The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  He was blank and bleary-eyed, his usual state after sipping turps or some other poisonous pickle juice. But his voice was startlingly sober, clear as an empty glass.

  ‘Hello,’ he said as he slid into the seat opposite, the sound of his voice a fresh insult as he waited for Crisp’s cue to begin. Was it possible my father had read the label of the elixir I had left behind and found his staggering way here? My father’s ability to read was negligible. Coincidence was surely an impossibility. He must have come of his own accord with the taste of elixir on his lips. He had asked someone to read him the address on the label, there could be no other explanation, but I couldn’t shuck the creeping sensation that there was more at play, or was that my own paranoia? Crisp did not smirk or grin, there was no tell. If anything, he was all ears.

  ‘Doctor Crisp, I recently tried your Elixir du Jour and found it very helpful. Calming, even. It put out a fire I’ve been trying to quench for some time. I was wondering if I could obtain another bottle. You see, I have an ailment, it shames me to say …’ Who was this man, talking cap in hand, bereft of all his dignity, whose unsuspecting seed helped form me? ‘My ailment is, I am tired of life.’

  For the merest of moments I felt sorry for him. He was a pitiful sight, always half-asleep, his eyelids drooping. His one suit was permanently crushed and stained; patchy whiskers peppered his face; white hair flared at his temples.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, there is no risk of me flinging myself from the Gap, but since the arrival of that baby on my doorstep I haven’t felt myself.’

  That was a relief: the ringing self-concern that filled my ears from dawn to dusk remained unchanged. My pity began to evaporate.

  ‘The thing that has haunted me, worn me to the bone, is that I have never been sure he is mine. There is nothing in his features that reflect me. I found him wrapped in a blanket, tucked inside a crate right at my own bloody front door! When I undid the swaddle I could see he was a little damaged, a tiny piece of him had been removed that could never be replaced. He was unlucky from the start.’

  Any momentary sympathy I had had vanished. Blood swirled in my ears; I was desperate to strike out at him. My knife was strapped to my leg, I could have taken a little bit of him all right, but I was frozen, my ears straining. The photograph I had flicked from his pocket watch before handing it over to Golden Fortune loomed in my mind – would he say more of her?

  ‘Oh, I could have handed him over to an orphanage or moved him along to the church step before he even opened his eyes and wailed for milk, but there was that odd chance, wasn’t there, that he was my very own. My decision was sealed when he looked up at me, fixing me with those eyes of his, not a baby’s faraway look at all, no, his gaze fixed me like ice fixes the water. Until he yowled. He always wanted more, he did. The more he had, the less I did, for as he grew, my luck began to dwindle, as if he were sucking it out of me. The day he spoke his first word, I lost all my winnings. The day he took his first step, I was struck with fever. But I never thought much of it, until the war began.

  ‘Only when he went to war did my luck return. Every hand of cards I played came good. I found coins in the gutter, a gold watch left in the lavatory at the pub, a stolen wallet tossed in the street a hundred quid concealed in a secret pocket the thief had missed. But when my son returned, I stumbled backwards again. I throw myself at your mercy, Doctor. Give me some more of your elixir; help to bring my luck back.’

  I became aware of a metallic taste: I had bitten my tongue so hard, blood filled my mouth.

  Crisp uncapped his pen and swirled the ink across the page, looking up to catch my eye, no doubt still wondering why I had not come out from behind the screen. He handed the paper to my father and was none the wiser. My father clasped the paper in his hand as if he had just been given the code to a safe at the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place and a promise of the bank tellers forming a guard of honour. Crisp looked at me, but I kept my face expressionless as a sphinx. Did he know this poor specimen of a man was my father? There was no twinkle in Crisp’s eye. He did not know I was that unwanted, unlucky, misshapen child.

  Crisp escorted my father out and I emerged from my hiding place and resumed my seat.

  ‘I take it you know that gentleman, Little?’ he said, and I nodded, my anger so raw I could not shape the words to reply. ‘Who is he then?’

  If Crisp was trying to crawl beneath my skin I would not let him; if he was going to be my itch I would resist the urge to scratch.

