Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘I heard you say goodnight,’ Jess accuses. ‘I saw you go upstairs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just after midnight.’

  ‘Was it?’ Nick raises his eyebrows. ‘I’d lost track of time.’

  ‘And Andrew didn’t go till after one.’

  ‘Ah.’ Nick smiles. ‘By then I was hidden under a tarp in the back of his truck.’

  Jess feels sick at the thought.

  ‘I climbed out on the verandah and slid down a post.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Not as crazy as Andrew Godwin.’

  He tells her about the drive out to Dirran-Dirran, 80 kilometres of unpaved road. ‘Not very comfortable on the floor of a truck,’ he says, ‘with a driver in advanced stage of drunk.’ He feels his ribs and buttocks gingerly. ‘Picked up a few bruises on the way.’

  ‘Count yourself lucky that you got off so lightly.’

  Nick laughs, then turns sombre. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know. Believe me, after what I saw, I know.’

  He sees again the hangar in which Andrew parks the truck: the half-dozen Land Rovers, the tractors, the drills and winches, the small plane, and something else: racks upon racks of rifles, semi-automatics, automatics, machine-guns. An armoury.

  ‘I mean, there must have been about a hundred of them,’ he tells Jess. ‘It shook me.’

  Jess realises how one forgets, in a place like Outer Maroo, what is normal and what is not. There are certain kinds of homegrown craziness that one barely registers.

  ‘It’s only mad,’ she says sardonically, ‘if you’re used to a different normal. There’s a roaring traffic in army surplus stuff in the outback.’ She spreads her hands to dissociate herself. ‘Cow cockies always buy big, whatever they’re into. It’s for when the government, or the Aborigines, or whoever, comes to take their land.’

  Nick rolls his eyes. ‘It reminded me of Albania, an army interrogation centre where I spent a few horrible nights. I’m sure there were weapons you can’t buy in Australia.’

  ‘Could be. Planes come in low from the north now and then. They’ve both got landing strips, Dirran-Dirran and Jimjimba.’

  ‘I feel queasy,’ he says. ‘I feel as though I must have stepped into some other planet. West of Quilpie somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah, you did.’

  ‘At about the same spot where I thought I saw surf on the Sea of Null.’

  ‘Yeah. Probably. Somewhere round there.’

  ‘What are the planes for?’

  ‘Opal deals. And maybe other kinds of traffic, who knows? Buyers come down from Singapore and Indonesia. No one knows what Andrew Godwin or Dukke Prophet or Bernie are doing with all that cash. That’s what got Susannah Rover asking questions. That’s what got her into deep shit.’

  ‘Who’s Susannah Rover?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘I am asking.’

  Jess sighs wearily. ‘I can’t bear to tell you. I still don’t understand how you could have got away with Andrew’s Troopie, he would’ve heard –’

  ‘Luck. He was pissed as a bandicoot, walking round fondling his guns, and all of a sudden he grabs a semiautomatic and hops into a different jeep, a sporty little thing with no roof, and goes roaring off into the night, blasting bullets. He couldn’t have heard a thing.’

  ‘Another roo and emu hunting spree,’ Jess says.

  ‘He’d left his keys in the Troopie’s ignition, so I just took off.’

  ‘Well, now you know he’s not a good man to cross. Just don’t go down a Dirran-Dirran shaft.’

  ‘Thanks for all the helpful advice.’

  ‘Please,’ she says, ‘do yourself a favour and leave, just leave, just –’ And then she is radiant with a sudden idea. ‘In fact, now that you’ve stolen Andrew Godwin’s truck, you’ve hit the jackpot. You’ve got a Troopie with two, maybe even a third, reserve tank. You’ve got enough petrol to get to Quilpie. You can drive out to the Givens now, before anyone’s up around here, and collect Sarah, and you can both get away.’

  ‘But I have no intention of leaving,’ Nick says, ‘until I find what I came to find.’

