The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  She was playing, though: what she remembered of what she had found most difficult. It issued thin and angular out of the disused violin. It sounded yellow. But grave and honest. The composer was collaborating with her. And cockatoos. Whatever penetrated the down, their eyes were engaged, as they continued bobbing, cracking seed, hobbling, and occasionally jumping.

  If the composer and the cockatoos had joined with her in the Sarabande, she entered on the Chaconne with deeper misgiving, and alone. But drove herself at her arduous climb. One of the birds flew off. He sat looking back at the scene through a window in one of the holm-oaks opposite. The rest of the flock stayed listening to her music. If they accepted her, it must have been from recognizing something of their own awkwardness.

  When a string snapped, her breath tore.

  Ballooning upward, the birds spread out, and flew clattering across the park, shrieking back at her, it seemed. She wondered whether she had experienced, or only imagined, moments of exaltation in what must otherwise have been a horrible travesty of the Partita.

  Across the brown lino she trailed to put away her violin. In future she would have the excuse that a string was broken.

  Unlike Busby Le Cornu. Nothing need prevent her playing another record. She would too, if she felt like it. Just as nobody, not even He, could prevent the cockatoos from coming to her garden if they chose to come.

  She played them a record for the first time on an afternoon when, unintentionally, she must have taken the sedative instead. She had dragged out the little table on which the player stood, and there where the shadow of the house cut the sunlight, on the edge of the lawn, she was crouching over what might have been her own lament for a real passion she had never quite experienced.

  ‘Mi tradì, quell’ alma

  ingrata, Infelice, o Dio, mi fa… ’

  she all but sang, herself soaring against reason and the tablet she had swallowed.

  The cockatoos shot off into the dazzle. She was alone with her alter ego, the voice.

  ‘Ma tradita e abbandonata,

  Provo ancor per lui pietà …’

  Cockatoos, two or three of them at least, were rejoining her in vindicating spirals, white-to-sunsplashed.

  ‘Quando sento il mio tormento,

  Di vendetta il cor favella,

  Ma se guardo il suo cimento,

  Palpitando il cor mi va …’

  Wings aswirl in alighting, the birds were soon striding adventurously back towards the dish she had filled to overflowing. When suddenly she switched off the machine. It wasn’t that she feared an encounter with the Don; she could not have faced the moonlit statue by daylight: a pity, because the Commendatore might have appealed to cockatoos.

  He had drawn one of the veranda chairs out to where the grass began. The air was growing chillier with early winter. Never before had he sat so close to his birds. His wife would probably have disapproved, but if she was watching from inside the house, he wasn’t aware of it.

  By this sharpened light the garden looked a deeper, lusher green – unnatural. It intensified the purity of white plumage as the cockatoos cracked seed or stalked around. They were restless today, not on account of his presence (in fact they ignored him) but because possessed with the desire to bash somebody up. Their flick-knife crests grew sinister against the walls of brooding green. One bird in particular, old, or disabled (he trailed a wing from time to time), appeared to offend the majority. Although tough and stoical, the outsider was chased away at last. A flight took off after him, undercarts tightly retracted, ailerons reflecting yellow, wings sawing as they manoeuvred into position, and pursued the enemy, or so it seemed, over the park.

  Davoren did not see how it ended. His eyes were hurting. (He had his headaches.) Never been the same since that crash-landing. They got him. He had got the other bastard first; when a formation swarmed on him out of the cloud. It became a hide-and-seek through cloud. He threw them off finally, climbed, and dived on their tails. He pressed the tit and let them have it with the brutality and desperation the times demanded.

  But failed. He was losing height. Down down o Lord ohhh a leaden feather could not have fluttered so surely. Then he was bumping over the hummocks of salt bush. Rebounded once. Not much more than a numbness, he slithered free before the flames took over. He lay in the wadi, sand hissing around him. He listened to their bullets ricochet off the surrounding rocks. Afterwards, the silence. He was not – dead.

