Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read online

I said lamely: “It must have been horrible.”

  “I hated him,” Gian said without passion. “He was a bastard.”

  “I gather many people thought so.”

  “Well?”

  “What are you asking me, Gian? How can I know what was the right thing to do? Only you can know that.”

  “I am the only person in this town who has killed a man. Do you realise that?”

  We stared at each other, and then outrageously he let his eyes wander slowly down my body with blatant intent, and walked away. I was trembling. After that I was always afraid to look Gian in the eye, and he always dared me to. When I turned to write on the board, I could feel two burning spots on the back of my neck. And when I faced the class again, his eyes were waiting, and a slow grin would spread across his face. Yet it was not an insolent grin. That was what was most disturbing. It seemed to say that we two shared a daring and intimate secret. But he knew it and I didn’t.

  Dellis and I had reached the beach. It was deserted. We kicked off our sandals, lay down, and curled our toes into the warm sand. The palms cast a spindly shade that wasn’t much help, but a tired wisp of sea breeze scuffled up the sand refreshingly from the calm water. So amazingly calm inside the reef. I never could get used to it. I had grown up with frenetic surf beaches, but from here you had to go a thousand miles down the coast before you got south of the Great Reef.

  “Dellis, you must visit Brisbane this summer, and give yourself a swim in the surf for a Christmas present. You just can’t imagine how exciting it is.”

  “Let’s go swimming now. It’s so bloody hot.”

  “But we don’t have swimsuits.”

  “Just take our clothes off.”

  “But somebody might come.”

  Dellis stood up and unbuttoned her blouse. “You spoil things,” she said. It hurt when she stood naked in front of me. She was only fifteen, and it wasn’t fair. I almost told her how beautiful she was, but envy and embarrassment stopped me. This is her world, I thought; she is part of it, she belongs. She was tanned all over; there were no white parts. She ran down into the water without looking back.

  I stood up and slipped off my dress, but then my heart failed me, and I went into the water with my underwear on. We must have swum for half an hour, and it was cool and pleasant. Then we ran along the water’s edge for ten minutes or so to dry out. We dressed and lay on the sand again. “It’s good to do that,” Dellis murmured. “It’s the best thing when you’re unhappy.”

  “Are you often unhappy?”

  The look she gave me suggested that if I had to ask such stupid questions, why did I call myself a teacher?

  “What I meant, Dellis, is that I’d like to … if you’re unhappy, I would like to … I mean, if there’s any way I can help …”

  “You don’t even know how to chew cane properly.” She was looking at me with a kind of affectionate contempt, as though I were an idiot child. “You don’t know anything. You really don’t know anything.” She shook her head and grinned at me.

  I smiled back. I wanted to tell her how much I was learning. I would have liked to speak of poetic symbols, and of the significance which flame-trees or Cooktown orchids would henceforth have for me. Instead I said: “Dellis, today … Who would have thought? How could I have guessed, this morning, that today would be so … would be such a … ? Well, a remarkable day.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “You spoil things. Don’t ask me why.”

  She giggled. “But really, why?”

  “It’s very complicated. It has a lot to do with a religious and sheltered background that you couldn’t even begin to imagine, and it would take a lot of explaining. But to put it briefly, it is a truly extraordinary thing for me to have gone swimming naked with one of my students.”

  “You didn’t even take all your clothes off,” she laughed.

  Now the silence was close and comfortable, and longer and drowsier. We must have dozed, because when I sat up again the humidity was even more oppressive and monstrous dark clouds had billowed up out of the sea.

  “There’s going to be a thunderstorm, Dellis. We’d better get home quickly.”

  “Too early in the year,” she said sleepily. And when she saw the clouds, “It’ll ruin a lot of cane.”

  We were walking quickly, and nearly at Gian’s house again when Dellis pointed into the shadowy green maze of the canefield and said, “That’s where Gian and I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Did it. He laid me.”

  “Oh! … I … I see. Your first…?”

  She looked at me, startled, and laughed. “He’s the only one I loved. And the only one I wouldn’t take money from.”

  Virgin and child in a field of green. No madonna could have beheld the amazing fruit of her womb with more awed astonishment than I felt. Something hurt at the back of my head, and I reached up vaguely with my hand. There was a whole ordered moral world there somewhere. But I couldn’t find it. It wouldn’t come.

  I said, inanely: “So you and Gian are in love?”

  “He was going to give me money and I wouldn’t take it. But he was gentle. And afterwards he took the orchid from behind his ear and put it between my legs. I hoped I’d have a baby, but I didn’t.”

  The storm was coming and we fled before the wind and the rain. At the mill we separated, but Dellis ran back and grabbed my arm. She had to shout, and even then I thought I hadn’t heard her properly. Our skirts bucked about our legs like wet sails, runnels of water sluiced over our ears. She shouted again: “Have you ever been laid?”

  “Dellis!”

  “Have you?”

  “This is not … this is not a proper …”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Gian says you’re beautiful. Gian says that you … He says he would like to … That’s why I hated you. But now I don’t.”

