Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read online

  His voice has the inflection of one used to authority.

  “Perpetua,” Mrs Gopalan says, urging propriety. “I do think His Highness is right.”

  His Highness coughs. “With the support of Mrs Gopalan,” he says, “I insist.”

  “Your Highness is too kind,” I murmur.

  His Highness winks at me, ever so slightly, over the heads of several people. Though of course it could have been merely an involuntary twitch of his eyelid.

  In the car we do not trouble to talk for a long time. Snow scuds across the road and catapults itself at the windshield in demented wraiths, a dance of Tantric devotees – though they also seem strangely like threshers flailing at the rice in the sun-white courtyards of Goa. His Highness, perhaps, sees the veiled women of the zenana dancing for his private pleasure. Diwali always lets us loose into our separate pasts.

  I am pondering also the usefulness of my sister – though she is not my sister really, and she lives in Saskatoon. After my mother died of a perfectly standard tropical fever, I wrote to my father and told him I wanted to come to Canada. I had not seen him for six years, and it took a dozen letters back and forth to cajole him into sending for me. What no one knew, not even my Bombay grandparents, and what my father had neglected to mention in the annual letters he sent me on my birthdays, was that he had quietly remarried, and had two stepbrothers and a half-sister as well as a stepmother waiting for me. He met me at the airport in Saskatoon and explained all this. He said he thought it better not to upset anyone back home by telling them.

  I must have looked subdued.

  He put his arm around me. “You’re old enough to understand that these things happen,” he said. “And for a Parsi, education is the main thing. In Canada the very best is possible.”

  My stepmother was an Italian who had been widowed. My father was definitely attracted to Catholics. It was linked, I think, to his love of Persian and Urdu poetry. He recognised that romantic tension between rigid prescriptive discipline and passionate intensity.

  His Highness has reserved a table for us at Le Chateau Champlain, the same table as last year. I am always touched by this extravagance since it is almost certain he has to pay for it by considerable bartending in brasseries far inferior to this. (Of course a ritzy place like Le Chateau Champlain would offer anything to have such a princely maître d’ but His Highness cannot work where he might be seen by any of us. It would be an unthinkable shame for everyone.)

  “Prince Sana’ullah,” I begin, ritually.

  “Please,” he says, as always. “You must call me Sani. I insist. We set no store by titles in my family. The throne, I can assure you” – he assures me – “is a very lonely place.”

  “It is difficult, Your Highness, to be so familiar –”

  “You must try, Perpetua. To please me.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Your Highness … Sani, for such a beautiful evening.”

  “There is a full moon,” he says. “Did you notice? The way it poured gold on the snow, the way the bare trees looked against it. I thought of how the minarets looked against the moon.”

  He lapses into silence, hearing a muezzin call perhaps.

  “In Goa,” I say, “when there’s a full moon, it’s bright as day.” I remember how it was: the white sands and white buildings glistening, and the palms waving like dark bunches of ribbons.

  “Did you ever see the Taj by moonlight?” His Highness asks.

  “I’ve never seen the Taj. I flew from Goa to Bombay and then to Montreal and Saskatoon. I’ve never been back.”

  He winces as though I have punctured something, or have read from the wrong script. He seems disoriented. “Agra,” he says, thinking aloud. “We all see Agra. It’s required. I must have been ten. Just before being packed off to Eton the first time. Then back and forth, back and forth. Always back for the worst time, that hot dead time before the monsoon.”

  “There’s been trouble near Agra,” I say. “Did you see in the Times?” (I mean, by this. The Times of India. We all buy it from Mr Motilal who has copies airmailed in to his newsagency.) “It seems Mrs Gandhi –”

  “Yes, yes,” he says, brushing this aside. “It is inevitable. I don’t want to beat the drum or hoist the flag too much, you know, but when my great-grandfather ruled there was none of this … this pettifogging disruption.”

