Her newspaper flapped only once before it fluttered up into the air, a suspended flock of black and white pages, her mouth cooing for them to return. One obscured the windscreen of a car as it tore around the corner. If the car had so much as sprayed her with gravel, I would have tracked it down and made a pretty pattern across the paintwork with my blade and turned its rubber tyres to ribbons. Pages blew towards a bicycle, flickering in the spiralling spokes. The bike stopped, but the rider continued, his jacket billowing until his limbs seemed to fold in on themselves and he fell twisted at her feet. She crumpled to her knees. Was she injured? Her mouth moved but no sound reached my ears from behind the glass. If he had made her bleed, I would have him bleed in recompense, an eye for an eye.
She put the cloth of her blouse to his temple, the faintest smear of red swelled onto the white. His fingers clutched at her and I wanted at once to pull the window up and shout. How I wished I had been able to calculate the exact moment when my little neighbour would be at the mercy of the elements. It could have been me cycling by, it could have been me leaning on her tender arm, subject to her gentle ministrations. But it was his hand on her arm, not mine. I looked away for a moment as I pulled the lid off my box and retrieved the mother-of-pearl opera glasses, which I was relieved to find had not been pawned. My fingers twirled at the focus wheel. Had a bruise suddenly formed on her flesh? No, it was just a blot on my eye. Lucky for him I could blink it away.
I steadied my hands as I had seen the snipers do in France. I could see a strange marking on his hand, a smudge no blinking could make clear. I rubbed the lenses of the opera glasses, one after the other, with my shirt tail. Yet still the illegible mark was on his hand. Perhaps some headline had released its ink with his sweat. I knew that when you bought pork from the butcher, the pink flesh displayed all yesterday’s news backwards. I fiddled with the focus; the letters jumbled and rearranged themselves before my eyes. It was a tattoo running along the middle finger of his left hand, from the top of the nail to the base of his wrist. I cupped my hand against the light. It was one long word. I tried to make it out, sounding out each letter to see if it would make sense.
I was about to give up, when the word was suddenly clear, sprung like a lock, the letters obvious, their meaning obscure.
Abracadabra.
Had I timed it perfectly I might have counted the steps she would take until she neared the house. I could have descended the stairs just as she ascended them. Instead I delayed, observing from the top of the stairs as she entered the front door. She was undamaged, but one could not say the same for the newspaper clutched beneath her arm, tattered like a drunk’s blanket. The rain had set her hair a-frizz, her cheeks suddenly rouged, and there was something about the way her lips parted, the breath panting out of her, her teeth small like pearls. I caught my breath.
She sat down on the settee in the living room, the newspaper pages falling around her like a nest as she searched them until she found the one she wanted. She discarded the rest to the fireplace, perched with kindling and waiting to be lit. I’d already read them all – debt, repatriation agreements, the decline of the price of wool. Tentatively I took another step down as she rested her chin in her hands, the employment page spread over her legs. She circled the possibilities with a reluctant swirl, hardly leaving a mark at all. I couldn’t believe my luck, she was just sitting there awaiting my introduction. She lifted her face toward me as I approached, and blinked, her hand coming up to shield her eyes. I stepped forward out of the glare of the chandelier and extended my hand, observing all the delicacy of her features, the curious absence of her eyebrows, the blonde fringe of her eyelashes over her dark eyes, and the transparent pink lips free of their paint. In that moment I imagined her in the gold braided theatre uniform and felt the little flare of her torch shine into the darkened corners, wishing it would shine into me.
‘There is a position going where I work, in the theatre, for an usherette, if you are interested? Billy Little at your service,’ I said, sweeping into a bow. I had just secured a position at the box office myself. Usherettes came and went, a feminine procession every day of the week, I was sure of it.
She smiled. ‘Sounds better than this lot,’ she said warily. ‘Better than my last job.’
‘Which was?’ There was so much I wanted to know, but she just looked down at her newspaper.
‘Anything to pay the rent.’ As much as I wanted to pry it all out of her, I let her be, lest she shut up completely.