  ‘Someone I thought I knew, that’s all,’ I replied, my voice a husk in my throat.

  The next patient came in, a crease like a lightning crack etched into his forehead. He started speaking before his arse even slapped the chair. It was easy to keep the contact; I couldn’t have listened even if I’d tried. Everything before me was a blur of rage. The son-of-a-bitch storytelling liar wouldn’t know the truth if an angel came down and placed a wafer of it on his tongue. How many times had he spun this tale of woe? How many ears sopped up the spill of his self-inflicted tragedy? He blamed me for his loss of luck, did he, his fate. If he thought I was the face of misfortune, the bringer of his bad luck, it was time to reveal the full and mighty force of it to him.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ari

  All that night, in my narrow camp bed, sleep eluded me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, the sight of his lips pressed against hers. The unsettled birds sang out, their strange nocturnal sounds puncturing my fitful dreams. The first sunlight splashed over me and I watched my breath rise out of me as if I had swallowed a cloud in my sleep. I felt my life being pulled out from under me, just as I had that night my mother made me run.

  The previous night my mother had read out loud from the newspaper. A man had been set upon by bandits. A shop window had been smashed. Someone had left a dog turd on the synagogue steps. It was no accident, for in the latest incident a word had been smeared upon the door. My childish ears pricked up at my mother’s angry tone, but when I looked up at her for reassurance she smiled softly and complimented me on the scribble of a house I had drawn. Until the words so upset her that she screwed up the newspaper and tossed it to the flames.

  The night it began, the shattering of glass was like a hailstorm that would not stop. My mother opened the door, no coat across her shoulders, and I remembered thinking this was strange for the shouting was coming down the street towards us. My mother had me by the hand, her grip firm, as if she was angry with me. Together we flew through the streets, taking refuge in the old doorways, cramming ourselves into dark spaces as if we too could become insubstantial as shadow. With the first streak of dawn we came to a door and she kissed me roughly; she had no time for gentleness. I fell against the legs of whoever opened the door and it was closed almost as quickly, but not before I saw my mother claimed by the darkness of the street. The sound of shouting was accompanied by shrieks, glass shattering, sounds smothered by the stranger’s hands, a woman’s hands, cupped around my ears.

  Why had my mother delivered me to strangers? We listened together, every hiss and spit of the fire making my new guardians sit fearfully still. The woman had a daughter, her hair in ragged ringlets, who buried her face in her mother’s skirt. She also had a son, reed thin, who kept his eyes on the gun at his mother’s feet, in case there came a time he too should need to aim it. From above we were watched by a painting of a mother and child: she clutched him close, just as my mother had held me. These were Christians hoping that they wouldn’t be mistaken for Jews.

  ‘Why is he here?’ the boy whispered. ‘He is a filthy Jew! He uses our blood for his bread. Saint Gavriil Belostoksky was six years old when they murdered him for their Passover –’

  The woman’s free hand swept through the air and stung his face with a loud cracking slap. The little girl peeked up from her mother’s skirts and whimpered. I looked at the boy, his mouth open. I was younger than six. I was frightened that what he said was true, but I knew how bread was made, I had helped plait the chall
ah bread, the egg sitting in the braid. Blood would have streaked the flour, I would have seen it, smelled it.

  ‘You shall remember this boy in your prayers tonight,’ she hissed. A rattle of stones was thrown across the roof and we were all hushed again. Somewhere out there in the muffled darkness my mother hurried back through the snowy slush to my grandmother, whom we had left alone in the house.

  Eventually the sounds died down, a fresh fall of snow smothering and erasing as it went. The flickering from the fireplace was the only illumination. Silence fell again and I ran to the window, searching for my mother.

  Before the woman could pull the curtain on my view, I saw what lay planted in the slush, grey with footprints blossoming black with blood. The snow was a blank canvas lit blue with the otherworldly light of a half-cracked moon. A body lay pierced and still, the legs and arms at uneasy angles. A dark serge skirt covered her face. Was it a long braid or a trickle of blood that trailed in the stained snow? It didn’t look like my mother. On the other side of the street a house billowed with smoke, the suck and flick of the curtains in its windows an eerie kind of breathing.

