The Elusive Language of Ducks

by Judith White

  Then, without any preamble, he’d grabbed her hand.

  Come, I want to show you something, he said.

  She’d clambered up from the log and followed, or rather was pulled behind him, along the grassy dunes, down to the beach and around a headland of rocks, their boots squelching through the wet sand left by the low tide. Around the next bay they stood against the rocks, sheltering from a keen wind cutting its way under their coats. The icy blue light of the full moon was shattered across the choppy sea. It’s stunning, Hannah said, pushing herself against him, more for warmth than anything.

  Diving into his coat pocket, he pulled out a large pair of binoculars. He moved behind her, resting his arms on her shoulders, breathing close to her ear as he held the binoculars to her eyes, directed towards the moon. His hand, she noted, was trembling. She took the binoculars from him, adjusting the focus as he pointed out the main craters and seas and mountains. He had names for them all. Unaccountably, she started to giggle, and the more she tried to stop the worse it became.

  What’s funny? he asked.

  Nothing, she replied, but the more unsettled he became, the more the bubbles burst out from under the lid of the boiling kettle.

  As he pulled away from her, she could feel his sense of rejection and this made her worse.

  What’s wrong? What did I do?

  She stopped until the hysterics exploded from her again.

  I’m sorry, she kept saying, I’m sorry.

  He wound the strap around the binoculars and stuffed them roughly back into his pocket.

  She pulled herself together.

  I just don’t get the joke, he said and, when she started giggling again, he grabbed her and placed his mouth over hers. He tasted of charcoal, sausages, tomato sauce, mulled wine. He tasted of teeth and tongue. He tasted of everything she had ever wanted, forever, in her whole life. Suddenly they were urgently making love, still bundled up against the cold in their layers of clothes, she with her back pressed against the rock face, and, above her, the unblinking eye of the moon, with all its craters, seas and mountains, shattering itself into every particle of her being.

  Afterwards, as they ambled hand-in-hand back to the bonfire, he said, with an element of hurt lingering in his voice: I still don’t get what it was that you were laughing at.

  I’m sorry, she said again. I tend to giggle when I’m nervous.

  But really, she’d been laughing at his premeditation, his obvious preparation, she was laughing because he had set up everything so that he could have the excuse to put his arms over her shoulders, and his cheek against her cheek to murmur craters and lakes in her ear. He could have muttered anything — the periodic table, his favourite ice-cream flavours, characters from Animal Farm; he could have been silent. And all these months at university he had given her no clue that he even liked her. They were both a few years older than the other students who were straight from school, and they’d enjoyed lengthy discussions in tutorials, in groups over coffee, sometimes sitting next to each other in lectures, in a contrived arbitrary sort of way. It had suddenly seemed ridiculously hilariously gloriously funny.

  And then he’d said, There’s something I need to tell you.

  Oh?

  I don’t want to tell you now, but just remember that I told you this: that I need to tell you something.

  You’re married with three children?

  No, he said.

  Ten children?

  Don’t be silly.

  I know you’re Australian, she joked. And I don’t mind.

  I’m wishing I hadn’t mentioned it. It’s not funny.

  You can tell me, she said.

  I don’t want to tell you now as there might be no point. I mean it’s early days, I mean . . . I don’t know what this means to you.

  OK, she said. Sure, that’s fine.

  I mean, we’ve only been ‘us’ for five minutes. Well, maybe seven, he said.

  OK, she said again, and nestled into his armoury of jerseys and coat. And she took from this that he was looking at a meaningful relationship, and, although this would normally scare her off so soon, for some reason she knew it was to be, and didn’t mind at all.

  THE DUCK AND THE MAN

  Hannah was stressed, bogged down with a sudden overload of the editing work she did. Sometimes the duck felt like the breaking point and she had to call on Simon to help her. And it so turned out that Simon, who had played an instrumental part in the duck coming to stay, didn’t like to touch it unless it was wrapped up in a towel and placed carefully in his lap. And even so, when this was forced upon him, he sat upright in a meditative pose with his eyes closed. The epitome of contrived tolerance.