  Jess feels heaviness settling on her. ‘You may want to kill the messenger,’ she says. She picks up the little packet from the tray and offers it. ‘What you want to know is in here.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Letters,’ she tells him. ‘Letters that were mailed, but never sent. You may have deduced by now that the postal and telephone services round here are irregular, to say the least. Don’t try to read these now. Don’t read them here. Read them when you’re back on the map.’ He stares at her, and she says uncomfortably, ‘It’s a pathetic enough handful. Three were given to me to mail by kids I didn’t even know, and I saved them from oblivion. The others were given to Mercy by Sarah’s daughter, and I managed to rescue those from Ma’s eagle eye. You can give them to Sarah when you’re safely . . . None are from your son, I’m afraid, but you’ll get the picture. Read them when you’re safely on the road.’

  ‘I’m not leaving, Jess,’ he says. ‘Until I hold my son, or find out where he is, or speak to his grave.’

  ‘I feel,’ Sarah says, ‘as though I’m living on the moon. I feel as though I’m trapped in a bad dream. I feel I can’t . . .’ She presses her hands, open and flat, against the Givens’ breakfast table, and pushes herself slightly away as though testing once reliable laws. ‘I have no energy,’ she says wearily. ‘The heat . . .’

  ‘Let us give silent thanks for a new day,’ Mercy’s father offers. ‘Let us pray.’

  Even the nerves in his eyelids, Mercy thinks, and whatever tiny muscles operate such frail flaps of skin, are engaged in warfare. The skin of his spirit, she thinks, looks like my skin, blistered and scabbed. She can see the wasting of his frame, the way the flesh hangs slack on his arms, his knotted wrists, the way the bones push through.

  Her mother’s face is upturned, intense, and a tic in her mother’s cheek bleats at the ceiling fan as towards a parent inexplicably harsh but still trusted. She appears, in fact, to regard some invisible point beyond the fan with the obsequious adoration of the abused child. She expects further punishments. She will not resist them. Her eyes are closed, but they flutter and tremble, and there are tears on her cheeks. Her hands are clasped tightly together, and Mercy imagines that the tiny fingers of herself and Brian, as infants, are somewhere in that web.

  Sarah stares open-eyed but blankly through the window, where all that can be seen are the verandah posts, the pathetic scrap of irrigated garden, the bloodshot sky. She struggles against the obligations of politeness. Very soon now, Mercy thinks, all Sarah’s questions will insist on being asked.

  The clock on the mantel ticks into the interminable quiet.

  ‘Amen,’ Mercy’s father says at last.

  And Sarah, struggling to be courteous, rushes the table with words: ‘I guess it’s totally American of me, but I cannot comprehend this passivity. Fear I understand, but fear should galvanise one, fear energises, fear in wartime, for example, leads to heroism, it’s well established. But fear that cringes in a corner, paralysed, is degenerative, it’s disgusting, it’s craven, it festers, it’s more dangerous to the victim than anything his attackers can –’

  Totally American of me, Mercy thinks, setting it beside that other puzzle piece: I’m just your regular non-observant American Jew, though my sister’s become orthodox, which was more upsetting to our parents . . . or something like that. She is constantly daunted by how many things she does not know.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Mercy’s father says carefully, ‘that we could describe Mercy’s intervention as passive. With the car bomb, I mean.’

  Mercy is alarmed by this violation of the unspoken rules in front of her mother. ‘That was an accident,’ she says. ‘The petrol tank –’

  ‘Oh God.’ Sarah holds her head in her hands. ‘Why is everyone play-acting like this? Mercy, if this was war, you’d have a Medal of Honour.’

 
Mercy swallows. ‘But it wasn’t anything, it was just a –’

  ‘What is happening?’ Sarah asks in a low voice. ‘What is happening? Why won’t anybody say anything? Why won’t anyone tell me what has happened?’

  ‘Because of shame,’ Mercy’s father says. ‘Because of grief, Mrs Cohen. Because of complicity.’

  Mercy’s mother is holding herself so still that Mercy is afraid she will shatter in the way that delicate fossilised shells fall apart from the heat of the sun. She says urgently: ‘I’m going into Beresford’s now. Sarah, would you like –?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah says firmly. ‘I would.’

