Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Or perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps the absolute absence of endorsement or appreciation or affection of any kind rendered them unnaturally indifferent to the opinions of others, and therefore quite unaware, quite unable to gauge their impact on their prey.

  I don’t know, I don’t know.

  I do know that people like Oyster walk inside a gigantic shadow of themselves and that they are entranced by the play of that shadow on the wall of the world. I know that they must have an audience to watch the flickering theatre of their lives. They must. What, after all, would be the substance of a shadow with no one to see it? But they always do have an audience, the Oysters of this world, because they believe in their bones that they are above the common ruck of men and of laws. It is an article of faith with them. They make rules for others to follow, they themselves being exempt. They know they are chosen, and the calm certainty fills them with an intense white light. Moths are drawn to it.

  Afterwards, in Outer Maroo, we told ourselves (that is to say, I believe each person told himself, went on telling herself, in secret; we have not often discussed the matter publicly in recent years, and especially not in this last year since the Reef disappeared; since then, needless to say, the matter of Oyster has become the ultimate taboo), we told ourselves that we had known immediately and instinctively that there was a certain kind of stink to Oyster, of a variety we knew all too well, though just how recent the blood reek was we did not guess. We forgave this stink because we were unable to scrub it off ourselves; because we thought it made him one of us; because, to put it bluntly, we thought it meant he was not a threat.

  That, I think, is what made everyone susceptible.

  But this is hindsight. This is hindsight.

  And perhaps – I sometimes think so – it could have been otherwise. (It was otherwise, a number of people believe, or believed, right up to the outbreak of the fire that still rages before my eyes.) Perhaps there could have been a different ending. (There was a different ending, some people say; and there are others – oh, I know there will still be others out on their properties, beyond the reach of the fire – who will insist that there has not been an ending yet, that the ending is still to come.) But even those who believe that a certain kind of ending has taken place, even they cannot help asking themselves if it might have been different. Perhaps Oyster could have remained what he seemed to be in the beginning, and it was the cast of characters and the circumstances of Outer Maroo which turned him into what he became.

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  I do know that in the beginning he arrived as rain arrives in the outback. He was our miracle, the one we had been waiting for. He changed the air. He put a spring in everyone’s step, and everyone was drawn to him.

  Almost everyone.

  There were, almost from the start, a few resisters: my prickly self, though perhaps this does not count, since I am wary of everyone; and there was Charles Given; and there was Susannah Rover, though Susannah came late and left early. Oyster had already been in Outer Maroo for a year when Susannah arrived, and he set his cap at her, I remember. He was dazzled, he wanted her badly. To no avail. She was immune, as Charles Given was immune, though God knows, those two would seem to have had little enough in common, other than a pig-headed refusal to compromise their spiky and altogether inconvenient integrities, or to shut up and be sensibly silent in their own best interests. Still. For what their refusal to succumb said about everyone else, the town has not been disposed to forgive them.

  This should hardly be surprising. Perhaps it was their fault, people began to tell themselves. They were troublemakers, those two. They were stirrers. This theory came to seem more and more plausible to people as time went on. They spread mistrust, those two, people murmured. They never gave Oyster a chance. They spread lies.

  That is why things got out of hand.

  That is what made Oyster change – and everyone agrees he did change. He twisted. He became twisted; but he was, some feel, bent by bad will.

  That is why payment had to be exacted and meted out.

  To be scrupulously accurate, it should be acknowledged that Mercy Given was also among the first resisters: but Mercy was only twelve years old when Oyster came, and children have an unfair advantage. There is, after all, some fierce and atavistic chemistry which informs them, unerringly, of the difference between those they can trust and those from whom they should draw back. Older people lose the knack of it. They age into too much dissembling and too many masks of their own.

  As for masks . . .

  Oyster, it turned out, had a wardrobe full of them.

