The Butcherbird Stories Page 12

  Ron loved telling people about how he was headhunted. He told it like Cicely Browne had come all the way to London for him alone. If he was talking to men, kitchen hands or another chef, then he’d add that for an arse as sweet as Miss Browne’s, he would gladly fly across any ocean, endure all manner of hardship, even come to the colonies. And he loved calling Australia that. If there were women around, he’d tell them in minute detail about the meal he cooked for her the night she was spellbound. Cicely never denied being entranced. If asked, she would close her eyes in a brief moment of relived rapture.

  “That beast is fucking magic in the kitchen,” she’d say to anyone who cared to listen. “A culinary revolutionary.” She would have liked to put that into the advertising; had sense enough to allow his reputation to grow through the meals he produced. Words might be bullshit but the brute fact of his talent was indisputable when people sat down to eat at Arcady Blue.

  The part of the story Ron rarely told was how Cicely had waited for him in the alley behind the Notting Hill restaurant to explain to him with ardent enthusiasm how she would take Ron to another country so that she could make him a rightful king of knives and fire. It was that expression that had caught his imagination. Or perhaps it was a knight of knives and fire, he told his Jane Doe one night as they walked the St Kilda boardwalk back to his place. Not mentioning he’d had a moment of awful behaviour months before in London and that he needed a new city to start again.

  Cicely liked the Serbian girl. Knew that customers responded warmly to her as well. The tips came in heavy, more than doubling the wages Cicely paid her. She was pretty enough but there were prettier just passing the windows. No, she made everything seem easy. She sang songs under her breath while she carried four fully loaded main course plates right across the wide restaurant from the kitchen. Had a loud sincere laugh that made a regular dinner feel celebratory. She could dance between customers with a tray of cocktails at midnight when the rest of Cicely’s staff were reduced to end-of-shift staggering.

  And then one night the girl told Cicely that she would be finishing. Not in a week or two. That day! Cicely’s first reaction was hostile. She wanted to slap her face hard, with the meat of her hand, to watch her nose bleed. Cicely did that once to another girl that worked for her who wouldn’t stop crying over some silly boyfriend, dropping tears silently on business suit shoulders like raindrops. Fired her afterwards.

  She didn’t want to give this girl the satisfaction. To know it felt like a real loss. Cicely didn’t say you can’t up and quit—no notice. With a damn smile on your face. As if I’m supposed to be some kind of fairy godmother, here to wave my wand so you can float along your merry fucking way to your next bullshit adventure.

  So Cicely returned to her reservation list without blinking. From the side of her mouth she told the wog to leave her locker key, restaurant apron, even her name badge before leaving. Told her to finish up straight away rather than at the end of the evening. Explained to her staff that she’d fired the bitch for using.

  Cicely didn’t read the words on the page before her for a few minutes, and wondered about her own desperation. Why did the Serbian girl leaving feel like a blow? As though she had been given a nosebleed slap herself. Cicely pinched the skin at her own hip, hard, to get herself to focus. She didn’t let go of the pinch for a few moments. Murmuring everyone’s replaceable, she got back down to the work at hand.

  I pulled my guitar out as soon as I picked it up from the checked luggage and played a few popular tunes like “Space Oddity” and “Fast Car”. I played a few of my own songs and finished with “Atlantic City” and “Free Fallin’”. Had twenty dollars in Australian coins in my hat in half an hour—people seemed generous here. Airports aren’t easy for busking. A man, just back from a holiday on the French Riviera, stood there a while, enjoying my songs over the crowd pleasers. He offered to drive me to the city. Said his name was Ron. I’ll take you to the city, he said. I might even get you a job. I said yes, despite a few drops of airline red wine on his white T-shirt. He didn’t look too drunk to drive and his eyes became clearer as he blinked and waited for me to finish another two songs.

