The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  I fingered the straw in my hands, the roughness a delightful scratch. I held the crown up to my nose and inhaled the scent of her freshly washed hair. I was overcome with the need to bury my nose in the nape of her neck, but I was disturbed in my reveries by her very self, standing right in front of me.

  ‘Why are you hiding behind my hat, Mr Little?’

  I hadn’t realised that I still held it up to my face like a man peek-a-booing at a baby.

  ‘I fully intended to return it to you. I just didn’t want to interrupt your little tête-à-tête.’ The flush rose in her face. Lily stood in front of me, and I still held her hat. Would she lose her cool and snatch it? Even in the wintry sunshine she was turning pinker by the moment, the scalp at the parting of her hair turning pinkest of all. I was an idiot. Right before me I was letting that smooth lunar skin burn. Before my eyes I imagined the fine white living porcelain of her skin at the mercy of the fiery kiln. I blinked and handed her the hat and saw the immediate relief shade brought to her features.

  ‘Would you like to meet Ari?’ She nodded in the direction of the Jew, who seemed so swamped in the sea of long grass that he looked in need of a lifeboat.

  ‘Another time, perhaps?’ If he wasn’t man enough to stand up and come and shake my hand, my feet would not step an inch in his direction. ‘But do tell him his aunt is delightful.’ Watching her face melt into curiosity was worth the price of admission. ‘See you this evening then,’ I said and bid her good day. Of course I would be in the right place at the right time to escort her to the theatre later. She returned to her perch on his jacket in the park, the grass folding in behind her to conceal them. What they talked about only the swallows pitching wildly around their heads knew, but I would find out soon enough.

  The latch of her door gave way to my touch like heat to ice; she’d forgotten to lock it. Unsurprisingly, her room was different to mine. Her room glowed, the light bounding with a defiant joy off the white walls, so that it seemed larger. I thought the room would offer her up to me, scattered objects each with a little part of her soul wrapped up in them. There were several fine silver hairs on the hairbrush, a pillowcase scented with rosewater, two dresses in the cupboard, one a nondescript cream colour, the other the colour of midnight, a blue that would have made her face look like the benevolent moon, her hair a frizz of shooting stars. I opened the chest of drawers, so empty that it rattled. A baser pervert would have fondled her smalls with the greatest of pleasure – taking her stockings, putting his hand though them and imagining her flesh in the web of silk – but I just noted them and went on to the next drawer, which was completely empty. She had even fewer possessions than I. Where was the detritus of her life? Where was the address book, the framed photographs, the notes from loved ones? I had seen men in the ward in Paris with more, the remnants of their old life crowding around them, talismans and idols to prove that they still lived. But she had nothing much of anything.

  Under the bed was her suitcase. I dragged it out, a single dust dolly rolling out with it. Inside was only a battered illustrated book on magic wrapped in an old scarf. The name Matilda was written in looping script on the flyleaf. I turned the next page and there was an inscription in an older hand. To my darling wee girl, life is magic. Many happy returns, your loving Father.

  Around the suitcase edge the lining was coming away. I ran a finger along it, liberating the last remaining fibres like slitting an envelope. She had hidden it well. Curled like a snake, a long silken skein of her hair was tucked away. As I pulled it out, it cascaded down over my arm. She was on her own. Was she a self-made orphan? She had up and left whatever life she had to make a new one, I was sure of it. I brushed her braid across my cheek, feeling a cool delicious swish, a caress. Why had she shorn herself so? And kept the thing so hidden? It smelled of lavender water and something else, exquisite and not quite nameable, the essence of her. Her lack of possessions, her seeming disdain of things, made me doubt whether what I really wanted was a souvenir of the adventure we would have. Perhaps this time the only souvenir I would settle for would be the girl herself.

  ‘Why is it that you aren’t married, Miss du Maurier? A handsome woman like yourself,’ I said at the dinner table later that day. I knew very well that women of a certain age had had their pick of the male crop prematurely harvested, left with nothing but their yellowing trousseaus as keepsakes, but I also knew that flattery would help my case when I told her my rent would be late. Miss du Maurier went a little pale.

