A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  ‘Nope.’ She laughed. ‘These days, it’s open slather. I’ll answer to anything now.’

  ‘Did you change your name when you got married? Do I need to turn you into . . .’ He paused, obviously trying to remember. ‘Lucy Something-Else?’

  ‘Lucy Carter? Nope,’ she said again. ‘I’m still the one and only Lucy Kiss.’

  ‘I did know that.’ He was settling his satchel, the umbrella unfurled. ‘I googled you, when that got going. Same with me: the one and only Ferdi Klim.’

  ‘You googled me? That’s a little bit creepy, you know.’

  He shrugged. ‘Just a different kind of conjuring—think of it like that. But no, I only searched for you once. There was a story about somewhere you were working. In London, I think. It had one of those counters: “three people are reading this now”. Me and your mum and your dad, I decided. Sitting at home, reading about you, being proud.’

  ‘Perhaps it was two of my vardøger—the other mes out there all living other lives. It doesn’t matter.’ She waved away his puzzlement and hugged Tom close as Ferdi leaned across to kiss her cheek.

  ‘So I guess I’ll be passing by this way again in ten years’ time or so,’ he said, smiling at them both. ‘I’ll come and see what Tom’s constructing then.’

  ‘Do that.’ She stepped forward to kiss his cheek in return. ‘You’re right, you have shrunk. Another decade. I’ll expect to see you then.’

  She went back into the house and saw his t-shirt on the floor where it had fallen from his bag. She set Tom down and reached for it, threading it through to right way out.

  Force of habit.

  There was a fragrance she didn’t know she remembered. She pulled her arms clear of the sleeves—it was as if she was trying him on.

  ‘Here.’ Tossing the scrunched-up ball of fabric out across the garden towards Ferdi as he stood there in the rain. ‘We don’t need more stuff around here. You take care of yourself and all your families, you disaster.’

  ‘Ferdi kiss,’ called Tom. ‘Ferdi kiss.’

  ‘No, Tom: it’s Ferdi Klim.’

  ‘Ferdi kiss,’ said Tom, pressing his fingers against his lips and flinging them out like a firework.

  ‘Got it.’ Ferdi made another show of catching. ‘I’ll see you when you’re eleven, little man. My best to Elsie too, when she comes by.’

  Tom waved so hard his fingers blurred.

  They were standing on the porch, watching Ferdi walk off through the rain, along the path that cut through the park. And as he disappeared behind the largest of the great fig trees, they saw another man, another umbrella, coming the other way.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ Tom was down the stairs and out across the grass.

  Ben caught him with a flourish. ‘You two out looking for me in this weather?’ he called to Lucy when he was close.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Lucy. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Not too bad.’ Ben shook the rain from his umbrella as he stepped onto the porch. ‘I finished early; thought I’d make the most of it.’

  Lucy smiled and reached up to kiss his mouth. ‘Come on then, let’s go inside.’

  ‘Elsie come over?’ Ben joked, pointing at the two cups sitting on the floor.

  ‘Ferdi kiss,’ said Tom distinctly. ‘Ferdi kiss.’

  Ben took the cups through to the kitchen. ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘Ferdi Klim—remember, the bloke with the cool name?’ Lucy rinsed the cups, turning the tap on slowly and letting the water run warm. ‘The one I left before I met you. He’s here for work.’

  ‘Ferdi Klim? Here? In the kitchen?’

  ‘Well, in the lounge room—he was building things with Tom.’ And she told him about her sister, Ferdi’s visit, her voice bright throughout it all.

  ‘Isn’t that a little creepy?’ Ben asked as she paused.

  ‘Creepy? No.’ But she paused again before she added, ‘It was lovely to see someone who knew me before.’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Ferdi kiss!’ Tom bounced around his father’s kneecaps.

  ‘Why does he keep saying that?’ Ben picked Tom up and held him at arm’s length as if he was an obstacle that needed to be moved.

  ‘What?’ Lucy turned from the sink, her bright voice dull now. ‘What do you think he means? He was blowing Ferdi kisses when he went—you must have walked right by him in the park.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ben, planting Tom back on the floor among his toys. ‘Whatever.’

