‘Thought you’d given it away this evening.’ Something had roused her anger; she might even have owned to a slight twinge of jealousy.
‘It’s late,’ he admitted from under the hat he wore for propriety’s sake, but which made him look less respectable.
He was staring straight at her too, out of his light-coloured eyes, which blended with the bluish dusk to the extent that he was, once again, not looking.
‘A button come off,’ he said, ‘and I had to sew ut on.’
She grunted leading the way along the path, under the magnolia tree which was rooted on Figgis’s side of the fence.
‘You should have brought it and let me sew it.’ She knew she sounded half hearted: sewing and mending, occupations she didn’t care for, had not become woven into the habit they had cultivated. ‘The food’s in the warmer,’ she said more kindly, if not kind; whatever was making her angry, unpunctuality couldn’t enter into it, not when somebody liked things frizzled up.
While he was eating the spoiled steak, she sat with her back half turned, rocking, in the kitchen where she served the food, never in the sun-room after they became used to each other.
Would it be the rates that had caused her anger? ‘I can’t remember whether I paid them – the rates,’ she explained, and rocked.
He couldn’t help her. If they had received their notice, Mrs O. Davoren would have attended to it.
When he had finished his meat, and laid his knife and fork together, unnecessarily precise, it seemed, he cleared his throat, and told, ‘This evenun as I was comun out there was two cockatoos strollun around at the foot of the big tree. I didn’t see a wild cockatoo in years. The white ones. Yeller topknots.’
She was rocking furiously by now, and laughed too loud. ‘So I heard. Figgis is out to poison any pests of cockatoos.’
‘He hadn’t better!’ She was surprised at such vehemence. ‘Not mine – he better not.’
‘How do you know these tramps of birds would want to belong to anybody?’
‘I wouldn’t want um to belong! Not more than to be fed.’
She stopped rocking. ‘What would you feed them on?’
‘Sunflower seed. Accordun to packuts I’ve seen in the shops.’
As though her friend’s eye were a mirror to her own mind, she saw a cockatoo groping after, then balancing on, a chimneypot; she saw a second, circling overhead; a whole strung-out flight was labouring against the wind. But those which clambered through magnolia branches, themselves like big white drunken flowers in motion, were the most desirable of all.
She sighed, and said, rubbing a cheek on its neighbouring shoulder, ‘Yes. It would look lovely. I could use a few of those cockatoos.’ When they were accustomed to her, she would try out some music on them: the mezzo voice most likely to have been hers.
He had got up. ‘Not any of mine you can’t – Busby,’ he said.
Then her anger rose again and, cresting over, rocked the chair she was clinging to. ‘How did you know to call me by my bloody name? Nobody knows – since Father and Mother.’
‘I heard as somebody saw the electoral roll, and well, ut’s your name, Busby.’ He was Irish enough to sound tender when it served his purpose, not for her, pleading of course for his birds.
‘I wouldn’t want to coax away anybody’s bloody cockatoo,’ she shouted.
Soon after, he left. Perhaps he would tell Her – at any rate write it on the pad – let her know he was sold on cockatoos.
Miss Le Cornu had to restore herself. She opened the bottle, and poured several into the palm of her hand. And would not sleep.
In fact, all around her there was this flashing and slashing of wings, white except where yellow-tinged. She could have shrieked.
In the end she took a sedative.
Olive Davoren had continued cooking tea for Him. She kept it in the warmer. When he didn’t come, she might eat a little of it herself, but mostly she had no appetite. She shot the rest in with the garbage. She could afford it, couldn’t she? Then she would go to bed.
Tonight she waited up longer, thinking about the wild cockatoos. She had gone back once to have a look – in any case she had to lock up – and for a moment imagined she saw something stirring in the white hibiscus. It could not have been a cockatoo; it was too late for any bird.
She went to bed, early though it was, because there seemed nothing left to do, and heard Him, when he came in, bumping around across the passage.
She had forgotten how fine her hands were. Or thin? She thought of the violin lying buried under linen on the upper shelf of her silky-oak-veneer wardrobe.
