Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (23 page)

She doesn't know what to answer. “Where are we going?” she asks, alarmed.

There's a blur, both car doors opening, a blank.

What she remembers: spiky grass and ants against her skin, and words marching in ranks through her head.
I don't believe this, I don't believe it, it doesn't make sense, it isn't happening.
And then the next day (she must have slept, or been unconscious, whatever), the next day: blood, bruises, and no clothes. No sign of her clothes. And diarrhoea, the worst, the most humiliating thing.

But she can remember only grass and ants and the shapes of words. The words themselves are jagged, they hurt her skin. Fog comes and goes. A search party shouts, she hunches herself up, ashamed, ashamed. She doesn't want to be found. The pain from moving is so great that she blacks out.

“Christ!” Big Bob has tears in his eyes. He covers her with a blanket. The picture in the newspaper shows him cradling her in his arms. “We found her clothes on the reserve,” Big Bob tells the reporter. “The animals won't get away with it, I can promise you that.”

Days come and go. She's teaching again, it seems. The children stare and whisper, the reserve kids don't come any more. She cannot look at Margaret, Big Bob's daughter. When she walks into the general store, people fall silent. “Poor Addie,” they murmur, as though she has a terminal disease. “At least the bastards are in gaol,” someone says. She stares, puzzled; there is something just out of reach, but only words rattle in her head like small change in an empty tin can. She has a nightmare, and in the morning she forces herself to read the papers that have stacked themselves up, unopened. She sees Joshua's father, Evangeline's father, in handcuffs.
We didn't do it, boss. We dunno how her clothes …

A fever descends.

“Benevolent reasons” is what the transfer slip from the Education Department says. She lies awake all the last night, afraid. Wouldn't it be better, she begs herself, more sensible, to say nothing? Reasons for saying nothing marshal themselves in ranks, they file through her head all night.
Please,
her body begs. I have no choice, she tells it. I have to.

Morning. Two blocks to the police station, bodily panic, retreat. It takes her until the third attempt, and then Sergeant Big Bob Hobson and Constable Terry Wilkes greet her effusively. They take her into their office, they give her tea and a biscuit. “We're glad to see you up and about again,” they say. “Glad to see you looking so well.”

Her hands are sweating, her knees are weak, her throat dry.

“I am going to tell,” she says. The noise each word makes as it falls on the floor is deafening.

They look at her blandly, innocent-eyed. “Tell what?” they ask.

Tell what? She feels dizzy, there is no bottom to this fall. She thinks: I will never know for sure again if night is night or day is day, what is dream or not-dream.

It would help, they told her at the hospital, to be a thousand miles away for a while. It would help, they said, to be somewhere where not a soul knew her. She took a year's leave, and went to Melbourne.

People were kind. At dinner parties in terrace houses they said to her, Of course Queensland gets the kind of government it deserves do you like the linguini? the salmon? in Brisbane we thought the food perfectly
ghastly
we do congratulate you on leaving, oh the Queensland police, the Aboriginal problem, no awareness at all, and Namatjira's tonal effects are
exquisite,
there was a black tie opening and we were simply overwhelmed
overwhelmed,
Aboriginal art's the going thing now a fantastic investment and I myself have a poem of social protest, a very
meaningful
people were kind enough a very socially aware in the
Age
will you have more champagne? you've come out of the wilderness, they said.

She was mute. The same hollow alphabet. No. Hollower. She could not acquire the knack of words that floated so weightlessly. She fled back to Queensland. She dreamed of alphabets that sent down deep webbing roots.

At dawn on the Burdekin banks (is she sixty or twenty?) she watches the foraging parties. Swimmers, dinghies, fights, whoops of delight. She huddles, not wanting to be found. Whole doors are coming up, chairs, verandah spindles, stovepipes, crosses, bits of clapboard, signs, signposts, there's a black market trade in souvenirs. At a trestle table, t-shirts are selling like hot cakes:
I was there for the Second Coming of Come-by-Chance.

