by Peter Carey
“Go on,” she encouraged, “it feels nice.”
In spite of a private conviction that he was being made a fool of, the manager stroked the bird, at first tentatively and then more surely. The bird, as if understanding the importance of the occasion, brushed its cheek against the manager’s and then for a minute or two very little moved in the room but the manager’s hand.
Lights from the highway flowed across the wall.
On the television a mute reporter held a microphone towards a weeping man.
Twice Lilly saw the manager trying to give the bird back and twice she saw him fail.
“Feels nice, doesn’t it?”
The manager nodded his head and looked embarrassed. She could see that pleasure had made his eyes gooey as marshmallow.
“Now,” she said briskly, holding out her hands for the bird, “I’ll put it in the car so we won’t be breaking the rules.”
“No.” He was like a two-year-old with a teddy bear.
“You’ll exhaust it,” Lilly said, “and we need it for tomorrow. It’s our business. That’s what I mean about it not being a pet.”
“Your business?” the manager asked, and in truth every person in the room was trying to think how this beautiful bird might be anyone’s “business”.
“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” Lilly said, lighting a cigarette although she had given them up three months ago. It gave her time to think. “We charge a dollar a minute for people to stroke it.”
“You people in show business?”
“Sure am.” Lilly exhaled luxuriously and sat down on the bed.
“Dollar a minute, eh. Good work if you can get it.” He was being nice now and she allowed herself the luxury of not despising him for it.
“You think that’s too expensive?” She held out her arms for the bird. “We’ve charged more and no one’s ever complained.”
The manager stepped back from the extended arms, cooing over the bird like a mother keeping its baby from harm.
Lilly started talking. Ideas came to her so fast that she hardly knew how the sentence would end when she started it. “You can have it for half an hour.” She watched the manager glow. “In return for the price for this room and the food.”
“Done.”
“And wine, of course.”
“Done.”
“For an extra five dollars in cash you can take it to the office so we won’t disturb you. We’ll get it when time’s up.”
“Done.”
“What’s the time, Mort?”
Mort picked up his wristwatch from the top of the mute television.
“Nine twenty-three.”
“OK, it is now nine twenty-three.” She opened the door and ushered the manager out into the night. “I’ll pick it up from you at exactly nine fifty-three.”
When she shut the door she was grinning so broadly her face hurt. She hugged Mort and said, “I’m a genius. Tell me I’m a genius.”
“You’re a genius,” he said, “but you were crazy to let him take it away.”
“Why, for Chrissakes?”
“He mightn’t give it back.”
“Oh fuck, Mort. Stop it.”
“I’m sorry, it was just a thought.”
“Be positive.”
“I am positive.”
“Well, pour me a glass of wine and tell me I’m beautiful.”
The manager had taken the corkscrew and they had to shove the cork in with a pencil.
As it turned out they made an extra twenty dollars’ cash that night. It was ten-thirteen before they persuaded the manager to relinquish the bird. They stood in his office holding the wristwatch while the man bought minute after minute of extra time from his petty cash. The phone rang and wasn’t answered.
As they left his office, the bird ruffled its feathers and shat on the concrete.
3.
Mort didn’t want to look at the empty wine bottle or the plan he had agreed to so easily the night before. When Lillian got up he curled himself into a ball and pretended he was still asleep. Lilly knew he wasn’t asleep and knew why he was pretending.
“Come on, Mort, don’t be chicken shit.”
Mort moaned.
“Come on, Mort honey, or we won’t get a stall.” She rattled a coffee cup near his ear. “Do you want to get rich or do you want to stay poor? Here’s your coffee, baby. It’s getting cold.”
When Mort finally emerged, tousle-headed and soft as a child’s toy, he was in no way prepared for what he saw. Lilly was wearing white overalls and clown’s make-up. There were stars round her eyes and padding in her bum.
“Oh Christ, Lilly, please.”
“Please what? Drink your coffee.”
“Oh shit, please don’t. We don’t have to do that.”
“You heard what I told the man. We’re in show business.”
“Take it off, please. I don’t mind the business with the bird, but we don’t have to do all this.”
“Drink your coffee and I’ll take Charley-boy out for a shit.”
When he drove to the markets it was in strained silence. The clown held the bird. The straight man was at the wheel. When the car finally lost its muffler neither of them said anything.
4.
The markets had sprung up to meet the needs of the new poor and were supplied and operated by an increasingly sophisticated collection of small-time crooks. The police, by mutual agreement, rarely entered their enclosures and business was thus conducted with some decorum, whether it was the purchase of stolen clothing or illicit drugs (the notorious Lizard Dust was sold here and it was only the poor who tolerated the violent illnesses that preceded its more pleasant effects). Here you could buy spare parts for rubber thongs, fruit, vegetables, motor cars of questionable origin, poisonous hot dogs and bilious-coloured drinks.
