Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “I would like you to know,” the captain said awkwardly, as the wharf drifted from sight, “that I provide for the child.”

  Much later, coming upon Doris alone in the lounge, he said suddenly: “She called him Sailor – isn’t that crazy? He loves to watch the ships, she takes him down to the wharf every day.”

  He opened his wallet and showed her a photograph, the kind taken in booths narrow as telephone boxes, with one slot for coins and another for finished photographs. The three heads were close together – the captain’s, the pretty young woman’s, and the little boy’s.

  “He’s afraid of me,” the captain said sadly. “He cries when I hold him. Already.”

  Bombay. When they left, Wendell was missing, but a sailor handed Doris a letter.

  Dear Doris,

  They have the right attitude here. Diet, meditation, healing, the spiritual needs, they know it’s all organically related. Ideal for finishing my book. I’m leaving you my supply of rose hip tea. (It’s in the closet over my bunk.) Keep working on the lotus position and don’t think limits.

  You can write to me care of the Bombay ymca if you want to, but I’m warning you, don’t expect answers.

  Love, Wendell

  And then Cochin. “Jewel of the Arabian Sea,” as they were told by the boatman who guided them in between islands green as jade, past the Chinese fishing nets in their hundreds, dipping in and out of the water like the gossamer veils of sea courtesans. Snake boats, with long curled prows and bellies pregnant with copra, shuddered in the Lord Dalhousie’s wake, the boatmen resting on their bamboo paddles as they waited for the turbulence to pass.

  They glided past Mattancheri, past the fabulous mansions of maharajahs, past the fifteenth-century Jewish synagogue. Past Bolghatty Island where the old Dutch Palace grew mouldy in the monsoons, a dowager empress fallen into soft times. Frangipani trees and marauding jasmine, extravagantly perfumed, sprawled beyond the bounds of gardens long since run amok.

  The Lord Dalhousie docked at the mainland to take on a cargo of cinnamon and sandalwood.

  When the ship itself becomes fragrant, thought Doris, is it possible that life will be the same?

  The streets of Cochin were daunting: wide as the tropics, and teeming with cars, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, buffalo carts, pedestrians, cows, pigs; the heat also a tyrannical swaggering presence. Doris realised she should not have come ashore without a hat. She bought a black umbrella – there were no other colours, only black – from a roadside stall. When she opened it for shade, she could see the arabesque of small holes across two membranes, a map of insect exploration.

  Vendors beckoned her into their shops, offering cool drinks and exotic English. Mem sahib is finding unique beauty as nowhere else, isn’t it? they asked. Certainly she is wanting, she is buying, isn’t it? They courted her. Brasses and sandalwood carvings were brought on cushions, as tribute to a visiting monarch. Swathes of silk were unfurled. The wet heat and the incense that rose thickly from little brass holders made her feel faint. Faces began to merge with their wares, floating upwards. Of course, she thought drowsily. The Indian rope trick! Now she herself seemed to be drifting away from her chair, away from her own feet.

  Perhaps she was dreaming. Or sleepwalking.

  She was listing leeward from the anarchy of the street of vendors, she was in a maze of back alleyways. A large bird, with draggled feathers that trailed in the gutter slime, was pecking at something rotten. The air was oppressive with the too sweet smell of organic matter decomposing. Doris slipped on something – cow dung – and stumbled against the bird. With a screech it turned and flared its muck-spattered tail into a whiplash of blues and greens. Peacock! Was this a benign dream or a nightmare? The bird’s lapis breast heaved with outrage, it fixed Doris with its brilliant blue-black eyes.

  She fled, running and stumbling back toward the safe chaos of traffic and vendors, her legs trembling. She needed to sit down. She found a tiny eating place, its two tables covered with dirty oilcloths. For atmosphere: a corona of flies. A waiter came and flicked a rag at the flies so that they dispersed momentarily. She ordered tea. She had learned the word in Bombay: chai.

  The tea was hot and very sweet and comforting, served in a glass tumbler patterned with circles of cloudy residue. Without feeling in any way disturbed by this, Doris studied the filth with tranquil fascination.

