Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “No, I suppose not,” the girl said. “Come whenever you want, why not?”

  She stood up and shaded her eyes as the ships sailed towards North Head and the Sydney Harbour docks. They were smaller, swan-like, graceful again. She brushed her cheeks with the back of one hand and tossed back her hair and began to sing in a sweet reedy voice:

  I saw three ships come sailing in,

  On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day …

  Still singing, she turned and stepped in her gull-like way across the rocks towards the cliff. “Wait!” he called, stumbling after and almost pitching himself into surf.” How will I find you?”

  “Just ask at the Cross,” she called back.

  Which one, which one? Holy Cross? The convent in Dee Why? She was getting further away. He felt panicky, desolate, he slipped again and gashed his arm. He had to stop. He didn’t even know her name. “I don’t know your name,” he shouted.

  She was climbing the cliff face now. “Just ask for Angela,” she called. “I’m well known. Fantasies a specialty.”

  “What?” he shouted. “I can’t hear you.”

  She kept on climbing.

  He leaned against a rock and watched till she disappeared over the top of the cliff. She did not look back. That was the way it was with visitations. You couldn’t hang on to them. But he thought he caught pieces of her singing drifting back in the wind:

  And who do you think was in those ships,

  On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day?

  ‘Twas Jesus Christ and His La-die

  On Chris …

  Bondi

  At twenty-six, Leigh (who is Cass’s cousin) is tired of playing the part of bad girl but the habit is difficult to break. She fell into the role quite naturally at puberty – parsons’ daughters do – and played it to the hilt, and now it’s like a skin she can’t shed. The thing is, Cass decides, Leigh knows the ropes of badgirl land, and even though the terrain has become tedious (has in fact become as boring as the Sunday afternoon prayer meetings of their childhoods), Leigh feels comfortable there. And safe.

  Safe? In a manner of speaking, safe; because Cass, watching Leigh smooth suntan oil on her bare breasts, knows that Leigh wouldn’t even count the Hanlon affair. Leigh wouldn’t give it any more significance than Cass would give a crunched fender or a smashed-up headlight. Annoying, yes. Inconvenient. But (shrug) these things happen, and besides, every life needs a little excitement, right?

  Nevertheless, it is because of Hanlon that Leigh has called, and because of Hanlon that they are lying towel by towel on Bondi beach, with Deb making sandcastles a few yards off. Not the usual way for Cass to spend a Saturday afternoon these days.

  “Come on, Cass,” Leigh had said. “Live a little.”

  “Well …” Cass hears herself again, all tiresome caution. She is torn between maternal anxiety and the pleasant pinpricks of risk. (Live a little? Being target practice for Hanlon?) “There’s this finger-painting thingamy at the public library. I was going to take Deb …”

  Leigh already has the stroller out. “Deb needs to be outdoors, not in. What kind of an Aussie kid are you raising here?”

  “But will it be safe?”

  “Safe as Sunday School. Hanlon’s so dumb, he’ll still be watching my flat in Melbourne.”

  Leigh and Cass have travelled different roads, but they need each other. We’re heads and tails, I suppose you could say, Cass explains to Tom. Though Leigh always counters: You’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I’m the little lost lamb playing wolf to protect myself. (Black and white, Tom hopes; night and day.) At any rate, each plays Best Supporting Actress to the other’s role. They grew up in Brisbane, which should explain a lot, and were fed milk and biblical verses in their highchairs.

  When Leigh telephoned, the day before yesterday, Cass could feel the rush at the top of her head. “Leigh!” She was laughing already. “I don’t believe it, I thought you’d vanished from the face of the land! Where are you? Brisbane?”

  “God no! Not Brizzy.” Leigh hasn’t been heard from for two years, though the family gossip mill has been murmuring Townsville, Cairns, Kuranda, Daintree, Leigh heading further and further north, heading deeper into shady reasons, bad company, offshore boats, Darwin! (in a shocked whisper). Cape Trib, Thursday Island {grant her Thy mercy, Lord), New Guinea! Then Brisbane again, it was rumoured. Someone had seen her at Expo, her hair un-gelled and unspiked, looking like a normal person, and she’d said In sales, giving a phone number. (Selling … ? No one dared to ask what.) At the phone number, a male voice went off in a shower of expletives and detonations about that fucking bitch who’d moved on, bloody lucky for her, and if he ever fucking caught up with the slut …

  Lost traces, lost causes, lost sheep. The family sighed and bowed its head: Remember, O Lord, thy wayward child and turn not Thy face away from …

  “I’m here,” Leigh says. “In Sydney.” Excitement, salamander style, comes slinking in through Cass’s eardrum and makes straight for all her nerve centres of temptation. “Listen,” Leigh says. “I need a place to crash, it’s sort of urgent.”

