Oyster

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘No one knows. Of course, it could have been an accident. There are always explosives . . . around mines, I mean.’ There are enough explosives in Outer Maroo, he thinks, to blow up Queensland. His own missing sticks of gelignite rise up again, accusatory. He feels a terrible weariness.

  ‘But you don’t think it was an accident,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Oyster got more and more paranoid toward the end . . .’ He makes an oscillating gesture with his right hand. ‘No one ever quite figured him out. But things went to his head, that’s certain. He seemed to believe he was God, he felt embattled, he thought almost everyone else was Satan in the end. Maybe he thought he was taking his chosen few to the Promised Land. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Nobody knows.’

  ‘Could it have been anyone else . . . ?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he sighs. ‘Who knows what to think?’

  The weariness is so great that his words seem to have to climb up infinitely long and infinitely steep ladders to connect with his voice. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘almost everyone wanted them gone. Not right at the beginning, but they came to want them gone.’ He makes a vague gesture with his hand, a gesture of helpless irritation. ‘I mean, there were more of them than of us, at least up until the Murris left. Counting the Murris, there were more out here on the Reef than in Outer Maroo. Most people didn’t like that. They wanted them gone. Not like that, of course; but they did want them gone. That creates a certain climate, you know, and Oyster was a weatherman of sorts. He was a dealer in signs and portents.’

  Oyster, he thinks, was like one of those bacterial forces that blindly and ruthlessly seek out the culture that will nourish them. In Outer Maroo, he found it. Outer Maroo was his petri dish, ideal.

  ‘And then, you know, the opal dealing complicated things. All that money.’ Invisible cash economies are volatile things, he thinks. They can blow up.

  ‘Ah, look!’ Sarah cries.

  Nick is at four on the dial but his arms are flailing in slow circles like a top winding down. Major Miner grabs the water and salts. ‘Gimme a hand,’ he says. Nick is racked with sobs when they reach him; the sobs sound like whooping cough, and each one seems to punch him violently.

  ‘Drink,’ Major Miner orders, pushing the bottle between his lips.

  Nick splutters and dribbles, but in seconds the fluid and salts begin to calm him.

  ‘I have to leave you,’ Major Miner says. ‘You’ll have to go down the main shaft. The ladder’s still bolted there. I’m . . . sorry, but it’s the only safe place to hide at the moment . . . There’s some serious craziness about.’

  He and Jess will come back, he tells them, with Andrew Godwin’s Troopie which he has hidden in a ravine in the breakaways. They should have enough petrol to get to Quilpie, and then they will be OK, they will be back on the map, they will be able to get petrol merely by paying for it, they can head on down the Warrego Highway to Brisbane.

  And Mercy. Jess will bring her, he tells them, as soon as Jess manages to get away. They should take Mercy with them to Brisbane.

  Another world, he thinks. He can dimly remember it.

  But they will have to swing south of Outer Maroo; they will have to make a big arc over open ground, they will have to steer by instinct, more or less, which Mercy can certainly do. And they will also have to avoid Eromanga, where too many of Bernie’s cousins . . . If they swing south towards Thargomindah and then north again towards Quilpie . . .

  ‘But until we get back, you will have to stay underground. There’s a torch here,’ he says. ‘And water and food. Good luck.’

  If they make it to Brisbane, he thinks, it will mean simply that the seesaw can always be tipped the other way. That is all one can ask, he thinks: to move between the spaces like Prince Wen Hui’s cook.

  8. Notes From Underground

  It is as though, Sarah thinks, something has been cosmically arranged. It is as though something has required that she should live the nightmares of relatives she never knew, nightmares that all her life she has tried to flee, nightmares that her sister and her sister’s children have fiercely embraced. Is there, after all, a Prime Trickster, the he-she mischief-maker of those belief systems tied most closely to earth and sun and stars and natural forces?

  Sarah is in an oven.

  She is actually sitting cross-legged on the floor of an oven, in the belly of a joke so black she feels faint. Blackout, she thinks. I am going to black out. What she cannot bear, what she cannot bear, is that Amy should have been trapped in the same web. How could that be, that doom should be passed on not only to the third and fourth generation, but across bloodlines to a step-generation, across faith boundaries, across traditions? Is harm as deadly in the breath as in the blood?

