Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘“Yeah,” he says. “But I gotta get to Lightning Ridge, and I sure as hell am not gonna go via Quilpie.”

  ‘“What’s wrong with Quilpie?”

  ‘“Spies,” he says. “Sniffers. Bernie’s eyes and ears, Bernie’s little hirelings. Don’t trust ’em as far as I could throw ’em. Lightning Ridge is where the serious deals are, and besides, they know black opal when they see it.”

  ‘I could hear those opals singing a Gloria. I stayed calm, though. I said: “No black opal in these parts, Bugger.”

  ‘“That’s what you think,” he says.

  ‘“You got something worth selling, eh, Bugger?”

  ‘“You bet your sweet arse,” he says. “And no bloody way I’ll let Bernie or Eromanga or Quilpie set eyes on these. We’re not talking boulder opal, Major. We’re not even talking good pipe opal here.”

  ‘“So what are we talking, Bugger?”

  ‘“We’re talking a pure crystal vein as long as Cooper’s Creek,” he says. “We’re talking stones like Lightning Ridge gets, the black beauty, the real McCoy. I got three of ’em, three fiery black beauties, on me now.”

  ‘Oh, I could hear the real McCoys, Jess. I could hear them singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the little pouch he had shoved down his sock. I could see them burning a hole in his leg.’

  He sighs regretfully. ‘I never saw them,’ he says. ‘But I wasn’t surprised that someone else picked up the signal too. I wasn’t really surprised when Oyster showed up, and then all those kids with starflash in their eyes.’

  Major Miner has a theory: that once the Bugger had found the way in, once he had brought some samples up for air, the seam began transmitting loud and clear. The real miracle, he thinks, was that half the world didn’t hear it, just the groupies, just the ragbag army of Oyster’s kids.

  ‘I can still remember,’ he says, ‘when Oyster showed us those stones just two weeks later on Bernie’s verandah. I felt my ticker turn a somersault. That’s it, then, I thought. That’s the same angel choir I heard on the Bugger. Oyster’s picked up the signal and tapped into another doorway to the Bugger’s seam.’

  In spite of everything, in spite of what happened, Major Miner still finds it difficult to believe that someone tuned into opal so attentively . . . he does not understand how Oyster could be entirely . . . at least in the beginning, he thinks, before the darkening, before all that, in the beginning, then surely, surely, there must have been something inspired, something pure, some idealism that later went horribly astray.

  A memory comes to him.

  It is just before dusk, and before the Murris have cleared out, and the sun is a great throbbing red disc behind the mulga clumps and that maze of bora rings. He is at the edge of Oyster’s Reef, and he sees the large circle around the campfire. Oyster is there, and a few dozen of those spaced-out innocent-faced kids that keep showing up, and the Murris, and a didgeridoo is playing, and there is singing and swaying, gospel hymns and didgeridoos, weird, he thinks, but in spite of himself, Major Miner is moved. He can feel something warm and glowing spreading around his heart.

  ‘Come and join us,’ Oyster calls, seeing him.

  And he is surrounded, it seems to him, by innocence and warmth. Oyster is telling Tully Wollaston and Percy Marks stories. Of course, Major Miner knows these stories, every digger on every opal field in Australia knows them, and Oyster knows them, and Major Miner is reassured by this, that Oyster must have worked all the fields, that he is a true opal addict, he knows the lore. Major Miner has no idea whether or not these stories are true, but every field he has worked on subscribes to them. For the patron saints of opal-seekers in Australia are Tully Wollaston and Percy Marks. It was faith, Oyster said, that had sustained those men. At the turn of the century, they had known pure beauty when they saw it, before there was a market for it. Tully Wollaston trekked through the desert and bought at the mineheads, and Percy Marks fashioned black-opal jewellery that dealers would give a king’s ransom for today.

  But they had no takers at first.

  The only opal Europe knew was the pale and milky Hungarian opal, and no one knew what to make of the dark untried barbaric fire. Tully Wollaston and Percy Marks had to give it away. They gave away pieces of the sun, moon and stars in single stones; they gave away splendour. They gave black-opal fabulations to Queen Alexandra, to the Duke of Gloucester, to Sousa the American bandmaster on tour Down Under, to Dame Nellie Melba. They turned the dreams of the famous into fire, and the bushfire word spread, and the famous began to covet Australian dreaming . . .

