She did have eyelids; they drooped across her sight. She was wrapped like a baby in rough, dry cloth. She was shivering, shivering. The shivering shook her whole body and almost all her mind. She was cold against her pa. He was chafing her arm and shoulder back to life through the blanket.
‘Did you go into his house?’ she said through her shivering jaws. ‘Did you see all those babies?’
‘That house there?’ Pa pointed and she saw the mound fading into the moonlit mist.
‘Did you cleave it?’
‘What’s that, my darling?’
‘Did you break it like that, the top of it?’
‘It were broken all along, Ollyn. It were rotten wrecked when we found it. And no babies inside, loved one. Nothing inside at all but earth. I saw it myself, and Huv and his lamp. Because we looked good and hard in there. Your ma said you might well be in there, buried. But we dug it apart and you weren’t. Then and then only, when we were spent and giving up, did you move yourself, and make that cry in the marshwater.’
‘Like a little cat,’ said Daff, rowing. ‘Miou, miou.’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Oll.
‘Of course not,’ said Huvvy. ‘You were just about insensible.’
Ollyn and Ma scoured the pots, down by the stream. It was Ma’s first outing since the baby. They were both numb-fingered with scrubbing, and the wind blew unpredictably, buffeting them off balance and twitching their hair.
‘How did you know?’ said Oll.
‘Know what?’ Ma slapped a fresh handful of sand into the rinsed stewpot.
‘Where to find me. Where to tell Pa and Huvvy to go that night. And to get a boat. How’d you know about that man?’
Ma scrubbed. ‘Everyone knows about that man.’
‘Pa didn’t. And “How’d she get there?” says Huvvy. And I told them and they said, “Ooh, sounds like Romany Tom” or someone. They would have guessed and guessed, and gone out and had someone thrown in the gaol, if you didn’t shut them up.’
Ma scrubbed on. There was a stubborn set to her.
Well, Oll could be stubborn, too. ‘So not everyone knows.’ She was back on her heels now, not even pretending to scour. ‘How’d you know any of it? Pa says you woke him and told him where to go if I weren’t at Kellers’, where to look. Kellers didn’t even know I was gone from bed until he knocked them up.’
Ma gave her head a little toss. With the wind, her hair clambered back into her eyes, as busy and black as duelling spiders.
‘Ma?’
‘What.’
‘Well?’
Ma lifted the wet sand and let it dribble into a turdy pile in the pot: blat-blat-blat, blat-blot. ‘All my babies,’ she said. ‘They wake in the night? I wake. I knew it were you in a minute. The way you carried on about going up to Kellers’, I knew you would not stay put.’
Oll laughed. ‘How could I wake you, halfway across the town?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ma bent to scrubbing again. ‘There must be a sound you make, your eyelids opening. It carries to my ears.’
Oll watched Ma’s wayward hair, her determined shoulders, her white and purple feet with the toes digging into the sand. These sights satisfied her like a solid meal in her belly. ‘But what about those other children, the dead ones, on the pile? Does not every mother hear that eyelid sound?’
Ma bunched up her mouth in thought. She rinsed the pot in the stream, holding it out wide where it would catch the clearer, faster water. ‘I don’t know’ – she swirled the water in the pot – ‘how it is for other mothers. I can only say how it is for me.’
Through the fiddle and rush of the stream they heard the baby’s thin cry. They sat straight to see over the bank, up to the house. Daff was carrying her down, her tiny fists and feet awheel in his awkward arms, her blanket dangling.
‘Oh lord,’ sighed Ma. ‘Take her, Ollyn, while I finish here. Wrap her tight and walk her up and down. Behind the house, where I can’t hear her noise so well.’
Oll climbed the bank. The sunlight dazzled her after the shadowy stream-bank; the earth was warm underfoot; the grass sprang high all up the hill and weedflowers nodded and lounged in it yellow and red and pale purple. Daff waded through them fast with the crying baby, and Oll went to meet him, almost laughing, he looked so frightened of the tiny mewling thing.
{ A Feather in the Breast of God
In memoriam: HG, Roy, Smoke and Whitey
I arrived in moonlight; it wasn’t hard to find the way. The cage was just as I’d left it, down to the droppings on the newspaper floor, black and white glisters with long moon-shadows. There was no water, and something was wrong with the food from being so old.
