Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  That is amazing, Prince Wen Hui exclaimed. What is your method?

  I have no method, the cook said. I follow the Tao.

  A good cook, he explained, needs a new cleaver once a year. He cuts. A poor cook needs a new one every month. He hacks. I have used the same cleaver, O prince, for nineteen years, and it has carved up a thousand beasts. That is because I see nothing with my eye, but instead, with my whole being, I give myself attentively to the mystery of the body of the ox. Then I let the blade follow its instinct. It finds the secret openings and the fine spaces between joints. I cut through no joint, Your Highness, I chop no bone. The ox falls apart. I clean the blade and put it away.

  ‘This is a story that Chuang-tzu told,’ Major Miner’s friend said.

  That is how it is with explosives, they both agreed. It is a matter of listening to the rock with the body and the mind and the sixth intuitive sense, and then the mountainside parts itself from itself in a slow and exquisite ballet.

  ‘We could survive prison camp by this method,’ his friend said.

  ‘We could avoid prison camp,’ the Major fiercely amended.

  ‘But if . . .’ his friend said. ‘If. It would be a way to survive.’

  ‘A way to escape,’ the Major argued, annoyed.

  ‘Escape and escapism are not the same things,’ his fellow junior officer said. ‘We have to be realistic. We have to be honest.’

  The Major could feel anger rising within him like a fever. ‘It is not dishonest,’ he said, ‘to know in one’s bones that one will never be unfree.’

  ‘Ah,’ his friend said. ‘That is not exactly the question. Freedom, ultimately, is an inner condition. But we have to be prepared. When the worst happens, and in war it often does, the Tao is a way to live, a way to survive.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Major Miner murmured, though of course he had not yet become Major Miner; he had a different name then; he was not a Major at all, he was still a minor. He was not even Minor Miner, he was Minor Somebody Else, but it no longer seems to him relevant to remember that name. It belonged to a different life.

  As for the junior officer with Taoist leanings, whose name, in the profoundly ironic way of things, was Robert John Blow – and who was known in the intimate circles of the army’s blasting clique as Joe Blow – as for Joe Blow: he did not live to see prison camp, but died en route, messily, of bayonet hacks, his butchers not cutting with the principles of the Tao on their minds. After his death on the day of the fall of Singapore, the day of capture, Joe Blow entered Major Miner’s head like a slow-smouldering mix of nitrates and sodium chloride. He took up residence there throughout the years in the camp. He brought his Chuang-tzu story with him. And Major Miner did in fact move through gaps between brutalities, he did shelter in the interstices of camp starvation, he did survive in the wafer-thin chinks of possibility until peace broke out.

  Often and still, Major Miner hears Joe Blow’s quiet and hesitant voice; it is like a very long, very slow fuse with a punch at the end of it. He hears Chuang-tzu in the rockface of Queensland. He listens for fault lines. For years, also, he would listen to the stresses and the sudden pressure changes and the growling burn of his gelignite. He would fit the blade to the opening. He would marry the sounds.

  Then his hearing became even more acute, his whole body became an ear. He could scarcely tell where his own vein ended and a vein of opal began. Like Prince Wen Hui’s cook, whose blade never needed replacing, he ceased to require explosives. News of opal came to him at the speed of visible light, at high inaudible frequencies that burned in his inner ear. He owed this extension of his listening range to Bugger Harvey, another old loner out in the breakaways, a bushie, a fossicker, an old soldier, an opal man; and he owed it also to the Murris who camped in the riverbeds and who were the Bugger’s mates.

  Major Miner knows that the universe is full of noise. He knows that the black void of space between stars is neither black nor void nor silent, but luminous with radiation and thickly washed with waves of sound: with short waves and with long waves and with waves of a frequency far too high for the human ear. For a while, after the war, after the explosives unit, he remained in the engineering corps. He monitored vast saucer antennae in the outback isolation of Woomera, and he knows that a babble of sound, a constant hum of galactic static, reaches earth without pause from deep space. This hum is received at numerous global sites (usually military, sometimes academic), wherever there are listening satellite ears that can pick up the tight ribbon-pleated wavelengths that are shorter than radar. He who hath ears to hear, the Major knows, can pull messages from the air. And so it does not surprise him that there are opal rushes, that suddenly a whole regiment of listeners – Bugger Harvey and the Murris, for example, followed so quickly by Oyster, and then by Oyster’s fey and growing crew – it does not surprise him that they begin to tune in suddenly, like a line of Telecom Australia repeater stations, to the sweet piccolo call of hydrated silica cells densely packed: that mother of all prisms, that hard-rock disco-beat diffractor of white light, the black opal.