  And Tully Wollaston . . .

  He’d always believed, he’d been a believer since he first peddled dream opal in London in 1890. He had to take raw stones over . . . there was no one in Sydney or Melbourne who knew how to cut and polish as he wished, as he imagined, as he dreamed. He had to match the cutters to his inner vision. He had to travel and search until he found. He found De Beers. He had to cajole the De Beers people, the diamond people, he had to hire them to cut and polish his stones . . .

  So Tully Wollaston had the stones cut, and Percy Marks fashioned them into magic, and in 1908 they exhibited at the Franco-British International in London, and seduction took place, and Europe fell under the spell. Australian opal had them in thrall.

  And De Beers panicked . . .

  Or so everyone says on the opal fields of Australia.

  So all the opal old-timers say.

  It’s a story that eddies through shafts and tunnels and open-cut blastings from Coober Pedy to Outer Maroo: how De Beers feared black opal, how they feared a drop of value in diamonds; how back then, at the dawn of the century they expended a fortune to discredit the Aussie gem, how they dug up the bad luck legend of opal and marketed it with the subterranean discretion that only millions of dollars can buy.

  ‘There’s no evidence it existed, this bad luck legend, before the turn of the century,’ Major Miner tells me. ‘It didn’t exist before Tully Wollaston had De Beers cut his stones from Lightning Ridge. And then suddenly it cropped up all over the place. It grew retroactively. It trawled up bad luck from centuries past, though the bad luck connection wasn’t noticed back then.’

  But what Oyster said to his wide-eyed kids was that it did not matter any more, for truth and beauty had won in the end, as they always and inevitably do. They were building a new Eden, he said, and they would live beyond time as opal did; for Australia’s national treasure had been required to wait through a few millennia, discreet, modest, doing nothing except guarding its purity, and now its hour of triumph had come.

  And it was true. There were Swiss buyers, Japanese buyers, American buyers falling all over themselves to fly in low and buy direct from every opal field in Australia: and Oyster’s kids and the Murris laughed and sang, and Major Miner sang along with them.

  Someone asked him to take a photograph, he remembers. He remembers it was an American girl with long blonde hair, shy and skittish as a rock wallaby. She had a Polaroid camera, and she asked him would he mind . . . ? He wonders what happened to that photograph. He wonders how many layers deep in Ma’s locked mailroom it lies.

  ‘They were happy that night,’ Major Miner says. ‘I think, back then, before things went wrong, it was a sort of Eden out there.’

  That is what he wants to believe; but Oyster did change, and the weather in Eden turned bad; yet even so, he cannot hold Oyster alone accountable, he cannot condemn him as the sole agent of harm. Major Miner knows better. He knows worse. He knows that someone stole a dozen boxes of explosives from his shack, his entire remaining supply. In dreams, Joe Blow and Chuang-tzu regard him sorrowfully. A man of violence, Chuang-tzu says, will come to a violent end. He sees that his own hands are covered with blood. He sees young bodies, innocent, falling out of the air. Chuang-tzu hands him a lubricated stick of gelignite. There’s a price to be paid, he says.

  ‘Jess,’ Major Miner whispers in anguish. ‘It was my fault, that ghastly, ghastly thing.’

  ‘R
ubbish,’ I murmur. ‘Nobody needed your explosives. There was enough stuff to blow up the country already at the Reef, and in Andrew Godwin’s bunker, and at Dukke Prophet’s, and in Bernie’s shed, and who knows where else.’

  ‘But it’s my gelignite that went missing.’

  He should have got rid of the stuff, he should have blown up his own hopelessly flawed life, he should have listened to Bugger Harvey . . . and then what puzzles him, suddenly, is why it was that the Bugger never came back.

  ‘It’s strange,’ he says, ‘it’s so strange to walk out on a claim, on a seam like that one.’

  The Bugger would have sold his black opals to Herman the Shark (Come in and be ripped off!), the broker with the bottomless pocket in Lightning Ridge, the broker whose buyers come right to the minehead in low-flying planes. He must have made a fortune from his pouchful of stones. He must have buggered off to Sydney and good luck to him too.

  Nevertheless. To vacate such a claim . . .

