Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  It’s OK.

  Out here there’s so much sky, and so many stars at night, and the rocks are so ancient, and I have this feeling that nothing ever passes away. It’s all here. It’s all with us. That is what Oyster says. It’s all ours. Last night there was a dingo outside my tent. They are very beautiful, very Other, somehow, not dangerous at all. We just looked at each other, the dingo and me, and I suddenly realised that he had Dad’s eyes. I felt the most incredible peace.

  I can feel you with me too, Sarah.

  I have never known such peace and happiness. I will confess a secret: I’m in love. All the women are in love with Oyster, and he is kind to everyone, he loves everyone, but I am his Special One. It is an honour and a joy that overwhelms me. I keep it secret, because he wants me to, so that none of the others will be jealous.

  I have a new name, by the way. Oyster gives each of us his own special name. We have a ceremony and we are baptised with our new name. We are born again. Mine’s Rose of Sharon, which I find very beautiful.

  I’ll write when I can, though we don’t get much time, and we’re not supposed to write letters, but I do feel I owe you this one, Sarah, and if Oyster knew our past history, he would permit it. We work terribly hard, and we meditate, and study Oyster’s teachings, and we’re all very happy together. When I meditate, you are with me, Sarah. All things were meant to be.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon (formerly Amy)

  Dear Sarah,

  When we meditate, we see a white light, brighter than anything you can imagine or have ever seen. We visualise it in the heart of an oyster shell. Oyster talks to us very softly, and teaches us, and the light grows and grows and swallows everything. I cannot describe how incredibly beautiful this is, but what I want you to know, Sarah, is that I reach out with the light and cover you with it in my mind.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon

  Dear Sarah,

  It’s hard getting used to the heat sometimes. A lot of the girls faint in the middle of the day, and one died from heatstroke. It was awful. So Oyster is changing the rules. He says we have to come into alignment with the rules of the universe. Even the animals obey very strict rules, the males live one way, the females another.

  So the girls cook, and they sew clothes. The guys are learning to hunt the way the Aborigines do, and we are learning to cook in the same ancient way. We’re not allowed to go into town on the trucks so much now, but nobody wants to anyway, because we can see the people in town don’t like us. If we go, we have to go in threes, for safety. I really believe in the way we’re living here, but I’m very tired, and not very well. I might come and see you for a holiday, but then I’d come back.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon

  Dear Sarah,

  Winter’s harder than summer, because it’s so cold at night, below freezing, but just as hot in the day. There’s been some very strange weather. We’ve had dust storms and freak hailstorms. I never knew hailstones could be so huge.

  Oyster says the town is against us, and he’s tightening the rules. There’s impurity at the Reef itself, he says, and he’s right, because we are supposed to keep ourselves pure, but a number of the girls are pregnant. There are a number of babies and toddlers now, and they are looked after by a specially chosen group. Oyster adores the children. We all have to wear scarves tied around our head now, the girls, I mean, to show that we are modest and our thoughts are pure.

  I’m not feeling very well lately. I’ll write when I can. It’s hard to get a chance to go in and mail our letters these days.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon

  Dear Sarah,

  I’m making you come out of the white light so I can talk to you. I’m very upset. We’re not supposed to talk to each other any more while we’re working, or ever really. We meditate all the time, we’re contemplatives, Oyster says. It’s a way to make the world pure. But I was working over a campfire with Jillian, we were roasting roots in the hot coals the way the Murris showed us, and suddenly Jillian just began crying and she couldn’t stop. I asked her what was the matter and she said she didn’t know what they’d done with her baby. It was Oyster’s baby, she said. I don’t know whether to believe her or not. Oyster says a lot of the other women have fantasies about him, and some of the men are not keeping themselves sexually pure. I think sometimes, even in perfect communes, things can go wrong. I’m thinking of leaving for a while, just to think things out.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon

