by Joshua Lobb
The boy wakes, petrified, in the night. He’s much younger now. He’s sweating and the sheets are jangled round his legs. He cries out, Please don’t let it. Please don’t let it. A figure shadows in through the open door. He shudders with recognition, yearning for her quiet presence, clinging to her comfort with frantic loneliness. Please don’t let it. Please don’t let it.
She soothes him. She smooths his matted hair. She whispers into the pale light. His mother is reading to him.
The man has moved away from newsfeeds. He’s reading poetry. He knows that he should go back to the spreadsheet, which is still waiting, untouched, in another window. He knows that the shimmering words are forbidden territory. He’s not allowed to be a poet. That door was shut to him. His father, annihilated, packed all the books away. Old books: their spines splintered like bark, the pages streaked with age and one moment of childish fury. They had to go: their gloomy shadow weighed down the hallway. Online, though, the poems are airy, feathery. He reads new poems, sparkling pinpricks of light. He bookmarks these to read another night. He finds familiar poems, ones he knows by heart. Poems about birds and night and loneliness. And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet bird did follow; Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night; Let us go then, you and I—
They’re sitting in a neon-lit hospital waiting room. His father is telling him something. It feels like a recitation, but it’s one he’s never performed before. The boy is scrutinising the man’s face so he doesn’t have to listen to what’s being said. One side of his father’s face sags, as if he’s had a stroke. The side of the boy’s leg thrums. Please don’t let it. Please don’t let it. He stops. He knows his father doesn’t want to say the words. He feels his father non-entifying in front of him. He can see the tongue retreating. The poor sap. The words drip—no, they waft—from his mouth. Shadows of nothingness, hollowing out the iron air. The two of them, father and son, watch the words together. Please don’t let it. Please don’t let it. The sentence is finished. The father has nothing more to say. The boy knows his father wants the silence to be appreciated, that it’s best to sit there, in the too-brightness, rigidly wordless, side by side on the plastic bench. But he can’t contain the ache filling the cavity in his chest. His head hinges open.
He veers away from poetry. He clicks on links, following whimsical lines of flight. Poems to paintings; paintings to myths. He encounters the story of the Bird of Sorrow. It’s not a story from his childhood; it’s a tale he’s never read before.
It’s Turkish. Another desert, cold and unrelenting. A happy princess witnesses her governess sobbing in the corner.
What makes you sad? she asks.
I have sorrow, the governess says.
What is sorrow? the princess asks.
The governess fetches a glistering cage containing a grey, speckled bird. It’s a nightjar. The girl is left alone with the bird and the bird speaks to her. Set me free, princess, the bird trills. I promise to return, always. Foolishly, inevitably, the girl opens the cage door.
Later, when the princess is playing in the palace gardens, the bird returns, cleaving the air. The bird snatches and carries the princess away over the desert.
The princess, terrified, cries out into the wind, Why are you doing this?
This is sorrow, calls the bird. And there’s always more to come.
The princess is dropped onto the sand, left to fend for herself. She scratches her way to a dusty village. There, she finds work in the local inn, clearing the plates and goblets from the drunken revellers. She settles in to a new life. The innkeeper’s son is handsome; the life is simple but satisfying.
Alone in the kitchen one afternoon, she is humming happily when the bird of sorrow appears at the window. The bird swoops in and smashes the saucers and cups, the plates, the bottles of wine.
Cowering among the broken porcelain and glass, the girl asks, Why are you doing this?
This is sorrow, calls the bird. And there’s always more to come.
The girl flees. She finds another position, working for a tailor. He’s handsome; she can sew: they fall in love. She loves to watch him thread the needle; they have a child. One morning she’s in the sewing room fixing a hem on a rich woman’s gown, rocking the baby’s cradle with her foot when the bird appears at the window. She scratches at the princess’s face, shreds the fabric, grabbles at the baby and carries him off.
The girl calls out, Why are you doing this?
This is sorrow, cries the bird, and carries the baby away, never to be seen again.
The young man sits with a blank piece of paper. He sees the past. He knows the future. There’s always more to come. He taps his pockets. He feels the rustle of the pill packets. He knows what to do.
