The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

  ‘“And I thought a thankyou was in order! No matter, curiosity is more important than manners in my book. I’ve done you a favour, now perhaps you can assist me?” I looked around, wondering what he was doing in the cemetery. “Come along, this is exactly the place where one does not want grass growing over one’s feet!”

  ‘I walked a little behind the great man, not because I showed any deference but because he set a cracking pace, nimbly leaping over the occasional rabbit hole. We walked deeper into the old part of the cemetery, moss speckling the names on the headstones, until Houdini called out for us to stop. One of his companions dropped a sack he had hauled, the clink of tools hitting stone. Houdini whipped off his jacket, though I didn’t even see him undo the buttons. He hung it across the shoulders of the nearest marble angel and folded up his sleeves as if he was about to make a coin dance across his fingers. His companion handed each of us an implement and we all set to work on clearing the grass and muck that covered a particular grave. The writing on the stone was near illegible through the rippling grass blades. We worked for over an hour in the screaming heat, until the blisters on the palms of my hand had baby blisters of their own. Eventually the name was clear: William Davenport.

  ‘William, like me.

  ‘“That, my boy, is one of the first escapists, him and his brother Ira.” Houdini bent down and flicked the lichen from the letters, but still it wouldn’t budge, for it had been baked on by the sun. One of his assistants passed him a wire-bristled brush and then returned to lifting the weeds with a fork.

  ‘“So how did they escape?” I asked.

  ‘“Well, according to P. T. Barnum’s Humbugs of the World, it was all in the knots. Though the Davenports claimed it was the spirits.”

  ‘With a grin, Houdini made the wire brush dance between his fingers, a weightless thing, till it vanished before my eyes.

  ‘“Did the spirits just take that brush? Can you see their shadowy fingers, their muslin breath? No, it is the skill of a human being that made it disappear. Let me tell you this, my boy, my brain is the key that sets me free. I wouldn’t want aspiring ghosts to claim my skill.”’

  Lily shivered beside me; the sun was brushed behind a cloud, a chill descended.

  ‘“So are there spirits?” I asked. All this talk had made my curiosity tingle. Working in the cemetery I often felt eyes upon me. I didn’t know if it was the human shape of the sculpted angels that gave a sense of an observing presence, or just the emptiness of the space, the high blue dome of the sky, making me feel like the most insignificant speck, easily blown away, unnoticed. Houdini fixed me then with his silver-eyed glare so that I could not blink even if I wanted to.

  ‘“Let’s hope so, boy, let’s hope so.”

  ‘Houdini retrieved his coat from its angel guardian, which suddenly looked naked without the comfort of cloth. He shook my hand with all the courtesy of a gentleman, though I was but a step away from being a tramp’s son. Before he walked away, he seemed to hesitate, and I thought for a moment he was going to tell me something so profound it could change my life and the life of anyone who crossed my path. I thought he would teach me the quicksilver power of his eyes. But he only stopped and picked up a stone and laid it atop the headstone of my namesake. I watched him walk away, acolytes in tow, unable to look away until he was just a flyspeck on the horizon.

  ‘When I opened my hand from his handshake, a five-pound note was scrolled in there, folded over and smaller than a postage stamp. I wanted to put it somewhere safe, somewhere my father couldn’t find it. With five quid I could find something to fill my belly when it roared like a fire that nothing could douse. I could pay a cobbler to mend the constant flap in my shoe. With five pounds I could begin to do something to raise myself up properly. I thought about swallowing it, the way I thought Houdini did with his key, or hiding it in the heel of my shoe, but I was frightened that with my sole’s blabbering to the footpath I would lose it.

  ‘I thought all these things as I made my way back to the grave my father should have been digging. The sides had collapsed in on themselves, destroying all my blistering work. A thought crept over me like the cold fingers of a shadow. I would have drowned in the dirt until I breathed soil. My lungs would have been stopped up with worms, I would have been buried, a coffin atop my head, if Houdini hadn’t pulled me out. I would have been one of the spirits he thought we couldn’t talk to but who watched over us. The hoe and the mattock, I realised, had also been swallowed by the grave’s mouth. I thought about digging down in the dirt like a dog to try and retrieve them, but the sexton was already striding toward me, the dust ploughing up behind him. I knew my father and I were done for here anyway.’

