The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  Minnie was the boss’s daughter and I was his gardener. She would practise singing her scales day in and day out. It was the strangest thing I ever did hear, as if someone were torturing a cat with a violin bow.

  I got the job by answering an advertisement in the newspaper. I knew when I saw the address of the place I wanted to work there; it had gardens big enough to lose oneself in. The boss had given me the job based on my own beautifully crafted copperplate references, with the odd floral phrase from the dictionary.

  I had never used a pair of garden shears in my life, the unwieldy buggers were slippery in my hands, but while shaping the hedges I had a convenient view through the music room window: a dowager pianist sat hunched over the ivory keys as if she could barely tell which ones were black and which ones were white, while Minnie stood singing out her caterwauls. When she caught sight of me, instead of screeching at the sight of a stranger, her notes went flatly on. I didn’t need to hear Melba to know how the notes should sound; any drunkard on City Road could tell you that. Either a note hurts or it doesn’t. Minnie’s were painful.

  What Minnie lacked in the sound department she made up for in the anatomical. I knew that by my own very special powers of persuasion I could make her hit the note aright. I had read Trilby; I knew that all a pretty lass needs is encouragement of a particular kind, like a feather’s gentle tickle of her tonsils.

  Every day I cut grass, pulled out weeds, trimmed hedges, watered blossoms, sewed seeds, and every day I stood in the window as she practised, willing her to dare to lift the sash. Until the day she did, sticking her head out while the somnambulist pianist played on, her fingers hitting keys with as much passion as a train clicking over the same tracks again and again. Minnie’s breath touched my face, my mouth on her ear. Her father’s voice rang out in the halls and I leaped into the rose bushes beside the windows. I could just see his pink pig-anus mouth through the curtain’s brief opening.

  ‘For you, my darling Minnie. Happy sixteenth birthday.’ He handed her a box of peach watermarked satin. The pianist tinkled on.

  ‘Oh Papa!’ she cried in delight, the lid open, the froth of tissue paper on the floor. She pulled out a pair of exquisite opera glasses, tiny mother of pearl tiles covering the surface.

  ‘Read the inscription, darling,’ her father said. ‘All the World’s Your Stage.’

  He squeezed his daughter so tight I thought her ribs might crack. She looped the baby-pink ribbon around her neck so that the opera glasses nestled close to her breasts, and continued with her practice. With every sound she made, they rose and fell, a brass breast-plate that concealed the flesh beneath. Her hand wandered up to them throughout her song – her fingers playing with the focus, caressing the nacre, brushing the inscription with her fingertips – so that I thought she would even be reluctant to remove them come time to bathe.

  When her father exited I gently tapped at the window and whispered our rendezvous, insisting she bring her new acquisition with her.

  The moon rose, a quiet observer, a drowsy eye not yet open, as I let myself into the hothouse. A wave of steam floated over me. The jungle blooms from distant shores, cultivated by Minnie’s papa and pampered like his daughter with only the very best, exhaled their thick spicy perfumes. I waited, lighting a taper I had swiped from Saint Joseph’s, filched from behind the priest’s back, a warm glow-worm of light undetectable from the main house. I heard her coming from yards away, her footfalls cracking twigs and sticks. She fumbled for the latch of the hothouse door, rattling and shaking the knob until I was sure even her accompanist, truly deep in slumber now, would hear. She tumbled right into my open arms, nearly dropping her new opera glasses, her treasure soon to be mine. In my arms she smelled of soap and fresh linen and sixteen years of inexperience. I could have melted her into me in moments, peeled off her clothes and licked the perspiration from her clavicle. But I wanted to stretch my pleasure.

  ‘Come, my dear,’ I whispered to her, ‘lift up your arms.’

  She did as I gently commanded, and I gathered up the beautifully starched nightgown that fell about her ankles and lifted it up to her knees. It must have tickled, or she was overcome with nervousness, for she squealed and I stopped, waiting for the house to wake and rain its wrath upon me. I gave her a special glare and she froze, excitement and fear wrestling within her. My fingers brushed upwards toward her thighs, the nightgown swelling in my hands. I pulled it up over the jut of her hip, a nub trying to burst into the fulfilment of a curve. I released her from her gown but my little onion was wearing another layer, a pair of lace-trimmed knickers and camisole. A ripple of goose bumps travelled down her arms.

