‘WHAT’S HE BROUGHT US TONIGHT?’ said Grandma, pulling back from stirring the fire. ‘Another whirlygig?’
Blacktaw trotted to her, wearing his mad outdoor look. The creature in his mouth rowed a white leg in the air.
‘Set it down, Taw-taw,’ said Grandma. ‘Set it free, now.’ Blacktaw sat and looked doubtful. ‘No pats until you do, I tell you!’ I loved her haughty look.
Blacktaw lowered his head abjectly.
‘That’s right—put it down, Taw,’ I said, trying to sound as sure as Grandma. The cat paused and checked with Grandma again.
‘Come along, puss. Show me your night’s work.’
Finally, he bobbed forward, put it down and sat back.
Every night Taw brought in something different. Mostly they were only broken inside, with their outer layers still bright and their remaining movements natural. But sometimes he lost his head and ate half, and brought us the rest, the light gone out of their eyes and the mechs and bio-springs trailing. This one was possumish and shrewish—a jumper, but with its jumping mechanism cracked. It had red button-eyes and miniature chuffer-train breathing.
‘I think he’s got a broken back, Taw,’ said Grandma.
I thought Taw looked apologetic, but maybe he was just waiting for Grandma’s word to start eating.
I reached down and patted some of the cold night air out of his fur. He bore with me, looking at Grandma.
‘Do you know what I think?’ She took her thread-knife from the basket beside her, bent down and made a slit in the little animal’s lower abdomen. ‘See? I thought so.’ With the knife-tip she pressed on a swollen pink sac inside, and a clean, wet, white egg appeared, no bigger than the end segment of my thumb. The animal moved its forepaws anxiously, voided its bowels of two tiny silver cog-wheels, and died.
‘What is it, then?’ Grandma looked at me with mock puzzlement—this I also loved. ‘Is it a mouse? Or is it a bird, laying eggs? This place, it’s full of mysteries. This pussycat brings us a new mystery every night. Don’t you, puss?’
‘I think he’s hungry, Grandma.’
‘Is he? Are you hungry, big black Taw-taw? There’s a lot of you to feed, certainly.’
‘You’re teasing him! You always tell me not to do that!’
‘I know. I am a cruel old woman. Go, Taw-taw. Take it away and eat it. It’s good food.’ And she nudged it with her toe.
Blacktaw picked the animal up by the head, laid it closer to the fire, and started to crack and crunch.
PLACE OF MANY POSSUMS, the Aborigines used to call Greville. It was like a lot of towns I’d passed through already this morning, a dying collection of buildings like eye sockets and mumbling jaws, grey under a grey sky. Its public buildings had been repurposed to death, through phases of gentrification, hippie squat and serious poorhouse. The Old Girl skittered on the built-up grit at every intersection.
I saw the glint of Mum’s flatbed cab down near the cemetery. She and my auntie had started out from the Wagga Mecho-dome last night. They liked to think they were tough old birds; they didn’t mind getting out to pee in the poisonous dark, or switching off all but the ventilator and kipping in the vehicle. ‘We’ve got a lot of old immunities,’ Auntie Pruitt was always saying, dressing up a boast as an apology for my newage feebleness. They’d be getting precious about relatives’ headstones, and the Fleeting Nature of Life. Going down there to join them would only be painful for all three of us.
The church was intact, but nothing was happening there yet. I parked and switched off most of the Old Girl. Then I clambered into the back seat, unclipped the torch, shifted Excision of Facial Nerves out of the way and eased out the seed tray.
Nothing yet. Lifeless as a Japanese gravel garden. Then you wait, Statner’s friend had said, and like an idiot I hadn’t asked how long. It was three days now. I had no idea—should I be ditching the mixture already, or not bothering to look for another week and a half? I wished I were an olden-days person who just knew these things, who had this knowledge all through them that they’d just osmosed from their elders. Who knew how the world worked—big intricate animal that it was—instead of paying her heart out for instruction on a small electronic part of it, all the while praying that the economy would hold still long enough for the risk to be worth it.
A car was approaching. I clicked off the torch and slid the seeds and books away. The square afterimage of the torchlit tray hovered in my eyes.
