Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Opal rushes and gold rushes, Major Miner thinks, are like bushfires: in the morning, not a flame is in sight; then suddenly you notice a lick of orange here, a crackle there, and another one over there, half a dozen separate little burns, a dozen, twenty . . . and then by early afternoon there are a hundred thousand acres of billowing firestorm.

  Speaking of which . . . ‘Fires,’ he says, apprehensive, noting the way the glowing arc is now extending itself in a small sickle at its southern end. ‘Fires always remind me of the Japanese raids . . . It’s bloody incredible, more than fifty years later, the way panic attacks . . .’

  ‘Hush,’ I murmur, holding him. For all those years in Outer Maroo, I would never have known he lived with panic. But then, I suppose, he would never have known what my silence was designed to protect, though it would hardly be new to him, the wish to disappear from a former life. He himself, after the war, had wished to cease being Major Somebody Else. It was not as simple as he had hoped.

  He can see Joe Blow waiting for him at the edge of the night. The prison camp is everywhere, Joe Blow says. The world is a prison, he says. The Tao, he reminds, is a way to be when the worst arrives.

  Is it? the Major wonders.

  We lie naked, not exactly entwined – it is far too hot for that – but close, slack, in post-coital lassitude. Through the shed window, we can see a curved brow of the breakaways and the glow of the bushfire and a few hundred million stars. It is January again, the season of hot/hot. There are two seasons in Outer Maroo: the season of burning days and of freezing desert-winter nights; and the other one, the longer one, of hot hot hot, of burning burning, when darkness brings not even a memory of cool.

  The season of hell, the Major thinks; the season when Oyster arrived, and when he left; the season of Bugger Harvey’s farewell.

  He has never spoken to anyone before of the Bugger’s last visit. In fact, he had more or less forgotten it, but lately it keeps coming back. He does not understand why he forgot it, because it was the Bugger who taught him how to dispense with gelignite.

  It is not exactly accurate, he thinks, to say he had forgotten Bugger Harvey; it was the Bugger’s absence he forgot. The Bugger has always been hanging around the diggings: around the Great Extended and the Reef. It is more that, since the war, the Major has known so many dead people that he has got into the way of dispensing with bodily presence as a condition for conversations and exchange. But he had definitely forgotten the specific occasion of the last supper with Bugger Harvey, and now he is puzzled as to why.

  The Bugger was an RSL-er too, and this was a bond between them, though the Bugger’s reclusiveness was extreme. Possibly things had been even worse in New Guinea; possibly the prison camps there had been worse, though ‘worse’ is a difficult concept to ponder when it comes to extremes, and especially when it comes to highly refined conditions of powerlessness. In any case, the Bugger’s surliness and occasional outbursts of drunken ferocity meant that not even the Major could take him straight for long. And then there was that other thing, the way Bugger Harvey took to aligning himself with the Murris and to getting drunk with them in their camps along the riverbeds, which put him beyond the pale for Outer Maroo, which made things tricky and complicated, for the Bugger had gone over the line.

  Major Miner tried to sort out what he felt about that, and there was no black-and-white answer, he thought, smiling grimly at the way language itself made bad jokes. How the Murris got along with the miners was a grey area, and the only word Major Miner could come up with was foreign. Not that the Murris seemed foreign to him, so much; well, they did, of course, but that didn’t matter. It was that he himself felt profoundly foreign among them. He felt that they tolerated his presence and his opal fossicking, as long as he stayed clear of the bora rings; they did not like his blasting, he knew that; they were friendly enough, but he felt that they viewed him as alien, and that they did not like having him sit with them in their camps. And yet they accepted Bugger Harvey as one of themselves.

  Major Miner did not understand the convolutions involved.

  He understood even less the kind of animosity towards the Murris that came off Andrew Godwin and Dukke Prophet. It made no sense to him whatsoever. It was as though they believed that such difference threatened the sequence of night and day, as though it were the force that withheld the rain.

  He knew the Murris couldn’t care less what the graziers thought, or what he himself thought.

