Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “I’m not allowed.” The girl with the telescope recognised the boy. She knew him from school. He was utterly disreputable, he was caned every single day, but he doesn’t feel a thing ran the playground legend, because the boy always grinned, jaunty, when he came back from the headmaster’s office. It was said that he tamed flying foxes and kept them as pets, it was said that he could fly, it was said that he could travel underground and pass through walls and that he had a magic protector, a guardian angel maybe, or maybe a devil, who held an invisible shield between his backside and the cane. He was bad. All the teachers and all the girls said he was bad. His name was Paddy McGee.

  Paddy-with-his-head-between-the-palings laughed. It was a low, wicked, irresistible sound. His glittering eyes pulled at the girl. “What’s yer name?” he demanded.

  The girl searched for a name. “Stella,” she said at last, because she had the stars at her fingertips and she had been studying maps of the sky and she was someone else now, not the girl she had been in Ballarat where her grandfather had pointed out the planets and named them, and not the girl she had been in Melbourne, and she certainly didn’t want to be the girl she was at her new Brisbane school. She was reinventing herself.

  “No it’s not,” the boy said. “You’re new. Where’re ya from?”

  “I’m Stella,” she said stubbornly. “I’m from the moon. You wanna look?”

  The boy smiled his dangerous smile and she smiled back (she knew she had crossed a line), and he wriggled through the fence and joined her under the frangipani tree and she held the telescope for him. He was filthy, he gave off a musky bush smell, and where his hand touched her arm it burned her in a damp feverish way.

  “Can’t see anything,” he said.

  She turned the focusing ring with trembling fingers. “You will,” she promised. “You have to get it focused right. Tell me when.”

  “Holy Jeez!” he said. “Struth!” Every word could attract a bolt of lightning from God, yet he lived, he breathed, he laughed his wicked and jaunty laugh, he was a miracle of fearlessness.

  “What can you see?” she asked.

  “Craters and stuff, holy Jeez!” He laughed in a breathless excited way and turned on her his glittering burning eyes. “Hey,” he said. “You’re okay for a sheila. You got guts.”

  At school, he meant. The taunting, he meant, and the other stuff, the bullying. She didn’t think she had guts at all, she was terrified.

  “I go for guts,” Paddy McGee announced, placing the telescope down in the thick unmowed grass. “I came lookin’ for ya. I followed ya home.”

  She knew this meant she was marked, just as he was. She knew this meant he recognised the mark on her, and that it was somehow visible to everyone at school.

  Through the open neck of his shirt, she could see the dirty silk cord around his neck and the gold chain and the delicate little gold cross. “What’s that?” she asked, touching the cord with an index finger.

  “It’s me scapular.” He took hold of her wrist and licked her finger with his tongue. “Come into the paddock,” he said. “There’s some good trees to climb. You wanna catch tadpoles with me at Breakfast Creek?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I reckon.” And recklessly, heedlessly, she went. She climbed through the fence with the boy who was half-wild and only half-tamed, and crossed into no-man’s-land, and that was where she sensed she belonged.

  Something there is that doesn’t love a boundary line. In the medieval Books of Hours, people step out of goldleaf miniatures and into the margins and sometimes right off the page. Falcons and hounds and pheasants and antlered deer, marginal to the Holy Offices for the day, outside the pale of theology, persist in nosing their way in from the white edges of the page to the text. And in response, as though lured by the exuberant outsiders, words put forth glowing tendrils, curlicues of Dominus, fronds of P and W and T which finger their way past the borders, past the rapture of martyred saints, into the white parchment margins where they swell and turn into gryphons, dragons, creatures of glowing crimson and lapis lazuli that are neither fish nor fowl, text nor subtext, not fully on this page and not quite on the next.

  These are my kin. They are always beckoning me to the mysterious space behind the word, between the pages, beyond the pale and the fence palings and the text and the sanctioned structures. Their eyes glitter. Listen, they murmur seductively: rules are for transgressing, borders for crossing. They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa. Censors and critics alike overlook the margins. In the margins one is ignored, but one is free.

  That is where homeland is.

  In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

  Down by Breakfast Creek where the warm water sucks at mangrove roots, Paddy McGee shows the houseboat where he lives. It doesn’t look like a house, and it doesn’t look like a boat. Stella is round-eyed with disbelief and an excitement she cannot quite name. To live in a creek, to live in something that can move away, to live, in a sense, nowhere, it suggests that seemingly immutable laws can be called into question.

  “But you can’t live in a creek,” she says, tugged at by the rules, by what is known and what is allowed.

  “Why not?”

  And she looks down a mirrored corridor of why nots ? infinitely multiplying themselves and leading to who knew what possibilities.

  “Because.” She says it lamely, not really resisting, more than willing to be swept into a world where houses swim. “What’s your address, then?”

  “Breakfast Creek.”

  Paddy McGee, Breakfast Creek, Brisbane. Stella Maris, Crater Lane, The Moon. She smiles to herself, and Paddy McGee laughs, complicit.