I waited in the middle of the perch, mostly tranced, saving my energy, with my ‘head’ under my ‘wing’ so that I looked like a normal bird sleeping. It was a day or so. I could hear them in there, voices and thumps, pad-padding back and forth. I heard Scarlet’s voice, definitely, once or twice. But they didn’t come out, and now that I was down here I didn’t have the overview I’d had. I remembered I used to be bored, when I was entirely bird; I used to greet them all, relieved, when they came out. But in this state there’s no such thing as boredom; the passing of time is interesting enough in itself.
Flights of lorikeets came through on the way to the pine-seeds and the black-bean tree. I would have liked to join them, just to stretch my wings again. But such visits as mine are very circumscribed; every movement must be in relation to a prior Connection – or at least directed to a tangible good. And I was never Connected to those birds.
Cats, now . . . well, there were plenty of cats. One came and watched me for long spells, a big orange thing. That would have used to make me go all still and nervous. My ‘body’ remembered that stillness, my ‘heart’ hammered. But the main part of me wasn’t afraid of such things any more.
In the end I said to it, ‘I have already been eaten by one of you.’
It puffed up all fat and stiff-legged.
‘Why don’t you go and find a real bird?’ I told it.
The cat shot away up the garden, looked back at me, fled up the fence, checked me again. I oughtn’t to have spoken, I suppose. But really, it would have starved itself, sitting and waiting for me. I was sure it would feel tangibly good, at its first bite of tin-food.
I started to need water. Without it, the light seemed to turn against me; the garden-bushes were full of disturbances; the junior magpies ambling on the grass, I imagined their eyes to be full of intentions they could not have. For some hours it was all I could do not to fly out as I had before – only instead of giving myself up to the teeth of the world, instead of being caught on a claw and crushed in a mouth, I would forsake this scrap of hungry earthliness I had borrowed, and return to my place on the god’s breast, free again of all dangers and lesser desires.
The boy, Taylor, that I used to sit on the shoulder of, he was the first out, and he saw me straight away.
‘Hey.’ He stopped with his laundry-bundle, which was like several big, multi-coloured cats knotted together. He backed away to the open door. ‘Hey, Mum,’ he called through it. ‘Smoko’s back.’
I heard her voice, disbelieving.
‘Come and look,’ cried Taylor. ‘Come and shut his door on him. I can’t reach.’
He waited there until she came.
‘Oh my goodness, so he is,’ she said.
‘Like I’d make that up.’ He went to the basket behind her as she closed the cage door. The scent on her fingers, and the smell of his sockery and pantery breaking open, nearly knocked me off the perch.
A human eye is bigger than the head of a bird like me, if you take into account all the parts behind their eyelids. When it looks at you, it’s hard to think straight, for fear of where all that attention might lead.
Mum opened the door again and reached her sweet, sweet, powerful fingers in. I flung against the far bars, I was so startled and faint.
‘Poor old Smoko,’ she said. ‘Let
me get rid of this mouldy old thing for you. Here, Tay, scrub this out and fill it with some clean water.’
‘Where’ve you been, Smoko?’ said Taylor in a special praying voice. ‘Have you had an egg-venture?’
‘What I want to know is what brought him back.’ Mum held the noisome seed-stick away to one side. ‘How he survived, for one, and how he found his way back here.’ And then she prayed to me: ‘There’s more in that little brain than meets the eye, bird, isn’t there? You’re not as dim as you sim, are you?’
After that, things fell into place better. The water came.
‘Look, he’s thirsty!’
‘He’s going for it! Just putting his head down and guzzling!’
They also brought some very good greens, a big bunch of them. I had much to concentrate on, working the beak and tongue, remembering the innards and the old satisfactions of how they worked.
Mum and Taylor took me into the house, just as they used to, because evening was falling. They put fresh paper below me and sat around marvelling.
‘Maybe it’s not Smoko,’ said Taylor. ‘Maybe it’s another budgie that looks like him.’
‘Well, that would almost be more likely. When was it we lost him?’
