Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Beverley finishes her green message and folds the piece of paper meticulously, moving the tip of her tongue between her lips to get it right. She does not turn and present her smocked dimples and puckers to Mercy, but regards the pulpit with beatific concentration. Behind her back, below the lower rail of the pew, she extends a rigid arm and offers her closed fist which rests in the bunched pink of her skirt, buttock-high.

  Mercy drops her chorus book.

  She leans forward to pick it up from the floor and takes the note. ‘Your father’s watching,’ she whispers into Beverley’s shoulder.

  The huge web has five guy-ropes that Mercy can see, and perhaps many more. She wonders if there are ever turf wars between spiders, webs running into each other between windows and aisles, passing through each other perhaps, interlocking. One of the guy-ropes disappears up into the rafters and the silvered galvanised iron of the roof. There have been, from time to time in the history of Outer Maroo, hailstorms against that roof: never rain, at least not in Mercy’s memory; just pellets of ice the size of ping-pong balls, or even larger, making havoc and thunder. Mercy remembers the time that hail fell exactly at the hour of afternoon prayer; and how they all went shocked and quiet beneath the doomsday din; and how, into the eerie silence that followed the storm, Oyster stood in the pulpit and said that the Seventh Angel had spoken, and there had been shouts and tumult, but Mercy does not want to remember all that, she cannot bear to remember. Not now. Not while Mr Prophet has his burning eye on her, not while the endless cyclic singing of the chorus is beginning to peter out, and the sermon is beginning to peter in.

  When Mr Prophet speaks, Mercy notes with habitual and awful fascination, there is a little fleck of white that lines the inside of his lower lip. Against her will, she observes the way it gradually thickens. It reminds her of the brackish tideline inside empty beer glasses at Bernie’s. She imagines Jess wiping a dishrag across the inside of Mr Prophet’s lip. She imagines the soggy corpses of minute insects and flies from the bar countertop being deposited under his tongue. She tries to imagine how Beverley feels when her father comes to her bedroom to kiss her goodnight. Does Beverley make a kiss with her own lips as she waits, pushing the soft flesh out, holding it ready, expectant? Or does she lie in bed pretending to be asleep, with the sheet pulled over her face? Mercy ponders this. If she were Beverley, what would she do? She supposes she would reluctantly kiss her father. She supposes that if she were Beverley, she would not even notice that line of foam.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ booms a voice behind her.

  ‘Amen, amen. That is the truth, Dukke Prophet.’

  ‘The Word of the Lord. Praise His name.’

  ‘And He shall come again,’ Dukke Prophet says, ‘and He will speak to the nations,’ and will He speak in an accent like Mr Prophet’s? Mercy wonders – faintly American, with those strange vowels underneath that must be South African, and other notes that are broad Australian but which nevertheless sound as though Mr Prophet is all the time making an effort to sound Australian. The cobwebs drift, the words drift and scorch, ‘. . . the terrible flame of the Day of God’s Wrath, that refining fire,’ why is he so in love with fire? Mercy wonders, watching his words fizzing from the pulpit like little straw knots soaked in gasoline: ‘. . . a message from the secret place of the Most High . . . for the Sanctified, fire is not a destroying flame, but a purifying . . . For it is written, He shall try them with a refiner’s fire.’

  Detonations of joyful assent break loose around Mercy like firecrackers. Beverley presses the back of her fist against her buttocks and flexes all her fingers, wavelike, in a signal. Have you read my note yet? her fingers demand, and even her fingers speak Australian because Beverley was born at Jimjimba Station. Mercy wonders if Beverley feels foreign out there and whether she sometimes has to be translator, sifting accents for her father, smoothing out the vowels of stockmen, shearers, opal miners, jackaroos.

