Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (22 page)

Clem thinks. The gulls wheel and screech above him. “I hear shrieks,” he says.

He cannot forget the way she flinches, the look in her eyes. “No,” she says, shivering. “No. Not shrieks. It's the way they call to each other.”

Clem has always lived by water.

Alone on the beach in Central Queensland, chill July and chiller mid-life, he strokes the pine tree where his mother used to spread the picnic cloth, he climbs the rocks that he and his father climbed, he walks the cliff path where his sisters loved to walk. He stands on the headland and looks out at the islands, every one of which he can name. He wishes his wife and children were with him. He rubs the coin in his pocket.

Between the headland and Pelican Island, something moves in the water. A shape. Two shapes. Small fishing boats? Sharks perhaps? Dolphins?

Something barrels into Clem, a wave of excitement. He races crazily down to the beach, rips off his clothes, drops them into a quick neat heap on the sand, tucks Uncle Seaborn's half-sovereign carefully into the toe of one shoe, and rushes into the water. After the first wintery shock of the cold, a manic pleasure comes. He swims strongly, stroke after stroke, his old Australian crawl, toward the twin shapes. He laughs as he swims, he is flooded with a pure intense joy.

I have come home, he thinks. I am where I belong.

The Second Coming of Come-by-Chance

In the sixty-fourth month of the tribulation, just five weeks before the drought finally broke, people began driving out from Townsville and Ayr and Home Hill, from Charters Towers and Collinsville, and from any number of smaller salt-of-North-Queensland towns: Thalanga, Mungunburra, Millaroo, Mingela. The Hinders Highway was thick with four-wheel drives, the air with dust. Afterwards, newspapers remembered that there had been a curious sense of festivity about, a sort of overwrought camaraderie, the kind that comes in the wake of cyclones, earthquakes, bush fires. Post-traumatic hysteria, the articles said. Old men had visions, revenants appeared in the pubs, crackpots wrote to newspapers, children concocted secret ways of sucking juice from rocks and of finding the underground channels where the rivers had fled.

All this was mere prelude. It was Tom Kelly and Davy Cobb, unlikely angels of the apocalypse, who ushered in what the Brisbane papers dubbed a “Flight into Egypt” and the
Sydney Morning Herald,
predictably supercilious, headlined as “Latter Day Madness in Queensland”. (Perhaps it is unnecessary, from this retrospective distance, and after so much analysis of the psychological effects of the drought, to note that those who live in the cities of the coastal plain, while not unaffected by years of water restrictions, are unlikely to be aware of the intensity of the inland thirst for something, for
anything,
to happen.) In any case, in the beginning it was just a trickle. Perhaps, that first weekend, only sixty people drove out to the dwindling Burdekin Dam to watch the reappearance of Come-by-Chance, for the tip of the Anglican steeple had been sighted by the two boys fishing in their homemade boat.

Sighted?
Bumped into
would be more accurate. Young Tom Kelly had laced a worm around his hook and cast his line. At the oars, Davy Cobb felt a jolt. What Tom hooked was the copper cross, green as verdigris, sticking out of the water like the index finger of God, potent, invisible (at least until the moment of reckoning). The faster Tom reeled in his catch, the swifter the little boat skimmed toward its ramming. Both boys went into the water like steeplejacks on the toss. This was a week before Christmas, and the momentum of Tom Kelly's unpremeditated dive was later likened by the Bishop of North Queensland to the downward swoop of the Incarnation. Tom claimed he looked through the rose window and saw a phosphorescent glow, then kept plummeting to the soft Gothic arch. The nave was full of green radiance.

“It was like there was sump'n
pullin'
me,” he said. “I couldn't turn, I thought me lungs were gonna bust. Then I saw this kinda light, this kinda I dunno, like a million green parakeets' wings or sump'n, and then this
blaze
like a double-bunger star, it bloody well bursts inside me head. And next thing I know, Davy's thumpin' water outta me on the bank.”

“An epiphany,” the Bishop of North Queensland said. (It was the last Sunday in Advent.) But the pastor of the Gospel Hall in Mingela, the closest town to Come-by-Chance, thundered darkly: “And in those days there shall be signs and portents, for He shall come as a fire descending …”

It is reasonably safe to assume that the
Sydney Morning Herald
would not have mentioned this spiritual event had it not been for the impending election and the clear correlation between water levels in the Burdekin Dam and political chaos in Queensland. The drought, it will be recalled, at first confined to that arid crescent between Townsville and Mt Isa, had spread like a virus. By the time of Tom Kelly's appearance on the front page of the tabloids, there were bush fires all the way to the Dandenongs and the Adelaide Hills. This “Queensland drift” seemed ominous, even to secular minds.