  The first time she handed him the duck, after the duck had been freshly bathed in warm water in the wash basin, both the man and the duck protested. The duck wriggled to be free.

  He doesn’t like me, Simon said to his wife.

  He doesn’t like me, the duck said to the woman.

  Well, you’ll have to get used to each other, said the woman to both of them. If you want me to cook your dinner, she said to the man. If you want me to clean out your box and give you fresh water and stir up your mash, she said to the duck. And smash up a snail or two, she added. And pudding for you, as well, and if you’d like me to be relaxed enough to have a wine with you later, she added to the man.

  She eased the duck from Simon’s big smooth hands. Held the duck against her stomach, rubbed his damp downy breast with the towel. He pressed against her and nuzzled into her shirt. He thought he had won. Simon, too, thought he had won. He yawned and stretched and scratched his ear. She chatted to each of them a little, and once they had both calmed down, she wrapped the duckling in the towel again and passed him over to the man. This time, both duck and man were resigned to each other.

  The duck was outgrowing the carry-bag, so Hannah had bought a large plastic storage box which he slept in at night in the bathroom. But he needed to have more of a free run in the daytime. And it was Simon who, under some pressure from her, had built the makeshift hutch for the bottom of the garden. A third of it was a wooden covered shelter, and the rest was a run enclosed above and around with chicken-wire. It was makeshift because one day the duck would have to go.

  At first the new hutch, about two metres long, seemed enormous, but already with his water dish and mash bowl and the towelling cloth in the shielded corner for nestling into when the wind was cold, it felt cramped. Hannah was thinking they should extend it. She’d imagined he would love his new abode, but once the duck realised that this was the place of confinement when she went away during the day, he would squeak unhappily every time she brought him near it. Now he threw himself insanely against the netting, over and over, trying to force his beak through the wire holes along the rows. This one and this one and this one. He was a persistent gambler, clinging to the vain hope that one of the wire holes was the magic one that would let him through.

  While Hannah was there, he ate, or sat looking at her. But as soon as she turned her back, the cheeping started. He was like her fridge door, reminding her that she had left it open. He was the smoke alarm needing a new battery. He was the drier saying that the clothes were ready. The microwave saying the food was done. The phone calling for an answer. He was an electronic beeper, reminding her to be anxious, that she was leaving him alone and motherless, and that she was mean mean mean.

  She thought of her mother in the Primrose Hill Rest Home. How, in the beginning, she would shuffle along the corridors — her handbag, now almost empty, over her arm — until the staff found her again. Sometimes she would set out with a wobbly friend, the two of them supporting each other, out for an adventure along the pastel-hued corridors that all looked the same. In the end, to stop her escaping, they’d crammed her bones into a bucket chair from which she couldn’t get up. In the end she couldn’t get up from anywhere. In the end she couldn’t stand. In the end the only exercise she had was to bat with her right hand at a balloon th
rown directly to her from the centre of the room.

  TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVE

  The duck was about a month old when the woman placed him in his cage and went out to a long meeting about a book on adoption and its association with mental illness. All day she had to consider people who were isolated or depressed or manic around issues of adoption.

  She couldn’t help thinking of the duck in relation to all this. At the meeting she mentioned him to people she hadn’t met before. She was told that ducklings didn’t have a defined gender until later, according to how they fitted in with the dynamics of the rest of the flock. Hannah found this difficult to believe, but even so, wondered whether she was actually influencing the final gender of her duckling. Somewhere, quite early along the way, she had started assuming that he was a male, and for no other reason except that she felt that he was. Almost without doubt. But when she was also told that drakes in general were rapacious and aggressive, she just knew this wouldn’t be the case with her gentle little duck, whatever gender he turned out to be.

  As soon as she arrived home from the meeting, the duckling jumped up and ran at the wire netting.

