Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  That is what has brought on the attack.

  The rash is made worse by this smell, this rotting everywhere, the Old Fuckatoo roosting again. The stockmen drag the carcasses off and burn them but the echo of the stench just hangs there. The wind keeps bringing it back. She has to roll across the scratchy scarifying hummocks of saltbush, mouth full of red dirt, and ants all over her legs and in between, the bull ants, the biting ants, every little crease they get into, but they do not help, no, they do not, the saltbush helps for a second or two, but only that, and what no one understands, certainly not Andrew – though Ross used to, Ross, her tender, her middle son, mourned for, yearned for, Oh Ross, Ross, my poor baby, You’ve coddled him, Andrew always raged, you’ve turned him into a sissy, oh she knew Andrew would take him away from her sooner or later, the bastard, the bastard, one way or another, she knew he’d win. I’ll make a man out of him if it kills me, Andrew vowed. And if it kills him, for that matter.

  It did.

  I’m a dead man, Ross printed neatly on the note he left behind. P.S. Dead men tell no tales.

  I hope you’re satisfied, she said to Andrew at the funeral.

  And then, after Ross, for a little shining moment there was Oyster, and he understood, he knew about hunger, Oyster who stepped out of the sun one day, a miracle, and who always and only wore white, and who – oh God, now she can feel the blisters inside her legs, on the underside of the skin, she can feel them galloping up the soft inside of her thighs – Oyster who came to her and touched her and who had a gift of stillness and peace in his hands and who –

  Stillness. What would that be like?

  ‘I am a healer, Dorothy,’ he said. ‘I have the gift of healing.’

  And he did: an extraordinary shimmering thing, strange and beautiful, like a mirage of still water in the desert: the Sea of Null, wet and shining from shore to shore. It reminded her, Oyster’s gift, of something from school in Brisbane, from history lessons, from medieval times, the Kynge’s Touch or the Kynge’s Evil or something like that, when people would bring the halt and the lame and the peasants with scurvy and rashes and plague, and the king would touch them and they would be well, and yes, Oyster could do it just exactly like that. His eyes. He just had to look at her, he could touch her with the milky blue behind the lashes – there was something a little strange about his eyes, a little frightening almost – or she could touch him, she needed only to brush the cuff of his loose white sleeve, she was like that woman in the Bible, the one with an issue of blood who touched the hem of Christ’s garment, and straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. Oyster recited the verses. Thy faith hath healed thee, he said, and she would be moist again just from the way he said it, ready for him. Whenever, she promised him. Whenever.

  He knew the Bible by heart. The Bible seeped from the pores of his sweet-smelling skin, but naturally Andrew was jealous, not jealous perhaps, that was not exactly it, though Oyster did have a way of making everyone want him all to themselves, which went both ways, it must be admitted. Oyster wanted exclusive rights. Nevertheless. It was not so much that Andrew was jealous in the usual and obvious sense, but he was uncomfortable with the religious aspect of Oyster, the Armageddon and Second Coming stuff, and reciting reams of the Bible by heart, which did, without question, put Oyster more into Dukke Prophet’s faction, more under the thumb of Dukke Prophet, that sanctimonious crook who was tapping the Godwin water table for his bore, and tunnelling under Godwin boundaries in his mines, and creaming off more than the agreed share of opal brokers and arms dealers with that bigger airstrip and that high-tech satellite dish that guided the planes under radar, flying in low and illegal from the Gulf of Carpentaria and Indonesia. (You would think Jimjimba was a bloody military base, Andrew said, furious, competitive, hating to be outdone.) Yes, she understood that, she agreed with Andrew on that, she could not blame him on that score, even though it meant that Andrew began to want to get rid of Oyster, maybe not Andrew himself, she is not saying that, she is not saying Andrew lit the fuses, although there are moments when she thinks perhaps he did, but that is not the crux of the question, the crux of the matter is that Andrew wanted to keep Oyster entirely for himself, he did not want to share him with Dukke Prophet, that Pharisee, that money-changer in the Temple, that horrid and dangerous man with the slick of Bible verses all over his greasy hair, or with Bernie, or with Dorothy, or with anyone else, and so after a certain point, he wanted Oyster gone, yes, in the end he did, in the end, almost everyone did, everyone wanted Oyster gone – and so what there is nobody left to understand, since Ross so violently and suddenly departed, since Oyster returned to the mirage from whence he came, is the fierceness, the rigour, the sheer self-punishment of the steps to which Dorothy immediately submits herself, at the earliest sign of redness at the wrists, in her attempt to stop the hunger of her body from escalating into sin and into theft.