  She felt drugged with peace.

  Perhaps I am approaching enlightenment, she thought.

  “Well!” A voice floated between the flies and the steam of hot tea and curled into her ears. “You are a find!” Some sort of vision, Doris thought. A visitation. It sat down opposite her. Its edges, mirage-like, wavered, but it had the appearance of an Edwardian Englishwoman. Hair coiled above an elegant aging face, lace bodice high at the neck, long sleeves, long skirt, parasol. Doris blinked several times, striving to keep her heavy eyes open.

  “My dear,” the vision said with some concern, “you tourists never learn. You’re succumbing to sleeping sickness.” The vision wagged an admonishing finger. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen, you know. Come on. I’ll take you to my home.”

  There seemed to be a journey in a rickshaw and then a comfortable wicker chair on a verandah rampant with ferns. An overhead fan was turning, pushing offerings of hot air at Doris.

  “I’m Emma,” the vision said. “And I must say, you are a find. There’s always someone of course, never a dearth of guests. Sailors, tourists, hippies, anthropologists, linguists, all kinds. But I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I talked to someone … well, of my own age and station, so to speak. I’ve just sent Agit down to the Queen’s Bakery for some little English jam tarts so we can celebrate.”

  “You live here?” Doris asked in drowsy amazement, expecting the dream to float off course before an answer reached her.

  “For thirty-five years, my dear. Minus a little spell back in England right after Independence.”

  Doris leaned forward, trying to concentrate. “But why?” she asked. Or tried to ask. She laced her fingers together to keep the dream from trickling away too quickly.

  Emma raised her eyebrows in amusement. “Why not?” She stirred her tea reflectively, looking into the gentle whirlpool of its surface, examining reasons not looked at for a very long time. “We did go back in ‘47. Perhaps I would have stayed if it hadn’t been for Teddy. Yes, I suppose I would have, though it’s hard to imagine … cooking for church fêtes, doing the altar flowers once a month, that sort of thing, I suppose.” She threw back her head and laughed heartily. “What I’ve been saved from!”

  There was a long silence as they both sipped tea. One’s dreams grow stranger with age, Doris thought. More colourful. She watched bright birds peck at berries in the courtyard.

  “Yes, it was because of Teddy really …” Emma’s voice seemed no louder than the soft humming of the mosquitoes which waited like a restive audience just beyond the lattice work. Lighted coils kept them at bay, coils that glowed like a row of tiny sentry fires around the edges of the verandah. “Teddy’s our boy. Our only child. I don’t understand why things turned out as they did. Julian was strict, I suppose, but I don’t think more than other military fathers …”

  What visions will come, Doris thought, when the ship is breathing cinnamon, when sandalwood seeps from its pores.

  “Teddy had been away from us, of course,” Emma sighed. “In boarding schools. Well, we all did that in those days, sent them back to England. We believed it was for the best. But Teddy, well … after he was sent down from his school … I suppose the scandal … I suppose he wanted to leave it behind. Anyway, he ran away to sea. At least, that’s how I like to think of it. A rather romantic thing to do, wasn’t it?”

  Whisper of spoon against cup; the tea stirred endlessly.

  “I came to understand it after Julian died. Being totally alone, I mean.” Pause. �
�I expect that’s how it seemed at school, you know … Of course it wasn’t the sort of thing Julian could live with.” Another long pause. “I think, once one knows one is absolutely alone, it is so much better to be among strangers. Don’t you agree? An alien knows what to expect.” Stir, stir. “And one day, you know, down at the wharf” – the voice dropped to a murmur – “I’m bound to bump into Teddy.”

  Doris sipped peacefully, at rest in her wicker chair.

  “Anyway,” Emma said brightly, “a pension goes a lot further in India …” but Doris drifted into sleep.

  When she woke it was dusk and the yellow flame from an oil lamp threw fantastic shadows across the verandah. What was the smell? Coconut. Coconut oil. She tried to remember where she was.

  “The ship!” she cried in alarm, jumping up and overturning the wicker chair. “How long have I been here?”

