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Oyster

Page 37

by Janette Turner Hospital


  ‘And where exactly will the new heaven be?’ Nick asks.

  ‘The kind of community we will have,’ Oyster says, ‘can’t be put on conventional maps.’

  ‘I did some research after they left,’ Nick tells Sarah. ‘I had just two clues: Coober Pedy and Broome. And I had an instinct. I found out why he’d want to put on the new man in Christ, all right.’ Police records, mug shots, it took him months. ‘He’d discarded as many names as the rest of us have thrown out old shoes.’ He would tell Sarah some day, if a day came when they could bear to talk about the Reef. ‘Oyster was nothing if not brilliant,’ he says.

  ‘If only they’d known,’ Sarah says. ‘If only Amy had known.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nick sighs. ‘I don’t know if it would have helped. Angelo showed up again one day,’ he says. ‘Out of the blue, as usual. Recruiting along the north coast, he said, where the young tourists are. So I told him what I’d found out. It shook him, I think. But then he said that was before. Oyster was born again now. He was someone else.

  ‘I didn’t believe him,’ Nick tells Sarah. ‘But I wanted to believe him.’

  ‘Here,’ Sarah says. ‘This’ll make the work easier.’ She has found two knives in the food basket. She gives one to Nick.

  ‘This is great,’ he says.

  They scrape from the ceiling down towards the floor. Nick has to stoop slightly when he stands; Sarah does not.

  ‘I was too strict, too demanding,’ Nick says. ‘Too proud. Too stupid. I just wanted one more chance, one moment . . . I just . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah sighs. It seems to her a miracle that there are any moments of safety or moments of happiness at all. They work steadily, scraping and blowing carbon dust from the wall.

  ‘I should have come looking sooner,’ Nick says wretchedly. ‘I left it too late.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah says. The lateness, the terrible permanence of it, suddenly pushes her like a blast of dead air. She stops scraping, paralysed. She can feel an unstoppable flash flood of sobbing, a tidal wave, coming at her from the depths of the tunnel, rising and rising and rising . . .

  ‘No, listen,’ Nick says. He drops his knife. She can hear it clatter and ring against the rock. ‘Listen,’ he says helplessly. He puts his arm around her and she buries her face against his shoulder. Her sobbing is violent but noiseless. He holds her. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘The ocean . . . Think of the ocean.’

  Her sobbing is noisy now. It bounces off the rock walls and reverberates and echoes back from deeper down. An ocean of mourning fills the tunnel. They sit in the small cleaned sand-coloured space and listen to the dirge of it. The light from the torch washes them. He strokes her hair. He kisses her. They huddle like frightened children, holding each other, and stare into the dark.

  EPILOGUE

  The End of the World

  Everything is going up in smoke, the years crackle like kindling, the feathers of the Old Fuckatoo smell black and singed. From here in the breakaways, we can now see two separate fires, but we cannot be sure that both are real. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but not always simultaneously; where there are mirages, the truth is bent. One blaze could be a twisted message from a crooked time, or perhaps both are ghost fires. Perhaps both are burning somewhere else, somewhere much further off.

  Smoke and heat haze hang like draperies in the air, they sway and twist, the years get in my eyes, they drift, I am giddy with time.

  ‘Did you know that it took the Great Fire of London in 1666 to wipe out the plague?’ I ask Major Miner, but he is somewhere else, and where he is, Singapore still burns. Ethel leans into past millennia, blowing on the flames of her little fire, fanning herself with gidgee smoke. At least the fire will burn the carcasses off, I think. The Old Fuckatoo will flap its slow wings and bugger off, at least for a while, just as the Great Plague was cauterised by flame. London’s burning, London’s burning, we chanted it at the convent, it was a game, it was a history lesson: 1666. Dukke Prophet would make something of that, it suddenly strikes me: one millennium plus 666, footprint of the beast, or act of God?

