North of Nowhere, South of Loss Read online

  It was a tea rose, a rich ivory. Champagne-coloured, perhaps. Off white, I would probably say to him in some future joust. His mother hovered over it like a quick bird, darting, plucking off dead petals, curled leaves, a tiny beetle, a grasshopper, an ant.

  “You’ve kept them up beautifully,” I said.

  “And I call this one Ed, I’ve planted a cutting on his grave.”

  There was something about the way she bent over it, something about her gaunt crooked arms and the frail air of entreaty, that made me think of a praying mantis. Maybe she heard my thought, or maybe the grasshopper she pinched between finger and thumb reminded her. “He said something about a praying mantis,” she said. “You asked him about it, Philippa. What was that thing?”

  “The ootheca.”

  “Funny word, isn’t it?” She pulled her housecoat around her and tightened the sash. “He won’t be there for lunch, will he?”

  I bit my lip. “He had to take an early flight,” I said. It was and it wasn’t a lie. We both knew it. “He had to be back in Melbourne.”

  She concentrated on the roses, bending her stick limbs over them, a slight geometric arrangement of supplication. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t like going out. We never did, Ed and me.” She straightened up and turned away from me, walking toward the gate. “I hope you won’t mind, Philippa, if I don’t …” At the gate, she reached up and picked a frangipani and gave it to me. “Could you tell him,” she said, “that I’ve still got his crystal set? It’s in his room. I thought he might, you know … I thought one day he might …”

  I held the creamy flower against my cheek. It’s excessive, I thought angrily, the smell of frangipani, the smell of Brisbane. I had to hold onto the gate. There was surf around my ears, I was caught in an undertow. When I could get my voice to come swimming back, I’d tell her about the safety layer that Brian kept around his mum and his dad.

  NORTH OF NOWHERE

  They are curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door to the reception room and come in off the esplanade. Their walk is different too; loose, somehow; as though they have teflon joints. Smile propulsion, Dr Foley whispers, giving her a quick wink, and Beth presses her lips together, embarrassed, because it’s true: they do seem to float on goodwill, the way hydrofoil ferries glide out to the coral cays on cushions of air. Friendliness spills out of them and splashes you. Beth likes this, but it makes her slightly uneasy too. It is difficult to believe in such unremitting good cheer.

  Of all the curious things about Americans, however, the very oddest is this: they wear their teeth the way Aussie diggers wear medals on Anzac Day. They flash them, they polish them, they will talk about them at the drop of a hat.

  “Got this baby after a college football game,” Lance Harris says, pointing to a crown on the second bicuspid, upper left. Lance is here courtesy of Jetabout Adventure Tours and a dental mishap on the Outer Reef. “Got a cheekful of quarterback cleats, cracked right to the gum, I couldn’t talk for a week. It was, let me see, my junior year, Mississippi State, those rednecks. Hell of a close fight, but we beat ’em, all that matters, right? Keeps on giving me heck, but hey, worth every orthodontist’s dollar, I say.”

  Beth never understands the half of it, but in any case, what can you make of people who talk about their teeth? She just smiles and nods, handing Dr Foley instruments, vacuuming spit. American spit is cleaner than Australian spit, that’s another interesting difference. Less nicotine, she thinks. No beer in their diets. But Scotch is yellowish too, wouldn’t that …? and certainly the boats that go beyond Michaelmas Cay for marlin are as full of Johnnie Walker as of American tourists with dreams. Champagne too. She’s seen them onloading crates at the wharf. She imagines Lance’s wife, camcorder in hand, schlurping up into her videotape Lance’s blue marlin and his crisp summer cottons and the splash of yellow champagne and the dazzling teeth, whiter than bleached coral. How do they get them so white? Here I go, she thinks, rolling up her eyes for nobody’s benefit but her own. Here I go, thinking about teeth. What a subject.

  She wonders, just the same, about amber spit and clear spit. Is it a national trait?

  “Australians don’t floss,” Lance mumbles, clamp in mouth, through a break in the roadwork on his molars.

  Beth’s hand flies to her lips. Has she done it again, blurted thought into the room? Possibly. She’s been jumpy, that’s why; ever since the dreams began again, the dreams of Giddie turning up. Or maybe she just imagined Lance spoke. Maybe she gave him the words. Her head is so cluttered with dialogue that bits of it leak out if she isn’t careful.

