by Nicole Trope
I stood up and pushed my chair back. My hand was shaking.
‘Everything okay?’ said the guard standing by the door.
‘It’s fine,’ said Lila. She held up her hand to show me that I had to stop. My fingers were pushing into my hand. My fist was getting ready to hit.
The guard started to walk towards me and I sat down again. ‘He. Wasn’t. Being. Nice,’ I said.
‘All right, Fliss,’ said Lila in a low voice. ‘It’s all right. I believe you, I believe Isabel, okay? Did you hurt Mum because you wanted to hurt Lester?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m going to get you a lawyer, a good one, okay?’
‘Okay, and you’ll take care of Isabel and tell her that I miss her and I love her?’
‘I’ll tell her. She’s living with me at the moment, don’t worry about her. One of my friends is looking after her right now.’
‘You mustn’t let Lester near Isabel. You have to take Isabel away from Mum and take care of her and keep her away from Lester.’
‘Maybe we should tell someone about Lester,’ said Lila.
‘Mum didn’t believe Isabel. Maybe no one will believe Isabel about Lester.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lila, ‘but if it’s true then we have to tell someone. He’s a teacher. He shouldn’t be allowed around children.’
‘I don’t want Isabel to have to tell. I think it would be very scary for her and if people don’t believe her then she will be sad. Don’t make her tell, Lila. Please!’
‘Okay, Fliss, don’t worry about it, I’ll think of something. I can look into it when Mum is taking care of Isabel again.’
‘No, no, no. Mum can’t take care of Isabel. She doesn’t see her, she doesn’t see anything.’
‘Felicity, I have to work, I can’t take care of Isabel. You know I love her, but I have to work. She’s staying with me while Mum’s in the hospital, but then she’ll have to go back home.’
‘Please, Lila, please, please, please don’t let her go back to Mum,’ I said. ‘Mum won’t listen to her. She won’t listen to her and she won’t see her.’
‘Okay, okay . . . stop crying. I’ll figure it out. I’ll keep her with me, I will.’
I think Lila lets Mum visit Isabel now, but I don’t want to go back and live with Mum. I don’t want to hurt her again. I’m trying to keep all my bubbling anger for Rose only, but there’s still some left over for Mum. I don’t know if it will ever go away. I don’t know why I’m so angry at Mum. I know what happened the day I hurt her, but I don’t know why. The only thing I do know is that that was the day all the anger bubbled up inside me and I couldn’t pretend things hadn’t happened anymore.
That’s what Henrietta wants me to talk about. Henrietta wants to know why. I’m afraid of why. Why is a secret that my mind won’t let go of.
‘I would like to try hypnosis,’ said Henrietta the last time I saw her.
‘What’s that?’
‘It means that I will help you relax, just with words, and you will feel sleepy and then maybe you can tell me what happened and you won’t feel bad about telling me.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no.’
‘Okay, Birdy, okay. We won’t do it.’
In bed at night now I can hear the wind as it howls through the valley like a monster. It makes me worry for the finches. They don’t like the cold. They’re so small and vulnerable. I have to protect them. I wish I could bring the finches into my room where it’s warm. I think they would like it. They could fly around and fill my room with colours.
‘Quite a few of them died last winter,’ Allison told me when I asked her to buy me some tarp for the cage.
‘They don’t like the wind. They’re too small. We need to cover the back half of the cage so they’re protected.’
‘Okay, Birdy, I’ll get you your tarp.’ Allison listens when I tell her about the finches. Last month we sold some to a pet shop and made four hundred dollars. Allison let me keep fifty dollars because I’d done such a good job. Gouldian finches can sell for a lot of money. The ones with pretty colours sell for the most money. Allison was proud of me because I managed to make the finches breed and all the babies lived. The finches were safe and happy and they had clean water and food and that’s why they wanted to have babies.
I also have some old blankets to put over the cage. They have holes in them but I think they will help keep the finches warm. And I had to take away the breeding boxes so they don’t breed. I love finches but sometimes they’re not very clever. They don’t know to only go in the boxes to keep warm. You can’t tell a finch something over and over again. Finches do what they always do. They survive by . . . by instinct. That means they are born knowing what to do and how to live. It’s not the same for humans. We have to be taught, but you can’t teach finches. If they try to breed in winter they can get something called egg bound. That means the eggs get stuck inside and then they die. They are only supposed to breed when it’s warm.
