On our walks he would stop and talk to everyone we met, “to anyone, anyone at all,” Uncle Cyril would groan. He spoke to the butcher, the baker, the lady in the cake shop, to men who did shady undiscussable things, even men who smelled of horses and took bets, whatever that was.
“What can you be thinking of?” Grandma would say, “with the child hearing every word? A man known to be mixed up with off-course betting.”
I knew bets to be deeply evil. I imagined them to be huge and ravenous and almost hidden behind fearful masks. Once upon a time, in Kalgoorlie, Grandpa himself had made bets, but that was before the Lord saved him and showed him the light. Now, he said, he only bet on the Day of Judgment. Still, he couldn’t see any harm in talking to people who “knew horses”. He would introduce me. “This is Paddy,” he would say. “A man who knows horses if ever anyone did.” I myself had no interest in knowing horses on account of their large and alarming teeth, but I rather liked those brave horse-knowing men.
Sometimes Grandma, shocked, would call out: “Dad! I want to have a word with you, Dad.” From the front window, she would have watched us coming over the bridge from the Ringwood Station. The most interesting people came off the trains and walked over that bridge. Grandma would have seen us stop and talk to some gentleman who wore string, perhaps, for suspenders, and whose shoes were stuffed in an intricate way with newspapers, and who gave off the rank smell of the pubs. “Dad!” she would say. “What are you thinking of, to introduce the child to such strangers?”
“Strangers?” Grandpa would raise his eyebrows in surprise. “That wasn’t a stranger. That was Bluey McTavish from back of Geelong. We don’t know any strangers.”
This was certainly true, though we’d only just met Mr Bluey McTavish of Geelong, whose life history we would discuss over the sorting of dahlia bulbs. I don’t know what it was about Grandpa Morgan, but people told him a great deal about themselves very quickly. “There aren’t any such people as strangers,” he told me. “Or if there are, I’ve never met them.”
“I don’t know what’s going to come of that child,” Grandma Morgan said, throwing up her hands and trying not to smile. “But one thing’s certain: she’ll never know the difference between truth and lies.”
Grandpa said with ruffled dignity: “One thing she’ll know about is dahlias.”
The dahlias, the dahlias. They stretched to the edge of the world. When I stood between the rows, I saw nothing but jungle, with great suns of flowers above me, so heavy they nodded on their stalks and shone down through the forests of their own leaves. Such a rainbow of suns: from creamy white to a purple that was almost black. The dahlias believed in excess: they could never have too many petals. The dahlia which could crowd the most pleatings of pure light about its centre won a blue ribbon at the Melbourne Show. It was an article of faith with us that some year the Morgan Dahlia would win that ribbon.
Grandpa Morgan did things to the bulbs and the soil. He married broad-petalled pinks to pintucked yellows; he introduced sassy purples to smocked whites with puffed sleeves and lacy hems. He watched over his nurslings, he crooned to them, he prayed. To birds and snails he issued strong Welsh warnings (the Lord having taken away a certain range of Australian vocabulary). As his flowerlings grew, he murmured endearments; and they gathered themselves up into a delirium of pleats, rank upon rank of petals, tier upon tier, frilled prima donnas. The color of the Morgan dahlia was a salmon that could make judges weep, the salmon of a baby’s cheek, the colour of a lover’s whisper. And it did win yellow ribbons, and red, at the Melbourne Show, but never the coveted blue.
“Is it waiting till we find the Morgan Nugget again?” I asked.
“Very likely,” Grandpa said. “Very likely.”
The day Grandma came out with the news of Uncle Charlie, we were deep in dahlias.
“Dad,” she said. “Charlie’s gone.”
Grandpa paused in mid-weeding. A clump of clover and crab- grass dangled from between his fingers. He sank down on the ground between the dahlias and rested his head in his hands. “Well,” he said, sadly and slowly. “Charlie. So Charlie went first.”
“Where’s he gone?” I wanted to know.
