Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (27 page)

“Rosita,” she whispers. Rosita's hair is clotted with blood, her face is swollen, she is naked, her body is grotesquely blackened … but Sarah recognises her. Doubling over her own pain, pleating it between her knees and breasts, containing it, she cradles Rosita.

She sings to her, she rocks Rosita in her arms, she strokes her hair.

Rosita cannot smile. Her lips are swollen shut, they are purple as eggplants, they are embroidered with scabs of blood. Rosita is slipping away. The mud floor is slick and treacherous, they are both of them sliding downhill. When the guards appear, swinging their truncheons like magicians, like jugglers, like the circus man with one red eye, they take Rosita by the ankles as though she were a sack of dung and begin to heave. It is easy work.

But Sarah digs in her heels and will not let go. She feels the mud and blood squelching up, warm, between her toes. She is on fire from her own contractions, a siren is blaring inside her head. She hooks her arms around Rosita, she sways and weaves to avoid the truncheons, she digs in her heels.

“Let me go,” Rosita pleads. Her lips are like rubber pontoons; the words ooze out, slow and viscous. “I can't hold on any more. Let me go,” she pleads.

The guards are dragging her off by the ankles. They are using chains; the flesh has gone, Sarah can see the bone.

“Rosita!” she gasps. She is losing her hold, Rosita has almost gone. “Rosita!” She clasps Rosita's hands and hangs on.

All night Sarah braces her legs against the wall. She will not let go. The muscles in her thighs and wrists are fraying like old ropes, they are twisting like knives, they hum a high note of pain so pure it fills the room with fog. Rosita's hands are limp and clammy and slippery as fish. Sarah squeezes harder. She insists that the hands stay warm; she will not let them go.

When morning comes, Sarah wakes exhausted. Her sheets are sodden.

I did not let go, she thinks.

Sarah was curled up on the window-seat looking out at the horsechestnut candles, her daughter visiting for Sunday dinner. Katy sat on a cushion on the floor and leaned against her mother's knees.

“When you were little …” Sarah said, winding a black curl around one finger, and stroking it with the brush. She smiled. “Do you remember that time – third grade? fourth grade? – when Michael Dunlap filled your shoes with mud?”

“Oh god, Michael Dunlap!” Katy laughed. “Did he do that? I'd forgotten. I'd completely forgotten. I used to have
nightmares
about that boy.” She laughed again then sobered. “Who'd have thought the way things would … God, poor Michael Dunlap. What a seesaw life is.”

“I saw his mother one day in town. So I asked, you know. Just making small talk, really. It was thoughtless of me. But he's doing all right now, she said. Driving a truck, a fruit and vegetable business, something like that. As a matter of fact, Richard bumped into him one day at a service station on the highway, an incredible fluke, did he tell you? They had a drink together.” She ran the brush upwards from Katy's neck, sweeping the curls into clusters; she held them in a loose knot with her left hand, and brushed up again, over and over, massaging.

“Mmmm,” Katy purred. She twisted her head back to look at her mother. “Mum?”

“Hm?”

“We're not doing so badly, are we?”

Sarah smiled and feathered the brush in deft little swirls behind Katy's ears.

“Nice,” Katy murmured. “Mum?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you still writing those letters?”

“When it's required.”

“Do you think it accomplishes anything? Do you ever
hear
… ?” “Sometimes.” Sarah thought of the terse bulletin that came … oh, two months ago? … along with news of fresh arrests in South Korea (please send letters to
His Excellency President Chun Doo- Hwan
…) and reports of torture in Iran (please write to
His Excellency
…)

Rosita Romero
– Update: Released yesterday, after worldwide barrage of letters, and after a number of official and semi-official protests from political figures in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe. (The politicians themselves were a target of our letter writing campaign.) Released in critical condition, due to several bouts of interrogation with torture. Currently under Red Cross care. Present condition: stable.

“You never hear much,” Sarah said. She let Katy's curls fall loose over her shoulders, and ran the brush through them again.

“Don't stop,” Katy murmured.

“I had no intention of stopping.”