  ‘Big deep breaths, my dear,’ I said, soothing her with the treacle of my voice, lulling her nerves. She would sing better all right after I had given her the master lesson.

  I put my finger on her mouth and pried open her quivering lips. I felt her pearly wet teeth and I knew that clay couldn’t have been more malleable. The opera glasses she cherished still dangled in her hand. I tried to remove them, but her stubborn fingers held fast to the cord. I yanked them further till they came away in my hands while her teeth bit hard down upon my finger. She reached for her glasses but I just held them high. O, how her hair smelled damp and animal! I wanted to see how desperate she could become, to what levels of depravity she would fall in the attempt to retrieve her bauble. I held them even higher and in her reach for them, her nails scratched at my arm. Outside the wind blew across the gravel path, a tree branch went rat-a-tat-tat on the windowpane, and as Minnie’s lips pressed against mine, the tenor of her body slapped against me, the sweetest pitch-perfect song of all.

  I saw his face framed by the window. A fox doesn’t need to be told when to run. I secured the opera glass cord around my wrist and made for the back entrance, not knowing that thorns had made their wild home in the abandoned seedling patch. I could hear her shrieks in my ears as I gathered pace, unable to tell if it was Minnie coming to her senses or her father beating them into her with the dried willow switches that were cut ready to be woven into a cottage garden fence. Yet in those shrieks were the perfect notes she had lacked in her lessons, sounding out clear and profound.

  Inside the shed someone moved right up to the window and I pulled the opera glasses away from my eyes and blinked. I wiped the perspiration off my palms onto my trousers: the metal and shell had grown hot while I had watched for my little neighbour. Downstairs the gramophone was silent. Miss du Maurier called my name, for I had promised to come help roll the carpet back. I closed the door to the mauve room, leaving its cloying scent behind me. Lily had no father to protect her here. And she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Deep in the night I heard Lily call out in her sleep. I flicked off the bedclothes and cupped my ear to the flimsy wall. ‘No!’ she shouted suddenly, and I jumped back, thinking that she had seen me, but it was impossible. ‘Stop!’ she shouted again, and I grew afraid for her. I slipped out my door and into her room, half-expecting to see an intruder, but there was no one there except for ourselves and the invisible ghost of her fears. The street lamp bled beneath the curtain and showed her to me: she was sitting up, wild-eyed, cowering in the corner of her bed, looking for all the world like the Virgin rejecting her Annunciation. I stood back, not wanting to disturb her, but curious as to what she would do next. She stayed like that, frozen, so that I thought she had returned to sleep, when she very slowly covered her hands with her face and sobbed. My fingers tingled to comfort her, but I knew better than to disturb a dreamer. I’d learned that from the war: a dream was sometimes the only place one could take flight. Her tears subsided and she slumped back down on the bed, her back toward me, drawing her knees up to her chin. Cautiously I stepped over to the bed: the strap of the camisole fallen off her shoulder revealed a trail of silvery scars across the delicate skin of her back. Who could do such a thing to this precious girl? My fingers hovered over them, wanting to follow their dips and lines like a map of the constellations, to t
ouch the stars, to discover her secrets. Instead, I carefully plucked the sheet and laid it over her bare shoulder, tucking her in like a baby.

  In the morning, noise lapped up through the floorboards as I turned over, the sheets garrotting me as I tried to return to sleep. But the damage was done; dreams were a lost continent now. I threw back the covers and let my feet rest on the sun-warmed floorboards, my trousers cold as I pulled them up my legs. My shirt was so woefully thin in places, without a singlet you could see a flock of goose bumps across my back. The mirror showed my reflection, in need of a shave, but I couldn’t wait, for the commotion below was going along without me.

  I walked down the stairs ever so slowly. The sitting room had turned into a jumble sale run by a harem – cloths, carpets, dresses, feathers, veils, scarves hung from the chairs, furs draped over the back of the sofa like strange antimacassars. In the midst of it all crouched Lily and Miss du Maurier, rummaging through an enormous trunk. Then Lily stood up in the wave and swell of it, like Venus emerging from her shell. They hadn’t heard my foot on the stair and I wanted to pause and absorb the scene a while, unnoticed. But I wasn’t able to, for behind me on the stair loomed the Jew, a good foot taller than me with the steps’ advantage, but caught in no-man’s-land, unable to advance.