The market they drove to was a vast concrete-paved car park which, at nine o’clock in the morning, was already unpleasantly hot. A blustery wind carried clouds of dust through the stalls, rattled the canvas roofs, and lodged a fine speck of dust in Mort’s eye. So it was Lilly who joined the queue for temporary stalls while Mort adjourned, more in embarrassment than pain, to minister to his eye in the men’s toilets.
The stall number was 128. It was nothing more than a wooden trestle table with a number painted on the top. Canvas awnings were a luxury they could not yet afford.
Mort stood behind the stall in his suit and tie, red-eyed and sulky. The bird stood stoically on the table. Lilly, resplendent in overalls and clown’s face, waddled to and fro in front, a balloon of swollen belly and padded bum.
“It won’t work.”
“Of course it’ll work,” she said. But her stomach was a mass of nerves and the baby, probably nervous of the life she had in store for it, kicked irritably inside her. “Don’t look like that,” she hissed. “I can’t do it when you’re looking at me like that.”
“Do what?”
And she started to do it. She felt a fool. She did badly what she had dreamed would be easy. Her voice sounded high and when she tried to lower it, it came out worse. What she said was hardly impressive and rarely funny. But she began to lumber amongst the crowds clapping her hands and making a fuss.
“See the Pleasure Bird at stall 128,” she yelled. “First three customers get a minute of pleasure for free. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. One dollar, one minute. They say it’s better than sex. One dollar, one minute and the first three customers get it free.”
A crowd of ragged children followed her. She did a cake walk. She danced a waltz with a black man in a pink suit. She fell over a guy-rope and made it look intentional. She attracted a small crowd by the simple device of placing a matchbox on the ground and making a big show of jumping over it, bowing and smiling when the jump was done. The matchbox jump was the most successful stunt of all and she gave the laughing crowd the news about stall 128 and the Pleasure Bird.
By the time she’d got lost in an alley of used car parts and been threatened by a woman who wa
s trying to sell bruised apples she was exhausted. She had blisters on her feet from Mort’s sandshoes which were four sizes too big and a cut on her hand from the fall over the guy-rope. She limped back to the stall to find an enormous crowd huddled around an old woman who was dreamily stroking the bird. Mort stood beside her with his watch in his hand. The crowd was strangely silent and the woman crooning to the bird seemed vulnerable and rather sad.
“Ten minutes,” said Mort.
The woman reluctantly handed the bird back and, from a pocket of her voluminous black dress, produced a half-unravelled blue sock from which she counted out, in notes and coins, ten dollars.
As Mort handed the bird to the next person in the queue, the quiet solemnity of the recipient’s face reminded Lilly of a face in her childhood taking communion in a small country church. He was an Italian, a labourer with a blue singlet and dusty boots and he had only had the bird for thirty seconds when he cradled it in one arm and dragged a bundle of notes from his pockets which he placed on the table in a crumpled heap.
“Tell me when time’s up,” he said, and sat on the trestle table, hunched over the bird, lost in his own private world, impervious to the mutterings of the impatient crowd.
After that they limited the time to three minutes.
They could have worked the market all day but Mort, rather than sharing Lilly’s ever increasing sense of triumph, became more and more upset with her costume.
“Take it off. You don’t need it now.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“Don’t be silly, Mort. It’s part of the act.”
“You look a fool. I can’t stand people laughing at you.”
They hissed at each other until one o’clock when Mort, his face red and sullen, suddenly dumped the bird in Lilly’s lap and walked away.
At two o’clock she closed the stall and limped painfully back to the car. The bird shat once or twice on the way back, but apart from that seemed none the worse for its handling. Mort didn’t seem to have fared so well. He was sitting woodenly inside the boiling car and when she asked him how much he’d taken he simply handed her the money.
She counted two hundred and thirty dollars in notes and didn’t bother with the silver.
5.
The balcony of their room looked across the wide graceful river which was now silvery and cool in the late light. A rowing eight moved with svelte precision through a canopy of willows and two black swans descended from the sky above the distant city and Lilly, watching them, imagined the pleasant coolness of the water on their hot bodies.
Her make-up was gone now and she wore a loose white cheesecloth dress. The ice clinked in her gin and tonic and even the small chink of the glass as it touched the metal filigree table sounded cool and luxurious to her ears. She put her blistered feet up on the railing and stroked the bird gently, letting the pleasure saturate her body.
“Mort.”
“Yes.”
“You feel OK now?”
He leant across and put his arm on her shoulder. His face was sunburnt and there was a strange red V mark on his chest. He nodded. “Put the bird inside.”
“In a minute.”
He took his hand back and filled his glass.
Lillian was feeling triumphant. She had a fair idea of the worms that were eating at Mort and she was surprised and a little guilty to discover that she didn’t care excessively. She felt cool and rich and amazingly free. After a few minutes she picked up the bird and put it in front of the bathroom mirror where, she discovered, for all its unearthly qualities, it behaved just like a budgerigar.
She went back to the balcony and stood behind Mort, rubbing his broad back and loosening the tense muscles in his neck.
“Tell me I was terrific,” she said. “Please say I was great.”
Mort hesitated and she felt the muscles under her fingers knot again. “Let’s not talk about it now.”
