DEDICATION
Dedicated with love to:
my Mother and Father
and
my Little Jackie Winter,
my little familiar
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PART ONE: 1929 IN FULL VIEW
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PART TWO: THE SWITCH
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PART THREE: THE METAMORPHOSIS
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
PART ONE
1929
In Full View
ONE
Billy
This window is my eye. From my room I can see everyone, including my neighbour, the girl who lives in the room next to mine, hobbling down the street in her new shoes, a pair made of silvery leather with a strap that buckles delightfully across her ankle.
From the moment I laid eyes on her that morning in the street I knew she was my shining light. I made sure she didn’t see me reflected in the shop windows along King Street, nor when I followed as she turned into a leafy avenue. She ran up the front stairs of a house and my eyes tracked the hem of her trousers – just like a man’s. I hadn’t seen anything like that since France, when a lady ambulance driver delivered her wounded to the hospital and we all gawped from our beds at her legs.
The girl vanished through the front door and I saw there was a ROOM TO LET sign in the window of a grand old house, with three tiers like a cake. A cat like spilled marmalade filled the sandstone groove worn into the stair and seemed disinclined to move, so I took the steps two at a time. Looking up at the cast-iron lace on the balcony, ornate as a petticoat, I knocked and waited, hoping to catch another glimpse. Deep in the house the wireless made tinny sounds like a pocket full of thruppences. Still I waited. On the side of the house was a pompous plaque, LEDA, it said, as if a house could not do with a number alone. Leda. Was the girl seduced by a swan or the swan seduced by a girl? I could never remember. There on the stoop, I could feel the heat coming off the building, the sun captured in the stone, the house like a living thing.
The door opened and the landlady appeared, her fine bleached hair scooped to the top of her head and held with a pencil. She took one look at me and my box of retrieved things, which had come so close to oblivion, and led the way to a room at the top of the stairs. Strangely, the vacant room had been painted pupil-black, but that was not enough to deter me. I followed her back down the stairs to the sitting room and waited on the velvet settee while she bustled around the kitchen.
A large carved sideboard crowded with photos caught my attention. I craned my neck in hope her face glittered back at me from their frames. Instead a door opened in the house and with it a draught brushed against my legs, followed by the reward of her, moving in the mantle mirror down the stairs. She shone. Her face was translucent, lips painted, pressed petals from the pages of a book, only in want of my kisses. The silver sparks of her shoes caught the light. I wanted to follow to see where she was going, I wanted to know all – what her breath was like upon my face, how her voice sounded close to my ear, how she looked first thing in the morning, her eyelids dewy with sleep. My curiosity was like an itch. The front door slammed with the assistance of the breeze, making all the oriental bibelots dance, and she was gone.
‘What line of work are you in dear?’ the landlady’s voice sallied out from the kitchen. My thoughts spun. How many jobs had I had? More than could be counted on a caterpillar’s toes, I’d keep them a week or month and move along, pocketing whatever coins I could jingle. I had been many things: a child scavenger, a gravedigger’s assistant, a boy soldier, a rabbitoh, a shearer, a knife thrower, an apothecary’s assistant, a hypnotic apprentice. But never again a dupe and a fool.
‘I am …’ I paused for effect, and the kettle began to hiss as if it knew a liar, ‘an artist.’ Of sorts.
‘An artist! Oh you will fit in here quite perfectly, monsieur.’ Why had she spoken to me in French? All I had ever seen of France was the arse end of a trench.
‘Rent is paid in advance, I’m sure you understand,’ she called out.
‘Perfectly,’ I replied, cutting her off, in want of no pity. ‘I start tomorrow at the box office of the theatre down the road. I’ll be good for the rent. I can pay my own way.’ The first job I had stumbled upon I took; I would be beholden to no one, never again.
The reassuring weight of my wooden box pressed on my lap, my old cradle, my beer crate. I was keen to check all had been preserved just as I had left it and stole a glimpse of all I had in the world. But I lowered the lid as she swept into the room, a clattering tray clutched in her hands. There would be time enough for me to do a proper inventory once I was alone, in my new room.
‘Of course, of course, mon chéri. Your room gets very fine light. It was my father’s study once and he could spend all day in there with his nose pressed to the print of a book and never notice it. Really the ancient world that he studied seemed more solid than the room he sat in. God bless him, Mr …’
‘Little. William Little after my father, but people just call me plain Billy.’ My father, the sly old bastard, would have to rely on what he had reaped in this life for his rewards in the next, for there would be no blessings from me.
‘Oh fortuitous heavens, it must be a sign! My father’s name was William too. You shall fit in here just so,’ she went on like a pork chop in a synagogue.
‘All these rooms – where do you sleep?’ I asked as politely as I could muster, imagining her rattling on through the night regardless of who was there to listen.
‘Oh, I have taken the space in the attic. So you’ll be sharing the house with me and a young woman, her room is next to yours.’
