by Naomi Booth
It’s about five feet away when I realise that, despite its spinning, when it comes to a rest there’s a remarkable stillness to the bird. No movement at all. None of those jerky, skittish little tics that birds, always watching for danger, usually have. And there’s no movement in the bird’s eyes at all. Just a dead stillness. The bird spins again and when it comes to a stop, I stare at it hard. It’s only a couple of feet away now. Its head is angled towards me, but it doesn’t seem to see me. It looks as though the bird’s eyes are closed, though I know this can’t be possible, that its eyelids don’t work this way. I remember the weirdness of bird eyes, from when we used to see them in my mother’s backyard. I remember her telling me that they don’t blink, exactly: sight is too important to them. She must’ve known something about birds by the end of her stint at the vet’s: she’d taken care of parrots, and parakeets, and birds of prey. Their eyelids were lubricated by a nictitating membrane, she told me proudly in the backyard one morning, pronouncing the strange words carefully. Nictitating membrane: a third eyelid that sweeps across the eyeball from the side or the bottom. But this bird’s eyes look closed: there’s dark grey skin covering them with the consistency of scuffed suede. The bird makes one more turn towards me, and then it’s so close that I get a really good look and then I’m sure of it: the bird can’t open its eyes. The eyelid skin makes a dome, fused over the place where the bright little eyes should be. It makes me think of baby birds, the thin, orange skin that covers the glowing blue bulbs of their eyes if they hatch prematurely. This bird’s skin is thick and over-developed. Its eyes look reptilian: dry and powdery. And there’s no sign of anything below the skin, no latent flinch towards opening. The bird’s eyes have been completely sealed over. And now the spinning begins to make a kind of sense: it’s blindly twirling, sweeping around with its wings, trying to work out where it is. I stand straight up and I gasp. I need to get more air. I try not to let the fear inside me escape into sound. My sudden movement must be loud enough to scare the bird anyway. It spins around several times in a panicked flurry and then it takes off into the sky. It hits the branches of the peppermint at the bottom of the garden, calling out a high distress-note, and then it plummets, swooping towards the valley, falling out of sight.
* * *
We’re sitting at the kitchen table and I can’t stop my hands from shaking. The tremor runs all the way through my wrists up into my elbows. I grip my hands together and squeeze them hard between my thighs until I can’t feel anything except my knuckles digging into the soft flesh there.
‘You’ve been through a lot,’ Pete says, ‘we both know that.’ He’s making a cup of tea for me and cracking open a beer for himself. ‘But, Alice, I think what you’ve been through, it affects how you see things sometimes.’ He’s speaking slowly and very deliberately, as though I’m a small child to whom he’s explaining complicated adult business. He puts the tea down in front of me and some of the tan liquid sloshes up and over the lip of the cup, running away down the sleek porcelain edge and disappearing into the grain of the wooden table. That’s the thing about Pete: he doesn’t notice details like this. He doesn’t care about the little things and he doesn’t realise that they matter, that they can add up to bigger things.
He sits down beside me and squeezes my arm, as though the problem is with me, rather than out there, in the sky and in the water and in the birds and in everything around us.
‘There’s never been a report of birds having symptoms, not even in the city, has there?’ he says. He swigs on his beer, leans back in his chair. ‘Look, that bird could have come from anywhere. So maybe you’re right. Maybe there was something wrong with its eyes. But that could be caused by anything! It could be congenital. It could be some kind of disease. It could have flown in from anywhere and brought some kind of new bird flu with it.’
‘It was an adult bird, Pete,’ I say, trying to sound calm and reasonable, though my voice is breathless and whiny, even to my own ears. ‘There’s no way it could have survived if it was born that way. And it couldn’t have flown any distance in that state. It must have happened recently, so it must have happened here.’
Pete puts his bottle down on the table. ‘Alice, you’re assuming things that you can’t know for sure,’ he says. ‘You’re imagining it everywhere, making inferences. I get it, babe, I really do. What you went through with your mum. It’s a classic stress response. You’re repeating the whole thing in your head, making it appear again and again. But that doesn’t mean it’s really happening. You need to think about the future, about this little one.’ He rubs the top of my stomach in the way that you might ruffle the fur on a dog’s head. I feel static prickle across my dress. ‘That’s what we agreed. We’re leaving all this behind us. Right? Fresh start?’
