The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  The girl pointed at graffiti before they went into the shop for their lunch. Tall temporary fencing ran across a piece of land next door. The face of a lion had been woven into metal fence links with pink plastic lengths of fabric or string. The heads of various animals had been appearing around Melbourne for years. Some kind of graffiti, yet as oddly innocent as they were precise.

  Beyond the fencing was a large rectangle of open grass. The land had been cleared of any remnants of whatever structure had stood there before. Even the foundation. The grass had grown thick, above knee height—a level cut showed it had been attended to by a gardener. Wildflowers like everlastings had taken root. In these affluent areas it didn’t seem as though the land had been abandoned, that something had stalled financially, but rather that a piece of land long occupied had been cleared, the ground opened up to breathe again. A preparation for new life.

  The Rhodesian ridgeback started barking for its owners and Charles realised the light at the crossing had gone green. The driver behind him gave a polite toot of her horn. Avon looked half-asleep. The girl came out of the shop to pat the dog as Charles pulled away, an apologetic hand raised to the polite driver behind him. He’d come to expect rage from drivers delayed by even a second’s hesitation.

  “When my son was young, we had a dog,” Avon said. “I never wanted a dog. My life was already busy enough. I didn’t want to look after anything else. Had all I could handle looking after my son and my wife. She got sick. Parkinson’s, so it was long and hard. He was such a quiet, sweet boy and it was rare for him to go on about something he wanted week after week. I told him that he could have a dog if he proved he could look after himself first. Because if we got a dog it would be up to him to look after it. And it turned a switch in my boy’s brain because he began to make himself breakfast, made his own school lunch, made his bed and dressed, brushed his teeth and combed his hair without needing to be asked. Walked himself to school when most kids still needed their parents to take them. And he was only eight. So after a few months I said yes, we’d get the dog and he chose a cute little Rottweiler. My boy called him Coper. Named after Copernicus. I got a call from my son one day when I was at work that there had been some trouble at home. And that Mum was in hospital. She’d been attacked. So I went to see her and it turned out they were eating ice-cream in the afternoon. A few hours after lunch. It was summertime. The dog hadn’t eaten much. His can of dog food sat in his bowl, barely touched. Probably because of the heat. I don’t think anyone gives ice-cream to a dog. Tommy and my wife were watching a film on the couch, laughing. And the dog must have felt that he was being left out. That they were eating without him and mocking him. It was the comedy they were watching. When Coper attacked my wife, he tore her face apart. We had to get a plastic surgeon to sew her ear back onto her head.”

  Avon had the palms of his hands to his eyes again. When he dropped his hands, Charles could find no sign of emotion for him to determine what to make of the anecdote. He had found that passengers might offer a story from their life because the separation and anonymity of a taxi were as intimate to them as a confessional. Mostly they bored him. Occasionally Koschade was interested enough to play along, as though he could offer anyone absolution for anything.

  “Did you put the dog down?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Avon. “When I got home from the hospital I was angry. It’s a Rottweiler, for God’s sake. Cute as hell when they’re puppies but it was too big and wilful a dog for the little place we had in Elwood at the time. And I should have had it properly trained. So what could I expect? I blamed myself for buying a beast for a little boy to look after. Tommy wanted a dog, and that was fine. It was up to me to choose a suitable pet. Not simply the one that caught his eye. You want your kid to be happy, right? Yet he would have been pleased with another choice. Any dog would have been Copernicus. He thought up the name before we even went to the pet store. I was planning on putting the dog in the back of the car and taking him to my brother’s house. He had a big property over in Montmorency. He didn’t have kids and he already liked Coper. They got on well. Every time my brother came over he’d stop off at a butcher’s first to get a big bone for the dog. Tommy was in his room when I got home, going over his homework. Doing his maths. He was so quiet I couldn’t shout at him. I knew cold silence would hurt him just as much, so I wasn’t being too kind. And it would be better if I took the opportunity to take his dog away as punishment. The dog was dead by the time I got over to my brother’s house. Blood in his mouth. A handful of rat poison rolled up in some mince, given to him by my boy while his mother was in hospital.”