  I didn’t sleep. I thought every footstep I heard was my mother’s. Every knock upon the door was the possibility of her return. The stranger offered me food, but I could not eat it. She wiped my face with a damp cloth and removed the yarmulke from my head, then carefully took the scissors and cut the curls at my temples and tossed them into the fireplace. They sizzled with an acrid burn and were gone, the same curls my mother would wrap around her fingers as she sang me to sleep. She looked down at the letters tattooed on my hand and wiped at them with spit on her thumb, but they would not budge.

  The streets were cleared by the time I was permitted to look out of the window again. The stranger’s children slowly returned to their games. The woman ushered me over to them, her face kindly but distressed. I kneeled next to the children and watched them play, feeling a world away from them – why stack these dominoes, why watch them fall? I went to the front door and thought about tearing it open and running back wildly through the streets, but I did not know the way to the faces that knew me.

  A knock at the shed door made me start. I took a deep breath and the past retreated.

  I leaned up on my elbows, the blankets falling from me, the cold air pricking goose bumps at my skin. She let in a gust as she entered, propelled by some other force, and settled on the edge of the cot, the letter clasped in her hand as if she would not let it go. The springs of the bed murmured beneath her weight. I sat that bit higher to give her more space, my leg touching hers through the bedclothes.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind me opening it, it was addressed to us both.’

  I shook my head. I didn’t mind: she and I, we were still in this together.

  ‘Well, it seems Harry Clay likes our turn.’ Her voice rose with excitement, her lips quivering. The same lips Billy Little had kissed last night, I remembered with a jolt. I felt a cold knot begin to twine itself in my chest. Did she really feel for him? Was I always to lose the ones I cared for?

  ‘Well, that’s good news.’ I said, my own mouth moving mechanically. I could barely concentrate – had they kissed before? I rubbed at my eyes. I wanted the image to be gone.

  ‘And he wants to give us a three-week contract.’ She didn’t look at me, yet I wanted nothing more in the world at that moment than for her eyes to rest upon mine. ‘With one proviso.’ She handed me the letter. My eyes ran over the words until I saw it myself.

  To fit in with the new policy as we endeavour to compete with the talkies, all acts are being asked to diversify with novelty or controversy (within the laws of decency, but not to be completely constrained by them).

  As I passed her back the letter, her hand ran up her throat. What was he asking of us? Within the laws of decency? Above the stage manager’s desk I had seen an image of a topless chorus girl from the Moulin Rouge. Was this what Clay was aiming at? How could I ask this of her?

  I wanted to cut out the offending words with my uncle’s scissors. What was magic but a diversion for children? But it wasn’t Clay who had set these events in motion and neither was it Lily. I had kindled the idea of being a magician from the very first moment I understood abracadabra. The tattoo on my hand was a lie.

  Lily stood on a chair and brought the raven down from the rafter where she perched to observe us. She was the colour of the very darkness; beautiful, self-possessed, the dark queen among the others. The parrot, the lyrebird, the currawong all shifted uneasily, their talons clutching and unclutching whatever it was they held. Why did she unsettle them so? I had seen ravens pursued by the angry cries of other birds, the raven winging itself away, black calligraphy in the blank expanse of sky. Were Noah’s birds still trying to drive the poor raven away?

  The blue-black bird so close to Lily’s pale glowing skin would create a powerful effect. It would be like the black spot that hovers in the eye after staring at the sun, her tender skin at the mercy of the eyes of the world. To my own eyes. What were we doing? Was our act really worth exposing her so, like Eve after the fall? What kind of man was I even to let her entertain the idea? Certainly no gentleman and certainly no good Jew, ‘pursuing the passions of my heart and straying after my eyes’, breaking the commitments I had made at my bar mitzvah to become a son of the Law. Why couldn’t we continue as we were? Surely there were other places that would have our act just as it was. But we had come so far here. Clay had offered us a contract; to go somewhere else would set us back to the beginning. Besides, Lily was adamant, though her cheeks had rouged up all on their own, that we could do it, that she wanted to do it, and I wanted to believe her.

