White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  “The fact that a week after Williams’s murder Nichols shows remorse, tells you he’s got things to put straight”—he grinned, and this time he lifted his eyebrows at her, asking, Yes? Follow?—“strengthens our case,” he finished.

  On Tuesday, a letter came by special delivery from the minister for science, technology, and the environment, saying that Diana had been appointed to the Ethics Committee of the Research, “but due to a delay in the ratification of appointments, you will be restricted to observer status for several weeks.” “What?” she shouted. “What’s going on?” She was so angry, it was several minutes before she read the next sentence, which said that in the meantime, she was welcome to attend meetings, and a security pass to the Research was available at the administration building, to be collected as soon as she liked.

  Diana had set aside the whole week for flying the peregrine falcon, to have him ready for release before the eagle’s training began. Each morning when she drove him out to the flying ground, she paused beside the eastern fence, at the back of the lab complex, and with binoculars examined the buildings. She was memorizing the shape of each building, where its windows were placed, and how many there were. Chimpanzees, she reasoned, would need to be kept in a section that was walled off from the rest of the lab complex. When, at last, she could tour the Research, she intended to walk the length of every building, counting the windows.

  The falcon, meanwhile, had stopped tearing out his breast feathers and was flying more dynamically, but he was still an unstable bird. His high-pitched, staccato “chak-chak-chak-chak” was so insistent that after an hour in close company with him, her ears rang. Out at the flying ground, he missed his prey time and again or, if he struck it, failed to bind it with his talons. He often dived after the food he had dropped, plummeting into bushes and sometimes getting stuck. Once, he almost flew into the Cyclone-wire fence. On Wednesday, in a fit of megalomania, he tried to fell a swan. The swan flew to water, as the falcon should have realized it would. Diana watched from the shore, blasting on the whistle she wore round her neck, shouting “Falco!,” warning him to let go. He ignored her, and the swan dragged him into the lake and tried to drown him. Somehow, he shook free, mounting from the water with lashing wing strokes. The next day, Diana noticed, his hunting improved.

  All week she had been careful not to let the falcon see the eagle, because she feared that the sight of the larger bird might send him into a jealous decline. On Friday morning, she thought, This is ridiculous, and with the unhooded peregrine standing on her fist, she strolled to the eagle’s mews. The eagle was standing in majestic profile, her gaze fixed on the sky. After a while she shook her mane feathers, like a woman loosening her hair. The hooked face turned abruptly, and she glanced insolently at her visitors. Immediately, the peregrine went into a frenzy of bating and screaming, but all at once the eagle pinned him with her eyes. The falcon froze.

  He had traveled so well on the drive out to the flying ground that morning, Diana decided as she got close to the Research that she could safely leave him in the van for a few minutes while she collected her security pass.

  It was a bright, hot day, with a sky the color of laundry bluing. There would be no rain for a few days, from the look of the weather, but there had been more than twelve millimeters in the past fortnight, and already the barley grass was coming up. On the drive out she had seen farmers sowing oats in some paddocks and in others spraying against earth mites. The spray everyone used, Le-Mat, killed foxes and rabbits and other small animals. For the next month she would have to be on the lookout for poisoned hunting birds. Meanwhile, the oats would sprout in a yellow-green fuzz across the wide, flat fields, drawing flocks of hundreds of galahs. They uprooted the sprouting oats to eat the seeds underneath. Years ago, when she was a child, she and Morrie had sat on adjoining fence posts and shot at them, laughing maniacally. As a shot rang out, the flock would explode into the air like a pink firework.

  She wondered again about Morrie: all week there had been no sign from him—although he must be needing supplies by now, she thought. His method of asking for things was to leave an empty container of whatever he wanted next to the old fence. Normally, he required a bag of flour a month, and it was five weeks since she had brought him any.

