It was as if all my mother’s fears became my own. I thought of the album of albinos, those sideshow freaks: they had claimed my fate already once inside the womb, would they do it twice? Their words had followed me all my life like an eldritch hum. Could I speak it, such weird augury? Could I redeem all I had lost? Billy put his arm around me and led me from the cemetery, but I could feel the cold following me as if the dead were already tapping me on the shoulder with communiqués that only I could deliver. Was it possible? Billy seemed so sure, but should I trust in him?
When the telegram about my father’s death arrived, my mother looked right through the postman, as if my father’s spirit was right behind him, waiting to take shape and return to her. The door closed, and the telegram, still in its envelope, slid from her fingers to the hall table. My mother took to her bed, a low moan of prayer beginning like the wind whistling down a storm. I wanted to stuff my fists in my ears. She lay on the bed, her breathing laboured, her lips moving, speaking quietly. ‘Mizpah, he said. The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another.’ She had my brooch in her palm, squeezing it so tight the pin pricked her skin, a bead of blood in her palm. I snatched it out of her palm, it belonged to me.
My eyes skimmed the words, barely absorbing their meaning, before I let the telegram fall. All I wanted was to be free of my mother’s pleas, but I could have told her that God wasn’t listening.
I ran for as long as my feet could take me to the base of the hills my father had called his mountains, the hills that grew into the Brindabella Range that shaded our town.
I found a paper knife in my pinafore pocket that I didn’t remember putting there. I must have used it to slice open the telegram. I was at the tree trunk scraping its blade into the bark. My mother was already sealing my father up and was drawing the curtains, rolling down the fog of memory, burying him with her prayers.
M
The last day we saw my father, my mother draped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his coat and I stood watching, my face puckered with tears. My father’s kiss still pressed on my cheek.
I
My father patted his uniform, my key was in his pocket before he turned and walked away. A whistle on his lips.
Z
My mother and I stood watching him walk down the street towards the station, my mother running her hands down the length of my plait, her rhythmic prayer for his safety echoing the sounds of his footfall. ‘God keep you, Stephen Aengus O’Farrell, and keep you safe.’
P
As soon as my father was out of sight, my mother turned and went inside, her prayer unbroken, one hand on her rosary, the other on the scapular she wore beneath her clothes.
A
And I shot out from under my mother’s grasp, like one of my father’s rescued birds and was after him down the street, the gravel spitting up at my legs as I ran. At the train station the familiar men from our town looked suddenly all the same as they milled around in their new uniforms. I saw my father hoisting his pack higher up on his shoulder and I called to him.
H
His eyes twinkled as he saw me. He swirled me up into the air and into his arms. ‘Til the Lil,’ he cried and I knew I didn’t want to let him go, not then not ever.
‘I don’t want you to go, Dad,’ I cried into his neck, my tears making his collar damp. ‘I want you to come back.’
‘I will, my darling fair girl, I wouldn’t trade you for tons of gold,’ he said and kissed my eyelashes and placed me carefully on the ground. ‘Look after your mother,’ he said before I watched him board the train. Amidst the future widows of our town, I kept watch until the train’s steam billowed out in the cool morning air like a ghost.
Mizpah. I carved the word into the tree, but it didn’t bring him back. The word was no more magic than I was; it had not kept him safe, it had not the power to keep watch. I furiously dug a small hole at the base of the tree and smothered the brooch in the dirt, turning to mud in the growing rain, and I stamped it down. A curious currawong swooped down to the lower branches of the tree and turned its orange eye on me before gargling out its rain-song. I shivered with the shock of its closeness. My father had said that birds would bring him messages of me, but would they bring me a message of him?
With Ari, I’d never felt the birds were anything other than themselves; they were not part angels or intermediaries between the living and the dead. But what if Billy was right, what if I was the instrument? If I could focus my mind, would I be able to get a message from my father? Just one word I could deliver home, and end the reign of my mother’s dark grief. One word just for me?
What if my father had been trying to contact me all along, but I had stuffed my ears with the impossibility of it? Believe. The Houdinis’ code. If Bess Houdini believed it was possible, couldn’t I? Billy’s suggestion was a rope thrown to me. I would be a fool not to take it, to keep me afloat. If he could teach me, I would learn.
THIRTY-FOUR
Billy
I blew her like a feather across my palm. It was so easy. I had my arm around her shoulders and she did not flinch. If she was the vessel I thought her to be, open to all I could give her – mind, body, spirit – what in the world would not be mine?
The Fates had smiled at me after my return to the city from my blinkered banishment in the bush – from the money that stopped beneath my heel to the hand that led me to the whereabouts of my box. I knew it was only a matter of time till they would grace me again. I sharpened my blades to a glisten on the stone. I picked up the most obedient and slid it through my waistcoat pocket, sheathed in its mons of leather. I spot-cleaned my one suit and used the steam from the hotel kettle in the breakfast room to reshape my hat. I would regather my strength and then all would see who was king of his kingdom here.
