The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  There was no time on an airliner for much more than murmuring quiet. Not enough liquid hours to drift along, to ponder while suspended below deck, listening to the stretched and riveted metal groan at the pressure of the passing fathoms, the loneliness of those who had left their homes for years on end. No stories about how seafaring people of previous generations had glimpsed women in the breaking water below the prow or dancing on fishtails in the endless wake of their departure. There was a tormented desperation that could be felt, even if in diminished forms, of those lonely sailors throwing themselves out to the mirage embraces of the mermaids.

  For the immigrants who came here by sea, the first experience was of an Australian coast extending beyond what they could conceive. The New World emerged from the horizon, large enough for them and their history.

  For the jet immigrant, there was a squeal of wheels and a rumbling touchdown. Their first experience of Australia was from above, a patchwork of land cut up by rivers and roads, sewn back together after deserts had revealed a landscape worn down to the bone. The New World for those descending into it was something equally vast, yet it was a place where histories fell to the ground—thousands of broken fragments spinning away across the scrub.

  The jet immigrants saw Australia through windows the size of mini televisions from the seventies. A telecast from a world of air, as lifeless as heaven, unreachable even to birds. It was a perspective many of them would keep for the rest of their lives.

  For a previous generation, a fireplace might have been the centre of a home, and a family could gather around it and listen to a wireless transmission of stories from people around the continent who resembled themselves. Someone in the family would read from a book or a letter by candlelight until everyone was ready for sleep.

  Television was the central point of every home in the New World of the jet immigrant, and it reflected almost nothing of the places they had known or their current neighbourhoods. Their new cultural landscape was revealed as a different kind of patchwork, made in America and Britain. The Australia they saw broadcast to them mimicked her parent cultures. It wasn’t any longer clear what Australian culture was. There was no doubt that an Australian society did exist, but it was evidently somewhere far from where they were living now.

  On faith, the new immigrants bought rectangular parcels of Australia. They built houses as replacements for their forfeited countries and believed this was all they would ever need. They reminded each other, and themselves in private moments, that this was ‘the dream’—Great American, Australian, or otherwise.

  They had children and watched as this new life trickled away into a world observed from small airline windows. Waved them on—sons and daughters becoming indistinguishable from the other faces of the televised and advertised New World.

  Letters with par avion stickers in the corner of the envelope read: Mother has died. Grandfather is now so old he can’t put his shoes on by himself yet he still enjoys taking the long walk by the lake. Sister got married and had a baby. Another sister had a miscarriage and a nervous breakdown; addicted to the medication ever since. Brothers who had lost their way and hadn’t been heard from in years sometimes turned up unexpectedly—over there. No-one ever turned up unexpectedly in Australia.

  A woman might put away a letter from overseas, burying it beneath clothes in a wardrobe, not opening the message for years. A man might receive a letter, and even when it contained nothing more than the mundane details of life lived in places his memory struggled to clearly recall, he might yet be found by his children in the kitchen, crying over the envelope. We sometimes gazed at pictures released from these envelopes and saw faces that resembled our own, before discarding them and the handwritten pages and returning to the television in the lounge room.

  We went outside and built our own houses with bricks that were dropped off by trucks on the empty paddocks—spinning their wheels in the mud on rainy days. We created warrens of corridors and rooms as we crawled through these forts of our imagination. They only ever lasted for a few days. We would return in the morning after a weekend of building our secret kingdoms and find everything had moved—construction of another new house already underway. There would be other blocks of bricks in other paddocks. When the workers had finished for the day we moved through the skeletal wooden frames of homes that would soon be filled with families. We were silent as we picked our way across the beams in the floor, as though we were the child ghosts of these families revisiting another reversed history.

  We wandered across a landscape that was ours, even if it was never the same from month to month. At school they taught us that there was a race of people that had once lived here, and that their civilisation had been an ancient dreaming in which every feature of the country was sacred—that it was a vast shared soul, unfolded and open to them and their future, until we came and built our houses. This was what could be understood from the fragments of information we were given in our classes. The vast silence of that erasure was ever present as we watched new houses spread out across the ground. There is a way in which that kind of erasure works in the minds of children. It suggests they will also one day be erased to make way for new construction and other populations.

  The paddocks were all filled in—teeth in an old skull, fitted into every gapping space like an ancient face growing younger and taking to the make-up of these new lives, seeming youthful in a way it hadn’t for thousands of years. Each summer showed everyone living in that neighbourhood how thin that make-up was.

  During the Australian heat out on Melbourne’s drab frontier, concrete shone white, scribbled in shadow here and there with the worn initials of the neighbourhood’s children. Steel or glass glinted in blinding sparks of light, yet sunglasses were rarely worn. The black bitumen of the roads went soft, threatening to turn into a free-floating moat of shimmering oil. Lawns had unrolled from the houses and jumped the footpath—went yellow-white quickly at the height of the season. Men stood out in their yards playing water back and forth from hoses every evening to fight back the heat that for weeks kept rising from the ground and fell from the sky in waves.