  There were still the times when he had to tell himself he was free. Or was he? The familiar chair in which he was sitting threatened to pitch him out. Those brutal birds, while bashing at one another with their beaks only a few yards away, had given off a stench he hadn’t been aware of before. He must get away. Perhaps if he sat awhile alone in a darkened room, he would recover his balance. He was glad nobody had seen. Not in years he hadn’t experienced such terror.

  Olive Davoren watched her husband drag his chair back to the veranda, away from the scattering cockatoos. She would not have known what to do for him, she thought, even if they hadn’t renounced speech. She would never have known her own husband.

  From under the hibiscus Tim Goodenough had watched and heard the flap. This old man had frightened the birds, but was himself frightened, you could see. Which in itself was fearful: an old, frightened man! When you had as good as made up your mind to spend the night in the park – on your own – to test your courage.

  Not long after, the neighbourhood began asking what had become of the cockatoos. For several days, those in whose lives the birds played a part hadn’t caught sight of a single one; no longer the dawn screeching, the ribaldry from finial and chimney-pot.

  When she could no longer bear it, Miss Le Cornu went down to Mrs Dulhunty, for whom she didn’t altogether care, and called up at her window, ‘What do you think has happened to them?’

  Mrs Dulhunty left off combing her hair to look down from where she lived above the garage. ‘He’s poisoned ’em. Figgis!’ she said in a loud whisper.

  ‘How could he poison a whole mob?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Mrs Dulhunty replied, dropping a ball of slag-coloured hair into the lane. ‘It’s what they’re sayin’. Figgis has been creatin’ because ’is magnolia tree is practically de-ud-ed.’

  Miss Le Cornu wondered which side Mrs Dulhunty would be on if ever it came to a showdown. ‘I’d have said there were leaves enough left on his tree – privacy on either side of the fence,’ she answered feebly for her.

  Mrs Dulhunty realized; she knew which side she was on – her own; and minded her own business; so she pursed up, and repeated, ‘That’s what they say.’ After which, she retreated slightly to pick between the teeth of her comb with a pin.

  Busby Le Cornu could only return up the lane, hoping she wouldn’t bump into either Davoren.

  More than anybody, Davorens had not been able to accept the disappearance of their cockatoos. They milled around their dark rooms, on the brown lino, and were often almost brought face to face. Olive was noticeably distraught. Her distress was aggravated by the smell of chrysanths which had stood too long in their vases and which ought to be thrown out. Friday she meant to turn out the whole place, if she remembered. She didn’t, for coming face to face with Mick in the most awkward, the darkest corner, outside the cupboard where she kept the Hoover and the brooms.

  They were properly caught. In spite of the dark she could see the light colour of the eyes she thought she had forgotten. He remembered the twitch in a cheek now that he met it again, and how it was probably what had decided him to take pity. The cheek had appeared sallow, and only later, after they started writing messages on pads, had it turned, if he ever glanced, yellow.

  There they were, trapped, outside the broom-cupboard, where for the obvious reason, there always lingered a smell of dust.

  It was her who uttered first, and then only ‘… the cockatoos?’

  He advanced perhaps a step. ‘Figgis has poisoned um. That’s what they say.’

/>   Then they were leading each other through such an unfamiliar labyrinth they were bumping into furniture. (She hated her own bruises: they ended up the colour of hard-boiled eggs.)

  ‘Who else?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Some foreigner could. The Yugo-Slavs shoot the ducks and take them home. Haven’t you heard them? In the park? At night?’

  He had stopped considering. Stretched on the bed they were trying to comfort each other; memory was becoming this spastic sarabande through which they were staggering together and apart. (Had love been strangled – or worse, deformed, in both of them, at birth?)

  Her bruises wouldn’t have risen yet; not that it mattered: they had their clothes on. He was mumbling something about his mother: it must have been the dark colour of her dress. She was suddenly ashamed of her long hands for having lost the art of touch, just as her music had left her except in the presence of the cockatoos.

