The High Places

by Fiona McFarlane

  ‘Not a bad old place, this,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘Been a regular for twenty years. This your first time?’

  Christopher looked at his article as if the answer might be found there.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘What are you reading up on, then?’

  ‘It’s research,’ said Christopher. ‘For my thesis.’

  ‘A thesis, eh? What’s the subject?’

  ‘History of science.’

  ‘History!’ declared Mr Kidd. ‘What’s it about, then? In a nutshell.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Christopher, ‘I don’t want to bore you. It’s very boring. Not to me, of course, but to anyone who isn’t me. Sometimes to me.’ The thought that other people might want to talk with him about his thesis always filled him, against his will, with a grateful excitement.

  ‘What else am I here for? Go on, bore me.’

  ‘All right, then. Actually it’s about eighteenth-century medical models. The anatomical models they’d make – of pregnant women, for example, obstetrical models – to teach students and train surgeons. In the eighteenth century.’

  ‘Oh ho,’ said Mr Kidd, a look of delight on his face. ‘Oh ho,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much about obstetrics, though I’ve seen two children into the world, but I know a little something about models.’ He fixed Christopher with an intimate eye. ‘If you’ve got a minute I could show you quite a model.’

  Was this what Christopher had feared, hurrying through the lobby of the St George Hotel, his chin tucked into his nervous collar? An invitation from a man like Mr Kidd, both blatant and disguised, more sad than it was awful? His experiences of seduction had been avid and unvarying; in contrast to this, they took on a new cast of yellow-lit tenderness, as if they had happened long before and were unrepeatable.

  ‘I’m very busy,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. So much to read. But thank you.’

  Mr Kidd maintained a smile around which the eagerness of his face shrank. He was obviously offended. His invitation had been friendly and too quickly refused. There was a genuine model of some kind – a train, or plane, or a luxury car, a coveted Bugatti convertible that could only ever be owned in miniature.

  ‘Not to worry. Give me a knock if you ever fancy a chat. Door’s always open.’

  Mr Kidd stood abruptly, confused at this failure; there was a collapsing of something, a crowding in of age or exhaustion. His disappointment revealed his years: over eighty. He smoothed down the tails of his invisible suit and persisted with his smile. A keen crowd of old men watched the termination of the exchange from all corners. Christopher worried that he might have humiliated this man in front of his lounge cronies and would now be responsible for a disastrous slip in the social ranks. There was that volatile feeling common to gatherings of this kind on public holidays, suggestive of a public execution.

  ‘Thank you,’ Christopher bleated to Mr Kidd’s departing figure, which waved a hand about and moved toward the lobby.

  Christopher spent a minute or two confused himself, and unable to concentrate, before calming down enough to remind himself that he owed nothing to Mr Kidd, whom he now connected with the cough in the next-door room, and that his aim in this city was to lead a simple life of research, seven days a week, until he could return home with new material and nothing else to report. Settled by these thoughts, he returned to reading.

  But the article on Christopher’s lap spoke with intelligent fury of the violence toward women represented by the obstetrical models that were, as he described them, his ‘intellectual bread and butter’; he grew ashamed and embarrassed in the lounge of the St George. From a distance – the distance of a few chairs away, by the tea and coffee table, where men continued to sweeten their cups with irregularly shaped lumps of sugar – he was sure the images accompanying his article must look obscene. He had become a man reading pornography in a hotel lounge. How long did it take to clean a room? Should he finish his tea, cold by now, before leaving the lounge, and where would he put his cup? Should he take it with him? His anxiety was something like the rolling pressure required to remove the shell of a hard-boiled egg. He sat in his chair with his cold tea and his dirty article, more and more of his composure flaking away; eventually he reached the same point of false bravado that had first led him to the lounge. He stood with purpose, gathered his things, and carried his cup with him into the lobby, nervously sipping the air. The doors of the lift stood open and he stepped through them with a sideways motion, pressing the ‘Close Doors’ button before selecting his floor. Fifth floor. He rose toward his room with a sensation of heavenly ascent. Stepping from the lift he could see his door still open, half the vacuum tube sticking out into the windowless hallway. He imagined a maid in crisis, called from her duty by a family emergency, and in his agitation permitted himself to pour his cold tea into a plant pot; at the same time he heard a voice calling, ‘Knock! Knock! Knock!’ The voice came from behind Mr Kidd’s door. ‘Knock! Knock! Knock!’

