Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Thirteen kids, all ages, in my school. They all come from another world. The kids at the Reef even more so; all utterly lost.

  Oyster hears voices, he says. Two things are abundantly clear to me: Oyster is extremely intelligent, and Oyster is mad. Quite mad. No, on the second point I waver. I was absolutely certain of it on first meeting; but circumstantial evidence to the contrary keeps unsettling me. How can it be that these young backpackers I keep meeting, these seekers, these best and brightest who drift in from Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne, from Europe and the States, how can it be that they are so drawn to him? What is it that draws them? Well, his eyes, I suppose, for one thing; though I find them chilling myself. Where do his voices come from?

  Mr Dukke vanKerk, or Mr Prophet as everyone calls him, once ran cattle on the High Veldt, I’ve ascertained. He saw certain writings on the wall, however, and moved on to a prosperous ranch in Oklahoma. He even went to the trouble of becoming an American citizen. Then, social change threatening to catch up with him even there, he decamped again to the cattle haven at the end of the line. He owns 250,000 acres and is now a born-again Australian, passionately opposed, naturally, to any changes in the constitution or the flag.

  Everyone seems to know, by osmosis, that Andrew Godwin’s middle son shot himself, and that Andrew is deeply mortgaged to one of those vast all-American hamburger corporations that own half of western Queensland and the Northern Territory these days. I learn these things from Pete when I push him hard for information; but he lets them out reluctantly. We don’t talk about stuff like that, he says. It’s not cricket.

  That, of course, is partly superstition. Since the bottom fell out of the wool market, sheep people everywhere are madly scrambling to switch to cattle as fast as they can, just as fast as they can get their hands on Simmenthal and Santa Gertrudis and Hereford stud. All those big spaces on the map that used to ride on the sheep’s back, as we all got taught in school, are letting the shearing sheds collapse and are turning to beef. Just about everywhere west of the Warrego is mixed now, sheep and cattle both, but some properties have managed the switch better than others. Nobody wants to jinx things by mentioning difficulties. So nobody comments that some American bank practically owns Andrew Godwin, hook, line, and ding-dong. That would be crossing a line.

  All year, I have been writing and mailing letters at the rate of knots. Lost cause. Letters becalmed in doldrums as I recently found out by accident. Post Office, what a laugh. Everything goes into black hole.

  Such original postal procedure, I must confess, has come as a blow, so have given up on letters, or rather, on mailing them, though still write them for reasons of sanity and calm. As for telephones, we do have them, though the servicing thereof is slightly bizarre, and a surf of static drowns all but a local call. Telecom linesmen and technicians do appear, but their vans have an alarming habit of combustion (the spontaneous variety, naturally: fierce sun, conducting metal, petrol tank; it must be faulty construction, people shrug; all these Telecom vans . . . they are probably Made in Japan).

  So. There do seem to be reasons for concern, as every paranoid person believes. Are my scepticism and self-mockery reassuring proof? How could such proof be said to be reassuring? So it goes. I consign myself to this journal and hope it’s just the extravagance of outback colours getting to my imagination. I’ve got a touch of the lurids, I tell myself.

  I told Jess I was keeping a journal. We all keep journals, she said, whether or not we write them down. I don’t quite know what to make of Jess, the way she only speaks when she chooses, which is practically never. What’s all this silence for? I asked her, and she, very loudly, said nothing.

  Why do I stay when I am afraid to know how this story ends? How do I think I would get out if I decided to go? I feel horribly pushed toward some grand and futile gesture. What more can I learn of Oyster and of Oyster’s Reef and of all of Oyster’s sad devotees that I will not regret knowing?

  Once upon a time, a young teacher (make that youngish), for various reasons of which she would prefer not to speak, answered an advertisement for a private posting in western Queensland. She took the train to the end of the line for an interview in Quilpie. (Quilpie! She should have known. She should have known.) After that she found herself lost – which was exactly what she was looking for – in Outer Maroo, where the object is not to be on maps.