It wasn’t Mum and Auntie. It was the priest in his Lambda, a glossy black bit of ecclesiastical luxury. He stayed in the car, like me, except he probably had a fully functional sound system pumping out Gregorian chant. Or motivational talk, because he looked young, I noticed with disgust. One of those new wave gay married priests, probably. Not what Grandma would have wanted at all.
The flatbed scooted past me and around into the carpark on the far side of the church. I got out of the Old Girl, whanged her closed and strode around the church hands in pockets, meshing my eyelashes against the blowing grit.
Mum was just coming around the flatbed, and Pruitt was flinging herself out of the passenger seat. They both gave me the same hostile look, from deep within sisterdom. They were eerily the same: the big glasses, the mannish faces, the long harsh-blonded hair snaking out in the wind, the blue-and-white quilted flannel shirts. Both of them were wept dry and feeling old; part of the hostility was the hatred of old for young, however modern and allergic she might be.
It was very cold. The sky was a flat, bright, migraineinducing grey. My eyes were already stinging.
‘COME NOW, WAKE, child. It’s a good morning for it.’
Blearily I peered over the quilt edge.
‘Up you get,’ said Grandma. ‘We’re going down to the creek, remember?’
‘Oh, that’s right!’ I pushed back the heavy cotton sheet, the soft quilt.
I dressed quickly and warmly, and came out to her pulling on my mittens. Even inside, our breaths were misting on the air.
‘Good girl,’ said Grandma, and we went out of the cottage.
The forest was unfamiliar in the fog. I was wrapped in captured bed-warmth, but the cold nipped my nose and cheeks. The path wound down the hill through the trees. Bark wept off the tree trunks, staining the creamy plush under-skin rust and black. The pointy leaves dangled out of the mist. The cold air smelt of the medicine in them. Grandma had made this path; her flower beds, edged with scallop shells, showed vague in the mist ahead, brightened to pink and mauve and gold for the moments we passed them, and faded back to grey behind us.
We came to the place. It was away from the path, through some dripping scrub. First Grandma’s cardigan-back got diamantéed, and then black-polka-dotted, with water shaken from the leaves.
‘I’m going to make a seat down here,’ she whispered as we settled on the leaf-matted ground. ‘It’ll be concrete, but made to look like wood. Like a wooden plank propped on two tree trunks. I’ve seen it done; it’s very effective. Now shhh.’ She cocked her head towards where I should look, a little clearing walled with dew-coated white stalks.
We quieted down to the silence of everything else. A few bird-calls echoed as if in a vast empty room. The cold air smelled of water and bruised leaves. Beside us the creek was a cable of glass under a twisted roll of mist; it looked as if the water were only trembling slightly, not actually flowing.
Grandma nudged me.
There was movement in the clearing, a fine net of rustling, but no shape yet. When had he flown in? Or walked? Or begun to shake together into being?
Then I saw where the net began and ended, and the bird behind it, blurred and shadowed. He was a modest thing, neat and busy in the grey morning. He would have been nothing without the tail—no crown, no colour, nothing special.
He walked about arranging. He tidied leaves off his patch. He pulled grasses into line. He fussed and fussed with one of Grandma’s garden shells, moving it about, getting it in the right place, changing his mind.
Even
with the tail, colour was not the thing. Two redbrown feathers held the design together at either edge, and the space between them was all muted sparkle, silver and grey, with a froth of red-brown and cream at the very end. He carried this fabulous artefact around with him while he did his housekeeping, and yet it was clean and bright, with no stray leaf or bush-bit caught up in it, with no part of it draggled or damp.
He went all around his patch, calling, waiting, moving the shell irritably, calling again. Pi-ipe, pip, he called. Rustle, scrape. Py-eep, pip. Py-eep, pip.
When the girl-bird came, she was nothing. She had no tail, and was a dull green. She said nothing, either, but he knew she was there, propped sideways with her claws in a tree, pretending not to see him.
And then, didn’t he dance! He tipped his tail up and over his head, drawing and shivering it along the ground, watching her from within. The sound was feathers, but also metal—very light rich rustly metal. And all the while he made such noises! Bird noises and dog noises, train noises, noises of Grandma and me, calling in the cottage yard. Everything that went on, in and around here, this bird had heard and recorded, and now he was telling her the whole story.
