The Elusive Language of Ducks

by Judith White

  Hannah wondered how a person could love eighteen ducks when she barely had the capacity to love one.

  Anyway, there was a shift in the intensity between her and the duck. She hadn’t had the same time for him of late. They hadn’t had the hours to garden together, to forage and weed. And when they did, he wasn’t quite so clingy. He’d be content to sit apart from her. Just the other day, she’d climbed a steep bank to attend to plants and there hadn’t been the same cheeping call. She’d been the one with the moment’s concern. She stood up from the foliage, her eyes flitting over the garden for him and . . . there he was. Concealed from her, but he had placed himself so that his eye was upon her. That intense beacon beaming through the panic of separation. It was a posture of independence as if he were practising for the eventuality.

  It felt like something akin to resignation. He was a ball being spun from a fraying rope which was stretching further and further until one day he’d be flung off and away from her, into the sky — his new wings flapping.

  VISITING TIMES

  It was the third evening of the farmers’ stay and they’d all just arrived home from a party. Hannah went to the bathroom to wash her hands. There was no chirruping welcome. The room was full of the absence of him. There was only the absolute stillness of something gone.

  The farmers and Simon sat around the table drinking whiskey. Hannah sat down and listened to the things that men talked about. They were having an animated discussion about an experiment, based in Moscow, in which five men, encapsulated in a make-believe spaceship, were well on their way into a simulated journey to Mars. There were three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Chinese man. They had eighteen months in which to understand their cultural differences. The man from China taught them Chinese. Their emails and conversations to their loved ones and colleagues back home were given a twenty-minute delay to reflect the time it took for signals from Mars to reach Earth.

  Simon knew all about it, had something to say about it. The journey was going to culminate in three of the cosmonauts bouncing around a sandpit in a module connected to the spaceship. This was to be regarded as a virtual landing on the planet.

  Well, said Hannah, isn’t that what we’re all doing? Travelling on a simulated journey to the end of our lives?

  The men stopped their discussion, and they all looked at her for a moment.

  Crikey, Hannah, said Bruce. You’ve got me there.

  Roy, his brother, clamped his warm, rough hand on her shoulder. You’ve always been a bit of a philosopher, Hann, he said kindly.

  Hannah left the trio. She took the torch and crept into the night, crunching over stones, past the pond to the hutch. She was careful to keep the torchlight subtle, not to shine it in the duck’s eyes as she had the night before, making him fling himself in panic at the cage wall. Tonight he rose from his towel in the corner, snaking his neck forward into the darkness, with just the tiniest hesitant gurgle of cheep. He was a white shadow in the dark. He was a ghost.

  She sat in the grass and cooed at him. He was the ghost of her mother who wanted to be a seagull but had found the body of a duck in the night and thought, That’ll do. He was the ghost of her mother, blinking from that half-dead place, wandering from the back corner of her mind, to see whether the only person in the world she could trust had anything to offer her.

  And then that person left, left her mother alone in the rest home, to go back over the lawn to the light and laughter in the house above.

  And in her heart Hannah was aware of the disappointment she had created through her brief, unfulfilling visit.

  LIVINGSTONE

  She was in love again. They were free to be in love again, she and her duck. The farmers left without her having to divulge any behaviour that could be categorised as obsessive or eccentric by those who didn’t understand. He was her secret, her bit on the side.

  Now, armed with a vicious bread knife, secateurs and a red-handled weeder, they made their way to the bottom of the section. Out of sight from the house, beyond a stone wall with a rotting wooden gate, this portion had been abandoned for years. There had been a vegetable garden here once, flourishing with beans and lettuces, tomatoes and corn. Now it was a spongy mattress of kikuyu grass. There was a small bush area where tui used to sup nectar from flax flowers, but the long woody stems were now rotting amongst other tangled foliage. Tree ferns spouted a fountain of dead fronds. Cabbage tree leaves lay thickly-woven underfoot, with fibrous borer-hollowed branches scattered amongst them.

