There is another noise from upstairs. It’s more of a pitter-patter. Victor asks whether we have seen The Brood and suggests that our guest has laid a nest of mutant children. Beth tells Victor to shut up. I try to remember whether the mutant kids were psychological manifestations or egg-laid. She declares she has to go to the toilet and will go up. I tell her that she can’t go alone. I ask Victor to go up with us. I still think he has the knife. Not my problem, is his reply, but he also reminds me that I was the one who left the egg-laying freak alone in the house. He is right, except for the egg-laying bit. I tell them I will go, hoping that we can come to a compromise and go together. Instead Victor and Beth turn and start talking as though I have already left.
I pause at the bottom of the steps. There is a pair of gumboots by the stairs. I look back and make sure neither Beth nor Victor can see me. I put the gumboots on my hands. I can never tell when Victor is serious or not. I clasp my best karate-chop knuckles under the protective sheaths of rubber.
Upstairs there is no sign of Josh. Instead a cat is spraying what isn’t Josh’s room, just about where his bed won’t be. I can tell this because he has roughly chalked out lines for his furniture. It looks like he moved in this afternoon and his life died under suspicious circumstances. I flick a gumboot at the cat. It misses, but makes a loud thud. The cat hisses at me. It doesn’t move. I am sure in the rehearsal it runs away. I respect its tendency towards improvisation, but still toss the other gumboot. The cat then scampers out the window.
The room is now empty apart from chalk lines, a puddle of piss and a note. Josh won’t be moving in, the note informs me. I’m a little taken aback. For a moment I think about the great location. The note says he did show someone else around while we were away: a woman called Irene. He has organised to sub-let the room to her. The note ends with ‘Give me a call to sort out the details. Seth.’ There is a series of handwritten smileys running across the bottom of the page. Their bracket lips are smiling ninety degrees askew. They are in lateral position. I hear the toilet flush. I look for their vital signs. I assume I have more in common with Irene.
Meanjin
The Crow
Ashley Hay
Warm in the sun, his eyes closed, Clem thought: What you see behind your eyelids, it’s never black – black as coal, black as pitch. He concentrated, and saw a gash of purple and a soft, round brownness, like middle distance. He tried to focus on that distance and winced; must be something that eyes weren’t supposed to do. Or he was getting old. At forty-three, with his kids grown and his daughter pregnant now herself, he didn’t want to think about that.
He heard the bird’s claws then as they collided with the deck’s railing, and opened his eyes fast to see a flash of its black feathers as it rocked a little, and steadied itself. Eyes closed again, Clem saw that flash of black across the brown darkness, and shuddered.
Crows: they made him nervous.
Back when he and Elsie were looking to buy a place, they’d walked down from Clem’s mum’s, up the hill on Gladstone Road, to this one – a little box at the end of a row of similar boxes, and the backyard a mess of mud and clay and paspalum. But it was new, and it might be theirs, and Elsie liked the view out through the kitchen window towards the swamp and the sky.
Skitting about among the green as they stood on the back step, a baby crow had been following its mother, mouth open, squawking.
‘Look at that, Clem,’ Elsie said, softly. ‘I’ve never seen a baby crow before – their feathers glisten, don’t they? Such a beautiful thing.’
Then she wanted to live in the house more than ever, and talked about it in terms of the crows – that it had been a special thing to see the baby, that it boded well, surely, for two people raising their own family. The twins were seven now, she said, and perhaps there might be another one, one day, soon. She blushed when she said this, the way he liked, a tiny frill of pink rising up from her chest towards her throat. She did say some silly things about adoring him for all time – he suspected she got them out of the women’s magazines she read. But she was always willing for whatever he wanted in bed, and that was something, he said to himself, he’d been very happy to get used to.
The day the mortgage papers were signed, he could hardly speak for the shock of the amount they owed. They shifted down from the rooms they’d had at his mum’s since they were married, seven years before, and put the twins’ beds in the bigger bedroom, taking the smaller one at the back for themselves. He and a mate added the deck as the first summer came round.