Addressing himself primarily to the political issues, a Sydney pundit commented, in passing, on the fishing story. Where else but in Queensland? he asked. Pressed by his interviewer to respond to a tabloid headline (“Christmas vision saves boy's life”), he spoke of the effects of shock and water-pressure and diminution of oxygen and concomitant hallucinatory indications such as the kind of aura that accompanies migraine or near-drowning, but no one in central or north Queensland watched this show. Indeed, even in Sydney and Melbourne, those infallible Geiger-counters of truth, many chose to ignore common sense. For what raconteur in the pub, what politician, what preacher, could resist Tom Kelly's aurora and the resurrection of Come-by-Chance?

“And there shall be famines,” bishops and gospel firebrands read as with one voice. “And pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places. For then shall be great tribulation …” On exegesis, however, the divines parted ways, and quite contradictory moral and political interpretations – not to mention voting admonitions – were brought to bear. It was only in the actual scriptural words of warning that they spoke as one again: “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.”

A swelling group of the elect began to gather for vigil and prayer and competitive political pamphleteering at the ever-lower waterline of the dam. A week after the fishing incident, the whole cross of St Stephen Martyr was visible and a foot of steeple tiles below; in the second week, the belltower of the Catholic church appeared; in the third, the Post Office clock. Word spread along the stock routes and talk-show arteries, and via the pages that come round fish and chips. The elect were joined by the curious, the bored, the Sydney and Melbourne reporters, the television cameras, the signs-and-portents groupies. A camp was set up.

“What come ye out for to see?” the Mingela pastor, distributing tracts, asked through a megaphone.
Ahh, knock it off,
people said, but not too savagely. Long droughts of continental proportions induce nervous piety in many breasts – though not in all. Around the country, bookies also set up shop and punters laid bets on the next building to resurrect itself. Daily the odds were published on the likelihood of there still being skeletons anchored to the stools in the bar, because many people now recalled tales of Come-by-Chancers who had refused to leave town.

The “flight into Egypt” became a veritable exodus, and the
Sydney Morning Herald
ran a full weekend feature in which the word “mirage” was frequently mentioned. In Melbourne, the
Age
went as far as a reference to “collective hysteria”. This was due to the curious fact that while everyone at the site, including visiting reporters, could clearly see the re-emergent town, no trace of it showed up in photographs. The Logos Foundation issued a statement to the press:
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Only the pure in heart, it was implied, can witness the unblemished city of God. Come-by-Chance became symbol and rallying cry for a lost way of life, a simpler cleaner time, which each political party vowed to restore.

In the capital cities, editors were deluged with letters. No one could have predicted the number of people still living who had visited, or had relatives in, or had themselves inhabited the town of Come-by-Chance before it went under the dam. By one newspaper's count, the population had been a quarter of a million just prior to inundation, though the town had boasted only three churches, a post office, seven pubs, a one-teacher school, a police station (with two constables assigned) and a handful of shops and houses. There was considerable divergence of opinion on the erstwhile economic base. Sheep, most claimed. Opal prospecting, others contended. Tall stories, suggested the literary editor of the
Australian,
a man noted for his scepticism and wit. He alluded to Ern Malley and the whole issue of the literary hoax. He quoted Banjo Paterson, and left readers to draw their own conclusions:

But my languid mood forsook me, when I found a name that took me;

Quite by chance I came across it – “Come-by-Chance” was what I read;

No location was assigned it, not a thing to help one find it,

Just an N which stood for northward, and the rest was all unsaid …

But 1 fear, and more's the pity, that there's really no such city,

For there's not a man can find it of the shrewdest folk I know;

“Come-by-Chance”, be sure it never means a land of fierce endeavour –

It is just the careless country where the dreamers only go.

Or where the victims of nightmares are trapped,
thought Mrs Adeline Capper.
And they can never leave.

Adeline Capper dreaded the newspapers and read them with a compulsive doomed fascination. She had always known there was no way of expunging the past. One could flee it, drown it, bury it, tear up the newsprint record, but it went on skulking around today. It was always
there.
Inside one.
Here.

