by Judith White
The next day she went down early and lifted the duck from his cage, cradling him against her chest. He pressed his head against her cheek, into her neck. She sat on a rock in the sun, and shifted him onto her lap. She examined him for change. The blood quills on his wings were bursting into tufts of feather. His wings were now extending into the ruff of stomach feathers.
I truly love you, Duckie.
And I love you, he said.
Why did you peck me like that?
He was silent. She stroked his back, dipped her hand into the burning hollow under a wing. Then, on an impulse, she rummaged deep into the feathers above his leg. She was shocked to make out a round lump of meaty drumstick.
MORE DINNER CONVERSATION
When her mother was alive, Hannah had often found herself talking with other people who had ill and aged parents. It was as if they were all agonisingly digging into sand on a large cold beach, using ineffectual toy spades, searching for the hidden boxes that might hold the answers to the questions they couldn’t even articulate. In the end, their conversations would finish in a mess pitted with holes too deep for them to cover again.
And now that her mother was dead, she had no idea what it was they’d ever discussed, what could have occupied her thoughts so thoroughly.
But this night she and Simon were invited out to dinner with old friends — Woody and Fritha. Fritha was a duck fancier and had constructed a pond in her back yard to attract ducks. Her partner, Woody, was a hunter. A hunter of wild boar, deer, rabbits and ducks. Another friend, who used to live on a property with a lake inhabited by many ducks and frogs, was also invited. The conversation, all evening, had been dominated by ducks.
Why didn’t you bring your duck? Fritha asked Hannah. Indeed, now, she had to ask herself, why hadn’t she?
And so this conversational beach, in comparison with the worn territory of aged care, was warm and silky. Hannah and the duck fancier flung themselves into the sand, moulding castles decorated with feathers, eggshells and bones. Hannah was ecstatic. She had never quite appreciated Fritha’s interests in ducks before.
Fritha gave her an umbrella and took her outside in pelting rain to proudly show off the pond. It had real duckweed, knots of green with loose threads dangling.
You must have some, she insisted, kneeling to scoop the water. Rain was pouring off the back of her coat. She shoved a plastic pot into Hannah’s hands, full of weedy slop, the weed knitting the surface like a lid.
Gratefully, Hannah placed the pot in the car, before returning inside to join the others who were drinking wine and eating nibbles.
They were mothers sharing baby loot. Fritha shared stories of rapacious ducks, hungry ducks, lesbian ducks, dominant ducks, bereft ducks and ponds. Hannah told stories of sprouting feathers and astonishment and friendship and loneliness.
Oh, you love him! said Fritha.
Well, I like having him around, watching him, Hannah replied sheepishly.
You do, you do! You love him!
One day he’ll fly away and look for a mate, said the friend who used to live by the lake.
I know, said Hannah.
Do they mate for life?
Some ducks do, but not muscovies, said Hannah. Any old duck, apparently.
She’d been exploring online.
You might be sorry, in the end, said Fritha.
Some people cut their wings, Woody said as he moved around the coffee table, filling their wine glasses. You can cut their wings so they can’t fly. If you don’t want them to leave you. If you cut the wing feathers they grow back again, but if you cut the wings themselves . . .
Hannah had a vision of the pulsating wing, blood squirting from the quill feathers in a crimson fountain. She flinched, her stomach tightening.
How do you know it’s a he, anyway? asked Woody.
I don’t really, it’s just that he’s always been a boy. It could be that he’s not. I suppose.
Mothers have a sixth sense, said Fritha. Anyway, do ducks have penises?
There was a silence. In the end, the woman who’d lived near a lake said she thought they did but she could be wrong. In all the time she’d lived near ducks, she’d never seen a duck’s penis.
Fritha said, Well, what are they doing then, when they’re doing all that mating kerfuffle? Something must be going somewhere.
Whatever it is, it’s over in a jiffy, said the hunter, because they’re at their most vulnerable. It has to be quick because of predators.