‘Our tropical paradise,’ Elsie said, installing a palm in a pot. ‘Never so fancy as to have lived somewhere with a deck before.’ As if she was the practised inhabitant of any number of grand residences, rather than the young mother who’d lived in her parents’ house, her mother-in-law’s house, and now this weatherboard cube.
She washed the floors daily and the windows once a week, and he was careful to comment on this. Another thing to make her smile; another thing to make her blush.
‘My little homemaker,’ he’d say, hugging her around her waist, and then the kids would run up and burrow in as well, and he’d say something expansive about their mum. That was love, he’d thought in the middle of those moments, not whatever those silly magazines of hers said.
But she never stopped wondering about the crow – ‘never saw it again, did we, love? I was so excited to have it to show Lainey and Don, but we never saw it again.’
‘Must’ve moved away – maybe crows do that. I don’t know.’
He never said, never told her about the day he and a mate had brought the bathtub – a day or so before they moved themselves in and settled the twins. Straining across the grass, the white enamel blinding him as it caught the sun, Clem had turned at a strange noise and seen a rough brown dog busy with something by the back fence.
‘Take a spell, mate,’ he said, lowering his end of the burden and walking towards the noise. Knew what it was before he got there, and there was the little crow, crumpled and bleating among the sticky paspalum stalks. ‘Go on with you!’ he shouted at the dog, his hand flinging out across its head and his voice harsh. He watched it slink back into the shadows that filled the swamp beyond.
What now? he thought. What the devil do I do with you now? But as he crouched down he saw the gash in the bird’s body, the way its wing was creased out awkwardly from itself.
His mate was beside him then, and Clem shook his head. ‘Young crow – that dog was at it. Poor blighter.’ He raised his boot and stamped before he could think about it twice. It was only then that he noticed a strange silence as if every nearby bird had stopped calling.
And then the cries began, a litany of long, wide laments – every bloody crow in the neighbourhood. He plucked some paspalum, lining his hands before he had to touch the bird. His hands, he saw, were shaking; and that was when he remembered what he knew about crows and their mourning.
‘Don’t tell Elsie, ay.’ He heard his voice catch as he carried the mess to the lowest corner of the yard where the dirt was moist. Scrabbling a hole, tucking the baby bird inside, he hunched his shoulders against the swoop and peck he half-expected from its mother at any moment.
Overhead, the crows’ noise built and built, and then dropped away. And Clem, leaning over his brand-new diamond-wire fence, let his head drop and his stomach empty, as if every piece of food he’d ever eaten was raking itself out of his guts.
‘Geez you’re a soft touch,’ his mate said then. ‘Put it in the bin, I would’ve. All that fuss for a blinking crow.’
All that fuss for Elsie, thought Clem now, and for all the crows, watching as this new black bird balanced on the railing and eyed off his last piece of toast. He’d never told her about the little bird. He’d never told her that crows made him nervous.
Behind him, in the kitchen, she was murdering Elvis Presley’s latest swooning
song, her light voice losing its foothold as it dipped towards the lower notes. She’d be after Lainey to call her little one Elvis, he thought, if it was a boy. Let Elaine have the good sense to shut that idea down.
‘Time for another cuppa, Clem?’ she called, coming out onto the deck and pulled up short by the sight of the crow. From the corner of his eye, Clem saw her stop, and in front of him the crow tilted its own head to take her in its sights. ‘You did give me a fright,’ she said to the bird, and Clem knew what was coming next. ‘Do you remember that morning we walked down to see the house? Remember the baby crow after its breakfast in the backyard – I’ve always wondered where it went. I’d’ve fed it the scraps, you know, watched it grow up.’
‘You had the twins,’ said Clem, short. ‘What more watching did you want?’ It ate at him, the memory of how frail the bird had felt under the heel of his boot. It ate at him that he hadn’t told her all those years ago, and couldn’t now, no way. ‘And I never thought them crows were such a good omen anyway.’ If we’d come down half an hour earlier or later; if we’d come down the day before, we’d never have seen the bloody thing – would she have wanted the house then? Or if I’d come with the tub in the afternoon instead; that dog would’ve finished it off and probably eaten it as well. She was a practical woman, his Elsie, but she did invest a lot in these small, strange things.