  They were passing Sandringham Football Club. Avon abruptly told Koschade to take the next right, down Jetty Road.

  “So damned awful,” Avon said. “I don’t know why when I think about how lovely a boy he was, I rarely think of the things he did that were sweet. I was horrified at the time. I worried that he’d grow up to be a sociopath, but he was never a violent kid—or man, for that matter. As things have gone, I think he showed his mettle that day. People don’t even know what the word means anymore. Made me proud, how resolute he could be. I’m still horrified. What a thing that must have been for him to see. That Rottweiler mauling his mother.” Avon wasn’t tearful yet had the palms of his hands up over his face again. He murmured words to himself as he rubbed at the flesh around his eyes and mouth. All Koschade could make out in the smothered words was “my dear woman”.

  They had reached a car park overlooking the bay. The beach ran south for two or three kilometres. Red Bluff was barely visible in the overcast haze. The steep cliffs rose thirty metres into the air all the way out to Black Rock. The bay roiled with shallow surf below them. Hundreds of boats and ships bobbled in their berths at Sandringham Yacht Club to their right. Nothing on the water as far as the ragged horizon.

  “Is this where you wanted to go?” asked Charles with his finger on the meter. Avon didn’t answer so he turned to him and asked, “Is this your destination, Mr Avon?”

  “It’ll do,” he answered. “You can leave the meter running. The weather might improve a little. I’m meeting someone here soon and still have some time to spare.”

  “Do you mind if I put some music on?” Charles asked. The rain was coming down again in sheets.

  “Yes, put some music on, please,” Avon said. “Do you have anything good?”

  Koschade’s phone was dominated by music a man Avon’s age was not likely to deem “good”. Areti also liked opera so he decided to put Maria Callas on again. Thomas Avon looked like the kind of bloke who thought opera was proper music. He didn’t respond to the choice of tunes.

  Charles couldn’t hear the music very well over the rain pounding on the roof and windows but her voice rang out clearly. It was the music that Koschade found dull. The sharp voice of Callas by itself was striking in the muffled interior of the taxi. She sang in a way that brought a fleeting sense of warmth and illumination to the dull, cold light of the dreary afternoon.

  As soon as Avon decided to get out, Koschade would drive to the Royal Women’s Hospital. The meter was running. He’d earn enough from this fare that he wouldn’t need to stay on the road today. He turned off all his lights. He wanted to rest as well. When Areti sent him the selfie video from the hospital he thought he’d seen her worry and exhaustion despite the smile but it hadn’t occurred to him that his photo would have shown her the same.

  “Put the music up a little, if you like,” said Avon. “Loud would be good. The rain’s drowning out poor Maria.”

  It surprised Charles when he heard Callas taking breaths between her words. And he wondered at the surprise. Callas wasn’t meant to be a woman on a stage somewhere being recorded. If she transcended, she became improbably ethereal, as unreal as an angel. Yet Callas wasn’t an instrument hitting notes, as precise as a piano, as clear as a trumpet. She was a woman opening her chest to let out the confused noise of her life as loudly as she might, and allowing that noise to
be transformed in the thin air around her, into clarity, into purity, a fusion of the world and its spinning time, never ceasing to be a person reaching out to other people. Maria Callas would now be a collection of bones bound tight in desiccated skin, in a box somewhere below ground.

  “The weather is awful. You’ll get sick out there by the water with that wind,” Koschade said when the song finished.

  “There’s no such thing as bad weather, as the saying goes. Only unsuitable clothing,” Avon said. “And I’ve got layers of warm clothes, Mr Koschade.”

  That expression made Charles think again of the Inuit pictures he’d seen, animal skins and fur bound tight over every part of the man’s body, leaving just the eyes, nose and mouth exposed to the white desolation around them.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Avon asked. Koschade looked in the rear-view mirror to see if he was serious. Avon already had a cigarette in his mouth—was ready to light up as though it were 1960.

  “Only if you’ve got one for me,” Charles said.