Rose doesn’t help much when we’re putting up the tarp. Her job is to hand us the hooks to go through the metal eyes in the tarp and then into the cage, but she has to sit down after a few minutes. She looks thinner to me than she was when she came here a few weeks ago. She was never very big to begin with. Heather says she doesn’t eat much at dinner, which suits her and Sal and Linda because it means more for them. I didn’t ask Heather about Rose. She just told me. I would never ask about her. But Rose doesn’t just look thinner. She looks like she’s shrinking. I hope she doesn’t get smaller and smaller until she disappears, not until I’ve done what I have to do. I will be the one to make her disappear. That is a bad thought, but it makes me feel strong to think it. I will be the one to make her disappear.
‘My husband never did this with his birds,’ she says while she watches the rest of us working our way around the cage.
‘He had heat lamps,’ I say, and then I have to bite my lip because I can’t cover my mouth while my hands are busy with the tarp. Speak no evil.
‘How do you know what he had?’ says Rose. Her voice is high and squeaky.
I have to think fast and I’m not good at thinking fast but my brain does me a favour. ‘Finches need to be kept warm. If he didn’t do this, maybe he had heat lamps,’ I say.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Rose, and I can feel myself getting angry. I want to tell her, ‘Yes he did, I saw them,’ but I know that I have to keep quiet. She didn’t come out to the finch cage. She stayed inside with Portia and Rosalind. Only I went out to the finch cage at the bottom of the back garden with him.
‘What if you’re doing the wrong thing?’ says Rose. ‘I’m sure my husband let them stay uncovered in winter. They need the sun. I know he told me that.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s not here now, is he?’ says Jess. ‘Birdy’s in charge here and we do what she says.’ Jess is using her bossy voice. I don’t think Rose likes it when Jess uses her bossy voice.
‘I think I may go and get some water,’ says Rose, and as she walks away she rubs her eyes with her hands and I know she’s crying.
‘I’m such a bitch,’ says Jess.
‘You can go and say sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m just about done here.’
‘Maybe?’ she says, and we hang the last piece of tarp. Jess isn’t big on apologies but she does the right thing when she has to.
Rose was right about her husband never doing this for his birds. Their cage had a wall built around half of it. The birds were always protected from the wind.
‘Now, angel, you must remember that if a finch gets a chill in winter it can get sick and die.’
‘They’re so little,’ I said.
‘Yes, angel, little and perfect just like you, but even though you want to touch them you cannot. They’re too fragile and their hearts would beat too fast if you tried to catch them, so we must always move slowly and speak softly when we’re around them. No noise and no shouting.’
I was allowed to help fill the seed containers and to
pick the grass that had been planted for them. I would press my face up against the cage and watch as they jumped from perch to stick to seed basin and back again. I would look hard at the colours and their quick little wings. Sometimes I would look so hard that my eyes would get blurry. The finches never stopped moving. They were light and free.
‘Can you see them, beautiful girl? Can you see the wonderful colours?’ he said, and I nodded and I looked and looked.
First his hand just rested on my back, then both hands would stroke my shoulders. It felt nice. Mum didn’t like me to hug her too much. She had to save her hugs for Lila because Lila was little. ‘Off you go now,’ she would say when I tried to put my arms around her. ‘You’re too big for this nonsense.’
I didn’t tell him that I was too big for this nonsense. I liked the stroking and the touching. It made me feel calm and sleepy. But after a bit he didn’t just stroke and touch. Sometimes he did other things. One day his hand went under my skirt and tapped on my private place. Mum called it my private place and I knew it was the place that wee came from. Mum said, ‘Have a bath and wash your private place.’ Now I know it’s also the place that babies come from. Grown-ups like to touch each other’s private places. It can feel nice. It felt nice when I was Frank’s best girl and it felt okay with Lester.
