Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  When he had finished his survey of the little crowd on the verandah – I suppose there were fifteen of us, and he gave the impression that he had memorised each face – Oyster wiped his forehead with the back of one forearm and began to drag his injured right foot towards the steps. He grimaced and swayed again, and hands reached over to steady him. We could see where the foot left smears of blood in the dust. He had to pull himself up, step by step, both hands on the banister, though that is a ludicrously refined word for the rough-sawn chunk of wood that served the purpose. Predictably (maybe even intentionally?) there came a moment when he gave a sharp gasp of pain and lifted his hand as though scalded. We could all see the thick jag of splinter, big as a casuarina pine-needle, and the bead of blood like a jewel in the palm of his hand. He stared at his blood and turned pale, though it was hardly to be compared with the congealing mess of it at his ankle. He looked around in a bewildered way and then his eyes settled on me and he extended his hand like a child.

  What I remember is a sudden intense flare of inner conflict, extreme, and entirely disproportionate to the moment, because I was still under the spell of his beauty, and his improbability, and his . . . well, theatricality, but I do not like to be given orders, implicit or otherwise. I don’t like it now, I didn’t then, I never have. I have an intense, highly allergic, gypsy railway-ganger’s reaction to the slightest hint of coercion. Yet it would have been a pointless discourtesy not to respond. I remember actually thinking that. Oyster swayed slightly, and the swag and the rifle lurched away from him, and that settled it, I suppose, because I respond equally instinctively, equally haplessly, to vulnerability; though now that I think back to that moment and hold it up to the light and study it, I realise (with a giddy sense of relief and self-congratulation) that it is not completely true that there was no cynicism whatsoever in my earliest response. I remember now that I had a sense of being manipulated, and that I felt irritated, but that simultaneously I felt it was churlish and ridiculous of me to be annoyed with a man who was clearly exhausted and injured (his foot, I mean; not the splinter) and I felt ashamed of myself.

  I stepped forward and cradled his hand in both of mine, and pulled the splinter out in one deft painless motion. There was a bubble of blood about the size of a ruby and I found that I had his hand in my mouth, sucking it, cauterising the puncture with my tongue. I had no recollection of deciding to do this; in fact, I rather think it was he who propelled his hand towards my lips (but perhaps that is retrospective dishonesty again). ‘Thank you,’ he said. And then he carried our joined hands to his own lips. He did not kiss my hand, though that is what the salute would have looked like to anyone else: a fleeting gesture of chivalry, a formality (though of a kind not commonly seen in outback pubs, as I imagine I have no need to point out). But no, he did not kiss my hand.

  He slid my fingertips into his mouth and licked them, his eyes on mine. I know what you want, his tongue said, casually arrogant.

  And yes, I felt a stirring of primitive sexual excitement, purely animal.

  I do not forgive him.

  I think even then (in fact I am sure of it; I am virtually certain; I am almost entirely sure), I think I resented him for it. His eyes offered some sort of dare; mine (I am sure of this) offered nothing.

  Then he returned my hand to my side, accompanying it for the length of its trip in an exotically formal and gentlemanly way, his eyes now milkily expressionless though still fixed on mine.

  You have a feverish imagination, his eyes said politely, with just a faint suggestion of hostility. (Was I aware of that then, or is it only now, in retrospect? Was the menace really there? Or am I adding it, now that I know what I know, what I think I know?)

  If you think that anything unusual has happened, his eyes seemed to say, it is all in your mind.

  He released my hand and pulled himself a little further along the verandah. He set the swag down, but kept the rifle slung across his back.

  The rifle. We all keep a rifle in the car. Everyone in the outback does; everyone west of the coastal cities does; it’s purely humane. Along with four-wheel drive, a spare tyre, spare parts, spare petrol tank, and a ’roo bar, it is a simple driving accessory, indispensable. None of us wants to leave a kangaroo or an emu or a prime example of Simmenthal heifer writhing in a pool of blood beside the road. No one (well, almost no one; there are, I’m afraid, sadistic hoodlums) wants to hit such creatures in the first place, the damage inflicted on both parties by collisions often being extraordinarily severe, but sudden encounters at high speeds are not infrequent, and a rifle behind the driver’s seat is simply a compassionate act. We do not leave animals to die in slow pain. So. Oyster’s rifle meant nothing; but the absence of a vehicle meant much. It disposed us, you see, to accept his coming as miraculous. It predisposed us to let him get away with talking in the way he did.

