Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  She called out over the wind, ‘Let’s go down to the beach. They obviously fancy each other.’

  While our dogs ran furiously up and down the seashore, barking hysterically, we sat on a rock and talked out the details of their coming union. It seemed Thomas, the Welsh corgi, was going to die quite soon. He had some sort of incurable illness and could live another six months, maybe a year, no more. Thomas had never had babies, and his owner wished that his genes should move on into the future. This seemed the perfect opportunity, as Olga and Thomas were obviously very attracted to each other. As the clincher for the settlement, I referred casually to Olga’s royal connections. That did it. It seemed that this charming countrywoman was chief friend and lady-in-waiting to the Governor-General’s wife, so Thomas had his own clout in the world of good breeding. An excellent match all round. We parted in happy expectation of Olga’s next heat.

  In due course Thomas came to a sleepover at Porirua and they got on enormously well. Olga’s babies were due two months before my baby. The timing could not have been better.

  Quickly and I set up bedding for Olga on the porch, off the dining room. The porch had a large window where we could view the proceedings. It all happened in the weekend, so Fraser was able to make an occasion of it. He had come to love Olga. He had not been brought up with creatures as I had been, so to begin with he was quite cautious, even resentful. His first name for Olga was the Wedge, because of course she would get in between us in bed. There was a finesse to Fraser’s wit, the way, for instance, he named Lily, my beloved samoyed of later times. He called her Total Hair. If you have never lived with a samoyed who has not been done, you wouldn’t know how clever his reference was. Lily’s hair, after the autumn storms, was there lining the insides of the nests built the spring before. After a storm I would go around examining them carefully, the wonderful weaving, the beautiful handiwork, all a tribute to Lily.

  However, this is about Olga having her babies, and how Fraser, Quickly and I were caught up in Olga’s transforming moment. Drinking wine, or was it gin and tonic? Ghastly Corbans gut-rotting sherry? I don’t remember now. Whatever it was, it was lovely – real love, a celebration – and for me another reminder that bodily functions were what life was about. Life was not in the head. (I have always feared that departure, that departure of the head from the body.) Olga giving birth was a practical demonstration of how much we shared. She experienced the danger and joy of giving birth just as I did; just like me she was subject to an hormonal ebb and flow. She was called a dog, I was called a human, but in the splendour of birth we were as one. She wasn’t less because she was a dog; she simply lived in a parallel reality, a reality I could only catch brief glimpses of.

  I marvel now that we had the good fortune to live in such a paradise – a paradise four puppies could gambol in and believe in eternal life. A superb vegetable garden, flower beds lovingly cared for, lawns lush and trim, trees bearing fruit, native trees grand and healthy. We owed all that splendour to Mr Quickly. Mr Quickly, who truly believed that on that beach in Dunkirk a bullet went through his right ear and then out his left ear. Well, after two hideous days and nights on that beach you should be excused for believing that Moses turned up and told you about the Promised Land – the Promised Land revisited, that is. However, Quickly didn’t get stuck in Porirua for any of that stuff. He became convinced that his wife had another man on the side and attempted to kill her. There was no doubt that Quickly’s wife was innocent, that it was all in Quickly’s head. In those days his label was paranoid schizophrenia; I don’t know how Quickly’s condition would be described now. It did seem, however, that his personality remained basically intact. The awful disintegration that occurs in schizophrenia proper hadn’t happened. Quickly’s satisfaction in his work and in the natural world sustained him, and his complicated politics in the hospital kept him on his toes. Was he on any medication at this point? I don’t think so. I have always felt that the cure is worse than the disease in psychiatry. There is no magical potion bringing about a normal state. That Quickly could accommodate his delusions was about as good as it gets. After all, that is what someone who believes in Hell and Heaven as physical realities is doing. Quickly didn’t fall off a horse on the road to Damascus like St Paul, but suffered his illumination from an enemy bullet on the beach at Dunkirk. Or believed he did. I expect myself that St Paul never saw God either but believed he did. My conviction that we humans were all clinically mad was reinforced at Porirua. You ended up in a ward in Porirua because you couldn’t look after yourself or no one else was willing to do it for you. Not because you were necessarily madder than, say, the head of your department at work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Looking Back and Being Here

  I have said there were more mad people out there in the world, functioning in a way that seemed perfectly all right to most people, than there were mad people as inmates in mental hospitals. Do I think this conclusion still holds true fifty years later? Without a doubt it does. Those powerful guys in the boardroom are madder than ever; the will to power rages on unopposed, remains undiagnosed. Capitalism masquerading as democracy; lies and hypocrisy accepted as necessary weapons to gain and then to hold on to power. How sane is that?

  The oppressor now takes on all the characteristics of the victim. Rich, white men as a persecuted minority, their way of life threatened by terrorists and hungry people. How they work it out that Jesus would be on their side is a mystery. I don’t know, but if they say it often enough, with all the religious fervour of fundamentalist belief, it seems to become true to some people. I had always thought that Jesus was the champion of the slave and that Jesus himself was viewed by the oppressors of his day as a terrorist. But no, in this land of the mirror image, everything is around the other way: back to front, upside down. Now you see it and then you can’t.