This is all very interesting, but enough is enough, said Simon, who had been quiet up until now. Really. If you don’t mind my saying so, I was hoping for a little escape from it all. No more ducks. Please.
Seconded, said Woody. Quack quack quack quack quack.
Muscovies don’t quack, actually, retorted Hannah.
Well, shut the duck up, whatever sound it makes. The hunter softened his jibe with a charming smile, but Hannah felt like hissing at him.
THE DAY THAT BIRDS FELL TUMBLING FROM THE SKY
The rain continued. It was raining enough to soak the parched, dusty earth. Windy enough to fling branches and palm leaves from side to side; the backyard was now a shaggy dog shaking off every flea from its hide, howling around the corners of the house because it had been left outside in the wet.
Across Europe snow was falling. The world over there was icing up. Even the Danube was a mosaic of crunchy ice and snow. And Korea was having to postpone its war because of the weather. Planes in London were unable to venture into the skies; they gathered on the tarmac, like frozen birds congregating on a beach in a gale.
And here, too, the sky was spitting out dead birds.
On her walk that morning, Hannah found evidence.
1. A little green wax-eye lying amongst red and bruised camellia petals on the pavement, ants busying themselves around its head.
2. A seagull laid out on the high-tide mark in the sand, already pecked at, its rib bones like the hull of a boat in the making, resting in a dock of seaweedy driftwood.
3. The body of a penguin floating on its back in the sea, like a lazy swimmer enjoying the bobbing chop of the waves, the frantic movement of the sea giving it a semblance of life, a cruel unrelenting dance.
4. A floppy-headed young thrush snagged by a pile of brown leaves in a gutter, water gushing past towards the nearby drain.
5. An empty nest flung from lofty branches.
When the rain stopped, the earth steamed in the summer heat. In the moist aftermath, things bred. Mosquitoes clung like magnets to exposed flesh. Delicate tiny praying mantises burst from their zippers to sway on shiny leaves.
The rain was good for snails. After dark, Hannah took a plastic bag and trawled the streets glistening with rain under the yellow light of street lamps. Snails grazed peacefully like sheep on grassy verges, in family clusters, or the occasional large bull loner. She felt like a wolf on the fold as she plucked them from under hedges and bushes, over roadside lawns, in damp rotting vegetation alongside driveways. She was a shady, lurking predator. Her bag became heavy with frothy slimy prey.
Back home, she tipped them all into a disused aquarium. She probably had a hundred of them. The next day she fed them with leaves and clippings and closed the lid.
At times during the following days she threw them to the duck and he waddled after them. He was fat, ungainly, funny. He was a dog playing catch, except he ate the ball.
A HARD ONE TO SWALLOW
As Christmas approached, Hannah was distracted with things to do. She noted that the duck didn’t seem to know how to act when she wasn’t with him. From the top deck she watched him surreptitiously as he waddled about the lawn. He appeared forlorn. She imagined that the overnight educator had been taking the chance to tell him bothersome things. He pecked miserably at a leaf, or a stone or a branch, and then drifted around with a bewildered air, as if he was truly baffled as to what to do next.
On Christmas Eve there was the shopping to finish, and the cooking, and the org
anising for visitors. And now Hannah had her feet parked by the kitchen bench, slipping the knife under the rind of the ham, tugging the skin away to reveal the terrain of succulent white fat. She sliced a grid of diamonds into the lard, then pierced it with cloves. All around the world people were preparing dead animals in a similar fashion. It might be time for her to become a vegetarian.
Simon came in from mowing the lawn and weed-eating, chucking off his gumboots at the door. His jeans were wet up to his calves, furry with cut grass.
Hmmm, yum, he said, leaning across her to pour a glass of water. The sleeves of his checked brown shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and a bloody scratch smudged across his arm. As he drank, she could smell his familiar body odour, warmly herbaceous and sweaty.
He put the glass down, lifted her hair and gave her neck a quick kiss.
