White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Diana’s task was to set her own body aside. She had to feel only the bird’s hunger, its temperature and heart rate. She crooned softly, “Come on, Aquila, don’t be frightened.”

  On the eagle’s fourth attempt to snatch the food, Diana rewarded her when she had landed by tossing a sliver of meat, just enough to stimulate the gastric juices and make her eager for more. When she regained her perch, the torment began again. In the back of Diana’s head, a dull voice complained that her arm was aching.

  At eleven o’clock, Grace put a note on the front door saying BACK IN FIVE MINUTES and hastened through the dappled shade of the eucalypts down to the aviary. She was trying not to spill a mug of tea. Outside the mews room, she gave the call she and Diana used as a private greeting. Back came the three notes that meant: Wait. She waited, taking a peek inside. Diana had her back to the door and was staring at the eagle, which stared back at her from the wall. Grace left the mug of tea on the concrete.

  At two o’clock, Diana lurched into the kitchen. She had bird muck on the navy T-shirt she was wearing, and her face was pale from strain. She licked dry lips, wanting to say something as she leaned against the sink, letting hot water run over her hands.

  After she had eaten a plate of sandwiches, she mumbled, “It’s going okay.”

  At six, Grace closed the front door and put her cashbox in the small safe in the cupboard under the stairs. It was time for the ducks to come back from the river.

  Overhead, birds streamed into the trees in the garden. A flock of forty or fifty white cockatoos had landed and was feasting on the seed she had put out. They lurched over the grass, broad-shouldered, yellow crests erect, yelling at each other like drunks in party hats. Above them, the branches were full of less belligerent birds, including the party of bluebonnets, too frightened of the cockatoos to come down. “Git off, you!” Grace called as she approached. The cockatoos rose with grating cries, and from all sides small, bright, quick bodies swooped to the ground.

  She paused outside the room again and whistled. There was no reply. At first when she peered through the glass, the room was so dark she could not make out what was happening inside. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw Diana standing toward the back of the room, blood oozing down the side of her face. She was as pale as cheese. Her right hand supported her left elbow, and on her bent arm stood the huge, dark eagle.

  As Grace watched, Diana let go of her elbow and took from the bag on her hip a long, slim feather. She stroked the eagle’s legs and feet with it. The bird fluffed herself up, shook her tail, then resettled her plumage like a hen settling on her nest. Very slowly, Diana walked with her toward the lower perch. The eagle peered forward but showed no inclination to move until Diana jerked her arm lightly Then the bird hopped off and roused her feathers once more.

  Diana backed away, placing one foot quietly behind the other until she reached the door. Grace stood aside. Neither spoke. Diana had a gash on her head and another on her shoulder, which had dribbled blood onto her jeans. She wandered out to the open section of the aviary, where she could see the sky. Her left arm was so painful, she now realized, she wondered if she had damaged a nerve. From where she stood, the big moon was visible, and she felt as if its clear light was a mirror of the light that still filled her, radiance from the moment when, just before dusk, she had stood still and felt through leather and steel a grip twice as strong as that of human hands tighten around her arm. The huge dark wings had rustled above her head, then feather slotted into feather, like giant fans closing, and slowly the folded sails lowered against the eagle’s sides. The bird squeezed and rocked slightly to test this strange, human perch. Then she stood still. Diana smiled.

  In the distance, the train from Sydney rumbled across the bridge.

  “Will you get the ducks, Gracie? I don’t think I can move,” she said.

  Next morning, when Lek had not appeared in U-1 by eight o’clock, Parker sent Phil to her cabin to see where she was. Phil returned with the news that Lek was still in her pajamas, either sick or sulking, he was not sure which, and would not speak to him, he said, but shook her head at all his questions as if she did not understand English today.

  Parker stalked upstairs from the lab, through the garden, and rapped on her door. She was still wearing pajamas. “Get dressed and come to work,” he said. “The animals need feeding and cleaning.” With a defiant glance, she closed the door in his face. He walked slowly back through the cool, still garden, thinking about what he would do to her. After a while he went upstairs and asked Sonja to lend a hand with the animals before she went to work.

