Oyster Read online

  ‘I’d say someone else is going to have the last laugh, mates,’ Susannah said.

  ‘But Lot’s wife looked back from behind him,’ Mercy read, ‘and she became a pillar of salt.’

  ‘Leave her,’ Pete said, apprehensively. He had pushed his lanky frame through the window, and climbed out with some difficulty. Now he made a rough and jokey claim to possession by draping an arm around Susannah Rover’s waist. ‘She’s a raving loony, mates, take no notice.’

  Mercy saw Miss Rover pick up Pete’s arm as though it were a bit of saltbush that the wind had blown against her. She looked at it with a raised eyebrow, curious, but certainly polite. She held it away from her and examined it for another second or two, then she kissed it on the wrist and let it go.

  ‘Now listen, Susannah, my dear,’ Bernie said patiently, much as he might speak to a man who has had a few too many, ‘I think you’ve forgotten who pays your salary. We’re only asking you to teach our kids to read and write. That’s all. Just stick to what you got hired for.’

  ‘If it isn’t Himself,’ Miss Rover said, curtsying.

  ‘She’s been drinking,’ Pete said. ‘I can smell the gin. I think she smokes stuff too. I think she gets it from those fuckwit kids at the Reef.’

  ‘As for reading and writing,’ Miss Rover said, ‘since you bring up the subject. The Murris can read and write, which isn’t something you ever take into account. They can read this country like a book, and they’ve got their own bush telegraph. I think you can assume that the word is out and about on Oyster’s Reef and on Outer Maroo. The other word, I mean. The word on what’s really going on. I think you forget these things.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Major Miner said quietly. ‘It was asking for trouble to sink shafts so close to the bora rings. The Murris aren’t going to keep quiet about it, and why should they?’

  ‘They can talk till it rains again,’ Bernie said, ‘for all I care. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re still Abos. They’re not getting any fancy new names outta me. I been watching black faces whingeing on TV ever since I got the satellite dish. Finders keepers, I say.’ There was a murmuring hum of assent from the drinking swarm, and Bernie warmed to defiance. ‘Nobody gets free beer or free opal on account of a suntan round here. Not in my establishment.’

  ‘Hear, hear.’

  ‘You know where they can shove their sacred sites.’

  ‘Look at what’s happening in Cunnamulla,’ someone called.

  ‘Look at what’s happening in Bourke.’

  ‘We don’t want any packs of feral black kids running wild around here, Susannah,’ Andrew Godwin said, affably, reasonably. ‘This isn’t New South Wales. It isn’t Bourke.’ He smiled expansively. ‘Hell, everyone knows I’ve got nothing against the Abos’ – and we all thought of him fucking Ethel in the shed. ‘If they have a legal case, there’s the courts.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Bernie said, disgusted, ‘they’ve got the attention span of five-year-olds. They’ve all lost interest and gone and buggered off to Bourke. Good riddance, I say.’

  ‘If I were you,’ Miss Rover said, ‘I wouldn’t congratulate myself on the sudden disappearance of the Wangkumara camps. I’d find it ominous, if I were you.’

  Ooooooh, the men said, looking at each other and winking and slapping their sides. The wonky-wonky camps, they said. The wonky-wonky men are gonna get us . . .

  ‘Ominous,’ one of the men said, pushing his tongue against the inside of his cheek. ‘We don’t know them big fucking words round here.’

  ‘Big words, big tits, and too big for ’er boots,’ someone said.

  There was raucous laughter.

  ‘She’s a bit too big for her boots, and she’s barmy, but otherwise she’ll do for a sheila,’ a deep voice offered from out of the twilight of the bar. ‘If she can just keep her nose out of other people’s business. Bernie’s right, Susannah. Finders, keepers. People gotta work for their bloody keep, that’s the rule in this country.’

  ‘Is that you, Bill Beresford?’ Miss Rover called.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, appearing at the door. ‘It’s me. You are lucky that most of us consider you one of the boys, Susannah, that’s all I can say. And a bit touched, up top, as well.’ Ma’s Bill tapped on his forehead with one finger. ‘That’s how come you get away with murder, love.’

  ‘Ah,’ Miss Rover said. ‘Now we get down to the heart of the matter. Getting away with murder.’

  ‘Jesus, Susannah!’ Pete said softly.

