The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  Merle was the most accomplished virgin I had ever encountered, an eager sacrifice, offering herself up on my altar without persuasion from me. When we left the room, she was purring like a cat, and my father was deep asleep, his snores barely puckering the air. Of course, back at the shop, one of us went ahead of the other. I was not foolish enough to flaunt my business with his daughter right under Crisp’s nose: I still needed to learn his secret. Though as the days passed the chance of that seemed to recede from me like the outgoing tide.

  I spent hours observing Crisp and fulfilling his tasks, cleaning bottles, standing next to Merle with invisible prescriptions, doling out the fragrant sprigs of herbs, hoping to catch Crisp’s fleeting secret – while the night became mine. With a bottle of elixir spiked with Tincture of Sleep, my father cavorted with the clouds, while I unwound Merle’s dark bun, a whirlpool that spilled all down the milk of her shoulders, and I dissolved her into me until the sunlight splashed over us.

  Until the Day of my Judgement. I arrived at the shop, but there was a To Let sign swinging inside one of the windows. How could they have skipped town without me noticing? I peered in the glass, cupping my hands for a better view: nothing inside had been removed. I was frantic. Why hadn’t Merle said anything? It wasn’t as if she’d had no opportunity, with her teeth on my earlobe, her tongue down my throat. Had I been so close to understanding the mind-control mechanism but missed it? Had these weeks of subservience been nothing but a ritual humiliation by Crisp, an outlet for Merle’s lasciviousness? I panicked, but perhaps that was what he had wanted all along. With Crisp the world was a test within a test. In my frustration, I pounded again on the door. There was no answer; my chances of being my own man were evaporating as the silence swelled in my ears. Then I walked around the back.

  There I found Crisp and Merle with their belongings piled high in a cart. Crisp glowered down at me as if I had caused this exodus.

  ‘Get in the cart, boy,’ he growled.

  I hesitated; the spittle on his lip was like foam. Merle sat beside her father and would not meet my eye.

  ‘Why should I?’ I called, brazen as brass. I may have been his apprentice, but I was no idiot, I didn’t need a keeper to instruct me like some dumb animal. The butcher from next door came out to the back step, his striped apron a bloody mess. He cupped his hand against the draught to light his cigarette and puffed slowly, observing us as if we were his own private circus.

  ‘We are taking the miraculous and proven, the one and the only Cuthbert Crisp’s Elixir du Jour to the masses on the high and holy road!’ His voice echoed off the backs of the nearby buildings and craphouses, ringing like the crack of doom. If there was an audience, he had to be the whole bloody show. He reached out his hand to help me up. I thought of all my treasures, back in the flat my father and I shared. They were in an old box – the one my father said I arrived in, on his doorstep, the blanket long gone – my precious things covered with a pair of old trousers I had outgrown. I took Crisp’s hand and was sure then that my treasures would be safe. Little did I know that I would soon be parted from them both – my box with its price above rubies, and my sodden father – for good.

  Crisp hauled me up into the cart, his nails digging into the veins in my wrist. I saw the butcher grind the stub of his cigarette into the road with his heel, but still he watched every movement of our lips. Crisp pulled me closer, my ear perilously close to his rank mouth, my balance precarious. He was about to say something, but the butcher’s eyes still followed us. Crisp gestured me to the back of the cart, a small space beyond the jumble of belongings, though there was room for me up front. It suited him to subjugate me so, a chattel. Had I thought I could squeeze between him and his precious daughter? Oh, no: I was just the boy in the back. My hand accidentally brushed the swathe of Merle’s hair as I climbed past, but she didn’t even give me the satisfaction of a twitch.

  The road roared beneath the wheels, the dirt flew up in my face. We passed the ordinary Joes who had to toil for a living – a crapper straining under the weight of somebody else’s shit; the iceman with his pick in a piece of igloo; some poor bastard sweeping up a poster onto a billboard, a glob of glue falling downwards like God hadn’t bothered to use a handkerchief – all the poor bastards who never had enough imagination to put their faith in something else, to earn their bread without breaking their backs.