  Major Miner cries out, as though from sleep, though he has not been asleep, he has been sitting staring into the haze. ‘Jess!’ he calls, like a child in the night. ‘Jess!’ But when I go to him, he blinks vaguely. ‘Where am I?’ he says.

  ‘With me.’

  ‘It’s hungry, the beast,’ he says, ‘once it tastes blood. It’ll gorge till it drops.’

  ‘It’ll be all right now,’ I say, calming him. ‘There’ve been no explosions for hours.’

  ‘But we did it anyway. We moved through the gaps. In spite of the beast, we got them out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m watching him, I’m keeping my eye on him, because the shivers keep taking him, the bushfire, Singapore, the thought of the three of them in that truck with the fire at their heels. It would have been touch and go. ‘The explosions have stopped,’ I say again. ‘All the cars and the tanks must have gone up by now. It should run out of fuel.’

  ‘Depending on the wind.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There were two separate fires,’ he says. ‘They joined up. It wasn’t just the spread from the Givens’ house. It was that shooting spree in town. They must have fired into Beresford’s tanks by accident.’

  ‘Yes.’ That would have been the first huge explosion, the one that had thrown Ethel and Mercy and me into a great skidding arc on the edge of town. We had almost rolled. We felt the explosion in our ears and against our skin like a punch on the side of the head. The wind was in our favour then, though the great fireball bounced at our tail. We were lucky. The wind favoured us.

  But since then? For the others?

  ‘Drive south, drive south as far as you can,’ I shouted at Mercy. ‘Curve around it on the south side, give it as wide a berth as you can.’

  ‘I have to go back for Mum and Dad,’ she said, aghast at the blaze. She was frantic.

  ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘You can’t. It’s too late. You’ll have to drive for your lives.’ And then I lied through my teeth; it was the last gift I had. ‘We’ll go back for them,’ I promised. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll keep them safe.’ Later, later, I would tell the black truth, but not until they were safely on their way. ‘I promise,’ I shouted, and she gunned the truck and they took off.

  But the whole place is nothing but tinder for hundreds of miles, and everything hangs on the wind.

  Ethel sits a little away from the bora rings now, in the spindly shade of acacias. ‘This is my tree, Jess,’ she says. ‘I was born under this tree.’

  ‘You going to push off to Bourke when the fire dies down, Ethel? Or what?’

  ‘Staying here, Jess,’ she says. ‘This is my country here, my tree. My mob’ll come home now, any day now, you’ll see. They’ll hear on the bush telegraph, they’ll all start showing up from Bourke.’

  ‘What about you, Jess?’ Major Miner asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘What about you? You heading back on to the map?’

  ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Not me. I’ve paid me dues to the world. I prefer rocks to people, present company excepted. I’ll just keep pottering on at the Great Extended till the end of the next world, the one after this. Me and the opal and me nightmares and that bloody great sky.’

  Me too, I think. The railway-ganger’s life is my style. We don’t need much. We’ve got what we need. We travel light.

  ‘You could move in for keeps,’ he says.

  ‘Shack up together, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  ‘We’re rotten bad luck, us railway-ganger brats.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ he says. ‘Why not?’

  Why not? I think. I play with my jacks, I hold my fossilised mussel in my hand, I toss Major Miner’s opalised oyster in the air. I imagine Andrew Godwin’s Troopie heading east.

  ‘They’ll be back on the map by now, I reckon. East of Quilpie.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘a
s long as, you know . . .’

  We both know it depends on where they were when the second and third explosions . . . and how the wind . . . but we will not say it. We will not. We insist that they outstripped the fire.

  I can see the three of them now, up high in the cabin, Mercy driving, because she knows outback terrain so well . . .

  The waiting seems interminable. Mercy imagines that a chrysalis must feel like this, locked inside the cocoon, blind, the wings damp and pressed shut and useless. Waiting. Waiting. The minutes feel like constrictions on her breathing, like swaddling bands. The three of them sit high and close in the Troopie’s cabin. Mercy drives. They feel the explosion like a blow to the side of the truck. It rocks them, they tip, they are poised like a ballerina à point, on two tyres. A funnel of freak winds twists them, they teeter, they can feel the sickening arc of the beginning of the roll, they hesitate, they drop back on all fours.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Nick breathes, and the pyramid of bottles in his grandmother’s cellar comes lurching at him, and he crosses himself.

