What the Birds See

by Sonya Hartnett

  “Free.” Beattie growled out the word. “You scoundrel. If Lester were here—”

  “If Lester was here I know what he’d say, and so do you.” A cheerful jankling marked the plucking up of keys. “He’s no trouble, you know. Amuses himself, doesn’t say much. He’s tame – he’s boring. You’ll hardly notice he’s here.”

  Beattie had followed the man to the door, waving her fists, assuring him in a demon-hiss that, in doing this, he had forsaken all his rights. The man had pushed the flyscreen so forcefully that it hit the side of the house. Adrian had hefted the garbage bag and walked down the hall to the spare room – his room – where he sat on the bed listening to his father’s car burl away. In those minutes he had found it difficult to breathe. He slipped from his coat and hung it in the cupboard, the hangers knocking metallically. The downy skin of his bare arms was un-marked, but it shouldn’t have been that way: the word boring felt branded into him with the blistering burn of an iron. His father thought him boring, a thing to be rid of. There is nothing good about me.

  Now, Adrian sits on the same bed, staring down at the same arm. The blind over his window isn’t down and the darkness beyond the glass looks like space he could step into and run through. He should never have gone near the kitchen, should never have let himself hear the few words that he had. Still, better he did – better to know. It’s his bedtime, but he suffers from a tiredness that feels beyond the reach of sleep. He has spent what seems like his entire life being driven from person to person and place to place. Like the bundle that gets handed about in the game of pass-the-parcel, he’s been unwrapped and made smaller as he’s been pushed from each to the next. He is haunted by the prospect of losing the last thin layer that protects him – he doesn’t want to know what he’ll look like then, can’t bear to think how he’ll feel. But he knows where he will be, when that final thing happens. He’ll be at a place like St Jonah’s, a special place, a place built to take care of children such as he.

  Rory is surprised when the boy taps on his door. It is late, nearly midnight, and he is propped against his pillows sketching landscapes to calm himself. Marta’s visits always fill her brother with such turbulence that it takes him hours to fall asleep, but Adrian’s room had been darkened and peaceful when Rory glanced inside it on his way to the bathroom. The boy is apparently wide awake now. He stands in the doorway holding the sea-monster painting in his arms. “I don’t want this,” he says, and lowers the canvas to the floor.

  Rory’s a little taken aback. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?”

  “There’s no sea-monsters,” the child replies dully. “It’s stupid to pretend.”

  His uncle considers him; he tucks the pencil behind an ear and lays the sketchbook aside. He leans forward, so his elbows touch his knees. He says, “You know what that thing was, Adrian – that dead thing they dragged out of the sea? It was just a fish – just a big dead basking shark. You’re right – there’s no sea-monsters. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not stupid to pretend.”

  “Yes it is.” The boy doesn’t move, standing with vast stillness in his racing-car pyjamas, hands hanging loose by his sides. The lamplight has bleached his face and bare feet; behind him, the blackness of the hallway hulks like something grimly alive. “You should never tell lies.”

  A frown slices the flesh between Rory’s eyebrows. “Pretending isn’t lying, Adrian. You know the difference between pretending and lying, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” the boy answers, “I do. But I don’t think you do.”

  Rory hesitates. Night air finds its way down his spine. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you tell lies.” Adrian’s voice is mossy, bedraggled. “You told me I wouldn’t have to go away. You promised. I promise, you said.”

  “But you’re not – you’re not going anywhere—”

  Anger pinches the child’s face. “Stop telling lies,” he says stonily. “I’m not listening to you any more.”

  Rory feels a twitch of the temper that’s chewed his ankles ever since the night he crashed the car, a temper which skulks like an eel in a cave, which darts out with puncturing teeth. He waves a hand, blotting out the boy. “Believe whatever you like, then. See if I care.”

  Adrian sets his mouth. He wants to hurt Rory as much as Rory has hurt him. He dredges up the worst insult he knows. “You’re crazy,” he whispers. “You’re scared to go outside. There’s only birds and grass out there. You’re a crazy loon.”

  “Get to bed, Adrian,” his uncle says icily, “before I tan your hide.”