  Merle sat stony-faced next to her father up front, not even turning her head to check I hadn’t fallen off, not even a smile when her father looked the other way. There was only a small square for my arse, my legs hanging over the edge, the dirt and gravel running like a stream between my feet as I watched the city recede. Crisp kept up a blistering pace, the poor horse feeling the hot sear of a whip upon its back more for effect than purpose, for the animal could go no faster. When we slowed, caught behind some slower traveller, I turned and hoped Merle would look at me, but all I could see were her spidery fingers, saluting the incessant flies.

  The Great Western Highway grew quieter; the buildings either side dribbled away and the sun was a well-aimed insult at my head. The rocking of the cart was a giant cradle and my eyes drooped, though I didn’t dare sleep lest I fall off and be forgotten entirely. The sun wheeled further over the horizon, glaring into my face like the angry eye of the Lord, then it slipped beyond the lip of sky and was gone, a hush of dusky light descending. I was parched. Gum trees lined the road, fields lying fallow behind them. A star winked at me. The cart halted suddenly, and if it hadn’t been for a large box of Crisp’s sour Elixir du Jour wedging me in, I would have found my arse scraping along the road.

  We had arrived at a pub in the middle of nowhere. I jumped off the cart, the hot rub of a blister forming on my left buttock, a powder of dust masking my face. Merle had already gone inside, her skirt swishing through the dirt, a halo of flies following her. Crisp waited for me and reluctantly offered me a drink from his canteen, the water like velvet in my mouth. We stood there a long time. The road had left a toll on him as well, a red stripe of sunburn down his nose. Did he expect me to go in and follow Merle, or help him unload the cart? The muscles in my legs wanted nothing more than to melt in a hot bath. But Crisp just stood there, his eyes boring into me like insects.

  ‘Is there a problem, Doctor Crisp?’ My legs ached and I longed to take a piss. I didn’t want to play this game with him one moment longer.

  Crisp’s eyes narrowed and suddenly, a whip lashing from nowhere, he slapped me. Tears sprang to the drought of my face.

  ‘My daughter is pregnant with your child.’

  The words were so unexpected that I was almost at a loss as to what to say. ‘No, no, not me, sir! I shoot blanks.’ It was worth a try.

  Crisp struck me again and I tumbled backwards, blood trickling through the dust on my face and spotting the ground. He turned and walked away, leaving me to the flies.

  I thought about making a run for it, but out there in the middle of the bush I would have been food for bunyips, a pincushion for snake fangs, a less than heroic end for William Little, lost like a prophet in the desert. Instead I took my rest with the horse in the stable, the gusts and eddies of hay-scented breath sweetly lulling me to sleep. The morning was a distant shore I would find myself wrecked upon soon enough – as father, husband, indentured slave? It was a wonder I didn’t take the whip and hook it into a noose and end it there. But I prevailed, unlike my father.

  Ah, my father. Away from my measured dose, I later learned, he became befuddled from the elixir and the opium-laced Tincture of Sleep, until he stumbled over the balcony, convinced his arms had turned to giant feathers. This I discovered only when our time on the road had come to its end, only after I had learned Crisp’s secret, but then that bloody victory was far from sweet. It stuck in my gullet like a fish bone, fine as a hair, which I could neither see nor pull out. The experience with Merle was like Eve after the expulsion – all hairshirt, shame and deprivation – but Lily would be Paradise.

  Lily
ran her fingers down the wig of her own hair; already she was transmuted by my attentions. When she was mine, she’d grow it again, a lush drift of falling snow, and let it cover me.

  Miss du Maurier’s party was in full swing, filled with her old cronies crammed into the living room. Miss du Maurier, her shepherdess outfit barely reaching to her knees, had already abandoned her crook. Her bonnet ribbons trailed behind her as she went round the room, punch ladle brimming, making sure everyone had a full glass in their hands. There was not a face I recognised, but even if I had, they were all in disguise. There were several Pierrot clowns and Columbines, but most of them looked like escapees from the Rozelle Hospital for the mad, streamers and face paint, tinsel and cellophane fixed to their costumes with flushed faces.

