The Butcherbird Stories Page 11

  Ron finished brushing and washing his mouth out. Nodded at the reflection in the mirror. Nodded at it again and again, saying yes. And yes again. And OK. Yes.

  He moved to the silver walk-in fridge he had specially built and fitted in his designer kitchen and turned the dial to full. Already so cold it hurt when he stepped inside. He reached around the outside of the door and swung it shut behind him. The handle and lock were still removed from the inside.

  Naked and pale. Sucking in the crystallising air. He lay down on the newspapers. Wanted to become a slab of meat. Breathed out shorter puffs of white. A clean taste in his mouth now.

  The black hours of no moon and an empty sky. The last trams outside rang in the hollow streets from the Esplanade and Fitzroy Street—the soft sound of their metal wheels across the smooth rails and the sharp electric crackling of the power they drew from the overhead lines. I wandered around Ron’s apartment, a ghost that night. Thinking about how lost I felt. Turning on the television and seeing news about cricket, a game that made me feel home was so far away it might as well have been Shangrila. Turning it off again.

  A man was crossing a wire strung between two towers in New York in a flyer on the coffee table. I’d brought the flyer home from the cinema after we watched a documentary about a high-wire walker from France. In the film the man also crossed a wire on Sydney Harbour Bridge. I found myself thinking, yes, Sydney, and yes, why not now. The French high-wire walker moved so easily from France to Australia to New York—no reason I couldn’t flit over to Sydney. I’d never planned on staying in Melbourne so long. Welcoming and offering belonging. I’d earn some travelling money busking at Southern Cross Station and sneak on a train going to Sydney. If they caught me I had enough for a fare but maybe they wouldn’t catch me.

  The last trams had long since left the streets outside Ron’s apartment for the evening and I still couldn’t sleep. The silence made my ears ring. I watched the clock tick over until my head was filled with red digital numerals multiplying and subtracting. In the snatch of sleep I got that night I dreamed my head was the top part of an hourglass and my body the other half, and through my throat went the red hot coals of digital numbers from a clock radio. I woke up choking and needing three glasses of water. I packed my backpack and placed it by the front door with my guitar in its case. Was ready to go. It was black outside and I didn’t want to leave Ron with nothing but a note and a bottle of Belvedere. So I wandered around his apartment again. Endlessly moving around, like I was searching for something. He was gone so often I felt I was suffocating in his spotlessly clean, stainless-steel, air-tight apartment. At the restaurant again. When he came home, it would be well after dawn sometimes, and then he’d sleep until four or five in the afternoon, and soon he’d go off again.

  I watched the sky change. Light creased the world at its purple-blue edges. I couldn’t get the idea of Sydney out of my mind. I wanted to see the harbour. I wanted to cross it in a ferry. I wanted to play music on the steps of the Opera House. I walked around his house, and then I went looking for an indigo shirt I knew Ron owned. I didn’t have any blue clothes in my backpack. It amazed me how strong and clear that desire for indigo felt that morning.

  On Ron’s wide open Esplanade balcony, looking out across St Kilda Marina and all its forever-furled masts, the West Gate Bridge, and the city of Melbourne and its endless searching gaze across the sea.

  I sat a while and composed a song, overlooking the careening, flashing morning trams, sounding like dodgem cars at local fairs back in Serbia. Feeling homesick for it, and the wild trumpet music of those fairs as well, which drew up a wild bliss—which forced you out of your seat and compelled your hands up and reaching into the air for it, screams of joy cutting through your heart, the deafening whistling from the men all around, calling it to them, to their women, to their children, and for the world to know, God will dance over the summer grass here with barefoot joy, amid the hopping, stamping, skipping feet of the bliss-abandoned dancers. Everywhere else it appeared in the world it was something tamer, and as I sat there, that homesickness swelled my heart with a longing I knew was the lie of distance.

  I was surprised to feel it cured moment to moment, by the vast opening blue skies of Australia, the brightest, crystal-clear skies I could have ever dreamed of. “The Cure of Australian Light” is what I called that song. Ron trudged up from around the Esplanade in his filthy chef’s gear. He noticed me up on his balcony and waved. A smile on his face as he saw me wearing his blue shirt. For a moment it felt we shared a life in that apartment but I hadn’t put the shirt on because of Ron. It was because I wanted to feel the indigo of Sydney’s harbour and Melbourne’s skies as though I were already flying from one to the other.

  Ron wasn’t generous. Even he wouldn’t have said that about himself. There was nothing generous about the world either. And if that was true, then generosity was just another kind of weakness.

  There was a story he’d heard years ago about battery hens. Crazed as they were with their compressed lives, occasionally one of them would be cut and a spot of red would appear in its white feathers. The other battery hens would begin attacking that red spot, killing the injured bird. In the frenzied attack another chicken would receive a red spot and the frenzy would go on until all the birds were dead. Or as good as dead. Generosity was that kind of red spot in the compression he felt all around him. Sometimes someone good could bring out the best in a person.

