Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Noodling

  ‘Noodling’ means sifting through the chalk dust for pieces of opal, although most of what is found is potch.

  Potch

  About 95 per cent of all opal is potch, that is to say, opal without a play of colour. Although frequently very beautiful, potch has little or no commercial value. It may be milky and pearlised, or black, or clear, or honey-coloured. It is used in the production of ‘doublets’ – that is, as backing for thin veneers of precious and colorific opal found as thin surfaces, which could otherwise not be displayed. While doublets have a mere fraction of the value of solid opal, the difference in appearance is not detectable to the untrained eye. The origin of the word potch is obscure, but it is probably a miner’s corruption of pot-shard. The children in Outer Maroo love to go noodling for potch, though the practice is very bad for the lungs and causes serious coughing fits.

  ‘Everyone already knows this,’ Mercy tells her.

  ‘In Outer Maroo they know it,’ Miss Rover says. ‘But this textbook is for my next school.’

  Mercy is still falling and coughing. She keeps passing Miss Rover and losing her again. She seems to be spinning in slow circles as she falls, like an astronaut in space, a phenomenon she has witnessed on Miss Rover’s television set. She falls into the schoolroom then out again. In several lateral tunnels, as she passes, she sees Pete with Miss Rover. She sees the way blue sparks leap between them, anger or passion, it is hard to tell which. Mercy wonders how Miss Rover can distinguish.

  She cannot stop coughing.

  She is noodling with Brian near Oyster’s Reef and Brian is coughing until threads of blood make stars in the chalk-white dirt. A fine white dust covers all the noodlers like a shroud. When they move, jam jars of water in hand to clean the stones and to keep them from crazing, knees bent, heads lowered, the noodlers look like dancers in a ghost corroboree.

  Mercy sees ghosts. She sees Brian consumed by intensity. She sees Amy with all her unsent letters in flames. Bodies are advancing rank upon rank, like sheep, into conflagration. There is Oyster, crisped and candescent in martyrdom as he’d always wanted to be, going out in style, in good company, thronged around by the votive candles of his power.

  It’s all done with smoke and faggots, he laughs, and his laughter turns into flakes of fire and scorches Mercy as she falls.

  Miss Rover Miss Rover come over, she whispers frantically.

  She tells Miss Rover’s name like beads that pass between her fingers. Like opals. Like pearls.

  I’m back in Oyster’s Reef, she thinks with despair.

  ‘How clever you are, my little pearl,’ Oyster croons. ‘You’re in my own private grief, my private Reef,’ and his voice bounces around the mine shaft like an echo gone berserk, my reefreefREEFREEFreefreefreefreef.

  ‘Welcome, Alice, to my little inferno,’ he says. ‘Welcome, welcome, welcome.’

  Welcome-come-come, the echoes call.

  ‘I’m not Alice,’ Mercy says.

  ‘Down here,’ Oyster tells her, ‘your name is whatever I tell you it is.’

  Either the mine shaft was very deep, Miss Rover reads, or Mercy fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next . . .

  ‘I’m not Mercy,’ Alice says, frantic. ‘At least, I don’t think so. Not any more. Am I? Am I?’

  ‘You’ll have to decide,’ Miss Rover says. ‘It’s up to you. Whatever your name is, you still have to think for yourself. You have to look yourself in the eye. You have to decide what you are willing to live with, Mercy, and what you will die for.’

  ‘I don’t want to die for anything,’ Mercy weeps.

  ‘Nobody does,’ Miss Rover says. ‘But sometimes it happens that we have to make a choice. There are lines we won’t cross, but we draw the lines ourselves. Nobody makes us do it.’

  ‘I don’t know where my line is,’ Mercy says. ‘I don’t even know if I’m falling up or falling down.’

  Down, down, down, Miss Rover reads. Would the fall never come to an end? ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ Alice said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think . . .’

  ‘That’s silly,’ Mercy says. She feels exasperated. ‘Opal shafts are not very deep. I must be falling slowly, that’s all.’

  ‘In nightmares,’ Miss Rover says, ‘the sleeper falls slowly because the unconscious is free to choose its own playback speed and to map its own routes.’

