How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  “He’s not impressed by all that shit that those girls go on with, you know.”

  “What shit?”

  “You know what I mean. He doesn’t care who looks good and who doesn’t and who’s on the footy team, who’s got money, who’s cool. He doesn’t even go to parties. You know what he likes?” Eddie laughed but not derisively. “Trees. He’s got books about trees.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He doesn’t like Skyhooks either, he likes music you wouldn’t have heard of.”

  “How’d he hear it then?”

  “From his brother. Same way you hear things.”

  “Very funny,” I said, but I didn’t care about the lecture because now that Eddie knew and appeared to be coaching me, it meant it was something. But then the phone was ringing and Eddie jumped up to get it. He just jumped off the bed and went out and then that was it.

  I couldn’t say anything to Ivy. I just kept looking at the floor.

  “Oh, it’s too sad,” she cried. “Oh, my darling, there’s been too much sadness in your young life.”

  Ivy drew me into her arms. I closed my eyes and rested my head on Ivy’s bony old shoulder. She was stroking my back, and rocking, just as if I were still a little girl. I tried not to let myself think of Eddie. I tried to hold my breath. And I stayed there with my wet eyes jammed up against Ivy, and Ivy didn’t say a thing and neither did I.

  chapter nineteen

  Dad had held me in the same way. Rocking.

  I remember it better than I remember any other thing that ever happened to me. It was four o’clock in the morning. I woke up because Dad was sitting on my bed. Just sitting there. So I knew straightaway that something wasn’t right: for it to be so dark, for him to be sitting there in the black, crumpled and motionless, not leaving for work, not kissing me good-bye. How long had he been there?

  “Dad?” I said. His hand went to hold mine.

  “Something terrible has happened.” His voice was wavering, thin, like a line of cotton. His dressing gown hung off him at an angle. I sat up. I braced myself. Then the words, so quietly wrenched out of my dad’s throat, came at me, almost slowly, sailing out of the night, like the sparks from a distant explosion.

  “Eddie’s been killed.”

  I didn’t cry, I broke: folded, like a snapped twig. I fell forward. I could hear myself screaming. My head was squashed into Dad’s chest. My dad was gulping for air. I screamed into his flannel pajamas.

  This is how it happened. Two policemen had come and knocked on the door at four o’clock in the morning. Dad must have heard them. He put his dressing gown on and walked through the dark house to open the door.

  Eddie’s death came into the house like a slow cold crack to a glass.

  “Are you the father of Edouard Clarkeson? We’re sorry, there’s been an accident,” said one of the policemen, taking off his hat in respect.

  And then Dad coming to me, holding me, rocking.

  Dad and I went to their bed. Mum was gone. Run off with Travis. We lay there while we waited for the day to come. Dad’s hands gripped the blanket, he faced the ceiling. I could smell my mother next to me, could almost hear her sharp little breaths, but nothing seemed familiar, not Dad, not the bed, not the house, not the blank, blank hour we lay awake. Not even I was familiar to myself. There was nothing to hold on to. Not a single thing.

  Dad got up out of the bed. He said, “I’m going to work.” Then he fell against the wardrobe. His head was sideways, pressed into the door and he slid down the wardrobe as if his legs had just given in, like a man in a movie who had just been shot as he was about to climb a wall. He cried like a child. I didn’t know what to do. I was supposed to be the child.

  I said he couldn’t go to work, it wasn’t time yet. But there was nothing to do in the dark house.

  Although I was waiting for it, I was dreading the daylight. Normal things would happen: There would be the dawn chorus of sparrows, John Jacob’s motorbike growling down the road on the way to work, the warbly happy song of the magpies, someone taking a shower, the same man on the radio; milk, bells, the day arriving with its smell of toast and list of obligations, just as if it were normal, like every other day. Only it wasn’t. The morning light was like a big lie that the world conspired to keep going.