  The buzz of all those foreigners arriving, all that opal excitement in the air, is still with him, even though his dreams have turned dark again and all the young foreigners have gone. He sleeps in his shack in the breakaways and the seams that run beneath him sing a high descant lullaby, but then darker notes interfere, and he smells Singapore burning, smells the bamboo cage and the latrines, smells the Old Fuckatoo.

  He wakes with a cry, uneasy.

  He remembers how the worst things happened just before the end, when the captors sensed the turning of the tide. He can smell that same madness in the air now. He could smell it at Bernie’s last night, the way it came off Andrew Godwin like a sweat, the way it rose from the hunched bodies in the bar like the stink of unwashed clothes. It was because the foreigner, Nick, was drinking with them.

  Early morning sun fingers the floor of his shack, and the ladders of white light streaming through chinks in the galvo roof all seem to him to lead downwards, only down. He hears the dark note again, the bass one that sang in his dream. It rides in on the dust motes, and all his senses stand on tiptoe. The sound is distant and faint, but he reads it. Andrew Godwin’s Troopie, he thinks, and sits bolt upright. He can tell from the way the burr of the motor reaches him that the truck is not moving towards the opal fields, but away from them, towards Outer Maroo, towards Bernie’s Last Chance, which he had seen Andrew leave just a few hours earlier, at a wee drunken hour of the night. And now it is barely dawn.

  Major Miner is not comforted.

  He needs someone to talk to, he needs to report the Singapore smell, the madness smell, and what it means and what might be done before it is too late, but the need itself frightens him. For so long now he has found it easier to confide in rocks and sky than in people. He is a loner. In Bernie’s, where he shows up perhaps once a month, he can spin small talk on cattle and opal and the drought, especially once the lubrication kicks in, but his talk skims across the surface of his life. He does not go for the talk, he goes for the silences. Jess’s silences. For a few years now, he has taken to believing that some indefinable connection exists between himself and Jess. He watches her hand on the brass lever when she pulls his beer and then sets it on the counter in front of him. Before she quite lets go, he reaches for the glass. Occasionally they brush fingers, usually not, but always there is that second when both of their hands are on the glass. Though she never meets his eye, he has come to invest that particular moment with power: he thinks of it as the point where the transmitter waves kiss the force field of the receiver. He has taken to fantasising that their two silences commune with each other like opal seams giving off high sonic pips. He has never wished to risk putting his theory to the test.

  Now his compulsion to talk is driving him into his clothes, though he fumbles and trips. He can think of only two people to whom it might be possible to say what he wants to say, to whom he might be able to explain: Charles Given and Jess. />
  He finds that his truck has decided on Jess.

  By Friday, the Old Fuckatoo is nesting down so heavily on Outer Maroo that it is difficult to breathe. Bush flies, always bad, are worse. Black balloons of them kite about in thick little swarms. The breakaways, upside down and bent out of shape, float on the wrong side of town, rust-red, bleeding into the pale sand of the riverbed, a mirage full of horribly ominous symbolism, it seems to Jess.

  She thinks the whole town may self-combust at any moment; that the sun and the methane gas will tango together; that kaboom, Outer Maroo will go up in smoke. She thinks everyone senses in the bones that the secrets cannot be sealed up any longer.

  Everyone’s nerves are shot.

  Everyone fears (or hopes) that another accident is arranging itself.

  When Jess climbs the stairs to the guest room in the early morning light, she fears the accident has already arrived.

  The aroma of thick black coffee trails behind her like a plume. It curls under and over the tray, and ribbons about the slim packet, tied with green tape, that she has tucked between the bowl of sugar and the cream. She waits for the fragrant smell of morning to slither under the door of the only occupied room.

