Her father knocked on the cabin door. He was dressed, for the last time, in his travelling clothes – linen shirt and trousers and vest, a plume of gold cravat at his throat – for they were not far from the coast of home. Tomorrow morning their ship would dock, and their quest would be at an end. “Happy birthday, Matilda!” he said in his loud voice, and gave his daughter a parcel wrapped in paper and a bow. “Before you open your present,” he said, “you must tell me the answer. What, besides a sea-eagle, is the most beautiful thing in the world?”
“There is no answer to your question, Papa,” Maddy replied. She had prepared herself for this moment, and she would not change her mind. “I have looked and looked, and thought and thought, but there is no answer. There’s so much that is sublime in the world, but it is splendour that should not be compared. Each beautiful thing is supremely, absolutely beautiful. There’s nothing that is lovelier than everything else combined.”
The father considered his child. If he was disappointed, it did not show. If he was pleased, that did not show either. He said, “Perhaps you need to look more closely at what is right under your nose.”
With that he kissed her forehead and brusquely left the cabin, as if he had remembered something imperative he needed to do. Maddy, listening to his footsteps thump away down the corridor, longed to call him back to her, to have a few final moments with the father alongside whom she had criss-crossed the globe. She would have the memory of him, but the truth is that a memory is hardly ever good enough to console a heart.
She looked down at the parcel in her lap, and unwrapped it carefully. Amid many layers of tissue was a small, silver-handled mirror. Maddy held it up so she could see her reflection, her dark eyes and freckled cheekbones. I am the most beautiful thing in the world. Her eyes filled with silly tears, which she dashed with a scoffing laugh. She knew she wasn’t lovely, not like a saluki or a palace or a Ming vase. She was no princess from a storybook. But she was well-read and widely travelled now, and she’d pondered interesting things. She still felt misfitted and out-of-place, like a jigsaw piece cut wrong; but it no longer caused her grief to feel that way. Now, she was pleased she hadn’t changed to become like everyone else. Her courage and defiance made her father proud of her – it made her beautiful. Gazing into the mirror at her ordinary face, her ordinary nose and mouth, Maddy knew she wasn’t a fairy princess, and that she wouldn’t live a fairytale life; but she would find her own way, and she would be all right.
The boy was prowling around the lounge room, considering closely the curious objects which decorated the shelves and walls. He brushed his fingers over the opalescent wings of insects blown from Venetian glass. He held an Amazonian mask to his face, and grumbled through its fanged mouth. On the floor was a lustreless Persian rug across which fantastic creatures challenged and cavorted; on the wall behind the television hung a cresting Japanese sea. The antimacassars were Irish, embroidered with fat clover. On the windowsill lay a walrus carved by an Inuit from tusk. Beside it stood a buffalo whittled by an Indian chief, who many moons ago had given Matilda a secret name he’d written in ash. There were leather-bound books from England and samovars from Siberia and corn ladies from Mexico; there were tikis from hot Hawaii, and penguin skulls stripped clean by Antarctic winds. Peake’s amber glare followed the boy everywhere, the self-appointed guardian of the museum. The visitor found a plump wooden doll inside which hid a smaller wooden doll, and another inside that, and another. He held the tiniest doll in his palm sceptically; then turned to Matilda and asked, “Why do you have so many things?”
Matilda smiled. “Objects remind people of their lives, I suppose. So many things change with time, so much disappears. It’s good to see something that was there, in the past, and hasn’t changed since. That looks and feels exactly as it did on the day it became important.”
The boy’s lip curved, he seemed unconvinced. He put the nesting dolls back together and resumed his tour of the room. He probably owned nothing, hardly more than his clothes – a few special and shiny things, perhaps, which had no weight and could be hidden in a hand. There was lightness in that, Matilda supposed; and felt a twinge of envy. This room and its untold souvenirs was like a memorial, a bell jar. Everything she owned spoke of what had been – never about what might have been, or what may yet be. The boy stopped suddenly at the window, peeping between the slats of the blind. It was the beginning of spring, when night still comes early, tamping down the late afternoon. Already the lawn and garden and the street beyond were dim. The lounge room was cosy now, but it looked dank and cold outside. “Is someone expecting you home for dinner?” she asked, only to hear what he would say.