‘Would you be interested then, Miss …?’
‘You can call me Lily,’ she answered, looking me squarely in the eye, so I knew she was lying, but still she had given me a name: a little victory.
‘I can introduce you to the boss tomorrow after breakfast if you like, Lily.’ Her name on my lips made me smile and she smiled back. I’d give her my own job if they couldn’t find her one.
‘Thank you, Mr Little, I appreciate it.’ She extended her hand and it rested briefly in mine, a bird’s handshake before fluttering away, our little bargain. I watched her walk up the stairs, the way the trousers cinched and draped her all at once, before waiting a respectful time to follow on her heels and return to my room. There I realised that my thumb was still encircled with her hair, the tip livid with blood.
The rain splattered the window. I had the comb tucked safely away and I was tempted to take it from its hiding place. But I didn’t need to see it to imagine what it would be like to slide it into the halo of Lily’s pale hair. The creatures made of jade and quartz would come to life. Would she ever let me?
TWO
Ari
The rain fell in the darkness, tiny fists a tantrum upon the tin roof. Miss du Maurier had been kind enough to let me use a little space where once the horses had been stabled and now was just a shed, somewhere I could practise on my own, without interruption, a place close to home. There were two stalls and an open space where the old trap would have been housed, and a small fireplace. I furnished it with a tattered armchair reclaimed from the lane. I kept my books and my Houdini scrapbook in a milk crate, and on the floor was an old kangaroo skin I had found rolled up under one of the saddles. A kerosene lantern hung from above, giving off a greasy metallic smell.
Since her father passed away, Miss du Maurier had decided to rent out rooms, more for company than for money. To get the house ready, I had helped her paint each room a different colour. We had painted one of the upstairs rooms black; I wasn’t sure that anyone would want to sleep in a room like that – it would be like sleeping in a tomb – but Miss du Maurier had insisted, a dramatic gesture, a room made memorial to her father. She had offered to help me paint the shed, but I preferred it as it was, the abandoned paint tins stacked in the neighbouring stall.
I had waited all day to come across the road and see how my precious cargo had fared. The day had all but disappeared between work at the Red Rose and my uncle’s errands – reading the newspaper for an elderly Jewish lady, teaching the violin to a congregant’s son, cleaning the synagogue windows up a ladder. My uncle kept me as busy as he could, leaning on my indecision, which he thought a weak spot. But for me this made a safe distance between his expectations and my dreams. With the evening meal over I had slipped the shackles of my uncle’s glare and returned to the shed, hesitant to lift the covering cloth from the box. The creature was still in shock, its yellow-lidded eyes not yet opening to the light. Just like mine the first day off the boat when I was a small child.
My aunt held me close that day, even though I had just met her, while my uncle barely let his eyes alight on me. The city rose up out of the dust, the buildings themselves made of sand. The sky seemed vaulted and never-ending, though it was the beginning of evening and the weeks at sea made the horizon tilt at every bump. Sharing the road with our cart were black shining motorcars, while on the footpath people walked dressed in light summer clothes. I was still wearing my winter coat. We turned into a large boulevard flanked by green grounds which seemed to
house a castle. My aunt leaned down to me and whispered in Yiddish, ‘Universitet.’ University. My uncle clicked his tongue, which I thought was a signal to the horse, but my aunt and uncle shared a glance that even the horse sensed and twitched his ears at. We trailed onto a different street, L’Avenue. The foundations of the synagogue were rising brick stumps in the dry mud, growing from my uncle’s ambition. Next door, in a building that had once been a peanut factory, was a hall where services were held in the meantime. My aunt and uncle lived in a flat above it.
Walking down the path came Mr du Maurier, as rigid as a piece of chalk in his grey suit, his cane tapping instructions to the ground. Clasped to his arm was his daughter, her hair shorn shockingly short for the time, her sheer dress whipping around her legs. I later found out that she was a dancer at the Tivoli, at which my aunt and uncle exchanged another glance and said no more, grateful for the friendship of her father all the same. My uncle spoke a greeting and they called out something in the language I was yet to understand. They stopped by the side of the cart and shook hands and Miss du Maurier put her hand up to my face and smiled as if I had done something clever. Her fingers were cool on my hot skin.
