Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (17 page)

I have a vivid memory of walking with my Grandfather Turner in the Ballarat Gardens, not far from Melbourne. It was before we moved to Brisbane, so I must have been five or six. We must have gone walking in the Gardens quite often because there are several photographs of us – black and white, not too clear – here and there in family collections.

My grandfather does not look in the least like other Australian grandfathers. He wears a tweed suit with a vest and watch chain. He carries an elegant walking stick. He is holding my hand. I am wearing the long golden corkscrew curls which I hate but which everyone else considers adorable. I am also wearing one of the little dresses with smocked bodices which I frequently rip while climbing trees.

The paths of the Ballarat Gardens are lined with statues. My grandfather, who was the school headmaster until he retired, plays a game with me.

“This one?” he asks, pointing with his stick.

“That's Mercury.”

“And this one?”

“That's the Venus de Milo.”

“And this one?”

“That's Persephone.”

“And why is Persephone weeping?”

“She misses … I forget her name. She misses her mother.”

“Demeter,” he says. “She misses her mother Demeter. And she wants to go back. Whichever world she's in, she always misses the other one and wants to go back.”

We emerge from the avenue of statues at the shore of the Ballarat Lake. We walk out on the little wooden jetty.

“When I was little,” my grandfather says, “about as old as you are now, my father used to take me walking on the Eastbourne Pier. Just like this.”

I already know (because with grandfather all conversations are lessons of one kind or another) that Eastbourne is in England and that England is on the other side of the world, a place as easily imagined and as fabulous as Persephone's Underworld. We sit on the end of the jetty and I swing my legs back and forth and throw pebbles in the water.

“Look at the dragonflies,” my grandfather says, pointing. But there is something in his voice.

“Grandpa?” I ask curiously. “What's the matter?”

He doesn't answer, but he puts his walking stick carefully down on the jetty, and takes me on his lap and holds me so tightly it hurts.

Morgan Morgan

My grandfather, Morgan Morgan, was a yodeller and a breeder of dahlias. On Collins Street and Bourke Street, I could tug at his hand and plead “Please, Grandpa, please!” and he would throw back his head and do something mysterious in his throat and his yodel would unfurl itself like a silk ribbon. All the trams in Melbourne would come to a standstill, entangled. Bewitched pedestrians stopped and stared. But this was nothing compared with former powers: when he was a young man on the goldfields, handsome and down on his luck, the girls for miles around would come running. Yodel-o-o-o, my grandfather would sing, snaring them, winding them in. The girls would sigh and sway like cobras in the strands of his voice. He was a charmer.

“Get along with you, Morg. You're bad for business,” Mrs Blackburn would say. Flowers bloomed by the bucketful around her. She would lean across roses and carnations, she would catch at his sleeve. “Here's a daisy for the Nipper,” and she'd tuck it behind my ear. She didn't want him to move on at all, even I knew that. “Your grandpa,” she had said to me often enough, “is a fine figure of a man, they don't make men like him anymore.” She'd pull one of her carnations from a bucket and swing the stem in her fingers. “A gentleman is a gentleman,” she'd sigh. “Even if he is poor as a church mouse and never found a thimbleful of gold.”

It was not entirely true. Grandpa told me, that he'd never struck it rich on the goldfields – the
Kalgoorlie
goldfields, he'd say, with a loving hesitation on the o's and
i'
s, a rallentando which intimated that music had gone from the language since The Rush petered out.

In those exotic and demented times, men were obsessed with the calibration of luck. Not Morgan Morgan. While other men mapped out their fevers with calipers, measuring the likely run of a seam from existing strikes. Grandpa Morgan simply watched for the aura. Wherever the aura settled, he panned or dug.

“Crazy as a bandicoot,” the publican told him. “You've got to have a
system,
mate!”

But Morgan Morgan knew that gold was a gift, it never came to men of system, never had. “King David danced before the Lord,” he pointed out, “which goes to show; and his goldmines were the richest in the world, I read it somewhere, some archaeologist bloke has proved it.” Grandpa had his own methods of fossicking; in scripture or creek bed, it was all the same to him. He found what he wanted, or at any rate learned to want what he found.

He laboured at strings of waterholes that were known to be panned out. He was after the Morgan Nugget. This was how it appeared to him in a vision: as big as a man's fist, blackened, gnarled like a prime, cobwebby with the roots of creek ferns. He expected its presence to be announced by an echo of Welsh choirs in the tea-tree and eucalypt scrub. And it was, it was. One day, with the strains of
Cwm Rhondda
all around him, he scratched at a piece of rock with a broken fingernail and the sun caught the gash and almost blinded him.

“Solid gold,” he told me. “And big as a man's fist.” Not for the first time, he knew himself to be a man of destiny.