He knew perfectly well why crows made him nervous, and it was nothing to do with that tiny death in the sticky grass back in 1948, no. It was what he’d remembered with that wide, awful lament. He watched Elsie watch the crow as he finished his tea and held out his cup towards her offer.
‘Fill this up, love, and I’ll tell you a story about crows. Back when I was a kid.’ The bird shuffled along the rail, first one way, then the other, as Clem heard the noise of the kettle and the tea canister coming from inside.
‘When I was a boy,’ Clem began, as she set the tea on the table and leaned towards his words. He could smell her hair, and it still took his breath away sometimes, to be close to her, to know her. We’re still young, he thought, even with all those bootees she’s knitting for our first grand-kiddy.
When Clem was a boy, his dad was one for pig-shooting, down near Lightning Ridge. First time he’d said he’d take Clem, the boy would have been only six or seven years old, and he’d spent his days fossicking around in the dust and the gravel, pulling out tiny flecks of opalled stone, their colours firing like rainbows. Clem wanted nothing to do with the shooting, the killing. The sound of the rifle and the way it jumped back against your body when it fired; the way an animal’s eyes dulled down to horrible, blank milkiness when its breath stopped: these things terrified him. The chance of a bucket of treasure, that seemed to Clem a better plan for a holiday.
But out there, past Lightning Ridge, where the sky was as brilliantly blue as the incandescent lines in an opal; out there, his dad and his dad’s mate had a bet on who could shoot the most creatures – pigs, primarily, they agreed, but there’d be points for anything that moved, and extra for birds.
His dad dropped a wallaby; the mate dropped two more; and Clem inched further and further away from them, busying himself with getting water, or sticks for a fire, or folding swags – anything to avoid the gun’s weight, its sudden jerk, its report.
On the last morning, with the mate leading the tally by a nose and just starting to boast, Clem’s dad looked up from the tea he was stirring and smiled.
‘There was no warmth in that smile,’ Clem said to Elsie, ‘just something nasty, and hard.’
Clem’s dad had set the billy on a rock, set the spoon he’d been using very carefully alongside, and reached for his gun. Propping it, adjusting it, he pursed his lips into something like a kiss. Then he pulled the trigger and fired, shooting a single crow – ‘a big one, huge, its feathers so black’ – from the top branch of a silvery dead gum.
‘So fast,’ said Clem, ‘I didn’t have time to cover my ears or shut my eyes.’
The crow had dropped to the ground – Clem could still hear the thud, feel the way the ground shook, and his very body seemed to shake now so that Elsie, across the table, felt some echo of the fall.
And there it lay, a tiny pile of darkness against the rich red soil.
‘I was seven years old, and I couldn’t hear a thing. Thought the bloody gun had deafened me. Then it started, this angry, angry sound, and all these crows were flying in, diving and wheeling. They damn near covered the whole tree, and they yelled and they wailed and they howled. Must’ve been a hundred of them in the end – I remember when I learnt the word cacophony in some poem at school. I knew what it meant; it was heart-breaking.’
Crouched down by the fire, Clem had watched the black shapes swoop and settle, more and more coming from as far as he could see.
‘Then a dingo came too – wanting the body, you know – Dad hadn’t scooped it up the way he did with pigs and roos, the stuff he called “real game.” And blow me if these crows didn’t go down after the dingo, swooping it and pecking until it slunk off and left them to their funeral. Most mournful sound I’ve ever heard, Els, like the wailing those foreign women set up when someone dies.’
In front of Clem, now, the crow startled and took flight as a truck clattered along the street, its tray laden with ironwork and scrap metal.