  He reached out and took a cigarette. Avon passed him the lighter.

  Koschade’s phone lit up with an incoming call. He turned the music off when he saw it was Areti calling. “I have to take this,” he told Avon.

  “Hey,” Charles said into the phone.

  “Hey,” Areti said, as if it were a regular conversation.

  “Sorry I haven’t come over today,” he said, glancing at Avon in the mirror. Koschade got out of the taxi and went to the boot where he had an umbrella.

  “I don’t need you here,” she said.

  He didn’t know what to say to that. The windows of his taxi were beginning to fog again. A local wearing a long frog-skin camouflage rain jacket had been walking along the beach and was now climbing up the many wooden stairs that led to the car park. He had his hood down and walked past Koschade without looking at him. Strode away down Jetty Road.

  “Sorry. That was a nurse asking me about lunch,” Areti said.

  “I’m out in the rain so I didn’t quite catch your order,” Charles said.

  “Why are you in the rain?” she asked.

  “Fuck the rain, Areti.” Louder than intended. “What did the doctor say?”

  “It’s OK. We’re OK. There’s no bad news. I didn’t sleep well last night. The maternity ward is the worst place in the fucking world for a good night’s sleep. Babies crying at all hours—it’s sleeping with a snooze alarm on the whole night long. There was a woman who had an early morning drama with her baby suddenly going blue and beginning to choke on amniotic fluid it still had in its stomach from birth. And then my whole family comes over …” She let out an exasperated sigh. “So I’m wasted and trying to sleep.”

  “You sound tired. We can talk later. I’m coming over soon.”

  “I don’t need you here, honey. We’ll sit on the couch in the lounge room soon and I’ll put my head down on your chest. So there’s no rush to hospital world. I’m going to sleep now, I think. I’d sleep better though if there was some good news. It’s OK. I wish we could have good news. All they do is delay the bad news. That’s me being pessimistic. The bleeding has stopped. They say it happens and it’s not always a disaster. So we’re OK. Our jelly bean is doing well again. They put her up on the screen, said she was sucking her thumb. Maybe the jelly bean is a boy. It’s so hard to make him out in all that static. Looked like he was waving. Not drowning. I suppose he’s not a little boy sucking his thumb. He’s just a jelly bean with a mouth and fingers. I could see the shape of him. He looks fine. Calm and relaxed. And then they found his heart and it’s beating so fast—double time. And they say that’s normal, but all I can hear is the thump-thump of that excited little jelly bean and I don’t know what more I can do to keep him safe.”

  Charles heard his wife crying. He fell into silences when they talked about the baby. That was so common Areti barely expected him to speak. She sometimes asked him if he really wanted a baby and he told her he did. He wasn’t lying even though she told him he was. Areti had already had two miscarriages. He couldn’t imagine what a third one would mean or what it would do to her.

  “We’ll be careful,” he said. “And I’ll be there soon. Trade you vodka if you haven’t eaten all the baklava already.” There hadn’t been vodka for years.

  “I’m going to have a nap,” she said. “Posted that remedy for a dead sky picture of you on Instagram and someone said something about American Psycho. Christian Bale was hot in that film so I liked the comment.”

  Koschade got back into the taxi. He put the phone to sleep but reached behind his seat to offer it to his passenger.

  “Do you need to call someone?” he asked Thomas Avon. “If you’re meeting someone here or whatever.”

  “No, it’s all right. I’m about to leave. Simply bracing myself for the the cold,” he said.

  “It’s fucking cold out there,” Charles said. “I’m shivering. I can take you somewhere else while you wait. A cafe nearby? Or we can sit here. Money in the bank for me, either way.”

  “You took my lighter with you when you got out, before I could light my cigarette,” Avon said, holding up his unlit cigarette. Koschade apologised and they both lit up.

  “I’ll leave as soon as we’ve smoked these,” Avon said. He drew back deeply on the cigarette. Blew smoke out with a sigh of pleasure.

  “Haven’t had a cigarette in ages,” Charles said, feeling light-headed and trying to suppress a cough. “Had to quit for the missus.”