  It is not like an opal junkie.

  It is not like Bugger Harvey, not at all.

  ‘It’s really very peculiar, Jess,’ he says, ‘that he never came back. It’s not like him. I reckon I was too distracted by Oyster’s arrival to give it much thought at the time.’ He thinks about it now. ‘One of these days,’ he decides, ‘he will come back. Actually, for all we know, the sly old Bugger is back.’

  Major Miner can imagine him holed up underground somewhere on the outer breakaway edges of Andrew Godwin’s property, living off goanna meat and smoking himself high on gidgee leaves. He can imagine the Bugger sneaking down the Innamincka track to throw them off the scent, then striking out east to Lightning Ridge: doing a Chuang-tzu. Major Miner smiles to himself. He can well imagine Bugger Harvey making his way through the gaps.

  ‘He’ll pop up through a chink in Bernie’s verandah one day, Jess.’

  But I am thinking of Bugger Harvey’s last damper supper, and of Bugger Harvey’s three stones, and of Oyster’s three stones just two weeks later, and I am remembering Oyster’s first night in town. I remember the way he slid into my room, limping, and stood against the window in the moonlight and looked at me. I sat on the bed and stared back. You might have knocked, my eye said, and Oyster smiled. He undid the buttons on his loose shirt-tunic and took it off. His body was golden. There was a nap of soft hair on his chest. He undid the cord on his trousers and let them fall.

  I watched, impassive.

  Oyster crossed the room and stood so that the silken hair of his crotch was at my lips and his yeasty smell in my nostrils. ‘Blessed are ye who hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ he murmured. He stroked my hair. ‘For you shall be satisfied.’ He put his right hand on the back of my head and pressed my face against his body. ‘Come unto me,’ he murmured, ‘and I will come. Come, let us come together. Let us be joyful before the Lord.’

  I did not move. I neither resisted nor yielded. I did think of biting him, but for reasons of past rashness, I held myself back.

  Seconds passed.

  Oyster released me and crossed to the window. He washed himself in moonlight. He preened under the Southern Cross.

  ‘I never coerce,’ he said easily, as he put on his clothes. ‘But you will desire me. You will come to desire me.’ In the moonlight, his milky eyes gleamed. He smiled, and I saw his teeth. His mouth was crowded with them, and they gleamed like white fangs. ‘I promise you,’ he said. His voice was as sleek and lustrous with menace as the pearled inner membrane of a shell. ‘I will be like a hunger,’ he promised. ‘I will be a thirst that you cannot quench. You will never be able to stop thinking about me.’

  But what I cannot stop thinking about is his foot.

  There was nothing wrong with his foot.

  He was soaked in someone else’s blood.

  ‘Bugger Harvey went down the Innamincka track,’ I tell Major Miner, ‘just as Oyster was coming up. From Coober Pedy, I’d say.’

  Major Miner stares at me.

  ‘The same three high notes of opal,’ I remind him. ‘He could have hidden the Bugger’s truck in the breakaways and walked in from there. He knew a lot of local gossip when he came.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Major Miner says softly.

  ‘Oyster’s leg,’ I say. ‘His foot. I saw it that night. There was nothing wrong with it. He was covered with someone else’s blood.’

  Major Miner’s sleep is full of skyrockets and shooting stars. His own gelignite drenches him, he is rained on by Oyster’s Reef, he is soaked to the skin with screams, with opalised legs and arms, with Singapore falling, with the Bugger falling out of the sky. He is covered in other people’s blood.

  ‘Jess!’ he calls, tossing. ‘Hold me.’

  And I do.

  3. The Seventh Angel

  Freakish things happen in outback air, especially in winter when diurnal extremes are so . . . extreme. Roiling currents are set up between the burning days, the 50-degree-Celsius days, and nights that seem as cold as the stars, and at first light there is a rind of frost on the Mitchell grass. Campfire embers glisten with splinters of white, shearers wake with chilblains, stockmen with tiny icicles in their lashes and in their hair. Cattle stand bemused at a waterhole gone milky beneath a wafer of ice.

  Freakish things happen high above, in the upper layers of air.