  No one appreciates this. No one gives her credit.

  And yet, God knows, she tries.

  Do they think she enjoys being called a kleptomaniac? Not that the opinion of anyone in Outer Maroo matters: riff-raff from Irish potato famines, drifters, wreckage from World War II and Korea and Vietnam, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, holy rollers and evangelicals, the small pickings of the social scale. She should not waste a moment’s concern on what they think, since what they think is of no consequence whatsoever, but then, ultimately, that is what she cannot abide: the lack of respect from people too ignorant to know that they do not have any warrant whatsoever to pass judgment.

  And so, yes, it does bother her that no one appreciates that she has never, not ever, not once, simply yielded to the first twinge of hunger without having tried every delaying trick in the book. She negotiates with herself. She pleads. She bullies. She reads the words of the Old Testament aloud to the boundary fence: For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven: and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble . . . She experiments with every other remedy she knows.

  These devices never work.

  They make her ravenous. They only intensify the famine.

  And there will be Ethel watching, just standing there, stirring something on the kitchen stove, or dusting the mahogany sideboard, or polishing the silver, and looking out the window, staring, just staring, as though she were watching the spinifex growing, or the sky hanging there, just staring with that terrible effrontery of someone who will not deign to react. Or she will be sitting out on the verandah peeling potatoes, the whites of her eyes like milk in her black face. Let her watch, the old sphinx. What difference does it make? Dorothy and Ethel have pretty much already seen everything there is to see about each other. They have pulled each other’s babies out and cut each other’s cords. They have thrown dirt in the graves of each other’s sons.

  ‘Please do not delude yourself that I don’t know who the father is,’ Dorothy said at one birth. ‘Please do not pretend that I don’t know what goes on in the shearing shed. I’ve hidden there and watched you, you slut, with your fat black thighs splayed open.’

  ‘There’s a lot has gone on in shearing sheds, I reckon,’ Ethel said, ‘since olden times. Since back before the last beginning of this place. There’s a lot I wish you could’ve hidden and watched. A lot of boss cockies always done what they want in shearing sheds.’

  ‘I hope you have relatives in Bourke or Cunnamulla or somewhere,’ Dorothy said, ‘who can take this one off your hands. Or we could make arrangements if you’d prefer. The mission school at Cherbourg or Woorabinda.’

  ‘My grandma was shot in a shearing shed,’ Ethel said. ‘My mother saw. She was hiding under a pile of fleeces and she was shaking so hard, the pile began to fall, but she stayed hid. Otherwise they’d’ve got her too.’

  It used to be that when the itch came, Ethel would smoke Dorothy with gidgee leaves. A calm would fall out of the smoke and gather Dorothy up. The itch would escape.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s what the Old People always did when we were kids,’ Ethel said. ‘Anyone died, anyone sick, that’s what they did. Happy smoke.’

  But she does not bother to smoke Dorothy any more. She just watches.

  Let her watch. What difference does it make?

  And so, after everything, and only ever as a last resort, Dorothy unsheathes the gin from the soft earth under the verandah, where she hides it from Ethel, and she takes a few medicinal shots, and then she gets the Land Rover out and she points it towards Outer Maroo and Beresford’s, and on the way she calls Pete Burnett on CB.

  ‘Pete,’ she says huskily. ‘It’s Dorothy Godwin. Andrew says to let you know he’s at the New Reef today, and he needs to see you. It’s urgent.’

