Owls Do Cry

by Janet Frame

  But God or the devil has come, walking the long corridor, squeezing his mind and voice in molecular drops through the forbidding encircling wall. He greets the women. He wrings the blood from their gowns of flannel. It drips upon the floor into a creek flowing to the wall and not passing through and now it is a wave pressing upon the wall and unable to escape.

  The women scream. They fear drowning. Or burning.

  The nurse picks off one of her pink petals, flutters it upon the wave to soak the crimson, suck it in one breath. Then she readjusts her body, tucking the petal in the gap between her mouth and eyes, and smiles upon God or the devil who stands ready to signal her with a lift of the hand, a widening of his eyes, a signal as secretive as a scream

  and the head of the writhing crocodile is broken off, dragged through the door at the end of the room,

  and the door flings itself open like two palms which gesture,

  Cela m’est egal, Cela m’est egal.

  And the writhing head is borne inside, and the women waiting hear a shuffle of footsteps, a voice, two voices, the scream of a soul being surprised in a funnel of dark. Then silence. Till the door flings itself open again in a gesture of indifference, revealing its wooden hands and the grains of heart and life and fate.

  Cela m’est egal, cela m’est egal, it speaks like a carefree breath or commonplace, and the wheeled-out bed holds what is left of the head of the crocodile, whose face is blue, like Toby, with a black pipe like a whistle stuck in its mouth.

  Its eyes are open in their triumph of instilled blindness.

  Unconscious, the head groans and writhes and quickly, as it would die, it is screened by roses from the rest of the writhing crocodile, and its eyes closed and smoothed with the forefinger of the pink flower, gently, as the dead are treated, who cannot be hurt now; and the pipe taken from its mouth as if, had it lain longer there, it may have played too enticingly its melody of blindness.

  And once more the crocodile is severed, the same procession to the door, the same quietness,

  Cela m’est egal.

  And now Daphne passes the rows of women who lie dead, each with her pipe or whistle thrust in her mouth, or quickly withdrawn in case the music make immobile, as in the fairy tale, the world outside and here.

  The doors receive. The same indifference.

  And God or the devil on the left, at the head of the raised bed that floats, chequered, like a shadow projected from the tethered real by some invisible globe of light. The doctor moves, carefully, as if he tiptoed between swords. He is guarding something. At first it seems his life. Then it is the machine, cream, with curved body and luminous eyes, one red, the dangerous eye, the other black for cancellation of impulse. He stands with his hand resting lightly, it seems lightly, upon his treasure; then Daphne knows he dare not move his hand away from the voluptuous body of the red and black-eyed machine which, in case of escape, is fastened, as a lover secures the object of his love with cords of habit, circumstance, convenience, time, with black charged cords, varicose, converging to a unity that is controlled by a switch, and pressure of the doctor’s own hand.

  —Turn on, my love, he will say, and reach for the switch, and caress the red luminous eye with his gentle hand.

  He looks at Daphne, as if she may have interrupted his pleasure, or as if he will communicate to her, then blot from her knowing, the delight he feels in his lovely machine.

  —Climb up on the bed, Daphne.

  She climbs a suspended shadow of mountain and finds on its summit a golden hollow, her own size, for lying in. How well it fits, carved for her comfort, by each year of her life, changed to rain and wind from the north, or the south, bringing snow.

  —Lie down, Daphne.

  Daphne lies down. Suddenly over the top of the mountain, their heads level with the lowest cloud, there appear the faces, set and shaped in cloud, of five women dressed in white, envying the gold hollow. They look down and smile, to win friendship. Their hands itch to dig the gold, to store it in their ample linen pockets and crawl from the room; for they must crawl, they are white insects with feelers waving in their heads, each feeler tipped with a trace of white like a separated snowdrop. They wave their feelers.

  —Lie down, Daphne.

  —Lie down, Daphne.

  The doctor comes as close as he dare without drawing his hand from the switch of his love.

  —Hello.

  He smiles, a wicked deceitful smile, like the world after the morning, that reveals the truth of the golden mountain, of every gold mountain; that all are nests of clay, and the sun an inarticulate rock whose deceptive attribute of light, chipped off by pick-pick of time, closes upon the silence of its unshadow and oblivion.

  —Hello, Daphne.

  The women wave their feelers. They suddenly go stiff, their knees set like concrete, their breasts of stone; and press icicles upon Daphne’s ears, and her body down, down in the hollow; though one of them says kindly,

  —Put this in your mouth.

  It is not an aniseed ball or acid drop or blackball, but a little black pipe or whistle.

  —Bite it.

  Should it not be played? Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. The doctor, waiting, exults. He presses the switch. One moment then, and nothing.

  14

  Oh the wind is lodged forever in the telegraph wire for crying there on a grey day on the loneliest of roads of dust and gravel and forest of cocksfoot at the side and gorse or broom hedge with the dead pods refusing to drop and the cross the crucifix of the leaning poles linked by the everlasting wire of crying of the wind lodged forever in the telegraph wire for crying there.

  The green baize and oil sickening smell of the gramophone horn, a smell swallowed and vomited from memory upon a folded sheet of summer, burned and boiled in a pumice copper with a pine cone gum log, old apple wood.

