The Flight of Birds

by Joshua Lobb

  He wondered what that thump had been.

  He had a fairly good idea what the thump had been.

  He knew he had to get out of the car and inspect the damage. His red-raw neck hummed painfully.

  The car door made a scratchy noise as he opened it, as if a piece of gravel had got caught in the hinges. He edged his way to the front of the vehicle.

  There, crumpled into the grille, was a clump of broken bones and feathers. It was amazing how deep it had penetrated, how much it was enmeshed with the body of the car. Globs of dark blood smeared the edges of the impact hole and dripped off the jagged silvery plastic. He thought he should probably crouch down in front of it, investigate more closely. He kept his distance. And, as he stayed still, the bloody lump began to twitch. The smallest, slowest movement, but movement nonetheless. He wasn’t sure if it was a wing or a talony foot, but something scratched against the plastic. A whiff of red and blue fluff detached itself from the lump and wafted away. The wing—or whatever it was—flexed a little more. It rested. It flapped, slowly, sadly. The body twisted. The wing was snagged by the broken edge of the grille. The bird—and he knew now that it was a rosella, a red-and-blue parrot native to coastal Australia, a species of bird that often flew past his office window or pecked about in puddles in the park where he took his daughter—the bird tried to twist the other way, but couldn’t untangle itself from the plastic.

  When he was a boy—a really young boy—he used to go camping with his parents at Jervis Bay. The rosellas were tame there. His mother would break off a hunk of day-old bread and he’d hold it at arm’s length. The rosellas would hop over, individually or in pairs, and then as a whole flock. They’d flap up to the bread and clinch his forearm, his shoulder, the top of his head. Their claws would tickle his skin.

  The rosella continued to twist against the grille.

  He stayed where he was.

  The sunlight dwindled and the shadow of the Outback stretched away from them.

  The bird stopped twisting, exhausted, and waited for what was going to happen.

  This is what didn’t happen:

  He didn’t move closer to the grille, kneel down in the dust and look into the bird’s cloudy eyes. He didn’t reach his hand past the sharp plastic and, gently, scoop out the broken body. He didn’t take the bird and wrap it in a towel he kept in the glove compartment and he didn’t take the bird to the vet in the next suburb. The vet didn’t place the red and blue bird on the metal table and, tenderly, fold the wing back into position. The vet didn’t tell him that he’d done the right thing and that if he’d left the bird alone any longer it certainly would not have recovered. The bird didn’t recover, not even partially, not even with a limp wing or a missing talon. It didn’t become the family pet and live in the vestibule near the laundry at the back of the family home, and it never splashed about in puddles when he and his daughter took it to the park.

  He didn’t remember what his dad had taught him back on the farm when he was a boy: what to do when you find an injured animal in the bush—a rabbit, a dog, a bird—and it’s too far gone. He didn’t peel the bird away from the car and hold it in the palm of his left hand. With his right hand, he didn’t feel about in the blood-matted feathers for the rosella’s neck, and, mercifully, twist it sharply and firmly. He didn’t help the bird in this way. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to. He’d never lived on a farm or in the bush and his dad had never taught him this kindness. He’d only seen men on television talk about the best thing for animals in pain, the most humane act you could perform. He didn’t perform this act.

  He didn’t feel a strange energy run through his veins. Filled with this energy, humming and tickling his skin, he didn’t reach into the plastic chasm and touch the bird’s rib cage. The golden flecks of dust in the sunlight didn’t swirl around the bird and, miracle of miracles, the bird did not suddenly stretch out its wings. The crimson and blue feathers glistening in the light and the bird flying off, fully healed, into the bush.

  He didn’t scoop his hand into the chasm. He didn’t even hold the feathery matted mess in his hand and keep the bird warm and safe until it died.

  This is what happened:

  He got into his car and drove home. He parked in the garage and pulled the roller door shut. The next morning, a crisp and cheery Saturday, he took his car to the detailing place attached to the local shopping centre. When he came back from the supermarket, the car was gleaming wet and clean.