Eggshell Expressway

“Up there,” he says, “right up there in the sixth floor window of the book depository, at the very time the supposed sniper had his telescopic sights on the motorcade leaving Kirribilli House and coming over the Harbour Bridge, at the very moment he was allegedly waiting for it to reach the turn in the expressway, at the very second he reportedly fired the shot heard round the world, right up there behind that sixth-floor window – see it? see it? – a very tawdry little scene was taking place.

“Yes,” he says, breathing hard. “The Prime Minister's real assassin, the slut herself, was down on her knees between the rifleman's straddled legs. Oh, she set him up all right. He was an innocent, he was duped. Very busy with her tongue, she was; blue in the face, stuffed with it, practically choking.”

“Like this?” asks Lisa, busy with her tongue.

“Yes,” he moans, “oh dear God, yes. Making sure he'd be caught with his pants down, caught with a smoking gun, hah hah, the little slut. Of course, she'll die for it, she'll hang for it. Jack Ruby is coming to get her, oh God, oh Christ, he's coming, he's coming, he's coming.”

“Shh,” Lisa mumbles, soothing him, crooning to him with her hands, her mouth. She swallows egg white, salt jelly, yuck, don't blink, don't think, don't puke, don't think. “Don't think about her,” she murmurs. “Don't worry about her, everything's gonna be all right.”

“A tawdry set-up.” He's weeping now. “Taking advantage. Meanwhile the real marksmen (who knows how many?) are everywhere: the toll booth, Circular Quay, the Law Courts, every doorway in King's Cross, the expressway underpass, oh yes, the underpass, that surprises you, doesn't it? You'd be sick at what goes on in that labyrinth, that slime-pit, that sewer-maze, that –”

“Shh,” Lisa says, cradling him, her back against pillows. “They missed. They didn't get him.”

“They got him,” he moans. “They got him.” He sees the skull burst like an eggshell, blood all over the expressway.

Shiv knocks on the door. “Time,” he grunts. “Hurry up in there, I got someone else waiting.”

“I have to get dressed now, Groucho,” Lisa says. “You have to go.” Sometimes she calls him Groucho; he calls her Old Mole.
Old!
she says; that'll be the day. Eighteen, she says when asked, though she's only fifteen, the age of all the wide world's daughter. This fact is pertinent and she will usually admit it later, sometime before they leave, because she knows what they want and she knows what will bring them back.

“Your fucking time's
up,”
shouts Shiv, bang bang on the door.

“Oh, the tollman.” Bitter Groucho puts on his trousers. “The tollman, is it? Come for payment in cash and blood. Can't get out of the underpass without paying dearly, can we?”

“Shh,” Lisa murmurs, doing up buttons for him. “Shush now.” Sometimes she calls him the Underpass Man. Things have come to a pretty underpass, haven't they? he is always and acidly asking. At Ebony's, he means. By any name, a slime-pit is what Ebony's is, he's right about that. If she's with someone new, really new, an American tourist say, she has to warn them. Look, she'll say, don't spin out when we get to the top of the stairs, okay? The joint's a slime-pit. Just close your eyes and don't think, she'll say. It's not so bad once you're inside the room.

She's seen them spin out, but. She's seen them practically puke from the sight of that upstairs hallway. Sweet Jesus, they say, and they want her to come back to the Sheraton, the Hilton, the Sebel Townhouse, wherever, which is nicer, God you wouldn't believe how much nicer, but then you're in heck with Shiv and it isn't worth it. Be out on your backside fast if Shiv loses his cut.

“Who was the bald bloke?” asks Shiv the Divine, the bearer of angel dust. “He looks familiar.”

“Yeah, well.” Lisa gets out her spoon and crosses it with her lighter, her hands are shaking. “He's a regular.”

(Beneath her window, the priest from St Canice's is telling someone about the Halfway House, the de-tox centre. Father Rescue-the-Perishing, he never quits, but St Canice's is okay, she's been there, they treat you decent, give you a decent meal.)

Shiv frowns. “No, I mean … he's a fucking VIP, I think. Seen his picture in the paper, or something.” Lisa's hands are shaking. “What's he do?”

Under the silver spoon, the flame wavers and dies, Lisa's hands are dancing.
Help me, Shiv,
Lisa's hands are having convulsions. (By the form tain of El Alamein, a circle forms.
At the cross, at the cross,
the Salvation Army sings to the dark,
where I first saw the light …)
Lisa sees light, too much of it, her hands are out of control.

