The Butcherbird Stories

by A. S. Patric

  His passenger held the door open for another moment, closed it with a hard push. A comfortable taxi silence was hard to find for some. Or it was simply pleasing to see the same face again rather than another total stranger. Koschade’s heart returned to a rest rate and he thought it had probably been too long since he’d had a fistfight for him to know how he would manage one these days. Maybe all he was good for now was posturing.

  He drove without a destination, Maria Callas singing on random from his phone. Charles coasted along, heading towards the city through a residential area. He’d hit a major road soon. He had no idea what Callas was singing about. Even the titles of the songs meant nothing to him. Her voice was as much a nonsense to Charles as a songbird’s call, singing out from the woods. No matter how beautiful, such songs never made him want to enter the forest she’d lived in. He switched to ‘Wolf Like Me’, a track with maniacal drums and distorted guitars that was too raucous to play when he had a passenger.

  Charles stopped when he saw a cafe and sat down at a table by the broad window inside to drink from porcelain. He found that paper or styrofoam ruined the flavour of coffee. He had a couple of emails from friends he didn’t want to read. A text from his father, but he didn’t want to look at that either. He put his phone back into his pocket.

  Across the street he saw a collection of what had once been fine wood furniture arranged on a stretch of grass. Months had passed since the lawn was mowed. It sparkled a wet emerald in passing shafts of sunlight. The lush grass made the furniture look all the more striking. Dumped and then shifted into regular domestic configurations of bedroom, kitchen, dining room and lounge. An old armchair with a small red cushion. A bed, now in pieces, with a filthy mattress and ripped-open pillows. Damp feathers moved in the breeze as though some bird was stirring awake. Or settling to sleep. Beside the bed were two large lampshades with cracked spines. Drenched rugs dripped dirt from decades of use, worn thin and draped over the branches of a withered pagoda tree. A cheval mirror off to the side, the stand resembling a man’s fractured hips. All of these belongings out in the yard for a few days, quickly ruined by rain, so nothing had been taken away, yet long enough for graffiti to have been sprayed over the broken mirror.

  no remedy

  for

  a dead sky

  but

  to

  burn

  The cafe played radio music. He waited for a song he liked by Chet Faker to end. He didn’t know what it was called and the words dissolved even as he listened to them, mattering as little as they had with Callas. Charles finished his coffee while it could still almost scald his tongue. Stepped back out into the winter morning—a wind sweeping in that felt as if it were on the verge of crystallising.

  Across the road there was a For Sale sign in the yard with a sticker on it that said Sold. The white lace curtains in the window had long since become tattered. Used doilies now, he thought. He zipped up his jacket and pulled down his beanie. He checked his phone and was relieved, also distressed that there were no messages from his wife. Areti had told him last night not to call her— that she would call him at 10:00 a.m., after she’d talked with the doctors. It was nearly 9:00 a.m. He sent her a text anyway.

  A mother was walking past the sold weatherboard with her two boys. She had an umbrella over her head even though the rain had stopped. Distracted by a phone call. Her boys wore unbuttoned rain jackets and were following her until they came across the old house with its ejected contents. They stole away. One of them climbed up onto a kitchen chair to stand on the dining room table. He waved about his head, swordlike, a dusting wand he had found in a tin bread box at his feet. The other kid picked up a teapot and looked inside. Poured rainwater into the open chest of a grandfather clock fallen on its back.

  Their mother noticed they were not following. Called to them. Her voice overly harsh and loud in this affluent neighbourhood. And yet she was ignored. The boys imagined they would find something valuable or useful. Unrestrained, they might have wanted to explore the abandoned house as well. Charles imagined it was too dilapidated to be properly secured. Broken windows or locks and latches that no longer worked. Likely a demolition crew would be arriving soon. One of the kids picked up a glass paper weight and coiled his arm to throw it like a rock. She grabbed her boy by the wrist and dragged him away before he could take his shot at the cheval mirror.