  For a moment Adrian does not budge, determined to seem unafraid; then he ducks back into the blackness, which takes him whole. Rory hears him shuffling down the hall, his fingers ticking blindly along the wood panelling, the soles of his naked feet tacking, with each step, to the polish of the floor.

  He sits in the garden, making plans. He won’t go to St Jonah’s. That’s a place for children who have no one to care for them. But Adrian has someone, he’s not completely alone. He doesn’t know how to find her, or where exactly she is now: hence the making of plans.

  Rory has been giving him hostile looks all day. It’s easier to think outside, away from him. His grandmother told him to wear his parka if he was going into the yard. He curls his hands up inside the pockets, commanding himself to be brave.

  The wind is blustering today; this morning it had rained. It’s brisk, the sky is marbled, the grass is clumped and soaking. It’s a day best avoided, endured indoors. Adrian’s ears smart with the buffeting, the tip of his nose is numb. But it’s better to be outside, watchful, here on the slope of the lawn: from here he can see anyone approaching, there’s no fence in front of him, there’s somewhere for him to run. In the junction of the empty streets he feels the liberty of being alone; he could be on a mountain, or the moon.

  His knees are black from pressing into the grass. He wonders what kind of creature he is, what it is about him that makes him so difficult to like, so undesirable to have around. He shunts such thoughts away.

  He thinks about the dog he had, the brown dog from the pound, and a part of him mourns for a thing that never was.

  Tomorrow, then.

  He hears the swing of his neighbour’s front door and looks up to see Nicole. She must have spotted him at the base of the tree because she strides with her usual authority across the road over the lawn right up to where he hunches, as if her dominion extends everywhere. She stands glaring down at him, hands clamped on her hips. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you look dumb.” She drops like a puppet to her knees, clawing her fingers in the grass. The sleeves of her jumper become dusted with rain. She stretches her arms, supple as a cat, smiling steelishly at him. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I know where they are.”

  He has looked askance to a garden bed, embarrassed and apprehensive with her proximity; now his head snaps around, his grey eyes thin. “Who?”

  “You know.”

  He doesn’t believe her – he wishes that for once she would tell the truth – but it’s as if his skin is convinced, as if his mouth believes her. “How did you find them?”

  “That’s my secret. We know what each other thinks.”

  A line of whiteness glints at her lips; Adrian folds himself up warily. “Where are they?”

  She leans against the treetrunk, her jumper jewelled by rain. “What will you give me for showing you?”

  “…What do you want?”

  “The Slinky?”

  Adrian blanches, drops his gaze to the grass. “Someone wrecked it. I threw it away.”

  She thinks about this. “I wouldn’t have wrecked it, if you’d given it to me.”

  He nods but says nothing, plucking a weed and rolling it to pulp between his fingers. Nicole sits on her heels, chewing the flesh of her cheek. It seems they are at stalemate, their conversation possibly over. The wind lashes the crisp leaves on the amba
r, chases the fallen ones across the lawn. The weather makes the girl’s nose run, and she sniffs brutally. A moment passes; she shuffles forward on her knees. She says, “I know what you can give me. Give me your regret for not giving the Slinky to me.”

  He doesn’t understand, addled by her looming teeth and eyes. She punches the earth impatiently, squeals, “Say it!”

  “Say what?”

  “Say you regret it!”

  “I regret it,” he intones.

  Satisfied, she settles back. “Meet me this evening, before it gets too dark. You’ll be frightened, but you can’t be a coward. You must be prepared for whatever happens – prepared for everything. You’ll never be the same again.”

  Though he doubts all she says, there’s a quaver of fear. “Where will I meet you?”

  “In the park – where we buried the bird. That’s the secret place, Adrian. The place that will give us strength. The strength of the bird.”

  He remembers how fragile the bird had felt in his hands, a powderpuff of nothing but feather and air. “Bring a torch,” Nicole’s saying, “and a knife, if you can. A cloth also, to shield your eyes.”

  He nods deeply. “All right.”

  “This evening, before the sky gets dark.”