  Dear Sarah,

  Some of the opal tunnels that are worked out have been widened out into rooms. The men do it with small drilling machines, though the noise is giving me terrible headaches lately. So anyhow, now most of us live underground instead of in tents or sheds. In some ways, it’s much better. It’s so much cooler underground by day, and it stays exactly the same at night. The temperature is constant down here, so this will be much better when next winter comes, though I don’t think I’m going to stay until then. There’s a special team to look after the babies and toddlers, but some of the babies have died. The toddlers seem terribly quiet and still to me, not at all the way little children usually are. They hardly ever even cry. It worries me, but Oyster says it is because they were born into an aura of peace. There are always girls pregnant, and there are births, but the mothers have to give their babies to the special team. One of them was so upset she tried to kill herself, but at camp meeting (which we have every night), she testified that she accepted the will of God and she confessed her sin of rebellion and she said she was filled with joy and white light, except the next day, when we were doing laundry duty together, she started crying and couldn’t stop. There are a lot of things I find hard to understand, and I’m not feeling very well, but I do believe in Oyster. I do love him. When I meditate, I feel at perfect peace, and I try to let the white light fill my mind for the whole day.

  Love,

  Rose of Sharon

  Dear Sarah,

  I haven’t written for a long time, and I haven’t told you about many things that happen here, because I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about them. I blamed myself. I blamed my impure thoughts. But something’s happened, I know it’s not just me now, I know something’s gone wrong. Someone came here and then managed to get away, and it’s changed things for me. I’ve suddenly remembered there is another reality out there, outside the Reef. Remember ages ago, I told you about Gideon (his real name’s Angelo), the one who first told me about the Reef? Well, he’s seen it too, and it’s incredible to have someone to talk to, though we hardly ever get a chance. I’m going to leave here. I’ll see you soon, Sarah, and I promise I won’t run away again.

  Love,

  Amy (formerly Rose of Sharon)

  Dear Sarah,

  Almost impossible to leave Reef at all now, even to get into town in threes, but am determined. Must mail this so you’ll know what happened if I never. Forgive scrawl, hard to find time and place, almost impossible, dangerous. Amazing diff. now Angelo and I can talk, really talk, tho vry diff to talk at all, talking not allowed anymore except wk, prayers, always 3s.

  Angelo and I can’t understand ourselves now, why it took us so long, how we lived with, why we put up . . . Hope you cn read. Not much time. It was like a madness, it was sick, hard to explain. Weren’t ourselves. Always too tired to think, work too hard, and then all night practically, sermon and singing, and too much meditating, fried our brains, I think; like being on drugs, being tranquillised for years.

  Oyster quite mad now, we think, and getting worse. Dangerous. Angelo told me Oyster has big plan for next week. Big ceremony, everyone underground, candles, middle of night. Service of Final Purification and Deliverance, we don’t like sound. All the vestal virgins waiting, Oyster says, for the Bridegroom Cometh. Angelo knows his moods, doesn’t like this at all. Going to take us all across the Great Divide, Oyster says, and into the Promised Land. Going to take us beyond time. Like the babies,
Angelo says, and the other ones, the chosen ones, who keep disappearing, tho we’re all too exhausted most of the time to know who’s missing or not. Angelo asked about the children dying and the missing. Offering to God, Oyster said. Caught up in the Rapture, Final Purity, Deliverance, changed in the twinkling of an eye, gone to be with God.

  Don’t like sound at all. Must mail. Angelo and I made up minds to get away, make a break. Coming home, I promise.

  Pray for me, Sarah. I’m scared.

  Love, Amy

  5. Shafted

  The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, Miss Rover read, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep mine shaft.

  Mercy, falling through nightmares and yesterdays and past lateral tunnels and the roar of drilling rigs and winches and the sucking sound of Cretaceous dirt being vacuumed in below her, and blown back out above ground as mullock heaps, tried to ascertain which chapter and verse she was in, which prophecy, which mine: Oyster’s Reef, or Aladdin’s Rush, or Potch Point, or Major Miner’s Great Extended, or simply one of the drill-and-abandon sites. It was hard to tell from the main shaft.