  He pulled his newspaper from his bag and spread it out across the table, smoothing down a page. It would be a story he’d written, Lucy knew. He always read his own stories first. Which, Lucy realised, could seem a bit conceited.

  Ben stood a while, apparently intent on the page. ‘Did I ever meet him?’ he asked at last.

  ‘He said you did—at a party. He said he gave you a nine-letter word. Astrocyte.’

  ‘And did I get it? I can’t remember.’ He didn’t even look up from the page.

  ‘Yes, Ben,’ said Lucy after a moment. ‘Of course you did.’

  17

  The little blue bird

  Clem was reading the paper when he heard a man say, ‘Hello?’ and a knock on the door. As he crossed the room, he tried to make the sound match his adult son’s voice. It was a rare thing that Elsie was out—with their daughter, and to hear a band, of all things, that Elaine had so wanted to hear. Who else but Donny would knock on a Monday evening?

  ‘You right?’ Clem said, flicking on the porch light, one hand on the screen-door’s handle.

  The visitor was a tall older man with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low. He nodded a greeting.

  ‘Found this bird down in the gutter—isn’t it a beauty? Pale-headed rosella, I think—gorgeous little thing. Must’ve run into something, and I wondered, would you have a box I could put it in? It might just have stunned itself. Might be right to go again in a bit. A shoebox? Or a carton? Would you have a thing like that?’

  Pushing the door open, Clem stepped onto the porch and peered at the bundle of feathers in the man’s hands. Birds were so light and frail, and this one was quivering. The movement shook the colours of its feathers towards a greater luminosity.

  ‘Come with me and I’ll have a look,’ Clem said. He led the way down the stairs and around to the garage door underneath the house. ‘I usually keep things like that, in case they come in handy.’ He found a pile of small cartons and selected one with a lid. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Like that. There you are, little one.’ The man went to set the bird down and paused. ‘What about a towel? Or a bit of fabric?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Clem, reaching for a tea towel that Elsie had demoted to an under-house rag. ‘This’ll have it feeling better in an instant,’ he said with a smile. The tea towel was printed with bright pictures of birds—lorikeets and parrots and big white cockatoos. He watched his visitor settle the little thing in its small soft nest.

  ‘D’you live around here?’ Clem asked then, wondering that the man didn’t have his own garage or shed from which to source a container.

  ‘I used to, up in the next street. Moved away a few months ago; came back to see the old place.’ The man shifted his hat a little, and Clem saw that it was the artist’s husband, the professor. What had Elsie said, something about their divorce, and the two of them moving away? Clem frowned, trying to think of something appropriate to say.

  ‘I recognise you—you’re at the university; something to do with flies? My wife knew your wife I think.’ He wasn’t sure if he should refer to the portrait, as if it might be illicit or suspect. That was how he felt about it, he realised, as though it was some liberty taken; some intimacy assumed. He cleared his throat. ‘I was sorry to hear—’ But that sounded too much like someone had died.

  ‘I’ve failed twice at marriage,’ the professor said bluntly, two fingers cocked as if they wanted a cigarette. ‘Not a thing of which I’m proud. I don’t fail at much as a rule.’


  Clem scuffed his feet, uneasy about these words. Pass and fail were things to do with school, not marriage. This man had his box; he should go.

  But the professor had stepped forward, resting the box on the bench that held Clem’s vice and lathe. Beyond the bench was Clem’s billiards table.

  ‘You know,’ said the professor, nodding towards its wide green surface, ‘I haven’t played for years. In the war, in New Guinea, we came across a coffee grower’s house, near Sangara. Beautiful place, and exactly what we’d all been yearning for: big verandas, comfortable beds, books and glassware and views across the foothills. And this billiards table, a huge great thing with the most impeccable cloth. We only had two nights—a little respite from the mud and blood and noise. But we had a championship going, twenty-four hours, as if we knew to make the most of it. I never played so well as I played in that place—to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever played since.’

  Clem cleared his throat: here was his quiet night, at home on his own. And the world had offered up a companion for billiards. It was all he could do not to smile.

