Charades by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

shade, and we — the blokes, I mean — are gathering at McGillivray’s to wet the whistle before the party starts. We’re on the verandah, see, and maybe some of us on the steps, and some others, yeah, I reckon some others are under the trees. There’s a sun like a flamin’ communion wafer hangin’ right against the roof of Wentworth’s, struth, I thought it’d set his sign on fire, like a bloody spitball of flame it was, just waiting for the half-dark to gobble it. And you can already see the moon standing by, thin as a piece of shell. We’re talking women, we’re talking horses, we’re talking bets. Bill Stolley, the old fool, has just lost his shirt at yesterday’s races and is cadging drinks.
    â€œThen this weird thing happens. Seems like every scrub turkey on the mountain hears someone at McGillivray’s call its name. Dozens of them, scores of them, maybe hundreds, cackling and scratching, colliding at the verandah rails, dropping feathers and worse in our beer. Holy shit, it was weird. I heard of it happening two or three other occasions, only when the sun and the moon are changing places in that space between Wentworth’s roof and the big blue gum outside of McGillivray’s.”
    â€œDad,” says Brian, “this tale gets taller with every drink.”
    â€œAnd out of the moon,” says Mick Donovan, “walking in between the birds like — I dunno, like gods or something, comes these two strangers. Jacky Dobson — he’s part Aboriginal — he swears he saw them covered with feathers and carrying nets, butterfly nets, bird-catcher nets, people nets. He starts trembling like he’s got the DTs. Hey mate, someone says to him, lay off the metho, eh? And Jacky covers his face with his hands and calls out: ‘Watch out for their nets. If their nets come down, you’re done for.’
    â€œThose two can hear Jacky, o’ course. They stare at him, and then the bloke speaks.
    â€œ ‘We didn’t mean to alarm anybody,’ he says in his fancy-pantsy voice. ‘We’re looking for Bea Ryan. We’re friends of Bea’s.’
    â€œ ‘And pigs can fly’, says I. The whole damn pub is cracking up. We can just see Bea sucking on her words to get them all shipshape, plum juice dribbling out of her mouth. We can just see Bea having friends like these.
    â€œ ‘We’ve driven up from Brisbane. We have an invitation,’ the bloke says in his Pommy voice. He’s waving this bit of paper. ‘But I’m afraid it’s not very specific about directions. Does anyone here know where Bea lives?’
    â€œSomeone says: ‘Every man and his dog knows where Bea lives. Just follow your own divining rod. Beg pardon, ma’am’ — because the sheila with the big dark eyes has turned to look at him, and we don’t use language in front of women. So there’s shuffling, like, and a bit o’ coughing and spitting, and someone else says: ‘She’ll be right, mate. She’s on her way
if you’ll hang on a tick. You’re at the party.’
    â€œBut this bloke acts like he don’t even know that a voice like his will get him into trouble. ‘Perhaps I’ll just go out to meet her,’ he says, ‘if you could point me in the right direction.’
    â€œAnd someone does, see. Point, I mean. And the bloke whispers somethin’ to his sheila, and next thing, pouf! he leaves her there on the verandah, leaning right on the doorway of the bar. I watch him moving down between the sun and the moon in that space between McGillivray’s and the blue gum.
    â€œWell, this is weird, you know, and everyone looks at everyone else with his eyebrows touching the top of his bloomin’ skull. I mean, the shadow of a sheila on a bar, it’s bad luck, it ain’t legal, it ain’t natural. Unless she’s