When the Lyrebird Calls

by Kim Kane

  ‘I thought you admired manners.’ Madeleine shook her head at her grandmother’s topsy-turvy ideas: fake tan and overalls, burnt bras and push-up bras, dance lessons and libraries. It was hard to make sense of it.

  ‘I think everybody appreciates good manners, but I don’t like them when they’re used as a sword.’

  After a shower, Madeleine put on a black T-shirt and then pulled Mum Crum’s old turtleneck over the top. It smelt of dust and camphor, but its shape compelled her to hold her neck high and her back straight. She pulled the woolly skirt up over her tights and slipped on the glittery shoes again.

  Madeleine tucked her boots into the wooden box, on top of the page of signatures. She stood. The skirt swished around her legs. She wasn’t used to long skirts, since her school uniform was short – one iPhone’s length above the knee, as the school rules required.

  ‘Oooh, bella, bella,’ said Mum Crum. ‘Don’t you look finer than Georgian iced fancy cake. You can have those clothes if you’d like – I won’t miss them.’

  Madeleine curtseyed. ‘Thank you. They’ll come in handy. The newspapers always seem more interested in sports-women’s lipsticks than their hockey sticks.’

  Mum Crum arched her back in a stretch. ‘Nothing has changed, has it? Just remember, Maddy Moo, as my great-aunt used to say, You won’t change anything from the parlour.’

  ‘Parlour?’

  ‘Couch is probably a better translation now, I suppose. Yes, you won’t change anything from the couch. Don’t forget the box, and make sure you take your own boots so you’ll have something to wear—’

  ‘Got them!’

  ‘Good girl. And have a look at the view while you’re there, Moo! It’s beautiful. The Wurundjeri people were onto this place thousands of years before we stuck our thieving flagpoles in.’

  Madeleine took out her phone, flicked her finger along the screen and smiled: Nandi had sent photos of her cats, her tiny baby sister, and her tiny baby sister’s tinier Dunlop Volleys.

  ‘Madeleine, honestly,’ said Mum Crum. ‘You kids are never actually in the moment – you’re always somewhere else.’

  That, thought Madeleine, is the point. ‘Just checking the cricket score,’ she said.

  Madeleine tried to find a pocket in her skirt for her phone, but there was none. She tucked the box under one arm and balanced the mobile on top, but quicker than a kid could pinch a Smartie from a birthday cake, Mum Crum grabbed the phone.

  ‘Mum Crum. It’s mine!’

  ‘Easy, sister. Watch your tone. Park it on the charger until you get back.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum Crum. I just—’

  ‘You’ll only be half an hour, and you’ll survive. I promise.’

  Madeleine glowered at her grandmother and headed for the front door.

  Once Madeleine was outside, her anger dissolved in the chilly mountain air. She wandered up the rough path outside Mum Crum’s cottage and out onto the street. The shoes made her take neater, tenser steps as she had to clench them on with her toes. Madeleine was very extra-curricular and, apart from sport, her favourite subject was drama. There was something magic about walking backstage and breathing in the thick, chalky silence. Sport was no different – as much teamwork, as many bright lights, just more grass stains and fewer choc-tops. Traversing the hill in these shoes now, Madeleine had the sudden sense that she was on a stage; that the world was somehow watching.

  At the end of Mum Crum’s street, Madeleine turned left and headed up the steep hill. Lyrebird Muse loomed above her. Even the back of it, the higgledy-piggledy outbuildings, were far grander than any of the other homes in the area, many of which had been razed by bushfire and modestly rebuilt a century later.

  The Muse was tall and built of stone, with a slate roof and huge windows blooming with jewel-coloured glass. It stood on the edge of the mountain, its chest thrust out like the figurehead on the bow of a ship, face to the wind, surveying the patchwork of farms that stretched towards Melbourne. A muddy lake curved in a bow at its feet a little way down the hill, home to a flock of bossy orange-billed geese.

  Madeleine reached the stone fence separating the property’s eastern border from the road. Just inside the tall iron gates were two flags beating against their own poles – one the Australian flag, with its Union Jack and starry Southern Cross; the other the Aboriginal flag, with its black peoples, red earth and a powerful yellow sun at the centre like a punch.