  Lily’s eyes shone up at me as if she had seen me in a new light, as if –

  Open Sesame! – I had rolled back the stone and been resurrected in her eyes.

  ‘Did … did he say anything to you about his maiden flight?’

  I looked at those eyes shining at me and I invented, if not quite the words he said to me, ones said freely to a journalist in a newspaper I had read in the lavatory once.

  ‘I asked him what it was like to fly.’ The word hung on my lip and she trembled as if I had all the answers to every question she might ever have.

  ‘He leaned in close and said: “The plane is like a swan, she’s a dandy. At first I was more timid than a bird. But it was different as soon as I was up. All my muscles relaxed and I sat back, feeling a sense of ease and freedom and exhilaration.” Then a little black shadow caught his eye, twisting its little tail, its white breast bared, a willy wagtail listening to our conversation. The great man scratched at his head. “Funny thing is, when I landed and I threw my arms up posing for photographs and yelling, ‘I can fly, I can fly,’ a bird like that landed near my head, and chirruped.” Houdini chuckled and said, “He was telling me that I couldn’t fly a cuss.”’

  Lily laughed, the echo travelling through the churchyard, sending two crows flapping upward. One hovered around the cross of the steeple, each one driving the other off, great swooping glides, alighting only for a moment before his mate flapped closer, sending him dancing though the air, around and around and around – invisible threads joining them in their mating waltz.

  I could read minds and she would speak my thoughts. If she believed in the spirits, why should I not to use them as a key to her door? Once she believed she could do it, then her heart would swing wide open. Lily was so pure she could make me cry. I knew I had sealed up the flaws in my self that Crisp’s apprenticeship had exploited. I was no longer the gull. I deserved her. She was my reward in the world to come.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ari

  The scenery raced past the window quicker than my eyes could fix it, until I tried no longer, letting the shapes of the houses wash out to spills of green. Beside me the Birdman snored, his greasy hide hat just covering his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest. We had boarded the train and found ourselves in an empty carriage. And it was just as well, for Beauty made the carriage her own. She sat on the Birdman’s shoulder, pinning us both with a blue intelligent eye, her claws clasping the Birdman’s coat, until his snores disturbed even her and she fluttered upwards, curling her talons over the luggage rail above our heads. As the train inclined again the air pressure changed. I felt my ears cram with a thick fog that no amount of yawning would dislodge. I put my fingers to the glass and it was bitterly cold. A small flock of slow-winged black cockatoos seemed to hover on the other side of the window, suspended, before the train took a turn and they peeled away – swallowed by the fog as the train was by a tunnel.

  When we came out, a huge gorge opened up, batter-coloured stone outcrops on either side of the gullies with massive drops down to the trees below. The woodland was so dense that I was sure the ground would seldom see more than a sliver of daylight. The train kept ascending, the view falling away with each curve, yet we were only at the foothills of the mountain range. As we climbed, the bush revealed itse
lf to me like an inland ocean, one silvery green wave after the other. My heart plunged. Even if the Birdman had seen my uncle board this line, he could have alighted at any stop and be anywhere, drowning in a sea of trees.

  Had Lily ever seen these mountains? There was something about them that spoke her name to me, in their breath gusting through the train’s louvred windows, as if all the forgotten words from the song at the party were coming whistling through, eddies for bars, rattles for notes. I thought of her delight when she laughed at the sea making play at her toes. If only I could peel the world like an apple and give her every sweet slice.

  The Birdman gulped on his last snore and woke himself, pushing his hat to the crown of his head.

  ‘Not to worry, son, that’s just the mountains making their introduction.’

