Oyster Read online

  And Mercy will walk through the wall of fire, oh she has no illusions, nobody can have illusions any more, it is not going to be painless, but she will do it. In the twinkling of an eye she will be translated into her real self, the one Miss Rover saw, the one Jess sees and knows, the one which has always been smouldering and fizzing away somewhere under her skin. There are nights when the hum of this other life burns her fingertips and fills her lungs with so much heat that she has to breathe fast with short little gasps or she will faint.

  But then again . . . maybe everyone in Outer Maroo lives by such lunatic hope?

  And if she did leave . . . if she did get away . . . ?

  Mercy tries to imagine herself in Brisbane. She tries to imagine Brisbane: tall buildings, a river with water in it, grass that is green instead of brown, garden sprinklers, jacarandas. She makes herself walk beneath the jacarandas, a little ghost full of emptiness. No matter how she moves herself through Brisbane, fast or slow, by ferry along the river, by foot, by day, by night, Outer Maroo goes with her like a phantom limb. That is how it would be. That is how it would be for all of us, she knows. We would be like people who have had a leg amputated, or an arm torn off. We would not believe that the missing piece was missing. We would not be able to tolerate the absence. We would have to come back.

  Nevertheless, Mercy would like to believe that possibilities she has not yet thought of could exist, in some other dimension perhaps. After all, could anyone have imagined Oyster before he came? Could anyone have imagined that day when Miss Rover stood on the verandah at Bernie’s and made the whole town hold its breath? So Mercy marks time. She takes messages as they come, she saves little tokens of light. She lets blueness and the spill of soft cotton cloth fill her senses, she gives herself to the lift of them, she holds them, she breathes them out.

  When she opens her eyes again, she must devote her attention to Digby’s truck, which has at last arrived in the street outside, which is rocking into berth at the Shell petrol pumps in front of Beresford’s, which is spilling out the newest shipment of foreigners. The foreigners float beyond the shop window, not yet fully tethered to the red earth, but twisted and pulled into thin wavery shapes by the haze.

  Jake Digby is already on the verandah. He leans against the screen door, his strong sweat-and-whisky smell moving on ahead of him, and he pauses for a moment to make a space for the fog of himself within the hot bubble of the shop. Flies nuzzle his face and he bats them off with his Akubra. He lets the door slam behind him.

  ‘Where’s Ma Beresford?’ he asks, looking around.

  No one answers. Sometimes it takes whole minutes to readapt to the eyes of an outsider, even to one like Jake Digby who comes whenever there are people who insist on being brought, which is not often. The thing is: he comes and he goes. There is a great gulf fixed between Jake Digby and everyone else. In Beresford’s, they suck on this knowledge and move it around in their mouths for longer and longer before they come upon the kernel of any word that can safely be spoken to Jake.

  ‘She’s gotta sign for the water,’ Jake says. ‘I brought ten fifty-gallon drums on spec. Reckoned you could do with ’em, but I gotta get paid up front, and she’s gotta sign for ’em.’

  Rivulets of sweat trickle from his hair and leave route maps in the dust on his face. He is wearing khaki shorts and heavy work boots and a less than clean singlet. He wipes the back of one hand across his forehead. When he lifts his arm, a gust of something like sweet flyblown fruit reaches Mercy and she swallows quickly and rests her hand on the spice jars behind her and concentrates on cinnamon sticks and thyme.

  Everyone is watching the foreigners – there are two of them, a man and a woman – who stand swaying in the heat.

  ‘Been on the road two days,’ Jake says. ‘Came all the way from Quilpie, with one bloody breakdown per day. Found this lot’ – and he jerks his thumb back over his shoulder – ‘at the Quilpie Railway Hotel. Been there weeks, apparently. Not travelling together. Don’t even speak to each other hardly. You’d think they were practically at war. According to the lady there’ – and here Jake indicates by a certain fleeting modulation of the voice that he is using the term in its generic sense, but with grudging respect, and that as far as city types go in general, and city women in particular, this one is a bit of all right – ‘according to the lady, she asked to buy a ticket to Oyster’s Reef, if you can believe where this cock-and-bullshit’s got to, it’s like bloody fairies, it’s like Santa Claus, yer can’t stamp it out. Well how was she supposed to know, eh? she’s a Yank, she read it in the papers over there or got a postcard or something, it’s gone halfway round the bloody world and back again, and some cleverarse joker in the pub told’er she’d have to wait a few days, the line was unnergoing temp’ry repairs. And she believed him, see, well that’s the thing about Yanks, innit? You could sell ’em Ayers Rock.’