  Outside Bernie’s at 2.23 on that particular December afternoon just before Christmas, he was boyish and handsome and charming. He was one of those ageless young-old, old-young men with greying hair that hung in a shock of curls on his forehead. His eyes were a piercing blue, but not piercing in the usual way because the blue was a strange blue, pallid, washed out, a whitish mauve-ish blue, almost the colour of jacaranda blossoms just before they die, just before they finally succumb to the heat and scatter themselves on the lawns of Brisbane, and it was this curious, almost milky pallor that made the eyes so disturbing. When he looked at you, in his fixed attentive way, you knew you were being singled out in an extraordinary way. You had the sensation, a physical sensation, even as you scoffed at yourself, even as you were embarrassed by your own reaction, that a spring in your life was being wound more tightly and that your nerve ends were gearing up for significant change.

  I remember reading somewhere that all that is required, in order to exert influence on, to attract, to seduce another human being, is to maintain fixed eye contact for several seconds longer than is socially acceptable; the recipient, in spite of himself (or herself), cannot resist the flattery. Perhaps Oyster’s power was as simple as that; or perhaps it was the eeriness of those limpid blue opalescent eyes; or perhaps, on that hot December day, it was the fizzing aura of compressed energy he gave off even though he was on the point of fainting from heatstroke and pain.

  At any rate everyone thought: here is a man in his fifties who is prematurely grey but remarkably vigorous, and who looks scarcely older than forty; though in fact it is possible, if more recent information is reliable (Nick’s information), that he may have been sixty – not that any information with respect to Oyster can be considered more than provisionally reliable. Perhaps because there was nothing at all at the core of Oyster (that is one of my theories), he had the fluid capacity of fitting the shape of everyone’s dreams and of being whatever age one needed him to be.

  I think young Donny Becker was the first to speak, and he asked a simple enough question. ‘What happened to you?’ – because the stranger was limping, and there was that ghastly mess of blood clotted along one leg. His right foot seemed to have been caught in a mangle, or perhaps rolled over by a jeep. The dark stain, a thick, blackish red, almost plum-coloured, on his white trouser leg and white boot was quite shocking.

  Oyster turned his pale eyes full on Donny for several seconds, and for some reason everyone looked at Donny too, as though the asking of the question, rather than the answer, had become the significant thing. Donny swallowed. He was just a sixteen-year-old kid at the time, and to be singled out in this way, to be the focus of everyone’s eyes, paralysed him with embarrassment. A mottled rash suddenly reddened the left side of his neck and branched upward on to his face. He lifted his left hand to his cheek. When he dropped it again, I could see the white imprint of his fingers against the flushed skin.

  ‘Who are you?’ someone else demanded, but this intrusion energised Donny. It was as though, suddenly, he became unwilling to relinquish the intensity of Oyster’s gaze, and he said in a rush: ‘Did your jeep roll over you? Did you hit a ’roo? What happened? How did you get here?’ – because no one could see any sign of an unknown vehicle in the street, no one had heard anything unfamiliar arriving, and outback people know the signature sound of everything on wheels the way city
people recognise faces.

  Oyster said something, but very softly, as though he were giving Donny a private answer. Maybe he did no more than move his lips. Whatever he said, or didn’t say, no one heard it, and everyone leaned in closer. There was a shuffling, a kind of swarming together, a hum of What? We didn’t hear you. What did you say? What did he . . . ? We couldn’t hear . . .

  I was watching Donny and I saw his eyes widen, as though the answer, intended only for him, was not at all the kind of answer he had bargained on.

  Then Bernie spoke. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded roughly, authoritatively, slightly irritably. ‘Where are you from?’