And slept.
She woke sweating. The big clam-shell continued shining, under the tree on the lawn, as in her dream. Dry, unless for rainwater reduced to a little slime. She must clean out the slime in the morning with her long fine hands. Her birds would need water as well as seed.
Olive Davoren fell asleep, a pillow-end between shoulder and cheek, like a violin.
She had noticed seed at Woolworths and Coles; it was only a matter of choosing.
One of the birds was pecking at her womb. He rejected it as though finding a husk.
Her hollow pillow was reverberating horribly.
She woke, and flew down at such speed, she could have forgotten something. She had. She returned, and put in her teeth, and began again.
The light was growing transparent around her as she filled the watering-can. Then she noticed that someone else had already poured water in the shell. More, they had cleaned it out first. The clam-shell shone like new teeth.
He used to eat the breakfast she cooked and left for him in the warmer, then go out about his Business. That, she had heard, was how he liked to refer to it. One of his mates from the bus days had invented a patent tin-opener. Mick would go from door to door ‘marketing the Miracle Opener’. How successfully she had never been told. All this had happened since they introduced the pad, and she could hardly have written, ‘How is your Business doing, Mick?’
He seldom held down a job for long: said it was the War had unsettled him. More likely he considered himself exempt from ordinary human activity. Or dedicated to the open air. When Dadda took him into Friendly Loans, he sat at the desk not above a few weeks. He took to gardening, but tired of digging weeds in. Greenkeeping was more in his line: the unobstructed sweep of the links. He kept at that for several years, and became less fidgety, she could hear. ‘Deep-breathing is the secret,’ she once found written on the pad, but came to the conclusion it was an observation not intended for herself or any second person.
Now here he was, descending the path in his business suit, carrying the case with the samples in it. Breathing deep, she could see from the action of his shoulders. Hatless (he never wore one unless on his way to Her). The nape of his neck might have made you cry if you hadn’t remembered the hat he wasn’t wearing.
So Mrs Davoren no more than wiped her nose on the Kleenex she kept down her front. And Mr Davoren continued down the path, looking sideways at the base of the tree where cockatoos had landed the evening before. He had stopped breathing. But there weren’t any cockatoos this morning. He went on, still what Mrs Dulhunty called ‘a fine figure of an Irishman’.
As soon as the gate squealed, Mrs Davoren couldn’t smear the powder quick enough, get herself ready for the supermarket. Or was it a Holiday? The possibility made her heart toll cold for several instants. It wasn’t a holiday, though. She bought her seed, both plain and mixed, with a pottery dish to put it in and, loaded with her purchases, she made for home.
Where someone else had already put out sunflower seed. In a pottery dish. Olive Davoren could have kicked it. The tears shot out and she didn’t bother to wipe them with the Kleenex.
The cockatoos came at evening, the pair, stamping round the dish at the foot of the tree. Clumsy, beautiful creatures! On seeing them, her mouth fell open: their crests flicked like knives threatening intruders; then when the first seeds were cracked, the feathers so
gently laid in a yellow wisp along the head. She loved her birds.
They were hers, surely? whoever had put out the seed. They were given to her as compensation.
In her anxiety, Olive Davoren twitched the blind behind which she was hiding in one of the front rooms, and the cockatoos took fright; they flew up into a tree. She was miserable, but could do nothing beyond wait and look.
She was sitting watching the empty garden, when there in the opposite bay of the other room, who was it half hidden behind the opposite brown blind? She had never accepted herself before as a woman of anger.
Pretending not to see her as he watched her birds!
She might not have felt mollified when they resettled on the grass around the gum, if they hadn’t become three – no, five cockatoos!
The two watchers were almost for glancing at each other from behind their blinds in opposite bays.
They were saved by the birds starting to menace one another like human beings. Perhaps it was the original pair who couldn’t tolerate the newcomers. Crests whipped open in flashes of sulphur; beaks clashed; breast was thrust at ruffled breast, as they stomped and thumped around the dish on callused claws, rolling as though they were riding a swell instead of flat lawn.