  The men sifted opals in their pockets and watched her.

  ‘Does anyone keep a head count out at the Reef?’ she asked. ‘Does anyone keep a pregnancy count? Does anyone know how many of Oyster’s kids –’

  ‘I wouldn’t comment, if I were you,’ Bernie warned.

  ‘Knock it off, luv,’ Pete urged. ‘Hey, listen, I’ve got the truck. Let’s go for a spin.’

  ‘I think,’ Bernie said, ‘that you should apply for a transfer, Miss Rover. I don’t really think we got that much need for a school after all.’

  Miss Rover, come over, the children sang.

  ‘And I think,’ Miss Rover said, ‘that you won’t shut me up so easily. I think that you don’t realise just how many messages are getting out. For example, a letter or two of mine went to Bourke with the Murris, which may be the long way round to Brisbane, but then again, it might be more expeditious than Australia Post.’

  ‘Jesus,’ one of the men said, seemingly casual. ‘What big fucking foreign words she keeps in that slutty little mouth.’

  ‘I think maybe she should wash her filthy tongue,’ someone said.

  ‘Maybe a few other private places, eh? She admits she’s a Boong-lover. How many of those black bastards do you reckon she’s fucked?’

  ‘They’re all cunts, schoolteachers. Always were, always will be. They all fuck you over in school.’

  Miss Rover come over, the children shrieked, madly excited.

  Miss Rover, Miss Rover, you’ve ticked off the drover,

  And here come the shearers to put you to bed.

  Here comes the swagman to chop off

  your your your your . . . head!

  ‘Listen to your own children,’ Miss Rover said. ‘Listen to what they know about you. Do you know what they know about Oyster’s Reef? Do you know what they say?’

  Mercy almost choked on a word from Genesis. She could feel her heart bucking against the Bible, and the lectern, soft with termites, shuddered.

  ‘Words are maps, you’ll find out,’ Miss Rover said. ‘Words are maps and they’ll get –’

  ‘Words’ll get you into trouble, luv,’ Pete warned jokily, a little panicked now, fighting to turn a hard edge in the air on its side. ‘You’re gonna trip on them and flip yourself arse-over-head. Better eat them.’

  ‘I’m eating them.’ Miss Rover reached down the front of her dress and pulled out a letter she had mailed from Beresford’s a week earlier. She waved it in front of the men, then she began to tear the paper into little squares. One by one, she put them in her mouth and chewed.

  ‘She’s off her rocker,’ Pete said. ‘I’m taking her home.’

  There was a skirmish, Pete pulling, Miss Rover resisting, the men closing the circle a little. There was a dreadful, mad, animal smell . . .

  ‘You keep right out of this, Old Silence,’ Ma’s Bill warned.

  ‘Jess!’ Bernie said, like an order. ‘For God’s sake, stay outta this! You want to get yourself . . . ?’ and there wasn’t much time, that was clear. These things are like bushfires. They can whoosh up out of nothing in a few seconds flat, especially when too much booze is involved, as it always is around here.

  ‘Not even you can shut me up, Jess,’ Susannah said. ‘Enough is enough.’

  ‘Listen, mates,’ and there was a sharper edge of anxiety in Pete Burnett’s voice, ‘just ignore her. Teachers come and go. They come and go and change nothing.’

  Miss Rover, come over, the children sang, turning somersaults in the
red dust and laughing shrill high-pitched laughs.

  You’re done for, Miss Rover, your number’s come over,

  and here come the squatters to chop off your head.

  ‘Words are like bushfires,’ Miss Rover warned. She was high on something. She was high on having crossed the line. ‘You can’t stop them. And you can’t tell where they’ll end up.’

  ‘You’re a flaming nut,’ Pete said. ‘I bloody well give up on you. I give up.’

  ‘I don’t give up,’ Miss Rover said.

  She turned and saw Mercy through the window and waved the remnants of her torn letter, and before Mercy had time to think, she had raised a hand in salute, and Miss Rover put a word there and it burned.

  ‘Thank you, Mercy,’ Mr Prophet said tightly. ‘You may sit down. And may the Lord inscribe His Word upon our hearts.’ The congregation, as one, was transfixed, its gaze on the scene across the street. ‘We will bow our heads in prayer,’ Mr Prophet said, ‘that the peace which passeth understanding may settle like a dove in every heart.’

