by Octavia Cade
There’s a fur seal on the rocks. It looks as if it might be dead. It smells as if it is dead: a sweet rot, rancid fat spoiling on stone.
It’s hard to see, the rough coat against the rock bank, the hairs the same shade as stones—like one of those three dimensional paintings that must be stared at, cross-eyed, before the image can be seen. It’s easy to lose by looking away, but who isn’t fascinated by death? No one looks away, no one isn’t fascinated, doesn’t want to poke it, to knead it between still living fingers, feel the newly rotting flesh to see if death is catching.
Poor seal. It looks asleep, but what a lonely place to die, in front of a wildlife viewing platform where, for once, no one was around to look, or to call for help. Better luck next time. It must have been recent, there’s no smell. Someone clambers down to it, but it isn’t Rosemary. She is not yet completely sure the seal is dead, and the nearly dead bite, their stinking jaws jealous and ready for company. So someone else goes, on the grounds of better him than her—but he doesn’t dare to touch. Above, her fingers clench on the railing, wanting to know the feel of the wet, jagged fur. Beside her, there is a call.
“Can you get me a whisker?”
A memento mori? Perhaps she collects—an album of animal parts, an extended family shot. Or perhaps it is something to cook with, to flavor eye of newt. There aren’t a lot of newts round here, but it is hard to see how whiskers substitute, or blend together in the pan as the rocks blend with the fur. What would she cook it with, Rosemary wonders? It seems like grave robbery—but worse, for this is not for gold but for gustatory self. Still, to know the feel of the whisker—the crisp roughness like no crisp roughness she has felt before . . . to not be jealous of her possibilities, that she will take something that Rosemary doesn’t get to take.
The caller doesn’t get her whisker, but now Rosemary wants one. Alas, the viewing platform is filling up, and mutilating the dead is not for an audience.
Laying down quadrants in cockle beds, digging down with small shovels and counting; sorting and sizing and measuring, mapping the relationship between tide and depth and length. Slopping up and down the beds in gumboots and sunburn, decanting the cockles out of the weighing bucket and back into their stretch of sand, making sure that they would not spend the afternoon in the bucket, beneath the hot sun.
At the end of the afternoon, another dig, but this time for cockles to take home, a full bucket with fresh seawater and the winding drive along the peninsula to another digger’s flat. Rinsing the cockles under cold water and then throwing them in a saucepan to boil, one that had to be borrowed off the neighbors to fit all the shells. Steaming them with garlic and butter, tossing in overcooked spaghetti, to be eaten with cheap wine off shared plates.
Sand in her shoes and her shirt and her teeth, the cockles not fully cleaned but no one had cooked them before, it was all a guessing game, and even with the crunch they tasted of the tides.
The sex was pleasant but unremarkable, and Rosemary did not transfer the memory of it immediately, preferring to laze in the sun and play with the shells about her neck. She had no immediate need of currency, and the experience was common enough. When, at dinner, she saw the polite and friendly eyes of the cook, ladling pasta with shellfish and white wine onto her plate, she saw in his face that he had not waited as she had. The slight reserve, the tinge of curiosity gave it away. He remembered, of course, how they had spent the afternoon, but the details were removed from him, locked into whatever coin he had chosen. Rosemary wondered what it was (driftwood? mussel shell? a polished disk cut from the glass of a bottle of sauvignon blanc?) and smiled to herself through dinner. She felt as if she had a secret. Smiled more to know that he would soon take up that coin and revisit the memory—curiosity was always a giveaway. She had done it often enough herself.
Of course it would be passed on soon enough, but Rosemary was no prude. Sex was a commodity, and she had benefited enough from others. Had she thought ahead, she could have brought one or two favorite coins with her for afternoons such as this had been, but perhaps it was best that she hadn’t. Narrowness of experience was to be discouraged.
Later that night, soft noises in the cabin next to hers suggested that the cook was reliving the memory of their lovemaking. At the same time, Rosemary was divesting herself of it. There was no need to put it off. The sun had gone down; the decks were stripped of warmth, and the day was over.