  In Kalunga, the Research minibus arrived at Fig Tree Gully Road at 8:00 A.M. to take Diana, as an observer, to her first Ethics Committee meeting, and so she did not notice that her van was low on petrol again. By the time she returned home that afternoon, Grace had run some errands in it and had filled the fuel tank.

  Only the shell of the old Pembridge homestead remained. Inside, in what had been the warm center of the house, everything she loved had vanished. In place of deep, tatty old chairs, the stone fireplace, milk-glass lamps, and steer hides on the floor, there was nondescript carpet and skinny-legged furniture. On walls where there had been paintings by friends and things found in paddocks—part of a tree that looked like a human torso and thighs, the white backbone of a kangaroo, a cream-colored snakeskin, almost translucent—there were prints from the Heidelberg school. On a long table in what had been the living room, meeting papers and glasses of water were set out in front of eight chairs, seven clustered at one end, one of them at the head, three on each side, while the eighth chair was banished to the far end of the table, two meters away. That was where the observer was to sit, a secretary explained.

  The sound of voices on the veranda was followed by the entrance of members of the committee, led by a very tall man Diana had seen in Kalunga. He advanced toward her, smiling, his hand outstretched.

  “John Parker,” he said. He was English, with a deep, well-modulated voice and the shabby dress of an academic. The color of his eyes was accentuated by a royal-blue cashmere sweater. His hair was a bit too long and needed a wash. “I’m chair of this committee. Delighted to have you here, Miss Pembridge. We’re looking forward to your contribution. It’s a pity that today you’re still an observer.” He sighed. “I’m afraid the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly.” His voice dropped a key. “How are your birds?” he added. “The falcon?”

  “They’re okay,” she answered cautiously.

  The blue eyes smiled, inviting her to take him into her confidence about birds.

  “You saw the falcon?” she added.

  “Did I!” He chuckled and looked at her intently again. Diana blushed. He’s lecherous, she realized. His look seemed to indicate that she found him attractive. “Well,” he said, “we’d better get to work. Let me introduce you …”

  He was an efficient chairman of a stultified committee. Seated opposite him, Diana tried not to meet his glances or, when she did, to gaze back coolly. He was doing, she knew, what every cunning chairman does with a new member: attempting to win her to his faction. She had decided to resist alliances until the politics that were at work became clear. Once the meeting began, she was quickly lost in a maze of jargon, acronyms, and references to earlier events. It’ll take me weeks, she realized, before I know what’s going on. Meanwhile, she looked for clues in details of the appearance and behavior of the three women and four men who studied the agenda papers, and grunted from time to time. Parker did almost all the talking, referring to the printed reports they should have read (but evidently had not). Each laboratory team had reported on its use of animals in the preceding two months, giving details of the processes the animals had been put through, the use of anesthetics in the case of surgical procedures, whether animals had been sacrificed, and so forth. Graphs accompanied each report, and each concluded with a request for permission from the committee to carry out further experiments. Most lab teams, Diana noticed, wer
e granted permission without discussion, while others, proposing almost identical work (from the animal point of view), had their submissions queried peevishly, analyzed for small discrepancies, and, in one case, rejected outright. Parker projected the image of a neutral chairman, but as Diana watched the glances that jumped back and forth across the table, she saw that he was orchestrating the votes. When the lab team working on Legionnaires’ disease had its proposal knocked back, Parker, she noted, wore a troubled expression, although he had said nothing to support the submission when he had the chance. Instead, he allowed a battle-ax from the New South Wales Health Department to thunder against the proposed work on the grounds that it would duplicate experiments already done at Westmead Hospital. They broke for morning tea.

  “Well,” Parker said, “do you find it interesting?”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  He bent close to her ear. “Of course, you and I are the only people in this room who’re seriously concerned with animals.”

  Diana murmured, “Yes.” She tried to keep her expression composed, to stop her heart from pounding so loudly, for just in front of her nose, on his blue sweater, there was a bunch of dark hairs about ten centimeters long.