  Christopher knocked.

  Mr Kidd opened the door and took Christopher’s empty cup from him with one fluid movement. It was as if he’d been privy to Christopher’s concerns; as if he’d known that Christopher was worried, was ascending, was standing outside the door with a cup in his hands. Mr Kidd threw the cup into the air, where it described a graceful arc over the bed before landing in his wastepaper basket. A pair of shoes already occupied this receptacle.

  ‘Christopher,’ said Mr Kidd, with outstretched arms, and he ushered his guest into the room. It was the reverse of Christopher’s not only in the arrangement of the furniture but also in its clutter, the disorder of which suggested long tenancy: piles of boxes, magazines thick-edged on these boxes, sloped stacks of books, a dish rack above the basin, a hat stand on which shirts and jackets perched on wire hangers, with the wardrobe itself taped shut, and a birdcage in the corner by the air-conditioning unit. The bird in the cage cried, ‘Knock!’ It shook its blue and black and white feathers against the bars and swung, one-legged, on its swing.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ said Mr Kidd.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ said Christopher. ‘I wanted to know – has the maid been to you yet?’

  ‘You mean Lori? She has, she has. Sit down.’ And he straightened out a stack of magazines on a low chair, so that Christopher understood he was to sit on them. He placed his papers on top of the pile and sat. The chair rocked a little against the floor, the bird’s beak darted among its seeds, Mr Kidd sat genially on the end of his bed. At Christopher’s feet, folded handkerchiefs filled a shoebox.

  ‘It’s just that she’s left all her cleaning things in my room, for some time now, and there’s no sign of her. Oh, I’m sorry.’ Sorry because, in attempting to cross his legs, he had upended the box of handkerchiefs, which spread gracefully on the floor.

  Mr Kidd hurried to right them.

  ‘Not to worry, not to worry! I do it all the time,’ he said, and stroked each handkerchief as he returned it to the box. They were all admirably smooth. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? I send them out, you see, to be laundered.’ He took evident pleasure in this; not only in the act of sending and laundering, but the words themselves.

  The bird worked intimately with its seeds, as if mending them. Christopher watched it lift its bright head and say, ‘Violet!’

  ‘Pretty little thing, isn’t it?’ said Mr Kidd. ‘Belongs to my wife.’

  Although Mr Kidd had mentioned, in the lounge, the birth of two children, Christopher had imagined the old man as a lifelong bachelor of regular habits. Now he must accommodate a wife. Actually, there was a neatness to Mr Kidd’s dress that suggested wifely attentions.

  ‘Or belonged to my wife, I should say.’

  So now Christopher must think ‘widower’, a word that always flapped at him out of Dickens, with a faint scent of camphor and a long, black, slightly feminine coat.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.

  ‘So was I, Chris, let me tell you. So was I. She brought this b
ird with her when we got married. I mean it – brought it with her to the wedding. It was like a, whaddya call it, a dowry. Like a ring on my finger, this bird.’

  And he gestured toward a photograph propped against a box, a sepia arrangement of bride, groom, and, yes, bird, although ‘bird’ was suggested more by the courtly lift of the woman’s arm than the avian blur perched upon it.

  ‘Nineteen forty-eight,’ said Mr Kidd.

  ‘This is the same bird?’

  ‘It is,’ said Mr Kidd.

  ‘This bird is over sixty years old?’ said Christopher, too polite to be distinctly incredulous, but he itched to take up his phone and research the lifespan of parrots.

  ‘It’s older than that,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime. It’s quite a story. You’ll be interested, Chris. This is right in your line.’