The girl-bird came down out of the tree. She got busy at one side, pretending to look for food, and then she stepped casually onto the dance-floor, as if she’d just happened by.
He was thrilled. The noises stopped, and the tail shone and shook and spread, and dipped this way and that. He was trying so hard, my throat opened and closed in little silent moans of effort for him.
Fl’hup!, and she was gone. His tail swiftly folded and he was after her.
We listened for a few minutes. The bush had come alive with the beginnings of a breeze, and leaves tinkled down from the invisible heights.
Then Grandma looked at me. ‘A good show, yes?’
IN THE CHURCH THE NEIGHBOUR, Irini, was keeping vigil. I’d heard about but never met her; here she was, yellowskinned, glossy dark-haired and martyred-looking. She sat to one side of the four candles in their square; among them, my Grandma was swaddled in knotted crimson synthetic bands, with a small cream-coloured mask inset. As I sat myself next to my mother in the first-but-one pew, I realised with a shock that this mask was Grandma’s face, sculpted by God and by genes, shrunken to dolllikeness by time. How she’s shrunken! I nearly whispered to Mum, until I saw her spotted hand in the clutches of Auntie Pruitt’s.
The priest when he came in was offensively padded and protected. His electronics and goggles gave him a manufactured and unreadable face. He was athletic and young; he moved as if he’d never lost anyone, never known ill-health in any form.
The church itself was long uncleaned, only opened for this small occasion and no effort made for it. No flowers, Mum had said, so there were only cold, flat cheques sent to one of Grandma’s charities (not from me—I couldn’t afford that, though I might have afforded flowers), and here, on the day, saints with chipped noses shedding blessing on us from their grimy fingers. The priest’s words were tinny and indistinct through his filter, and I sat after a while and watched the patterns the grit made, eddying around the floor, watched the nose-point of Grandma’s little pinched face, so white.
Mother and Auntie Pruitt clutched to each other very hard and subdued. Did they go shopping especially for those matching outfits? I became preoccupied with glancing at them undetected, picking the differences in the cargo pants (it was in the tabs and the pocket placement) and the shirts (Pruitt’s tartan had a thread of gold, my mother’s was plain and more pilled).
‘Eternal sumth grant unto her, oh loggdg …’ squeaked the priest with bossy finality.
‘And let perpetual light shine upon her,’ we murmured.
Irini blew her nose, loudly. I was blinking a lot by now against the stinging in my eyes, and the skin under my arms, behind my knees, inside my elbows, was beginning to feel fat and welty and irritated. Grandma lay like a bound stone, radiating some kind of meaning I wouldn’t be able to appreciate today. I was too itchy and angry and ill.
And then it was over, the whole dull, music-free, flowerless affair. The four of us—Irini, me, Mum and Pruitt—each took the end of a swaddling-band, and we carried Grandma out after the priest. He walked slightly too fast, but we let him go rocketing off. Grandma followed slowly, evenly, floatingly along like an airship, like a seriously injured body, properly cradled.
We laid her on the footpath outside the church gate. Blown twigs, grit and old dark brown dead leaves brought the pavement alive, around her utter stillness. The hearse, a grey banger from the days of the Epidemics, slid up to the kerb.
Mum and Auntie Pruitt stood back, shirts flapping, loose hair lashing about, faces red-mottled with the wind and with weeping. Irini was neater, her hair tucked up under a firmly pinned hat, a folded hankie pressed to her nose. She was the only one of us in skirt and stockings; she would pay for that tomorrow—didn’t she know how much cortisone cream was? And she’d get no Compassionate Allowance, not being related at all.
‘I can’t quite believe it,’ Mum wobbled, and Pruitt took her elbow in both hands, and looked intense. Grandma’s face was already grit-speckled, and leaves were caught in the swaddling. If we left her there a little while, she would bury herself.