  He gave her another intimate look. She could smell his unwashed scalp. I’ll gag, she thought, but she moved a fraction closer to him and her hand edged toward his sweater. Touching him seemed loathsome. Suddenly he seized her fingers and squeezed them. “See you at lunchtime,” he said quietly. She flinched.

  The meeting dragged on until twelve-thirty, when a buxom young woman approached the table diffidently and Parker said, “Oh, here’s lunch!” making everyone laugh at her. Diana had barely heard a word in almost two hours. She had been trying not to stare at Parker’s sweater, trying not to let him realize what she was thinking—that the hair on his sweater looked like the hair on Carolyn’s T-shirt.

  People shuffled their papers together to make room for the platters of sandwiches, fruit, cheese, and petits fours that began to arrive. There was too much food, Diana thought, but from the veranda other voices could be heard, and she realized that the committee would be joined for lunch by Research staff. They came traipsing in, men in beards, women with hefty shoulder pads, Joe Miller, and the man who had almost broken into a run to escape from Carolyn in High Street one day For a moment Diana remembered Carolyn’s head turning as she jeered across her shoulder at him. Could several of them have been in on the killing? Diana wondered. Her glance darted from one to another, but the rest of her face was as still as a mask. She was introduced to the Gang of Six. She knew most by sight already but had previously spoken only to Joe and the carroty-haired busybody who lived in the house on the ridge and was friendly with Jason.

  “Sonja Olfson,” she said. “I’m John’s wife. Let’s go outside.”

  She tried to remember what gossip she had heard about Sonja Olfson. The only thing that came to mind was Grace’s pulling a face at Sonja in the news agent’s shop. Diana followed her out onto the veranda, wondering how such a small, hygienic-looking woman could be married to such an unwholesome man. Sonja pointed to two folding canvas chairs beside a table where they could rest their plates.

  “I prefer being outdoors,” she said, gesturing in a proprietary way toward the well-kept lawn and flower beds. One rosebush still had a blowsy yellow flower on it. Diana’s mother, Joan, had grown it from a cutting, but there was no point in mentioning that to the director of personnel, she realized.

  As soon as they were seated, Sonja launched into a complaint about how the Research was run on a traditional energy-inefficient model, while she was using solar power and making compost—so why couldn’t everyone else? Environmental witch sniffer, Diana thought wearily. She knew the ritual observances of people like Sonja: every time they used a paper bag instead of a plastic bag they congratulated themselves. It was egotism wearing a cloak of green. Sonja had arranged their chairs around the table in such a way that nobody else could sit with them without being intrusive, and was rushing on under a full head of steam, too busy to eat now that she had arrived at the subject of the coming planetary cataclysm owing to the selfishness of human beings. At public meetings on land care, one had to put up with people like Sonja. Diana continued to nod slowly, hoping her face did not betray her boredom. She bit into another of the roast beef sandwiches heaped on her plate. In the doorway, Parker appeared. Diana, mouth full of food, gave him a welcoming glance.

  “You’re not vegetarian?” Sonja asked, leaning forward, her voice rising in disbelief.

  Diana swallowed, shaking her head, then suddenly stared at Sonja’s cream linen jacket. Partly hidden by the lapel was a long, dark hair, identical to the one on Parker’s sweater. She reached forward and plucked it off with such a quick movement that Sonja did not realize what had happened—but Parker, at their elbow now, hesitated and glanced down at his own clothes. Noticing the hairs on his sweater, he quickly brushed them away.

  “Hair falling out,” he murmured. “It’ll be teeth next.” He gave a mournful smile.

  Sonja tittered.

  Diana wanted to leap to her feet and shout, “You’re keeping chimpanzees! You’re experimenting illegally on them!” But all she did was give a silly grin and slip her fingers, holding the hair, into her trouser pocket. Sonja had missed it all.

  “Darling, I was longing for you to join us,” she said.

  Parker’s presence had caused his wife to become suddenly more vivacious, with a new edge of anxiety in her manner, an attempt to capture his attention entirely, not allow him to speak or look at Diana, as if she imagined Diana was a dangerous flirt.