  Below his left eye, Sarah sees (her own right eye pressed against the sliver of light between two weatherboards in the kitchen wall), there is a small imperfection, the faint brown stain of a birthmark, which seems to her to offer a delicate and tantalising suggestion of vulnerability, of some secret inner layer which is kept armoured over by the confident pronouncements of his body, the way he walks, the way he frowns. Or perhaps it is simply evidence that the fizzing intensity he gives off was there from the start, or from before the start. Perhaps he hurled himself dangerously from his mother in his impatience to be Nikos, Nick, to be his own invention.

  Mercy is pressed up against Sarah, and from Mercy’s narrow angle of vision, the stained eye looks smudged, slightly out of focus, defenceless, as though it has sustained an injury but has learned to compensate for it. Donny Becker had pale freckles on the soft skin at the edges of his eyes. She imagines putting her lips lightly against Donny’s closed eyelids, as lightly as a butterfly settling there, and her breathing turns ragged and she kisses the wooden battens of the wall.

  Jess taps her on the shoulder, and when Mercy turns, startled, embarrassed, Jess gives her the plate of steak and fried eggs. ‘Take it to him. He’s had his coffee, but he hasn’t eaten yet.’

  Nick looks up as Mercy enters the dining room. Sarah watches from the crack in the wall. Mercy bites her lip, and her feet suddenly behave as though they do not belong to her. She is conscious of Sarah watching.

  ‘Is that for me?’ Nick asks, and she nods. She wishes he did not have Gideon’s eyes.

  He takes the plate from her, salts it and peppers it, and begins immediately to eat with single-minded attentiveness to the food. He lifts each egg with his fork and examines its underside. He prods the toast with one finger. The steak he cuts to see if it bleeds. Everything meets with his cautious approval. Minutes later, when he glances up, he and Mercy are both startled that she is still there. He frowns.

  ‘You work at Beresford’s.’ He pulls out one of the other chairs for her. ‘Talk to me,’ he says. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Jess says you won’t leave, but you have to leave. You have to take Sarah and go.’

  ‘Ah. Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to die,’ she says in a low voice, desperately.

  His eyebrows lift slightly but his eyes do not move from hers. They regard each other gravely, intently. He reaches up to touch her cheek with his index finger. ‘I won’t,’ he says. ‘That’s a promise.’ But they go on staring at each other, not moving. ‘My son,’ he says quietly, ‘my son Angelo has your kind of intensity. Your kind of curiosity.’ He says something in Greek, and she feels as though she knows what this means. ‘I hope it doesn’t get you into trouble,’ he says sadly. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘A child,’ he sighs. ‘Angelo is twenty-three but he’s also a child.’

  ‘And you?’ she asks boldly. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Old,’ he says, with a short bitter laugh. ‘Too old. But very stubborn.’ He is studying her face, absorbed. ‘So you don’t want me to die. I take it there’s been a bit of a death epidemic.’

  He waits for her response and she lowers her eyes. ‘Am I the only person outside the know?’

  ‘And Sarah,’ she says.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘The other one. She came with you on Jake Digby’s truck.’

  ‘Oh, her.’ He nods, and goes on nodding, smiling savagely, absent-mindedly forking bacon into his mouth. ‘But apart from the two of us, everyone else knows what’s going on and what happened at Oyster’s Reef?’

  Mercy studies the network of cracks in the Formica tabletop. If she closes one eye, she notes, and squints with the other, the cracks could be a map of the tunnels at the Reef.

  ‘I brought Sarah to see you,’ she says, rising abruptly, knocking over her chair.

  Nick is not going to look at her. His allergy to vulnerability is too high.

  ‘There are some letters,’ he says gruffly. He fishes the bundle out of his jeans pocket. ‘Jess gave them to me. Some from your daughter, apparently. Look through them and take what you want.’

  She is so still that he has to look, just to see what she is or isn’t doing. She is very pale. He can see the beads of sweat above her lip. He looks away.

  ‘Just give me a minute,’ she says, in a low voice.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s a shock.’ She bites the back of her hand, she blinks very rapidly, she is swallowing sounds. ‘It’s too . . . it feels final. I don’t want a last will and testament. I want her.’

  ‘I know. I can’t look yet either.’

  He doesn’t mean to do it, he is angry with himself for doing it, but he reaches across the table and puts his hand on hers. They sit there not looking at each other.

