The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  Just like the wren, my mother had been knocked senseless by my father’s death, but no warmth or quiet could rectify her. She’d always been superstitious, fragile, but my father had kept calm, speaking honeyed words, taking extra care when he found her sticking pins in her palms or making tracks of small cuts up her arm with a razor blade. My father had the powers to keep her darkness at bay, but without him she was without the light she needed to break through the darkness that consumed her.

  When I went to liberate the wren from the laundry, the box and bird had gone. In the house, my mother was busy bending over the shoebox, carefully surrounding the bird with flowers and fern fronds, her fingers winding white ribbon to make a rosette.

  ‘A little house for the wren,’ was all she said as her hands worked away with an automaton’s persistence. I leaned in closer to see if the wren was still alive, but its eye was a black full stop, its little neck floppy, broken.

  ‘In Ireland they hunt the wren every Saint Stephen’s day, the first day after Christmas, and carry it from door to door in its bower, its little house. To those who refuse the wren, no luck comes …’

  ‘How about you lie down for a bit and I’ll bring you in a nice cup of tea?’ I coaxed, taking her by the elbow. There was her medicine in the cupboard, but I wasn’t sure I could convince her to take it. At least if she could rest, in the quiet she might regain her senses. My mother shrugged off my grasp and clutched at my hands, holding them so tight that her nails left crescents on my skin.

  Seeing my upset only enflamed her and her grip tightened. ‘No, Tilly, the world still isn’t free of its Judases. They will walk amongst us until the Last Day.’

  She dropped my hands with a little sob, and I felt them tingle as the blood returned. She gently lifted her wren house and I dreaded the prospect that she would want to take it from house to house to show the neighbours. But it seemed the fire of her mission was gone from her eyes now and I ushered her down to her bedroom, carrying the box with her.

  ‘Have to keep an eye on our little betrayer. You remember the story of Saint Stephen. He hid in the bushes from those that would martyr him, but this little Judas bird squeaked and hopped over the furze until they found him out. Their stones rained on him, yes, they killed him, they killed your father, pushed down in the mud.’ The tears pricked at my eyes, for it was rare that she ever mentioned my father, his memory was for her alone.

  I helped her place the box just so, on the pillow beside hers, where my father’s head would have lain in sleep, once. This seemed to lend her peace for a time, for she lay there quietly, her eyes settling on nothing in particular, the doleful little bird in his funereal box beside her. I had heard different variations of this story before from my father. He used to tell of how the wren was sacrificed by the druids to call forth the spring. ‘Poor bird,’ he’d say, ‘Spring will come anyway.’

  ‘A penny for your thoughts?’ Billy said, his footsteps cracking the twigs across the path between the headstones, bringing me back to myself.

  ‘You’ll need a whole pound.’

  ‘See then, there’s my quid …’ Billy jested and pulled a pound note from his pocket and pressed it into my palm, wrapping my fingers over it tightly. I quickly pulled my hand away.

  ‘I was just thinking of home, that’s all.’

  ‘Home, ha! What does it have that the city can’t offer? Doesn’t the city have it all?’ He was playing with me, I could hear it in his voice, but this city never let anyone belong: it was spitting me out, even as I breathed here in this lonely place. I missed a place in the world where I belonged, had once belonged. That world was gone; it vanished the day the army telegram arrived.

  ‘Do you ever wonder if the dead think of us when we think of them?’ I spoke my thoughts aloud. Even though I had tried to evade Billy’s questions, his joking attempt to pry me open with a pound, my thoughts were turning to my father. We never even knew where he lay. A magpie chortled somewhere high in the enormous fig tree. Wardle-dardle-doodle-ardle my father would always reply back. It stopped me in my tracks. ‘Sometimes I just miss my father, that’s all.’

  Billy looked at me then and it unnerved me, for all the pluck had gone and was replaced by a sincerity I didn’t know he possessed.