  ‘Would you like a hand, Miss du Maurier?’ Lily asked, but Miss du Maurier shook her head and retrieved her handkerchief from her brassiere strap and blew her nose.

  ‘I’m fine, dear, we all lost someone we loved in the war,’ she sniffed, before she walked back into the kitchen.

  ‘Were you in the war, Mr Little?’ Lily asked, her sincere face glowing back at me.

  I nodded.

  ‘So was my father,’ she said. ‘He never came home. He was in France.’

  ‘I was in France, too.’ I had to answer her, as much as I detested talking about the whole bloody thing. She looked at me, her eyes swilling with tears before she blinked them away. Her vulnerability arrested me. How was I to proceed? To comfort? Miss du Maurier swept in with three plates of grey meat and pale vegetables and my stomach wheeled. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to hit the full stride of my own cock-and-bull story, to drag it all up. Would she ask me to tell her more? I was unsure if I could ever refuse her anything.

  ‘He was in the Holy Land, my soldier. We were to marry when the war was over. But it wasn’t to be,’ Miss du Maurier said, sitting down next to me, her hands neatly folded in her lap.

  ‘Where was he killed?’ Lily asked. Her knife and fork were gripped upright and motionless in her hands.

  ‘Oh, I had a letter from someone, telling me my fiancé was dead, and I mourned. Until I saw him again when the war ended, arm in arm with another woman, a gold band on his finger. Hadn’t the guts to call it off with me, the coward.’

  To have Lily bend closer, I’d paint a heroic picture, one triumphant detail at a time, but I’d keep the truth to my grave – the sights of men dying, the smell of rotting flesh, my tortured frustration at leaving my mates to their battlefield fate without my heroics, the rain that made us human peas in a muddy soup, the sound of the gunfire pounding in our ears from dusk till dawn, dawn till dusk, the voices of the enemy, their guttural gibberish from across no-man’s-land, sometimes their voices raised in song, the woodsy scent of their cigarettes filling our nostrils – but no, it was Miss du Maurier’s broken heart that palpitated for us over dinner, Miss Havisham all over again in her rotting lace and pestilent perfume. Her voice whined on like a shell through the air. What did she know of it?

  Out there in that infernal mud, I listened to the bloke next to me yack on about the smoothness of his girlfriend’s thighs, a smoke dangling from his bottom lip, when boom, a shell landed somewhere above us. My mate’s face was torn to ribbons, my face splattered with the red confetti of his blood. Aside from that I was fine – nothing was broke or bung, pierced or tattooed. My mate slithered to the ground, a red balloon expelled of all air.

  Oh, I was all right for a bit, happy to take commands, shoot the odd round at Gerry, eat with gusto my ration from a can, kick the rats away at night and the odd brazen bugger in the day. But all the time my mind was ticking over at a hundred miles per hour as to how the hell I could get out of there. If I went AWOL it would almost be as bad as death; if I shot myself I would be branded a coward, something I was unsure my manly pride could survive. I would have to risk an accident.

  So I took my life in my hands and took a jaunt into no-man’s-land. Of course it was a stupid risk but I’d grown madder than a cut snake with each passing day, desperate to get home. I waited for Gerry’s songs to grow more out of tune, when the schnapps might have blurred their vision, then made a mad dash under the dark of the moon. In my hand I held a grenade, aiming to chuck it over into t
he ditch if I ever got there. It is rude to be a guest and not bring something.

  Those leaping strides I took seemed to take a lifetime, the detritus of the battlefield tripping me up in the darkness. I didn’t dare look, as I had seen what was out there when I planned my course with binoculars – helmets, scraps of cloth with flesh still attached, mud made from men, men like me, who longed for a full belly, a warm dry bed and that friendly curve of feminine flesh beside them. Was it too much to ask for?

  I felt the blood trickle down my leg before I actually felt the hot sharp pain of metal. At once I was afraid and grateful. All I had to do was run back, still within the sniper’s sights. I turned and ran for dear life, my blood pumping out of my leg, the smell hot and metallic. I was not sure if I was running away from or into the mouth of hell. But I sent my note of gratitude, my grenade, pin free, tossed in my kind would-be assassin’s direction. What a way to say thank you to the poor bastard, happy in his schnapps. He probably thought he was aiming at a rabbit. Oh well, c’est la vie, as my Frog allies would have said. I must have made it back over the edge at last: the beautiful bang I had set in motion, my thrown metal bouquet, was the last music to my conscious ears.