  Then we ran for our lives.

  All through my dinner and all through the evening, the rain drummed on the iron roof, and the wind dashed the banana palms against the window in a violent tattoo. For some reason I wanted to dance to the night’s jazz rhythm. But then surely there was something more insistent than the thunder, a battering on my door. She was standing dripping wet on my doorstep.

  “Dellis, for God’s sake, what are you doing here? It’s almost midnight.”

  “They were fighting at home again, and I couldn’t stand it. I brought something for you.”

  She held out a very perfect Cooktown orchid. Somebody’s prize bloom, stolen.

  “Come inside, out of the rain,” I said vaguely, listening to the lines from Eliot that fluted in my head – fragments and images half-remembered. I had to take down the book, so I showed her the passage:

  ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

  ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

  – Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

  Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

  “Dellis,” I said, as (teacherly, motherly) I combed out her wet tangled hair, “for me, you will always be the hyacinth girl.”

  “Poetry!” she sniffed. And then: “What do hyacinths look like?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine they look like Cooktown orchids.”

  The Inside Story

  Genuflection can be disturbing. I noticed the oddly suppliant man when I signed in, his boot soles gawping at the public while someone attended to his ankles. His knees were crammed together on a stackaway chair, his locked hands rested on its back. God damn you, you sons of bitches, he doubtless prayed.

  These things upset me. I was not at all suited to the job
, but I got by with endless inner dialogue and a lunatic devotion to curriculum. After the sign-in, the identicheck, and the various double doors, I asked my class: “Do they always hobble you like that in public?”

  What do you mean, in public? they demanded. This is an exclusive place. You’ve got to belong to be here.

  “It seems so … so unnecessarily distressing. Surely handcuffs are sufficient?”

  It’s not so bad, they said. Except for boarding buses. And for dancing. It’s a definite handicap at dances.

  My class had a very stem rule about cheerfulness. I was often reproached for transgressing it. We can’t afford your romantic empathy, they would say. Please check your angst in at the cloakroom before you see us.

  On the day of the hobbling I had brought the Malamud novel. With The Fixer I hoped to broach barricades that had not bent for Ivan Denisovich. Curriculum content was a sore point, but nothing could be done about it. The budget would not run to a new set of multiple orders and English 101 was blue chip currency with the parole board, not to be traded in lightly. They were stuck with me and my reading list.

  “I thought you would enjoy the prisoner as hero,” I protested.

  Hero! they said witheringly. That whining little Deni- sonovabitch! He’s just your regular run-of-the-mill convict. He’s a paperback hero here only because he’s in Russia. We could tell you a few things that would make us heroes in Russia.

  “I detect jealousy,’ I said. “You’re jealous of Ivan Denisovich, and of Solzhenitsyn too. You want to be famous prisoners.”

  You are a very sassy broad, they said.

  “Kierkegaard suggested that we are all equally despairing, but unless we can write and become famous for our despair, it is not worth the trouble to despair and show it.”

  You people with a tragic world view, they sighed, you make life so difficult for the rest of us.

  George came to the door. He came twice a day in his white coveralls with his pail and putty knife.

  “Haven’t you got any broken windows?” he would ask wistfully.

  He had been doing this for ten years, and is undoubtedly still doing it. A long time ago he killed someone.

  Actually, the class did like the Fixer, solitary and unbowed.

  “Tell me,” I begged with indecent eagerness – I have a sort of prurient interest in the metaphysical underpinnings of others – “how is it possible to endure such brutality and deprivation? How does anyone survive that? How does he stay human?”

  It is comparatively easy, they said, when you are completely alone. It is fairly simple when the guards treat you like a dog. The real danger, the greatest threat, is the friendly keeper.

  “But the degrading body searches?” I pursued. “The invasion of the Fixer’s physical self? How does anyone survive that?”

  The body can adapt to anything, anything at all, they said. Beating, hunger, cold, humiliation. We speak from experience. You would be surprised how simple it is to separate yourself from your body. But head space is another matter. There is no foolproof defence against the invasion of private head space. Ivan Denisovich had it easy. Just plain physical hardship, too exhausting for dreaming or thinking. The Fixer had it much worse, but at least he was alone. We are in graver danger than either of them. We have shrinks and counsellors and classification officers.

  “It is not true that the body can adapt to anything at all,” I said. “I will add Frantz Fanon to your reading list. It is ludicrous for you to talk so glibly when you know nothing of torture or concentration camps or Siberian cold.”

  It is even more ludicrous, they said quietly (they forgave me many moments of rashness), for you who know nothing of either body invasion or head invasion to presume to judge which is worse. We will not read Fanon – although we’ve never heard of him but can guess he’s another tragic bloody humanist – because that would be the kind of invasion of our head space we can’t afford in here.

  “But you see – you must see – it is terribly important to answer these questions. How can there be any hope for us if we don’t have an ideal of moral survival like the Fixer’s? I hear you talking about the ‘sleaze’. I see the gestures you make. I know the men you all consider sleazes. You see, for you too, salvation lies in not being a sleaze.”