  He sat cheerfully on the bed, his head cocked, his arms rigid and his fists on his knees. Christopher beheld his loneliness and said, ‘I’m all ears.’ This colloquialism struck him as false, as something Mr Kidd would say. But it was Christopher’s habit to fall into the speech patterns of those around him, and in this way he succumbed at last to the shabby sociability of the St George Hotel.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Kidd, and he sprang from the bed toward the bird. It didn’t cease cracking its seed until he opened the cage door; then it stood quite still and said, ‘Hello! Hello!’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘You won’t come out?’

  He offered his hand, but the bird remained motionless.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, but just as he went to close the door, the bird flew in a bright flurry into the room, settling at first on top of the wardrobe, then on the basin, and finally on Christopher’s leg. Christopher sat rigid with anxiety – he realised he had never actually touched a bird – but it was placid enough, and he found he enjoyed the light weight of its claws on his knee.

  ‘I met my wife young,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘My parents were actors. Whole family, actually. I’m an insurance man myself – was. On the road as much as my parents were, just a different kettle of acting fish, really, if you think about it. I say actors but I don’t mean Shakespeare, I’m talking music hall stuff.

  ‘Well, Violet – my wife – was from another theatre family. Her mother was Gladys Nie – you won’t know her, but she was big news back in the day, she tap-danced in gold tights and sang like a bugle, but they called her the Blue Canary because she performed with a blue parrot on one shoulder. And she had this daughter we all loved, and that was Violet. I was playing piano for our act back then – we were the Kidds & Kids, my brothers on fiddle and horn, Dad sang, Mum sang, we all danced. And I just met this girl, Violet, and fell for her. There was one song she did with her mother, she came out in a white dress like this was The Nutcracker, and she and Gladys sang about a man they were both in love with – mother and daughter both in love with the same fellow! – who turned out to be a woman dressed as a man, and she ran off with the father.’

  Mr Kidd, laughing, unleashed a bubble of watery snot; he attended to it without embarrassment, using one of his laundered handkerchiefs.

  ‘Now, Violet was only seventeen, so we had to wait, and we were touring all the time, not always to the same places – she’d be in Grafton and I’d be in Bendigo, say – and along comes the war and I’m called up, but they turned me down for service on account of my asthma and I end up running errands for the War Damage Commission, which is how I got into insurance.’

  The bird shifted on Christopher’s knee, as if to remind Mr Kidd to get on with it.

  ‘So finally the war’s over, Vi’s twenty-one, and on our wedding day she shows up with her mother’s blue parrot on her arm. It’s a wedding present. She carries it down the aisle, it sits on her shoulder all through the wedding breakfast, and finally we’re alone in this little hotel in Brisbane and here’s this bird. And I say, “Look, Vi, I can’t do it with a bird in the room” – there was no cage, see, to cover over. So she put it in her suitcase, and I said, “Won’t it die? No air?” and she just shakes her head at me and that’s that, my mind wasn’t on the bird, let me tell you. What a night.

  ‘In the morning, Vi opens her suitcase and out comes the bird, right as rain. And I say, “Shouldn’t we feed it?” and she laughs at me and says, “No need.” Then she tells me the strangest thing. “This bird,” she says, “has been in my family since 1851.”’

  Mr Kidd paused. The bird picked discreetly at its chest feathers. ‘Knock,’ it said matter-of-factly. Christopher listened for sounds that the maid might have returned to his room.

  ‘She says, “Bob, we’re married now and I’ll tell you everything. A Chinaman made this bird for my great-grandmother, and it isn’t real.”’

  ‘Not real?’ said Christopher, looking at the bird, which hopped on his knee.

  Mr Kidd rubbed his hands together. ‘I told you I had a model for you, didn’t I?’ he said, and his pleasure in saying it seemed to make his eyes water a little; he touched them with his handkerchief.

  ‘Well, I was a newly married man, I was ready to agree to anything, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it – the thing looked so real, you can see for yourself, and here she was saying it was clockwork. An “automaton” is the word, but you’ll know that with your thesis.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘There was a duck that ate and defecated, the Vaucanson duck, right in my time period.’