  When I woke, I was in the army hospital, happy as a pig in muck, thinking my plan had succeeded, until a sour-faced doctor came to my bedside and told me my wound was superficial and they would return me to the front promptly once my scab healed over. So I had to settle for the kind faces of pretty nurses, with their sad-eyed smiles. To drown out the moans of the other men – amputees, shell-shockers and the general wounded – I took to reading the only book available, the Bible. I took to it like a drowning man, starting with the begetting, to the Song of Songs, until all I could think about were the Delilahs and Jezebels, all the whores of this Babylon who waited for me on the other side of the hospital walls.

  I was taken back to the front with my leg bandaged. My mates in the trench had barely had time to miss me – I had been gone less than a week. So it took a different kind of cunning. Amidst the rumours I would be getting a medal for my previous ‘act of bravery’, I took it upon myself to be rid of that place. When the next mortar exploded in our bunker, I rolled around as if death were upon me. In my hand I held a cold piece of metal that I had doused in whisky, and in the confusion I shoved it with nary a blink into my thigh. It hurt like Hades but I was soon shipped out to Paris. It was to a hospital, of course, but it wasn’t all that bad.

  After I had recovered, the streets were mine, as was the certificate of leave. I was happy hobbling the boulevards, sipping coffee in the cafes, taking in the shows at the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge, my time measured in the pink world of flesh and frills. One of these arbiters of entertainment was Josette, a delightful little strumpet who did a number in the revue, a tableau vivant, whose flesh was as smooth as ivory, but which I knew was as soft as butter. She had a thing for accents, though I didn’t think I had one, calling me her petit kangourou. The delectable Josette would smuggle me past her half-blind concierge and up the flights of spiralling stairs, the steps only as wide as a child’s foot, until we reached her tiny room – a bed, a dressing table and an old crate for a chair. The bathroom was shared and if a bloke wanted to have a bath, he had to cross the concierge’s palm with silver to cover the cost of soap and a towel, though I knew one could be bought at the market down the street for a mere fraction.

  All this aside, it was worth the ascent for the salty taste of her flesh, the taste she lathered up with every kick of her legs under the audience’s steamy breath, the grease of makeup, the smoke of the lamps. A saltier woman I had never met, her skin fizzing on my tongue. If we ate apple tart or crepes suzette, the salt of her would turn a sweeter flavour, a sherbet if you will, to trip and dance upon my tongue. With every lick, my crepe Josette would prickle with goose flesh, until I thought she would dissolve. I could have spent an eternity there, my tongue hanging out, but it wasn’t long before my marching orders came to return to Australia. I toyed with staying behind, but I knew I would soon have tired of my petite salt lick. I had already had all the sweetest flavour from her and I had begun to miss my mother tongue. I think poor Josette had plans for emigrating, a gold ring jammed on her finger, queen of the kangaroos, a castle made from gum trees, a crown woven from the red petals of waratahs. She departed for the matinee, all kisses and mon amour, and left me to pen my farewell and claim my memento.

  I felt the satin of her underwear, like trailing my hand in cool water. Too predictable. I stretched the lengths of her stockings under my nose and enjoyed the salty smell of her dancing endeavours, but knew such trifles would be too paltry. Surely there was something more fitting, more enduring, for my collection of souvenirs. On her dressing table was an enormous bottle of fragrance, the shape of a grenade in cut glass, the hand pump like the loop in the pin. I picked it up and sprayed a series of puffs into air, the droplets of perfume falling on my face like light rain, settling on my tongue like the salt spray of the sea. It was the scent of the fresh lilacs that lined the boulevards. It made me care not two brass razoos whether there was a war on, for the taste of perfume was like Josette, my salty mermaid. I wrapped my glass treasure in my kitbag and slung it over my shoulder, hoping it wouldn’t shatter.

