by Carmel Bird
Over the years, the concept of the woodpecker toy fact has become very important and dear to me. I have lived here in Woodpecker Point, on the northwest coast of Tasmania, all my life. My parents have died and my sisters have all married and left the island. I live alone in the house with the rotary clothes line and the paling fence. Mrs Back-Fence is in a nursing home in Burnie, and I have never seen the wife of the Turkish man who now lives in the house. They have a baby daughter who sings Baa-baa-black-sheep sadly and endlessly in the garden. It is a very boring and irritating song, after a while. Jack Frost has disappeared. One of my nephews took Dapple Grey to the beach and left him there and he was washed out to sea. As these and many other things have changed, so the idea of the toy fact has changed and developed. The quest for the toy fact has gradually come to dominate my life.
Once when I was at the beach, years before the toy fact was named, I captured a starfish in my tin bucket. The tide was out and there was a cold breeze coming in across the shiny wet sand. I was sitting on the pebbles, which were shaped like eggs, and smooth, and all different kinds of white. I had the bucket between my legs so that I could stare down into it at the starfish, and I was given the ability to understand the shape of everything.
The moment passed, and yet it has never left me. Five minutes later, the sky went darker, and a red-haired girl in a green dress came up behind me and grabbed the bucket. She ran off across the pebbles with the starfish. My second-oldest sister chased the girl, and the girl defended herself with the spike of a beach umbrella. She drove the spike into my sister’s lip, ran off with the bucket, and disappeared.
I think my quest began with the starfish. Perhaps if that girl had not stolen it when she did, had not injured my sister as she did, I might never have undertaken the quest. Then, when the toy fact was named and its nature defined in a rudimentary way, I sensed that there was a system of knowing things that could, if handled in the right way, lead to understanding, the idea of which dazzled me. The simplicity and complexity of the starfish, punctuated in time by my sister’s blood, and coupled with the glorious lie (which might not have been a lie) about Jack Frost and the Infant of Prague, suggested to me that if I assembled facts in a special way every minute of every day for years and years and years, I would eventually see something more beautiful and more wonderful than anything I could have imagined. It was as though I had a golden thread which I wove to make a net in which I caught the toy facts, trapping them, bright birds in flight, planets in amber. I have collected and assembled the toy facts in my brain, and I am still uncertain as to whether I will ultimately discover The Toy Fact and so complete the pattern, or whether, by placing the final fact I will produce The Toy Fact. The quest itself is, however, absorbing, and has, as I said, come to dominate my life.
It is not only a matter of discovering things, but of manufacturing from those things the toy facts in all their fullness and beauty. I sometimes think my golden net of facts is like a fabulous story I am writing in my head. Once, when I was studying poetry at school, I used to think that everything was a metaphor, and said ‘metaphor’ in answer to every question.
‘If we took a slice off the top of her head,’ said the teacher, and I thought she was going to pay me a compliment, ‘we would find that the only thing in there was a metaphor.’ She meant to be insulting but had stumbled on the beautiful truth. It was this remark of hers that set me on my final course. From then on, I did not have to pass any exams or do anything much at all. I have spent my time since that day listening to people, reading encyclopaedias, browsing in the library, sitting on the beach, and generally pursuing one toy fact after another. I cared for my parents when they were ill, and I have worked in the Morning Glory cake shop for the past ten years.
One day, I am going to know everything about everything. I will know what makes a Cox’s Orange Pippin different from a Granny Smith. I will know what it is that stops hydrangeas from having any scent. I will see the pyramids being built and survive the Hundred Years War. I will understand the nature of fire, and know the depth to which the longest tree-root goes down into the earth. I will know what sorrow is made from, what constitutes joy. I will have conversations with the sage of Zurich; afternoon tea with Chagall in his garden; speak to Polycrates the King before his crucifixion in Magnesia. There are bound to be times when I can think in Chinese.
Meanwhile, I live here in Woodpecker Point, not far from the ruins of the park where the deer and the peacocks used to roam. I prune the roses and the fruit trees and I talk to my finches.
I have a large collection of feathers, and am making a study of their colours. At present, I am particularly interested in the iridescent colours, which ripple and change on the necks of pigeons. They are formed when the light is refracted from the surfaces of the tiny scales that make up the feathers. I suppose some colours of reptiles and butterflies work on the same principle. I have spent a lot of time with butterflies, and can here, quite naturally, in the course, as it were, of the conversation, mention a very high-class toy fact. This is the fact that the Cabbage White Butterfly arrived in Tasmania on the feast of St Teresa in 1940, which was the day that I was born. We both arrived in Devonport at the same time, and have been constant observers of each other from the beginning. It is possible that the Cabbage White knows more about me than I know about it. I have a photograph of myself with a cloud of Cabbage Whites. I am three and I am standing among the cabbages in my maternal grandmother’s garden, wearing the blue dress with the white edges that my grandmother knitted for me for Christmas. As these were the days before colour photography, the blue of my dress and the blue-green of the cabbages are tinted with inks. My hair is the colour of butter, and my shoes are magical red. The butterflies are untouched by the tinter’s brush so that they possess a quality of ethereal purity, which is lacking in the coloured areas of the picture. I have always been pleased that I had a grandmother who had Cabbage Butterflies in her cabbages. And I have the photograph to prove it. It was taken the day before Christmas, and on Christmas Day my grandmother died.
