Oyster Read online

  ‘Hush,’ Jess murmurs. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You should wash your mouth out, Mr Digby,’ Mr Prophet says.

  Jake laughs easily. ‘Bloody good idea. Just as soon as I get to the pub.’ He winks at Mercy, not noticing the change in the silence, or perhaps choosing not to. ‘Remind me to send you something belated for your birthday, darling. Something you won’t forget for your sweet sixteenth.’ Jake rocks his hips back and forth, suggesting promises, an arc of them, a trajectory. ‘Just kidding, luv,’ he winks. ‘Got a daughter meself, and I’d shoot the donger off of any fancyman who laid a finger on ’er. Hey, let’s get moving. Give us a hand, you blokes. I need help to unload the water.’

  The screen door slams behind him.

  Mercy, awash in confusion, watches almost everyone follow. She buries her face in Jess’s shoulder. ‘I have to go now,’ Jess says. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  Mr Prophet opens the screen door to let Jess pass. He closes it again, and looks back into the shop. The weight of his gaze is like a grey week of prayer meetings.

  ‘The Lord be with you, Mercy,’ he says.

  She should say, she knows she should: And also with you, Mr Prophet. She tries to. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. The door squeals, sighs, lets in the heat, lets in the odour of dead and dying cows, bangs shut again.

  He is a righteous man, Mr Prophet. Mercy tries to like him. He is, Mercy’s father says, a man in torment.

  Mercy can smell fear on him.

  She is afraid of him.

  The Lord be with us, she thinks nervously, from habit. But she no longer has any confidence that the Lord is anywhere at all.

  THIS WEEK

  Jess: Mapmaking

  Now that the end of the world is upon us (the end of the world as we have known it in Outer Maroo), it has seemed to me sensible to start there, with the beginning of the end, just last week, the day the foreigners arrived. But beginnings and endings have always puzzled me. How can we tell one from the other, since they so inevitably swallow their own tails, their own tales? Here we go round the mulberry bush, forever chasing those two trollops, those two teases, those tarts, Start and Stop. Both the flash of the starter’s gun and the finishing post are so dependent on point of view, they are so damned tantalising, that the very idea of pinning them down provokes.

  Another damned photo finish, my dad, a great man for the horses, used to fume; and what he always meant was that someone standing somewhere else had cheated him out of fair winnings.

  As for the spectacular photo finish of Outer Maroo, I am as troubled by the telling as by the tale, one person’s termination point being another’s brave new world.

  Consider Ethel. She sits there, cross-legged in the red dust at the edge of the bora rings, smiling to herself, rocking gently backwards and forwards as though she hears singing and the rhythmic stamping of feet in the gidgee boughs. She has been putting the scattered rocks back where they belong, filling gaps in the circles and centuries. They have been here, the bora rings, for over twenty thousand years, it is believed; it is only in the past hundred, a hiccup in time, that indifferent graziers and the treads of their four-wheel drives have scattered the stones and have imprinted zippered scars across their sacred clay skin.

  From time to time Ethel grins at me, and her teeth flash in her black face like stark white lightning.

  ‘My mob chuckling up their sleeves,’ she tells me. ‘My mob been here all along. They been waiting for this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought your mob were wearing sleeves.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jess,’ she grins. ‘Whitefella Maroo been and gone once, and been and gone twice, and we’re still here, my mob and me.’

  She is waiting for a lost language to come back to her. She believes it will rise out of the stones. It will drift into her, into the place where words are made, with the smoke from the gidgee leaves. She pokes at her smouldering branches with a stick. She is waiting for a name other than Ethel to rise out of them, for the name she was never given but should have been, for the name history took from her. She is waiting to meet her other self. She is waiting for her name to settle into her cupped hands, knowing that it might not come from the smoke because there is no predicting the ways of the Old People. It might fall from a passing bird. The Wandjinas might bring it. It might slither over her arm. She, the rock python might set it down beside her. She waits.

  ‘Reckon us Murris got the last laugh,’ she says complacently. The Murris in their serried invisible ranks crowd around her. She sees them all. ‘You just johnny-come-latelies, Jess. You and Major M.’