  Goodbye Paris, goodbye boulevards, goodbye Parisian minxes. Hello sunshine, hello blowflies, hello the stench of the harbour and my father’s beery breath. Hello the mother tongue, hello my she’ll-be-right-mate you-beaut vernacular. When I got back to Australia, it was a semi-paradise, there seemed to be five women for every man. I didn’t spare a thought for the poor buggers back there, thick with footrot in the trenches or with worms beneath the ground. Pity the poor creatures stuck somewhere in between on a damp stretcher. But I was free of all that, the doctor at my physical determined that I had tangoed with one too many exploding artillery shells. It was my secret that I’d taken fate in my own hands, tapping that piece of metal into my thigh. The doctor wrote an address on a little piece of paper and sent me on my shaking way.

  I followed the directions to the school of arts. When I got there it was devastating, all these virile men sitting around weaving baskets, chattering amongst themselves like old women about their aches and pains and the goddamned state of the weather. I would have walked out that door and never turned back if it hadn’t been for the teacher lifting her head. It had been bowed like the rest of them over their handiwork, her long tapered fingers guiding those who shook as if the very Lord was entering them. I let her show me to my seat and lean over my shoulder, her breath sweet on my neck, her hands on mine as I purposely went limp, her fingers dexterously twining the willow of the basket through its frame. Her eyes were the colour of a splendid wren, a blue almost painful, and I felt all the other cripples’ eyes burn into my back at her sudden attention to me, the newcomer who looked unscathed at first but became wounded at her touch. I, like them, knew a good thing when it presented itself. Some of these fellows wouldn’t have even been that close to a woman before the war, let alone after it.

  Her name was Marion, all crisp in her freshly starched shirt, her knees pressed together by the tightness of her skirt, but it was her neck that struck me, and no doubt the others. It was pale and long and if I said it was like a swan’s I could be accused of cliché, but sometimes only a cliché will do. It was white, like the neck of a painted geisha – though there I suppose I was alone in knowing what a geisha was.

  It wasn’t long before I was weaving my fingers in the basket of her hair as she kneeled before me, her magic working wonders on the same thing the doctor had said would never work again. Or so I told her. A woman like Marion liked nothing more than a cause, a challenge, a chance to put something right, and so, in the storeroom before setting up for class, she set her lips to making it so. She was a potter by trade and I was clay to her healing touch. So one of her own pots, fluted like the petals of lilies, was my souvenir, its pale milky glazes like those pearls of mine on her tongue.

&nbs
p; Miss du Maurier finished her tale and stole me away from my delicious reverie of clay and flesh. I recalled that I hadn’t seen the pot in the box. It would look like Lily’s skin against my room’s black walls, like a creamy marble in a museum.

  Miss du Maurier got up from the table and rummaged through a letter rack on the sideboard and produced an envelope. Lily’s eyes opened wide, her cheeks turned pinker than fairy floss at the Easter show. I took a sideways look at the writing. It was addressed to a Mrs Someone or other, the script familiar. I had seen it in the book under her bed she had labelled with her real name, Matilda.

  ‘Lily dear, I hope you don’t mind, I found it on the stairwell, but I took the liberty of putting the return address on the back, you wouldn’t want it getting lost in the post. I’ve been meaning to post it, but here, you have it and you can put it in tomorrow’s post.’ Miss du Maurier handed it to her as if it was nothing but the simplest of goodwill gestures – to write the name of the street, the number of the house, not ever dreaming that was the last thing Lily might have wanted. Lily’s hand shook as she accepted it and quickly concealed it in her pocket.

  ‘I must have dropped it the other day after I knocked Ari off his bike. Thank you for thinking of me, Miss du Maurier, it had slipped my mind. Full of old news now no doubt, time to write another,’ she said, short-winded, her fingers touching the blunt edges of her self-inflicted bob.

  ‘I couldn’t help notice the address, dear. Beautiful country. We had a holiday there when I was a child, to see the snow.’

  Lily was frozen for a moment and she looked at me bewildered, as if she was trying to find a reply. I held her gaze. My Lily of the Valley in the snow, flakes of ice swirling between us. Miss du Maurier was waiting for a reply, but there was none forthcoming. All the suspicions aroused when I had snooped in her room were confirmed: she had run away and I wanted to know why. In time she would open like a flower to me. Magic, the Jew boy and propriety all be damned. What made her run away would be the key to make her run to me.