The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  Olive Davoren got so cranky she jerked the Holland blind to shut herself off from her thoughts. She must have frightened the cockatoos. She could no longer see, but heard them as they gathered themselves, wings creaking at first, then beating the air, steadily, till faint.

  Probably they would never come back however much sunflower seed she put. She snivelled a bit, before cooking the tea He would not be there to eat.

  ‘Six years – no, seven, she told me. Without exchanging a bloody word! If they have to, they write it on a pad.’

  ‘Waddayerknow!’ Gwen Goodenough stirred the pan. ‘That’s a way, Clyde, it’ll never take you an’ me.’

  The boy had come in with some kind of old bottle he kept on stroking and looking at.

  ‘Who didn’t speak for seven years?’

  ‘Somebody,’ the father said.

  He had unpinned the paper heart. His legs, his varicose veins, ached. He was tired by now, and ready for a beer or two.

  ‘Lots of people don’t speak,’ said the boy, still stroking what looked like an old medicine bottle.

  ‘I never heard of anybody, Tim. Not when they live together.’ The mother was more concerned about the contents of her pan.

  ‘Lots,’ said Tim. ‘They speak, but don’t say.’

  ‘Mr Clever, eh?’ Clyde Goodenough had taken offence, though he could hardly have explained why.

  ‘I don’t know anything, of course,’ the boy answered, too quick for parents.

  ‘Here,’ said the mother, ‘don’t you cheek your dad!’

  For the moment Tim hated his dad. An old man in shorts! He hated his father for showing his varicose veins from door to door the day of the Heart Appeal.

  After Dad had knocked back his first beer, and Mum only a sip of sherry, and they were all eating the gristly old stew, Tim Goodenough continued fingering the bottle he had stood on the table beside his plate.

  ‘What’s this?’ the father asked. ‘I’m blowed – a dirty old bottle at table!’

  ‘It’s an antique liniment bottle. Found it in Figgis’s incinerator.’ He held it to the light. ‘Look at the lovely colours in it.’

  If you looked hard, you could see a faint tinge of amethyst, even a burnish of incinerated green.

  It troubled the father: what if the boy turned out a nut? or worse, a poof – or artist?

  ‘That’s not anything to keep,’ he advised. ‘You oughter throw the filthy thing away. Carrying home useless junk out of Figgis’s back yard!’

  ‘I’m going to put it in my museum.’

  ‘Museum?’ the mother asked, in a voice which would have sounded severe if she hadn’t remembered to make it chummy. ‘You never told us you have a museum.’

  ‘I don’t tell everything,’ said Tim.

  The father sucked his teeth; he looked as though he might have been going to throw up, till he got the better of his disgust. ‘D’you know what? There’s a wild cockatoo in Davorens’ garden.’

  ‘Someone must have left the cage open,’ Mrs Goodenough said because it was her turn.

  ‘That’s what I told ’er. But she said it was wild.’

  ‘How could she possibly know?’ Mrs Goodenough wasn’t all that interested in cockatoos.

  Tim said, ‘There’s mobs of wild cockatoos in the park.’

  This was something the parents couldn’t contradict: they couldn’t remember when they had last been in the park. Mr Goodenough sighed; he wondered why his charm never worked at home. Mrs Goodenough sighed too: she suspected her monthly was coming on.

  When he had finished the IXL peaches, Tim Goodenough got down from the table, taking his antique bottle with him.

  ‘You’re in a hurry tonight, my lad.’

  ‘I’m going to Davorens’ to see the cockie.’ It sounded younger than he was, and sickly, because that way he often pacified them.

  Mum said, ‘I’m not a naturalist, but know that cockatoos don’t take root. It’s more than likely flown off.’

  It was true, he knew, but also as stupid as truth can often be. The cockatoo’s presence in Davorens’ garden was only the half of looking for it.

  He went out humming, first to the garage, to put his bottle in the museum.

  It did exist, in a disused bathroom cupboard, stashed away behind a roll of Feltex and several of wire-netting. In it he kept the skull of a small animal, probably a rat, found in a storm-water drain which emptied itself into the park. He also had – still a matter for surprise – a silver Maria Theresa dollar.

