“Your mother’s disowned you, kid.” Bird Girl heard this from Mary Magnificat, whom she met by chance one night in the City’s dockyard area. Mary was a wrestler. She had the strength of three men, but had always been kind to The New Amazons’ only child. Mary had tried to give her money that night, which Bird Girl proudly refused.
“You shouldn’t have called her a . . . ,” Mary said bluntly. Bird Girl had plugged her ears with her fingers. As a wrestler, Mary had never had to cultivate much subtlety.
After that encounter, Bird Girl had leapt into the thick of the City’s darkest places, testing her cunning in its labyrinths, where far worse threats than the Minotaur lurked. She became the thing that would most appall her mother: a highly selective and expensive sex trader. She told herself it was a business where she could hone her wits and her instinct for survival, and where she might, on occasion, meet cultivated individuals who would tell her some of the things she so longed to know about the world. Some of her clients, oh, glory of glories, might even give her books as payment or part payment.
Bird Girl was always on the lookout for books. By which she meant real books — literature. The contents of the City’s libraries had all been burned when she was still a baby, but she knew you could find books if you were assiduous, and had a nose for them. She had found treasure troves stuffed under the floor boards of derelict houses. She had once yanked a copy of Dante’s Inferno from the mouth of a dog. It was well gnawed but still quite readable. In refuse dumps she had uncovered books from which she had to pluck the maggots one by one; books smeared with muck and maybe even shit. If you want to read these days, Bird Girl always told herself, you can’t afford to be fastidious.
One day, after sobbing over Cordelia’s death scene in King Lear, she found the courage to go back to the Armoury and seek a reconciliation with her mother. Awaiting her was the scene she had always dreaded. Something large and lethal had gouged through the Armoury’s outer steel door. The inner door had been wrenched from its massive hinges. It lay flat on the concrete floor and because it was so completely out of place, she did not at first recognize what it was. She succumbed for a moment to the wrenching delusion that the door was a vast pit dug for the dumping of her mother’s corpse.
Her legs were rubber; her stomach acid. Something hard and nasty stuck in her throat. She flung herself to her knees and was sick. She was aware of an ominous thunder gathering in the room, and of a slick wetness gathering at the back of her neck, in the crooks of her elbows, and behind her knees. It took her some seconds to realize that the thunder was the pounding of the blood in her head. She could remember thinking, because she has the kind of mind that never stops seeing things in words, that only one letter separated “dead” from “dread.”
Even on her knees, rocking herself in anguish, she clung to the idea that The New Amazons had staged this assault on the Armoury themselves as one of their clever moves to disorient the hydra-headed enemy. There were rust stains on the concrete floor that might have been blood.
Bird Girl had made herself creep up the metal spiral staircase. Her legs trembled at every step. She could not recall ever before having to hang on to the handrail. Chilled and hot by turns, she forced herself upward and into every room on the two vast upper floors. There was some broken glass and more rusty stains on the floors, but absolutely nothing else. The Armoury had been stripped. Not a bike part, not a bed sheet, not a single sanitary tampon was left.
And that emptiness gave her hope. She believed, as she believes still, that The New Amazons had moved all their belongings out gradually so as not to attract notice; staged the raid on the Armoury doors themselves, and decamped. She clung to that belief, not least because she could not bear to think of the tortures the enemy would have inflicted on her mother and her warriors. She wished The New Amazons safe. She wished them well. She wished, with her heart’s blood, that she had not uttered those poisonous final words to her mother.
It was then she decided to leave the City. She sensed Epona was out there somewhere beyond its confines, roaming free. Bird Girl was also convinced that once on the road, she might find somewhere a whole library still intact, in some sleepy town or village as yet untouched by the decay. She knew she would smell the library if she came close. It would smell as she imagines the sea smells, briny and sharp and full of promise.