  Something brushed Mercy’s heart and her wrist. It was the dove of Miss Rover’s word and she closed her fingers round it and kept it in her fist where it fluttered violently and bucked about like a trapped thing.

  Mr Prophet rose to his feet, lifted in the wind of the Holy Spirit. ‘We will now sing a hymn,’ he announced. ‘We will sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers”. Begin to play, please, Mrs Jones.’

  ‘At the right moment,’ Miss Rover whispered, ‘you must set my word free.’ She whispered this to Mercy quite clearly in her teacher’s voice (so Mercy insists), between the first and second lines of the hymn. Mercy could feel her own heartbeat cavorting as wildly as the word in her hand. She started and turned around, but Miss Rover was not in the pew behind, only her brother Brian, with his eyes closed; not just closed, squeezed shut. She beamed his name at him: Brian, Brian! But she could no longer reach him that way, perhaps because he was four years older and was becoming strange to her, distant, moody, solitary, an adult.

  Across the street there was a scuffle going on, nothing out of the ordinary, no more violent than usual, a few broken bottles and jagged shouts, it went without saying, but nothing that wouldn’t blow over in fifteen minutes, Mercy thought. Nevertheless, she wished she could still see Miss Rover.

  Miss Rover, come over, she prayed silently.

  ‘Remember me,’ Miss Rover whispered, clear as a bell. ‘Promise.’

  Mercy turned around again, startled, and this time Brian watched her from wide sombre eyes.

  ‘All my books and journals,’ Miss Rover whispered from somewhere inside Mercy’s head, ‘are in the wooden press in the schoolroom. You know where the key is hidden. Keep them safe.’

  I promise, Mercy said.

  2

  Mercy pored through Miss Rover’s dictionary, word by forbidden word, sucking each meaning as she went. The taste was addictive. She licked words and polished them and held them up to the light. She set them down with precision, she set them down with the same kind of care that Bernie took when he and his underlings cut opal, or when they polished the rough stones, or when they bonded opal veneer on to potch. Bernie and his workers turned out flame doublets, lightning doublets, red doublet flash. What they made smouldered. What they made sold to tourists for a great deal of money in Brisbane.

  Whenever it was possible, Mercy stole away to Aladdin’s Rush, where she had hidden Miss Rover’s books. There was a corroding iron ladder bolted into the main abandoned shaft, and she climbed down, carefully, into coolness. She had to keep a map of the tunnels inside her head, and she had to feel her way. Though she carried a torch, she steered by touch. So far, she had never been lost; she had always found her way back to the books. They teased Mercy and provoked her. She found them as fantastic as the Bible, and she began to fashion her own kind of doublet, to bond substances as different as onyx and opal, as incompatible as sandstone and silk: there was the Gospel Hall view of things, and there was the view from Miss Rover’s books, and how was she to join them? How was she to contain both ideas at once?

  Psalm 90, verse 9, she wrote in her diary. We spend our years as a tale that is told.

  There’s a tale that needs telling, Miss Rover said. She had been doing this quite often since her transfer. She would start up conversations and leave Mercy to write both scripts. I’m counting on you, Mercy, she would say.

  Once upon a time, Mercy wrote in her diary, not long before the year 2000, the people of a small town in south-west Queensland shaded their eyes and looked into the white of the sun. They saw something: a black speck, a bloodspot, a shape no bigger than the size of a man’s hand at first. It moved toward them from out of the haze.

  That is very fine work, Miss Rover said in her ear, and Mercy glowed, she preened, she flared on the sparks of her own words. Miss Rover told Mercy whatever Mercy needed to hear. You could escape if you chose to, Miss Rover told her. You could spread your wings.

  ‘We could escape, Jess,’ Mercy said to the tunnels of the Rush. ‘We could leave Outer Maroo.’ She wanted to hear the words out loud. She wanted to make them tangible. She wanted to see them visible, like a mirage, in the treacherous air.

  This is where Jess has escaped to, the tunnels could have told her.

  The walls of the Rush curved around Mercy, they folded her in. They were the colour of whipped cream, fluted like drifts of silk, and if she stood and stretched her arms above her head, she could brush the arc of the roof with her fingertips. On the other side of the roof, thirty feet above, the parched red earth broiled and cracked; but underground, in the creamy Rush, the air was cool. Mercy could feel the picked seams of where the opal used to be, she could feel the shimmering echoes of the blues and teals and greens, she could see the phantom tongues of fire.