  Cicely drove home as the sun was coming up. Exhausted all the way through. Singing between yawning and laughing. She could have opened her window to sing for the new sun as it began to rise—the night had gone that well. She flattered herself that she could use the word triumph.

  Her restaurant was in St Kilda but she lived across the West Gate in Yarraville. A bit of a drive during rush hour; quick enough this time of day. After she crossed the bridge all her elation flew away from her somehow and a bitterness rose in her mouth that wouldn’t go away. It got worse until she was forced to stop her car. To get out and vomit.

  Between the heaves she felt annoyed at her body, at her stomach, at the happy music pouring from her old Corolla, at the car itself, which was third-hand when she bought it and now looked multiplied by thirty hands more. She stood up and wiped the back of her wrist across her mouth, trembling right through her body.

  At Cicely Browne’s feet were the remains of the food and wine from the grand reopening of her restaurant Arcady Blue. Completely refurbished and a new menu put together by one of the world’s most accomplished chefs. A man she’d headhunted from a three-star Michelinrated London restaurant to come and cook for her down in Melbourne. All of it, her triumph, the culmination of over twenty fucking years of clawing-desperate ambition and white-knuckle dreams.

  The cars passed with a constant shoosh-shoosh. There was not much else around her. The most desolate place in the world was a stretch of roadside a little off the West Gate Bridge. And she was stuck there as she leaned over again and got down to ribbons of acid.

  Cars continued to pass by, shoosh-shoosh. Moving along like an endless metal river that was gathering a current. Shoosh-shoosh-shoosh. Such a relentless noise. The sound of a river in which drowning was not just guaranteed, it was instantaneous. You’d be gone before you knew it.

  The water moved past her, swinging her right leg out and back, her right arm, waving to and fro. But the rigor crept in and it was only her hacked short hair, peroxide blonde, that moved across the surface of the running river by the time evening fell. New light found her lying there—a nameless body. Face up and eyes open. Flesh the colour of concrete and the cold touch of fish scales. Caught on a riverbank, out by the long Maribyrnong. A trickle of mud ran from her mouth, open the space of a smile.

  Isaac took the guitar out of the wardrobe and walked down to the gazebo in the Catani Gardens, where he found it. He had seen people play music there before and he knew the owner of the guitar might show up and ask for her guitar back. He was afraid that might happen. It also made him feel less guilty.

  Isaac played in the gazebo every day after school, before Mum and Dad came home from work. He was getting better. He could sing and play at the same time now, which wasn’t easy. Putting down a few lyrics. Almost had a song. If she didn’t show up soon, if he had a few more days to practise, he might be able to play Nina one of her songs.

  She hadn’t written down any lyrics for her songs. She’d sketched out chord changes and picking patterns. It wasn’t easy to fingerpick a twelve-string but Isaac was trying. He will tell Nina he was sorry he took her guitar from the gazebo if she showed up—the pretty girl in the four black-and-white photo-booth pictures. Isaac liked the one best where she took a section of her long hair to give herself a long moustache. Because then there was the photo after it, where Nina looked silly and sweet, laughing at her own joke.

  Maybe that was her name. Isaac wasn’t sure. In the guitar case there was an unsent postcard with a picture of the West Gate Bridge with no stamp. No message yet either. She had started by saying Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Isaac wasn’t sure why she didn’t buy a Christmas card instead of a postcard. Possibly a spur of the moment thing. At the end of the postcard to Mr Lawrence there were a few playful music notes and hearts in red ink and the name Nin
a Krunić.

  Punctuated Air

  I don’t know if he ever began to cough up blood. By the time a man starts doing that, there might be no way back for him. My father didn’t talk about the men he saw dying in hospital beds from tuberculosis—the same disease in his lungs.

  He was sixteen and would be in that Belgrade sanatorium until he was nineteen. He read men like Joyce, Zola and Dostoyevsky to pass the time. He never talked about them either. He continued to read into his seventies, authors like Stefan Zweig and Victor Hugo, writers he’d discovered when he was dying.