  Oyster’s rifle clattered against the verandah post, and he adjusted it, and eased his back against the railing, and everyone settled warily around.

  ‘The blackest waters have passed over me,’ he said solemnly, conversationally, as though he were saying: it’s been a bugger of a drought, hasn’t it? ‘As they have passed over many of you,’ he said.

  There was a long silence while we pondered these words, while we wondered what it meant that someone would speak like this on the verandah of a pub, rather than saying, for example, I’ve been up shit creek without a paddle, mates, and we wondered about someone who could make such an earnest way of speaking seem ordinary.

  It seemed to go with his arriving out of the blue.

  Across the road, cars and utes were beginning to arrive at the Living Word for the afternoon prayer meeting. Here come the holy rollers, someone murmured, but Oyster frowned at that, and for some reason people wanted his approval, and so the usual round of jokey comments did not start up, though, in general, in small outback towns, the godly and the ungodly accommodate one another quite affectionately. They shear sheep at the same shearing time, they muster cattle the same way, that is what counts. They are as interdependent as night and day. They need each other. ‘We are the seed ripe unto bloody harvest,’ Ma’s Bill is in the habit of saying, speaking on behalf of the ungodly. ‘Who else would they have to bloody pray for? If we all up and got saved, the whole prayer-meeting kit and caboodle would come tumbling down.’

  And then there is also this: both the godly and the ungodly in outback towns distrust equally the government, the coastal cities, the newspapers, the ABC, the Department of Education, the godless Other, the World, the Flesh, the Devil, all the people out there who are not in the little crucible of pastoral us. This binds the two camps into one family.

  Across the road, the Given family was arriving in a battered Holden ute. Bernie raised his hand in greeting to Charles Given, and the pastor returned the salute. Brian and Mercy clambered out of the back of the truck. Mercy would have been twelve at the time, but she was small for her age and could have passed for nine or ten. She was one of those children whom people instantly take to, the way they do to kittens, to newborn puppies, to foals, to lambs, to day-old calves.

  ‘Will you look at that little monkey?’ Ma’s Bill said fondly. ‘Someone’s gonna pick her up and put her in his pocket before she’s eighteen, eh Donny?’ – and Donny coloured up like beetroot water.

  ‘Hello darlin’!’ Ma’s Bill called, and Mercy waved and blew kisses.

  Oyster turned to look.

  ‘Who is that beautiful child?’ he asked, and I don’t know why, but the way he asked it made me deeply uneasy.

  ‘That’s young Mercy Given, the pastor’s kid,’ Ma’s Bill told him.

  I watched Oyster closely. Who knows? Perhaps my motives were of the basest kind. Perhaps I was still in the confusing middle of that finger-licking buzz, perhaps I felt a stirring of the most primitive kind of sexual jealousy. I won’t even try, from this distance, to sort that out. What I do know, intent as I was on his intent gaze, is this: it was not Mercy his eye rested
on, but Brian.

  People used to joke about the Givens. Given this, and given that, they would say, and given a bit of a mix-up at birth, Brian is too bloody girl-beautiful and Mercy has the brains of a boy.

  They do not make jokes like that any more; certainly not on the subject of Brian.

  Mercy saw Major Miner on the verandah and ran halfway across the road. ‘Major Miner,’ she called, ‘can I come and see your boulder-opal mine again? Will you take me again? Please, please, please?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Major Miner said, teasing her. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘Oh please,’ she said. ‘Jess, please make him take me.’

  I might as well admit that Mercy Given has been able to wrap me around her little finger from Day One, and for reasons that I don’t pretend to hide. She is a kind of weird reversal of myself, of my gypsy railway-ganger and my convent-girl years. She has the same kind of innocence (frightening), and limitless ignorance about the world, that those environments (both cloistered, in their totally different ways) gave me; and the same kind of unconventional knowingness. I want to hover around like her guardian angel. I don’t want her to make my mistakes.