  Opal is amorphous silica, she wrote in her diary, with water trapped inside. The water and the silica diffract the light, and that is why colours chase each other on the skin of the stone. The water in opal is thousands of years old (Miss Rover said millions), so the past is locked inside it the way a meaning is locked in a word.

  Aladdin’s Rush is abandoned, it has been worked out, but opals still hide here. I have found three opalised seashells – from a million years ago, Miss Rover said, when Outer Maroo was under the sea. If that is true, fish have slithered and silvered where I’m sitting, and the great slow waves of the ocean floor have washed these walls.

  That is the long history of Outer Maroo, Miss Rover says. She showed us photographs of the plesiosaurus that miners found at Lightning Ridge. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, a great opalised fish that has swum through colour since the world began. It is older than the dinosaurs, she said.

  Beverley Prophet told her father and he came storming into the school. It was his school. He owned it, he and Mr Godwin and Bernie, because they didn’t want any of us kids from Outer Maroo to be sent away to Quilpie or Brisbane. They were afraid we would talk, I suppose. Brian and I should have been in high school, Toowoomba or Brisbane, Miss Rover said, but of course we don’t have the money for that, and in any case Mr Prophet says that everything we need to know is in the Bible. He read us the first chapter of Genesis, and told us that God made the plesiosaurus on the fifth day, and that no fish or any living creature existed before six thousand years ago.

  ‘You mean God made the plesiosaurus on a Thursday?’ Miss Rover asked, and he told her to watch her step.

  My shells must know their own past. They are full of nothing but ocean when I hold them to my ear. I don’t know what to believe.

  I do know my father is embarrassed by Mr Prophet. When I asked him if we had to believe that the plesiosaurus was created on a Thursday, he said that the Bible speaks to each of us in its own mysterious way. We should leave the answers in God’s hands, he said. Brian, my brother, said I shouldn’t be asking these questions, Brian said they are not relevant, Brian said that Oyster says that time itself is the fossil from which the opalis
ed future comes. Miss Rover said that Oyster is highly intelligent, but he still talks bullshit.

  Brian said that Oyster says that Miss Rover could never understand the transcendental nature of interlocking time spheres, and nor could I. That was before Brian left us and went to the Reef.

  I know it is less than sixty years since a Beresford, some older relation of Ma’s, found opal floaters at Aladdin’s Rush and built the house that is the oldest in Outer Maroo. That was in 1938.

  But before that there was Maroo, a handful of miners and a few opal shafts in the 1870s. The miners set up camp and sank the first shafts inside a bora ring, not far from where Oyster’s Reef is today. There was trouble. The miners blamed the Murris and there was a massacre of their camp. Everyone knows this. It’s still a junkyard of bones out there, not far from the Reef. Some of Oyster’s backpackers came and told Miss Rover one day, and she took photographs. She mailed the film to a newspaper in Sydney, but of course the letter never left here.

  After the massacre, the old town, the town of Maroo, prospered on opal for three years, and then it was burned to a crisp. Everyone says that the Murris who escaped the massacre came back and did it. Everyone said the place was jinxed. That was in l873. Maroo sank into the earth until Outer Maroo was built to the east of it. We call the oldest shafts, the 1870s shafts, Inner Maroo, because all that is left is holes in the ground.

  Mercy closed her diary and leaned back against the curving wall of the Rush. She pressed her fingertips together. Miss Rover, come over, she wished, and she rubbed the old Aladdin seams, and abracadabra, Miss Rover’s own journal rose like a genie from one of the cartons of books. The journal had not been regularly kept, and there were pages torn out, and the entries were very rarely dated, but for Mercy, the fragments were full of enticements. She cherished them. She read them avidly.

  Outer Maroo. February.

  Hotter than Hades. Lost world. Just getting here pretty amazing in itself; picked up in Quilpie, 2-seater Cessna, by local grazier, Andrew Godwin, a lecher if ever there was one. Blindfolded; security reasons, he claimed; real reason, in my opinion, an excuse to touch me up, plus kinky leanings. Landed on airstrip on his property.