When I closed the door behind me I placed my box upon the bed and curled myself beside it, the dark walls comforting like a womb. Sleep dragged at my eyelids and I woke with a start, not recalling where I was, listening to the house settle around me. My head ached as I stood upright and leaned against the wall to watch the quiet street with only the gathering of the clouds for company. Hanging from my shirt sleeve was a gossamer thread of hair, a heartstring. The hair of my silver-heeled girl? I stretched it taut and plucked it and listened for a bewitching music, but I had not earned the ears to hear. Her hair the colour of a spider’s web. So very differen
t from the first girl I thought I loved.
Her name was Golden Fortune and her hair was as black as rain falling in the darkness. There was something of the doll about her – she was around five foot two inches, dressed in the calico pyjamas that her people wore, a simple backdrop for the fuchsia flare of her cheek, and on her feet black velvet slippers with tiny gold embroidery. In her hair were stones twisted in golden twine, just a comb, but in the slick of her dark tresses it was a crown. Golden Fortune worked for her father, a wily old oriental who ran his own opium den down at the Rocks, right under the noses of the police. It was Golden Fortune’s job to make sure the customers remained comfortable, their heads resting on worn cushions from the first blissful inhalation of smoke, and to float like a golden koi though their hazy fancies and shuffle her fingers though their pockets and the treasures therein.
I do not know where it was that my father developed a taste for opium, whether it had been while he worked the docks or during his travels at sea, but it was a taste he would never forget. We were living in a room above a pub in the Rocks so he could be closer to the boats and the fresh gambling companions he would cheat out of their wages. Where or who my mother was was as much a mystery to him as it was to me, or so I thought. My father claimed in one of his floating moments that someone had left me on his doorstep with nothing but a piece of paper, the words Ha ha scrawled upon it. But I could never glean the truth. My father treated me with carefree negligence, as if the heavens had made me and therefore were responsible for my mothering. When I was an infant he had procured an Aboriginal barmaid as my wet nurse and it was she who had wiped my tiny arse and rocked me close to her heartbeat when I cried. She sang to me songs in her own language, songs of brolgas and emus and magpies, until, as an older child, I couldn’t get to sleep without rocking myself with their melody, just as my father couldn’t seem to sleep without his daily lullaby in the poppy’s embrace.
The opium den my father favoured was hidden by an innocuous wall made from bales of wool, hidden in plain sight at the back of a warehouse. The wool bales were stamped with black-inked names of farms all across New South Wales, some stamped with the image of the proud merino’s spiralled horns. According to my father, opium was a legitimate import like wool was an export. Had the sickly stink of opium penetrated through the bales and into the wool itself? Would it be spun into wool or smoke?
Golden Fortune’s father dabbled in more than one line of business, but he knew she was his biggest asset. He often called out her praises from his small black lacquer desk down the back of the den, hung with curtains made from the old hessian stamped in a language I didn’t understand, more like naughts and crosses than words. While the opium smokers gazed only at the calligraphy or rising smoke, I watched Golden Fortune, her eyes the only glittering thing moving in the half-light. From the pockets of the regular dreamers she took only a tithe. In the case of the customer just passing through, she would rummage a little deeper, the tax for being a stranger. In my presence, she only skimmed my father’s pocket, and if I was lucky, she’d slip me a shilling of the plunder.
Sometimes Golden Fortune would try to teach me to play mahjong, not that I ever mastered the game, for I would only ever win when she let me, if I had pleased her. I was in the habit of bringing her gifts: a blue wren’s egg, a boiled sweet, a perfect glass marble – anything to see her reaction. She was the only friend of my childhood.
I remember one day my father was, as usual, lying on his back, the pipe still lolling in his fingers, soon to be abandoned on the floor. The smoke was sickly strong in the air, as the rain polka-dotted the window. Golden Fortune greeted me with her usual disinterest, the comb in her ebony hair luminous in the gloomy light. The comb’s twisted gold held a world in itself: turquoise crickets, bloodstone dragonflies, quartz shimmering koi, the milky green jade of butterfly wings, all interlinked with delicate knots of seed pearl and coral.
Her father was working out the back and only nodded to acknowledge my presence. When Golden Fortune bent down over my father, the comb clattered to the floor, and a swathe of her hair fell over her shoulder, revealing the skin of her neck, so pale that I shivered. I wanted nothing more than to put my dirty thumb prints all over it. None of the dreamers stirred. She snatched the comb back up and wound her hair into its teeth before she got back to the task at hand inside my father’s coat pocket. She hesitated and I watched her gold-flecked eyes grow large with curiosity. What had her dexterous fingers plucked? The buds of her chest rose and fell under her calico sheath. She reeled it out: there between her slender and stealthy fingers was a golden pocket watch I had never seen before.