Chatham
When Rosemary took her bird-memories and handed them over for the sixth coin, handed them over to a lumpen, earthbound merchant too seasick for travelling and boats, she lost her liking for more than feathers.
Warm shuffles like mice in the cupboard, the soft sounds of an unbalanced body. She knew she should leave it, let the darkness soothe feathers and fear until she could take it in her hand calmly, stroke the soft walnut head, strangely solid under the spare down covering. Rescued from the jaws of her horrible, over-fed cat, and the nest too high to return to, too far out on the sea cliff, and Rosemary with no way of getting it back.
So it was in the hot water cupboard, wrapped in a tea towel in an old ice-cream container. And Rosemary, sadistic with childish curiosity, a pendulum between her books and the cupboard, unable to leave it for ten minutes at a time, knowing her jack-in-the-box appearance was frightening it but unable to stay away. Was it thirsty, was it starving?
Would it eat cat food and thrive, like a previous refugee had done, oblivious to the irony if not the cat, which shared its food and watched with gleaming eyes, ready for canapé, for vol-au-vent, for stuffed-plump gull dumpling. Would it eat, would it refuse? Would it die? Could she keep it alive and for herself, to sit on her shoulders and pick fish-bones from her hand?
It would be wrong to let it go hungry, this gaping greedy baby fallen from the nest.
Soft in her hands, the ridge of spine tender against her palm, head tilted backwards as she tried to prise open the tiny bill, hovering tweezers clogged with food, food smeared against the smile lines of the beak. The bird was rigid in her hands, staring, too scared to turn its head away, but Rosemary did not return it to the warm safety of the cupboard.
Was it thirsty, was it starving? Eat this, little birdie, it’s good for you. Yum, yum.
The pleasure and relief when she was able to force lumps down its throat. You’ll feel better with something in your stomach, birdie. The horror at its choking, the harsh breaths, the panic in the small feathered face, in the small black eyes. Open up, down go the silver tweezers! Quick, pull it out—before it dies in her hands, terrified, stuffed from one end to another and wondering what it had done to deserve this death, too petrified to move as more food was stuffed down its throat. Too petrified to turn its head away, to live.
The shame of it stiff in her hands, suffocated by fear and love and sardines. Why did it not swallow, stupid thing? Why did it not turn its head?
Why could she have not left it safe in the cupboard, to recover in its own time? Rosemary wept guilty tears, threw it in the marram grass where no one would see the corpse. Threw it where even the cat couldn’t find it, the bloody beastly cat who she loved better than birds. The cat who plop-sucked his way across the damp sands, shaking miserable feet, shaking wind-shuffled fur and glaring.
Sea birds, land birds. Short, flat-beaked birds; long, red-footed sharp-beaked birds. He would bring them home for Rosemary to cure or kill, to drown in warm water, to stuff to death. Birds that soared on still warm air; island birds casting shadows on the water. He had no sportsmanship; would climb trees at night, slinking sleeping birds from the nest, scattering feathers across Rosemary’s carpet. Feathers, and a tiny remnant claw. A reminder that he could have left the entire corpse, had he wanted to.
Rosemary did not want him to. It was all right with small birds, common birds. Who would miss a sparrow? But the protected penguin, clumsy and clambering onto the beach at dusk, would get them both into trouble. A fine for Rosemary, and a site two foot under for naughty puss. The Departme
nt of Conservation didn’t joke about bird catching. It was unaccountable—they cared more for the live creature than the memory of it, the warm salt smell half smothered with feathers, the graven coin. No vision whatsoever. Bound in the wheels of bureaucracy.
Rosemary took the penguin, with pangs of guilt, half-suspecting the cat was laughing at her, knowing she would protect him and mocking her for it. He had dragged it home whole, telltale marks left in the sand. Rosemary went out and scuffed them, disguising the evidence; wrapped the bird in a pillowcase in panic, and shoved it into the freezer.
