The Bird's Child
Page 35
A sudden wind struck at the tops of the enormous fig trees, shaking a barrage of smaller branches to the ground. Twigs scattered behind me as I walked away.
Miss du Maurier’s house was strangely silent. A lamp burned on a hall table, a small arc of light spilling on the floor. Before me in the mirror emerged a ghostly face and I realised as I moved toward it that it was mine. Flickering candles showed me to myself as my fingers crept over the shorn surface of my head. My hair was roughly cropped, my scalp grazed. It stung to the touch. The blow he had dealt me must have stilled me for some time for him to do such handiwork.
I got to her door and knocked but there was no answer. I called her by her name, but there was no reply. I carefully turned the handle, the light from the hallway flooding her room. She was not there. Her room was bare, anonymous.
I could see Mr Little’s door wide open and I had to look. All the black walls had been used like a blackboard from a schoolroom, a mad scrawl of beautiful words, from the songs of Solomon. Scattered across the floor were the smashed remnants of glass, china, a curled ball of gold metal, the remains of a comb? Something had happened here. The room still bristled with violence.
Miss du Maurier appeared in the hallway wrapped against the morning cold in her dressing-gown, her bare feet in want of slippers. She looked at me and let out a startled cry.
‘Ari?’
‘Yes, Miss du Maurier, it’s me.’
‘Oh Ari dear, I didn’t recognise you for a moment. Are you all right?’ She instinctively reached to touch my head, the grazes stung beneath her touch. ‘Your uncle?’ she said, pulling her dressing-gown closer as a cool gust blew through an open window.
‘I found him, he will recover,’ I said hurriedly, peering over her shoulder to Lily’s room, her absence yawning at me. Miss du Maurier turned to look at the room’s emptiness and then to Mr Little’s. The crazed mess of it alarmed me. Where could she be?
I raced down the stairs, out into the dawn light and over to the shed. She would be nowhere if not there.
Beauty sat in the window, her beak wiping the edge of the sill, a morning worm already in her belly. A loud chorus of sparrows lit up the old plane tree with life that seemed to surge with them, brown leaves amongst the freshly sprouted green. The wind steadily whipped at the branches, as the last of the night surrendered to the morning, a magic wind, a holy wind, whistling about my ears. Here I was – illegitimate, marked, shaved, set apart. But I would not be cast out. I was a blessing not a curse.
I will as I create. I speak as I will. I create as I speak.
I opened the shed door. Condensation beaded the windows and it was dark, but I could see her lying there in the gloaming. Her face glowed in the darkness as I moved closer to the bed. Beside it she had placed a shovel as if to arm herself.
I watched the breath from her tender mouth rise into the air. She was wrapped in the old kangaroo skin, underneath which she wore Mr du Maurier’s wedding suit, the black plunge making a snowy V of her skin. The top hat was a new perch for the parrot: he shuffled sideways along the rim as if it were a circular tightrope, his feathers jade against the jet.
‘Abracadabra, Shekinah, Mizpah,’ the parrot whispered in his hoarse voice. Or had I imagined it? I listened for it again, but the bird was still.
‘Lily,’ I said, her name coming out of me like smoke, a whisper turning to mist in the air. ‘Lily?’ I wanted to wake her, to see those eyes upon my own, but I also wanted to let her sleep, untroubled. I could have stepped silently away, retraced my footsteps. Be gone and leave her be. But she opened her eyes to me, and they shone.
She was no glimmering girl; she was not going to vanish with the dawn. She reached out her arms and I felt her warm fingers brush the grazed skin of my neck as her arms encircled me. She was my Rosh Hashana, my New Year. I removed my coat before I slid in beside her. There was much to say. But there would be time enough to say it later. For now, it was enough to be close to her. Her body breathed warmth into mine.
‘May you be written and sealed for a good and sweet year,’ I spoke gently into her ear, and her hair caressed my face, soft as blossom.
She took my left hand, the petals of her lips pressing each and every letter until my skin tingled. She had written her name with kisses.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Rabbi Chaim Rosenthal of Mikveh Yisra’el and the members the Sydney Jewish community who were kind enough to answer my many questions. All errors are mine. To Lauren Dawes, who shared her thoughts and experiences of albinism. To Wet Ink magazine, who published the first chapter under the title ‘The First Seduction of Billy Little’ in the June 2009 edition.
To early readers with gratitude: Rachel Cooley, Mary McCallum, Karen Ferris and Kate Menday, Ruth Richardson and Victoria Innell.
Thank you to my editors for their illumination and insight: Ali Lavau, Denise O’Dea and Julia Stiles. And to proof reader Nikki Lusk.
Thank you to Isobel Dixon and the team at Blake Friedmann, to HarperCollins Australia, and to my family for their love and support.
And special thanks to kischef Macher Catherine Milne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Leigh Price lives in Sydney. She graduated from the Australian National University, Canberra, with a double major in English Literature and Drama, and co-established a small theatre company before moving to Sydney to pursue a career as an actor. She has written for both the theatre and the screen. The Bird’s Child is her debut novel.
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2015
This edition published in 2015
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Sandra Leigh Price 2015
The right of Sandra Leigh Price to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Price, Sandra Leigh, author.
The bird’s child / Sandra Leigh Price.
ISBN: 978 1 4607 5000 1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0420 2 (ePub)
Magic – Australia – Fiction.
A823.4
Cover design by Matt Stanton, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images by shutterstock.com
Author photograph by Joern Harris