The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  EIGHTEEN

  Billy

  Miss du Maurier was standing on a chair fixing paper streamers to the doorframes, swags of coloured crepe paper, a pastel waterfall. Of course I offered to hold the chair for her, the pleasure was all mine, for with every reach upwards she showed me the well-preserved shape of her legs, dancer’s pins in remarkably fine form even for her vintage.

  ‘Would you hand me the tinsel?’ she asked and I became her lackey, though all in my own interests. This party she had insisted upon was surely a fine opportunity for me to step closer to my aim.

  ‘Have you worked out what you are wearing, Mr Little? Do remember it is a costume party, no civilian clothes allowed!’ She was as excited as a little girl. She stepped down from the chair, a fountain of gold tinsel in her arms.

  ‘Like what?’ I asked. Whenever I wore a uniform I felt like a clown, ready for the pratfall.

  ‘Something literary would be good. Lancelot or Hamlet? You are handsome enough with your blond hair and blue eyes,’ she said.

  Handsome? Was she flirting with me? It was hard to suppress the guffaw at the back of my throat, which came spluttering out in a cough that I covered with the back of my hand. Miss du Maurier was obviously not impressed by my lack of interest in her suggestions and went back to dressing the mirror frame. It was a foolish individual that turned her back on me. My reflection was handsome? Perhaps to some, but all I could see was my white-hot desire to get what I wanted. Ah, Miss du Maurier was harmless enough, but my father, in turning away from me so neglectfully, had exposed his back to me – what else could I do but stick in the knife?

  After my father’s visit I watched Crisp closely all day, waiting for his guard to drop, for his tell, his twitch, the sign that he had somehow orchestrated my father’s visit. But there was nothing, not even a flare of a nostril or a knowing glance. Merle dispensed as usual, a wisp of hair escaping from her bun, softening her face. Perhaps she knew? Yet there were no snickering glances between father and daughter.

  A strand of hair hung over Merle’s eye; I suspected a signal, some code as I waited for her to tuck the strand behind the whorl of her ear. But she left it alone, making no attempt to blow it away. It drove me to distraction, until I wanted to take the hair between my thumb and forefinger and do it myself.

  I must have been staring for she turned those dark eyes upon me and smiled. And what a smile! At first in my paranoia I thought that too was a signal to her father, the proof of my duping, but the consulting room was closed and Crisp was nowhere to be seen. I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t smiling at anyone else – it hadn’t even occurred to me till now that she might have a beau – but there was no one there, unless she had a penchant for smiling at ghosts. No, that smile was directed at me, a smile so full and bright, it could have germinated a frozen seed! What wonders occurred on her face – the beakish nose softened, the myopic stare infused with intrigue – how could I not have noticed before? Merle was bordering on the beautiful. An acquired taste no doubt, but one that I could indeed acquire.

  ‘Mr Little, would you pass me that jar?’ she asked, her teeth grazing her bottom lip, as practised as a French coquette. I could have pinched her tender cheeks.

  I leaned up to the jar, straining to reach it, but Merle did not step back. She stood so close I could smell the rosewater she had splashed under her armpits. I got the jar down, but before I could hand it to her, her hand was already overlapping mine as if she was greedy to touch me. I tried to step back but the cabinet was in my way and I had nowhere to go. My ears were pricked for Crisp’s unexpected footstep. She stepped into my arms as if there was space cut out exactly for her and wrapped her whole hands around the jar before taking it into her clasp. She looked briefly up at me from under her lashes, a faint glimmer of moisture on her lip. From beneath the counter she pulled out a blue tincture bottle and loosened the lid: the faint sweetish smell of opium cloaked my nostrils. She let several drops fall into the elixir bottles. The label was hand-printed with Gothic script: Tincture of Sleep, as if inside was the very essence of closed lids, the soar and swoop of dreams.

  This was the very thing my father needed to shut his trap! It was what he had sought all his life: why couldn’t he have it, the pitiable bastard? It would cure him of me, surely; I who, in his own words, had turned his luck. Why else the pipe of delirium at Golden Fortune’s father’s opium den? Perhaps this was the very thing he needed now. It is a very hard thing for a son to learn that he is his father’s disease.