  Attached to one gate, quivering in the wind, was a metal sign advertising a café that had been set up in the old stables to quench the thirst of tourists more interested in snacks than history. Devonshire teas daily, it said.

  Madeleine had smuggled some coins into her left boot earlier at Mum Crum’s, hoping the café might just be open. She danced onto the property, buoyed at the prospect of decent food and the accolades she might receive for the secret-hole shoes. Kindly bequeathed by Madeleine Barnett, a sign might say. Who knew, they may even want her photograph for the local paper, to run above a little caption about how she’d come to find them.

  As soon as she was inside the gates, Madeleine stopped. The garden was as damp and mysterious as ever. The trees were so tall and so thick in some parts that the light that filtered down to the stony paths was as green as the moss that lined them. On the other side of the property, out along the western border, Madeleine could just see a small stream glinting in the afternoon light, marking the point at which the English garden gave way to the edge of the mountain and an army of tall, straight gums. On the far side of the stream, the grey tree trunks were bare, a tatty canopy of gum leaves arranged metres and metres above the ferns and scrub.

  Madeleine followed the drive across to the house and walked up the stone steps and into the lobby. She was standing in a large timber entrance hall with a high roof and doorways leading in several directions, each cordoned off with dusty velvet rope. The walls were covered in dark-brown wallpaper that was curling up near the roof. The enormous floor was covered in pretty blue, green and terracotta tiles that were chipped in places.

  On one wall was a large, glossy oil painting in a golden frame, showing a woman with a brown coat and a curly striped feather on her hat. The light in the hall reflected onto the subject’s face, obscuring it completely.

  A woman with a frozen bob peered over the edge of the counter. She wore a badge saying Volunteer pinned to her blouse, and an Alice band in her hair. She looked at Madeleine in her sparkly dance shoes and immediately pushed her thick pink lips together. ‘I am sorry, but we’re not open on Mondays.’

  ‘Oh, but I just wanted to drop in—’

  ‘I am sorry, but we are not open to the public on Mondays.’ The woman tightened the knot on the printed silk scarf at her neck. ‘That door really ought to be locked. Now, be a good girl and be off.’

  The women said the word off like it had an r in it. Orrrf.

  Madeleine stood her ground. ‘But don’t you have a museum? I thought you did, and I found—’

  ‘We are closed on Mondays. You will have to come back tomorrow.’ The woman put her head down, cauterising the conversation.

  Madeleine spun and walked out of the lobby, closing the door sharply enough for the glass panes in it to rattle. She clutched the box under her arm.

  Uppity otter. I can’t imagine any place I’d rather not put these beautiful shoes.

  Madeleine walked back down the hill to the park, which lay like a hem between the mansion above and the edge of the tiny town below. Mum Crum said that the park had once belonged to the Muse estate but had been sold off with all the land below it in a subdivision years before Mum Crum’s time – around about the time Australia had become a federation.

  At the entrance to the park was a barbecue and an old metal slide. A line of oaks ran across the hill, like soldiers standing guard. A helicopter chopped overhead, sending the birds flapping as it whizzed weekend bankers back to their banks. Madeleine walked across the hill, away from the noise, following the knobbly pat
h of the oaks. Acorn caps crunched under her feet.

  At the very end of the park was an old, torn woolshed. Madeleine trailed her hand along its corrugated-iron wall. She let out a low, steady ‘Ahhhhhh’ as she walked, listening to the undulations under her hand in the rattle of her call. On the other side of the woolshed was a lane edged in stone and lined with grass and rubbish. Somewhere beyond the lane, Madeleine could hear the creek.

  Madeleine stepped into the lane and turned left, following it downhill. She had never been down this lane before. It was, she figured, the kind of lane she might have been down with a dog, because dogs were more likely to explore that sort of thing – well, more likely than grandmothers, even curious ones who collected property.

  Madeleine reached the end of the lane and understood why Mum Crum had never bothered: it was a dead end, damp and musty and filled with shadows. It smelt of hay, lanolin and rust. The old-fashioned shoes pinched Madeleine’s feet on the uneven ground, and she stopped and pitched, rocking from one foot to the other. She looked about for a bench, but there was nothing – it was not the sort of place to rest.

