The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  The Jersey voice tells me to enter but he isn’t around once I’m inside. The room is brightly lit. Glass walls to the north and east reveal a hundred towers with the wide river below, dead still, perfectly reflective of the billions of city lights ceaselessly moving or flickering. The empty room has flowers beginning to wilt in vases and fresh American newspapers on the bed. An unmade bed and a packed suitcase. An airplane ticket on a coffee table with a vibrating phone that is ringing on silent. Down a darkened hall there’s a bright light below a door. I hear the sound of a toilet flushing. Sinatra saunters towards the painting humming one of his popular tunes—“Fly Me to the Moon”, I think. He notices his phone illuminated by another incoming call. Sinatra waves me out of his room as though I were a porter bringing him up a present from one of his fans.

  I pass the taxi stand outside the doors of the hotel. I don’t want to go home, at least not straight away. I need to walk. I want to leave as much of the fury and humiliation behind me as I can. I’ve never walked from the centre of the city out to the bay, where we’ve been living since the kids were born. I move past parts of the world I’ve seen only through the windows of a car until I’m walking along streets where I’m used to the air coming in off the water.

  I go to the garage instead of my bedroom. The light is busted. Three times I’ve replaced the light bulb at the end of the cord dangling down from the ceiling at head height. It always burns out within a few minutes. I suspect it must be old wiring or a bad fuse. The garage has a few small cracked windows that run high along the wall. I wait until they begin to evidence the morning. The darkness of the garage is relieved so slowly it’s almost imperceptible—yet I’ve never been so still and patient in my life as I wait for the sunlight to enter through the open door of the garage and those small windows high along the wall. The shape emerges, leaning against the wall. I have left it uncovered so the light turns red when it reaches down into the frame. Or it’s a deep orange. Soon after, I’ve lost the words to name what I see.

  HB

  The two women were speaking half-turned towards each other on the couch while the boy sat at their feet on the carpet. He had a clean sheet of paper and a greylead pencil, just sharpened for him by the woman wearing black. He had followed her into the kitchen and watched her sharpen the pencil over the sink with a butcher’s knife. The pencil pierced the unruled piece of paper on the carpet.

  She’d been wearing black for years because leukaemia killed her son. Living alone now. He wondered how old the boy had been. The first time he and his mother visited had been brief. An exchange of books. This time the two women settled in to talk about writing. Both had been writers in another language and in another country.

  She wasn’t old—the boy had seen crones before who always wore black. No wrinkles on the backs of her hands and her fingernails were perfect and clear. He’d noticed when she gave him the greylead in the kitchen. When she patted his hands. His mother’s fingernails broke easily, one or another cut to the quick, and they were always painted red.

  There was a pillow nearby, so he crawled over to it and lay his head down. Let the women murmur as he drifted away, waiting for it to be time to go home. There were pictures of the son around the house in frames—one of him in a karate uniform like the boy himself wore every Tuesday afternoon.

  The boy held onto the pencil and had a dream about drawing on the white cloth of the woman’s pillow as though it were a sheet of paper. This time the sharp HB didn’t push through because he’d worked out that all he needed to do was wet the tip with his tongue before drawing. He’d seen that done in a film but it didn’t make sense when he was fully conscious again. This pencil would pierce the soft pillow, of course, just as it had the paper on the thick carpet.

  He walked down the two steps beyond the door and waited as the two women said a few final words inside. The flat looked smaller from the outside. A living room that was also the woman’s bedroom. And there was nothing more except for a tiny bathroom and kitchen. No garden or trees outside her windows. Communal concrete extended down to the bitumen of the road. There wasn’t even a fence.

  The woman didn’t wave to the boy or his mother from her doorway. She stepped down instead and gave the boy the pencil to take home with him. Patting his hands again in the way she’d done in the kitchen.

  “For your art,” she said, with a twisted smile that acknowledged it was a very meagre gift. Her English wasn’t good. It sounded to the boy as though she had given him the pencil she’d sharpened with a butcher’s knife and told him it was for his heart.

  Memories of Jane Doe

  She appeared in the paper seven times under the name Jane Doe. First the details of her body being found by the Maribyrnong River. Then details of the investigation. Speculation as to who she was. Appeals to the public for information. More speculation and no answers. A few brief mentions before she disappeared altogether. The last one was an article about crimes against women, on the rise, more brutal, increasingly unsolved, etc. etc. At that point she’d barely paused in her transition from an anecdote to a statistic.