  Mercy, by way of showing affection, brushes the inside cushions of Beverley’s fingertips and thinks of fire, listening only to the edges of Mr Prophet’s words, for both girls, raised from infancy in the noisy inner courts of the Lord, take as little notice of godly hubbub as those who live opposite railway lines do of trains, and usually Mercy would climb down into Aladdin’s Rush, below the bluster of pulpit and congregation, and leaf through her books, or she would commune with Miss Rover, or she would surface and study insects on the walls of the Living Word and the patterns of nails in the floorboards and the play of light and the spinal knobs at the napes of necks bent in worship and the relative greasiness of one head of hair compared to another and the way some people rock and others shake and some roll on the floor in holy laughter and some are afflicted by weeping. She has become a dispassionate cataloguer of ecstasies, though today she thinks of the classifications and sub-systems of fire.

  She thinks of petrol tanks ablaze, of exploding cars, of infernos in mine shafts, of the fire of the Holy Spirit moving like a Zippo lighter in sin-struck souls. Even tongues of fire, of sacred fire, she notes, speak in predictable vocabularies and in certain limited ways. She notes that Mrs Johnson, for example, always tips back her head until it rests on the top rail of the pew, and she makes a trilling sound with her tongue as though she were straining not to swallow it; that Mr Murray, on the other hand, has a habit of catapulting his body forward from the waist and slapping his hands against his thighs and shouting Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah, but Mercy thinks of fire and of Brian. Brian, Brian, she whispers urgently, backwards across the two years since he left, further back into childhood, and his eyes gleam, and he holds up his fingers and flashes them twice behind his chorus book and they are playing it again, the old guessing game: how many times during one praise meeting will Mr Murray shout his hallelujahs out? Brian bites down hard on his fist, Mercy stuffs her handkerchief into her mouth, they both splutter and shake with squashed-down mirth, they pray for forgiveness, for Brian yearns to be purer than light, to be a spotless soldier of truth, and Mercy too, sometimes, mostly, except why do Ma and Ma’s Bill and Jess and Miss Rover and all of the people who don’t come to prayer meeting, have to be cast into outer darkness, it doesn’t seem fair, simply because they have never been washed in the Blood of the Lamb, which is something Mercy has imagined since about the age of four, very vividly and horribly, and she is grateful that she has apparently already washed herself in the Blood but fortunately cannot remember doing it, or perhaps she hasn’t really done it, perhaps she is not really saved after all, perhaps she will be cast into outer darkness too, which might not be so bad if Miss Rover is there and Mercy can look at her books, though Brian has certainly done it, but all those thoughts were years ago, years ago, and Brian has since marched on into battle and up into light, while Mercy . . .

  Mercy is probably guilty of almost everything that cannot be forgiven, and she always has been. She cannot keep her thoughts pure. She cannot even hold her attention on a single spider because now he has disappeared and there are seven trapped flies, and when did the new ones arrive?

  She is addicted to tangents.

  You’re too earnest about everything, Mercy, Miss Rover says, used to say, though Miss Rover always seems to be around because Mercy can never stay in one time zone either, she is always bouncing between future and past, the present never stays around her for longer than the blink of an eye though she tries to stay there, she does try, she throws out anchors but they never hold, she tries to get off at the station of Now, she pulls the cord, she tells the conductor, but the train is always express, it never waits. A wandering mind is not something to be ashamed of, Miss Rover says. It’s an asset. The great artists and inventors could all be led astray on tangents at the drop of a hat. It’s a good sign. It is even – though I hate to poach on your father’s territory, and I feel pretty bloody ridiculous making any sort of comment whatsoever on the dubious concept of sanctity – but it is even said to be the mark of true saints that the tiniest details can distract them. They s
ee God in the distractions themselves, they see Him in the most minute details. They see infinity in a grain of sand.

  Saints. The people with golden saucers stuck to their heads in Dictionary of Great Paintings of the Western World, and every last one of them Catholics, some of whom, it is true, might be saved in spite of themselves, this is acknowledged in the Living World Gospel Hall, at least in the opinion of Mercy’s father, though probably not in the opinion of Mr Prophet, yet even Mr Prophet will acknowledge that some Catholics will be saved because it is not the fault of individual Catholics that the priests stop them from reading the Bible themselves, and it is not their fault that the Pope is probably the Antichrist and is also the Beast described in the Book of Revelation, but just the same, Mercy thinks, it cannot be considered reliable information to know what Catholics have to say about saints and their wandering minds.

