The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  First Published 2018

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright ©A.S. Patric

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private

  study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part

  may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be

  made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Ben McLaughlin Private Collection Wilson Stephens

  Fine Art, London/Bridgeman Images

  Author image: Kevin Rabalais

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in China by Everbest

  ‘The Bengal Monkey’ originally appeared in Island #131, 2013 and ‘Avulsion’

  appeared in Meanjin, Volume 77, Issue 2, Winter 2017. ‘Among the Ruins’, in

  an earlier version titled ‘A Dead End’, was shortlisted in the 2013 Viva la Novella

  competition, and when titled ‘Bruno Kramzer’, appeared in an edition of FLSmalls

  2013, Finlay Lloyd. ‘HB’ appeared in an earlier version in Flashing the Square,

  Spineless Wonders, 2014; ‘Dead Sun’ in The Review of Australian Fiction, Volume

  11, Issue 2, 2014; ‘Memories of Jane Doe’ appeared in an earlier version in The

  Great Unknown, Spineless Wonders, 2013; ‘Amy in #12’ in Canary Press #3, 2013;

  ‘Punctuated Air’ in The Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 19, Issue 5, 2016;

  ‘The Rothko’ in an earlier version in Meanjin, Volume 73, Issue 4, Summer 2014

  and ‘Butcherbird’ originally appeared in The Big Issue, Fiction Edition 2014.

  A cataloguing-entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-21-7

  For my darling daughter

  Summer Suzana Patrić

  ’Tis a fearful thing

  to love what death can touch.

  Yehuda HaLevi

  Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which proceed and follow them.

  Flannery O’Connor

  Contents

  The Bengal Monkey

  Avulsion

  Dead Sun

  Butcherbird

  Amy in #12

  Among The Ruins

  The Rothko

  HB

  Memories of Jane Doe

  Punctuated Air

  The Flood

  The Bengal Monkey

  Inviting an ex-lover to an engagement party was bound to turn out badly. Clara had been persuaded it would be OK. It really hadn’t required a lot of persuasion since Lucas was one of those lovely alcoholics and she liked him more now than when they were together. He got sweeter with every glass of wine and his hard living hadn’t yet been too unkind to him.

  There was a smile on his face when he brought the framed painting out into the room of friends and colleagues. The bastard must have gone hunting through her wardrobe to find it—pulling out blankets as he searched, pushing aside coats she hadn’t worn in years. Photo albums would’ve been lifted away, as well as another framed picture, to finally get to her portrait.

  “Remember this?” he asked with his smile spilling at the edges into drunken goofiness. No-one else in the room had seen it. Her fiancé, Mitchell, hadn’t seen the portrait either.

  Clara walked towards Lucas to take the painting from him before anyone could have a proper look. Lucas was prepared for this response and clambered up onto the seat of the couch behind him. He stepped up onto the armrest and then climbed to the precarious heights of the backrest—the painting held aloft in one hand, a wineglass in the other. Lucas teetered and pushed the wineglass in her direction. She took his glass from him with haste.

  “Careful, darling,” he said, charming as ever. “Don’t spill my wine.”

  “Come on, Lucas. What are you doing?” She moved closer to him—wasn’t sure whether reaching out to brace his leg would unbalance him.

  His right foot swung out and his left arm windmilled. He was playing. Even drunk he had an impeccable sense of balance. She’d seen him walk the long steel rail of a train track in India, deliriously high as the rumbling came down the line, metal shrieking as it got near—giggling as he tried to sing in a Dylan drawl, yes, to dance, beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free. Not losing his footing. Hopping off at the last moment. The city of moving metal and glass with its population about to spill from the roofs above roared by for long, long seconds, their embrace destabilised by intoxicated glee, both of them tottering, about to be crushed by a locomotive metropolis, until the train passed and left them in each other’s arms wishing for ways to move deeper into oblivion before releasing.

  Lucas knew about the painting because it’d been his idea that she should get it done when they travelled through Bangladesh. Lucas had first heard about the Bengal Monkeys as a tourist myth in Goa and chased down a connection in the maze of Dhaka. Afterwards, while they were in India, all she kept saying was that she would burn it before they left the country. They broke up when she found him screwing a German hippie with huge tits, remained friends because they knew the same people. When she told him she was going home Lucas said he was going to keep travelling. He wanted to see if it was still possible to travel the Silk Road all the way up to Alexandria. Lucas had no money, hadn’t had any for days. Trade would feed him in the months ahead, he said.

  He’d threatened to steal the painting and take it with him, saying he wanted to save it from destruction. He would have sold it. Clara never left Lucas alone with it again. There was a day he sat sipping his poppy tea, staring at the portrait for a whole sultry afternoon, sweat dripping from him until he was wet through. Happy all the same. He’d been quiet for most of the time, enjoying his hallucinations, eventually saying, “A soul is a knot and I suppose the monkeys just mistake it for a nut— crack it open instead of trying to untie it as we do.”