“Uncle Charlie’s gone to heaven,” Grandma told me, and Grandpa said: “He’s dead.” He pushed his trowel into the soil and lifted up a handful of earth. It was alive with ants and worms, we watched it move in the palm of his hand. “I’m next,” he sighed, and he smelled the earth and held it for me to smell, and he rubbed it against his cheek as though it were a kitten. “I’m next, I suppose.”
“Next for what?”
“Next for dying,” he said.
“What happens when you die, Grandpa?”
“They put you in a box and they bury you under the ground with the dahlia bulbs.”
I stared at him in horror. “Unde Charlie should run away and hide.”
“You can’t run away when you’re dead,” he said.
“Grandpa,” I whispered, beginning to shiver, “will they do it to you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And to me?”
I crept between his earth-covered arms and he held me tightly and rocked me back and forth between the dahlias. “Yes,” he sighed, “one day, yes. That’s the way it is. But then we’ll be with the Lord.”
I didn’t want to be with the Lord. I had a brilliant idea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we’ll run away before we die. I know a very good place in the woodshed; they’d never find us.”
“Dad!” Grandma’s voice steamed over with exasperation. “Now just what have you been telling her this time? How will that child ever know the difference between truth and a lie? Uncle Charlie,” she said to me, “has gone straight to heaven, and that is the simple truth.”
Mr Peabody knew the truth. Every Sunday it spoke in his bones, it shook him from head to foot.
There must have been some obscure and ancient rule at church. It must have been this rule which forced Mr Peabody, week after week, to sit directly in front of Grandpa Morgan. Mr Peabody was a tiny man, elderly, and seemingly frail as a sparrow, though he must have had enormous reserves of stamina on which to draw.
Behind him, sheltering in the leeside of the Spirit of the Lord as it blustered and rushed through Grandpa, my little brother and I kept score. When the spirit moved. Grandpa shouted hallelujah in his fine Welsh voice. The shock waves hit Mr Peabody sharply in the nape of his neck and travelled down his spine with such force that he would rise an inch or two from the pew. Most of his body would go rigid, but his head and his hands would quiver for seconds at a time. Glory, glory, he would murmur in a terror-stricken prayerful voice.
These seismic interludes infused Sundays with extraordinary interest. And there was also this: from monitoring the passions of Mr Peabody, my brother and I learned self-control, the ability to tamp down an explosion of mirth and turn it into a mere telegraphed signal of gleaming eyes and a coded numerology of fingers.
But then came the day that a shaft of sunlight fell from a high amberglass window in the church and placed a crown of gold on Mr Peabody’s head. “Oh!” I gasped aloud. “Look!” And Grandpa shouted Hallelujah! and Mr Peabody rose up into his corona like a skyrocket and I saw a million golden doves and the gilded petals of all the dahlias in the world rising up into the pointed arch above in which God lived.
“It was the Holy Spirit you saw,” the pastor told me. “The Holy Spirit descending as a dove.”
“Going up,” I corrected. “Lots and lots of them, and dahlias too.”
“The Holy Spirit,” he said again, less certainly. “In the form of a dove.”
“I’m not so sure,” my Sunday School teacher said. “She makes things up.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” the pastor reminded her.
“She makes things up,” my Sunday School teacher insisted. “She handles the truth very c
arelessly. She believes her own lies.”
“Grandpa,” I asked, “how can you tell the difference between truth and a lie?”
He was working bonemeal into the soil around his dahlias; over us nodded those heavy salmon suns. He went on kneading the rich black loam, intent on his labour.
Apprehensively I persisted: “Is the Morgan Nugget true?”
He went on sifting the soil.
I thought hopefully: perhaps he made up death.
“The truth,” he said at last, “shall make you free. John, chapter 8, verse 32.”
“Grandpa,” I said, “there were doves with gold wings, and dahlias too. Mr Peabody made them fly. I saw them.”
“I know you did.”
I leaned towards him. “And the Morgan Nugget?” I breathed.
“Is true,” he said. “Is true.”
After Long Absence
For years it has branched extravagantly in dreams, but the mango tree outside the kitchen window in Brisbane is even greener than the jubilant greens of memory. I could almost believe my mother has been out there with spit and polish, buffing up each leaf for my visit. I suggest this to her and she laughs, handing me a china plate.