  These men would grow old and move along streets named after people and places that had never been familiar to them. They were men renamed in their places of employment—spur of the moment and without ritual. They used these anglicised names for decades. Often there was merely an initial letter left from the birth names of the many Johns, Michaels, Sams and Jims who lived in the neighbourhood. They carried these names for decades. When doctors and principals gave them news about their children, these immigrants were addressed by the Australian names they had been given. Their children would bear similar makeshift names if theirs were not easily pronounceable, or were not remembered by their teachers.

  The heat would drive everyone from their homes. Air-conditioning wouldn’t be seen in that neighbourhood for many years after the houses were built. Mattresses were carried out onto the lawn or flopped onto a balcony. Many roamed the streets and congregated beneath the occasional streetlight, waving away moths and slapping at mosquitos.

  On long summer Sunday afternoons the local pool became a necessity, no longer the luxury it often seemed. The grassy hills rolling away from the water to the cyclone fences were covered with thin towels, filled out by a community that, aside from these sweltering days, never saw itself whole.

  Children picked their way between the patchwork of bath towels to get to the blue water. Heads bobbed across it as bodies flew through the air and splashed down among them. Laughter, chatter, exuberant voices welcoming everyone who came near. The noise rising up from the pool reverberated as if there was a liquid soul at the centre of our lives.

  At the high diving board a competition might begin, though there were no judges, scores or prizes. Someone would stand up on that three-metre diving board and his birth name would be used and we would tell each whose brother he was, and whose son. The streetlights would flick on without anyone noticing as the day�
�s heat began to ease off. Families would make a start on the short walk to their streets and houses. A small crowd would remain for a final man standing on the edge of the long board. Some of these inland divers could spin and turn and break the water with barely a splash.

  I was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in a part of the city called Zemun—right at the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava. There was one small room for the three of us to sleep in. My mother, father and I watched the world turn white. Winter got in through the windows, past the heating, and penetrated the blankets. My parents were still driven by new love and talked for months about a long journey that would take us far from our two rivers. Their voices were the only sounds in the room some evenings. I dozed within an old wooden cot beside their bed. Australia was one of the first words I heard, whispered in the darkness of that cold bedroom. A word which was like a balloon that couldn’t be seen in the icy air above the cot, but that I knew was filled with the warmth of their love for me and their hopes for the future.

  I do not know these details as facts. Memories from that baby’s life are resonances that my imagination evokes and puts to paper. The two rivers don’t need names to be remembered. For generations, watercourses like these have cut grooves through the landscapes we were born in. They have worked their way through the lives of those that are part of that land. At the time I was born there, the Danube and the Sava met within a federation of loosely related cultures, divided by history and divergent dialects—a country called Yugoslavia.

  I was always very ill in Zemun. The hospitals of Belgrade became familiar places. The voices within these buildings were as harsh as the winter outside. Words filled with pain and the cold disregard of those who learned to live with suffering as a profession. My illnesses fell away to nothing as soon as I began breathing Australian air. If my memories of infancy were of a white city and its two rivers, then those of growing up in this country were of vast blue-white skies, endlessly opening up. It was as if the dream of that balloon made by the word Australia had floated down into my cot and became my world.

  My family was living in Melbourne by the time we celebrated my second birthday. I began learning English in primary school, so I suppose I would have been five when I began speaking it, though I don’t remember a pre-English history. If Serbian is my first language, in my mouth it is now the language of a child. Serviceable for greetings and household chores. There are odd gaps and strange inclusions. I’m able to distinguish the word for wind from air, to separate the very similar words for breath and soul, but I am unable to tell you how to say cloud or name the days of the week in Serbian.

  It’s a strange circumstance when you devote yourself to a language that does not belong to your parents. Because a writer does not simply use the language; a writer becomes the language. There’s a devotion to a literary legacy. Dedicating your life to a history in which your ancestors have never belonged creates a separation within your mind and seems to say: before you, there is nothing.

  The first vocal rhythms most of us feel are the words that rise and fall on our mother’s breath. What we hear are the same sounds over and again, and we will continue to listen out for them while we explore our lives through this veil of language. The first words for sleep and hunger, for beauty and pain and love, come from our mother’s tongue. We feel them cover our faces with kisses—sometimes with tears.

  For me, those whispered words of the cradle were Serbian. They were hushed murmurs, warm against my neck, as the windows went white with the ice of a Belgrade winter. I do not remember that image. It’s a reconstructed history. A sequence of words put together to represent the disconnection of verified personal experience with the desolate white wasteland of everything forgotten.

  My father had gone ahead to Australia, to find a job and a home for us. My mother and I were set to follow nine months later. In 1974 there wasn’t a jet bridge connecting our airplane to the departure lounge. She carried me from the terminal to the plane that would take us across the oceans to my father. Aircraft lifted into the sky with roars so loud I could only feel the drowned-out sobs heaving through her chest. She crumpled to the ground with me in her arms. She sat me there beside her for a moment and lowered her face to the ground. She breathed over that rough black tarmac while I watched, and placed her lips to the ground.