  Ron looked through every page of the newspaper. He forgot about the ink on his fingers and licked them as he turned the pages. Must have been doing it for minutes before he noticed. The black smear of news on his tongue. And he was a chef, for God’s sake. To say he’d been distracted lately didn’t even come close to it.

  Ron put the paper onto a stack of other newspapers. Looked at those piles, some now as tall as his shoulder, leaning against the walls in his walk-in fridge, and still didn’t know what to do with them. They kept piling up. Filled with the controversy of a musician being discovered with paedophilic pictures on his computer. A celebrity divorce—Katie Sterling pictured with a black eye in the window of a taxi outside her hotel. Articles about a man stopping his vehicle on the West Gate Bridge to throw his four-year-old daughter into the water. A drop of 58 metres. Broken by the fall. Dead from drowning. The American presidency dominating all the papers, going on about it, every nuance, every day, in every newspaper, ceaselessly, repeating every detail, over and over again. And nothing more of his Jane Doe.

  Ron walked to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Washed his mouth out with Listerine to get the black ink smear off his tongue. He stuck it out in the mirror and saw nothing but the green of the mouthwash. His skin looked colourless. Pale because of all the hours in the kitchen and sleeping away the best parts of the day. Pale, and pink. The look of uncooked chicken. He brushed and rinsed again.

  She didn’t know the word for rooster. Called him a male chicken when he woke her too early one day with a cock-a-doodle-doo. A joke as it was closer to noon that it was dawn. Roosters did not make that sound where she came from—it confused him since it had to be the same animal noise, didn’t it? Yet every language interpreted the sound differently, cocorico to kokekokko. She was confused and then amused by the call of cock-a-doodledo. Both of them laughing about it for days. Neither of them needing to know then that another phrase that differs in every tongue is Jane Doe.

  He came home from work one day. It was as late as seven or eight in the morning. Found her in the bathroom, her head in the basin. Washing peroxide from her head. Her long brown hair in clumps all over the floor; and in his imagination, the walls, the ceiling, out in the hall and strewn across everything everywhere. Because it felt disastrous, even though she raised her head with a giggle that put a cleaver through his chest.

  He pulled her away from the basin, and stared at her with her hacked hair, as if he’d caught her in the act of suicide.

  Yelling at her. “What are you doing?”

  She looked at him with that wide open smile of hers beginning to collapse. “I wanted to see what blonde felt like,” she whispered.

  No way for him to explain to her what all that lustrous brown hair, smelling of bergamot, meant to him because he couldn’t explain it to himself. She put her small hand to his chest to calm him down.

  “I was going to
clean this all away, after,” in a heavy accent. “I never cause mess for you, do I?”

  It was the day he knew something was wrong with him. Because he went to bed and he cried about it. Seeing her with short peroxide hair was part of it. All that bergamot hair hacked to the tiles—it was a suicide that only killed the parts of her he loved.

  Isaac stopped at the back door of his house and had his lie ready before he went inside. It wasn’t a believable lie. There was no way he could hide the guitar from his parents but they didn’t ask him about it.

  Isaac’s mother was on the phone in the kitchen, trying to whisper advice to Sharon, a friend of hers finding it difficult to be alone. There were years ahead of waiting out her husband’s incarceration. The husband had been drunk at the wheel one afternoon and ran down two schoolgirls, killing one of them and crippling the other. Whispering because Dad was in the lounge.

  “Hi, Dad,” Isaac murmured as he passed through the lounge room.

  Dad was in pain. Some days the pain was in his back, other days it was in his hips or knees. Getting bad enough that each hour at work was a misery. No way out and it was getting worse. A new doctor had recommended meditation, so Dad was in the lounge room, lying on his back on the bare floorboards with his eyes closed, looking like he’d been shot. The voice of a man called Cabot Zen on a CD was telling his father he was a lake. That no matter the splashes or ripples, changes of season, the lake was always itself. Its nature would not change. Across its surface, the lake reflected the world as it passed by overhead—each cloud, each storm—yet the lake was not made of reflections.

