North of Nowhere, South of Loss (26 page)

“Gladys,” Flutie says, encircling her from behind with his arms. “Tell me why you came here. Because there's no time left, you know. You confess and I'll confess. I wanna know the lot.”

“Jesus, Flutie.” She can't believe men, she really can't. Boss cocky to the very last second.

“Where'd you come from?” he persists. “Brisbane? Sydney?”

Because he can smell a city girl, yes, that's partly what's been grabbing him, that dazed state of the city slicker in the bush, that
Where am I? What am I doing here?
bemusement, he's a sucker for that.

“Brisbane,” she says. “If you must know.”

What will she tell him? She ticks off items in her mind: married twenty-seven years, three kids all grown up and married, Mum dying of cancer in Toowoomba; and while she sits at Mum's bedside, her old man buggers off with the neighbour's daughter. End of story.

How boring, how
embarrassing
a life is, once it slides down inside the tacky skin of words. Cheap skin, sharkskin, vulgar. Who could bear to say them? They had to be shoved away somewhere, in a suitcase under a bed. Goodbye words, good riddance; because what you felt afterwards, after the disorientation, when your clumsy tongue got free of dead explanations, was an immense and intoxicating freedom. You felt like singing your new self without any words at all.

You felt like a snake discarding the skins of past lives, sleek, unimpeded.

“When Mum died,” she says absently, smiling, “I hopped on a train and bought a ticket for the end of the line.”

“Amen,” says Flutie.

“I didn't bring any luggage,” she says. “No luggage at all.”

“Amen,” he says again. It doesn't matter if she tells him anything or not, they're both end-of-the-liners. Compatible histories is something he can taste, and he moves his tongue into the warm currents of her mouth.

When there's a space, she says mildly: “I don't mind fucking you, Flutie, but I'm never going back.”

To a man, she means. To routine. To luggage. To intolerable ordinary life.

Then he realises,
of course,
it's her sheer indifference, her unreachability, that's been driving him crazy.

“Hey” he says sharply. “Hey, your dinghy!” – because floating rubble, like a tank on the move, is ramming the rubber boat against the railing, ramming the lattice, ramming the shipwrecked verandah, oh Jesus, are they in the water or swamped on the deck? Chaos. He swallows an ocean. Verandah posts approach, an anchor holds, he is wrapped around something vertical and he can see her scudding out of reach, body-riding the dinghy like a surf-board queen.

“Gladysssss …!” He dingo-howls across the water.

She waves, or so he wishes to believe. Yes, she waves.

Gladys waves. But what she is seeing is the swooping green of the mango tree in Brisbane. The leaf canopy parts for her and she keeps flying. She is on that wild delicious arc of the swing, soaring up, up, and out from the broken rope. A sound barrier breaks. There are shouts, but they reach her only faintly through the pure rush of bliss, they are a distant and wordy murmuring of bees in mangoes.

We
begged
you not to swing so high … We told you the rope was frayed, we warned, we warned, we promised we'd fix it but you just can't wait, you can't ever wait, you foolish stubborn little girl
…
you wilful impetuous
… Buzz buzz
to reckless ears.

“I don't care! I don't care!” she shouts. She has flown beyond the farthest branch of the mango tree, she is higher than the clothes line, euphoria bears her upward, she is free as a bird. Any second now the broken legs waiting on the lawn will come rushing to meet her, but she doesn't care. This is worth it.

She waves. But all that comes back to Flutie is her laughter, the wild clear rapturous sound of a child on the last Big Dipper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Seven of these fourteen stories appeared in
Collected Stories: 1970–1995
(University of Queensland Press, 1995), which includes Hospital's first two collections
(Dislocations
and
Isobars)
plus the seven stories marked below with an asterisk.