  When she reached the gatehouse at the front entrance, she was directed to the top floor of the administration building, to Joe Miller’s office. His secretary was a soft, middle-aged woman who came to the gallery sometimes to buy small gifts for her grandchildren. Once, Diana had taken her out to the aviary to see a beautiful blue-gray harrier that had flown into telegraph wires. He could never fly free again, but there was a breeder in West Australia who would care for him and had a harrier hen with whom he might be happy in captivity. The woman’s expression had become childlike as she gazed at the bird. “Look at the white spots on his wings!” she whispered.

  She had ready in an envelope Diana’s electronic key, plus an ordinary one for a padlock, both welded to a tag saying they were issued to Diana Pembridge exclusively, and unauthorized use would be prosecuted. The electronic key opened the red-and-white boom at the main entrance and another at the entrance to the laboratory complex, she explained. “And this is for the gates in the perimeter fence. We’ll be changing to an electronic system for them, too, in a few weeks. Meanwhile, this key opens all of them.”

  As Diana took them, the woman added, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but now you’re allowed to go wherever you like, you know—so you don’t have to detour around the outside to get to the lake. You can drive straight through.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It was agreed to at a debate about the freedom of movement of Ethics Committee members. It’s in the minutes.”

  Diana pocketed the keys and galloped downstairs to her van. To be able to drive straight through the Research would cut ten minutes off every trip, saving her forty minutes a day—not to mention how useful it would be for checking the lab complex from the front.

  But when she set off down the long, smooth road, the familiar terrain of home with its violation of unfamiliar buildings made her mentally queasy. For years after this land had ceased to belong to her, she had yearned for it with an almost animal force; now she felt her passionate attachment had loosened, while her love for it had grown. Her grandfather had begun the desecration, ring-barking the forest and introducing hard-hoofed animals that injured the soil. The love she felt for this landscape was, partly, for its endurance.

  At the gate closest to the flying ground, she discovered that the hasp on the padlock was still cut. She drove through, parked, and went to the old fence. There was still no sign from Morrie. She glanced at the house on the ridge to make sure nobody was watching from the veranda, then climbed through the strands of barbed wire and, at the tree line, shouted, “Morrie! Are you okay?”

  After a couple of minutes, she entered the cool, dim pine forest. She had scrambled no more than ten meters up the slope, when a large rock came rolling down. A smaller one flew through the branches above her head and dropped a couple of meters behind her. “Cut it out!” she yelled. Another rock flew overhead. He’d spent five years in jail for the murder of Doug Pembridge and Louise Williams when Jack Williams walked into the police station one morning and confessed he’d done it. That night, Jack hanged himself. Morrie returned to Kalunga an old man.

  Diana ran back down the slope.

  In forty-eight hours the improvement in the falcon was breathtaking.

  The moment Diana threw him from her hand that morning, he became a blade in the sky. He flashed and cut. His long, tapered wings scythed the air.

  A small flock of ganggangs was feeding in the trees on Mount Kalunga. Diana could not see them, but she knew they were there because from the treetops came noises like rusty hinges. The falcon, after flying for only a few seconds, spotted their red crests against the pine foliage and zoomed in close to the canopy to try to flush them out. At first the cockatoos stuck together and swoope
d to lower branches, but he fluttered down and kept harassing until he panicked two birds into breaking from cover. In desperation, they flew for the open sky, where no bird can outfly a falcon. The chase was fast and magnificent. The peregrine rocked and weaved after the fleeing parrots and dispatched one in midair with a strike on the back of its head. He dropped it at Diana’s feet, landed on her fist, and hurriedly swallowed the piece of fresh chicken that was his reward. Then he went up after the second ganggang. It was dead in less than a minute.

  The day before, he had stayed away from the lake, as if he were fearful of it after his near drowning, but now, when a black duck flying near the foreshore caught his attention, he headed for the water, stalking it so skillfully, flying underneath and maneuvering in its blind spot, that until he burst on it from behind, the duck did not know he was there. Diana whirled in excitement, yelling “Hooray!”