  The woman picked him up from the cage, her hands slipping under his belly to calm his clockwork legs. He was like a puppy, such was the intensity of joy as he snuggled into her. She was a dandelion leaf salad, the sun on his fluff after a bath, she was a paddock wriggling with worms, she was a wing, she was a mother duck.

  I thought you would never come back, he whimpered. He told her how cats had slunk towards the cage, their whiskery noses investigating. How it had rained — the first time he had experienced water that hadn’t been presented to him in a dish or a basin. Today it had fallen from the sky, and she hadn’t been there. He dug his beak under her hair, delving into the skin of her neck. She sat down on the steps of the deck, and he laid his neck upon her stomach, burying his head into the crook of her arm, and finally the chirruping settled, and in the silence, in his silence, she thought she could feel his heart vibrating against her arm.

  And she thought of his anxiety and isolation all the day long, and wondered whether there would be issues in the future over his adoption.

  FILLING UP HER LIFE

  As the days passed, the duckling’s shape pushed out further into the form of a duck. It looked as though a thumb had pressed its beak outwards. Its body was stronger and also longer, its neck snaking out from its body. It was a balloon being blown up in the night by a masterful street artist. One day, she thought, its tail might be tied into a knot and the duck released to float away into the sky, to join all the other fluffy white balloons that skidded high across the wide summer blue.

  The woman wondered what would happen to the duck when he grew up. She visualised him filling up all the spaces she had to offer. She imagined going down to the bathroom one morning, to where he slept on straw in the large plastic box, only to find that the duck was a square thing occupying every corner of the box.

  Chapter 3

  VISITATIONS FROM THE OVERNIGHT EDUCATOR

  And with every new day it seemed that he had learnt things overnight about being a duck.

  The woman took him down to the tiny pond in the garden, surrounded by trees and lilies and tall reeds. Two life-size ducks — one a decoy and one a concrete sculpture — cluttered up the pond, along with a slimy plastic lily-pad, a plaster-of-Paris frog, an ugly spouting fountain, and a weathered wooden bridge. Pieces of driftwood sat at the edge. Several orange goldfish lurked in the shadows. It was a once-crafted pond, abandoned.

  When the duck was still a pom-pom he floated on the water, wildly paddling his little legs until he started to sink. He’d then panic back into the hands of the woman, with his transparent fluff sticking to his naked pimply skin.

  Now that he was bigger, he plodded around the edge, flicking his head under the water before wiping it over his back. The woman, sitting on the bridge, watched him as he lifted his body upright and flapped his winglets. Then he took himself across to the other side of the pond where there was a mini beach of stones. Standing in a patch of sunlight, he poked his beak into his downy breast, as if exploring new terrain, searching for a clue to his duckness.

  It was a new development for him to be apart from her while they were together. They were separated by a muddy puddle of water. They were separated by a vast expanse of pond, where she as a woman and he as a duck were different beings. He stood up tall again, fluffing up, flapping. Every day he did this now.

  The mysterious overnight educator had informed him that he would fly, and every day he checked to see whether this was the day.

  LAYING OUT THE FOUNDATIONS

  The woman looked at his stumpy wings fluttering uselessly. The design plan of his day-to-day evolution was impeccable. Even if he could fly now, it would be perilous for him, crashing into the walls of the world and careening into the mouths of cats and dogs and rats. Once he flew, where would he go? And how would he know to stop? She thought of thistle-down floating high in the sky and imagined that it was individual feathers on test flights, checking out the lie of the land, the sigh of the wind, the lift under the wing, and finally all returning to assemble on the duck for the first grand take-off.

  DIFFICULT DAYS

  Sometimes unpredictable events or expectations settled on a day before it had even started. They arrived by email, or phone. This day they’d arrived in a couriered box. The house shook with the early morning hammering on the door. Simon was in Sydney at a conference, and Hannah was still dozing in bed. When she opened the front door, there was the box on the doorstep, delivered by a guy in a uniform and a cap.