  They could be in safari suits, the woman and her trusty duck, slashing through undergrowth, pulling at layers and layers of desiccated leaves and branches, disturbing wetas that aggressively lifted their thorny legs, ready to attack.

  The duck was uncertain of the new terrain. As she hacked away, he sat patiently, jumping up to gobble shiny black spiders and wood lice. Mercurial lizards slid into nowhere. Occasionally they came across a pooling of rancid rainwater caught in the base of palm fronds, holding a brew of worms and mucousy slugs.

  The woman’s face and arms itched as she surged forward, a pile of branches and leaves growing behind her. Finally, they burst through to a small clearing around the old wooden shed, the man’s workshop.

  Well, here we are, said the woman to the duck. Civilisation at last.

  She turned the metal doorknob and tugged. The wooden door was either stuck or locked. She peered through the cobwebby window. She hadn’t been down here for years. The shed was crude but neat, with high shelves stacked with books and notebooks. A workbench spanned one wall to the other. There was also a bench seat that ran almost the length of the shed. On the floor were bags of blood and bone, lime and gypsum stacked against the wall, some spewing their stuff onto the floor. The unlined walls had exposed four by twos, and a few garden tools hung from nails, with various tins along the beams. Cobwebs hung in clouds from the ceiling.

  Well, she said to the duck. With a bit of work this could be a nice cosy duck hotel one day.

  The duck waddled wistfully behind her as she turned and started back to the house. At the deck, she picked him up. She kicked off her gumboots and stepped inside. Simon was working at his computer. He looked up, his fist wrapped around his beard, his eyebrows dipping to the bridge of his glasses. His eyes resting on the duck.

  Hi, she said brightly.

  What’s going on?

  Oh, I was just coming in for a cup of tea. It’s so hot out there.

  I mean, why are you bringing that thing inside? You are both extremely dirty.

  We’ve been gardening. Oh well — she backed, her enthusiasm imploding — can you pass me out a drink then? Water’ll do. Actually, you’re right. I’ll clean up and come in for lunch. I’ve got work to do.

  Simon’s chair scraped loudly across the floor as he stood up to pour her a glass of water. Hannah drank and handed the glass back. She turned and took the duck back to his cage.

  The man is coming between us, said the duck.

  Don’t be silly, said the woman. He’s a bit fussy, that’s all. He’s not used to ducks. Never mind. We’ve had a lovely morning together, and really, I do have work to do.

  But that night in bed she moved across the sheets towards Simon, resting her body against his back. She folded her legs into his legs, wrapped her arm around his plump stomach. She always loved the way his skin softened after a bath, and the fragrant hint of soap. Pulling herself against him, she sank gently into the comforting position of familiarity. And suddenly he twitched. Violently. His whole body in a dream-sinking spasm, rejecting her. He was a shanghai and she was a stone, flung away from him, from the bed, out the window, a stone with flailing arms and legs, thrashing madly through the night sky, then plummeting back to Earth, back to bed, where she yanked the bedclothes across her shoulders, spinning over and over and over away from, far far away from him, into sleep.

  Chapter 10

  THE UNBEARABLE POLITENESS OF POOING

  This evening Hannah had attended a di
nner party with a group of women. The conversation had turned to pets: stories of puppies, old dogs, old cats, kittens, and thrushes in a nest outside a window.

  And I have a duck, she’d announced.

  Oh, a duck! they’d chorused awkwardly. Where did you get a duck from?

  She found herself holding her cupped palm across the table. When he arrived he could sit in my palm, she said. A ball of yellow fluff. An orphan. Ostracised by the flock.

  Cute! they cried.

  And now he’s bigger than a football. He’s a fatball. He’s ugly and grubby-looking. He follows me everywhere.

  She’d felt like a turncoat.

  But doesn’t he poo? somebody, of course, had to say.