  As for Oyster’s Reef . . . the object is not only to be off maps but outside time. The Oysterlings await, with mournful eagerness, the big bang, the crustacean shazam, the end of the world, and – according to Oyster – trailing clouds of zeros shall it come. But then, if old newspapers are anything to go by, people began to lace zeros and events a decade ago, and here we are, still, in the final decade but not quite at the lip of the turn, with signs and portents whizzing by, so who can tell?

  At any rate, the Apocalypse Kids have been arriving in droves, and most of those are still here. I think. I hope. When I say here, I do not mean in the town itself, though individual kids surface briefly from time to time, then vanish again. They always come into town in threes. They watch each other. I barrelled up to one such little trinity the other day and asked them why. The triangle is the most stable of forms, they said, and points in all directions to God.

  Triangulation, I told them, is a slow and most painful form of death.

  They did not even smile. They are terribly earnest. They live in the underground opal tunnels of Oyster’s Reef. Everything runs to excess out here, including the drought and this ghastly and omnipresent smell of death. The Old Fuckatoo, people call it, and it is pressing us hard. The whole town seems drugged.

  Time played its usual games with Mercy: it was not a line, not a circle, but a fog. Things happened, but it was difficult to fix them in a sequence. Her brother Brian, for instance, moved out to the Reef, she found it hard to be precise about when. And then Mercy herself, without intending to, went there briefly, but when was that? She was looking for Brian. She kept seeing her visit again, she kept seeing the Reef, it kept appearing to her, she kept seeing Brian, she kept seeing Susannah Rover . . .

  What would constitute a true mirage? she kept asking herself.

  ‘Jess,’ she said, dancing around a question, and the usual rush of silence, busy, foaming, swirled around us. You could see the crests of questions coming in, and the murky undertow of answers rushing back. They roped and braided themselves, they were never still, they were always moving away, their speed was quicksilver, dangerous, they could never be grasped. They threatened to drag her completely out of her depth.

  ‘Jess? If mirages are real . . . ? I mean, somewhere they are, aren’t they? So how would we know, Jess? I mean, if we saw something . . . if we thought we saw something . . . how would we know . . . ?’

  And how could she be encouraged to finish a question like that?

  ‘Jess, I want to tell you . . .’

  But mirages assailed her.

  ‘Except I can’t,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you what happened at the Reef, but I can’t. I just can’t.’ She covered her face with her hands. Her sobbing was very quiet and came from a long way down; it was like old air bubbling out of a mine shaft.

  ‘Lord, make me to know mine end,’ Mercy read from the lectern of the Living Word Gospel Hall. ‘Make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is, that I may know how frail I am.’

  She lifted her eyes from the page and looked out the window. Across the road, people loitered under the acacias with their hands in their pockets, or sat on the steps, or waited in an untidy line along the verandah. Mercy could see the lacework of their nervy intentions, the short shadows they made, the way the burning sun toyed with them, the way the red dust kept silting up their dreams. They were waiting for their turn. Their hidden fingers played with colour-shot stones. The blues and scarlets in the stones flashed like birdwings; they were never still. The people with stones in their pockets were waiting for Bernie. They waited for Bernie to weigh and ass
ess and pay cash.

  Less and less often now did the young foreigners come in from the Reef. When they did, they came in threes. Mercy kept watching for Brian, but never saw him.

  Oyster no longer trusted Bernie, it was said, and vice versa. He had a new middleman now: it was Andrew Godwin, some whispered; Dukke Prophet, others claimed. Or maybe Ma Beresford? All gossip raged unspoken, a matter of raised eyebrows, pursed lips, the significant pause. Alliances were shifting, that was certain, but no one was quite sure how. There were more people who no longer trusted anybody else.

  Below the reading shelf of the lectern, Mercy made O’s with her index fingers and thumbs. Miss Rover, come over, she prayed.

  She thought of asking the congregation: To what town was Miss Rover transferred?

  Teach me to know Miss Rover’s end, she thought of reading out loud. Teach me to know the measure of her days.