  ‘Morning, ladies,’ I said, taking the final few steps to the landing. There is nothing like a striking entrance, or so I thought. The Jew had come down behind me and it wasn’t until he reached the floor as well, the light flooding around him, that I realised why the ladies were struck so silent. He was wearing a beautifully cut evening suit, which gave off the sharp smell of camphor. The trousers fell with an elegant drape, nipped in at his waist, the tails dipping at his knees. The silken shirt, yellowed with age, still had the benefit of the tailor’s art, the cuffs’ stitching holding their stiffness after all this time. Above the collar his shaggy hair curled. I had the sudden urge to shear him, pressed between my knees like an errant ewe.

  ‘The hat, the hat!’ Miss du Maurier screeched, her excitement at his visage uncontainable. Lily reached down amidst the froth of fabrics and props to a red and white striped box and pulled out the slickest satin topper I had ever seen. It was like a black cake, the sheen refracting light across the room and catching the reflection of our faces. The Jew walked forward and passed me, all eau de mothballs, and took the hat gingerly from her. He turned to face the old mirror over the mantle, his back to us, and positioned it on his head. From behind he glistened, the static coming off him, tall and dense with darkness. Satisfied with his reflection, he turned to face us again

  ‘Oh my, I haven’t seen anyone look so fine for the longest time,’ Miss du Maurier sighed. ‘My father was the last to wear that hat and I’m not sure he even wore it more than once.’

  Lily just stood there speechless, her eyes taking in the dark height of him. The suit was beautiful, there was no doubt about it, and at another time I would have thought nothing of walking into a Zink and Sons with all the airs and graces I could muster, a nom de plume on my lips, to try on a suit and walk away with it swinging over my shoulder, knowing that some tight-arsed bastard in Vaucluse would open the bill and wonder when he ordered it, while I didn’t even have one brass razoo to my name. But to see a suit like that on him invoked a fearsome rage within me.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he said, ignoring Miss du Maurier and me and directing his question straight to Lily.

  She gazed at him, bedazzled, and then looked from Miss du Maurier to me as if we all waited for her appraisal, her pretty sea anemone mouth opening and closing, not sure which way the current was taking her.

  ‘What do you think, Mr Little? Shall I call you Billy?’ He extended his hand to me.

  ‘Of course, Harry, be my guest.’ I bloody well knew his name wasn’t Harry, nor was he Houdini, but I wanted to test the waters to see if he would bite.

  ‘Ari,’ he corrected me. La-di-da.

  I shook his hand and squeezed it as hard as I could muster and watched for a wince to spread across his features, but it never came.

  ‘You look …’ I said, trying to hide any enthusiasm for the outfit, ‘… sharp.’ It pained me to say and I watched his face keenly to see what effect my words had on him. He looked away.

  ‘What are you going to wear, Lily?’ Miss du Maurier asked.

  Lily looked around at the old theatre costumes, headdresses and reams of fabric, then peered into the chest to see if there was anything else in there, her fingers absently fingering the plain stuff of her own dress.

  ‘Come upstairs with me, darling, there are more things up there that may be more to your liking,’ Miss du Maurier said, taking Lily by the arm.

  Soon the Jew and I found ourselves alone, with the tapping of the ladies’ footsteps upstairs our only conversation.

  ‘Shall I pop the kettle on then?’ I said brightly. I might be a paying guest, but it was still my home, and though he had a cubbyhouse like a termite nest out the back, he was still just a visitor. I padded into the kitchen and filled up the kettle. My movements were deliberately slow, so that I could think of something that would get the hair pricking the back of his collar. ‘How is your act coming along?’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ the Jew said, still hesitating near the stairs. He was a little shy without the ladies to guide him.

  ‘When is your audition?’ I called out. All I could hear in reply was the rustle of desiccated tea leaves into the old chipped china pot. I could see him in the mantelpiece mirror shifting from one foot to the other.