They tried to work that out. Finally they arrived at the four weeks by remembering that they’d been on the way to the Show; the bigger boy, Ethan, had been hurrying and forgotten to close the cage; they’d bought a mirror at the Show that Smoko had never got to use. I sat up at that, but from what they said, they’d given the mirror away.
All this was very interesting, but it was not what I was here for. Where had the girl gone? I guessed she was at that man’s place, but I couldn’t see from here. I had lost perspective. My birdly anxieties said, She could be anywhere, hopped on a plane and anywhere. I didn’t have all the time in the world.
And now the cage door was closed and I was limited in movement, unless I left this body behind – and it’s a serious job to make a body that will function discreetly in the Hereunder. Once it’s made, it’s best to stay with it, not pop in and out as if it were a birdbath.
‘Goodnight, Smoko,’ they prayed, and covered me with a cloth smelling of their laundry-perfume. Soon the light stopped showing through the cloth, and silences fell, each one deeper than the previous – first the family, then their laundry-machine, then the neighbours, then the plane traffic, then the road, then the rail. There was tippy-tapping of a few mice; a rat ran by, but did not come inside; those big black insects scrittled over floor and wall and table. One came and investigated, but I hissed at it and it went away. I never liked those things – bad enough sitting over your mess all night without those things scratching and nibbling it as well.
I settled eventually, more or less, although secretive cats’ paws went over the roof all night and made me stir. Ethan came into the house, and toileted and ran water and gulped it down. I kept quiet and he didn’t even look under the cloth.
Scarlet would have visited this room, had she been home at all; she might be sliding uncontrolled towards a Defining Moment, but her appetite wasn’t affected – or hadn’t been, up to the time I took birdly form and Descended.
I tried to tuck myself away in a trance again, but my brain would keep worrying. Scarlet could have gone anywhere, done anything; she was an angry girl – and for no reason! She had a lovely mum, and Mum and Taylor and Ethan together formed a wonderful bosom for her, to all intents and purposes unconditional in their love. Why she should want to lever herself out of that bosom and stalk away into the cold and the chemicals, who knew? That man, he was no sort of reason at all. A ball of blackness wrapped in handsome paper, he was – even Scarlet could put her finger through him if she had a mind to. Which of course she didn’t – she was very much set the other way, to not see things, to not protect herself. She was all biology: get away and mate, her body was telling her. Last thing she wanted was to think sensibly.
How was I going to do this thing? The water in my drinking-dripper was too small to put a simulacrum through. If they hung me by a window, maybe I could use the glass. If I was outside and it rained, or a hose leaked a puddle. If they kept me in the kitchen and left me alone, if there was a drink on the bench, or if they wiped the sink shiny enough, maybe I could see through and find her and go to work.
All the long next day, hanging by the laundry, I waited and pondered. Funny how when it’s not wanted, some reflective surface is always winking, throwing out irrelevant scenes and voices, making it hard to eat. Yet when there is a task to accomplish, all is matte and movement. The only hope I had that whole long day was when Mum hung out some Scarlet clothes, like thick black spider webs clamped to the line. There, the girl will come back to collect those – but then, sometimes Mum washes things, and packs them in a bag, and takes them up to the box by the railway station. And I was all doubtful and anxious again.
Mum took me indoors late that afternoon, and there was a lot of praying and swinging and uncertainty just about that. Then Scarlet came in, all of a sudden, smelly with smoke and train-smells and the pa-choury she’s started burning at the man’s place. She pushed past Mum at the door, to fetch her spider webs from the line.
‘Well, and good morning to you too,’ said Mum.
‘Hi, Mu-u-um,’ said Scarlet in her boredest voice, unpegging.
Mum gathered herself to start talking, but then the house filled with arriving Taylor and arriving Ethan, so she didn’t.
Taylor thundered straight through from the far entry, shouting. He flung himself across the table at me and swung something bright from his hand. ‘Do you like it, Smoke? Do you like the look of yourself? Are you beautiful?’ he prayed.
‘Oh,’ said Mum. ‘Did you get it back from Marina?’