  She could hear, as she so often did, Miss Rover’s voice inside her head: the measure of days from any one event to another is determined by a slide rule, Mercy, and time is a trickster. So is memory, Mercy thought. Miss Rover hovered like a cobweb, almost visible, and sometimes Mercy could feel the fine silky touch of forbidden ideas. But more often Miss Rover began to seem like a wicked tale she kept telling herself, a perverse tale, a tale that smelt of vain questions, a tale that spoke of a spirit of rebellion which was punishable by . . .

  She made Miss Rover write her letters, though both of them knew these letters could never arrive. Miss Rover’s messages were long and witty and irreverent and encouraging and full of all kinds of illicit knowledge, and they were beautifully written in intricate sentences that Mercy wanted to wrap in crocheted cotton handkerchiefs to tuck up her sleeve. She often read these letters to herself.

  She did believe Miss Rover would post them, in spite of what they both knew of Ma.

  It would be an act of faith.

  Mercy thought of the actual messages, which she would never see, piling up in the Dead Letter Office in Brisbane, drawing attention to themselves, snaking whitely through the fascinated dreams of postal clerks until somebody, some day, opened them and read, because stories do insist on being known.

  But how old will I be? Mercy wondered. How long will it take?

  She lowered her eyes to the sacred text of the Psalms. ‘For a thousand years in thy sight,’ she read, ‘are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth . . . For all our days are passed away in thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told.’

  ‘You’ve got your head in the clouds again, Mercy,’ Ma Beresford said. ‘You dream up too many tall tales.’

  Why didn’t you at least let Miss Rover’s letters go out? Mercy wanted to ask her; why didn’t you take them to Brisbane and post them there? Because, she would point out, the rules should have been different. An exception should have been made. Miss Rover was a Queenslander, she wasn’t foreign at all.

  ‘Yes she was,’ Ma Beresford would say.

  Or perhaps she would say: ‘I don’t remember any Miss Rover. You made her up, Mercy. It is crazy, the things you make up. You always have your head in the clouds.’

  There would be reasonable grounds for this response. No one ever spoke of Miss Rover, who had vanished like the water from a creek; absolutely, that is to say, leaving behind her not even the sound of her name. For fear of such an answer from Ma, Mercy kept her questions locked in her fist. And so her days passed as a fitful sleep and as the grass which flourisheth (though only within the little sphere of an artesian bore and only on those properties which irrigate their scrap of lawn constantly) and then turneth brown and withereth under the relentless sun.

  ‘Mercy,’ Ma Beresford would say sharply, snapping her fingers, and Mercy would startle, lost. ‘Major Miner is waiting to be served,’ Ma might say. Or: ‘Do you think you could serve Mrs Godwin, Lady Muck, if I’m not asking too much.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mercy would say, embarrassed. ‘I was . . . I’m sorry.’

  ‘Head in the clouds.’ Ma Beresford would tap her forehead with a finger.

  ‘You must come and visit Alice, Mercy,’ Dorothy Godwin said, ‘before she leaves. I’m sending her down to boarding-school in Brisbane, I’ve made up my mind.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Ma was not impressed.

  ‘I know what you all think. And Andrew is opposed, but you don’t understand. This is no place . . . There are certain graces, you know, which can only be acquired . . .’

  ‘Tell Alice I miss her,’ Mercy said. ‘It’s been ages.’

  ‘Yes,’ her mother conceded. ‘That school business, that frightful business . . . She’s been too upset.’

  ‘Tell her . . .’ Mercy said, agitated, brushing words off her clothes, off the counter. ‘Tell her . . .’

  Mrs Godwin was flexing her fingers as though she had cramps, which always meant . . . ‘Yes yes, yes of course. Yes?’ she prompted. ‘Yes yes?’

  ‘Tell Alice . . .’

  Mercy watched the fingers of Mrs Godwin touching things, reading their surfaces, sliding them into her bag. This happened in slow motion. It was beautifully done.

  ‘And tell Alice . . . ? tell Alice . . . ?’ Mrs Godwin pressed.

  Mercy blinked. ‘What?’ she asked vaguely.