  ‘None of us had much chance. It was Buckley’s or none.’ Billy had been in the war. We had spoken of it, but he had gone quiet then, and now I understood: there were some things that couldn’t be spoken. Billy shifted his feet uneasily, batting a stone with the furled umbrella.

  The wind gusted through the churchyard; I hadn’t noticed but it had stopped raining. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and Billy, without taking his eyes from mine, put his hand on my neck as if to comfort me, shooting a shiver across my skin.

  ‘So what are you going to do now your friend has gone off to find his uncle?’ He cleared his throat, glad to change the subject.

  I had the overwhelming sense that headstones were listening, seeming to lean in towards us. ‘I honestly don’t know.’ The world seemed askew. If I had the least hint that my father was still alive, I would have crossed oceans. Ari could only do the same now, to find the man who was the only father he had. I understood that, but I had been too stunned to say so. But would Ari really leave his home and all who cared for him, at his uncle’s command?

  ‘Surely his uncle couldn’t have got far?’ Billy wondered. That is what I had hoped, but the Birdman’s arrival had spelled otherwise. ‘Ha, I wouldn’t have looked for my father even if he was on the other side of the street! The boy’s aunt said his wallet was on the bedside table, untouched, so he wouldn’t have had two brass razoos to rub together.’

  ‘Ari’s friend, the Birdman, saw him board a train to the Blue Mountains, so he must have had enough for a train ticket.’

  Billy arched his eyebrows then and a curious expression crept across his face. ‘The Blue Mountains? Have you been there?’ I shook my head. His face grew grave. ‘Dangerous place to be stumbling about in. People go missing there every year and are never found. Perhaps the old man doesn’t want to be found.’

  The instinct to cross myself, just as my mother always did, was strong, but I pushed it down, folded it away in myself. A raven swooped into the long dry grasses between the headstones, taking up a small lizard in her beak, and I missed the pressure of those claws upon my shoulder. Beauty had gone too. How could there be any magic now?

  Billy leaned close to my face, his breath upon my cheek, and whispered, ‘Perhaps they can, perhaps the dead think of us when we think of them.’

  I felt the prickling of my own need. Was my father thinking of me right now? I longed for his voice in my ear with its smiling cadence. If I could speak with him I could get the message my mother so wanted to hear, the message all her praying could never give her: that he was watching over us, close as a heartbeat.

  Billy took my hand then, cupped in his, his long fingers engulfing mine. There was no shrinking away this time. I let my hand nest in his, grateful for the warmth of the living.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Billy

  Together we walked in the soft washed world of the cemetery. She was close to bending, though she would not snap, for she was supple, a green willow sapling, pliable enough to be woven into whatever shape I chose. Unlike me, when Crisp and Merle nearly snapped me like kindling and put me in the fire. She was ready now. Ready to see a change in her fortunes.

  Mine began when a twenty-quid note blew past me on the street on that dark day after I left the police station. With one step my foot claimed it. I thought about taking it down to the Quay to blow it away in a card game or inhale it through an opium pipe, a tribute to my father, but that thought vanished quicker than a smoke ring. How many of these notes had he stashed about him while we starved? My revenge burned quicker.

  I took a room at a hotel and ran the bath water until it was hotter than a scald’s tongue and immersed myself until my pores opened and released the bitter absorption of Crisp’s influ
ence. It was as if my nose had been pinched closed and my mouth pinned open against my will, the dry, sour pill going down my throat as I gagged. I swallowed a gulp of bath water, a strange brew, an antidote against the bitterness – Elixir du Little – and slowly, as the water began to cool, I felt myself return, the part that had been missing revealed to me. My face upon the surface of the water, in the transparent mercurial skin between the air and the liquid, my true mettle. I stood up, waterfalls trickling from my elbows, my shoulders, my knees. I was baptised: I would be my own salvation.

  I dressed and returned to the police station, the air cold on my newly made skin. I could not call myself a man if I didn’t at least try to get back what had been mine all along.

