Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘They’ll take Dirran-Dirran over my dead body,’ Andrew promises. ‘There’ll be a siege that will make them think twice. I’d like to see the Queensland police and the Australian army face up to my arsenal. We’ll go down fighting, I can assure you of that. We’ll leave them nothing but scorched earth, that’s a promise.’

  And Alice will not go down with the property, but will make a proper début with engraved invitations, Dorothy thinks. That’s a promise too. If Brisbane is too much of a risk, they could send her to Melbourne, Presbyterian Ladies College, somewhere like that; get her married to one of those nice Scotch College boys that live in immaculate little terrace houses and never rock boats unless they have their feet and their bank accounts safe on dry land. They could even send her to Europe, if necessary.

  Are you crazy? Andrew wants to know. Does Dorothy have any idea of the kind of information you give over to government computers when you have to apply for a passport and buy an international airline ticket and fill out departure forms? Does she want all their private business spread out naked for every sleazy little federal bureaucrat to masturbate over? That is exactly why, he explains patiently, they hired a teacher and set up their own private school.

  And look where that got us, Dorothy tactfully refrains from saying.

  We are interviewing again, Andrew says. We will find someone more suitable.

  But Dorothy privately vows that Alice will go to a proper school. What is the point, she wants to know, of making these vast amounts of tax-free money out of opal and then not being able to send your daughter to the best school money can buy?

  The point, Andrew says, is to be ready. The point is to be prepared for the battle that is coming. Does she, for example, have any idea how much all these kalashnikovs cost? Does she have any idea of the difficulties and the costs of smuggling them in? That is the point of making money: to be ready.

  ‘Ready for Armageddon?’ she asks drily.

  Because she must admit, although she always found the words of the Bible in Oyster’s mouth seductive, she never seriously lumped him in with the evangelical types. He had too much class. The Bible was poetry on his lips. She never had a sense that he himself took things with the heavy literalness of Dukke Prophet; she felt there was a certain lightness to him; she felt that other things mattered more to him . . . though there was no question that the year 2000 loomed large in his mind. Privately, she supposes, she always interpreted that in a metaphorical sense.

  And so, perhaps, does Andrew. Armageddon? he shrugs. If that’s what Oyster and Dukke Prophet want to call it, he says. Personally, he doesn’t care what it’s called, but there’s no question in his mind that the federal government has unpleasant things in mind for the year 2000. It is a watershed year. We know what’s behind the republic, he says. We know what’s on the politicians’ minds. As far as Andrew is concerned, the coming battle is about graziers keeping their land.

  My land, Dorothy says.

  Ours, he says, frowning.

  He is willing to join forces with Dukke Prophet to save his land. He’s willing to concede that a worldwide conspiracy is afoot. In a last all-out pitched battle – and that is what’s coming, make no mistake – one takes reinforcements where one finds them. As for the religious dimension, it doesn’t affect Andrew one way or the other. But if they, Andrew and Dorothy Godwin of Dirran-Dirran, lose their land, it will be the end of the world, right enough.

  And Junior? she asks.

  Junior! he says, lifting up the palms of his hands and rolling his eyes, because Junior and Delia live in a different time zone on Kootha Downs. They live in a different age. They do not live in Outer Maroo and never have, though they get their supplies from Beresford’s like everyone else. No one knows what to make of Junior, who sticks stubbornly and totally to cattle though everyone knows there are opal seams as thick as rock pythons on his land. Junior is not interested. Junior studies cattle the way Oyster studied the Bible. He crosses Santa Gertrudis and Herefords with Simmenthals, he breeds out this trait, he breeds in that, you would think his cows and his bulls were fine crystal. He paid $9,000 for a bull at the Roma saleyards last year.

  ‘Nine thousand dollars!’ his father says.

  ‘It’s an extraordinary bull, Dad,’ Junior says. ‘Not just weight and body form, but the servicing capacity for the cows is phenomenal. And temperament! That’s not easily come by in a bull, it’s the X factor, as you know very well, but when it comes to servicing time, I can’t even calculate how big a plus it is. This bull – I call him Hannibull – is so sweet-tempered you can walk up behind him and pat his bum.’