  The fire reaches out like an octopus, like a many-pointed star. The fire is like vast red batwings on three sides.

  Mercy drives for the gap. She keeps her mind on it, that opening between the flames. Beyond it lies the edge of the map.

  Cards riffle through my mind like a waterfall of light: beginnings, arrivals, departures, Susannah and the elders, Oyster in the pulpit, Mercy’s card.

  The dealer calls.

  The dealer calls, and I insist on dealing the cards the way I want.

  Especially the last card.

  I see the three of them moving east like a charmed arrow, the sun gilding them, the fire like wings at their heels. I see them passing Thargomindah, I see them somewhere east of Quilpie by now.

  ‘Gonna be rain,’ Ethel says suddenly, jumping up and raising her arms to the sky. ‘Rain on the way. I know these things. It’s coming down from the Gulf. Three days, maybe four, you’ll see.’

  And I believe her, I believe her, I believe the weather is going to change. I believe the Old Fuckatoo has fucked off.

  I can see the Troopie flying down the Warrego Highway, and I can see Mercy reaching inside her shirt and taking the photograph out.

  ‘We got Mercy’s photograph,’ I tell Major Miner. ‘That one you took at the Reef. She hid it in the one place she knew Ma would never look. She hid it in the Gideon bible that Ma kept stuck in a cupboard at the back.’

  ‘They were happy that night,’ Major Miner says wistfully. ‘They were laughing and singing when I took that shot. I think it was still a kind of Eden out there then. It seemed to be.’

  I see Mercy hand it to them, I listen to her explain, I see her conjuring up the day that Amy came into the shop. I watch Nick and Sarah as they stare at the Polaroid past, they stare at Oyster who is in the middle, and at Angelo who is on his right, and at Amy on his left. They consider the meaning of the smiles.

  Nick turns the photograph over.

  Dear Dad,

  Thought you’d like to see how happy we are.

  I miss you.

  Love, Angelo

  ‘It was Gideon,’ Mercy says, ‘I mean Angelo, who got me away from the Reef. It was Gideon who saved my life.’

  Nick cannot speak.

  He winds the window down and leans out. He leans far out.

  ‘My son,’ he shouts into the hot wind and the red dust and the great blue dome of the sky. ‘Oh my son, my son Angelo!’ He begins to sob noisily like a child and cannot stop.

  Sarah holds him as though he were her own lost waif.

  Mercy drives always for the gap where Brisbane lies, Brisbane the beautiful, the city of dreams, the fabulous city of anecdotes, of her mother’s thousand and one embroidered tales, and she will bring her parents, she will go back for them, because I remember, Mercy, her mother says, how we used to drive down the range from Toowoomba when I was a girl, and I would imagine the city long before I could see it, and the sun would be on all the tall buildings, and on the glass windows, and it would be shining like the New Jerusalem, you know, in the Book of Revelation: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.

  And Mercy imagines Brisbane, the golden city. She imagines the great river with water in it. She thinks of grass, ferns, trees, ocean, sand. She imagines herself running into the ocean as into the world. She will let the world crest and froth about her.

  She is driving back on to the map. She imagines that some qualitative change will occur. Perhaps the light will be different. Perhaps the pull of gravity will shift.