“Just what the hell am I supposed to do with it now?” she snapped at the cat, his eyes winking up at her, reflecting in the kitchen lights. The trouble with neighbors . . . word would get around that Rosemary had a wild cat about the place and starved, it would go after native birds. Of course it wasn’t starved, just good at looking feral. Good at behaving monstrously to poor defenseless creatures—although the penguin had left a sharp slice across the nose as a parting gift. Rosemary felt no sympathy as she held the cat down and doused it with iodine.
He scratched her, sharp and indignant. The iodine stung her as well as him. “Bugger off then, you little bastard,” Rosemary said, and there was real feeling behind it.
The penguin stayed in the freezer for a long time, and every time Rosemary caught sight of its blue feathers through the freezer bag, the staring, milky eyes, she had been irritated. She began to wish she had buried it as soon as she had found it splayed across her floor. Surely it was only paranoia that made her want to hide it as quickly as possible, but that same paranoia kept it safely buried under tuna steaks and lamb chops. The little penguin ghost hung over her, wheedling and threatening in turn, gazing mournfully at the ocean. Eventually she tired of its mute accusations and fed it to the cat. He didn’t like it, but Rosemary refused to give him anything else until the penguin was gone. It took an entire fortnight, and the birds in her garden suffered for his disgust. They were smaller than he was, weaker, and the cat had so little sense of shame that Rosemary would see him mooning at her through the glass of the living room door, a delicate wax-eye green in his mouth. He dropped them unmarked on her carpet, although some mornings brought only feathers.
How Rosemary wished he would pick on something that would fight back! And not as ineffectually as the penguin, but something that would put him off his downy dinners for good, freeing his mistress from the obligation of cleaning up after him. Yet the only bird she could think of that he wouldn’t challenge were the albatrosses that sometimes flew over the coast and circled the fishing boats. On sunny days, when she needed to feel her own freedom from the cloistered walls of the library, Rosemary would barter to spend the day on one of those boats. As a child it had been her favorite treat, and she saw no reason to deny herself as an adult.
When quicksilver fish were netted and brought to deck, shiny-scaled and scattered over the salt-wet wood, Rosemary would watch from her perch at the bow, resplendent in a yellow parka. She loved to see albatrosses drop to the boat; their still wings a dark scythe against the sky. Protected, they swooped for the fish, were permitted their tithe. Giant beaks sliced through flesh, tore and gulped in ruthless greed. Dark eyes watched Rosemary, fearless, and fascinated she kept well away from those razor beaks, the heavy wings each as long as her arm.
It was their freedom that appealed to her, that and the disdain with which they floated in currents that slapped Rosemary’s face, chafed it raw, and rocked the boat from side to side. Air cracked in the sails, waves smacked at the hull.
She would have liked to take them home with her, to circle her house in stormy weather and remind her of the wideness of the world, the world that wings could take her to, the freedom those wings would give her. Coined albatrosses were nearly unheard of—bad luck to kill an albatross, it was worse to capture them—although there were several known copies on the black market, and Rosemary had purchased one of them. She found—but she would never have admitted it—that the false freedom of albatross flight in her library couldn’t match the reactions of her own escape to the fishing boats, her own identification with the bird. This gave her disquiet, and so she dreamed of an albatross that flew home to her, a garden of better birds, of further flight, and buried her purchase in the stacks. Buried her flight in cages, and small birds that could be tamed and contained.
Rosemary had birds as a child, peach-faced lovebirds that cooed and died in elegant, lime feathers, too delicate for her chubby hands. They fed on fright, and more often than not expired of it. Rosemary buried them in the garden where she had once lost another bird, one that had escaped from its cage when she was cleaning it, one that had flown around the room, bumping into clear glass until it found a window that was open and flown away, into the cool green garden and the brightness of sky. She went to the neighbors, asked if they had seen it pale green against the deep, clear silhouettes of ferns. She left food on the veranda dutifully, having no real expectation of the lovebird returning with its silly face blushed with adventure. She heard her parents talking. “It’s obviously not from around here. The other birds will gang up on it—it’s probably dead already.” Well, they were clannish, Rosemary supposed. She could understand it, and felt surprisingly little sympathy for the wanderer. What a nuisance bird to cause all that trouble, to go where Rosemary could not follow! Hadn’t she fed and watered it, done her best to ignore what a disappointment it was as a pet? Freakish, flighty . . . unfriendly in the extreme. The bird didn’t return, and Rosemary did not grieve for it, jealous for the freedom she could not contain and could not mimic. She searched briefly for a well-pecked corpse, fallen stiffly into the long grass of the hedged garden, but she never found anything. She looked at the remaining bird with dislike, and her parents misunderstood. “We’ll get you another birdie, darling.”
