Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘Where yer from?’ Bernie asks.

  ‘Brisbane,’ Nick says tersely.

  ‘Brisbane?’ Tell that to the marines, the tone suggests.

  Nick takes a mouthful of beer and says nothing.

  ‘Brisbane,’ Bernie says again, derisively.

  ‘That’s right, mate. More or less. North coast, to be precise. Noosa Heads. I own a small –’

  ‘Before that, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, all over the bloody shop, mate,’ Nick says lightly. ‘Born in Melbourne,’ – it is only slightly a lie; only seven years out – ‘yeah, started out in Melbourne. But after that, all over the bloody shop.’ At least he has learned that much in Australia, how to play verbal cricket, how to deflect questions off the side of the bat, how to swim unseen behind words the way Australians do, so that interrogation slides away like water off a duck’s back, no feathers ruffled, not his own nor those of anyone else. He can feel the air in the room shift, in fact. He can feel that a small wary space has been made for him. The right idiom, the right pinch of slang, the right pattern of intonation, these are like the right caress of Aladdin’s magic lamp. Open Sesame, they say.

  Not that being born in Melbourne would help all that much up here. It’s difference that Australians hate, he thinks; Melbourne or Athens, they’re much the same to people out here.

  Bernie pushes a somewhat grubby sheet of paper and a chewed ballpoint pen across the counter. ‘Fill ’er out,’ he says. ‘For the room. What’s yer name?’

  ‘Nick.’ He prints just the four letters. He even thinks of himself that way now, especially at Nick’s Taverna, classiest restaurant in Noosa Heads, serving Greek cuisine, and written up in Places to Eat in Australia. ‘Nick McCree,’ he says, and prints it in block capitals, since Nikos Makarios on a bar chit does not help matters anywhere, and certainly not between the Warrego and the Barcoo.

  ‘Irish,’ Bernie says, reading upside down, his voice dry. He raises his eyebrows and looks around the pub and pushes his tongue into one cheek. ‘Irish. Now, who’d’ve thunk it?’

  ‘Only on my father’s side,’ Nick says, unruffled. Reel them in on their own superstitions; hook them on their sanctities. The savage taste of the satire improves the beer. He feels better by the minute. (It’s in our blood, his grandmother reminds. Disasters flock and call to us like sirens, but one person in each generation has the luck of Ulysses. You have it, Nick. You will often be scorched, but never burned.) It is absurd, he gives not a minute’s credence to these family superstitions, but he has always, nevertheless, been sustained by a quite magical belief in his own luck and his own invulnerability. ‘Never knew the bastard,’ he says.

  ‘Oh well,’ Bernie offers uncertainly, and again Nick can feel the slight shift in the mood of the room. Absentee fathers are something they know about. Bernie wavers and then extends his hand. ‘Bernie O’Donoghue. The room’s not much chop, I’m afraid, but the tucker’s good.’

  Bernie does not ask what has brought Nick McCree to Outer Maroo, and Nick reads ominous meaning into the absence of the question. He feels his luck hesitate for a moment and turn a queasy somersault, colliding with the doomed fortunes of Angelo. Of course it is all nonsense, his grandmother’s predictions. He can never shake their hold on him. He is made profoundly uneasy by the failure of Bernie O’Donoghue, publican west of nowhere, to ask what a man with a ridiculous Irish name and a Greek face and a faded Melbourne/Greek accent is doing in this fly-blown place. It is not as though strangers would wander into such a townlet every day. He can feel the unasked question like a tic at the corner of one eye. He can feel a pulse beating at his temples. He wants to push for the question to be asked.

  ‘I’m on me holidays,’ he offers, getting the wrong grammar carefully right. ‘Fossicking around.’

  Fossicking for what? he wants Bernie to ask, but Bernie is cleaning the counter with a cloth. Fossicking for information, he might answer Bernie. Or might not. Fossicking for whatever is hidden, he might say lightly. Fossicking for whatever it is you are covering up in this god-forsaken hole. No, these impulses are outright stupid because it is dangerous to show your hand in outback poker. There are altogether too many abandoned mine shafts round about, too many ex-army types with a thing about explosives and a craving to blast boulder opal from any stretch of ironstone rock, too many people with nothing to lose. At night the people with nothing to lose can hear the black tunnels cooing to each other: sing a song of opal, of nowhere, of oblivion; send us your foreigners, the strangers in your outback ports; send us your desert sailors, let them listen to our siren song.