  ‘Vis is from Ethiopia,’ said Mr Lipski, the old gentleman from whom he had got it.

  ‘Will you give it to me – please?’

  Mr Lipski laughed because caught off his guard. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘vhy shouldn’t you keep it? May be ze start of somsink.’

  ‘Ooh, Tim, d’you think you ought? Something so valuable!’ Mum pretended to be shocked, or was; greedy herself, he had noticed she suspected others of greed.

  But in this case you couldn’t honestly say it was that. He had never owned what he recognized as a talisman – well, there was the rat’s skull perhaps. But he badly needed this coin as well.

  Now in the dusk of the garage and the stink of damp Feltex, he could only explore the shapes of the silver dollar and the rat’s skull by touch. In their mystic company, he left the liniment bottle he had churned up out of Figgis’s incinerator.

  There were several mobs of kids with mongrel dogs playing in the dusk after tea on the pavement and in the road. A lot of the owners of the houses which made an island between the parks were old and childless, but several large families had migrated to the neighbourhood so that their children could benefit from the parks. Tim Goodenough didn’t often play with the mobs of other kids. Being an only child made him superior, or shy. You couldn’t say the others disliked, but they didn’t like him. Nor did he encourage them to. Not that he despised them for being stupid (several of them never stopped doing well at exams and already thought of becoming doctors and lawyers). It was just that they didn’t know what he knew though what he knew he didn’t altogether know – but knew.

  Sometimes the mongrel dogs belonging to the large, consolidated families followed him wagging their tails, licking the backs of his hands as they never did to their owners. He liked that.

  This evening one of the boys shouted, ‘What are you up to, Tim-the-Snoop?’

  ‘I’m sauntering,’ he called back.

  Because it was unexpected and peculiar, the girls giggled, several of the boys jeered, and somebody threw a seed-pod at his head.

  When he reached the Davorens’ the house was dark; the brown blinds were down, making it look deserted, though the old girl was probably inside or round at the back. There was no sign of a cockatoo. But he climbed the fence and lay for a while under the spread of a hibiscus bush. Some of the white flowers had grown immense with the gathering dusk; their red pistils glittered with a stickiness which looked like dew. In the west, above the liver-coloured house, the sky still dripped red where it wasn’t streaked with green and gold.

  Of course any cockatoo would have flown to roost by now, but he didn’t need one. He could make the whole mob spread their wings, exposing that faint shadow of yellow, claws clenched tight and black as they veered against the netted sky, then flew screeching past the solid holm-oaks and skeleton-pines, into space.

  He lay awhile longer under the hibiscus, gathering one of the white flowers to taste the stickiness on its feathered pistil. It tasted of nothing to explain its attraction for bird and bee, but he felt content.

  Miss Le Cornu was leaning on her gate. She was wearing the jeans she always wore, and a pair of sloppy old moccasins. Her shirt white against the dusk. It made Mr Figgis snort: a mature woman dressing like a teenage girl; bursting out of the jeans besides.

  Did she know, he asked, that wild cockatoos were around? He had seen two of them under Davorens’ big sugar-gum.

  Miss Le Cornu didn’t know, but now she came to think, she might have he
ard.

  Figgis said, ‘If there’s anything I hate it’s a cockatoo. Dirty, screeching, destructive brutes! I’m prepared to poison any cockatoo and be rid of a public nuisance.’

  Miss Le Cornu had never considered whether she was for or against cockatoos. ‘Don’t you think they might look pretty in a garden? Climbing through that big magnolia, for instance.’ She stopped short, and sniggered, because for the moment she was feeling high.

  Figgis found himself looking into the gap between Miss Le Cornu’s breasts. The breasts themselves, though draped with shirt, looked peculiarly naked in the dusk.

  Figgis opened and closed his mouth. Having delivered himself on cockatoos, he would have liked to offer a few remarks on Miss Le Cornu’s bursting jeans, but as he couldn’t very well, he left her. There was an awful lot he would have wished dead, perhaps because he had spent life as an undertaker.