‘I’m telling you exactly what I saw,’ I say. ‘You just don’t want to listen. It’s like yesterday in town. That bloke, sitting on the street, I told you there was something wrong with his feet and you didn’t even want to look. I’m not seeing things – you’re refusing to look out there, to see what’s really going on.’ I’m gesticulating now, waving my right hand wildly in the direction of the verandah. My voice has gone funny. I’m not going to cry. I am not going to cry. It’s just the tremor, it’s all the way through me now.
Pete stands up. He cradles my head in his hands and pushes my face against his stomach. ‘Shhh, babe,’ he says. ‘You’re alright. Everything’s going to be alright.’ For a moment I breathe him in and I forget where we are: I shut my eyes and let myself be cocooned into Pete’s body. Since we were kids, Pete and I have always retreated into one another like this. We grew up next door to each other, fooled around when we were teenagers. We tried to be together after college, which was a disaster. And then for years afterwards, whenever we were homesick or feeling lost, whenever relationships ended, whenever we were grieving, we always found one another. It was my mother dying that took me back to him again this time; and then I fell pregnant, and that means that we’re doing things properly now, Pete says, like we always should have.
There’s a reason we didn’t ‘do things properly’. Pete likes to forget that we’ve tried this before, that it wasn’t me who screwed things up the first time. I’m breathing into his t-shirt, the soft cotton sucking against my nose and mouth. I try to relax, I try to remember what it was like to feel safe with Pete, but I can’t help it: I start to picture the man’s feet, the man sitting on the roadside yesterday. I should have recorded that. Did I see it clearly? Am I remembering it right? The man’s skin is dark, creased all over but supple-looking. The man’s toes are long, articulated with bulbous bones like arthritic knuckles. It’s the ends of his toes where things get strange: there should have been nails there, ten blunt bits of pale, ridged protein, shiny, or made dull with dirt. Instead, I can only see more skin: the dark, soft material curves around the end of each toe, the man’s nails swallowed up. I’m sure of it. And if I can see it again so clearly, surely I can’t have made this up, I can’t have imagined it. I can’t get enough air. I’m hyperventilating against Pete’s t-shirt. The cotton mixes with his scent and it’s filling my mouth, covering my nose. I lash out at Pete, pushing him away.
‘I can’t breathe,’ I say, ‘get the fuck off me,’ and Pete stumbles backwards.
* * *
We’re in bed together, in our new bedroom. It’s late and Pete’s already asleep, but the sky is still alive with the summer day – a dark, vivid blue – and I’m still agitated. I can’t stop thinking about the bird; and then I can’t stop thinking about the city, remembering all of the things that I’ve recorded in my files.
The very first day of it, the day it all began, started out ordinarily enough. It was hot and, for once, clear. No smog at all. I woke early and I walked to work from my bedsit in the old town and I stood on the harbour bridge, pausing for a long moment. Taking the air, my mother used to call it, and I really did take in that clean, clear air, breathing it deeply, gulping it in, turning to
see the view. There were a number of ways I could get to work and I varied them, depending on my mood, the severity of my hangover, the density of the smog. This was a day for walking, for watching the glittering sea, for slicing through the different sections of town before I landed at my desk, to sit under the low ceiling and rattling air-con. That moment on the bridge: have I once breathed so deeply since? The sky was bright blue, not a cloud in it, the air was warm and still fresh, the harbour was busy with little commuter boats crossing the bay. There were no birds in the sky, but things still felt hopeful. I’m sure they did, I’m sure there was still hope then. I can just about remember it, hopefulness. I know that my body felt light and restless; my stomach was empty in that good, yearning way, the way that drives you on. I might have put my hands on my waist: I might have felt my own tautness, my compact density; I was full of myself, back then, and only myself. I looked out across the harbour. If I were to fall from the bridge, I felt that I would float, lifted on the thermals, buoyed-up by my own energy.