  She makes some signals around him with her fingers, casting an elaborate spell. Then she leaps to her feet and bounds away, anteloping through the grass. She runs across the road and into her house, slamming the door behind her. The sound of it booms along the deserted street. Adrian returns his hands to his pockets and lays his plans anew.

  TEN

  When he goes inside, his grandmother instantly detects his grubby knees. She rains down on him threats of a horrible death, all this suffering the invariable result of sitting on waterlogged lawn. “I’m sorry, Gran,” he says, and his weary contrition is enough to silence, for a second, the torrent of noise boiling from her. Her face wrestles with a gamut of emotions. When she bends down, Adrian skips away nervously. She grips his wrist and pulls him close and whisks, with brisk precision, a clover from his hair.

  “Off you go,” she says. “Go and get changed. I don’t want you getting sick.”

  He tramps to his room, trousers clammy at the knees. In the privacy of his bedroom he changes his clothes. He searches his wardrobe for the warmest jumper, the thickest jeans, the longest socks, the strongest boots. When he puts them all on he feels swaddled and hot.

  He tips his schoolbag upside-down: out of it drops a lead pencil, a ball of rainbowed sandwich paper, and the wrapper of a long-gone Wagon Wheel. He stuffs into the emptied satchel a scarf and a miniature torch, which is really just a keychain. He adds a pair of socks and some underwear, slipping these into an inner compartment that Nicole, should she raid the bag, will hopefully overlook.

  He sits gripping his ankles, thinking. He doesn’t know what else to bring. He has no practice in running away. Until now he’s always stayed where he was put. Even now, he’s not truly running away. He’s going to something, as much as away from something else. His mother, when he finds her, will never let him become a child of St Jonah.

  When he finds her. The words are like a stagger, something important gone bung. He has qualms innumerable about embarking on a search for his mother when he has no idea how to begin, no knowledge of where she is or how to go about finding her. He thinks about sleeping out in the night, how cold and unpleasant that will be. The satchel is not spacious enough to hold a blanket, but another jumper fits in when he rams it down hard.

  What he’ll do is ask for help. She always told him, when he was just a little kid walking to and from school alone, If you’re frightened, ask for help. He had never needed to do so and now as he takes the advice out and readies himself to brandish it he sees how keen and glossy and decisive it is, a weapon more effective for never having been used.

  One thing is certain: if he stays here, he is doomed. Under the ambar he’d decided to leave tonight: tomorrow is a place that can no longer be relied upon, and once he’s in the park with Nicole he’ll already be halfway gone anyway. There is, in addition, the faint possibility that Nicole truly does know where the children are. If he were to help find them, he doesn’t think his grandmother would send him away. She would probably look differently on a boy who did something so heroic. His doubts and loneliness would become just memories, signposts that pointed the way to being brave.

  He buckles the satchel and sits down on his bed.

  While Beattie is making Rory turn the mattress of the big bed he rushes on socked feet to the kitchen and rummages through the biscuit tin. There’s not much in there – spongy Saladas, broken shards – but he scoops out a salty handful and pushes them up his sleeve. He returns the tin to its shelf and sweeps the crumbs from the bench. Biscuits prickle the soft skin of his arm. He slips open the drawer where his grandmother keeps the knives.

  In the hall, something catches his eye. He slides to a halt and traces his step. The cherub bowl squats on the mantelshelf; the cherub is looking at him. The cherub customarily faced Royal Doulton and continued to do so after she was gone; now it’s turned, and smiling at him. Adrian steps tentatively past the doors of the lounge, his heart pulsing at his ribs. He approaches the mantel on the balls of his feet. To the cherub he whispers, “What do you want?”

  Its apple-plump face is raised to him, the eyes curved over bulbous cheeks. Its hands on its thighs look lively, starfish of wicked intent. Adrian extends a finger, touching it to the small of the cherub’s back. “You can’t come with me,” he says.

  Why not?

  I’ll get in trouble.

  You’re in trouble anyway.

  Adrian hesitates. The cherub smiles sunnily. It wasn’t asking much, was it, what you asked from them.