  ‘What a lot of bull,’ Andrew snorts. ‘Do you know how many kalashnikovs $9,000 would buy?’

  Junior and Delia look at each other and lift their eyebrows. They live in the clouds.

  As for this permaculture thing: fanatics.

  ‘I would never have believed I’d raise a communist,’ his father says.

  ‘If this raping of the land goes on, Dad,’ Junior says peaceably (and that is one of the most infuriating things about him, the way he never loses his calm), ‘it won’t help much to have an arsenal. The land will be degraded down to rock. It won’t support a blade of grass or a living thing. And yet the Murris were here for forty thousand years, through drought and floods, living off the fat of the land. I don’t understand why it’s taken us so long to learn from them. It’s really quite simple to practise drought-proof farming.’

  ‘Of course,’ Delia says sweetly in her steel-trap voice, ‘when you use sound farming practices, when you don’t overstock, when you accept that there is a perfectly intelligent way to live with drought conditions, you do have to give up your $60,000-a-year drought relief from the government.’

  ‘That is one of the few decent things this bloody government does,’ Andrew says. ‘I never thought I’d raise a bloody communist.’

  It’s because we let him go to Gatton, he tells Dorothy. It’s those university types. Communist farming, Dukke Prophet says. Look what it led to in South Africa. This is one of the issues on which Andrew concedes that Dukke has a point. Dukke Prophet has shown Andrew how the telltale number, 666, the Mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, the number of Satan, shows up over and over again in the catalogues at Gatton: course numbers, telephone numbers, the place is saturated with it. Not that Andrew needed magic numbers to tell him there was something wrong with farming that wanted to turn the clock back to the bloody Aborigines.

  ‘Junior has been brainwashed,’ Andrew says.

  ‘Junior is Junior,’ Dorothy sighs.

  ‘Mum,’ Junior says sorrowfully, reproachfully, resigned. ‘What are you doing?’

  And here she is, she’s arrived, she should have noticed because as soon as she slips something into her bag, the itch goes. It is amazing that she was so busy thinking, so involved with the futures of her children, that the calm could have slithered over her skin again without her noticing. She rubs her forearms: the surface is smooth as silk.

  They are in Beresford’s, haberdashery, her favourite aisle.

  ‘What have you put in there?’ Junior asks in a low voice.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she says, because this is the amazing thing: even though she gets this electric buzz, this really quite delectable feeling, a wonderful on-top-of-the-world rush of joy . . . yet she is never conscious at the moment of doing it that she is doing it. That is part of the thrill: getting home and finding out what she has taken. It is like being a child on Christmas morning, or like buying a sample bag at the Ekka, the Brisbane Show. What will be inside the wrapping?

  And the other astonishing thing is to find that her hand always follows the rules. She does not plan, and yet she has never taken anything of personal use. There is a profound moral system at work even when her mind is on holiday. She is reassured by this.

  She believes Junior understands.

  ‘Mum,’ Junior says gently, very quietly. ‘Why don’t you just put those thimbles
back now, and save me a trip to Potch Point?’

  Well, he knows the answer to that. She also understands what he believes he has to do, she does not condemn him, although Potch Point has suffered in consequence. Potch Point is not the place it once was.

  ‘Junior,’ she says. ‘I think Alice should come home again. I want to send her away to school. We have to get her out of this place.’ She drops her voice and leans close. ‘Have you noticed that the stench is getting worse, no matter what precautions people take? The whole town is smelling rotten,’ she says.

  ‘Alice is much happier with us, Mum. I really don’t think –’

  ‘Junior,’ she says urgently, remembering Pete. ‘I have to go. Give Alice and Delia my love. Tell Alice I’ll come for her next weekend.’

  Outside, as she starts her car, she can see Dukke Prophet through the window of the Living Word. He has his arms in the air, he is calling down God. She does feel quite confident that God, whom she thinks of as a Churchie or a Brisbane Grammar Old Boy, she does feel confident that God would find Dukke Prophet very tiresome.

  She catches a glimpse of Jess and the foreign man, no, not the foreign man, it is Major Miner. Interesting, she thinks. She remembers that no one is quite sure where the foreigners are. Perhaps she should get Andrew to check out Major Miner’s shack.

