How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  “Yes.” He nodded, or his chin moved inward, toward his neck.

  “Okay.”

  As we left the room I could hear the sound of his old lame breath dragging in and out. I ran outside and sat in the gutter.

  Benjamin died the next morning, in Ivy’s arms. That was how he wanted it.

  That night, Eddie and I climbed up on the roof of our house. Eddie went there to smoke a cigarette. I sat there to look at the sky. There was a huge motionless cloud. It felt as if something had just stopped: the forwardness of life. All the speaking, the gusts of voices, telling and asking and cutting up the silence, were just for a moment extinguished by the great sheet of darkness that rose up in the cloud. For a moment even Ruth Warlock’s picture was gone from my mind. Everything had gone. There was just that dark sky curtain hanging between us and the rest—whatever the rest was. Eddie put out his cigarette.

  “You thinking about Benjamin?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  And then the cloud passed and it became too cold to sit there. I went and dug up that book about Janet the housewife, but I didn’t read it, I just smelled it.

  chapter thirteen

  Hope Street went downhill. A long narrow street with old weatherboard houses on either side. I hardly had to pedal, I just sat on the seat and looked at the houses going by. Nice houses, I thought, probably with nice families in them too. Cyril Jewell House sat at the end, tucked in an elbow in the road. Not far away there was a freeway, but you could only see the curved cement walls that blocked out the noise. It was a dead end, actually, and right opposite it there was a shut-up timber factory with yawning black windows and huge metal roll-up doors. Cyril Jewell House wasn’t an old red house on a windy hill, as I’d imagined. It was a sprawling brick veneer with shrubby stone garden bits, tucked in a decline between the Tullamarine Freeway and Lacey’s Timberwood Products. An end-of-the-line kind of place.

  As I locked my bike up I could hear a wailing sound coming from one of the windows. At first it was like a hungry cat moaning for dinner, but as I listened I thought there were words in the moan. One word repeated over and over. A person’s name. It was an embarrassing, private sound. I felt I shouldn’t be listening.

  Inside, facing the door, was a big counter. To the right there was a very large open room. Around the edges of this room, facing inward, sat the residents. A woman in a purple quilted dressing gown sat in a wheelchair at the edge of the hall. She was neither in nor out of the room, but hovered on the edge as if she just wanted to watch from a safe distance. Leaning at the front desk was a large Maori woman talking to another woman, who held a mop over a bucket and leaned on one hip. A man walked past and popped a sweet in the mouth of the woman in purple, and the large woman interrupted her conversation to call out to him.

  “That’s enough, Mr. Borgello. Dorothy’s had enough. No more.” Mr. Borgello seemed to derive great amusement from this telling off. He giggled, hunched up his shoulders, and shuffled off down the hall.

  This was almost the only activity in the whole room, despite the number of people who occupied it. They were all very old and were arranged in large padded vinyl chairs, which folded and bent and extended out like small airplanes. It looked like a very tired carnival. Quite a few of them seemed to be sleeping. Others looked out as if their eyes were just half-opened windows. I was staring at a whitish bloke in a corner who was doing a jigsaw puzzle. He lifted the pieces slowly and examined them, turning them around in his hand. He was concentrating so exactly that you could tell there wasn’t a single interfering thought or doubt, and I wished I could concentrate like that. Next to him, there was a pale pink, delicately slumped woman, whose drooping head made her look like a dying hibiscus.

  “Can I help you?” said the large woman. She had just caught me gawking at the old people as if they were some kind of live show of the near-dead.

  “I’m here to see Ivy Clarkeson.”

  “Oh. You’re a relative of Ivy’s, aren’t you?”

  “She’s my grandmother. But I haven’t seen her for a long time. I live in the country.” I felt I had to explain. She must have thought we were a terrible lot to leave Ivy alone in a nursing home and never visit. It was Mum’s fault. She didn’t like us to see Ivy. She said Ivy spoiled us.

  “That’s all right. Ivy’s got photos of you and your brother on her shelf, from when you were younger. She’ll be thrilled to see you. She always talks about you and Eddie. I think she’s in her room. I’ll take you.”

