The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  An Australia Post van stopped in front of Koschade’s taxi. The driver got out and opened the side door to deliver packages to an office building, stacking them on a hand cart. In his free hand he carried a large bush of flowers and greenery in a gift-wrapped box. Heavier clouds rolled in low with a cutting wind. The postie appeared unflappable.

  “Goddamn,” he said, shaking his head when he saw another working man in Koschade. “This fucking weather!”

  Charles lifted his chin in reply as he closed the boot. He had placed two surprisingly heavy suitcases into the back of his taxi. Both had been dragged along the footpath on luggage wheels. The old fellow would have struggled to move the suitcases in and out of a tram, or even over a curb, unless he was stronger that he appeared to be. Koschade wondered how far his new passenger had travelled with his suitcases. Neither had flight tags. If he wanted to go to the airport he’d have trouble with the weight of his luggage.

  “OK. So where do you want me to take you?” Koschade asked when he got back into the warm interior of his vehicle.

  Wet and annoyed. Wanting to sleep again. It had turned into the kind of day that was so overcast it never felt like a real day—more of a continuing extension of the evening. The darkness of the night lifting for a few hours only to fall again. He’d taken a pill to go to sleep when he went to bed alone and another pill this morning to wake up enough for a shift behind the wheel.

  “You can start driving. I’ll tell you where we’re going in a few minutes,” Avon said, blinking as if he were looking into a bright light.

  “We can call someone for you … if you’re not sure.”

  “Please drive. I have money,” Avon said, searching through the many pockets of a mackintosh and another coat beneath it. Beneath these two layers he was also wearing a suit jacket, and he had pockets to search through there as well. He might be as young as sixty, thought Charles. So dishevelled and distraught that he appeared older.

  “It shouldn’t matter to you where I’m going,” Avon said. “All that matters is that I pay you for movement. Or, I mean to say, for transport. Makes me think of Emma Bovary in the back of a cab, asking the driver to continue without stopping, to go on for the entire afternoon. Different circumstances, of course. Odd comparisons sometimes go through your mind.”

  “OK,” Koschade said, when his passenger began to search through his pants pockets as well. “It’s all right, Mr Avon. Your wallet is beside you on the seat … probably took it out of your back pocket when you first sat down.”

  “Don’t know where my mind is at today,” Avon said. “Hope you won’t judge a man on his worst day.”

  “I need to make a call before we get going,” he said as he woke his mobile. “OK?”

  Avon nodded as he opened a plastic ziplock envelope he’d found in one of his pockets and withdrew a letter. He began to read it over as Koschade waited for his phone to dial Areti.

  “Hey,” Charles said when the call went to voicemail. He felt awkward talking to his wife with a passenger in the back of the cab. It was rare for him to talk to anyone on the phone while he was working—privacy rather than propriety.

  “It’s …” he looked at the time on his dashboard and saw meaningless digital numbers ticking over. “Suppose I was hoping you’d pick up and … we could talk … just quickly. You don’t have to call me back straight away or anything. Got a fare with me now anyway. Wanted to touch base with you … that’s all.”

  “I like the smell of mandarins,” Avon said when he was certain the phone call was over. Koschade glanced in the rear-view mirror at his passenger, surprised by the vulnerability—that a man could say something so childish. Perhaps Thomas Avon had never been among men who would take such a comment as a radical statement of weakness. Avon placed his letter back into the ziplock envelope.

  Koschade turned on the radio. Turned on his headlights, meter and GPS. He looked for a break in the traffic to do a U-turn. He wanted to take St Kilda Road rather than Queens Road, prone as it was to flooding when it turned into Kings Way.

  “Please switch the music off,” Avon said. “I know it’s not loud. The murmur is even worse to me than clear sound. It’s a polite volume, so I’m not complaining, but I’d really appreciate you turning that off.”

  “OK,” Koschade said and switched the radio off.

  “I find it pleasant to listen to the car moving along the wet streets. When it’s cold and wet out, the interior of a car is a haven. Makes you remember what it felt like being a child and finding unexpected safety.”