Her hands are a bright slippery pink from the soap suds and the fierce water, and when I take the plate it is as though I have touched the livid element of a stove. In the nick of time, I grunt something unintelligible in lieu of swearing. “Oh heck,” I mumble, cradling the plate and my seared fingers in the teatowel. “I’d forgotten.” And we both laugh. It is one of those family idiosyncrasies, an heirloom of sorts, passed down with the plate itself which entered family history on my grandmother’s wedding day. The women in my mother’s family have always believed that dishwashing water should be just on the leeside of boiling, and somehow, through sheer conviction that cleanliness is next to godliness, I suppose, their hands can calmly swim in it.
I glance at the wall above the refrigerator, and yes, the needlepoint text is still there, paler from another decade of sun, but otherwise undiminished: He shall try you in a refiner’s fire.
“Do you still have your pieces?” my mother asks.
She means the cup, saucer, and plate from my grandmother’s dinner set, which is of fine bone china, but Victorian, out of fashion. The heavy band of black and pale orange and gold leaf speaks of boundaries that cannot be questioned.
“I’d never part with it,” I say.
And I realise from the way in which she smiles and closes her eyes that she has been afraid it would be one more thing I would have jettisoned. I suppose it seems rather arbitrary to my parents, what I have rejected and what I have hung onto. My mother is suspended there, dish mop in hand, eyes closed, for several seconds. She is “giving thanks”. I think with irritation: nothing has ever been secular in this house. Not even the tiniest thing.
“Leave this,” my mother says, before I am halfway through the sensation of annoyance. “I’ll finish. You sit outside and get some writing done.”
And I think helplessly: It’s always been like this, a seesaw of frustration and tenderness. Whose childhood and adolescence could have been more stifled or more pampered?
“But I like doing this with you,” I assure her. “I really do.” She smiles and “gives thanks” again, a fleeting and exasperating and totally unconscious gesture. “Honestly,” I add, precisely because it has suddenly become untrue, because my irritation has surged as quixotically as the Brisbane River in flood. “It’s one of …” but I decide not to add that it is one of the few things we can do in absolute harmony.
“You should enjoy the sun while you can,” she says. Meaning: before you go back to those unimaginable Canadian winters. “Besides, you’ll want to write your letters.” She pauses awkwardly, delicately avoiding the inexplicable fact that the others have not yet arrived. She cannot imagine a circumstance that would have taken her away, even temporarily, from her husband and children. All her instincts tell her that such action is negligent and immoral. But she will make no judgments, regardless of inner cost. “And then,” she says valiantly, “there’s your book. You shouldn’t be wasting time … You should get on with your book.” My book, which they fear will embarrass them again. My book, which will cause them such pride and bewilderment and sorrow. “Off with you,” she says. “Sun’s waiting.”
I’ve been back less than twenty-four hours and already I’m dizzy – the same old roller-coaster of anger and love. I surrender the damp linen tea-towel which is stamped with the coats of arms of all the Australian states. I gather up notepad and pen, and head for the sun.
They are old comforters, the sun and the mango tree. I think I’ve always been pagan at heart, a sun worshipper, perhaps all Queensland children are. There was always far more solace in the upper branches of this tree than in the obligatory family Bible reading and prayers that followed dinner. I wrap my arms around the trunk, I press my cheek to the rough bark, remembering that wasteland of time, the fifth grade.
I can smell it again, sharp and bitter, see all the cruel young faces. The tree sap still stinks of it. My fingers touch scars in the trunk, the blisters of nail heads hammered in long years ago when we read somewhere that the iron improved the mangoes. The rust comes off now on my hands, a dark stain. I am falling down the endless concrete stairs, I feel the pushing again, the kicking, blood coming from somewhere, I can taste that old fear.
I reach for the branch where I hid; lower now, it seems – which disturbs me. Not as inaccessibly safe as I had thought.
