Oyster Read online

  So there was opal and there was Oyster.

  Those who were suitably receptive might have had a leaflet pressed discreetly into their hands on city streets in Brisbane or Sydney. These were handed out by Oyster’s recruiters, and I used to have one that a backpacker, a young American woman, had given to me.

  OPAL: THE VISION SPLENDID

  Pure light and pure truth preserved in the

  womb of Mother Earth.

  Opal is the Logos made manifest.

  Prepare ye the Way of the Lord.

  Join the seekers and ye shall find.

  Contact Spiritual Quests Unlimited

  (phone and fax below)

  Do you see what I mean?

  Some pamphlets, less biblically inclined, claimed that opal was the ovum of the Earth Goddess, and there were occasional arguments, sudden and violent, I understand, on the Brisbane–Quilpie trains, between seekers of differing theological persuasions. There were persistent rumours of underground towns like Coober Pedy, new ones, their presence detectable by the sudden eruption of moonscapes. These were unmistakable, people said, and clearly visible from the air as colonies of white mullock heaps blistering the red earth, the white mounds being the only detectable sign of urban life. It is certainly true that Oyster’s Reef looked like this.

  The towns that were being gossiped about in the railway pubs bore names like De Profundis, Deep Thought and Pascal’s Pit. Entering such towns without a guide was hazardous, the rumour went. People disappeared with no more ado than the sound of an indrawn breath. Abandoned shafts lay in wait for them, lured them, lapped at the edges of their desire for final truth. Without warning, they hurtled down toward the ultimate black opal of their dreams.

  Certain kinds of people – tax inspectors, for example; government surveyors, reporters, Telecom linesmen, cameramen – seemed particularly prone to disappearance without trace. There was, in consequence, a quiet traffic in runic maps which travelled along the stock routes and outback pubs and came with a mantra: ninety per cent of the world’s opal supply. And the pilgrims and seekers and map-buyers told it to themselves like beads: ninety per cent ninety per cent ninety per cent, and only for the pure in heart.

  The stance of the national media (not readily obtained in Outer Maroo, I have to say) toward this ragtag brigade of prospectors was supercilious and was relegated to small filler items deeply buried. There was no evidence whatsoever, the respectable newspapers announced (though the tabloids told a somewhat different story), of any finds beyond agglomerates of worthless potch, and the occasional floater of value, and the not-commercially-viable fortresses of boulder opal. Queensland opal, officially, remained as obdurately inaccessible as ever.

  But the pure in heart were not deterred. They took the train from Brisbane with a ticket to the end of the line: one thousand kilometres of fevered dreaming and spiritual exercises and bore-water showers. Everyone smelt faintly of sulphur. At Quilpie, they hitched rides on anything that moved and kept westward.

  The outback, they murmured to one another.

  The voyage out is the voyage in, they said. They exchanged secret signs, left hand to left hand, palm against palm, thumbs entwined.

  Forty-eight degrees Celsius, they wrote wearily, proudly, on postcards; or possibly, depending on postal destination intended, they wrote instead: One hundred and twenty Fahrenheit at noon.

  And at night, they wrote, it’s freezing. Below freezing point.

  The difference between night and day in the outback is astonishing, they wrote. Out here, everything runs to extremes.

  The Old Fuckatoo was extremely present, that was certain. The length of the drought was extreme. There were extreme degrees of animal panic about. There were too many foreigners, everyone said.

  There were far too many foreigners around.

  And then one day, abruptly, there were none . . .

  The stench, on certain days, was worse after that.

  The drought continued.

  The absence of the foreigners grew vast and oppressive and terrifying. We turned in on ourselves. We hunched into the smelly breast feathers of the Old Fuckatoo.

  We were ashamed.

  We were frightened; or perhaps, I think now, not so much frightened as living in a prolonged state of shock.

  And now more foreigners are on the way . . .