  ‘If you don’t mind my racking the balls, Professor, I could stand you a game.’ Clem flicked on the bar of light that hung directly over the table, gesturing towards the cues at the side, and the professor dipped his hat and rubbed his hands, briskly, glancing at the bird.

  ‘Rack them up, then, rack them up,’ he said, giving the bird’s feathers a gentle pat. ‘I’d have been here years ago if I’d known that I’d a billiards fiend for a neighbour.’

  It was the one extravagant thing Clem Gormley owned, inappropriately ostentatious. A mate had told him of a hall closing in the city, all the tables priced to clear, he said, and Clem had found himself carried along to the auction, hardly keen or interested, and going home with fifty square feet of souvenir, wondering how to explain it to Elsie.

  ‘Your wife won’t mind?’ The professor was chalking his cue, and Clem shook his head.

  ‘Out with the daughter,’ he said. ‘That show that’s on; those Beatles.’

  The professor laughed. ‘World gone mad,’ he said. ‘I read in the paper about some woman passing a sick child over to those young layabouts, as if they were saints or shamans. You want to be careful of your wife getting caught up in something like that. Music.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t see the point.’

  Clem shrugged, this time defensive. ‘She likes her music, Elsie, lovely singing voice. When my daughter said she wanted to go, well . . .’ Elsie, zipping herself into that special silver dress, the one he liked, and dusting at her cheeks with a flat pad of rouge. He’d have gone with her if she’d asked, whatever he thought of it. But Elsie had tickets for herself and Elaine, treating them as if they were invested with the power of reconciliation.

  Elaine: her teachers had always said she was a bright one—‘a head for learning,’ one had said—and Clem wondered sometimes if they’d done enough with that. But she’d never said, his daughter. She’d never said a word about such things. She grew up and got married and had a baby, exactly as Elsie had hoped she would. And she hated it; Clem could see that. She’d hated it from the get-go, and still did.

  It flummoxed Elsie; Clem could sense it at night, when she lay staring at the ceiling, doubtless winding back through every moment and permutation she could think of to try to explain to herself her daughter’s inexplicable behaviour. He could feel the way her fingers played across the texture of the chenille bedspread as if she was trying to trace a path towards some exquisite point where a different thing might have been said, or done, or initiated, and Elaine would emerge, blissful and content and reconstructed in the present. Then Elsie would sigh, and worry at her pillow, and whisper, ‘Sorry, Clem,’ and, finally, sleep.

  It would have been easier, Clem thought, if his daughter had moved away altogether. Except for Elsie fretting at not seeing the little one, Gloria. She was some sort of blessing.

  But it ate at him, the way Elsie threw herself at any tiny enthusiasm Elaine might want to share—like a dog after scraps, he’d thought once, not proud of the analogy. And he knew Elsie would’ve paid for the tickets, although Elaine’s smart young husband, Gerald, was high up in mining. Not that you ever saw his hands dirty, thought Clem.

  He blinked at the sound of the professor’s cue against a ball and the triangle exploded across the smooth green surface.

  ‘There’s nothing like it, is there?’ the professor said quietly, and Clem saw the same look of satisfaction that he felt on his own face.

  ‘Could you use a beer with it?’ he asked, setting out two yellow cardboard coasters etched with Mr Fourex, and turning for the stairs.

  ‘Again,’ said the professor, taking one of the two glasses Clem brought down from the kitchen, ‘I must now rue that we’re no longer neighbours.’ And he clinked his glass against his host’s. ‘To perfect breaks,’ he said. His throat made a strange glugging noise as he swallowed—it reminded Clem of water running out of a bath.

  They played four games—three–one to the professor—and drank four glasses each, and all the while the little bird lay in its box, each man standing by it as he waited for the other’s shot. But as the professor potted the last ball, Clem caught the edge of a different movement in the rosella’s feathers, and he touched his finger lightly to its breast.

  ‘Professor?’ he said gently. ‘I think it’s gone.’ The bird’s head had slumped, its eyes vacant. Clem flexed his finger slightly against its body.