Adeline sits hugging herself, shivering in the fierce morning heat. Two gangs are fighting over the clock face from the Post Office tower, and a reporter in a frenzy of picture-taking swears irritably as he runs out of film. Rewind, unload,
rip
(the velcro carry-case),
rip
(the Kodak pack),
rip
(the foil covering).
“Shit!”
He tosses packet and foil over his shoulder. He is not an ordinary reporter. He has literary sensibilities and does these things, these projects, as a cultural enterprise, a refined monitoring of the pulse of the nation. He shakes his head at Adeline in disbelief. “I don't believe this. Bloody animals, a pack of hooligan looters.” He gives off a kind of jubilation of disgust. “No one's going to believe this in Melbourne.”

“No. No one ever believes.” Nevertheless, that does not absolve … She takes a deep breath. “I would like to set the record straight.”

“Yeah, who wouldn't?” He's got the clock face and a bloodied forehead in focus, he's shooting like crazy.

“Capper is not my real name, I was never married, I am Adeline Crick.”

“Yeah?”

“I want to tell you what really happened.”

Christ, not another one. Any direction you point your lens. And she's got the DTs, the old soak, she's only worth one shot.

Adeline's words are heavy, their roots go down below the Burdekin, her clumsy tongue trips on them, she has to speak with the care of those who have had a stroke. She says: “I have the blood of innocent men on my hands.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right.”

“At times one has to ask oneself,” he wrote in a photo-essay that was given prominent space in the
Age,
“if Queensland is our own Gothic invention, a kind of morality play, the Bosch canvas of the Australian psyche, a sort of perpetual
memento mori
that points to the frailty of the skein of civilisation reaching out so tentatively from our southern cities.

“To return to Sydney or Melbourne and write of the primitive violence, the yobbo mentality, the mystics, the pathetic old women generating lurid and gratuitous confessions, the general sense of mass hallucination … to speak of this is to risk charges of sensationalism. And indeed, after mere days back in the real world, one has the sense of emerging from a drugged and aberrant condition.

“One has to ask oneself: Does Queensland actually exist?

“And one has to conclude: I think not.

“Queensland is a primitive state of mind from which the great majority of us, mercifully, have long since evolved. And Come-by-Chance is a dream within a nightmare, the hysteric's utopia, the city of Robespierre, Stalin, Jim Jones, the vision of purity from which history recoils.

“Come-by-Chance, we who are sane dilute you.”

Yes, he'd done that rather well. Seen the essence of things, touched the depths, but kept the tone right. Words were his business, and if he often caught himself being plangent and acute, well, it was a forgivable sin. He was tempted to add a rider explaining how his work should be read, how his words should be picked up one by one like stones from the bank of an enchanted creek. But he would save that for another time.

When the drought broke with the series of maverick cyclones we all remember, there was flash flooding throughout central and southern Queensland. At the tent city on the Burdekin Dam, winds hurling themselves down from the Gulf at unprecedented inland speeds caused death and mayhem. Police estimated as many as forty people drowned. Cars were marooned on the Flinders Highway for days, army ducks were still rescuing stranded survivors weeks later. In both coastal and inland cities, powerline disasters, the uprooting of trees, and the collapse of buildings in the gale-force winds brought the region's death toll to over one hundred.

In Melbourne and Sydney, where water restrictions were at last lifted to everyone's immense relief, people read of the Queensland floods and shook their heads. If it's not one thing, it's another, they said.

I Saw Three Ships

Three ships came up out of the Pacific onto Collaroy Beach. Not ships exactly, though he had watched them sail out of the haze where North Head was, and past Long Reef. When he saw them turn shoreward and bear down on his fishing post – a folding chair in a pocket of cold winter sand – he thought he had finally (so many years after the event) gone mad; then he thought that the three pilots had.

The ships had a bead on him.

He was reeling in his past, what a catch. It figures, he thought. The whole wheeling world comes back to where it started, there's no help for it. He always knew he'd have to pay before the end.

