Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘What they do,’ he said, ‘after the divers bring up the shells . . . What they do . . . and it’s a very delicate operation . . . They take each shell, they take the shells one by one, and they prise them apart very gently with a very sharp knife, forcing the adductor muscle, which holds the shell like this’ – he clenched his fist – ‘to release its grip. Inside, the oyster breathes like a baby. You can hear it snuffle and gurgle very very softly, a poignant sound. Then the pearler takes a silver instrument, a fine pair of tweezers, a jeweller’s tool, and he reaches in . . . the two shell halves are propped slightly, just slightly ajar like this’ – he held his thumb and forefinger a whisker apart to demonstrate – ‘and he reaches in . . .

  ‘Now the oyster is a bivalve mollusc, as I explained, and the pearler reaches in, he holds open the valve like this . . . It’s like . . .’ He was breathing raggedly. He had us all in the palm of his story, he was braiding narrative into the hot drugged air that filled our lungs. ‘There is the soft muscle, the mucous membrane which he must part, and it’s like easing apart . . . it’s like separating and spreading . . . and then slipping it in . . . letting it swim up that warm, swim upwards. It is an incredibly moving, an incredibly beautiful thing, a virginal thing, the virginal aspect is the most . . . And what they do, the pearlers, what they do, in this opening they have made: they insert foreign matter, grit, a small seed pearl, a little nub of nacreous substance . . .’

  We were dazed. Our breathing fogged the hot air. Something steamy, something akin to desire slipped into all crevices: gaping mouths, wide eyes, minds reeling open; and each person asked himself furtively, nervously, if such silences, such omissions, could possibly have been unspoken on the verandah of an outback pub.

  ‘And what they do,’ Oyster said, gesturing colourfully with his hands, orchestrating shock, conducting us, directing our fantasies, ‘the pearlers, what they do: they insert this foreign matter, the small seed pearl . . .

  ‘They just set it there . . .

  ‘And then they let the valve close over it. They let those soft nether lips of the oyster kiss it. They close the shell. They attach the shell to a mesh rack, a rope mesh, a fishing net full of seeded molluscs. They attend to the oyster racks with such gentleness, such exquisite grace, the pearlers.’

  Like the Holy Spirit hovering over a crop of Marys, full of grace and lustrous concretions, Susannah Rover said tartly, much later, Blessed art thou among molluscs, and blessed is the pearl of thy womb.

  I should not let her interrupt, but she does that, she always did, she had a gift for irreverent interjection, though Oyster too was gifted with unwanted intrusion, coating it, pearling it, slicking it over with words.

  ‘And they lower the racks of shells,’ he said, ‘into the blood-warm equatorial ocean of time. For seven years, my people’ – and all of us, dumbfounded, breathless, absorbed, were willing for the moment to be his people, at least for as long as his story and his voice and his eyes had us swaying like seaweed on undersea racks – ‘and seven is a very significant number in the codes of the Lord; seven, I say unto you, is the perfect number, that is what the compilers of the Bible believed, and the first disciples believed it, and all the mystics and martyrs, and the ancients knew it, for there were Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and it is still true today, for there are seven days in the week, and seven states in Australia if we count, as we should, the Northern Territory, and leave out, as we should, Canberra and the ACT, that nest of vipers, and the Lord rested on the seventh day, and it is the seventh angel who will open the seventh seal, and it is for seven years that the racks of the seeded shells are lowered back into the ocean by the growers of pearls. They are suspended from a man-made reef of nautical rope and marker buoys and nets, and at night they sway and wander/in the waters far under/and morning rolls them in the foam.

  ‘For seven years they are monitored by the pearling luggers, they are watched and tended and caressed. The racks are lifted from the sea every few weeks, and the shells are scraped and cleaned and keelhauled, in order that the tabernacle of the pearl may be pure, and that the oysters be left inviolate at their secret work, and then the racks are lowered again to the deeps. And then lo, after seven years, exactly as the disciples pulled in the nets on the Sea of Galilee, the pearling luggers tow their reefs to shore.

