Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda

Where it stood last Christmas there is now a bare patch of earth, which is joined to the kikuyu grass by two great wheel ruts where the low-loader was temporarily bogged. There are sixteen banks of old cinema chairs which had lately served as pews for the small congregation. But there is no sign here of anything that the church meant to us: Palm Sundays, resurrections, water into wine, loaves and fishes, all those cruel and lofty ideas that Oscar, gaunt, sunburnt, his eyes rimmed with white, brought up the river in 1865.

There are thistles everywhere. They are small and flat now, like prickly sunbathers, but by the end of summer they will be three feet tall, and they will be thickest beside the short fat stumps where the church has stood. No one will slash them because this ground belongs to the church and the church is not here.

There are wheel ruts. There are thistles. By autumn their seeds will be catching in the needles of casuarinas, floating down across the shallow gravel beds of Sweet Water Creek. There are no stories to tell about thistles.

Ill

A Song for Oscar

When Oscar said goodbye to my great-grandmother he no longer thought that the glass church was a holy thing. He thought it a conceit, a vanity, a product of the deuce's insinuations into the fancyfactory of his mind. He was like a drunk waking after a spree, sour and sick and full of remorse and mixed in with all of this was the sin of fornication, his great fright to discover women have hair in "that place," the throbbing pain of his sunburn, the lesser pain of the infected blister on his heel, his itching, bleeding arse-hole, the rope burns on his wrists and the nauseous fluttering feeling that told him he needed more laudanum.

a. V\

A Song for Oscar

He walked out along the ringing wooden wharf as though the water were no threat to him. The church rode on its mooring, creaking slightly as its ropes stretched against the zenith of high tide. He limped down the steps, grimacing, and entered through the cedar door which he carefully shut behind him. He walked across splintered glass and the bodies of dragon-flies and wasps. He sat on the straight-backed chair which Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister had carried through the bush to give him as a farewell gift. He reached for his laudanum and, having raised it to his lips, found it empty. He dropped the bottle on the deck, and then bent his head to pray. He begged God forgive him for the murder of the blacks which he, through his vanity, had brought about.

He begged God forgive him for the death of Mr Stratton.

He begged God forgive him for the murder of Mr Jeffris.

He begged God forgive him for the seduction of Mrs Chadwick.

He begged God forgive him for his complacency, his pride, his wilful ignorance. But even as he prayed he felt himself polluted almost beyond redemption.

He prayed as he had prayed in his Bathurst Street boarding house, digging his nails into the backs of his hands, rocking to and fro on his chair until its legs groaned, but somewhere on the inky side of dusk, as the flying foxes began to detach their pegged and ragged forms from the branches of the Moreton Bay fig trees by the Bellinger, he drifted into sleep. Thus he never reached the final destination of his prayer which was to ask God to destroy the glass church. In the event, no heavenly intervention was necessary, for the lighters belonged to H. M. McCracken whose house stood on sinking stumps, whose wagons had wheels with broken staves. One of the lighters, the one away from the wharf, shipped water, not so much, but enough to have made H. M. McCracken tell Percy Smith to "keep an eye on 'er." It had been taking in just under half an inch of water for every hour and now it was over one hundred hours since anyone had thought to look at it. At ten minutes past eight on Good Friday eve, the old lighter passed the point at which it was buoyant and then, with no fussit sank. The clever platform Percy Smith had built dropped on one side. Water rose into the church. There was nothing to stop it.

Oscar awoke as he hit the floor. He slipped down to the low side, furthest from the door. He scrabbled up the sloping platform towards the door. He slashed

Oscar and Lucinda

his hands on broken glass. The twisting of the platform had jammed the door. It was not quite dark. Flying foxes filled the sky above the river. The tilting platform became a ramp and the glass church slid beneath the water and while my great-grandfather kicked and pulled at the jammed door, the fractured panes of glass behind his back opened to let in his ancient enemy.

A great bubble of air broke the surface of the Bellinger and the flying foxes came down close upon the river. When they were close enough for his bad eyes to see, he thought they were like angels with bat wings. He saw it as a sign from God. He shook his head, panicking in the face of eternity. He held the doorknob as it came to be the ceiling of his world. The water rose. Through the bursting gloom he saw a vision of his father's wise and smiling face, peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father's study. Shining fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him. And when the long-awaited white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar's lips, he welcomed them in as he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a nightmare.

J

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Glossary

brolga-a large silvery-grey crane found in Northern and Eastern Australia, which performs an elaborate courtship dance.

Coberm-a worm, eaten as a delicacy.

jinker-a light vehicle, designed to carry two people.

kingsman-a large showy handkerchief in fashion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Mohawk-a colloquial term for a late Regency/early Victorian "Hooray Henry." the push-colloquial Australian for a gang of vicious hooligans. shickered-drunk. swy-a gambling game.

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