Cosmo Cosmolino

by Helen Garner

  For consolation he brought his thoughts to bear on their plainness. Maxine’s skin was papery, Janet’s nose was red, and both of them had something middle-aged and hard about their mouths: unloved, unkissed. He did not need these two ducks. Ducks, he thought. They were waddling away from him, waggling their smelly tail feathers, swaggering down the yard and bumping their folded wings as they went, lowering their blunt beaks over the empty cage, quacking and clucking together as if they had known each other all their lives.

  He flopped upstairs to the room he had chosen, Chips’s old one, which he had swept, crouching soberly with Janet’s pan and brush, then mopped, having to apply severe push and pull to the encrusted lino. The mattress he had lumped to the tip and dumped, not without raised eyes and a brief murmur in memoriam; and now on the dull green floor he spread his strip of foam rubber and on top of that his sleeping bag, khaki, aired for once, and flattened. He lay down on his back and took out the book. The nubbliness of its black cover soothed him. He opened it at random.

  And the Babylonians came to her in the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom. Uh oh. Try again. And he brake in pieces the images. Better. Once more. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come near thy dwelling. Good. He closed his eyes, keeping his finger between the pages. Maxine’s piece of art, the twig thing. Now, away from them, he could think about it. Really it wasn’t such a bad little job, a box, a cage, a cot or whatever, though what all the fuss and sighing were in aid of he didn’t know, it was only a couple of scraps of wood fixed together and was that supposed to be art? Also it was hard to separate his picture of the thing itself from the awful smile behind it, the toothy gash in the face of someone whose eyes were spinning in her head. How old were these two women, anyway? Same age as Alby—forty-five at least, ten years older than he was. And they looked it, in spite of the bottles in the bathroom, the muck they must have slapped on themselves over the years. He was after someone younger. Someone he could . . . influence, and educate, now he knew what to teach. Someone innocent. A virgin. Were there virgins, any more? He turned it up in his book. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Oh, stop. Not to be used like this. He shoved the book into the hood of his sleeping bag, and tried to scour his mind. Sternly; be stern. He herded his thoughts back to the young girls on the church steps with their families: their horsy cruppers, their dry hair scraped back, their skirts, their pink and yellow jumpers, the way they stood close to their fathers and glanced about them with meek and stupefied faces. Chantelle, Casey, Tiffany and Stacey. One of them was meant for him. What he should do was marry. What he needed was a bride. The idea of having to play a part in a public ceremony made him go dead all over, and grimly, to punish himself, he stuck with it, wielding it to discipline his thoughts away from these afternoons in rented and borrowed rooms, to send them briskly down lanes to the back doors of factories, to the gnashing confusion of construction sites, the damp concrete of supermarket loading bays. A job. A job. He looked at his watch. It was twenty to five in the afternoon, that terrible time of day for the unemployed, when all hope of a fresh start is lost and everything shrivels, loses colour and slides gravewards. He had himself under control now, and sat up on his bag, disoriented, sorry for himself, homesick for something he had not yet found.

  And that was when he heard the bird. Here, after all this travelling, outside even this ivy-clogged, broken-corded, sunless window. It started on the same note as before, as always, with no trilling or quavering, and worked its way drearily up a scale of six, where it stuck, but instead of hitting the seventh and eighth notes to round off a proper tune, repeated the fifth and sixth ones over and over again till Ray was nearly tearing out his hair. It refused to—it was too stupid to—he did not know the words to describe what the bird’s song withheld from him.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Janet stripped off the rubber gloves and put out her hand to the tap. Gripping the metal, she heard from outside in the garden a bird’s clumsy stepladder of notes, vibrato-less, unresolved, and felt her own skeleton fold itself up like the spokes of an umbrella inside its loosened covering of skin. Behind her left shoulder a fissure opened in the room’s density. I will die. I will die and leave nothing behind: I will be forgotten.