  In Outer Maroo, the weather can turn dark; not dark with rainclouds, although it is not unknown for mirages of rainclouds to scud by and mock us in their dry, arch manner, telling of water falling in channel country, or north around the Gulf, or in various places that are hundreds of kilometres away. But a different kind of darkness, a twilight, a sort of doomsday murk, can settle in for several hours or several days. It speaks of exceptional instability in the upper air: there may be snowstorms, dust storms, hailstorms, or torrential rain, all happening a few kilometres straight above. The rain may be whipped towards the sun; it may fall up. Gusts of wind, full of red dust, can take the roof off a shed.

  These are dangerous and unpredictable times.

  In Outer Maroo, the weather was turning dark.

  We have to do something, people said. There are more of them than of us, they murmured, frowning, and the murmuring ran to the Reef.

  We should not rock any boats, others said. We should not look a gift oyster in the mouth.

  From out of the breakaways, fierce winds, hot, blew saltbush tufts and jagged spears of gidgee root through the town. A window in Beresford’s was broken, and a black tortured twist of gidgeewood came through. Dead birds were found on Bernie’s verandah. The air was the colour of dark blood.

  The Old Fuckatoo is roosting again, we said.

  Cattle died, sheep rotted, the waterholes shrank and stank, the bore water gave off a sulphurous fog.

  The weather turned freakish.

  There was lightning, both day and night, high above, like the flash of great seraphic wings. There were dull thunderous booms.

  In the first winter after Oyster arrived in town, a twilight fell on us like a thick russet cloak for three days, and out of the murk, out of the hot choppy wind, Oyster came.

  He came out of the red dust, alone, in his loose white clothes, at the hour of the afternoon prayer meeting. He stood under the gidgee trees and raised his arms. From Beresford’s and Bernie’s, and from the Living Word Gospel Hall, people stared. It was fiercely hot and eerily dark, but the Old Fuckatoo had lifted just a little, had seemed to fan us with its wings so that there was a hint of fresh air and a brief false promise of change. Such days are cruel: nobody will say aloud that the sweeter cloudiness could mean hope because this would surely extinguish the possibility.

  Everyone waits.

  Under the twisted black trunks of the gidgee trees, Oyster waited, his arms lifted to the sky.

  Major Miner was on the verandah at Bernie’s. I was watching from behind the bar. One by one, from Beresford’s, from Bernie’s, people came outside to stare. Even those on their way to the Living Word stopped to gaze, and did not go
inside. They stood in the street. They edged closer.

  Oyster waited, his arms raised, his eyes fixed on the sky.

  He’s gone crazy, people whispered. He’s in a trance, others said. The Murris have told him that rain is on the way, someone said, because everyone is aware that the Old People have mysterious ways of knowing such things.

  At a certain point, when most of Outer Maroo had gathered in the street, as though he had been waiting for an audience of a certain acceptable size, Oyster lowered his eyes and looked around him. ‘Follow me,’ he said. He turned towards the steps of the Living Word, and we all crowded in behind. Major Miner had never been inside the Gospel Hall before; nor had Bernie; nor had I. Even for funerals, we non-believers always clustered outside. For many people in Outer Maroo it was the first time, and the spare puritan place, beautiful in its austere way, had its own power, it cast its own spell.

  Oyster said something privately to Charles Given, who frowned, and appeared a little puzzled, a little distressed. Oyster, I noted, was looking at the floor, not at Charles Given, and was talking in a low intense voice. Charles Given reached out and put his hand on Oyster’s arm, and Oyster raised his head then, and the two of them were eye to eye, for five seconds, eight, ten, it seemed interminable. A shuffling began, because most people could not see what was happening, and the crushing was considerable. There was standing room only; the heat and the dust and the twilight murk and the body fug were suffocating. Charles Given never dropped his eyes from Oyster’s, he never wavered in focus, but he did seem to concede something. Compassion came too easily to him, I think, and not always at the right time.

  ‘All right,’ I heard him say, and I actually saw him squeeze Oyster’s arm, a sort of brotherly gesture, the kind of thing that would probably translate roughly as: my friend, these states of agony pass; these dark nights of the soul roll away and then morning comes.

  Oyster climbed into the pulpit and raised both arms, slanting them outwards, embracing us, and the wide white sleeves of his tunic hung like wings. The moving and shuffling ceased. For several seconds, he let the silence grow.