“My stepmother kept huge aviaries,” the woman said. “All kinds of small birds, she bred and sold them. She liked birds more than she liked people.” Her hand shook as she refilled his glass, so that water splashed onto the plate of sandwiches, and over the wicker table.
He watched her rise and move towards the kitchen; she returned with a dish cloth. Arthur stared out over the garden while she mopped up the spill. When she’d finished she offered him the sandwiches again, and he took one to show goodwill.
“That day that I left,” she said, “I opened all the cages. At first the birds didn’t know what to do, so I ran from cage to cage, banging on the wire netting with a stick. Suddenly the air was thick with birds. It was more beautiful than you could ever imagine.”
Arthur could imagine it all too well, and for the first time since he’d left the island he thought of the starlings massed at dusk in the winter trees behind the children’s home. He remembered the rustle of their wings when they twisted in skeins over the fields, or swelled and contracted high above the cliffs, dark wave after dark wave, lifting and falling in a kind of dance. Sister Lucy had said it was a murmuration. He was still quite young, and he had thought the birds were showing him a sign, that there was something written in their fluid patterns. Probably he’d thought it was a message from his mum – all of them had been obsessed with their mothers – and he had wept bitter tears because he couldn’t read it.
A few years later, when he was sick one time, he had looked down from a high window in the sanatorium just as the play bell rang and all the kids ran into the yard. In their dull grey overalls, with their dark, bobbed heads, they had exploded across the cobbled quad like small birds flocking. Their boots on the cobbles had sounded like the beating of wings; so swift were they that their separate shapes were blurred – it was a flow of bodies coming together and pulling apart, but always more of them together: a murmuration of children.
It had been wrong to send them out one by one. They should have gone into the world in groups, or at the very least in pairs; they’d have kept each other strong. He should write to Mother Stella Marie, tell her that going it alone was too hard after a crowded childhood. He wouldn’t write, of course. But it made him feel better to think that he could.
Linnie’s birthday would have been at the end of the summer. She’d have been seventeen. They had dreamed of finding a place together, and they’d laughed about not having to wrap newspaper around their shins to wade through the nettles behind the potting sheds to reach their private domain. And it was those hours he’d spent there with Linnie – their murmurs in the long grass, her mouth warm against his ear – which Len’s missus was stealing from him too.
The worst of it was that he couldn’t complain to Len. If Len believed him, he’d be shattered, because Arthur could tell that Len adored his wife. But his wife was not the woman Len believed – if he only knew. And from the way she looked into his eyes and smiled while she was touching him, that hard, mocking gleam, she knew for sure he couldn’t tell Len.
To Arthur’s horror, hot tears welled up and spilled down his cheeks. He sat as if frozen, the half-eaten sandwich still in his hand. Tears dripped down his neck, and the woman put down her drink.
“What is it?” she said.
But Arthur couldn’t speak. It was Linnie he was crying for, and how the letter had come to say she’d fallen to her death from a window at that shirt factory they sent her to – a little bird that hadn’t been able to fly. Well, maybe he was another one. Maybe that was the only way out for him.
Arthur’s shoulders were shaking with the effort of holding himself in the chair; though he was blinded by tears he was aware of the woman going into the house, of her coming out again.
“Here,” she said softly, “use this.”
It was a tea cloth with a comforting, fresh-ironed smell. He pressed it to his eyes, blocking out the porch and the woman.
“If there’s anything I can do,” she said.
She hadn’t touched him. And with his face buried in her cloth he heard himself bawling out everything he’d been holding in, about growing up with people always around him, and now being cast adrift, about Linnie, and about Missus Robsart, and that one time she’d bailed him up while Len was out, him like a rabbit and her like a weasel, and how part of him had wanted to escape and another part had wanted to grab her and throw her down and show her that he was stronger than she thought. And how he could never tell Len. He even told her his theory about being sent out in groups, like birds. But by the time he’d got to the birds, a new and terrifying thought had occurred to Arthur: what if the woman took upon herself to inform his boss?
He dropped the cloth into his lap and looked at her in a kind of pleading silence.
“It’s all right,” she said quickly, “I won’t say anything to Mister Robsart. But you need to get away, Arthur. You have to find other work. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded. But it wasn’t that easy. Even a woman like her who had left home at fifteen had probably forgotten what it was like, living from one pay to the next. At the end of the week, when Len gave him his wages, once he’d settled his board there was so little left over.
The woman went inside and returned with a mug of tea. “I guessed you’d take it with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar,” she said. “Am I right?”
After he’d drunk the tea he felt better, and got up to go and dig the last of the lawn. When he heard Len’s truck coming, he splashed his face with water from his water bottle and mopped up with the old t-shirt. He hoped he didn’t look like he’d been crying, hoped Len would be pleased that he’d finished off the grass. Tomorrow they would load the cut turf onto the truck, and then they’d be done. Someone else was coming to lay the paving.
That night, he washed the cotton gloves she had given him and hung them to dry. He’d return them to her, though she probably would throw them away. Arthur wished he could think of some way to thank her for her kindness, but nothing occurred to him. He would give them to her as they were leaving, so that if it was the wrong thing to have done he’d be going anyway.