  “You slept for a couple of hours, that’s all,” Emma said calmly. “When does your ship leave?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. Oh thank god, I was afraid I’d …” With a shaking hand, Doris picked up the overturned chair and sat down again. “I’d better get back for the night.”

  “You could stay here. Anyway, tiffin is ready.” She called back into the house. “Agit! Bring tiffin!”

  A young man bearing platters of rice and curry and sweets emerged.

  “And now,” Emma said. “We can talk.”

  They spoke of many things as the oil lamps flickered and the perfume of the night-jasmine drifted in and out like fog. From time to time there was the soft thud of a bat hitting the verandah eaves. And whenever Emma laughed – which she did often – a chorus of nearby frogs responded throatily. Antiphonally. Or perhaps in protest.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Emma demanded. “Just like old times. A regular dinner party. Of course I have guests at least twice a week, usually sailors.” She paused. “I don’t suppose there’s a Teddy on your ship’s crew? No. Well, one of these days.” She walked over to a hanging basket of ferns and pulled at some straggling fronds. “You know, you could stay on with me for a few weeks. Or months. We could …” She stopped, and when Doris said nothing, added quickly, almost harshly: “Just a passing thought. In fact, where would I put you? There simply isn’t room. Agit! Brandy!”

  And after the brandy, Emma said briskly: “Now before you go back to your ship, my pièce de résistance. I share it with all my guests. Agit! An autorick!”

  They lurched their way back through the tumult of the main thoroughfares to a wooden building on low stilts, theosophical hall, proclaimed a billboard in uneven hand-painted letters.

  “She was one of us, more or less,” Emma said, pointing to the sign. “Annie Besant, I mean. Couldn’t be worn down.”

  Doris said carefully: “I don’t think … it’s quite my taste, theosophical …”

  Emma laughed. “The Kathakali dancers use the hall every night. It’s a family troupe. Three generations. Absolutely first rate.”

  In the gloom inside – the power had failed, and a row of oil lamps had been placed along the front of the stage – the dancers were still applying their elaborate facial make-up. The small audience was watching with interest. Perhaps this was part of the performance? There were, it seemed to Doris, peering about in the golden-misted twilight, about fifteen people in the audience. Some Indian families with children. A young tourist couple, probably German. And three sailors. Somewhat to Doris’s dismay, Emma immediately introduced herself to the Westerners, conversing with animation and much gesture, hazarding her imperfect French and terrible German, asking the sailors their names and whether there was a Teddy (or an Ed, Eddy, Edward, or Ted) on their crews.

  Then the performance began. To the accompaniment of a tabla player and a singer, the dancers, gorgeously costumed and dramatically and fantastically made-up, acted out the great legends of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. It was primitive and splendid. Perhaps it was the drum beat, or the incense, or the rhythmic stamping of the dancers’ feet, that gave Doris a sharp memory of love-making, that made her grieve with a sudden painful intensity for the presence, the body, of her husband who had slipped through some crack into non-being.

  The Indians in the audience began to smile and lean forward eagerly in their seats. Doris could feel Emma touching her, was aware of Emma seizing her hand and whispering urgently: “This is the exciting part. This is where Rama destroys the demon Ravana, and right order prevails again in all the worlds.”

  She forgot to release Doris’s hand.

  Ever so slightly, they leaned inwards toward the stage and felt the damp pressure of shoulder against shoulder. It was an accidental and fleeting thing – as a child momentarily reaches for its mother; as lovers make discreet contact in public.

  Neither drew back.

  They sat there hand in hand in the darkness, waiting for Rama – upholder of right order in the universe – to triumph.