  BOOK ONE

  Outer Maroo

  We are talking about spirits, living spirits and Dreams and tribal areas . . . A lot of gudias [white people] talk about land as if there’s nobody owning it underneath the ground . . . He can drill a bore . . . and make his roads with a bulldozer. But what happened to my tree here. I’ve got that tree here, I was born under that tree. That’s my background in that tree. For so many years it was standing here, for so long . . . We are walking on top of our old people’s bodies.

  Noonkanbah: Whose Land, Whose Law?

  Steve Hawke and Michael Gallagher

  LAST WEEK

  Monday: High Noon

  More foreigners are on the way.

  In Beresford’s, someone looks up and sees Digby’s truck float into view, suspended out there (maybe still twenty miles off, maybe only two), shimmering at the yellow edges of its cabin and rocking gently on the swell of its own heat wave. Someone, one of the men, observing this in the middle of fence-repair calculations, lurches a little and lets a handful of nails leak through his fingers. The nails shuss back into the nail sack, shik shik shik, a shivery rush, metallic.

  This is a sign.

  Any sound can be a sign now, and everyone in Beresford’s goes still. This is the way it is. Everyone watches, everyone listens, everyone disappears behind a vacant look that says It’s no use asking me, I don’t know anything, and the question on everyone’s mind is: where will it end?

  Well. It will end at Oyster’s Reef, of course, where it began, we all know that, but when will it end?

  Mercy has noticed that people cannot live in the ordinary way any more, drifting comfortably along without thinking, the way they used to. Hours used to flow into days and days into time just as smoothly as creeks sail into rivers and rivers to inland seas, or so people say, so books maintain, so Miss Rover – Mercy’s former and only schoolteacher – claimed, and Mercy is inclined to believe that once upon a time these things were so. On certain days she can almost remember when there used to be a slick of water in the pale golden bed of the river and in the concave salt-pan crust of the Sea of Null.

  But now it is no longer certain that B will follow A, or that rivers will ever flow anywhere again, or that the air will not smell of death, and so the people of Outer Maroo are wary, especially where foreigners are concerned, and Mercy can feel the anxiety fluttering around Beresford’s like a bird that cannot find its way out.

  At the soft pock of the falling nails, the spell settles on them all (they are familiar with it now, the way it drops like a mosquito net, suffocating). The clocks become loud, and each second takes twice as long to pass. In slow motion, women turn from the vegetable freezer and gaze out the window where the heat and the thick fragrance of corruption crouch like sluggish, malevolent beasts. Young Alice Godwin and her dreadful mother Dorothy are fingering a bolt of thistledown cotton, their hands full of the soft blue stuff, but the second they see the yellow mirage of the truck drifting in toward anchor, their fingers go slack and the bolt of cloth gallops off the counter and over the floor. Blue billows east and west, soft masses of it puckering at tea-chests, frothing over booted feet, pleating up against saddlery and sorghum sacks and tubs of rice. Ma Beresford is going to be furious, but Mercy catches her breath and shuts her eyes tightly to memorise the lovely rush of colour unspinning itself. She folds it away for safe keeping in those same dream niches where she stores the pinfire opal and the gem-seamed book-rich tunnels of Aladdin’s Rush.

  Visions such as these shimmer and tease and make promises and translate themselves little by little. When Mercy summons them up again and unwraps them, she feels lighthead
ed. She feels that soon she will be able to build a fence with them, no, not a fence, a wall, that soon she will have enough pieces of . . . pieces of . . . ? – what are they? – enough pieces of these things that cannot be turned into darkness, these pieces of light, enough of them to build a wall, four walls, and the walls will be high enough and potent enough to contain everything she knows about Oyster’s Reef, and there will be no windows and no door at all in this room that she will make, this shining bunker, but nevertheless she will put locks on the radiant walls and wrap them in polished steel bands which will flash back the sun, and all the darkness of Oyster’s Reef will be contained within them, on the inside of the fortress, with no possibility of leakage whatsoever, and then Mercy will be able to walk away and will no longer have to know what she knows.

  ‘Mercy,’ Mrs Dorothy Godwin says sharply, irritably. ‘Don’t stand there in a daze, child, when strangers are coming. Help me roll up the blue.’

