Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Sarah follows.

  ‘You let go,’ Amy says dully. ‘You didn’t hang on to him.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah says. ‘You can’t hold anyone against his will.’

  Amy’s eyes flash with anger. ‘How do you know it’s against his will? Sometimes people can’t say what they want, they just can’t. Sometimes they have to say the opposite of what they want.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you still can’t hold someone who won’t let you hold him.’ Or her, she does not add.

  ‘You didn’t try.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps I’m tired of trying.’

  Amy stares out over the lake. ‘So you’re leaving us,’ she says flatly. ‘I knew you would.’

  Sarah says nothing.

  ‘He’s probably fucking some graduate student,’ Amy says, working up anger again. ‘They’re probably having it off on the sofa in his office at this very minute.’

  Sarah watches Amy trying to convince herself. It is as though Amy hopes that sufficient rage exercised on his behalf might push her father back into a manic phase. On the other hand, it is possible that she is not aware of how critical things have become.

  Amy raises her voice, panicky. ‘And it serves you right. You don’t even fight. You don’t even try to hold on to him. That’s what you get for taking advantage of how lonely he was when my mother left.’

  Sarah is surprised by a fleeting urge to laugh. A memory of dazzle brushes her: Stephen as meteor, Stephen ascendant, Stephen as the man who always got what he wanted and who never took no for an answer, Stephen as perpetual motion machine . . . Who could have guessed how fragile, how tissue-thin, that costume was?

  Amy pushes out her lower lip. ‘My mother knew he’d never stay with you.’

  In fact, Sarah thinks wearily, sadly, as your mother would have known very well, and as we both know, Stephen, quite simply, cannot stay. Anywhere. With anyone.

  But then again, memory is so cunningly selective. Stephen moves from tick to tock and back again, but not regular as clockwork, not at all. He immerses himself, appropriately, in the mathematics of chaos. He swims in the fissures of existing logic, he dives into the great crevasses where paradigms shift. From time to time he fails to come up for air. This may be personal quest as much as academic discipline. He is trying to unravel the equations of his fractal life. In any case, not even Stephen himself can predict when his tick will turn to tock, and certainly not that delicate point when his pendulum will pause and quiver and reach again for the other end of his arc. Who knows if any given swing can be weathered?

  Amy, possibly, erases the tocks. She is careful not to remember them.

  Without forethought, and without intending to speak aloud, Sarah says: ‘Before your father . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Before Stephen . . . Yes, there was such a time. There must have been; though recovering it is like reading old teaching notes for a history lesson. Time is elastic, a function of the mind, Sarah knows this well enough. Even so, it is astonishing how far back ten years can stretch.

  ‘Well?’ Amy challenges. ‘Before my father?’

  ‘Before your father, I was your Grade 2 teacher. And now you’re about to go off to college.’ Sarah smiles. Maternal pleasures and anxieties keep catching her off guard. ‘Four acceptance letters! When are you going to let us in on the big decision?’

  ‘That’s for me and my father to discuss.’

  Sarah puts a hand up to her cheek, as though she has been hit with a stone. She notes that the paint is peeling again on the porch railings and decides that she must scrape them down tomorrow and coat them with sealant.

  ‘And what about you?’ Amy demands. ‘Where are you off to?’

  Sarah thinks there is enough sealant left in a can in the garage. She must check tonight, in case she needs to buy more.

  ‘What about you?’ Amy says, agitated.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Sarah shrugs. ‘I suppose I’ll move on.’ Afterwards. She almost says it, but stops herself in time. After whatever is going to happen, happens. ‘Before your father,’ she says, ‘I was a bit of a wanderer.’

  ‘A wanderer.’

  ‘You’ll always have my address and phone number.’ She is afraid of appearing to make demands that will scare Amy off. ‘If you want them,’ she adds.

  ‘A wanderer. Before my father, you slept around, you mean. And now you’ll do it again. Like a slut.’

  ‘That’s a silly word, Amy.’

  ‘Didn’t you.’ Amy does not inflect her voice. ‘Before my father.’

  ‘Not so much.’ It’s curious, Sarah thinks, to see an image of yourself in someone else’s frame. ‘But that’s one way of putting it, I suppose.’

  ‘And they never stayed with you.’

  ‘I think I never let them.’