  We walked down a corridor. The floors were covered in gray lino and stank of piss and chlorine. I started feeling anxious. Was Ivy going to be as old and emptied-out as these people? We went past the room where the wailing was coming from. I saw a very old woman curled up on her side, lying on top of a single bed, like a pinkish shell tossed on its thin edge. She kept wailing, just as if she’d got stuck on a groove and couldn’t get off. The woman called out to her as we passed. “Hello, Vera,” she said, but we didn’t stop.

  “What’s she saying?” I asked, though I could hear the words now: pain, pain, pain.

  “Oh, she does it all the time. Sometimes she calls out ‘I’m buggered, I’m buggered,’ or some other complaint. Today it’s ‘pain.’ Look, this is where they can get their hair done.” Her large brown arm swiftly flung open a door to reveal a cell-like room with only a sink and a chair. “The hairdresser comes every month for perms or colors. And this is Ivy’s room.” She gave a gentle knock and then pushed open the door, saying, “Ivy, look, you’ve got a visitor.”

  Ivy sat in a big armchair next to her bed, facing the window. She wasn’t reading or watching television or doing a puzzle. She was just sitting there, so still and quiet and gentle that it made you feel you ought to whisper and kneel, as if she was a holy person having a spiritual moment. An apricot and blue floral dress hung over her small, bony body, and as we entered, her thin arms moved slightly, like startled branches in a sudden gust of wind. Then she turned toward us in an awkward flurry, as if we’d woken her up. Her eyes squeezed together, trying to focus.

  “What?” she said crossly, her bony hands clutching at the sides of the chair. The woman pushed me forward and whispered loudly, “It’s Manon.” Then she closed the door and left us.

  “Manon?” said Ivy, and her voice climbed up and seemed to dissolve.

  “Hi, Ivy.” I bent down and took her hand. It was covered in sun spots.

  “Manon?” she said again, and she gripped my hand tightly. Her other hand rose, trembling, to her mouth. She seemed pale and worried as she scanned my face. Then she turned away and looked at the window, her hand tapping at her lips.

  “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, and when she turned back to look at me there were tears in her pale old eyes. It did a strange thing to me, seeing Ivy then. It grabbed at my heart and made tears come to my eyes. I hadn’t cried for a very long time and I felt ashamed of myself. I went red in the face and wiped my eyes and then I gazed wildly around the room, since I felt I had to do something rather than just stand there with tears in my eyes. Ivy reached for me and then I was in her arms, next to a cheek, soft and loose like an old hankie. Ivy smelled like lavender and soap, her eyes shone, and she patted the bed, indicating for me to sit down.

  “Look!” she cried, pointing proudly to the bookcase. It was mainly empty except for three photo frames standing side by side and a small silver urn. There was the photo I recognized of me and Eddie, taken on Christmas Day. My arm was in a plaster cast. I’d broken it trying to fly off a rope at school. I did fly, just for a moment, outspread in the air like a swallow, like a balsa-wood-eagle show-off. Then I landed. A belly whacker. My arms cracked on the ground. I only broke one though, and I didn’t cry because the whole playground was watching.

  Hanging from my other hand there was that doll, Velvet. When you pressed her belly button the hair shortened, disappearing into a hole at the top of her head. You could pull the hair long again whenever yo
u wanted, but I cut the hair with Mum’s nail clippers to see if it would still grow. It didn’t, and Velvet looked like a punk. When Mum saw, she said I didn’t deserve to have nice things since I ruined them, but I never meant to ruin Velvet.

  In the photo, Eddie was wearing red shorts and thrusting his chin forward, looking very pleased with himself, for no reason; no doll, he was just pleased. Typical of Eddie, I thought, and I sighed.

  Next to that photo was Ivy’s wedding photo, in black and white. Benjamin stood tall and proud, one hand holding a pair of white gloves, the other wrapped around his new wife, in an owning kind of way. Ivy held a bunch of lilies. She smiled calmly. A veil foamed around her feet. She wore an ivory satin dress with fifteen buttons on the sleeve. She’d made it herself.

  I picked up the third photo. It was of my parents in a restaurant. Mum was looking at Dad; he was looking at the camera. She had a low-cut dress on and her hair was swept up. She was looking at Dad in a way I’d never seen before, as if she thought he was lovely.

