Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Mercy tries to concentrate. She blinks and squints and strives to settle her wandering eyes on Mr Prophet. His edges are spiky and shifting, Mercy is feeling dizzy, she is possibly going to be sick, but Mr Prophet is talking about cars, something terribly important about cars, and through the window Mercy can see them parked outside, all wearing their thick overcoats of dust, all the cars and trucks and utes of the Living Worders who have driven in from cattle stations and sheep stations and opal stake-outs, who have driven 20, 50, 150 kilometres, about half the population of greater Outer Maroo, faithful souls to sing the praises, to listen while Dukke Prophet preaches cars, and so here is Mercy counting off cars like sheep, counting off the cars bought in Quilpie or Longreach, here they trundle, floating by her with their numberplates, God speaks in numbers, Mr Prophet says, and who is Mercy to argue, for all the cars arrive with plates but no one bothers to keep them in Outer Maroo. Here are the people discarding them, and here are the metal plates, clankety-clankety-clank, marching by Mercy’s heavy eyes, rank by numerical rank, here are the people trading them in to Ma Beresford. There is Ma and Ma’s Bill (though not inside Gospel Hall, of course, not in the sanctum of the Living Word where they are nevertheless prayed for, they are much prayed for, the day of their salvation being always confidently expected), so there is Ma and Ma’s Bill, and there is Dukke Prophet himself, all stockpiling numberplates, and there they go to Brisbane or Toowoomba, or to the sheep sales in Charleville, the cattle sales in Roma, using a different numberplate each time. There’s less trouble that way, Ma says. We don’t want a bunch of foreigners thinking they’ve got our number, do we now?

  And now Mr Prophet has something very troubling to show them, and he is asking them to draw their own conclusions, he is grey with sorrow, yea, he is pulled down almost to the grave with sorrow, and he lifts a numberplate and holds it above his head.

  Mercy squeezes her eyes tightly shut, then allows a small splinter of light to enter in. She sees the 666 MDX, she is impressed with Mr Prophet, he is such a good weeper, he is such an outstanding sorrower, Mercy cannot help but agree with herself that he is brilliant at what he does, he is so good at sadness that she herself is feeling miserable, she is feeling a deep ocean swell of sickness, and he found, my brothers and my sisters, this damning object under the Gospel Hall, under this very building, under the vestry, under the very room where the pastor spends his time in Bible reading and prayer, and in these latter days, brothers and sisters, it is Dukke Prophet himself, the humble voice crying in the wilderness, who occupies . . . but it was not, oh no my brothers and sisters, it was not . . . not the one who cunningly tried to hide the numberplate . . . that was someone who came before . . . and Mr Prophet is asking them to ponder in their hearts the meaning.

  Mercy can feel the little scuffles of the wind of soft gaspings, of supplications, of the murmured pleas to the Almighty for guidance, and what does MDX stand for, brothers and sisters? Perhaps Mercy is the air, the swaying body of the hot still air of the room which Mr Prophet is jabbing with his finger, in which he is poking holes, at which he is stabbing because M stands for Man who has vaunted himself, puffed himself up in earthly wisdom, for Man reading worldly books instead of the Bible, turning aside from the wisdom of God and leaning towards the wisdom of Man and climbing the Tower of Babel to his own destruction.

  And what does D . . . ? Mr Prophet swoons to them, he sweeps them into the new, he swears it stands for the Devil who lurks within the puffed-up prideful, pray for them who trust to worldly books, who twist and turn the Holy Word to their own devising, and X is for Christ re-crucified, nailed there over and over again, placed last, crossed out of the reckoning.

  Mercy sees how the spider is busy remaking the web that Beverley Prophet, so casually, broke. She watches the nimble parcel of legs slide down a new guy-rope and then swing like a pendulum between window and pew, anchoring streamers. Phrases attach themselves. Mr Prophet is reading from the Book of Revelation, chapter 13. ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea . . .

  ‘And the beast . . . maketh fire come down, my brothers and sisters. He . . . maketh . . . fire . . .’