  Mercy is relieved. ‘This is a nightmare,’ she says. ‘I knew it was. I knew I’d wake up, and you would still be here, and Brian would still be here, and Oyster would not be here, he would never have been here, and it’s just a nightmare.’

  ‘Outer Maroo is a nightmare,’ Miss Rover says, ‘but a serious one. Not everyone manages to wake out of it. As for depth statistics,’ she says, ‘you are right. Speaking comparatively, among the planet’s geological nips and tucks, it is true that opal shafts are mere pinpricks in the epidermal layer of the terrestrial crust, though they are deep enough to violate the earth under Aboriginal law. As the Old People say: you cannot mutilate your mother without repercussions.’

  ‘I think I’ve stopped falling,’ Mercy says.

  Although the light is poor, she can see along several lateral tunnels to other mines. In one tunnel, she is catching lizards with Donny Becker. In another, she can see Oyster arriving in town.

  ‘A significant question to ponder,’ Miss Rover says, ‘is which came first: opal or Oyster?’

  It is rumoured, she writes in her journal, that Oyster, before the secret of world salvation was vouchsafed to him, had come from an earlier life as something else in Coober Pedy, and as something else before that on the pearling luggers at Broome. It would be wise, I am sure, not to enquire too closely into what that something else was. But once he saw the calibre of the opal floaters here, he put a word in the ears of Bernie, and of Andrew Godwin, and of Mr Dukke Prophet. These pillars of the community – may their names be blessed, may their names be recorded in the Book of My Unspendable Salary – crossed the South Australian border and bought a drilling rig and winches and trucked them up the Birdsville Track.

  Could anything other than opal and the recurring fantasy of the end of the world, Miss Rover writes, have wedded Bernie and Andrew Godwin and Dukke Prophet and Oyster?

  Behold the prophecy of a schoolteacher whose sense of adventure ran away with her: here, if ever, is a marriage made in hell.

  Here is a ménage-à-quatre made for violent divorce.

  Mercy has definitely stopped falling, but feels giddy. The tunnels are spinning. Will you join the dance? Miss Rover asks.

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? the twelve other children sing.

  They hold out their hands and pull Mercy into the ring, shrieking with laughter. They form a conga line around the one-teacher schoolroom and they dance through the tunnels and up and down the ladders in the shafts. The Walrus and the Carpenter, they sing, leaping and kicking up their legs.

  The Walrus and the Carpenter

  Were walking close at hand:

  They wept like anything to see

  Such barren salt-panned land:

  ‘If this were only opal mined,’

  They said, ‘it would be grand!’

  The Walrus and the Carpenter

  Walked on a mile or so,

  And then they rested on a rock

  Conveniently low:

  And all the little Oysters stood

  And waited in a row.

  ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

  ‘To talk of many things:

  Of 6–6–6 and sealing wax –

  Of mullock heaps and kings –

  ‘This isn’t funny,’ Brian says.

  ‘This is blasphemy,’ Mr Prophet roars, ‘and the fire of the Lord shall descend and shall burn the singers to a
crisp,’ and Mercy can see the end of the song approaching, the Walrus weeping as he eats, the Carpenter shedding crocodile tears, and all the passive little oysters disappearing one by one.

  I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! Miss Rover reads. How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think – but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?

  ‘Of course, Mercy,’ Miss Rover says, ‘you understand that a book always reveals things about an author that the author himself is not aware of. Attitudes. Assumptions. Cultural blind spots. Down here in the Antipathies, as a consequence, we have an advantage or two. We know how Here looks from Over There, because they keep telling us what they see and we’ve always had to listen. But we also know how Over There looks from Here, and they don’t, which gives us a tactical edge.’

  ‘Do you mean for the republic?’ Mercy asks. ‘By the year 2000, the way the Prime Minister says? Or do you mean the end of the world, like Oyster says?’

  ‘I mean,’ Miss Rover says, ‘that whenever there’s a top dog and an underdog, the underdog knows more.’

  ‘Knows more about what?’ Mercy asks.

  ‘Well, for one example,’ Miss Rover says, ‘the Murris know how the miners and the cattle cockies think, don’t they? But not vice versa. Everyone thinks the Murris have disappeared for good, shot through to Bourke and Innamincka, but I do not believe that will be the end of the story.