  Merle carried the bottles out into the storeroom. It was now or never – the moment her foot was swallowed by the green curtain, I swiped the small blue bottle and shoved it into my pocket. Merle came back, a bouquet of bottles in her grasp, and looked for a place to plant them on the counter, where the tincture had been moments before. I rushed to her aid and the concealment of my theft, and cupped my hands under the bottles. She had so many, a baker’s dozen, that there would have been no way to put them on the counter without some skittling away. As I secured the glass, tricksy in my fingers, I overreached and found my fingers touching her breasts. She seemed as surprised as I, and for a moment we stood suspended, our arms full of empty bottles, an embrace brittle and as sharp as the glass between us. I could feel her nipple with my thumb, the slight rigidity of it beneath my touch. Was it my fault I had to feel it further? The bottles only had one place to go as she stepped back. They fell with such a spectacular smash, glittering shards a carpet for our feet, the greenish light from the curtains making them look like precious stones.

  Now the bottles had been dispensed with in more ways than one, a vacuum was created between us. With my breath she was sucked right into me, her lips pressing into mine like a hungry fish, her tongue darting in and out of my mouth, an eel in sea coral, enticing my own tongue into her mouth. Where had she learned to kiss like that? I’d initially thought Merle have a heart like a shard of ice, a cool little suffragette who kissed the pictures of Emmeline Pankhurst before sleep, her toes frigid in damp winter sheets. But here she was, a firework, her tongue catherine-wheeling in my mouth, inciting a riot in my trousers. She wanted it as much as I did, and I hadn’t even sought it, she had come to me – my powers of persuasion were more than Crisp realised.

  I led her to her father’s consulting room: the zebra rug looked like the perfect place to fall upon my prey. I was excited to think of her naked limbs stretched on the stripes, but Merle would have none of it. She tugged at my arm.

  ‘What about your place?’ she breathed hot in my ear. Usually I would have said no, but Merle’s fingers danced across my skin and loosened my shirt tails. The Tincture of Sleep, which rolled in my pocket, would take care of my father.

  We walked down Elizabeth Street, Merle cleaving to me, making it hard to walk without losing my balance, a ship with one mast tilted perilously close to the footpath. If people stopped and stared at Merle on heat, I didn’t notice. I just wanted to get her home before the flame of her went out.

  We walked through the backyard; a whirl of grimy washing was drying on the line. The outhouse door was closed, a pair of muddy boots visible beneath. I held her close up the stairs to our door. I had no need of a key. I just pushed and the door opened, and I led her inside. My father was sitting in his armchair, one we had dragged from the side of the street, the springs already bursting free beneath it, the arms threadbare, the seat worn. His head was lolling onto his chest. Merle paused as she surveyed my father, who embarrassed me with his dribble staining his collar, his gaping mouth, his nose a red cherry from the drink. The opium had been kinder to him. Now he was just a sad drunk. I pulled at Merle’s hand, eager to get her into my room before she could change her mind.

  Merle’s breath was hot on my neck as I led her through to my excuse of a room, a balcony closed in with old wooden crates on both sides, a mattress on the floor. My clothes, such as they were, hung pitifully on the hook at one end of the balcony. Merle peeled off her coat and her blouse i
n one. I hadn’t noticed her buttons had been undone, had she been undoing them all the way here? She slid out of her skirt and hung her discarded garments on the peg with mine, our clothes all over each other even before we were. She was the first girl I had brought back here; the others I had pursued and taken wherever I could.

  She pulled off her shoes and sat on my lowly bed, her fingers drumming expectantly on the bare flesh of her knee. I slipped out with a quick excuse and an even quicker promise of a return. The bottle of Tincture of Sleep burned in my pocket. My father’s breath was already shallow when I approached him, his eyelids barely fluttering. The half-empty bottle of Crisp’s elixir sat in his lap, hardly a glowing advertisement, that was for sure. From piss it came, to piss it will return. I took the Tincture of Sleep and measured a good spill into the bottle. My father stirred in his sleep and an unexpected pity welled up in my chest: the poor bastard blaming me for his lack of luck when with one look at him anyone could tell he had never made any of his own, and never would.

  ‘Is that you, Bill?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Yes, Dad, drink up, will you.’ I guided his hand, feeling the tenderness, of a mother towards her child. There was a trail of dribble running from the corner of his mouth: I resisted the urge to wipe it away.