  In pain, the itch scalding her, shredding her, she waits for the static to settle. She waits, she waits, she can scarcely contain herself. One of these days the rash will eat her before she can feed it, she knows that. She guns the engine, she puts her foot to the floor, the needy red dust spumes around her. She holds the CB transmitter tightly as she drives. Her hand shakes.

  ‘Calling Pete Burnett,’ she says, gasping a little because of the way the rash branches over the lining of her lungs. ‘Calling Pete Burnett, Pete Burnett, Pete Burnett.’ She is beginning to hyperventilate now. He has no idea, Pete, of the agony a few minutes’ thoughtless tardiness on his part can cause.

  His voice scratches through the static, thank God. ‘Pete Burnett,’ he says. ‘Receiving loud and clear.’

  ‘Oh thank God,’ she says, rather unwisely. ‘Um, Andrew needs you, it’s urgent. He’s at the New Reef, and he says he’ll be out there till –’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Opal?’

  ‘Opal,’ she says. ‘Potch Point. Personally, I won’t be there. I have to go into Beresford’s for something.’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Over and out.’

  And now she can begin to reassemble her elegant self, because she can be elegant. Her real and essential self is calm and elegant, as well as unfailingly gracious, courteous – though also, of course, in certain situations, when it is appropriate, she is polite but distant, as in dealings with domestic servants and Aboriginals, whom they are now supposed to call Murris if you please. Well, she said to Ethel, you won’t get any newfangled word for what you are out of me; and what you call me, Ethel said, doesn’t make one scrap of difference to me, Mrs Godwin. There is something about Ethel that provokes her. There is something about Ethel that brings out a side of Dorothy that is not her true self.

  Her essential self is elegant. She was made for silk and lace parasols. She used to be, in fact, disturbingly beautiful, and perhaps she still is, but certainly she used to be, used to bewitch, she used to have such a reputation as a beautiful woman that all the eligible sons of the richest cow cockies around, every property from the dingo fence to the Northern Territory border, would drive a few hundred miles for a single dance. She was, earlier in life – it seems altogether another life now – but she was, in that earlier life, the belle of balls from the Isa to Charleville. Oh Charleville. She remembers with particular clarity that cloud of peau-de-soie satin and seed pearls and the streamers and the ballroom floor at Corones Hotel, beautiful Corones, pride of the outback, pride of the west, with its grand oak staircase and its marble floors and its leaded and stained-glass windows, and the graziers in black silk jackets and black bow-ties, and all the sheep money, all the photographs of prize merino studs on the walls, all the elegance, all the diamonds and pearls, when Australia still rode on the sheep’s back, and click went the shears, boys, click click click, and the money rolled in, and the wool flecks flew, and the fleeces won prizes and went into bales and were trucked down to Brisbane, to Brisbane . . .

  And they would all go down to Brisbane for the Royal Brisbane Show, and for showing off to one another the blue ribbons, the prize wethers, the prize studs, the prize bulls, the engraved débutante invitation cards, the diamond engagement rings, the parties, the balls, and Andrew Godwin, reckless and handsome, who danced only with her until dawn . . .

  That was before the bottom fell out of the wool market.

  That was before all the properties had to add cattle to the sheep if they could manage it, if they could possibly sink bores deep enough and build turkey-nest holding dams high enough. That was before the multinationals, the hamburger people, the Coles and McDonald’s people, that was before they all began pulling the rug out from under the individual grazier.

  And then there was opal, which has changed everything and saved the day, she supposes, if one is speaking only of money. But the soul has dropped out of things. Elegance has gone from the land.

  For mining is grubby.

  A grazier has class, but a miner? A miner has none.

  These days people may think she is mad, oh she knows what they think, but they know nothing, they have no idea of the losses, they have no inkling of the complications in her life, they do not even remember that it was her land, her family property that Andrew married into and threw away, her birthright that he gave over to American hamburgers, American banks – and the itch is bothering her again now, she wants to scream, she has her foot to the floorboards, and people have no idea that she went to one of the most elite boarding-schools in Brisbane, that she won prizes, academic prizes, her mother had to beg her to disguise the fact in case she lost Andrew, what a catch, what a serve-herself-right catch-of-the-day Catch–22 that turned out to be, people in Outer Maroo have not the remotest idea that in actual fact Dorothy Godwin’s logical and intellectual powers are as refined and intricate and precise as the complex arrangements of silica cells in opal.