The computer screen comes in and out of focus. The man’s eyes droop with sleep and sadness. He needs to slip away from this capsule of sorrow. On his slouching path back to bed, he deviates to his daughter’s room. He peers in and watches her soothing, sighing sleep. He leaves the door open in case she calls out.
He’s never seen a tawny frogmouth. But he has read, late at night, two lines from a poet:
This is how frogmouths disappear.
They raise their beak and petrify.
A branch of sorrow on the road ahead. But this bird doesn’t want to snatch you away; she has no desire to scratch at your face. She’s hoping that you won’t recognise her lying there. That you’ll pass by, contented and oblivious.
Magpies
A good territory may well be matched by good occupants. Plenty of experience, high levels of vigilance, and strong group cohesion (effective teamwork) may be the most important qualities that mature individuals can bring to maintaining a territory.
Gisela Kaplan, Australian Magpie
This is what happened at the office.
I can’t get to any of my emails today because we’ve been forced to go to a group dynamics workshop. I don’t need to give you any more detail than that. You can imagine. I’ll let you decide for yourself what the facilitator looks like: if she’s ratty-haired or poised; if she delivers her point about roles and responsibilities with a flourish, or if she wavers between each thought, her words clagging the corner of her mouth. The tables in the conference room might have been divvied into small clusters, flowing with butcher’s paper; or they might have been managed into a large rectangle that’s now tacking us to the walls. There’d be a lopsided hole made by the shape of the tables in the middle of the room, and we’d all be rolling our eyes at one another across the expanse. You can see the textaed jargon-terms razor-bladed into the whiteboard, but the specific words aren’t important. I want you to look instead at two of the people in the room who are the focus of this story. Two members of my team.
The first is our team leader. She’s dynamic, inspiring, zealous: a stickler for detail, a cutter-to-the-chase. Her polished hair is shrewdly scraped back and her earrings glint. Her jacket is tailored precisely: v-shaped around the neck, bold at the shoulders, slender at the waist. A permanent silhouette. Only occasionally do you see flashes of the white blouse underneath. Her eyes dagger about the room. She’s been essential to the department since it started and she’s always been proud to represent it. When the facilitator proposes a discussion topic, any discussion topic, our leader’s incisive solutions resolve the matter. She pivots in her chair and adjusts her collar.
The second person is not polished or decisive or inspiring. His name is Peter. He’s probably in his fifties; he might always have been in his fifties. He’s a bit sloppy. Today he’s wearing a lumpen jumper over his shirt and tie and there’s a glob of breakfast on it. There’s a shred of unshaven beard in the bend of his jaw. He’s kind of foul. We’re always on task-and-finish working groups together, but I never want to make eye contact with him. I try to make small talk in the stairwell up to our department. He has terrible teeth: brown and clumsy.
Peter talks a lot about stationery. His office is next door to the cupboard where we
store the Post-it notes and the extra suspension files. He’s often passing my office, his clotted body clutching another ream of paper for the photocopier. He’s very dutiful. Right now, he’s listening carefully to the facilitator’s sales pitch, nodding his head politely. He’s even taking notes.
At one moment, after a succinct summary of core competencies from our leader, Peter offers his extemporaneous thoughts on the matter.
Our team leader stiffens. You can feel the hair bristling on the nape of her neck.
‘Peter, that’s hardly the point.’ The outburst is a bayonet. We all reel from it.
Our leader is unruffled. Systematically, mathematically, she extracts the fallacies from his flabby argument. She peels away the oversights. His ideas are not proactive or innovative or sustainable. She’s absolutely right. Peter tries to smooth down the cowlick in his hair. He turns away from her pinprick gaze. The facilitator interposes, but quickly retreats. Nobody else moves.