  ‘And what has happened to that seed of irritation? That carnal moment, that incarnation, that hard little kernel of foreign matter and bodily pain taken into the sex of the oyster?

  ‘Ah, my people, it has been layered over with the milk of divinity, with mother-of-pearl, with layer upon layer of an exquisite nacreous distillation. It has become the cultured pearl of great price. Men will die for it, they will kill to own it, they will give fortunes for it. It will fetch anything from $2,000 to $8,000 in the Japanese gem wholesalers’ market.’

  No one moved. No one made a sound. We stared at him, awed. There is a kind of excitement, you see, that gifted orators have, and there can never be a full accounting for it outside the atmosphere that they themselves create.

  Oyster smiled at us, boyishly, disarmingly, as though he had just given a lighthearted set of instructions for making damper or for travelling beyond the Barcoo.

  ‘That is what happened to me,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I was chosen.’ He said this as someone else might say: my mother was Irish; that’s why I have red hair. ‘God touched my orifices,’ he said. ‘I was tested as Job was tested. Pain and evil entered into me, I was tormented, I suffered.’ He bent over slightly, and pressed his fists into his stomach, and the memory of past torment was present and visceral in us all. We all winced, I think. We all bent forward a little, self-protectively. ‘And within me,’ he said, ‘the suffering was transformed.’ He lifted his fists from his stomach and held out his hand again, and the opals shimmered bluefire in the afternoon sun.

  In opal country, you respect a man with stones like those, the way you would respect, at high noon in a western, the man who has already drawn his gun. Whatever private reservations you may have about the man, you accept that the game is his. He is calling the shots. If an inner whisper tells you the man may be a lunatic, you grant him – under the circumstances – even greater respect. You do not want to mess around with him. You fall back. You let him have his head.

  That is how, from this distance, I account for why we let him go on. And he did go on. And on.

  ‘As it is written,’ he said, ‘And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I, Oyster, being caught up in the Spirit, was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

  ‘But go to a place that I will shew thee, and to a people that I will shew thee. And I will shew to thee a reef where all the colours of mother-of-pearl clap their hands and where opal sings. And you will lead the people of that town to repentance, and when they are pure in my eyes, you will share with them the riches of my reef. And glory and honour and power shall be given unto them.

  ‘And the seventh angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven. And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer.

  ‘My people, these things were told to me by the seventh angel, after the black waters had passed over me.

  ‘I was struck down by a white light, like Saul on the road to Damascus. And the angel showed me the shining mathematics of heaven, and I saw spinning discs of sevens, I saw sevens multiplied since the beginning of time, and the angel moved them among the mystical numbers and passed his hand over them, and they became the year 2000, and the angel said to me: when this year is come upon you, time shall be no more.’

  Oyster paused and looked around him.

  We were all, I suppose, more than a little bewildered by this time, a little stunned. I don’t think any of us quite took in his words. They simply hung there like a mirage, and we were used to mirages. We were mesmerised by the lilt of h
is voice. He had a way of gesturing with his hands, his eyes flashed opals, he had everyone’s absolute, awed, and undivided attention. But as for belief or disbelief . . . ?

  I suppose you could say that some sort of division set in from that very first day, because no one in Outer Maroo outside the congregation of the Living Word (whose members, both before and after Oyster, were perpetually expecting the Second Coming and the end of the world, and expecting them as imminent events), but apart from the Living Worders, not one of whom was on Bernie’s verandah that afternoon, no one else in Outer Maroo ever really believed all that business about 2000 and the end of the world; whereas all the young foreigners did.

  They began arriving within days, it seemed to us, all those young backpackers from Brisbane and Sydney and overseas. Certainly within a few weeks, after Oyster went to Brisbane and then came back, we had more strangers in town than we’d had in the previous ten years. They came in waves, and we were like recluses hauled into a crowd: we were blinking, bewildered, affronted, frightened, shocked. We did not know that people dressed like that, or spoke like that. They kept arriving. Oyster had recruiters, and they must have been on fire. They worked up and down the coast and in the big cities, and they found devotees ripe unto harvest: all those bright young seekers so desperately certain that their days were shunted hard up against the end point of time.