  As for what is visible: there are only three of us left here; one Murri woman, and two of us johnny-come-latelies.

  There may be more survivors, we hope there are more survivors, there will certainly be survivors out on some of the properties, there’ll be jackaroos, some station hands, there may even be survivors in town, but we can only be sure of ourselves. For those few who got away before the end, in the opposite direction, toward Brisbane, we have hopes but no information. Everything depends on the wind, and on how it shifted, and on where their Land Rover was when it shifted.

  There are three of us left on this side of town: Major Miner, Ethel and myself, camped out here among the breakaways. To the east, the bushfire rages like a mad thing, like a dragon unleashed. It bucks its tail and snorts and coils itself around boulders and trees and pushes its own wind systems from its throat. We can feel its hot breath. We can hear it roar and spit and blaspheme. If it so chooses, if the fancy takes it, it can lift its long neck and flick its tongue in our direction and translate us into white heat and into clear gaseous nothing. We could never outstrip it, not even with both petrol tanks full and Major Miner’s foot to the floor. It is the Beast of the Apocalypse run amok.

  This is the Day of Wrath.

  I write because what else is there to do? I write against time. I write against the whim of the fire. If the flames pass over us, I would like a record, at least, to survive. This is a sort of primitive magic I’m engaged in, I recognise that, and I’m well aware that whatever I get written won’t last nearly as long as the bora rings; but at least it will huddle safely under Cretaceous layers older than the first firestick. Inside the Land Rover’s metal toolbox, hidden down one of the shafts, it will wait for the next millennium. In ten years, fifty, two hundred, when someone stumbles across the mine, all the opal will be crazed from the heat. The skin of the metal box will fall away in black flakes. The paper will be frail. Perhaps my writing will be stranger than runes.

  Of course, this tinpot end-of-the-world with its one hundred k radius is not the first endgame for Outer Maroo. Armageddons come and go out here, like everywhere else, a dime a dozen all over the world: all of them horrific for those involved, all of them quickly forgotten. But this little end of the world has come early. It is ahead of schedule, this one; ahead of Oyster’s prediction. This end of the world is a much more lower-case mickey-mouse affair than Oyster would have liked (set off by accident and ludicrous miscalculation) and it did not wait for the zeros to flip over. It would have hurt his pride, this explosive fuck-up. Oyster got the date and the scope of it wrong, though those are the least of his errors.

  Speaking of which, speaking of the year 2000 . . .

  But here is the problem: if that is the end point, where to begin?

  How can I speak of Oyster’s 2000 without grief? It is torture, this impotence; knowing that it is possible (not likely, perhaps, but possible) that people are still alive over there, inside the ring of the fire. There is nothing we can do. The heat beats us back like a blowtorch.

  ‘I think it’s quick, actually,’ Major Miner says. ‘Smoke inhalation and shock take care of things, I think, thank God.’

  I want to believe him.

  We wait. We watch.

  I think of famous last words, of last year, of last week . . .

  I can’t make sense of time, particularly not out here where the Firs
t Ones speak to Ethel in lost tongues, where she hears corroborees from the last millennium, where the Old People sing of the ocean that used to lap these inland rocks, where the fire scorches yesterday and will burn into several tomorrows; but I do know that time does not run in a straight line, and never has. It is a capillary system, mapped outwards from whichever pulse point the observer occupies. I happen to know plenty about mapping. In another life, another time system, an earlier incarnation altogether, I was a surveyor and cartographer for the state of Queensland, Australia. I know only too well the extent to which maps are magic systems. I know all about the hocus-pocus of precision instruments and of time.

  To put this another way, stepping into a story or constructing a map are much the same thing; and both are like tossing a stone at a window: the cobwebby lines fan out from the point of impact in all directions at once.

  I began with the beginning of the end, one week ago. But of course, the end began long before that. Perhaps I should start one year earlier, with the event that was the indirect cause of the arrival of last week’s visitors, an event crouched like a toad, loathsome, in all our dreams; by which I mean, of course, the abrupt and spectacular disappearance of Oyster’s Reef. But I cannot bear to start there.