  She seemed nervous as she tied the end of an old sheet over her shoulder to see if the Raven could pluck it free and reveal her clothes underneath. Could we find a leotard to avoid her humiliation? She fumbled with the knot and I moved closer to help her, the fabric yielding to my fingers. She seemed to tremble, but as the knot tightened she straightened. The raven hopped onto her arm and turned a bright eye toward me, as if daring me to a greater challenge, and then, with a tug of her beak, released the knot as if she had only been playing with us. The creature was indeed as smart as the Birdman said.

  ‘We may need to make it look more difficult than that, otherwise the audience will think the whole thing rigged,’ she said, folding the sheet up and throwing herself and it into the armchair. ‘It is not enough.’ She was right – it was all very well to fixate on protecting her modesty, but to have a flash of her skin alone was not going to capture the audience’s imagination. Lily twiddled her feet in the air as if they could manifest an answer.

  ‘We could add a trunk trick, the Metamorphosis, like Bess and Harry,’ she said. ‘Where they swapped places in a blink. Could we pull it off?’

  A trunk? The last time I had been in a trunk came back to me in a rush. I felt the pitch of failure in my throat, a kind of seasickness that tipped at the corners of the room and made the floor slant beneath my feet. I reached for the wall to steady myself, but the room seemed a carousel, Lily a figure spinning in my periphery. She called out to me but my dizziness conspired against me. I felt that if I opened my mouth the whole world would fall out.

  How long did I live with that Christian woman and her family? I stayed until a stranger arrived at the door, a distant cousin with a telegram from my uncle in his hand. He had tracked my whereabouts and come to collect me; we were bound for another country, ripped from my mother and now ripped from my homeland.

  We walked for the longest while, my cousin’s hand in my back leading me onward. Was he leading me back to my mother? When I tired, he carried me on his shoulder. At one point we hitched a ride on the back of a cart that was rolling along the back roads; my cousin pulled a crust of challah bread out of his pocket and I nibbled at it, never wanting it to end. Eventually a port rose up ahead of us, the dockworkers like ants in the distance. I had never felt so small. At the dock itself, my cousin pulled me fran
tically through the crowds of people until he came to a group that parted for us and swallowed us in their cries and tears, their breath hot upon my face. But I was an icicle that nothing could warm.

  The crowd started moving and my feet with it, though they barely seemed to touch the ground. I dug around in my pockets, empty but for a ball of soft red yarn – my grandmother must have put it there. I took the wool out of my pocket and knotted it to the railing, the metal so cold it bit my skin. The group of people slowly moved up the gangplank, their feet shuffling as one. Someone held me by the hand, moving me forward to who knew where. Crates and trunks bobbed above me, carried overhead. We were all of us so much baggage, flotsam and jetsam tossed up by a human wave. Yet the ball of yarn remained, unravelling in my hands. Sometimes it hit a snag, which a quick tug remedied, the wool creating a warm friction in my hands, spindling out like a thin taper of flame. The ball’s red heart grew smaller as we shuffled on. A huge foghorn sounded and someone let out a cry beside me; an engine roared and the metal groaned, jarring my bones. We were off. The ball of thread dwindled in my tight-clasped fingers until all I held was one solitary thread and then at once, like the whoosh of a blown candle, it slipped from my fingers and was gone.

  A pair of hands grasped me under the armpits and lifted me atop the trunks and perched me there for safekeeping while stranger jostled with stranger, searching for a little patch of ship to call their own. From that height I felt the world was a dizzy mess. I did not belong. I never would.

  Lily repeated my name over and over, a weird chant as vertigo took a hold of my limbs. As if cast adrift, the room pitched. My body had no anchor. I felt Lily’s hands tug at me and hold me down. I threw my arms around her and felt the flesh beneath the fabric of her dress, her body warm and real in my arms as she leaned into me, tethering me to the earth.