  Dur-dur-dur dur-durr, Miss Le Cornu hummed against her teeth.

  She couldn’t think why she felt so good, except she had taken a handful – anyway, up to five. And He would probably come; it was his time. More often than not he did, so this was hardly reason for exhilaration. Nothing more than habit. Which was why it had begun, and continued. She had needed a habit.

  That first occasion, a sleep-walker, he mightn’t have been addressing her, ‘… told me I’d let ’er bally boodgie die …’

  Miss Le Cornu had never kept a bird, but was moved spontaneously to sympathize. ‘Well, it’s sad, isn’t it? to lose something you’re fond of. And getting back from her sister’s funeral.’ When she realized it wasn’t Mrs Daveron at whom she was aiming her sympathy; and a bird is a detached, uncommunicative creature.

  He leant on her gate, the hair already grey at the nape of his neck. Although he had glanced at her out of social obligation, it was his own predicament he was looking at.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ she suggested. ‘I’ve got a nice T-bone steak I’ll grill.’

  That was seven years ago. She had never thought about a man before, or to be truthful, she had, and most men were distasteful to her. After Mother died, she had invited a girl called Marnie Prosser to share her life; but it hadn’t worked: Marnie picked her nose rather too ostentatiously, and smeared honey on things: there was honey on all the door-knobs.

  While he sat eating the steak in the sun-room which opened off the kitchen, it occurred to her: this is more than a neighbour’s face I’ve seen a hundred times in the street, it’s Mick Davoren, and an Irishman into the bargain. It was too fantastical to contemplate for long.

  ‘Is it good?’ she asked in a voice louder than necessary.

  He half laughed and some red juice trickled down from a corner of his mouth. ‘A bit raw, isn’t ut?’

  At least she could admire his teeth.

  ‘That’s how my father liked it,’ she said. ‘Very rare. He was most particular – in everything. He was a colonel, you know. Came here on leave from India. And married Mother. And settled. Not that I remember Father at all distinctly. I was too young when he died. They used to have to press his trousers, always before he put them on. He was hot tempered. That was what made his pants wrinkle.’ She couldn’t think when she had said so much at one go.

  After he had wiped his mouth and pushed away the plate with almost the whole of the rare steak – delicately enough, she observed – Mr Davoren asked her, ‘Was it your mother had the money then?’

  ‘Yes. She was a Busby.’

  It did not occur to her to explain who the Busbys were. Nor him to ask. He looked gloomier, though. Like when he told her about the boodgie.

  ‘Mother died – August last. You may have heard.’

  He had heard something about it, he admitted, but continued sitting, looking, not at her, but inward, above the unfinished steak.

  Miss Le Cornu thought she had never heard the house more silent.

  That it was her house appalled her. First her parents’, then her mother’s – still a normal situation. But not hers! She had never felt the need for possessions. What she needed was a habit. Father died too soon to become one. And Mother, her great, her consuming habit, had left her without warning, over a cup of hot milk, the milk-skin hanging from her lower lip.

  She had tried to figure out what consolation she would find in living. Certainly not freedom – if that exists. But was relieved to realize that, if she took care, no one would again address her by her first name. (They had christened her Busby for her mother’s family, and she had grown up big and rather furry.)

  Now to her own surprise, Busby Le Cornu was asking this Mr Davoren, again in a voice far too loud for the silence of the house, ‘What do you like best? If it isn’t raw steak!’ Anyone else might have giggled, but she was too serious for that.

  He too, evidently; although it became obvious he had misunderstood her intention. ‘What I liked best – ever – was the days when I did a bit of prospectun on me own. I was hard up, you see, Miss Le Cornu. And I got this idea in me head. To look for gold. But never washed more than a few specks – that I kept in a bloomun bottle. I must have throwed ut away in the end. After I took the job drivun the interstate buses. But the skies, I remember, of a mornun, and the smell of wood-ash, when I was prospectun down south.’