  The back door swung open and Maxine stepped in from the verandah in her rubber shoes.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said shyly. ‘I was out there working, and I thought I’d—Oh, pardon me!’

  Janet looked up from the sink. ‘What?’

  Maxine stared past her, then gave a small, embarrassed laugh. ‘I must be tired,’ she said. ‘It’s only the apron. Hanging on the cupboard door.’ She shoved the heels of her hands into her eyes and rubbed harshly. ‘Is it all right if I make myself a cup of tea?’

  ‘Feel free,’ said Janet. ‘You live here, don’t you?’

  She let go of the tap and reached along the bench for the kettle. It was a quarter to five, the hour when children burst into kitchens blank-eyed and mindless with hunger, when schoolbags crash against skirting-boards, when music starts and for ten minutes the house is jostled from within by its own unruly future. The fridge motor, whose purr had been the only thing holding at bay the daily end of the world, cut out. Between the kitchen and the sound of traffic a block away where the tramline ran and the big trucks thundered northward, a chasm opened. The house shifted on its foundations, redisposing its emptiness.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Maxine vaguely, ‘what that little bird is. That sings. Out there.’

  ‘You heard it too?’

  ‘I thought it lived at my old place,’ said Maxine, ‘but it must have followed me here.’

  ‘I hear it sometimes,’ said Janet, holding the kettle under the dry tap. ‘Don’t you know what bird it is?’

  ‘No,’ said Maxine. ‘And I’ve never seen it. But it tries to sing around this time nearly every day. I made up a name for it.’ She laughed, a sound more like a sharp sigh.

  ‘What?’ said Janet. ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘It’s silly, I suppose,’ said Maxine, ‘but I call it the failure bird.’

  She was pale. The way she stood with her hands hidden inside her bunched-up cuffs made her look tiny and stiff-armed, like a wigged doll propped on a shelf in a toyshop.

  ‘Have you got any children?’ said Janet suddenly.

  ‘No,’ said Maxine.

  ‘And is that something you . . . regret?’

  ‘For a long time,’ said Maxine, coming forward, still holding her cuffs closed from inside, ‘I thought it must be my destiny not to. But now I’m ready. I’ve got the message. By the end of next summer I’ll have one. I have got pretty pressing money problems—but I’ve made up my mind to, and everything else seems to be falling into place.’

  Janet tried to smile. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got a bloke? It’s all lined up?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Maxine. Two red dots appeared on her cheeks. ‘That is—unless you’ve got plans for him, of course. In which case I’m quite prepared to wait. To wait my turn.’

  ‘Who on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Him.’ Maxine dropped her head back and pursed her lips at the ceiling.

  ‘You mean Ray?’ said Janet. She turned on the tap. Water crashed on to the floor of the kettle. ‘You mean you’ve arranged it? Already?’

  ‘Not in so many words,’ said Maxine with a laugh. ‘I wasn’t quite sure myself, till I heard his name. But now—here we are—and living in the same house, thanks to you!’ She shot back her cuffs and spread her hands in a gesture of wondering beatitude.

  Janet swallowed. ‘And—Ray does know about this, I suppose?’

  ‘Perhaps not with his conscious mind, yet,’ said Maxine. ‘That depends on the number of his incarnations.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Janet.

  ‘Oh
, everybody,’ said Maxine, ‘at some stage has to do a spell on earth.’

  ‘On earth?’

  ‘Yes—on this particular level.’

  ‘I don’t quite get it,’ said Janet, hanging on to the kettle handle.

  ‘I know it sounds strange, at first,’ said Maxine. She repositioned her feet on the floor, preparing to expound. ‘See—angelic beings aren’t necessarily aware of their status.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Janet. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re talking about Ray? The bloke upstairs?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maxine. ‘Who else?’

  ‘And you’re telling me there are angels who don’t know they’re angels? And that Ray’s one of these?’

  ‘Well, he’s made it pretty clear to me,’ said Maxine, ‘that he’s been sent.’