  No one laughs. It is all very well for people in Quilpie to make jokes. Quite apart from everything else, people in Quilpie think they are superior because the railway line stitches them to Brisbane. They act, so Ma Beresford’s Bill has informed Mercy, as though you can hear the pulse of the whole bloody nation tick tick ticking in their precious Railway Hotel, in which you can buy the Brisbane papers, well la-di-da, and in which you can even buy unused paperback books and the Australian, and who would want to, could Mercy tell him that, when those toy boys in Canberra and Sydney don’t know a Santa bull from a Simmenthal bull from bullshit, or an artesian bore from a fucking hole in the ground. Hell, any moron with a satellite dish can tell you what the Prime Minister said yesterday (begging Mercy’s pardon, and the pardon of the whole Living Word congregation of which Mercy’s father is the pastor, or used to be; begging the pardon of the whole bang lot of the Living Worders who believe that a satellite dish is the mouth of Satan, and television is his voice in your home), still, with honourable present company excepted, any dope in the pub who is watching the TV over the bar can wank on about foreign policy and the bloody arrogant French in the South Pacific, but it takes intelligence to know when to crop-dust for heliothis in the sorghum or for locusts in the fucking buffel grass. And even though at Mercy’s house they pray for Ma Beresford’s Bill . . . no, that was before; at Mercy’s house they used to pray for Ma’s Bill, that the Spirit of the Lord might put a burning coal on his tongue to purify it, nevertheless they always agreed that he was right about Quilpie, that wicked city.

  ‘Well how was she supposed to know?’ Jake repeats with a touch of belligerence, from which everyone understands that Jake has fallen for his female passenger hook, line and sinker.

  ‘Yeah, Yanks are funny like that,’ someone concedes, finding a voice, a safe thought. ‘They’ll believe anything you tell them.’

  ‘But how could she have known Quilpie was the end of the line, eh?’ Jake is warming to his subject, spoiling for an argument. ‘I found out who the joker was. Gave him a little lesson in manners for his trouble. Should keep him quiet for a while, I reckon.’

  Mercy is squinting, because the heat rearranges people. The two strangers are pleated diagonally like Japanese dolls, rice-papered, their heads stretched out into points that slant away to the right of their feet. When they move, the lines shift in slow motion, and new points form, new angles, new shapes. They rearrange themselves like coloured chips in a kaleidoscope. The woman puts out a hand to steady herself, and for a moment Mercy can see her clearly, but as soon as the woman’s palm touches the flank of the truck, her mouth opens in shock and she goes out of focus again. She cradles her hand against her cheek and then blows on the pads of skin tenderly (Mercy can see two mouths, two hands) and looks around in a sleepwalking way. She is wearing sandals and a sleeveless white dress which comes halfway down her calves, and a floppy straw hat from which a crumpled ribbon trails. The hat, Mercy thinks, has been rammed into suitcases all its life. It is soft and durable, much worn, not fashionable, not a tourist’s hat of the kind Mercy has seen in year-old Women’s Weeklies that Ma
brings back from Quilpie. It could belong to a cattle cocky’s wife. The woman takes the hat off and fans herself. You can tell from the way she puts up her hands and does little tapdance steps that she is not used to bush flies. Folded splinters of her arms whirr around her and she looks at her hands in a blurred way as much as to say: which pieces are me and where oh where have they brought us and what are we doing here? She smiles at the slow ballet of her hands much as a baby does, absorbed in its clever fingers and thumbs. Mercy can see a helpless kind of laughter rising in the woman, and recognises the hysteria that sits on the edge of sunstroke and dehydration. The woman turns toward the man, laughing, inviting him to share an uncertain joke.