  Ron felt that was true about the Serbian girl he drove to the city from the airport. He let her change the radio station to whatever she wanted. Changing songs he enjoyed midway. She leaned towards the radio as if it was vital she find the perfect song. Lighting harsh French cigarettes even though it made him cough. He felt an expansive generosity. It’s OK, he said. It’s OK. It felt unusual—a benediction for himself as much as for her. The Eastern European accent made him think of burning villages and barefoot winter poverty.

  She wasn’t the kind of pretty to make a man act crazy. So it wasn’t that, but she had beautiful hair, a lovely smile, and a laugh that made him feel good. As though he’d been laughing as well. Couldn’t help grinning at her when she slapped the dashboard, saying finally, finally, because a singer she called Jason Mraz was playing a song called ‘I’m Yours’. Singing out the window at the top of her lungs and flicking away her cigarette when they crossed the West Gate Bridge. She seemed to deserve a little generosity. His Jane Doe accepted it easily and didn’t detect any red spots on him. He wasn’t living a battery life after all.

  Ice was in the corners of the windows. Lazy snow drifted down, and up again, in flurries. The black marks of skeletal trees made the Belgrade winter sky look like it was cracking open. But that was through double-glazed glass. And we’d cranked up the central heating to full and let it continue to blow the warm air around us past spring and into the height of a thermostat summer. I lay on the clean sheets he put down before I came over. I breathed the aroma of bergamot oil his mother used in her washing, fresh off the fabric. He was sleeping so deeply in that moment that I could rustle up a pen from my schoolbag, draw a heart across the left side of his chest, and write Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in red ink inside it, because we’d been listening to that one song all day. It was just a shame I couldn’t have tattooed that red ink into his chest. I knew this wasn’t going to last forever, even in the most persuasive transports of our love. The trinkets we could afford for each other would fall into drawers and tumble further into the back of wardrobes and then roll into basement boxes, never to be looked at again. I still wondered about permanence. About what stayed in us while everything else kept washing us out clean with bergamot perfume. My face in his pillow on that winter’s afternoon while his parents were away. Through the crisp white linen that still caught the delicious scent of this one person, this one man, this one boy, this one bit of love. Both of us naked and that being odd enough that it was thrilling. I would pull the sheet across myself and he’d tug it away and revel
in simply looking at me. His eyes full of me. His head full of me. His heart and soul too … only for now. Soon he would wake and we’d have to give all of it up and surrender to the cracked sky out there beyond the skeletal trees and heat-frosted glass. When he woke, we kissed. Kissed long, like love lived in this shared breath of lips, like it might last forever, or as forever as lips could sustain. My love for this boy would fade, and his name would mean less, like the love that lasted this one winter, but it was the long, long kiss that was the heart he drew through my chest. The taste of forever, sweeter for every moment it dwelled and breathed red lies. That’s the way I thought back then as I drew on his chest with a red biro from my schoolbag.

  Cicely drove in with another speeding ticket, to have breakfast in the closed restaurant. Her staff went about cleaning cutlery, polishing glasses, preparing their stations. She didn’t change what she had for breakfast. Great coffee. Great bread. A homemade plum jam. Occasionally quince. Ron introduced a marmalade recently which he made himself. And the paper spread out before her. She could do all this at home but Cicely loved being surrounded by tables, with chairs placed upside down on them, and to then feel them all being removed quietly, and positioned below the tables. To feel her staff around her, in impeccable white shirts and immaculate black pants or skirts, cleaning down the tables with soapy cloths in the graceful arcing movements of their arms. To feel the building preparation. Everything becoming ready as she looked over her paper. So quiet she could hear each page falling open. Later, there would be the sound of a busy restaurant in full swing, and for hours there would be in all that noise, the threat of chaos. Even a broken plate could create a silence that rushed at her with the possibility of disaster.

  She was not to be interrupted during her breakfast. Not for phone calls. Not for apparent emergencies. Until she finished her paper she’d receive her floor manager or her chef, and even they would have to have a good reason.

  Ron walked to her table. Hesitation in his face despite the casual stroll from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a tea towel that was already filthy. A pastry chef he’d had to fire summarily would need to be replaced. He found her sitting oddly still. Her cigarette in the ashtray, with two centimetres of unknocked ash. Looking down at the paper, fixated.

  He stopped by the edge of the table and saw what she was looking at so intently. Not reading. Staring at a picture. Jane Doe printed below it, as though that was her name. The newspaper asking for any information. Both of them looked at the picture until she lifted her head and stared at him. Her fierce eyes cutting through his face.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “Yes,” he said in a small voice. “I did.” He’d practised a response but in the vital moment was overwhelmed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice sliced through the parts of his brain desperately searching for a response, finding nothing in himself other than the need to hide.