  The day before going to the airport, Clara found she couldn’t toss the portrait into the flames. She rolled up the canvas and told herself she would burn it when she got back to Hobart. Buried it for years. Unrolled it when she was between jobs and living alone for a while. She switched out a picture in a frame already hanging on her wall; could only tolerate her Bengal portrait for a weekend before it became too much. The bottom of the bedroom wardrobe was the only place for it though she never again deceived herself into thinking she would throw it into a fire. And now all she wanted to do was snatch it away from Lucas but he hopped from one foot to the other, holding it aloft.

  The painting was a full-frontal nude. Pornographic in detail, her legs wide open and the folds of her labia exposed. Her body ranged above that focal point, towering over the image as if she were immense, treelike, her limbs grand, powerful branches. And ultimately, not pornographic, yet evoking the same sense of extreme intimacy, revealed in the most brutal lights to the hungriest appetites. It was pointless to explain that she hadn’t been naked when it was painted since Clara did look very much like the image on the canvas. There were a number of snail shells on her stomach in the picture, all of them headless. Very large shells, coloured in bright fruit colours. Clara’s face resembled her portrait more these days than it did when it was painted ten years ago.

  Lucas’s trilby had fallen off when he scrambled up onto the couch to get out of Clara’s reach. Mitchell picked up the hat and offered it to the balancing man. Lucas opened his arms in the graceful gesture of a magician to an assistant, took his trilby and tumbled it over w
ith a swivel and turn of elbow and wrist, placing it on the back of his head, gave it a tap so that it would stay put, then offered another flourish of his hand to his audience. A few of the guests without glasses of wine, who had their hands free, clapped. A subdued applause lest he be distracted. So far no-one had time to look at the framed portrait in his left hand as they watched him wobble above them, drunk or high, sure to fall in the next instant. When this didn’t happen, Mitchell picked up a wine bottle and offered it to Lucas.

  “Why would you do that, Mitchell?” Clara asked, appalled.

  “How long can he stay up there?” Her fiancé had a pleased expression, as though he were enjoying the sight of a bear on a ball, and not a full-grown man who had climbed up onto their chesterfield.

  “We should get him another two bottles and he can do a fucking juggling act!”

  The music had stopped a few minutes ago and the silence was still fresh enough to give her voice an amplified effect. Everyone would surely understand she was angry at Lucas and was not swearing at her fiancé.

  Earlier in the evening, Lucas had been taking the bottle of wine around the room, urging everyone to have a taste of it, if only a sip, so there wasn’t a lot left. Mitchell might have been thinking there wouldn’t be much of a spill when he handed it up to Lucas. He’d been balancing on the back of the couch for a short while. Not longer than a minute. Each second stretched out longer than the last. She would either scream or shove him to see him crash into the Tiffany lamp on the side table.

  “Drink with me and I’ll come down,” Lucas told Clara, who’d refused to drink from the bottle he’d brought back with him from the Subcontinent, offered as an engagement gift, and then opened. Not drinking despite everyone agreeing with Lucas that his Shambhala wine was indeed quite special. Clara said she wasn’t drinking tonight. She didn’t want to embarrass herself, as she often did, and got through the toasts with champagne cocktails that had no alcohol. The engagement party had been going so well until Lucas decided to turn it into a circus.

  “Just get down, Lucas,” Clara said. He raised the bottle and had to tip his head back to get a sip but didn’t fall.

  “Drink with me,” Lucas said. He still had that wild smile. She used to say that’s what she fell in love with, ‘that damned madman’s grin’, if only because it sounded dumb and clichéd in the perfect combination to produce something sincere. And then later told her friends she didn’t know what it had been, yet was sure it was nothing more complicated than the stupidity of youth. Despite what she said, she understood it better than that. They’d been writers together. They tried to live a literary romance on the road, scribbling into Moleskines as they travelled on planes and trains, rowboats and rickshaws, looking into each other’s words for a way to love themselves, lusting in stanzas, longing in paragraphs, believing as no-one had ever done before and no-one would ever do again.

  She lifted his glass and drank the wine. “Please get down.”

  Waved around in the air as it was now, with the modulated lighting in a ceiling high above set to a perfect dimness for pleasant conversation, the dark shapes of the painting wouldn’t be easily seen by the other guests at her engagement party. If she was quick enough she might snatch it away before anyone got a good look. Lucas didn’t come down. He continued to balance on the chesterfield.

  A number of the guests pulled out their phones to take pictures. Mitchell had stepped back to take in the view. The long leather couch was in the centre of the room and the ceiling vaulted above Lucas. She wanted to yell at them so they’d see there was nothing remarkable about a drunken man balancing on the furniture. It was pure idiocy. Even so, it was an image that struck everyone in the room into silence. Quiet enough to hear the various smartphones simulating the shutter sounds of old-style cameras.

  Clara gazed down into the glass and saw his reflection in the tiny pool of wine and understood what Lucas had done. That miniature reflection dissolving in her bloodstream, opening her up to the tiniest sounds and impressions. When she raised her head she saw it in her fiancé as well—his face unnaturally clean, showing no doubts, jealousy or competitiveness, simply rejoicing in the exuberance of the man above.