  Isaac walked to his room and hid the guitar in his wardrobe. He sat on his bed thinking about the guitar for half an hour and then opened the wardrobe and brought the instrument out of its case. He had been playing guitar for almost a year. It was a cheap nylon string with a bowed neck that his father had bought at a garage sale down the road. The guitar he was looking at now was similar to the ones he’d seen in his guitar magazines. A Guild twelve-string. Dark satin-finish mahogany with a mother-of-pearl rosette and inlays. The guitar case alone told him it was a fine instrument—a crimson velvet interior that made him think of his mother’s jewellery boxes. This kind of guitar might be worth as much as his father’s car, so Isaac wouldn’t be able to pretend he’d bought it with pocket money. Or that anyone had lent it to him. That was the excuse he would have used if his mother had asked in the kitchen or his father in the lounge. Isaac had to come up with something better.

  His parents wouldn’t think Isaac had stolen it, because where would he steal it from? He wouldn’t have been able to walk out of a music shop with a Guild. Doubtful the dudes behind the counter would let him even touch it. Isaac couldn’t have broken into someone’s house. Burglary wasn’t shoplifting a Kit Kat from the milk bar.

  If he told them he’d found it on his way home from school they would be obliged to at least try to return the Guild to its owner. Because no-one forgets this kind of instrument in the gazebo at Catani Gardens. It wasn’t a wallet or a phone, to slip out of a pocket. Nor could it be dumped like a broken television or an old fridge. Clearly it was a perfect instrument.

  It was clean—nothing but a few handling smudges. He wiped down the guitar with a soft cloth because he didn’t want to see the owner’s fingerprints. He wanted the guitar to already be his. It would still be in tune. He didn’t strum the strings to see if that was true because the noise might alert his parents. The steel strings, especially on a big twelve-string dreadnought, would sound entirely different from his usual guitar noise.

  If it was damaged, it would be repaired. This was one of those things in the world that was never willingly destroyed or abandoned. So it was some kind of accident. Isaac hadn’t stolen it and there was nothing for him to feel guilty about. He just wanted to keep this accident. Why should only the bad kind of accident be permanent? Like what happened to the two schoolgirls because of Sharon’s alcoholic husband.

  Isaac put the Guild back into its case and then found a better place for it on the top shelf of his wardrobe. He picked up his old nylon-string guitar and practised playing Saltarello as his mind went around in circles futilely searching for a way to explain this accident.

  Her name was not discovered. Days went by. Nothing turned up. And it appeared nothing would. The coroner couldn’t determine the cause of death. Evidence of hypothermia, which was hard to make sense of, and nothing definitive. Occasionally it was impossible to get conclusive evidence of what had happened. We could guess and we could assume. There were questions and there were searches. There was speculation and there was imagination. But her name remained unknown. And days and days had gone by. Naked. Broken nails. Painted a light blue. Some defensive wounds. Rope burns. Callused fingertips only on her left hand, so a guitar player. Ring marks on her fingers, none indicating marriage. Not yet a mother. Dentals pointed to a European birth. She had not been raped. And still no name though days had passed on a metal table.

  She started going out to raves and came home still dancing like she was insane with music that wouldn’t stop thumping through her head, and going on and on about nothing, speeding or exhausting the ecstasy that was smudging her eyes with that dark sleepless shade of static. The different men coming home with her, fucking her in her bedroom. All vivid, welts and bruises in his mind, as if they were filming pornos using his daughter.

  Yet he was nothing to his Jane Doe. Simply a friendly man who decided to let her stay with him after working with her for three weeks. So that they could cook together and enjoy meals with good wine. She could play her guitar, and he could listen to her songs. Encourage her and occasionally clap. Never did he take advantage, even though he woke up with thoughts about her and went to sleep thinking about her. And he was only ever appropriate, when he could have devoured her he was so hungry for everything she was.

  It was after a great meal that she told him. Tasmanian Atlantic salmon caught just the day before, on the couscous she’d never heard of before she met him, with the fresh lemons she loved so much. Rich, buttery chardonnay in tall, clear glasses on his balcony and looking out to the West Gate Bridge, the water going out to a thin blue horizon, and holiday life down on Fitzroy Street buzzing up to them as if the whole world was suddenly delighted. Everything filled in his heart, running reeling red and luscious thick—it was then that she told him she was leaving for Sydney.