Quick, quick, have mercy O Lord for whom not a sparrow falls to the ground but thou knowest, quick quick under blood where all the hypodermics meet, quick quick, on the wings of a powder-white dove, be swift O Lord, be swift Father Shiv for I have taken the habit, I have sinned, quick quick … ahhh, ahhhhhh … ahhmen, ahhhmen, aaahhhhhhhhhhmen.

“What's he
do?”
Shiv asks, impatient, touching cigarette glow to flesh.
(Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, ya gotta let 'em know who's boss, ya gotta crack the whip.)

Lisa opens her eyes very wide, then closes them. She smiles. Slowly, she brings the sleepwalking index finger of her left hand toward the small scorched circle on her right wrist. She strokes it, wondering, and lifts drowsy lids. “It's beautiful, Shiv.”

“What the fuck does he do?”

“Who?” Her eyelids flutter and droop. “What does who do?”

“The bald bloke. What the fuck
is
he?”

“Oh him. I dunno. A judge or something, I think. Can't remember.”

“Seen his picture in the paper,” Shiv says. “Some hankypanky, it's on the tip of me mind, it'll come to me.”

It's his turn again. Groucho's turn.

When it's his turn, he orders the streets to be cleared, he has a day-long curfew. It's in the people's best interests, he says, because of the snipers.

Lisa says: “I can't just stay here, Groucho. I gotta get back to the street. I'm
working.”

But Groucho insists. “I'll pay again.” He beams thoughts at her: Get back to your sewer, Old Mole; get back to your tunnels, stay down in your underpass maze.

He's fond of her, he doesn't want her shot down. He offers what protection he can. Not lacking in gentleness or a sense of justice, he has tried to explain that there are rules, good rules, and that the rules must be obeyed because they are in fact immutable, they form a kind of eternal monument that towers above the underpass. Transgressors will be shot down, that is one of the rules, and that explains why she must stay with him. Otherwise the snipers may get her.

Sometimes he comes before it is even dark and pulls down the blinds. “They can't see us in the underpass,” he says. “It's black as slime in here.”

Sometimes he strings half-hours together like beads, at eighty dollars a shot. Shiv knocks, Groucho pays. Shiv goes. It's fine by Lisa who wears her habit like a mm, the zeal of Ebony's eating her up, six tricks a day, rain or shine, six tricks a day keeps convulsions away. And the tunnels are endless, Groucho says.

“What's his name?” Shiv asks.

Lisa shrugs. “Dunno. I call him Groucho.”

“It'll come back to me,” Shiv tells her. “I know I seen him in the papers. It'll come back to me who he is, Mr Humpty Dumpty.”

He (Mr Humpty Dumpty) considers her territory dark and unmapped. Once, on the bench during session, he wrote and wrote, covering juridical pages in a handwriting that was spidery, crabbed perhaps, the fountain pen slanted just so. He used the finest of nibs. (Long ago, very young among the boarders with their blazers and ties and terrible sobbing dreams, his penmanship had been deemed worthy of special commendation. There had been a pennant for calligraphy. If I might read the handwriting on the wall, Brother Damian had joked, this is but the first rung of what will be a distinguished career.)
Ebony's Ebony's Ebony's Ebony's,
he wrote on page after page, evidence that might be used against him.

He considers her territory shady, and there are stronger words that he does not say, words that rise into his mouth and cause him discomfort, nausea even.
Disreputable. Murky. Fuzzy. Crotch-ety.
He coughs, and spits the words into a handkerchief already full of some milky viscous substance, and stuffs the handkerchief discreetly into a pocket. On his turf, everything is out in the open and above board. Sharp distinctions come under his jurisdiction. He marks out the boundary lines.

Hup, hup, hup, go the boundary lines, keeping dotted formation, defiling by (when they get down to her, they're defiled, how now Old Mole?), merrily merrily marching through parallax errors, hyphenations, the presenting of arms, all wending their way down past the golden eggshell wall to the underpass.