  ‘We believe in the sainthood of all believers,’ Mercy tells Miss Rover doubtfully, dutifully, at the age of thirteen.

  ‘We,’ Miss Rover says. ‘But what about Mercy Given? When she is thinking for herself, what does Mercy Given believe?’

  Mercy Given believes that thinking is a minefield. She thinks thinking is like climbing down a deep abandoned shaft full of picked-out opal seams and of dangerous gases that wait for a match to be thrown in. She finds Miss Rover’s cache of knowledge to be as seductive as opal tunnels that lead to who knows where but possibly never come out into daylight again. She finds knowledge itself to be inexhaustible and exhausting. She is not at all sure, any more, what she believes.

  Beverley Prophet twists restlessly in the pew in front of Mercy, and casually, inadvertently, breaks the guy-rope of the web. The spider reappears out of nowhere, hunched down to half-size, and sprints up a single thread to the roof. On Mr Prophet’s lip, the foam line has crested a little, and tiny pieces of spume detach themselves and fly into the congregation. Mercy is uncharacteristically alert, listening intermittently, gathering clues. Under cover of her chorus book, she unfolds Beverley Prophet’s note.

  DEAR MERCY, it says in wobbly crayoned capitals. ITS GOOD TO SEE YOU AGEN I MISSED YOU I AM TROOLY SORY YOUR FARTHER IS 666 I WISH WE CUD FEED THE LIZARDS TOGETHER AFTER CHURCH BUT IM NOT ALOUD ANYMORE LOVE BEVERLY.

  ‘Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,’ Mr Prophet spumes on. The Book of Daniel, Mercy hears . . . the fiery furnace. The Living Word Gospel Hall feels like an oven, and the blades of the ceiling fan, turning slowly, urge her to sleep. She watches them, drowsy. Her eyes circle in to the nub of the fan. She feels drugged, but struggles to focus.

  ‘As it is written,’ Mr Prophet spittles, ‘Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonied, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counsellers, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.’

  ‘They have no hurt,’ Mr Prophet shouts. ‘They – have – no – hurt! Hallelujah!’

  Amen amen amen, rabbles around them.

  ‘I see four men loose,’ Mr Prophet calls, jubilant, the foamy tideline on his inner lip cresting and breaking, ‘I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt.’

  Amen amen.

  ‘Brothers and sisters, God speaks to us in signs. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear. Walking in the midst of the fire, I say unto you. And they have no hurt!’

  Amen amen hallelujah.

  ‘The redeemed of the Lord,’ Mr Prophet shouts, jabbing his finger at the congregation, ‘wherever they may be, may walk in the fire without hurt. The blessed saints, the pearls of great price, yea, even the redeemed of Oyster’s Reef, they have walked in the fire without hurt.’

  Amen amen.

  ‘The one hundred and forty-four thousand,’ Mr Prophet says, coasting, reining back into peacefulness his jubilation and his frenzy, ‘which is signified by the four men loose, the precious living jewels of Oyster’s Reef.’

  Amen amen.

  Mercy cannot believe her ears. Fires are unhappening themselves, reefs reappear, guilt vanishes like clouds that bring no rain.

  ‘And who,’ demands Dukke Prophet, ‘who was that fourth man, whose form is like unto the Son of God?’

  He leans forward and whispers to them. ‘It is Oyster,’ he says. ‘He is set apart. He has sent a message. Those whose hearts are pure shall never die.’

  Some people laugh and some weep. Some fall to the floor and clutch at the legs of others.

  ‘Even so, dearly Beloved, the forces of darkness have not prevailed, for the Angel of the Lord was standing at the gate of that inferno, and he was pointing the way, and behold tunnels of which no one had known opened themselves and led into safety. And Oyster and all the redeemed, the truly redeemed, radiant as pearls, shining like opals, pure as the clearest clouds after a storm, they wait for us . . . They tarry out there, brothers and sisters, like Jesus himself, who went out into the desert to pray.