  She rewarded the peregrine with more chicken from the bag on her hip and threw him up for the fourth time, feeling her blood mount in excitement. Sometimes falconing seemed like a shadow falling across her memory, as if all she were doing was remembering how to work a hunting bird, and in the calls and gestures made between herself and the animal, the past connected perfectly to the present. At these times she felt the seamless web of life stretching through her, connecting her to every other living being.

  After forty minutes, seven bright, limp corpses lay at her feet.

  She glanced furtively toward the house before putting a brace of ducks in her bag. She knew she must set the falcon free today, without keeping him in the hack box. Peregrines could get into the habit of hunting for fun, like humans, and once you had a killer bird, you had to put it down. She imagined him soaring away from her, his horizon growing wider, as she dwindled to a dot below.

  The bird was drifting about three hundred meters above her, a fleck in the sky, resting up there on his tapered wings. The Alymeri jesses on his ankles would have to be cut off before he returned to the wild. She gave a blast on the whistle and, squinting up, cried, “Falco!” In the sheer blue air the soaring fleck paused, then began a wide, slow downward spiral. For every falconer there are three sublime moments, and two of them can happen only once. The first is the moment of taming. The last is the instant of setting free. But the other, the daily glory, was this—to call a hunter from the sky to one’s hand.

  The spiraling fleck gradually gathered speed. Seventy meters above her, the peregrine folded his wings, squared his shoulders, and stooped. He plummeted like a falling bomb. Twenty meters above her head, he was traveling at more than two hundred kilometers an hour—then he flared his wings and alighted on her fist as delicately as a leaf.

  “Remarkable!” Parker said to the company in general. He handed the binoculars to one of the boys.

  As a special treat, everyone from U-1 had gathered for morning tea on the upstairs veranda because Steve had turned twenty-three that day. Sonja had prepared a cake and little sandwiches but had to dash back to her office for a meeting. “Lek will look after us,” Parker said.

  He knelt beside Lek to demonstrate the focusing mechanism on the binoculars. She gasped when suddenly she trapped Diana in the lens. “Lord Buddha says good. Good to let birds fly away.”

  “I don’t think you quite understand,” Parker said. “She’s not letting him go; she’s hunting.” Above Lek’s head he said to the boys, “Falconing happens to be illegal in Australia. I’ll have to raise that at the next Ethics Committee meeting.”

  They sniggered.

  “Fax the minister,” Steve suggested.

  Lek was intent on the scene being played out near the mountain. “Look! Bird is free!” she said.

  Diana had cut the jesses from the falcon’s legs and tossed him away again. She was already running for her van.

  The van took off, followed by the fluttering bird. Both vanished behind a hillock but a few minutes later reappeared, inside the Research now, the falcon still giving chase. His head was down, and he was screaming so loudly his cries were audible to them on the veranda. He hovered down to the level of the driver’s window, as if pleading to be let inside, but the window was closed and through the glass they glimpsed a face staring straight ahead.

  “How the hell did she get in here?” Parker muttered. “Those idiots in administration must have given her a key.”

  “What’ll we do, Doc?” Freddie asked.

  “Nobody can get into U-1,” Parker answered, half to himself.

  Their attention remained fixed on the chase. The van had now passed the turnoff to Sonja’s house and reached flat ground.

  “I calculate she’s doing sixty-five K,” Steve said. “The bird’s lost the race.”

  Suddenly the falcon beat away with thrashing strokes, banked, turned, flew back, then flashed forward again, easily outdistancing the van. Then he veered into a long U-turn, rose higher and higher, his tail fanned and his white breast glowing. He was heading back toward the lake. As he passed over the house he uttered a sharp, wild cry.

  “Too much cry,” Lek said. She handed back the binoculars with a puzzled expression.

  “What is it?” Parker said.

  “Ebery animal has Buddha nature and Buddha sound, isn’t it?” She had a vertical crease between her eyebrows.

  “Absolutely.” Parker smiled in anticipation of the nonsense toward which her mind was working. A glance to the boys alerted them that they should listen.

  “Why Sailor and Lucy have no Buddha sound?” Lek asked.

  “Hmm,” Parker said. “Freddie, can you enlighten us on this conundrum?”