  Something swings loose in Mercy’s memory like a black bat, the smoking tunnels, the roasting flesh, she feels desperately sick, it is urgent and she rehearses how, in a minute, she will stand and walk down the aisle and out the door and then she will run to the clump of she-oaks . . . The congregation sways a little and turns pale. People weep. Mercy presses her arms against her stomach and hunches over.

  ‘And he causeth all,’ Mr Prophet thunders, ‘both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.’

  Mr Prophet is leaning over the pulpit, a sad father, he is gentle with his wayward children, he knows they have questions: who is the beast? and who are those sent among us to administer the mark of the beast? and how long until that moment when the trumpet shall sound and the Second Coming . . . and the Day of Judgment will announce itself . . .

  And let there be no mistake, Mr Prophet warns. ‘If thine hand offend thee, cut it off,’ he reminds them, ‘for it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched . . .’

  Let no one mistakenly think, he thunders, that it is Christian kindness to hold back, to spare the wicked . . . If a member of the Body of Christ offend thee, cut him off, pluck her out . . .

  How long, O Lord, how long? Mr Prophet implores.

  And how long before Mercy’s sickness will be fully upon her, before it will rise up into her throat and announce its coming? Perhaps if she concentrates on being down in Aladdin’s Rush, perhaps if she pretends she is alone, perhaps if she makes Miss Rover sit beside her, perhaps then it will go away but why does she not simply get up and walk out, not walk, no, because it may very well be necessary to run, why is she afraid to do this, if only she could put mind over matter, if she could think the sick feeling away, because she is afraid, knowing they will all look at her and there will be a terrible silence, and then they will pray for her, Amen, sister, and the Devil will leap horribly from her throat in the form of vomit . . .

  Rejoice, rejoice, Mr Prophet will say, because the evil is departed from her. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, but this child has been saved, the evil has leaped from her body, rejoice, rejoice, o my people.

  Mercy sways and moans and holds her hand against her mouth. She wants to keep her evil to herself. How horrible to be prayed for, how horrible to be approved of by Mr Prophet.

  Or perhaps he will say: If Mercy Given offend thee, cut her off . . .

  Mr Prophet is patiently, lovingly explaining, decoding the beast who is sliding to the very core, sneaking into Outer Maroo by satellite dish though not in the homes of the godly where television, praise God, is not . . . but through the length and breadth of this country turned godless and gone whoremongering after . . . and the beast, it seems, is the godless government in all its manifestations . . . its Prime Minister who, significantly, serves the Pope, the Antichrist, the same Prime Minister who wants to twist history, to sink the country in a godless republican sea . . .

  Mercy is adrift in the god-thick sea, she will get quietly to her feet in ten seconds, she will move to the end of the pew, she will walk meekly and unobtrusively, perhaps she will run, she will count to ten and then . . . and the ten horns of the Beast are the departments of the State Government, especially its Department of Education . . . and its teachers, its tax collectors, its maps, its roads, its tourist buses, all the forms of impurity and danger sent to tempt, to spy, to corrupt, to soil . . . but the end is near, the end of which no man knoweth the day nor the hour, as saith the Scriptures, but many signs, many prophecies, suggest that the year, and hath not Oyster warned them, though Mer
cy definitely cannot wait for the year 2000, she rises, she can feel a cold sweat from forehead to feet, her legs feel like water, she will have to will herself down the aisle, there is something rising in her throat with the force of a newly sunk artesian bore, it is urgent and irresistible. Mr Prophet points his fiery finger, but Mercy runs down the steps and across the packed red gravel to the spindly cluster of she-oaks where every one of Mr Prophet’s words leaves her mouth in a thick rush of grey.

  Something strange is happening to the light. At one corner of her eye, the livid disc of the sun clenches and unclenches but its rim is tearing loose and its centre is swooping into darkness as though a total eclipse were taking place. Pieces of Dukke Prophet’s voice come loose also, black soot drifting . . . sun turning to darkness . . . moon into blood . . . judgment judgment judgment handed down.