I won’t say we’re used to the behaviour. It’s always a surprise, even when you see it coming. It comes in high and fast like a sniper’s headshot; it spikes in deep like an arrow. Up close, she can bite sharp and quick, serrating a suggestion or ripping into a memo. She can also sting in from a distance: via email or with a shout, whirring down the corridor. Some of us are targeted more than others, but she’s always got her eye on Peter. He tries to avoid her, I think. I see him peeping furtively out of the stationery cupboard and bolting for it, running the gauntlet, waving his hands above his head. But she senses his presence. ‘Peter—a minute?’ she calls. Her black wings open and he’s assaulted by the flash of white shards.
We all know about magpies. We all have anecdotes about When Magpies Attack. Mine happened when I was very young—during my first year of school, I’d say. There were poplar trees between the classroom and the oval. I wandered down during playlunch and the bird roared down at me vertiginously, viciously. Its stiletto beak actually drew blood—at least that’s what I remember. I know I howled. The deputy called my mother in, so it must have been when I was very young indeed. My mother swooped in and scooped me away.
My daughter regularly brings home notes from her school, warning that ‘Magpie Season’ is upon us. These scrunched-up pieces of paper provide handy hints to reduce the risk of assault. They include:
Avoid areas where magpies are swooping, and make a cardboard sign to warn others.
Walk quickly and quietly away if you see a magpie swooping, trying to keep an eye on the magpie as you do so.
Make a hat from a cardboard box or an ice-cream container and scribble on a pair of eyes.
Carry a stick or an open umbrella above your head.
Above all, if you’re swooped by a magpie, do not stop. You are in the magpie’s territory and he will keep on swooping.
We have other handy sources of information about the magpie. There’s the Sunday-arvo barbecue banter: know-it-all insights, informed by the scent of burned sausage and the comforting beer in the stomach. Usually commencing in spring, these insights are foraged from slivered articles in the local newspaper and half-watched segments on TV science shows. Apparently, the conversations begin. Apparently, magpies are super-intelligent, even more clever than crows. Apparently, they can distinguish one human from another and carry this memory for years, even decades. According to scientists, magpies can communicate this knowledge to other magpies in their community. They target some individuals for swooping and not others. I heard this one story, someone says, squinting from the sizzle on the hotplate, about a man who threw sticks at a magpie in his garden when he was a kid. Hoppy, he called it, because the bird only had one leg. His mother used to lay out hunks of bread on the lawn for the poor bird. Years later, fully grown up, he comes back to visit and Hoppy’s son scimitars through the air and takes his revenge. It’s not about provocation, someone else says. He takes a swig of his stubby. You can just be walking by and bang! Man, those beaks are sharp.
Then what’s the reason? Why do they pick some people and not others? Everyone wonders, and the sausages are turned over to reveal their charred underbellies. We believe, smugly, that magpies won’t attack us. But we’re all scratching the tops of our heads, soothing old wounds between the hair follicles.
A magpie once settled in the centre courtyard of the building I work in. She built her nest in the crook between two branches in the courtyard’s solitary leafless tree. She swooped for weeks: any time people wanted to smoke or eat lunch or take a diagonal shortcut. Eventually, security came and escorted her away. Our team leader pointed out that this was an incorrect strategy. As the cage passed the gathered crowd, our team leader snipped, ‘It’ll only come back. They’re sharper than you think.’
She was absolutely right. I don’t know where security released the magpie, but a few weeks later, there she was, pitched on the flat roof of our building, vigilant as a prison guard.
Our team leader keeps a strict routine. First thing in the morning it’s emails and then a briefing with her PA. Then she does the rounds. ‘This office has a lot of moving parts,’ she often says, ‘and it’s essential to touch base with the team.’ She clears a path down the corridor as we all scamper to our desks. She works the plot systematically. She looms. You never know what she’s going to do next. Sometimes she’s jocular, throwing her head back and jubilating. That can be more terrifying than her stern head-tilt; in me, it induces a hollow replica of a laugh, spindly and embarrassed.
Despite the pain, it pays to stay at your desk: poised, alert. As soon as she passes, though, we tend to disperse. I hear her pontificating to a colleague further down the corridor. I strike off another action item and abscond.