At least this would lure the girl, and yes here she was coming down out of her concrete sky again. “Tenth floor,” she'd answered yesterday. “I can see the seminary tower at Manly.” He thought that was probably a lie, with all of Dee Why in between, but he knew about needing to believe in nice fictions. She'd have her reasons.
Interloper,
he'd thought irritably, just a week ago – he should have been able, in July, to count on the beach being his – but as day after day she had ignored him so completely, he'd felt challenged.

“You must be from down south,” he'd said.

She'd looked surprised. “Well … yes, originally. I was born in Melbourne.”

“I mean, from down south in Sydney.” She'd laughed, startled, her eyebrows darting upwards like birds. He said: “It's only hardy locals and a few city weirdos who come to the beach in July.”

“Oh.” She had not bothered to stop and be social. She had just gone on walking towards the rocks.

You had to wonder about a young woman alone. Now she was letting the wavelets curl around her ankles, shading her eyes, staring out at the kamikaze ships.

“I don't believe in them either,” he joked into the wind, but as usual she failed to respond.

When the ships splashed into the shallows they sprouted wheels and clambered out of the water, rasping, snorting, noisier than a bevy of beached whales. Jesus, he thought. What you reel in if you live too long! The same fucking army ducks he'd seen parading out of New Guinea and into the sea. The shivers hit him. He was too bloody old for this, too bloody old to fish in July, sitting still till he caught his death. His reel jammed, he had to throw down the rod half tangled. While he folded his chair, all thumbs, the army ducks wheeled and roared, a mating game of rhinoceros.

“Catch anything, grandpa?” called a kid – a mere boy – in khaki. You would have been sushi by now, mate, the old man muttered. Men were dropping over the tailgates like gravel on the spill, some sort of manoeuvre, what a farce, what a blooming picnic, a game with museum pieces. He could just imagine: hunt the nuclear missile, race you to the fallout shelter. The men wore yellow oilskins, for god's sake, over their uniforms. There was probably a waterproof fridge stuffed tight with beers in the cabin.

A young officer dropped to the sand like a god; and landed face to face with the girl.

Some things at least never changed.

The old man's shivers were bad. The chair, resisting his attempts to fold it, took a savage bite out of one hand. Jesus, he swore, extricating his fingers and sucking them. As he stumbled up the beach with his gear, he could see the young officer making his moves: an accidental lurching in the wet sand, collision with a thigh, a necessary clutch to steady himself. But the girl tossed her head and the long single braid that hung down her back twitched free like the tail of a haughty filly.

The old man laughed through his shivers: You'll never get anywhere with that one. A nun in the making. I can smell them.

It was too early for the pub.

At the bottle shop, a girl with green streaks in her hair eyed him sharply. “You got the DTs, mate?”

He frowned, giving her his look of offended dignity. “Aren't you Old Gabe from down at the rooming house?” She was watching him cautiously. “I'm not allowed to sell if you're already …”

The mere possibility of not being able to calm his nerves made the shivers worse. His breath rattled through his teeth, asthmatic. “Been sitting fishing,” he gasped. “Too cold … pneumonia, maybe, if I can't … the doctor said spirits …”

Then the kid couldn't let him have the rum fast enough, tried to call a doctor, the works. But he got away.

The girl on the beach never wore anything but canvas shoes, jeans, and a sweater three times too large. Sometimes her long black hair blew loose in the wind, sometimes she wore it in a single prim braid that hung almost to her waist.

When she wasn't there, the long stretch of sand was empty. Desolate. He would watch the tenth floor windows and wait. He angled his chair so that he could keep his eye on her building while he fished. He wanted to know if anything had happened with the young officer. He was willing to lay bets …

“I was afraid you were sick,” she said, and he almost fell off his chair.

“Jesus!” he spluttered, lurching round and clutching at his heart. “Don't
do
that!”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you.” She had a deep voice, almost gravelly, but soft, full of smoke and mist. “When you weren't on the beach yesterday … Have you been all right?”