  Koschade read the graffiti again and thought fire might also be a remedy for the tumbledown. It was a strange notion that Charles couldn’t quite set out in a proper thought. Wasn’t it a shame that no-one would burn down the weatherboard? A fire couldn’t be controlled safely enough. Toxins from old construction materials might be released into the air. Bulldozers and excavators will arrive to break it up instead. The fragments will then go into a skip and be carted away to a tip and thrown in with the remnants of other houses and the general debris of the suburbs. The weatherboard had contained life for two or three generations so cremation felt more fitting to him than mutilation. Koschade took a photo of the mirror with his reflection behind the graffiti.

  Areti texted as he sat in the car, warming his fingers at the dashboard heating vent.

  It had rained overnight and in the morning, petering out for a couple of hours as if easing away, but it resumed in a deluge. Charles Koschade stopped beneath the branches of the trees arching over the road near Albert Park Lake. In a clearway on Union Street. He switched off the radio and the GPS. He listened to the water drumming on the metal of the roof, the rain creating a reverberating mist on the bonnet of the car.

  He read Areti’s text again. The emoji forced a deeper breath—holding it for a long moment. And then he laughed at himself for it. An emoji had never brought tears to his eyes before. Before Areti he’d always hated the silly little yellow faces attached to a brief message. Rarely used them himself. He scrolled back through the thread of messages to the previous one, sent last night at 10:35 p.m.

  His response logged at 10:38 p.m. No reply from Areti. Maybe if he’d used an emoji Areti would have remembered it was a quote from Atlanta. It was the episode where Earn woke up next to his estranged wife—a joke about her morning breath. It’d been a while since they watched that episode. They’d both laughed.

  The wipers weren’t able to clear the windscreen. He let them beat uselessly left and right. It made Charles think of metronomes and the descriptive names for the various musical speeds. This was a tempo for the setting beyond vivacissimo—whatever the word for frantic or desperate time was in Italian.

  Pedestrians scuttled along the boulevard, holding onto their umbrellas, wet from their elbows down. Some didn’t have umbrellas. These people were tentative when they stepped out of their buildings, staying under the shelter of entrances for minutes, darting left and right as though searching for cover, and then decided on straight lines, striding ahead, drenched by the time they reached shelter.

  A woman with a glossy magazine held above her head ran through puddles barefoot, carrying her shoes, although most of the women Charles could see along the footpaths continued to wear their high heels. They kept their umbrellas low over their heads. Make-up might be kept pristine on their emotionless faces. We need our emojis, he thought. Hang them from earrings; changed at a signal from an app that monitors our moods from a phone. A bloke could wear one from a lapel, as once a gentlemen would sport a flower—a natural emoji from the nineteenth century.

  Traffic was slow yet ceaseless and chaotic with low visibility. Drivers leaned forward to peer over their steering wheels. One fellow drove by attempting to text a message and negotiate the chaos opening up on the road before him at the same time.

  A pedestrian halted at Koschade’s car, intent on crossing right there, not at the intersection. She didn’t have an umbrella and her glasses were spattered with water. Ready to cross for a minute. Standing beneath a tree which sieved the downpour into fine droplets. When she noticed Koschade in the car she grinned and shrugged, retreating back to the foo
tpath. It surprised him that a woman might still smile at a man sitting in a car looking at her the way he had. Her clothes were wet—clinging to her supple body. She was distracted, and the danger was in getting hit by a car rather than dealing with a sexual predator.

  Charles felt grateful for the smile she gave him. He didn’t have the sort of face or body that would assure people he was safe. Easy enough for someone looking at him to imagine the monstrous. Other pedestrians walked along the footpath with umbrellas. Easy for us to imagine all things in anyone, he thought. Everything and nothing at once.

  Koschade switched off his lights and turned off the wipers. Umbrellas and windscreen wipers were still the best we could do to cope with rain. It felt Old World, as though we hadn’t made any progress in dealing with rain for over a hundred years. Cars passed him by, slowly pushing through the storm. Charles blinked. Hadn’t been progress in some things for a thousand years. He winced and shook his head.