  She feels the queasiness in her stomach that Alice felt when the foreigners arrived. If strangers keep showing up looking for people, and they have to accept that this will happen, that this will go on happening, how will the smell ever lift? Where will it end? Because there is no way back now; there is absolutely nothing anyone can do. It is horribly regrettable, but the greater good has to prevail in such cases, and she will not relax again, and Alice will not relax, until suitable precautions have been taken and the problem of the foreigners has been, as it were, laid to rest. Perhaps it has been. Perhaps it already has.

  She can see no sign of Pete Burnett. She is late.

  She drives like a cyclone on the loose.

  But when she reaches Dirran-Dirran, there is no sign of Pete there either. He is not at Potch Point, which is Andrew’s supercilious term for the shed where her things are stored. The shed is over the first shaft that Andrew ever drilled, the shaft that yielded nothing but potch – worthless opal, opal without any play of colour. The mine was dubbed Potch Point, and was backfilled. The shed was built over it. Dorothy adds two dozen thimbles, neatly arranged, to one of the pigeonholes. She prints out a label and dates it. In its way, her collection is a kind of diary, carefully organised.

  Where is Pete?

  When he comes, she will show him things she has never shown him before. She will show him watches and jewellery, things she took years ago in boarding-school: things she has never of course worn, and never coveted, because they were not to her taste. And she will show him larger, more poignant things, symbols of operations that were extremely difficult to execute when she was a student in Brisbane. For example, the road signs: MEN AT WORK, STEEP GRADIENT, CURVES AHEAD. There is a STOP sign as tall as she is and she leans against it, her cheek in the hollow of the O. I am so lonely, she tells it, I could scream. The S stands for scream and she will . . .

  There is Pete’s car, thank God.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to,’ she says. He has lost weight lately. His skin seems to hang on him, faintly grey. He looks haunted.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. He smiles but the smile does not reach his eyes. ‘It’s not easy any more.’

  ‘It’s this awful smell everywhere,’ she says, full of concern. She touches his cheek. He smiles again and strokes her hair absently.

  ‘Shall I unroll the mattress?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  But they just lie there, looking at the undulations in the corrugated iron roof. Great hammocks of cobwebs dip towards them, heavy with dust.

  She says in a small voice: ‘You don’t want me any more.’

  ‘Oh Dorothy,’ he says gently, taking her hand between his. ‘It’s not that. It’s not that.’ He sighs heavily. ‘I don’t want anything any more. That’s the trouble. I’ve tried, but I cannot think of anything I want.’

  ‘They’ve gone,’ she says. ‘They’ve disappeared. It’s going to be all right. The Old Fuckatoo will fuck off.’

  ‘I can’t sleep any more,’ he says, ‘but I have nightmares anyway.’

  ‘It’s all these carcasses,’ she says. ‘It’s the drought. If we had rain, it would wash the smell away.’

  ‘I keep smelling her perfume,’ he says.

  ‘Pete, she was asking for it.’

  ‘Do you know what they did to her?’

  ‘She was asking for it. Face it, Pete, Susannah Rover was a shrew. She was a troublemaker, and she strung you along for one hell of a ride. Forget her.’

  ‘I don’t mean then,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean that day at Bernie’s. I can almost live with that because I did try to stop it. I did everything I possibly could. But I don’t mean that. I mean afterwards. After they had kicked her to death. Do you know what they did?’

  ‘Pete, please. What good does it do?’

  ‘Do you? Do you know what they did?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ she asks dully. She can feel the rash starting again, she can see the redness at her wrists.

  ‘They took her to one of the old shafts at Inner Maroo,’ he says. ‘They had a feral pig in the shaft.’

  Dorothy scratches frantically at her arms. ‘I think –’ she moans. She can feel the blisters lining her throat. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘So there is nothing left,’ Pete says. ‘Nothing at all. No bones, no clothing, nothing.’ He reaches for a cobweb and pulls it down. He smears it over his face. ‘Except her perfume,’ he says. ‘Her perfume is everywhere.’