Our building is one of those sixties blocks, a cube with the middle cut out of it. Cancerous concrete with a gravel roof. Our department is three floors up, so you don’t always have time to sneak down to the courtyard. My colleagues tend to linger in the stairwell. It’s your basic cement chasm, echoey and cold, the white paint peeling off the metal railings. It’s not unpleasant. We install ourselves on the steps and gossip. It’s a half-escape. It’s like we’re working up the courage for the real liberation, the total bolt.
Sometimes Peter joins us, and we engage in polite, awkward chitchat. I sit on a lower step, not wanting to get a whiff of his sour breath. Most of the time, though, he doesn’t hang around. He seems to prefer walking down to the ground floor and back up again. He tells me that he’s trying to lose a few kilos. He’s rubbing his wobbly jumper. So up and down he goes. He calls it his daily regimen. When he’s out of earshot—or when we assume he’s out of earshot—our conversation turns towards him. I know she’s awful, we say, but a lot of the time he does bring it on himself. If he just learned to placate her, if he just kept his trap shut …
There have been times in meetings when Peter has floundered over a piece of policy. I’ve seen our leader’s hackles rise but before she has a chance to strike, another colleague cuts in to Peter instead. I’ve done it myself. If I do it, I think, I can explain his mistake in a reasonable way, in a friendly way. Another colleague joins in, just as pleasant, just as helpful. We’re providing a buffer, we reason, a safe zone. Our team leader sits back, smoothing down the front pocket of her jacket.
We’re still chatting when he plods back up the stairwell. As he passes, his head flicks to us: furtive, disappointed.
It’s lunchtime and we’ve all been called to a systems review meeting. It’s a small meeting—our leader calls these a ‘huddle’—in the glass-walled conference room next to her office. We were ordered to submit our reports in advance of the meeting, but we still don’t really know what it’s actually about. I’m shuffling at my office door. I don’t know if I should print copies of my reports or not. I want to make the right impression: the big boss is coming, the boss above our team leader. Better to be primed for all contingencies. But I also remember the rant our leader bombarded us with at our last meeting about resource management and greening the office. I decid
e against the printouts.
I slip through the glass doors. Our leader is pitched next to the big boss. She’s touching her hair conspicuously and nodding as the big boss talks to indicate how intently she’s listening. Between them is a platter of catering. It’s fancier than the too-dry, too-wet sandwiches we normally get. There’s a chopped-up baguette, some pickles, slabs of salami and cubed feta, lettuce and sliced cucumber, and, in the middle, some chicken wings. The big boss takes the corner piece of the baguette and affixes some salami to it. Our leader lifts a chicken wing, daintily.
The big boss announces he’s only got forty-five minutes until his next conference so we’d better get a hustle on, hadn’t we. We settle. The first report—an update on a new policy—has already swung into action before our team leader twigs that Peter is missing.
One of my colleagues mutters something about seeing him loitering near the stationery cupboard.
Our leader looks askance at him and the colleague is silent.
I’m sent to fetch Peter. My murmuring colleague is right. He’s not in his office, and I can hear whistling emanating from the stationery cupboard.
It’s not quite a melody: it’s the absent-minded sub-song of someone happy and on his own.
The door is plastered with bits and pieces: almost-risqué cartoons, postcards from gloating colleagues, clippings from the social pages showing our not-game-enough-to-be-debauched Christmas parties. It’s pretty ratty: the clippings are frayed like hessian bags; the sticky tape is sallow. The whistling—the sound of a flat kettle boiling—continues from within. I’m wondering if I should knock. I opt to make a vague scratching noise with my throat.
The whistling stops and Peter peers out. He tells me he’s sorry, he lost track of the time, he’d just come in for a minute and he’d noticed … He opens the door and for a moment I’m blinded by the light behind him. There’s a large window above the shelves letting in a multitude of sky. Peter, a blobby shadow, tells me he just thought he’d do a spot of spring cleaning. When my eyes adjust I see how organised everything is. A density of stacked manila folders, their rounded corners aligned. Glue sticks in a row like soldiers. Hoarded boxes of staples stacked, neat and compact, in a pyramid. I think he’s waiting for me to pay his tidiness a compliment. I turn back to the glass room and he shuffles after me.