Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘Yes,’ Mercy says. ‘I do.’ She leans into the lost afternoons, listening to forbidden radio. ‘You mustn’t idolise the ABC and the BBC World Service,’ Miss Rover warns. ‘They’re formulaic, really. Spread your wings and fly higher than that.’ But Mercy does idolise them, especially now that she can only hear them in her head. She spreads her wings and flies back to them, to all the illicit and crackling short-wave afternoons, all the lambent bell-like FM tones, all lost to her now; all the lovely voices, all the crisp ideas, they are all gone into the world of static.

  It was the absolute confidence of those voices that so fascinated Mercy. There were so many different ways, she saw, of being certain you were right: there was her father’s quiet way, and Oyster’s way, and Mr Prophet’s way. And then there was the way of the voices on the radio, which was just as certain, and just as dogmatic, but different. This is the truth, their tone said calmly, and no intelligent person will dispute it, but we will still be quite polite and only discreetly supercilious if you are not sufficiently well informed to believe us.

  ‘When you write,’ Miss Rover says, ‘I want you to use your own voice, Mercy; the one you use to ask me your unnerving questions.’

  ‘What is my voice like?’ Mercy asks, surprised.

  Miss Rover laughs. ‘Original,’ she says. ‘Because your kind of innocence is so weird, Mercy, and you don’t even know it. John Locke would have loved you.’

  John Locke. Mercy estimates that she heard of more unknown things in a day from Miss Rover than she would ever live long enough to look up in Miss Rover’s books.

  Miss Rover laughs. ‘Mercy,’ she says, in the particular tone that signals a huge and private joke, ‘you’ll need to update Remnants. You’ll need to write a second draft. You’ll have to throw in car duels, ten-stubby races, apocalypse utes, the whole shebang.’ She goes on laughing, and then suddenly turns quiet. ‘I have a horrible feeling, Mercy, that I’m going to do something grand and pointless and irrevocable quite soon. I’m not going to be able to stop myself.’

  The big bang, the Oyster gang, the whole shebang, Mercy thinks, leaning against the cash register in Ma Beresford’s. She still gets a singing in her ears, and popping sounds, she still gets the flashes of Tim Doolan’s car going off, then Donny’s. Lightheadedness comes and goes. Her pointillist limbs itch and burn.

  In Beresford’s, though business is not brisk and time passes languidly, people do come and go, buying spare parts and dried parsley and bull bars and roo bars and cotton cloth. BERESFORD’S BULL BARS REALLY DO BUMP BULLS, reads a hand-lettered sign. Pete Burnett needs a fan belt for his auger. Jess is buying sacks of potatoes and grain. Mr Prophet is buying leather boots.

  ‘Pete,’ Mercy says in a tentative and foolhardy moment, ‘do you remember that day Miss Rover was transferred?’ She is surprised to find she has said this. Pete lurches as he turns to look at her, and tries to catch hold of one of the shelves, and then in mid-turn something odd happens to him, or perhaps it happens to Mercy, perhaps something slows down the messages to her brain. At any rate, Pete seems to wince and hug himself as though shot, then to finish his turning infinitely slowly, sleepwalking, sleep-turning, his arms weighted with lead. His eyes are alarmed. ‘You remember? That day she’d been drinking a bit,’ Mercy says, ‘and she called you out on to the verandah at Bernie’s.’

  Jess lifts a sack on to the counter.

  ‘Hello, Mercy,’ Mr Prophet says. His voice is always gravelly and bronchial, conveying benediction from a great height. He appears to notice nothing unusual in Mercy’s appearance. He appears not to notice Pete Burnett. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you that we’ve missed you.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Prophet,’ Mercy says. ‘You saw me on Monday.’ She holds her breath and counts to three. ‘Before I got dressed up for the corroboree,’ she adds flippantly.

  There is a momentary flicker of shock in Mr Prophet’s eyes, but it dwindles into something expressionless. ‘I mean that we have missed you in the House of the Lord, Mercy.’

  ‘It was the day the foreigners arrived,’ Mercy says.

  ‘Your guest is welcome too, of course,’ Mr Prophet says. ‘In the House of the Lord.’