  Oyster shifted his gaze from Donny, and as he did so, Donny put both hands to his cheeks. Everyone registered this, and then everyone turned with Oyster to look at Bernie, and Bernie frowned. I’m more than used to Bernie’s short fuse. Oyster looked at Bernie for so long that I knew something exceptional was happening by the mere fact that Bernie did not swear, or spit, or turn away. I was astonished. I was fascinated. I kept expecting Bernie’s usual kind of deadpan over-the-top line: What’s the matter, mate? Haven’t you ever seen a red-blooded transvestite before? And when Bernie said nothing at all, when his eyes kept swimming in the watery blue-mauve of Oyster’s eyes, I felt a slow burn of excitement, though excitement was something I’d trained myself not to feel for a good few years. Perhaps this stranger can hypnotise, I thought; perhaps he has hypnotised Bernie so that Bernie cannot lower his eyes and cannot turn away.

  ‘What did you say?’ Oyster asked. He spoke very courteously and very quietly, but everyone heard him.

  And Bernie stammered: ‘Who . . . ?’ – and cleared his throat and began again. ‘I said . . .’ And he cleared his throat again.

  ‘Yes.’ The stranger nodded, as though Bernie’s difficulties were a tribute which he accepted, and as though he had heard the question in its unspoken form. ‘Yes. Of course you are curious.’ He nodded again. Then he beckoned to everyone with both hands and we all leaned closer. ‘I am Oyster,’ he said.

  Ahh . . . , we murmured uncertainly.

  A collective sigh slipped through the verandah railings and down to the street where the stranger still stood, drooping a little, and sometimes wincing from the pain in his leg. He was pale, and there were beads of sweat on his face, and no one would have been surprised if he had fainted before our eyes. Nevertheless it still amazes me in retrospect that no one asked ‘Oyster who?’ – though later, of course, later, in the brief period between the end of the honeymoon and the state of undeclared war with the Reef, this moment became the long-running serial gag of Outer Maroo, an endless game, with more versions and more reruns than Dad-and-Dave jokes.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Oyster.

  Oyster who?

  Oystro-enteritis, otherwise known as pearl-up-the-arse.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Oyster.

  Oyster who?

  ‘Oist ’er up ’ere, mate, where me drilling rig fits in her opal shaft.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Oyster.

  Oyster who?

  ‘Oist ’im, mate; ’oist ’im, not ’er; ’oist ’im on ’is own petard.

  And so on, and so on, for ever and ever amen in Bernie’s pub, non-stop through the cold war period, right on up until the Disappearance, after which all jokes and all discussion abruptly stopped.

  Of course I should not be remembering the jokes now, out of sequence, because the memory falsifies the mood of that first afternoon, a mood which swung from astonishment, to anxiety, to awe. There was no shred of jokiness in the air that day. On the day of Oyster’s arrival, not one single person, in a pub chock full of habitual larrikins and knockers, not one of them so much as thought of the question Oyster who?

  No one spoke at all. We just waited. We gaped, I suppose.

  I wish someone had taken a photograph of us from where Oyster stood. These days, I find myself imagining us in a painting by Drysdale: the terracotta earth all around, the stark verandah rails, a gaunt vertical cluster of lost souls with staring eyes and open mouths, all of them looking as though they had seen a ghost.

  We just stood there waiting.

  For the mounting of the sermon, Susannah Rover laughed a year later. You were set up, she was to say often and sardonically. You were set up. For the mounting of the sermon and the B platitudes, she claimed, but she’d give Oyster an A for seduction.

  Very funny, Susannah, Pete Burnett would say.

  Can’t you see that you were set up? she would ask. Just days before Christmas? Honestly.

  Blessed are the graziers, she would mock, who live on vast cattle properties and who believe the government is out to get them, for they shall be protected from state and federal interference.

  She had an uncanny way of mimicking Oyster’s voice, the rise and fall of it, the passionate fortes and intimate lows.

  Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for a taxless cash economy, she would say, for they shall be in on my opal spree. And blessed are ye, o little towns of the outback, when all men revile you and persecute you, blessed are ye, all ye cow cockies and yobbos with a persecution complex, for a white knight with a rifle on his back will arrive when the Christmas star is in the sky . . . but at about this point Pete Burnett would stop her mouth with a long wet kiss. You’re a raving lunatic, love, he would say, but nervously, in case anyone else but himself and me had heard her. It was never a smart idea to make fun of gullibility in Outer Maroo. It was not a way to endear yourself to the town.