  ‘They have a message for us and this is the message:

  ‘Behold the times of the Great Tribulation are upon you. The powers of the Prince of Darkness are sent to try you. The forces of Mammon, and the forces of the State Government, and the forces of the Federal Government, and the forces of the Department of Education and its teachers who brainwash our children, invasion, they say, blaspheming the memory of discoverers and explorers, of good Christian men who lived in the fear of the Lord . . .

  ‘The invasion of Australia, they say, but when this land was discovered, my brothers and sisters, when this land was discovered in 1770, it was claimed in the name of God,’ though that was long before Mr Prophet was an Australian citizen, Mercy thinks, and the way you can tell he is not Australian, Miss Rover used to say, whatever his documents say, and whatever passport he carries these days, is by the way he wraps himself in the Australian flag, and by the way he flies the flag above Jimjimba, because whoever heard of an Australian who needed to do such things?

  ‘And it is in the name of God,’ the name of Gaahd, Mr Prophet thunders, ‘that Oyster calls to us to resist the forces which blaspheme and mock and disregard . . .’ and Mercy tries to disregard the flecked white words, the spray of spit, the American/South African accent, the calls of Oyster, the pieces of Oyster that are caught in the webs of her mind, his eyes, his hands that touch, the fruit of knowledge that she had to eat, the unpleasant yeasty swollen overripe fruit of bluish red, no, I don’t want to, and again again, she is sweating, she feels sick, she cries out . . .

  ‘The Spirit of the Lord is moving among us,’ Mr Prophet says, and amens and hallelujahs clatter about Mercy like hail.

  Beverley swivels a little in her pew to see if Mercy has read her note, to see what is the matter with Mercy whose face has gone deathly pale. Are you OK? she mouths. ‘And how shall we identify the false prophets among us?’ Beverley’s father demands. ‘How shall we know them, when Satan himself, as the Scriptures warn, can come disguised as an angel of light?

  ‘Be not deceived by those who show a humble and contrite spirit, be not deceived, my brothers and sisters. For many there be in sheep’s clothing who inwardly are ravening wolves.’

  There is a rumbling as of muzzled wolves from the congregation, and Mercy can feel the hairs on her arms and legs lifting, standing on tiptoe, as though waiting for a car to roll down a driveway to a house.

  ‘How shall we know these false prophets, brothers and sisters?’

  Tell us, Brother, voices on all sides urge.

  ‘I will tell you,’ Mr Prophet says. ‘Ye shall know them by their actions, and by the secret signs that the Lord has given us. For the 666, the Mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, the Number of Satan, the 666 will show itself . . . and I ask you to examine your memories, brothers and sisters.’

  A murmur, a hum, moves through the pews. Mercy can feel something like wet towels inside her lungs. When M
r Prophet breathes out a word like books, he breathes fire; where the sparks fall, trouble flares. Books give off the scent of Miss Rover. They have the rank charred smell of her father’s library. She fears that she herself is giving off the stench of printed pages and of the tunnels of Aladdin’s Rush.

  ‘I ask you,’ Dukke Prophet spumes, ‘to think of the ways in which God speaks. I ask you to ponder the Divine Mathematics. I ask you to consider the ways in which the Lord of Hosts uses numbers to send us messages and to advise us of His will.’

  Mr Prophet closes his eyes and raises both arms above his head. Someone begins to hum. Another takes up the burden of tune. Words break out, washed in the blood, there is a detour, of the Lamb, into song, into singing, into washing, into blooding, words are going round and round in Mercy’s head, six rounds that Beverley sings and Mercy counts, six rounds of the chorus, each one washed, each one wheezing from the organ, and the pews are racing eights, leaning this way, leaning that, Mercy is dizzy, she is ill, she is going to be sick, in the blood, in the sweeping, of the New, aaaaaand . . .

  ‘Sing it again, my brethren, sing it, sisters, one more time . . . !’

  . . . and they are sweeping through the webs of the New Geometry, and now Mr Prophet is flashing a numerology of fingers, three on his right hand, three on his left. Six, six, six, he flashes, then he waits. Six, six, six, he signals again.

  ‘I ask you,’ he implores, eyes closed, the semaphore of fingers held high, ‘to think of the numberplates of cars that you know, yea, even of the cars of those who present themselves as servants of light.’