  We are both silent for a long time, I sipping my wine and Prince Sani his Scotch. (The Prophet, he is in the habit of saying, forbade only the fruit of the grape. On the subject of Scotch and cognac, he was silent.)

  Our waiter comes and asks: “Monsieur est prêt à commander maintenant?” He has assumed from the start that we are French- speaking. Perhaps we have a Gallic aura of romance about us. We look, I suppose, exotic. Certainly not des maudits Anglais. (“This is a bilingual country,” my father said. “And my children will be bilingual. Even in Saskatoon.” In fact, of course, I became trilingual.)

  His Highness says: “Nous avons déjà mangé. Nous ne sommes ici que pour le dessert. Montrez-nous les pâtisseries, s’il vous plaît.”

  His Highness learned his French at Eton, but his accent is pure joual, perfected in the sleazier taverns of Old Montreal. The waiter is nonplussed. He does not know what to make of the combination of aristocratic bearing, Parisian syntax, and Québécois street French. His Highness is indifferent to what the waiter thinks. When it comes down to pure physical presence, Prince Sani can make any man quail before the mere disdainful flutter of his royal eyelids.

  After we have selected our pastries, he says to me gently: “It was a command, you know, what I said last year. I insist you do something about your future. I won’t have you throwing your life away teaching school in a small stuffy town. It’s such a waste. You’re too beautiful and too intelligent.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness.”

  “Please, Perpetua. In my family we have never stood on ceremony. We do not hide behind our crown.”

  “Thank you, Sani.”

  “A private school in Montreal, at the very least. A modicum of elegance. The sisters will leap at the chance of having you.”

  “I’ve applied,” I sigh. “All over. Nobody’s leaping at the chance. Teaching jobs are hard to come by. I’m lucky to have the one I’ve got.”

  “It’s not … appropriate,” he sighs. “Also it’s time for marriage. I ordered you to write to your family. Bombay and Goa, both.”

  “I did, Sani. My mother’s family has arranged a match. I’m going back to Goa in July to be married.”

  “Back to Goa?” He is startled, as though a figure in his dream turned and tampered with his pillow.

  “Just for the wedding. He’s a professional man. Wants to emigrate to Canada. I’ve seen a photograph. And our horoscopes match.”

  “Well,” he says. “That is very fine. Congratulations, Perpetua. It is the best thing.”

  We both think it probably is, given everything. Certain traditions are comforting in their way. It makes no sense to flout them. Pointless as railing at the monsoon. Nevertheless we lapse back into silence for a long time.

  Finally I ask: “What about you, Sani?”

  “My father also is arranging something. Negotiating with the girl’s family. I think it will work out.”

  We stare at each other.

  We are aware, suddenly, that this will be the last such Diwali. Not that the festival belongs to either of us; it is alien to both our traditions. In a sense. Except that it was part of the totality of our childhoods and it has this private significance: we met at the Diwali festival in our small town four years ago.

  “You remember,” His Highness says dreamily, “how the Taj looks in the moonlight?”

  I smile fondly, beginning to believe I have seen it. For now the love-making has begun in earnest. Though of course it had already begun in the cloakroom before the
concert, and was well under way when His Highness bowed to me across the aisle. It flows on through the murmur of nostalgia, the first accidental brushing of fingertips against fingertips, the holding of hands. It wafts us up to our reserved suite and through the long perfumed night while our bodies converse. They are attuned to each other, the raga they make is like the dialogue between sitar and tabla. Our love-making is present also in the intervals of talking and reverie.

  Near dawn, His Highness sits up and greets the first light with Urdu poetry. His voice rises and falls, a musk of sound, a long ululating chant that curls into the niches of elsewhere. And that is when I begin to cry, helplessly and unstoppably. His Highness turns tactfully away, not because he is embarrassed, but because he does not want to intrude. He stands in the window and watches the neon strings of light along rue de la Gauchetière. He knows I have fallen into my childhood – my father and Father Diego on the verandah, my mother in the kitchen.