“What did you do with it, Grandpa?” I was full of awe. When he spoke of the past, I heard the surf of the delectable world of turbulence that raged beyond our garden wall. We were still at the old place in Ringwood then, across from the railway station. If I buried my face in the box-hedge of golden privet, I could hear the rush of Grandpa's life, the trains careering past to Mitcham and Box Hill and Richmond. He would listen too, leaning into the sound, and I would see eyes travel on beyond Richmond, beyond Footscray even, out towards the unfenceable Nullarbor Plain and Kalgoorlie.

“What did you do with it, Grandpa?”

“With what?” he would ask from far away.

“With the Morgan Nugget?”

“I put it down again,” he said, “right back down where I found it, inside the vision. It's still waiting just where I put it. Listen,” he said, “if you put your ear to the Morgan Dahlia, you can hear it waiting.”

I buried my ear in those soft salmon ruchings of petals and heard the deep hush of the past. And then
pop, pop:
he pinched the calyx with his fingers. “That's the sound of the Morgan Nugget,” he said, “when it gets impatient. It's waiting for one of us to find it again.”

“Dad!” Grandma Morgan, with a basket of eggs on her arm, came down the path from the hen house. “Don't confuse the child with your nonsense.” She lifted her eyebrows at me. “Always could talk the leg off an iron pot, your Grandpa.”

“Pot calling the kettle black, I'd say,” he grumbled. He hated to be listened in on; I hated it too. I didn't like the way the Morgan history drooped at the edges when other people were around.

Grandma Morgan was picking mint and tossing the sprigs into her basket. The leaves lay green and vivid against the eggs. “Came to tell you the pension cheques have arrived,” she said.

“Well, praise be,” said Grandpa, mollified. “Praise be. There's corn in Egypt yet. And on top of that,” he whispered, as she moved off towards the house, “the Morgan Nugget's still waiting.

“Dad! No more nonsense. That child is never going to know the difference between truth and lies, you mark my words.”

“Got eyes in the back of her head,” Grandpa grumbled. “And ears in the wind. No flies on her, no siree.”

It was one of his favorite sayings:
No flies on so-and-so, no siree.
To me it implied an opposite state, an unsavory kind of person, stupid, sticky, smelling overly sweet in the manner of plums left on the ground beneath our tree for too long. I imagined this person – the person on whom there
were
flies to be pale and bloated, and to have bad breath and unwashed socks.

There was a man who delivered bonemeal for the dahlia garden on whom I thought there might be flies – if only one could see him at an unguarded moment. His clothes gave off a rich rancid smell. When he laughed it was like looking into the squishy dark mush of fruit I had to collect from the lawn before a mowing. Those few teeth which the bonemeal man still had – they announced themselves like unvanquished sentinels on a crumbling rampart – were given over to a delicate vegetation. I recognised it: it was the same silky green fur that coated the fallen plums over which floated little black parasols of flies.

Yet one day, when I came out to the dahlia garden just as the bonemeal man was leaving. Grandpa Morgan was tossing his fine head of hair in the wind and laughing his fine Welsh laugh. The bonemeal man was laughing too, trundling his barrow down our path, doubled up with mirth between its shafts, his green teeth waving about like banners.

“Grandpa, what is it, what is it? Why are you laughing. Grandpa?”

“Oh,” Grandpa gasped, patting me on the head in the way that meant a subject was not for discussing. “No flies on
him,
no siree.”

This was the best thing: I could always count on Grandpa Morgan to be outrageous. That was the word people used: the neighbours, my grandmother, my mother, my uncles. “He's
outrageous,”
they would say, shaking their heads and throwing up their hands and smiling.

If I asked him to, he would yodel in the schoolyard when he came to fetch me, and abracadabra, we two were the hub of a circle of awed envy. When I passed the Teachers' Room at morning tea time. I'd hear the older ones whisper and smile: “That's Morgie's granddaughter.”

On our walks he would stop and talk to everyone we met, “to
anyone,
anyone at all,” Uncle Cyril would groan. He spoke to the butcher, the baker, the lady in the cake shop, to men who did shady undiscussable things, even men who smelled of horses and
took bets,
whatever that was.

“What can you be thinking of?” Grandma would say, “with the child hearing every word? A man
known
to be mixed up with off-course betting.”

I knew bets to be deeply evil. I imagined them to be huge and ravenous and almost hidden behind fearful masks. Once upon a time, in Kalgoorlie, Grandpa himself had made bets, but that was before the Lord saved him and showed him the light. Now, he said, he only bet on the Day of Judgment. Still, he couldn't see any harm in talking to people who “knew horses”. He would introduce me. “This is Paddy,” he would say. “A man who knows horses if ever anyone did.” I myself had no interest in knowing horses on account of their large and alarming teeth, but I rather liked those brave horse-knowing men.