  Mercy thinks of telling him that Sarah is Jewish, but decides against it because the meaning of this is still mysterious to her and she has not yet raised the subject with Sarah. It was not a topic Miss Rover ever touched upon. It does not appear to be covered by Miss Rover’s books. Of course there is a wealth of information in the Bible, and Mercy is very familiar with it, but Sarah has said that she is not at all like the Jews in the Bible. Mercy is nevertheless still tempted to mention the matter because intuition tells her that Mr Prophet would be disturbed by the information, and such a prospect is pleasing to her, is almost irresistibly pleasing; but this temptation is typically reckless and sinful, and indeed dangerous, on Mercy’s part.

  She climbs on the stepladder and takes down boxes of R.M. Williams boots. ‘What size, Mr Prophet?’ she asks.

  ‘I understand,’ he says, ‘that there was some trouble with stubby races near your place.’

  ‘No,’ Mercy says. ‘I don’t think they were stubby races.’

  ‘It’s a terrible problem, young men and alcohol. And the Lord sometimes has harsh and fiery ways to call a community to repentance. In the Day of Judgment, the Bible tells us, only a Remnant of the faithful will be saved.’

  ‘I think these size tens will fit you,’ she says.

  ‘I hope you will be in the Remnant, Mercy.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asks, surprised, looking up from prodding his foot through the leather. She touches the bruises and gravel rashes on her arms delicately. ‘Do you really, Mr Prophet?’

  His eyes waver, and it occurs to Mercy suddenly that he is as frightened as everyone else, that he has to stave himself into the armour of biblical texts every morning to keep himself upright and safe.

  ‘The world is full of evil, Mercy,’ he says. ‘Full of the forces of darkness.’ He is sitting in the chair Ma keeps for the trying on of boots, and his fingers grip the thin wooden arms. His fingers are white, the knuckles almost blue. ‘It is like a canker, Mercy. It is everywhere. It is in the government, in the schools, in godless schoolteachers who poison our children’s minds. It is in the goods which come to us from Brisbane, it is in the outside world bearing down on us. We have to raise up the standard of the Lord, we have to raise money for the armies of God, we have to arm ourselves against that Last Day when the gathering forces of the Prince of Darkness –’ There is a sharp pistol crack of splintering wood, and Mr Prophet, shocked, stares at the dagger of chair-arm in his hand. He blinks, disoriented. A bead of blood swells on his index finger and runs slowly towards his wrist.

  ‘Mr Prophet,’ Mercy says awkwardly. He looks so pale that she wonders if he is ill. She reaches for his hand. ‘You’ve grazed the skin,’ she says. ‘Wait, I’ll get –’ She goes to the shelves of home remedies and takes ointment, a box of Band-Aids, a bag of cotton puffs. ‘Give me your hand again.’ It is the gnarled hand of a cattleman, leathery. She notes the dark scaly blotches on the skin. ‘If Beverley wants me to read stories to her again,’ she says, full of compunction, ‘I could come out and visit one evening.’

  Mr Prophet withdraws his hand. ‘Thank you, Mercy,’ he says, though she has the impression that the words are like pieces of wood in his mouth.

  ‘She must get awfully lonely out at Jimjimba.’ Beverley, she means, who is eight years old, and who has been rescued from the godless life of school. ‘Tell her –’

  ‘Mercy, that’s very –’ Something that is perhaps intended as a smile crosses his face, though the muscles of eyes and mouth go tense. ‘. . . kind,’ he says. He grimaces. Softness frightens him, Mercy sees; he translates it as weakness. He looks at her sorrowfully. ‘You see, Mercy, if a cow or a sheep is diseased, it is not a kindness to leave it living, is it? It is not a kindness to let it suffer, and to let infection spread through the herd. You understand tha
t, don’t you?’

  Poor Beverley, she thinks. Poor Mr Prophet.

  ‘We cannot let Beverley be contaminated,’ he explains, in a tone which Mercy supposes he means to be gentle. ‘Come ye out from among them, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing. That godless schoolteacher, Mercy, has turned you from the path of righteousness in ways you do not even realise. And then there are those who erect their pride in learning,’ he says, delicately studying his boots, delicately avoiding direct reference to her father, ‘into an obstacle between themselves and God . . . All this is the cancer of sin, Mercy.’

  Mercy says as evenly as she can, indicating the blotches on his hand: ‘You should have those cancer spots looked at, Mr Prophet. At the hospital in Roma when you’re there for the cattle sales. You should have them removed.’