I arrived at work, poured out my cereal, began to process my cases. There was a kind of carnival atmosphere in the office: these bright, clear days were increasingly rare. I remember odd details: Kimmy, my boss, was wearing a jumpsuit with a garish, tropical pattern. Tony was making plans to take his kids to the beach after work: he would pack a picnic and take the boat across the harbour and show them how you could see all the way to the city while you made sand-pies when the sky was clear. Doreen says that her lungs are clear today and that she hasn’t had to use her eye drops – she keeps on whistling. We’re all taking things a bit easier than usual and I can see that Mandy, at the desk next to me, is intermittently clicking on sites for scuba-diving holidays and night-school courses in DJing. She’s planning alternative lives; the clear skies made these things feel possible.
By mid-morning, Kimmy was pacing around, dashing in and out of the office, and swearing under her breath a lot, which wasn’t so unusual. By mid-afternoon, her agitation had built to a kind of crisis and she planted herself in the middle of the office, legs akimbo, clapping her hands. ‘Listen up, ladies and gents, there’s something I need you all to take a look at. I’ve sent you a preview, front page of tomorrow’s Herald. You lucky buggers. Go ahead, read through it.’ She remained standing in the centre of the room, arms folded. We all turned back to our terminals and clicked through to the article. ‘Sealed-In By His Own Skin?’ the headline ran. I skimmed through it, alighting on the main points. I’d pour over it later that evening, reading it again and again, returning to it compulsively on my phone in the sleepless early hours. A homeless man had been found dead. It seemed that he’d been sheltering at the edge of the big rubbish tip on the outskirts of the city; his body was found in the midst of the trash. And it’s a wonder he was found at all, really; the report made it clear that he’d hidden himself pretty effectively, improvising some sort of shelter from large sheaths of plastic. Cause of death was thought to be suffocation. He was near covered in rubbish. This wasn’t a straight-forward death-by-interment-in-debris. That might have made the news, but certainly not the front page. The men who found the body were claiming something much stranger.
I’ve often thought about those two men working together on the morning that they found the body. What would it have been like to have seen the very first symptomatic in the city, with no clue about what you were witnessing? This is how I picture it: one of the men is operating a large bulldozer, driving it across the dump to compact the waste. The other is on foot, walking along the road that runs through the site, slightly ahead of the vehicle, scouting for anything that might cause the bulldozer any problems. When they get to a far corner of the site, Barry Patton, the walker, spots something slightly unusual. There’s a regular irregularity to the surface of the rubbish, ordinarily, an averaging of the shambles of discarded objects. On a day like this – overcast, the clouds curdling in the heat of the sky like roiling, grey-gold fudge – Barry looks out across the regular, irregular surface of the rubbish and it makes him think of different things, none of them pleasant: it makes him think of a shipwreck, a broken vessel smashed to pieces, and the rubbish is the new, bobbing surface of a sea of ruined objects; it makes him think of the demolition sites he used to work on, of a building, half-knocked down, its outer walls smashed away, each floor exposed, everything spilling out like shredded paper, and then, finally, collapsed into a rocky, metallic stew, simmering down to dust; it makes him think of mass graves, of bodies leafing over one another, inert but still producing warmth and movement and odour as they decompose, caving into one another. All of these surfaces share the same levelled, gently undulating chaos of the dump. But here, here in the corner of the dump, is something different. Larger pieces of plastic are collected together in one place (already this is unusual – similar objects don’t usually remain so close to one another), and some of them have been placed together, rising above the rest of the mess, creating a small triangle. It looks like a shanty construction of some kind.
Barry whistles loudly, to get the bulldozer driver’s attention, flagging him to stop, and then immediately regrets removing his mask to put his fingers in his mouth: they taste of soil and something worse, and the sour smell of the tip still has the power to surprise him. He carries on waving, shouts to his workmate, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ The machine grinds to a halt and its blade stutters in mid-air, freezing half-way through its cycle. Mike jumps down from the cab. ‘What is it, mate?’
‘There’s something in that corner,’ Barry shouts back, jumping up onto the rubbish mound and starting to make his way across.
‘Watch your step,’ Mike says, ‘hasn’t been compressed in a few days.’