  Coming around to the bench, the professor picked the bird out of its makeshift refuge and held it to his cheek. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. We saw it all the time, around the corner—Ida’s studio had glass on three sides, and the poor birds used to try to take a shortcut. That terrible thump, and then a tiny bundle of feathers on the grass. Sometimes they were just stunned—but mostly . . .’

  Clem looked up, and saw the other man wipe at a tear.

  ‘It’s birds, you know, something moves me about birds.’ The professor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, hard. ‘I always hoped to study birds, but I landed with flies—fruit flies, diptera, all those other things with wings. I still miss my birds—their colours, and their songs. I’ve stared a long time at a lot of diptera and I don’t find much of beauty compared to these splendid things.’

  Instinctively, Clem swatted an imaginary bug.

  ‘Now that’s what I should have studied, of course,’ said the professor, laughing. ‘The time it takes between the first mention of a bug in a conversation to the instant someone’s convinced they’re being dive-bombed. It works with fleas too—and lice, I expect. The power of suggestion: it’s some thing, the human mind.’

  Clem slapped again. ‘What about your bird, Professor?’ he asked, scratching at the side of his head. ‘What shall we do with your bird?’ The man still had its body nestled up against his cheek.

  ‘I had a hummingbird in the house once,’ he said at last. ‘I was visiting a colleague in America, and I dozed off at his place one afternoon. Woke up to the strangest sound in the room—I could tell it was a struggle, but it was so delicate. And there it was, this exquisite hummingbird, flying from one picture rail to another. It must have come in through the window and not known how to get out. I caught it, you know, and I held it for a second. An amazing thing: it was like holding beauty, or life—an abstract thing made real. And then I sent it back into the world.’

  ‘Can you change what you do? Can you change to be a birdman?’ Clem almost blushed. It seemed a presumptuous thing to ask, but here was this man, in his garage, drinking his beer, shooting his billiards, and holding a bird against his cheek like a kiss.

  The professor laughed. ‘In a lot of ways,’ he said, ‘that bird brought me nothing but trouble.’ He laid the rosella’s body back in the box, and his fingers rested on its feathers. ‘My American colleague, he had a daughter. She came in while I was holding the hummingbird, and we stood there, the two of us, in that moment. It felt like the most
significant piece of time I’d ever experienced. We were married before my sabbatical was up.’ He shook his head. ‘Brought her back here—to Sydney. It was the thirties, and she hated it. We found a little place in Newtown; I had a job at the university. And I loved Newtown. I set out a garden for her, all the flowers blue—it looked lovely in the twilight—and I built a little aviary for a couple of birds, two blue-faced parrot finches. Gorgeous. There was the most splendid gum tree in the yard too, and a tall rangy camphor laurel—they’re useless things, block off any chance of anything else having a foothold. But she loved it—the shiny deep green leaves that looked the way leaves were supposed to look, she said. Not like a eucalyptus.

  ‘I told her it’d have to go, because it’d starve out the rest of our garden. I told her I’d wait a year, so she could enjoy it, but that I’d need to take it down after that—they grow so fast, you know. At the end of the year, I told her it was time. Had a chap come with a saw, and we got it down between us, poured some kero onto the stump, and that was that. When I went in to pull a couple of drinks out of the ice box, I saw that she was cooking something on the stove.’

  He stopped talking then, and stood swaying a little from side to side, his fingers still touching the dead rosella’s chest.

  ‘I never told this story to a soul, but it was my birds there in that pot. Fair trade, she said, the finches I loved in exchange for her tree. I couldn’t speak—damn near packed her on the first boat to America, but what can you do? What can you do? Must have been the end of 1938, because as soon as the war came, I was off. Got myself out of her way. When I met Ida, it was easy to stay away.’

  They stood facing each other, two tall men in the clutter of Clem’s garage—although Clem was staring at the other man with a look of horror on his face. Birds in a pot? Pets in a pot? Who’d even think of a reprisal like that? It felt evil—and that your wife, the woman you loved, would do such a thing. Fancy realising you’d married someone who did a thing like that.