  Mercy is conscious of Pete Burnett and of Jess at the edges of the room, but no one moves. She has the odd sensation of being on a slow swing, Beresford’s drifting and dipping under her. She feels queasy. The Old Fuckatoo is brooding close, his fungal stink wafts along the aisles, they may all run out of air, Mercy thinks. The silence seems to be endless, though Mercy supposes that only seconds pass.

  ‘There is a spirit of rebellion in you, Mercy,’ Mr Prophet says sadly. ‘We are praying for you.’

  Mercy can feel a sudden throbbing in her arms, she can feel her spirit of rebellion beating its wings, she can feel the same dangerous thing that beat in her as she revved Tim Doolan’s car to one hundred and thirty and jumped. She understands, suddenly, what Miss Rover was drunk on that day on the verandah at Bernie’s, that day of her transfer, she understands what kept her so apparently lighthearted, what kept her so calm. It is an unnatural calm, Mercy knows that now. It is a dangerous calm. It is something one feels like a shimmer on the surface of one’s skin. Mercy knows from the way Pete Burnett is looking at her that her eyes are glittering. It is even possible, she thinks, that this is what was happening to Oyster when his blue eyes burned, when he mesmerised anyone who looked, and the thought that she and Miss Rover and Oyster might all have something in common brings on such a shock of nausea that she tastes a thin bitter liquid in her mouth. Even so, she cannot apply any brakes. What is most dangerous of all about this glittering shimmering state is that it pushes up inside her like a cyclone and she cannot resist.

  She lifts Mr Prophet’s foot into her lap and kneads his ankle and instep, pressing the soft leather, assessing the fit. She bends forward over his leathered shins and looks up into his face. ‘Are you praying for me the way you prayed for Donny Becker?’ she asks.

  At the edge of things, Mercy can see Pete nervously wiping the back of one hand across his forehead, but she does not blink, she does not drop her eyes from the face above. Mr Prophet goes still in the manner of someone who has just been slapped in the face. He withdraws his foot from Mercy’s lap and stands. He raises both hands, palms open, fingers extended, high above his head. ‘Lord,’ he cries, as though in anguish. ‘Lord, how long?’ His closed eyes are raised and he addresses a presence beyond the ceiling. ‘Lord,’ he implores, ‘with the Psalmist I cry unto You: Remember the reproach of Thy servants . . . Remember Thine enemies . . . wherewith they have reproached the footsteps of Thine anointed.’

  Like the coming of rain – of which Mercy, like everyone in Outer Maroo, has fantasies – Ma Beresford arrives from the storeroom with a carton of tinned pineapple resting on her stomach like a misshapen child. She breathes heavily from the effort, and the carton slips a little in her arms. She lets it slide to the counter and bends over it and rests her head against it for a second. Perhaps it is the horizontal perspective, Mercy thinks, that lets Ma see the scene differently.

  ‘You look very silly like that, Dukke Prophet,’ Ma says. ‘Put your hands back in your pockets where a man’s hands belong, or else give me a lift with this stuff. I got rules here, and no carrying on with the Lord in public is one of them.’

  Dukke Prophet flinches and seems to wake from a trance. So does Mercy. There is just a membrane, she thinks, between one world and another. When you pass through that membrane, the meaning of everything changes. Gestures, words, thoughts, emotions: none of these things are translatable. On one side of the membrane, Mr Prophet is powerful and dangerous; on the other side, he is ridiculous; he is just a pathetic old man as frightened of the world as anyone else. But is it not possible, Mercy asks herself, that he is both of these things at once?

  Is Mercy the only person in Outer Maroo who moves back and forth across the membrane? She envies Mr Prophet and Ma Beresford who know only the language of one world, who see only one way. As for Mercy, who knows too many languages, but is at ease in none of them, she feels exhausted. Perhaps I will blow apart into little pieces, she thinks. Like Donny.

  Mr Prophet lowers his hands slowly and picks up his hat. ‘Tell your father,’ he says to Mercy, ‘that we are praying for him also. The Lord saith that he who is not for us is against us. Remember that, Mercy.’

  Yes, she thinks. I will.

  ‘Tell your father that the Spirit of the Lord is pressing me. God will hold out an olive branch, but He will not be mocked. It will be a sign, Mercy. Whether the Given family returns to the Living Word with a contrite and humble spirit, and seeks to be re-fellowshipped, or whether the Given family keeps itself at a stiff-necked distance, you will give us your sign, and that sign will not be overlooked.’