  ‘Tsk. How could he not know, if he’s been sent?’

  Maxine smiled. ‘Who knows what they are?’ she said. ‘Do you?’

  Janet made an impatient movement. ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Look—don’t get me wrong,’ said Maxine. ‘I’m talking about a being pretty low down in the hierarchy. Once you get to a higher echelon—to archangels, the ones that everybody’s heard of—well, they’re much more likely to know exactly what they are and what their mission is. I’m not important enough to be noticed by one of those. I’d be satisfied with a novice. I could even be a learning experience for him—a beginner could easily be led astray. By human passions. There are things here that are very hard to resist. But I don’t imagine Ray will stay long. He’ll do the job—as soon as he realises what it is—and then he’ll be on his way. The universe is large. I can’t expect an actual relationship.’

  Janet set the kettle on the stove. Sliding the lid into place, she saw the water inside it trembling in concentric rings, and not for the first time she doubted whether any force existed which could warm this chilled, heavy mass, let alone bring it to the boil and transform it into steam. If I can’t believe even that, she thought, in spite of its having been proved to me daily all my life, how the hell am I supposed to live in the same house as this—this—

  ‘Tell me, Maxine,’ she said, straightening up from the lit stove and flicking the dead match at the bin, ‘is there anything at all you don’t believe in?’

  The brightness went out of Maxine’s face. She thrust each hand into the opposite cuff, dropped her bushy head, and presented herself again at once, flushed but still beaming.

  ‘There’s sure to be,’ she said. ‘I suppose there must be, mustn’t there!’

  In the next room something gasped and shuffled. They looked up. Coming at chest height through the thickening doorway was a bird, a tiny blue and yellow thing with dotted gills, flat-breasted, smug, helmeted and beaked, its claws neatly clamped to the extended and quivering forefinger of Ray.

  ‘Help,’ he croaked. ‘Help! Emergency. Get this thing off me. Quick, someone—get it off me.’

  His teeth were showing right back into his cheeks and his eyes were sunken, as if soot had been rubbed into their sockets. He gave a shrill laugh.

  The kettle began to tick and shimmer.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Janet. She hid her hands behind her. ‘I’m hopeless with animals.’

  Maxine glided forward. Her leathery hands shot out of her sleeves. One forefinger stroked the budgerigar’s blue bosom, and the other offered itself as a new perch on to which, while she clicked her tongue and kissed the air, the little creature took two brisk steps, whirring and settling its plumage; then, as she raised it gently to the level of her eyes, it fixed her with an expressionless gaze, opened its tucked-in beak, and peeled off a trill of such relaxed and thrilling inventiveness that they forgot to breathe out.

  ‘That can’t be the same one,’ whispered Janet. ‘The one we heard before.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Maxine. ‘This is a real bird.’

  ‘I opened Chips’s window,’ said Ray, ‘and it flew in. I thought it was going to bash itself against the walls. I’ve got a thing about birds. I hate them to touch me.’

  ‘But he’s yours now,’ said Maxine. ‘He came looking for you, and he found you. You have to take him on.’

  ‘No way,’ said Ray. Fervently he shook his head. He was trying to smile, but his forehead shone with sweat. ‘No way known.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Maxine. She approached Ray with her bird hand out in front of her. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘How can he hurt you? You’re a hundred times his size.’

  ‘Its feet are scaly,’ said Ray, backing away. ‘I felt them. Look at those holes in its beak. They can fly in your face and peck you. And don’t they have lice or something?’

  ‘Ray,’ said Maxine. ‘Take him.’

  ‘They make a mess!’ he cried. ‘They do their droppings!’ His back was against the cupboard.

  ‘Ray,’ said Maxine. ‘Ray.’

  Her hair fanned out round her head. She was so close that he could make out each fierce lock where it sprang coiled from her scalp; but closer to him still, enthroned on her finger, sat the bird, unblinking now and virtuous, so subtly caparisoned in ripples of grey and cream, riding so smooth and high, that he might have been an emperor erect upon his chariot.