The boy shook his head imperceptibly. He would not be drawn into such discussions. He said, “You should have kept that toy giraffe.”
“I know—”
“If you had kept that, maybe you wouldn’t need all these things. You have these things, but they’re not what you want. Is that what life is – settling for what you can get, if you can’t have what you really want? A pile of junk, instead of the one perfect thing? Pictures inside your head, instead of the real thing in your hands?”
Something like a strap of metal tightened around Matilda’s chest. “Sometimes,” she conceded. “For many people, often it is. Life is a lot longer and more complicated than you expect it to be. Nothing is permanent and certain. Every day you have to renegotiate a way to survive the hours between waking up, and falling sleep… You’re an odd child, aren’t you?” She looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “You do and say some strange things.”
The boy replied, with much gravitas, “I am what I am.”
Matilda said, “Well, I am in need of more tea.”
“Wait!” Her guest spun on his heels. His ash-coloured eyes were familiar to her, as was his fawn frown. “I have a question. Did you really believe what you thought on the last day of your quest? Did you really think that you were going to be all right?”
Matilda thought back through the years that separated herself from the girl on a steamer holding a mirror in her hand. “Yes,” she said, “I did. I had to. I knew I wouldn’t live a fairytale life. And for that very reason I had to have faith in myself, just as does a princess in a fairytale. I had to believe there was worth, and courage, and promise in me. How else could I have lived? How else could I have survived what was going to happen next?”
The boy lifted his pointy chin, looking down his nose at her. “What’s going to happen?”
“Two very important things.” Matilda stood up from her chair with difficulty. “Peake is going to get his dinner, and I am going to make another pot of tea.”
It is always a peculiar feeling to be home after a long time away. Maddy had missed her bedroom and her little cat Perseus, and she was glad to see these again. But the house she’d always lived in, the town where she had been born – these didn’t feel to Maddy like things she knew and loved. Everything about them seemed cloistered and monochrome. Waking every morning to the same things, she discovered that she missed journeying, knowing that each day would take her somewhere she had never been. And she missed her father, who, as soon as their ship sighed into port, went straight back to ironing money – as if, through all the months of excitement and discovery, through every hour of his epic search for breathtaking beauty with her, ironing was what he’d secretly wished he could do. The iron man hurried about, making up for lost time – time that had been given over to his daughter, and was thus classified as lost. Maddy had expected things to be this way, and reminded herself that Papa loved her and she him, yet she couldn’t help feeling piqued. Her travelling father, Maddy thought reproachfully, could have tried a little harder to stay.
Shockingly, Maddy hadn’t missed her mother while she was abroad, and what pleasure there was in seeing her again was speedily rubbed away. Maddy had grown up during her travels, and had cultivated some grown-up likes and dislikes. She knew how she wanted to dress, and how to style her hair. She knew w
hat she wanted to eat, and when she’d eaten enough. She had her own convictions, and the pluck to almost always defend them. She arrived home feeling like a proper person – but her mother swept her up like a stray puppy from the street. When Mama looked at Maddy, she saw that her daughter’s hair was too long, and worn in a style that didn’t suit. The clothes Maddy preferred did not flatter her shape. Maddy could benefit from pinching, plucking, perfuming, and some powder on her sunbeaten cheeks. Matilda Victoria Adelaide was a girl on the brink of personal and social catastrophe, she had come home just a hair’s-breadth away from being Frankenstein’s monster, and Mama was aghast. Everywhere she turned, the year’s most desirable beaux were being snatched up like trout by lesser girls, and it smarted. “I’m embarrassed!” Mama declared. “Embarrassed! Imagine: my daughter, left on the shelf like a bowl of last night’s custard. My daughter! I cannot believe it is happening.”