  As a writer I wonder about those of us who have been removed from our places of birth, who leave language, history and ancestry to begin anew somewhere else. We become proud owners of words inherited from parents that are not our own. Our first sentences are composed within a literary history that has given us so few pages we barely exist.

  Above me there is a balloon. It used to float across my cot in that cold room in Zemun while Belgrade froze. It is filled with the history of those two rivers, the Danube and the Sava, and the people who lived at that confluence like my mother and father. It is incidental that in the Serbian language my place of birth, Beograd, translates as “white city”, though that’s how I remember it. When I put my ear to that white balloon I can still hear the lullaby of a vanished world.

  The Flood

  Charles Koschade rolled to a standstill. A car was on its roof by the road. One window had cracked; another shattered. The overturned Camry was empty—no broken body inside— yet the vehicle’s blinker was flashing and its headlights were switched on. Just starting to fade as the battery drained of power. A tyre turned, dripping rainwater. Charles lifted his foot off the brake when the truck in front of him moved, inching forward with the incline of the road, engine idling. A crackle of broken glass below him as he rolled past the crashed vehicle at the intersection of Punt and Domain.

  An ambulance had recently come and gone. A body would have been pulled out of the Camry, carried away, conscious or unconscious. Inside the vehicle were the spilled contents of a handbag: hairbrush, balled-up used tissues, cosmetics bag and box of tampons. There was a scattering of paper in and around the car. Pages and pages of drawings and sketches. They might have belonged to the driver of the Camry, or to her child.

  A teenager stood on the top landing of an external staircase overlooking the intersection. The door of her apartment was open. She was wearing a dirty-white dressing gown and smoking a cigarette; talking on her phone as she used it to take a video of the scene below. Two pedestrians with dogs tugging on their leashes stood nearby. A woman wearing an oversized Driza-Bone talked to a man in a leaf-green puffer jacket. The early morning air from their mouths rose in puffs of fleeting steam. They were neighbours chatting about the crash or strangers who had stopped to share known details and to speculate.

  A policewoman dismounted from a police motorcycle to direct drivers past the vehicle. When he first started driving Charles hadn’t really understood that police had to be at the scene, not so much to stop people colliding into each other or a crashed car (not a risk in this case, with the Camry on the footpath and sidelong against an ivy-covered wall) but simply to keep traffic flowing. Passers-by would stop if they weren’t impelled forward by police.

  Drivers slowed so they might savour the disaster. Opened their eyes a touch wider to take in a catastrophe— still a little groggy from sleep. Lingering nightmares seen in the wide-awake world. Was it a kid that died here? Was it an artist? It might have been both, mother and child. A broken neck? A crushed skull? Was there another car that sped away after the accident? It would have left tyre marks on the road. How else might a car end up on its roof?

  Pleasant thoughts because the bodies had been removed. There wasn’t any blood. So the guilt was distant, as was the loss of life. A terrible thing might have happened to those driving by if only they’d been further along the road. The pleasure was in coming close to tragedy—knowing that it would slip past now without touching anyone else.

  He wasn’t more than a minute or two late for his pickup despite the accident. It turned out to be a short fare, barely worth the drive, taking an athlete to his dentist. He had an intense physicality, sitting in the
passenger seat next to Koschade rather than in the back. He was dressed in UFC Reebok gear as though he was planning on going straight to a mixed martial arts gym afterwards yet asked Charles to return for him at 11:00 a.m. A general anaesthetic and the removal of four wisdom teeth meant the athlete had been advised not to drive afterwards. Koschade wanted to suggest the man could walk home; knew it wouldn’t be welcome advice.

  “A taxi will be waiting for you after the surgery,” he told him instead.

  Charles found nothing new when he woke his phone. He checked both his email and text messages, was about to read the thread once more when he noticed the athlete hadn’t disappeared after paying.

  “But it won’t be you?” his passenger asked, standing in the open door.

  Koschade was surprised at the question. Switched the screen to sleep and plugged the phone in to charge. After saying good morning to each other they had not talked. No conversational back and forth. The fighter had only explained about the wisdom teeth when asking to book a ride home.

  “It doesn’t matter who picks you up,” he said.

  The passenger didn’t respond. Koschade wasn’t sure whether the MMA athlete was leaning towards a thankyou or wanted to get back into the taxi to loosen his driver’s teeth with a straight punch.

  “There will be a taxi waiting at 11:00 a.m.,” Charles reassured him.

  Adrenaline kicked his heart into another gear and he found himself ready to brawl in the street. He couldn’t win against an octagon-ready fighter yet it wasn’t likely to get to that. Stopped traffic would flash lights and blare horns. Koschade had found that a real fight only ever happened if there was an encouraging audience. Posturing was usually enough, perhaps with some pushing.