  But it came. The light came, just like every other morning, and Dad and I got dressed. We drove to Melbourne. To tell Mum. She came out to the car. We were sitting in it. She clutched a coat around her, frowning. She knew something was wrong, I could tell. It was as if she was expecting us. She leaned her head in the window where my dad was sitting. She didn’t speak, she just stared at the violent silence on our faces. Then, as Dad said it, just as he said it to me, she folded up and her head dropped, but she didn’t scream like I did. She just deflated, as if the life had gone from her. She sank to the ground.

  Dad got out of the car and put his arms around her. There were tears dripping off his nose.

  “It was the black ice,” he said. She stared at him and gripped his arms, and then she started to breathe as if she was choking.

  In winter, apart from the black ice, there was also frost. It killed the nasturtiums and the zucchini. It also killed lemon trees, unless you covered them up at night. In winter, when you woke up, everything outside was covered in ice. The skies were a pale gray, the grass was glittering in milky sheets and the trees turned scratchy and bare. When you walked Mou, your sneakers got wet in the frost and you always had to bring back some kindling. Dad poured his hot tea on the car windshield to get the ice off. Winter was so cold that when your feet touched the floor you’d have thought there was ice there too, but it was just the air cutting in through the cracks between the floorboards. We had slippers with sheep’s wool on the inside, but still…The kitchen was the only room you could sit around in, because of the woodstove, which we had to keep going all day. In the morning, the water was frozen in the pipes and you had to remember to fill up the kettle the night before. In winter, the roads got the black ice on them.

  They call it black ice. I don’t know if it really is black. Maybe it is. All I know is you can’t see it. It’s deadly because it’s not crunchy like the white frost; it’s got no grip, no sound, no warning. The black ice is invisible and slippery and lurking. You can’t tell if it’s there or not. It’s where the shadows are, they say, where the sun can’t reach. There are signs warning you to go slow, but you don’t always do what signs tell you to do.

  Eddie was driving, Harry was in the passenger seat. They were going to Melbourne. Eddie didn’t have a seat belt on. He was careless like that. They said he died instantly.

  Harry said it was his idea to go to Melbourne, but like I said, I didn’t hold him responsible for what happened.

  Mum came home with us. When we got back, there were two bunches of flowers waiting on the veranda. One was all forget-me-nots, with a pale blue bow. Already people knew. Soon people were coming over. Some brought pies. Mrs. Jacob sent over a basket of roses from her garden. The Bartholomews came, the Nelsons, the Hill family, and Eddie’s friends came, various members of the footy team, the coach.…Lucy Brixton came with her mother, and they brought a beef stew. It’s funny how any other time I would have been excited as hell to have all that food the people brought over, but you just don’t get hungry when you’re full up on sadness.

  So, in the kitchen there was such a clutter of people and quiches and brandy that the awful silence in the house couldn’t be heard. Dad was sometimes sunk in the couch, and Mou came to his lap. Mum seemed to appear and disappear, wandering through the house like a ghost. Harry’s mum organized things, spoke to people, answered the phone, rang the priest. She gave me the job of finding vases for all the flowers that arrived, and writing thank-you letters for the kindness. Sometimes I would try to feel just the good feeling of gratitude and not the other bad feeling. I had sleeping tablets. At night, Dad sat on my bed till I went to sleep. I didn’t want to be in my mind. It was like an unfamiliar,
terrifying room with no one else in it. I didn’t know it anymore. I was glad of the people filling up the house so that we wouldn’t notice what was missing. At least not until the people went. Eddie’s room, the outside bungalow, was left just as it was. No one moved his things or arranged them better.

  Mum became very pale and quiet and she wouldn’t eat at all. Most of the time there were tears in her eyes, which she kept wiping away with the back of her hand. Once she put her hand on my shoulder and patted me. I saw her staring at nothing.

  Eddie’s bungalow was like a museum. Each of us entered it, alone. We’d go there, one by one, sometimes passing each other, looking away, as if we’d been caught. Caught just looking at Eddie’s things, his emptied things. You had to do it, to stand there and slowly let the emptied bed, the ghost-cold stillness in the room, convince you that he had gone. Yes, he is gone. Yes, he is not here. Yes, something has finished.