I didn’t like it when I was little. It felt funny when his fingers went tap, tap. My tummy felt like there was something inside pulling it down. It wasn’t a bad feeling but it wasn’t a good feeling either. It was a confusing feeling. I didn’t say anything. I looked at the finches.
‘You’re such a beautiful girl,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be so lovely when you grow up.’
‘I’m big already,’ I said, but I was only six and seven and eight. After I turned eight we moved to the shitbox far away from him.
‘Such a beautiful girl,’ he said, and his fingers went inside my blue undies with pink flowers on them. His voice sounded strange because his breathing was all raggedy and he didn’t seem like Mr Winslow who was nice. In my head I made him the raggedy man. The raggedy man with the raggedy breathing. He wasn’t nice Mr Winslow. He was different.
I tried to say, ‘I’m too old for this nonsense,’ but the words wouldn’t come out and his breathing was raggedy and raggedy and I felt pulled down and then it was sore and I wanted to say ‘stop’ but the raggedy man with his raggedy breathing was a stranger. The finches hopped from perch to perch and their wings were all the colours I loved. I watched the finches.
The fingers stopped their tapping and Mr Winslow was back and he said, ‘Time for you to be off home, I think,’ and his hands weren’t touching me anymore. He smiled at me and patted my head. ‘Come back tomorrow and you can help me feed them again. If you’re very good I might even let you name one.’
He was nice Mr Winslow again, and I thought that maybe I had imagined his tapping fingers and his raggedy breathing, but then I didn’t know why I felt so funny.
I went home but I walked slowly because I felt so heavy. I felt heavier than a stone. I didn’t want to be heavy. I wanted to be light and free like the finches.
I lay on my bed until my mother came to find me. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Well, get up then and come and have dinner. I can’t deal with one more thing from either of you today.
I had been next door the whole afternoon. I’d had lunch and then I went down to the finch cage. I hadn’t been in the house. Mum couldn’t see me. She couldn’t see me when I was there and she couldn’t see me when I wasn’t there.
I couldn’t eat dinner.
‘Please don’t tell me you’re getting sick,’ said Mum.
‘I’m not getting sick,’ I said, because that’s what she said to tell her.
I didn’t want to eat dinner. I didn’t want to put food inside my tummy, because I knew it would make me feel even heavier. I wanted to be light and free like the finches. He couldn’t touch the finches. He couldn’t catch them, because they would fly away fast. I wanted to be like the finches.
In bed I thought, What happened? What happened? I thought about Isabel who was brave and didn’t care. I thought about how she didn’t scream or scurry. I tried to remember all the words, but lots of them had gone out of the door in my head. I wished for my dad. I wanted him to come and lie on my bed and read me a story and then say, ‘Mum’s turn,’ so Mum would say ‘Isabel’. I was heavy and sad and I felt the tears come out of my eyes.
‘Isabel met an enormous bear,’ I whispered into the dark. ‘Isabel, Isabel didn’t care.’ I wished that Mr Winslow was a bear so that I could wash my hands and comb my hair and very quietly eat the bear.
After the first time his hands tap-tapped on my private place he did it every time I went next door. I would come home from school and me and Mum would do homework but I was bad at homework and Mum would say, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I can’t take this anymore, just go and play next door until I call you for dinner.’ It took a long time for me to learn to read, and Mum didn’t like to show me over and over again.
‘C-A-T spells cat,’ she would say, and she would point at the word with her finger. ‘Now what does that say, Felicity?’
I would look at the letters and I knew they were letters but I didn’t know what they said when they were all next to each other.
‘It’s C-A-T, Felicity. I’ve just told you what the word is—it’s cat. Say it now, say cat.’
‘Cat,’ I said.
‘How do you spell cat? Look at the letters here.’
‘I,’ I said, because I could remember I. I was for Isabel.
‘No, Felicity, cat starts with C. It’s C-A-T, see, look here, look at the letters.’
I looked and looked but the letters didn’t look back. ‘I remember I,’ I said.
‘Oh God, I can’t take this anymore,’ said Mum. ‘I just can’t take it.’