  When he drove to work on Monday he stayed on the highway, following clear lines of sight.

  The Pecking Order

  Who is suffering? No one.

  Carol J. Adams, ‘The War on Compassion’

  At fifteen, my daughter officially became what her grandfather called ‘a bloody vegetarian’. She was pretty militant about it. She started a subcommittee of the student council dedicated to making the canteen a meat-free zone, made loud pronouncements in restaurants, distributed animal rights pamphlets around the neighbourhood. ‘We’re murderers, Dad,’ she’d say, ‘we’re all murderers.’

  I had nothing to say in response. I did what I could to avoid looking at the images on the pamphlets splayed on the hallway table. They’d always catch my eye. Broken wings tangled in cage wire; beaks gasping in an airless metal shed; steroid-altered torsos weighed down by disproportionate pendulous, ulcerated breasts; millions of dead eyes glaring amongst layers of sawdust, woodchips and excrement. I tried, too, not to take in the statistics she’d thrust at me over our evening meal, ‘Fifty billion chickens are slaughtered every year, Dad.’; ‘An industrial farm can hold a million or more birds, genetically altered to make flesh fast before the animal dies under her own weight.’

  At fifteen, my daughter could see the truth of the world. But, in fact, the kernel of this knowledge was formed much earlier than that.

  It happened in a supermarket. I’d say she was about six. (I measure time sometimes by determining which Charlotte was in the vestibule; this was definitely in the era of the second Charlotte.) We were shivering in the meat section, my daughter and I, mapping out the week’s dinners. Above us, suspended from the darkened ceiling, was a cardboard mobile of a red barn and cows and chickens, and the words Old MacDonald’s Farm. After she got bored with jumping up to try and grab one of the black and white cows, my daughter dashed over and started banging a big red button on the wall between the eggs and the meat fridges. She wouldn’t stop banging the button, which caused an artificial, strangulated buck-aaw to burst out of a speaker in the wall. I tried not to acknowledge the flicked irritated looks from the other shoppers. Next to the button was a childlike drawing of a white hen; between bangs, my daughter would trace the elongated S of the bird’s back, from beak to tail. In an effort to distract her, I asked my daughter to fetch one of the punnets from the meat-display shelves. Carting it back, she scrutinised the pink glistening pillow underneath the plastic film, tracing the words on the sticky label. She stared at the silhouette of the bird next to the button on the wall: sleek body; beak, comb and fluffy feathers.

  At school, she’d been learning about homonyms. Around the rim of the classroom, the teacher had hung up rectangles of cardboard, with a different definition written in capital letters on each side. ‘There’s bark like a dog,’ she’d told me, ‘and bark of a tree.’ There’s left and left, pen and pen. Up to this moment—the moment poised between the eggs and the freezers, holding a plastic tub of flesh—I think my daughter thought that chicken was also a homonym. ‘There’s a chicken in the farmyard, Daddy,’ she might have said, ‘and there’s chicken you eat.’ The cardboard rectangle spinning slowly in the air.

  That night, my daughter looked down at the fleshy pillow, now battered with breadcrumbs and laid out on her plate. She turned her plate so that the fillet was as far away from her as possible. When she finished eating her broccoli and carrots, she pushed the plate into the centre of the table.

  My wife and I let her thoughts flutter for a few days. We would
take turns offering phrases like ‘Just try a little tonight’ or ‘But that’s your favourite’. My daughter’s eyes would cloud and the food would congeal on the plate.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ my wife would say later, when we’d scraped the uneaten food into the bin, or were lying in bed with the lights off, staring up at the shadowy ceiling. ‘There are plenty of vegetarian recipes and we can work out other ways for her to get the protein she needs and, really, it’s a good thing, it’s good to have a daughter who knows what she wants, who cares, who …’ The words trailed off into the darkness.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘I just realised … we’ve got my parents’ barbecue on the weekend …’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  My wife’s family was nothing like my own. We used to alternate Christmases: one year with my father; the next with my wife’s parents, and sisters, and brothers-in-law, and aunts, and uncles, and nephews and cousins. The overwhelming silence of my father’s barn of a house, the muted gift-giving ceremony, all over in five minutes. As opposed to the chintzy clutter of my mother-in-law’s lounge room: the raucous ritual underneath an enormous Christmas tree over-burdened with tinsel; the ritual starting before the crack of dawn, everyone dressed in elf caps or Mrs Claus wigs or ‘ho ho ho’ T-shirts or aprons that said ‘Kiss me, I’m Santa’. After the frenzied ripping and squealing and complaining, we’d struggle through the wrapping paper before going out onto the patio for the even more important event.