  ‘Or take Ethel,’ she says. ‘Ethel knows how Mrs Godwin thinks, doesn’t she? But Mrs Godwin doesn’t have a clue about Ethel.

  ‘And for another example . . .’ Miss Rover laughs quietly to herself and turns the pages of the book she is reading. She does not seem to see the page she is looking at. Mercy has learned that laughter may have many translations, and when Miss Rover laughs she can hear a wild undernote, the kind of sound you hear a kangaroo making in its throat when a pack of cattle dogs has bailed it up. The kangaroo will stay on its hind legs to the end; it will bat at the dogs with its forepaws, disdainfully, full of contempt, as they tear it apart; it will die making that eerie laughing noise in its throat.

  ‘For another example,’ Miss Rover says, ‘what does the private school board of Outer Maroo know about me?’ She tips her chair back and turns her face up to the ceiling and seems to shake with merriment at some internal joke, but her laughter this time is quite silent.

  ‘We have to ask ourselves, Mercy, why certain people can find Outer Maroo without difficulty, in spite of its absence from maps. These people never come from the direction of Brisbane or Quilpie, but always from the north or north-west, have you noticed? I’m talking about the small planes that fly in low . . . perhaps you’ve heard them . . . ? they fly in low and fly out again, and nobody ever mentions them. If I mention them, nobody knows where they come from or where they go.’

  ‘They come down from Darwin and the Gulf,’ Mercy says.

  ‘Yes, they must. How did you know?’

  ‘Everyone knows,’ Mercy says.

  ‘I see,’ Miss Rover says.

  ‘They buy opals.’

  ‘I’d like to know where the opals end up.’

  ‘Singapore,’ Mercy says. ‘That’s where they sell them, Ma Beresford says, the best stones. She says the stuff she takes down to Brisbane isn’t worth much. She says you can sell any kind of opal junk to tourists, they’ll even buy potch.’

  ‘Oyster is potch,’ Miss Rover says. ‘But he’s dangerous potch.’

  Composition of Opal, she writes in her textbook.

  The water content of opal may be as high as one-fifth of total mass, but the most precious stones contain about 10 per cent water.

  The microspheres of silica are packed densely together and arranged in regular patterns. The more uniform the size of the particles, and the more regular the arrangement, the more brilliant the colour and the greater the variegation and flash, though it is, in fact, the minute void spaces between the silica particles that cause the light to be diffracted.

  In potch, the microspheres of silica have no pattern, no system. They are lumped together like a wet load of clothes on washday. They have no void space.

  In precious opal, the void, being an orderly three-dimensional design between stratified silica cells – a strict system of absence – splits incoming light into its full spectrum of colours . . . thus proving that something comes of nothing, that a ray of light falling into nowhere is splintered but not lost.

  But Mercy keeps falling and falling into nowhere, and Brian is lost among the pure.

  ‘The secrecy at the Reef . . .’ Miss Rover says. ‘I have a very bad feeling about it, Mercy. The way the kids are always in threes when they come into town. The way some go out there, and then we never see them again.’

  ‘We never see Brian now,’ Mercy says, and she is falling, spinning, and Brian has been gone two months without a word, and Mercy’s mother keeps crying, and it isn’t like Brian, it isn’t like Brian at all. But then Brian hasn’t been like Brian for some time, Mercy thinks. Not since Oyster stood in the pulpit and the seventh angel spoke.

  ‘We have to let air in,’ Miss Rover says, breathing strangely. ‘We have to get out, Mercy. We have to get out.’

  ‘Will you go back to Brisbane?’ Mercy asks anxiously. ‘If you get out?’

  ‘Now that,’ Miss Rover says, pressing her hands against her chest to help the air in and out, ‘is an interesting question. That is a very interesting question. Will I ever get back to Brisbane? I wonder what long-range planning the private school board of Outer Maroo has in mind. I must be quite a worry to them, I would think. I was not what they bargained for.’

  Mercy keeps falling.