  ‘Jess?’ she cajoled. ‘Tell Major Miner he has to take me,’ though she knew very well, the young minx, that she was not going to get me to speak. Not in public.

  ‘G’day, Mercy,’ Donny Becker said, blushing.

  ‘G’day, Donny. Hey, I found a great new place to catch lizards.’

  ‘Mercy,’ her father called sternly, and Mercy turned and ran towards the Living Word.

  ‘Ah, Donny.’ Charles Given said. ‘We haven’t seen you in prayer meeting for a while.’ It was meant obliquely, I think, as parental warning, but Donny took it as invitation.

  ‘I was just coming, Pastor Given.’ And then he called out with such uncharacteristic bravado that I can only assume Oyster’s gaze had transformed him. ‘Hey, Mercy! Wait for me!’

  Mercy turned.

  Oyster watched her, and this time, yes, his eyes were on her, and I bridled, I felt a different kind of jealousy, I felt like a mother lion watching her cub.

  Oyster watched her. Everyone watched her. She was quite as beautiful as her brother Brian, but of course her beauty sat on her more easily, more casually, than it did on him. It was not an advantage in an outback town, or in any Australian town for that matter, for a boy to look as Brian Given did. But there was also the matter of Mercy’s fizzing little mind. She was a stirrer. She came out with startling ideas, as though some vinegary person, pickled, a hundred years old, were curled up inside her and were pushing words out through her mouth. Everyone was as wary of her as they were fond of her. People treated her as though she were some sort of exotic rainforest lorikeet inexplicably blown off course and over the Great Divide and on into Outer Maroo. She might suddenly bite as a cockatoo bites, but more likely she would simply fly away. We all watched Mercy and Donny Becker and Brian and Charles Given disappear into the shadows of the Living Word.

  ‘Amen,’ Ma’s Bill said. ‘Jess, how about more beers all around? This one’s on me.’

  ‘Amen,’ Oyster said, and as I began to move back into the bar, he put his hand in his pocket and withdrew it and then held out his open palm. Three opals the size of walnuts, only roughly cut, and only partially polished, nestled there. The shimmer of the blues and reds, in particular, was extraordinary and of a brilliance only possible when the undernotes were dark; they were like the black opals of Lightning Ridge.

  Opals are something we know about in Outer Maroo, even though only half a dozen loners, Major Miner among them, were working the old seams and the old fields and the open-cut boulder-opal cliffs in the breakaways at that time. Most of us have found floaters of some value out among the breakaways. As for Bugger Harvey and Scotty McTavish and Big Leather Jack and the rest, they were certifiably crazy, and we saw them once in a blue moon when they sidled into Bernie’s back room and reached into their socks or their underwear and fished out their little bags of stones.

  So. Opals we know about.

  But Oyster had our instant awed attention with his stones, and everyone, myself included, forgot about the next round of beer.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Major Miner said with reverence.

  ‘A pure child,’ Oyster said, ‘is like one of these. Those children who have just entered the House of the Lord are like these gemstones. Goodness absorbs the light and gives it back. Verily, I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.’

  Now this is the kind of thing that is no doubt comfortably said in places like the Living Word Gospel Hall, but it is not said on the verandahs of pubs. I do not know, even now, how Oyster got away with it, I simply do not know; but the opals, and the rifle, and the absence of any visible means of transport, and perhaps also his bloodied foot, and the heat of the day, and the hour of mirages, all that must have swung it, I suppose. All I can vouch for is that we were mesmerised.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Major Miner said again, staring at the opals. I almost thought he was going to cross himself. ‘I want to touch them,’ he breathed. ‘I want to kiss them.’ And when Oyster extended them towards him, he did. That is exactly what he did. Anyone who has been to Coober Pedy or Lightning Ridge or Yowah will have no trouble believing this. The devotees of opal will prostrate themselves before its colorific and prismatic silica flames. They will offer up house, mortgage, bank account, spouse, children, life itself, to opalescent fire. They smoulder with passion, they burn.

  ‘Where did those come from?’ Major Miner breathed.

  ‘They were given to me,’ Oyster said. ‘Our Mother Earth gave them to me. My new name was given to me. A hand rose up out of the ocean of time and gave them to me. If you are drowning, and you know you are drowning, and someone throws you a lifeline, everything changes. Everything is different.’