I walked the streets as if I owned them, patting children and dogs alike, taking old ladies by the elbow and giving them a quick foxtrot across the road while the traffic waited. I gave waitresses tips when I bought my cheap chops, as if I actually had in my pocket the money Crisp had taken. But this city was mine regardless. He could not take that. Only Merle’s signature and smear of address haunted me: if only I could see through it, for the suburb to be legible, but that was a wild hope, for people like her and me, we have no fixed address. There were thirteen Australia Streets in Sydney, several thirty minutes from the city. I would find which one. I dreamed it coming clear, the neatly swept front steps, the lace curtains hand-made by maidens in Brussels, a trellis of bee-fat roses nodding their perfumed heads in agreement with me. I was the font of all this generosity, all this rightfully belonged to me. When I caught up and made my mark, claimed what was mine, even the cicadas would sing out my name, from dusk until dawn.
It was morning when I found her. I had risen from the sheets of the hotel I was staying in, not a kink in my spine. I was as straight as a ruler. I shaved slowly with my sharpest knife; I would have used my razor but that was with the treasures that had been so cruelly pried from my possession. On the road I had let my whiskers grow until my face had a golden shadow, but now I scraped it all off with my knife, like the fur off a kill, until my face shone. I had three quid left in my pocket. I pressed my only set of clothes. As I stepped out onto the street, the summer humidity was already turning the sky sour.
I walked the length of George Street, up through the cake smell of the Brewery at Broadway, up the incline towards Redfern railway. My feet took a wild turn through the backstreets and lanes; the housewives hanging out their washing peered over their fences at my quiet step, my hat floating like a ghost over their eye line. The birds were silent, except for the crows that carolled me. It was an easy stone that glided from my hand in their direction, but they were too fast in their black glide. Up through Abercrombie Street and onto King I paced, walking into Newtown. My new town. Gliding past the ironmongers, the theatres, the haberdashers, the traffic rolling on beside me, horses kicking up dust with a military beat, their hoof-beats
my accompaniment. I walked past the post office, wishing I had Mercury’s winged feet instead of my own. I wanted to see Merle and Crisp so desperately that I started seeing their faces on strangers, their reflections in shop windows, hearing the sound of their voices in the traffic. But there is reward in wanting.
For I saw it then, burrowed into the blondest hair mere steps up ahead, like a golden sheaf in the sun. I squinted and blinked and felt the power of a swallow’s first flight guide me, weaving me through the people. I followed close so I could see every detail – the jade insects, the coral leaves, the bloodstone blossoms, turquoise stamens, mother of pearl wings. It was my first treasure, the one I had fleeced from Golden Fortune in the opium den, worn in the hair of the woman who had taken everything from me. Though the crowd was thick with unfamiliar faces, I was only in search of one. I felt that familiar surge in my trousers, for I had vowed abstinence until justice served me.
I was right behind her, but not so near she would sense me, so I could observe her in every way. She cadged a choice cut from the butcher and he gave her a wink with it. She chose only the bruised fruit, to bargain for a lower price. She picked a loaf of yesterday’s bread.
I followed her to the house on Australia Street, opposite the courthouse, watched her cross the road, open the door and disappear up the stairs, the door swinging closed behind her. Quietly, I turned the knob and followed, treading carefully on the stairs, but I needn’t have for she was there, at the top – changed yet unchanged. It was Merle. Her dark hair bleached to the colour of sunshine, but her moth-fringed eyes the same, except no longer framed by her bottle-thick glasses. I blocked her only exit: unless feathers sprouted from her needle-sharp shoulder blades, she could not evade me this time.
‘Billy. I think you had better come in,’ she sighed, her voice quietly defeated as she anxiously fiddled the keys hung on a string around her neck. She turned her back to unlock her door and my knife blade itched. It would have to wait until I had back that which was mine.
The door to her room swung open and I knew then that Crisp had rolled over her with the force of a tidal wave as well, for the room was little more than a cell. She would not meet my gaze, but I sought hers in the mirror as she washed her hands in the washbasin in the corner of the room. She filled a dented kettle and put it on the gas ring and hung her head like a penitent. But I kept my eye on her, I who had been once an innocent, twice an idiot. There was but one window and it was nailed shut, so she could not jump out. There was a growing fug in the room as the kettle rumbled, spewing steam. I took the only seat available, the sunken edge of a single bed. The room was colourless except for the golden glints from my precious comb and the green bloom of mould sprouting in a moist corner. If she was living here, why hadn’t she sold the comb? It was gold, after all. But I was blessed that she had not, for if she still had the comb perhaps she had the rest too, unless she had considered my treasures worthless and given them as alms to a rubbish bin.
She made me wait and wait we did, patiently, my blade and I. Her belly was far from round, not even a seam of her skirt puckered: if anything, she looked in need of a good meal. When she gathered herself to speak, she stood with her hands wrapped around her elbows, pressing up the curve of her bosom, offering it to me like a strutting dove. Ah, let her not underestimate me, I was steeled against her now, and I could have let the metal fly, target-true, without a thought. She was going to blame it all upon Crisp, I knew, and I waited for the jumble of excuses she would give in an attempt to save her own life. Let her splutter away, her time would come.