  Francie, come in you naughty bird

  the rain is pouring down,

  What would your mother say

  if you stay there and drown?

  You are a very naughty bird,

  you do not think of me,

  I’m sure I do not care,

  said the sparrow on the tree.

  Francie, come in you naughty bird, the rain is pouring down, the fire is pouring down. Now be careful kiddies, for wherever you walk you may meet an angel; for angels walk upon the earth among people, and the day Christ comes He too will walk unknown upon the earth. And blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.

  Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

  And childhood is nothing, it is only the wind in the telegraph wire for crying there, the toothache in the cavity of night, the too big body curled up in the cot too small, the grandmother breaking her back in the hot Virginny sun, grandmother what big eyes you have; and the boy in the fox’s belly, unstitch, unstitch, boy girl or day locked in the suffocating belly of memory.

  Now that Francie is dead, I, Daphne, am the eldest sister, the eldest in the family, not counting Toby who takes fits and lies sometimes in hospital with his lips lolling together like rubber and covered with saliva and his face twisted and his eyes bulged. He does not know us when we go there at visiting time, and the nurse leads us along a corridor to a room like a cage, with bars, where Toby lies on a high bed white and clean as a china plate; as high as the bed where the princess lay, under twenty mattresses; the real princess. Toby, when you get better we will go to the rubbish dump and find things. A diamond. A lump of gold. A moa bone. Toby we must find things that other people have thrown away as no use, all day and night they are standing on the edge of the cliff and throwing, and sometimes in the night they cannot see what they throw; in the night or sleep or dream; till they wake too old and late.

  Toby when you come from hospital and they have paid the bills – but they will never pay the bills. The window letter will come from t
he hospital board and our mother will put it inside the clock or pin it to the calendar, and our father will reach for it when he comes home at night, hold it up to the light to read through and be prepared, then slit it open and throw up his hands or dance out of rage, like Rumpelstiltskin, though not going through the floor, and cry

  —Money! Money!

  And a little mouse will crawl from a hole in the corner of the bin and whisper, in a voice like hundreds and thousands, Money? In the bin we keep old shoes and books and pieces of leather that our father uses for mending. Where’s the last, he calls out. Who has seen the last, and the hammer, and the box of tacks? And men in peaked blue caps come at night to help him mend our shoes.

  Oh. Toby. Our father doesn’t wear glasses to mend. He can see quick as light in the dark corners, or quick as the troutlet that moves to hide under the river-bank, its belly to the earth. So perhaps our father is not going blind yet. You remember Grandad wore glasses and pushed them up on top of his forehead as if there, in that shiny spot before you got to his hair, the shiny spot that in old people and babies gets covered with scales, again like fish, was a secret pair of eyes that needed help with looking. The case he kept his glasses in was rubbed and shiny too, with orange spots. Were they polka dots? What are polka dots, Toby? I heard someone say polka dots, I think it was Aunty Nettie, you remember we watched her one day through the door. She had a case with a paua shell cover, on the duchesse in front of her, and a powder puff in her hand, and was patting her face and smiling a private smile to herself in the mirror. A smile full of delight and arrangement and what is called wisdom. And then she turned and saw us and went red.

  —How dare you watch me put on my face.

  It was a sin. To have watched Aunty Nettie putting on her face. And it was worse for her, I suppose, because now we knew she had another face and another smile to it. We had found her out, like a thief. She kept blushing.

  —You rude children.

  As if we had been watching her on the lavatory or picking her nose or doing any one of those things you do in private, to yourself.

  But Toby you do not get better. You do not know us or speak to us, and Chicks and I play together and wait for you to come home, and the children at school say,

  —Your brother takes fits, Ya-ha.

  And then when you come from hospital and walk down by the sea and they find you having a fit, the people say to our mother,

  —Mrs Withers, your boy will have to be sent away.

  Now Toby, I know about people being sent away and I wonder where away is. Perhaps it is down Rio where they sing a song of the fish of the sea. Away down Rio. You remember the woman up the road had to be sent away because she kept going out in the street with no clothes on, like the emperor in the story, except that people were wise, like the child, and noticed, and said,

  —Hey you. You can’t get away with that.

  So they put her away somewhere, and also the other lady, Minnie Cuttle, who stood on top of the hill and dropped swears like hailstones on everybody in the valley, even on our mother, who would have given her food and clothing, not that she needed them but that was our mother’s way of love, like giving us milk and milk to drink, and keeping a jersey cow that breathed in our face the breath of grass and cavern of milk, like love; though Chicks was too small for an extra mother, at first, and was kissed more, but not our father who said

  —Get away can’t you, if our mother put her arms around him or touched his shoulder.

  Our father was sad, though he had a new bicycle in exchange for Francie’s and had burned Francie’s slacks, at last, under the copper, setting fire to them in secret, and he was guilty now and did not like to be kissed.

  —Get away can’t you.

  And our mother would put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and when the kettle began singing and the pot stood warm and ready on the side of the stove, with two teaspoons of tea in it, no, three, one for each person and one for the pot, as it said on the outside of the packet, our mother would say with the same look she gave our father when she wanted to kiss him,

  —Have a cup of tea, Bob.