The night before they buried her, she came to me as I lay sleeping. She had taken by then the form of the smallest British butterfly, the Small Blue, so often found near warm and sunny grass slopes and in hollows. She was like a forget-me-not. She alighted on my quilt and smiled at me, sweetly, as she always smiled. All she said was one word. This almost shocked me at the time, because she was a magger, like my mother. She had no doubt trained my mother. She smiled at me and she said:
‘Listen.’
The Common Rat
A Story in Seven Parts
The Common Rat
The first rat I saw was one that lived in the wall behind my bed and ran across the top of the bedhead. I shared the bedroom in college with two other girls who were called Claudette and Shirley. In the fashion of the time, girls were named after film stars and in college we had two Deannas and quite a few Jeanettes. I felt a kind of heaviness on the wooden bedhead and when I put on the light beside the bed the rat ran from one side of the bed to the other and went out of sight behind the bookcase. I sort of screamed.
‘Put out the light,’ Claudette said. ‘Shut up.’ Claudette needed her rest and got distinctions in nearly every subject including Anglo-Saxon and Psychology. She had a moustache and long black hairs around her nipples.
‘Put out the light,’ she said.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s a rat over here.’
‘There isn’t.’ Claudette had a ring of authority in her voice and I knew she thought I was just a show-off. She would think my rat was a device to draw attention to myself.
Shirley sat up in bed. She was fat with short hair. Not a fashionable girl but very nice. She gave me a red scarf for my birthday and was prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt.
‘It won’t hurt you,’ Shirley said.
‘Because it doesn’t exist—put the light out.’
‘It won’t hurt you. It’s gone now. You can put the l
ight out and go to sleep,’ said Shirley.
After a while I did put out the light. I lay awake listening for the rat. It didn’t come back that night. I saw it only two other times. Once in the afternoon when I went into the bedroom to get a book, and again one night just after I had gone to bed. But the first night, when I was lying there in the dark listening for the rat and Claudette was snoring and grunting, Shirley came over and kissed me on the mouth and said not to worry too much about the rat. Claudette muttered a few times but she didn’t wake up.
The beds were covered with striped bedspreads and we had to make them before we went downstairs for breakfast. Claudette was very organised and her bed always looked neatest. She had a shower at the same time every morning and never saw anything such as a rat. She had a regular boyfriend who was doing Law, and a few years later they got married and had three daughters with the names of flowers and their house was destroyed in a bushfire but they rebuilt. Shirley became a librarian.
At breakfast Claudette said to everyone at the table, ‘She imagined she saw a rat in our room.’
‘I did.’
One of the tutors sat at the head of the table. She looked at me over her glasses and for a moment stopped serving scrambled egg.
‘There are no rats in college,’ she said.
The tutor’s name was Dr Friend. She taught psychology and was having an affair with the tennis coach. Her tutorials were terrible because she talked with her throat full of spit and constantly stroked her legs. Her hands were covered with rings.
‘There are no rats in college,’ she said, with the same authority in her voice as she had when she said, for example, ‘The life span of sexual passion between couples is never greater than a period of five years, and in fact passion is usually spent after a period of two to three years under normal circumstances. Never more than five.’
As well as stroking her legs and talking through spit, she rolled her eyes all the time to emphasise a point. I couldn’t stand psychology and nearly failed. Claudette got a prize and she also won a tennis medal.
Dr Friend held the big silver spoon up in the air with the mound of scrambled egg on it and water dripping off and said, ‘There are no rats in college.’ I sometimes saw her do a similar thing at dinner with a jug of custard.
We were always hungry and not supposed to keep food in our rooms. We each had a food locker in the kitchen corridor and our tins of biscuits and fruit cake from home were meant to be kept there. Everybody had a secret hoard of food in the cupboard beside the bed. Even Claudette. Once I went into the room where one of the Jeanettes had a tin of her mother’s famous fruit cake. I was starving and went to steal some cake when Jeanette was downstairs practising the piano. She had booked the music room for two hours and so I was safe. I found the tin in the wardrobe and cut a slice of cake. I was just eating it when I saw that Jeanette had a huge picture of Jesus on the wall with marks of lipstick kisses all over the glass. I could hear her playing Beethoven.
Dr Friend said we were always hungry because we were homesick, lazy and bored. We believed a lot of what she said, such as the things about the duration of sexual passion, but we didn’t believe her about homesickness, although we didn’t argue. We thought we were hungry because we didn’t get enough food in the dining room. I think we were right and we got fat from eating so much fruit cake.
At the end of the year we changed rooms. I said to the girl who got my old bed did she know a rat lived in the wall behind her, but she said she had heard all about me and my rat fantasies and she knew for a fact there were no rats in college.
I decided to keep quiet about rats. I went to a picnic by the river with one of the Deannas and two men from Trinity and I saw a rat run past the tree behind us, but I said nothing.