  ‘To magic,’ Miss du Maurier cried, and raised her glass before downing it in one swallow. ‘Don’t you three look a picture!’

  My Lily of the Valley, the Jew and I were still clumped together like refugees from the human race, none of us getting swept into the throng of guests.

  ‘Let me see, we have Trilby here who will sing perfectly under Svengali’s enchantment. But Ari dear, I am not sure how you fit in the picture? A faun from Arcadia?’ Miss du Maurier said quizzically, looking at me in confusion. I had given her instructions, which she had followed to the letter, but she had not asked me for a rationale and I had not offered her one.

  A dish smashed somewhere in the kitchen. The doorbell pealed. A gramophone was cranked and out spilled the silky threads of ragtime. The Jew shifted uneasily on his feet.

  ‘What say you, boyo, give it to us from the horse’s mouth, who are you dressed as?’ I pressed, revelling in his vexation. If the Jew had looked any more uncomfortable he would have stepped out of his own skin. How could he know what he was when it was I who had planned the whole thing, right down to the last dazzling detail? He was a cloven-hoofed beast, being prepared for the knife.

  The Jew sat down at the piano stool, leaving the two of us standing together, my dove and I, the hummingbird heads brimming with opalescence around her long white throat. Their colour only accentuated her lunar skin. I envisaged Lily cleaving closer to me, for she was still to laugh at my little joke. The perfume of her rose up through my nostrils and made me dizzy with desire. I leaned closer to her, but she moved away, her hand resting lightly on the top of the piano as his fingers brushed the keys. I wanted to tug on that silver snake of a plait and pull her away from the lure of his music, twine it around my fingers and reel her in to feel the press of her lips again on mine.

  The Jew played softly, the notes barely piercing the noise of the party, and cursedly Lily tilted closer to him, turning the pages of the sheet music. The room was overly warm, and they seemed bound together by the notes he played, their faces made rosy in unison. Then, as Lily turned the next page, her hand faltered.

  ‘I know this song,’ was all she said.

  The Jew paused and then began to play the melody. And Lily took her cue: her voice rang through the room, pure and rich, belonging not in heaven but here on earth.

  ‘Oh, I see the great mountains

  Oh, I see the lofty mountains

  Oh I see the corries

  I see the peaks under the mist

  I see right away the place of my birth

  I will be welcomed in a language which I understand

  I will receive hospitality and love when I reach there

  That I would not trade for tons of gold.’

  Oh, I would be her mountain! I would speak a language she would understand! Could she be any more beautiful? I did not think so. Her face was like an angel’s carved from marble, her eyes cast heavenward as she searched her memory for the next line, her mouth a perfect little coral ‘o’. Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet:

  ‘That I would not trade for … tons of gold…’

  Her lip quivered. It seemed she was searching her memory for the next line but it would not come. The Jew slowed his playing to match her, and the notes seemed to hover in the air.

  ‘That I would not trade … for tons of gold…’

  The noisy room had trickled slowly to silence, guests turning to look at her, my Lily-at-a-loss-for-words. Oh, I could have given her words to sing, like a ventriloquist’s doll she would speak at my direction. A tear swelled in the curve of her eye, but it did not fall. However, her plait did; it fell from her shoulder to the piano keys, fluid as an eel, stopping his dancing fingers. I was glad. Why should he be the one to command the room, and her attention? He would not be her Pied Piper, I would. But before I could step in and be her comfort, she was off like a flickering moth through the dimly lit room, her foot swift upon the stairs, just the rustle of her ancient skirt behind her and she was gone.