‘This isn’t ours.’ It was Taylor’s best withering voice. ‘Ours was orange, remember, with beads. Marina’s dad got this one. I was telling Marina this morning about Smoko coming back, and I didn’t say she had to give it back or anything, but her dad heard. And he didn’t say anything, but when he came to pick her up he had this, because—’
‘Are you sure you didn’t say anything? Anything that would make them feel guilty?’
‘No-o! You ask him! He said Wellington got so much joy out of the mirror we gave him—’
‘Is that what he said – “got so much joy”?’ Mum was smiling now – I only just managed to notice it, through the noise and the swinging light and the general discombobulation, and trying to keep a hold on the whereabouts of Scarlet.
‘Yes! He said he couldn’t bear to think of any budgie going without a mirror. He said sorry there aren’t any beads; he said the lady in the shop said—’
Whack! went the door on the wall and in came Scarlet, trailing her webs through the kitchen. She stopped Ethan at the bathroom door, sweeping past so imperiously.
‘Oops,’ he said, and that was all. I like Ethan – he’s a kind boy, really, for all he pretends to be an angry boofhead.
Into the silence Mum said, ‘Well, that was very nice of him. What’s his name again, Marina’s dad?’
‘I don’t know.’
Juan, I thought, to stop myself feeling sick. Juan Antonio Jimenez. A bird brain can’t hold much and keep it straight.
Mum closed the whacked door. ‘Put it in the cage,’ she said, ‘so he can start to get some joy out of it.’
I backed away. Taylor’s hand, smelling of play-dirt and lollies, came in and hung the mirror at the far end of the perch. It was the perfect size, if a bit— ‘It’s a bit smudgy,’ said Ethan. ‘He won’t be able to see himself in that.’
Taylor took the mirror out again, breathed on it and polished it (‘Not on your school shirt, Taylor – use a tissue!’ ‘It’s fine, Mum!’), then hung it back. Now it was perfect.
When the hand withdrew I sidled up the perch.
‘Look, he loves it already!’
‘Who’s that new bird, Smoke? Who is it?’
‘“Now, did I part my feathers right this
morning?”’
I pecked at the simulacrum a couple of times to make sure it was working properly. Behind it Scarlet was clearly visible in her room, packing all manner of black clothing into the bag that used to be her school bag.
‘“What a beautiful bird!”’
‘“Stunning. Gorgeous.”’
‘“I think I’m in lurv!”’
I wouldn’t be able to do anything with the family around. I disguised my irritation with some grooming.
Frightening a cat is one thing; showing your true nature to your Connected Souls – well, you can do it in an emergency, but frivolous exposures can have consequences you might not want to deal with.
‘“Yes, I could do with a bit of a tidy-up.”’
‘That’s right, Smoke. Make yourself nice for your girlfriend.’
‘Bet you didn’t meet anyone as cute as that on your travels.’
It’s best just to wait, when they carry on like this. It doesn’t usually last long.
But even when they stopped they were distracting, making their dinner, eating around the table, breaking into prayer if I made a move. I put my head under my wing as a hint, but they wouldn’t put the cloth over me. They didn’t talk about anything useful, either – Scarlet barely entered the conversation, let alone importantly. She and Mum must have had words while I was transmigrating; things must have come to a head. That was good timing on my part. I didn’t like to watch them fighting from above; I saw inside them too clearly, to all their pains and rages. But I’d be able to do some good while the feelings were all stirred up and tender.
I glimpsed Scarlet through the mirror, during dinner, running for the train, then sitting grooming her dark-purple claws, painting her dark-purple lips darker. Where she got off it was raining, hard to read the wet ground and all those extra lights. Then – after a bit of praying, Mum finally put my cloth on – she was at the man’s house.
He was on the phone – for a long time, talking trash, two low-worth people talking together, further lowering both their selves. She waited, at first irritably, but then she went farther into the house, from room to room, looking at everything but not touching. He didn’t like that – when it was clear she hadn’t just gone to the bathroom he came out to the hall and frowned about, and when next he saw her he beckoned. She skipped away into the bathroom then, and while his voice and his pretend-laughter boomed in the hall she went piece by piece through the marvels of his bath-cabinet, touching and lifting only as much as she needed to, to see what was what.
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