  It was hard to see anything but dread through the skeins of white dust. Miss Rover come over, she prayed, and the words turned over and over with each slow sickening cartwheel of her fall. They rolled around Mercy like gemstones clattering down a well. She clutched at them and kept them tight in her fist, and Miss Rover’s name was warm against her palm, a fire opal sending out sparks. When she rubbed it, her own fearless genie broke loose from her body. ‘Where am I?’ she called. ‘I can’t see . . .’ Her lungs filled with mullock dust and she was seized by a coughing fit. Miss Rover, she coughed, and Miss Rover will-o’-the-wisped forth from from a lateral tunnel, chalk-dusted.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ Mercy said, joyful. She could not stop coughing. ‘It’s the mullock dust,’ she gasped. ‘It’s killing me. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m so glad I found you. They said you’d been transferred.’

  ‘Translated,’ Miss Rover said, ‘to a higher sphere. They promoted me.’

  She was hitting the blackboard duster with a ruler, and small white clouds rose like balloons. ‘The dust is a problem,’ she acknowledged, ‘though it could be just the poor-quality classroom chalk.’ Nevertheless, she entered mullock dust and mullock heaps on a fresh page. She was keeping a journal of gaps in the curriculum. ‘You may be right,’ she said. ‘It may be mullock dust in the lungs that is killing people off. A lot of people do seem to be dying around here. But the thing is, in the long scheme of things, Mercy, in the sweep of history, this little end-of-the-world sideshow doesn’t count for very much, although of course it does not seem that way to those of us caught up in it. Everyone is ridiculously arrogant in that way, you know. We all place ourselves front and centre in world history, but the world has already ended once for Outer Maroo, and who remembers?’

  ‘I remember,’ Mercy said. ‘In 1873. You taught us.’

  ‘Very good,’ Miss Rover said. She swept her duster across the classroom board, erasing dates. ‘For various peoples and places, there’ve been other Armageddons, and I regret to say there’ll be more.’ She blew a cloud of chalk dust out the window. ‘One person’s end-of-the-world cataclysm is another person’s footnote, Mercy. Take the Armageddon that began in 1788. We are only just beginning to know chapter and verse on that.’

  She sat down at the teacher’s table and put her head in her hands. ‘What haunts me,’ she said, ‘is how little I achieved. I will be honest with you, Mercy. Even in my new posting, it gives me no peace.’

  She shuffled a pack of report cards, and the cards rose and fell like white birds. ‘I achieved nothing,’ she said. She was still overwhelmed by how inadequately a Queensland education prepared one for Queensland. She was overwhelmed by unfinished work. She could not release herself. ‘I am still in Outer Maroo,’ she said.

  Something about the way she said this frightened Mercy, who felt a need to shield herself from dreams, and especially from unwanted revelations. ‘I know you have sent me letters,’ she told Miss Rover. ‘I know they can’t be delivered because of Ma. It’s so cold here.’

  ‘It’s the wind off the Reef,’ Miss Rover said. ‘It’s the wind off Inner Maroo. It’s called the chill factor. Just ignore it. I’ll go on reading because I’m still here.’

  Miss Rover is still reading Alice in Wonderland. There are thirteen children in the one-teacher school and their ages range from six to eighteen. Mercy sits in the back row. ‘Children’s stories,’ Miss Rover explains, ‘are rarely just children’s stories. And this one in particular,’ she says, ‘seems pertinent, since suspensions of normal logic hold sway.’

  ‘How do you know what normal is?’ Brian asks.

  ‘Exactly,’ Miss Rover says. ‘People arrive and then they vanish. It’s normal in Outer Maroo.’

  ‘They don’t vanish,’ Brian says. ‘They withdraw from the world, which is altogether a different thing. They seek to purify themselves.’

  ‘And death,’ Miss Rover says. ‘Death is normal here too.’

  ‘Death is always normal in the outback,’ Brian says.

  Mercy has to agree. It’s true. The drought, the dead cattle, the dead sheep. And people too. In cattle country, sheep country, the cancer statistics are high. Cattle dips, insecticides, crop and forage spraying, it can’t be helped. And there is a rule in Outer Maroo that upsets Miss Rover: the rule that a man with cancer does not burden his family with slow death. He disposes of himself, discreetly, somewhere on the outer boundaries, where one of his stockmen will find him, muzzle in mouth.

  Pete has explained it to her, Mercy has heard him. ‘That’s what separates the men from the city boys, love,’ he has told her. ‘As for forage-dusting and shooting ’roos and mining on the so-called sacred sites, she’s a real bugger, the land. If you don’t slap her round a bit, the land gives too much damn cheek.’