And yet, it was hardly surprising. Invited to parties, Maddy stood in a corner radiating disgruntlement. She hated the smothersome dresses her mother chose; she had no clue what to say to the beaux who sidled up to her. She had only her travels to talk about, and she wouldn’t share them with people she didn’t like. Standing mute, she felt ridiculous, and very near to tears. “But you needn’t say anything!” Mama wailed, after yet another evening spent in futile son-in-law pursuit. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk when your best days are behind you. Forget talking, Matilda – girlhood is for smiling. Just smile, smile, smile!” So Maddy smiled, and it was the smile of a jellyfish. It got her nowhere, and she didn’t care. She was scorning of the fulsome young men she met, and irritated by the competitive young ladies. The parties vexed her, the chatter was infantile, the music made her angry. She didn’t care if everyone in the room ignored her – she was glad of it! She longed to be far away, in the middle of the ocean, rambling and unbothered, seeking lovely things. Earth-bound, Maddy felt shipwrecked. Her whole world had become torment, and she was the most tormented and tormenting thing in it.
The only time she felt like her old self again was when she was climbing the hills. Whenever she could, Maddy escaped her mother’s noisy chagrin and fled into the wilderness. She had missed the hills when she was away, their bushfire smell and crackliness, the still air between the trees. She’d missed seeing lizards vanish under stones, missed hearing bellbird calls link the eucalypts like silver neck chains. She walked the dirt tracks that wove down to the cove, trying to think about nothing. Her mind was crammed with bric-a-brac, teetering and full of sharp corners: it was restful to close a door on the chaos. On the days when her mind couldn’t help but think, Maddy thought about what might happen. According to her mother, Maddy should select a gentleman, fence him off with a wedding ring, and embark on a life of glossiness as quickly as possible. It was what well-bred girls were born to do; it was what Mama’s ideal daughter would have done at least a year ago. Yet the prospect of such a life made Maddy feel choked. She didn’t want to be a pricey bauble, a walking, talking, well-fed decoration. “I want my life to be mystifying,” she declared, although she didn’t know what she meant.
Sometimes, when the nargun had risen from the banks of a billabong to trudge through the bushland beside her, Maddy discussed love. Though she had packed up her dolls and childhood toys long ago, the nargun remained her confidant and defender. The nargun had no sense of humour, so it never laughed at her; she told it what she dreamt and feared, and it took what she said very seriously. It folded her secrets against its solid black heart and carried their weight for her. “I wouldn’t mind if someone fell in love with me,” she admitted to the creature. “It might be nice. But he would have to be handsome, and have lustrous hair. He would have to be profound, but never be a bore. He would be generous, but naturally not a wastrel. Clever, but never tedious; clean, but not fussy; careful, but never a prig. He would desperately need me, but also want me to be free. He would be a free-spirit too, of course, but he would always come home to me.”
“Such a man does not exist,” growled the knowledgeable nargun. “No one is perfect. You are not.”
Maddy broke off a gum leaf, and breathed its steely scent. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, dropping the leaf with a sigh. “If such a man did exist, he would only make me look foolish and mean. Oh, what am I going to do, nargun?” And she felt the familiar panic of staring into a future that unnerved her, and which she didn’t understand.
The nargun’s clawed feet left rips in the ground from which winged ants swarmed in their thousands. “Perhaps you are meant to be alone,” it murmured. “Your father said you are beautiful. Most beautiful things are alone, in one way or another.”
And although she snorted and said, “I’m not beautiful,” something in Maddy secretly believed she was. “Is that true?” she asked, and saw herself alone, like a quoll or a cat, living a mysterious life in treetops, eventually forgetting how to speak.