  He gave a mocking bow. “Miss Pembridge, may I invite you to join me for coffee?” he asked. “We’ll be starting again in five minutes, and I want you to have a chance to talk to a couple of the committee members.…” He raised his eyebrows at his wife in some shared understanding. Diana followed him indoors.

  She still felt unsettled when she got home late that afternoon.

  Upstairs in her study, the boys were lying on the floor, surrounded by books. Slowly and carefully, Diana pulled the pocket out of her trousers and plucked off the hair.

  “What’s that?” Tom asked.

  “Chimp hair,” she said.

  The kids gaped.

  “Those bastards are using chimpanzees. Illegally. Unquarantined. Killing them however they like.”

  “Killing them?” Tom asked.

  Diana nodded. “Up to thirty, so far.” She fell silent, thinking, Plus Carolyn. She pictured the mauve corpse again, and its mouthful of flies, and turned away to hide her face from the children. They made you dumb, like an animal, she thought.

  Tom’s crybaby face was ready to burst. “Why do they kill them?” he whined.

  Forty kilometers away, on Sonja’s balcony, Parker sat brooding over the day’s events. Sonja, seated on the other side of the weathered outdoor table, glanced at him, restraining herself from asking what was going through his mind. He had already shouted at her once that afternoon.

  “Christ almighty, woman! On a light-colored jacket you should have seen it!” he’d muttered when they drove home together in the Land Cruiser. “It isn’t as if you never look at yourself in the mirror. You spend half the day primping.” Sonja steered on in silence, concentrating on the road ahead. “D’you need glasses?” Parker asked.

  She pressed her lips together and kept her foot down.

  The silence on the veranda continued. At last he turned to her with a smile. “I forgive you,” he said.

  Sonja thought, He forgives me! For shouting at me? For abusing me? When it was he who asked me to help him with the chimps this morning, because we can’t trust Lek.

  Outrage made her face pasty, but she showed no other sign of anger. “Thank you, darling,” she replied.

  Parker visibly relaxed. “Bloody girl,” he mumbled, and shook his head. According to the boys, Lek had arrived at work as soon as he and Sonja had driven off in the Land Cruiser.
“I’m going to ring Otto and tell him Lek must be replaced immediately,” he announced.

  “What about Joe? Shouldn’t we drive up to admin and ring from the pay phone?”

  “I’ll speak in riddles,” Parker said. An amusing thought crossed his mind.

  Sonja wanted to ask what riddles, but intuition told her it was something to do with the flesh trade.

  In Mae Wong National Park, Michael Romanus shifted his backbone against the tree trunk and resettled his legs across a branch, wide as a child’s bed, that he had chosen as his hideaway for the night. Sunset was still an hour away, and from where he was sitting he looked out across an ocean of treetops, all the way to Burma. Beneath him, five meters down, there was a salt lick, which was visited sometimes, the park rangers had told him, by a tiger. He had dragged his equipment up to the branch and already had one camera set up on a tripod. Another, for hand-held shots, had a blimp on it so that shutter sound would be inaudible, even to a tiger’s ears.

  It was the quiet time of the afternoon, before the evening ruckus when the day shift, as he thought of it, left and the jungle’s night shift appeared; he had half an hour, at least, before any night creatures would come to lick the salt. He took his telephone from the pocket of his shirt and pressed the button for Raoul. After a few rings the familiar “Sí?” sounded in his ear.

  “How’s it going, pal?” Romanus asked.

  “Mierda!” muttered Raoul. “Idiotas!” He could not get the fax machine in his room to work and had been obliged to complain to the hotel manager. He was still waiting for another machine to be installed.

  “So you haven’t sent the stuff yet?” Romanus asked. “The stuff” included his photostats tracing the illegal sale of the baby orangutan, plus documents Raoul had collected from a dealer in Chiang Mai about trade in other protected apes. Up there, protected animals were often taken as payment for heroin.

  Yes, he had faxed it all last night, Sabea said, but because he had heard nothing in reply, he was not satisfied the fax had gone through properly, and he wanted to send the material again, tonight. He added something in Spanish, then translated: “The noose around Otto’s neck grows tighter.”