  “Used to bring my wife and son down to Sandy beach some summers,” Avon told him. “Kind of against my will most of the time. Always felt the sand and the water were more mess than it was worth. And sunscreen was such a pain. You get a boy near the ocean on a hot day and all he wants to do is run into the water. The sand is scorching so you have to unpack and roll out a beach towel first. And then the sunscreen has to go on before the water as well. All the while my boy’s trying to escape my clutches and get into the ocean, and I’d be swearing under my breath. Barely felt his arms and legs in my hands. And then there was the face to do, asking him to close his eyes so the sunscreen wouldn’t blind him. Hated the feeling of that kind of oil on my fingers. Just when I’d rubbed it all off and was ready to relax, my wife would remind me that I needed to put sunscreen on her back.” Avon spoke as if that might have been a joke at some point but it had lost its humour for him over time.

  Koschade grew up in Mildura, so he had few beach experiences to speak of. Thomas Avon gazed at his hands as though he could still feel sunscreen stickiness … or perhaps now all Avon remembered were the lithe limbs of his son wriggling in his hands and the radiating warmth of his wife’s summer flesh.

  “A Melbourne beach in winter can give you a sense of proximity to the South Pole,” Avon said. “Not that it’s that cold. It’s not Copenhagen. There’s something crystalline that settles in the back of your lungs when you breathe out there by the bay for a little while. Like a white dust. There’s a particular wind that comes across the water this time of year. We should have a name for it, as they do for the sirocco in Europe. Have you heard of the sirocco?”

  “I’ve heard of it. Never been overseas,” Koschade told him.

  “Once or twice a year the sirocco starts up in the Sahara, crosses the Mediterranean, drawing up water as it does. It can be ferocious, hitting the coast of Italy with what they call blood rain. All the desert sand the sirocco has carried over the sea. If ours came with blood we would have a name for it here as well. No-one really thinks about Antarctica. If they do, I suppose they imagine an iceberg the size of Tasmania. What do you think?” Avon asks.

  “It’s just a place, really, for the hole in a desk globe,” Charles said.

  “Twice the size of Australia. It’s an entire continent. All of it a desert despite the ice and snow. I can’t take in a place that big a little south of Tasmania. It doesn’t fit in the mind. Too much nothing. For most of the planet’s history, though, Antarctica wasn’t covered in ice.
It was a regular continent about the size of South America. Might have been the best place for life when the oceans simmered with heat. But it’s been dead for a long time now.”

  “They’ve got some bases out there for scientists,” Koschade said, stubbing out his half-finished cigarette and feeling compelled to add something to the conversation. “I think it’s too dark and too cold for people most of the year.”

  “You can almost smell mountain ranges of ice. Then there’s some dust in the lungs from a nameless wind that comes across the bay. When you stand on the beach in a Melbourne winter you can feel that bone-white continent going on and on if you don’t forget it’s there.”

  When he was in prison Koschade heard a climate scientist talking on the radio about the seas rising and wiping everything out again. “Again” wasn’t the right word. The scientist didn’t mention the great Flood and maybe that never really happened. The scientist talked about the unimaginable amount of water that had been gathered up into ice over in Antartica. Like God’s fist. The bloke on the radio didn’t say that—it was the image that came to mind as Charles listened. That fist didn’t make him think of a punch. It was the kind of fist needed to hold on to something. The threat was that the hand might open and let everything go. An open palm twice the size of Australia. Koschade never went to chapel and hadn’t contemplated any questions of divinity since he was a child, yet there was a thought he found oddly painful. We would never again be punished by God. We would simply be forgotten.

  “Hard to imagine people reaching the South Pole not being upside down when they get there,” said Koschade, embarrassed that he might sound religious if he mentioned a fist holding back the flood. “I suppose they’ve got an actual pole down there to mark the spot.”

  Avon finished his cigarette. Koschade opened his windows a few centimetres and turned on the heater to circulate the smoky air.

  “If you can remove my luggage from the boot I’ll get going,” Avon said.