  What she steals in Beresford’s, for example.

  But to be honest now: could she seriously expect anyone in Outer Maroo to be sensitive to the nature of her choices, to the fine moral gradations involved? She is a woman of principle. For a start: she will never take anything of personal use. For another: she will steal nothing edible. Also, because she is fiercely patriotic: nothing that is wholly processed and packed within Australia. (She reads labels and fine print assiduously; she steals foreign, especially American.) And she will steal nothing blue – even though that might mean, as it did only recently, that day the foreigners arrived, that she had to pay an exorbitant and utterly ridiculous price for a bolt of fine cloth to make Alice a going-away dress, because she is determined, whatever Andrew might say and might try to do, and whatever act of reckless courage it might come to involve on Dorothy’s part, hijacking one of the gem brokers’ small planes for example, or just screaming off across the western plains with Alice and herself in the Troopie, whatever it takes, she is determined that she will whisk Alice off to boarding-school in Brisbane, whatever that may mean for Outer Maroo, and she really cannot see why it should matter, it certainly has nothing to do with Alice, poor lamb, nor with herself, although there is undeniably this sense of general contamination, this moral stench, it is like a toxic gas in the air, but all the more reason to get Alice out of it now, and whoever heard of a boarding-school that sent investigators out to a grazier’s property, for God’s sake. Boarding-schools know where their bread is buttered, especially these days. There would not even be any need to mention Outer Maroo. When Dorothy herself went off to school, her address was ‘Dirran-Dirran, Western Queensland, via Quilpie’. If that was good enough for Dorothy, it would serve for Alice too.

  ‘Via Quilpie is not the kind of risk I want to take,’ Andrew says.

  ‘What rubbish,’ she says. ‘We’re not even going to mention opal, which in any case would be a social liability for Alice. When I was in school, miners were down there with stockmen and shearers and Aborigines, lower, in fact. Lower. Alice will say “in sheep and cattle” as any well-bred grazier’s daughter should.’

  ‘That,’ Andrew says, exasperated, but patiently, night after night as to a slow-witted child, ‘would be playing right into their hands. That would be giving them a trump card on a silver platter. They could ta
ke her hostage.’

  ‘Who could take her hostage?’

  ‘The government,’ Andrew says. ‘You don’t have any idea how critical things have become for the primary producers. You have no idea. You live in a fool’s paradise, Dorothy. There’s already been a siege at a property near Cloncurry. They sent in the army.’

  ‘That’s because those people refused to pay their taxes. They were asking for trouble. But the government doesn’t even know about Outer Maroo, and no one here pays taxes on anything, so where’s the risk?’

  ‘That’s what the graziers thought up in Cape York Peninsula,’ Andrew says. ‘They thought they were off the maps and off the edge of the world. You can’t even get to them by road, you can’t even get there by four-wheel drive, for God’s sake. You’ve got to fly in. And has that protected them? No. The government ups and takes their land. Someone in Canberra signs on a line and that’s it. All this bowing and scraping to world opinion and the United Nations, all this Indigenous Peoples crap, all this stuff forced down our throats by Canberra, I mean Oyster was absolutely right about that, even Dukke Prophet (and I hate the guts of that holier-than-thou crim), but he is right about that: it’s in the Book of Revelation, it all adds up, the Beast and the Whore of Babylon, there’s no question they are the federal government and all these World Thought Police organisations: give us a break. The greenies, the Abos, the unions, all these communists, they’ve got the government over a barrel. National Parks, Land Rights, I tell you they are coming to take our land and we have to be ready, and I’m certainly not giving them Alice as a pawn in their game.’

  If things are so bad, Dorothy thinks, that is all the more reason to spirit Alice safely away. ‘If we are going to lose Dirran-Dirran,’ she points out, ‘then it is essential, essential, that Alice have proper social –’