  Suck-up television and radio can always present the outrageous, the plain awful, as some sensible alternative, as the only way to save ourselves from our enemies. Savage, yes, but necessary. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen,’ some will reply when you object.

  Don’t tell me all the mad people are in the mental hospitals. Anyway, these days if you are desperate, despairing and mad, you will find it hard to locate a mental hospital to get into. However, you can always join the ranks of the losers on the street, those not equipped to survive market forces.

  That period of our life at Porirua Hospital, me often working at Harry’s, Fraser often in hospital, formed us, reshaped us. What could have seemed a disaster became enormously rewarding. Contemplating Fraser’s death changed the way we perceived the future. It was, I see now, natural that the world of medicine should forget us. I had to learn to make a life in a social limbo and Fraser had to understand he was no longer a contender. What all this did for Fraser when he got back into medicine was free him up. He did not feel beholden to the medical establishment. As best he could, he made his own decisions about what worked for him in medicine and what didn’t. Fraser was not burdened with a sense of entitlement, so when bad things happened to him he accepted the next situation.

  When he was growing up, a great deal had been expected of him academically, both by his parents and by the boarding school he attended, St Patrick’s Silverstream. Nevertheless, this was accompanied by a sense of hopelessness, a Catholic feeling that worldly success was futile. His father’s Protestant side might have been expected to balance this, but Ivan McDonald’s clan came from the Western Isles and they had their own tragic history of loss. To be cut down by fate, to lose status, didn’t seem to Fraser like a very unusual thing to happen to someone. In other words, nothing in his previous life led him to understand he was entitled and would escape misfortune. This was a good attitude to develop in a mental hospital. He didn’t feel emotionally removed from the patients; he didn’t use Ivory Tower language when he was talking to them. He translated into common language, common talk, that was easily understood. He would suggest to a wo
man suffering from acute depression, for instance, that she could take charge of her own recovery. That her depression was reactive and she was simply reacting to harsh circumstances; that if she could change the circumstances of her life it could possibly lift her depression. It sounds sort of obvious now, but I assure you it wasn’t then. I do believe that Fraser owed that mentality to his ability to understand that there but for the grace of God went himself.

  At this time my own gaze would often be drawn to the repellent. I would think of Saint Francis of Assisi but, sneakily appalled, I would nevertheless note the spittle at the corner of the mouth of the manic depressive, the smell of old clothes worn by the agitated housewife, the bad teeth, the veins, the spots and the blotches erupting on the faces and hands of just about everyone. I had, especially acute when I was young, a strong sense of smell. This was no advantage when mixing with the great unwashed. I did find, however, that if I got to know and understand a patient they smelt fine. After all, if one of our dogs was sick I didn’t mind the smell. In other words, I got used to it.

  When I was writing about how Fraser’s tuberculosis changed him, I remembered something. How when I first met Fraser in Wellington I was deeply immersed in Katherine Mansfield. I had read an article about her somewhere and she became my trail blazer. My first memory of Katherine Mansfield involved the wife of my dear Uncle Fred – that same Fred who saw those first seven tanks on the battlefield of the Somme. Till, his wife, was the most generous-hearted of creatures, high living and fortunately rich. Mr Speedy, her chauffeur, was driving us grandly around the Wellington waterfront when we passed the memorial to Katherine Mansfield. My Aunt Till announced quite indignantly, ‘Oh that naughty girl, she caused her family a great deal of grief.’ That remark lodged in my brain and I would take it out and finger it every now and then. It suggested all the dilemmas that I could become embroiled in should I commit to painting. How old was I then? About fifteen? Fortunately, when I was working at Harry’s I met Antony Alpers, Mansfield’s biographer. Antony had recently separated and this made us a convenient couple for parties. We were in fact just good friends and my intense interest in his research for his book consolidated that friendship. And the conjunction of Fraser’s illness and my interest in Katherine Mansfield was fertile ground for romantic notions about tuberculosis.

  When I said earlier that tuberculosis was viewed then the way AIDS is now, that isn’t quite true. After all, you don’t have romantic young women who are dying of AIDS lying in their lover’s arms singing arias. Greta Garbo as Camille would not have had the same box-office appeal if she had been dying of AIDS. Mind you, there were a whole lot of people around who thought coughing up blood was very anti-social, spreading death, no less, and so indeed it was. But I embraced Fraser and didn’t think I would ever catch anything. I of course thought I would live forever.

  Most people died when they got tuberculosis, and they died in poverty and pain. What protected me was a romantic illusion that I had absorbed from literature. After all, the very first Russian novel I read was Turgenev’s On the Eve. In Insarov’s tragic death scene he cries, ‘I am dying. Goodbye, my poor darling! Goodbye my country!’ I sobbed in communion with the tragic pair. I was psychologically prepared to fall in love with an idealistic, handsome young man who was dying of tuberculosis.