  Cass picks her up at Circular Quay. “God, you look –” terrible, but what does it matter? Reinstated as bailer-out-in-chief, Cass feels giddy with pleasure.

  “Yeah, well. I’ve been doing a bit of coke. Doesn’t go very well with food.” Leigh lights a cigarette. “How’s Deb?”

  “Adorable. You’ll see in a minute. Tom’s home, so I just rushed out.”

  “And have you been a good girl while I’ve been gone?” Leigh asks.

  They both laugh.

  “What happened?” Cass wants to know.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said it was urgent.”

  “Oh, that.” Leigh shrugs. “Nothing much. You remember Hanlon?”

  “That bloke you were living with in Brisbane?”

  “Him. We hit the road for a while, business you know, but I got tired of doing the dirty work and taking shit, so I –”

  “What sort of shit?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. He hit me round a bit.”

  “Leigh, why? Why do you keep latching on to men like that? You’ve gotta stop –”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve tried, I really have. I just can’t seem to get turned on unless they’re hellraisers. Anyway, in Brizzy, Hanlon set up this little dream of a deal, with me in the hot seat, natch, and it came to me that I could just take the money and rum. So I did. Ripped him off for twenty thousand, and headed for Melbourne.”

  “God, Leigh! Twenty thousand dollars!” Cass is appalled, her eyes glitter, she is full of plans. “Well …” – she can’t stop reeling from the enormity of it – “Well, now you can afford to, you know, quit … Quit, uh, selling. You can go straight, get an apartment here, finish your degree …”

  “Never give up, do you?” Leigh says fondly. In high school, they had been neck and neck. Leigh had won a state medal as well as a Commonwealth Scholarship. A brilliant future, her teachers said, which turned out to be true in a way. “Still,” Leigh sighs. “Mackie was worth it for a while.” She winces, then smiles, then winces again, remembering Mackie, the ex-con she’d run off with before the end of her first year at Queensland Uni. “About going back … I think about it a lot, but I dunno after all these years.”

  “It’s never too late.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Leigh is wistful. “I meant to, actually. Use the money for, you know, uni or something. But I blew it all on coke in Melbourne and last week I saw –”

  “You blew twenty thousand dollars?”

  “Well, not just me. Friends, you know. I threw a few parties. And I guess the word got round because last week –”

  “It’s all gone?” Cass is awestruck. “That entire amount?”

  “’Fraid so.” Leigh twists sideways in the seat, leaning against th
e passenger door, to gauge the effect of her words on Cass. “My coke’s at maintenance level, though. It’s under control.”

  “I get frightened for you,” Cass says. (If Leigh weren’t around, what would happen to the world on its axis? What might Cass have to do?)

  “Yeah, me too sometimes.” Leigh laughs. “Anyway, last week I saw Hanlon watching my place. He doesn’t take kindly to being gypped, so I thought I’d better bugger off. Hitch-hiked up, left early yesterday and just arrived. God, I’m tired.”

  She slept for fifteen hours. She woke, she ate something, she threw up, she slept, she sleeps.

  Tom, looking into the guest room before heading for his office (the Saturday catch-up), says: “God, it’s the worst I’ve ever seen her. She’s thin as a whippet.” Except for her tits, he thinks. In spite of himself, he’s stirred. The unspiked black hair, longer now, shaggy and glossy, falls across a child’s face. He kisses Cass brusquely: “So how long is she planning to camp here?” Not that he’s made uneasy by Leigh’s presence in his house, not really. Because this is what Tom has observed: that the children of True Believers go one of two ways, and that there is a delicate ecology within families. To Tom’s legal mind (he’s a partner in a Regent Street law firm), Leigh is some sort of warranty.

  Leigh wakes into high sun. “Let’s go to the beach,” she says.