  ‘A week, Saturday morning,’ he murmured, taking off the silken topper and fingering the polished sheen of the rim.

  ‘You have been spending a lot of time with young Lily,’ I said.

  All he could manage was a nod of agreement, and the cloud of his silence thickened the air. There had to be something to make him rumble and spill. I carried the tea things in and plonked them on the table. The Jew moved a bit closer; by God he was a tall bastard.

  ‘So what did you do before you started work at the Bridge Theatre, aside from being an impromptu member of the fire brigade?’ The sound of his voice so near made me jump. I turned and there he was standing in the doorframe, his height almost blocking the space completely, his gaze direct and without the ruse of politeness.

  He could sniff all he liked, for what could he possibly know of the likes of me? Snippets of hearsay from Lily, a general sketch from his aunt, an array of flattering details provided by Miss du Maurier.

  ‘After the war, you mean?’ The mention of the war made the Jew shift uncomfortably in the doorframe as if all of a sudden his skin didn’t fit.

  ‘After the war I did a lot of things – a bit of man-of-all-work, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Like what in particular?’

  He was like a dog with a snake. If he was going to shake me so, beware my bite. Let my words stop up his questions and render him mute. Let the Jew be damned and him not know it.

  ‘I was a shearer up north, hard and dirty work, but there is satisfaction in it. The wool is grimy on the outside, but part its greasy lushness and you find it clean and as pure as Snowy Mountain snow. My hands became soft as a baby’s bum from all that lanolin, so smooth that not a line remained. Even my fingerprints softened and I am sure they would be illegible if I were ever required to press my inky finger upon the law’s notepaper.’

  The Jew thrust his hands into his pockets as if it was him that had blood on his hands. A lie written right there on his finger. A tattoo, pricked out with a needle until the blood and ink intermingled. A Jew with a tattoo: who ever heard of such a thing?

  I was a shearer all right, but not for long. One day a carnival came straggling past the property where I was shearing. We all went to the neighbouring wool shed, a gander to ease the monotony of sheep in and sheep out, ready to throw pissy one-liners at their two-bit circus. The other blokes had all had a belly full of sherbet, the froth still tickling the hairs of their noses, their th
irst nowhere near quenched. Me, I never touched the stuff. A greasy git presented himself before us and opened his coat to us with a flourish, and there in the lining was the flash and flare of his knives. Some blokes shifted uneasily in their seats: a man with thirteen knives in his coat grinning at us like an insane butcher bastard was not what we had been expecting. He stood there and pulled a knife out of his pocket and used it to comb his beard, dividing it until it was cleft in two. He called someone out of the audience to hold up a mirror for him. He took the knife and dragged it across the stubble of his cheek, as one would a cut-throat razor, the scraping sound making the men wince and long for soap. As if that was her cue, out stepped a girl in a mere bandage of a costume, barely covering her plump little body. He called for assistance to help secure the girl to a wooden wheel. Hands went up quicker than weeds after rain. Since I didn’t put my hand up, he chose me, and I, being of a good nature, accepted.

  Her flesh tingled beneath my touch; she was grateful no doubt for some warmth as the wind whistled from under the uneven floorboards. And I was gladdened to feel the velvet of a woman beneath my fingers. The ropes held firm her limbs and it seemed almost cruel to tie them so tight as to leave welts in her skin. As I returned to my seat the knife thrower tested my knots before giving the wheel a dramatic spin. The girl spun like water draining down the plug.

  He threw the first blade and it flew with frightful accuracy, slamming into the wood above her spinning head. He did it with such ease and lack of showmanship, the knife could have been just a card being dealt in a game. He took the second one and threw it so fast it blurred before our eyes. It landed between her outspread knees. The third knife flew, as did the fourth, with dull thuds into the wood, the crowd unsure whether to cheer in case it distracted him from his aim. With the fifth knife, he paused, the blade waiting. He seemed unsure of the perfect moment to release it, the wheel slowing, the form of the girl returning from the spinning blur. He released the blade, but its arrival was strangely silent, muffled by the tender carving of the girl’s flesh. The blood. Oh my, the blood. She screamed like a slit pig.