  Koschade paused when he heard sirens. They were getting closer and louder until the dull day was dazzled by revolving emergency lights as a fire truck and an ambulance made slow progress around Albert Park Lake towards the city.

  “Did you want me to take you home? I don’t need an address. If we can get you to your neighbourhood, we can work it out from there. Or you can tell me your doctor’s name, a GP you go to, or whatever.”

  It wasn’t only a question of age. There might be a disability or a sickness of mind. Thomas Avon might have a book with the numbers of doctors or carers who could be called in an emergency.

  “The meter is running. The traffic is awful and I’m not in a rush. Do you have another person you need to pick up?” Avon asked, blinking as though he were speaking into the ferocious weather outside the windows.

  “I’m not taking bookings today.” He’d decided to keep himself free to go to the hospital. Areti might call with a disaster.

  It was distressing, the notion of driving endlessly as Thomas Avon said Bovary had done. Avon had forced his way into an out-of-service taxi so he’d have to be grateful wherever he was taken. And since the passenger had no destination anyway, if it came to that call from Areti, Koschade would drive straight to the Royal Women’s Hospital. Avon could get the fuck out wherever and whenever he chose.

  “It’s an uncommon day,” Avon said. “Let’s not hurry about beneath those doomsday clouds outside.” He opened his wallet as though he might pay in advance.

  “That’s fine.” At least it wouldn’t be another five-minute drive as it had been with the MMA fighter. This is the job, Charles reminded himself.

  “It’s not about a destination, it’s about the journey.” It was a joke he usually murmured only to himself. The “journey” was what paid his wages. Koschade was frustrated by the confused, open-ended nature of this fare so he didn’t smile. Avon acknowledged the joke with a grin and a nod of his head.

  A woman with a thin white cane stood at the intersection of St Kilda and Toorak. She had a sign on her chest saying she was blind. Her gaze was downcast but not unusual. That was why the sign was necessary. She didn’t have rolling eyes or irises pointing in different directions. She walked straight across the road with her cane tapping the wet bitumen. She didn’t need a seeing-eye dog—she must have at least enough vision to see amorphous shapes forming about her, a corridor of shadows.

  Koschade thought about a story he’d heard inside, about the Buddha. A counsellor taught the inmates about meditation and she said her favourite story was from the end of the Buddha’s life. Surrounding the old man, sitting in mediation, were many people whose lives had been transformed by his words. They knew that soon the Buddha would be gone and before he died they wanted to understand him—and whether he was the son of God. An angel or an avatar? Some kind of superman? He shook his head at every suggestion, eyes and mouth closed. Eventually a woman who was not one of the Buddha’s followers, there simply to wash clothes, asked what the deal was with him. He told her he was awake. That’s all. Awake. His final spoken word.

  Charles imagined people asking this woman, out and about in a storm, Are you lost, are you dumb, are you bereft, are you lonely and alone, are you forlorn?—and she might say, I am blind. And if the Buddha’s insight was that there was nothing more miraculous than being fully awake, the blind woman would point out that there was a great general blindness. We saw what was around us in a small sphere on
ly a few metres in radius, most of the time, beyond which were receding shapes and forms that quickly became a haze of unknowns, gathering again in delicate shadows that could nevertheless run us down in the street to leave us dead if we weren’t careful.

  His phone pinged with a text from Areti:

  A mock-panic look on Areti’s face. Behind her were new bouquets and vases of flowers. Also plates of baklava and almond biscuits with icing sugar—Charles couldn’t remember what those were called. The selfie video with two women in faded black dresses was brief. Both her grandmothers had stopped to smile as though for a photo, had quickly resumed bickering as Areti snuggled in between them. Making light of the situation, but he could see real exhaustion and worry in her face. Koschade sent her the image of himself reflected in the graffitied cheval mirror and started to text her. Traffic began to flow so he switched the mobile to sleep.

