Tourmaline (5 page)

A strange effect, almost miraculous, to see a mask come alive; an event like birth or metamorphosis, very solemn, and slightly flavoured with the taste of tears. There he was: a life for Tourmaline, a life that we had saved. He was ours. And his eyes were very vivid, very blue, like the sudden kingfisher-flash down by the creek, at the end of the garden, at home, when I was young.

I asked: ‘Can you see me?’ An old man going soft at the heart had best keep to the bare necessities of speech. ‘You’re not blind, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, after staring at me for a time. He turned his head a little and studied Mary and Deborah. Then he lowered his gaze again.

‘Does your head ache?’ Deborah asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, moving, restlessly. ‘Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. I don’t——’ But he seemed to forget whatever it was he meant to say.

Meanwhile Mary came with a glass of water, and raised him, and held it to his mouth. He drank quickly and greedily. While she was filling the glass again, he said: ‘That water—ah—bad water.’

‘There’s salt in it,’ she said, giving him more. ‘You need salt in your body, so Rocky says. You’ll probably not be well for a few days yet.’

All the while he gasped and swallowed. ‘Bad water,’ he said, when the glass was empty. ‘Not just salt.’ Nevertheless, he went on to drink two more glasses of it, before lying back, panting, on the pillows.

‘Where is this?’ he asked, later.

‘This is Tourmaline,’ Deborah said.

‘Tourmaline.’ He made a curious sound, like a laugh. ‘I didn’t think—ever——’

‘Were you coming here?’ she asked him.

Ah, yes—maybe. I didn’t think——’ He opened his eyes again and looked at me, down at the foot of the bed.

‘I am the Law,’ I said. ‘Would you like to tell us who you are?’

He shifted his shoulders, uncomfortably, watching me all this time. At last: ‘I’m not——’ he said; and then, sighing: ‘I’m—ah—diviner.’

‘Diviner,’ Deborah said, wondering.

‘Dowser. Water. You know?’ And his voice had grown thin and unsure.

But what a bound of my heart there was, to think that it was this that we had saved for Tourmaline. A diviner in our midst, in our waterless and dying town.

‘A diviner,’ Mary said. And she too was rapt.

‘I’m—ah—tired,’ he murmured. ‘Sick. Could sleep some more.’ But his half-open eyes had turned towards the door, and I looked round and saw Byrne leaning there, intent.

‘A diviner, Byrnie,’ Mary said. ‘Imagine.’

He came to stand beside me at the bed’s foot, and it seemed as if he couldn’t take his black eyes from those blue ones. In time he said: ‘Good day, mate.’

The diviner said nothing.

‘You don’t remember me,’ Byrne said, ‘do you?’

‘Stranger,’ the diviner said. ‘First time—in Tourmaline.’ He looked uneasy, suddenly, his eyes uncertain.

‘You talked to me last night. Don’t worry, you didn’t say anything.’

‘Sick,’ said the diviner. ‘Too much sun. Out of water.’

‘And you a diviner,’ said Byrne.

The man on the bed closed his eyes and sighed, painfully.

Byrne said: ‘I wasn’t getting at you. Honest. Anyone in this town’s your mate. You staying with us?’

The diviner made a sound, a sort of audible shrug.

‘We don’t know your name, even,’ Byrne said. He had taken charge of the proceedings. ‘Well, this is the Law, up here with me. That’s Mary Spring next to you, it’s her house you’re in. Deborah over there’s been nursing you, and I’ve been doing the same. I’m Bill Byrne.’

I recall that the rest of us were mildly surprised by this reminder that he had a Christian name. He had been Byrnie most of his life.

‘But we don’t know your name,’ he persisted.

The diviner shifted and sighed on his pillows.

At length he murmured: ‘Michael,’ wearily.

‘Good enough name,’ Byrne said. And I remember thinking how oddly in command of himself he was that morning, how assured. His ravaged face was almost stern. ‘That all?’

The diviner stirred.

‘It doesn’t matter, son.’

‘Random,’ said the diviner, suddenly, and as if he had surprised himself. And I knew then, we all knew, that he was lying.

Still, it was of no importance. We were only amused to see how little he knew of Tourmaline if he thought that his real name, for good or ill, could ever have reached us.

