The Starlings

by Vivienne Kelly

  The possibility didn’t arise, however, although it was dark before they were home. The car stopped outside and Pippa got out; the car pulled away and she came in and went straight up the stairs and into her room. I was deeply hurt that Rose had neglected to check on me. I followed Pippa up the stairs and knocked loudly on her door.

  When she opened it I had expected to see her in a triumphant and possibly unpleasant mood. But to my surprise she was silently weeping and her face was filled with despair.

  ‘Rose didn’t come in,’ I said, with an inadequacy even I could feel.

  To my surprise, Pippa responded sympathetically. ‘She couldn’t, Nicky. She said to tell you she was sorry. But Mum’ll be home soon and we can’t afford for Rose to bump into her.’

  This seemed weird. ‘You mean because Mummy doesn’t want Rose to marry Grandpa?’

  ‘Sort of. That’s part of it, Nicky.’

  ‘But why would Mummy mind—’

  ‘Nicky, I just can’t talk at the moment. Please go away, there’s a good boy.’

  I was unnerved by Pippa sounding gentle and sad and polite, and I backed away.

  ‘It’s really important that Mum doesn’t know anything about this, Nicky. Please don’t say anything about Rose being here, or me crying, or—or anything. Anything at all.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But then will you tell me?’

  ‘Will I tell you what?’ She blew her nose.

  ‘What’s going on. I don’t understand what’s going on.’

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Maybe not straightaway, Nicky, but I promise I’ll tell you. Just, just don’t say anything. Please.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  My mother arrived home shortly afterwards. I wandered downstairs and found her standing in the kitchen leafing through the mail, which I had forgotten to collect from the letterbox.

  ‘Hello, Nicky,’ she said absently. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, waiting for her to drop the customary kiss on my head. She didn’t.

  ‘Sorry I forgot to get the letters,’ I said.

  ‘No worry,’ she said, just as absently. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, miserably.

  It was around this time that the Unscared Game started to get much worse. Now the phantoms were thronging my bedside in the dark. A monstrous quivering slug had joined the company and stretched its revolting gelatinous body across the doorway. Other nameless things disturbed my sleeping hours: a vast glossy black-beetle, with many hairy legs, scuttled from behind the wardrobe; a pair of neon eyes surveyed me from the ceiling. A severed hand wandered under the bed and might clamp its icy grasp on my ankle when I was getting into bed or leaving it. I took to jumping, both ways, from a small distance. Tree Man loomed large.

  Going to bed was turning into a real problem for me. I’d always slept with my door closed; now, however, I left it ajar at night. But my mother would softly close it as she went past on her way to bed. I asked her if she would leave my door open.

  ‘What on earth for?’

  I said something about fresh air, and got a sceptical stare in return. ‘You know what a light sleeper you are, and Daddy and I are certain to wake you when we go to bed.’

  ‘Well, can I have a night-light?’

  ‘Heavens, Nicky! You’re eight years old!’

  I couldn’t see why it mattered to her, what difference it could make whether my door was open or shut, my light on or off. Once, we would have had a conversation about it and she would have yielded laughingly. I tried again.

  ‘For goodness sake, Nicky! Don’t carry on. I’ve said no.’

  Her unwillingness even to consider this most minor of changes was of a piece with the rest of her behaviour. Even when she was speaking to me, her mind was elsewhere; her gaze was fixed on some remote vista I could not share.

  The worst of this was that a new presence had made itself felt among my nightly visitors. I hadn’t seen it clearly yet, only in flashes: it hung in the shadows behind the other horrors and made itself visible so rapidly that although I recognised it (or thought I did), I hadn’t yet been able to examine it. It fluttered at the perimeter of my vision: when I tried to look directly at it, it would slither aside. But I knew that one day it would come closer. Sometimes it called my name.