  Oh salvation! they said. It is not exactly a major concern here, lady.

  “But it is, it is. Or at least damnation is. The sleaze is damned. But he’s only someone who has cracked under pressure. And all of us must have a cracking point, given torture. I’m deeply ashamed of it, but I’m sure I’d break at the first instant of physical brutality. Or even before that, at the mere fear of it.”

  You are not allowing for the rage, they said. Because you’ve never experienced it, you can’t conceive of the rage you would feel at physical abuse. There’s a lot of energy there. It convinces you you’re right. The Fixer, for example, could see that he was driving those pigs crazy. He had something they wanted so badly – the sight of him snivelling – that it was pure pleasure not to give it to them.

  “I wish I could believe you, but surely fear is greater than rage.”

  Not yours, they said. You get so worked up about these things. A good sign, if you’re hung up on salvation. You’d get mad as hell and it would jolt you right out of all that garbage of fear you carry around inside your skull. Besides, you can take it from us, and we are experts on this subject, you are not and never could be a sleaze.

  No other award, I am embarrassed to confess, has comforted me so much.

  “Haven’t you got any broken windows in here?” George asked from the door. “I fix them good.”

  He sighed.

  “Just ain’t nothing for a skilled craftsman to do these days.”

  “You know,” Jed said to me privately after class, “I don’t mean to make an issue of it. It’s no big thing. But we do know what torture is, we just don’t give it such a fancy name. See, I was twelve when they had me up for B and E the first time. They were interrogating me, you know, licking their dirty lips. Three white cops staring at one naked black kid, scared shitless. Used a fireplace poker to jab me in the balls. You’d be amazed how many cops are perverted queers. But then, you wouldn’t believe me. We’re the guys your mother told you to stay away from. Nothing but grief, baby.”

  One lunchtime, in the staff room, a guard asked me: “Have those snivelling sobs told you their cruddy little life stories yet? Every one a bleeding tragedy. They get better and better in the reruns. Mark my word, by the end of the term your whole class will be orphans with unhappy childhoods.”

  “Another thing,” Jed said to me. “Get the hell out of this job. What kind of a nut are you? You think because we like you you’re safe. You’re too hung up on heroics. That shit just don’t mean anything to us. Listen hard now. To me personally, and to a lot of the guys here, you are the sunshine itself. And I would like to pretend that I would lay down my life etcetera for you. Listen, when they throw me in The Hole, I don’t give an inch. If I were the Fixer, just me against the screws, I wouldn’t crack. But if things were to blow up here – everyone inside against everyone outside – and you were in the middle of it, I couldn’t promise you a thing. I can’t tell you what I’d do. I don’t even know. I’ve been through one riot inside and it scared the shit out of me. I saw some ugly things and I did some ugly things. I’ll tell you something – people inside dread blow-ups more than the screws do. I’m telling you this so you won’t take it personally if anything happens. But I would consider it a favour if you would get your luscious little ass out of here, because you are such a stupid innocent snowflake in this hothouse, you make me weep.”

  * * *

  Protoplasmic, was how I thought of the class. Fluid in shape and structure, observers drifting in and out to watch and listen, credit students being drafted out to yard work or to The Hole or to other penitentiaries, reappearing and d
isappearing.

  I could have looked up records, separated the murderers and thugs from the embezzlers, but I never did. Better not to know. Occasionally fragments of inadvertent information would slip out, but students were generally reticent about their pasts.

  One student was a proselytising tm-er. If you have deep inner tranquillity, he said, you can make disciplined decisions even in times of chaos and crisis. For example, there had been a moment during his last bank robbery when he had a gun pointed at a policeman’s head. In the frenzy of that instant he had had to weigh immediate getaway (which would have been possible had he pulled the trigger) against a lifetime of being wanted for a capital offence. If it were not for tm he would have blasted out in the heat of the moment. As it was, he had only a six-year sentence.

  “Armed bank robbery!” I was astonished. He was slight and dreaming, with the mystic’s eyes of intense vacancy.

  “I was charged with six armed robberies.”

  “Six!”

  “They only have evidence for one,” he said modestly, “and they wouldn’t have got that without plea bargaining. I am a very careful planner. I hate violence.”

  Zen and the art of, I thought.

  George came to the door again.

  “Haven’t you … ?” he asked sadly.

  Oh George, they said, we’d gladly break a window for you. Only it would mean The Hole, you know. Which of course we love – all that privacy and special attention. But we mustn’t be selfish. Been there a lot lately. Got to give someone else a turn.

  “I fix them good,” said George. “I’m a real craftsman. Well, let me know …”

  Christmas was a bad time. During the preceding weeks, a guard came to the classroom door with the day passes, just two or three each day to keep up the air of seasonal expectation. The class was monumentally indifferent. What a bore, they said, when their names were not called. Look at all the snow beyond these cosy walls! Who wants pneumonia for Christmas! No one to cook your meals, no one to see that you’re safely tucked in for the night. New Year’s re-entry hangover, who wants it?