  In Outer Maroo we were bewildered.

  But just the same, people told one another in Bernie’s, as long as they stay out there at the Reef . . .

  As long as we’re in on it . . .

  No skin off our noses, if they want to sing and pray all night and mine opal all day . . .

  If they all up and vanish in the year 2000, more opal for us . . .

  They look strange, but they’re harmless enough . . .

  In the beginning, Oyster had Outer Maroo on his side; he had people in his pocket and under his thumb. He seduced them. They were in on the cut. They were cutters, and grinders, and polishers, and truck drivers, and mullock heap sifters, and they had opals forever dancing in their eyes.

  Oyster’s got a few ratbag ideas, but he’s all right, they’d say in the pub. He knows opals. Got his head screwed on. Got his heart in the right place. And mind you, about the government, and the way the world is going to pot, and stuff like that, he’s absolutely spot-on there.

  For Oyster’s sermon on the verandah was followed, in weeks to come, by many more. He did not stop at oysters. There were wars and rumours of wars everywhere, he would say, and who could disagree? There were fornications and perversions, there were men who were not men and women who were not women, and Australia should return to the way the world was meant to be. This was fertile ground. Governments were not trusted, he said, by the people they governed, and everyone passionately agreed. Politicians were as ravening wolves, he said, and our governments, state and federal, spied on us and stole from us and squandered our hard-earned cash.

  In Bernie’s, they lapped it up, they kept the rounds going, ‘Another jug, Jess,’ and ‘It’s on us, Oyster,’ they would plead. ‘Keep up the good work, mate.’ But he would never join in; he did not touch alcohol; he would never enter the bar. He sat on the verandah, white and shining, and all he drank was awe. There were sure signs, he would say, warming up, winding up, there were signs that we were living in the latter days, and sure signs that on the first day of January in the year 2000 . . .

  ‘Yeah, well, the bloody republic,’ someone would shrug. ‘Time’s running out, all right.’

  ‘The bloody ratbag politicians.’

  ‘We know what they’ve got up their sleeves.’

  ‘It’s our land they’re after, the buggers. World heritage, national parks, the bloody Abos, one damned excuse after another.’

  There was a confluence of apocalyptical fears, and Bernie’s regulars would swim in the currents of Oyster’s dreams. ‘At the Reef, I am rebuilding Eden,’ he would say. ‘We will be the end and the new beginning. I am what I am.’

  Where the light touched him, he would burn like a sunflash opal himself. His lips were parted. I would imagine his oyster bivalves vibrating in climax, and I would remember again that first afternoon, and the way we all stood there, after his mad-eyed sermon, and the way Ma’s Bill spoke for all of us.

  ‘Jesus,’ Ma’s Bill said softly, and we could hear for a moment the hum of the end of time drawing close, and then out of the hum, at the same moment, came two four-wheel drives, both of them Toyota Land Cruisers. They arrived in a skirl of red dust and parked on opposite sides of the street: the little world of our local aristocracy, our squatters, our squattocracy, our robber barons, our princely landed graziers, behold, tan-ta-ra: the lords of Jimjimba and Dirran-Dirran. Our cow cockies, as is uncharitably said in the pub. Dukke Prophet got out of one Land Rover, his bible under his arm. He did not look at Bernie’s, and the Living Word swallowed him whole. Andrew Godwin swung himself out of the other and tossed his Akubra on to the front seat. He raised his eyebrows at the crowded veranda.

  ‘Heard on the CB that we got company,’ he said. ‘What’s he after?’

  Oyster turned to look at him.

  ‘I was sent,’ Oyster said.

  ‘What?’ Andrew Godwin, philandering sheep-and-cattle man, part swaggerer, part grazier thug, was about to take the verandah steps in one booted stride, but he paused and blinked.

  ‘I was sent to you. You are the one. My reef is on your property.’