  Of course the police sergeant had no fixed address for Mrs Little, I knew that, but I hadn’t served my mock apprenticeship with Crisp without learning a thing or two, even if I myself had been the subject of the most recent lesson. People drop information without knowing it, like the stray hairs off one’s head. I could see he was discomfited by even talking to me, pinpricks of sweat beading his upper lip, a tell if there was one. He was the one who had handed over my father’s money and my possessions without hesitation, not even a breath between her request and his delivery, I reckoned. I bet his eyes barely skimmed the words of our certificate, the seal of our so-called marriage. She had softly breathed words that made his finger pluck at his damp collar. What light touch had she given him to turn him into such a compliant fool?

  I would peel him like a fruit, with a question mark as my blade. But first, I had to appeal to his sense of justice: he was a police officer after all.

  ‘You know what riles me?’ I asked, taking my hat from my head and clasping it to my chest in the sincerest of fashions. ‘It’s not that she was tempted to leave me for the money – I can forgive that as I would have given it to her anyway.’

  The desk sergeant’s knuckles whitened as he gripped his pen, jotting incomprehensible characters on the blotter, as if channelling messages from the other side. He was but a fish, already sucking on my hook; all I had to do was reel him in.

  ‘It is just that I want to know what I did wrong. If I knew that, I could make it up to her. To her and our little one on the way.’

  The sergeant coughed, a surprise gulp of air sending his eyes skyward. ‘What sort of woman takes a child from his father before it’s even born?’ Perhaps he had one of his own. Crisp’s mesmeric hold on him was lessening. He cleared his throat and paused, as if trying to work out the most tactful thing to say without making me seem a dupe or him a gossip, but I knew what sort of woman Merle was now, nothing could come as a surprise.

  ‘I did overhear her say something to her father about Australia Street …’

  I was just about out the door when he called behind me, another flake of information dislodging from his mind, a man now eager for my absolution.

  ‘It has to be close to the city, as her father said it would only take half an hour at most for her to go back and get whatever it was she wanted. He was going to meet her back down here at the docks.’ He had thrown the dart and it had landed so close. I knew where she was now. All I needed was to get my hands on her, lay them on her and squeeze.

  Lily’s marble-white hand was in mine; her skin was smooth like a shell. The tenderest expression formed across her face as she turned to make out the inscriptions on the gravestones, and it filled me with a new feeling. I had her hand in mine, but she did not struggle to reclaim it. She was the mouse surrendering to the paw. But even so, I held the kernel of desire that she would soon come to me of her own volition, that for all my defects she could see the better man in me, the man I could become, putting aside my past, my stash of objects, my pursuit of experiences, my gleanings from women who were but fickle examples of their sex when all the while she was the exemplary. Would it be too much to hope that Lily could, without my manipulations, find me already in her heart? Could she learn to love me of her own free will?

  IN MEMORY OF

  THE MANY HUMBLE, UNDISTINGUISHED,

  UNKNOWN, UNREMEMBERED FOLK

  BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY,

  WHOSE NAMES ARE NOT WRITTEN

  IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY

  BUT ARE WRITTEN

  IN THE BOOK OF LIFE

  She read it aloud, leaning toward the monument, her hand withdrawing from mine. I wanted to snap her back, seal her fingers up in mine. It took all my control to resist. She looked at the monument for some time, a slight pink rising to her cheeks. I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell she was thinking about the Jew. If only her thoughts of him were banished into the mountains. I knew how to wind her in and it wasn’t by force.

  ‘I once met Houdini. Have I told you that before? If I am repeating myself, forgive me.’ I knew very well what I had and hadn’t told her; this I had been saving for her ears alone. At the mention of the master magician, her face lit up expectantly.

  ‘Not that I recall, I’m sure I would have remembered. Tell me!’ There was a happy little skip in her voice. Our feet started moving again in unison as the playful breeze tossed the fallen fig leaves around us, little fox faces looking up at us, rustling as if trying to get our attention.