  Beauty clacked her beak as if she were adding something to the statement.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Some think a mountain is just a lump in the landscape, an obstacle to get over, something to get around. Little do they know the mountain can talk with its own spirit. Yet those that are trying so hard to get over and around, they probably have no time to listen.’

  I raise my eyes to the mountains from whence my help comes. I could hear the psalm in my mind, the memory of my uncle’s prayers.

  ‘What does your tattoo mean?’ The Birdman came right out with it. It shocked me. I was used to it being unmentionable, the mark that set me apart.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ I replied.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ the Birdman said as he pulled up his shirt and showed me his chest. Below his ribs were several marks, each the width of a small branch. As I looked closer I could see there was no ink to speak of in his tattoos, only blood and scar tissue. ‘These hurt like hell, though I didn’t cry out, for they are what showed I was a man and no longer a boy, my father’s idea, part of his Dreaming.’

  The letters in my hand hurt in a different way. Even though I was in the city and had no experience of the bush like the Birdman, I had been part of my uncle’s Dreaming, a rescued child. I was his chance of a son, someone to follow in his footsteps and become the family he had desperately wanted. But like my mother before, I had my own dreams and he could not control them.

  Once, at the du Mauriers’ house, my uncle and Mr du Maurier had been talking in the study; their slowly raising voices had drawn me in. I had caught a sneeze in my hand and they had not even heard me.

  ‘Why did your boy have the mark upon his hand when he arrived? I know your people have their traditions and that it is forbidden.’

  My uncle went silent and I felt goose bumps rise on my neck. While Mr du Maurier waited for an answer, a pigeon cooed on the windowsill, over and over like a motor that wouldn’t quite start. Then my uncle spoke.

  ‘You are right, Mr du Maurier, Leviticus states as much, for it is only the pagan that will rent his flesh and make markings in homage to false gods and fake messiahs. Like your Jesus you have hanging there on your neck upon his cross.’

  I could hear Mr du Maurier’s intake of breath, shocked at my uncle’s personal tone, for their conversations were usually coated with the dust of formality. But my uncle couldn’t stop there.

  ‘Your Jesus, your saviour, was nothing but a charlatan who did small tricks to entertain the masses and called himself the Messiah. He knew how to, how do they say, work a crowd.’

  ‘Israel, I didn’t mean to cause offence. I was just curious, that’s all,’ Mr du Maurier spluttered, but my uncle could not stop, the flag had been waved at the bull.

  ‘It is well known in the Toldot Yeshu that your Jesus was just a magician.’

  ‘That is not the common assumption,’ Mr du Maurier stiffened. ‘Surely that is just apocryphal.’

  But my uncle was angry now, and his voice rose and filled the room. ‘He made a parchment written with the secret name of G_d, cut himself a tattoo and inserted it into the wound, like ink in my child’s marking. Your Jesus chose to do so as a trick, my child did not. He is but an innocent, but we cannot say the same of your saviour – betrayer of his people, claimer of false titles, a mere man. There has been too much blood spilled in his name.’

  Mr du Maurier went quiet and we left. As we walked home, I was unsure of exactly what had happened in the study, except that my uncle had come to my defence.

  As we had crossed the road my uncle had reached down and taken my small hand in his, the hand with the tattoo, and enclosed it in his and I had felt the shelter of his love.

  Instinctively I concealed the tattoo with my hand. The Birdman stretched in his chair and clicked his tongue to the top of his mouth, summoning Beauty. She dropped down to him, and his hands ran affectionately over the petrol-dark plumes. Noah had cursed the Raven for his disobedience; perhaps the same was my due. I was marked from the start. I did not know how to be like the Dove and bring back what was commanded of me. The Raven flew off and never returned; the Dove flew off and delivered a branch, but then it too flew off to find its own kind. What, in the end, was the difference between them? Didn’t I have a right to find my own promised land?

  The Birdman pulled out something from his pocket, a flash of a silver-bellied skink visible for the briefest of moments. Beauty seemed to smile and the lizard was gone.

  ‘It is good Beauty is here. They are guardians of this area. If you do right by them, they will do right by you. Wugan like her have come from this country from the birth of time.’

