Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  When there’s a space, she says mildly: “I don’t mind fucking you, Flutie, but I’m never going back.”

  To a man, she means. To routine. To luggage. To intolerable ordinary life.

  Then he realises, of course, it’s her sheer indifference, her unreachability, that’s been driving him crazy.

  “Hey,” he says sharply. “Hey, your dinghy!” – because floating rubble, like a tank on the move, is ramming the rubber boat against the railing, ramming the lattice, ramming the shipwrecked verandah, oh Jesus, are they in the water or swamped on the deck? Chaos. He swallows an ocean. Verandah posts approach, an anchor holds, he is wrapped around something vertical and he can see her scudding out of reach, body-riding the dinghy like a surf-board queen.

  “Gladysssss … !” He dingo-howls across the water.

  She waves, or so he wishes to believe. Yes, she waves.

  Gladys waves. But what she is seeing is the swooping green of the mango tree in Brisbane. The leaf canopy parts for her and she keeps flying. She is on that wild delicious arc of the swing, soaring up, up, and out from the broken rope. A sound barrier breaks. There are shouts, but they reach her only faintly through the pure rush of bliss, they are a distant and wordy murmuring of bees in mangoes.

  We begged you not to swing so high … We told you the rope was frayed, we warned, we warned, we promised we’d fix it but you just can’t wait, you can’t ever wait, you foolish stubborn little girl … you wilful impetuous … Buzz buzz to reckless ears.

  “I don’t care! I don’t care!” she shouts. She has flown beyond the farthest branch of the mango tree, she is higher than the clothes line, euphoria bears her upward, she is free as a bird. Any second now the broken legs waiting on the lawn will come rushing to meet her, but she doesn’t care. This is worth it.

  She waves. But all that comes back to Flutie is her laughter, the wild clear rapturous sound of a child on the last Big Dipper.

  Acknowledgements

  The stories in the first two sections first appeared in Dislocations (UQP 1987) and Isobars (UQP 1990). Under different titles and in slightly different form, they appeared in the following magazines: Australia: Meanjin, Scripsi, Overland, The Australian, Imago, Fine Line, LinQ and Southerly; Canada: Room of One’s Own, Descant, Chatelaine, Canadian Forum, Dalhousie Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Malahat Review and Queen’s Quarterly; USA: The Atlantic, North American Review, Translation (Columbia University), Prairie Schooner and Mademoiselle; England: Encounter, Critical Quarterly, London Review.

  The stories in the third section were first published in the following books or magazines (sometimes under different titles): “The Ocean of Brisbane” in Outrider, Vol. X, 1993, Nos. 1 and 2; “Unperformed Experiments Have No Results” in Eureka Street, Vol. 3, No. 10; “North of Nowhere” in Nimrod (University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1993); “Our Own Little Kakadu” in Ormond Papers, January 1994; “For Mr Voss or Occupant” in More Crimes for a Summer Christmas, edited by Stephen Knight (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); “The End-of-the-line End-of-the-world Disco” in Millennium edited by Helen Daniel (Ringwood: Penguin, 1992); “Litany for the Homeland” in Homeland, edited by George Papaellinas (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991).

  First published 1995 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  This edition published 2015

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Janette Turner Hospital 1995

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,

  criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior

  written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design and illustration by Nada Backovic

  Typeset in 10.75/12.25 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Melbourne

  Lines from “The Waste Land” in the story “You Gave Me Hyacinths” are reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd from Collected Poems: 1902-1962 by T.S. Eliot.

  Lines of verse quoted in the story “Golden Girl” are from “The Lady of Shallott” by Alfred Tennyson.

  The poem “Come-by-Chance” by A.B. (Banjo) Paterson is from Song of the Pen: Complete Works 1901-1941 (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1983), by permission of Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 0 7022 5386 7 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 5614 1 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 5615 8 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7022 5616 5 (kindle)

  University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.