  “It astonishes me, the lack of dental hygiene hereabouts,” Lance says. “We notice it with the hotel maids and the tourist guides, you know. As a dentist, it must break your heart.”

  “Oh, we manage,” Dr Foley says. He lets the drill rise on its slick retractable cord and winks at Beth from behind his white sleeve. She lowers her eyes, expressionless, moving the vacuum hose, schlooping up the clear American words.

  “You see this one?” Lance mumbles, pointing to an incisor. “Thought I’d lost this baby once, I could barely …” but the polished steel scraper gently pushes his consonants aside and only a stream of long shapeless untranslatable vowels grunt their way into the vacuum tube.

  If we put all the tooth stories end to end, Beth thinks, we could have a twelve volume set. Oral history, Dr Foley calls it, laughing and laughing in his curious silent way at the end of a day, the last patient gone. Every American incisor and canine has its chronicle, lovingly kept, he maintains, laughing again. Many things amuse him. Beth can’t quite figure him out. She loves the curious things he says, the way he says them. She loves his voice. It’s the way people sound when they first come north from Brisbane or Sydney. He seems to her like someone who became a dentist by accident.

  As he cranks down the chair, he murmurs: “The Annals of Dentition, we’re keeping a chapter for you, Lance.”

  “I’m mightily obliged to you, Doctor, mightily obliged. Fitting me in at such short notice.” Lance shakes the dentist’s hand energetically. “And to you too, young lady.” He peers at the badge on Beth’s uniform. “Beth,” he reads. “Well, Miss Elizabeth, I’m grateful to you, ma’am. I surely am.”

  “It’s not Elizabeth,” she says. “It’s short for Bethesda”

  “And a very fine city Bethesda is, yes ma’am, State of Maryland. I’ve been there once or twice. Now how did you come by a name like that?”

  “The tooth fairy brought it,” Beth says.

  Dr Foley’s eyebrows swoop up like exuberant gulls, then settle, solemn. Lance laughs and, a little warily, pats Beth on the shoulder.

  “Well, Lance,” the dentist says in his professional voice. “Fight the good fight. Floss on. Mrs Wilkinson will handle the billing arrangements for you.” He ushers the American out, closes the door, and leans against it. “Don’t miss our thrilling first volume,” he says to Beth, madly flexing his acrobatic brows. His tone has gone plummy, mock epic, and she can hear his silent laughter pressed down underneath. “Wars of the Molars. Send just $19.95 and a small shipping and handling charge to Esplanade Dental Clinic, Cairns –”

  “Ssh,” she giggles. “He’ll hear.”

  “No worries. Now if Mrs Wilkinson hears me –”

  “She might make you stand in the corner.”

  “You’re a funny little thing,” he says, leaning against the door, watching her, as though he’s finally reached a judgment now that she’s been working a month. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” she says, defensive. “It’s on my application.”

  “Oh, I never pay attention.” He brushes forms aside with one hand. “I go by the eyes in the interview.” Beth feels something tight and sudden in her chest, with heat branching out from it, spreading. “You can see intelligence. And I look for a certain livel
iness. You haven’t been in Cairns long, I seem to remember.”

  “No.”

  “Just finished high school, I’ve forgotten where.”

  “Mossman.”

  “Hmm. Mossman. No jobs in Mossman, I suppose.”

  “No,” she admits. “Everyone comes down to Cairns.”

  “Does your father cut cane?”

  He might have winded her.

  “Well,” he says quickly, into the silence, “none of my –”

  “My father raises Cain,” she says tartly.

  His eyebrows dart up again, amused, and spontaneously he reaches up to touch her cheek. It’s a fleeting innocent gesture, the sort of thing a pleased schoolteacher might do, but Beth can hardly bear it. She turns to the steriliser and readies the instruments, inserting them one by one with tongs. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not funny at all, I suppose. And none of my business.”

  She shrugs.

  “I didn’t realise Beth was short for Bethesda,” he says.

  “It’s from the Bible. Mum gave us Bible names”

  “It’s rather stylish.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m pleased with your work, you know.”

  “Thank you.” She fills the room with a shush of steam.