  But the man will have nothing to do with uncertainty. The woman’s languorous amusement irritates him. He turns from her, frowning, and studies the road that runs to nowhere in both directions, assessing Outer Maroo’s five public buildings: Beresford’s General Store cum Farmers’ Co-op cum Post Office Agency; the pub; the School of Arts hall, which once served, before dry rot set in, for all dances, wedding receptions, and wakes, as well as for the Country Women’s Association and the Returned Servicemen’s League; and finally the two churches: the Living Word Gospel Hall and St Chrysostom’s, once Catholic, well, still Catholic, no doubt, in secula seculorum, but now unsafe, untenanted, collapsing under the weight of termite colonies, evangelical rivals, and soft rot. The stranger who came on Jake Digby’s truck notes everything with the fierce air of a man taking down evidence. There is something about the mass of him, about the concentration of will, that causes his mirage selves to settle and coalesce. Even with the width of the shop, the window, the verandah, and the road in between, Mercy is mesmerised and can feel the pull of him.

  She thinks suddenly, incongruously, of Gideon.

  She does not want to think of Gideon. Oyster’s Reef streams from Gideon like a vapour trail. She does not want to think of Gideon, though some bodily tic of the stranger perversely reminds her . . .

  Is it Gideon, perhaps, for whom the man has come looking?

  The man makes a decision and crosses the space of red dust and leaps lightly up the verandah steps without even looking to see what the woman is doing. For a moment his hand rests against the screen door, but then he changes his mind and rubs a space in the dust of the window instead, and peers through the grubby glass. He looks directly at Mercy and she holds her breath, although she knows very well, having done it often enough, that when you look into the murky shop from outside in the sunblind light, you see nothing but shadows.

  The man himself is shadowy, framed by the smeared oval clearing he has made. He looks like a formal portrait, sepia tinted, from some other time. Mercy wants to memorise him for her private collection, to file him with the pinfire opal, and with Miss Rover’s books, but she dare not close her eyes in case he vanishes. He has greying hair, once dark, and dark eyes. It will not surprise Mercy if the glass begins to melt where his gaze passes through it. Several tendrils of his hair, damp with sweat, fall across his forehead. His lips are not like the thin hard lips of men in Outer Maroo, but full and soft. Sensual, Mercy thinks. It is a word she has been waiting to use, longing to use, ever since she heard Miss Rover say it. Yes, sensual.

  Mercy’s own lips move responsively, shaping themselves toward something she cannot name, and it occurs to her that she could come out from behind the counter very naturally and cross the shop and check the levels in the grain bins below the window. She should do this, because it must be a couple of days since she has checked the grain levels, and he has not moved, the foreign man, he is still staring through the oval of rubbed glass. She knows he can see nothing except shadows, but at a certain point, when she is close enough, their eyes will meet . . .

  ‘Maybe we could tie a string to ’er and pull ’er back down to earth.’ Jake Digby is snapping his fingers, click click, in front of her face.

  Mercy blinks at him.

  ‘Thought we’d lost you,’ he grins. ‘Got our head in the clouds, have we, love? You gonna tell me where Ma Beresford is, or not?’

  ‘Uhh . . . she’s gone down to Brisbane with Bill,’ Mercy says. ‘With the two big trucks, for supplies. I’m minding the shop while they’ve gone.’

  ‘You’ll have to sign then,’ Jake says. ‘If you want the water.’

  Mr Prophet says stiffly, ‘Mercy can’t sign, she’s under age.’

  ‘Suits me, mate. I’ll take the bloody water back. Gotta be at least ten properties between here and Windorah where I can sell it for whatever price I care to ask. I’ll just have a few beers and I’ll be off.’

  No, no, no, voices protest.

  ‘Hot-headedness,’ Mr Prophet reproaches, ‘is not an asset in business, Mr Digby.’

  ‘Is that so, mate?’

  ‘A little patience, Mr Digby. With a little patience, we can come to an arrangement.’ Mr Prophet always speaks, even when mustering cattle or supervising the winching at the opal digs, in what Mercy thinks of as his prayer-meeting voice. She believes he is not aware of this. His property is a hundred kilometres out of town, well served by an artesian bore, but the bore, alas, has a high sulphur content. Particularly high, most would say; so that, while the water on Jimjimba is fine for livestock, and for the washing of dishes, and even for the taking of showers (once one gets used to the alkaline slick on the skin, and the frightful smell), nevertheless it is not pleasant – decidedly not – for human consumption; although when rainwater tanks are empty, as now, one drinks what one must.