  That was where she began to blubber. She was heaving – and glugging, it sounded. He must have got a fright. He stood up, and put an arm around her, then thought better, and removed it.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  But it increased her sense of loss, and not knowing what to do next, she took his hand and looked at it. The strangeness of her own behaviour, in which she could never afterwards believe, turned the hand into a thing lying in hers: an object rough enough as to palm, but in its veins and structure singularly elegant. She would have liked to put it somewhere and keep it.

  Instead she said in a voice she made as much as possible like a man’s, ‘All right, Mr Davoren, we’re not going to eat each other, are we?’

  They both laughed then, and she saw that his eyes were of a light colour.

  Busby Le Cornu had only once slept with a man, and that was equally unexpected: he had come to mend the dishwasher. It had not given her great pleasure. There had been another occasion, earlier, but she preferred not to think about, or had forgotten, it.

  Now, out of deference to Mr Davoren as well as herself, she did not switch lights on, but lay waiting on her mother’s bed. Her body looked long, strong, and white, her breasts spread white and cushiony in glimmers from the street lighting. The fuzz of hair between her thighs – her ‘bush’ the dishwasher man had called it – looked by this same light fathomlessly black. She hoped the Irishman would not become unnerved. As for herself, she was by now nerveless, or indifferent.

  Neither of them much enjoyed it, she imagined. He had taken off his shoes, but not his clothes. His buttons grazed her only briefly.

  But when he was sitting in the dark, getting back into his shoes, she said out of need rather than politeness, ‘Next time it will be better. I’ll frizzle it up. I only did it rare because that was the way Father liked it.’

  That old chair never stopped creaking, which Father brought from India, which meant that Mother couldn’t throw it out, although she laddered her stockings on it.

  Mr Davoren stamped his foot to help with a shoe, and the chair creaked enough to give up the ghost. ‘That time I was tellun you of – when I was prospectun for gold down along the Murrumbidgee – things got so bad I had to look for work at last. I presented meself to the manager of a station down that way. It was harvest time. They put me an’ one or two other young fellers stookun up the oats behind the harvester. And as fast as we built the stooks, the cockatoos would pull um down.’ He laughed; the chair had quietened: he must have finished his shoes. ‘Have you ever seen a mob of wild cockatoos? A bit what you’d call slapdash in flight. But real dazzlers of birds! I’d say heartless, from the way they slash at one another. Kind too, when they want
to be. They have a kind eye. And still. You see um settun in a tree, and the tree isn’t stiller than the cockatoos.’

  ‘Oh?’ She yawned; she wished he would go; if Figgis wouldn’t have rung the police, she would have liked to play a record to herself.

  ‘See you later, then,’ he said. ‘For the frizzled steak!’

  See you later was an expression she disliked, because half the time it didn’t mean what it was supposed to.

  But He had meant it. He had become her habit. Here she was leaning on the gate, after so many years, waiting for him to approach. Neighbours had stopped seeing an ‘immoral relationship’, even Mr Figgis and Mrs Dulhunty no longer hinted at it aloud. And anyway, what was there immoral in cooking tea for a man you didn’t love and who didn’t love you? If you had done it together a few times – no more than three or four, or five, or perhaps six – it was only as if you were making a bow to convention. Neither of you referred to it. Had he ever enjoyed it, she wondered? She had read that Irishmen, conditioned by the priests, had little taste for sexual indulgence, which made it difficult for the women, and turned many of them into nuns.

  If Miss Le Cornu ever felt immoral it was in thinking of that yellow woman down the street, to whom she had never spoken, not even before taking the weight of her husband.

  Miss Le Cornu felt less high. If it hadn’t been for expecting Him, she would have gone and put on a record. This was the longest established of any of her habits, and might have sustained her, if you didn’t also need the touch of skin. She preferred sopranos, or best of all, a velvety mezzo, and through such materializations of her inner self, would pursue the curlicues and almost reach the pinnacle, that golden cupola, or bubble of sound.

  If she had never tried out a record on her friend Mick Davoren, who was just now approaching up the street, hat cocked against the dusk, it was because they said his wife had been a music teacher in her youth. Miss Le Cornu sometimes wondered which of all music Mrs Davoren favoured.