  Clara could already feel a familiar tide tugging at her arms and legs, and soon her thoughts would flow away beyond where she could save them from drowning. It was frightening now, yet she remembered a time when she sought the rising black water that would bring with it new subaquatic movement and a different way of breathing. When Lucas would guide her along to discover submerged cities the way fish nosed around sunken pirate ships full of stolen bullion. In the mornings she would wake with him and they would both be broke again—dead fish on a bleached white shore. He would yawn and groan as he pissed in a chamber pot or he would get back into bed and say the stars are our reflected souls pushed along by the pulse beats of God’s own bloodstream. Insisting moments later that he didn’t believe in God but there was simply no way to talk about some things without reaching for them with religion’s bankrupt language. If she closed her eyes those miniature reflections would begin dancing again, so she kept her eyes open, turned away from the demon dancing on the head of a pin.

  Mitchell walked around Clara to stand behind her, so he could put his arms around her belly. Still flat. It was a dead giveaway though, as clichéd as a man in a nappy ad. The reason for the decision to get married, not really headlong love demanding rituals neither of them believed in. A submission to the necessary paperwork: signing up for the package life of car, house, child and health plan. And why shouldn’t she? If not Mitchell, then who? And what a sad thing it would be to arrive at the grave having never been married, to have never allowed that one promise, the last vow anyone ever got to make anymore, both hoping it might transmute from husband-wife into father-mother—at least as deep a wish in their chemistry as the foetus already able to blink, wave a hand and swallow amniotic fluid. She had closed her eyes without wanting to and Clara saw the translucent flesh and the way blood washed through the organism in swirls and trickles and pulses of movement.

  Lucas was singing in his Dylan drawl again but she also heard him whispering about the monkeys as the bus travelled through the horrific heat of bodies out through the chaos streets, men hanging from the overhead straps dripping sweat. The smell of all that living flesh in her nose and mouth until they emerged from Dhaka onto roads leading through yellow-flowered mustard landscapes, lush green paddy fields, the meandering rivers crisscrossing until they got off the bus and made their way up into the hills on foot. All the while he went on, saying how the monkeys had been able to paint portraits of Shakespeare when his plays were read to them. Different groups of monkeys at various times and always the same man emerged, in changing moods and ages. Lucas wanted to see Shakespeare, a face that had been lost from the world for over four hundred years.

  Clara had been told to bathe before she went in for the portrait. The handlers talked to Lucas while she was gone though he had a way of taking a few strands of information and spinning whole new wardrobes for a parade only he could see. They had explained to him that the words of the great bard had come from a source, not simply a provincial Englishman’s mind regurgitating the little it had been fed in a country that was still practically medieval. His genius was the ability to channel the same source that heaved out a metropolis like London and fleets of ships to sail across the world. The deeper the bard went, the less it was about the folk on his island. Out in the Bangla jungle they’d found a way to tap an even deeper source, which for millennia had been bubbling up through every species, rising from an ever alive genius that had created hummingbirds and pterodactyls, spider webs and dandelions, neural networks and moss growing on rock, where nothing was ever forgotten and everything was possible.

  She was slapping and plucking at bugs landing on her sweaty skin, waving away a mist of gnats, only half listening to Lucas as the handlers led them along a path that would bring them to a dilapidated Raj mansion overcome by the ju
ngle. Monkeys dropping from the trees and entering the remains of what had been an immense royal dining hall, now missing two walls, vines and roots working their way deeper into the elegance of the crumbling structure. She’d been asked to stand alone in that room and wait for them. It didn’t take long.

  The canvas on the floor was surrounded by bowls of paint and brushes. Grey monkeys with black faces and large eyes. They took her by the fingers and moved her about the room. A random game of theirs. They watched her walk as they screeched and chattered. They scrambled around the room, jumping up and down in the same spot, picking up brushes as though they were branches from a jungle floor, dipping them into paint with no particular care, moving to the canvas and making as if to touch it, taking the brushes away again, painting on walls in random strokes and scribbles of colour.

  The canvas remained blank for a long time. She thought it wouldn’t happen and it was all a sham but the monkeys began to add colour to it in small dabs here and there. It seemed random and these rambunctious animals didn’t appear remarkable. The image didn’t make sense to her until the final few minutes when it came together, her resemblance emerging in the chaos of paint, sharper and sharper, until she could only feel the pure awe of a child discovering the world all at once in a single flash of insight.

  “They poison the monkeys,” Lucas said as they walked away from the ruined mansion with her portrait. “That’s how they get them to do it. The monkeys go crazy after a few weeks, though it’s not a poison. It’s a new kind of hallucinogen. A monster strain of LSD. So strong it doesn’t produce a change of consciousness for a few hours. It’s permanent, so there aren’t many humans willing to try it. No-one’s that hardcore. And the animal rights people are furious of course. It’s going to be a while before we see the Bengal Monkey in Australia.” He’d laughed as he’d said that in India, same as he was laughing above them now—taking a step off the arm of the couch and about to dance out into the air.