  ‘Do you think it could have been the gas men? Who was flushing the pipes all these days. One of them told me we need new burners on the stove. Said he’d come and put them for me.’

  ‘Don’t trust um.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Too affectionate.’

  They were laughing mouth to mouth. He was soothing the hands she thought had grown, or perhaps always had been, useless.

  They must have fallen into a doze, and might have forgotten the cockatoos if the light hadn’t reminded them; it was about the time the birds used to come. Davorens sat up on hinges, and without so much as smoothing the creases out of their clothes, rushed down to put out the seed.

  And the sky was awash with cockatoos returning, settling on the gumtrees which grew in the garden. If silent, the birds might have merged with the trees, but they sat there ruffling, snapping at twigs, screeching – cajoling, it sounded; one of them almost succeeded in forming a word.

  ‘Where have they been?’ Olive Davoren called recklessly to her husband.

  The Irishman shrugged. ‘Buggered if I know! Woronora – Wyong – Bullabulla – the Monaro!’ he shouted.

  Then when Davorens had turned their backs to drag out their veranda chairs and prepare themselves for the spectacle, their birds descended. Absence had tamed or made them ravenous. Their plumage was smoothed by concentration; the sulphur feathers in their crests were lying together, at peace.

  If Davorens did not comment it was because they had discovered in this other silence the art of speech. Once he touched the back of one of her hands with an index finger, pointing out nothing they didn’t already share. She hardly breathed for fear her love might make him fearful of being possessed; she must try to make it look nothing more than gratitude.

  It was different fears which began possessing them both, before any reason showed itself from behind that hibiscus she had always meant to prune. It was Figgis; more – Figgis with a shotgun.

  ‘The bloody madman!’ From up on the rise, Davoren started bellowing as soon as he recovered from the shock. ‘Only perverts would dream of shootun at cockatoos!’

  ‘A public menace! Picking at the slates – shitting on the paths – destroying trees – disturbing the ratepayers’ sleep!’

  After that, Figgis fired. The cockatoos were already rising, a fountain of white fanning out into separate wavelets; all but those who had been hit: a couple were tumbling, flopping, jerking on the grass, as the life inside them broke up.

  Tim Goodenough saw, and it was terrible.

  He saw Davoren running down the slope, no longer this elderly man, but like a boy with windmill arms.

  ‘Murderer!’

  ‘I was never one to neglect my duty,’ Figgis was muttering.

  He took aim again, at distance.

  A whole mob of kids had come running up and were hanging from the park railings to get a better view of what was happening.

  Figgis would have fired again – he was that mad – if Miss Le Cornu hadn’t run along the street. She would have grabbed him, if Davoren hadn’t got there before her. The two men were whirled round together on their heels, and as part of the same whirlwind, the shotgun.

  Which went off for the second time.

  A bunch of women began screaming. Children giggled.

  Lying on the pavement, Davoren was looking skywards, his eyes as still as still water. The blood was running.

  ‘You sod!’ Miss Le Cornu shouted, it wasn’t clear for who.

  She and Mrs Davoren, already on their knees, tugged at first, each trying to raise, or possess Davoren for herself; then began a regular stroking. They might have been easing the life out of him: you could see it had started to leave. At moments the women unavoidably stroked each other’s hands, and threatened to knot. But continued at their work. Their faces were equally pale.

  ‘Speak to me,’ Mrs Davoren said. ‘My darling? My husband?’

  (My poor habit! You will understand.)

  Tim was glad his father had come, to organize. (Because it was the evening of a week-day Dad wasn’t showing his varicose veins.)

  Figgis refused to give up his weapon; he would wait for the police. He was sitting on the kerb, clinging to the gun, slightly dribbling.

  A little girl was whimpering.

  Ladies told each other what a shame.

  The police, the ambulance arrived.

  ‘Look!’ one of the kids called.

  Some way up the street half-a-dozen cockies had returned to settle on top of a pole and along the wires. Feathers ruffled, still shocked, they sat offering their breasts to the wind. They were a nasty grey colour, more like hens which have been fluffing themselves on an ash-heap.