She had better luck with budgies, lazy mincing birds prone to fits of screeching temper, but they spent the rest of the day nibbling on cuttlefish and ignoring Rosemary’s attempts to be friends. She liked them, even when, unprovoked, they showed all the character of feather bolsters. Even the cat (an earlier model, but with the same greedy stare) didn’t bother them greatly. A lovebird would have keeled over in terror. Perhaps budgies had less imagination, Rosemary thought. They spent their days squatting and bobbing, producing infertile eggs. Only one hatched. Blue-gray, reminiscent of grave clothes and sacraments. It was weak and had no strength to fly: sat shivering on its perch, small squeaks rocking its body like earthquakes. With its downy baby feathers fluffed up, it was almost the size of its parents, and they fussed over it, preening, feeding, clucking. It made no difference, the lovebirds were back, a cuckoo in the nest. The blue budgie sat ghostly in the cage of its predecessors, a well-scrubbed cage that still had echoes of lovebird, for the budgie trembled, possessed with terror. Rosemary hung over it, hoping to claim one success, but for all her hovering the baby died. She wondered if it was from fright, if her presence had stifled the bird, suffocated it. Perhaps she was a plague on the feathered population of the world, and yet albatross flew about her.
From that time on, Rosemary kept cats. They could be trusted not to keel over when her back was turned. Their independence was a comfort.
(When Rosemary took her bird-memories and handed them over, she lost her liking for cats.)
Tararuas
It was a hard walk in the scaly, ridge-backed mountains, but Rosemary had paid porters with bright handfuls of summer holidays and the flat presses where oil and wine spilled like blood through her fingers, dripped onto her tongue, staining brilliant teeth. It was worth it to walk freely and unburdened, to the remote hut of her next vendor.
The wind across the tussock tops spread her hair like streamers, lifted her arms as if they were wings. She let it toss her along the mountains, careered down slopes with arms winged open, and felt she was flying. The wind was so strong that her feet barely touched the ground, and Rosemary pictured herself alone in the hills, weightless and soaring. Th
e sun shone on the tussocks and on the tiny waxy leaves of the trees below the bush line—they glinted in her eyes and made her dizzy, the warm, slippery smell of growth and earth coating her face and fingers as they spread in the wind. It was the smell of freedom and luck, with porters far behind and the land opening out beneath her, green-scaled and golden at the tips where the tussocks came in.
The moment Rosemary realized what luck was—and that she had it—was stamped on her memory with dragon wings and old crayon.
A primary class, with sun shining in despite the shallow veranda with its glowing red windows like spilled paint, where at the end of year children sat in a circle, dissecting the classroom and taking it home with them. Pieces of chalk, and broken crayons, and pictures that held the walls up. There were some things everyone wanted, class projects that had hung all year and waited overhead for lots to be drawn. The dragon was one. It ran the length of the classroom, an enormous shadow of bright green, with children riding between the bright scales. Rosemary had drawn herself, reluctant, and pasted it on in turn, although she was sorry for it and whispered apologies in the dragon’s ear when no one was looking. Her portrait didn’t belong there. It didn’t look like her, and she disliked how inferior it was—how inferior they all were—compared to the sleek perfection of the dragon itself, the mountain outline of its scales. Too high to reach, she imagined them cool between her fingers.
Leaving the house, it was the open-mouthed, back-toothed chewing of the cat—and the suspicious glare it sent in her direction, a sneaky prelude to sidling—that caught Rosemary’s attention. Usually the cat only looked like that when it was eating something it shouldn’t, just long enough to catch her attention before running off with the sticky remnants of its dinner.