  He already regretted sending Areti the selfie. He’d been smiling like a fool. He had hoped to make her laugh with a radical contrast to the mirror’s grim message. Beanie pulled down over his ears, miserably cold, and yet a wide hick grin on his face. Maybe he would come off more as a psychopath with a crazy message about dead skies and burning things down.

  “Have you seen that they’re trialling driverless cars now?” Avon asked. “A cyclist got killed recently by an automated Uber. So they’ve stopped for the time being.”

  “Probably just a bump in the road.” Koschade glanced at Avon in his rear-view mirror. His passenger acknowledged the joke with a grimace.

  “OK, but how does that make you feel?” Avon asked. “Soon you’ll be made obsolete. If not by Uber, then by automated cars.”

  “This is not my life. A way to make money is all it is. If they have computers driving cars I’ll make money another way.”

  “Which way?”

  “I don’t know. How much time do I have to decide?”

  No point in going through his hopes and ambitions with Thomas Avon. Exposing them to a passenger’s gaze always made Charles feel naive and desperate. He ceased to be a driver and became a dreamer instead. A Yiddish proverb passed through his mind—that the best way to hear God laugh was to declare your plans.

  “If it’s going to be ten years before those driverless cars take over, I’ll probably want to do myself in anyway … if I’m still driving a taxi.”

  Koschade had thought it was a random anecdote, yet Thomas Avon must have been looking over the median strip into that lane of traffic as the NGV came into view. A cyclist lay on the ground beside a car with hazard lights flashing and an open door. The driver crouched over him, talking to the dazed cyclist on the wet road. A precarious situation. The vehicle was stopped in a no-standing zone outside the VCA. The cyclist had been doored and the driver stood over him, waving the traffic to continue flowing around them both. The cyclist rose to his feet with some assistance and managed to hobble over to the nature strip.

  “They’ve stolen the Pathfinder’s hammer again,” Avon said.

  “What?” Koschade was bewildered by the strange sentence.

  Avon wasn’t concerned with the accident anymore. He was looking in the other direction, towards the Queen Victoria Gardens—at a bronze statue of a man on the back of his heels, straining in a static moment, within the spinning blur of an Olympic hammer throw.

  “They stole his hammer?” Koschade asked. “I know it comes and goes. I thought it had something to do with maintenance.”

  Traffic on Princes Bridge was often terrible but it became diabolical when it rained. He checked the BoM site to see a red-orange mass sweeping out to the eastern suburbs on the radar. Blue-white waves of cloud were rolling in from the west over the rest of Melbourne—so dense he couldn’t make out Port Phillip Bay beneath.

  “A grandiose gesture manufactured from bronze. So why not have a laugh?” asked Avon. “Transcendence tripped up. I’m sure there’s an amusement some feel in seeing a noble image rendered ridiculous. Because you know that in the very next chaotic moment, for the hammer thrower without that leverage, there would be an overbalanced spin and crash. A man struggling against the limitations that bind us on all sides becomes an arrogant desire for power, from the despoiler’s perspective. They can chuckle because all he is now is naked and fragile.”

  A cyclist zipped around the traffic inching along Princes Bridge.

  “Wonder if those vandals ever replaced the hammer with something else,” said Charles. “I’m thinking of that Banksy image with a masked rioter lobbing a bouquet of flowers instead of a Molotov cocktail.”

  When they neared Flinders Street station Avon told Charles to take a left. Traffic flowed more freely after the turn and neither spoke for a while. They went down Flinders Street and kept going until they crossed over the Charles Grimes Bridge. Rain swept in hard against the windows over the Yarra but it was no longer a storm front. Avon directed Koschade under the West Gate Freeway on Montague Street. It was almost noon and yet each car they passed drove with switched-on headlights. Avon asked Koschade to take Pickles Street until they reached the bay.

  The Spirit of Tasmania was securely docked to their right at Station Pier. He had seen the ship when it broke its moorings recently, during a bad storm, crashing sidelong into the beach. One of the most unnerving things he’d witnessed. A pristine vessel, as massive as an ocean liner, bobbing on the surf like sea junk.