  He has gone too far. He has not gone far enough.

  ‘Gotta be a better way of making dosh than running a restaurant in Noosa, eh mate?’ he prods Bernie. ‘Heard there’s opal lying around out here for the taking.’

  Bernie squints and holds a pint pot up to the murky light. He considers. He spits on the outside curve of the glass and applies his polishing cloth. He decides in favour of the larrikin and putative Irish father of Nick McDoubtful. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Cost you in sunstroke and dehydration, but.’

  But. Nikos Makarios makes a note. Remember to throw in a few floating terminal buts, play your Queenslander card. Should have done it already.

  ‘We get a few suncrazed bushies staggering in,’ Bernie says. ‘From time to time.’ He lifts up another pint pot, squints, spits on it, applies his cloth. ‘Sometimes they got a floater or two, and sometimes they got nothing but potch, and mostly they just got ravings about seams no one can ever find again. You wouldn’t believe the number of fabulous finds that have been sworn to.’ He laughs. ‘Seams thick as a man’s arm, and long as the drought. And never set eyes on again.’

  ‘Like Oyster’s Reef?’ Nick says lightly.

  In the mirror behind Bernie O’Donoghue, he sees all the heads turn, sees the stillness. The mirror is smoky amber. It is pocked with black spots where the silver backing has gone, blistered by dryness, scratched, chewed by insects. These irregular non-reflective spaces seem important to Nick. He can hear the silence of the watchers gathering strength. A man could walk into a bar and disappear, he thinks. He could fail to walk out again, and who would know?

  He can smell the tension, the hostility.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  He has thrown away the advantage. Was there ever any point in having the advantage? Did he ever, in fact, have it? Did they ever believe in a streak of Irishness in him? In spite of himself, he feels a prickle of pleasure along his skin. There is something in him that loves brushing up against danger, loves the feverish touch of her hot whore’s body. And he believes in his luck. He believes he is immortal.

  Bernie busies himself with a tray of glasses. ‘Heard that one, have you? Must have gone halfway round the bloody world, that tall story.’

  ‘I read it in the Sun, but,’ Nick remonstrates. ‘Some journalist bloke who said he’d been there.’

  Bernie lifts his eyebrows. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Read all about it. Werewolves in Brisbane, flying saucers in Alice Springs.’

  ‘Some journalist bloke from Melbourne,’ Nick insists.

  ‘Melbourne,’ Bernie says, rolling his eyes. ‘That’d be right.’

  One of the men leaning against the counter shifts his feet, and twists himself toward the visitor. Nick stares straight ahead, watching the mirror behind the bar. The man has eyebrows like unkempt brushes that meet the downward droop of his curls. Nick imagines them scraping the rim of the Akubra that the man has placed on the bar. He has the face of a beautiful boy grown middle-aged, grown both sly and slack, gone prematurely to seed. Cow cocky, his body language says, speaking the easy sprawl of entitlement. At the forward peak of the crown of his Akubra there is a hole, about two inches in diameter, jagged at the edges – as though rats, or some inner obsession perhaps, have chewed their way out from his hair. Beneath his ferocious eyebrows, his cow cocky’s eyes are ferret-bright.

  ‘Where’s the sheila?’ he asks.

 
Nick turns from the mirror and stares at him.

  ‘The sheila on the truck,’ the man says. ‘The looker. The bird in the white dress.’

  ‘Got yer eye on ’er, eh, Andrew?’ Bernie laughs. ‘Got the old shearing shed in mind?’

  ‘Gave it a thought,’ the man says.

  Nick inscribes a circle on the bar with the bottom of his beer stubby in order to ward off her perfume, but wisps of it, like fog, appear from nowhere and eddy under the edges of this manoeuvre. He can see her shoulders, the soft skin puckered slightly against the white straps. She reminds him of his wife, his ex-wife, now why is that? She reminds him generically. She reminds him of the image he had (so wildly wrong) of his ex-wife when he married her. He feels angry. People like that, people like her (the woman on the truck) and his ex-wife (as she seemed to be) and Angelo, they should be locked away in isolation wards. They should be quarantined. There is something dangerously infectious about them. They get themselves into trouble too often, and their indifference to their own fates makes too heavy a demand.