  Coughing up blood is how I imagined it when I was the same age, in my late teens. Handkerchiefs wet—red bundles of them beside his bed. Droplets across the pages, the punctuation of chaos, in books that would later be burned to keep the disease from spreading.

  Those other dying men coughing up their lives as they passed away at different times of the day or night. Conversational patients, in anonymous hospital pyjamas, who had nothing on them but the stories they could tell about their lives while they waited for the outcome of an invisible war being waged within the mystery of their chemical bodies.

  For a sixteen-year-old who would celebrate three birthdays with them, there wasn’t much more to do but read and drift in and out of those long meandering tales, punctuated with fits of coughing. He hadn’t lived long enough to have tales of his own, so he learned to be quiet and to listen.

  Did they allow family to visit those TB sanatoriums? How many friends, brothers or sisters braved a lethal disease to visit, even for birthdays? I don’t know. Perhaps only his mother.

  I wonder what the sound of coughing meant to him on a weekend in suburban Melbourne—lying in his bed, listening to me or my brother coughing from a cold we’d caught at school. Picking up one of those books by a European writer again and reading for the whole of a Sunday morning. Hearing us cough from our beds into the silence of his memories.

  The library in St Albans was what you might expect to find in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Dreary. Limited hours. One and a half rooms and a three-book limit. The librarians weren’t particularly helpful. They stamped the little slips inside the front covers and slid the three books over the counter, never making a comment or a recommendation. They let me wander the aisles looking for books with Saturn on their spines. The one and a half rooms were enough. They weren’t insignificant when I was a kid and the librarians didn’t need to do anything more for me. They were noiseless and tended to a calm place.

  The Sea of Tranquillity was an idea of paradise. I looked at images of the moon and saw a place that registered billions of collisions, impact upon impact, yet there was an immense area that was smooth and undamaged. A blue tinge to the otherwise grey-black expanse. That’s how the idea first appeared in my mind, because I’d never heard anyone use tranquillity in a sentence. A dictionary in the St Albans library told me what it meant—it didn’t close the door on its meaning. The Sea of Tranquillity was a place where you couldn’t drown, and from there the world was a perfect blue and white sphere turning in an endless, silent flow of sunlight.

  Saturday morning would come and there’d be a pile of books on the carpet beside my bed. I didn’t have bookshelves because I didn’t own many books. As soon as I could clear my eyes of sleep I began reading and didn’t stop until I came reeling out of my room for food and water. I went back to bed and let the bright light outside my windows resolve into evening darkness. I did the same thing Sunday and wished Monday morning wouldn’t have to be such a colossal interruption. A whole week of school would follow and disassemble all my time and thoughts and I would register a billion impacts like a surface that can never be smoothed over with a calm hand. I don’t remember most of the books I read in those years but lying on my belly in bed, with words moving along in a silent flow, was another view from the Sea of Tranquillity.

  None of the kids I played cricket or soccer or tennis with in my neighbourhood ever mentioned prose or poetry. They didn’t own any more books than I did. My friends read what was required at school and those were the books I didn’t want to read. We threw, kicked or hit balls up driveways, across courts and over fields. We played in a place where prose and poetry didn’t really exist. Art was transmitted into our lives only via the radio and television. What literature made it through was diminished and trivialised, altering little in the lives we were learning to inhabit. I have heard it said that a child needs just one literary experience to devote themselves to reading—and that has been described as a feeling of their lives being changed by a book. Every time I walked into St Albans library, wandering along the quiet aisles, all I was looking for was the Saturn sticker. I returned my books to the librarians dutifully, and I’m sure I appeared as untroubled by art as any of the other children in my neighbourhood.