Irini performed the final part for all of us: stepped forward, knelt on the pavement and, holding her skirt decent in the wind, bent and kissed Grandma’s forehead. It seemed only right—she was the one who knew Grandma best, these last days. It’s the role of daughters to move ever away from their mothers (and could there be greater distance than between those two sighing snaky-haired lumberjacks of women and this close-wrapped, completed object at our feet?) and it’s likely, isn’t it, that someone will step in, and appreciate everything the daughters can’t, being so busy pushing themselves out into the world, saying, No, no, I’m not you.
The priest said his few words to Mum and Auntie, stranger to strangers. He was in the Lambda before you could say condolences. He drew away slowly, but you could hear the relief in the engine revs as he rounded the corner onto the highway.
WE WERE WALKING BACK FROM A DAY AT THE LAKE, toiling slowly along the dirt road up the last long rise to Grandma’s turn-off. In a few more steps the late sun would be blazing in our eyes—the rise was topped with a pink-gold fur of grass; the road cut a bright, straggling hole through the slim black trees.
Into that arbour a man strolled, up from the far side of the rise. I thought he was wearing a plumed costume. I wasn’t surprised; I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything that walked out of the landscape at Grandma’s—the place was full of wonders. But as he came down the hill I saw that he was quite an ordinary man. His hat was a beloved worn hat, grown fast to his head, but his boilersuit and boots were the dark-blue Meeko-system standard.
At his waist he wore a special belt with quantities of bunched feathers strung along it, swinging. The sunlight behind him filled the bunches with needles of light, and made the main curves shine like polished blades, and glowed in the frothier feathers. That delicious rustling, of soft live metal, whispered at us as he neared us.
‘Good evening to you!’ Grandma said in her uphill voice. ‘Evening.’
Grandma stopped. ‘Do you have birds there, or only feathers?’
‘Oh no, I’ve got whole birds.’ He lifted an armful of glitter. The small grey bodies hung beneath. Some were undamaged; others were part-devoured or crushed, the feathers matted with oil or blood; one was just the root of the tail, with the fine metal leg structure, the kera-plas claw-tips stripped of their paint.
I wanted to reach in and touch, make the leg bend with my finger, but I sensed Grandma’s silence. She had drawn back in the stiffest disapproval, her whiskery mouth pursed. ‘The child doesn’t need to see that,’ she said sharply.
The man dropped the tails over the bodies, and smiled down at me. ‘They can get pretty banged up, out here in the bush. Every so often we go round and collect ’em all up, make ’em pretty again, and p
ut them back out all fresh.’
Grandma drew in her breath to speak, but he said to her, ‘I’ve always believed in giving it to ’em straight, little kids.’
‘Well!’
‘Yeah. Best to let ’em see things as they are. They can take it.’
‘Oh, you think so,’ said Grandma.
He winked at me and walked on past us, down the road, his flounced bird-skirt setting up its fine rustling. I turned to watch him.
‘Come along, Daphne,’ said Grandma up ahead.
I caught up with her and we topped the hill into the full orange blast of the sunset.
‘Those people aren’t meant to be seen,’ she puffed. ‘Not by residents, not once induction’s complete. I shall write a letter to management.’
‘Why? What would management do?’
‘Put him in his place, I hope. Out of sight.’
I looked back down the hill. He already was out of sight. The white road was empty, slipping away into the dusky bush.
‘THAT CLOUD’S THICKENING,’ said Irini, peering out the Old Girl’s windscreen.
I didn’t answer. I felt ratty. Mum and Pruitt together always made me feel ratty, even without Greville’s pollutants and my usual overreaction to the injections. And now I had to ferry Irini home. Mum and Pruitt had only paid to bring Grandma to Greville. They hadn’t bought Irini a return trip.
Well, we knew you’d be going that way anyway, darling, said Pruitt.
It just would’ve been nice for someone to tell me, I’d muttered. Ahead of time.
You’ll be fine. She’s a nice old thing.
Pruitt was already light on her feet anticipating the trip home, the music, the communing. They spoke their own language together, those two. They might look like sides of beef, but they gushed at each other like Victorian spinster poets. If we’d all lived in the same town, and all come out together as a funeral party should—as blood relations, most of us—I’d be throwing up by now, having listened to that all the way.
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