  It was familiar to me from my illustrated book about Jason and the Argonauts. Jason hadn’t gripped my imagination in the way Roger Lancelyn Green and the Lambs had, but the Golden Fleece had some of the glamour of the Holy Grail, and Jason had good adventures on the way to securing it. One of these adventures took place when Jason stopped by the home of Phineus, a Greek king who had displeased Zeus. Zeus had blinded Phineus and also, in case he didn’t get the point, condemned him to a particularly nasty version of starvation, in which great banquets of food were placed on Phineus’s table and then snatched away by harpies.

  My new visitor was a harpy. I recognised her from the illustrations of harpies in my book: they had broad, eagle-like wings; sharp, hooked beaks; evil, predatory faces and horribly curved claws.

  My harpy’s wings, though broad, were the colour of pigeons’ wings; her voice had a piercing note I recognised all too easily. She was Didie, come back to haunt me.

  Further, my visitors had started to sing. Sometimes they sang humming tunes; sometimes their voices rose in a swelling babble that turned into words. One of the things they sang to me went like this:

  One, two, three, four, five,

  Why should Nicky stay alive?

  Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,

  Let’s go torture him again

  Let’s kill him in his bed

  Let’s make sure he’s stony dead

  Nicky thinks he’s so damn smart

  We can stab him through the heart.

  This terrified me half to death. My heart pounding, I hunched in the darkness under my blankets and thought I could hear Didie’s voice, rising thin and clear, above all the others. Why should she torment me like this? What might she do to me, when finally she swooped over me and plunged her cruel claws into my neck?

  Early the following week, when Pippa and I had come home from school, the telephone rang. Pippa had for so long commandeered the telephone that I had all but given up taking any notice of it. I was deep in some problem connected with the Merchant: it took me a while to realise Pippa wasn’t going to answer, and longer still to decide to wander out of my room, thinking the ringing would stop before I lifted the handpiece, but it didn’t.

  ‘What took you so long?’ said my father’s voice, with the tone he used when he felt goaded beyond all bearing.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Listen, Nicky, tell your mother I’ll be late home. I’ve got a patient with an emergency and she can’t get here till late. I’ve already got one after-hours session and I won’t be home before nine at the earliest.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t forget, mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’ I was good at delivering messages, but my father always annoyed me by telling me not to forget them.

  ‘Nine,’ said my mother, when she arrived home.

  ‘Yes.’

  She bustled around in the kitchen and called us for dinner a little earlier than usual. At the end she stood up.

  ‘I want you two to help me out here,’ she said, in a wheedling voice. ‘I need to go out, just for a short while. So you guys clean up, okay? It won’t take long. Just, those saucepans you’ll have to do, but the rest can go in the dishwasher. Do it together, okay?’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pippa.

  ‘I have to go out.’

  ‘You said that.’

  My mother looked as if she were going to cry. ‘Pippa, darling, please try to be helpful.’

  Pippa stared at her. My mother’s gaze dropped.

  ‘You’ll help, won’t you, Nicky?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hating her.

  ‘I’ll be back very soon,’ she said, as if being back so
on made everything all right.

  She was out the door and into the car within two minutes. Pippa and I sat at the table and looked at each other. Our mother’s defection had brought us suddenly closer together than we had been for weeks.

  ‘Well,’ said Pippa. ‘Where do you suppose she’s going?’

  Assuming she didn’t require an answer, I started to get the plates together. I carried them to the sink and started to rinse them.

  ‘Why should we do her dirty work for her?’ Pippa wasn’t addressing me so much as the air.

  I opened the dishwasher door and started to stack things.

  ‘I hope Dad comes home early,’ she said venomously.

  At this moment we heard a car crunching the gravel. Pippa went to the window. ‘It’s him,’ she said, in an odd voice.

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  ‘No fear.’ But she said it meditatively.

  I put the glasses in the top of the dishwasher and turned the tap on to wash the saucepans. I looked under the sink for the detergent.