  “Drive towards Frankston, please,” Avon told him at the Beaconsfield Parade intersection.

  “Is that where you want to go?” Charles asked. “Frankston?”

  It would be a long drive back to the hospital. In this weather it would take over an hour. Perhaps two. Charles told himself that whatever the outcome, Areti was already where she needed to be for help—and that he was himself utterly useless.

  “Let’s drive along the beach for a while. We’ll stop well before Frankston,” Avon said.

  Near Catani Gardens they saw a digital billboard. A woman with long, streaming hair was swimming in a bright azure ocean. Then a young man was running in the sun, alongside a luxury yacht—glittering with silver and white metal. The swimmer was about to reach the surface as the man dove into the water. A sudden split screen in slow motion showed the two people moving towards each other. There was a white-capped wave breaking into particles that fused into a swirling pulse of energy after the diver and the swimmer crashed. It all settled into the shape of a perfume bottle, around which wound a red satin ribbon with the word Heatseeker.

  “It’s a slow explosion,” Avon said when they started moving again. “Everything drifting out in a million directions. A wonder the world doesn’t disintegrate with all those incalculable vectors. My son was a mathematician. He would have been able to explain with one of his theories how it all continues to cohere despite the ricocheting shrapnel we feel. I’m sure that’s simply my perspective. Your own thinking plays out in what you see. What do you think?” Avon was gazing out the window at the long desolate boardwalk along St Kilda beach. Perhaps he wasn’t really expecting an answer.

  “A world of traffic,” Koschade said. “Some days I barely see the cars. It’s all just moving lights over a black ribbon.”

  They didn’t talk for a few minutes. Charles felt as though his passenger was was waiting for him to say something more. To prove he wasn’t an outmoded automaton at the wheel of a taxi randomly throwing out barely understood words.

  “Do you remember the first time someone showed you a picture of the planet and told you that’s where we live? My parents blu-tacked a poster of the Earth on my wall and thought I would be delighted. I wasn’t—told them it wasn’t true and shook my head, crying every night for a week, even when they pulled that poster down. I believed them but I said I didn’t because it scared me that we lived on a bubble. It would be so easy for that bubble to pop. Around that time, a neighbourhood friend I played with died while mucking around with firecrackers—so that probably had something to do with it. As I grew up, satellites gave us better images of t
he planet, and it didn’t look like a bubble on a shitty poster anymore. At some point though you realise that there’s a layer of gases drifting over a vast mass of moving rock, trapped in an orbit around the sun. What we’re a part of is an incredibly thin membrane really, when you take in the size and density of everything else trapped by the same star. So it still feels precarious, but I reckon we prefer images of heaving oceans, billowing clouds filling the skies, fields of rolling grass, making everything appear endless.”

  They passed the Brighton sea baths. Avon had been leaning back into his seat, face to the ocean, turning to Koschade when he stopped speaking. He made a guttural noise with a nod to indicate he was still listening.

  “About that same time I came across a story you might have read—‘The Little Match Girl’. There was a line where the freezing girl says, ‘Someone is dying now.’ And then she thinks, ‘When a star falls, a soul rises up to God.’ I know Hans Christian Andersen never saw the planet from the moon or from satellites. If he had, he would have understood there is too much death on the planet to wait for shooting stars. Instead, I imagined each life was a bubble and the oceans were like water in a pot beginning to boil. Each one of those bubbles was the death of a person. And then I thought of milk and the way the whole thing begins to foam when it’s forgotten … it boils right out of the pot and turns everything black.”

  Charles stopped at a pedestrian crossing. They were so near the sea he could feel the cold of winter ocean air coming through the glass. A father crossed the street, leading his daughter over to a fish and chip shop. He had another child strapped to his chest in a Babybjörn. All of them wearing beanies, mittens and scarves. The girl had a Rhodesian ridgeback on a leash. She tied the dog to a fence and it strained on the leash to follow her.