  There was something else that bothered him greatly: it was the obliging way that some of the Murris used to sit out on the verandah at Bernie’s, never venturing into the bar; the obliging way they moved off when they were ordered to; the obliging way they offered – in the beginning – their skills to Oyster. It was the way they held their bodies and their smiles. He recognised it. He had seen it in the camps when men decided to give up. Once you saw that slackness in the body, that benign smile, you knew that an inner deal had been made about not resisting, you knew a man had accepted death’s terms.

  There were other Murris who had not accepted the terms of decay: the young ones whose eyes gave back nothing; the ones who never drank at Bernie’s, the ones who wore T-shirts silk-screened with the Aboriginal flag. He had seen them giving Oyster the finger behind his back. That he understood. He was not surprised to learn that they were the ones who led the insurrection at the Reef, the ones who organised the Vanishing, the ones who were now in Bourke.

  Good on yer, mates, he wanted to say – not that they gave a damn about Major Miner’s opinion on the matter.

  As for Bugger Harvey: he had walked the line ever since New Guinea. Sometimes he took on the world; and sometimes he just curled up and drank himself legless and blind, and it was this ambivalence, this dual way of living, Major Miner had decided, that made the Bugger so at ease with the Murris, and the Murris so at ease with him.

  Nevertheless, it was Bugger Harvey who had startled Major Miner one day, who had, in fact, inadvertently perhaps, pushed him deeper into the way of the Tao, coming up behind him unexpectedly at the very moment when an ironstone slope in the breakaways flew apart like a flock of cockatoos rising. It had been beautifully done. Against the sky, great slices of rock traced slow arcs as delicate as feathers on the glide, and there, on the rockface so exposed, Major Miner could see a vein of pipe opal like vivid blue-green lightning descending through whooshes of fire. Chuang-tzu and Joe Blow were watching, as always. You have done well, they said. Truly, a great cutter does not cut. The finest work is effortless.

  The Tao does all by doing nothing, they said.

  ‘Hack work,’ growled Bugger Harvey from behind him. ‘Completely unnecessary violence. Completely senseless.’

  ‘God, don’t do that, you crazy old bugger!’ The Major clutched at his heart. ‘You gave me one hell of a scare.’

  ‘Not surprised,’ the Bugger sniffed. ‘You’d block out the end of the world with a butcher of a blast like that.’

  Major Miner was offended. ‘If you care to go and look closely, that entire run of pipe opal is unscratched.’

  ‘That,’ said Bugger Harvey mournfully, studying the cliff face as though he felt its ravages in his gut, ‘is what I would call mutilation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Of a very beautiful mesa.’

  ‘You’re off your rocker again.’

  ‘If that pipe opal is meant for you,’ the Bugger said, ‘there’ll already be a way in. You could learn a thing or two from the Murris, you destructive clod.’

  ‘I see they’ve taught you some very refined behaviour, Bugger.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the Bugger said. ‘They have. They’ve taught me that anything that can’t be reached with a pointed stick doesn’t belong to us, and I say they are bloody well right. You know what happened here in 1873?’

  ‘Is this going to be a sermon?’ the Major asked.

  ‘All I’m saying is, the earth is our mother, like the Murris say, and you can’t cut her up and get away with
it,’ Bugger Harvey said. ‘And you don’t need to tear her up, you stupid oaf, because she’s generous. I’ll show you.’

  He walked towards the breakaway face, from which great slabs of rock were still flaking away like slow drifting soot. Though it seemed to the eye of Major Miner’s appreciation of his skills that the slabs floated weightlessly as ash, he knew better than to walk into their black rain.

  ‘You crazy old suicidal drunk!’ he yelled.

  But Bugger Harvey had taken off at a tangent, and he made for a particular point, beyond the range of the falling rock, where a line of wild native orange trees straggled up the slope. Major Miner followed. He saw the Bugger begin to climb, and then the Bugger disappeared. Exasperated, muttering colourful words beneath his breath, Major Miner climbed too. To his relief, he found the Bugger flattened against the underside of a gigantic rounded boulder at the base of a rubbled pyramid of rocks. A bush orange tree pushed its way out from between the rocks, and the Bugger was sucking at one of its hard and woody little fruits.