  “That’s your parents,” said Ivy, leaning forward. “That was their engagement. Before you were even born. We were at Florentino’s, in the city. Did you ever go to Florentino’s?”

  I shook my head and replaced the photo. Ivy leaned back in her chair and gazed up at me. “Would you look at you, Manon. Can you believe it? You’re so grown-up. Look at your dress. My, you look lovely, really lovely. How long since I saw you? How long?” Her hand was pressing into her chest.

  “Not since Eddie—”

  “Oh!” she cried. There was a sad look in her eyes and she nodded slowly. “It’s a shame, darling. That’s all. It’s a great shame. Your mother—” Her voice evaporated into the air, while her hand clutched at her throat. Ivy was suddenly quiet.

  “Ivy?”

  Ivy stirred and touched my cheek.

  “Manon. One day you must go there. To Florentino’s. You tell Georgio who you are. Say you’re Ivy and Benjamin Clarkeson’s only granddaughter. He’s the headwaiter. He’ll remember me and Ben. We went there every anniversary. Third of May. Every one. Can you believe it?” She patted me on the knee and grinned. “Tell me, my darling, tell me, have you got a boyfriend?”

  “No,” I said. I wanted to say yes. I really wanted to tell Ivy about last autumn. But it was a long story and I wasn’t sure a grandmother would understand.

  “No?” She laughed and patted my knee again. “You will have,” she said. I steered the subject away.

  “Ivy, is it all right here? I mean, do you like it?”

  “Here?” cried Ivy. “Oh, my dear, no one likes it here. No one wants to be here. Oh, the nurses are very good, but no one wants to be here. My God, have you seen the dayroom? Have you seen them all sleeping there?”

  “But you’re not like them, Ivy.”

  “No, not yet. There’s a couple of us here still got our wits. Me and Patricia and Bert Gammon. And Selma Blake too. Selma’s all right, only she talks too much. Gives you an ache in the ear after a while.” Ivy rearranged herself in the chair and nodded toward the door. “Have you seen the courtyard? They had to build the wall higher because some of them keep trying to go back home.” She gave a little snort and then shrugged, her thin old elbows squawking out to the side.

  “You should have been living with us, Ivy.” At this Ivy’s eyes glazed over, her gaze drew back within, and she stared straight ahead into space and drifted off. I watched her. Her mouth widened into a thin pale line. Ivy was an old lady now. Her face had no more padding in it. I couldn’t help but see that she was near the end of her life, and it gave me a great pain in my heart. Even though I never saw her, I depended on Ivy being there. I loved Ivy in a very true way. Ivy was what gave me a family feeling, a proper family feeling, where someone hugged you and asked questions and told you that you were a beautiful girl, not hopeless. The thought of Ivy not being there was making me grip my leg so tight it hurt. When Ivy returned, her face lit up, as if she’d just seen me for the first time again.

  “Hey, Ivy, let me give your feet a rub. Are they sore?”

  After Benjamin died in his big blue bed, Ivy became thin and frail like a swan, and her bones seemed to give in. She was often falling over and breaking her knee or her foot. When she was in the hospital, I massaged her feet because they were infected and nothing was making them better, not the drugs or creams. She claimed only rubbing them really helped. I worried about Ivy’s feet; I worried that she was losing her footing, that after all those years of being Benjamin’s wife, her feet were abandoning her now. I imagined her dissolving slowly, starting at her feet. So I rubbed those feet, to coax them back, to show them the ground.

  After Benjamin died in his big blue bed, the flat was sold and Ivy had to move into Cyril Jewell House. I helped her to sort out her clothes—which ones to take, which ones to give to the Salvation Army. She had four cupboards full of clothes, and each piece of clothing was a decision. To leave it behind was also to leave something of herself. She’d been the wife of a successful man, that was her role, an enviable role, which she performed with pride. There were hats. A hat for every outfit, worn once and packed away in a round box, wrapped in shadows and time. Ivy and I had opened each one as if it was a gift, a new strange flower that contained within its veils, ribbons, edges, and floppy brims, the faded music of another time: a carnival, glasses of champagne, a crowd of people being polite, being impolite. So we stood there in the hats, pulling out dresses and shirts (most of them still wearing the yellow smudges of spilled wine or chicken casserole), pulling out lavender dressing gowns, Chinese silk pajamas, beaded handbags. And then there was the wooden chest of drawers, the one she was leaving till last.