‘Well,’ said Byrne, ‘I’m glad to know you, Mike.’ And we all made small friendly noises. It was ludicrous. The diviner, in return, tortured himself into producing a smile.

‘I’m glad—to be here,’ he painfully informed us; and as it sounded so perfectly inane he went on to an equally painful but quite spontaneous laugh, in which we were relieved to join. It did serve to clear the air a bit.

‘You’ll soon be well,’ Deborah said, coming closer to the bed.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Soon.’

‘But your poor face,’ Mary said, ‘it’s going to come off in strips.’

‘My face,’ he echoed. ‘Not worth much. Start with—a clean skin.’

He sounded exhausted, and I suppose had not noticed poor Byrnie’s pits and craters, although he was looking directly at him as he spoke. The strain of making new acquaintances and attempting to be affable must have been, at that time, almost intolerable, and I began to feel guilty. We had leapt upon him like eager and loving dogs. He could not possibly know how much he meant to us.

Mary must have felt the same way; for she abruptly stopped studying him, and said: ‘Everyone out of this room,’ in a tone of command. ‘You too, Deborah. Let him sleep in peace.’

So we were herded away; not without reluctance, in spite of our goodwill to the patient. The last to go was Byrne, who appeared to be laying claim to some special interest in our find (I say ‘find’ because no one apparently considered at that stage that the rights of ownership in our disputed property might be vested in the property himself) on the grounds of their earlier conversation. He leaned over the bed-end and said, rather wistfully: ‘See you, Mike.’

‘See you,’ said the diviner, closing his eyes, ‘ah—Jack.’

Poor Byrnie came out of the room looking rejected.

But outside in the store Tom was sitting, as usual, behind the counter. And for certain people (people, so far as I could see, who were bent on wrecking their lives, or had done so, like Jack Speed’s father) he had a wonderfully warm and gentle smile. Byrne was one of them. I was moved to see that smile, and Byrne responding. I am soft at the heart, I know, soft at the heart; and they are so ghostly to me, all my fellow men, that such moments, when the reality of them is suddenly there, and brilliant, made manifest by one to another, and by both to me—such moments touch my soft old heart with a pleasure and pain past bearing. There stood poor Byrnie, wearing his twenty-eight years as if they had been eighty, there was so little in his life of hope and promise; and there was elderly Tom, bathing him in the radiance of his young smile. For a moment Byrne looked beautiful.

‘He’s a diviner,’ he told Tom, elated.

‘I knew,’ said Tom, ‘he was something—not common.’

‘You haven’t heard him yet.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Tom said. ‘The boy’s weak still.’

I went away from them, leaving them talking. I went to my house and spoke, as on every other morning, to the wireless. Why did I think, listening to the silence, of our wild garden at home, and of tough frail lilies breaking open the ground, before the earliest rains?

Then for three days we saw nothing of him, although from Mary we had a running commentary on his activities. He was deeply depressed, we heard, and would lie on his bed all day without moving. He suffered from headaches, and from fits of shivering, during which the sweat poured from him, leaving him cold as a fish. His skin began to peel. On the third day he shaved himself, taking off a good deal of his epidermis with the hair. His proportions had returned to normal, but Mary found herself unable to form any aesthetic judgement on his face, which, she said, most resembled the flaking ceilings of the Tourmaline Hotel; although not (she added, with a hiss of insecticide) held together with the vomit of flies.

Byrne fretted, kept unjustly at a distance from his interesting property; to whom, it seemed to us, he had been inexplicably bullying and tedious, and who probably did not care to see him again. On the second night he got drunk, and sang for several hours from his usual platform. Later he staggered into the bar and made a long oration to Kestrel on the subject of the diviner, during which the phrase ‘The desert’ll blossom’ occurred many times. Kestrel replied, when he could: ‘Will you get out of here?’ Byrne then offered to go and live with Jack Speed’s father, at his camp ten miles away, and never set foot in Tourmaline again, if that was Kestrel’s desire. After that Kestrel and Rock laid hands on him, and dragged him off to his bed.

On the first night or two of the diviner’s sojourn in Tourmaline Kestrel’s attitude to him was charitably neutral. By the fourth night he hated him. He had not, of course, seen him since a few minutes after his arrival, and he was not so rash as to pass any judgement; but when Michael Random’s name was mentioned, the set of his mouth said all that was needed. Said more, indeed, if he had known, than he may have wished; for there were not many people in Tourmaline who did not guess pretty early that he was afraid of the diviner. I think he saw himself deserted, bereft of Deborah, and of Byrne; such a charm the other man seemed to have, even when insensible.