  Madeleine hopped over to a small heap of stones with old chip packets and faded cans jammed between them and sat down, wiggling her achy toes. The glittering shoes slashed the shadows. They reminded her of the tiny phosphorous mites she had once seen with her father as they’d fished. The phosphorescence had glowed from the water and the stars above them had cut the salted air, and Madeleine had felt weightless, giddy, suspended in a briny Milky Way. She had pressed against his woollen sleeve to stop herself tumbling away.

  Madeleine looked around her at the stones on which she sat. Maddison 4 Kai was carved into one of them – carved deep, finger deep. A person no doubt needed true love to make that much effort, thought Madeleine. She pushed her nail into the K of Kai and wobbled the rock, trying to imagine what sort of hand had carved it. Then she pushed some more. The Maddison 4 Kai rock tilted on its point and flipped.

  Cemented onto its other side was a photo in a copper frame. It was an oval-shaped photograph in sepia, partially obscured by grime, of a small child with a big bow in her light curls and cheeks lit with dimples. Madeleine ran her fingers around the frame, trying to work out what it was doing attached to the rock and how on earth it had got there. It was a bit like the photographs attached to graves in the cemetery, but this wasn’t a gravesite, and while the photo was old, really old, it obviously wasn’t of an old person. Madeleine examined the rock. There was no name, no cross, no indication that it was a tombstone.

  She flipped up another piece of stone. A couple of slaters curled into balls and rooted in the moss underneath, but there were no more photos. Madeleine knocked the rock back and hauled up a third. While this one did not hold a photo, it was studded with wonky, creamy-coloured beads. Madeleine traced them with her finger; they ran in a loose ring around the stone. She pressed down on one. Its tip was sharp. It wobbled and then, with a puff of dust, fell into the palm of her hand. Madeleine dusted the bead off and held it up to the light. It was only then that she realised she held a tooth.

  ‘Now that is gross.’ Madeleine almost dropped it. The tooth was disgusting, completely disgusting, but it was also intriguing. It was an eyetooth, a milk tooth, which, like paper, had yellowed with age. Madeleine tried to push it back into its socket, but the glue had crumbled to powder. She put the rock down and balanced the tooth carefully on top. I wonder if the tooth fairy brings money for other people’s teeth, she thought.

  Madeleine heard a rustle and looked up. Then she heard a laugh – a high-pitched, musical laugh, which leapt up from the ground and did pas de chats against the sides of the stones and the tips of the trees. It was coming from the mouth of the lane, but the lane was empty.

  Madeleine grabbed her wooden box and stood up. ‘Hello?’ She stared down at the framed photograph at her feet. The little girl smiled back at her through a slick of mud and silver insect trails. Madeleine bent to wipe the glass with a finger, and then she pushed the rock back over. Maddison 4 Kai. She felt awful leaving the photo facedown like that – it was like burying the girl alive – but Madeleine didn’t want to leave her exposed either.

  There was a rustle from a patch of browning bracken on the other side of the lane. Madeleine stood and peered over to see a bird stomping on a damp soil mound. It had stocky legs, short rounded wings, and a long, white, feathery tail, shaped like the fern fronds that ringed it. The bird raised its tail up in an arch and lowered it down over its back gently, like a fan. The two feathers that edged the tail were heftier, as cream-and-brown as a Burmese cat, with squarish crenellations of colour like the gappy bricks at the top of a castle. The bird cocked its head and warbled, looking at Madeleine with a stony eye, the feathers on its neck jiggling. But rather than a bird call – well, a normal bird call – the deep, brassy boooonnnng of a gong sounded from its beak instead. It looked at Madeleine and blinked. Then the same noise sounded again, only from somewhere else, further up the hill.

  A lyrebird? It must be!

  The bird twitched and ducked further behind the bracken. Madeleine wobbled. She had to get back to Mum Crum, to let her know that lyrebirds were still here! If only she’d had her phone, she could have taken a video.