  Well, yes, she said, thinking of the conversation that she’d once had with Max, Eric’s grandson, as he sat on the potty. Yes, everyone and everything poos. Mummy poos, Daddy poos, Auntie Jane poos, and Poppa. Yes, and me as well. And Simon? Yes, and Simon. And birds poo and cats poo and dogs poo and elephants too. And baby elephants? Yes, baby elephants and caterpillars. And ducks.

  Somebody else said, as a loud aside and with particular emphasis: They do. They certainly do. Everywhere. Actually, they don’t stop.

  Hannah was wishing, how she was wishing she hadn’t started this. She didn’t mention how she cleaned his hutch out each morning, now that he slept outside, relocated the hutch across the lawn every two or three days, had spent a fortune on rubber gloves, hosed the lawn, scooped up any stray dollop on the deck. Had paper towels and a mop and bucket within ready reach inside. She hadn’t mentioned that, after years of looking after her mother, a little duck’s plop was like pesto in comparison.

  Then, in an effort to rescue her, another woman said, I bet it has character, does it?

  Oh yes, said Hannah. Oh yes, he does.

  In what way? asked the same woman, who had just talked about her cat as being resilient, determined, intelligent, haughty, resourceful.

  Umm, he’s umm . . .

  She was stumped. Did he, in fact, have any character at all?

  He’s clingy, was all she’d been able to find to say.

  Yes, but what sort of characteristics does it have, specifically. Clingy, yes, but its personality. Does it have any particular personality trait you enjoy?

  Hannah had stopped herself saying that he was a loving duck, who needed her to hold him, nestling his beak under her hair and under her chin, or wangling his neck beneath her shirt and under her arm after she’d been away for a while. She was viewing the middle distance above the candle in the centre of the table as she thought. Somebody passed the salad, offered the wine around, somebody else clattered her chair back to go to the bathroom. The stuttering silence that had been stumbling from Hannah’s head was filled again by chatter.

  And now she was driving home and the question was haunting her. His personality. Any redeeming characteristics. How well did she know her duck? What was the attraction to him? Was it because he made her laugh? The questions were disconcerting. Her mother had drained any nurturing tendencies until she felt she had nothing left. She didn’t need another dependent creature. So, what was going on? Perhaps the love between them was an ongoing love between her mother and herself, transferring itself from body to body as each one died.

  When she died she might become a snail, and, should the duck eat her, what would happen to the love then?

  But. Personality?

  DARLING ONE

  Now that she was spending more time in the garden, the neighbourhood cats regarded this as reclaiming her territory, so the threat of cats was lessening. Her roar at the white long-haired lion slinking in the bushes, watching the cage, must have been heard across the valley. However, there had been some alarming incidents over the past couple of weeks.

  She was always amused at how adept and quick the duck was in finding a short-cut to her, should they become separated, winding through passages in the undergrowth to appear at her feet. One day, though, she was behind the stone wall, still dealing with the jungle by the shed. With his short-cut logic, he pushed himself through an opening in the hedge to reach her on the other side of the wall, landing in the public right-of-way that ran alongside their property. His pleading cries alerted her as he realised there was no throughway to her on the other side of the wall. She, too, panicked, racing along the dividing wall and back again to the gap in the hedge. She imagined having to tear up to the top of the section, out the gate and down the path to retrieve him, and by then . . . the possibilities already gripped her. Neighbours seeing the opportunity for Christmas dinner. Cars. Mauling dogs. Just plain old disappearance. Meanwhile, she stood under the trees with wet leaves around her toes, calling desperately.

  Ducko! Duckie!

  He paced frantically on the other side of the hedge, his eye on her. She cried out to Simon.

  Help! Help, Simon. Help!

  Her heart beating crazily. Ducko, come on. All the endearments, embarrassing even to herself. Darling one. Come on, come to Mummy.

  And, of course, he found the gap, pushed through again, into her arms. And there was Simon running down from the house, his face taut with anxiety.

  Hannah? What’s wrong?

  She was still breathless, holding the duck’s feet still.

  The duck, the duck escaped. Into the right-of-way.