The next afternoon, with Len on site, there wasn’t much opportunity for him to approach the woman. Luckily, she came out onto the porch just as Len went to relieve himself against the back fence. Arthur took the gloves from his kit bag and walked over to her.
“In case you wanted them back,” he said. “I washed them.”
“Oh! You shouldn’t have worried.” She looked past him, and then, seeing that Len was busy, she reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out an envelope.
“Don’t open it until later,” she said, and the sudden smile she gave him lit her face, so that he saw all the sharp-edged beauty that was still there under the greying hair, the reddened eyelids. “Good luck, Arthur,” she murmured in her foggy voice. “Go well!” And she turned away before he could say anything.
Len was whistling as he walked up the yard. Arthur sensed that the woman didn’t want him to know about the envelope, so he slipped it inside his shirt and wandered over to the truck.
“Good to go?” Len said.
The woman waved from the porch as Len eased the truck down the drive. Later, in his room, Arthur opened the envelope. Inside, he found a letter; it was sealed and stamped, and addressed to Delia someone-or-other. She had written in pencil on the back: please post. But the biggest shock was that the outer envelope contained a thousand dollars in cash, and a note, addressed to him, scribbled on a page torn from a lined note book: Fly away, Arthur. Fly far, be free. Erris.
Around the edges of the paper, cloud shapes were filled with dozens of small, dark, pencilled birds.
Paper Boats
Amanda has sent a short story to The New Yorker. On the walk to the post office she’d felt purposeful, but the moment the envelope slips from her fingers into the box she wishes she could wrench it back. Writers she reveres have been published in The New Yorker, literary greats like William Trevor and Alice M
unro, and, going back a bit, the sharp, the stylish, the tragic, Maeve Brennan. What on earth was she thinking! Amanda stares into the dark slot that has swallowed her story, and as always at the point of letting go she thinks of how the word ‘submission’ suggests humiliation, suggests a helpless yielding.
“Forget you’ve posted it,” she tells herself sternly. And in a day or two she will forget for quite large chunks of time. But just at the moment, she is stricken.
“It’s a story that needed to be told,” she says, and turns her back on the post box.
The idea had come from her neighbour, Magda Woźniak. Amanda and Magda live in the two rundown villas bequeathed to them on the deaths of their respective parents, old, high-ceilinged houses, like most others in the surrounding streets. Once occupied by migrant families, they had been affordable only because they had fallen out of favour for being difficult to heat, and in constant need of repair. But as the older generation gradually died out, so the suburb has been colonised by young professionals, couples who spend their weekdays in city offices, and their weekends renovating.
In their un-renovated homes, Magda and Amanda are the only residents on their street who remember their Menick and Woźniak parents; they are almost the only residents who remember when kids played hopscotch on the pavements, and the front yards were filled with tomato plants. On Sunday afternoons they like to sit together for a few hours, drinking coffee and gossiping. When it’s Amanda’s turn to host Magda she bakes a carrot cake, or in summer she will make a strawberry and rhubarb pie because it is Magda’s favourite, and it pleases Amanda to watch her neighbour eat – Magda, who is as thin and straight as a clothes peg, works as a contract cleaner, and Amanda worries that she still smokes, that she doesn’t eat properly.
The things Magda sees and hears and is asked to clean up after often provide the substance of their Sunday chats. Amanda has never felt compelled to write about anything she’s heard, until Magda told how she’d been sent to clear a house of the belongings of a woman who’d died. They’d been sitting on the back verandah to catch the last of the sun, the street quiet but for the distant drone of a lawn mower.
“The husband couldn’t bring himself to touch anything she’d owned, which is common enough,” Magda said. “Usually it’s because they’re not coping with the grief.”
But this husband had been different.
“He’d loathed his wife. I felt it as soon as I walked through their front door.”
“How could you tell?” Amanda poured coffee while Magda lit a cigarette.
“There was an atmosphere you couldn’t miss. Anyway, it turned out that they had slept in separate rooms, and before he took me into her bedroom,” Magda paused, and her pencilled brows shot skywards, “he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.”
“To go into her bedroom? How very odd!”
Magda shrugged. “He was a doctor, so I suppose he had a ready supply of those gloves.”
“He didn’t wear a gown and mask, did he?”
“No.” Magda said. “But I’ll tell you this – he seemed to be holding his breath in that room. It was as if he didn’t want to breathe, just in case there was some air left in there that might have been exhaled by his wife.”
They sat in silence, Magda blowing cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth so that it drifted away from where Amanda sat, and across the garden.
“I will say,” said Magda, “that it was very close in that room. It had been shut up tight as a tomb. The first thing I did once he’d gone was to open the window.”
Later, when she’d been bagging up the woman’s clothes, Magda had found miniature bottles of vodka pushed down into the toes of shoes, and hidden in the pockets of coats and dresses hanging in the wardrobe.”
“Most were empty, but one or two were still full. I expect she’d forgotten where she’d put them.”