  Sometimes (so he says) his Mum and Dad are there (though Stella never sees them), sometimes not. His Dad is mostly at the pub or the races, he says; his Mum is a barmaid at the Newmarket Pub. Most days he comes to school, but often not. On the days when he doesn’t go to school, she knows he will be waiting for her at the back fence, beckoning, and she will wriggle out between the palings into the forbidden world of bush and creek.

  “Oh,” she says vaguely when asked, “I was up in the mango tree reading a book.” She is famous, both at home and at school, for disappearing and for reading books.

  Paddy McGee never reads books, but he knows more than anyone she has ever met. He knows the saps of trees and their differing uses, he knows where tadpoles breed, he knows which ants bite and which don’t, he knows how to read the telltale flying-fox tracks in banana clumps.

  At school, he knows nothing.

  At school, Paddy McGee and the girl live on different planets and it would be quite impossible for them to speak or to acknowledge each other in any way. They are absolute strangers at school, they never even look at each other. Nevertheless she is always conscious of him. Once, in the playground mêlée (she does not hear or feel these things any more, she goes away to another place inside her head, and it is said of her, as it is said of Paddy McGee, that she is made of wood, that you can kick her and she won’t feel a thing, and in fact this has become true; there’s a trick she has learned), during one of these times when things are happening and she is somewhere else, inattentive, she does become aware of Paddy tossing punches around and screaming Leave her alone, you bloody bullies, leave her alone!

  He is caned for this violent behaviour.

  On another occasion, for reasons unclear, one of the teachers, a rough giant of a man named Mr Brady, thrashes Paddy McGee to within an inch of his life, and the hushed class watches in fascinated terror as blood oozes fro
m the purple welts on Paddy’s legs. The classroom building is high up, on stilts above the cool under-the-school where the children eat lunch, and Mr Brady, convulsed by some inner cyclone of rage, finally throws the cane across the room (its cuts inadequate to his fury), and picks Paddy McGee up by the shoulders … Paddy McGee being small and wiry, though tough as bootleather, teachers say. Mr Brady shakes Paddy McGee as though he were a stray tomcat and he holds him out the casement window.

  “I’ll teach you, you insolent filthy little mick,” thunders Mr Brady.

  A number of the girls in the class are crying with fright. Stella herself has moved right into Paddy McGee’s body, she can feel Mr Brady’s claws eating into his flesh, she can feel the sickening air below his dangling feet, she can feel the warm trickle when he wets his pants. Perhaps the still eye of his own storm reaches Mr Brady, or perhaps he hears the nervous shuffling of feet and the murmurs and the crying of girls. Quite suddenly he stops. He goes slack, as though the storm has exhausted him. He drags Paddy McGee back through the window and dumps him on the floor like a sack of sugarcane cuttings and orders gruffly, “Get back to your seat.”

  It is the only time in recorded history that Paddy McGee is unable to flash his jaunty smile at the class, but he most certainly does not cry and he does not speak. In spite of the wet stain on his khaki shorts, he fixes his glittering eyes on Mr Brady and he stands as tall as his purple-striped legs and drenched pants will permit. The class is as one person, scarcely breathing. It seems to the class that something curious is happening now, that one end of an invisible seesaw is going down and the other end, the Paddy McGee end, is going up. A whiteness has appeared around Mr Brady’s lips. No one moves, no one breathes. Then Paddy McGee turns and walks from the classroom, head high. He never comes back.

  That afternoon he does not appear at the back fence, but when Stella slips through the palings and through the bush and across the paddock, she finds him down by the creek. They sit side by side, saying nothing.

  At last Paddy McGee says, “You wanna be my blood sister?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  And with his pocketknife, he makes a small cut in the vein at his wrist, and then in hers, and he places his wrist against hers, flesh to flesh, blood to blood.

  She never sees him again. He vanishes. Day after day, she waits for him to come to the back fence, she roams the creek, but the houseboat has gone without a trace. Weeks go by. She begins to fear she dreamed up both the houseboat and Paddy McGee, but then Mr Brady makes a terse announcement. “Good riddance,” he says. “Bad blood.”

  And she is comforted. She is comforted by the fact that Mr Brady had to say his name, and by the predous drop of Paddy McGee’s bad blood in her veins.

  Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around its nationhood.

  In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.

  From time to time, when I am least expecting it, in the most unlikely countries, I run into Paddy McGee. He wears unpredictable names but I always recognise him by his eyes and by the mark of the outcast on his forehead. Like some ancient but ageless mariner, he keeps seeking me out to finish his tale, he keeps setting his compass for my shores. And whenever I see him, I find I have the mud of a Queensland creekbed under my feet.

  In Boston his name was Franklin D. He was one of my students at MIT, though he was a good bit older than the others. He wore jungle-camouflage combat fatigues with the Marines insignia removed. I never saw him in anything else, nor did I ever see him without his rollerblades on. They seemed attached to his feet like calluses and he moved on them with dazzling speed and grace and dexterity, his feats eyecatching and incredible. He could skate up flights of stairs and down them. He moved along the endless corridors of mit, especially the famous Infinity Corridor, head and shoulders above crowding students and professors, weaving, braking and pirouetting, swooping along like some exotic jungle creature, part human, part bird. Certainly flamboyant. He skated down subway entrances, into trains, onto buses, into bars, and into class. I think the desire to be untrammelled had blazed its own evolutionary detour and caused his legs to sprout wheels. He was doing a Physics degree on the Veterans’ bill. He was black.