  Madeleine picked a path that avoided the stones, the damp spots, and began to walk back across the hill towards the park’s entrance on her tippy-toes. She almost tripped, but steadied herself. Looking up, she found that she was disoriented.

  A tall band of gums traversed a part of the park Madeleine had never visited before. There was no slide, barbecue or tall soldier-oaks. There were no acorn caps. To her left ran a line of waist-high saplings. Madeleine reached out and snapped one of the soft branches absentmindedly.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Madeleine looked up. A girl with a face as round and red as a Christmas ham stood before her. Madeleine started. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I . . . I just sort of reached out and snapped a bit off. I hope I haven’t damaged it.’

  The girl scowled from under the brim of a hat. Madeleine looked from the red face to the grass, taking in a volley of dark skirts and puffed sleeves. There was something about the girl’s patchy freckles and wide forehead that was frustratingly familiar, and yet her accent, her clothes and really her face were strange. Madeleine twitched, trying to work out whether she had seen the girl before. She might have been from Sydney. That happened sometimes, when you saw people out of context and didn’t recognise them – like seeing a famous actor holding a bowser at the petrol station.

  The sun had sneaked out from behind the clouds, and sparkles from the shoes bounded about the grass. Madeleine looked back up. The girl crossed her arms. ‘I was not enquiring after the shrubs,’ she said imperiously. ‘I want to know what you are doing in Bea’s dress slippers.’

  ‘Bea’s dress slippers? I don’t think they belong to a Bea. I found them hidden in a cupboard.’

  ‘They are Bea’s dress slippers. Not surprisingly, they were made to go with a dress – the first she wore during her season.’

  Madeleine took a step back. She felt her face shuffle in confusion.

  ‘Take one off and look inside. The cobbler always stitches our initials.’

  Madeleine wobbled on one foot and handed a shoe to the girl, who flipped back the tongue. B.C.W.

  ‘Beatrice Cecilia Williamson. I told you so. You’ve a cheek, waltzing in here and stealing. Have you taken her feathers too? I ought to . . . to . . . to turn you over to Percy. I’ll get him to fix you – he can pop you on the train to Melbourne, throw you into the river and let you fester amongst the horse carcasses.’

  Madeleine tried not to look startled. ‘Horse carcasses?’

  ‘From the tannery. By the time they get to the city they’re curdled and swollen. Daddy doesn’t call it the fetid river of death for nothing, you know.’

  In all the years Madeleine had come to Victoria to stay with Mum Crum, in all the houses Mum Crum had owned
down here, she had never heard of the Yarra containing horse carcasses and she had never heard of it described as the fetid river of death. Muddy, sure. Rowers, sure. Shopping trolleys even – but this sounded like a very different waterway from the iced-coffee-coloured river she had once chugged along in a tourist boat.

  ‘I think you’re exaggerating, but I hadn’t reali—’

  ‘You’d better give me the other slipper now.’

  Madeleine shrugged. She slipped off the shoe and handed it to the girl. ‘I was going to deliver them to the museum. We could still donate them, if you’d like – together, I mean.’

  ‘The museum?’ The girl laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh between friends. ‘What would the museum want with Bea’s left slipper? Museums have things like stuffed kangaroos and gruesome masks from Oceania, and shrunken heads no larger than oranges with sewn lips – which my father says come from real cannibals. Bea’s dress slippers would look quite daft amongst that lot.’

  Madeleine tried not to snap back. ‘I actually wanted to keep the shoes, but Mum Crum, my grandmother, suggested it.’ She eyed a row of tiny hand-stitches in the kidskin. ‘You don’t get craftsmanship like that anymore.’

  ‘It’s just a shoe.’ The girl rolled the shoes into her apron and the fierce look on her face faded. ‘Not that my sister doesn’t have a number of pairs.’

  ‘Your sister?’ exclaimed Madeleine with a start. She had assumed Bea was an old, powdery lady – the girl’s great-aunt or something. ‘How did Bea’s shoes end up in my cupboard?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. We can ask Anna, but I suspect you’re fibbing. Bea’s terribly careful, you know. Me? I might leave my slippers in somebody’s cupboard, but Bea never would, and certainly not the dress slippers from her season.’