Each night, the pale face of my brother would float from behind the glass of his isolation ward and rise through the mango leaves like a moon. I never asked, I was afraid to ask, “Will he die?” And the next day at school, and the next, I remember, remember: all the eyes pressed up against my life, staring, mocking, hostile, menacing.
There was a mark on me.
I try now to imagine myself as one of the others. I suppose I would simply have seen what they saw: someone dipped in death, someone trailing a shadowy cloak of contamination, someone wilfully dangerous. Why should I blame them that they had to ward me off?
This had, in any case, been foretold.
I had known we were strange from my earliest weeks in the first grade. “The nurse has arrived with your needles,” our teacher said, and everyone seemed to know what she was talking about. “You’ll go when your name is called. It doesn’t hurt.”
“It does so,” called out Patrick Murphy, and was made to stand in the corner.
“With a name like that,” said the teacher, “I’m not surprised.”
She was busy unfurling and smoothing out the flutter of consent letters which we had all dutifully returned from home, some of us arriving with the letters safety-pinned to our pinafores. The teacher singled out one of the slips, her brow furrowed.
“I see we have our share of religious fanatics,” she said. She began to prowl between the desks, waving the white letter like a flag. “Someone in our class,” she announced, “is a killer.” She stopped beside my desk and I could smell her anger, musky and acrid and damp. It was something I recognised, having smelled it when our cat was playing with a bird, though I could not have said what part of the smell came from which creature. The teacher put her finger on my shoulder, a summons, and I followed to the front of the class. “This person,” said the teacher, “is our killer.”
And everyone, myself included, solemnly observed. I looked at my hands and feet, curious. A killer, I thought, tasting the double l with interest and terror, my tongue forward against the roof of my mouth.
“Irresponsible! Morally irresponsible!” The teacher’s voice was like that of our own pastor when he climbed into the pulpit. She was red in the face. I waited for her, my first victim, to go up in smoke. “Ignorant fanatics,” she said, “you and your family. You’re the kind who cause an epidemic.”
I always remembered
the word, not knowing what it meant. I saw it as dark and cumulous, freighted with classroom awe, a bringer of lightning bolts. Epidemic. I sometimes credit that moment with the birth of my passionate interest in the pure sound of arrangements of syllables. Epidemic. And later, of course, in the fifth grade, diphtheria, a beautiful word, but deadly.
I know a lot about words, about their sensuous surfaces, the way the tongue licks at them. And about the depth charges they carry.
My mother brings tea and an Arnott’s biscuit, though I have been out here scarcely an hour, and though I have not written a word. I have been sitting here crushing her ferns, my back against the mango tree, remembering Patrick Murphy: how no amount of standings-in-the-corner or of canings (I can hear the surf-like whisper of the switch against his bare calves) could put a dent in his exuberance or his self-destructive honesty.
Once, in the first grade, he retrieved my shoes from the railway tracks where Jimmy Simpson had placed them. In the fifth grade he was sometimes able to protect me, and word reached me that one of his black eyes was on my account. One day I brought him home, and my parents said later they had always believed that some Catholics would be saved, that some were among the Lord’s Anointed in spite of rank superstition and the idols in their churches. But I was not seriously encouraged to hope that Patrick Murphy would be in the company of this elect. When my mother offered him homemade lemonade, he told her it beat the bejesus out of the stuff you could get at the shops. He also said that most of the kids at school were full of ratshit and that only one or two sheilas made the place any better than buggery.
One morning Patrick Murphy and I woke up and it was time for high school. We went to different ones, and lost touch, though I saw him one Friday night in the heart of Brisbane, on the corner of Adelaide and Albert Streets, outside the Commonwealth Bank. The Tivoli and the Wintergarden (“dens of iniquity,” the pastor said) were emptying and he was part of that crowd, his brush-back flopping into his eyes, a girl on his arm. The girl was stunning in a sleazy kind of way: close-fitting slacks and spike heels, a tight sweater, platinum blonde hair and crimson lips. My kind of sheila, I imagined Patrick Murphy grinning, and the thought of his mouth on hers disturbed me. I rather imagined that an extra dollop of original sin came with breasts like hers. I rather hoped so.
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 19