  Freddie, who had met a computer on his thirteenth birthday and found true love, screwed up his face, as he always did when Lek asked a question. “I don’t understand the problem,” he said to Parker.

  “Lek asks, Where is the Buddha voice of Sailor and Lucy, and does their not having one mean that their Buddha nature—surely you remember what Buddha nature is, Freddie?—is somehow diminished?”

  Freddie struck himself on the forehead with the flat of his hand. “Riiiight,” he said. “Well, Lek, it’s like this: we cut their vocal cords.” He pointed to his throat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We cut their vocal cords so they don’t make a nuisance of themselves.” He again pointed to his throat and made a slicing motion. “It doesn’t hurt,” he added.

  Lek felt her soul slip out of her throat like a handkerchief pulled from a magician’s sleeve. Her dark bean-shaped eyes blinked for a moment, as if she had not understood, then she collapsed with a thump. The men gazed down at her in amazement.

  “Now look what you’ve done, you great sweaty goon!” Steve said.

  They tried maneuvering her so her head was lower than her heart, but she remained a lolling, unconscious lump. “C’mon,” Parker ordered. “You take her feet, Freddie.” They carried her into the bedroom and laid her on Sonja’s bed. Parker stayed watching her, while Freddie got a glass of water.

  The boys had tidied up the teacups and were trudging down the veranda steps when Sonja returned.

  “Where’s John?” she asked.

  “In the bedroom with Lek.”

  Sonja stared.

  “She fainted,” Freddie called as Sonja bustled past.

  Parker was sitting upright on the bed with a glass held to Lek’s mouth when his wife burst in. “What are you doing?” she said. The tableau before her was more dreadful than anything she had imagined. In her own bed! In broad daylight!

  He put a finger to his lips, buying time to collect himself. He had been fondling Lek’s breasts to help her regain consciousness and had developed something of an alp in his trousers. “Just coming round,” he whispered.

  She’s pregnant, Sonja thought. He’s made her pregnant.

  Lek opened her eyes slowly and kept opening them until they were wide with fright. “Excuse me,” she said. “Bery sorry. Silly.”

  Parker had never seen her so meek. Sonja smiled and took her hand. “Will you be abl
e to go back to work?” she asked in a concerned voice.

  “Oh, yes. Bery silly. All right now,” Lek said.

  Around midnight on Friday, Tom and Billy crept out of bed. They had trained themselves to wake in the middle of the night, when they could be certain their grandmother was asleep.

  They made their way on foot through cool, silent streets until they reached Fig Tree Gully Road. Tonight would be their first adventure in almost a week, since the rousing they got from Grandma after she had discovered the things in the chookhouse. For four nights she had stayed awake almost all night, watching to make sure they did not go out. But she had fallen into a deep sleep at eight o’clock in front of the television, and they felt sure she would sleep all night.

  Outside Diana’s house, they stood beneath the bedroom window, listening. “Wish she’d snore, like Grandma,” Billy said. There was silence above them. The van was parked on the other side of the house, but although the sound of starting the engine seemed as loud as an earthquake, somehow the stone walls muffled it, and Diana never woke.

  Often, they just drove around for a while, but on special nights (when the petrol tank was full), they went on long trips, driving out to the lake or to neighboring towns, not getting back until almost dawn. On these forays they found all kinds of useful things: money, a chain saw (which they had hidden down by the river), a box of canned peaches, and other objects people left lying around. They had a fire extinguisher, a baby bouncer, and Kerry Larnach’s bolt cutters. Twice they came home with kittens, but Grandma made them put a note in the news agent’s window saying “Lost Kitten,” and people took the kittens away. They were not allowed to have a puppy either, because Grandma said they were not responsible enough to look after it, since they forgot to water the hens and one died of thirst. Their most exciting trip now was to go to the Research, where, ten days earlier, they had cut the padlocks off all the gates. They had been back once already but had so far only brushed the surface of possibilities inside the Cyclone-wire fence. The guards with flashlights and nightsticks made going there even more thrilling.