Golden Fortune held the watch aloft by the chain and it spun by itself in the air. I held my hand out for it, but the beauty of the thing fixed it to her hand and she would not give it up. The watch spun in the air between us – its golden back was engraved with something, but it was spinning too fast for me to decipher the words. My father stirred. Golden Fortune hesitated. Her doubt was the signal for my action. I reached out and grabbed it and she acquiesced without a sound, knowing in her little thief’s heart that it would be a more fitting thing to be seen in my possession than hers.
My father settled back down and I clicked the catch and watched it spring open. On one side was the fine stark face of the watch and on the other was a photo of a woman who could have been my twin. Did I have a sister and not know it? I wanted to kick my father in the ribs right then and there, but I didn’t. Not because I wasn’t brave enough, nor fired with enough rage, but because if I was going to do it, I wanted him to be awake, aware of where the bruises came from. I was trembling and Golden Fortune gently took the watch from my hand, holding it close, her fingers running over the engraving. I knew she was tempted not to put it back and it was then that I knew everything was in my favour.
The steady rhythm of her father’s fingers upon the abacus stopped abruptly. As he brushed past the curtain I saw the beads were still spinning, his count forgotten as he rushed out of his office, his pigtail streaming behind him like a kite’s tail. His emergency was my opportunity. He turned the key in the lock and left us alone with the smoke and the sleepers.
‘What do you want for it?’ she said bluntly, loudly, not her usual whisper at all. Her audacity caught me unawares.
What could I ask for in exchange for the watch; what couldn’t I ask for? Surely five minutes passed with all the possibilities and everything in between, till Golden Fortune interpreted my unspoken request and slid her shoulders out of her calico pyjamas, her hips shimmying out of the cloth. She stood before me naked, her narrow sloped shoulders and the slight flare of her hips reminding me of a fish out of water. I reached and pulled out the precious comb from her hair and placed it on the floor. Her hair untwisted itself slowly as if unwinding underwater. The only sound between us was the ticking of my father’s watch.
Golden Fortune was the first living female I had seen in the flesh. I had seen my father’s collection of French postcards, tucked under his mattress, but they were nothing compared to this.
If my father’s drug was opium, mine was surely to be skin. The texture of Golden Fortune’s skin surprised me: the most supple silk draped upon her bones, her hip and collarbone ivory points pressing against it. I looked at all the opium sleepers, some eyelids leaden to the world, some fluttering like poppy petals in a breeze. When my hand touched her, her eyes widened. I could have done anything, but all I wanted was to touch every inch of her golden skin. I ran my fingers down her arms to her fingers, a gust of goose flesh blowing like pollen across her shoulders. I ran my fingertips around the aureole of her nipples, watching them blush and grow harder. I tracked both sides of her ribs and encircled her waist, cupping the twin moons of her bottom. I crouched down, my hands swirling over her belly, down the flank of her thighs, tracing the mons veneris of her nest. I demanded she turn around, her straight hair like a horse’s mane twitched down to her hips. I flicked her hair back over her shoulder, whipping it
back like a rein, her neck shining for my touch. And so I did, with my fingers, my lips, my tongue. She shivered without restraint, before dropping to the floor, gathering her calico garments and making for her father’s office, leaving her comb and my father’s watch abandoned on the floor.
Without thinking I gathered up the comb and shoved it in my pocket. I heard her father’s key in the lock, so I plucked the watch off the ground and flicked the glass plate off with my thumbnail and took the photograph before she returned. By the time Golden Fortune’s father was in the doorway, I had tucked the watch in her mahjong box, roused my father from his stupor and led him out the door. When he sobered up and came down from his heaven, he reached into his pocket and let out an almighty howl, but refused to tell me what he was missing. After the watch was gone he vowed to give up the poppy altogether and instead fell into the world at the end of a bottle.
With her silvery hair still twisted around my finger, turning my skin as pale as hers, my vigilance was rewarded. She appeared in the street below, a newspaper tucked under her arm. How beautiful were her feet with shoes. Geisha steps. The late afternoon sun painted her all over golden, an idol, though she was white as white can be. She stood out from all around her, the world made silhouette by her light. Her skin was incandescent and had the waxy quality of a candle. She leaned down as if she had dropped something, but no, she was easing off her shoes, wincing, her stockings ruined by two little peepholes of flesh where blisters flared against her heels. Ahead of her, men had started to trickle past, their shapeless coats tugged at by the breeze. Were they half the gentleman I was, their coats would be off, a bridge for her feet to walk upon.
The light in my room turned a stark yellow as the approaching storm squeezed the last of the sunlight from the sky. I looked out the window again. A man’s skullcap was lifted and tossed away on the fingers of a gust like a coin in a magic trick, right over to the dainty instep of my little neighbour. She stopped it with her toe, and plucked it up with her spare hand, her shoes clasped beneath her elbow with the newspaper. She returned it to its owner, then the sound of the thunder made her start and do a quick foxtrot on the road. Her feet moved quicker as the first raindrops splashed and the branches of the trees overlapped like waves on a violent sea.
The Bird's Child Page 1