The duck’s all plucked and gutted, he said. Where do you want it?
Up your bum, she snapped, flicking him away. She was sick of jokes about eating the duck.
Later she sat by the pond shelling fresh peas, while the duck vacuumed up the dandelion leaves she’d scattered there, darting impotently at the goldfish and randomly pecking at the stones around the water’s edge.
Suddenly she noticed that he was selecting particular stones to swallow.
No! No, Ducko, no! She grabbed him, tipped him head down, knocking over the bowl of precious shelled peas, which spilled into cracks or rolled to join the new duckweed in the sludgy pond.
He clawed and writhed and flapped until he managed to escape into the water, fluffing himself up and repeatedly dipping his head under the surface. She wondered whether stone-eating was a neurotic action, in the same way that people obsessively pulled out their hair, or washed their hands, or cut themselves. She imagined him eating and eating stones to fill a void, until he became stone, to join the concrete statue of the duck already half-submerged there, like a headstone over a submerged grave.
THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
She dreamt that she was holding the duck upside-down by his legs. His beak was wide open and he was still. Dull grey stones plopped from his mouth one by one, landing in a pile at her feet. Each stone had written upon it a foreign word she couldn’t understand. Finally the cascade stopped. She gave a shake and one more dropped out. This one was a green pea. She shook him again and more peas fell. She turned him upright again, but he was empty. He was a floppy feathered handbag, and she couldn’t find his head. She was turning him over and over looking for his head. She found a zip in the handbag and inside a leather purse, and inside that . . . nothing. There had to be something. She scrabbled around in the purse and found a comb with a few white hairs curling from it. There was also a powder puff and a lipstick. In a side pocket she found a well-worn piece of paper folded into four. Inside a tiny thin scrawl. Happy Christmas, dear.
Chapter 14
PAPARAZZI
Christmas Day. Before lunch, Rosemary and Max arrived through the hedge with a box of snails. Rosemary was wearing a pink dress and a pink bow in her hair. Her bare arms were fat and downy. Max looked the real little man in clean shorts and a checked shirt with sleeves folded up his arms and secured by a button. His hair had been slicked from his forehead with water. She wondered whether Eric had done this before they came over. Normally, Eric would be over here himself. She squatted with each child balanced against a knee on the lawn as the duck devoured their offering.
Now we have to go, said Max.
We’re going to have ice-cream, said Rosemary. Hannah placed her nose in their hair, first this one’s head and then the other.
You smell delicious, she said.
But you can’t eat me, said Max, wriggling to escape.
And you can’t eat me, said Rosemary the parrot.
When they left to go back to Eric, she gave them a box of chocolates. To share, she told them. She also gave them a large walnut.
This is for Poppa, she said. Make sure you give it to him, otherwise there’ll be no chocolates for you. She had already prised open the shell and replaced the nut with a note. She’d read a short story once of a mother who had done something similar with a walnut at her daughter’s birthday party — made the walnut with something inside as the prize in Pass the Parcel. She’d liked the idea and had always wanted to use it herself but, as she had no children, she’d never had the opportunity.
In this case, she’d made several attempts at the choice of words for Eric. Some were meaningful, some cheeky, some bitter, some profound and obscure. In the end she wrote: Is that our friendship, in a nutshell? Happy Christmas, Eric, from Hannah. Then she resealed it with glue.
Claire and Bob from Te Awamutu arrived with a tray of asparagus rolls and savoury eggs. Bob with his fitting red shirt and his healthy head of hair, an electrified mop sliced in two with a straight parting. Hannah’s cousin and husband from Titirangi came with a chick pea salad and their ruddy-faced teenage twin boys, who slouched into the house resentfully, and she knew they’d barely bring themselves to speak or look up from their cell phones the whole day. A younger cousin and her new boyfriend came, late and radiant with their hair still wet from showering. Simon’s brother from Australia, Dennis, had arrived the night before. And Maggie and Toby came direct from the airport, dragging into the guest room the two bulging suitcases for the week that they were to stay. Maggie brought with her a burst of energy, greeting everyone loudly, laughing and joking, yanking the cheeks of both twins to induce a sneery smile from each. Well, that was something. Toby was nervy, thin, his elegant jacket hanging from the bones in his back, and when Hannah tiptoed to kiss his freckled cheek, he reeked of smoke.