  His corduroy jacket hung over the back of his chair; thrown on top of it, a red shirt. His bed was unmade. I stood in the room and looked. Sometimes I picked something up and then I put it back. That old red shirt thrown over the back of the chair, a thing I’d never looked at before but had always seen on Eddie. It was just a shirt, but I kept holding it, pressing it to my face, inhaling it. It wasn’t a shirt anymore, it was a last, uncareful gesture. And then it was an absence. Eddie had gone from it.

  I saw Mum in there. She was sitting on Eddie’s bed, a piece of paper in her hand. Her dark hair hung in a plait down her back. She looked like a child woken from a bad dream.

  “What’s that?” I asked. Mum looked up, red-eyed and distant.

  “I don’t know. Something of Eddie’s.” I knew what she was looking at. I’d seen everything in the room. It was a piece of paper with some words Eddie had scribbled on it. There was an address and then the words “D. Wolton,” and beneath that: “It is Sunday. Outside the wind…She’s bitten by the wind again.” That was all it said. It was just a fragment, a sign of life, a last word. But you couldn’t help looking for a clue, a reason why. Why had it happened? Grief makes you so unreasonable.

  “You all right?” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She hung her head down. Like her neck was broken. My heart curled inward.

  “I’m living the wrong life, Manon. It’s a mistake.” She closed her eyes and put her head in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  In the impermanence of life, it was impossible to accept the foreverness of death. When something is suddenly wrenched from you, you stumble after it, stunned and aching, loss leading you to the abyss, where you hover like a vagrant, forever wanting that thing to come back, perhaps straining to see it and call it back. It’s a common lament: Oh, my child come back to me, Oh, lover come back to me, Oh, my friend come back to me, Oh, Eddie come back.

  Let me tell you, the lonely infinity of memory was a wretched place to live, and I was getting out.

  chapter twenty

  Manon, dear, and how’s your father? Is he coping?” Ivy held my hands on her lap.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t say.” I sniffed.

  “Don’t you two talk?” she cried. “Oh, you must. You should talk to your father. You’re together in this.”

  I couldn’t explain to Ivy but Dad just never seemed to have anything to say anymore. We were both changed. It was as if the life we had before had gone, as if a big warm blanket had been yanked off us and we were adjusting to the cold in our own separate ways. My way was to want and want, to want Eddie back. Dad’s way was to give up on people altogether. All he invested his energy in now was the animals. A dog will never desert you, that’s for sure. Besides, Dad was tired, and when he did come home he only seemed to hover there. He hovered in the hall, holding his bag with one hand and with the other picking up the letters on the table and staring at them a while, turning them over but not opening them. That was how he appeared in my mind’s eye, like a passenger caught in transit. A passenger. I almost repeated the word out loud as it came to me with such a satisfying ring of accuracy. When Dad came home from work, he sank into the almost-new couch in the living room as if he was never going to get up out of it again. With his squawky old pale face, he looked wrong on the buoyant cherry couch; he was like a dirty gray stick caught on the edge of a sumptuous ball gown. He bent his head close to Mou, and then he lay back with his eyes half closed and his hand, a tired old claw, lying on the dog’s head. He patted every now and then, and said dog things to Mou. This was enough. Just this simple mild thing of sitting and patting the dog was enough for Dad.

  “You should let Mou get up,” I said. Now that Mum was gone again, what did we care if the couch got dirtied up a bit? Dad nodded wearily. He’d smile at me, but it was such a worn-out old smile, and everything he said was exactly the same. He was just opening his mouth and letting out the suite of suitable sentences that lay stacked on top of each other.

  “How was your day, Mannie?”

  “Okay.”

  “What shall we do about dinner? Did you remember to lock up the chickens?”

  “Yeah.” I walked to the fridge and removed a box of fish fingers from the freezer.