In the absence of books, Bird Girl now strove to read the world; or rather, what was left of the world. Before joining up with Lucia and the others, she had dug potatoes for a while with the bunch of grimy, good-hearted folk who call themselves the Diggers. And so she had learned how to study and to read potatoes, and to dream away, with the cold clay soil freezing her fingers and wrists. She had seen a picture once in an old yellow-covered magazine of an Australian Aborigine. His naked body was completely covered in dried clay decorated with the most intricate spirals of colour, twining and twining, heading for some miraculous nub of power.
She had felt like him while she worked in the potato field. She had imagined herself to be long and lean and potent, simultaneously new-made and ancient, with the cold clay caking her arms.
The shapes of the potatoes were miracles in themselves. Some had a proboscis. Some had the huge flowing breasts and buttocks of the figurines people secreted thousands of years ago in caves. Yes, she had enjoyed her time with the Diggers. But there was one man among them who looked at her with such obvious lust, she grew more and more uncomfortable. One night she woke with his fetid breath on her face and had no choice but to knee him in the testicles. After that, she had gone on the move again until one lucky day, she met Lucia.
When Bird Girl first washed Lola (with the softest washcloth she could find, for the old lady winced when anything at all rough touched her skin), she wondered if the old girl had ever had to fend off a man with a well-aimed knee or her pointed nails. Or were all of Lola’s sexual experiences pleasing, or even ecstatic? Did the old lady actually have the many lovers she boasted of? Was she ever really a seductress or courtesan?
Cleansed of its patches of lurid colour, the old woman’s face was leadenly pallid, small as a child’s, and so cross-hatched with lines Bird Girl could not imagine Lola young. It bothered her that she could not do so, as if this failure was somehow a betrayal of the old lady’s growing attachment to her.
Initially, Bird Girl was extremely disappointed not to find the least scrap of reading material in the stone house. Then she realized that Lola’s life was probably itself a book. She found herself wanting to make up a life story for the old woman but always managed to resist the impulse. Why did she stop? Because to impose an imagined story on Lola seemed disrespectful? Or because this urge reminded her uncomfortably of the machinations of the EYE? There was a rumour the EYE had machines that could suck your brain cells dry of all you ever were, and rewire your neurons so that another being walked about in your skin.
What an abomination! To be emptied and then filled, as if your essence was just stuffing for a sausage.
No, Bird Girl reasoned with herself. Her wish to make up a rambunctious past for Lola — even a happy, rambunctious past — in no way resembled the horrific manipulations of the EYE. The truth was she wanted to protect Lola from harm, the way she imagined some women had a natural urge to protect a baby, although Bird Girl had never actually held a baby, or even seen many. None of The New Amazons pursued the artificial pregnancy route in the time Bird Girl was with them. Not at least, with any success. Growing up as the only child in the Armoury accounted in part, she supposed, for her self-confidence. In a sense, she had had ten mothers. There were more than ten in the cohort, of course, but quite a few of The New Amazons merely tolerated her presence or remained stolidly indifferent to her. And why not? Bird Girl had no illusions about every woman having a soul-deep need to nurture something small and helpless, and often — or so she understood — wet and stinky.
Lola doesn’t smell, whatever Candace might think. Does Candace think? Now, there was a question and not a
s cruel as it might appear on the surface.
As far as Bird Girl can see, Candace is a kind of puppet of her own making. Candace has apparently swallowed a line, an entire life-choreography in fact, and now simply jerks herself about to it. What amazes Bird Girl above all is that Candace seems quite oblivious to this, just as she seems unaware they all find her cheery homilies and intrusiveness so irritating. It is only Harry who habitually gives voice to that irritation, which endears him to Bird Girl all the more.
She likes to savour the irony of the situation: that while Candace simpers and chatters and thinks up insipid ways to bind them as a group, it is their shared contempt for her clumsy efforts that bring the five of them closer.
One had to feel sorry for her. Well, one didn’t have to, but Bird Girl does. In fact, what she feels for Candace (apart from endless annoyance and sometimes fury), is pity rather than sympathy. And pity can exude some pretty nasty miasmas: condescension, smug superiority, noxious self-regard. All deeply flawed and dangerous.