  Once – I must have been about eight years old – my father took me to see San Sebastian, a splendid crumbling ruin of a Portuguese mission, still ghostly white in patches between the creepers. The jungle had reclaimed it, and peacocks screeched in its bell towers. But inside, where bats and monkeys made their home, we could still see the faintest old gold sheen of the saints fading into the walls and my father murmured: “Sic transit gloria. But remember this, Perpetua, it is only when glory has gone that it is appreciated. Do you think the ancient Persians were anything but military louts at the height of their imperial powers? It is now, in the twilight of Zoroaster, that our poetry and art enshrine them. Remember that, Perpetua. We love best what we have lost forever.”

  Prince Sani, naked and golden against the haze of city neon, turns away from the window.

  I think about the fact that next summer Father Diego will unite me in matrimony with a man I have not yet seen. I wonder if he would consent to perform the ceremony in the ruined mission church?

  His Highness takes me in his arms and brushes my damp cheeks with his silk handkerchief.

  “Happy Diwali,” he says, kissing me.

  You Gave Me Hyacinths

  Summer comes hot and steamy, with the heavy smell of raw sugar to the north-east coast of Australia. The cane pushes through the rotting window blinds and grows into the cracks and corners of the mind. It ripens in the heart at night, and its crushed sweetness drips into dreams. I have woken brushing from my eyelids the silky plumes that burst up into harvest time. And I have stood smoke-blackened as the cane fires licked the night sky, and kicked my way through the charred stubble after the men have slashed at the naked stalks and sent them churning through the mill. I have walked forever through the honeyed morning air to the crumbling high school-brave outpost of another civilisation.

  The class always seemed to be on the point of bulging out the windows. If I shut my eyes and thought hard I could probably remember all the faces and put a name to each. One never forgets that first year out of teachers’ college, the first school, the first students. Dellis comes before anyone else, of course, feline and demanding, blotting out the others; Dellis, who sat stonily bored through classes and never turned in homework and wrote nothing at all on test papers. “Can’t understand poetry,” she said by way of explanation. There were detentions and earnest talks. At least, I was earnest; Dellis was bored. She put her case simply: “I’ll fail everything anyway.”

  “But you don’t need to, Dellis. It’s a matter of your attitude, not your ability. What sort of job will you get if you don’t finish high school?”

  “I’ll work at Valesi’s. Or the kitchen at the mill canteen.”

  “Yes, well. But they will be very monotonous jobs, don’t you think? Very boring.”

  “Yes.” Flicking back the long blonde hair.

  “Now just supposing you finished high school. Then what would you do?”

  “Same thing. Work at Valesi’s or in the mill canteen. Till I’m married. Everybody does.”

  “You could go to Brisbane, or even Sydney or Melbourne. There are any number of jobs you could get there if you were to finish high school. There would be theatres to go to, plays to see. And libraries. Dellis, this town doesn’t even have a library.”

  Silence.

  “Have you ever been out of this town, Dellis?”

  “Been to Cairns once.”

  Cairns. Twenty thousand people, and less than a hundred miles away: the local idea of the Big City.

  “Dellis, what are you going to do with your life?”

  No answer.

  I felt angry, as though I were the one trapped in the slow rhythm of a small tropical town. “Can you possibly be content,” I asked viciously, “to work at the mill, get married, have babies, and grow old in this shrivelled-up sun-blasted village?”

  She was mildly puzzled at my outburst, but shrugged it off as being beyond her. “Reckon I’ll have to marry the first boy who knocks me up,” she said.

  “You don’t have to marry anybody, Dellis. No doubt you could fall in love with some boy in this town and be quite happy with him. But is that all you want?”

  “Dunno. It’s better’n not getting married.”

  I knew her parents were not around; perhaps they were dead; though more likely they were merely deserters who had found the lure of fruit picking in the south too rewarding to resist. I knew she lived with a married sister – the usual shabby wooden cottage with toddlers messily underfoot, everyone cowering away from the belligerent drunk who came home from the cane fields each night. The family, the town – it was an intolerable cocoon. She simply had to fight her way out of it, go south. I told her so. But her face was blank. The world beyond the town held neither fascination nor terror. I think she doubted the existence of anything beyond Cairns.