Embarrassing, the way it pleased him that she had noticed his absence. “Jussa … ju … just a touch of old age,” he stammered, but it came out self-pitying instead of sardonic as he'd intended. The way she stared at him, gravely, right between the eyes! It made him flounder. Once upon a time, girls lowered their gaze; you saw their lashes and the blush on their cheeks. Good girls, that is. If they didn't do this, you knew something right there.

“Are you all right now?” she persisted.

“Fit to fish all night.” But his voice was playing up, sliding and slipping about, turning scratchy, as though he were nothing more than a show-off in a schoolyard.

She said earnestly, “You can sit still for so long in the cold, it's amazing. I wish I could learn your secret.”

He laughed, a crude sharp sound, startled. “My secret?”

“Your patience. Your tranquillity.”

He had to laugh again, it was involuntary. Him, the original cantankerous, irritable husband, father, grandfather. In Mosman and Cremorne, his daughters braced themselves for his visits. He didn't know what to say. He gestured vaguely at the surf, tongue-tied.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. That's why I come here too. On Saturday, there were skindivers in around the rocks up there.” She pointed to the Long Reef end of the beach. “That would be even better, I think. I wish I were a stronger swimmer.”

“You'd freeze –” But he checked himself from telling her she'd freeze her tits off. “You'd turn yourself blue,” he said.

“They had wetsuits on.”

“Just the same.” He couldn't fit her into a past or present. She was as different from the bottle shop girl with green-streaked hair as a star is from tinsel. He couldn't think of anyone less like his teenage grand-daughters. She was not of course the kind of grand-daughter he would deserve. More the kind Lew might have had if he hadn't stayed on in New Guinea. “Anyhow, you'd take such an awful battering on the rocks.”

“I don't know.” Her smile was strange, secret, full of private desire. “I think it would be nice. One of the divers told me that if you stay down deep … below the surf, you know there are caves down there. He said it was still as a church. He said there were fish that glowed like lamps.” She drew something in the wet sand with a pointed toe; it might have been a flame, or perhaps just a crooked line. “It's only when you have to come up through the surf … He had blood all over his face and hands from the reef, but he dived back in.” She gazed down the beach at the rocks, smiling her dreamy smile. “I would like to see those caves.”

In the time she might have come from, he thought, she was the kind who would have worn a hairshirt and whipped herself with penitential cat-o'-nine-tails. He understood why nuns drove soldiers to rape; and old men to dreams.

Old men, old men. He was where he belonged: in one of the rooming houses strung along the Pittwater Road, a club of sorts. The rooming houses were desiccated outside and in by the corrosions of sea salt and of stubborn cardiovascular systems that went on pumping breath and even hope through an assortment of derelicts, all of them left stranded by old age and widowerhood. He picked his way along the high tide line. He knew this route, messy, wavering, a shifting seaweedy border.

Nothing was stable.

Housemates came and went, anything could claim them: death, a son or daughter whose conscience got the upper hand for a while, loss of memory. (Sometimes the police returned a dazed lodger from the ferry docks at Manly, or from Wynyard Station.)

Cockroaches whispered to one another when Gabe came in, snickering among their dustballs. He crumpled up another newspaper (someone's find at the pub) and stuffed it into the window space. Perhaps he should learn skindiving. Stranger things, he believed, had been accomplished by old men.

He took off his coat and laid it on the bed. He huddled under it.

Something glowed in the corner of a dream. It was the girl.

Once, when the tide was fully in, he saw her standing on the rocks at the end of the beach and thought she was going to dive in. The shivers hit him.

She's a loony, he thought. A real loony.

There was absolutely nothing he could do. It would take him at least ten minutes to reach her.

If he saved her, would it cancel out the other?

She just stood there, a silhouette against the sky and the waves, while the morning did a slow hapless slide towards noon, and ten thousand cars made their zombie way along the Pittwater Road to Manly and the Harbour Bridge. The spray threw itself around her in a frenzy. She must have been drenched.

