST MAGICIAN
This superb novel is richly textured and intellectually challenging, a tour de force from our most elegantly seductive writer.
The last magician is Charlie, the photographer, who monitors and records everything as he seeks the silent Cat through physical and emotional infernos. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest. But a death intruded on their charmed circle, binding them to complicity and silence.
Decades later, festering memories seep through into the present, in the same way as the desperate underside of a corrupt Sydney breaks through into tidy lives and well-kept secrets.
“Spellbinding reading, an adventure of the mind and heart that enthralls from first page to last … Haunting, disturbing, subversive.”
Newsday, New York
“The real magic at work here is the writer’s … an ambitious, intense and satisfying book.”
New York Times Book Review
ISBN: 0 7022 3401 X
BORDERLINE
A meat truck is intercepted at
the Canadian-American border, and a group of illegal immigrants is removed. Felicity watches from her car, and talks with Gus who is also waiting in the queue. When they realise a woman has been left behind, they impulsively smuggle her across the border. La Magdalena will change their lives irrevocably.
In this, her third novel, Janette Turner Hospital transforms a thrilling and suspenseful story into a deadly resonant parable for our times, leaving her readers not just entertained, but enriched.
“Janette TurnerHospital is a stunningly stylish writer who turns almost every chapter into a virtuoso performance … this is a very clever, very fascinating book which should not be missed.”
Brenda Little, Australian
“This book is brilliant in its several meanings: sparkling, intelligent, distinguished…Hospital is in complete and wondrous control of her material.”
Shirley Streshinsky, San Francisco Chronicle
ISBN: 0 7022 3400 1
THE TIGER IN THE TIGER PIT
Like the rare Blue Wanderer butterfly, Emily Carpenter is never still for long. She flees emotional commitment, despite the longing of her eight-year-old son for family, and for the easygoing sheep farmer with whom she once found peace.
While Emily’s eccentric mother works to reunite her scattered children, her once tyrannical father does his own scheming, made “irritable as the tiger in the tiger pit” by old age and regret. The scene is set for dramatic confrontation and unexpected revelations.
Janette Turner Hospital explores her fascination with the interweaving of time and place and displays the superlative skills as a storyteller that have won awards and critical acclaim for all of her published books.
“One feels the rush of life in her pages … a writer of remarkable talent who writes about family relationships with rare insight and compassion.”