  Each year’s fare would be grander than the last’s—one year a pig on a spit; another a surf-and-turf smorgasbord. Every weekend in the lead-up to Christmas, my father-in-law would hold rehearsal barbecues, testing out potential honey-glazes, perfecting the crackling. ‘How about that marinade,’ he’d say, wiping his brow with a beer. He liked to spice things up, offer a range of choices, the patio table ending up like an oversized meat-lover’s pizza. Legs and hocks and racks, barbecue sauce squirting over the potato (and bacon) salad. Pork and beef and venison. ‘Rudolf tastes great, Granddad!’ a nephew might say. We’d talk a lot about the meat. Was a steak better medium-rare or burnt within an inch of its life? Was a thermometer necessary to roast the perfect turkey, or was it just a piece of useless MasterChef paraphernalia? We were all required to provide detailed feedback, rate the quality of the rump over the one we’d chopped up at the previous week’s barbecue. Although the way my father-in-law would leer at you, tongs poised, ready to snap, there was really only one response you could give. ‘Top feed,’ one son-in-law would say. ‘Yep,’ the second would say, and then I’d murmur, ‘Yes, excellent.’

  My wife was the middle of three daughters. On the drive to family barbecues, she’d itch in her seat as if transforming into her younger frizzy-haired self: a bodily return to a state of resentment, of long-lost feuds and teenage spats. The hierarchy between sisters was always shifting, dependent on some nuances of power that I could never quite identify. On the way home, she’d mutter about the appalling thing that one of her sisters had the hide to say: each journey home it would be a different sister. I’d watch my own daughter in the rear-view mirror. She’d be looking out the window, but I’d know she was listening.

  ‘Why do you bicker all the time?’ I once made the mistake of asking.

  My wife sharpened in her seat. ‘We don’t,’ she snapped. Then, as the distance widened between the car and her old family home, she said, quietly, ‘It’s what we do in our family.’

  The hierarchy of sons-in-law, on the other hand, was firmly fixed in place. The superior son-in-law always knew the football score, could keep up with the beer-tally set by his father-in-law, could do the biggest bomb in the pool. The second-seeded son-in-law was working hard to be noticed, had bought himself a Weber six-burner, made sure he knew the right stubby-holder to use, always began know-it-all sentences with: ‘I saw on TV that …’ or ‘Apparently …’ I could only say, ‘Yes, excellent.’ I think some of the nephews—scowling at their phones or Marco-Poloing in the pool—ranked higher than me. I think even my mother-in-law did. She was always on the edge of the conversation, clearing up the plastic plates and paper serviettes. Of course, the king of the heap was always the man who slapped a plate of chicken wings in front of you and waited, looming.

  ‘No,’ my daughter said.

  The tongs snapped. The only sound was the hiss of the middle son-in-law’s beer. Even the splashing in the pool ceased.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ my father-in-law said.

  My daughter’s face was blotching with pink. A droplet of marinade splatted from the tongs onto the patio table.

  ‘I’ll have some, Dad,’ my wife said.

  My mother-in-law fluffed her tea towel.

  I sat opposite my daughter, willing us both into oblivion. My daughter scrunched up her eyes. My body hummed.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ the lump of a man said.

  ‘Dad, it’s just—’ my wife said, ‘she’s just, we’re just—’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  And my daughter swept from the table, bolting away to the furthest reaches of the backyard.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ another man said, many years before.