  In any case, how could I start there, without explaining . . . ?

  So perhaps it is better if I begin two years ago, with that terrible day when Susannah Rover, as the town so carefully, so delicately, so euphemistically put it, was ‘transferred’.

  Or perhaps three years back, when she arrived?

  Or I could begin more than a year before her arrival, on the broiling December day just before Christmas when Oyster himself arrived.

  Surely that is the real beginning of the end?

  And yet Oyster’s coming looks so utterly different from this vantage point, knowing what I now know, than it did when he staggered into town, so different that I do not know how I can begin to reconstruct that day without misrepresenting it.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh God, Major! Don’t do that to me.’

  He has this way of materialising, Major Miner, this way of seeming simply to appear from fissures in the mesa where the veins of opal run.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  ‘I was tying myself in knots.’

  ‘Join the club,’ he sighs. ‘Doesn’t do any good, though.’

  We both stare at the cavorting horizon where it leaps into red and orange peaks.

  ‘I hate this,’ he says. ‘I hate it. Not being able to do anything. It drives me crazy.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why I can’t get Quilpie on the CB. Can’t raise anyone anywhere. There has to be some stray trucker somewhere between here and Innamincka . . . but I can’t raise a bloody peep.’

  ‘The fire must interfere.’

  ‘Shouldn’t. I don’t see how or why.’

  ‘Anyway, no one would get here from Quilpie in time to do anything,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he admits. ‘I’d feel better, that’s all.’

  ‘And what would they do for water?’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know. But I would have done something. I’d feel as if I’d done something.’

  ‘You did do something. We both did.’

  ‘Yes. But the things we did . . .’

  That is the trouble with complicity. It is so intricate; it is like a gigantic cobweb; it clings; you can never get it off; you can never tell where any one thread is going to lead.

  ‘The things we did,’ he sighs. ‘The things we didn’t do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were writing.’

  ‘A bit. Mostly thinking.’

  ‘Old habits die hard. You’re a compulsive mapmaker, Jess.’

  It’s true. He knows I’m trying to map the last four years. ‘I’ve plotted the reference points,’ I tell him. ‘But I can’t decide where to begin.’

  He laughs. ‘Yeah. That’s a question and a half, for bloody sure.’ He shakes his head, watching the horizon. ‘Talk about depressing déjà vu. Reminds me of the fall of Singapore, fires everywhere, end of a whole way of life. You knew it was the end.’ He studies the palms of his hands with amazement, as though the lines on them might offer some clue. ‘I was nineteen years old and scared to death.’

  He shocks me like that from time to time, reminding me how long he’s been around. It’s hard to think of him as an old man: all that energy, that quickness of movement, the wiry body, the agile mind. ‘Can’t believe how far I’ve come to get nowhere,’ he says, his eyes on the flames; they show no perceptible signs of diminution, though there have not been any explosions for several hours. We think all the petrol supplies must have gone now, but there’s so much tinder about: the saltbush, the acacia scrub, the wooden buildings. ‘Hungry things, fires,’ he says. ‘You should’ve seen them eating up Singapore.’ He brushes the back of his knuckles against my cheek, then lets his hand slide down my arm. He leaves it there. ‘On the plus side,’ he says, ‘I’ve survived a few Armageddons and kept going. You could say I take ends-of-the-world in my stride. Almost, anyway. I suppose that’s something.’

  I look at his hand on my arm, the way the light catches the tiny hairs on the backs of his fingers. Odd, isn’t it? how details snag the attention at the most inappropriate times. I study his wrist. It is sinewy; it seems to me both indestructible and frail. I find his hands madly exciting. I take both of them in mine, and lift them, and put his fingers, one by one, in my mouth. His breath smells ragged and sweet. And then suddenly we are in his cabin, in his tumbledown mining shack made of galvo and nerve, and we are frantic for each other, everything a blur of skin, legs, cock, cunt, breasts, buttocks, and where does all this hope, all this laughter, come from? We are famished, hungry as fire. We devour. We feast on each other.