  ‘I see,’ Miss Rover says.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Pete says. ‘You don’t. Because the land always wins, see, in the end. We know that. Shit. There’s a whole townful of skeletons and rotting foundations just the other side of the breakaways. This town’s already come and gone once. I mean, gone. Absolutely. All that’s left of Inner Maroo is nothing.’ Pete snaps his fingers, then kisses their tips and blows the kiss away. ‘That could happen to us, Susannah. We could all go under to the drought, every last one of us. I mean, all these carcasses . . . you must have noticed. The smell of death hangs over us. Or we could all be washed away in flash floods. She’s a tough old bitch, is the land. We respect her, and that’s why we give her no quarter. We’re talking about passion here,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’ Miss Rover raises her eyebrows. ‘Passion?’ she says.

  Pete is angry. ‘You don’t understand our way of loving.’

  ‘No,’ Miss Rover agrees, unwinding his arm from her shoulder, and they seem to be sitting on Bernie’s verandah, and Mercy is sitting on the steps. ‘Sounds more like rape to me,’ Miss Rover says.

  ‘Now don’t get difficult,’ Pete cajoles. He takes one of her hands and traces the up and down of her fingers with his own. ‘Tell you what. After you’ve survived a few droughts and a few flash floods and a bushfire or two, we’ll give you a gold-plated soapbox, no questions asked. And we’ll all listen like Sunday School kids.’

  But Miss Rover has a terrible taste for making trouble. ‘Foot-in-mouth disease,’ Pete sighs, ‘and a terminal case.’ And here is Andrew Godwin choosing the very moment to swing himself out of his truck and up Bernie’s steps. He empties a small sack of severed emu heads on the floorboards. ‘How about that?’ he asks proudly. ‘That’ll teach the buggers to swipe forage from my cows in a drought.’

  Miss Rover, fully mounted on soapbox, rising, pushing both deckchair and Pete aside, asks coldly: ‘Aren’t emus protected?’

 
; Andrew Godwin blinks.

  He has to pause and replay the question to himself.

  Then he laughs. ‘Only by their feathers, love,’ he says.

  ‘God, she’s something!’ he tells Pete, and the merriment is so general, so infectious, that everyone is inclined to forgive Susannah and to buy her a drink. Isn’t she something? they say. These Brisbane sheilas, aren’t they something these days? Strike me blue.

  ‘If you’ll forgive me,’ Miss Rover says, trembling, smoothing her skirt. ‘I’ve got lessons to prepare and thirteen children waiting. Come on, Mercy. Let’s go.’

  And they are walking away up the street, hand in hand and heads high.

  ‘Like two jabirus,’ Pete tells them later.

  Mercy watches the way he watches Miss Rover. She knows that Miss Rover seems to him as graceful and flighty and wild as the long-legged birds of the waterholes. Dangerous, too. The men watch the way her cotton skirt whispers around her legs. Mercy knows that Miss Rover is angry. Pete knows it too.

  ‘Don’t make trouble, Susannah,’ he begs, low-voiced. He slides his hand along her arm. ‘The living’s rough out here. You have to make allowances, that’s all.’

  ‘Believe me, Pete,’ she says. ‘I’ve been making allowances.’

  She is keeping a private record of allowances made.

  She is compiling a textbook, unorthodox, unasked for, ‘because,’ she tells Mercy, ‘we need proper local reference points for Outer Maroo.’ Mercy studies the flow of her fountain pen, the thickness of the downstrokes, the elegance of the loops. The secrets are hidden in my writing, Miss Rover says.

  ‘Mullock heaps,’ Mercy reads.

  Mullock heaps are small mountains of coarse white chalk dust at the head of every shaft. They are deposited by the winches attached to the drilling rigs. They often contain fractured pieces of precious opal and also much opal potch. Various tourists (usually young backpackers) and also Aboriginal tribespeople (the displaced fringe-dwellers of the mining areas; the Wangkumara in the vicinity of Outer Maroo) have picked up fortunes by noodling through mullock heaps at many opal fields throughout Australia.