I had begun to be quite interested in rats and read the only three books I could find on them in the university library. These were History of British Mammals by Hamilton and Hinton; Donaldson’s Memoir on the Rat; and Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser. I bought a copy of Rats, Lice and History in a second-hand bookshop. It says the first rat to arrive in Europe was Mus rattus—the black rat, house rat or ship rat. It may have wandered in between 400 and 1100 AD with the hordes of people that swept in from the East. The black rat was pretty well wiped out by the brown rat, Mus decumanas, which is a ferocious, shortnosed, short-tailed Asiatic. This rat is known as the common rat and thrives all over the world, but particularly in the wonderful climate of California. Hans Zinsser traces the rat as a carrier of plague and typhus fever. The brown rats have, he says, conquered the world. They have nibbled the noses and ears of infants in their cribs, and starving rats once devoured a man who entered a disused coal mine. Hans Zinsser compares rats with humans and criticises what he calls the irresponsible fecundity of both species, neither of which, he says, has achieved the social stability reached by ants and bees. ‘Man and the rat,’ he says, ‘are merely the most successful animals of prey.’ Both species have spread across the earth, keeping pace with each other, unable to destroy each other.
My interest in rats lasted for about a year, and I was able to get references to rats into my essays for Psychology and Literature, and in some cases Linguistics. I studied The Pied Piper of Hamelin and The Wind in the Willows. I considered writing a thesis on the rat in literature, finding the dark flitting shadow of rattus rattus scurrying hither and thither through everything from Shakespeare to Mother Goose. There are no rats at all in the Bible. In the end I wrote my thesis on the verbs and images of Nabokov, and my title was a quotation from Ada: ‘Rippled by Rats’. I never completely lost interest in the rat, but my passionate interest died down at the end of the year when we had to change rooms and I left my rat behind. The affair between Dr Friend and the tennis coach lasted a bit longer, but by Easter of the next year they had split up and he was living with a woman in Zoology and she (Dr Friend) fell in love with the Presbyterian minister. She continued to disapprove of me because of the rat, and I gave up Psychology after a while.
I never shared a room with Claudette after that. She got a lot of prizes for her subjects over the years and married the law student who later became a judge, and their daughters with the flower names were all very musical. One of them went on to study in Germany. The house they built after the bushfire was designed by an architect from California and can sometimes be seen in bright photographs in magazines. For a time Shirley shared a house with Dr Friend and a Norwegian scientist but later they all went their separate ways.
I know Dr Friend was wrong about the rat, and I know she might have been wrong about a lot of things. I think she was right about the duration of sexual passion. Five years is a terribly long time.
I was living with Jack. We had an English sheepdog, and a colony of bees lived in a crack in the wall of the house. I used to imagine the bricks on the outside and the plaster on the inside falling away and leaving a house made from honeycomb with the light shining through.
I came home from work one day and found Jack sitting in the garden talking to a rat. He was sitting in the cane chair in the garden near the bees that crawled around the crack in the wall.
I said, ‘That is a rat.’
Jack said, ‘No, it isn’t. Look at its ears. They’re round.’
‘Rats have round ears. It’s a rat.’
‘It is not a rat. I found it in the park. We met in the park. I rang the zoo and they said they didn’t know what it was. It’s rare.’
‘It is a RAT!’
‘You think you know everything. What would you know about rats anyhow?’
‘A lot. Quite a lot. I know quite a lot about rats, as it happens. I used to study them. This is the common rat.’
The argument was a short one.
The five years were up.
The Cricketers’ Arms
You remember the wheat silo at the end of the South Eastern Freeway? I know a man who knows a man who had a dream about the wheat silo at the end of the South Eastern Freeway. I don’t know
anything else about the dream, but every time I drive past the silo, I think of the dreamer. Then I think the dreamer might have been Jack.
When I was living with Jack he always said he never had dreams. I said everybody does. You have to, don’t you? It’s part of life, like food and exercise. But Jack said that even if he did dream he never remembered the dreams, and didn’t want to remember. Reality, he said, was bad enough without adding to it with a lot of imaginary bullshit.
Jack and I used to live close to a silo. This silo was made from pale-grey concrete, almost white in places. It was a tall stern pair of concrete cylinders surrounded by trees, standing on the edge of a river, not far from the waterfall. It was more than a local landmark—I think it was a sort of mythic thing. It had no windows, and that was what made it so different from other buildings—that, and the shape of it. Two tall stern cylinders of pale-grey concrete. One day two children were playing in the silo and the wheat was poured in on top of them and they died. When we read about the children in the newspaper Jack suddenly said in a quiet voice that he thought he had dreamt about them the night before. He said he dreamt some children were running through a field of golden wheat and scarlet poppies. From a distance the wheat moved like waves on the seashore, and the poppies flowed like blood. A tunnel of pale-grey concrete opened up before the children and they ran into the darkness, their footsteps ringing loudly as in an empty hall. And then the wheat, in grains like bright yellow glittering sand, came pouring in behind them, chasing them and catching them and flowing over them until they were lost from sight and there was silence and the wheat was still.
That’s really why I never dream, Jack said, because dreaming is so terrible and you wouldn’t want to know.