  He stopped abruptly. Oh, he said, the bloody duck. I heard you calling. I was worried. I thought you cried ‘Wolf’. I should have known better.

  She watched him go. He kicked a plastic bottle flying across the section.

  And now, today, Max and Rosemary arriving unexpectedly through the hedge, and Max taking it upon himself to terrorise the duck. The duck escaping around the house, through the bromeliads, darting around the clivias, over the lawn, under the trees into the open front doorway, through the foyer slap slap slap, into the hallway, the kitchen slap slap slap slap, the living room, the deck and squeezing through a narrow corner and halt.

  Max also halted. Hannah caught up. The duck had managed to find a haven away from Max, behind a post onto a wee ledge without a railing, with a drop of five metres to the ground. He was petrified, lifting one foot then the other, over and over, staring into the space below.

  Where’s your little sister? You should be looking after her. Go and get Rosemary now! cried Hannah.

  The boy rushed off to find his sister. The duck tried to back through the gap he’d slipped through so readily, but the feathers that had eased the smooth passage now prevented it. Hannah slipped her hands between the post and the house to squeeze him out. She tucked him under her arm and took off to find the children. Rosemary.

  Rosemary had found the tadpoles that Hannah had been acclimatising in a large bowl by the pond, with the intention of giving the pond more life. The little girl had, with Max’s blessing, five of the tadpoles lined in a row on the bridge over the pond, and was dipping into the bowl for more. And was experimenting with one of them between her fingers and thumb, examining its sloppy slimy texture. Hannah threw the tadpoles back, but that particular one floated to the top.

  She fished it out and displayed it on her palm.

  Look. Look at this poor tadpole. It’s going to die now.

  Don’t worry, said Max. It can die into a frog.

  The duck, suddenly there beside her, snapped the tadpole from her hand, squishing it in his greedy beak, a bulbous head one side and the tail the other before gobbling it altogether.

  The children’s nonchalance turned to disbelief.

  The duck ate the tadpole. He ate it. He ate it all up.

  Max. Rosemary. What are you doing over here, anyway? Where’s Poppa?

  In the garden.

  Well, I think he’d like to see you. I’m sure I heard him calling you.

  She guided them back through the hedge. Eric was digging in the garden.

  I thought you might be worried about your grandchildren, she called.

  I knew exactly where they were, he said. I’ve had my ear o
ut.

  Well, you didn’t hear them squelching my tadpoles.

  She turned to the duck at her feet.

  You’re disgusting, she said.

  What?

  Eating that tadpole, and in front of the children like that.

  The boy’s a monster, chasing me the way he did. And what was I supposed to do with that thing? Look at it? It was delicious. Are there more?

  All this consumption, she said, exasperated. What sort of example are you setting the children? All the little creatures in the garden, and here you are, gobbling them up.

  I’m teaching them about all the little creatures in the garden, said the duck. And all the big ones that like to eat them.

  Like duck for Christmas dinner, said the woman.

  And the cruelty of people who pretend to be kind, said the duck, and she heard the voice of her mother repeating, You have a cruel streak, you really do. He waddled down to the back of the garden into the obscurity of dusk, and didn’t come when she called him. Before she put him in his cage for the night, she had to hunt for him as he crouched, hiding, sulking, amongst the clivias.

  SITTING UNDER A TREE

  Sometimes the woman became a heavy thing, her arms and legs filled with stone, her heart squeezing thick mud through the tendrils of her veins. Her cheeks were packed with gravel, pulling her mouth down towards the earth.

  And on this particular day, the duck scrambled onto the dusty old pond of her lap and wrapped his developing fevered wings around her and together they lifted into the air, a whiff of fairy-down rising. He placed his winglets over her eyes so that her vision turned inwards. Far below she could see a muddy puddle and an empty nest of white fluff. In a paddock nearby, its juices already sinking into the earth, the carcass of a duck lay sprawled amongst a wreath of white feathers, its neck twisted back and a wing splayed across the grass.