  ‘Anyway’ Amy says, ‘you made one big mistake.’

  ‘I don’t regret anything.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Amy says softly. She walks naked the length of the verandah and back again. She sits on the steps and hugs her bare legs up against her breasts. ‘If anything happens,’ she says, ‘I hold you responsible. I want you to know that.’

  There can be no doubt, Sarah thinks, that cataclysm sends out shock waves in advance of a strike, and that those who are about to be most closely affected can sense the vibrations just as surely as a delicate seismograph can detect earthquakes before they arrive.

  ‘If anything happens to whom, Amy?’ Sarah asks quietly.

  Amy begins to weep, at first silently. Her body is hunched over, forehead against her knees, her shoulders move as though she were swimming to save her life. Strange sounds gurgle from her throat, louder and louder. The sounds of drowning, Sarah thinks, but she does not know how to offer comfort without offering offence. She moves from the porch swing to the steps and sits beside Amy without touching her.

  ‘It’s nobody’s fault, Amy,’ she says. ‘Not his, not mine, not your mother’s, not yours, not the fault of any of the other women, not his research. It’s like having cancer. Or like being damaged in a car crash. It’s just one of those rotten things that happen.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s not like having cancer. He can do something about it. Why doesn’t he stay on his medication? Why?’

  Sarah sighs. ‘It’s part of the condition, unfortunately. He believes he doesn’t need it.’

  ‘What about us?’ Amy sobs. ‘It isn’t fair.’

  ‘No.’ Tentatively, Sarah touches Amy’s long hair. ‘It isn’t fair. Especially to you. I’m so sorry, Amy.’

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Amy says. ‘Don’t you fucking touch me.’

  Sarah feels immeasurably tired, far too tired to move away from Amy, to move back to the porch swing. The loon floats its long plaintive note across the railings. Sarah feels that after whatever is going to happen has happened, she will need to sleep for a year or so, like Rip Van Winkle, and then she will wake up and perhaps she will be again the person she once used to be. The past ten years will be erased. Her life will continue as though those years had never been, and she will have slept off the dangerous burr of attachment.

  ‘I’ve decided I’m not going to college,’ Amy says abruptly. ‘I had accepted Wellesley already, but I cancelled and got the first term tuition refunded direct to me, not that Dad will notice. I’ve bought a round-the-world ticket with the money. I’m not hanging around waiting for him to decide whether to off himself or to win the Grand Slam of Mathematics. I’m going to India first. I’ve got a charter flight that leaves next week.’

  She stands and walks down the steps and keeps walking. Sarah feels dizzy with panic. ‘Your towel,’ she calls stupidly, snatching it up and running after.

  Over her shoulder, Amy says evenly: ‘I don’t want to know what happens. You can write if you want, on condition you never tell me what he’s done.’

  ‘Where will I write to?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Post offices. American Express offices. Wherever. If you want.’

&n
bsp; ‘Of course I want.’

  ‘I’ll send you postcards,’ Amy says. ‘If you want. So you’ll know which country I’m going to next. And which city.’ She is already at the end of the dock when Sarah reaches it. A pale gold light, faintly green, falls down through the leaves and spills from her shoulders, flowing down her back and over the curves of her buttocks, to puddle like wings at her heels. ‘I have to take off,’ she says, poised for flight, poised for diving, but not moving.

  Sarah can feel, with a certain amount of dread, the sticky future, the burrs of obligation, the rush of protectiveness spreading like a contusion below the skin. Love is a virus, she thinks fearfully. It lurks around like malaria. Just when you think you are extricating yourself, just when you think you are cauterised and ready to leave, it resurfaces. Once you’ve been infected, you’re never again completely free. It’s a lifetime condition.

  ‘Don’t let go of my string,’ Amy says in a little girl voice before she dives. There is scarcely a sound. Sarah sits on the end of the dock and watches the sleek white body underwater, smooth as milky opal shot from a bow. She shades her eyes and waits for a break in the surface. She waits and listens. Beneath her she hears a soft slapping against the pylons of the dock and she lies on her stomach and hangs over the edge, but sees only a water snake. ‘Amy?’ she calls. But there is no sign of Amy beneath the dock.