I only learned to read when we moved out of the big house to the shitbox and I went to a new school. Mr Watkins was my teacher in the new school and he helped me learn to read. I was in a class with Leonard and May. We all needed to be told things over and over again but Mr Watkins didn’t mind. He laughed and smiled and said the letters so many times that Leonard and May and me all learned them and then we learned to read. Sometimes on a Friday afternoon Mr Watkins would say ‘Isabel’. Not every Friday, because May liked the poem about the swing and Leonard liked one about trucks, but if it was my turn to choose I always chose ‘Isabel’.
Sometimes after Mum told me to go away I would hide under the stairs and pat Mum’s pet fur coat, but if she found me Mum would shout, ‘What are you doing there? It’s dirty and disgusting. Just go and play next door and give me some peace.’ And then I would go because Mum couldn’t take it anymore.
‘Rosalind and Portia have homework,’ Rose would say, ‘but you can sit here with me.’ I didn’t call her Rose then. I only called her Mrs Winslow. She gave me hot chocolate with marshmallows on cold days and I watched her cook. She was happy when she made dinner. She would hum little songs. Da dum da da dum. She would talk to me and ask me questions, but she would talk very fast and sometimes I couldn’t make the answers come out quickly enough. Then she would take a big breath in and let it out like she was sad.
And every time I went there he would come into the kitchen and say, ‘Hello there, Felicity. I didn’t know you were here. Why don’t you come and help me feed the finches?’
I wouldn’t answer him, because I didn’t want to go. I was quiet and I hoped that maybe he wouldn’t see me anymore.
‘Felicity, Mr Winslow is talking to you,’ Mrs Winslow said. ‘Don’t you want to go and feed the finches? You love the finches.’
‘Not today, thank you,’ I said. I knew how to say please and thank you because Mum had taught me over and over again.
‘Come on, little angel, the finches miss you,’ he said. ‘I can hear them calling your name. They flap their wings and they say, “Fl
iss, Fliss, come and play with us.”’
‘Can’t I stay with you, please?’ I said to Mrs Winslow. ‘Please let me stay with you.’
‘Silly Fliss,’ smiled Mrs Winslow. ‘Pop off and help Mr Winslow and then I’m sure your mum will want you home for dinner.’
I had to go next door because Mum couldn’t take it anymore, so I had to listen to Mrs Winslow because if she couldn’t take it anymore then I didn’t know where I would go.
I had to leave my hot chocolate even though I wasn’t finished and I had to go and fill the seed trays and then I had to watch the finches while his fingers tap-tapped. I tried to hear their wings saying, ‘Fliss, Fliss,’ but I couldn’t hear anything except my heart thumping and thumping and his raggedy, raggedy breathing. I tried to like what he was doing but I could feel my stomach pulling down so I was heavier and heavier. I tried to open my mouth to say, ‘I’m too old for this nonsense,’ but the words wouldn’t come.
When I went back home, Mum would say, ‘And what’s the perfect family next door doing?’ It was a question, but she didn’t wait for the answer. ‘I suppose you’ve had a lovely time pretending Rose is your mother and the famous Simon is your father while I’ve been dealing with your little sister all alone. I’m always alone. You’re selfish like your father, Felicity—selfish, selfish, selfish.’
I would go and lie on my bed so Mum didn’t have to tell me I was selfish. Selfish is a bad word. I knew when I was seven that it meant I was mean and greedy and that Mum couldn’t take it anymore.
I would lie on my bed and stay quiet and then Mum would come and say, ‘Oh, Felicity, I’m sorry, love. It’s just been such a hard day. I don’t mean to yell. Come and have some dinner and we can watch television together.’ Then she would let me sit next to her on the couch after Lila was asleep and I would forget about the tapping fingers, but they always came back.
Always.
Sometimes I have a terrible dream about the tapping fingers. I dream that I am walking in the garden to the finch cage. I am small and the garden is big and I walk and walk and walk because the garden keeps getting bigger and bigger. When I finally get to the finch cage it is empty but Mr Winslow is there and then his hands go inside my undies and I want to shout but I can’t shout because suddenly I am Isabel and Mr Winslow is Lester. I feel myself running and I am running and running to the cage to save Isabel but the garden gets bigger and I run and I run but I know I will never get to her.