  Going to Sydney. With that smile. Her face already a golden colour from the early St Kilda summer. Golden like she was glowing with caramelised sun. Sydney. Going. Going. Gone … but for a puff of smoke. He could feel the words in his chest as though he’d swallowed the fish whole, and all the bones catching on his insides, and he couldn’t swallow and couldn’t move.

  “You can’t go,” he told her. “Not like that. Just vanish.”

  “How wonderful you make Melbourne for me.”

  For her—as if he was a fucking ambassador to the city. He told her he wouldn’t let her go, and of course she giggled sweetly. Even her laughter was confectionary. He explained it carefully for his Jane Doe.

  “I will not let you go.” He wanted to close his eyes but he couldn’t blink for a few moments. “I’ll never see you again.”

  It took a while before she wasn’t laughing about it, and that quickly became a kind of fighting that threatened to become her leaving now, right out the door with her half-empty backpack and her guitar. He put his hands on her for the first time.

  The struggle for her limbs became oily with things he’d never seen in himself before, rising with black mist in his brain, and spraying from his mouth until she was on the floor and she was bleeding. Not dead. Frightened when she looked at him and afraid to scream. But then finding her voice. So he had to make a gag. Her limbs flailed and fingernails broke. He had to tie her down. He took the locks off the inside of his walk-in fridge. Rigged it so it could only be opened from the outside.

  The idea was to put her in there and take off the gag and the
ropes so she could start to think. So that this craziness could pass. He drank the chardonnay and started on the Belvedere vodka she’d bought him as a going-away present. He wandered from room to room. Drank and sat on his balcony and gazed out to the blue horizon—the edge of a sharp kitchen blade just off the whet stone. He drank so he wouldn’t think about Sydney, and the brutal marks across her face and arms, and all of this ending so ugly when it began as something clean and good.

  He couldn’t explain how he fell asleep for such a long time and how the dial on the fridge was turned to maximum. His intention had been to turn it to minimum and click it to off. That wasn’t what happened. His hand had turned in another direction.

  In that last minute, before the car tumbled over, throwing the world around in a catastrophic spin of fragmenting glass and bits of plastic and crushing metal—even in the moment when the new Merc went over its right side, Cicely thought it wouldn’t happen. And as it was happening, that this would be something else. One of those things you could talk about with a thrilled whisper in the back of your throat. Even as her ribs broke under the steering wheel, and her right arm was all but cut from her body with the impact of a wooden telephone pole through the driver’s side door, she didn’t see it coming. Didn’t believe it was here. Not now. Already. She had a few more moments. If she’d been given a choice, before the pain obliterated her mind, she would have ticked the box that read ‘Immediate Painless Exit’. She was broken, a busted, bleeding body and barely saw anything outside raging agony. It might have been beautiful if not for the pain and fear. Bunches of flowers on her back seat, the impact sending them tumbling around her, like the inside of a snow globe. The flowers dancing floral rainbows about her eyes. A carnation falling to cover her right eye in pink. It could have been beautiful. And it should have been. Earlier still, there was Veuve Clicquot and tears, even from Ron, for the three chef hats in The Age Good Food Guide. Waiters, for whom it was a way to earn a wage and get good tips, couldn’t understand what Cicely and Ron felt that night, when everything went fairytale, like the cosmos itself was whispering pearl music in their ears—you are loved by the stars, you are loved by destiny—calling them by their very names. The fire from the ruptured fuel tank blew, not with a Hollywood explosion of dynamite, but a pop and whoosh, and the calm flow of petrol spread around her and the clean-smelling leather seats of her first new car, with a gentle fire at first, which hurt far less than the shards of rib piercing her lungs, building to a crescendo. It made her use her last breath for something not quite a scream, and barely a moan. And if at the ticking of the boxes beforehand there had been a choice for cause of death, she would have laughed at this one option that did her in. It was almost funny. Almost beautiful. But it wasn’t a box. This was what happened: a duck, with a line of trailing ducklings behind, crossing the road just beyond the West Gate Bridge. She would have mowed the motherfucking things down if she’d been given that box to tick. Some kind of instinct made her swing the wheel to the right and then left to correct. Overdoing it; not used to the new car. The champagne didn’t help. The euphoria of three chef hats in The Age Good Food Guide. That’s what it was … probably. And that whispering pearl star music.