  ‘There’s water in here,’ he said. ‘Where there’s bush orange, there’s a fault line, and where there’s a fault line, there’s water, and where there’s water, there’s a waterway, and where there’s a waterway, there’s hydrated silica, and where there’s etcetera, there’s opal, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Major Miner said, disgusted. ‘That’s why I blasted, you barmy old galoot.’

  ‘Uncalled for.’ The Bugger squirmed into the narrow opening between two boulders.

  ‘I’ll call you whatever I bloody want.’

  ‘The blasting was uncalled for.’

  ‘You’re gonna dislodge them, you fuckwit,’ the Major yelled. ‘You’re gonna start a bloody landslide. You’ll get us both crushed, you stupid fucking dehydrated raving –’

  ‘Got enough room to swing two cats here,’ the Bugger called. His voice came out manifold, resonant, as from echo chambers. ‘Come and see.’

  Major Miner had run out of breath and words. Warily, he crawled through the gap.

  ‘How’s that for pipe opal?’ the Bugger asked.

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘The Murris know a damn sight more than we do,’ Bugger Harvey said. ‘They’ve been around longer.’

  Oyster thought so too.

  In the beginning, he sat in the riverbeds with them. We share our secrets, he told Major Miner. We are all God’s children. At the End of Time, the First Ones will be there, as they were in the beginning . . .

  In the beginning, a lot of Murris moved into the burrows and tunnels of Oyster’s Reef. They gave their hearts to the Lord, they sang hymns, they listened to Oyster’s Bible lessons, they showed Oyster where the opal ran. And then all those camp followers, all those young kids from Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne, from New York and Timbuctoo, from God knows where, all those kids began to arrive. It seemed to be all one big happy family, black and white, white and black, at the Reef.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Bernie told Major Miner at the pub. ‘If I were you, I’d leave a bit of gelignite around, accidentally on purpose, if you know what I mean. It’s going to be us or them, I reckon.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Major Miner said. ‘They’re a bunch of kids.’

  We don’t like this, people told one another in Beresford’s and at Bernie’s. It’s going to be us or them.

  ‘Who’s getting hurt, for God’s sake?’ Major Miner asked Bernie. ‘Besides, you’re doing pretty well out of all this.’

  Bernie frowned. ‘We’d be doing a whole lot better if we took over the mining ourselves.’

  ‘You’re getting a lot of free labour,’ Major Miner pointed out.

  ‘Oh sure,’ Bernie growled. ‘Trouble’s free.’

  It interested the Major that a ragtag camp of thirty Murris and another sixty or so backpacking kids could generate so much fear. Not one of either group was armed, so far as he knew, unless you counted boomerangs and Oyster’s rifle. He found himself quoting Bugger Harvey. ‘Maybe we could learn a thing or two from the Murris,’ he told Bernie. ‘They’ve been around longer than us.’

  ‘Reckon you’ve shown your colours,’ Bernie said.

  ‘There are more of them than of us,’ Ma’s Bill pointed out. ‘It stands to reason, Major M. We hafta do something.’

  Major Miner did something; he stayed out in the breakaways with his boulder opal. He found that several boxes of explosives had gone missing. He began to hear old voices. The world is a prison, the echoes called. It doesn’t matter how far into the outback you go, Joe Blow said. It’s still part of the prison camp. Freedom is an inner condition.

  ‘How could it have come to this?’ the Major asks me in the dark. ‘Just spaced-out kids and a Murri camp and ordinary people in an outback town. How could we have turned that into the fall of Singapore?’

  ‘There’s the Old Fuckatoo, don’t forget. And the opal. And the drought. They had something to do with it.’

  He is haunted by his own stolen explosives. In dreams, the gelignite lodges itself in every crevice: mouth, nose, ears, and private parts. A man of violence, Chuang-tzu whispers, will come to a violent end.

  Major Miner puts his head in his hands. He should have got rid of that stuff, he should have listened to Bugger Harvey, and suddenly, unpredictably here is the Bugger again, large in memory, larger than life, arriving with the last supper wrapped up in a bit of newspaper and cloth. Here comes the Bugger, against all probability, bearing gifts: a bottle of whisky and a round of damper still doughy and hot from his blackened pan.