  There wouldn’t be time for the duck today. She cleaned his bathroom box and let him scurry behind her to his daytime cage on the back lawn. When she dropped him in, he chirruped in disbelief, demanding that she come with him to probe the catchments of dew in the bromeliads. He wanted her to peel back the long leaves of the agapanthus, so he could snaffle the cockroaches and wood lice leaping like people from a burning building.

  He was too little to be released to forage alone — there were too many predators waiting for him. And he wanted to be with her.

  She picked him out again and plonked herself down on the grass. He sat on her stomach.

  That’s better, he said.

  I can’t be with you today, Ducko, said the woman. I just can’t.

  What do you mean? You are with me. Everything is good.

  But not for long. I have work. I have to go inside and work.

  That’s OK, I can come, too.

  Ducko, she said. Listen. A box arrived today from the outside world. From the world outside our world. And when I opened the box, the whole house was filled with birds, dark flapping crows batting their wings against my face, their claws pulling at my hair. Squawking at me for attention. I screamed at them. Get out! Leave me in peace! I opened the window, releasing some of them, but they sat on the railing around the deck, or on the roof, or hid in leafy branches. Waiting for me.

  That’s terrible. I didn’t see them. What did you do?

  I flapped. Inside, one was drinking water from the kitchen sink, lifting its head as if about to gargle a song. Another paced on the kitchen table, its claws clattering like pins on the wood.

  And then what?

  Duckie, each crow is a task on a list. And I don’t have energy for them today. I’m tired, Ducko. I have to catch the crows and tie coloured bands around their stiff-worm legs before they’ll go away, labelled as done.

  That’s all very well, said the duck, but what’s that got to do with me?

  What it’s got to do with you, Ducko, she said as she stood up and opened the lid to his cage, is that we’re not going foraging today.

  As she walked away she could hear the vibration of the wire netting as he threw himself against it. She wondered whether the feeling she had was anything like a mother might have, walking away from a crying baby.

  And on top of that, this morning, when she’d b
een searching for a pencil sharpener, she’d opened the top drawer in her mother’s bedroom cabinet, and there she was presented with all the non-descript knick-knacks left behind when her mother had gone to Primrose Hill. Spare glasses, magnifying glass, comb, birthday book, a writing pad with half-written letters, abandoned because her disease made it so difficult for her to write. Hannah picked up the pad and flicked through it. I ask myself whether I will ever be happy again, she read. And there it was again. The pain, swelling in her chest, in breech position, kicking its heel against her heart.

  During the course of this day, the weather shifted. It seemed that the wind was filtered through ice. She went to the window. The sky had sucked up the shadows from the earth. The garden was misshapen, its edges gnawed into by its shivering self. Animals slunk by and tentatively sniffed at the wire netting. The duck had pulled himself under the wooden covering, into his own darkness, where Hannah had left a heap of soft towel. He’d backed into it, and tried to become a part of it, so that he was unseen. Hannah went once more down to the garden to put a tarpaulin over the cage to keep him warm, then left him again.

  When she finally returned to the duck from her work, it was night. She took him inside and filled the bathroom basin with warm water. He stood there, letting the heat seep into his body as Hannah sat on the bath edge, her face level with the basin, talking to him softly. He flitted his beak at her mouth. It gave the impression of kissing her, but she knew that he was checking that her lips weren’t two fat, lazy worms.

  After the bath, Hannah dried him on a towel and held him for a while. She had more work to do, another crow to deal with, so she put him to bed in his box. As soon as she left the bathroom he hurled himself out of the box. He’d managed to do this once yesterday, too, for the first time. She put him back and turned off the light. He clambered out again, waddling triumphantly into the kitchen where she’d just sat down at the table to work. Again she returned him to the box, but again he flung himself out onto the tiles. She could hear his flippers slap slap slapping on the floor as he crossed the hall and proudly waddled his way to her feet. She returned him to his box, but she hadn’t even left the room before he was out again.