  “She was living with you, wasn’t she?” asked Cicely.

  “Yes, I had the spare room. Never been used in the years I’ve been in that place.” All of that empty space, and how she’d filled every part of it, became clear in his mind in that moment. He was ready to admit he had killed the girl. He was only waiting for Cicely to ask the inevitable question. He was ready to nod and accept everything that might be brought down upon him. He wanted the judgement. He understood he deserved any and all punishment that might be given him for ending the life of a traveller moving through the world, playing music and smiling easily.

  “That type of girl lives dangerously, doesn’t she?” asked Cicely, and then answered her own question. “Girls like that go out into the woods and think all the wolves will be puppy dogs, because her smile is sweet and she can sing for them. And we both know she was only going deeper and deeper into those woods. There was no protecting her from her own fairytale.”

  Feeling lobotomised, he nodded. “She left for Sydney. Had some guy up there promise her a recording deal. Because of a demo tape, or, I don’t know ... but she left me with a mess.” That was one of the lies he had practised.

  Cicely continued to cut at him with her eyes as though she wasn’t doing anything more than criticising a point on the menu. Ron felt he needed to keep talking now he’d started. He began another rehearsed response, not realising one lie would negate the other.

  “She liked to busk around Degraves Street in the city or sometimes even those empty alleys—because the acoustics were good, she said. And maybe it was a bad lift she got,” Ron suggested. “Because you know she liked to hitchhike. That’s how I met her, for God’s sake!”

  Cicely finally returned his nod yet accepted neither of Ron’s scenarios, continuing with her own line of thought. “Fairytales only end well in cartoons. In the real world there’s no saving a girl lost in a fairytale.” She blinked. And blinked again. My chef and my restaurant, she thought. She saw newspapers and camera lenses. Blinked and blinked. Each time clearing the disaster from her mind as she would have the calamity of a waiter dropping a tray of drinks onto an A-list guest the night before. Of course it was impossible. And if not impossible—because Ron had proven himself volatile in the past—there was no reason for her to know anything about the girl after she left Cicely’s employment. She’d had hundreds of waitresses come and go.

  “You must be shattered,” she suggested.

  He was finally able to look away. Let a breath sag the paunch under his apron. “She lived with me a month. I don’t know if I can talk about it. She was a beautiful girl.”

  “Don’t talk about it. You don’t need to talk about it. We’re fully booked tonight. And busy is good. You just keep it together. This kind of thing is never easy.”

  He walked away, not having told her about the fired pastry chef.

  Cicely folded the newspaper. Noticed her cigarette had burned out. She lit up another one. Threw the newspaper in the bin as she went around the bar to talk to her barman about the new cocktail menu. For the next month she did not buy a newspaper to read while she had her coffee and toast in the mornings.

  There was something about people passing by that created a space in my mind I loved to fill with songs. I had to soak up minute after minute and accumulate hours of them to really feel it fully dilate. For the air to get thicker and be revealed as gas and the bodies and voices to blur and smudge through me with the oil of passing life. I would play while I waited, and then, when my soul was open, all of these people moving along Degraves Street could flow through me.

  One day I saw a man drinking a latte and eating an almond biscotti. He had a crack through one lens of his glasses but he didn’t appear to notice. He checked his watch every few minutes. His head filled with thoughts that couldn’t find a way out. After he finished his coffee and biscuit he sat and went on thinking. They cleared his table and when he remembered to check his watch again he got up and left quickly.

  Maybe the crack through his glasses didn’t bother him but I had an image of broken eyes. Glass eyes fractured throughout. I had this idea that it was possible to look at the world through broken eyes and see everything fractured and exploding in a billion flying pieces— pooling in our minds because all of us were the broken pieces of a larger thing, a soul that formed during an ice age that lasted a hundred generations, now starting to melt in us. Leaving shards to float through the blood. Music brought warmth into the body. That’s what it always did for me. I sang:

  “Tell me babe, do you know

  it’s not enough to crawl

  not enough, my dear, to fall

  from your cradle with a wave

  slip soft down into your grave

  you’re meant to find the chance

  to hear the sun sing while you dance.

  Dance, babe, let’s dance, let’s dance.”

  In the end, I let all the lyrics go and went into the music wordlessly, playing with my eyes closed, as long as my hands would let me. Opening my eyes to find ten people had stopped to listen. A little boy had
his eyes closed too. His mother gave him some coins to throw into my open guitar case. I called that song “The Broken Ice of a Melting Soul”. I wrote down the chords. I couldn’t find that song again anyway. Some of them just come and then they go, no matter how hard you try to remember.