  Major Miner is at Bernie’s kitchen door.

  ‘Jess,’ he says, awkwardly.

  Jess finds she is suddenly clumsy with the coffee pot. There has always been a bar counter between them, a line drawn. She prefers to keep boundaries set up.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asks.

  She nods and shrugs at the same time, to indicate indifferent courtesy. She gestures with the coffee.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  But her hand is not steady, and she manages to slop coffee into the saucer and across the tabletop. Not that he notices. He begins pacing around the room. ‘Jess,’ he says, with an explosive sort of energy. ‘I’m sorry to take liberties, and you’ll think I’m mad. But I get these forebodings.’ He circles the table, jerkily, like a feral dingo in a pen. ‘I don’t dare ignore them,’ he says. ‘It’s a prisoner-of-war thing. You pick up moods from the air.’ He keeps pacing. ‘You’re a good listener, Jess. I always feel I can trust you. You make me feel safe to let off steam.’

  Jess sits down, or rather perhaps, sinks down, into one of the chairs at the table. Major Miner keeps pacing.

  ‘I pick up auras,’ he says. ‘I don’t even know how I do it. Sounds, smells, tensions. I felt it the day Susannah . . . and the day the Reef . . . and this week again. Everything is about to blow, I can feel it. It’s going to be ugly –’

  ‘I know,’ Jess says.

  ‘It’s going to get out of control, and we have to get the two foreigners –’ He stops pacing suddenly, between the great cast-iron wood stove and the refrigerator. ‘Jess,’ he says, amazed.

  ‘It’s my day for speaking,’ she says drily.

  Very carefully, he pulls out a chair and sits down opposite her. She is grateful for the line of the table in between.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ she says. ‘We’ve got a chance. They’re both in there, in the dining room. And outside, Andrew’s Troopie is parked . . .’

  ‘I saw. I heard it this morning. That’s why I came in.’

  ‘Nick stole it. Not a smart idea, but, on the other hand, it’s got a full reserve tank.’

  He is still stunned to hear her talk. He is only half listening to what she says, and she can see a little smile running around his lips, and it disconcerts her. She has to turn away from him.

  ‘There’s only one way to get them out of here,’ she says, ‘and that’s to promise to show them the Reef.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says heavily. ‘That has to be done, I suppose. I’d rather not be the one t
o do it.’

  ‘It has to be you,’ she says. ‘But you don’t have to do it today. What does have to be done today –’

  ‘Get them out of here, yes. And hide the Troopie in the breakaways somewhere, till they get a chance –’

  ‘They won’t leave until they’ve seen the Reef,’ she says. ‘Not Nick, anyway. He’s stubborn.’

  ‘But the woman? Do you think it’s a good idea . . . ? I mean, the shock is going to be . . .’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. They both have a right, though. I think she’ll insist too. But for now, can they camp out with you?’

  ‘They can stay in the shack. I’ll doss outside. No one’ll think to look for them there.’

  ‘Take them in Andrew’s Troopie. I’ll drive out later in your truck, so you’ll have it. You can bring me back in.’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Right. Jess?’

  ‘What?’ she says.

  They study each other, the table in between.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Jess says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Take them,’ she says, turning away. ‘Quick. Before anybody comes.’

  Saturday

  How it begins: like a hunger on the surface of Dorothy Godwin’s skin. Redness appears at her wrists and then gallops. The itch is excruciating. She has to roll in grass, at express rates, and Ethel is watching as usual, let her watch, what difference does it make? Dorothy would like to scrape herself with steel wool.

  It’s because of the foreigners, she knows that. And now Andrew has invited the man to visit the mine, she doesn’t know what Andrew can be thinking of, she told him that. I know very well what I’m thinking of, Andrew said, but then abracadabra, his Troopie vanished. And now the foreigners have done likewise, or so Ethel says. That is the word in town and along the CB trails. This might be a good sign, it might be bad. It might mean a propitious accident has arrived, it might not. She can see Andrew is jumpy too, because of the Troopie. Andrew thinks it might mean that the Murris are back. And the phones are all down, an ominous sign.