  Everyone is looking at him, apparently waiting for an answer.

  What was the question?

  ‘Eh?’ he says blankly, meeting the cow cocky’s eyes.

  ‘The sheila, mate. Where’d she get to?’

  ‘Beats me, mate,’ Nick says. ‘Don’t even know her name.’

  ‘Bloody waste of a truck ride from Quilpie,’ someone offers, and everyone laughs. The laughter is raucous and does not quite cover several ribald suggestions.

  ‘You been here before?’ the man demands, studying him intently.

  ‘You must be joking.’ Take the offensive, Nick thinks. They recognise that. They respect that.

  ‘Coulda sworn I’d seen you,’ the man insists.

  Nick thinks, with a lurch of excitement: he is remembering a family likeness, he sees the shadow of Angelo’s face. Nick brings the tips of his index fingers together, separates them, touches them again. His fingers are steady.

  ‘Maybe I got a double, mate,’ he says. ‘They reckon everyone has.’

  ‘Don’t mate me in that poncey accent, mate.’

  Nick stays loose and lets the idea of molten steel run through his veins. He lets the steel cool and harden. He has never backed off from a fight, though he considers fights stupid and tedious. He used to box. He still plays rugby. He is not as fit as he would like to be, but he expects to come out of any fight as the winner. Of any fair fight, that is.

  ‘Maybe you have a relative,’ the cow cocky says. Private-school accent, Nick notes; but one that has gone loose at the edges, silted up with too many years of outback dust. Nick flicks one eye toward the mirror without turning his head. They are all waiting. ‘You have any relatives keen on opal fossicking?’ the cow cocky presses.

  ‘I have not had the habit to observe,’ Nick begins, and would like to spit on his stupid tangled words. Damn these grammar-book constructions, damn them, these old patterns that seep up because he is really nervous now, excited, on the brink of something. There is no question, now, that he has found the right town. He gulps at his beer. ‘I don’t keep tabs on my relatives,’ he says, levelling out, surfacing into Queensland vowels. ‘Not worth the trouble, and practically none of them in this country anyway, as far as I know. Well, yeah, a handful in Melbourne maybe. But most of me mad dad’s crew took off to America from what I can make out’ – he’s talking too much, he has to stop – ‘from what I hear on the family grapevine, that’s where they went, New York, their loss as far as I’m concerned, don’t know what they’re missing, eh? They’re all so busy trying to strike it rich over there.’ Talking too much, talking too much, for God’s sake, stop.

  ‘The luck of the Irish,’ Bernie says drily.

  ‘Yeah,’ Nick says. ‘The bloody luck of the Irish. I’ll drink to that.’ He raises his stubby. He sweeps it in an arc, embracing the room. ‘To the luck of the Irish.’ He drinks, but no one responds. No one moves. Without conscious decision or volition, he finds himself adding: ‘As for me, I’m gonna find Oyster’s Reef and get rich as sin. Gonna haul in opal by the tonne. I’m counting on me fucking Irish luck.’

  Bernie is absorbed in polishing a pint pot. After several long seconds, he says, ‘You’re gonna need it, mate.’ He reaches back and seems to be placing the glass tankard high in the mirror behind the bar, but turns out to be signalling someone. ‘Jess’ll show you the room,’ he says.

  Jess materialises out of the gloom. It is not clear to Nick where she comes from. She is simply there, waiting.

  Jess is stillness itself, Nick thinks, though he has the sense of something coiled, waiting to spring, under the placid mask of middle age; something sleek and sensuous, like a female tiger.

  Bernie says, as though speaking to someone slow-witted, or hard of hearing, or both: ‘Upstairs, Jess. The room with the sink. And show him where the dunny is, OK?’ To Nick he says (tapping his forehead): ‘Old Silence, we call her. Don’t take it personally.’ To Jess he says again: ‘Don’t forget to show him where the dunny is.’