  Everyone shifted uneasily, watching him.

  I saw him casting invisible lines, hooking people, winding them in. The opals won their respect; and beyond that perhaps it was his eyes; perhaps it was his voice; perhaps it was the sheer absence of self-consciousness. Oyster believed in himself.

  ‘Consider the oyster,’ he said. ‘The oyster is a bivalve mollusc. It produces its own eggs and its own sperm. It fertilises itself. It is male and female, both. It is complete in itself. It is perfect.’

  Dazed, we considered the perfection of oysters.

  ‘Have you ever visited an oyster farm?’ he asked. ‘Well, out here . . . out here, I suppose not . . .’ It was a little joke, and his eyes invited us to laugh.

  ‘I’ve got fossilised oysters out on the Great Extended,’ Major Miner said. ‘That’s my stake,’ he explained. ‘My claim. Boulder opal, though, not like those, nothing like that . . .’ – and his awe at the stones was like a hot breath fogging them. ‘I’ve found a couple of opalised ones too, oysters I mean, I mean the fossils have become opalised, and one opalised sea horse.’

  Oyster seemed slightly disconcerted by this interruption. It was like an ill-mannered bit of flotsam sticking up suddenly in the path of the prepared floodwater of his speech. (Did I really think ‘prepared’ then, or was I swept along like everyone else? I would like to believe I was already wary by then; I think I was; but I also know how the devious memory picks over and re-edits the past; and I also know, I am also compelled to admit, that I was in any case spellbound, and I still can’t really account for how he got away with it, except to concede, as even Susannah always did, that whatever else Oyster was, he was brilliant, he was a consummate choreographer, a master of ceremonies, an actor of the most exceptional kind.) In any case, after Major Miner spoke there was a pause, and then Oyster’s words flowed on around the obstruction.

  ‘On the oyster farms at Broome,’ he said, ‘and the ones off the Queensland coast, in the Gulf, and at Thursday Island . . . the pearl oysters, I mean . . . they are different, you know, not edible . . .’

  Ve
ry few people in Outer Maroo have had close acquaintance with oysters of either genre, or not, so to speak, in the flesh. And most certainly not in the fresh. They did not know oysters, that is to say, in the biblical sense of knowing, in the carnal sensation of viscous seafood on the tongue; though fossilised specimens and opalised shells lined our drawers and our windowsills. Nevertheless we were dazzled. The range of topics for conversation in Bernie’s has always been narrow, and such intricate knowledge of crustaceans was exotic to us. It was like a breeze, like a raincloud, like a monsoon tale from a thousand and one ocean nights. It sent a buzz of excitement along the verandah boards. I could feel it against the balls of my feet.

  Oyster turned to look westward and shaded his eyes as though he could see Broome over there on the north-west coast of the continent, just a couple of thousand miles away, nothing but scrub in between. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he said dreamily, and everyone turned towards Broome, we all seemed to go under that blue sky like divers, the Indian Ocean lapping us; ‘so intense,’ Oyster said, ‘that blueness, that equatorial blueness, you can’t imagine . . .’ He made some graceful motion with his hand as though drawing back a curtain, parting the air – the magus, I remember thinking; or if I didn’t think it then, I can see it now, the way he held the magician’s baton in his hand – and everyone swayed, we all leaned into his vision, we were stunned by the blue wave washing us, the tide coming in, shussing back over lost sands, picking up fossilised shells it had dropped on an ancient ebb. We saw Broome, we saw the Indian Ocean, we saw the curves of pale sand, the white shavings of surf, we turned languid in the lush coastal humidity of Oyster’s words.

  ‘They dive for the oysters as they always have,’ he said. ‘They bring up shells by the thousand. But this is no longer harvest, you know. It is not the end point. It is cropping. It is just the beginning.’

  He turned from Broome and from the equatorial waters of the Gulf, he motioned Thursday Island off stage with a flick of his hand. There was a slow fade, the red dust drifted in. He addressed himself again to the little orchestra pit of Outer Maroo. It must have pleased him: fifteen of us hanging on his every word, the whole continent as endless stage on every side.