  Sarah scans the unruffled skin of the lake, and the clumps of bushes and low-hanging trees that lean into it here and there. She waits. Amy is a strong swimmer and a secretive one. Perhaps she has grown gills. Perhaps she is watching Sarah from the reeds. Sarah waits until she hears the thunder of Amy’s car thrashing its way back through undergrowth towards the road.

  ‘Amy!’ she calls, bounding up the slope, stumbling and slipping. ‘Amy, wait! What day do you leave? What flight?’ There is so much furniture in the way, and the verandah is the wrong way round. ‘Stop!’ she calls. ‘Stop the car, stop!’

  ‘Sarah, Sarah,’ Mrs Given says, fluttering. ‘They’ve stopped. But we don’t know who they are.’

  ‘I do,’ Mercy says. ‘I know the trucks. One is Donny Becker’s ute.’

  ‘I can’t see Amy’s car,’ Sarah says, blinking.

  ‘Donny’s working the new mine out at Jimjimba now,’ Mercy says. ‘The other truck’s Tim Doolan’s. It’s always parked outside the pub because he does opal-grinding for Bernie.’

  Sarah sees a battered utility truck, more or less white, and a rust-corroded faintly blue Mazda at the far end of the Givens’ drive, at that point where the bore-water-nourished oasis gives way to red earth. Dust is shifting around the tyres, and exhaust fumes fart upwards at intervals in blackish tufts. The cars are idling side by side, facing the house.

  ‘Where are the dogs?’ Mrs Given asks. ‘Oh, why don’t the dogs come? What does it mean?’

  ‘I’m going out to talk to Donny,’ Mercy says.

  ‘Mercy, no!’ Her mother clutches at her. ‘No. We will stay on the verandah and pray. The Lord will protect us.’

  Mercy extricates herself as gently as she can. ‘We don’t need the Lord’s protection, Mum,’ she says drily. ‘Donny and I are good mates. He’s probably come with a message from Ma Beresford, she must be back by now.’ Mercy’s tone is festive. She could be setting out to catch goannas again with Donny. ‘Maybe you should make Sarah a cup of tea,’ she says, over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh where are the dogs?’ Mrs Given moans. ‘What does it mean?’

  Mercy can see the men talking to each other through the car windows as they wait for her. Left foot, right foot, she has never realised how long the driveway is, Donny Becker would never hurt a fly, left foot, right, once he caught the most beautiful lizard that either of them had ever seen, quite tiny, with dark flashes of blue, like opals, on its scales, and he gave it to her, he put it into her two hands and his fingers brushed all the way up to her elbow and the lizard ran after his fingers, tickling the length of her arm and over her shoulder and slithering under her dress and between her breasts. She shrieked with embarrassment from the tickling, and Donny reached in and caught his lizard by the tail and took it out for her. But Mr Prophet saw them and they both had to confess at prayer meeting, and the whole congregation prayed that the works of darkness and of the flesh be cast out of them. Another time, in prayer meeting, Donny was next to her in the pew, and he ran his hand along her leg and no one saw. Mercy asked Miss Rover if she knew why everyone at the Living Word believed that God didn’t want people to touch each other. Miss Rover laughed and said: ‘I believe you will work that out for yourself very quickly, Mercy, in that sharp little mind of yours.’

  The soft crunch of Mercy’s sandals on the drive says Miss Rover, come over, come over and help me, I am trying to set it all down like you did, I am setting my left foot down, then my right, I am setting everything down. Miss Rover, come over, don’t let them see I’m scared, do not let Donny Becker and Tim Doolan see that Mercy Given is frightened because she can smell in the stillness of the air that something is not quite right, that something is definitely wrong, do not let them see that Mercy Given’s hands are beginning to tremble very slightly, because Mercy knows that fear is simply something she has made up, and she is going to unmake it, and she is determined to write the short history of Outer Maroo quite differently, she is going to change the ending, she is going to make it come out right, and that is why Mercy concentrates on her feet. She watches the bull ants scattering in paisley swirls around her sandals, she sends them into a frenzy with each step, they stream away from her like sprays of jet. She could lose herself in those mazy patterns, she could hypnotise herself.

  ‘G’day, Mercy,’ Donny says.

  ‘G’day, Donny. G’day, Tim.’

  Tim nods and says nothing.

  ‘What do you want?’ Mercy asks.