  ‘How did you find her?’ I asked.

  Beauty lowered her beak into her feathers and tidied the ones at her breast. She was a dapper bird; every feather had to be in its place. I had grown fond of her, though she belonged only to those she chose to. And part of me wished she had stayed behind and kept watch over the one I had left behind.

  ‘There was a little boy who wandered away from the track into dense bush and me and some other fellas were on a search for him. Well, I came across the willy wagtail who was only too happy to tell me, little gossip, that he had seen the boy at dawn, asleep on a pile of twigs, but for the life of himself he couldn’t remember where. I walked onward, my companions taking different directions. It was clear the boy had walked in circles, a dangerous sign, for who knew how far wide he had swung, and I knew that there were old mine shafts and gullies where none would expect them. I spoke a prayer to my ancestors and a flock of mountain-dwelling black cockatoos flew by, and behind them came Beauty, calling noisily. At first I thought she was trying to chase them off, but she was following them, shadowing them, blending into their flock, until for some reason she fell, her wing tips skyward, not flapping. I ran to where I guessed her descent, for she plummeted like a wounded thing, but when I got to that small patch of ground, there she was, her beak ripping apart the innards of a lizard she had spied. The little child was asleep, exhausted, the tracks of tears on his cheeks. I pulled him up into my arms and wrapped him up in my coat and he cried out for his mother, but I would have to do for now. I was about to leave when Beauty hopped up to my boots, thinking I had food, which I did. I gave her a scrap of bread I had kept in my pocket, and for that she adopted me there and then.’

  The Birdman’s tale was still circling in my head when the train halted and all the passengers tumbled out, including Beauty, the Birdman and I. The icy air stabbed into my lungs with each breath.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Lily

  The rustle of the grasses brushed at our calves as I listened to the hum of Billy’s stories. It felt peaceful. I read the monument, the names of so many ordinary, hopeful people inscribed in the Book of Life, and immediately my thoughts were back to the sand, our feet in the water, the salt passed between our lips, and our shout to life. But none of that could give me the answer to what I would do. My life had seemed a cup filled to the brim, but now I felt that with one false step I could tip and lose everything. My happiness was just water in my cupped palm, trickling through my fingers, until Billy mentioned his meeting with Houdini, and fo
r a moment my hope held.

  I was more than listening, I was living Billy’s words, each one a spell, each one making me lean closer to hear them. His voice became quieter with each breath; he was the wind and I was the branch. Did Ari expect me to hold my breath until he returned? I could see now though I hadn’t wanted to. He had been plain, he would go away, whether he found his uncle or not. A departure into the bush to be followed by an exile of duty later. When Ari left he took away our chance and the act, and the raven and left in their place a book with a word I didn’t understand. But Billy was here. He always seemed to be nearby. When he spoke of Houdini it felt like a message from beyond. My father’s presence was close, I could hear his soul in Billy’s words, disarming, enchanting, and it gave me hope, hope that I could find my place in this city yet.

  ‘I could help you with the show if you like. I did a knife-throwing act a long time ago and once helped an old charlatan with his medicine show, so I am no stranger to illusions. But I can do something else, do something better,’ Billy said. Knife throwing? I felt chilled, afraid of what he might suggest.

  ‘But Clay said he wanted more flesh, more excitement …’

  ‘I can talk to Clay. I can give him all the excitement he can handle. But I don’t want to see you made so low again, so bare, exposed to all those people that couldn’t give a damn about you.’

  Billy’s vehemence surprised me; his voice was tinged with another emotion. I thought I had owned my skin when the cape fell, that there was daring and skill in it, but when Billy spoke to me, I saw in his eyes that I had presented myself as nothing but an offering to false gods, a misfit of nature in a tawdry display. What had I done? Perhaps my mother was right, perhaps I was tainted, a face turned away from the light. I shivered with my shame.

  ‘What could we do?’ My voice sounded desperate even to my own ears.

  ‘You, my dear, will talk with the dead and they will talk back.’