  ‘Well, I was only a boy. It was when he was out here flying his plane and doing his escapes at the Tivoli.’ The questions itched across her face, but she remained silent, her ears hungry for my voice. ‘As a boy, I often worked with my father at Rookwood Necropolis. My father would be good for about an hour with a shovel, after I had scraped back the couch grass and dandelions with a hoe. The ground out there could be tough. Sometimes, beneath the grass, a bed of hard clay would make a mockery of his shovel, splintering the handle. These little obstacles would inspire my father’s thirst; he would down tools and scan the horizon as if somehow there was a foaming pint of beer in the clouds. He was gone quicker than a raindrop evaporating in the three o’clock sun. For us to get the rest of the payment, I had to finish whatever it was my father had started, a boy doing the backbreaking work of a man. Don’t think that I’m complaining. I knew I had to pull my weight and do my share.’

  Lily walked even slower beside me, her step a metronome to the music of my word.

  ‘Most things I could manage, except finishing the bottom – for that I would have to leap into the grave six foot deep. I would neaten off the corners, tossing the soil for all I was worth over the edge, some of it falling back down in my face like dirty rain. It was easy until I attempted to get out. I tried to make footholds in the clay and scramble out using the roots of the grass as my ropes to freedom, but not that day. When I met Harry Houdini, no siree, the soil was like sand. I tried to find somewhere to wedge my foot but the whole side of the grave seemed to shimmer as if it would fall like the wall of a sandcastle and drown me on land. I thought about calling for help but there was no one around for a mile. This was the quietest corner of the cemetery, only the sparrows bothered with their dive and burrow into the pools of dust. The sun swung higher into the sky, hot and blistering. I swallowed, my saliva not enough to wet my mouth. This was the view the dead had, the sky only a keyhole, before the dirt rained down, rat-tat-tat.’

  Lily swallowed noisily beside me as I embellished my enchanting real-life tale with cock and bull tailored for her ears only.

  ‘I didn’t hear the sound of footsteps but I saw the hand thrust out. A hail of errant pebbles fell upon my head. Stretching up, I took it, thinking it may have been my father taking pity on me, but at the merest touch I felt that hand’s strength, I knew it had to be someone else for it tingled where he touched my skin, like a light electric shock.’

  ‘Was it him?’ Lily said, her eyes searching my face, as if somehow she would find his name written there. She did not know her own name would be woven into my story before the afternoon was done.

  ‘I was pulled out like a rabbit from a hat, a real little Lazarus. You can imagine my surprise when I saw who it was. I had read the papers, seen the photographs. It was
none other than Houdini!’

  Lily’s feet stopped and she grabbed my arm of her own accord. ‘Are you sure?’ Her fingers were little trills upon my sleeve.

  ‘He was shorter than I even then and that surprised me, for he was certainly strong to have pulled me up by one arm.

  ‘“You were in a bit of a fix,” he said, pinching a worm from my hair, contemplating it for a moment before gently setting it aside on the mound of soil that I had dug.

  ‘“I know who you are,” I said. I would have known those piercing eyes anywhere, for his face had been printed in the newspapers, his name splashed on every billboard. Back in the autumn of 1910 in Sydney there was no escaping the name Houdini, he was the master. A troupe of men marched down George Street; I had seen them and thought they looked suspicious when, at a certain beat, they lifted their homburgs one by one, each shaved bald as a convict, a letter painted on the back of each head. H-O-U-D-I-N-I.

  ‘He thrust out his hand to shake mine and I was suddenly ashamed of my dirt-crusted nails and my patched trousers. I could see his suit was pressed with creases, the collar crisp and stiff with starch, his nails shapely and clean.

  ‘“I am Billy Little,” I said, shaking his hand and giving it a measure of my boyish bravado by squeezing extra hard to show my strength was equal to his, at least in my child’s mind. “Is it true you always keep a key in your mouth?”

  ‘Houdini guffawed and I was even more disturbed by those eyes that were sharper than a surgeon’s blade. When he released my hand I noticed his two less glamorous companions behind him.