  It takes two to demythologise, Pete, she would say. One to go over the top, and the other to undercut. Half the time, he never knew what the hell she was on about, but he loved watching her talk. He loved the perfume of danger on her. He got high on it. I’m the undercutter, she would say. And guess who is over the top?

  She could not leave the topic alone. She kept hearing different accounts, all embroidered, and increasingly so, of Oyster’s first manifestation – that was her term for it, ironical; but funnily enough it caught on and came to be used straight, without any self-consciousness, so that people would speak of that hot afternoon, a Friday, wasn’t it? the day of Oyster’s first manifestation, or they might say There was something he said at the second manifestation that keeps . . . and so on, and they would say these things much as they might say That day Bernie’s truck broke down, you remember?

  Susannah kept hearing stories and she could not resist setting to work, snip snip snip, with her scissoring mind.

  With apologies to Dickens, she would say, in a puckering Pickwick kind of voice, they’ve got very good power of suction, Pete, oysters have. Oyster would ha’ made an uncommon fine oyster himself if he’d been born in that station o’ life.

  With apologies to Swift, she would say, he was a bold, rash man, Pete, he who first swallowed an Oyster.

  But I should stop myself from remembering this sort of thing out of sequence, because it skews things, I keep skewing things, I keep bringing to bear a knowingness and a scepticism that were simply not present that first afternoon (though I’m not averse to pretending there was something of Susannah in me right from the start, because of course I’m embarrassed, thinking back; perhaps I’ll become more like Susannah as my chronicle proceeds. Of course I’d like to pretend to myself that if Susannah had been there that first day, she would have succumbed like everyone else, at least for a day or two. I wonder? But no, I suspect not; not Susannah). Anyway, I should try to be more rigorously honest. I should not muddle up pristine and retrospective attitudes, except for the fact that it does not seem to be possible to think about Oyster in only one way at a time.

  And yet on that first day, of course, everyone did. There were no complex levels to our reactions. We were apprehensive as we always are with strangers, and then we were intensely curious, and then we were beguiled. We had no cynicism.

  ‘I am Oyster,�
�� he said, and we simply stood there, patiently waiting.

  ‘I used to have another name,’ he said. ‘An ordinary name. But it belonged to another life.’

  (‘That,’ Nick was to tell me, ‘is the understatement of the century. He had other lives.’

  Ah well, I thought, who hasn’t? In Outer Maroo, who hasn’t?

  ‘And not one of them edifying,’ Nick said.)

  Oyster smiled disarmingly and looked from person to person in a slow and deliberate way as though he were searching for someone he knew, letting his eyes rest on each face for whole seconds. You know what I mean about another name and another life, his eyes said; and of course we did. Most people in Outer Maroo knew exactly what he meant. When he looked at me, his smile deepened in a complicit, knowing way, and he nodded slightly, and for a few seconds I had the eerie and totally unnerving sensation that he could see the bar and the back alley in Roma where I had so hurriedly shed the skin of my past life. I had the sensation that he saw all my selves in multiple exposure (gypsy child, rural convent girl, city student, government surveyor, violent offender, and finally me, Old Silence, at home beyond the end of the railway line). It is mortifying for a strong-willed person like myself to admit to having experienced this sensation of transparency, this sensation of . . . of what . . . ? of momentary fusion, of the illusion of momentary fusion. How did he do it? How did he sense so unerringly everyone’s Achilles’ heel? No, that is not the way to put it. How did he make everyone believe that he had access to secret shames? It is my own collusion in this, even though it was brief, that still disturbs me. I still cannot account for it. His eye contact was intense, and lingered longer than was comfortable, and when he nodded again and moved on to the next person, I found myself, like Donny, putting a hand to my flushed cheek.