  Jess gives no sign that she has heard. She seems to Nick to be suspended in a vacuum, floating, waiting for a button to be pushed. Everyone seems unnaturally still to Nick, though it is possible, of course, that the problem is one of perception and that the receptor nerves in Nick’s eyes and ears have gone into slow-motion cycle, or perhaps the nerve paths to his brain are partially blocked. Receptor nerves: would that be right? he finds himself wondering heavily. Where would he have picked that up? Why does he have this lethargic sensation of being underwater? Everyone is watching. It must be the heat. No one can afford a wasted movement.

  Someone over by the window says: ‘They’ve finished unloading the water. Himself is on his way, Bernie.’

  ‘Right,’ Bernie says.

  Jake Digby pushes disturbance ahead of him, there can be no doubt of this, since Nick can feel the soft buffeting of his approach fill the room and push against his skin in little shock waves. Something has definitely tampered with his sensory system, revealing, for example, the electric currents of anxiety in fizzing gold, like a run of sparklers, from head to head. Jess seems closer to his bar stool. He has the odd sensation that she is smiling at him, though in fact her lips are in a straight sombre line. He wonders if it is possible to be drunk on only two beers. Possibly; if one is seriously dehydrated from the desert air. When he slides off the stool, Jess nods and turns and he follows her.

  On the stairs, she turns and winks.

  Or perhaps he imagines it.

  LAST WEEK

  Monday Evening

  Beneath her fingertips, the texture of the gingham tablecloth speaks to Mercy of sorrow. She can feel anguish in the slender rolled hem. Each tiny impeccable stitch against the pad of her thumb has a history. To such labour Mercy’s mother now gives herself with passionate concentration, stitching and knitting, stitching and knitting, washing, ironing, cleaning, cooking, as though sufficient attention to detail on the smallest domestic grids might shift alignments elsewhere, might rectify something in the larger scheme of events.

  ‘Let us give silent thanks,’ Mercy’s father says.

  Into the heavy silence, the clock on the mantel chimes. Mercy can feel the weight of her father’s inability to pray pressing down on the dining room. The word for his face, she thinks, is ravaged. She tastes the consonants carefully: ravaged. They carry within themselves the sound of storms, the exhaustion of storms weathered. Yes, it is a good word, the right word. In a mysterious way, the exact word can slightly and momentarily ease her anxiety.

  Mercy studies the face of Sarah, whose eyes are politely closed, but whose lashes flutter a little against the curve of her upper cheek so that the pupils under the eyelids seem skittish and busy. Light and shadow dapple the room. The setting sun fills the sky with brash orange and floods the verandah and falls through the open doors and across the table and splashes the soft skin of Sarah’s hands. The hands are tightly clasped, the knuckles white. Is Sarah so
meone else who wishes she could pray? Mercy wonders.

  Perhaps not. Perhaps not. A regular non-observant Jew. What would that mean? Perhaps, like Miss Rover, Sarah would see prayer as a cowardly avoidance of responsibility and action.

  A belief in powerlessness is seductive, Mercy, and so is belief in a Higher Power. They both let one off the hook too easily.

  Since her departure, Miss Rover has taken up permanent residence as a sniper inside Mercy’s head. There are other snipers. There are the irreverent and earthy voices of Ma Beresford and Ma’s Bill. And the voices of the elders. And others, and others. Mercy is trapped in the crossfire. Also there are the clamouring voices of books, Miss Rover’s books and her father’s library, what used to be her father’s library, two different worlds. Is all this listening so exhausting for everyone, or only for Mercy? She feels like the conductor of an orchestra full of musicians who have run amok; they play discordant instruments; they have set up permanent and competitive rehearsal inside her mind.

  She follows the spill of light that flows over Sarah’s wrists and multiplies itself in knives and forks and white plates, and laps at the hands of Mercy’s mother, hands which are also clasped, but slackly, with the trust of a child. Her mother’s face has the kind of repose available only to the very young, the very innocent, the very old, and to those who have suffered a stroke. Which, in a way, Mercy thinks, her mother has.

  ‘Amen,’ Mercy’s father says.

  ‘Amen’ – a soft echo from her mother.

  Her mother rises and goes to the kitchen. When she opens the oven door, a blast of heat seems to displace all the air in the house. The filmy curtains at the windows lift and preen. Beyond them, wind-chimes peal softly.

  ‘It seems so strange,’ Sarah says, ‘to eat hot food in this heat.’