  “Listen,” he says, “after I close the surgery, I always stop for a drink or two at the Pink Flamingo before I go home. You want to join me?”

  “Uh …” She feels dizzy with panic. Anyway, impossible. She’d miss dinner. “Uh, no thanks, I can’t. Dinner’s at six. We’re not allowed to miss.” She keeps her back to him, fussing with the temperature setting.

  “Not allowed?”

  “At the hostel.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says doubtfully. “Well, I’ll drop you home then.”

  God, that’s the last thing she wants. “No. No, really, that’d be silly. It’s way out of your way, and the bus goes right past.”

  “You’re a funny little thing, Bethesda,” he says, but she’s reaching into the steriliser with the tongs, her face full of steam.

  “Girls,” Matron says from the head of the table. “Let us give thanks.”

  Beth imagines the flap flap flap of those messages which will not be spoken winging upwards from Matron’s scrunched-shut eyes. Thank you, O Lord, for mournful meals. Thank you for discipline, our moral starch, so desirable in the building of character. Thank you for stiff upper lips. Thank you for the absence of irritating laughter and chatter at the table of St Margaret’s Hostel for Country Girls. Thank you that these twenty young women, sent to Cairns from Woop-Woop and from God Knows Where, provide me with a reasonable income through government grants; in the name of derelict fathers, violent sons, unholy spirits, amen; and also through the urgings of social workers and absurdly hopeful outback schools. Thank you that these green and government-sponsored girls, all of them between the dangerous and sinward-leaning ages of sixteen and twenty-four, are safely back under my watchful eye and curfew, another day of no scandal, no police inquiries, no trouble, thanks be to God.

  “We are grateful, O Lord,” Matron says, “for your abiding goodness to us, and for this meal. Amen.”

  And the twenty young women lift grateful knives and forks. Beth, hungry, keeps her eyes lowered and catalogues sounds. That is finicky Peggy, that metal scrape of the fork imposing grids and priorities. Peggy eats potato first, meat second, carrots last. Between a soft lump of overcooked what? – turnip, probably – and some gristle, Beth notes the muffled flpp flpp of gravy stirred into cumulus mashed clouds, that is Liz, who has been sent down from the Tablelands to finish school at Cairns High. Liz’s father is a tobacco picker somewhere near Mareeba, and Liz, for a range of black market fees, can supply roll-your-owns of head-spinning strength. That ghastly open-mouth chomping is Sue, barely civilised, who has only been here a week, dragged in by a district nurse who left her in matron’s office. Where’s this bedraggled kitten from then? matron asked, holding it at arm’s length. From Cooktown, the district nurse said. Flown down to us. You wouldn’t believe what we deal with up there. North of nowhere, believe me. In every sense.

  “Inbreeding,” Peggy sends the whisper along. “Like rabbits. Like cane toads, north of the Daintree. If this one’s not a sample, Bob’s your uncle. Whad’ya reckon?”

  What does Beth reckon, between a nub of carrot and a gluey clump of something best not thought about? She reckons that this, whisper whisper, is the sound of matron’s own stockinged thighs as Matron exits, kitchen-bound.

  “Oh Christ, look at Sue,” Peggy hisses. “Gonna cry in her stew.”

  A sibilant murmur circles the table like a breeze flattening grass – Sook, sook, sook, sook! – barely audible, crescendo, decrescendo, four-four time, nobody starts it, nobody stops. Stop it! Beth pleads inwardly. Malice, a dew of it, hangs in the air. Sue wants her Daddy. Nudge, nudge. Maybe she does it with her brother.

  “Leave her alone,” Beth says.

  Peggy makes a sign with her finger. “Well, fuck you, Miss Tooth Fairy Queen.”

  “Girls,” Matron says. “Jam pudding and custard for those who leave clean plates.”

  * *

  January presses hotly and heavily on the wide verandah. Beth, in cotton shortie nightie and nothing else, lies on the damp sheet and stares through the mosquito net at a tarantula. How do they squat on the ceiling like that? If it falls, it will fall on Peggy’s net. Please fall, Beth instructs it. She beams her thoughts along the road of moonlight that runs straight from the louvres to the eight hairy legs.