  “Well … There’s this finger-painting thingamy …”

  “Live a little,” Leigh laughs, exasperated.

  And so they push the stroller along the neat residential streets of Bellevue Hill and down the long asphalt slope to Bondi. Cass is always mildly surprised that no one asks for her passport at that point where the buildings change so sharply.

  Cass watches the way the men walk up and down where the sand turns hard, the way their equipment strains against their skimpy briefs, the way their eyes, not even pretending to be covert, scan the rows of oil-slicked breasts: the peacock parade on its mating route between towels and bodies. It still surprises Cass, the lack of selfconsciousness on all sides. Bare bosoms are so common that if she rolls sideways on her towel and squints, the beach appears to be strewn with egg cartons, pointy little mounds in all directions. Big ones and small ones, floppy ones and tight little cones. She considers: if I took off my top, would Deb be startled? Would Leigh? (And if Tom heard of it?) A man walks within eight inches of her head, flicking sand in her eyes, and manages to spill beer on Leigh’s midriff. Leigh sits bolt upright and her splendid bare breasts bounce and quiver.

  “Jeez, sorry.” The man squats down, blotting at beer-wet skin with his towel.

  “Oh, bugger off,” Leigh says without malice.

  “Hey, an accident, swear to God!” The man turns toward Cass and winks. He has very white teeth and a dimple beside his chin. Cass has an urge to stick out her tongue, throw sand at him maybe, and a simultaneous one to run her fingers down through the hair on his chest, across the flat tanned belly, across the blue lycra welt to that bleat of skin on the inside of his squatting thighs. Baby skin, and she can’t take her eyes off it. She’d forgotten this: the way sun and salt air and drowsiness and the smell of suntan oil add up to lust. Not lust exactly. More a sort of catholic sensuousness, an erotic languor toward the whole wide world.

  “Got some beer in the Esky,” the man says. “Wanna join me?”

  “Sure,” Cass murmurs silkily, eyes meeting his. “Why not?”

  “Be right back.”

  Cass stretches like a cat and reaches behind and unhooks her bikini top. She squirts a glob of sunscreen into one palm and rubs it lovingly on her nipples.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Leigh asks. “Why’d you invite that jerk back here? We’ll never get rid of him.”

  Cass smiles. This feels good, very good: sun on her white and private breasts, it’s like losing your virginity again, a lifesaver watching while she massages in the oil, a slow rhythmic caress, auto-erotic. Watching herself being watched, she can feel what it was that hooked Narcissus.

  “A married woman!” Leigh is agitated, Leigh is suddenly and inexplicably angry. “A mother! Put your clothes back on, we’re going.”

  Cass’s eyes go wide. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “You think you’re funny or something? You think you’re –”

  Then chaos comes in a skirl of sand. First, the Esky man is knocked for a sixer, the blue Esky sails in an arc toward the surf trailing cans of Swan Lager like so many bows on a kite tail. After that, it’s helter-skelter: screaming, cursing, an assortment of missiles (footballs, cricket bats, a rubber skipping-rope), bodies lunging, bodies falling, blood. There are gouts of blood on the sand. Mothers scream and gather up tots and towels, heading for the concrete steps. Cass scoops up Deb and runs to the water. Children cry and don’t know if they’re crying from fear or from the sand in their eyes. People wipe their wet faces and find themselves sprinkled with blood. A little further off, a ring of boys gathers to watch and barrack. This is some fight, some thrill.

  It’s wogs! The wogs started it. They were bothering a white girl, they threw sand in a white lady’s face, they kicked a football right into a little kid’s head, a little white kid, he’s got concussion. Theories fly as fast as punches, as thick as blood. Go get ‘em, send the buggers back where they bloody came from.

  On the concrete embankment that separates beach from shore road, the gasping out-of-condition mothers watch with bemusement, the way one watches a battle scene in a movie. Here and there a ghastly detail catches the eye, but no one can tell who is fighting whom, or who is winning, though it’s broken beer bottle time now, it’s getting ugly. Time to blow the whistle.