  Miss du Maurier turned back to me, a sprig of tinsel caught in her hair. ‘Do you know what Lily and Ari are coming as? In all the preparations I have forgotten to ask,’ she piped up, her voice grating in my ears.

  The gold and silver tinsel jarred against the arterial-red walls, and I thought suddenly of shrapnel burning into flesh. A sulphurous stench invaded my nostrils, making me want to gag. A poisonous taste bitter in my mouth. The old wound in my leg made itself known to me, turning itself inside out under my skin.

  ‘For myself, I may come as a shepherdess, what do you think, Mr Little, am I too old to pull it off? Or maybe I could wear my apron and come as Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre.’

  ‘Who?’ I gasped. All I wanted was an end to the incessant noise that echoed through my ears.

  ‘The madwoman in the attic,’ she blathered on. ‘Rochester’s wife, the one who burns the house down and blinds him. The one bent on a perfect act of vengeance.’

  Steadying myself against the wall, I felt the pain begin to ebb. Suddenly she seemed to be speaking a kind of sense. This was a game I would play to my own gain.

  ‘Miss du Maurier, I shall need your assistance.’ She blushed at my request. What if I could become the thing I wanted to wreak havoc upon, if I could inhabit my enemy’s skin to show Lily just what she was sidling up to? It was what cannibals did: eat their enemies to cancel them out. Mine would be a metaphoric consumption: I would become the thing I hated, and satisfy my prodigious hunger. My words would become flesh.

  NINETEEN

  Lily

  Spread over my bed was the sunset-pink dress Miss du Maurier had left for me to wear. ‘Why let it be food for moths?’ she had said. It felt as fragile as a dried petal, the fabric crackling under my fingers as I pulled it over my head. A shiver ran across my bare shoulders. The nape of my neck still felt strangely exposed, as if a cool hand were running across my burning skin.

  On the train, in flight, I had taken a pair of nail scissors and fed the long strands to the metallic teeth, glad to be free of the weight of my hair. My face hovered in the glass, as the landscape unreeled like a banner, each mile freeing me, taking me further from home.

  I tugged the suitcase out from under the bed and peeled back the loose lining. My fingers riffled through the fabric till I felt it – the slippery, silky threads of my own hair, which had once brushed the scars on my back. The plait was as long as my forearm: if it had been a tree each inch would have told the story of a year. I gathered some string and some pins and fixed it to the back of my head. As my plait fell over my shoulder, tickling my neck, all the memories of home came with it. Things I had thought tucked away, safe in my suitcase. My father’s voice muted, as he rumpled dry my newly washed hair, the soft cloak of a towel cupping my ears.

  ‘Aengus was beautiful and fair. He was the god of love who lived by the river in a valley in Boyne. Four little birds flew about his head, a feathered halo, each set of wings flapping so fast they were like an x for a kiss. Four little birds, four little kisses. One night he had a dream of a girl who stood at the end of his bed, but as he reached for her she vanished. From that day onward he could not eat or sleep. He searched for her for a year till he came to a lake where he saw maidens in the distance, each wearing a silver chain, except for the girl from his dreams, who stood a head taller, her hair dressed with golden bells, a gold chain around her neck. She was no ordinary girl, she was Caer Ibormeith, named for the Yew. She could disguise herself as a swan by means of the swan-down cloak she wore. As Aengus neared the water, a drift of swans floated by, without a maiden to be seen. He called her by her name. She glided to him and as he reached to embrace her, his arms turned to wings, and their long white necks intertwined. All the mortals who heard their singing lapsed into sleep for three days and three nights …’

  I wished I could stay in the drowsy spell of my memory, my father’s voice disappearing as the noise rose from downstairs. Miss du Maurier laughed, too loudly, as if she had taken a swig of Dutch courage from the decanter while preparing the punch. My father’s voice faded away. I looked in the mirror at my costume. Who was I supposed to be? Who were those people downstairs? Tiredness pulled at my limbs and I longed to climb into bed, to let a deep dreamless sleep claim me.