  There is no response to her knock.

  She knocks again, loudly.

  From sheer anxiety, she leans her shoulder against the closed door and it gives way, and she sees the body through the cloudy folds of the mosquito net. The way it hunches so unnaturally under the sheet makes her feel ill. She does not know what she does with the tray, but she finds herself pulling handfuls of gauze from under the mattress in sudden frenzy. It’s too easy, she thinks, for anyone to climb a post to the upper verandah and get in. Whoever has been here has tucked in the net very tightly, with a clear intention to deceive.

  The body turns out to be a duffel bag under the sheet.

  She stands there staring at it stupidly, not sure if this is good news or bad, and then she hears the low growl of a four-wheel drive moving slowly to keep its noise down. She lurches through the french doors on to the upper verandah, a rash move, because the boards have been soft and termite-ridden for years. Her foot goes through in one place, between studs, and pain shoots up her leg, so she backs up carefully and leans against the wall. She strains her ears: Andrew Godwin’s truck. She watches the bare red thoroughfare, and at first sees nothing but stillness and the last stars, and then, in the dawn twilight, she can just make out the thick square shadow moving slowly, black against black . . .

  She waits for it. She waits until it gets so close it is out of her line of sight. Then she goes back through the doors.

  She hears the purring sound, the soft fart of parking; then silence; then the creak of the verandah below, and the low squeal of the door to the bar. She thinks of going downstairs, of confronting Andrew there, but decides to wait. She hears footsteps, quiet as a cat’s, on the stairs.

  The bedroom door opens and closes soundlessly.

  Nick slides into the room.

  ‘What the –? For God’s sake, Jess,’ he says, startled.

  She glares at him. Relief makes her furious. She has got seriously out of the habit of voicing her thoughts, except to certain people, but she has a speaking eye. Where the hell have you been? her eye says, and she feels incredibly, disproportionately angry, she feels rage, she feels for all the world as though she were a frantic mother, or a teacher on a school trip who has had a student go dangerously astray or almost drown – because somewhere between her first and second knock at his door, her will to get the foreigners safely out of town has hardened into an intention as ferocious and single-minded as that other blind force that is busily arranging bad chance.

  Nick sits on the floor and leans back against the foot of the bed. ‘I’m a bit shaken,’ he says, ‘by what I’ve seen during the night.’

  You were supposed to see nothing but your pillow, Jess glares.

  She wants to hit him. She has to squeeze her two hands together, and all her interlaced fingers show white and red. She presses them against her stomach but she cannot keep her voice down there, she cannot stop it from rocketing out. ‘You have no idea,’ she says explosively, ‘how dangerous, how incredibly stupid –’

  ‘Well, Jess!’ he says, raising both eyebrows, ‘you spoke!’

  ‘You’ve made me,’ she says tightly. ‘You stupid bastard.’

  He laughs. He reaches for the coffee on the tray, stares at it, puts it down again.

  ‘Oh Jess,’ he sighs. He talks in a rush. ‘I know this place is crazy. I knew it would be. I knew Oyster would pick a place exactly like this, a place like this was tailor-made for Oyster, it was probably mutual passion at first sight. And I knew Oyster was crazy because Angelo has such a talent for self-destruction, he’s gifted at it, and because I met Oyster once, and because I’ve read a dossier on him that would make your hair stand on end, so I wasn’t expecting sanity in Outer Maroo. But even so, this place is a bit of a shock.’

  The kind of silence that is full of incredulity and anger and grief spreads between them. It rises out of Nick and fills the room. He gets lost somewhere inside it, and reappears on another of its tracks.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Jess,’ he says, looking at the floor, ‘I want my son.’ His voice has gone strangely small and vulnerable, like that of a schoolboy offering excuses. He is placating somebody, not Jess, pleading. ‘I’m not going to ask you what’s happened, because I want to believe they’ve just moved on, they’ve moved into the red heart, or that Angelo’s . . . I want to believe . . . I just want one more minute with him.’

  And then Jess realises that part of her anger is because she knows she is going to be required to tell him, eventually, even though he is holding that moment off just as fiercely as she is. And she understands simultaneously, and with blinding clarity, that the whole town smoulders with so much anger toward all foreigners, particularly toward those who come looking, because everyone owes them explanations, because everyone is going to be accountable for their grief.