She was twenty then, sixty now, but twenty was as close as her skin.

It is the doing nothing that is intolerable, she thought. The fact that there is nothing to be done.

From her brown garden on the south side of Townsville, she watched the trekkers herding down the highway and out to the dam. A hot wind blew. Her bougainvillea made a dead parchment sound against the fence. Like a sleepwalker, she got into her car and followed the columns of dust.

A settlement – a tent city – had sprung up: trailers, kombi vans, canvas of all shapes and sizes, camp fires, styrofoam iceboxes full of beer. People told jokes and sang songs. There was raucous laughter, catcalls as Adeline Capper moved among them. Was she twenty or sixty? Night was such a dangerous time.
Hey, grandma!
someone called.
Wanna cuppa?

“Hey, didn't mean to give you such a scare,” a young man said, apologetic. “Here. Have a cuppa tea.”

She took it, shivering in the dry evening heat. Her teeth chattered.

“You all right?” the young man's wife asked, concerned.

They always asked that, but no one wanted to know the true answer. No one ever wanted to know that. She couldn't remember how far the reserve was from here, how far she had walked.

“See?” the young wife asked. She held out a wooden plaque, bleached colourless, soft to the touch. But you could still make out the carved indentation: XXXX.

“Four-X, the Queensland beer,” the young man laughed. “A true-blue bit'v history. She was a bugger to rip off the wall, but.”

“Brian dived,” his wife said proudly. “You wouldn't believe what people are bringing up.”

Oh, Adeline could well believe. And how soon would someone surface with her first teaching year? Who would wave it aloft? It was written in stone down there somewhere. Everywhere.

It was, it
is,
loud in the air.

“Where've you been, Adeline?” Sergeant Hobson had crooned,
croons,
pulling up beside her in the car. (Big Bob is what everyone calls him. She teaches his daughter in the one-teacher school.) He leans out and sings in her ear: “Oh where have you
been,
Adel
een?”

And she laughs, and Constable Terry Wilkes in the passenger seat laughs too. And they stand there in the moonlight on the dirt road winding into town from the reserve. “I've been visiting some of my school kids,” she says. “The ones that live out … uh, the Chillagong ones.”

“The boongs, you mean?”

Boongs. Abos. Everyone says it. It strikes her as terribly rude, but she doesn't want to offend, doesn't want to appear stuck-up, doesn't want to sound like the smart-alec who just arrived from Brisbane. “Yeah,” she says.

“Bit late, innit?” Big Bob asks. “To be walking back into town.”

“Yeah, I reckon.” She laughs nervously. (She'd been terrified, as a matter of fact; and so relieved when the police car pulled up.) She'd thrown them into total confusion back there. Hazel, Evangeline, Joshua, their mothers and fathers, walking the three miles out after school. It isn't what anyone does, goes to Chillagong, she can see that now. “I got invited to stay for dinner.” (Though she thinks they hadn't known what else to do, and nor had she; and the minute she'd accepted, she'd realised they hadn't expected her to. Perhaps hadn't wanted her to.)

“For
dinner,
well, stone the crows!” Big Bob and Constable Terry roar with laughter. “Kangaroo rat and witchetty grubs, ya like them, do ya?”

“Oh no,” she shudders. In fact, she doesn't know what it was she ate. Some kind of stew.

“Well, get in then.” Big Bob lumbers out and puts an arm around her shoulders. “We'll drive you back home.” He presses his big fat lips against her neck and his beery breath hits her like a fist. “Can't have the little lady-teacher from Brisbane on her own in the bush at night.” He strokes her hair protectively, and the front of her dress, accidentally pressing her breasts. She's a bit embarrassed, but they are the police, after all. She's between the two men on the Holden's bench-seat and feels safe.

“Adeline's been having a little night life with the boongs,” Big Bob tells Constable Terry. “She likes those big fat witchetty grubs.”

“Big fat witchetty grubs,” Terry sings. “Oh Adeleen, our village queen, she loves those big fat witchetty grubs.”

“No, no,” she protests laughing, but Big Bob joins in, and they sing and sway and laugh in the dark, and after a while she sings along: “I love those big fat witchetty grubs.”

“She loves those big black witchetty grubs,” sings Constable Terry.

Both men laugh so much that the car slews onto the shoulder and back, then off the road again. She's nervous now. She thinks they are both quite drunk.

“You think they're better?” Big Bob demands. “The big black juicy ones?”