Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (46 page)
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Authors: Janette Turner Hospital
“Gladys,” Flutie says, encircling her from behind with his arms. “Tell me why you came here. Because there's no time left, you know. You confess and I'll confess. I wanna know the lot.”
“Jesus, Flutie.” She can't believe men, she really can't. Boss cocky to the very last second.
“Where'd you come from?” he persists. “Brisbane? Sydney?”
Because he can smell a city girl, yes, that's partly what's been grabbing him, that dazed state of the city slicker in the bush, that
Where am I? What am I doing here?
bemusement, he's a sucker for that.
“Brisbane,” she says. “If you must know.”
What will she tell him? She ticks off items in her mind: married twenty-seven years, three kids all grown up and married, Mum dying of cancer in Toowoomba; and while she sits at Mum's bedside, her old man buggers off with the neighbour's daughter. End of story.
How boring, how
embarrassing
a life is, once it slides down inside the tacky skin of words. Cheap skin, sharkskin, vulgar. Who could bear to say them? They had to be shoved away somewhere, in a suitcase under a bed. Goodbye words, good riddance; because what you felt afterwards, after the disorientation, when your clumsy tongue got free of dead explanations, was an immense and intoxicating freedom. You felt like singing your new self without any words at all.
You felt like a snake discarding the skins of past lives, sleek, unimpeded.
“When Mum died,” she says absently, smiling, “I hopped on a train and bought a ticket for the end of the line.”
“Amen,” says Flutie.
“I didn't bring any luggage,” she says. “No luggage at all.”
“Amen,” he says again. It doesn't matter if she tells him anything or not, they're both end-of-the-liners. Compatible histories is something he can taste, and he moves his tongue into the warm currents of her mouth.
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!” â 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 â¦
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
© 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
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.