  How cold Mercy is, holding herself up with the she-oaks, no, not cold, burning hot, or perhaps both at once. She seems to be travelling between Cold and Hot as though they were separate and distant countries. She is moving at dizzy speed, too quickly for the vehicle of her body. It vibrates. Its wheels seem to be out of alignment. Its brakes have failed. Someone must have turned a hose on it because everything feels damp.

  Mercy presses her clammy forehead against the trunk and stares queasily at the mazy rabbit tracks around her feet, the land’s worst enemy, Miss Rover says, in spite of myxomatosis especially introduced, in spite of government death warrants, millions of them rabbiting on, breeding resistance, burrowing in, riddling the outback with holes. The entire bloody country will cave in one day, Ma Beresford says. The rabbit tracks merge and dissolve. It’s late, Dukke Prophet cries, it’s late, and the Day of Decision is at hand, and Mercy watches a rabbit surface and listen, nose twitching.

  The rabbit quivers in sunlight, it gives off fear, it gives off a fog that Mercy enters, a strange new state, and a wonderful undulating calm is beginning to settle on her like a silk cloak dropped from the sky.

  Oh dear, oh dear, the rabbit says, I think you are going to black out, and Mercy does not feel at all surprised to hear it speak because on the last day there shall be great signs and wonders, and also, Miss Rover says, the secret of the most subversive books is that the author never acknowledges, by so much as the tremor of an eyelash, that anything out of the ordinary is taking place. Remember that, Mercy. It is also the secret of con men like Oyster. That is what is frightening about them.

  Oh dear, oh dear, the rabbit says, we shall be too late, we shall miss the end of the world.

  Mercy clings to the trunk of the gidgee tree. She hears her name called.

  She is dimly aware, on her left, of Jess. On the shadowy verandah, Jess is waving her arms, she can hear Jess’s voice . . . ‘dehydrated . . . sunstroke . . . going to faint if we don’t . . .’ and the percussion of feet.

  On her right, Beverley Prophet is also running, ‘Mercy Mercy, Daddy says we’ll take you home . . .’

  But Mercy is mesmerised by the paisley swirls of tracks in the dust. She is transfixed by the luminous eyes of the rabbit. Help me, she implores. She is swooping towards it in a sickening arc. The rabbit-hole widens and widens.

  Miss Rover come over, Miss Rover come over, she calls.

  And in another moment, Miss Rover reads, down went Mercy after the rabbit, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  BOOK TWO

  Oyster’s Reef

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

  1. Oyster

  What we cannot forgive is the fact that we were seduced.

  We cannot quite believe that we were all taken in by Oyster – at least in the beginning – and we cannot accept it. We cannot forgive ourselves. No. That is not quite right. Because we are embarrassed and even frightened by our gullibility, and because we are instinctively self-protective, and because we are cunning and devious and desperate in all the ordinary ways, we have come up with many different reasons for forgiving ourselves, but we cannot forgive Oyster. Dreams visit us in which, retroactively, we see all the signs and portents, all the early warning signals that we blithely ignored at the time. We were seduced because we wanted to be, and we do not forgive Oyster for that.

  When he stumbled into town – it was just over four years ago, a few days before Christmas, at 2.23 one afternoon, a trivial piece of information perhaps, but a detail that happens to be fixed in my memory because I was behind the bar in Bernie’s as usual and when I saw the stranger with the swag and the rifle on his back limping past the window, I looked at the clock as though it might give me some clue – but it was still the doldrum stretch of baked heat, when nothing is supposed to move. The pub was in a state of torpor, drowsy with stockmen and roustabouts and a few opal diggers (Major Miner, for example, was there; and young Donny Becker, I definitely remember that). They had all just had lunch and were sleeping over their beers. It was the listless hour, the hour of mirages, and for a moment I assumed I was witnessing an optical illusion.

  Then there was a palpable sense of shock that it was possible for someone unknown to be out there, just beyond the verandah railing, without having given any advance warning whatsoever: no oncoming hum of a car engine, no cloud of dust, no whisper picked up in Quilpie or Charleville on supply trips that some drifter was in the region. More than that, more disturbing than that, was the fact that he was approaching from the west, from the broiling heart of the country, and not from the direction of Quilpie or Eromanga. Now it is true that there is a road of sorts, a track of sorts, from Birdsville; and there is another, of sorts, from Innamincka; but the four-wheel drivers who tackle these routes are rare, and this visitor was on foot.