Would Candace ever see how artificial her own devices were? And a cruel question — does Candace have eyes under those blinkers? And an even crueller one — is Candace bright enough to be truly introspective? With all her gabble about synergy and accommodation (sugary mental group gropes, Bird Girl always thinks), Candace is apparently incapable of empathy.
Had Candace ever read a good book? For what better way was there to learn how to look out of the eyes of people absolutely unlike you: pig-headed old kings or guileless young women like Miranda in her brave new world, or even murderers, whether they committed their frightful deed by accident or by design? As many beings as there were good novels and plays and poems.
Based on Candace’s callous and despicable remarks about Lola, Bird Girl surmises she had never even tried to imagine herself inside the withered, spotted skin of a frail and elderly human being.
Well, as an imaginative act, it took courage. No doubt about it. Bird Girl finds Lola’s fragility both oppressing and terrifying. She dreamt that Lola got up from the bed and danced: a bungled pirouette and some faltering kicks of her bony, old limbs. No, “limbs” was too robust a word for those twig-like, vein-scored appendages of Lola’s. But a more accurate description, like “skin-covered bones” would sound disrespectful, if not doom-laden.
The most frightening part of her dream was when the dreaded thing happened and Lola fell. In the dream, Bird Girl felt the crack in her own bones, and Lola’s sharp little cry seemed to issue from her own throat. Bird Girl woke, with a dry mouth and a racing heart, in fear of the bone-grinding pain that had beset her poor crumpled Lola. In the final dream image, seared on the back of her eye-lids before she woke, she saw Lola lying absolutely motionless on the wooden floor, curled in on herself like an embryo in a womb.
If Lola fell and injured her skull, it would be the end. Just as Bird Girl assumes it would be the end if someone dropped a baby on its fragile bulb of a head.
She does not like to dwell on how vulnerable human flesh and bone are, particularly at the beginning and end of life. This line of thought too often leads her to the conclusion that human beings must be a mistake. Or worse, that the human species is a deliberate joke perpetrated millennium after millennium by some hard-eyed soak in the sky, swilling down his ambrosia and having a good old belly laugh as he pulls human beings’ strings and another one falls on its head, or rams a stiletto into a neighbour’s kidney. Or...
Enough, Bird Girl, she tells herself. “Oh, that way madness lies,” as King Lear said.
She must lift up her mind, and concentrate on the tiny pulsing light inside her she thinks must be her soul. Bird Girl does not doubt that Lola has a soul. And she is always delighted to witness the old woman’s transporting joy as she meanders through the most cherished scenes from her past. Lola’s memories (or are they imaginings?) are often just highly vivid, disconnected fragments that nevertheless tantalize Bird Girl by their brightness and illogic.
She has come to see that Lola fixes her flitting memories by focusing on what she wore. “I had on my apricot sheath,” she will say. “When he slipped it over my head, there was a rustle of silk.
“The sound was like new leaves turning in the wind.
“He told me I looked as if I bathed in moonlight.
“He told me the word for ‘brightness’ in his language put together the signs for ‘moon’ and ‘sun.’” (Bird Girl relishes this mysterious allusion, which Lola often repeats. It seems so unlikely that one of Lola’s lovers was Chinese or Japanese. And if Lola had travelled so widely and been so adored, how had she ended up in this remote stone farmhouse?)
“His hands were delicate as doves, his body as lean and supple a lion’s.” (The image of the dove-like hands makes Bird Girl shiver in delight. She thinks “dove” is a lovely word, like the slip of a satiny tongue round one’s nipple.)
Sometimes Lola gets a bit more graphic. As in: “I wore my emerald-green ball gown. It was midsummer. Two beautiful young men came to me and waited upon me all night. Like moths to my green flame, he told me afterwards.