He watched, shivering, until miraculously she turned and picked her way back across the rocks, leggy as a gull.

He was trembling with anxiety and outrage. Long before she reached him, he could smell – or fancied he could smell – her body heat, her denims steaming at the crotch, the musty soaked wool of her sweater. He left his fishing rod propped against his chair and hobbled to meet her like a broken toy, overwound. He planned to take her by the shoulders and shake her. You'll catch your death, he planned to shout.

He was stopped short, however, by her radiance.

There was no other word for it.

She brushed the sodden tendrils of hair out of her eyes and asked, puzzled, “Is something the matter?”

Now the army ducks came rumbling nightly, two by two, through sleep. They were crowded with the past, packed tight with faces pale as communion wafers. Lew's face was always among them, his eyes on Gabe no matter how Gabe twisted and turned.

Once, Gabe staggered out of bed and shouted: “Damn it, won't you ever let up?”

Someone else with a hangover came reeling in and offered a tumbler of booze and an oath.

In the morning, the shivers came, a daily companion. Gabe dosed himself with rum chasers, he headed for the beach with his fishing gear, he waited for the girl.

He had decided she could save him.

He had decided she was a visitant from somewhere outside of the known. He had only to look at the girls who hung around the newsagent's or the fish and chip shop, snapping gum, sucking on cigarettes, dressed in cheap tight clothes, to know that he was right. She belonged in a different dimension.

He would watch her paddle her way along that shimmering nowhere, that space between sand and sea where the undertow fans its fluted way back to the deep, her canvas shoes laced together and slung over her shoulders like the nubs of clipped wings. Her oversized sweater was infinitely suggestive. It was pure as a nun's habit.

That kind of person, he thought (and he meant, vaguely, white witches, crazies, saints), that kind of person has a certain
touch,
a gift. If he could walk into the circle of light that came from her … It was a kind of underwater luminousness, the sort that tropical fish gave off in deep caves.

He became obsessed.

He watched the tenth floor of the concrete building, he became an expert on the movement of curtains, the language of lights switched on and off, of shades raised. He watched by day, and also by night when the sand crackled with frost and the skin of his fingers swelled and split from the cold. He plotted her routes.

One night, as he shivered down by the water's edge, he was certain he saw her standing naked at the tenth floor window. He considered seriously, then, the question of whether he had become nothing more than a dirty old man.

But he absolved himself.

It was something else altogether.

She was on to him though. That kind of person knows when her powers are being sapped, and it got harder and harder to cross her path. He would see the cream-coloured fisherman's sweater, like a peace flag, against the cliff or the rocks. He would wait and wait. And then finally a fluttering up at the tenth floor would catch his eye, a window opening or closing. She had given him the slip again. Yet if he walked along the Pittwater Road to the top of the cliff, she would take the beach route.

In dreams, on the bad nights, Gabe would wave the girl's sweater.
Truce, truce!
he would plead, and the magic worked. Lew would smile. He would give the thumbs up sign. I'm okay, he would call. Save your own skin, for god's sake; that's what you're
supposed
to do.

There was a bad spell when he did not so much as catch a glimpse of the girl for three days. The beach was grey. Fish avoided his line. His pension cheque was late – the threatened postal strike? – and he had to take a bus into the city to see about it. The bus was much too full of rude teenagers who might have belonged to a different race altogether from the girl. No one gave him a seat. It rained.

He waited in line to see about his cheque. You should have got it, they told him; it has already gone out in the mail. If you haven't received it by Friday, come and see us again. No one offered him an advance for the purpose of buying a beer in the pub near Wynyard Station. He thought of calling his Mosman daughter, or the one in Cremorne, but decided not to. Instead he waited in line for the return bus, which was late. At the Spit Bridge it was stalled in traffic for an hour. When he finally got off in front of the Collaroy Post Office, he walked along the length of the beach without any hope and stood on the rocks. There was no sign of the girl. The rain was not heavy, merely spiteful and persistent, and he was soaked to the skin. He could feel the cold everywhere. It was a dark time.