  ‘There’s no safe place,’ she says. She has not meant to say it aloud.

  ‘No,’ Nick agrees, sighing, but when she looks at him, she sees this has nothing to do with her words. He is somewhere else altogether. He is buffeted by inner conversations of his own.

  We are like a Rembrandt painting, Sarah thinks: two faces, luminous, within a little fog of softer light, and everywhere else, thick blackness. The torch – it is a sort of emergency lantern, a miner’s lamp perhaps – is on the rock floor between them and throws up a cone of light. Within the cone, Sarah can see dimples and fist-sized cavities and scored grooves in the rock. The grooves (Sarah supposes they are the teeth marks of drills) are the length of her forearm, each one straight as a ramrod, and they all face the same way, as though a blizzard of dashes had been forced into the tunnel from some machine. Everything is coal black, but if she touches the wall or the floor, the surface comes away like a blister and below it she sees the pale buttery colour of the rock itself. The tunnel smells like an ashtray. It smells as though the Old Fuckatoo has a nest deep inside.

  ‘Both my mother’s parents,’ Sarah says, ‘my grandparents, died in the camps. I have cousins whose parents died there. I have a great-aunt who survived.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nick says from some other place. ‘I know.’

  Sarah puts the back of her hand against her mouth and bites it. She is appalled to find her thoughts slopping about in public like this. It is the black tunnel, she thinks, that is inducing such helplessness. There is something so fearful about the smell of ash. It is like being in an interrogation cell. There is something about the smell that makes her babble. I am going to black out, she thinks again. I have to keep talking to stop myself blacking out.

  ‘My father wanted to escape history, he wanted to bleach the past out of us. That was the gift of America, he believed, a chance to escape the European past. He was passionately secular. Religiously non-observant, you could say.’

  Nick looks at her and frowns but says nothing.

  ‘But it drove my sister into orthodoxy. She is ultra-orthodox, she accused me of being part of the Final Solution for marrying a non-Jew. She said I was doing the work for them. She wouldn’t speak to me for years, she broke my heart.’

  Nick watches her lips, as though she speaks in a language he does not know. ‘Yes?’ he says vaguely.

  ‘I just wanted to find a little happiness,’ Sarah says. ‘I just wanted to be somewhere safe.’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Nick says, frowning, apparently concentrating, as though here and there, fleetingly, one of her words holds meaning. But no, she thinks, studying him; more likely there has been a random intersection of two thought paths.

  ‘Extremism is everywhere,’ she says. ‘There’s no safe place. My sister’s daughter Rachel, my niece, has joined the Lubavitchers in New York. She has terrible arguments with her parents. They aren’t orthodox enough, she says; they aren’t pure. She breaks her orthodox mother’s heart. My nephew Jeremy, my sister’s son, is in the Israeli army. He worships Ygal Amir. My father won’t watch the news any more. He says he doesn’t know which he’s more afraid of seeing: an Islamic terrorist bomb in the street where his daughter lives; or his grands
on laughing like Ygal Amir in the dock.’

  Sarah wonders why she, why her father, should be surprised that being secular offers no protection from the true believers, or from the irrational, or from extremes. All the celibates in the world, she thinks, have not by one whit reduced the sexual voltage of humankind. Sex goes on degrading and exalting the way it has since history began. The religious impulse, she thinks, is the same. It is simply there, biding its time, manifesting itself in forms both horrific and sublime, regardless of where an individual places himself on its scale.

  ‘The thing about Angelo,’ Nick says, ‘is he always managed to tie me in knots. Always. I can’t . . . I can’t . . .’ He can’t decide. Was it Angelo who always relied on Nick to straighten out the messes? Or was that something Nick imposed upon himself? Was he a failure as a parent? Or was he too protective, too ready to bail Angelo out of every scrape? ‘He was always in trouble as a kid. Stealing apples from gardens, that sort of thing, harmless at first. But you couldn’t . . . no one could . . . because he was also generous and reckless and loving, kind to old ladies, you know, that kind of . . . everyone loved him. You could never stay angry with him.’

  Sarah is listening. She is watching him. For some of us, she thinks, life consists of figuring out other people’s lives.