The parrot lifted his eyelid and looked up at me now with a world-weary eye. I dipped my finger in a glass of water and let the drop fall into his beak, his almond-rough tongue reaching out for it. Poor little thing. He was a little miracle of colour: Eden-green feathers, chalkier on the breast, a black band like a velvet choker around his little throat – created by G_d with the other birds on the fifth day according to the Torah.
The parrot’s tongue searched for the tip of my finger, while the pincer-sharp beak pressed close to enough to draw blood. I did not pull away. When I was a boy I had read in the newspaper that Harry Houdini had a pet parrot, an African grey, he had taught to pick locks and say, ‘Hip hip hooray.’ I had foolishly read these words aloud to my aunt and uncle.
Straightaway my uncle had snatched the paper from my hands, ripped out the offending article and thrown it into the hot mouth of the stove.
‘Hip hip hurrah! The disgrace of it! Hip! Hip! is the abbreviation for Hiierosolyma Est Perdita, Latin for ‘Jerusalem is destroyed’, coined by the Romans under Titus’s destruction of the Temple. The Hurrah was added by German Knights in the Middle Ages while they were crusading in the Holy Land. It is Slavonic for ‘to Paradise’. They shouted it while killing our people. Let me hear no more of it!’
When Houdini died, I had later learned, the parrot went to live at a boarding house as Mrs Houdini couldn’t bear to hear her husband’s voice coming from the mouth of the bird. It escaped one day, turning a key left in a lock, deft as its master.
The green parrot looked up at me, a slow filmy blink. What would my uncle make of it?
I pulled my collar up around my neck, nestled the parrot in the front of my shirt and made a dash outside. Perhaps there was something in the kitchen I could feed him with. Some oats in milk or breadcrumbs? Miss du Maurier left the back door unlocked and I was free to come and go as I pleased. After my shift at the Red Rose I’d spend some time trying to learn my tricks in the shed, poring over the instructions, until they were tangled in my head. Sometimes if Miss du Maurier was still up, she’d call me in and we’d share a pot of tea, or she’d ask me to play some of her old Tivoli songs on the piano for old times’ sake, her slippered feet remembering half-forgotten steps. But as I approached the house, I could see the door was already wide open and the girl sat on the stoop, hands under her chin as she watched the rain fall, the water drawing vertical lines against a backdrop of darkness.
When I had crashed into her with my bike I had only seen a blur, but now I could see her clearly, sitting on the back stairs, lost in her thoughts. She appeared amidst the raindrops to be stitched from the light and I hesitated unsure if she would fade from my sight, a figment made solely by my eyes, the afterimage of the extinguished lamp. I stepped forward, but the rain was too loud on the tin roof for her to hear my footsteps. When she saw me she skittered sidewise before her eyes adjusted. Her hand fluttered up to her chest.
‘Sorry to frighten you,’ I said, the water dripping off my elbows and into puddles at either side of my feet.
‘I just got a shock, that’s all,’ she said, rising to her feet and dusting off the back of her trousers. I had never seen such a thing, a woman in trousers, and tried not to stare. ‘I am so sorry about yesterday …’ With the rain falling about her in the darkness, she was as white and silvery as a sapling birch.
‘I should have watched where I was going.’
The water from my wet hair started down my face and travelled the ridge of my nose, but she didn’t seem to notice. She resumed her seat in the doorway, shuffling over so I could pass if I chose to. But I didn’t choose to. I shrugged off my wet jacket, trying to release myself of the tight grip of the wet wool, carefully cradling the parrot with one hand beneath my clothes. As I attempted to peel off the coat I became entangled. The parrot dug his beak into my skin – an accident or in protest – and I winced. Then her hand was on my shoulder, pulling at the coat until it slid free and she draped it over the back of an old beach chair that was sheltered from the rain. I was glad that my uncle was across the road, deep in his dreams – touch between unmarried men and women was strictly forbidden.