  The writers of those Saturn books were outcasts, half-insane dreamers, scientists from diverse fields, and many were hacks who had failed to find success with legitimate literature. They never wrote about the world as it was. Instead they insisted on other visions, speculating on possible futures. They projected their fears and hopes into vast space operas or focused them into claustrophobically demented psychological shapes. Often, paranoid and broken worlds emerged from their pages. Radical philosophies and politics were cast out with thinly veiled narratives. They specialised in generating ‘a sense of wonder’—a term that many of them used as though they had invented the experience. Where everything I was told to read at school seemed to be trapped in history or the suffocating minutia of suburban lives much like mine, the books with the sticker of Saturn depicted breaks with reality, in society and the individual. Every one of them had an irony at its heart, because all those books assured me that the future is unwritten. One of the librarians must have been a true believer, a person convinced of the value of science fiction, because the library of St Albans might have been small, but its collection of those novels was comprehensive.

  I forgot the Sea of Tranquillity. I now look up at the moon as rarely as anyone else and it’s been years since I’ve even thought about one of those Saturn books. There are other names for places on the moon. The Sea of Cold and The Sea of Nectar, The Sea of Crises and the Marsh of Dreams. Hundreds of craters and mountains have been named on that lifeless satellite caught in an orbit by the weight of our planet. The golden era of science fiction culminated in the landing of two men on the moon, and it was from that smooth, calm place that they gazed back at our bubble. A planet where everything was named to the last speck of dust and there was an endless generation of stories. It was a moment in which the future seemed to open up and allow each of us daydreams of infinite possibility.

  We played among the bricks. A rubble of homes that were waiting for the foundation concrete to dry. Many of the houses rose up around us with two storeys of ambition. They spread out over their plots with little space left over for more than a vegie patch out the back. Paddocks between new houses were filled in year after year. Before that, they had been the unbroken spaces of a useless and forgotten frontier.

  No family had a pool in their backyard and it seemed natural to walk to the public pool in summer with a towel over the shoulder, wearing nothing more than bathers and thongs. We had the opportunity to scrawl our initials into wet concrete almost any day of the week. We walked along footpaths that led over rocky ground where even weeds struggled to survive, and moved across the paddocks of neighbourhood blocks, cutting through from street to street. Within the cyclone fencing of the local swimming pools, the grass was thick and a vibrant green. We unrolled our bath towels as we arrayed ourselves around the pools.

  A deep pool for diving—the springboard three metres high. The circle of water for toddlers to splash around in and the fifty-metre pool they called Olympic-sized. The lane ropes were rarely used and there was no-one in that neighbourhood who would ever swim for gold.

  Children, wet from the pool, would luxuriate on the hot concrete paths that cut through the grass. After a few min
utes we would stand up and watch our water shadows quickly evaporate from the concrete.

  Coasts and oceans existed for us in the same way that deserts did in the imaginations of children in England. For us, it was glimpses of the ocean from verdant hills in commercial breaks and the myth was that we belonged to the same country.

  There were no rivers or creeks running through our neighbourhood. Melbourne had been developing for little more than a hundred years and its waterways and coastal areas were the first to be turned into real estate.

  Immigrants of the seventies generated a suburban sprawl pushing out over land that was worthless for farming. These ad-hoc neighbourhoods were supervised by local government only so far as streets, plumbing and electricity were concerned.

  There was no town hall and local government was invisible. There were no sports grounds or arenas, parks or playgrounds. Public works didn’t extend beyond a few cheaply constructed primary schools and high schools for the children of these immigrant families. A library or a public swimming pool was an extravagance.

  Sea voyages were rare for the families who built their houses in our neighbourhood. These were jet immigrants, who only had a matter of hours for their transition from ancestral lands to the Australian scrub.

  On a ship, land didn’t simply drop away. It receded to a broad horizon. The world grew into a vast sphere. For these earlier immigrants there were storms and the threat of drowning—nightmares, as they rocked on cots at night, of being lost at sea. Months passed and friendships were created. They learned a few words of English. They got a clear idea that this would be the great barrier, but that there were ways of getting through.