Sometimes Grandma, shocked, would call out: “Dad! I want to have a word with you, Dad.” From the front window, she would have watched us coming over the bridge from the Ringwood Station. The most
interesting
people came off the trains and walked over that bridge. Grandma would have seen us stop and talk to some gentleman who wore string, perhaps, for suspenders, and whose shoes were stuffed in an intricate way with newspapers, and who gave off the rank smell of the pubs. “Dad!” she would say. “What are you
thinking
of, to introduce the child to such strangers?”

“Strangers?” Grandpa would raise his eyebrows in surprise. “That wasn't a stranger. That was Bluey McTavish from back of Geelong. We don't know any strangers.”

This was certainly true, though we'd only just met Mr Bluey McTavish of Geelong, whose life history we would discuss over the sorting of dahlia bulbs. I don't know what it was about Grandpa Morgan, but people told him a great deal about themselves very quickly. “There aren't any such people as strangers,” he told me. “Or if there are, I've never met them.”

“I don't know what's going to come of that child,” Grandma Morgan said, throwing up her hands and trying not to smile. “But one thing's certain: she'll never know the difference between truth and lies.”

Grandpa said with ruffled dignity: “One thing she'll know about is dahlias.”

The dahlias, the dahlias. They stretched to the edge of the world. When I stood between the rows, I saw nothing but jungle, with great suns of flowers above me, so heavy they nodded on their stalks and shone down through the forests of their own leaves. Such a rainbow of suns: from creamy white to a purple that was almost black. The dahlias believed in excess: they could never have too many petals. The dahlia which could crowd the most pleatings of pure light about its centre won a blue ribbon at the Melbourne Show. It was an article of faith with us that some year the Morgan Dahlia would win that ribbon.

Grandpa Morgan did things to the bulbs and the soil. He married broad-petalled pinks to pintucked yellows; he introduced sassy purples to smocked whites with puffed sleeves and lacy hems. He watched over his nurslings, he crooned to them, he prayed. To birds and snails he issued strong Welsh warnings (the Lord having taken away a certain range of Australian vocabulary). As his flowerlings grew, he murmured endearments; and they gathered themselves up into a delirium of pleats, rank upon rank of petals, tier upon tier, frilled prima donnas. The color of the Morgan dahlia was a salmon that could make judges weep, the salmon of a baby's cheek, the colour of a lover's whisper. And it did win yellow ribbons, and red, at the Melbourne Show, but never the coveted blue.

“Is it waiting till we find the Morgan Nugget again?” I asked.

“Very likely,” Grandpa said. “Very likely.”

The day Grandma came out with the news of Uncle Charlie, we were deep in dahlias.

“Dad,” she said. “Charlie's gone.”

Grandpa paused in mid-weeding. A clump of clover and crab- grass dangled from between his fingers. He sank down on the ground between the dahlias and rested his head in his hands. “Well,” he said, sadly and slowly. “Charlie. So Charlie went first.”

“Where's he gone?” I wanted to know.

“Uncle Charlie's gone to heaven,” Grandma told me, and Grandpa said: “He's dead.” He pushed his trowel into the soil and lifted up a handful of earth. It was alive with ants and worms, we watched it move in the palm of his hand. “I'm next,” he sighed, and he smelled the earth and held it for me to smell, and he rubbed it against his cheek as though it were a kitten. “I'm next, I suppose.”

“Next for what?”

“Next for dying,” he said.

“What happens when you die, Grandpa?”

“They put you in a box and they bury you under the ground with the dahlia bulbs.”

I stared at him in horror. “Unde Charlie should run away and hide.”

“You can't run away when you're dead,” he said.

“Grandpa,” I whispered, beginning to shiver, “will they do it to you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And to me?”

I crept between his earth-covered arms and he held me tightly and rocked me back and forth between the dahlias. “Yes,” he sighed, “one day, yes. That's the way it is. But then we'll be with the Lord.”

I didn't want to be with the Lord. I had a brilliant idea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we'll run away
before
we die. I know a very good place in the woodshed; they'd never find us.”

“Dad!” Grandma's voice steamed over with exasperation. “Now just what have you been telling her this time? How will that child ever know the difference between truth and a lie? Uncle Charlie,” she said to me, “has gone straight to heaven, and that is the simple truth.”

Mr Peabody knew the truth. Every Sunday it spoke in his bones, it shook him from head to foot.

There must have been some obscure and ancient rule at church. It must have been this rule which forced Mr Peabody, week after week, to sit directly in front of Grandpa Morgan. Mr Peabody was a tiny man, elderly, and seemingly frail as a sparrow, though he must have had enormous reserves of stamina on which to draw.

Behind him, sheltering in the leeside of the Spirit of the Lord as it blustered and rushed through Grandpa, my little brother and I kept score. When the spirit moved. Grandpa shouted
hallelujah
in his fine Welsh voice. The shock waves hit Mr Peabody sharply in the nape of his neck and travelled down his spine with such force that he would rise an inch or two from the pew. Most of his body would go rigid, but his head and his hands would quiver for seconds at a time.
Glory, glory,
he would murmur in a terror-stricken prayerful voice.