  ‘What the hell is this fuckwit talking about?’ Andrew Godwin wanted to know.

  Oyster fixed his eyes on Andrew Godwin, and Andrew Godwin raised his brows sardonically and curled his lips in polite and amused disdain, but then his expression seemed to droop and float back towards neutral. It was a staring match. Andrew Godwin was a man who always took what he wanted, who always wanted what he took. In any sort of competition, he would certainly never be the first to lower his eyes.

  ‘If you follow me,’ Oyster said, ‘he whom you have lost to violent death will be restored to you.’

  It was as though he had hit Andrew Godwin with a stone between the eyes. I know Andrew Godwin intimately; more intimately than I would have liked, as a matter of fact, since, drunk or sober, but especially drunk, he is amorously inclined. I saw his eyes widen with shock. I saw a flash of anger, and simultaneously a sort of buckling. He was winded. He sank down right where he was, on the steps. His hands shook, though at the funeral for his son Ross, whose suicide is never mentioned in Outer Maroo, his hands were steady, and he did not weep.

  ‘There was an opal floater found by your son,’ Oyster said. ‘You keep it hidden in your shearing shed.’

  Andrew Godwin turned very pale. We could see the line of sweat above his lip.

  ‘The opal came from my Reef,’ Oyster said. ‘There is enough opal to make all of us rich. It is on your land. I will make you a fisher of opal,’ he said, ‘if you follow me.’

  A vibration moved through Andrew Godwin’s body. There were people on the verandah who will swear they saw Andrew Godwin weep. I have heard them, drunk and solitary, telling their pint pots as though the astonishing fact must be set down. I have heard them talking in their sleep. Andrew’s weeping, if that is what it was, was barely audible. It was like the soft gurgle of an oyster being seeded in its shell.

  2. Dreams of Black Opal

  Even before Oyster had lifted his hand and displayed those lozenges of opalescent fire on Bernie’s verandah, Major Miner could tell by the racing of his heartbeat and the singing in his ears that some rare sound was in the air, something new and stunning, which was also disorienting – like the quarter-notes of African jazz, say – because it could not be attached to any known scale. He could feel the follicles in his inner ear go crazy.

  The memory of that moment, of that excitement, is still strong with him four years later, even though darkness is closing in and the bushfire still rages, and even though, more and more often in dreams, he has found himself in the bamboo cage again, an
d the cage is being lowered deeper and deeper into a black pit, and there do not seem to be any spaces or slivers of light at all, nor even any niches where a stick of dynamite might be lodged.

  He has had ghastly dreams, since the Reef disappeared, of licking a stick of gelignite, lubricating it, and sticking it up himself, the last refuge: he has sometimes felt that he is swimming towards Oyster’s 2000, he has felt the final climacteric building in him, felt the incredible release as he floats with his final fragments into peace.

  Major Miner sighs heavily and fearfully and reaches out in the dark. ‘Jess,’ he calls, out of a half-sleep, tossing. ‘Jess, hold me.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘We’ll be all right. I think the fire is beginning to slow down.’

  ‘What?’ he says startled, sitting up, and we stare at the glow over at the edge of the sky. ‘I was dreaming again,’ he says. ‘Singapore dreams.’

  His breath feels leaden to him; he has to strain to push it out, pull it in.

  ‘We can begin again,’ I say.

  One can always begin again, with less visible baggage each time, but more of the invisible kind. There is always more sombre knowledge to drag along, and it can’t be left in a cloakroom, it can’t be abandoned, it can’t be cut loose. But then again, the journey never ceases to surprise: thigh against thigh, the sweet close body smell, the soft interlocking. I explore with my fingers. I love, in particular, the silky hollow at the groin, and the kinked knotted veins at the back of his neck.

  ‘The strange thing was,’ he says in a low voice, ‘that day Oyster arrived in town, when I listened to those stones in his hand, I knew I’d heard the same sound just a couple of weeks earlier. The same sort of sound, I mean. The same frequency. It was when Bugger Harvey dropped by the Great Extended.’