  “Has Mou had a walk?” he called from the couch. He knew I walked Mou every afternoon, up to the Nelsons’ orchards and sometimes to Wally’s dam. But still he asked and still I told him yes. Yes, the chickens are in and Mou’s been walked. He nodded, but only because it was his habit. It was because he worked with sick animals all day long that he had forgotten how to inquire about what went on in a person’s mind. He only knew about snake bites and flyblown sheep and the wounds that came up, ugly and blaring, on an animal’s body. He didn’t think about a person’s heart, about my heart, or even his own, for that matter, not anymore. Dad’s heart was worn down like an old carpet, with the light and the smells and the music moving over him in a familiar way. He just let it happen, let the days pile up on top of him.

  I didn’t have to let that happen to me. I was just going to waste. That was how I felt. Like that bunch of wild flag irises stuck in a jar of water and left on the bench next to the toaster and the fruit bowl. Like just another thing that sits there, losing petals, dropping crumbs.

  I told Ivy my plans. I told her I was going to Paris. She nodded at me, but she didn’t say anything about the money. So I had to ask.

  “Ivy. Eddie told me that there was money put away for us. He said we were allowed to have it when we were eighteen. Money Benjamin put away.”

  “Oh,” said Ivy and she frowned. “I don’t know. I remember something like that. Didn’t you speak to your father about it? He’d know.”

  “No. I didn’t ask him.” I didn’t want to tell Ivy I’d gone without telling Dad. How could I tell him I was leaving? I couldn’t face it, to tell you the truth. I couldn’t face leaving him alone, but I couldn’t stay just for his sake either. What would Ivy think of me if she knew I’d just deserted my dad? She’d think I was like Mum. Selfish. A deserter. I heaved a big sigh.

  “There’s a lawyer, though,” she said. “He might know. Mr. Crock. You could look him up. He works in the city. He looks after all Benjamin’s affairs. He pays my bills here. He’s…” She waved with her hand toward something in the room and then she closed her eyes as if trying to remember.

  “Don’t worry, Ivy,” I said. I could tell she was tired. Her eyes stayed closed for a while. I didn’t want to go see that lawyer, anyway. I had other plans, more pressing. For some reason I couldn’t think past that day. I didn’t want to. It was like looking into a hole when you can’t see the bottom. You feel disoriented. I had to keep my attention fixed on the tiny distance ahead of me, not the large one.

  “Dear, it’s our lunchtime. Will you come back again?” said Ivy. A bell was ringing.

  “Of course. I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said. I gave Ivy a big hug and I was careful not to squeeze too hard, since she seemed brittle as a paper nautilus.

  I really intended to go back again the next day, and if the
next day had gone as I planned, I would have gone back. But it didn’t. It certainly didn’t.

  chapter twenty-one

  The next place I had to go was the other side of town.

  3137 Tennyson St., St. Kilda. D. Wolton. It is Sunday. Outside the wind…She’s bitten by the wind again.

  I had that bit of paper with Eddie’s writing on it. It had been making a lump in my brain, that bit of paper. It was giving me a notion. I only let it out every now and then. Who was the girl in the wind? I see myself knocking on a door, number three. I see the door opening and there is a girl. D. Wolton. Her name is Demeter, or Delia. She is mythic. She has long white hair, like Lucy, only she is beautiful in that Sleeping Beauty way. Soft and fine and gentle, like mist. She knows who I am immediately. She has this way of knowing. “Manon,” she says, almost in a whisper. “We’ve been waiting for you.” And she leads me inside…

  Don’t get me wrong. I knew Eddie was dead. But there was something of him there, behind that door. There had to be something more; even just a new knowing was something. Sometimes I accidentally saw Eddie, for the tiniest moment. It was as if a speck of him had surfaced in someone else. Maybe it was just a curve of dark hair falling over a forehead, but it made me jump. And afterward I’d sink a bit.

  I didn’t know if I could go there straightaway. I’d been thinking and thinking about it for a long while. I’d been building up to it. I was counting on it, somehow, and now that it was within reach I started to panic. Besides, I was all emotional after seeing Ivy, and I had to dry out a bit and build up again. I decided I’d go lurk around the area for a while, get myself more prepared.