Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (16 page)

“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
pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance.
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-si
è
cle 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 mistake.”

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.

Who will unravel the routes and reasons of my nomadic life? – though they are no more convoluted, I suppose, than the reasons which led my great-grandfather to abandon, overnight, a wife and young son and a respectable law practice in Eastbourne, that most proper of English cities.

From the window above my desk I gaze out, bemused, at the river – the St Lawrence River. Down at the bottom of my yard, it sucks away at the base of our cliffs: plucks and thaws, plucks and thaws. I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere.

My grandfather's face, pensive, hangs in the maples like a moon.
Never,
he begs,
never live on the banks of a river.

This is wry high ground, I assure him. Sixty feet of limestone between me and the water.

My great-grandfather comes lurching through the trees, avoiding his son. He laughs his well-bred English laugh. He laughs his turn-of-the-century Brisbane tavern laugh.
This too will pass,
he promises.

* * *

After the Second World War, when my father came home from the Air Force, jobs were not so easy to come by in Melbourne. Too many returning soldiers and new immigrants from Europe, I suppose. When an offer of work came from Brisbane there was no question about whether we would go, though neighbors and relations, stunned, all said: “Brisbane! You can't be serious?”

“When you buy a house,” warned my grandfather, “buy on high ground, and well away from the river.”

But memory is short. In Brisbane my grandfather's advice was thought to be quaint and neurotic. Just the same, my father would not look at a house near the river, nor one that was not on high ground. He had cause to be grateful in Christmas ‘74 when the river got up to its old tricks, thrashing around like a dragon in fitful sleep.

“There's a purpose behind everything,” my father told me by trans-Pacific phone call on the morning following the disaster. My father is a deeply religious man. “Sometimes we have to wait a long time, almost a century in fact, to know what was in the mind of God.”

“Dad,” I say awkwardly. My father and I have, for a long time now, avoided discussing many topics, especially such matters as what may be on the mind of God. “Everyone's safe, then?”

“Hardly everyone,” he says with a hint of reproach. “But your parents and your brothers and their families are safe. We're all pitching in with the relief work, everyone is, it's fantastic. I thought you'd want to know we're okay, in case you saw something on the news.” Then he laughs, self-deprecatingly: “Though I don't suppose Brisbane … over there. I suppose we don't count for too much in the big wide world.” There is a silence and then he laughs again. “If you could see me! Mud from head to toe. But it isn't funny. It's awful, it's tragic seeing them crammed into schools and churches. They look so dazed.”

“Dad …” I say, but am awash in old places, my old schools, the university bus stop, the park on the river bank where I had my first kiss.

“The water's receding now,” my father says. “The worst's over. But it'll be
days
… and the
mud
! Heaven knows how long before the mud will be cleared away. I wonder if Brisbane will ever look the same again. I wonder if anyone will stay.”

People do stay, of course.

They even – amazing as it seems – build right on the river bank again.

As for us, for my expatriate husband and myself, the mere thought of Brisbane almost ceasing to be did something to us. We couldn't afford it, but we had to go home – come home – that summer; the
northern
summer, that is – though it was a mild and sweet-smelling winter in Brisbane, and the wattles were in bloom along the river.

“Since ‘ow long ‘ave you been in Canada?” asks the telephone voice from the Australian High Commission in Ottawa. It is a French Canadian voice, heavily accented, but I long ago gave up expecting the logical in matters such as this.

“Much longer than I expected,” I answer.

“Why did you come?”

“Academic reasons.” In both senses, I think. “It wasn't planned, really. It just arrived.”

“II est arriv
é
?”
she says, thrown slightly off course.

“C'est ga. Exactement,”
I assure her. “Look, is this relevant to the renewal of my Australian passport?”

“Yes,” she says. “Why do you stay ‘ere?”

“Stahier?”

“Au Canada.”

“Ah. For the same academic reasons. I really can't see what this has to …”

“Before we can renew your Australian passport,” she explains … (and I puzzle over that plural. Who is this French Canadian Australian
we
?) … “Before we can renew, you ‘ave to sign a document authorising us to conduct a search of Canadian immigration files. As long as you ‘ave never applied for Canadian citizenship, there is
pas de probl
è
me.”

“How nice,” I say, cut to the quick. And hear my great-grandfather's laugh.

Television had just come to Brisbane in 1953, though no families we knew could afford a set. For the coronation, we loaded folding chairs into family cars and drove into the city and sat outside shop windows to watch as Her Majesty arrived at Westminster Abbey. It was all very festive.

I remember the backyard parties, the fireworks, the decorations. Ours were splendid, especially on the garage, a corrugated-iron structure that slumped against the banana dump. A mango tree leaned over its rotting wooden doors, which we had festooned – my brothers and I – with red, white, and blue; with the Royal Ensign, the Union Jack, the Southern Cross.
Elizabeth regina,
in huge wobbly letters, pricked its way across the undulating wall. Below this, stretching all the way from the mango tree to the banana palms, was a long accordion-pleated poster (we had all been given them in school) of the Royal Coach and the horses and the footmen and the Crown Jewels and each item of the coronation regalia, especially that part of the royal hem line where the Golden Wattle was embroidered.

“Magnificent!” my father said.

He was, I recall, deeply moved, perhaps by the ingenuity and acrobatic skill that had been involved in climbing the mango tree and springing across to the garage roof in order to hang the bunting. He put his hand on my shoulder. He never held it against me (not even, I truly believe, in secret) that I, his firstborn, was a daughter. “Tradition,” he said, and I was both curious and embarrassed about the huskiness in his voice. “We have to know where we come from. My own father and grandfather …”

He went astray in his thoughts and I had to prompt him.

“Did Grandpa ever see the old king?”

“He saw the old
Queen
once, Victoria. He was very young, it was before his father … Your great-grandfather, I'm afraid, was a scoundrel, but still, even he … There was money that kept coming for your grandfather to go to Grammar School. All those years when nobody knew where … so even he had a sense of …”

There was a long silence.

“Well, anyway, now we belong here,” he said.
“Here.”
He looked at our little wooden house, and the rusty iron garage, and the gravel tracks of the driveway, and the old Bedford van and the mango tree and the passionfruit vines hanging matted over the fences. He took a deep princely breath of that damp and heavy air, and I remember thinking with a thrill of proprietary power: How
rich
we are!

“This is the place where we belong,” he said. “You'll always belong here. And your children. And your children's children.”

About me, I think, he was right. But perhaps it was only to be expected that I would be nomadic. Perhaps it was in my blood.

My son and I are walking beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because – for the time being – I am teaching at MIT.

“Well,” he says, “I've decided on the University of Toronto.”

“I'm glad,” I tell him. “I'm glad we'll still all be living in the same country. Well,” I correct myself sheepishly, gesturing at Boston, “most of the time, that is.”

My son shrugs and grins at me. He finds me unnecessarily anxious about separations. Movement is the norm of his life.

My son seems to me very American. That is to say, unlike me, he has an easy confidence that the world is manageable. He is not unduly bothered by absurdity. The random and irrational do not cause him anxiety. This, it seems to me, is because of his birth and his many subsequent summers in Los Angeles. He seems to me very Californian.