“They walked me to the riverside, where he was waiting and watching, in a rowboat just off the shore. He watched as they stripped me under a great spreading tree. And oh, I was willing, for them to do it, and for him to watch.
“Such pleasure to be had from two soft young mouths, two strong pairs of hands, and a single watcher offshore. Oh, the moans I sent out from under that spreading tree as I came and I came and I came.
“How often, he asked me afterward when we lay in bed together, how often did you orgasm? I was exploding in the little boat, he told me, exploding as I watched you with the two young men.”
Bird Girl almost comes to orgasm spontaneously herself, listening to Lola and thinking of the two mouths, the four hands, and most especially, the exceptional, liberal-minded watcher.
Candace barges in on them.
“Ugh!” Candace says. “It’s unfortunate when they get to this stage. Their wandering often turns foul-mouthed.
“You don’t have to sacrifice yourself this way, you know,” Candace says. She lays a moist hand on Bird Girl’s shoulder.
“I admire your charity,” Candace simpers, with extravagant insincerity. “I really do. But you must weigh your priorities.”
Bird Girl turns to face her; puts on her very best round-eyed, innocent gaze. “Pardon?”
“We need you downstairs,” Candace confides. “The group needs you.
“The dynamics are faltering,” Candace adds; then immediately corrects herself: “Our centre needs strengthening.”
Lola begins to wheeze, and then to cough, generating much flying spittle. Bird Girl knows this is a ploy, even if Candace doesn’t.
“She doesn’t have long to go from the sound of her chest,” Candace remarks.
Lola rolls her eyes, and begins to make rude spluttering sounds, like eruptive farts. This is more than Candace can take.
“We’ll hold a little airing session this evening,” she says on her way out the door. “I’ll call you when we’re about to start, if you haven’t already joined us.” She bestows on Bird Girl one of her most painfully artificial smiles.
Bird Girl grimaces, amazed anew at how blind Candace is to her own manipulations. In the group’s five days in the stone house, they have all, with the exception of fretting Candace, found ways to occupy their time. Bird Girl tends and listens to Lola; Old Harry huddles together with Chandelier, telling the boy tales of his past and drawing diagrams of some kind in the dirt just outside the front door; Lucia prepares their meals, and works at a ball of clay she must have found somewhere.
The Outpacer, around whom Bird Girl now feels a bit uncomfortable, is often busy splitting wood in the barn — to keep fit, she presumes. Only Candace is at loose ends.
Bird Girl takes this to mean that Candace has few inner resources, other than revising her tedious theories of group dynamics and cohesion exercises.
Lola lets out a great sigh.
“Is that one gone?”
“Yes, for now.”
“Where was I?” Lola asks. “What was I wearing, little chick?”
“An emerald gown. There was a man watching you from a row boat.”
“Oh yes.” Lola is silent a moment. Bird Girl finds herself wishing she might one day experience the bliss written on the old woman’s face.
Oh my dove, Lola recites in apparent rapture, thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs.
“He was the finest,” she continues. “He told me pleasure was a great wheel. It did not matter where you got on or off, so long as you ran no one over.
“His left hand is under my neck, and his right hand doth embrace me.”
Could there be such a man, Bird Girl wonders, watching from his Pleasure Wheel in a state of supreme arousal, while his beloved frolicked with other men? This sounded not at all like grubby voyeurism — of which she’d seen quite enough in her sex trade years — but exalted adoration.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love, Lola says, her little face aglow. Bird Girl longs to know the source of these images. She has never been lucky enough to get her hands on many books of poetry, but she knows the genuine article when she hears it. She honestly believes she has an instinct for poetry, just as she has for smelling out books. Is this something gifted to her through her genes? Was her test-tube father a poet? She guesses that poetry has much in common with spells, and the old idea of working magic. Concentrated power, musical, sometimes resistant as a hard-shelled nut to your understanding. But with reading and rereading and mulling over, the meaning springs out at you and insight floods your brain at the speed of light. You feel a delicious pleasure then and it’s as if you’re floating.
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