  Night after night, the tarantula will show up in exactly the same spot, but is gone by day. There’s another. It has been camped below the louvres, opposite Corey’s bed, for six nights. Then suddenly both of them will pick new stations. Or maybe they change shifts. Maybe there are hordes of tarantulas waiting their turn in the crawlspace below the verandahs? What do they see from the ceiling? Ten bunks on the east verandah, ten on the west. Do they sidle in through the glass louvres that enclose the verandahs? The louvres are always slanted open to entice sea breezes. Is that how the spiders get in? And where do they hide by day?

  No one worries about them. Or perhaps, Beth thinks, no one admits to worrying about them, though everyone takes note of where they are before the lights go out. As long as she can still see, by squinting, the filaments of spiky hair on the spider’s legs, Beth can stop the tide from coming in. She can keep back the wave that has her name on it.

  Beyond the spider, beyond the louvres, she can see the tired palms that bead the beaches together, filing south and south and south to Brisbane, reaching frond by frond by a trillion fronds north to Cape York. She can hear the Pacific licking its way across the mangrove swamps and mud flats, though the tide is far out. God, it’s hot! She reaches to her right and yanks at the mosquito net, tucked under the mattress, and lifts it to let in some air. Uhh … bite! Bite, bite, bite. God, they’re fast little blighters, noisy too, that high-pitched hum, it could drive you crazy in five minutes flat. She hastily tucks the net in again and swats at the stings. Greedy bloated little buggers. By moonlight, she examines the splats of blood on forearm and thigh.

  “Who’s making all the fucking noise?” complains someone, drowsy.

  “Can mosquitoes spread AIDS?” Beth asks.

  “Ahh, shuddup ’n go to sleep, why don’t ya?”

  But if dentists can …? Beth wonders. She is fighting sleep, she is fighting the wave coming in.

  She fans her limp body with her cotton nightie, lifting it away from herself, flapping air up to the wet crease beneath her breasts. There is no comfort. The tide is coming in now.

  Every night the tide comes in. It seems to well up from her ankles. She feels this leaden heaviness in her calves, her thighs, her belly, her chest, it just keeps rising and rising, this terrible sadness, this sobbing, it can’t be stopped, it bubbles up into her throat, it is going to choke her, drown her, she has to stuff the sheet in her mouth to shut it up.

  Then she goes
under the wave and sleeps.

  Black water. Down and down and down.

  Beneath the black water, beneath the wave, in a turquoise place, the pink flamingos swim. Their breath is fragrant, like frangipani, and when Beth vacuums the bright pink ribbons of their spit, pouff, tables appear, and waitresses in halter tops and gold lame shorts. This way, the waitresses say, and Beth follows, though the sandy path between the tables twists and turns. There are detours around branching coral, opal blue. Here and there, clamshells lurk with gaping jaws. At every intersection, the bright angelfish dart and confuse.

  “Where is he?” Beth calls, and the waitresses turn back, and beckon, and wink. “Is he waiting for me? Is he still here?”

  The waitresses smile. “He is always just out of reach,” they murmur. “See? Can you see?” The waitresses point. And there he is beyond a forest of seaweed, fiery red. He sips a piña colada that wears a little purple paper parasol like a hat, but when she fights her way through the thicket of seaweed, he’s disappeared.

  “Terribly sorry,” the waitresses say, winking, “but he’ll be right back. Dental emergency. Floss on, he says, and he’ll join you as soon as he can. He really really likes your work. He really likes you, you know.”

  And all the waitresses line up and link arms and kick up their legs in a can-can dance. He really really really really likes you, they sing, but they roll their eyes to show it’s just a sick joke and then she sees that the waitresses are Peggy and Liz and Corey and Matron herself and she throws the piña colada at them and they disappear.

  But their laughter stays behind them like the guffaw of a Cheshire cat. Sook, sook, sook, it splutters, hissing about Beth’s ears. We can hear you crying in your sleep.

  No, Beth protests. Never! Never ever.

  Nevermore, the waitresses sing, offstage. He’s gone for good.

  No, Beth argues. That isn’t true.

  And see, he’s coming back, he is, she can’t mistake his coat, there it is, yes, white against the brilliant coral, starch against sea-hair flame, but she won’t turn her head, she’s not going to make a fool of herself, she pretends not to see. She wants to be surprised. She wants to feel a light touch on her cheek and then she will turn and then …