  How bad would the weather need to get before all the drivers stopped? Cars would crash. Slow collisions that would not kill, that might only crumple metal at the edges, leaving fragments of coloured plastic from automotive indicators. Traffic would halt when enough vehicles had dodgem-carred to a clustered halt. There would be a great beeping of car horns. What might in other circumstances feel an expression of the indomitable human spirit now made him close his eyes and wish they would just stop. As useless a desire as wanting to dispel a storm by standing in the middle of the street and thrusting up outstretched hands.

  The windows were turning white with the interior heat. Charles didn’t have any food. He should have had a meal in the cafe. Soon he’d be on the move again. Rain as heavy as this could only last five or ten minutes. Half an hour, max. There was a limit to how much water the clouds might hold. He couldn’t remember whether the biblical Flood had any scientific validation. Was it an event as factually established as the Ice Age?

  When he was a child there were news reports that an archaeologist had found what remained of the Ark up on a desolate mountain somewhere obscure, perhaps Armenia. He was young enough then not to instantly dismiss it as religious idiocy. The report showed hazy pictures of the outline of what appeared to be a massive ship. The great vessel, the one that carried the human race whole, saved everyone—right there in a ruin outlined by snow-capped rock. It reminded him of the show Doctor Who and the magical police box. The space within the Ark might have been nearly as spacious, compacting every bit of life down to the paired essentials. As though the entire spectrum of existence could be folded like a fan in God’s hand, collapsed to fit between two thin pieces of wood—unfurled again in sunnier weather with a flick of the wrist.

  He thought about how humanity found itself at some points in the life of the planet, as it was during the Ice Age, diminished to a few thousand people dotted across the entire globe. And how a ship really might have been enough to carry the whole of our species to a warmer, brighter world. Those starving, stumbling ancestors shivered in mountain caves instead, when the world froze or drowned down below. One of them waking from the Ark dream and whispering of a warm interior on a God-directed journey. A summer-bright expanse of grass—wide open fields with freshwater rivers flowing over pebbles— kept inside himself as secret as a soul. A murmured paradise in the darkness of that biblical dreaming.

  Charles remembered a mandarin he had put in the glovebox yesterday before going to the hospital. He glanced at the digital clock on his dashboard as he peeled the fruit. About twelve hours ago now. If he went slowly enough the rain would ease away by the time he was done eating. Some fruit didn’t have seeds. The genetically modified ones. This wasn’t that type. Perhaps a mandarin was already a modified fruit, a mutant that was bred because it was more consistently pleasant and had a less acidic sweetness than an orange, but especially because of its easy-to-peel skin. Skin that just fell away. Skin that even a child could tug from the fruit within. Each segment had one or two seeds. They made Charles think of embryos nestled in a womb, drawn to the centre of the fruit and its umbilical connection down to the roots. He spat out the seeds into his hand, and when he was finished he chucked the mandarin scraps out the bottom of his open door, knowing it was not likely anyone would be able to see him litter. Or if they did, to report him. He checked his phone—found no messages and felt too bleary to look for distractions on the little screen, like searching to see if the great Flood was real.

  The windows had entirely hazed over; he might have been buried in snow. Seeing ice and steam, thinking of the car as an igloo. When Charles was a child, he found out about the Eskimos and thought that’s what they lived in all the time—imagined towns constructed of igloos. A capital city with towers of ice. White palaces in the snow. But he’d seen pictures of their homes since, made from whalebone, driftwood and animal skins. Inside their huts were thick blankets and deep rugs with embroidered cushions. A space that might have been filled with the warmth and noise of children, of men and women calmly speaking with each other. He’d seen pictures only of isolated Inuit males when he was a child, alone in a wilderness of ice. He supposed the igloo was more often a temporary place to live in while hunting.

