Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

first…?”
    She looked at me, startled, and laughed. “He’s the only one I loved. And the only one I wouldn’t take money from.”
    Virgin and child in a field of green. No madonna could have beheld the amazing fruit of her womb with more awed astonishment than I felt. Something hurt at the back of my head, and I reached up vaguely with my hand. There was a whole ordered moral world there somewhere. But I couldn’t find it. It wouldn’t come.
    I said, inanely: “So you and Gian are in love?”
    â€œHe was going to give me money and I wouldn’t take it. But he was gentle. And afterwards he took the orchid from behind his ear and put it between my legs. I hoped I’d have a baby, but I didn’t.”
    The storm was coming and we fled before the wind and the rain. At the mill we separated, but Dellis ran back and grabbed my arm. She had to shout, and even then I thought I hadn’t heard her properly. Our skirts bucked about our legs like wet sails, runnels of water sluiced over our ears. She shouted again: “Have you ever been laid?”
    â€œDellis!”
    â€œHave you?”
    â€œThis is not … this is not a proper …”
    â€œHave you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œGian says you’re beautiful. Gian says that you … He says he would like to … That’s why I hated you. But now I don’t.”
    Then we ran for our lives.
    All through my dinner and all through the evening, the rain drummed on the iron roof, and the wind dashed the banana palms against the window in a violent tattoo. For some reason I wanted to dance to the night’s jazz rhythm. But then surely there was something more insistent than the thunder, a battering on my door. She was standing dripping wet on my doorstep.
    â€œDellis, for God’s sake, what are you doing here? It’s almost midnight.”
    â€œThey were fighting at home again, and I couldn’t stand it. I brought something for you.”
    She held out a very perfect Cooktown orchid. Somebody’s prize bloom, stolen.
    â€œCome inside, out of the rain,” I said vaguely, listening to the lines from Eliot that fluted in my head – fragments and images half-remembered. I had to take down the book, so I showed her the passage:
    â€˜You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
    â€˜They called me the hyacinth girl.’
    â€“ Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
    Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
    Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
    Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
    Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
    â€œDellis,” I said, as (teacherly, motherly) I combed out her wet tangled hair, “for me, you will always be the hyacinth girl.”
    â€œPoetry!” she sniffed. And then: “What do hyacinths look like?”
    â€œI don’t know. I imagine they look like Cooktown orchids.”

The Inside Story
    Genuflection can be disturbing. I noticed the oddly suppliant man when I signed in, his boot soles gawping at the public while someone attended to his ankles. His knees were crammed together on a stackaway chair, his locked hands rested on its back. God damn you, you sons of bitches, he doubtless prayed.
    These things upset me. I was not at all suited to the job, but I got by with endless inner dialogue and a lunatic devotion to curriculum. After the sign-in, the identicheck, and the various double doors, I asked my class: “Do they always hobble you like that in public?”
    What do you mean, in public? they demanded. This is an exclusive place. You’ve got to belong to be here.
    â€œIt seems so … so unnecessarily distressing. Surely handcuffs are sufficient?”
    It’s not so bad, they said. Except for boarding buses. And for dancing. It’s a definite handicap at dances.
    My class had a very stem rule about cheerfulness. I was often reproached for transgressing it. We can’t afford