  Through the curved kettle spout slid the first tuft of steam, stirring the throat of the whistle. It groaned, choked, then cleared itself and gave voice to a flawless shriek. The bird exploded into the air, releasing a jet of shit. It cannoned off the ceiling and plummeted. Maxine was ready. She darted across the room and swooped to seize it where it struggled, half-stunned, to get airborne; but Janet leaned past her and threw open the back door, and before Maxine could clap her hands around it, the bird gathered itself, flashed along the lino, and shot across the doormat out into the dusky garden.

  Janet twisted the knob of the stove and the kettle died.

  Maxine, sprawled half across the doorstep, got to her feet and slowly closed the back door. The sleeve of her check flannel shirt was streaked with birdshit and her tracksuit knees were stained. Pointlessly brushing, she turned to face the others, expecting to see them as they usually appeared to her when they were together: two lost souls, two rectangles jarring each other with the jagged light fields they radiated; but in the breathless calm that followed the shrieking they showed new to her, fresher, more vivid. Ray was solid dark red, ah yes, death, a bird outside a room and a body, something he could not speak of which had terribly shocked and frightened him, poor angel; and Janet (if one could ignore a blip the colour of verdigris, a rent in her aura low down at four o’clock, a rupture neatly stitched but impossible to hide) would have been almost presentable for once, except that behind her left shoulder reared a column, more intense than the dimness of the evening kitchen, seven feet tall and shadowy as smoke: a lord of terrible aspect.

  These matters Maxine had learnt not to speak of. Now she dismissed them, firmly but with respect, and as they faded she arranged her features into what she hoped was a suitable smile, and moved forward into the room.

  ‘Well!’ she said, lifting her chin with her clasped hands. ‘What sort of tea will we have? Ordinary or camomile? There isn’t any milk.’

  So now three people lived at the house, though nobody could have called it a household: why, they were still barely acquainted, keeping as they did to their own quarters where they brooded over their private histories, their disciplines, their fantasies and intimations about one another. They never sat down to share a meal. Each of them ate separately, guiltily, in haste, shovelling it down in a kitchen corner or bowed over a newspaper at the white table, bogging in without grace or pleasure, as if the need for nourishment in company were something to be ashamed of, a weakness.

  But the twig cradle, left by Maxine on the corner of the kitchen bench, on the mantelpiece or the edge of the bath, could sweeten the atmosphere of any room in which i
t found itself. Eyes were drawn to it and rested there, talk faltered and thoughts turned dreamy, for it was always in motion, responding with insect-like frissons to air currents that were imperceptible to humans. A single word uttered, a note sung at the other end of the house would be enough to set it off. It was so small: what kind of being could it contain? Only an imagined one, a baby conceived and born on a puff of wind; and having read in one of her cosmic pamphlets that anciently the Amazons, when they had fallen out with their neighbouring tribe of impregnators, would open their loins to the wind in the hope that the seeds it carried might inseminate them, Maxine paid close attention to the weather.

  It was the season of winds. Air hissed all day and all night long, tremendous, sharp and dry. It travelled in off the northern grasslands, the stony rises, the mighty basalt plains, barrelling furiously down freeways, rolling empty cans in the streets, stripping the foreign trees, pressing back dark foliage in which the globes of lemons shone.

  Though the shed had its back to the source of the wind, its timbers let the breath through in filaments and slivers, and Maxine lived in oceans of air: by night she floated on streams of it, a foot above her bed; by day, anchored only by the metal tools she worked with, she bobbed on its currents. The rhythm of her saw, the deliberate placement of her hammer blows inserted wedges into the balance of her housemates’ sleep. If at an inconvenient hour she ran out of suitable timber she simply pulled apart something previous. Nothing but the cradle was precious to her: it was real art, and though one day it would have to leave her, she would be proud to let it go.