‘What is in your shirt?’ she wondered, wrapping her arms around herself.
I sat in the gap she had made for me, our bodies close, our shoulders nearly touching. Somewhere out in the night a plover made its ghostly echoing call and the rain pelted even harder in response. Sheet lightning flared up in the sky and seed pods fell to the ground from the plane tree. The parrot attempted to stretch his wings, his claws trying to find traction in the few hairs that gathered on my chest, until his green head sprouted over the top of my shirt.
‘Oh, he’s beautiful!’ she burst out. ‘Where did you find him?’
‘I found him crouched in the gutter, just before I started work,’ I replied, pulling him free. ‘I put him in a darkened box hoping he would recover.’
She reached over and took him, the tips of her fingers brushing mine, before she cradled him in the crook of her arm. His eye rolled up at me in bliss. When he was calm she pulled out each wing like a Spanish fan and the bird shivered beneath her touch. She handed him back to me and picked up seed pods the rain had shaken from the trees, placing one spiky ball between her teeth and plucking out the seeds within before offering them to the parrot. His beak opened ravenously.
‘How did you know he would eat that?’ I asked.
‘At home flocks of parrots hang off the plane tree for hours, stripping them seed by seed. When there are no leaves left on the trees, the birds hang like jewels.’ She smiled at me. Her face gleamed as if she had been caught in a photographer’s flash and the glare would not leave her skin.
I passed the bird back to her and tried to release the seeds from the pod myself with my teeth, but nothing came free in my mouth. Her laughter tumbled out of her.
‘How long have you boarded with Miss du Maurier?’ I asked. The first I’d seen of her was when we collided on the street.
‘I escaped here almost a week ago,’ she said, scouting around for another seed pod to crack. ‘You? I thought you lived across the road.’
‘I do, but I’ve been coming over here since I was a little child. Escaped also,’ I replied, running my hand through the wet bramble of my hair, trying to make light, yet not wanting to elaborate to a stranger, no matter how friendly. I did not want to make her the bearer of my burden.
‘Well, aren’t we a bunch of escapees,’ she said, breaking apart another pod and sorting the seeds in the palm of her hand. ‘Yes, real escape artists, that’s for sure.’ The rain seemed to slow, rivulets carving their way through the couch grass.
‘When I enquired about the room, Miss du Maurier mentioned that there was a young man who used the shed for his magical aspirations. I knew then I had to take the room. I am assumin
g this young man is you? Would it be rude of me to ask what those aspirations are? You see, once my curiosity has been piqued, then there is no end to it.’ Her face was as open as a book.
‘You took the room because of me?’ I asked in disbelief, feeling my face grow hot.
She blushed in reply, her voice flustered. ‘It felt like a sign. Superstitious nonsense, I know, but my father loved magic, it made me think of him.’
‘I have an interest in magic, just for myself, for my own amusement,’ I said cautiously. ‘It’s nothing really, a silly hobby. Miss du Maurier thinks everyone has stars in their eyes.’ Self-consciously I tugged my sleeve over my hand, letting the wool conceal my tattoo. The parrot stepped up my forearm to find better purchase, his eyes wide and blinking in the darkness. I looked at the green feathers graduating to pink in his tail, rather than see her expression, wishing I had kept my foolishness to myself.
‘Yes?’ she said breathlessly, and I took courage to look at her. She didn’t blink. She didn’t look away. She was waiting for me to say more, her eyes were on my lips. What did I have to say that was worth her hearing? I looked away and heard her sigh. I could have fallen into that silence and never spoken again.
‘My father had a magic trick he taught me once. It was famous in our household, especially at Christmas,’ she said wistfully. She pulled out her trouser pockets, ‘Do you have a coin on you? I can show it to you if you like.’ A woman in trousers. Suddenly it came to me: Houdini had made Bess wear a type of trousers upon the stage when they first started out. It was in the book my aunt had given me. Plunging my hands in my pockets, I rummaged for the coin she requested, but all I could find was a handkerchief and scraps of paper.
The Bird's Child Page 2