  The Jew sat there with the trophy in his fingers, looking at me as if somehow it was all my fault – her forgetfulness, her falling tresses, her flight. That look said it all. He suspected; he knew something. Yet he had had but a glimpse of it. He was going to be the Abel to my Cain.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ari

  I had worn the costume because I had thought Miss du Maurier had organised it. If I had known Billy Little had had a hand in it, I would never have put it on. I only stayed at the party to be with Lily. Yet when her hair fell into my fingers, the long cool silk cord of it, she was gone before I could fully comprehend what had happened.

  I hadn’t noticed how the room had filled up. As my fingers touched the ivory, as the hammer hit the wire, it threw out a net of notes to capture an audience. But when Lily sang, it was otherworldly and strange as the music from King David’s harp that could play all on its own. Until she faltered and the listeners grew restless, then the song, elusive as a butterfly, was gone. It was kol isha to hear a woman sing, a type of nakedness, but I had heard her voice and felt it work upon me like a salve.

  After Lily’s flight, Miss du Maurier cranked the handle of the gramophone, the tinny notes spilled out and the party came back to life. I wanted to go after her, but Mr Little stood at the end of the piano like a bookend, hemming me in. The plaster holding his travesty of a nose in place was coming adrift. I wanted to squash that wax into his face and rub the darkened eyebrows from his forehead. What was he trying to prove, coming dressed like that? Was it a warning, a threat, or mere mockery? He leaned forward, fencing me in even further. I stood up, pushing the piano stool back with my legs.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Little said, his hand reaching to snatch the plait from me, but I had the advantage of height. ‘Come, come, hand it over, my boy, no need to be childish about it.’ Childish? He was the one trying to pluck it from me, like a schoolboy in a playground squabble.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll return it to her,’ I said, heading for the stairs, but he came and stood in my path.

  ‘Come, tell me what’s bothering you. Don’t you like my costume? You can’t find a piece of literature offensive, my boy, it is all just pretend. You know the difference between fact and fiction by now, don’t you?’

  I could feel the anger uncoil from my belly, slowly, like a snake from the shade. ‘No, I don’t find literature offensive. The only thing I find offensive, Mr Little, is you.’ I pushed past him, my arm clipping his shoulder. He made a final lunge for Lily’s plait, but he missed. As I walked away I could feel the anger spit out of him behind me, expletives hissing like oil in a hot pan.

  At the top of the stairs was Miss du Maurier’s costume trunk. I pulled off the headpiece and shoved it in, horns and all. The lid fell and nipped my fingers, but I was only too glad to be rid of the foolish costume, and the party.

  The dark inside a trunk is different to all others: the last sliver of light, the pressure of the lid above, and then the abyss of the living tomb. At night at sea, while my mother’s cousins slept on their bunks, I would sleep in a trunk atop a pile of stranger’s clothes, the lid rigged so it would not fall down and smother me. Sometimes if one of the crew came down, I was whisked into the trunk, bundled
in roughly as a foot creaked upon the stair. I would be able to make out only the strip of light, the cross-section of someone’s trousers, a grease stain, the thumb of a disembodied hand. They had not had enough money for my passage; sending someone to find me had drained their meagre finances. I was a stowaway, a little Jonah in the belly of the whale. All I longed for was the ground beneath my feet, fresh air in my face, something green for my eyes to rest on. To my sea-struck mind, it was the flood all over again: I felt like Noah trapped in the ever-rising waters, no land in sight. The waves scared me, black obsidian, constantly moving, ceaseless in their roaring.

  At night, rocked by a soft sea, I could hear them talking through the crack of the lid that had been propped open. ‘The boy looks like her, doesn’t he?’ my cousin said. I squeezed my eyes closed and pretended I was asleep.

  ‘Hephzibah will have the son she wanted then. Flesh of her flesh.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean? Zipporah is not related by blood to Hephzibah’s family. Only through marriage to Israel …’ My mother’s name was a bright little spark in the overwhelming gloom, one little word, a window. I would have given anything to be able to open it and find her.

  ‘That is not what the sparrows told me.’ I struggled to understand. Sparrows speaking? Could they?

  ‘Well, Zipporah was very friendly with Hephzibah’s brother.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’