  The Bloody Past, The Wandering Future

  “The bloody past!” my great-grandfather swore. “The interfering bloody past!” He was half stunned with incredulity and whisky, not so far gone as to damage the crisp Oxford edges of his vowels, but enough to make him grateful for the embankment railings. He leaned against them and pushed the matted bougainvillea furiously aside as though slamming a door. He made a fist and brandished it. Litera scripta manet, his fist said. (After two drinks he sweated Latin, and he’d had whisky for breakfast as usual.) “It was the Grammar School money, wasn’t it? That’s how you traced me. From those bloody remittance cheques! Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” the young man (my Grandfather Turner) said simply. Most of his eighteen years he had been rehearsing this moment. He stood waiting for his life to change irrevocably. Certain details he never forgot: the muddied alcoholic stink of his father’s black gown, the runnels of sweat leaking out from under the preposterous wig (now slightly askew), the cascade of damp legal curls dripping onto the starched collar. Ever after, he could not so much as catch sight of a barrister or a Queen’s Counsel without feeling this same lurching of the earth beneath his feet.

  As for my great-grandfather, the drunken barrister, I suppose that visions of the Eastbourne Pier and his wife’s face, and the English Channel back of both, must have flooded his memory with the suddenness of aneurisms bursting. He actually moaned and put a hand to his forehead, though all he could see, between the railings and the bougainvillea, was the Brisbane River winding its slow unhistorical way to the sea.

  In a matter of weeks that same river, in that same torpid fin-de-siècle January, would astound my great-grandfather and several thousand other people, hurling itself down like a dingo on the little fold of Brisbane, laying waste much of the city and drowning my great-grandfather and the interfering past as deeply as he ever could have wished.

  But on the day of which I speak, a few weeks before the flood, there was a moment when he hesitated before that past as before a door opened in a dark alley. He stared at the son who had come halfway around the world to find him. Seconds, maybe whole minutes, ticked by in the swooning air.

  “What is it you want?” he asked at last.

  My grandfather was not able to answer this question with words, though years later he wished he had asked why. Simply: Why? Then again, he was often relieved he had not.

  Beads of perspiration gleamed on the barrister’s eyebrows and hung in dewdrops from the tips of his juridical curls. He straightened his spine against the embankment railings and stared, puzzled, into the crimson throats of the bougainvillea. He made a large, vague, sweeping gesture of disbelief. “This too may pass,” he said. His gesture took in the splendid colonial Court House, the unpaved street, the slatternly river, the heat. Even in the face of absurdity, his gesture implied, a gentleman – especially a decaying gentleman – must never lose his composure.

  “I should think we are in agreement,” he said courteously, “that this was a m
istake.”

  Then he nodded politely and walked away, the black gown lifting and dipping like damp wings.

  My grandfather had to lean against the railings and the bougainvillea. He stood and watched until there was no further point in doing so. A few weeks later the spot where he had been standing – so he judged from the newspaper photographs – was covered with fifteen feet of warm mud and raging water. My grandfather fancied, in retrospect, that he had known, had had a precognitive glimpse of chaos. But he had blinked it away and turned round and gone back to Melbourne. He was in a hurry. He was, in fact, in such urgent need of a new purpose for his life that almost immediately he set about becoming the kind of patriarch he had fantasised he would find: scholarly, devoted to the family, touched by tragedy. He did not wait for the boat back to England. He married and put out roots right there where he was, begetting sons and daughters.

  And in Brisbane, if my great-grandfather had second thoughts, the river left no record of it.

  * * *

  My visitants. At certain seasons they catch me unawares: when return passages are booked, when passports must be renewed. I wake, sometimes, in the middle of the night, heart pounding, and listen to the seconds changing places, a dizzy quadrille.

  This summer, my son turns eighteen. (My great-grandfather laughs his whisky laugh. You too, he says, with a polite but sardonic smile, you too will pass. His consonants cut like crystal, his vowels are solid sterling, pure cashmere. You are losing your Australian accent, he comments, pursing his lips. Not that your present accent – whatever it is – is any improvement.)

  He says: I was the age that you are now, and my son was the age of your son, when the river threw its tantrum.

  I am as far from Brisbane as it is possible – sub luna – to be, though I expect, in this summer of my son’s eighteenth birthday, to lean against the bougainvillea again and stare at the river. When I myself was eighteen I stood there often enough, a moony undergraduate, waiting for the university bus, reading the river, listening for the future that would sweep me off my feet.