  His rifle slipped from his shoulder, and he grabbed at it, making a clatter, and there was a feral stir of watchfulness and unease, the kind that a stranger evokes as surely as a match strikes fire. Everyone moved out on to the verandah, a wary swarm, and the stranger stopped and looked at us.

  He was like an apparition, insubstantial. He was like a mirage.

  I think we did not really believe our eyes.

  He was quite strikingly beautiful in that disturbing way of people who seem to hover in the androgynous border zones.

  His clothes were loose-fitting and white – they seemed to be made of sailcloth, at least the loose pants and even the white canvas boots did, though the tunic was of something softer and finer. And then there was the blood, ghastly against the white pants, a great clotted sweep of it, dark and still moist, on his leg. We were all riveted.

  He swayed a little, as though he were about to faint, and the weight of the swag and the rifle almost pulled him off his feet, then he steadied himself by catching hold of the verandah railing, and he smiled. When he spoke, his voice was low, and we had to lean close to hear, so that there was an aura of intimacy from the start, or there seemed to be, and we had the impression that we were being invited to hear momentous secrets.

  This suited us.

  He is one of us, we thought, relaxing a little, for nobody lives in a place like Outer Maroo unless he has things to hide (certain private details to bury, certain details to flee), and these hidden matters are so legion that they populate the desert spaces quite thickly, they sigh and leer and whisper and flaunt themselves, they fill sleep with a crowd of witnesses, they appear and disappear and reappear in such a way that even after a fugitive has safely reached nowhere, even after he has preened himself on his absolute exit from the map of his life, he will never feel secure. He will never feel adequately isolated. At night, he will hear the soft slither of the past: all the people who have observed him even momentarily in his flight, who have registered him, perhaps, who have mentioned his passing to someone else, who have read an item in a newspaper and looked at him (or her) and knit their brows together, thoughtful;
all the people who know something, or who might know something, all sending out messages (a word, a raised eyebrow, a newspaper clipping) and in dreams a woman like me, for example, or a man like Major Miner, can see these messages seeping into the water table, drop by slow distant drop, leaking from memories and locked files on the other side of the decade, of the country, of the world, seeping into the great subterranean places where all the waters and all the memories meet and wash together. A man with a past to hide can hear the soft plash of evidence far below him, a thin but detectable stream polluting the Great Artesian Basin, bubbling and roiling away down there, its temperature increasing under pressure, its will to erupt growling and growing. It is biding its time. It is waiting to blow. It is waiting only for a new bore to be sunk, a new vent, a new opening, and then it will announce itself in a savage, showy, scalding explosion.

  People who flee to nowhere are always waiting for retribution to catch up with them.

  What is different about the Oysters of the world (so I realise now, though I did not understand it then) is that their dreams are untroubled. What I do realise now, at this moment, is that I am instinctively sliding away from reliving the moment of Oyster’s arrival, embarrassed by the recollection of it, by the impact on all of us (on me too, I might as well confess it), by that indefinable but calculated aura that held us in thrall, and for which we will never forgive him – though the Oysters of the world are indifferent to the giving or withholding of forgiveness, they care nothing for recrimination or blame. Their dreams are untroubled. They do not expect to be caught. They never consider that what they have done merits censure. Perhaps they were adored and over-indulged as children; perhaps any mischief brought applause; perhaps they pushed at the edges of this unstinting adulation, looking for limits, and found none: when they tortured mice, say; or when they shoplifted; when they lured other children into danger, or dared them to lie on railway lines, promising safety . . . perhaps a mother or a grandmother smiled fondly and absent-mindedly and said: Isn’t he a little devil? Isn’t he a larrikin? Perhaps an ambitious but often absent father (a man of political power? a military man?) tousled the cruel little head and said approvingly: That’s my boy. We men don’t let the world push us around.