‘The pigs, they were one thing, even the roos – and he’d never shoot one with a joey. But a crow, a crow; they’re magnificent. I dunno why he would’ve thought to do it. Just trying to win the bet, I suppose, but it seemed so mean, so unnecessary.’ Clem sat a while saying nothing, staring into the middle distance of the yard – seeing the crow, the dingo, the dead tree, the sky.
‘My dad drove home without a break – petrol here and there, I suppose, I can’t even remember whose truck we were in now, but I was glad of its noise. Didn’t want to have to say anything. Didn’t know what to tell my mum, either. But I was terrified of being taken on another shoot after that. I even wished he was dead, so I wouldn’t have to go again.
‘And then I was eight years old, and he was – pneumonia in the middle of winter, and that was it. Me and Mum, and then it was boarders, and peoples’ mending coming in, and the typing she did for one of the university blokes, me going to sleep to the clicking of that ruddy machine. Still, still,’ he patted Elsie’s hand, ‘she made me a good life, and she gave us a good home till we got sorted here. Never told her about the crow, neither. But I always wondered if it’d marked Dad somehow—’
Clem cut himself off; it was a crazy thing to think, a crazy thing to say. He drank the fresh tea and watched a couple of kookaburras fluff their feathers in the poinciana. He’d always wondered if it was his wishing his dad gone that had done that too, the pneumonia. But that was even less sayable.
They sat in silence.
‘Does he still work over there, that professor your mum used to type for?’ Elsie was leaning back and stretching, her hair lit by the morning sun so it shone.
Clem shrugged. ‘Dunno – I never thought to look. He’d be old by now; he was older than Mum, and she’d’ve been heading for seventy if she was alive. I used to wonder if he was sweet on her – he’d bring her chocolate sometimes, and a card once for her birthday, which made her blush.’ A different life, he thought, if your dad was a smart man, and a living one. Maybe Clem could have gone to the university instead of just polishing its floors and fixing its window sashes. He shook his head and stood up, passing the empty cup back to his wife.
‘I’m off then, up to the punt. Shouldn’t be late tonight, if you want to wander up and meet me.’ He liked it, looking out from the barge as it crossed the river from St Lucia to Dutton Park, and seeing her there, her hair light against the shadows of the foreshore and its tall, dark trees. They’d cut through the cemetery and head home, the river turning and lapping alongside them.
‘I’ll do that, then,’ Elsie
smiled. ‘And something nice for tea – a bit of lamb, or some steak, if you like.’ She paused in the doorway, watching as he stretched himself. ‘Maybe he was showing off, your dad. Maybe he thought it’d impress you, taking a great bird like that when it could just as easily have risen up and flown away.’
‘It was never me he wanted to impress,’ said Clem, shrugging his arms into his coat and feeling in its pocket for his cap. ‘Just his mates, always his mates. Might’ve been different if I’d been older and he’d thought I could shoot something myself. But I don’t think he really minded what I thought about him – don’t think it occurred to him I thought anything. Nicest thing my mum ever said to me, when Don and Lainey were born, that some men were made to be fathers, and I was one of them. “Not like your Pa,” she said to me, Els. “You’ll not make the mess of it your Pa made.” I never saw her cry once when he died, you know,’ he said, checking for his wallet and starting down the stairs. And it occurred to him then, for the first time, that maybe his mum had wished his dad dead too.
As the punt reached the end of its crossing, Clem wedged himself against its railing to take the force of the bounce. He did love the river, its twists and curves, and the quietness of it. If he could have anything, he thought, he’d have a little boat, go rowing on the weekends, maybe throw in a line. Wonder what Els’d think of that? Probably pack up a picnic and want to come too.
She was plucky; he’d always liked that – and he wondered, out of nowhere, what she’d have done if she’d been the one to come across the mangled little bird and the dog. Because she’d fed that dog for weeks after they’d moved in, a bone here, an end of meat there, wondering aloud what sort of person could let a dog be so skinny and unloved, and making a sack-bed for it in the laundry, out of the chilly night wind. Another reason he’d never told her what he’d found, what he’d done; he didn’t want that generosity compromised.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 16