  He hears Beattie directing the making of the bed, Rory’s intolerant sighs. They will be occupied just a minute more. The bowl has always been a comfort to him, and might be so again.

  I will be a comfort, Adrian. When you’re alone.

  He hasn’t the space, not in his slight satchel. But there’s nothing to a cherub, not without his bowl.

  Adrian lifts the cherub by its head; the lid, soldered to the putto’s calves, rises off the bowl. There’s a tidy weight to the lid and cherub, it’s glacial and awkward as an icepick when he tucks it against his skin. The bowl stands on the shelf, pert on shapely legs. Like a vault that’s been opened, it gives off the smell of bronze. Adrian steps away, considering, and decides that, although the bowl gapes like a wound, the absence of its lid and cherub should go unnoticed for at least a while.

  Jammed into his satchel are the jumper, the socks, the underpants, the scarf, the torch, the cherub, the biscuits, the knife. These few items make the bag so global and solid it’s like a medicine ball perched on his back. Adrian slips the satchel off and prods it, but it holds its swollen form. None of the goods can be abandoned, they’re each in their own way vital to him, so he resolves to live with the difficulty. He hefts the bag and slips his arms through the strap, settling the leather at the nape of his neck. His hands are free, his shoulders bear the load, the bulging satchel looks like some terrible growth on his spine, the kind of hump that bent people double hundreds of years ago.

  He’s just a child, and he knows that: he knows his plan is futile, that all of this will come to nothing, that he has absolutely no chance of finding his mother. He knows he’ll be sleeping in his bed tonight, rather than under a shrubbery. But if he blocks out that knowledge, if he prepares to succeed and tries to believe, something miraculous may occur – others have succeeded before him, and maybe so will he. One thing is certain: nothing miraculous will happen if he stays.

  When the sky clouds over, he stands up. His Batman clock says it’s five. He’s become stiff and cold sitting on his bed, and his legs tingle with the fresh flow of blood. The burden of the satchel tips him towards the wall. He blows air on his hands to warm them, and has another idea: he paws through the cupboard until he unearths a pair of knit
ted mittens. Pleased, he puts them in a pocket, but feels, too, a vague qualm: he wonders what other simple yet blessed item he is forgetting to bring.

  The sky is powdered livid; these winter evenings grow rapidly dark and Adrian is glad he must hurry. He would like to say goodbye to his uncle and gran but worries that, if he does so, he will never leave. They won’t let him, or he’ll decide not to go. So he waits until the coast is clear, when Beattie’s unpegging washing from the line and Rory’s settled down with coffee and cigarettes, then yells from the hallway, “I’m going out to play. OK? I’m going across the street.” Nothing answers, but he knows that his uncle, in the den, will have heard. Without lingering any longer, he slips past the front door.

  Adrian runs down the road, the satchel thumping on his spine, the raw air scouring his lungs. The street is damp and vacant and he is the only thing that moves, the sole survivor of an unexpected Ice Age. His feet fly along the footpath, the cords of the parka flicking his thighs. The satchel tries relentlessly to slow his pace, to turn him around. He clenches his fists and powers on.

  When he reaches the park he runs between trees to the track, which is puddled with shallow rainpools. The stones make a crunching sound as they’re tamped below his boots. His nose and fingers throb with cold as he runs, his cheeks are warmly flushed. In the grassy centre of the park a pair of white ibis step on legs as long as his own. Their disregard of him is complete, but other birds see him coming and flap sluggishly away. He leans into the bend of the track, the trees flashing by, the sky like a slab of mother-of-pearl, a gravestone polished with pink. The sky is a shell enclosing the park, a brittle roof over the land: sound ricochets off the greyness, pings curtly, goes nowhere.

  He remembers where they buried the bird among tangles of eucalypt root and as he nears the place he slows, breath steaming out of him. He can see the tree but not Nicole and as he walks he spins a circle, scanning fretfully for her. A quick shrill whistle makes him look up and there she is, a lemur on a bough. She’s wearing a purple poncho that brushes at her knees. “Did you come alone?” she asks, in a voice that’s deep and dangerous.