She smiled just the same, remembering checking into this hotel, Mort dressed in his salesman’s suit, she in her clown’s make-up, the bird quietly hidden in a plastic shopping bag.
“Lillian,” she said, “you were terrific.”
The river was almost black now and, when two birds cut across it towards a certain tree, it was too dark to see the stunning colours by which she might have identified them.
6.
Their days were lined with freeways and paved with concrete. They limped south with a boiling radiator and an unmuffled engine. They worked markets, factory gates and even, on one occasion, a forgotten country school where the children let down their tyres to stop them leaving.
Mort no longer complained about the clown, yet his resentment and embarrassment grew like a cancer inside him and he seldom thought of anything else. He had long since stopped touching the Pleasure Bird and the full force of his animosity was beamed towards its small colourful eyes which seemed to contain a universe of malignant intentions.
“God, Jesus, it likes freeways.” Lilly held the bird in the air, displaying its ruffled feathers, a signal that it was going to shit.
Mort didn’t appear to hear.
“Well, stop the car. You’re the one who’s always worried about where it shits.”
Slowly, irritatingly slowly, Mort pulled the car into the white emergency lane and the bird hopped out, shat quickly and effectively, and hopped back in.
“This bird seems intent on spreading shit from one end of Highway 31 to the other.”
Mort pulled back onto the road.
“It’s really crazy for doing it on nice clean roads. Do you notice that, Morty?”
“Why don’t you put it down for a while. You’re getting like a bloody junkie.”
Lilly said nothing. Her clown’s face showed no emotions but those she had painted on it, and in truth she did not allow herself to think anything of Mort’s jealousies. She stroked her index finger slowly down the bird’s sensuous back and the slow waves of pleasure blotted out anything else that might have worried her. Even the police siren, when it sounded outside the window, did not startle her. It reached her distantly, having no more importance than a telephone ringing in someone else’s dream.
She watched the police car park in front of them and watched the policeman walk back towards their car, pink book in his hand. She heard him talk to Mort about the muffler and saw them both walk around the car looking at the tyres. Even when the policeman stood beside her window and spoke to her she did not think that the words were really addressed to her.
“What sort of bird is that?”
It was only when the question was repeated that she managed to drag her mind to the surface and stare blinking into the strangely young face.
“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” she smiled, “here.” And she passed the passive bird into the big white hands.
“Sure does give a lot of pleasure.”
“Sure does.”
The bird was passed back and the pink notebook opened.
“Now,” he said, “how about we start by you telling me where you got this.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s an exotic.”
“No. It’s from New Guinea.”
“Look, madam, you’ve chosen the wrong fellow to lay that on. This bird comes from Kennecott 21. I was there two years.”
“Fancy that,” said Lilly, “we were told it was from New Guinea.”
The notebook closed. “I’ll have to take it.”
Lilly was struck by the early rumbles of panic. “You can’t take it. It’s how we earn our living.”
But the policeman was already leaning over into the car, his hands ready to engulf the plump jewel-like body.
Then he was suddenly lurching back from the car window with his hands to one eye. Blood streamed down across his knuckles. The bird was pecking at the fingers which covered the other eye. The noise was terrible. She saw Mort running around the car and he was beside her starting the engine, and the bird, as if nothing had happened, was bac
k sitting on her lap.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Mort. Don’t.”
But Mort was white with panic and as he accelerated onto the highway Lilly turned helplessly to watch as the policeman staggered blindly onto the road, where a giant container truck ran over the top of him.
Even as she watched she stroked the bird in her lap so she had the strange experience of seeing a man killed, of feeling guilt, horror and immeasurable pleasure all at once. The floodgates lifted. Seven colours poured into her brain and mixed into a warm sickly brown mud of emotion.
They turned east down a dusty road which led through the rusting gates of neglected farms. Grass grew through the centre of the road and swished silkily beneath the floor. Lilly began to remove her make-up. Mort, pale and shaken, hissed inaudible curses at the dusty windscreen.
7.
Yet their life did not stop, but limped tiredly on through a series of markets and motel rooms and if their dreams were now marred by guilt and echoes, neither mentioned it to the other.
They bought a small radio and listened to the news, but nothing was ever said about the policeman and Lilly was shocked to find herself hoping that his head had been crushed, obliterating the evidence of the attack.
Mort drew away from her more and more, as if the crime had been hers and hers alone. When he spoke, his sentences were as cold and utilitarian as three-inch nails.
He took to calling the bird “the little murderer”. There was something chilling in the way that dreamy childlike face moved its soft lips and said such things as: “Have you fed the little murderer?”
He was filled with anger and resentment and fear which had so many sources he himself didn’t know where the rivers of his pain began, from which wells they drew, from which fissures they seeped.
He watched Lillian perform at the markets, saw the bird shit on every hard surface that came its way, and he watched it narrowly, warily, and on more than one occasion thought he saw the bird watching him. Once, removing the bird from bedroom to bathroom for the night against Lilly’s will, he thought that the bird had burned him.