  In the classroom the air was still and fetid. There was the stale sweat of forty students; there was also the sickly odour of molasses rolling in from the mill. An insistent wave of nausea lapped at me. Dellis’s face seemed huge and close and glistened wetly the way all flesh did in the summer. She looked bored as always, though probably not so much at her detention as at the whole wearying business of an afternoon and evening still to be lived through – after which coolness would come for an hour or two, and even fitful sleep. Then another dank day would begin.

  “Dellis, let’s get out of here. Will you go for a walk with me?”

  “Okay,” she shrugged.

  Outside the room things were immediately better. By itself, the molasses in the air was heavy and drowsy, but pleasant. We crunched down the drive and out the gate under the shade of the flame-trees.

  “I love those,” Dellis said, pointing upwards where the startling crimson flaunted itself against the sky.

  “Why?”

  She was suddenly angry. “Why? You always want to know why. You spoil things. I hate your classes. I hate poetry. It’s stupid. Just sometimes there is a bit I like, but all you ever do is ask why. Why do I like it? And then I feel stupid because I never know why. I just like it, that’s all. And you always spoil it.”

  We walked in silence the length of the street, which was the length of the town, past the post office, Cavallero’s general store, Valesi’s Snack Bar, and two pubs. The wind must have been blowing our way from the mill, because the soot settled on us gently as we walked. The men swilling their beer on the benches outside the pubs fell silent as we passed and their eyes felt uncomfortable on my damp skin. At the comer pub, someone called out “Hey, Dellis!” from the dark inside, and laughter fell into the dust as we rounded the comer and turned toward the mill.

  Halfway between the corner and the mill, Dellis said suddenly, “I like the red. I had a red dress for the school dance, and naturally you know what they all said … But the trees don’t care. That’s what I’d like to be. A flame-tree.” We went on in silence again, having fallen into the mesmeric pattern of stepping from sleeper to sle
eper of the narrow rail siding, until we came to the line of cane cars waiting outside the mill. Dellis reached into one and pulled out two short pieces. She handed one to me and started chewing the other.

  “We really shouldn’t, Dellis. It’s stealing.”

  She eyed me sideways and shrugged. “You spoil things.”

  I tore off strips of bamboo-like skin with my teeth and sucked at the soft sweet fibres.

  We had passed the mill, and were on the beach road. Two miles under that spiteful sun. Close to the cane there was some coolness, and we walked in the dusty three-foot strip between the road and the sugar plumes, sucking and chewing and spitting out the fibres. The dust came up in little puffs around our sandals. We said nothing, just chewed and spat. Only two cars passed us. The Howes all hung out of one and waved. The other was a utility truck headed for the mill.

  About one and a half miles along, the narrow road suddenly emerged from its canyon of tall cane. A lot of cutting had been done, and a farmhouse stood alone in the shorn fields, white and blinding in the afternoon sun. The haze of colour around the front door was a profusion of Cooktown orchids, fragile waxen flowers, soft purple with a darker slash of purple at the heart. “Gian’s house,” said Dellis as we walked on, and into the cool cover of uncut cane again.

  Gian! So that was why he always had an orchid to tuck brazenly behind one ear. He was seventeen years old, a Torres Strait Islander: black, six feet tall, a purple flower nestled against his curly hair any time one saw him except in class. Gian, rakishly Polynesian, bending over that day after school till the impudent orchid and his incredible eyes were level with mine.

  “Did you know that I killed my father. Miss?”

  “Yes, Gian. I was told that when I first arrived.”

  “Well?” The eyes were incongruously blue, and watchful under the long silky lashes.

  I knew the court verdict was self-defence, I knew his father had been blind drunk, a wife-beater on the rampage.

  “Well?” Gian persisted.