North of Nowhere, South of Loss

Beth’s hand flies to her lips. Has she done it again, blurted thought into the room? Possibly. She’s been jumpy, that’s why; ever since the dreams began again, the dreams of Giddie turning up. Or maybe she just imagined Lance spoke. Maybe she gave him the words. Her head is so cluttered with dialogue that bits of it leak out if she isn’t careful.

“It astonishes me, the lack of dental hygiene hereabouts,” Lance says. “We notice it with the hotel maids and the tourist guides, you know. As a dentist, it must break your heart.”

“Oh, we manage,” Dr Foley says. He lets the drill rise on its slick retractable cord and winks at Beth from behind his white sleeve. She lowers her eyes, expressionless, moving the vacuum hose, schlooping up the clear American words.

“You see this one?” Lance mumbles, pointing to an incisor. “Thought I’d lost this baby once, I could barely …” but the polished steel scraper gently pushes his consonants aside and only a stream of long shapeless untranslatable vowels grunt their way into the vacuum tube.

If we put all the tooth stories end to end, Beth thinks, we could have a twelve volume set. Oral history, Dr Foley calls it, laughing and laughing in his curious silent way at the end of a day, the last patient gone. Every American incisor and canine has its chronicle, lovingly kept, he maintains, laughing again. Many things amuse him. Beth can’t quite figure him out. She loves the curious things he says, the way he says them. She loves his voice. It’s the way people sound when they first come north from Brisbane or Sydney. He seems to her like someone who became a dentist by accident.

As he cranks down the chair, he murmurs: “The Annals of Dentition, we’re keeping a chapter for you, Lance.”

“I’m mightily obliged to you, Doctor, mightily obliged. Fitting me in at such short notice.” Lance shakes the dentist’s hand energetically. “And to you too, young lady.” He peers at the badge on Beth’s uniform. “Beth,” he reads. “Well, Miss Elizabeth, I’m grateful to you, ma’am. I surely am.”

“It’s not Elizabeth,” she says. “It’s short for Bethesda.”

“And a very fine city Bethesda is, yes ma’am, State of Maryland. I’ve been there once or twice. Now how did you come by a name like that?”

“The tooth fairy brought it,” Beth says.

Dr Foley’s eyebrows swoop up like exuberant gulls, then settle, solemn. Lance laughs and, a little warily, pats Beth on the shoulder.

“Well, Lance,” the dentist says in his professional voice. “Fight the good fight. Floss on. Mrs Wilkinson will handle the billing arrangements for you.” He ushers the American out, closes the door, and leans against it. “Don’t miss our thrilling first volume,” he says to Beth, madly flexing his acrobatic brows. His tone has gone plummy, mock epic, and she can hear his silent laughter pressed down underneath. “Wars of the Molars. Send just $19.95 and a small shipping and handling charge to Esplanade Dental Clinic, Cairns—”

“Ssh,” she giggles. “He’ll hear.”

“No worries. Now if Mrs Wilkinson hears me—”

“She might make you stand in the corner.”

“You’re a funny little thing,” he says, leaning against the door, watching her, as though he’s finally reached a judgment now that she’s been working a month. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she says, defensive. “It’s on my application.”

“Oh, I never pay attention.” He brushes forms aside with one hand. “I go by the eyes in the interview.” Beth feels something tight and sudden in her chest, with heat branching out from it, spreading. “You can see intelligence. And I look for a certain liveliness. ‘You haven’t been in Cairns long, I seem to remember.”

“No.”

“Just finished high school, I’ve forgotten where.”

“Mossman.”

“Hmm. Mossman. No jobs in Mossman, I suppose.”

“No,” she admits. “Everyone 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.