  But we didn’t do anything, everyone wants to say, aggrieved.

  And Jess can feel the sick echo of that: We didn’t do anything.

  Aye, there’s the rub.

  That is precisely where complicity lies.

  Nick is festooned all around with the filmy tail of the mosquito net, and he pulls great dollops of it toward himself and twists it into a thick rope and hugs it. ‘I just want to tell him it doesn’t matter, whatever he’s done, it doesn’t matter. Whatever group he chooses to join, you know, if that’s what he . . . I just want to tell him that.’

  He stares into his coffee.

  ‘Fathers,’ he sighs. ‘Why are we so bloody hard to please, so bloody slow?’ He gives his net rope another twist. ‘I’m such a stupid pig-headed idiot,’ he says.

  Now that she can keep her eye on him, Jess lets him sit there and bleed remorse into the folds of the net. Join the club, she could say to him. She lets him twist the gauze rope around his arm and untwist it and tie it in knots.

  ‘I knew before I got here,’ he says, ‘from bits and pieces Angelo said . . . He came back and forth a few times, he was the recruiter, he was apparently Oyster’s right-hand man.’ He rolls his eyes savagely. ‘I suppose you’ve met him, my son, I mean, but I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear a word against – not that you could say anything I haven’t said myself.’ He’s made the net into a tourniquet without realising it, and he examines his arm, bright red and turning blue, and relishes the pain. Jess knows about that kind of relief. When the throbbing starts, he unwinds the net. ‘He’d show up at Noosa again, on and off. Unpredictably.’ He stares into the net and sees unpredictable times, sees Nick’s Taverna, classiest restaurant on the Sunshine Coast, written up . . . etcetera, sees Angelo back from the Reef.

  ‘I knew that any town that went to so much trouble to seal itself off from the world . . . you’re not even on the Government Surveyor’s map, did you know?’

  Jess knows only too wel
l.

  ‘Even properties are on that map. Every single cattle and sheep station in western Queensland is on that map, but not –’

  ‘Not Dirran-Dirran,’ she says. ‘And not Jimjimba. Not even Kootha Downs, though Junior Godwin wouldn’t care one way or the other.’

  Nick blinks. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘There you go. I knew a town like this was going to be full of lunatics, but I’m still shaken by what I’ve seen.’

  What Jess can’t believe is how much she didn’t see. Evidently. And she is not used to missing anything at Bernie’s.

  ‘How did you get out of here without anyone seeing you go? How the hell did you get hold of Andrew Godwin’s truck?’

  ‘How do you know it’s Andrew Godwin’s?’

  ‘That’s a stupid question to ask anyone in the outback. We know the soundprint of anything on wheels the way you recognise the face of someone you know. How did you get it?’

  ‘I borrowed it. Without asking, I must admit.’

  ‘You’re a maniac.’

  ‘Andrew Godwin’s a maniac.’

  ‘He will be when he finds a truck missing, and then finds it back in town.’

  ‘But he’ll have no idea who took it, will he?’ Nick says. ‘He won’t believe anyone could have whisked it out from under his nose.’

  ‘By a fairly simple process of deduction,’ Jess says drily, ‘he’s going to figure it out.’

  ‘He’s invited me to work in his mine.’

  ‘Oh yes, I heard him. If you’re foolish enough to go, I suspect it’ll be the last ladder you’ll ever climb down. A lot of bad luck will happen, do you know what I mean?’

  Jess had watched them, Andrew and Nick, drinking in the bar the night before. She had kept her eye on them, she had watched them buying round after round: a bull-ring routine, an elaborate game, the way they circled each other, the way each tried to get the other drunk, discussing cricket, discussing rugby, discussing politics, discussing cattle and opals, discussing restaurants in Brisbane and on the coast, discussing politics, opals, and opals. Nick had tossed Oyster’s Reef, the two words, on the table once too often, Jess thought. He was a careless gambler. He placed the words down casually, recklessly, as though they were trumps. Andrew had ignored them each time. It was a high stakes game.