  The police collared Figgis and shoved him in the van after taking his gun for an exhibit.

  The ambulance carried off what must have been by now Mr Davoren’s body.

  Ahhh, Mrs Dulhunty moaned; she was done with it all, and would go to Our Lady of the Snows, Ashfield, where a nun of her acquaintance had promised to take care of her.

  So it was over.

  Only Mrs Davoren and Miss Le Cornu, along with most of the kids present, had not yet found they could believe in death. Then the two women seemed to realize they were empty-handed. They let themselves be led, ramshackle, groping, on their separate ways.

  Soon after, Tim Goodenough remembered the dead cockatoos. He would have liked them for their yellow crests. But somebody must have already collected them for burial or snitched them as souvenirs.

  Darkness gathering made the grass look poisonous. He might have let out a long howl, like a dog hit by a car, if he hadn’t glanced down and seen the pool of somebody else’s blood. In the last light it glittered so splendidly it stopped him howling, and he was glad, because Dad was still looking important, ordering people back to their houses.

  Time passes: nothing better can be said of it. All was tidied up: manslaughter established, and the cockatoo murders over-looked. Some said Figgis had been taken north to Taree, and handed over to relatives; while others had it on the best authority that he was locked up in a nut-house – and good riddance.

  Tim Goodenough thought the nut-house more likely, from hearing Mum and Dad on nuts. (There’s a lot more than you’d believe, and it’s only luck if you’re not found out.)

  On the eve of his ninth birthday he decided he was ready to carry out the plan he had been chewing over for the last few months: to test his courage by spending a night alone in the park. Just the other day he had drawn a cross on the inside of his left arm with the smallest, sharpest blade of his penknife, and had not flinched – or not much: he ought to survive night in the park.

  He would slip out after they had sent him to bed, after messing up the bedding to make them think he had slept in it. He would take provisions in case he felt hungry, and his knife for protection.

  When it came to the point, he forgot the provisions: he was that anxious to get away without being heard. Dad had drunk his last nightcap of beer, and Mum more than her usual sherry. They were already otherwise occupied when he
crept out and slid between the park railings.

  He made first for the storm-water drain in which he had found the animal’s skull he kept in the medicine cupboard. Down-and-outs slept in the drains in the park, Mrs Dulhunty said; it was a wonder the lot of them weren’t flushed out like rats. He lay awhile knocking on the sides of the drain which came out near the Moreton Bay fig. The moon was up, already a bit lopsided; it reminded him of oyster shells.

  He continued knocking, listening to the reverberations. There was a man got regularly inside the drain, and lay there knocking, Mrs Dulhunty said; he was no nut: he was in league with the Redfern thieves, telling them in code which of the houses had been vacated by their owners going to the pictures. What if you hit on the crims’ code? They could break in while Dad was on top of Mum. Or murder Mrs Dulhunty before she got round to leaving for Our Lady of the Snows.

  Soon after that he climbed down from the drain. He left the park. He would keep to the street for a bit, to the blue lighting which the council put because some of the ladies were afraid they might be indecently assaulted, though the last thing they could expect was rape. He picked up a stick for company and ran it along the railings as he marched.

  Some of the houses were in darkness (waiting for the crims) but a light was shining in what must be Mrs Davoren’s bedroom window. There was a light also in Miss Le Cornu’s – Buz. (Wasn’t it what everyone called her? since Dad came across it ruling the lines through the names on the electoral roll.)

  He walked slower, to prolong the street. There was time enough for the bloody park if he was to spend all night in it.

  Mrs Davoren was lying in her bed watching the moon balanced on a black pyramid which by day became a holm-oak. She wasn’t frightened living alone in their house. She would never be frightened: there was no reason for it. There was no reason.

  She lay and stroked the pillow where his head hadn’t lain in years. It had lain on the pavement. She didn’t cry: she was as far removed as the Bach partita she had played to the cockatoos before they were frightened by the string snapping.