  Mr Prophet speaks. ‘Outer Maroo always needs drinking water,’ he says. He gives the words such a mournful and delicate moral resonance that he seems to have indicated: Thou art weighed in the balances, Jake Digby, and found wanting.

  Jake is impervious. ‘I’m easy, mate. I just gotta be paid, that’s all, cash on the barrel. This is me own initiative, and me own risk, a bit of extra business on the side, as close to legal as you’ll get out here, and at a discount price some blokes would hock their mosquito nets for. But somebody’s gotta sign, because I gotta have legal-looking receipts for the weigh-station johnnies and the tax man, and those blokes have a bad habit of cropping up when you least expect ’em on the other side of Quilpie. Once you hit the bitumen, in fact. The second the road surface improves, that’s me rule of thumb, civilisation is down on yer like a ton of bricks.’

  Mercy, startling herself, offers: ‘I can pay you cash from the safe, Jake. That’s what Ma Beresford would – She’d want me to.’

  ‘I believe she would, Mercy,’ Mr Prophet says. ‘Nevertheless we do not look upon . . . irregularities . . . lightly, Mr Digby. We do not look upon . . .’ In his mind’s eye, perhaps, Mr Prophet looks upon the sulphurous bubbling of his bore-water outlet pipe. ‘In times of drought,’ he murmurs, ‘we cast ourselves upon the Lord.’ He closes his eyes. Perhaps the Lord confides in him. ‘His Ways are not our ways,’ Mr Prophet acknowledges. He clears his throat. ‘This is the Lord’s doing, Mr Digby, although you may well think you have come here of your own accord.’

  The elders cannot help themselves, Mercy has noticed. They must always speak this way, it is like a disease. They reinfect one another at every prayer meeting and become incurable. Once Mercy was afraid for herself, thinking such thoughts. Now she lets them come and go. She lets them stay for a while. She holds them up to the light and examines them. If it were not for Ma Beresford and Ma’s Bill and Miss Rover, if it were not for Miss Rover’s hidden library, if it were not for Jess and Major Miner, how would she have known there was any other way to talk? And since there are these two worlds, one of which she could so easily have missed knowing about, how many others might there be?

  Jake is scratching his crotch. ‘I reckon I’m a bit surprised to hear that God is in on the water traffic.’

  Mr Prophet smiles his sorrowing smile. ‘In spite of yourself, Mr Digby, you are an instrument of the Lord.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jake says. ‘Gimme a break, mate.’

  Mercy cannot bl
ame Jake. She always wants to wipe Mr Prophet’s smiles off her skin.

  ‘Your blasphemy changes nothing, Mr Digby. I will sign for the water. Mercy is too young, her signature would not be lawful.’

  ‘Yeah? So who’s gonna know? A scribble is a scribble. I’ll do it meself for that matter.’ Jake makes a defiant flourish on the white form with a ballpoint pen. ‘Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,’ he says witheringly. ‘An old sinner like me.’ He squints with one eye, and holds out his thumb like a measuring stick, assessing Mercy. ‘Too young, is she? Looks just about the right age to me.’ He runs his tongue around his lips in a particular way, and makes small animal sounds, and winks at Mercy. ‘How old are you, anyway, my luv?’

  ‘Do not answer, Mercy,’ Mr Prophet says.

  Behind his hand, Jake makes a face and rolls his eyes for Mercy’s private benefit, and she presses her lips together to prevent a smile from escaping. ‘What’s this?’ Jake says. ‘Muzzling the witness? I call that buggering up the evidence, which is, I understand, against the law. Gonna have to report this, Mr Holier-than-Thou. How old are you, luv?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ Mercy says, blushing, complicit.

  ‘And never been kissed, eh? Never been touched.’

  Mercy wants to be on Jake’s side against Mr Prophet, but she is unprepared for this remark and that is precisely the problem with foreigners. Any stray comment can turn out to be a hand grenade. In a second, all the air can be sucked from a room. The mosquito net can settle. Mercy’s lungs feel as though they are stuffed with wet towels. She can see warning eyes all over the room. Panicked, she steps toward Jess.