  Mr Kidd nodded. ‘So I asked her to show me its insides, and she said no, taking it apart would break it forever and there was nothing else like it in the world. And my Violet said to me, “Bob, by god, if you ever doubt this bird I’ll walk out the door and never come back.” She’s saying this, mind, without a stitch on, and she looked so serious – what could I do? I made a vow more solemn, I reckon, than our marriage. Tell me you would’ve done any different, Chris, faced with a beautiful naked woman.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Christopher, although he thought instead of a beautiful man with a bird on his bare shoulder; and, as if startled, the bird flew to the top of the wardrobe, where its tail tipped up and down like a little lever. But only like a lever, thought Christopher; really, just like a bird.

  ‘She kept it up all through the honeymoon – we only drove down the coast – all through setting up the house, and when I said, “Let me buy it a cage, shouldn’t it have seeds to eat, shouldn’t it drink?” she said, “I told you, Bob, it isn’t real and it can’t eat – ask me another question like that and I’ll be out the door.” For the longest time, you know, I thought she fed it on the sly. There was no mess. And of course I was gone all day at work, then for days at a time, weeks eventually, out on the road. The boys came along pretty early, two boys, but the third baby was stillborn, and after that it was a string of miscarriages, very hard, and one day she says to me, “I don’t mind, we have our boys, except I wanted a girl to take the bird, it’s supposed to be a girl.”’

  ‘Does it have a name?’ asked Christopher, because only now did it occur to him that Mr Kidd hadn’t mentioned one.

  ‘She wouldn’t name it,’ said Mr Kidd, ‘on account of it not being real. Anyway, by this time I’d forgotten about it being an automaton and all that, it was just The Bird, and she didn’t make a big song and dance about it, except she told the boys to take care when they were playing. But when she said the bit about wanting a girl for the bird, I thought, Hang on, that thing must be getting a bit long in the tooth, how many years does a budgie live for anyway? I asked at a pet shop and they said seven or eight, maximum ten. Well, we’d been married for seven, and I figured old Gladys had been replacing the bird on and off and she probably got a fresh one to give Vi, so our time with this bird was nearly up and then we’d see.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Christopher. Mr Kidd’s nose had begun to well, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. He rubbed his thighs with his fists. A strange high hum entered the room; it took Christopher a moment to realise it came from next doo
r and was a vacuum cleaner. The bird, as if insulted by the noise, ducked its head and said, ‘Violet! Violet!’

  ‘But a year passed, and a few more, and the bird was still with us, the bloody thing. I’d inspect it whenever I got home from a trip and wonder if it was the same bird or if she’d gone out and got herself a new one. But they all looked the same to me. One day she sees me peering at it and asks what I’m up to. I thought fast, Chris, and I said, “I’m trying to figure out where you wind it up.” She gave me a kiss for that.

  ‘So the boys grew up, and when the first one got married I asked Vi if she was going to give him the bird, and she said no, and I asked if it was because he wasn’t a girl. And she said it was because he didn’t believe it was mechanical. I was glad to hear it, but I said to her, “You told me you’d be out the door if I didn’t believe you,” and she said, “I’m his mother, not his wife.” And the second boy got married and he didn’t get the bird either, but I knew better than to ask. All this time, it’s still going into the bath with her, sitting on her shoulder all day. It’d perch on the telly at night while we watched. It wasn’t till after both boys left home that it started to talk – Hello! Knock! All of that, and her name too. So I figured she’d finally bought a smart one.’

  ‘Violet! Violet!’ said the bird.

  ‘It used to come on holiday with us, camping and road trips, but then we planned a trip to England – Vi always wanted to go to England – and I found her putting it in her suitcase. So I said, “You can’t do that,” and she said, “I have to, they won’t let it on the plane with us,” and then it all came out, Chris – that I’d never believed her, that I thought it was a game, that she fed it in secret and bought a new one every ten years. She was spitting mad, and I said to her, “Well, take it apart, show me its insides, prove it,” and she refused to go on the trip, shut herself in the bedroom, and wouldn’t come out. It was all I could do to make her eat. The boys came over and talked her out of it, but it was never the same after that, she never really forgave me.’