  That was all very well for me, but how did Fraser feel about all of this? I now understand that he was ashamed of being a sick person. A lot of the time he was in denial. Personally I’m glad he didn’t accept his fate, that he went on behaving like a healthy young man who was looking for a good time. From his point of view, my most important contribution was my ability to live in the moment. If I didn’t look back or into the future, he didn’t feel he had to either. By the time we got around to understanding that he might indeed have something of a future to look forward to, we had begun our metamorphosis, turning into something else. When he went back into medicine, Fraser was on his way to becoming an original thinker. I believe he made things much better in mental hospitals. Just for a while, but that is a real achievement – to turn things around, even if it doesn’t last long, and most things don’t.

  When I moved to this small house in Grey Lynn, feeding a few baby blackbirds in the breeding season was no big deal. It’s a big deal now. After a few years the mother and father took over my territory. It’s only a ribbon garden but it’s flourishing and free of poisons. Those two birds would present their babies to me in a frantic sort of way – a sort of, Look, here she is pregnant again and we can’t cope with these screams, you take them over. We had some deaths from local cats and she would cry piteously for a day or so, then a grief-stricken silence would follow.

  He, the father blackbird, is so handsome: strong, plump and a glossy black. She is quite plain, a sort of shabby appearance with a streak of white down one wing. Glamorous she might not be, but that they are bonded for life is quite obvious to anyone. Some thrushes joined them, and after that came the wax-eyes. They had always nested in the hedge out the front anyway. Then, a few years ago, a flock of sparrows arrived, and now it’s a feeding frenzy. I had the house cleaning organised, but where the birds eat on the back deck it’s all bird poop. I scrub down the feeding board where I put their plates and water, but the deck itself is all bird excrement. The sparrows have moved into the higher reaches of my great bamboo. The noise they make going to bed and getting up in the morning now sounds like a sparrows’ cocktail party, wildly animated conversation. The blackbirds and the thrushes are all call and response, and the mynahs’ harsh shouting is just a small part of that. The mynahs stay on the verge outside the garden and I didn’t used to like them. Now I appreciate them. They are the first guard against cats: dive bombing the neighbour’s cat, shrieking like banshees – and it works. The blackbirds have developed a similar strategy. They set up a frantic, nerve-damaging alarm. Eight blackbirds all shrieking together sends any cat running in panic. With more and more birds, it’s more and more food. The water has to be changed at least three times a day. It’s servitude: why am I doing this? I think it’s because I like them, and they are pretty fascinating. If they ask, I am obliged to give. What I must do, though, is think up a more hygienic way of feeding them, make it an art project, like the things Maori constructed to store food to protect it from rats, otherwise I will drown in a load of crap. I must make it work for them and for me. I realise now that I have never before fed birds in a confined space. I have never before felt that birds are refugees escaping persecution. That they have nowhere else to go except into my tiny garden. Well, I’m pretty sure these birds haven’t anyway.

  It’s not such a bad end to my story. Feeding birds and doing a bit of painting in between. Walking around Grey Lynn and looking: I can think of lots worse fates than that. I had better count myself lucky. There was a Chinese philosopher who lay dying, attended by his disciples. The great man had spent a lifetime struggling with the mysteries of life. In a nearby tree a flock of sparrows set up an unearthly racket. The philosopher opened his eyes and said, ‘So all the time that was it, was it?’ Well, that’s the rough meaning of what he said, and that will do for me.

  REFERENCES

  PAGE VI Constantine Cavafy, Collected Poems, edited by George Savidis, translated by Edmund Keely & Phillip Sherrard, London: Hogarth Press, 1984

  PAGE 32 ‘sprang into prominence at once’: New Zealand Celt, 1868

  PAGE 43 ‘24th April, 1916, Easter Rising’: Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin Adair, 1980.

  PAGE 48 John Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (3rd ed.), Dublin: Mellifont Press, 1922

  PAGE 85 Ismail Kadare, The File on H, translated by David Bellos, London: Vintage, 1997

  PAGE 112 ‘And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion’: Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989

  PAGE 205 ‘I am dying’: Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve, translated by Gilber
t Gardiner, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950

  When I was a child this convent looked to me like a fairy palace. Later on it seemed more like a French chateau out of a Stendhal novel. The story of Duval, pictured here too, was always part of what I saw: Duval the architect, Duval the glamorous Parisian, part of my family’s history.

  I imagine Duval and my great-grand-stepfather O’Driscoll as they trample the fragrant flowers under their best shoes after Mass. Full of importance, they lead the procession – the cross bearer and acolytes, girls, boys, women, men, priests and bishop. Elated, O’Driscoll mutters to Duval, ‘No doubt we will see you later at our soirée. Don’t you think it is a great honour that the bishop has chosen to stay with us?’ Duval will only answer the first question. ‘Yes, you will see me later as I have taken a special interest in the preparation of the food.’

  Duval was an architect, a musician and a chef. What else was he?

  Here she is, Great-aunt Mary-Ellen, Michael Edmund Dennehy’s sister and Miss Dennehy to you. This was taken about 1866. She was a powerful influence on my mother and living proof that you didn’t have to marry or be a nun to matter. She made being single seem like a really glamorous option. She was, according to my mother, a true Irish beauty: black hair, white skin and blue eyes. She ardently defended the rebels in Ireland and supported the Easter Rising. Given that she must have been working in women’s prisons by then, it’s surprising she didn’t end up in a prison herself.