  And so the lifesavers come in their tanned and bleach-blond ranks, barefoot, high-cut bikinis exposing their golden buttocks, skullcaps in place, oars from the lifeboats flailing at air and insurrection. It’s the jousts: there are pennants (the Bondi club pennant, and also – how did they come to be in the mix? – the pennants of the Dee Why and Curl Curl clubs); there are broken lances, broken oars, there are gasping damsels in a swoon of distress, wearing nothing more than a scrap of fabric between the legs. The venerable order of the Knights Templar of the Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club, aided by the Knights Templar of Dee Why, Curl Curl, and Collaroy, runs on the double and tilts at the windmill of Crusade.

  Sirens now! It’s a full scale rout, it’s epic, it’s newspaper and television stuff, there are squad cars, an ambulance, an ABC cameraman. (How did the news travel so fast?) And here are the police, truncheons raised, all blue-serge efficiency and ocker sentiment, here are the upholders of the Australian way of decency, howya goin’ mate? it’s a free country, we don’t mind wogs on the beach if they behave themselves but if they’re gonna muck the place up, well they’re bloody not gonna know what hit them, are they? Ah, here are the police running on the double in their shiny black lace-up shoes, here are the police floundering through soft sucking sand, here are the Keystone Cops.

  The wogs are fleeing. Born into Palestinian camps, winners of immigration and fitness lotteries, full of street smarts and survival instincts, the wogs are very very fleet of foot. There’s a long line haring south toward Cronulla, single file: the wogs (there are only ten of them actually, mostly teenagers, Palestinian kids, a few in their twenties perhaps), then the swift lifesavers (about thirty of these), then the ragtag posse of original combatants (the local Bondi and Darlinghurst boys, beer-bellied, a little flabby, falling back), then the dozen sand-wallowing cops, then the cameraman.

  Young boys hop and dance on the sand in a frenzy of excitement, little bookies in the making, calling bets. The line is thinning out now, it’s single file with bigger and bigger spaces between the dots. It’s going to be a clean getaway, no one’s laying odds, the tension’s gone. Towels and blankets and buckets and spades and bodies move into the vacuum. Someone turns a radio on. The sand settles quickly.

  Where’s Leigh? Cas
s, disconsolate and shaken, spreads her towel and looks about for the stroller and Deb’s bucket and spade. Deb, paddling down in the water all this bloody while, is unaffected, and talks confidentially to the shells in her pink hands. Cass sees the stroller, which has travelled thirty feet or so and is almost undamaged.

  One by one, the heroes – the local boys – return. Good on yer, mate! They swagger a little and flaunt their battle scars: the bloodied mouths, busted teeth, purple welts. It turns out to have been an argument about a frisbee, a Palestinian frisbee which had sailed right across a true blue volleyball game without benefit of visa or may I please? Directly in the frisbee’s path had been the head of a local boy. Bloody wogs come out here and think they own the bloody beach. Little clusters of veterans, hobbling, grumbling, strutting, climb the concrete stairs and cross the street to the Bondi Beach Hotel.

  Deb struggles valiantly up from the shallows with a bucket of water and empties it at Cass’s feet. Avidly, she watches the sand suck at her offering, watches the wet funnel form. “Where does it go, Mummy?”

  “It goes to China.” A boy says this, a passing teenage boy who, as it turns out, is in urgent need of a listener. He is full of important information which pushes against the aching skin of his body, a body in which he is not at ease. He flops down and arranges all his arms and legs beside the child.

  “You got a big bitey,” Deb tells him solemnly, running her small pink and wondering finger across his cheek. A purple welt, like a brand from a poker, makes a diagonal from mouth to ear.

  “Yeah,” he says, speaking to the child but needing her mother’s reaction. “I’m the one that got hit with the frisbee.” He waits. He hasn’t quite decided whether to be victim or hero, he needs an audience, a soundingboard. “I’m the one got the whole thing started.” Cass can see on the surface of his skin – the pulsing tics, the flinches – a pas de deux of swagger and self-pity. While his hands offer their services to Deb (packing the wet sand for her, tamping it into her bucket, tapping it neatly out into pristine castle) his toes clasp and unclasp sand. Beneath the backwash of battle, he is locating a surf of emotions. “And then me mates bugger off to the pub and leave me.” The wound of his under-age status hurts like hell; he feels the purple scar gingerly, and Cass can see him translating, interpreting, deciding: he’s victim, definitely victim, abandoned, cruelly neglected. His head is throbbing. “It’s me Saturday off,” he says forlornly. “Gotta work shift again tomorrow. It’s me only day for the beach.”