Details of original publication of stories (sometimes in slightly different form):

✻
  “The Ocean of Brisbane” in
Outrider,
vol. X, 1993, no. 1 (Australia)

✻
  “North of Nowhere” in
Nimrod,
1993 (USA)

– Also included in
Best Short Stories in English, 1994,
edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1994; NY: Norton, 1994)

– Also in France as “Au Nord de Nulle Part”, trans. by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in
Revue Le Serpent à Plumes,
#28, été 1995

✻
  “For Mr Voss or Occupant” in
More Crimes for a Summer Christmas,
edited by Stephen Knight (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991)

✻
  “Unperformed Experiments Have No Results” in
Eureka Street,
vol. 3, no. 10, 1992 (Australia)

– Also included in
Best Short Stories in English, 1992,
edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1992; NY: Norton, 1993)

– Also included in
The Best of Best Short Stories 1986-1995,
edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1995)

– Also in France as “Ces Expériences qu'on n'a jamais faites”, trans. Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in
Revue Le Serpent à Plumes,
#23, printemps 1994

✻
  “Our Own Little Kakadu” in
Ormond Papers,
1994 (Melbourne, Australia)

“Cape Tribulation” in
Westerly
, vol. 42, no. 4, 1997, pp. 16-25 (Australia)

“Flight” published in French, as a novella, under title of “L'envolée” trans. by Mimi Perrin. [Commissioned for a select literary series called “Le Miroir Etoilé”] (Paris: Editions Solal, 1995)
Subsequently published in English in
Cheatin' Heart: Women's Secret Stories,
edited by Kim Longinotto and Joanna Rosenthall (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998)

“Frames and Wonders” in
Literary Review
(USA), fall 2001 (Nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

“Nativity” in
Nimrod,
vol. 44, no. 2, summer 2001, pp. 155-71 (a finalist for the Katherine Ann Porter prize in fiction)

“Credit Repair” in
Hecate,
vol. 28, no. 1, July 2002

“Night Train” in
Antipodes,
summer 2000 (U of Texas, Austin)

✻
  “Litany for the Homeland” in
Homeland,
edited by G. Papaellinas (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991)

✻
  “The End-of-the-Line End-of-the-World Disco” in
Millennium,
edited by Helen Daniel (Penguin, 1992)

– Also included in
Best Short Stories in English, 1992,
edited by Giles Gordon & David Hughes (London: Heinemann, 1992, NY: Norton, 1994)

– Also in France as “Club Terminus au Bout du Monde” trans. by Marie-Odile Fortier-Masek, in
Revue Le Serpent à Plumes
, #30, printemps 1996

First published 2003 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.uq.edu.au

© Janette Turner Hospital

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Typeset by University of Queensland Press

Sponsored by the Queensland Office
of Arts and Cultural Development.

Cataloguing in Publication Data

National Library of Australia

Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942– .

[Short stories!

Collected Stories

New ed.

I. Title.

A823.3

ISBN 9780702256004 (ePub)

OTHER FICTION BY
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL

CHARADES

This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland's Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital's characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning Scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-held secrets of her family origins.

“A journey of strange and beautiful complexity through some of the finest prose being written anywhere today.”

Toronto Star

“Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength – ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story – and in
Charades
throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism.

I loved it!”

Fay Weldon

ISBN: 0 7022 3388 9

THE LAST MAGICIAN

This superb novel is richly textured and intellectually challenging, a tour de force from our most elegantly seductive writer.

The last magician is Charlie, the photographer, who monitors and records everything as he seeks the silent Cat through physical and emotional infernos. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest. But a death intruded on their charmed circle, binding them to complicity and silence.

Decades later, festering memories seep through into the present, in the same way as the desperate underside of a corrupt Sydney breaks through into tidy lives and well-kept secrets.

“Spellbinding reading, an adventure of the mind and heart that enthralls from first page to last … Haunting, disturbing, subversive.”

Newsday,
New York

“The real magic at work here is the writer's … an ambitious, intense and satisfying book.”

New York Times Book Review

ISBN: 0 7022 3401 X

BORDERLINE

A meat truck is intercepted at the Canadian-American border, and a group of illegal immigrants is removed. Felicity watches from her car, and talks with Gus who is also waiting in the queue. When they realise a woman has been left behind, they impulsively smuggle her across the border. La Magdalena will change their lives irrevocably.

In this, her third novel, Janette Turner Hospital transforms a thrilling and suspenseful story into a deadly resonant parable for our times, leaving her readers not just entertained, but enriched.

“Janette Turner Hospital is a stunningly stylish writer who turns almost every chapter into a virtuoso performance … this is a very clever, very fascinating book which should not be missed.”

Brenda Little,
Australian

“This book is brilliant in its several meanings: sparkling, intelligent, distinguished…Hospital is in complete and wondrous control of her material.”

Shirley Streshinsky,
San Francisco Chronicle

ISBN: 0 7022 3400 1