Sorry about your mother, he said, his body jiggling uneasily. I liked her. We got along well.
This was the first she had heard from him since her mother died.
Thanks, she replied. That’s OK.
Maggie told me that she had a great farewell.
Oh, did she? Yes, I think Mum would have liked it.
So, this was the Christmas package. This was the blast-off that the countdown of the past few weeks had been leading up to.
And all anyone wanted to do was to see the duck.
First of all Claire and Bob trudged down the deck stairs to the lawn, where they gathered around him in the sunshine. He stood, legs splayed, looking beseechingly at Hannah.
Oh, he’s big, they said.
But he’s gentle and he doesn’t have a drake’s tail.
And he doesn’t have a mohawk. And not much of a caruncle. But he does have some. You might find, they said, that he’ll lay eggs.
But then again, he’s very big so he might not.
Then the rest of the party trundled down the steps, glasses of bubbly in hands. Even the twins bumbled along, bumping into each other as they went. Hannah picked up the duck as she normally would, cupping her hands behind his wings and swivelling him around so that he was upright against her chest. It was a practised motion that, as long as they prepared themselves calmly, they manoeuvred with grace. As he usually did, the duck touched his beak under her chin, at this cheek and the other. This time he was bashful, hiding for longer under her chin.
Suddenly she realised she was surrounded by shiny black eyes, duck eyes, single dark eyes blinking. Everybody had a camera trained on her and the duck.
She was aware of Simon standing back from it all, his arms folded tightly, muttering to Maggie.
I might be married to her, but I’m not a blood relative. And there’s some consolation in that.
Hannah couldn’t hear Maggie’s actual reply, but she didn’t like the way her sister laughed so conspiratorially at her expense.
IT WAS THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
One day after Christmas Day. The duck had avoided the roasting dish, the fantasies around the ideal Christmas dinner when ham had become passé, the envy of those bored with thoughts of one more year of pig. No one had snuck through the fence and stolen him.
It was the first Christmas without her m
other having to endure her decrepit body — the cracked old vessel that, over the last few years, had only just managed to contain her soul.
And there was another earthquake in Christchurch, a 4.9 aftershock. Maggie and Toby rang neighbours, ascertained that once again their house had escaped practically unscathed. A few things on the floor, some broken crockery.
Thank bloody goodness for that, said Maggie.
Toby brushed his hand over her shoulder.
I’m going for a walk, he said. His normally pale face was ashen. His freckles scattered under the surface like tiny autumn leaves trapped in ice.
Hannah didn’t know Toby well, even though he had been married to her sister for ten years. He and Maggie both worked hard, drank a lot, partied hard. They each had children from first marriages, all now living overseas. He worked into the small hours as a chef in an upmarket restaurant in Christchurch. Hannah’s infrequent conversations with him over the years made her think of twin water-skiers skimming and bouncing along the surface of a choppy lake, hauled behind the master controller at the wheel — Maggie.
Chapter 15
CRUISE CONTROL
And now all the long days travelling from Christmas towards New Year.
A year or so before she met Simon, Hannah and a friend had travelled to Sydney on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. As it pulled out from the terminal in Auckland, passengers were throwing streamers and unravelling toilet paper as a link to those waving from the wharf. She’d been able to distinguish the face of her mother amongst the pixelated sea of the crowd far below, but what astonished her more than anything was that she could determine whether her mother was looking at her or whether her gaze, rather than her head, was turned askance. Amongst those dotted faces below, the link between her mother’s eyes and hers was discernible. It wasn’t that she could see her eyes, but she knew when her mother was looking at her.