  And our father, deceived, would smile,

  —Just what I need. Why didn’t I think of it before?

  So our mother would have given the lady on the hill, Minnie Cuttle, a hundredweight of tea in exchange for a hundredweight of swears; but they put the lady away who dropped hailstones in the valley; and they did not put you away Toby for our mother said, always,

  —No child of mine. No child of mine.

  And so on and on. And we walk like Theseus or an ashman in the labyrinth, with our memories unwound on threads of silk or fire; and after slaying by what power the minotaurs of our yesterday we return again and again to the birth of the thread, the Where. And what Theseus or ashman will wear in his hair a scarlet poppy made of paper, or tie up his trousers like a parcel, with string, fasten the legs of them like two Christmas crackers with a gold thread?

  And the sky is now a blue mask to cover memory, the ledgers, the wonder beneath glass,

  Rapunsel, Rapunsel, let down your hair.

  Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe.

  PART TWO

  TWENTY YEARS AFTER

  15

  TOBY

  —Sings Daphne from the dead room.

  I talk of the woodlouse and his traffic across the wall, the turtle-turn of him and his legs writing in the air his telegram to pity,

  —Come quick. I burrow in the closed eyes of wall and wall for trickle-taste of light.

  sings Daphne from the dead room.

  I kept a dream of two thieves under my pillow, and my thieves

  are gone, full with my last meal of sleep

  to a beach blessed with shell

  where winter pours velvet sunlight

  where small buttons like pearl

  green as karaka leaf

  are sewn to sleep in shrift of tide

  in seabed of my brother’s grief.

  Listening at keyhole of summer,

  I hear the roar of snow.

  In case the sunlight kill

  I will make you, Toby, a salt shirt

  with small buttons like pearl

  white as manuka bud

  sewn in the sleeves that sweep the sea

  all winter with your life’s blood.

  Looking at green wave through glass of fire

  I see the red shadow.

  Toby, I will give you a loaf of blue air from wheat that grows in the sky, and trawl the wasting seas for paradisal shoal of love, and when you die

  sings Daphne from the dead room.

  I will say you lived in a half-world, a microscopic place of bitten oranges like blighted sunfall, where neither the wind blowing the way forward nor the way back, articulate with ripe fruit of night could feed or make you whole.

  —Rags bones bottles scrap iron old steel a life to sell

  sings Daphne from the dead room.

  Now Toby, what will you be, what will you be,

  in freezing works west-coast mine or foundry?

  Now Toby where will you live, where will you live

  —in hovel or bungalow God forgive.

  Now Toby how will you die how will you die

  —dug and dumped in the pit of why.

  16

  Hard cash.

  Toby Withers unrolled his bundle of ten shilling notes and put them down in a layered and crumpled confection of soft rust upon the table that was small and shaped like a cell of black honey.

  A world ago the hives with their hats on in the corner of the paddock and the bees in a swarm in the gorse and the apple-blossom and the world-size apples where a child’s reach exceeds his grasp else what’s a heaven for, Granny Smith, Kentish Fillbasket, Rome Beauty, Delicious, Jonathan, Irish Peach, and the stripey ones like eating green ice cream, else what’s a heaven for?

  Hard cash.

  The ten shilling notes were from the freezing works where Toby worked in season with good m
oney, overtime, bonus, boots provided, strip the guts all day and bring home a kidney in your pocket a spare for your old man who’s retired, sixty, sits in the corner by the stove, jigging his knee or tapping on the edge of the table with his three middle fingers, remembering the war, which war,

  Fall in A

  Fall in B

  Fall in all the company.

  The old man–

  —Toby, never call your father the old man.

  Toby’s father takes pills in a narrow bottle with a red wrapper insect-ridden with instructions and warnings. Toby takes pills too for his fits that happen now only sometimes, and then it is his mother, faded, shrunk, stolid, vague, with the hardened arteries and swollen belly of salt, who will comfort him. Toby is a man, thirty-two, new-minted from adolescence and the twenties, a gold coin, silver coin, copper coin, ten shilling note of rust lying upon a black cell of honey.

  17

  It was half-past ten, the three clocks told it, for where one had stood on the mantelpiece in the Withers kitchen, fed year after year with bills and receipts and tickets, two more have been put for companionship, a gloating and clucking collection of time, a triple blackmail, the old grandfather clock and the two alarms with their moon-faces and humped shoulders. They all pointed to half-past ten, and were believed.

  But the radio knew, and its telling, in a human voice, gave comfort to Bob and Amy and Toby Withers, sitting in the kitchen, under the spell of the thirty-six inhuman eyes.

  —A quarter-past ten, the man on the radio said.

  —The clocks are wrong, said Bob Withers, looking at the mantelpiece triumphantly; but even as he said The clocks are wrong, he knew they were right, and they looked down at him, idiot-shining they were, and told him they were right, and he said,

  —What’ve we got three clocks for, anyway?

  —Now, said the man on the radio —A session for bandsmen, conducted for you by Walter. Good morning, Walter.