comes down to Cairns.”
“Does your father cut cane?”
He might have winded her.
“Well,” he says quickly, into the silence, “none of my—”
“My father raises Cain,” she says tardy.
His eyebrows dart up again, amused, and spontaneously he reaches up to touch her cheek. It’s a fleeting innocent gesture, the sort of thing a pleased schoolteacher might do, but Beth can hardly bear it. She turns to the steriliser and readies the instruments, inserting them one by one with tongs. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not funny at all, I suppose. And none of my business.”
She shrugs.
“I didn’t realise Beth was short for Bethesda,” he says.
“It’s from the Bible. Mum gave us Bible names.”
“It’s rather stylish.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m pleased with your work, you know.”
“Thank you.” She fills the room with a shush of steam.
“Listen,” he says, “after I close the surgery, I always stop for a drink or two at the Pink Flamingo before I go home. You want to join me?”
“Uh …” She feels dizzy with panic. Anyway, impossible. She’d miss dinner. “Uh, no thanks, I can’t. Dinner’s at six. We’re not allowed to miss.” She keeps her back to him, fussing with the temperature setting.
“Not allowed?”
“At the hostel.”
“Oh, I see,” he says doubtfully. “Well, I’ll drop you home then.”
God, that’s the last thing she wants. “No. No, really, that’d be silly. It’s way out of your way, and the bus goes right past.”
“You’re a funny little thing, Bethesda,” he says, but she’s reaching into the steriliser with the tongs, her face full of steam.
“Girls,” Matron says from the head of the table. “Let us give thanks.”
Beth imagines the flap flap flap of those messages which will not be spoken winging upwards from Matron’s scrunched-shut eyes. Thank you, O Lord, for mournful meals. Thank you for discipline, our moral starch, so desirable in the building of character. Thank you for stiff upper lips. Thank you for the absence of irritating laughter and chatter at the table of St Margaret’s Hostel for Country Girls. Thank you that these twenty young women, sent to Cairns from Woop-Woop and from God Knows Where, provide me with a reasonable income through government grants; in the name of derelict fathers, violent sons, unholy spirits, amen; and also through the urgings of social workers and absurdly hopeful outback schools. Thank you that these green and government-sponsored girls, all of them between the dangerous and sinward-leaning ages of sixteen and twenty-four, are safely back under my watchful eye and curfew, another day of no scandal, no police inquiries, no trouble, thanks be to God.
“We are grateful, O Lord,” Matron says, “for your abiding goodness to us, and for this meal. Amen.”
And the twenty young women lift grateful knives and forks. Beth, hungry, keeps her eyes lowered and catalogues sounds. That is finicky Peggy, that metal scrape of the fork imposing grids and priorities. Peggy eats potato first, meat second, carrots last. Between a soft lump of overcooked what? — turnip, probably — and some gristle, Beth notes the muffled flpp flpp of gravy stirred into cumulus mashed clouds, that is Liz, who has been sent down from the Tablelands to finish school at Cairns High. Liz’s father is a tobacco picker somewhere near Mareeba, and Liz, for a range of black market fees, can supply roll-your-owns of head-spinning strength. That ghastly open-mouth chomping is Sue, barely civilised, who has only been here a week, dragged in by a district nurse who left her in matron’s office. Where’s this bedraggled kitten from then? matron asked, holding it at arm’s length. From Cooktown, the district nurse said. Flown down to us. You wouldn’t believe what we deal with up there. North of nowhere, believe me. In every sense.
“Inbreeding,” Peggy sends the whisper along. “Like rabbits. Like cane toads, north of the Daintree. If this one’s not a sample, Bob’s your uncle. Whad’ya reckon?”
What does Beth reckon, between a nub of carrot and a gluey clump of something best not thought about? She reckons that this, whisper whisper, is the sound of matron’s own stockinged thighs as Matron exits, kitchen-bound.
“Oh Christ, look at Sue,” Peggy hisses. “Gonna cry in her stew.”
A sibilant murmur circles the table like a breeze flattening grass — Sook, sook, sook, sook! — barely audible, crescendo, decrescendo, four-four time, nobody starts it, nobody stops. Stop it! Beth pleads inwardly. Malice, a dew of it, hangs in the air. Sue wants her Daddy. Nudge, nudge. Maybe she does it with her brother.
“Leave her alone,” Beth says.
Peggy makes a sign with her finger. “Well, fuck you, Miss Tooth Fairy Queen.”
“Girls,” Matron says. “Jam pudding and custard for those who leave clean plates.”
January presses hotly and heavily on the wide verandah. Beth, in cotton shortie nightie and nothing else, lies on the damp sheet and stares through the mosquito net at a tarantula. How do they squat on the ceiling like that? If it falls, it will fall on Peggy’s net. Please fall, Beth instructs it. She beams her thoughts along the road of moonlight that runs straight from the louvres to the eight hairy legs.
Night after night, the tarantula will show up in exactly the same spot, but is gone by day. There’s another. It has been camped below the louvres, opposite Corey’s bed, for six nights. Then suddenly both of them will pick new stations. Or maybe they change shifts. Maybe there are hordes of tarantulas waiting their turn in the crawlspace below the verandahs? What do they see from the ceiling? Ten bunks on the east verandah, ten on the west. Do they sidle in through the glass louvres that enclose the verandahs? The louvres are always slanted open to entice sea breezes. Is that how the spiders get in? And where do they hide by day?
No one worries about them. Or perhaps, Beth thinks, no one admits to worrying about them, though everyone takes note of where they are before the lights go out. As long as she can still see, by squinting, the filaments of spiky hair on the spider’s legs, Beth can stop the tide from coming in. She can keep back the wave that has her name on it.
Beyond the spider, beyond the louvres, she can see the tired palms that bead the beaches together, filing south and south and south to Brisbane, reaching frond by frond by a trillion fronds north to Cape York. She can hear the Pacific licking its way across the mangrove swamps and mud flats, though the tide is far out. God, it’s hot! She reaches to her right and yanks at the mosquito net, tucked under the mattress, and lifts it to let in some air. Uhh … bite! Bite, bite, bite. God, they’re fast little blighters, noisy too, that high-pitched hum, it could drive you crazy in five minutes flat. She hastily tucks the net in again and swats at the stings. Greedy bloated little buggers. By moonlight, she examines the splats of blood on forearm and thigh.
“Who’s making all the fucking noise?” complains someone, drowsy.
“Can mosquitoes spread AIDS?” Beth asks.
“Ahh, shuddup ’n go to sleep, why don’t ya?”
But if dentists can … ? Beth wonders. She is fighting sleep, she is fighting the wave coming in.
She fans her limp body with her cotton nightie, lifting it away from herself, flapping air up to the wet crease beneath her breasts. There is no comfort. The tide is coming in now.
Every night the tide comes in. It seems to well up from her ankles. She feels this leaden heaviness in her calves, her thighs, her belly, her chest, it just keeps rising and rising, this terrible sadness, this sobbing, it can’t be stopped, it bubbles up into her throat, it is going to choke her, drown her, she