  ‘Lily!’ Miss du Maurier piped up the stairs. I stepped out the door, preparing excuses to escape the party. Just then I saw Ari coming down the attic ladder, his shaggy legs taking one step at a time backwards down the rungs. On his head were two little horns. Miss du Maurier had dressed him as a faun, but instead of going bare-chested he had left his shirt on. His eye caught mine, both of us uncomfortable reflections of each other, neither knowing what to say: a gasp would have been more satisfying than the silence. A feather of anxiety tickled in my gut.

  ‘Your hair has grown,’ Ari said at last. ‘Miraculous!’

  ‘Not like your horns,’ I said. ‘Diabolical!’

  The laughter popped out of us, bursting into the hallway, until I felt squeezed of all air. We looked foolish and we knew it and we didn’t care. Instead, we seemed closer; the walls of the hallway had narrowed, our breaths merging as we gathered ourselves. One of Ari’s horns sagged to the side, a waning crescent moon. I itched to reach and straighten it, to see him as he should be, but the weight of my plait made me nervously finger the pins. All of a sudden I felt I would be naked if it fell, a lifeless rope, to the floor. How would I ever manage to stand on a stage in the altogether when the fear of losing a plait made me feel exposed? Whatever possessed me to think it – the sea air had addled my brain. In the end I could no longer resist: I reached across and pushed the horn back up onto his head, my finger catching in a spiral of his hair.

  A door slammed behind us and the frames hanging from the picture rail danced. The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention. Ari’s features froze mid-laughter, his smile slowly dissolving into a grimace. I didn’t want to turn around.

  ‘Have you started the party without me? Tut, tut.’

  I would have known that silken voice anywhere. Billy. I turned to look at him. His voice may have been recognisable but the rest of him was not. What was he dressed as? In the middle of his face was a huge nose made of theatrical wax. I had seen the makeup kit in Miss du Maurier’s trunk. Billy’s new nose was large and hooked. He had coloured in his fair eyebrows with a dark pencil. His wheat-blond hair had vanished beneath a long oily black wig. Hanging off his chin was a beard of biblical proportions, and he wore a crushed suit, the edges frayed.

  ‘Well, I can see what you are, my boy, you are obviously a devil. But can either of you guess who I am? Can you? Go on, take a stab at it. You know you want to. Any ideas, any clues? Is the nose too much, do you think? If you pric
k me, do I not bleed? A touch of the Shylock but not quite so noble, I’m afraid. Still no idea? Shall I give you a clue?’

  Whatever Billy thought he was, it was obviously a grotesque attempt to make Ari a victim of his spite. Was it some sort of perverse attempt to impress me?

  ‘Haven’t guessed it yet, friends?’ he said the word friends as if it was sour. I looked at Ari, a frown carved into his face.

  ‘I am that great wandering creation, the one who would not help Christ when he passed by, the greatest of all usurers, that circumcised originator wrapped up in a familiar nineteenth-century package. No idea yet? But surely you have both read your classics? I am that mind-controlling fiend, Svengali!’

  Billy handed me a red velvet box, the one I had seen on Miss du Maurier’s dresser when she had transformed her wedding dress into my costume. I had been curious as to what it contained but hadn’t wanted to pry. I opened the lid and my stomach wheeled. Inside was a necklace, shimmering captured rainbows, four little hummingbird heads mounted in gold. Four little birds like kisses. I snapped the lid shut.

  TWENTY

  Billy

  The Jew’s expression was more of a reward than I could have expected: like an egg thrown hard on a wall, his features were on the downward slide. But it was not his face I cared about. I looked to Lily, but she had her modest gaze cast aside. Whatever she was thinking or feeling, she kept it as veiled as a bride. Had she not wondered who she was, my little songbird? My Lily of the Valley, my dove, there is no spot in thee. She would know when I told her.

  But she was an inventive squirrel, wasn’t she? It was one thing to plant the seed in Miss du Maurier’s head that we were coming as a pair, but my little well in the desert had added her own little flair, her touch of je ne sais quoi. Where had it been when I had shuffled through her things? She had kept it up her sleeve, a surprise for me, my little card sharp. Her beautiful long Rapunzel plait, a tail of rippling mercury. Oh, she was as slippery as the underside of a silver salmon. She was the soft mist that divided this world and the next; she almost made me believe I could put my hand through that waterfall and contact the dead. Perhaps with her trust I could make her believe it too. She could be transformed, just as Merle was transformed by my baptism.