She was indulging in these opulent ruminations when she stepped off the track and onto the beach, and immediately saw the young man. He was crouching at the water’s edge, where the waves rolled their foamy knuckles into the sand and left behind a scum of whey-grey bubbles. In his arms he held a great white pelican, whose long yellow bill was affectionately tousling his hair. Maddy stopped at the sight, and a small startled sound yipped out of her. Instantly the pelican lifted its head and found her, fixing her with a single black eye. It lowered its beak to the young man’s ear and clacked a sea-bird noise. Immediately the man released the bird, which took to the sky on vast black-and-white wings, the air whumping under it. Maddy watched it tilt across the shallows, its head tucked into its shoulders, its bill a jousting lance. When she looked again at the man, he was staring coolly at her. She tugged her straw hat more securely onto her head. “I’m so – sorry,” she said haltingly.
The young man said nothing; as he stood, Maddy saw how boyhood still played around him, that he was about the same age as herself. He was slim but not lanky, and his skin was sunbrowned. His hair fell dishevelled onto his shoulders, the colour of a palomino’s tail. He was wearing a pair of tatty red trousers that were cut off at the knees and faded almost to pink. But for a dusting of dry sand, his chest, arms and shins were bare. Maddy had never seen so much of a man, and she didn’t know where to look. The young man, however, did not seem discomforted: he stood in silence and considered her, confident as a magpie. The cove was an empty one, rocky and windswept, useless for fishing and swimming, and there was none but the two of them on it, now that the pelican was gone. The heat beat down on the rumpled white dunes, the water lapped the beach with its shushed, encouraging sound. Maddy supposed she should turn and walk away briskly, perhaps alert her mother and other guardians of propriety to the existence of this stranger. Instead she stepped closer, her shoes denting the sand. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. “You were talking to that pelican.”
Nearer, she saw he had eyes that were smoky, lips that were pale, and long black eyelashes. He seemed about to reply that birds do not speak, or at least not to anyone other than their own kind – instead he smiled, although hardly at all. His gaze travelled seriously down to her feet, and up to her face again. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and his voice was trim, a bird’s flying wing. “It wasn’t saying anything important.”
“…They talk about the weather, I suppose?”
“Sometimes. Mostly they talk about wharfs.”
Maddy smiled; she didn’t laugh. She looked at the young man, and had the singular sensation of being suspended by strings. She felt the sand eroding under her feet, heard the waves repeat a word again and again. The sun was searing, almost stunning, the air was dry as flame. There was a tornado in her, but she hovered inside its calm, quiet centre. “I’ve never seen you before,” she said. “Where have you come from?”
He answered, “Here and there.”
“Oh! Me too.” A corner of her mind was already noticing his peculiarities, his smokiness, his featheriness, the gli
nt of his skin. There was something impossible, unexpectable, about him. Maddy felt a touch feverish, she wondered if she should sit down. She listened to herself say, “For two years I searched everywhere for the world’s most beautiful thing.”
Any of the beaux would have gallantly replied, You, Miss Maddy, if I may say so, are the world’s most beautiful thing. The pelican-boy only said, “There is nothing that’s more beautiful than everything else in the world.”
If he knew that her heart jumped inside her chest – if he heard her blood sing, if he saw the debris tumble from her mind to leave her whole world clear – he did not show it. He only scuffed the sand with his toes and looked out over the waves. He showed no sign of noticing that time stood still when he said, “If I had to choose one thing – if choosing was the rule – I would choose a sea-eagle. Sea-eagles are the most beautiful things in the world.”
He might have had a proper name, but she always called him Feather. She liked to remember the sight of him with the great white bird in his arms. She sensed that, like a rambling sea-bird, he had travelled many blue miles with nothing to guide him except the sun and moon. He walked the water’s edge like a wrecked and lost ocean bird which must wait for the wind to recollect it and carry it elsewhere. A stranded, migrating winged thing: when she asked where he came from, Feather would smile and shrug; when she asked if he meant to return to that place, he would simply smile again. His silence made Feather the smartest and most mysterious person Maddy had ever known.
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