He pinpoints the risks: the dotted lines, as a fortification system, are intermittent at best. There are constant perforations, imperfections, perfumed slits, perfervid gaps for a quick perv where sewer gas might seep through. He has spoken of the need for constant moral vigilance. Civilisation, that great spreading oak, has root rot, its fruits are infested, the young saplings are diseased, they breed disease, they breed like rabbits, like vermin, like mould in the underpass, even the lamp posts sprout ovaries, and it behoves men of classical education and impeccable parts, men of upright parts, to stand in the mud, sire, to draw the snipers. Ramparts have been called for, a buttressing of the eggshell wall itself, a better fornication policy.

“The perfect legal contract,” he confides to a distinguished colleague, “would be constructed so intricately and so exactly that an improper word or thought or interpretation could not find a way in. Or if it did get in, it would vanish, it would never be seen again.”

“Ahhh … yes,” his colleague murmurs. “Quite so.”

From under the crimped platinum curls, he (Mr Humpty Dumpty) describes how the contractual labyrinth itself would stir at the first sign of infection, how the coiled sentences would sway and unfurl their darting tongues, how they would swallow the blight whole, ingest it, eliminate it. Illegal words (and thoughts and deeds) would falter, bemazed, they would slide down perfect clauses to the mouth of the minotaur.

On the bench, during session, he draws up meticulous blueprints. His model is the human brain itself, those delicate yolky spirals held in by a tissue of self as thin as eggshell.

“It's a sobering thought,” he says to his colleague. “The complexity and the fragility of the mind. Did you know, for example, that if we are prevented from dreaming, we go mad?”

* * *

In the underpass, he says into the darkness: “What do you dream about, Old Mole?”

And Lisa answers: “No one at Ebony's has dreams.”

“I dreamed,” he says, “that the Prime Minister and Princess Diana were leaving Kirribilli House in a black limousine. Princess Di was wearing an off-the-shoulder off-white ball gown that was spattered with the Prime Minister's blood. There were broken eggshells all over the front of the car.”

“It means you think Princess Di plays around,” Lisa says.

Groucho mournfully demurs. “It means treachery. It means the snipers are out.”

Lisa asks: “Shiv, do you ever dream?”

“I never
sleep,”
Shiv snaps. “Got no time. I'm a working man. Hurry it up, will ya?”

She is cutting his hair. He watches both of them in the wardrobe mirror.

“If you had three wishes, Shiv, what would you wish?”

“Got no time for guff like that,” growls Shiv.

“But if you did have time, Shiv, what would you wish?”

“Oh shut up,” he says, hitting her across the mouth with the back of his hand.

Lisa kneads the back of his neck, the way he likes. Lisa kneads and kneads. She wonders: If he asks me what would I wish, will I say “No more cigarette bums”?

Shiv says: “I been taking photographs of you and the bald bloke, the judge, Humpty Dumpty.” Lisa's hands hang motionless above the shoulderblades of Shiv. “Don't let on,” he says. “I reckon there's money in it. Get on with the haircut, will ya?”

Lisa's hands hover with scissors and comb. Shiv watches her in the mirror. “He ever tell you anything?” Shiv asks.

“Who?”

“You know who I mean. The one I know I seen something about in the papers, but I can't remember what. Could be a few years back. I think he went in for politics or something. He tell you anything?”

“Nah. Only his dreams,” Lisa says.

* * *

Half hour by half hour, he pays and pays. Lisa hardly has to do a thing, it's easy work. She lies there naked, he strokes her, he talks; in the last few minutes, she has to swallow him, that's it. Up until then, he just talks.

“Where did you go to school. Old Mole?” he asks. “Which convent?”

“I didn't go to a convent, I went to Parramatta State.”

“Were the nuns kind to you? Or did they beat you? Did they cover your little buttocks with scars?” He rolls her over to look. “Oh poor little, poor little mole.”

(Click, click, goes the camera shutter behind the mirror. In the next room, Shiv watches through one-way glass.)

“There weren't any nuns,” she says. “I got those scars from me dad, he drank too much.”

“I'll lick them better,” he promises. “But you must have been a naughty girl.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I reckon. I got sent to reform school.”

“Time,” Shiv says, rapping on the door.

(“There's money in this,” Shiv has told Lisa. “If we get the photographs to the right person, maybe to the Prime Minister himself, I gotta think. Then we show some reporter, or threaten to show … I read about something like this once, you can make a fortune.”)