  ‘Mum,’ Alice Godwin says, ‘I feel sick.’ She presses one hand against her chest and holds the other over her mouth. ‘Mum, can’t we go before they get here?’

  Alice and Mercy exchange a look of pure kinship, pure panic. Their helplessness is like the soft unravelled blue cloth, Mercy thinks; it connects them.

  ‘We will go just as soon as we can, Alice.’ Alice’s mother has no time for weakness, not even in herself, although she is sometimes willing in her own case to grant extenuating circumstance. ‘Don’t talk in that whiney tone, child. Pull yourself together. We will go just as soon as we can.’ Alice’s mother slips several reels of thread into her handbag, a discreet gesture, and one that is executed with the utmost delicacy and grace. All the reels are in garish and impractical colours. It is a point of honour with her to steal nothing that could be of personal use. Honour flourishes in the town of Outer Maroo. Honour will compel Junior Godwin to drop in over the next few days, embarrassed, and equally discreet, to return what his mother took. Everyone knows this will happen.

  Dorothy Godwin knows, and does not know, this. She has the gift of forgetting.

  There is much to forget in Outer Maroo. In Outer Maroo, forgetting and honour are as crucial to survival as a good artesian bore.

  Dorothy Godwin pushes the cardboard core of the unravelled bolt of cloth across the counter. ‘Mercy, the blue.’

  The blue streams silkily through Mercy’s fingers.

  The eyes of Mrs Dorothy Godwin move from face to face. Everyone watches everyone else, warily, eye to eye. Everyone understands that such mutual vigilance is necessary. Mercy thinks of a story in the school reader: the one of the little boy who kept his fist in the dyke all night. If anyone slacks in the hard communal duty of forgetting, she thinks, who knows what sort of inundation will drown the town?

  Alice folds herself over her stomach and whimpers.

  ‘Well,’ her mother sighs. ‘It can’t be helped.’

  No, people murmur.

  What’s done is done, they sigh; and any stranger would instantly conclude: here is a group of people bound by guilt; they dread, and constantly expect, retribution. Or, conversely: here is a group of innocent people dazed by awful circumstance; they know that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly and unjustly against them; they wait haplessly for a harsh and wrongful judgment to be handed down.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ Dorothy Godwin says.

  As though a secret signal has been passed, there is an exodus, carefully unhurried, of Godwins and of several others who have recalled pressing business at far reach. Beyond the verandah, red dust and exhaust fumes plume around their idling cars. As soon as they have seen the new arrivals, they will leave, but they need to know who is coming. They need to take stock. After that, they will go.

  But why is it, Mercy wonders, that they will all drive back to their cattle properties or their sheep stations or to their stake-outs in the opal fields, and not one of them will simply drive away? And why is it that from time to time, not often, certainly, but there has after all been a slow trickle of visitors since . . .

  since . . .

  . . . there has been a steady trickle of visitors in these past twelve months since Oyster’s Reef disappeared . . . since people began to come looking for the missing . . .

  So why is it that Jake Digby occasionally arrives with passengers, but no passengers ever leave with him again?

  That thought catches Mercy off guard, and she breathes quickly and hugs herself in the manner of Alice Godwin. Jess puts her hand on Mercy’s shoulder. ‘Hush,’ she murmurs, or seems to murmur. ‘It will be all right.’

  Everyone looks at Jess.

  One of the men, laughing a little, relieved to have something to laugh at, says to Jess: ‘I could’ve sworn I heard you speak, Old Silence.’

  Jess looks at him without smiling and nods.

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Mercy foolishly tries to explain, but there really is no need. Spoken thoughts or unspoken, everyone has the same ones, and Mercy presses her crossed arms harder against her stomach and curls herself over her sickness till the feeling passes.