  ‘You see?’ Ma said. ‘Hopeless. I blame the Old Fuckatoo.’

  The Old Fuckatoo was roosting again. The drought continued.

  A work roster had to be set up. By first light, before the heat and the flies, teams in Land Rovers had to drag the livestock carcasses further away from the town. The smell of death seemed to settle in like a permanent resident.

  The Old Fuckatoo came and went. It came and drifted away.

  Mercy drifted.

  She watched for the young people from the Reef who came and went, who came and went, though less and less often, but when they did, Mercy sold them stamps, and touched the ink of their frailties with her hands, and drew the postal-bag drawstring of oblivion around them.

  ‘How much does it cost airmail to Boston?’ a girl asked. She had an American accent. She had bitten her fingernails raw. The other two Oysterlings, her watchers, were at the door. They hovered, picking up packets and putting them down. ‘I’m Amy,’ the girl said in a low voice, nervous. ‘I recognise you. You were out at the Reef for a little while, but then you got away, I don’t know how.’

  Mercy could feel a softness starting at her ankles, and then spreading, and she knew that in a second or so she would dwindle into nothing, she would simply leak away, she would disappear through the floor like the last waterhole in a creek bed seeping into sand. No, she wanted to say. No, that wasn’t me. She had to hold on to the counter.

  ‘Well, I do know how,’ Amy said. ‘But I mean I don’t know how you managed to –’ They both jumped. ‘There isn’t just this postcard,’ the girl said urgently, looking nervously back at the door. Her companions had let it slam shut and were on the verandah, but one of them watched through the glass.

  Mercy tried to speak but had to gesture behind her instead. Her gesture meant: there’s no one here except Jess, and you don’t have to worry about her, she won’t talk; but Ma Beresford’s out in the storeroom and she could come in.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said, flurried. ‘I’ll be quick. I’ve got these letters.’ She rummaged in her handmade sack, the kind the people from the Reef often carried, rough spun, embroidered with peace symbols and with pentacles and with the dire number 666, which was the Mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, and which was cancelled out with a fiery cross; there was also the Opal of Great Price in its oyster shell. The girl took out a slim bundle of letters tied together with green tape. ‘I haven’t got envelopes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to mail them. I was in here once before and I don’t know, I just had a bad feeling somehow fr
om that woman, that . . . Ma Beresford, isn’t it? I mean, she’s not very sympathetic to any of us, is she? She doesn’t like us. And there were other people here and I didn’t want to ask for envelopes, you know, in case . . . because we’re not supposed to send letters, we’re not allowed, just postcards. So I’ve kept writing these letters and hiding them and waiting to mail them. There’s not many, we never have time. The thing is, I have this feeling I can trust you, I don’t know why. Well, because you’ve been there, I suppose.’

  She looked at Mercy with intense pleading eyes, and Mercy’s eyes, also pleading, looked back. Don’t, Mercy’s eyes begged. Don’t, don’t, please don’t ask anything of me, please don’t count on me.

  ‘Because,’ Amy said, ‘do you remember that day . . . ?at the Reef . . . ? and Gideon was carrying you up the ladder to the meeting, and I was at the top waiting to go back down the shaft . . . it was the purest chance, you know, that we met, it was Oyster himself who sent me, who told me to go back and get . . . and anyway, at the top I took your hand and pulled and helped you out . . . and we looked at each other . . . ?’

  Mercy said nothing. Mercy thought she might faint.

  ‘I knew at that moment,’ the girl said. ‘Because, you know, I’d been chosen too. I’m one of his Special Ones, so I knew. And I knew our paths would cross again. I don’t know how I knew that, but I just knew. I knew everything would depend on you. It was like . . . I looked Gideon in the eyes, and I knew he knew it too. It was the first time I saw someone else out there admitting it to himself . . . that everything was, you know . . . that it was crazy . . .’

  Mercy felt as though the air were unsafe. It was heaving. It was curling her into waves. She felt seasickness, air sickness, coming on.

  ‘You remember?’

  ‘I don’t remember anything,’ Mercy said.