  Once, as a child, I’d found a set of false teeth in the top drawer. I ran downstairs, holding the teeth in the palm of my hand like an inexplicable insect I had found in the garden. I shouted, “Look, teeth, teeth, I found teeth!”

  Ivy had been embarrassed. She had quietly taken them and put them away and not explained the teeth at all. She had simply said that I should not look in those drawers because they were private. Private. I whispered the word. It excited me.

  She didn’t go to the top drawer. She kneeled down and opened the bottom drawer and pulled out, one by one, a suite of sumptuous nightgowns and black lace slips. She held them up to her, long satin flowing things, and thrust a pale pink one in my direction, saying she was too old for pink. She kept the rest. I never wore the pink satin nightie. It was more something Mum would have worn.

  “Ooh, that’s lovely, thank you,” she said as I kneaded her old feet. “Tell me, how’s your dad? Are you here all on your own?”

  “Dad’s fine. I came on my own.”

  “Oh, and where will you stay?”

  “With a friend called Helena. A theater director!”

  “A theater director,” repeated Ivy vaguely and I could tell her mind had gone soft again. Perhaps the effort of talking tired her out. I sat quietly and waited for Ivy to speak. I was looking at the window with the slat blinds. There was sun coming through in thin planks. Leaves scratched by outside on the street. Ivy sighed and said how it was sad. I didn’t know what it was she was referring to exactly—maybe it was the dead leaves being tossed in the gutter. I always felt sad about that myself. In fact, I bet everyone feels that good-bye feeling in autumn, especially. Autumn is the sad season, but once there’s a true sadness within you, autumn will sing it soft and slow in your heart. It’s because of the turning. In that last blaze of red, in the biting air and the slow drift and fall of leaves, you see the slight farewell that life is always repeating. You know you can’t hold it still. You watch it go.

  That last autumn I started going to the orchards after school, instead of going home. It wasn’t any good at home when Eddie wasn’t there. With no one to help negotiate Mum’s moods, I got the full blast of them. So I just dumped my schoolbag, grabbed some biscuits, called Mou, and we went. Not only that, I didn’t hang out with Lucy at the sawmill or the gas station
anymore. I just didn’t feel like it.

  I’d always naturally liked autumn best of all the seasons. In fact, if I’d been a season instead of a girl, that’s what I would have been. I wouldn’t have chosen to be autumn, I’d be summer if I could, but that’s not how I was. Lucy Brixton was summer. So was Eddie. But I was always autumn. I liked the gold, shaking leaves and the long slow movement of the skies and the bruised look of summer sinking away. Summers were fierce and bright, blasting down over the fields, turning the grass into a crackly straw and drying up the creek. It was too hot to walk up the dirt road in summer, but by the time apple season came, it was too cool for swimming and just right for walking. It was glowing and fresh outside, and you could walk anywhere and not have to worry about flies or sunburn or snakes.

  The apple trees stood in long lines. It was best up the back, near the surrounding bush, where the trees were older and larger, with bigger canopies. There were pear trees there too, and you couldn’t see any roads, just the bush and the cold storage shed and the big stack of wooden crates that sat on top of the hill like a badly built castle. The young trees at the front lined the roads and had their middles cut out of them and their branches pruned in funny U shapes. They looked as if they were reaching their arms up, waiting for the heavens to unleash something upon them: a shower of gold or just plain forgiveness. Not that apple trees need forgiveness.

  I walked down the rows looking for Eddie and Harry. Usually I could find them because of Harry’s habit of whistling. He had a very good, tuneful whistle, which floated through the trees and skipped around and caught the edge of your mind, so you opened your ears and listened. And it lifted your spirits to hear a little tune like that, because it was jaunty and breezy and gave you a hopeful feeling, the feeling you get just before a holiday.

  When I found them I plonked myself down on the grass and leaned back on my arms and stayed there a while. Mou gave up on the walk for a while too, and he rolled on his back or gnawed on an apple. The last shafts of sun fell between the trees. No one said much. I tugged at the grass and watched.