She was so entranced she forgot Him.
And soon it was time to cook tea. When it was done, she put it in the warmer. He hadn’t gone out; she could hear him moving in remote parts of the darkening house.
After giving adequate thought to a proposition she would like to make, Olive Davoren wrote on the pad, ‘Be considerate for once …’ She crossed it out and substituted, ‘I hope you will allow me the pleasure of putting out the morning seed.’
In the morning the sheet was gone from the pad, and she found written, ‘Don’t forget water, v. important.’
So it was arranged, anonymously.
Mornings became hers, when she removed the husks, filled the dish with striped seed, and the clam-shell with water. She shared his sentiments over the water: it was important.
In the evenings, which were his, they sat in their opposite bays, watching the cockatoos feed after he had done his duty by them.
For some time she had not caught sight of him strolling down the path, then along the street, hat cocked for Her. Instead she heard him moving through distant rooms, or sitting the other side of a wall, at least thinking, she hoped, but sighing.
Once as he sat looking out through his window at his birds feeding in the gathering dusk, Mick Davoren realized they had multiplied: he could count eleven cockatoos. All docile for the moment, kindness and wisdom in the currant-eyes. Or if the crests rose, it was like ladies delicately opening fans.
While himself no longer sat looking out: he was the boy outside, who stood looking in through this great window to where the company was seated, in knots on gilded chairs, as well as a wider circle round a curved settee, the meeker, sleeker girls all of them in docile white, their harsher elders ablaze with a white fire of diamonds, as they picked at the words they chose to offer in conversation. When a certain elderly lady shrieked, for some secret perhaps, that she was making public. And all the ladies and meek girls were joining in the general screech. Whirling as they changed position. Diamonds bounding. Some disagreement, but with a fine display of polite temper. Then the gentlemen were coming in, laughing too, some of them stumbling, some arguing, others full of ostentatious consideration for their neighbours. While he, the boy standing in the dark the wrong side of this stately window, retreated backwards into the drizzle, all but tumbling over a giant hound that was lying on the lawn pointing her nose at a watery moon.
Mick Davoren hawked the phlegm up out of his throat.
It must have frightened the cockatoos: they rose in a wave, white to greenish by present light, and broke on the shores of holm-oak and araucaria in the park opposite.
He dared glance at the window in the other bay, where Olive, the woman he had married, sat glaring into nothing.
Mrs Dulhunty had read that birds bring lice. Starlings do for a fact: the lice drop off of them down the chimneys.
Cockatoos! Figgis was becoming ropeable.
Most of the kids in the neighbourhood had been and seen the birds, and oo-arrr’d, and shouted, and thrown stones, preferably to hit, or if that failed, to frighten the cockies. If Tim Goodenough hadn’t yet seen them in the flesh, it was because he got home from school before the cockatoos had landed, and by the time his mum and dad let him up from his blasted tea, the birds had flown. All he found was Mr and Mrs Davoren looking out from opposite windows.
Once in passing her gate, he asked Miss Le Cornu whether she had seen the cockatoos, and she answered, ‘Ye-ehss,’ about to share a secret with him, it seemed.
But he didn’t need it. As though he had stared at them as deeply as he stared at the people in buses, he knew what would be going on behind cockatoo eyes; he knew about the wisps of yellow feather the books showed cockatoos as wearing, as good as if he had touched these tufts, like people he brushed up against, simply to find out about them, and discovered he already knew.
The cockatoos were coming less often, then only three or four of them. Occasionally none. Or one elderly creature who hobbled, and at times trailed a wing. It was the children who had frightened the birds, and probably stoned the loner. Mrs Davoren almost suggested it to her husband, not in writing, but in spoken words, then was saved by her principles.
She felt sorry for Mick, however, seeing from the corner of an eye that their birds’ defection was making him suffer. She heard her husband fart softly in the dark, the other side of the separating wall, and forgave him for it.