  ‘You’re too nice, Nicky,’ she said. ‘Here, I’ll do it. You can dry them.’

  We were occupied thus when my father came in.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Bloody woman didn’t show up,’ he said. ‘Waited half an hour. No phone call, no nothing. Is that my dinner in the oven?’

  He took his coat off and went upstairs. He came back down, retrieved his meal, poured himself a drink, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘Good kids,’ he said, approvingly, through a mouthful of shepherd’s pie. ‘Doing the washing up. Helping your mother. Good to see.’

  He pulled across the morning’s paper and opened it.

  Pippa gave me a sideways rolling-eyes sort of glance which I knew meant He hasn’t even noticed she’s not here. I smirked back at her.

  As we were putting things away, he glanced around the room in a puzzled way, as if he had only just noticed an absence but couldn’t work out whose it was.

  ‘Parent-teacher night?’

  ‘No,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She said she had to go out.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. There was a pause. ‘Listen to this, Nicky.’

  I waited.

  ‘We’re playing Collingwood this weekend, right? And Matthews is back. He had that four-week suspension.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as Pippa went through the rolling-eyes pantomime again.

  ‘They’re saying here he might retire.’ My father’s voice was desolate.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pippa, in the tone of someone telling a child to cheer up. ‘He’s been around a long time, Dad.’

  ‘I’d have thought he’d hang in there a bit longer,’ he said.

  Pippa and I climbed the stairs together shortly afterwards, she to play Madonna full-bore and me to puzzle further over Shylock.

  ‘I don’t know what planet he even lives on,’ she said to me outside her bedroom. ‘She’s not here and he doesn’t even notice, and when he does notice he doesn’t care.’

  She slammed her way into her bedroom.

  It was difficult, because of Madonna, to hear when my mother’s car returned, but I did manage to catch the hum of the engine and the gravel crunch. It was almost exactly nine o’clock. I’d had my bath and was in my pyjamas, but my father had neglected to make sure I was actually in bed and therefore I wasn’t.

  I crept out of my room to the landing. I heard the back door open. My father was in the lounge watching television, and I heard him call out a kind of wordless grunt implying welcome. I waited to see if he was going to accuse her of something (what?), or challenge her in any way. I heard nothing, and I stole down a few stairs.

  ‘Parent-teacher night?’ I heard my father asking. I thought this was curious, as Pippa had told him this wasn’t the case. And parent-teacher nights were always flagged a good way ahead.

  My mother made a noise that was muffled but sounded acquiescent.

  ‘Any difficult ones?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘All pretty much okay, really. Did you get your dinner?’

  Surely my mother wasn’t lying to my father?

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  I heard her footsteps, staccato in her heels, over the kitchen floor.

  ‘Frank, could you please try to remember to turn the oven off when you take your dinner out of it?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  At the end of school the following day, Pippa was on a school excursion and I was to go home with my mother. I trailed up to the senior campus, dragging my backpack on the ground. I didn’t like going to the senior campus and I didn’t like changes to routine. And when I turned up at the staffroom, having deliberately dawdled all the way in order to be late, my mother was not there.

  ‘You can wait inside, Nicky,’ said one of the senior teachers, whom I had met because she was a friend of my mother.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, retreating to the corridor, where there was a line of hard uncomfortable chairs. I sat on one of these, where I trusted nobody would take much notice of me, and resigned myself to waiting.

  After ten minutes or so my mother came walking briskly down the corridor towards me, carrying her briefcase. She had just raised her hand to signal a greeting to me when I heard somebody call her name and a dark, lanky man with glasses came loping after her.

  My mother paused and turned. The pair conferred together and he gave her a sheaf of papers.

  Then she turned to me. ‘Nicky,’ she called.

  I stood and went to her.

  ‘This is my son Nicky,’ she said, and to my surprise I saw she was blushing. ‘Nicky, this is Mr Bloomberg.’