  ‘He had no fear of anything,’ Nick sighs.

  When he moves like that, precipitously, flakes of black drift from the wall. Eventually, Sarah supposes, all the black will crumble away, and there will be a line of ash along the floor of a wide cream-coloured pipe. Or perhaps not. Perhaps an agent of movement is required. She looks down the tunnel into blackness, and shivers. Amy’s bones may be down there somewhere. She wants to do something religious for them, she does not know what. Some ritual of passage seems called for, but she does not know any.

  She has a sudden queasy memory of the Boston subway, the Red Line train careering down the black tunnel to Harvard Square. The subway car is packed, it is peak hour, and she and Amy are standing, hanging on to one of the chrome columns, swaying violently with the movement of the train. It is not possible to fall, the press of travellers being so great. Amy gives herself to the safe turbulence with a kind of ecstasy as the train hurls itself around a bend. She laughs aloud in a high breathless way. Sarah is startled. It is a rare show of uncensored emotion.

  Perhaps life consists of a series of templates and treadmills, she thinks. Perhaps we unconsciously seek them out, or respond to them, simply because they are familiar. Perhaps Amy loved this tunnel.

  ‘Angelo was risk addicted,’ Nick says. ‘My little boy.’ He laughs, a tired unhappy sound. ‘He was taller than me. That never stopped me from feeling I had to keep him under my wing, I don’t know why. Well, partly because his mother left us when he was very young, abandoned us . . . left me, I should say. She never wanted to leave her son, but I –’ He puts his head in his hands. ‘She left me for another man. She wasn’t Greek, his mother. In my parents’ culture, you know . . . it was not something I . . . I was devastated.’ The shame of it. The humiliation. He had not thought he would find the will to go on living, but he tapped into it via anger and pride. ‘I fought for sole custody rights. It wasn’t hard. Adultery . . . unfit mother. I destroyed her, and I was glad. I took my son back to Greece.’

  He twists sideways and bangs his forehead against the wall of the tunnel, a slow, rhythmic, self-punitive act. When he turns again, his face is streaked in black.

  Sackcloth and ashes, Sarah thinks.

  ‘His mother was killed in a car crash,’ Nick says. ‘No other car involved. She was driving alone at night up the Pacific Highway. She drove over the cliff.’ He rakes his fingers through his hair. ‘Revenge never solves anything,’ he sighs. ‘Greek history should have taught me that. And after that, you know, I felt I had to keep Angelo in my pocket, keep him safe. But he felt the same, I think. Well, maybe not . . . Maybe he resented it. I’m not sure about anything. But it became a habit. He contacted me when things went wrong.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sarah nods. ‘But with Amy . . . I always knew I was partly looking after myself. Trying, somehow, to make sure the ending came out right.’

  ‘Then his scrapes began to get a bit more serious,’ Nick says. ‘Or maybe it was a way of . . . I think, looking back, I was pretty strict. The more worried I got, the more I laid down the law. Maybe I drove him to it, anyway he dropped out of high school, got into drugs, things like that. He’d call from Broken Hill or somewhere, backpacking. He’d been arrested in some scam he got mixed up in. Swore he didn’t know it was illegal, which was probably true.’ He had a fatal capacity for trusting the wrong people, Nick thinks. ‘He was a sort of perpetual Unholy Innocent.’

  He has begun to peel the black off the floor as he talks. Sarah watches how neat he is, scratching at small recalcitrant smudges with his thumbnail. Incongruously, she thinks of the obsessive way some people pick at peeling skin after sunburn. The buttery colour of the rock spreads. Nick moves and begins on another patch.

  ‘About six years ago he got into some kind of trouble in Brisbane,’ he says. ‘So I went up. I was still living in Melbourne then, but Angelo took off to Sydney a couple of days after I got him out on bail. That’s where the action was, he said.’

  He bends low and blows at the blistering skin of the floor. He peels off a piece as large as a man’s handkerchief and sets it delicately to one side.

  ‘I felt pretty desolate when he left. I felt all I’d done was blame him. I felt I’d driven him away. So I drove up the north coast. I didn’t know where I was going, really. I just stopped at some point and went and sat on the beach and stared at the ocean. It was Noosa. Noosa Heads. I was going to stay for a week, then I made it two. I sat on the beach every day. Then I added a third week. It reminded me of the Aegean, you know. I fell in love with the place and never left. I wasn’t expecting it. It took me by surprise.’