‘If you have come for Crisp, you will not find him here, nor anywhere, I’ll bet. As soon as the money was collected, he did to me what he did to you – disappearing with everything in his portmanteau, his steamer sailing through the Heads to Europe, no doubt with a new name already calculated at our expense.’ She rubbed at her face then, before turning away.
My knife hummed in my waistcoat. Could she be telling the truth? If she had the money, then surely she would not subject herself to this squalor. She leaned on the window frame, her arms gripping the sill, the daylight catching my comb, but I let her continue, for I would not be satisfied with just a brief snippet of Crisp.
‘I met Crisp six months before I met you. I was working nights on my back and he came along with a proposal that I couldn’t refuse. Crisp had set up his apothecary shop and was fishing for the perfect catch.’
‘And then he found me, the shapeable dunce?’
Merle cleared her throat. A dust mote pirouetted in a pool of light.
‘No, it was your mother.’
My mother? I had no mother. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked.
‘She came to Crisp seeking a cure, as they all did. She was suffering and had no one. I remember the first day she showed up, she had suede gloves that snaked up her wrist, every button a pearl.’
‘What did she look like?’ I remembered the photo I had pinched from my father’s pocket watch the day I traded with Golden Fortune for my first treasure. It was in that box, wrapped safely in an envelope. Was that my mother?
‘She was a fair thing, eyes just like yours. She had come to see Crisp because she was dying, but her heart was conflicted. With each session the truth cracked out of her like a nut. She told him that when she was sixteen she had an admirer, one of her father’s staff who worked as an occasional labourer on their family’s vast grounds. He would leave her flowers where she was sure to find them, notes stuck in tree bark along the paths where she would walk, and he would blush whenever she walked past him in his sweat-stained singlet. She would say good morning, but he stumbled with his words and would not talk, but his eyes would burn into her skin as she passed. Her father held her on a tight rein and, as you know, the horse bridled too hard will buck. So when he appeared in her bedroom she did not cry out. But when he put his hand upon her, her limbs turned to stone and she wished she could take back the shy glances she had offered him, will her voice to call out, for what he was about to take was not freely given. By the time her father found out, Billy, your father, was long gone and his daughter was to be a mother before she had the chance to call herself a woman. Her father was beside himself, his little girl was tainted and he hadn’t seen it until the doctor came to see why she wouldn’t get out of bed. In shame, he sent her away until you were born.’
I could barely keep up; I had more chance of catching a fly in my palm than grasping what she said. But she went on and I listened, against my will.
‘Your mother never knew what happened to her child, she was not even permitted to hold you. She told Crisp that she knew the baby was a boy, but her father handled the adoption. He didn’t know his daughter’s resolve. She paid a sympathetic nurse a fine sum to make sure both your parents’ names appeared on the birth certificate, so her child would not be a bastard. She paid extra to have it notarised quickly to skip the queue, so that the certificate was swaddled close to your skin before you were taken. Your mother did not know where you were going, but she wanted to leave you with a way back. The secret was hers alone, until she found Crisp and it all tumbled out.’
Birth certificate, there had never been a birth certificate. I would catch her in her own lie yet.
‘Before her father died she asked him about the boy. All he would say was that the child had returned to whence he had come. His death left her a wealthy woman but without the knowledge she craved. Crisp was always swift to exploit the merest of opportunities. So he tracked you down through the registry of births, reading through the war enlisted, tracking your father’s last known address and sniffing out your trail. Everything you did became known to him. He studied you better than any book, he knew you from inside out, cover to cover, until he memorised you.’
I wanted her to shut up; I could not hear my own thoughts.
‘When Crisp told your mother that he had found you, he told her you were conflicted, not yet ready to see her, even though of course you never knew of such things
because you were kept in the dark. She took a turn for the worse and it was at Crisp’s encouragement that she made you and Crisp the only beneficiaries in her will. So when she took to her bed, it was Crisp who came and fed her remaining hope with little mouthfuls of you between spooning her broth – tales of your bravery, events that never happened, not a peep of your discharge for dishonourable behaviour – while he kept you close with the promise of learning the key to his great success.’
How could Crisp know of my cowardice? Who hadn’t he sniffed at to find me?
‘On her deathbed it was Crisp who held her hand and closed her eyes and shuffled through her drawers for an advance until the probate. But what she left him was never going to be enough; he wanted your share too.’ Merle’s hand wandered up to her neck and pulled at the errant hairs wisping from her bun. If what she was saying was true, my mother and I could have passed each other in the streets. We were sheltered by the same city, our lungs filled with the same air. Could we have met?
‘Crisp knew your cheque would be sent to your father’s address. He’d given the lawyer your address himself. All he needed in your absence was your namesake father to cash it. And under Crisp’s persuasion, he did so. After that Crisp had no more use for him. The laudanum-laced elixir, spiked with arsenic, did the rest.’
The Tincture of Sleep. Merle had baited me with the bottle, letting me drug my father for my pleasure. But had the fatal dose been delivered by my own hand?
‘He waited for you to leave your father’s place the day we left Sydney. It didn’t take much for him to convince your father he could fly. Crisp tailed you all the way back to the shop, ready to intercept if you turned around, while I wired the police anonymously of your father’s suicide.’
‘But the cart?’
The Bird's Child Page 27