  Beginnings astonish me, the way they can rise out of ashes; and as for the histories of lovers, they’re outrageous. They’re like folk tales, they’re like fantasies, with the embarkation ports of the two protagonists so often altogether incongruous and the crossing of their paths so random; not to mention the question of their ruthlessness, of their swimming through joy like heedless kids while the end of the world is taking place, fiddling each other while Rome burns.

  The sheer tactlessness of starting over at such a time!

  This is the sober truth: In the beginning is always now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen; and starting points are like so many cards to be shuffled. They change shape, they change in value, according to how they are dealt.

  And here I am in the role of the dealer in the last poker game in Outer Maroo.

  I deal Susannah’s card because I can do that. The dealer calls. The sequence belongs to me. I deal Susannah Rover, who haunts me, who haunted us all, and who kept quite a few records herself, though they end abruptly.

  Knock it off, Jess, she says.

  I like to think of her like that, unbroken as ever, unbowed.

  God, you were reckless, I accuse. I find I’m still angry with her. You were so damned foolhardy, I say. So bloody impatient. So intransigent. You can’t change Australia in a day. You can’t just barge into western Queensland and snap your fingers –

  Yeah. Well, she shrugs, in that same old disarming way. I’ve never thought that getting nowhere let anyone off the hook, that’s all.

  I’m not sure this is any better than last week as a starting point, but it is the thing which presses most insistently against me. It happened about two years ago. Oyster and Oyster’s Reef were still with us. Brian (Mercy’s brother) was still with us. Susannah herself was still with us.

  It was the day she was so suddenly ‘transferred’.

  TWO YEARS AGO

  1

  ‘You can seek but ye shall not find,’ Susannah Rover called through the screens. ‘That’s the rule around here, I reckon.’

  She threw her words like a handful of stones at both the Gospel Hall and the pub
. The faithful winced in mid-prayer and turned startled faces to the windows. Inside Bernie’s Last Chance, in the bar, they stopped talking. The ceiling fans were old and noisy, but the men heard her.

  ‘It’s that nutty schoolteacher,’ someone said.

  ‘Twelve gates to the city,’ she called tartly, ‘and every last bloody one of them bolted shut. To keep us in and them out.’ She had Outer Maroo’s attention, and she paused to savour it. What she tasted, I suppose, was that kamikaze potency, fleeting, yet unassailable, of someone who has decided she has nothing left to lose. It went to her head. ‘Even if someone were looking for this place,’ she challenged (she spoke loudly and clearly; she seemed calm, and even disdainfully amused, but some inner stopper had blown) ‘even if someone were determined to find this town, chances are they wouldn’t. The odds are against them. The game’s rigged.’

  Miss Rover, come over, the children sang. There was still a school then, though there were never many children. There was never much of a school. Miss Rover taught in it more or less by accident, not quite officially, and not for long. She came, she turned things upside down for a year, she was transferred. Once upon a time the school was probably a pinhead on a map somewhere, in the office of some Director of Education in Brisbane. Probably the pin, or the map, or the office, or the Director of Education himself was somehow mislaid.

  ‘I realise,’ Susannah said, ‘to be explicit, that for Outer Maroo the object is not to be on maps.’

  From inside Bernie’s, where even at midday you needed cat’s eyes, came the shuffle of uneasy movement on bar stools. One of the men groped for a shutter, opened it, and stuck his head out the window. ‘You are asking for trouble, luv,’ he warned.

  ‘Hello, Pete,’ she said, tugging at the long black hairs on his arm. ‘I’m over here.’

  But Pete Burnett, leaning out from the dark inside, was sunblind. He thrashed about with one hand, searching, irritated to be at a disadvantage. By way of punctuating his confusion, and to gain a little dignity, he blew into the torpid air an amber spitball of beer and beer froth and phlegm. When it hit the hot verandah, it sizzled, and a tiny vaporous plume floated off it. ‘You are really asking for it, Susannah,’ he said.