  He is chipping away at the blackness faster and faster. He keeps moving slightly, further into the tunnel, cleaning as he goes. He casts about for some sort of tool, then takes his sandal off and uses it as a scraper. Sarah feels obliged to pick up the torch and move it towards him. He needs light. She begins to scrape her side of the floor.

  ‘Sunrise and sunset every day,’ he says, ‘I always sit on the sand and watch the ocean. Every single day. I watch the sun coming out of it, and dropping back in.’ He pauses in his peeling and looks at her. ‘You can’t pollute the ocean,’ he says. ‘It just throws everything back out on the shore eventually, even oil slicks. That comforts me. That there’s something, you know, that goes on resisting.’

  Sarah pushes the torch a little further down the tunnel. ‘But we should concentrate on one area,’ she says. ‘Walls and ceiling, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. You’re right.’ He picks up the torch and crawls back to their starting point. He begins on the wall. ‘The trouble is,’ he says, ‘the ocean threw up Oyster. They were like two magnets, Angelo and Oyster. The minute I met him I had a horrible premonition that the chemistry would be fatal.’

  ‘You met Oyster?’

  ‘With Angelo,’ Nick says, ‘. . . there were always as many good impulses as bad ones . . . But Oyster, he was a different kettle of fish altogether.’

  He turns around again from the wine racks, he is always just turning around from the wine racks, and Angelo is always arriving with the companion in the white linen tunic and pants. Angelo hugs Nick, ‘I’m not me, actually, Dad,’ he says in Greek. ‘I’m not the person you know. I’ve completely changed. I’ve been born again. I’m Gideon now. This is Oyster. And this is going to be a sort of baptismal dinner and a celebration.’

  There is a manic edge to Angelo’s voice which Nick notes uneasily.

  ‘Gideon,’ he says, weighing it. ‘Why Gideon?’

  Angelo says solemnly: ‘After a Gideon bible in a motel room.’

  ‘That is how God spoke,’ Oyster says.

  ‘Dad,’ Angelo says earnestly. ‘I can’t explain it
to you.’ He presses his hand against his heart. ‘It’s something inside,’ he says. ‘It’s like a fire. I’ve never felt this way before, Dad. There was a hole, there’s always been this hole inside me. And now God is there.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Nick says, embarrassed. ‘So what next?’

  ‘Opal mining,’ Angelo says. ‘Oyster’s staked a claim out west, west of Quilpie.’ Oyster knows the gem market, Angelo explains, because he used to be a pearler at Broome, and then he worked opal at Coober Pedy after that. ‘We’re going to be self-sufficient. We’re going to live in a new way.’ It was going to be a pure community, a commune, a born-again world.

  Another racket, Nick thinks. ‘And who was Oyster,’ he asks casually, ‘before he was born again?’

  He sees the light change in Oyster’s milky eyes and feels a chill. He knows that what would attract Angelo is this dangerous buzz of intensity. Oyster smiles with the basilisk charm of a cat. His eye contact is so intense that Nick expects his wine to turn sour. He sips it warily, to experiment. It tastes like vinegar. He imagines that dining with Rasputin would have been like this. He is exasperated when he catches himself thinking this way. It is the way his grandmother thought, and he knows he has a few hundred years of Greek-village superstition in his veins. He tries to discount it. He sips his wine again, but it does not taste as it should.

  Oyster says lightly: ‘I was a bad boy, Big Daddy. But God spoke to me.’ He moves his voice into a performing register, low and intense: ‘And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Do you recognise it?’

  ‘Uh . . . no,’ Nick says.

  ‘The miraculous conversion, on the road to Damascus, of bad boy Saul, persecutor of Christians. He became St Paul. That was the chapter I was reading in the Gideon bible. It hit me like a laser and transformed me.’

  ‘And what was the former bad boy’s name before he was Oyster?’ Nick persists. ‘Just for interest’s sake.’

  ‘But it is of no interest and no relevance whatsoever,’ Oyster says. ‘The old is dead. I have put on the new man in Christ. I will build a new heaven and new earth.’