A question had floated into Amanda’s mind then: what if the husband had worn gloves so as not to leave fingerprints in his wife’s bedroom? If the room was being cleared it was not a crime scene, so her death had not been deemed suspicious. But what if he had caused that death? What if he’d got away with it, but was still being careful, just in case?
“How did she die?” Amanda asked.
Magda held out her mug for a refill. “He never said. Some alcohol related illness, you would think.”
Amanda had felt a quiver of unease. What if the bottles had been planted; what if the wife hadn’t ever been a drinker? It was the gloves that bothered her: they were so clinical, so calculated.
“What was he like, the husband?”
Magda thought for a moment. “He was … like a heron,” she said slowly, “all legs and beak. Sad looking, I suppose you could say, and scrupulously polite.” But Magda, picking up cake crumbs with her fingertips, which, like her hands, were red from scrubbing, and from contact with cleaning chemicals, had one more surprise.
“There was a nursery room,” she said. “The wallpaper and matching curtains were yellow and white – sunflowers and bunnies. There was nothing else. No furniture, nothing in the built-in wardrobe. But when I lifted the rug to sweep underneath, I found something.” She had reached into her bag and pulled out a paper boat. “I kept it to show you.”
Magda set it on the table beside their coffee mugs, and they stared at it: a tiny boat made of paper torn from a lined notebook. On the prow, its name: Erris.
“Look, there’s more.” With her reddened fingers, Magda gently unfolded the paper sail. Inside, pencilled letters that seemed about to fade before their eyes:
I was never mad
“Shouldn’t you take this to the police?” Amanda said.
“They’d laugh their legs off,” Magda said.
The flattened paper, with its creases, looked like something you would find blowing along the street, and yet its pencilled message rushed at Amanda; it entered her chest as a formless, aching beat. She picked up her mug and steadied herself with a mouthful of the strong black coffee.
When Magda had gone Amanda had thought she probably wouldn’t write about it – after all, it seemed like the start of a crime story and she wasn’t a crime writer. But then neither was Alice Munro, yet her stories teemed with violent deeds. So Amanda had sat down at her writing desk and allowed herself to imagine Alice beside her, guiding her hand and thoughts, and when the story was finished she had thought it one of her best.
Amanda has other stories out on submission. Her life is one of writing, and waiting, and while she waits she must maintain her hope, while ignoring the obliterating silence that emanates from the places she has submitted work to. The silence of editors and publishers is matched only by the silence of the grave, but then occasionally a note of encouragement flutters in, a small white ghostly bird that lands chirping on her desk. It was after one such message that she had converted the garden shed into her writing room.
There have been successes; stories published in anthologies, one or two in the company of well-known authors. A reviewer once described her prose as ‘finely tempered and meditative’, and a literary agent had read that review and made contact. The agent had suggested that Amanda expand her story into a novel, and she had tried – draft after draft. But the agent had wanted a racier style, and eventually it had become clear to both of them that Amanda couldn’t write in that vein. She didn’t even read the sort of books the agent was suggesting she write.
Walking away from the mail box in which her story, in its crisp white envelope, floats in the first dark pool of its outward journey, Amanda turns towards the station. Dry leaves tumbled by the wind make a scratching sound that sets her nerves on edge. She wonders whether William Trevor ever becomes discouraged, or Alice. Surely they are both so well published that they are past the point where they could ever feel dejected. Poor Maeve Brennan, though, for all her wit and skill, she had touched rock bottom. Maeve’s editor at The New Yorker had been William Maxwell. Imagine! Maxwell is another writer Amanda reveres, and a beautiful human
being, too, by all accounts. She saw a picture of him once in which his face had seemed to shine with goodness. To deserve such an editor, a writer must be exceptional. On her better days, Amanda tells herself that anyone can dream.
In the railway station entrance, a woman with mad bright eyes and straggling grey hair jiggles a placard on a pole: Christ is Coming and He will Repay Unbelievers with Affliction! She thrusts a leaflet at Amanda, who accepts it and shoves it into her bag, noting that the woman is no older than she is and might even be a year or two younger. It is then that Amanda feels herself sinking, as helpless and as doomed as when she had drifted into the deep end at the swimming baths as a child, while her mother sat on the grass, engrossed in a book. If it hadn’t been for someone else’s mother jumping in and hauling her out she’d have drowned. But who will haul her out now? Her story is on its way to one of the world’s iconic magazines.
On the train, searching in her handbag for a mint, Amanda takes out the crumpled leaflet. What affliction, she wonders, is in store for her? She scans it to see whether there is a date for the predicted Rapture, because with luck it will arrive before the New Yorker receives her submission. It will certainly come before they respond. Then again, you never know: her story is compact, and sometimes an editor is desperate to fill a small space, though never, she suspects, an editor at The New Yorker.
Amanda returns the leaflet to her bag – she is not a sharp enough writer for The New Yorker. Not yet. And if the world does not end and save her, she can only pray that whoever reads it will not write a cruel letter. Because it takes her so long to recover from the shame of failure, which in some twisted way is like the creeping shame she has felt after rough treatment from one or two men she has known, men who are no longer in her life. But why, she wonders, do women accept the blame that shame implies? Why do writers? I was never mad: damn it, what had happened to that woman!
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