  She falls back into a certain day in Beresford’s . . . Oyster is there. He is moving between hardware and rows of canned beans. She knows it is Oyster, though her face is pressed against boxes on the highest shelves. She is on the stepladder, reaching for something, stretching. Shoebox labels, too close to her eyes, are distorted. There is someone at the foot of the ladder. She knows it is Oyster. She presses her legs together, pushing her soft cotton skirt between her legs, and holding it there, bunched. She knows it is Oyster. Perhaps, from the top of the ladder, she saw him at the edge of her eye in the street without realising it. Or perhaps there was something about the sound of the door as it opened, the way it was pushed, or the sound of his footsteps in the shop. Perhaps it was a faint and particular body smell that caused Mercy to stiffen. In any case, she knows it is Oyster. And she knows now how a tortoise feels pulling into its shell. She can feel a layer of air – it is actually something she does with her mind and with her nerve ends – she can feel a layer of air against her skin turn hard, like a carapace.

  ‘Come on down,’ Oyster says, his voice milky. ‘I won’t bite you.’

  She does not want to climb down, but she does not want to stay up there above him either, her skirt bunched between her legs. She does not know what to do. She does nothing.

  ‘Brian asked me to give you a message,’ Oyster says.

  Mercy can feel a small jolt, like electric currents, through her body. She climbs down slowly. When she reaches a certain level, she feels Oyster’s hands on her ankles. Her calves slide through Oyster’s fingers, her thighs slide into his hands. She can feel his thumbs slip under the elastic in her knickers.

  Her body goes hard, like a shell.

  ‘You like that, my little pearl, don’t you?’ he whispers, his lips in her hair.

  She is completely wrapped, like a tortoise, inside the bone of her will. ‘What did Brian say?’ she asks.

  ‘He wants me to bring you to the Reef,’ Oyster says. ‘He wants to tell you something himself.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I have my car outside,’ Oyster says.

  ‘All right.’

  At the Reef, she does not see Brian. She sees gunyahs of corrugated iron leanin
g against gidgee trees. Cockatoos rise in soft fleecy clouds, but she can scarcely hear their screeching for the great burr of noise: the drills, winches, the graders, the generators. Smoke and dust and fumes fill the air. The mullock heaps, pale and chalky, glisten like mounds of talcum powder against the red earth. People in lines come and go. Mercy feels dizzy from the heat and the dust and the noise and the patterns of movement, the movement itself shimmering like a mirage so that she has the impression of some great, tentacled, cog-wheeled machine, fuzzy at its edges, with people as sprockets who circle and file and defile, bearing buckets of powdered rock. When they pass close to Mercy, she sees the white hollows of their eyes ringed with red. They are shrouded in mullock dust: ghosts, revenants, the living dead. Their sandalled feet are rust-coloured. Sometimes one or another of them drops soundlessly in the heat, folding neatly into itself like a silk scarf. When this happens, there is always a young woman from a small team reserved for the purpose – they all have kerchiefs tied around their heads, these young women; they all look like nuns; they are all pregnant, the women in the water-bearing team; their swollen bellies move ahead of them like announcements – and the young woman will bring a flask of water tipped with a rubber nipple, like a baby’s bottle, and she will press it between the lips of the fallen one. The water-bearing team also seems to be looking after a cluster of toddlers. The children sit in the dust very quietly and play with coloured stones. They look at Mercy with listless eyes.

  This could be a dream, Mercy thinks. Or it could be a moon colony; or it could be hell.

  ‘I don’t see Brian,’ she says.

  ‘Brian is one of the elite,’ Oyster tells her. ‘Those whom I have chosen to be close to me work underground, where it is cool. Follow me.’

  She sees the shafts and the iron ladders bolted into rock. On the rungs, her shoes ring, and each footstep sings a lower and more plaintive note. The uprights hum against her fingers like tuning forks. Down, down – the temperature dropping with each step. At the foot of the ladder, tunnels unfurl themselves into coolness. Some of the tunnels have been widened into cavernous rooms and the rooms are crowded with sleeping bags. Somewhere above, in the heat, a generator throbs, and Mercy can feel its heartbeat. She can feel her own heart thumping, but not keeping time; it jumps about unevenly, like a cockatoo with frantic damaged wings.