  Sunday

  The black flies are so small and quick that sometimes they pass through a web like grapeshot, tearing it, and then a part of the spider-lace goes slack. It sways and drifts. Its sticky filaments grope about like lost streamers. The entire punctured web folds in on itself, a slow-motion parachute collapsing.

  At other times, the black flies are caught unawares, especially by new webs not yet picked out with red dust, or when the flies perhaps are simply at cruising speed, or are coasting on a thermal downdraught, their wings idling. They trampoline into the nets, stretching them, and are catapulted back, but never quite far enough or fast enough to break the adhesive embrace. An airquake ensues.

  In the Living Word Gospel Hall, Mercy watches the convulsions in a webbed theatre slung across the side aisle. Five flies, in assorted stages from outrage to shocked apathy, are wrapping themselves in soft death.

  Mercy is here as a sign. She wants to know what is being said. Around her, people pitch themselves against the heat and dust and torpor and the sticky cobweb of sin. They clap their hands and sway to the music being belted out of a small, asthmatic bellows organ. They are seated closely packed on the wooden pews, and they lean into the words, listing sideways, left to right, then a hesitation, and back to left again, and the slipping sliding motion of the bodies gives the pews an odd look of racing eights bending competitively, though Mercy is not supposed to be thinking such worldly thoughts, Miss Rover Miss Rover come over, and here is Mercy watching sinful television again. That is Cambridge, Miss Rover says, I saw the racing eights one year, the first time I went to England, because there was an Australian rowing for his college, and it’s important, Mercy, to look back here from over there, because only then can you fully appreciate the satire of the Henley-on-Todd regatta in Alice Springs, for just one example, and Mercy struggles to be over there looking here, or to be in an illicit television screen looking out, or even to be in Alice Springs where sprinters dress up as boats and compete, fleet-footed, on the dry riverbed, though one year, Miss Rover says, the regatta had to be cancelled on account of water flowing in the Todd. Mercy struggles to be watching from anywhere else, her eye on Outer Maroo, dipping he
r paddle in red dust and coxing for her pew, the rowers clapping and singing their way through the fifteenth round of a gospel chorus, sweeping themselves through the gates of the New Jerusalem and into the upper registers of spiritual climax.

  The flies struggle to the same percussive beat, they wager the turbo panic of their wings against the give of the webbed trampoline. It is never a fair contest. The flies die, Mercy suspects, of exploding hearts. She would like to release them, except that she has an irrational fear of cobwebs.

  Sweeping through the gates of the New Jerusalem, Washed in the Blood of the Lamb . . .

  From the pulpit, Mr Prophet directs the singing.

  Far from the convulsive centre of the web, apparently uninvolved, the spider watches, gentlemanly. It grooms itself and licks its delicate feet. Perhaps it is giving thanks: a grace before feasting. It owns a property, Mercy thinks. One hundred thousand acres at least, good artesian water still running strong despite the drought, and who knows how many head of cattle and of sheep? It can afford to wait. In the spider world, it wears R.M. Williams boots and Akubra hats. There are opal stake-outs on its property and abandoned shafts for unwary flies.

  One guy-rope of the web runs from the boss at the end of the pew in front of Mercy, where Beverley Prophet sits. Beverley is eight years old, the daughter of Mr Prophet’s young second wife, and has her left hand cupped around her bible. She sings along with everyone else, and sways a little in keeping with the others seated in her pew, but she also writes as she sings. Her bible serves as laptop desk, and she shelters behind the bulwark of her left hand a piece of paper on which, with her right hand, she makes green-crayoned marks.

  Beverley Prophet has a soft urchin face, not entirely plain, especially not when she smiles, and wispy brown hair which she wears in plaits that spiral into corkscrew curls below blue ribbons. She wears a pink cotton dress. She wears black patent leather shoes with buckled straps (ordered by catalogue and picked up in Quilpie by her father), and white socks with lace edging. A section of lace has torn loose and trails subversively. Whenever she twists sideways, which she does from time to time in order to glance furtively over her shoulder, Mercy can see her smocked bodice and the winking pink of satin-stitched rosebuds. There are interesting terracotta smudges of dust, and streaks of blackish red that represent, Mercy supposes, the remains of squashed flies.