  ‘I was even more surprised than I was suspicious, Jess. You can imagine . . . that cranky old bastard.

  ‘“I’ve got meself a Christmas present, Major,” he says to me. He was practically pissing himself with excitement. “I don’t mind telling you because you’re straight as a die,” he says. “You’ve still got the army and all that bloody pommie-officer guff they drummed into us like a steel rod up through your arse. Besides, there’s . . . you know . . .” He meant we’d both been fucked over in the camps, which isn’t something you talk about, but it’s always there. “Rather die than rat on someone, that sort of thing,” he says. “I may be white meself,” he says, “though I’m less and less sure about that, but you’re the last white man I trust besides meself. I’ve come to see things from the Murris’ point of view. You can’t trust a white man as far as you can throw him. Just the same, I reckon I’m bursting to tell some other white man, in case that’s what I am after all, so bully for you, Major, I picked on you.”

  ‘Of course, he didn’t have to tell me anything. I knew. And I knew why he could only tell me. After the war . . . after the camp . . . after stuff like that . . . you can only talk to other ex-prisoners-of-war . . .’

  Major Miner had tried for a while, after the war. He had tried to stay in the army, stay in the world, get married, have children, have a life, but the marriage was done for almost before it began, the children fathered on various army bases did not know him, did not want to know him, he seemed to treat everyone badly and then he seemed to treat everyone worse, he seemed to be mostly drunk, he seemed to be violent . . .

  ‘I just wanted to blow everything up at first,’ he tells me. ‘That’s the truth. I wanted to blow everything to kingdom come, once and for all.’

  That was why he had had to head for the outback. He had needed to be where no one else was. That was why he had bought a jeep, a few cases of whisky, and six boxes of assorted explosives. He drove to nowhere. He drove aimlessly and bumped into Lightning Ridge and got blotto. In the pub someone had asked him: ‘Are you a miner?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, deadpan. ‘I look young, but I’m old enough to drink, cross me heart.’

  It went down well in the bar, it was a hit. They laughed all over Lightning Ridge and all the way to the White Cliffs field. They laughed all over their beer slops and they bought him another round of drinks. ‘I used to be a Major in the army,’ he allowed, and it turned out that sitting right there in th
e bar with him, surprise surprise, there were other RSL types, other ex-Changi, ex-Tobruk, ex-New Guinea flotsam, other bits of war wreckage, and they took him right into their hearts and into their mines. He offered his blasting expertise. Overnight, he stopped drinking and switched his addiction to opal. He took on a new life, a new name. He was hooked. He moved on, he worked all the fields in New South Wales and South Australia, but Queensland boulder opal lured him in the end because it was so intransigent, it was so bloody hard to get, it required such delicate blasting skills, it required the wisdom of Chuang-tzu and the patience of Prince Wen Hui’s cook. It required the Tao.

  Also: it was beyond the margins of maps.

  Out on the opal fields, like calls to like, and Bugger Harvey and Major Miner boil a billy and eat damper together.

  ‘That day . . .’ he begins to tell me again.

  He can see it: the old jeep chugging up in its private heat haze, the whisky, the hot flour-and-water bread. He shakes his head fondly. He has a soft spot for Bugger Harvey. He misses him. ‘The minute he got out of his jeep, even before I smelt the damper, I could hear the opals like gamma rays squealing in a satellite dish. Hell, he taught me how to hear that stuff. Like angel sopranos, they were. They gave me a hard-on. They gave him a hard-on too. He was practically shaking with excitement. He looked as though he had the DTs.

  ‘“G’day, Major,” he says.

  ‘“G’day, Bugger.”

  ‘“I’m heading down the Innamincka track,” he says, “but that’s a decoy. Three hours, and I’ll cut across the back way to Thargomindah, and then to Bourke, where I reckon I’ll have a party-and-a-half with a few of me old mates –”

  ‘“The Murris,” I say.

  ‘“Right,” he says. “Got something bloody incredible to show ’em. And then I head on down to Lightning Ridge.”

  ‘“Bloody awful track,” I say. “The Innamincka track, and the back way to Thargomindah.”