  We were sitting, as we always did, opposite each other across the marble table in the kitchen. This was the beginning of it all. (I measure time sometimes by determining how frequently my mother was able to get out of bed; at this stage, she did occasionally emerge from behind the pale door and pad down the hallway. Once or twice she’d join us at the marble table; once, she came and read to me in bed.) In the middle of the table was a chicken casserole.

  My father hadn’t made the casserole. It had been delivered by one of our well-meaning neighbours. There was a stack of chicken casseroles in the fridge supplied by other well-meaning neighbours, another stack in the freezer, ready to go when we needed them. In the afternoons after school, I’d have to open the front door and take the casserole from the neighbour from across the road or down the street. She’d occupy the doorstep, waiting for me to force the words ‘thank you’ from my mouth. They’d fall out, dry and hollow, meaning something different from the dictionary definition. It was better when I arrived home late, having planned a circuitous path home from school, and found another Pyrex dish laid out on the welcome mat.

  The steam lingered between us. There was a fatty scent in the air. My father didn’t say anything else. He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘please’. I wouldn’t mouth the word ‘no’. My father’s fingers tapped the marble. We sat there in the absence of words, waiting.

  I don’t remember what made me start eating it.

  At school, I pretended everything was the same as it was for every other kid. I did my best to scrape my knees on the quadrangle; to tumble into the classroom over the frayed carpet. But kids worked it out. There was a gap in the way they talked about me. ‘He’s the one with the ______,’ they’d whisper. There was always an empty space around my body as I wandered across the playground, too, everyone repelled like the bad end of a magnet. I understood. There was a white humming in my mind that was palpably repellent, a rhythm that was beginning to form. The phrasing wasn’t there yet. It was still ______ ______ ______ ______, although sometimes it was turning into Please don’t ______ ______. At that point, my mother’s appearances on the hallway side of the door could stave off the humming. But little acts of control—like stepping over the lines on the quadrangle or crossing the road at exactly the same spot every day, or playing a record over and over—meant that everything was going to be ______ ______.

  I didn’t tell anyone about these acts. There was no one to tell. If another kid was near me when it was time to cross the street, sometimes I’d walk a few steps along the footpath until I was alone and then double back, or I’d crouch and pretend to do up my shoelaces, just in case they worked it out. I’d watch the beak of the stylus slide down into the correct groove on the record, but the volume was so low that no one—
not the body sleeping; not the body sitting waiting at the kitchen table—could hear. At night, in the dark, hemmed in by the blankets, that’s when the humming was at its worst. The only way to protect myself then was to accompany the rhythm. Arms straight, palms against thighs, tapping. Please don’t let . Please don’t let . Repeat until the grey shadows of morning stretch across the room.

  One morning I was making my way across the chilly quadrangle, tracing a particularly complicated pattern to get me from library to classroom, when I noticed a different shape from the configuration of the bodies. There was another empty space forming around another figure in the playground. ‘He’s weird,’ I heard one kid say. ‘He stinks,’ hissed another. It was a new arrival at the school: the worst thing you could possibly have happen to you, coming in mid-term, when everything was already settled in its proper order. He had other marks against him, too. He wore a home-made knitted jumper, which wasn’t quite the same grey as the official uniform. As I shifted towards him I could see he had a vertical scar that sliced over his top lip. He also had a sneer on his face: I wasn’t sure if that was caused by the scar or by whatever he was thinking. He did smell, like he’d weed himself a few weeks before and never changed his shorts. I could feel my body veering away from him, like all the other magnets.

  Eventually, though, he and I found ourselves alongside each other more often than not. We weren’t in the same class—he was in the year below me—but we’d see each other at playlunch. I’d watch the birds skipping along the edge of the quadrangle and he’d flick out some of his crumbly sandwich bread so the birds hopped closer. We’d sort-of talk: a bit about books we were reading or what was on telly last night. I told him that my favourite show was The Goodies; he agreed with me that the giant cat episode was the best one. We became almost-friends. He liked to look over at the other kids and make bitter comments, using words I’d never heard before.