Deborah was more silent than ever. But one afternoon, not long after a quarrel, I suspect, she took a first sip of some tea she had made, and grimaced, and said to Kestrel: ‘You’ve been here all your life, and what have you given us? Rum.’

There was no water, he told her. Did she think no one had tried? Did she think Tourmaline hadn’t enough cranks of its own, without picking them up off the road?

She said nothing, to great effect.

Rock was stolidly hopeful. For many years, even before it was his, the meagre garden had been kept alive with the waste water and kitchen slops of the whole town, and this had to be collected. The rest thought first of the gold. In the bar of the hotel, with Kestrel dourly watching, visions arose of a Tourmaline greater and richer even than in its heyday, a town paved with gold and murmuring with sluices, inhabited solely by millionaires. So wild was the optimism that there seemed to be a hazy feeling that the drought might break with the diviner’s coming, and the millionaires go yachting on Lake Tourmaline.

This was the state of hope and curiosity he induced in us. And on the fifth day of his citizenship, having been informed by Mary of our mounting impatience, he sent word that he was ready to be visited.

Mary’s sitting room, furnished with cane and seagrass chairs, and dominated by a panoramic photograph of Tourmaline in its prosperity, now brown and nearly featureless, was a bleak place, but cool; cooler, certainly, than the more comfortable parts of the hotel, with their monstrosities of brown velvet and imitation leather. No fly ever intruded there, and very little light, for the aged green curtains were always drawn. An upright piano (the property, need I say, of Tom’s grandmother) glimmered in one corner, surmounted by a silver lamp. The carpet, originally green, but worn bare in many places, resembled a drought-stricken lawn. In another corner stood a bookcase, containing the pick of the Miners’ Institute’s one thousand volumes, and as much wisdom, I dare say, as there was to be found in Tourmaline, in those days or in ours.

It was into this room that Mary led me, and after me Byrne, to be received by the diviner.

He had been lounging in an ancient basket-chair, but rose to meet us as Mary pushed back the door, looking self-conscious, I noticed. Tom had dressed him in blue dungarees, with a blue shirt, such as most of us wear, and as he faced into the light that fell through the open door I was struck again by the deep cloudy colour of his eyes, like the Timor Sea, as I remember it, long ago. Something about him always recalled to me the sea, the coast, many things I have not known since I was young. There was so much hope in the look of him.

He was moderately tall, I discovered, about an inch under six feet, a good manageable size. In height and build, indeed, he was almost the double of Byrne, and in his first days at Tourmaline they were often confused. Both were thin, sinewy, almost hipless, with that apparently spindly but actually unbreakable wiriness that the plants of these arid regions also have. Even in his prostration we had seen that he was tough; and that in spite of the fact that the ribs showed under his skin like the laths of a crumbling wall.

All this time I had been studying him, in the way he must by then have been getting used to, and beginning to hate. But he came forward pleasantly enough, and shook hands with me. Curious hands he had; rather fine, strong hands, but seeming somehow to consist of not much more than his fine, strong bones, elusive and ungraspable.

This was emphasized by his still being coated with unguents, although no longer with the whitish preparation with which Mary had first plastered him. He gleamed wherever his skin was exposed. His straight nose shone like a plum. Threads of skin clung to his lips, and he did in general, as Mary had said, resemble the flaking ceilings of Kestrel’s pub.

Even so, it was evident that he possessed certain advantages. He had fine bones, and the yellow hair flopped over his forehead in an amiable way. If he had good looks, they were of a kind that could irritate nobody. In a word, he was prepossessing.

I said that I was pleased to see him so well.

‘I’ve been lucky,’ he said. ‘Lucky to land in a place like this. Mary and Tom have treated me like a son, or something.’

Byrne had been standing behind me, dark and expectant, like a shy dog gauging a stranger. The diviner presented his lean hand.

‘Thanks for looking after me,’ he said.

Byrne suddenly grinned like the sun. ‘You did remember.’

‘Not that part of it. But thanks, anyway.’ And then he hung irresolate, and it became apparent how severe a trial he found all this sociable behaviour, probably wishing us at the devil all the while.