She herself was taking the bicarbonate, you couldn’t say by handfuls, but always increasing the quantity.
When Mick Davoren put on his hat and went up the street to Miss Le Cornu, it was still broad daylight, or broad enough for neighbours to revive their interpretation of motives. This evening she wasn’t leaning on the gate in accordance with custom. A cockatoo was perched on one of her chimneys, a wing outstretched straight and stiff as he picked beneath the coverts. A second bird, feathers ruffled as he sat clutching a terracotta fireman’s helmet, screeched at the intruder. Or was it a former love?
Davoren took the brick path which led towards the back, under the Figgis magnolia tree.
‘What – who is it?’ she called.
Her shirt was open, which she buttoned quickly.
Several cockatoos, heads bobbing, were cracking seed in a circle at her feet.
Davoren roared with a laughter which wasn’t.
The cockatoos flew off. That much he had achieved. (He could even imagine telling his wife.)
When Busby Le Cornu started laughing. ‘You bugger!’ she cried. ‘You bloody – Irish bugger!’
He was so enraged, he snatched at her shirt, and again it was open on her. He continued roaring, red with pseudo-joviality.
‘Coming,’ she was now giggling, while stifling it in her nostrils, ‘too early,’ she shrieked, ‘for the frizzling! If I’ve got any,’ she added in the throes of her convulsions.
All this time she was leading him into the house, away from neighbours’ ears and the scene of her deception.
Neither of them was any longer much deceived.
‘Those are my cockatoos,’ he shouted on the stairs.
‘They’re free to make their choice, aren’t they?’ As if anybody ever more than imagined they were.
When they reached the room to which they were being conducted, he did not wait for her to take her shirt off, but ripped it away. She seemed to hear the last of her buttons hit the wainscot.
Davoren was caressing her large but flat breasts, as she had never experienced, or if she had, it was so long ago she could barely remember. He was mumbling on them, about the blessed cockatoos. Then, because he had begun pulling off his clothes (it hadn’t occurred to him to make such a move on their other occasions), she took her jeans off, and lay waiting for him on the bed.
I
n the light just before dark, her own body surprised her. Till Davoren was straddling it. She had never allowed herself to look at a man’s cock, though she had seen it celebrated on walls, graphically, as well as in writing. Now she looked and the sight was splendid.
‘See here, Busby,’ he was hectoring from above, knees planted on either side, ‘the violation of a confidence is what I’m objectun to. I didn’t tell you about me birds to have you seduce um away from me.’
He became so congested he couldn’t contain himself. It spurted on her stomach, burning her.
She sighed from within the crook of her arm, ‘I don’t see why we can’t share what doesn’t belong to either of us.’
He was already getting back into his clothes. ‘The wife would be disappointed,’ he said.
For some time after he had gone, she was left without the power to move. The light was failing. She tried to think which solution she should choose: should it be the sedative? or whether to let the fireworks off. In the end she opened neither bottle, but went down as she was, flat-footed, into the garden. There was moss between the bricks in the path, which at least her feet were able to enjoy. She looked down and wiped away a drop from what the dishwasher man had referred to as her ‘bush’.
Of course the cockatoos had not returned, except that in the magnolia tree she thought for a moment she could see one of them moving amongst the giant flowers. Or flowers stirring.
Whatever influenced the cockatoos’ movements, Olive Davoren was overjoyed whenever they honoured her with their presence. One morning, when He had gone out early, she counted fourteen of them. They would stand still for moments, wondering whether to be afraid, looking like china ornaments. Then, it seemed, they became reassured, and the kindness in their eyes was directed at her as she stood in the window.
It was on this particular morning that she conceived her idea. She in turn wondered whether she ought to feel frightened as she went upstairs and groped around in the wardrobe, under the linen on the upper shelf.
By the time she opened the glass doors within sight and hearing of the cockatoos she was as brittle as the violin she had not touched in years. Which she began to tinker with, and tune. Fearfully. What if some human being caught sight of her from the street? Her skin grew glossy with anxiety.
The Cockatoos Page 27