  The Warrego Highway stretches ahead, and in the distance, always floating, beckoning, shifting, sometimes upside down, sometimes not, the golden city shimmers in the heat.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hawke, Steve and Gallagher, Michael, Noonkanbah: Whose Land, Whose Law?, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, l989

  McKellar, Hazel, Matya-Mundu: A History of the Aboriginal People of South West Queensland ed. Thom Blake, Cunnamulla, Australian Native Welfare Association, l984

  Roberts, Kevin, Red Centre Journal: A journey in two parts, South Australia, Wakefield Press, l992

  Cram, Len, Opals: Australia’s National Gem, Brisbane, Robert Brown Associates, l994

  O’Leary, Barrie, Field Guide to Australian Opals, Melbourne, Gemcraft Books, l977

  Kaihla, Paul and Laver, Ross, Savage Messiah: The Shocking Story of Cult Leader Rock Thériault and the Women who Loved Him, Toronto, Doubleday, l993

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features included in a new section . . .

  About the author

  * * *

  Meet the author

  Life at a glance

  About the book

  * * *

  The critical eye

  Behind the scenes

  The inspiration

  Read on

  * * *

  Have you read?

  Find out more

  About the author

  Meet the author

  Janette Turner Hospital

  JANETTE TURNER was born in Melbourne in 1942. She says: ‘I grew up in a very religious family – Protestant fundamentalist – without radio or television, and I did not see a movie until I was 20 years old.’ She ‘escaped’ from this constricted lifestyle, but she says, ‘I still feel very protective towards the faith of my parents and of other marginalised lives for whom this kind of faith is empowering and consoling.’ Her family life was, in fact, warm and happy, and she didn’t realise quite how different her upbringing was from that of other children until she started primary school and found herself an outsider, an ‘extremely painful’ experience. She credits her rich inner life and her fascination with characters who survive trauma to this upbringing.

  Her family moved to Brisbane when she was seven years old, and, despite her travels and the fact that she now lives in the US, she still considers herself a Queenslander.

  She attended the University of Queensland and Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College, and taught in high schools around country Queensland and in Brisbane before marrying academic Clifford Hospital in 1965. In 1967, she moved with him to Boston, USA, where he did his PhD at Harvard while she worked as a librarian in the Harvard University Library. Their two children were born in the USA during these student years. In 1971, they moved to Canada where her husband was a professor at Queens University and where Hospital did her own graduate degree in Medieval Literature.

  In 1977–78, the family lived in a village in the south of India in connection with her husband’s sabbatical research. Hospital’s first short story, ‘Waiting’, about the culture clash of East and West, was written in South India and received publication and an ‘Atlantic First’ prize from the prestigious American magazine Atlantic Monthly. This story was expanded into her first novel, The Ivory Swing, which won Canada’s biggest literary prize for a first novel. ‘Then I thought, I guess I’m a writer, not an academic. Or at least, a writer, and an academic on the side,’ she says.


  Since then, she has lectured in universities in Australia, Canada, USA, England and Europe; her writing has won international awards; and her novels and story collections have been published in many languages. Something of a ‘global nomad’, she has lived in Canada, France, India and the UK but now divides her time between the USA and Queensland.

  In 1999, Janette was invited to the University of South Carolina where she holds a chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English.

  She has been called ‘one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today’ by the Times Literary Supplement and Joyce Carol Oates describes her as ‘a writer of consummate craft and visionary insight. She is always surprising, and seems always to be renewing herself as one of our major writers.’

  ‘I guess I’m a writer, not an academic. Or at least, a writer, and an academic on the side’

  Life at a glance

  BORN

  * * *

  1942 in Melbourne

  PREVIOUS WORKS

  * * *

  NOVELS

  The Ivory Swing (1982)

  The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (1983)

  Borderline (1985)

  Charades (1988)

  A Very Proper Death (as ‘Alex Juniper’) (1990)

  The Last Magician (1992)

  Oyster (1996)

  Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Dislocations (1986)

  Isobars (1990)

  Collected Stories 1970-1995 (1995)

  North of Nowhere, South of Loss (2003)

  SELECTED AWARDS AND HONOURS

  • ‘Atlantic First’, The Atlantic Monthly, USA, 1978, for ‘Waiting’

  • First Prize, Magazine Fiction, Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters, 1982, for ‘Our Little Chamber Concerts’

 

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