  In my office, we were discussing the profoundly disturbing stories he had submitted: tales of gang rape as weekend sport, casual deaths, violent excitements.

  “I don’t know how to grade these,” I told him. “I can hardly bear to read them. They frighten me.”

  It was as though I had turned a key, as though all his life he had been waiting for someone to acknowledge: your life is frightening.

  “I’ll tell you two stories,” he said.

  His first death: he was six years old, a basketball-obsessed kid in Harlem playing on a charred lot between stripped cars when he saw two teenage boys knife an old man for his cash. The man struggled. “Forget it, Gran’pa,” the boys said, and slashed him several times across the chest. Grandpa’s chest unfurled itself slowly toward the child Franklin D. like a fresh steak, and Grandpa looked at his own ribs in mild surprise and raised his gnarled hands vaguely to hold himself in before he curled forward like the steak of his chest and died on the sidewalk. This happened in slow motion, Franklin D. said. It took an extraordinarily long time for Grandpa to hit the ground. Franklin D. felt nothing at all, he said. Nothing at all. Except that suddenly he had to run inside to the bathroom and vomit.

  A story about the Marines: when he turned eighteen, Franklin D. signed up because it was a job, the only one he could get. He was promised good pay, a uniform, status, women, the chance to become a finely tooled killing machine, an adventure to remember. He remembered, constantly, another Marine in the same company. What this other Marine used to do for a hobby on afternoons off, was to catch a squirrel or a chipmunk and skin it alive so delicately, so tenderly, with such a sharp and masterly knife, that the animal still lived and trembled in the palm of the craftsman’s hand after it was totally skinned. Then the Marine would let it go.

  “A thing people don’t understand about the Marines,” Franklin D. said, “is that once you’ve signed up, you realise in the very first week you want out, but you’ve got six years like a Mack truck in front of you. I’ve known guys,” he said, “break their own legs to get out of combat drill. The problem with being in the Marines,” he said, “is figuring out how to become a human being again when you get out. When you get out,” he said, “the only people you can talk to are war vets and other ex-Marines. You’re not army, you don’t know how to think civilian, you’re nowhere.

  “But what do you do with all the stuff in here?” he demanded, knocking on his forehead. “You need a garbage truck to cart it away. If I could write stories and send them to you …” he said. He held his head in his hands as though the clamour inside was deafening. “If I could let it out,” he said. “If I could send you letters.”

  He did. He still does. With Franklin D., I slipped through fence palings at MIT and went to bars in Cambridge and Boston I would have been afraid to visit alone (me and Franklin D. and his rollerblades). I thought he knew more than most people at MIT. I thought he had the dignity of Paddy McGee. He spoke of Harlem, I spoke of Queensland … not such different places.

  In northern Manitoba, Paddy McGee had a Cree name, and he surfaced in a ramshackle van at a tiny airport, 54°N. (I was on a reading tour of prairie outposts, heading north to the tundra.) The drive into town was long enough for two entire life histories to be exchanged, though it seemed to me that the bridge which divides strangers from kin had been crossed (in the
mysterious way in which such things happen) before we got out of the airport parking lot.

  It was January deep in a bitter northern winter, about 30 degrees below zero, as I recall. The van’s heater wasn’t working too well, and when we spoke, our words made little white clouds in the night.

  “Have you always lived here?” I asked. “Were you born here?”

  As though I were Aladdin and had suddenly touched the magic spot on a lamp, he turned to me with an air of immense and barely controllable excitement. “It’s there now,” he said, cryptic, intense. “It’s there again, where I was born. I can show you. Would you like to see?”

  His eyes glittered in the bitter black air, and so, knowing that whatever this entailed was momentous, I simply said yes. He made a U-turn. Snow barrens stretched as far as the eye could see. Since we’d left the airport, not a single car had passed us either way. We two might have been alone in the universe, under the immense night sky and the stars.

  The young Cree Indian (he was about twenty, I think) was lit by some inner radiance. Until this abrupt decision we had talked non-stop, but now silence enfolded us. So great was his excitement, so intense the light within, that an aura shimmered around his body and the van seemed to me full of golden fog. We swung off the road and drove over bumpy packed snow. He was steering either by stars or by instinct. By a grove of scrubby dwarf conifers, he braked sharply and we got out and stood by the shore of a frozen lake, and then he stepped a little way out on the ice and pointed.

  “Out there,” he said, transfigured by moon and snow and rapture.

  It was the week of his birthday. His mother and grandmother had been ice fishing on the night of his birth, camped out on the lake, fishing shack tethered to the ice, unstable, when his mother’s pains came upon her, suddenly, early. They were strong women, his mother and grandmother. By the light of tallow candle, on the frozen wafer that ties December to May, inside the smoke-warm shack, his grandmother delivered him into the world. In the morning she pulled the sled containing her daughter and grandson to shore.