  ‘Hop in,’ Donny says. ‘I come to take you back to Beresford’s, Mercy. Ma wants to see ya. She’s back.’

  ‘Why didn’t she telephone?’ Mercy asks. She steps up to the driver’s door of Donny’s ute. There are beads of sweat above his upper lip. His suntanned arm, resting on the window frame, is almost touching her. She is very aware of the distance between her lips and his arm. She thinks of kissing it. She knows he wants her to. She can smell his pleasant Donny smell. His eyes rest on hers the way they did when he gave her the lizard.

  ‘How come Ma didn’t call me?’ she asks.

  ‘All the telephone lines are dead, didn’t you know?’ Donny swivels his eyes away and stares down the drive uneasily. ‘Hop in, Mercy. We gotta go.’

  ‘Why’s Tim here?’ she asks.

  Donny shrugs. ‘He was on his way to a stubby race.’

  Tim gets out of his car and stands behind her. ‘Get in, Mercy,’ he says impatiently. ‘My fan belt’s gone. Gonna have to leave my heap here, and come back. We’re both going back with Donny.’

  ‘My dad keeps spare fan belts,’ Mercy says. ‘Only he’s got them in the car, and he’s out at the Dempseys’.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tim says. ‘What’s he out there for?’

  ‘Because Grandma Dempsey’s dying.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tim says.

  ‘OK,’ Donny says, suddenly animated, relieved. ‘That’s that, then. Get back in your car, Tim. Let’s go.’

  ‘Doesn’t make any difference,’ Tim says. ‘That foreign woman’s there, isn’t she? That’s the main thing. Get in, Mercy.’

  ‘No,’ Mercy says, her heart thumping loudly. ‘I’m going to go back into the house to phone Ma first.’

  ‘No, you bloody aren’t,’ Tim says. ‘Because all the bloody phone lines are dead, we already told ya.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ She touches Donny’s arm with her fingertips. ‘What’s going on, Donny?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Donny says, not looking at her.

  ‘We bloody haven’t got time,’ Tim says, grabbing her and pushing her towards the passenger side of Donny’s ute. She kicks and struggles. Tim gets in the car, dragg
ing her with him. ‘Let ’er roll,’ he yells at Donny, but Donny is staring through the windshield, paralysed. ‘Will you give ’er an almighty jolt and get ’er rolling?’ Tim yells.

  ‘Let’s call it off,’ Donny says.

  ‘Are you crazy? And what’ll happen to us if we do? Ram the car, you fucking idiot.’ Tim is gasping with the effort of pinning Mercy’s arms. He knees her in the back and Mercy feels something like a ten-tonne bruise at the base of her spine.

  ‘Mercy, I’m sorry!’ Donny yells. ‘I’m sorry, Mercy, I got no choice. It’ll just be a fire, that’s all. They’ll get away.’ He reverses at high speed, manoeuvres, accelerates, and drives straight for the back of Tim’s car. There is a jarring crunch, and the empty car starts rolling slowly down the slight incline of the drive towards the house.

  Time changes then. The air changes. The light changes.

  Something strange happens in Mercy’s ears. Everything goes silent. Everything floats in slow motion.

  Mercy can see the intention ballooning in front of the windscreen, poised there like one of those floating balls of incandescent white light that drift from roman candles, she sees it hanging there, sees it in the rolling car, sees it in the anguish on Donny’s face and in the leer on Tim’s.

  ‘No one’ll get hurt, Mercy,’ Donny is shouting. ‘It’s just to make her leave.’

  ‘Teach your father a bloody lesson,’ Tim snarls.

  They are all three of them curled up and pressed against the dashboard from the collision, and now whiplash descends on them as a slow ballet. As they recoil, soundlessly, weightlessly, Mercy twists herself from Tim’s pinioning arms, reaches for the door handle, launches herself into air. She rolls and rolls. She is one complete ball of pain and gravel-rash. Her mouth is full of dust and she is watching the number plate on Tim’s car as it rolls towards the house.

  ‘No!’ Mercy screams. ‘Miss Rover! Jess!’ she screams, instinctively calling on the most powerful forces that come to mind.

  She can feel almighty strength rushing into her from somewhere, she rolls on to her feet and then she sprints. She lunges at Tim’s car, hangs on to the rear bumper and lets herself be dragged.