  He could hear Maria Callas singing again. The phone was not on mute, because of Areti. She might call soon. The rumble of traffic faded. The soprano’s voice was coming through a white partition, reminding him of the kind of screen he’d seen around a shower. It was still cold, but where she sang there was steam, so he knew it was warm. She might be close. He wasn’t sure. She had the kind of voice that could carry right through the vast space of an opera house. He took a sharp breath when he felt a gentle pressure at his hip. Shoving forward—a slow mass of moving fur coming around from behind him. He couldn’t see clearly enough. The frost of white affected his eyes. Only the grey bristled back. A tail lowering and slinking towards the sound of running water and that naked voice. Because she’s singing, he thought, she won’t hear me if I call out to her. She was used to the swelling sounds of an entire orchestra moving her through an aria. She was used to being shouted at by audiences who adored her and those who despised her; they even threw cabbage heads at Callas. And maybe what moved around him was simply a dog. She might welcome the hound as a pet. Charles was worried now. If she stopped singing her silence would mean it wasn’t a dog that had found her. It would be a much more dangerous beast.

  Charles woke when one of his back doors thumped shut. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep. A man sat in the back of his car. Koschade blinked through an awful sense of angry confusion, like he was coming to after being KO’ed by a UFC fighter rather than rousing from a brief nap.

  The rain continued to drum on the roof, so the man in the back of his taxi might have thumped on the window before entering. The new passenger kept his silence until he coughed into his shoulder. He might as well have stepped fully clothed in and out of a shower. Charles could hear him dripping onto the leather seat.

  Koschade kept his hands on the steering wheel. He did not propel himself out of his vehicle. He did not pull the man out with a good grip of his collar. He did not throw him sprawling onto the wet bitumen. Still no hello. Not a word. And because the man behind him did not speak, Koschade could keep his hands on the wheel. At two and ten. He imagined the clock, holding onto it as if to stop this moment. The next second threatened to turn him towards disaster. So he focused on the wheel in his hands. He rocked with the desire to annihilate anyone who would enter his domain while he slept. He reminded himself where he was, that the rage couldn’t free him anymore—that fists could not save him out in the world.

  “Where do you want me to take you?” he asked.

  Koschade glanced at the man in his rear-view mirror. The passenger was as old as eighty. He sat in the back of the taxi, not responding, disorientation in his eyes. Perhaps he had lost his hearing.

  Charles encouraged the surging agitation to dissipate. Breathing it out, as he’d been taught by counsellors. He took the last water
from a thermos Areti had bought him when he got the taxi. Charles turned the heater on to full.

  “Thank you,” the man murmured behind him. He lifted the palms of his hands to his forehead. Dropped them a moment later. “Thank you, Mr … Koschade,” he said, leaning forward to read his name from the dashboard identity card. When he turned in his seat to look at the old man directly, Charles noticed his passenger was shivering.

  “I turned on the heater to clear the glass. Your warmth wasn’t on my mind.”

  “My thanks wasn’t for the heater,” he said, taking a breath and dropping his shoulders. Gratitude for not being thrown back out into the rain.

  “Sure,” Koschade said. “OK.”

  His passenger had decided to avoid mentioning the restrained violence he’d seen in Charles. Acknowledging anger could sometimes draw it back to the surface after it had settled. Face to face, the man smiled—would have offered his hand if it was possible to shake hands.

  “My name’s Thomas Avon.”

  He had a smile that seemed pathetic to Koschade. Avon was old enough that he retained an outmoded code of civility. He removed an ivy cap that had soaked through to his grey head.

  “My luggage is still outside,” Avon told him.

  Charles nodded. It took him a few seconds to realise that this meant it was his duty to get out and put Avon’s belongings into the boot of the taxi.

  The streets were rushing with oil-black water. The noise of the traffic was muffled and yet felt brittle in the cold. Trams moved up and down St Kilda Road—rolling along the wet rails like illuminated cargo containers on steel rollers, advertising Air Asia with a plane pictured lifting into an open, bright-blue sky, and the face of Cosette advertising Les Miserables playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

  The windows of the taxi were translucent but the lights were on inside, and soon the heater would clear the glass. For now he could see the round shape of Avon’s head through the back window. It made him think of the seeds visible through the membrane of the mandarin.