  Mr Bloomberg took my hand in his long, bony one and shook it without enthusiasm. He was tall and thin, with untidy dark hair, black-framed glasses and a general air of disorganisation. He muttered something indistinguishable and hurried away.

  ‘Well!’ said my mother, still pink-faced. ‘That was nice, wasn’t it?’ She opened her briefcase and pushed the papers he had given her inside.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it’s nice when you meet my colleagues, Nicky. Don’t you think that’s nice?’

  ‘No,’ I said, angry without knowing quite why. ‘I hate it when you say this is my son Nicky like that.’

  She was startled. ‘What on earth is wrong with me introducing you as my son?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, sulkily. ‘I just hate it, that’s all.’

  *

  On Thursday evening I was occupied as usual in my bedroom. I’d given up on Shylock and Portia: the story made me uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t define and I didn’t much like anybody in it. I was becoming increasingly impatient with the plots the Lambs presented me with, and more inclined to change them when I felt like it. I’d been encouraged by the success of my amended endings to Othello and Romeo and Juliet and was considering a version of Macbeth in which Duncan was not killed but chose to retire, and happily passed his crown on to Macbeth, who after some misunderstandings turned into a very good king. In the middle of these deliberations I heard Pippa on the landing; I heard the soft click as she lifted the handset.

  I crept to the door. I didn’t dare open it, but Pippa, when she was trying to whisper, used a hissing voice that was actually easier to hear than her ordinary voice. Normally I wouldn’t have cared much about what Pippa was saying, but recent events, combined with my resentment at having been shut out from them, fuelled my curiosity.

  ‘Rose?’ I heard her say. ‘Is that you, Rose?’ And then, after a pause, ‘Rose, it’s okay. It’s all okay. It’s come.’ Another pause.

  ‘Yes, yes, perfectly normal. Maybe a little heavy. But fine, just fine. I had to tell you.’ Pause. ‘Yes, yes, isn’t it so great! I can’t believe it.’ Pause. ‘Oh, Rose, I will, truly I will.’ Pause. ‘Thank you so much. I’ll never forget how terrific yo
u’ve been. Thank you so very much.’ Pause. ‘I have to go, Rose. Thanks again.’

  The enlightenment I had hoped for was not forthcoming. Shrugging, I went back to Macbeth.

  I could no longer evade my father’s demands, and we went to the football together on Saturday afternoon. We were lying third on the ladder, now, and as the end of the season approached, my father was allowing himself more confidence. This match was again at Princes Park and we were playing Collingwood. It was a terrible afternoon—wet and cold, and the ground was nothing but mud. The players slipped all over the place and fell on top of each other: by the end of the match it was hard to tell the teams apart because of the mud splattered over them. And the ball was, my father said, as hard to hold as a greased pig. Matthews was back after his four-week suspension, but my father was disappointed with his contribution to the game until the last quarter, when he scored two ‘brilliant’ goals. Fortunately Hawthorn won, and the journey home was accompanied by my father’s happy ramblings around the theme of the grand final.

  The following week Leigh Matthews incurred a fine of a thousand dollars after a magistrate found him guilty of assaulting Neville Bruns. My father was by turns inconsolable, and incandescent with fury.

  Matthews had pleaded guilty and had expressed remorse. It emerged that he had offered to resign from football immediately after the Bruns incident, but that Allan Jeans had persuaded him not to.

  ‘There was nothing wrong with what he did,’ my father pleaded. ‘He should never have been convicted of anything. It was a game of footy, for God’s sake.’

  None of us was listening, particularly. I was preoccupied with Launcelot of the Lake. For the moment I had set Macbeth aside and was exploring the Launcelot and Guinevere story at the end of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table.

  Lancelyn Green told me that from the very first day when he came to court that Launcelot had loved Queen Guinevere and her alone of all ladies in the world. He went on to say that Arthur felt no jealousy, for he trusted the high honour of both Launcelot and the Queen.