  Mercy watches him look vaguely at his old boots, laid neatly to one side. He cannot seem to remember why they are there. Only Ma Beresford bustles about as though everything is as normal as ever. Jess, still and silent, watches Ma. Pete Burnett has not moved. He holds the fan belt in his hands and stares at Mercy, who stares at Mr Prophet, who stares at his old and new boots.

  Friday

  When he sleeps, Major Miner is always in tunnels. He always has explosives in his hands. What moves him is that musty fragrance, subdued, loamy, faintly sweet, faintly rotting, of nitroglycerins in dark enclosed spaces. If he feels the walls of his tunnel, he can tell immediately where its weaknesses run, he can press his ear against the rock and hear the soft hum of restive fault lines and feel them shifting and stretching and resettling themselves. He is aware of them as a pulse against his finger pads. They vibrate in his inner ear. Geological planes, meeting and overlapping, send out signals: long sonic pips which he decodes. The sedimentary layers give off mellow notes which are blurred at the edges, and he can detect undertones both throaty and plaintive that remind him of oboes. He does not know where these reading skills come from – they are like a sixth sense – but he knows that his quirky affinity with wombats and roots and all things that feel their way in the dark is a dubious blessing. It is as though he had been born with a deformity, a useless extra, something quite shameful and best kept hidden, but one which can be made to yield up a double-edged sideshow value akin to that of the circus careers of a calf with a dangling fifth leg or a woman thickly matted with pelt from head to toe.

  When sleep closes in on Major Miner, the walls of his dreams breathe and sigh. Often, too often, he is huddled down in bunkers or latrines. There are bombers overhead. Singapore falls and falls in the present continuous. Sometimes he is crab-walking, sucked-in, flattened, through vertical fissures in rock, and he feels like the soft centre of a sandwich. He expects constantly to be eaten. Bridges, or the steel lacework of radio towers, soar above him, eagle-beaked, and their pylons send down clawed talons; the talons grope for him. Ear against the rock, he can hear the thick bass notes of their foundation stumps. He feels for the intimate crevices, the vaginal folds, where he will slide the gelignite.

  At other times, the sky seen through cracks is vast and empty and painfully blue and full of a fierce white light that sears his eyes, and he curls gratefully into his burrow, sunblind, hypersensitive in the dark. Along the walls, and pendant from the arced ceiling, he can feel the cobwebby nap of roots, the infinitely fine delta-ends of them (or are they in fact the beginnings, the alpha hairs
where the very idea of the tree begins?) The roots feel like cornsilk, like angelhair, like the cloudy outer fuzz of silkworms’ cocoons. This is where opal sings to him its siren song, and he could be at Coober Pedy, or Andamooka, or Mintabie, or Lightning Ridge, or at Yowah in western Queensland – he has worked all the fields since the war, he is a junkie, opal has him in thrall – or he is beyond all those known fields, beyond west, beyond anywhere, he is in Outer Maroo, and then he presses his whole body against the earth and his heartbeat sends out a signal and a signal comes back, and so it is that opal and the Major commune like two fax machines whistling to each other, cooing in their upper electronic registers the way they do in the latest high-tech deals of Andrew Godwin and Dukke Prophet with foreign gembrokers; and then the capillaries of glittering, colour-jangled, water-spiked silica sing to Major Miner like choirs of angelic children, their plaintive voices descant, otherworldly, and pure.

  He knows how to reach them. He can part rockface from rockface like a lover, gently, to expose the glowing smears of boulder opal unblemished. He was trained in explosives. The calibration of detonation velocities is his speciality, he can calculate brisance to the fineness of a hair, he can tame ammonium nitrate, the truly wild one; he can make it jump through hoops at his bidding; he knows exactly how many grains of inert desensitiser will slow TNT and cyclonite to slow burn.

  In Singapore, not long before the cataclysm and the capture, one of his mates in the explosives unit had gone reclusive and oriental. It was fatalism, Major Miner thought; a way of preparing; and not, in the Major’s opinion, the best way. They were both junior officers; Major Miner was nineteen, his friend twenty-one; they were both little more than frightened kids. His friend had taken to reading Confucius and the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-tzu. He told Major Miner the story of Prince Wen Hui’s cook. Prince Wen Hui, touring his kitchens one day, admired his cook’s flawless ease as a butcher. Beneath the cook’s hands and beneath his blade, the carcass of an ox seemed to fall apart, neatly segmented, as though it were made of softened butter.