  Jess touches Mercy on the cheek with the back of her hand, motherly. It will be all right, her gesture says, but Mercy fears that it means goodbye, that Jess is about to leave, that she will walk out of the shop, across the verandah, across the dust to Bernie’s Last Chance, where she will be instantly absorbed by the washing of floors, or the making of steak and kidney pies, or the pulling of drinks at the bar, whatever Bernie needs. Then Mercy imagines, feverishly, that Jess will hang up her apron on the peg behind the kitchen door, and that she will walk away toward the Red Centre and disappear, as so many have disappeared. She clutches Jess’s hand convulsively, and Jess does not let her hand go.

  She can feel Jess’s thoughts coming back to her through the pressure of Jess’s hand. It’s all right, Jess says. I’m not going. And I know what you meant.

  What Mercy meant, what she meant, was not the obvious. Of course any passengers arriving with Jake cannot leave, that is understood. It is horrible, it is more horrible every time, but that is the way things are. The question is: why does no one else ever leave? – not counting Miss Rover, who was in a different category, a different category altogether, Mercy is quite clear about that. Miss Rover was very suddenly transferred, and in any case that was before things at Oyster’s Reef got out of hand. Teachers were always in a different category.

  Teachers never belong, people said. They come and they go.

  From the small towns of western Queensland, they mostly go.

  But why, Mercy asks herself, does no one else leave? Leave and not come back, that is; because obviously Mercy does not count the small convoys that go to Longreach or to Quilpie or to Brisbane to sell the opals and to bring supplies back: to bring food, beer, drinking water, drums of petrol, clothing, haberdashery, bolts of blue, supplemental fodder for the cattle and sheep until the drought lifts, spare parts for the tunnelling machines and the blowers, for the winches, for the hammermill mixers, for the augers, for all the grazier’s and the opal miner’s needs. No one wants supply-company men arriving unannounced, so people leave and come back, yes. They leave in fours: two trucks per trip, two drivers per truck; and they return in six, ten, fourteen days.

  But why does no one simply leave, the way Miss Rover did, without looking back? Petrol rationing is one reason, of course; the fact that petrol is kept under lock and key. But even the people with access to petrol come back. Why? This interests Mercy, the riddle of what it is exactly that has glued them all together. At night she lies awake and ponders it. She constructs thought experiments and unravels them and follows their threads. Ma Beresford and Ma’s Bill, for example . . . suppose they failed to come back from a provisioning trip, what then? Suppose they sold a whole shipment of opals, and kept the money, and bought airline tickets to Tahiti?

  Suppose Mr Prophet failed to return from the sheep and cattle sales in Longreach or Charleville or Roma?

  Or consider Mercy herself. Could
she leave?

  Suppose she were to climb aboard Jake’s truck one day, suppose her parents permitted it, suppose the elders permitted it . . . well, of course no one would actively permit it, but suppose they were to turn a blind eye? Well, of course they would not turn a blind eye, but suppose she were somehow to sneak on the truck anyway, suppose she were to hide under a seat until Jake reached Birdsville or Windorah, and suppose she were then to hitch another ride east to Quilpie, and then take the train to Brisbane or to Sydney or to . . . well, to anywhere. The unlimited possibilities make her dizzy.

  Could she do that? Anxiety drums against the underside of her skin. She tents her hands and presses her fingertips together and there seems to be a low electric humming in her veins like pins and needles, like hope perhaps, because the stunning thought comes to her that she could, she could, she could leave on Digby’s truck, technically she could. And perhaps one day she will. She will, yes. She will fly through the window of Outer Maroo. One day. She will escape, possibly, in spite of so much evidence that there is only one way to leave town. In Mercy’s case, an exception will be made. Something will happen. Any day now, perhaps today, someone not yet known to her will arrive in Outer Maroo, perhaps today on Digby’s truck, and there will be a certain kind of light around this person which Mercy will recognise, and the stranger will look at Mercy in a certain way, and Mercy will look back, and the stranger will beckon, and Mercy will go to the stranger like a sleepwalker without a second’s pause and without looking over her shoulder, the way people did when Oyster first arrived in town, but this will be different. This stranger will be as different from Oyster as day from night.